11. Memory
Ori never told Sein about the flashes of memory he got from the Ancestral Trees. He figured the same thing happened to her, only maybe she could control it a bit more. After all, she immediately knew the identity of the fallen spirit, and would occasionally tell him something about how they'd died. He supposed perhaps she recognized them by the unique feeling of their light – it was slightly different for each tree – but since they had all died after Kuro had taken Sein from the Spirit Tree, he didn't see how she could have known, say, that Tatsu had fallen from the cliffs of Sorrow Pass.
If Sein did see the last memories of the fallen spirits like he did, Ori thought, there was no point in telling her, since they saw the exact same things. And if she didn't, it would be just one more painful thing to explain.
When Ori first laid eyes on Fil's tree, he saw the ghostly image of the spirit, silent and still. Then again, a few paces further on, as if he were looking at her through closed eyes and occasionally blinking them open. It was the first time he had ever seen a creature of his own kind, besides his own reflection. The images vanished if he looked at them too hard, but he could see the pain in the translucent spirit's face and in her posture. Even before hearing Sein's explanation, he knew that this was a place of sadness.
He gently laid his paw on the tree, and shining blue tendrils of light wrapped around him and lifted him into the air. For a brief moment he was afraid, but the light felt warm, and comforting on a level as deep as the knowledge that breathing was good. It felt like Naru's arms around him. He felt the presence of another creature, and he knew that she meant him no harm. But then the memories came. The sounds of the forest vanished, and in a flash of blue light, the secluded hollow was gone. He saw, and heard, and felt, brief fragments, like a half-remembered dream. Running, his heart pounding in his throat, his hooves burning. A great shadow behind him, and a cold wind and the sound of enormous wings. Leaping into the air, his tail lashing behind him to keep his balance and his paws and hooves finding just the right spots on the tree trunk ahead to spring off it and climb over. Then a searing, stabbing pain in his side, crawling under a fallen log, and hearing an unearthly screech. Lying there for a while, and then crawling out again. There were other fragments of the same bounding climbing technique, but they all felt like they were from much farther in the past. Fil never did it again, she didn't have the strength. Ori saw through her eyes as she limped down an overgrown trail in the Sunken Glades, picking her way past brambles and spines, now in a place that looked familiar. The memory went blank, then picked up again with her paddling through foul-smelling water, dragging herself out, and forcing herself forward with the last of her strength, until she collapsed in the hollow. Then Ori was back in his own body again. Strength surged through him, but in his mind the memory of Fil's death remained.
The other Spirits' last gifts came with fragments of memories too. Ano gathered a ball of light between his paws, forcing more and more power into it until it exploded in a wave of flame. But the Corruptions surrounding him were too numerous, and keeping them at bay with blast after blast drained away his energy until he was too exhausted to use even a Spirit Flame, and they closed in on him and tore him apart. Leru could jump without touching the ground by pushing the air itself away at high speed, but when her spine was broken by a falling boulder, she could only crawl to where her tree now stood and wait for death to claim her. Reem tried to climb through the inside of the Ginso Tree, as Ori did, to restore the Waters, but broke through into a now-vanished pocket of corrupted water, releasing a poisonous flood. Ilo's strength, too, was no use against the poisonous water, and he died of thirst in the middle of a swamp. Eki slowly starved, lost in the endless darkness of the Blackroot Burrows, and Sol succumbed to grief after her brother vanished. Tatsu, too, was lost, deceived by the mists of the Forbidden Woods as she searched for her brother, pushing on even though the fall from the heights of Sorrow Pass had broken her arm and taken her ability to climb. Eventually, her calls for the already dead Atsu attracted too many Corruptions for her to fend off.
It was hard watching the others die, and knowing nothing he could do could change their fates. It was hard feeling the fear, the pain, and the despair of their last moments. But Ori was no stranger to death, not anymore. He had gone through everything they had, but as himself, feeling everything. And with every tree he visited, the fallen spirits' final gifts only strengthened his resolve to restore the elements, so their deaths would not be in vain. They had all put their trust in him, shown him the secrets of their abilities, because he was Nibel's last hope.
But nothing… nothing could have prepared Ori for the memories he saw when he stumbled upon Kuro's mountainside nest, and he made the mistake of touching the last egg.
A/N: "Hmm… the Ancestral Trees giving Ori new abilities is one of the only times in the game when he actually looks kind of happy and confident. Lemme ruin that for him too." – My basic thought process.
I mean, not really, but I was kind of thinking about how Ori getting skills from the Ancestral Trees actually worked, and based on the ghostly impressions he gets from some locations (Fil's tree, Lost Grove, and Kuro's Nest), it seems like he can essentially see fragments of memory from other creatures. So I had the idea that he essentially experiences the spirit using that skill, and that's how he learns to do it himself. But he also experiences their deaths.
12. Insanity
"You know, they say the definition of insanity is trying the same thing many times and expecting different results," Sein said.
Ori scowled. He leapt himself into the air again, twisting to redirect a ball of poison from a spider Corruption and ascend even higher. His paws just barely touched the wall above, but it was enough to flip backwards away and gain a few more inches of height, then airjump back to the wall. He bounced further and further up. A tree root dangled almost within his reach, but the overhang was too steep, and he slipped on the slimy, moss-covered rock. He tumbled back to the ground, landing heavily on his back. He let out a gasp of pain as the thorn bush pierced his ear, and for a moment stared up at the spines, realizing just how close they'd come to his head.
"…Maybe there's not a way to get up there-"
"Shut up!" Ori panted. He rolled to his feet, narrowly avoiding a shot from another spider. "It's not impossible – I know if I can just grab that root, I can do it. If I can make them both shoot at me at the same time, maybe I can get to that other ledge, and then…"
Movement to his side caught his eye. He jumped again, but the spiders were uncooperative. The ledge remained well out of reach, and he was even farther from the tree branch.
"Ori, you've tried it at least twenty times, and you're only tiring yourself and making it worse. You've already died twice. Let's just move on."
"If you were the one getting cut and stabbed and poisoned, you'd care about getting Life Cells too!"
Ori tried the jump another time. As he fell, he saw another glob of poison flying up at him. He flipped himself into position to reflect it downward. Finally, after all this time, he was up high enough that it would launch him past the root! But the thorns' poison was starting to take effect, as was exhaustion. He timed the reflection poorly, and the ball caught him in the face, sending him tumbling helplessly into the bramble again.
"…Okay… you were right…" he said dejectedly at the Soul Link. "Let's move on."
A/N: Inspired by watching multiple LetsPlayers try WAY too hard to get that one out-of-reach item.
Ori really is a stubborn little creature.
13. Misfortune
Most of the time, Ori had decided, dying was his own fault. There was a sense of perspective that came with being able to try again after a fatal mistake and see the danger he'd missed the first time around. And usually, it was something he should have, or at least could have, avoided. Sometimes the crucial moment was a simple misstep – slipping, losing his balance, or even blinking at the wrong time. Sometimes it was an error in judgement – panicking and trying to escape a group of Corruptions without knowing what was ahead of him, or forgetting to look overhead for unstable rocks or slimes clinging to the ceiling of a cave, or not realizing how much faster he ran out of air trying to fight off angry fish than swimming normally. Occasionally, his death was actually Sein's fault – mostly early on, like when she accidentally said right instead of left when warning him about spikes around a corner, or when she scouted a little too far ahead and left him unable to use Spirit Flame when a group of Corruptions snuck up on him.
But there were times when Ori couldn't help but believe Nibel had it in for him. Perhaps a wiser creature could have foreseen that the rot and Corruptions had blocked most of the outlets for the Element of Waters, and restoring it would rapidly fill the entire Ginso tree. And perhaps a Gumon inventor could have predicted that his kind's architecture would react poorly to years of neglect combined with the weight of unnatural amounts of ice and snow bearing down on it. But both of the Elements immediately trying to kill the one who restored them was just unfair.
A/N: This is another of those prompts where it was easy to come up with the theme – poor Ori is unlucky as hell – but hard to figure out how to articulate it.
14. Smile
It was about a third of the way up the Ginso Tree that Sein noticed she'd never seen Ori smile. At least, not genuinely. There were a few moments that came close, like when he sometimes laughed after just barely dodging a needle or glob of poison, or when he caught himself just before landing on a blob of spines, or when he finally made it through a difficult sequence of jumps, but it was more a mixture of nervousness and relief at not dying than actual happiness. There was the contented expression he made when he stepped or crawled into a spirit well, or had his wounds healed by a life shard, but again that was really just relief from having the weight of pain and exhaustion lifted away. He marveled at the sheer size of the Ginso tree, and at the newfound mobility the gifts of the lost spirits gave him, and (sarcastically) at the elaborateness of the traps around Gumo's hideout, but it was always just a brief moment before his soul was clouded over again by fear, or intense concentration, or the ever-present sadness.
No spirit Sein remembered was like that. They were usually a fairly cheerful species, playing and exploring and telling each other stories. They mourned the dead, and sometimes fretted in times of scarce food, harsh winter, or incursions of creatures from beyond Nibel that threatened the balance of the forest, and sometimes just had bad days, but eventually they'd be back to their usual selves. But Ori… actually, if she thought about it, he reminded her of the way Eki and Sol were wrapped in a dark cloud of despair after Naru disappeared. And really, that was it. Naru was gone, and her loss had ripped Ori's heart in half. He was still a child really, he still needed the comfort and protection of a parent, and try as she might, Sein couldn't give it to him. She couldn't even keep him alive, Sein thought bitterly. Ori told her he'd lost count of how many times he'd died and been brought back by the Soul Link. She said she'd lost count too, but that was a lie because she was worried the truth would discourage him. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine if she counted when the Spirit Tree had first brought him back. He had plenty of reasons to be unhappy.
The two of them slowly made their way up the tree, and by the time they reached its diseased heart, night had fallen outside. Twenty-nine deaths became fifty. They finally restored the Element of Waters, working together to sear away the Corruption choking it, and they somehow made it out of the tree ahead of a surging flood. Kuro was there waiting for them, and Ori descended the tree much, much faster than he had ascended it. He fell so fast that Sein couldn't keep up; all she could do was watch helplessly as the great owl dived after him, and as he struck a branch and bounced off into the canopy where the trees were too thick for Kuro to follow. Gumo saved him from the Corruptions that gathered around his motionless body, but all Sein could do that night was hope he would be okay. The Soul Link was deep underwater now, she knew. If Ori died then, it would be for real.
"There's no time to lose, we must make haste!" Sein said when Ori finally woke. She could see the toll the quest was taking on him. The sooner the other two elements were restored, the better, she thought, not just for her, the Spirit Tree, and the survival of Nibel, but for him. But as soon as she said it, she regretted it. She watched Ori's gaze wander from side to side, his mouth hanging open in wonder. Thornfelt Swamp really was beautiful, she thought. She'd forgotten just how beautiful. There were still a few Corruptions around, and the unnatural tangles of thorns hadn't all gone, but the sun shone, the grasses and the trees had come back to life, and the waters were crystal clear. For the first time, she watched a real smile spread across Ori's face. His light seemed to shine brighter, and he practically skipped along the path through the marshes. But when the first really dangerous patch of brambles appeared, the smile vanished, replaced again by the same look of apprehensive determination.
"Let's go," Ori said. He took a deep breath, shifting his weight to prepare for the jump.
Sein made a decision. "Wait!" she called. Ori stopped just in time.
"Huh?" One pair of ears folded against his head as he looked back at her, then scanned the path ahead again. "What's wrong?"
"Maybe we should explore this place first," Sein said. "You never know, you might find something you'll end up needing if the journey ahead gets worse." But she knew that he already had.
It had already been years since the night of the blazing skies, years since the Element of Winds had fallen silent deep in the Forlorn Ruins. It could wait a few more hours.
A/N: A little bit of not quite fluff. The Thornfelt Swamps after you restore the Ginso tree are just so… peaceful. So pretty. And the area gives you such a sense of fulfillment: after the insanely difficult Ginso Tree escape and the intense cutscene with Kuro, it gives the players a rest and makes them feel like they've really accomplished something.
15. Silence
Nibel was not normally a quiet place. In the old days, there were always birds chirping, or crickets, or the sound of breeze rustling the leaves of the trees, or the distant babble of a brook. Most of those sounds were gone by the time of Ori's journey, but there was always some noise. Sometimes the dead leaves clinging to the branches still rustled, other times the sound was a Corruption creeping up behind Ori. In the Thornfelt Swamp, and in the dried-out Ginso Tree, even before the element was restored poisoned water still flowed, and in the caves water dripped from the ceiling. In the valley, and in the narrow canyons and cliffsides of Sorrow Pass, and even in the frozen ruins of the Gumon city, the wind howled in his ears. And at Mount Horu, branches popped and crackled as they burned, pools of water and mud bubbled and hissed, and even the lava itself made a noise as it flowed, continuously tearing apart and crunching together the thin crust that flowed on top of it.
But now, Horu's slopes were completely silent. It was winter, the winter after the forest's restoration. Trees had recolonized the lower flanks of the mountain, but up near the summit only grasses and lichens grew in the scree, cinder, and ash. There was no wind, and even Ori's footfalls were muffled by the blanket of powdery snow that covered the ground. The only thing Ori could hear was his own breathing, and if he closed his mouth the chattering of his teeth. It was ironic, he thought, that the coldest place in Nibel was directly above the Element of Warmth.
Ori shouldn't have even been up there. The mountain was on the outskirts of Nibel, far from the Spirit Tree's light. Even back in the old days, Sein told him, few Spirits ever strayed this far, especially not young ones, and especially not in winter. Yet two adventurous young spirits had gone missing the night before, and hoofprints were found leading up towards the volcano. There was no danger of an eruption anymore, but there were treacherous, unstable slopes to contend with, along with the whims of the sky itself. The Spirit Tree was wiser now than when the storm had taken Ori from him. The skies would not be lit ablaze again. But they couldn't just be left alone up there. Ori was still a child himself, and he didn't like it when anyone acted like he was responsible for the other spirits. The Spirit Tree was their parent, and Sein perhaps an older sibling, but Ori had a younger sibling of his own – probably curled up at home with Naru and Gumo, he thought, wishing he was too. But no other spirit was as experienced as he was, no other spirit was as accustomed to being away from the Tree's light, and certainly no other spirit was faster.
When he set off that morning, the weather was still clear. There was a light dusting of snow on most of the forest, and the air was chilly, but not dangerously so. But things soon took a turn for the worse. The sky was blanketed by thick, featureless grey clouds, and snow began to fall, fat flakes drifting lazily down in straight lines with no wind to swirl them. The lost spirits' tracks were wiped out by the fresh snow, and so were Ori's own. It was a bit past midday when he'd last seen the sun directly, but now he was sure it was setting. All around him, wherever he looked, there was nothing but a sea of grey.
Ori knew there was little hope of finding the lost spirits in the storm. Even in clear daylight, their white fur tended to blend into snow, but now both his calls and their faint light would be lost in the whiteout. He could only hope that they had found a cave or a crevice or even just an overhanging rock to shelter under, and he knew he had to find one too. But it was getting harder and harder just to move. The snow was already past his knees, and none of the skills he'd learned from the Ancestral Trees kept his narrow hooves from sinking right through the soft powder.
But for most of the climb, it hadn't been silent. Ori's kind might not have been equipped for dealing with snow, but there were creatures that were. Pale blue icemoths, creatures not of light or dark but of cold, chirped and hummed as they flitted about, mostly unseen but not unheard to Ori's sharp ears. As the snow grew heavier, they grew more numerous. But when the sky overhead turned black, and Ori found himself in a tiny circle of light, they abruptly fell silent.
Ori stopped in his tracks as well, doing nothing but look and listen. The completeness and the suddenness of the silence were unnerving. Something had to be wrong. But what? The ground underfoot was still, the sky dark and featureless with snowflakes appearing out of the gloom as they got close enough to reflect his light. There was snow, featureless apart from the lumps of half-buried rocks, uphill, downhill, sun-wise, and anti-sun-wise. The silence was absolute.
And then, something moved in his peripheral vision, something too big and too dark to be a snowflake. He spun around, alarmed, but it had vanished. Then another came into view, a looming, shadowy shape just far enough away for its outline to be visible. He tried to back away from it, but his foot slipped on an icy rock, and he fell, half-burying himself in the snow. He floundered to his feet, and the silence was finally broken by a long, low rumble.
The shapes disappeared, but Ori frantically turned from side to side, staring out into the grey. His ears went flat against his head, and his paws shook from more than cold as he raised them, lighting twin sparks of Spirit Flame. This wasn't like the dreams, or the shadows of bushes and tree branches that sometimes frightened him at night, not this time. This time he knew it was real. There were things out there, and they were hunting him.
A/N: When I saw this prompt, I immediately thought… "It's quiet… too quiet." But there's not really any silent time in the game, especially not with the gorgeous soundtrack, so I invented a completely new scene. I don't normally like to set stuff after the ending since I have no idea what the story of Will of the Wisps will turn out to be, but I liked the idea of Ori facing danger all alone.
16. Questioning
"...Ori?"
"Huh? What is it, Sein?"
"I was wondering… what's it like?"
"What's what like?"
"Dying, I mean."
Ori stopped in his tracks. He stared up at the orb with a look of utter confusion, one ear folded and one eyebrow raised. "What do you mean? Don't you die, too? Since you linked us together?"
Sein's glow flickered slightly. Her triangular pattern shifted back and forth, and Ori had the impression that if she had a body she would be shaking her head. "No. If you die, your Soul Link pulls me back to it, but my light never goes out the way yours does."
"Oh." Ori thought for a moment, and sighed. "I don't know how to describe it. Sometimes it's so fast I don't know what happened, but sometimes I can see it coming –" he glanced down from the branch at a large patch of bulbous, spiny growths that had already claimed his life once, and wished Sein had waited until after he'd made the jump over it to ask, "- and I know it's too late to do anything, so I just shut my eyes and tell myself it'll be over soon. But, I'm always surprised, and scared, and it hurts, and then there's just… nothing. And then I'm back at the Soul Link, and it doesn't hurt anymore, but I feel like it still should..." He paused, carefully shifting his weight and digging his hooves into the bark. He couldn't overthink it, he knew from experience. If he thought about it too much, he'd freeze up and fall.
The little spirit sprang forward, running as far as he could, then launching himself into the air with the help of the branch's springiness. There was a moment of terrifying free-fall as he somersaulted through the air, unable to see his target. He landed in the tangle of branches of the other tree. It swayed dangerously under his weight. He knew instinctively his feet would slip, and grabbed onto a twig with his arms. A shower of dead leaves drifted down, settling on the spikes below. Ori crawled along the limb, not daring to breathe until it was wide enough to stand on.
"Sein… I'm glad you told me," he finally said. "I… I felt horrible when I died because I made a mistake, because I thought I was killing you too."
"Well… still, try to stay alive," she said. "I don't know if it's as bad as dying, but I have to watch you every time, and I don't have eyes to close."
A/N: Sein asks an innocent, but not completely helpful question. Inspired by this fanart on DeviantArt:
art/Lost-and-Never-Found-573205731
Not so much by the art itself (although it certainly inspired other parts of this challenge) as by the artist saying: "...I just realized, Sein must have it really rough whenever she has to helplessly watch as Ori dies during gameplay. I imagine we'd be treated to some snippets of heart-reading dialogue if the game didn't just revert back to the last save point the moment Ori kicks the bucket."
By the way, this is set early in the game, around Hollow Groves before the encounter with Gumo, when Ori has only died a few times, and has been lucky enough to get relatively quick ones.
17. Blood
Ori knew he was in trouble the moment the gelatinous, spiny mass split in half. He backed away, still lashing out with the Spirit Flame, but he didn't yet have the experience to hit more than one enemy at once with the power, and the massive Corruption only split further, the pieces getting smaller, more numerous, and faster. Before he knew it, he was surrounded. He weaved and rolled back and forth, keeping the slimes away as he slowly whittled down their numbers, but there were just too many.
"Ori, behind you!" Sein shouted, almost in time.
Ori started to turn, but something hit him in the back, throwing him face-first to the ground from the force. He let out a cry of pain and surprise. He couldn't see the remaining slimes, but he kept willing them to die, and the Spirit Flame tore away at them until the weight on his back was lifted.
"Ori? Are you all right?" Sein hovered anxiously over him. Her voice reminded him uncomfortably of Naru's whenever he hurt himself.
"I… think so…" Ori said. But as he struggled to his feet, he nearly doubled over from the pain. He looked down and saw spines, bright red spines protruding from his chest and belly. For a moment, he didn't understand what he was seeing. The slime had struck him in the back, he was sure of it. He felt the pain in his back, but also in the front of his body. Then he realized what had happened.
"Oh, no… no, this is bad." Ori watched the broken-off spines disintegrate into ash. Red liquid started to trickle out of the holes left behind, staining his white fur. He felt something warm and wet running down his back, too. He scanned the little balls of light left behind by the destroyed slimes. Orange, orange, blue… no green. No green. "Sein…" he tried to keep the panic out of his voice. "Where's one of the – the healing plants!"
"Back this way!" Sein flitted off to the left. Her tone made it clear she understood the urgency.
Ori staggered after her, pressing his paws to the wounds in an attempt to stop the bleeding, but his blood kept leaking from between his fingers. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, and as hard as he tried to keep his breaths slow, he was panting like he'd run from one end of the Sunken Glades to the other. He was lucky enough not to be attacked, or have to get past any thorn bushes or the bulbous masses of stationary corruption that often blocked his path, but he could feel himself getting weaker with every step. Finally, he could see the plant, a large rosette of thick, fuzzy, waxy leaves that when trod on released a pleasant green light that could heal his wounds. But the path was blocked by a ledge in the rock. It was barely higher than Ori himself, and he could normally have easily jumped up, but now he wasn't sure if he could jump at all. But he had to…
He tried his best, frantically hopping into the air and trying to grip the smooth rock, but all he managed to do was make the pain worse. Even balancing on his feet grew harder, and after one final attempt he slumped to the ground, leaving bloody pawprints on the ledge.
"Sein… help…" he sobbed, wrapping his tail around himself. "Make it stop… please…"
"I'm sorry, Ori, I can't!" Sein sounded like she was going to cry too. "The Spirit Flame can't break that kind of plant, and I'm giving you all the strength I can! You have to keep trying!"
Ori nodded silently. He tried to get up, but his legs gave way, and he collapsed back into the spreading red puddle. He knew he was dying. It was like the first time, his strength fading away and his senses growing more indistinct. But this time, it was faster, and made worse by pain and fear. The forest started to swim in front of his eyes, shapes melting together into blobs of color. "Sein? Sein, where are you?" he whimpered. "Don't leave me…"
"I'm right here! I'm not leaving you, Ori!" The orb of light hovered so close to his head that she brushed against his ear. "Can you still hear me?"
"Yes…"
"Listen to me, it's going to be all right! You'll come back, you just have to hold on a little longer! It'll be over soon…"
But the little spirit didn't respond. His eyes closed, his body gave one final shudder, and he fell still, his last breath escaping as a quiet sigh. Then his form blurred, and dissolved into a thousand tiny motes of white light. They drifted away, and vanished, leaving only a bright red stain and a trail of bloody footprints.
A/N: …and here's one of Ori's less easy deaths, but still a pretty early one, somewhere around the Sunken Glades.
Whenever you write fanfiction of a game, you always have to decide what mechanics you treat as "real" and which ones you treat as abstractions for the sake of playability. For example, Ori and the Blind Forest is has 2-D gameplay, but unless you're playing Pac-Man or Tetris, 2D games are always simplifications of a three-dimensional world. Hit points, and dying instantly when you run out of them, are something I almost always treat as an abstraction. HP is a very simple, yet very elegant way of representing injury, and for good reason. Back in the old days, games were all either pen-and-paper or on primitive computers which couldn't really handle complex damage tracking, but even in most modern games having your health be reduced to a single number massively reduces the workload on both players and developers. And instant death? This is, in most cases, a VITAL abstraction; in real life fatal injuries still often take at least a few minutes to kill you, but if you had to spend several minutes watching your character bleed out while being helpless to save yourself every time you died, 99.9% of games would be unplayably frustrating.
But in fanfiction I can do whatever I want, which in this case means making adorable, innocent little creatures suffer a horrible, traumatic death. Repeatedly. Because Soul Links are one mechanic I am treating as real, because (a) I like writing about the psychological effects of dying repeatedly and remembering it, and (b) because I hurt every character I love.
18. Rainbow
Sorrow Pass was one of the highest places in Nibel, and Thornfelt Swamp one of the lowest. But they were surprisingly similar in that they were both the wettest. From Swallow's nest, Ori could sometimes see the red cliffs, but just as often they were shrouded in cloud. He knew clouds were wet, but despite that he always thought of the pass as being dry, because in his mind it was connected to stories about the red soil of the desert far beyond Nibel.
But now that Ori was close enough that he could touch the red cliffs with his own paws, he realized he'd been totally wrong about them. The sky overhead was cloudy, but it was only a thin layer at the very top of the plateau somewhere above him. It was raining… but it was raining upward.
The Valley of the Wind was named accurately, but there at least the winds were somewhat horizontal. The wind swirled around itself in different directions, though, and by carefully steering his feather through the places where the wind changed direction and angling it just right, Ori could catch it and use it to lift himself higher. But in Sorrow Pass, the maze of slot canyons funneled the already strong winds into updrafts so strong that Ori had to be careful to not unfold the feather completely; if he didn't it could be ripped from his paws, or he could be flung upward into overhanging crystalline spikes. The reason the rock was bare, he knew now, was because the wind had scoured the soil from it. Small streams ran down the canyon walls, and in places springs trickled from the sandstone, and the wind snatched at the water, and the spray from waterfalls lower down in the valley, and turned it into a thin, misty spray that was constantly flying up towards the clouds. Soon Ori's fur was soaked. The air was chilly on its own, though not freezing, and with the damp and the constant wind his ears and paws grew numb from the cold.
The cliffs weren't bare, either. Splotches of moss and lichen covered the rocks, and in the cracks, or in the sheltered spots where a little bit of soil hung on, shrubs and flowers and even trees grew, sometimes protruding sideways from a vertical wall of stone.
Nir had lived here once, and Tatsu. Ori couldn't imagine how. Before the forest went blind, he knew, the Corruptions wouldn't have been there, nor the spikes or the beams of searing yellow false-light. But he couldn't imagine why anyone would live in a place where the wind constantly howled and screamed and tore at your fur, and the plants had tough, waxy leaves, and you couldn't get anywhere without scaling a cliff face smoother than tree bark.
But there was a moment that redeemed it a little bit, even before he broke through the top layer of cloud and could see all of Nibel spread out below him. He had just taken a wrong turn and died, and slowly crept in the other direction from the Soul Link, carefully watching for the deadly beams. He rounded a corner, and found himself on the edge of a sheer drop. The wind lifted his ears up over his head. He clung to the wall instinctively, even though he knew that if he fell he could use the feather. But off in the distance below him, there was a waterfall, and a cloud of spray flying up past him, perfectly catching the sun behind him. And around it, a perfect ring of colors – or half of one, stretching from up near the clifftops, left and downward, and then right again to the cliff below, just above the waterfall. Red and orange and yellow and green and blue and purple, and if he looked closely more rings of green and purple just inside, and far outside another ring barely visible. Ori gasped in amazement. It wasn't the first time he'd seen a rainbow, far from it. But he'd always seen an arch of colored light, never the bottom half. Now he saw for the first time that he was looking at a circle.
A/N: I portrayed Ori's flight in the Valley of the Winds with Kuro's feather as basically being dynamic soaring, a method used by birds, RC gliders, and occasionally full-sized gliders to stay aloft and lift themselves higher in the sky. In-game the wind just goes straight upward, but strong, sustained updrafts aren't that common IRL: you mostly find them in storm systems or in places like Sorrow Pass where something funnels the wind into a very narrow channel. And while it can't be done in a 2D game like Ori, dynamic soaring seems like it could be pretty fun as a video game mechanic if you had a good way of visualizing the air currents.
19. Gray
Nibel was home to three basic kinds of creature. First, there were the creatures of Light, like the Spirit Tree and all his children. In fact, it could be said that the light was the reason for Nibel's existence; the Spirit Tree's roots spread throughout the forest, and his power, along with that of the three Elements, kept the rain falling, the rivers full and clear, and the winters mild, allowing life to flourish. The light made the forest a paradise, but light and dark were opposites, deadly to each other. Creatures of Darkness still lived in and around Nibel, drawn to its abundance. Naru harvested the fruit trees of Swallow's Nest, and before that she had lived in the Lost Grove. The Great Owl Kuro nested at the summit of Mount Forlorn, and hunted in the forest below, where food for her chicks was plentiful. But they and all the others like them maintained a respectful distance from the Spirit Tree, until the night when even that distance wasn't enough.
Most of Nibel's creatures, though, were of the third type, sometimes referred to as Grays. Instead of consisting entirely of Light or Darkness, their souls consisted of a mixture – though not necessarily an equal mixture – of both. They couldn't feed off either, or be healed by them, but nor could they be harmed unless the power was focused into a destructive attack like Spirit Flame.
Guardian Spirits had a limited ability to feel the souls of others. With other creatures of Light and Dark, their souls were clear, and Ori could pick up Naru's love and worry, the dying anguish of the Spirits of the Ancestral Trees, and Kuro's terrifying hatred, like seeing the sun in a blue sky or the moon and stars at night. But Grays were like staring into clouds; the alternating swirls of light and dark blended together made it impossible to distinguish their feelings.
That was why Ori never felt Gumo's fear of Kuro's wrath, the fear that had possessed him to follow the young spirit until he was sure he meant to restore the Ginso Tree, then to steal the Water Vein and lure him into the caverns of the Moon Grotto. Gumo hoped the traps wouldn't kill Ori, only frustrate him into giving up or slow him down until Gumo could think of a way to hide the Vein so well it could never be found. But if he had to be killed to stop him, Gumo thought, that was the way it would be. Even if his people had exiled him, he didn't want them to get hurt. He knew the Great Owl nested above their city, above where they guarded the Element of Winds. After all this time, if the best minds of the Gumon hadn't found a way to restore it with the stored Light they harnessed, he figured, then either it was impossible for anyone but the kin of the Spirit Tree… or they'd realized what he had, that if they succeeded, Kuro would slaughter them to stop them from bringing back the Waters and Warmth as well. Either way, Gumo believed that the Guardian Spirits had all been dead for years, and the Spirit Tree's strength would soon fade. They had to learn to live without Light. But this new spirit was dangerous. If he somehow managed to restore the Element of Waters, Kuro would strike, to stop the restoration of other two.
But Gumo's nerve failed him when the little spirit pulled the rocks from his legs without a moment's hesitation. He couldn't feel his soul, but he could see the determination in his eyes, and the compassion, and the fear. No… his nerve didn't fail him, it returned to him. Reflected in those eyes, he saw his own cowardice. This spirit was risking his life to save Nibel, risking his life to help him and his people, and he'd tried to stop him, perhaps even kill him, because he was afraid of what might happen. If his family had seen him, he knew they would have been ashamed. The Gumon were the guardians of the Winds, and they would never throw away a chance to restore it out of fear.
When he watched the young spirit vanish into the Ginso Tree, though, Gumo began to doubt again. It was hard to tell with Guardian Spirits, but this one seemed just a child, and Reem, one of the most clever and experienced of them all, had gone into that tree soon after the water turned bad and never come back. Had he sent the spirit to his death? When he found him again, unconscious at the foot of the tree, and heard Kuro's screams of fury, he worried that he had doomed his kind.
Gumo returned to the Forlorn Mountain, deciding that the consequences of violating his exile were worth it to warn his kind, but he found a frozen wasteland where his home had been. He still had a sliver of hope that somehow, his people had managed to harness the power of the stored Spirit Light to keep the city warm, but that vanished when he crossed the threshold and discovered their frozen bodies. The bitter-cold winds produced by the corrupted Element itself had blasted through the underground city, tearing machinery apart. The city's ventilation shafts were shaped to run air from the outside over banks of heaters which could be activated in a blizzard, but they were useless against frigid air coming from the inside. But Gumo saw things Ori and Sein didn't. Half-finished blueprints scratched on the walls, scattered fragments glowing red hot, and every Spirit Light Container but one gone, exhausted in a last-ditch effort to keep the Gumon alive until they could erect partitions to redirect the icy wind outside. They had kept trying, right to the last breath.
Gumo watched silently from below as the spirit stood on a broken platform before the frozen Element. Sein, the eyes of the Spirit Tree, stood beside him. Gumo heard her say his name… Ori. He'd overheard it before, but now he realized why it was so familiar. He'd heard about the child, lost in a storm not long before he was banished from his home. He heard Sein say what he already knew, that he was the last of his kind. And then, he heard another voice, barely audible over the howling of the wind. "Then… I guess Gumo and I are the same. He lost them, just like I lost Naru. But he doesn't have anyone like you to guide him… maybe that's why he fell into darkness. Do you think when all this is over, we could…"
Naru… all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. And Gumo, with the pain of loss still fresh, made a decision. Ori and Sein would bring back the Light, but he would bring back the Darkness. He knew it was possible. The Gumon knew the truth about Light and Dark: they were two sides of the same leaf, both the energy of life. Since they were Gray, neither would harm them, and with the right technique they could change one into the other. But neither was life to them either. Nothing in the world could bring back the other Gumon. Gumo had learned that the hard way, last time. But Naru was Dark. This time, it could work – no, it would work.
A/N: Holy hell. This started as just being about the light, dark, and gray creatures headcanon, but I'd already kind of written about that before, and it ended up turning into a backstory for Gumo.
20. Fortitude
"Ori!" Sein cried as the beam of scorching heat knocked the little spirit out of the air. It seemed like a glancing blow, with only his arm and his ear actually going into the beam, but it was enough. There was a flash of yellow light, and he tumbled from the sky. His right hand still clutched the unburnt half of Kuro's feather, which flapped uselessly behind him. His other arm, as far as Sein could tell, was gone above the elbow, and half of his ear had vanished as well. Smoke trailed from the feather, and from the charred stumps, as he plummeted into Mount Horu's lava. He landed facedown, his body breaking through the thin crust and submerging halfway in the gooey molten rock. A second later, and he was hidden in a cloud of steam, but Sein was already turning her attention away. She couldn't bear to watch him die, not like this. She could only hope the reason she hadn't heard a scream was that he was already unconscious when he hit the lava.
"Are you okay?" she asked a minute later, beside the overhang the Soul Link was safely tucked under.
"I'm fine," Ori said breathlessly, shaking his head and pushing himself to his feet. "Didn't see it… hurt so much I couldn't breathe… but I'm fine," he gasped. "Let's go."
Ori wasn't fine. He didn't remember more than a brief moment after landing in the lava, but burning was one of the worst ways to die. Normally after coming back it took him a few minutes to get his bearings, and for his mind to actually convince itself he was alive. He set off without waiting for sensation to come back to his arm and replace the phantom burning. This time, the pain wasn't all an illusion either. He hadn't been able to find enough life shards to heal himself before he placed the Soul Link, and the pads of his hooves were still burned from standing on superheated rock a short ways back.
This wasn't a place living creatures were meant to exist. Even with all the life cells Ori had collected helping protect him, the heat was almost unbearable. Constantly panting had dried his body out, and he was as thirsty as he'd been inside before restoring the Element of Water, so thirsty his head hurt, his throat burned, and every jump brought a moment of faint dizziness like the one which had led him into the lethal beam. He found himself missing the cold mist of Sorrow Pass, or even the Forlorn Ruins.
Sein could tell even without feeling the fear still in his aura. She could see the way he looked at his arm while he moved it, because he couldn't feel where it was. She could see the way he hopped from foot to foot and winced with each step. She could see the foam he wiped from his mouth, and even the cracked, dry skin of his nose.
But neither of them said anything. A change had come over Ori ever since he'd seen Mount Horu's building fury from the top of Sorrow Pass. Sein felt a new intensity in his aura she hadn't felt since the Ginso tree. He barely paused to rest now; even after dying and coming back he just got back up and kept moving. Sein knew he was only making things harder by pushing himself until his reflexes were dulled, but when she'd tried to suggest taking a break he only snapped at her that there was no time, that Horu could erupt at any moment. It was strange, Sein thought, that at the start of their journey she was the one trying to hurry them along, but now she wanted him to slow down. She knew he had a point, though. It was impossible to tell how much time they had left. Even before the final explosion came, rising lava flows could make it impossible to reach the Element of Warmth.
Ori's impatience had another reason, too. It wasn't just fear of an eruption. It wasn't just that resting barely helped when the air around him was almost too hot to breathe. The last several days – he didn't even quite know how many anymore – had been a desperate struggle to stay alive, but now the end was finally in sight. One way or another, he told himself after each death, it would all be over soon. He just had to keep going a little bit longer.
A/N: "Fortitude. Noun. Courage in pain or adversity." – Oxford English Dictionary. This prompt is kind of similar to how I interpreted number nine, and I hadn't set a chapter in Mount Horu itself yet, so I decided to make it about basically the same thing. And actually, I think this theme has become one of the overarching themes of the entire story. Courage isn't easy. It's not something you just have or don't have, it's something you have to create for yourself.
PSA: Living creatures DO. NOT. SINK. IN. LAVA. Basaltic lava, which is the kind almost always shown in fiction, is three times denser than your body. Andesitic and rhyolitic lavas are a little bit less dense, but also much thicker and don't flow very well on a human-sized scale. This is approximately what would happen if you fell into a lake of lava, as demonstrated by throwing in an approximately human-sized bag of trash: watch?v=kq7DDk8eLs8. Your remains would stay approximately at the surface, which would violently bubble due to the steam produced as your body fluids boil. That fall would be instantly fatal due to the impact alone – even falling into water from that height normally kills you – but Ori doesn't take fall damage.
