I am Veritas; a Knowledgeable Nano who Shares Stories. I am sending you this Postcard from the Ninth World.
Still on our way to Qi, we have been following the River Road. As we get closer to the city however, we find that we are no longer by ourselves; there are numerous other travelers, merchants, and pilgrims on the road with us.
Today, we found our travel interrupted when we reached a point where the traffic had stopped. The river had backed up and flooded the road ahead of us. Of course, we could easily get around the obstacle if we had climbed up a relatively rough slope to the side of the road away from the river, but we stopped to see what the problem was. A few of our fellow travelers were taking the alternate route but most of them, including most of the merchant caravans, were stuck on the road.
The cause of the flooding was quite obvious. A mound of something had risen in the middle of the river, diverting it to either side. It was a plant of some kind; resembling nothing more than an enormous head of lettuce. Overlapping leaves define the object that had taken up over two-thirds of the riverbed.
Janal formed an ice bridge out to the mound and we went to investigate it. Up close, the resemblance to a head of lettuce is even more pronounced. I, I will admit, decided to investigate the mound further and started chopping off some of the leaves.
Almost immediately there was a stirring and a number of insects emerged from beneath the leaves. They seemed to be beetles of some kind, but were attached to the mound by some kind of thin vine.
The insects attacked us, inflicting incredibly painful and debilitating stings, but we were able to fight of those that had emerged and retreat back across the bridge. Janal collapsed the bridge as Nyla and I looked around. Things had changed while they were at the mound.
A second plant mound had risen from the ground near the trail and other insects like the ones we had fought were emerging from it. The other travelers who had been on the road with us were fighting them.
We joined in and defeated these insects as well. One of the merchant caravans decided that it had had enough and started herding their wagons up the slope, as we looked around to see if anything else had changed.
A third plant mound had grown behind us and a fourth had appeared across the river. We decided that we needed to climb the slope to bypass the flooded trail ourselves.
There, we saw that the merchant caravan that had preceded us was being attacked by the insects; there were several of the mounds up here as well. The insects attacked us almost immediately and there was another brief fight. The insects’ size made them difficult to hit and they inflicted an extremely painful sting, but when we did hit them it took relatively little damage to kill them.
Again, we looked around and saw the mounds had grown during the fight and that more kept forming on both sides of the river. Then, possibly a bit too late, we noticed that the area was pockmarked with holes or craters. Some fairly recent and still showing bare drit, some partially covered in grass, and others mostly filled in. We realized that these mounds were common in this area.
More insects appeared and started moving towards us and we decided that we could not continue to fight, especially since more mounds and insects kept appearing. We ran forward along the trail, yelling for the merchants still fighting to come with us. Taking the hint, most of them followed.
A few hundred yards past the mounds, we stopped. The insects did not follow more than a certain distance; apparently the vines connecting them to the mounds prevented them from getting too far away. Most of the other travelers on the road had either run with us or retreated backwards and away from the mounds. We heard the screams of those who did not.
Moving faster, we continued up the road. Within an hour we encountered a Steadfast patrol and told them what had occurred. The patrol used a mirror device to signal watchtowers up and down the river to notify them of the mounds and to stop traffic.
The patrol told us that the mounds appeared along the river every now and then, but rarely in the same place. After a day or so, the mounds would rise up into the air like balloons and float away. No one has ever determined where they go.
With that small understanding of what we had encountered, we resumed our journey.
Iadace.