[OW] Shadowmancy 102 - Jan

It was a strange feeling, being shadowported, but Ross hopes he can adjust to it. It feels like being liquefied, then being squeezed through a tube to solidify elsewhere. Suddenly and unexpectedly in a different place, Ross is left feeling disoriented and shaky. The transport felt far too much like being submerged in water for his taste.

Steadying himself, the warlock looks around him. His Shadowmancy classmates are regaining their feet and steadying their legs, just as he is. Deciding instead to orient himself, Ross looks further. They aren't on the academy's campus any longer; surely quite a distance from the Shadowmancy building. He assumes the class is in the mountains, but there's little besides the rock around him to make him sure. He's standing at the bottom of a massive crater, but it's too dark to see anything besides the grey sky.

Professor Drake's voice echoes around the crater, making it impossible to pinpoint him, though Ross is fairly sure the professor is hiding out in some shadow. Their task is a simple one--escape the hole that he's deposited them in without getting themselves killed. Several students around him jump as a tendril is pulled from their shadow by the professor, but Ross is unmoved. Shadow tendrils jumping out at him are old news. He grabbed things with strings of shadows all the time a child. This should be easy work.

Drake appears high above them on the edge of the smooth walled crater. Escape or starve--not much of a choice. Ross casts a look about the edge in front of him. "Barren place, isn't it..." he mumbles to himself, and someone beside him snickers, overhearing the comment. He spots a naked, grey tree high above him, dark against the slate grey sky, and little else around it. The warlock throws out a hand toward it, and his shadow tendril follows the motion, shooting up the side of the cliff--

--And it jerks to a stop, nearly three-quarters of the way up. He's never pushed his shadow so far from himself before. Slowly, with sheer force of will, the tendril continues its journey up the face of the cliff, but Ross isn't sure it's going to make it all the way. He steps closer to the wall of rock, and starts drawing from the dim shadows cast by the rock to strengthen his tendril. It still moves slowly, but now Ross has made its pace increase by a bit, and the tendril isn't so pathetically thin, not that the thickness particularly matters. Even a thread's width of shadow would have been able to pull him out if he could stretch it far enough.

At long last, the tip of the tendril prods a tree root, and Ross can feel it in his fingertips, the shadow being essentially an extension of himself. Merging his tendril into the dark shadows under the tree, Ross grins as he pulls the remainder of his shadow around him to carry himself to the ground above.

Oh, joy. He can see the winter sunrise from here, and lower down the mountain, the full campus of the academy fits neatly into the panorama...
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My SHD102 assignment, accompanied by a mini novel xD (Word Count: 530)
The task was to escape a deep hole somewhere in the mountains using a shadow tendril.

Comments and critiques are always welcome. I want to get better, so advice/tips are appreciated!