high-wiz-technomancer
This was written earlier, pre #maw
picture, a falling line of shadow across a valley, a staff reaching through. This is cast by a solar panel circle (mini Dyson ring) geosynched to a certain locale. The space inside is constantly satellite monitored and various algorithms track changes inside it, alerting its denizens to the presence of any intruders. The PROBLEM is that it has slowly been shifting and moving closer to Merc's general areas of wandering.
world building: the technomancers are a cult of high technical capability, artificers that similar to Merc, employ technology, but masquerade as gods. A typical technomancer appearance is tall and thin, but this belies their miniature stature. Bred for longevity, they have shrunk themselves over centuries, and walk around in stilted suits, seeming to have long legs and short torsos. The mostly subsist on vat grown algae of various kinds, moving mechanically (or watching the world through sensors and screens) limiting their physical interaction with space.
Their beef with Merc is that he is a technological sharer as well as a competitor. They have been able to trace various rediscoveries or technical leaps to his intervention.
SCENE #1
#technomancer
It is very hard to see a border without a map, reflected Merc. One might see a river and know a certain people lived on the east side of it, and they didn't well get along with the west-siders., even though the drank and irrigated their fields from the same source. Mountain ranges were another obvious landmark, large, imposing, but again no one really lived on a ridgeline, and even the mountains in time shifted space, though much slower than the people that used them as borders.
So it was with peculiar curiosity, that Merc observed a definite border, here in the real world, just a few feet before him. It was a line of shadow - stretched in a regular ten foot line as far as he could see to each side of his vision, in the tough, hard scrabble valley. The edge of this liminal zone was iridescent where illuminated dust in the air scattered light, and empty beyond.
He looked up - the darkened space extended above too, but from no source he could see. He reached out his staff, the hardened wood with varies tools strapped along hands-worn surface. The staff crossed into the darkness. Nothing occurred.
He planted the staff on the ground, just in front of the barrier, and stepped back a pace. Then waited. (Pulled out a pipe, packed a bowl?). Twenty,-six minutes later, according to his wristwatch, the shadow had shifted to fully cover the staff.
- This scene should be Merc planting the staff, and walking a mile away. Then he waits and has happened YEAR OVER YEAR, the border jumps a mile or more. It covers well over him and the walks back for his staff, seeing in the distance a landing craft..?
The border was moving.
Merc's furry brows furrowed. He put away his pipe, that had occupied his twenty minutes of waiting. Stood still. Then with no seeming change, walked a step forward, gather his staff in hand without breaking stride and continued through the shadow barrier.
The same arid landscape under his feet, but now muted of hue, subdued in color, temperature, feeling.
He had crossed the border of the technomancers.
--
This of course was not much of a wanted decision by Merc, who was so often moved by pragmatism. The expanding border circle, even at a slow pace would, he was reasonably certain, encroach and cover his particular stretch of forest before years end.
YEAR AFTER YEAR, THE SHADOW HAD EXPANDED. LEAVING BEHIND A TWISTED AND WEAKENED FOREST. IN IT'S WAKE - DESERT, AT ITS FEET GREENERY. MERC MUST SAVE THE GREEN LAND.
-- ON THE NEXT EPISODE
INSIDE THE WORLD OF SHADOW
The solar circle and barrier could be blocking out green light, causing trees and plants to grow sickly. Rather it should be forest OUTSIDE the barrier, but wasting inside. A process of YEARS perhaps of slowly creating a swath of desert, geoengineering on a timescale of decades. Attempting to dislodge and destabilize the population of earth.