Macro March is still in full swing and I don't intend to stop writing anytime soon! Heck, let's even drag the Shady Impressions crew along for the ride! I even managed to keep it canon.

Thumbnail by  Darkomi!

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Shady Impressions (Macro March Edition): Loomy in Letum
By: RaddaRaem


“Who thought this was a good idea?” Bundled up, cumbersomely so, Russo waddled forward. The mage sighed bitterly at the change of plans that had been thrust upon at a moment’s notice.

“The Master did! As did I,” Jem replied matter of factly. The rough collie’s plate armor, wrapped tightly around his muscular frame, clacked in tune to the gait of his step.

A disgusted sigh escaped from between Russo’s chapped lips. Rendered nigh unrecognizable under layer after layer of clothing, cloaks of countless colors draped across his shoulders, the human struggled to keep himself perpendicular to the stony earth. “Bastards, the both of you.”

The rough collie shrugged his broad shoulders. “You could’ve always said no,” Jem teased with a toothy smile.

“You know damn well I’m in no position to deny him,” Russo grimaced. Gravel crunched noisily beneath his boots.

Pebbles, coarse and dry, collected between Jem’s thick toes as they tread the rocky path. “Don’t be like that,” said the rough collie.

“I will be like that! What kind of idiot goes stumbling back to the scene of one of their many crimes?” Puffy arms tossed out at his sides, with multiple scarves wrapped around his neck, Russo constantly glanced over his shoulder.

“You tell me,” Jem snorted.

“Stop enjoying this!”

The canine made no effort to conceal his widening grin. “No,” he gently barked back. His tail wig wagged in delight at the various noises Russo mustered in response.

Slouching forward, the mage held his head low and trudged ever onward. He grunted at each and every elbow Jem tossed his way.

“Drama queen,” the rough collie barked. He slapped a hand against Russo’s shoulder and pulled him in close. “Aww, come on. You have to remember that Letum, even under the watchful eye of the Guild Masters, nearly fell to ruin.”

“It did fall to ruin!” Russo answered. He gestured at the flattened mountaintop before them before making jazz hands at the boulder strewn horizon. Letum, and the flimsy wooden structures that comprised it, scraped together out of perseverance and sheer desperation, lay in splinters.

“The casualties were… minimal,” Jem coughed nervously into his fist. “But it could have been worse!”

Russo, once more for emphasis, gestured out at the horizon and the dilapidated village left in ruins.

“Okay fine so you can’t dare show your face in public here ever again,” Jem relented. The collie pressed his whiskered and fuzzy cheeks against the mage’s own. “Look, it’s like this. Master, and I, approached this in a brutally pragmatic manner. You… you were the one that saved the day here. Singlehandedly, even.”

The mage’s eyebrows went flat as his scruffy cheeks were smooshed against the side of the rough collie’s muzzle.

“And yes it… did… come at a great cost. To literally everyone that had the poor misfortune to call this place their home,” Jem acknowledged with nervous laughter.

“Blowing up a mountain will do that,” Russo deadpanned back.

Clearing his throat, Jem made a desperate effort to change the subject. “E-even so! We can’t rest on our laurels and assume the threat has passed.”

As they spoke the gravel beneath their feet gave way to blasted bedrock as the sloping path gave way to a flattened, and blow out, mountain top. Both the mage and collie warrior’s footsteps echoed loudly against the rubble strewn about.

Russo warily regarded their surroundings. The noxious atmosphere that had greeted them on their prior excursion was entirely absent. Everything had simply been… blown away. “So which is it then?” the human asked. He fiddled with his cumbersome, yet pleasantly well insulated, disguise as a bitter wind howled. “Does the old man just want me to suffer? Or are you banking on the fact that, worse comes to worse, I’ll save your ass yet again?”

“It could always just be I like working with you,” Jem pouted.

“I like working with you too,” Russo reassured the collie while he rubbed at his back. “But we both know that’s not why I’m here.”

A huffy growl escaped the canine’s lips. “Hmmph.” The rough collie crossed his arms about his chest with a sigh as he disengaged from what had become a hug. “…Little of column A and little of column B,” Jem trailed off.

“Thought so,” Russo snorted. Steadying his breathing, the mage’s misting breath trailing from his lips like smoke from a chimney, he closed his eyes and allowed mana to gather above his puffy and mitten clad fingers.

“Aaaaaanyway,” Jem shot back with a roll of his eyes. He dropped to his knees and slid his clawed fingers beneath a nearby boulder. Grunts, low and syrupy, rattled out from Jem’s ribcage as his arms bulged with muscle. The stone grudgingly rolled forward only to reveal nothing of particular import. Panting, Jem dragged an arm across his brow. “Let’s not spend more time here than needed, shall we?”

Shaking his head, Russo failed and resisted the urge to snark. “You’re the one that wanted to banter,” he spoke. The growl he received in response filled him with life. With a laugh Russo twirled his hand about his wrist. Swishing his index finger through the wisps of gathering magic, he slowly guided and congealed the accumulated mana into an orb.

Jem slapped his calloused hands against his knees after overturning another boulder. “Any luck?”

Russo casually backhanded at the air. The simple spell he had prepared shot forth and crashed itself against a slab of stone with a crackling fizzle. A raucous cacophony of stone scraping against stone polluted the air as the mass of rock barely skidded forth. “Nothing yet. Although…”

A draft of air, warm to the touch, buffeted the human’s cheeks. Huh. Curiosity piqued, Russo tugged at his gloves as he approached. “Jem!” he called out.

The rough collie promptly padded over. Crouching beside it, both the human and canine tugged at the massive rock. In shuddering fits they dragged it inch by inch across the flattened mountaintop.

Heart thumping, Russo warily stood before the sloping path into the earth itself that had been revealed as Jem looked over his shoulder. “Shall we?”

With only the echo of their footsteps to keep them company, Jem and Russo made their descent into the heart of Mt. Letum.

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“Whole hell of a lot less purple than last time around…” Russo mused aloud.

“Purple?”

Lips pulled flat, Russo carefully tiptoed around a cluster of shattered stalactites. “Oh, right, you weren’t here for that. That… artifact… genie… we never did settle on a name for that thing did we?”

Panting, Jem tugged at the neck of his chest piece. His fluffy mane, matted down by the humid air, clumped against the plates of metal wrapped around his torso. “No. And I hope we don’t have to.”

“Well, whatever it was, it was stupid.” Russo, hand held out before him, conjured an orb of light to guide them. “Hell, let’s just run with that. So like I was saying, Stupid had a really purple aesthetic going on.”

“Uh huh. We talking lilac or fuchsia or…”

The mage shrugged. “Iunno! I mean… violet if anything. It was a beacon all the same, obnoxious as it was.”

Jem hmmed. Nostrils flared, the rough collie struggled to fill his lungs. The air had grown thick and soupy. With every breath he took his armor constricted all the more tightly around his broad chest.

Russo continued on unphased. “Almost like it was trying to lure me in. Granted, you’d think the promise of unlimited power would be more than enough to do the trick but whatever.”

The sloping path, littered with broken rubble, evened out as the duo emptied out into a cavernous chamber. Both the human and collie’s limbs struggled to slice through the heavy air.

Blinking, Russo warily regarded his Cast Light spell. “The hell…” It trembled in his palm before flaring in intensity and lighting up the entirety of the cavern. Clouds of ambient magic, winding its way through both the stalactites and stalagmites, hung over them like a fog.

“I… guess that’s a good thing?” Russo mumbled. He watched on curiously as magic pooled upon magic as his simple spell was strengthened many times over through no will, or effort, of his own. The free floating mana, without a form or shape of its own, readily clung to whatever could provide it one.

Jem grunted as clothes, plate mail included, rode up along his thickening shoulders. “You say that…” the rough collie nervously chided.

“Or at least it’s not a bad thing,” Russo posited while he swished his free hand through the fog.

Hurking, Jem’s bloating arms trembled. His fingers went numb as the sheets of metal wrapped around his limbs throttled the flow of blood to his extremities. “Why would you jinx this?!”

The human dismissively waved back at the canine. Eyes scrunched, Russo worked through his thoughts. Think! Maybe Stupid was in possession of such obscene amounts of magic that it simply didn’t disappear along with him. And… without his malevolent will to shape and guide it, it just, sort of, hung around. Patiently, and harmlessly, waiting for someone or something to take command and reshape it as they saw fit.

CRNK

A bowed out sheet of metal, along with the bolts that kept it in place, rocketed by Russo. Sparks sailed off it as it scraped against the rocky earth.

“Uhhh. Russo…” Jem’s cratering voice called out.

Oh right. Giants were size shifting, and technically speaking, magical creatures. Magical as in said ambient magic would be more than happy to pool into them, regardless of their current size, and fill the mold they provided them to the point of near bursting. “I can already tell this is going to end poorly,” Russo replied. He turned around and, lo and behold, watched as his best friend violently swelled up and out as the ambient magic pooled into him.

Like a sponge, Jem filled out and up while he soaked up the dense fog of mana. The canine’s body audibly groaned as it bloated with muscle.

Russo casually distanced himself from the wumbo warrior before raising a barrier that, conveniently enough, reinforced itself many times over. Plates of metal, popping free with explosive force off of Jem’s increasingly massive frame, embedded themselves into the mage’s barrier as the rough collie spilled out wide as he was tall.

“A-at least I can breathe easy now…” Jem pitifully bellowed. Brushing a hand against his exposed chest, fingers tingling as blood flowed back into them, he filled his lungs with air. His pectorals ballooned in response as wisps of magic wafted between his teeth. “So much for silver linings,” Jem pouted.

“So you were saying about me jinxing this?” Russo replied from the relatively safety of his barrier.

“Don’t start,” Jem growled back. Cheeks puffed out, the collie’s tail hung low between his legs as the elastic of his waistline gave way and his pants turned to tatters. His sheathed sword, as did the rest of his belongings, clanged loudly against the stony floor below. The entire cavern trembled as the emerging multi-story, and multi-ton, canine shifted his weight.

Arms hanging at his sides, biceps chafing against his chests, Jem huffed. “You could have at least offered to help!” the giant’s bone rattling baritone pleaded as he peeked out over his pecs. His growth, as forced as it was awe inspiring, tapered off. The colossal canine smarted at the stalactites he knocked free with every turn of his floppy eared head.

Eye level with Jem’s ankles, Russo pulled his lips flat and tossed his arms out to his sides. “Be honest. What was I even supposed to do?”

“I. You. I don’t know! You could have at least offered to do something! Anything!” Teeth clenched, Jem struggled to will himself smaller. The instant he so much as dwindled an inch, exhausting a negligible amount of mana in the process, the ambient magic hanging around the collie’s shoulders like a shroud flooded back into him and restored what mana was lost. Boosting him back to his full size in the process.

Russo watched on impassively as Jem shrunk and swelled in rapid succession. “We’re going to be here a while aren’t we?” he asked. A grin, smug as could be, came to crease the human’s lips.

“Shut up and stop enjoying this,” Jem grumpily thundered back. “And lend me a hand here will you?! The sooner we can burn off this magic the sooner we can get out of here.”

The mage shook his head side to side with a smile. “Mmm… how bout I don’t?”

“Russo!” the colossal canine barked.

“Hold on now! Let’s play hypotheticals here…” Russo trailed off.

“Auuuuuugh I hate this game,” Jem groaned.

Thrumming his mitteny fingers along his waist, Russo continued to do nothing. “Imagine I cast a Fire spell,” he said.

Jem furrowed his brows. The thought of a tiny ball of flame drawing in a whirling mist of a magic and promptly exploding into an all-consuming conflagration the filled his thoughts. “I get it,” he answered.

Russo cleared his throat. “Now imagine that I cast a Water spell!”

Eyes clenched shut, Jem sighed as his imagination got to work. A tiny glob of liquid, frothing as mana bubbled up within it, surged out in waves and threatened to submerge the entirety of the cavern. “I get it!” the collie barked.

“Okay now this time around imagine that I cast a Blink spell and teleported out of here,” Russo snickered.

“You’re awful. Absolutely awful,” Jem grumbled back.