Vera
It's a small thing, that which wandered through that darkness.

Impossibly complex, and entirely simple. Wood met metal met wood met metal met wood met metal met wood. Somewhere, in that mess of things and ingredients was flesh. Flesh met blood and bone, boiled together into a sapient machine, strands of pink and strands of red interlinking around columns of white until a beautiful mortal stood. A mortal; a boat. A mortal on a boat. Several mortals, even. They had built it, in their great knowledge and power, and it allowed them to sail into sections of the world they had yet to explore. How incredible was that, then? That with their hands and their thumbs and their thick heads they could put together something that allowed them such freedom?

Could they invent wings to fly next? Could they forge themselves a future where they were safe from threats?

In the same way that they had created that bone, through love and labor and intent to succeed, they too had been created. Chiseled away from stone like sculptures that were never meant to move. And yet they moved, their stone to flesh and everything else that composed them. What an incredible thing! Would they too some day build something that would build something that would build something? Would they too build something that could look for its creator and wonder its purpose? How terrifying a thought, how incredible. These mortals were young, so young. They would live for hundred of years, and every year a great well of knowledge expanded. What would one mortal's one hundredth birthday look like? Would their boats still be made of wood? Would they use boats at all?

Would their creator too move on from such primitive creations?

Perhaps it was that dark, ever reaching sea that drove such thoughts to the forefront of a mortal's mind. So many years spent in the stone, and now they were every where but. There was no where more opposite of the stone than this obsidian sea where stars speckled and monsters roamed like slumbering mountains in the sky, and storms brewed as if alive. Was this sea, this great sea, forged too? Had it been made upon a table as most things were? Everything trickled back to that most greatest monument in the horizon. The tree.

Gaia. 

It presented Gods without direction and without guidance, and in turn those gods turned and did the same with their mortals. Had she too been created and abandoned? How far back did it go, when explored deeply enough? Was there an end to things were one to travel back, or only an infinite amount of beginnings, feeding on itself like a misguided serpent? The dwarves did not consciously seek out answers from the tree, but their path found themselves at one of the many roots, the tip of the boat gently brushing off the expansive side of the bark covered limb.

"Let's dock here." A dwarf spoke. Brick. His name reflected his appearance, quite nearly wider than he was tall, and packed with muscle. His shaved head was compensated by a beard that reached his feet, every step a threat to catch it and crack his neck like a fragile crystal. Jak focused her gaze, looking up from the stone tablet in her hand, chisel gripped loosely and without effort. 

"Huh?" She asked, vision swimming together slowly as she tried to remember what they'd been doing before she got lost in her thoughts.

"That girl, always dreaming. This is why we never get anything done." Hamm chortled, his head shaking as he looked to Brick, tying the boat off on a knob of wood that hooked it well.

"I was hoping if you weren't going to help with the oars that you'd at least write what we've been doing." Brick grumbled, expression tired as he tossed a hide bag to each of his fellow scouts.

"Not much to write." Jak said, looking about as she fumbled the bag out of the air. "Why are we at the roots?"
_ _

"To have lunch, silly." Hamm said, slapping Jak's bag with the back of his knuckles as he waddled forward, small boat shifting with his *Rotundness.* According to one of the many stories he regaled Brick and Jak with in their many days on the sea, he'd never wanted to join the scouts. A big man like him, going all hood and dagger? It hadn't called to him the same way that staying at home had. No one ever wanted to join the scouts. The stone was safe. It was secure. Why would someone leave that just to go to the most dangerous parts of the wider world?

Jak had joined because she was curious. 

Brick had signed on because he'd lost someone he cared about, and Jak knew little more than that.

Hamm had just plain been unfortunate, and yet he'd been the one who'd adjusted the best. He was good with the boats, and he kept good track of their resources when Jak became too lost in her own mind to bother remembering. For that she was grateful, and doubly so that he never really held it against her. His meaty hand helped her onto the roots, and it wasn't long before the three dwarves were seated and eating.

The scouts was the branch for the lost, Jak liked to think. Maybe it was corny. But there was a call, and all three of them knew it, six sets of dwarven eyes set on that great tree in the distance, so large it seemed close and yet *So* Far away. It was like fate called to them. 

Jak just knew how to listen better than most.
William
Perhaps the team of scouts was a home for the directionless, but it came with certain benefits. For example, the sights that they might see.

 The roots of Gaia were a scene that no dwarf would ever be able to behold from their home of Lithos, a creation beyond mortal comprehension. Even the root that they had settled on, small and scrawny in comparison to most of the other Roots of the World Tree, seemed large enough to hold several planes. Even from here, Yggdrasil rose higher than their mortal eyes could see, and a seemingly endless sea of nothingness stretched out farther than they could sail in a hundred of their lifetimes. From their position on the boat, the place had seemed completely clear.

Then they stepped onto the root, and the vast emptiness only served to make the giant stand out more. 

The stranger had been like a mirage. One moment she had not been there, and the next she was. The dwarves that remained on the boat would continue to be oblivious to her presence, but those that laid their boots on the wood of the World Tree would suddenly catch sight of her.

It was certainly a *Her*, just by the shape of her body, yet to call her that seemed odd.

She was no dwarf. She could barely be called human. 

White linen spilled over pale skin as the creature kneeled over a woven basket of grain. An alabaster hood cast a shadow over her face, but a pair of golden braids did protude from the hood. They hung like chains over the basket, nearly indistinguishable from the massive sheaves of wheat and rice that peeked over the edge of the basket the colossus towered over. 

Two pairs of arms jutted from her sides, the only part of her besides her feet and braids that wasn't covered by her garments. Nimble fingers pulled ear after titanic ear of grain from the basket, deftly either placing them at her side or tossing them into the ocean of void in front of her.

The giant had yet to notice the dwarven arrivals. 

Or, perhaps, she simply did not acknowledge them.
Vera
The three dwarves hadn't even time to start unpacking their lunch before a tension filled the air, so thick it could almost seem to suffocate them.

First, it was Brick, his shoulders squaring and his body straightening as his eyes set ahead at the figure he wasn't entirely sure was present. It wasn't until Hamm too froze in trepidation that Brick seemed to confirm his own perception. There was something down the way. No- not something. A woman. It was Jak who noticed last, her eyes settling past the two meaty men with an unfocused bleariness, and it was her who took the first few steps forward. Hamm was almost silent, a small noise escaping his throat as he reached for her shoulder, but he made no move to stop her. It wasn't until Brick set out his hand and placed it upon her shoulder with a firm strength did words finally tear from the trio.

"Don't." Brick said, his steely gaze set upon the young woman before him.

"What.. Is that?" Hamm murmured, his eyes still affixed to the figure in the distance with something grander than horror, and yet different than awe. Something entirely new and wholly unknown. In its infinite complexities, he could not decipher it, so all he could do was stare, like a deer in headlights. 

Jak couldn't summon an immediate answer, her hand coming to Brick's much larger one to wrench his fingers off. It didn't take much persuasion for him to release her, but with every step she took, her took one to match. If she weren't to go then, the dwarves wouldn't go at all. Her gaze floated across the enchanting figure as if afraid that it might vanish when she blinked.

Every second that passed, she drew in the shape of the woman. Would this be the last thing she saw, or just another story to record on a tablet? Could a tablet ever do something like this justice? Jak had wanted to be a writer of tales for as long as she could remember. Maybe it was what drove her to become a scout, really. She had too much in her head. It felt nice, at times, to get it out. But there were times were in all of her literacy and all of her grammatical knowledge, that she could not summon forth the words or phrasing to do justice to something so aweful. 

It was a silent walk as the dwarves closed the distance, thick muscles set with wariness within the men. Jak led the way, an almost dream like quality to her every move, as if she could so easily discard the reality of danger in such an otherworldly scenario. 

"My name is Jak." She murmured out, to the much larger woman, a grand thirty feet between them. She wasn't entirely sure her words would carry that far, but in the vastness of such a space they sat within, there was little other noise.