Everyone was dead.

Oocid. Madam Rutabrood. Mita. Yugen. Fihra.

And Awelah. Unless…

Ooliri had climbed up the ridge. With Makuja’s seeming betrayal, it shouldn’t be a surprise to find the pale nymph lying there, bleeding out.

Her cloak was gone.

A filament of enervation extends down to her body, trailing from the wisp-masses high above. It makes him quirk an antennae.

Ooliri sits, and his eyes pale in meditation.

There was no reason to expect this. But he had a feeling.

He’d done this same ritual yesterday morning. He’d withdrawn arete from the crypt of his one vesper.

And now…

Now he had multiple vespers. He was a vesperbane.

Make that three gifts from his brother, then. Why entrust all this to him?

But if he had his brother’s heart pumping blood, if this arm was the design of that medical genius…

Ooliri had watched him make the signs enough times. Centipede. Cricket. Mite. And so forth.

⸢Serum Form: Pure Healing Palm⸥

Blood pools in his new hand. He feels a tug of what is not his will, and follows it. The blood brightens and clears to purity. He presses it to Awelah’s back.

Healing yourself with ichor is hard. Healing others is so much harder. So much could go wrong. But Awelah is dead anyway.

The filament extending up to the sky fades to nonpresence. Awelah screams. Ooliri does not know if that means it worked, or didn’t.

Awelah’s eyes scramble for focus. She finds him sitting there. Antennae spiral defensively. She leans away. Her murmur is barely intelligible.

“Traitors…”

Awelah clasps her tarsi together into the seal of focus. Holds it for a moment, and when her tarsi release, the palms are covered in black nerve.

She nods once, and her gaze flickers to the clear liquid on his hands, albeit stained with hemolymph now. Awelah is wary, but this seems to confirm that she at least had one ally remaining.

“So we’re vesperbanes now.”

“Long awaited, and yet I find the circumstances… distressing.”

“Let’s make our first mission getting back at the ones who did this to us.”

Ooliri wants to say no. It was stupid. They would die. Just like the rest of team nineteen. But…

“Before he died, my brother told me what our mission really was. We need to find our father’s correspondent and” — this was inference — “help them decode his last research notes.”

Awelah waits, listening for more.

“I checked our mentor’s body. The notes aren’t there. I think Unodha has them.”

“She has my family’s cloak, too.” Awelah stands with a groan, and wobbles for a few moments.

Ooliri stands with her. “It’s not defeat until you fail three times, right?”

----------------------------------------

A clear sky yawns above. The wisps are gone. It feels like something is ending.

The sun seeks darkness at the horizon. As it sets, the tone of everything warms, like the world had been set alight.

Makuja’s world had been set alight. She’d watched master burn in that warden’s suicide technique. She wonders how much of her had burned, in that conflagration. She wonders how much of her remains.

They sit at their camp. Unodha drinks her tea. She is condensing enervation, binding arete to replenish her reserves. Makuja sharpens her knives.

Their camp is not hard to find — they thought everyone else in a large radius was dead, and they’d be leaving soon. Two figures round the bend of a ridge — a familiar, vexsome pale violet and a gray against gold.

It seems they hadn’t been hard to track, either.

Unodha didn’t have her bow; Makuja hadn’t retrieved it.

Dutifully, she says, “Enemies incoming.” Doubtless the fearsome hunter her master was had already noticed.

“You should have brought me her head,” Unodha growls. “You told me you killed her.”

“She has returned to life, much like the nymph whose heart you set free.” Makuja grabs her other knife. “Shall we put these angels back in the grave?”

“Gladly.” Unodha takes the skin of tea and downs all of it. “Bitter. You should know better,” she murmurs.

Makuja smiles. “Allow me to spill your blood?” she requests.

Master arches one antennae.

“You do not have the arete left to manifest your myxokora. Nor your bow, nor your hounds. You have me, but my body is young and weak. I am an assassin, and with only my natural endowments, I will be of little use in this battle. With your blood, however, you can use ⸢Blood Wolf Howl⸥ and grant me strength.”

A moment, and then Unodha holds out a foreleg. Makuja stabs, and drinks. The wound closes itself.

In moments, Makuja feels the blood in every muscle fiber. It hurts.

----------------------------------------

Awelah and Ooliri arrive.

There’s no will left for posturing. It’s the dregs of two exhausted armies meeting, each disfigured by attrition.

Awelah has one word for Makuja. “Traitor.”

Indeed.

Ooliri has a proposal. “There’s still a possibility of an amicable resolution if —”

Unodha’s voice is not a growl. “Die.” Makuja watches closely, sees the shadow of a pentagram in her eyes.

Her master lunges forward and the nymphs flinch back. She slams a leg into the ground and casts, ⸢Sand Form: Rising Ground.⸥

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The earth in meters’ radius around them expands, granting them the high ground.

Master had explained to her the limit of this technique: it was just an air bubble supporting them. Excess weight would pop it. But would fresh pawns know that?

The mystery of her survival is joined by a new inexplicability. Awelah is a vesperbane; she claps her tarsi together, and casts, ⸢Umbra Form: Umbral Body Projection⸥.

A second pure black Awelah joins the first, but without the spear.

How can a nymph who was pawn yesterday cast such an advanced technique?

They rush in to engage Unodha, and the bane is moving substantially slower now.

Something has changed in the gray nymph. Ooliri closes in with so much less hesitation. And why should such a soft larva outdo her in that regard?

Time to play her part.

It’s with a rush of power that Makuja enters the fray. Her legs pump, and she darts forward. Her arms swing forward with weight. She breaks Ooliri’s baton swing.

Then Awelah claps and swings her foreleg and her shadow is rushing for her, faster than the pale nymph herself can move. Makuja dodges back, and its raptorial stab misses. Then she replies with a lunge forward, and stabs once, twice, three times with only her knife. The barrage unravels the projection, and it melts.

The blackness clings to the metal of Makuja’s knife, and it no longer reflects light.

When she blocks a swing of Ooliri’s baton with the knife, the metal bends. She drops the useless, degraded tool.

Awelah can do more than make projections. She holds out her palms and casts bane blast — but it’s nothing like her relative’s efforts. It’s more of a black sputtering, spitting enervate at Unodha.

A scrape of master’s raptorial spines across the gray nymph’s thorax leaves a gash. Then he makes a sign and slowly runs a bandaged arm over the wound, messily closing it.

Makuja evaluates the tide of this fight. Her chance to end it would be soon.

It comes when Awelah stops, stabbing down on her master’s foot, briefly rooting her to the spot.

The red nymph takes a deep breath.

Makuja does what needs to be done. She is not just violent, but patient.

Last thoughts flicker through her mind.

A blade should never hurt its wielder.

No mission matters more than her master.

Makuja is a good tool, and does what needs to be done. But whose needs? Who would wield Makuja, when this was all over?

Makuja crouches with the great power that hurts her legs, and she leaps. She flies like an arrow and buries her knife to the hilt in what was her master’s neck.

Unodha roars, and there’s something uncertain in it.

“Your tea was poisoned. This fight was over before it began.”

Makuja wasn’t done. The two former pawns have halted in confusion. The nymph pulls herself onto Unodha as she begins to struggle. Reaches for her abdomen, retrieves her knife and stabs again. Begins to dig.

Feels her heartbeat accelerating.

Makuja grabs Unodha’s entrails, rips them out and bites down.

Blood loss gets to the huge bane, and she shudders and crumbles. Makuja turns to face the nymphs as she feels something squirm in her gut.

And now, to inherit. She’s seen her master do this.

⸢Vesper form: Chimerical Sacrifice.⸥

Three nymphs’ eyes pale in unison.

Two entities, wriggling in dark crypts, so tiny, yet growing, reaching out —

— through an endless procession of profoundly rotting corpses, worm-colonized and fungus-rooted, the gravestones like pillars upholding realms —

— through a grand bat with wings like the heavens above, exalted above every last thing in existence, his head a fractal of horned antlers like a great lord’s crown —

— through a small mantis kneeling supplicant, whose eyes are spirals and tarsi are joined in prayer, whose back is wingless before bat wings climb free and there is kneeling no longer, never again —

Appraisal.

Agreement.

Investment.

Agreement.

⸢Vesper form: Pharmakon!⸥

When lucidity returns, two nymphs look upon bloody Makuja, standing atop the corpse of her teacher, her guardian, her master.

She hyperventilates. From her side, liquid muscle erupts. It sculpts itself into a form broad and long, tipped with claws.

The two nymphs look upon Unodha’s heir.

Awelah moves first, forelegs reaching for the projection mass Makuja earlier dispersed, compelling it to reform.

A new battle unfolds. From a distance, it resembles the first fight of the day in miniature.

Awelah flanks her with her projection. Makuja surges. She feels the blood in her muscles. It doesn’t pain her. It’s not her masters’ power now, but hers.

It’s a dance. Wing-sweeps meet with spear thrusts. Myxokora meet with projections. Makuja meets with Awelah.

One thrust lands true, and Makuja leans into it. Awelah is forced to readjust her grip. She now holds her spear just beneath the head as Makuja closes to extreme close range. Myxokora hug Awelah, box her in, and Makuja stabs and stabs with her knife.

A bane blast and a touch from a projection frees Awelah from the hug, but dangerous proximity is inescapable. So she leans into it. The next beat of the fight is a climax.

Makuja’s knife is just under Awelah’s head.

And Awelah’s spear is right against Makuja’s neck.

But it’s not restraint holding them back.

It’s Ooliri.

“Stop it. We won.”

Awelah stares at Makuja for a moment, then pulls away.

“Your eyes,” the pale nymph says. “There’s light behind them now. Something’s lit a fire inside you. You really needed it.”

“And you… I see reflection, faintly. A deliberation of impulse. Perhaps you’re learning patience.”

“Are we…” It’s Ooliri speaking. “…allied? Were you against Unodha all along?” They look at the corpse. Unmoving now, they finally get a look at her antennae-band: a copper plate with two nested, concave hexagons, thinly trisected. The insignia of the Bloodweb Stronghold.

“I loved my master.”

“Why?” “How?”

Beside her, Makuja’s myxokora are falling limp, and squishing as they invert back into her. She says, “Years ago… the poorest of my village were stricken with a blood plague. Unodha and her apprentice came through on a journey, but had no reason to help us. Eventually, I convinced them to heal my family and my neighbors… the cost was I would be taken, as per the law of heroic exchange. So I became her pawn. She taught me strength. She gave me everything.”

Awelah latches on to one element in that, as if hunting for lies. “Unodha has an apprentice? Where are they?”

“She had. They were the one who healed the plague. But one day, after I had trained with them for seasons, they disobeyed an order master gave. So my master… disabled them and ordered me to… strike them down, to prove my loyalty. I was loyal.”

“I — I’m sorry,” Ooliri says.

“Don’t be. Traitors deserve death.”

“But you… your master…”

“Unodha betrayed herself, in the end. It’s what she would have wanted, were she in her right mind.”

Awelah hisses. “You betrayed me, nearly killed me. You tried to kill me.”

“I failed. My — my hand lacked the confidence to strike you down.”

“What does that change? You. betrayed. me.”

“Your trust was freely given. I freely discarded it.”

“So it doesn’t count?“

“A traitor forsakes their sworn ideals. I swore you nothing.”

“So swear you will atone for what you’ve done.”

Makuja pauses as if considering. “Why should I?”

Ooliri says, “We have to stick together? We’ve each lost all else.” It doesn’t win her over. “What do you want, Makuja?”

“Want… My master’s will was not her own. She would want me to find out why, and strike it down. So I must know what all of this was for. Who wanted this?”

At the mention, Ooliri looks down and sees something. Emerging from the dead bane’s head, a thorned black stem beneath an orb glowing baleful red like a terrible rose. A shadow, as of a snake’s pupil, splits the orb.

“Whatever is behind this, I think this is our first clue.”

“You mentioned research notes Unodha stole,” Awelah says to Ooliri. Glancing at Maku, “Did she seem interested in them?”

“She did retrieve a sealed object from the master warden’s remains.”

“The notes, the control of Unodha, and the eradication of Duskroot. It must all be connected. Someone wanted all of it. To find out who… we share that goal.” Awelah leans toward Makuja. “Swear loyalty to us, and we can work together.”

“You make it sound like we’re some organization.”

“We can be a team. United in the wake of Duskroot… Team Duskborn.”

“So be it,” Makuja says. “I shall serve.”

“Then where do we start? We can ask around, about whatever this thing is, about the surgeon or what happened in Duskroot… but I get the feeling that just leads to more people coming to kill us.”

“The roaches,” Makuja says. “They were heading to a village to the east. They say it’s blessed by a guardian who shapes the earth. I suspect this means a powerful vesperbane lives here, on the border between Duskhold territory and Windhold territory. Perhaps they’ll be willing to teach us the arts of vesperbanes, or grant direction.”

“Or we could just report back at Solaroch,” Ooliri notes. “I’m registered as a pawn of the wardens.”

“And get picked off on the long road over? And let everyone know what happened, who we are? Whatever enemy we have is powerful, and subtle. We need to… we have to hide, and become stronger.”

“So that’s our first mission as Team Duskborn, isn’t it?”

Makuja nods. “When the reaper cuts away at foliage, only the toughest stems resist. So many have been cut down… but we remain.”

“That already makes us strong, doesn’t it?”

“Or lucky.”

And so, team Duskborn escape the doomed land amidst the ruins of Duskroot, and journey further to the east. The sun, having gone to the darkness at last, leaves them. Night has engulfed them all, and dreams elude.

Yet the omen of dawn remains.

End of Arc 1: A Duskroot Exodus