A Clean Kill

“Damn you!” Drusk fired an arrow, piercing the werewolf’s chest. He had fired hastily and missed the heart. Channeling magic into the portal stone, he reappeared at some distance on the monster’s left flank.

“By blade be balanced,” he said, pulling his cloak open via the drawstrings, then sliding his wisp blades from their sheaths. Using the wisp stones infused into the metal, he darkened the swords. They became shadows in his hands.

Daggers and arrows had slowed the beast, but Drusk didn’t take chances. He waited until the beast entered his inner ring of portal stones, then appeared behind it but didn’t strike. The werewolf sensed him and turned, but he was already gone, back on its flank but close enough to attack. He swept a blade down the creature’s exposed chest, then disappeared, already preparing his next attack.

He teleported between six stones in a rough ring around the werewolf. Drusk was a raging river, and the werewolf had fallen beneath his currents where sharp rocks tore him apart a piece at a time. Each time he appeared, Drusk cut another line of blood across the werewolf’s body. It spun and snarled, lashing out blindly, never knowing where the next attack would come from.

Between teleportations, Drusk spent only enough time in the realm of magic to quickly change position. As the Balancer fell into a familiar rhythm, he flared light in his wisp blades. The left glowed yellow, drawing the werewolf’s attention, while the right remained black as it struck. Next time they both lit up yellow. Neither was a feint, and each blade came away wet with more blood. The colors changed each time Drusk teleported. The beast clawed at afterimages. When it snapped its teeth where it thought Drusk’s head should be, the flat of a blade flared with red light as it smashed into the creature’s snout.

Drusk had not used the dual wisp blades since his fight alongside Einar. They had faced half a dozen Balancers. It was the only time in the history of their discipline that Balancers had been set against each other. Drusk had buried the memory of flashing wisp blades and the friends they had cut down. That memory roused, tossing and turning in a vain attempt to shake itself free.

Screaming, he increased his attacks, reburying the memory beneath anger and action. He teleported so quickly a single attack flowed through three different locations. Nothing in the world was deadlier than him. Hadn’t he slain the great beast rousing from its slumber in Keeper’s Mountain? And stood beside the Halcite burrowers to cleanse cave after cave of abyssals. He had exterminated an entire hive of kilkinteth in a night.

That last thought struck a discordant note. The anger was spilling over into pride and apathy. Unmaker’s fingers were wrapping around his soul.

Three fingers. It was too many. Like the beast before him, Drusk could easily lose himself to those darker emotions. He reminded himself that all his great deeds had been necessary for a greater good. The great beast, abyssals, and kilkinteth had threatened countless lives.

Drusk appeared several paces back to face the werewolf. The beast was sluggish. Some of that was genuine, but Drusk had learned never to underestimate his foes. Several of his oldest scars were from enemies he had thought on the verge of death. The werewolf bled from countless shallow cuts. A few deeper wounds had finally immobilized one of its arms. Seeing the werewolf so thoroughly reduced helped Drusk find enough compassion to counter Unmaker’s fingers.

“Last chance,” he said between heavy breaths. “I can still heal you.”

“Stronger...than you...lonely andruí,” the werewolf growled, struggling to force out human speech with so much of its mind given over to the beast.

“But I’m not alone,” Drusk said. “Balancers fight in pairs.”

Sensing an attack from behind, the werewolf turned, but his attention was too low. Onyx swooped, raking her talons across the wolf’s face. At the same time, Drusk teleported back to the inner ring and thrust both his swords through the wolf’s back and into its chest. A quick twist before he pulled them out, and he teleported back to safety.

The werewolf stayed on its feet, dying but not yet dead. Drusk only had to wait. The wolf made a half-hearted attempt to advance, but its legs finally gave out, toppling it to the ground. As the creature released its transformation, becoming a man again in its final moments, Drusk teleported to each of his portal stones, dropping them back into his pouch before jumping to the next. A few stones remained in the forest, but he would gather them later. He wasn’t finished with the night’s work. Returning to the single stone he had left in the field, he refused to look upon the dying werewolf, to see the man it had once been.

“It isn’t right for you to change like that,” he spat. “I gave you a chance, and you chose the beast. You should die as one.”

“I don’t like what you’re becoming,” Imena said.

His partner stepped out of the nearby trees, a single lock of silver hair hanging across one cheek and glinting in the moonlight. The rest of her hair, a deep red the color of dying embers, was pulled back into a dreshen tail. With her black cloak pulled tight, only her head exposed, she approached him, moving with a predator’s ease so that she seemed to float across the uneven ground.

“What kind of Balancer curses the dead?” she asked. Her eyes were tight with either concern, shame, or admonishment. Perhaps a blend of all three.

“Thank you, Onyx, for your assistance,” Drusk said, ignoring Imena. It wasn’t easy. The years hadn’t touched her as harshly as they had him. She was even more beautiful than when they had first become partners nearly twenty years before. She would argue that Drusk was merely blinded by love and thus unable to see the wrinkles around her thin mouth and beneath her violet eyes. “Seems my partner decided to sit this fight out.”

“My fighting days are behind me,” she said. “One of these days, your denial will cost you.” She held him with her eyes for a moment then strode to the dead man. “Will you not say a blessing to aid his return to nature?” She stood over the corpse with a look he knew well--pity. Even after all these years, she reserved so much compassion for the monsters they killed.

“I’ve done enough this night,” Drusk growled. He knew he was being too harsh. He was still wound up from the fight. Softening his tone, he asked, “Would you mind?”

“Only if you’ll join me.”

Imena bent and placed her hands atop the dead man’s. All traces of the werewolf were gone. Anyone who happened upon them would see a naked man, his body mutilated by countless cuts, which were much deeper in his human form. Drusk refused to feel shame for doing what needed to be done, but he wouldn’t look at the results of his handiwork.

When Onyx sent a visual image to Drusk, he didn’t have a choice. The nightwing’s view was so alien though that it didn’t affect him in the same way viewing the body with his own sight would have. When Onyx had sent images earlier, Drusk had been distracted by the battle. Now, he was able to marvel at the beauty of seeing through the bird’s eyes.

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The nightwing could see three times more colors than most humanoids. Colors Drusk had no names for waxed and waned as heat left the dead man’s body. If being drunk dulled your senses, seeing through Onyx’s eyes had the opposite effect, sharpening all the world and revealing hidden wonders.

Drusk knelt opposite Imena, the body between them. While she spoke words of forgiveness over the body, he retrieved his daggers and arrow shafts. They pulled free easily. Using his Mender skills, he opened the flesh around each weapon, and extracted the precious silver. Drusk wondered if he could be content healing wounds instead of inflicting them. Manipulating the flesh of a dead body took less skill than operating on a living person who thrashed and screamed. Those times he had brought people back from the brink of death had been rewarding, and even simple applications of healing like mending a broken bone or clearing away an infection had been fulfilling.

When Imena was nearly done, he took a sapling from one of the pouches at his waist, raining bits of dirt in a trail across the man’s bloody chest. Imena closed her hands over his own, and together they pressed the sapling down upon the corpse’s stomach, just above his navel.

With magic, Drusk parted and folded flesh beneath the sapling, creating a bloodless indentation. As they pressed gently upon the sapling, the pocket deepened until they reached the soft soil damp with fresh blood. In much the way Drusk communicated with Onyx, he sent nudges of will into the sapling, urging it to seek purchase in the ground. The plant needed little persuasion, wanting nothing more than to grow its roots deep, anchoring its life to Severia as it reached to the sky.

When they were finished, the man’s flesh sealed, the hole disappearing until it closed around the tree. It was a particularly powerful image of the dead lycanthrope who had failed to balance his dual natures in life.

“What kind of tree did you choose?” Imena asked, as if she didn’t know.

He shook his head, not daring to speak. The ritual helped to calm him after the rage he had felt during battle, but he didn’t yet trust himself to speak with the respect Imena and this moment deserved. As she always had, Imena accepted his silence and didn’t seek to fill it.

As Drusk stood and ceased looking through Onyx’s eyes, rather than sending a visual response, he sent his feelings of awe and thankfulness to the bird who cawed with delight. Imena rose from her task and cast Onyx a dark look. She didn’t approve of his choice in animal companion. If she’d had a strong argument against the bird, she’d have said something. Lacking such, she made sure to glare, sigh, and frequently sharpen her blades while watching the bird.

“At least our years of inactivity haven’t made me rusty,” Drusk said, wiping the blood from his wisp blades.

“Let’s not pretend you ever stopped,” Imena said. “I was well aware you were hunting abyssals with Spur Thu’Kore. While also being stalked by his mother.”

Peak Caesonia, the Spur’s widowed mother, would have made a formidable Balancer. She had the battle experience, and based on how fervently she’d pursued him, despite Drusk giving her every reason not to, the Peak welcomed a challenge.

“Of course you knew.” As Drusk wiped the blades, he spared an occasional glance for her face. “Remind me, is that one of the reasons I fell in love with you? Because you’re always a step ahead of me?”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Fine, two steps ahead.”

“Naturally. If I’d wanted you to stop…” Imena trailed off.

“You’d have said something. I know,” he finished for her and slipped the blades into their sheaths. He set to work cleaning the remaining weapons. “I was just thinking that.”

“I didn’t say anything because I’d hoped you might make a difference in the Spur’s education. Besides, hunting is who you are.”

“Who I was,” Drusk said, punctuating the thought by shoving a clean dagger into its sheath on a belt running diagonally across his chest. “I don’t know what I am now.”

“You’re still a Balancer,” she motioned to the dead man. “If you don’t want to be, then choose a different discipline.”

“It’s that easy?”

“Of course. You didn’t know?” she said, echoing and twisting his earlier words while wearing her wickedest smile. That smile made promises requiring a sturdy locked door.

Onyx interrupted the moment with a shrill cry as she glided on leathery wings to the now unattended corpse. With her sharp beak and large talons, she tore into the body. Drusk almost sent her a warning to avoid damaging the sapling but resisted the old impulse. She knew a Balancer’s ways by now and would only be offended were he to suggest otherwise.

“Come, my love,” Imena said. She pointedly ignored Onyx’s feeding. “There’s a kilkinteth hive not far from here. Surely they’ll be telling stories.”

Imena never missed an opportunity to visit the kilkinteth whenever they were out on a hunt.

“For you, anything.” He had never spoken truer words.

Imena leaned forward, a smile playing on her lips with promises of a kiss. Before their lips met, she vanished.

“Are you coming,” she called from deeper in the forest.

Soft wisp light in the distance marked her position. Placing his hand on the pommel of a sword, he jumped to the portal stone, only to find himself alone once more.

“Be a dear and retrieve the stones,” she called, now even further away.

Like a grocklin following a trail of breadcrumbs into a trap, he pursued. True to her word, he was always two steps behind.

***

There was no sign of Imena when he paused on the forest’s edge before the Telal River Hive. Tucked into a ravine, the hive’s thick brown structure resembled a series of large bubbles filling all the ravine’s space and overflowing onto the banks above when necessary. He had found the guest’s entrance without too much difficulty, partially aided by the canary glow of wisplight which spilled from the high archway. Other entrances would be far less conspicuous and would be no larger than the neck of a barrel.

Standing alone before the hive sent him tumbling down a warren of memory. Not all races found harmony with nature, and there had been a time when the kilkinteth had threatened so many with their quick breeding and voracious appetites. All the kilkinteth knew what had happened to the Tower Hive, and they knew he had been partly responsible.

Poison darts dealt with the guards scattered around the base. Imena climbed the hive’s outer shell, setting fires in entrances two and three stories up. Wisp blades in hand, he sped through the hive, striking out at anything that moved. Pheromones and honey filled the air, an acrid scent of fear as sour as the other was sweet.

The previous hive they’d visited, that one in Grinteal, had conjured the same memories. For Drusk, the past was another body to be buried and left behind. Visiting the Kilkinteth was like walking among graves he had helped fill.

But Imena continued to adore the waist-high insects despite her own role at the Tower Hive. She had always looked upon the world with far-seeing eyes. She saw potential and often knew how the world around her would develop. Imena had not viewed the destruction of the Tower Hive in terms of death. They had given other kilkinteth the chance to live and thrive. To become something amazing.

Drusk had only seen her falter once in her beliefs, and it had cost them both dearly.

Notes of impatience pulled him from the past. Onyx sent a quick burst of emotion. She had caught up easily enough after her meal and now stood upon the leather bracer wrapped around his wrist.

With a sigh, he left the forest, making as much noise as possible to announce his arrival. The pair of kilkinteth guards startled but quickly relaxed. After all, what threat could a single middle-aged traveler pose? Then he stepped close enough for them to see the Balancer’s cloak and the nightwing on his arm. They gripped their spears tightly, wings buzzing. Their caution was justified, but it stirred those memories Drusk didn’t want to revisit.

“By the abyss!” he swore to himself.

With a thought, he asked Onyx to wait on the ground, which she did, and Drusk opened his cloak via drawstring. He did it slowly, pinching the drawstring between thumb and forefinger while keeping his hands spread, palms facing the guards. They watched him warily as he unhooked his scabbarded wisp blades and set them on the ground beside him. He added the bow and quiver, plus the mechanism strapped to his arm which held his throwing knives. It wasn’t all his weapons, but it was enough to relax the kilkinteth.