Gase sat on the silver disk in the caravan of the mage. His chest rose and fell as he kept tight control over his breath. The faint creaking of the wheels gave him something to focus on, at least. Not that it stopped his hand from tapping against his knee.
He curled the hand into a fist and looked up. Holin gave him a look. Gase returned it with a nod.
"I'll give you 'till the count of three," Holin said, as he knelt down on one knee in front of him. Behind the hunter, the mage leaned closer with a look of anticipation.
"Okay-"
Gase could barely finish the word before the wind was knocked from his chest and pain flared through it. His eyes darted down and saw the hilt of the knife sticking out between his ribs, the hunter's hand wrapped around the grip. Holin wrenched the blade to the side. Gase snapped his teeth shut to muffle the cry that built in his throat.
Instinctively, he tried to grasp the blade, to get it out of him, test be damned. Before he could, something cold wrapped around his arms and neck. Gase's eyes widened at the metal rope retraining him. It looked like a solid piece of iron, but it slithered around him like a snake. Glowing symbols were etched onto its surface. Behind Holin, he could see the mage holding out a hand, controlling the thing.
Gase felt the blade cutting further through him. Warmth spread across his bare chest as his blood spilt out. He screamed through clenched jaws. The sound tore at his throat and left it raw. He strained against the metal binding, twisting his arms painfully.
"Hold still, for fuck's sake!" Holin exclaimed. "You're making it worse."
Hold still? He was supposed to hold still? Gase wanted to punch the man in the face... or bash his head in with a rock. Either one felt like a fine idea at the moment.
He forced himself to look as Holin dug his fingers into the wound. He pulled to one side, using the flat of the blade to press against the other.
Gase's vision swam, and tears blurred his sight as he looked on. He caught glimpses of layers off red muscle being forced apart underneath the glistening blood. Red—and black. Black veins spread through the flesh. Whatever the markings were, they were more than skin deep.
Why did he agree to this, again?
"Go further," the mage said. "We need to see where it ends."
Another stab of pain. He coughed and tasted blood in his mouth. Each new breath felt like its own little slice of agony. Voices reached his ears, but he didn't pay them any attention. His head grew lighter, and his vision grew darker. He slouched forward, only the mage's restraints holding him upright.
Finally, at the edge of his awareness, he felt the skin-crawling sensation of the magic array. He saw the light beneath him that could only come from the runes of the disk. The itching feeling continued to grow even as the rest of the world faded before him.
Gase walked along the dried and cracked riverbed. Every now and then he could make out shapes in the soil. Shapes reminiscent of what they had once been. Some he could recognise as human, others as some of the stranger things he had seen in this place.
The shapes were faded and smoothed over, just the barest of outlines remained. But they were there... and everywhere else. Silent companions; lifeless and grey like the rest of the Dead World, as he had come to call this place. The first time he had noticed the figures, it had been disturbing, now it was merely another aspect of the colourless plane.
He wasn't sure how far he had travelled, but there was never a change in that dour grey. Beside the riverbed, he could see trees. Except they were little more than dried husks that stretched to the grey skies, spindly and leafless. Above him, the ash-coloured skies hung, locked in half-light, without sun or cloud in sight.
Yet, even so, the place was far from empty. He frequently passed other beings of white like himself. Souls he assumed they were... he was. They came in all shapes and sizes. Some were human, like him, others downright freakish and bizarre.
Some sat motionlessly, and others wandered, or dug holes, or gathered rocks into a pile. Mindlessly repeating inane tasks. Occasionally a few would bound together to create structures. He called them structures because they were built in a seemingly random fashion, each builder having their own idea of what it should be. More often than not, these builders weren't even of the same species and didn't communicate in any fashion.
At first, he had thought they were mad, but, as time went on, he understood. It helped. It helped keep their minds focused, keep their memories sharp and themselves from... fading. Those he had seen who sat despondently were the worst. All of them looked like they were merging into the grey landscape itself, becoming part of it.
Gase held up a hand. The edges were just a bit blurry, as though the border between him and everything else wasn't entirely defined. He couldn't be sure, but it seemed worse than the last time he had looked at it. Like the rest of him, his hand was made entirely of white, soul matter, yet seemed to imitate flesh and blood. He could still make out the skin-like texture and the indication of blood vessels beneath, even though there were none.
The longer you stood still in this place, the more you slipped into a stupor, and the quicker you became part of the fossils beneath your feet. So he walked and thought back on his life, keeping it close to remind him of who he was.
He remembered smells, tastes and sounds. They were here too, in a sense, but it was not the same. Everything in this place seemed lacking. Hollow and empty. Like his body, it was only an imitation of something else. There was a lack of meaning to the Dead World that seemed to afflict everything it touched, like a disease.
Ahead of him, the riverbed he had been walking on ended abruptly, trees rising up from the bank. It seemed improbable that the river would just end so suddenly, but then again, there weren't a lot of things in this place that made sense.
Somewhere up ahead in the forest, he saw a cliff rising above the treeline. Setting that as his destination, he stepped up onto the bank and into the woods. There was no undergrowth, no plants, only the husks stretching like fingers to the sky. He brushed a hand across one of them as he walked. It felt like bark, but, again, it was off somehow.
The trees grew denser as he continued before opening up as he neared the cliff. Soon he stepped past the last of them and into a clearing. Gase's eyes were drawn to another soul standing in front of the grey cliff, its back turned towards him. Something struck him as odd about the being. It was only a moment later when he realised exactly what it was. The person was wearing clothes.
Or at least, the figure's white form was shaped into a flowing cloak that hung over its shoulders. And peeking out beneath the cloak was a pair of leggings and boots, also of the soul matter. Gase was still standing dumbfounded when the cliff in front of the figure moved. A deep rumble accompanied it, seeming to shake the very air. Slow and ponderous, it rose and fell in alien sounds.
Gase quickly scanned the cliff looking for the source of the sound. Then a part of the cliff slid open, and Gase found himself staring into an eye. The sheer size of it boggled his imagination. Its width must have been at least a few times his height. The eye swirled and focused on the cloaked figure in front of it before the rumbling sounds came again.
With a start, Gase realised that he wasn't looking at a cliff at all. It was a creature. He stared at it disbelief, even being in this place so long he still struggled to comprehend the thing before him.
Absolutely massive in size, the titan lay half-buried in the ground. It had turned almost entirely grey, and its features were so faded that he had mistaken it for a part of the landscape. What he first saw rising above the treeline was its shoulders. The movement he had seen was a part of its mouth, peeking out above the ground.
The only signs of life that remained in it was in its single, uncovered eye. Even though it wasn't looking at him, the sheer presence behind that eye left him stunned.
The rumbling ceased as its mouth stopped moving. Then the cloaked figure in front of it gestured and spoke, the sounds barely audible compared to the voice of the titan. The eye blinked slowly as if it was thinking, then it spoke again, the sound echoing around the forest. After it did so, the eye slowly closed and the titan went still once again.
Gase looked on for a long time, unable to shake the feeling in his chest.
"Its aura imbues a certain sense of awe, does it not?" A voice asked.
With a start, Gase realised he had been walking closer and was now next to the cloaked figure. His head snapped towards the being. From underneath the hood, the face of a man was staring at the creature before them.
All of the beings he had seen in the Dead World seemed in different states of focus, different states of degradation. Some were so blurry that you couldn't tell how they once looked, or even how many limbs they had. This man however... each of his features were defined as though a master sculptor had spent a lifetime chiselling each line out of marble—every hair on his head, every crease in his skin.
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But what most surprised him was something else altogether. "...You can talk!'
The man's lips quirked with amusement. "Can I? You have my gratitude for informing me then."
As he spoke two lines of glowing script appeared trailing from the corners of his mouth, down his neck. They dissipated again as soon as he stopped.
"That's- I mean. I can understand you!" Gase exclaimed.
"Understanding concerns concepts and intent, not sounds. If I desire people to listen, they have no choice but to," the man said with a chuckle.
The man's voice didn't match the words he heard, Gase realised. He wasn't speaking in his language, but in some other foreign tongue. Yet, even so, Gase had no trouble understanding. For a moment he didn't know what to say. How long had he tried to communicate with the other souls in this place before he had given up?
Some simply stared at him. Some didn't have eyes to do even that. Others talked in sounds he could not comprehend, even those he thought were human. The most he could manage were a few simple gestures and, even then, whether or not someone would understand was a coin toss.
In his silence, the man had gone back to looking at the half-buried titan in front of them. "It is the last of its kind. An elder race far older than our own. I had hoped..."
The man sighed.
Gase opened his mouth to respond when a mangled snarl beat him to it. He spun around, and his eyes immediately locked onto the culprit. Black. Not the white of souls or even the grey of the landscape, but the black of a moonless night. It was large, at least three times his own size and it walked on four limbs. Its front 'arms' extended overly long and ended in claw-tipped hands.
Unlike the cloaked man beside him, the creature seemed to shift its shape with every moment. A new arm grew out of its shoulder as it took a step forward, then merged back with the first. Its long snout twisted until the side of it resembled a beak, then it began to shorten altogether. Its head rearranged itself into a face that might have belonged on a human. Lips peeled back, revealing long teeth in a ghastly smile.
Gase narrowed his eyes and took a step back. This proved a mistake as the creature immediately focused on him. Its shifting eyes were like empty holes. The moment they met his own, Gase felt a terror rising up in him, a primal fear that promised nothing but an end. He swallowed and felt his knees grow weak and threaten to fold beneath him. The creature laughed, the sound sharp and grating.
Then the cloaked being beside Gase stepped forward calmly, his eyes hard. "Leave, abomination. There is no sustenance for you here."
The creature turned to the man, and Gase felt a momentary relief. It opened its mouth and roared. More mouths grew out of it as it did so, all of them in different shapes and producing different sounds. The collective howl stabbed at his ears and seemed to hurt his very being. He did fall then, bracing himself on the ground with his hands.
Beside him, he heard the cloaked man grunt and saw him raise a hand. Thin wisps of white seemed to peel away from his arm and swirled in rings around the limb. A hum built in the air as the rings turned into the same glowing script as before, only much more intricate.
The man curled his hand into a fist, and the world bent. The ground stretched and curled up to the skies, the air expanded. It was as if reality itself took a breath.
The creature hurled itself forward, itself stretching and twisting in the warping spaces. Then the man snapped his hand open. With a crack, the world snapped back into place. The creature turned into a blur as it streaked back, so fast it almost seemed to disappear. Trees shattered in an instant, broken as the thing was hurled through them without slowing down.
Gase struggled to regain control of himself as he stared into the hole the creature's passing had left in the forest.
"What... what the fuck was that?" He blurted out, unsure himself as to what he referred.
"A mistake. One born of hubris and ignorance," came the answer.
There was a sadness to his voice that made Gase look at the man next to him. The man's face was hidden by his hood as he looked to where he had flung the creature.
"A last desperate attempt to stave off a fear as old as life itself." — The man glanced back at the buried titan. — "Confronting oblivion is daunting enough a task for untethered souls. For the living? It was enough to drive them to madness."
Gase opened his mouth to respond but thought better of it as the image of the world bending flashed in his mind. Not wanting to accidentally offend the man, he pushed himself to his feet and held out a hand. "I'm Gase."
The man looked at the offered hand with a quizzical expression on his face. He then extended his own, holding it alongside Gase's. "Tu'herin."
Gase grasped the man's hand and quickly released it. "Well met."
"A greeting where you're from?" The man guessed.
"You've never seen it?" Gase asked, trying to hide his disappointment. The man seemed to notice anyway and gave him a sympathetic look.
"You shouldn't be too surprised, this place is old beyond imagining and it has a size to match. Few ever find their own."
"You seem to know a lot about it."
The man laughed. "No, I do not. I'm nothing more than a stranded traveller. Well met, Gase."
With that, the man turned and began walking away. Gase looked at his back, then he looked at the broken trees in the forest.
"Hold up," he called out and started after the cloaked figure.
Gase opened his eyes and sucked in a lungful of air. He hacked and coughed, spitting out saliva and blood. His cheek was pressed against the hard floor of the caravan. He could hear the creaking beneath him as the caravan rolled along. They were still moving.
"You okay?" Holin's voice came from somewhere above him. He turned his head and looked up at the hunter standing over him, hands on his hips. "You were out for a bit. Thought something might have gone wrong with the healing."
A snort came from the side before the mage spoke. "I told you he'd be fine."
Gase felt a tremor running through him. He swallowed at the lump in his throat. The memory of that hellish landscape clawed at his mind. He didn't know what it meant, and he didn't want to think about it right now.
He pushed himself into a sitting position and looked around him. The mage was at his desk, hunched over something. Gase glanced at Holin, who was looking at him with an unreadable expression. The hunter's arms were covered in blood, as was the floor. Gase looked down at his chest. The sight froze him. The black markings on his chest had grown once again, which he had expected. But what drew his attention were the black veins that extended from them, branching out further on his chest. He touched a finger to the markings, but it still didn't feel any different from before.
"Quite something, isn't it?" Holin asked.
"What-" He stopped. His throat felt like he had swallowed a handful of salt.
"No idea," Holin answered the question anyway and looked towards the mage.
Gase stood up and saw what the mage was working on. On the desk was a strip of bloodied muscle perhaps the size of two fingers. Through it ran black veins similar to what was on his skin. The mage was cutting into it with a thin blade, and another such piece was in a small jar next to him. It didn't require much guesswork to know where the mage had gotten it from.
"Any progress?" Gase forced out the words as he kept the distaste from his tone. He didn't expect an answer, but, after that, he certainly felt he deserved one. To his surprise, the mage did answer him.
"I was half-expecting this... affliction to disappear when it was separated from you. It didn't, and the sample is still seemingly resistant to direct applications of magic. This is simply unheard of."
Gase looked at Holin. "Didn't you say runes didn't work on organic material? Why spears and polearms didn't have inscriptions?"
"I said they barely work on organic material."
The mage clicked his tongue. "A basic understanding at best. Reality is much more nuanced than that. The irregularity of living tissue makes it bad at accepting runes for any number of reasons. That is not the same as being resistant to magic itself. Something like this that actively seems to absorb the magic is entirely different."
"So, have you learned anything from it?" Gase asked.
"Have I learned anything? Boy, how do you think this works? That knowledge simply springs into my mind, fully-formed?" The mage shook his head. "This will take time and tests. But it is a good start. Now begone. I have work to do, and I don't need you hovering here the whole time asking questions."
The mage turned his back on them and returned to cutting up the piece of muscle. Gase glanced at Holin, who looked at him and shrugged.
"Come on," Holin said and pushed him towards the door.
Gase didn't argue, feeling the need to get some fresh air himself. He opened the door and stepped out. He dropped down onto the ground from the moving caravan, stumbling a step as he did so. He could see a few people around eyeing him. Some with pity, some with interest, others with disgust at his blood-covered body. He figured it wouldn't be long before all kinds of rumours began to spread, not that anyone had much time to spare worrying about others right now, given the circumstances.
Holin dropped down after him, barely breaking stride as he hit the ground. He smiled at those watching, and a lot of them quickly found the ground or sky to be much more interesting.
"Well?" He asked Gase as they began walking.
"Well, what?"
"Anything interesting? You said these... things gave you memories of your past. And you certainly look like you saw something."
Gase took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Yeah, I suppose you could say that."
Holin's smile grew wider. "Good. I like interesting stories."
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Rhone walked through the trees, enjoying the lush evergreen woods. He liked the Yode forest. It had been a while since he last came this way, back during his... darker days. Back then, he had been so focused on slaying every beast he came across that he never even noticed the view.
How many terms had it been? Twenty? More? Gods, that made him feel old.
He stroked a hand over his salt-and-pepper bread and looked around him. It really was a beautiful place. A different beauty from the luminous groves up north or the snowy mountains and ice plains beyond. This wasn't a beauty that inspired awe or made a man feel small, but instead, one that seemed warm and approachable. A part of that was no doubt due to the evenly divided days and nights. It was little wonder why so many lived here in the lower half of Eidir.
He found himself relaxing, and the tension seemed to drain out of his body as he walked. He frowned and glanced over at Adler. The young man seemed similarly at ease, he noticed the glance and returned a questioning look. The frown on Rhone's face deepened.
"Hold on a moment," Rhone said and stopped. He planted the butt of his spear into the ground and leaned on it. He closed his eyes and searched, trying to feel the pull of the horde. It had been ever-present these past few days.
Except now there was none. He opened his eyes and resumed his pace. "Find the others and let them know we left the influence of the horde, in case they haven't noticed themselves."
He said it more for Adler's benefit than the others. Kali and Adler might be new, but the rest of his team were veterans, they wouldn't be caught off-guard.
He saw surprise cross Adler's face before realisation replaced it. The young hunter gave a quick nod and turned on his heel.
Rhone looked on as he left. Adler was a good hunter. He was reliable, and he did as he was told, though perhaps a bit too willingly. He valued structure a bit too much for Rhone's liking. But he could work with the boy. He wouldn't be in Rhone's party for long, no doubt destined for his own command in two or three terms. Even the Order wasn't without its politics. But until then, there were still a few things he could teach him.
Rhone turned back to the forest and looked over the hues of green and brown. It seemed that their temporary break had come to an end. Shouldering his spear, he continued on.