COBALT 7.10: FALLING
“I am the stone that turns and turns then stops. I am the loyalty implied by the vow. I am the toil of arduous undertaking. I am Lord Oath.”
– from the Glaivan Creed
No one but me.
I waited until the last moment. The streets of Rivertown rushed up at me as I sank towards them like a stone. There was no wind in my hair, no drumming in my ears. In breathless silence, I went through the darkness to my death.
As far as she cared.
I was numb. The sorrow bit down with bitter teeth on my brain, clamping my mind in place so that my thoughts couldn’t move, locking it into the moment of despair. It was only as the ground approached at a sickening speed that instinct took back over.
Instinct, and indignation.
She really is trying to kill me.
I dispelled my eldritches save for my sylph, and fell through an ethereal portal. Avaelar caught me with fifty feet to spare, soaring with me through a dark-green sky, my back to his chest. I gulped in the sweetly-scented airs like a drowning man.
The influences of vampire and wraith negated, my native attitude was still taking shape, my true assessment of the situation coalescing like a quivering thing, creeping into the light.
“Carry me up, that way!” I cried, nodding.
“Very good, Feychilde,” my sylph huffed, “yet it appears you are once more engaged in perilous activity. Is it truly advisable for you to ascend, if –”
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“Up!” I roared.
He obeyed. We ripped away from the landscape below, but now that we were high above the intervening obstacles it only made the strange hills of web and reed, the tremendous tree-pillars of the distance plain to the eye. I felt sick, and screwed my eyes shut.
The vampire had been clouding my thoughts again; under its influence I wasn’t just misinterpreting my own emotions, but everyone else’s. The truth of what Tyr Kayn had done to me, done to Emrelet, finally entered my bone marrow.
My plan had been to lift myself back up to a decent elevation then return to Materium, using Zab and the wraith to hide me this time, until I could start dropping demons on her. Now, having taken a few seconds to think it through, I decided that I didn’t want to fight her. I feared her, yes, but I feared hurting her even more. She’d been deluded by enchantment, as much as it pained me to admit it. She was a victim here, of Lovebright’s lies – and my own.
I should’ve just told her about Nighteye…
But there was nothing to confirm it. Nothing to tell me she’d have acted any differently, finding out then instead of now. If anything, this current performance might be tame in comparison to how she could’ve acted, if I’d said something after the battle at the library. I’d have been right there, in the middle of everyone.
No escape. No enchanter willing to plumb the depths of my mind to uncover the truth, my innocence, for fear of becoming corrupted along with me.
What’s done is done. I need to get the twins.
My main goal now was to lie low. Stay safe.
I opened my eyes for just a moment then jerked my head around, shouting, “That way!”
Avaelar swung about, bearing me in the direction of home.
It wasn’t comfortable, being carried like this, but it was a damn sight better than being hunted across Mund.
I would get home, and I would take the twins, take my money… and that would be it. We would go – live wherever they wanted, do whatever they wanted… We didn’t owe this city anything. I’d paid our debts. I’d done my best. I’d saved the lives I could save. Now I owed it to them.
It was, truly, over. I had no way to proclaim my innocence that anyone would be willing to listen to. Maybe I’d come up with something… one day…
Can I ever come back?
Surely, one day, I’d find a way. Surely…
I shed my tears in Etherium where no one else could see me but my bound slave, just a stupid sorcerer being awkwardly carried through the weird sky by a sylph. When at last I came back to the material plane I was ready.
Ready to leave it all behind.
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