Yelena

She was looking out into the sands of the First Layer from somewhere beyond herself. Out of time. Out of mind.

She could barely feel the hard stone of the wall she was standing on – something broken and ruined – an extension of a sandstone stronghold that rose above the edge of this world, the turrets of its topmost towers holding eyes that were watching her.

But she didn’t feel fear. She thought that was strange. Had she been that same little girl she was up there on Averix, she would have cried out or tried to strike at them in anger – projecting all her fears into action.

Instead, she simply breathed in the air of the Shifting Sands, feeling the dry grains of the Layer fill her chest and evoke a sense of…comfort?

“After all, there’s no place like home.”

She felt herself turn slowly, like her limbs were moving through molasses. She felt the pain of the turn even though only her vision and voice remained, and so when she saw the black haze that shimmered beside her, hunched over and looking out at the Sands too, she tried to ask it the questions that were burning in her mind.

But her voice died in her throat. She couldn’t croak the words out.

She could only follow the slowly rising head of the benighted being and saw it stretch one translucent hand towards the sunstruck horizon.

It was pointing towards a nest of giant wasps with quadruple, serrated wings, circling a body in the sands. Each of the fierce creatures took their turns striking at the corpse with their bloated stingers, pumping poison into the inert corpse before flying away again, apparently satisfied.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?”

She frowned, and this time made her tacit reply:

“No.”

The swirling haze of darkness shuddered in a sickening approximation of a chuckle.

“You haven’t learned how to look,” the voice said. “Look with your mind – not with your eyes. Reach out and try to understand something that is beyond the understanding you allow yourself to hold.”

She shook her head without ever once turning back to the sight of the diabolical insects.

“Wasps that big shouldn’t be able to fly,” she said.

“And yet, there they are,” the dark mass replied with triumph, like it had won some unknown argument. “There they are defying your vain attempts to apply your disgusting veil of normalcy onto them. Have you learned nothing, my daughter?”

“I told you before,” she said. “I’m no daughter of yours.”

The wasps kept circling their target, trying to find an artery they hadn’t yet punctured as the body below them sizzled in the rising sun.

“I suppose not,” it replied, cooly. “I thought perhaps that title would work with a mortal like you. With one who saw to the destruction of her own parents, it seemed an appropriate way to establish trust.”

Her hand flew to her blade to find that it was absent from her side. When she looked back up she then saw that the dark haze had began to resolve a body. Something familiar…

“Oh, so angry, so bitter,’ it laughed again. “Level three and rising, aren’t you? Even though you have earned none of your strength. You have done naught but borrowed greatness and let it fester away. Even as you know that, within you, you have the power to destroy that Black Bird and his minion, whom you hate.”

She saw them then, hovering in the air, suspended above the crimson-streaked sands that they had made theirs. The swarthy Knox smiled at her, and she watched his scarred face elongate like a snake’s jaw. His overlord draped a thin black wing over him and swept the other over the entire First Layer, casting a shadow that left the sands cold, and dead.

“They mock you with their bastardization of your ‘order’”, the darkling whispered in her mind. “They rape this land and leave its beings – the things you consider so ugly – in desolation. Perhaps in your heart you simply do not care?”

Of their intentions, the creature spoke true. She had seen what the Don had done to something that was once as pure as Jael’s quest to conquer the Everloft. The fact the foul Jilae and his fiendish band were left here, alive, did not make sense…

She felt the smoky fingers of the dark voice’s hands grab the small of her back.

“You wish to see them die, Yelena,” the voice – now so close to her own – thundered. “You wish to strike them down, to watch them flail like fish beneath you just as the lizard did. You did that all on your own. Imagine what you could do…if you let me in.”

She watched their skin blister and burn. She watched their eyes sizzle and melt, like the sun itself was slowly stripping the flesh from their bloody bones…

“NO!” she screamed in her mind, fighting her hatred, feeling her pain.

“Why not?” the voice laughed again. “See – I snap my fingers – CLICK! – and they are gone!”

Their bodies curled and their spines snapped. They fell in on themselves like paper dolls – every bone cracking in the depths of her brain.

“Except, I can’t snap my fingers, can I, Yelena?” the dark one growled tetchily. “You feel my power, I feel your anger, and nothing happens.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“That’s nothing to do with me,” she answered, surprised to find herself now watching the melting bodies of the two devils crisp and bleed in the air. “You sought me out as your prey, creature. You latched onto me like a parasite, and now you complain that you can’t get the despair that sustains you.”

She turned back to look now into the face that the dark one had formed – a lifeless, pallid version of her own image.

“I will never yield,” she said. “Not to you.”

At first the mocking reflection said nothing. It stared back at her with its formless eyes, then slowly the gaze narrowed to a gimlet, and it laughed. It laughed with unnatural hysteria that bellowed through the dry, worn winds.

“’Nothing to do with me’ she says!” it howled. “Your Argents taught you nothing. Your heritage…Your purpose…Your precious Jael’s hubris…”

As he said the name of Lord Jael she saw the mocking reflection cringe and curl away, like it was staring into a fire.

“But then, you never had a choice, did you?” it whispered in her head. “Never for them to ask for permission. They blundered around down here – those thieving, wretched beings that named their sundering light ARGENT! That fought in the name of their vile CHAINBREAKER! And for what?”

She stared back at her corrupted self, waiting.

“For you, Yelena,” the voice boomed with a rueful smirk. “For you.”

The wind had risen to a screeching growl. Below, the wasps continued their sadistic ritual.

“I suppose your impotence is a kind of vengeance in itself,” her dark reflection said as its mirthless laughter came to an end. Then it looked at her hard and fierce.

“Know this: if you shall not use my gift, there are others that will come. Others that will heed the call and seek to take away any semblance of humanity you have left. If my strength cannot force you to realize what you are, then perhaps they will.”

She saw that this, too, was the truth: as the sun reached its zenith, a shadow stretched its fleshless body over the clouds. The sun’s color died away, and she heard again the mirthless laughter of a thirsting demon. But when it spoke, it spoke with fury:

“They have already taken scraps from my table and fed them to their dogs,” it hissed. “Mongrels undeserving of my potency. Not like you. You have proven already that you are more than a mere beast driven by the baseless desires of mortal flesh. If you shall not accept me - if you hate me and my ugly world - then see what awaits you when those made of sterner stuff claim your destiny for their own.”

The wasps injected their stingers into the punctured victim of the sands and dredged him up, bringing the body towards her so she could see it – so that it was all she could see. And though she tried to turn away, to hide her fear under a grimace of hate, she couldn’t help but flinch. Her eyes wouldn’t let her focus on anything else.

Limbs twitching with each painful welt of the wasp’s injected venom, Marius stared back at her with hollowed-out eyes.

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-Catacombs of Bhashera, LVL 4-

It was his voice that woke her.

As usual, he was complaining about something, and as usual, his tone of childish offense was quite out of kilter with, well, everything in this place.

“Look, I get it. ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ but couldn’t you use your mystical-magic-animal speech to get that beetle off my back?”

“You are not having ‘scorned’ her, Ch’alokk!” the Red-Woman scolded him. “You are having harmed her.”

“Oh, yeah. Guess that little turn of phrase doesn’t apply. Well, can you tell her I’m sorry, then?”

“Be telling her yourself.”

“I don’t speak big crazy beetle!”

She then heard him grunt in pain and land beside her, followed by the laughter of the Red-Woman and the freed Edna, who was happily nuzzling against her rider’s swarthy skin.

“The human is being sorry, Ta’Kella,” she whispered. “For what that is worth.”

At this moment Yelena chose to rise and nod to her companions, drawing a suspicious look from the Red-Woman and a glare of utter desperation from Marius.

“Honestly, every woman in my life tries to kill me!” he exclaimed privately as the Red-Woman turned to stoking up the fire. “I’m starting to think it could be a me problem.”

“No,” Yelena said with a roll of her eyes. “It couldn’t be. Your manner is so endearing.”

“You really think so?”

“No.”

He slumped back on a piece of loose rock, rubbing his back against the runic symbols etched into the sandstone amidst images of dog-men at prayer. “Yelena: New skill acquired: sarcasm. I’ve taught you well.”

She brushed off his demeanor with a shake of her head, focusing her gaze instead on the stoked-up bonfire they’d constructed while they slept through the night. She told herself it was because she hadn’t felt the warmth of a fire for what seemed like an age. But, really, it was because she couldn’t shake the sight of his eyeless corpse boring into her soul.

Through the hazy smokescreen belched by the fire, the Red-Woman watched her intently.

“What’s your name?” Yelena asked suddenly, craving distraction from her own mind.

The fiercely sharp eyes of the woman narrowed.

“Your friend is not asking such a question. Why are you being interested?”

“Unlike my friend,” she said with a strained smile. “I have manners.”

“And thus, I begin my new Everloft existence as a punching bag,” Marius moaned through his closed eyes. “Victim of an oppressive Matriarchy where I exist as public enemy number one. Two hours mandated Marius hate every day. Social credit when one gossips about him in public. Judicial system designed to systematically oppress all males with names beginning with the letter ‘M’, anti-Marius studies taught as an entry level course at uni-“

Yelena spoke through his rant: “If we are to shed blood together, we should know eachothers’ names. Mines is Yelena. Yours?”

“It is not something you are needing to know.”

Yelena looked back at the core of the crackling bonfire.

“You are right,” she said. “I was simply curious. I know the Everloft only through the stories passed down by my Order, and what I have seen does not match what I have learned. I know now that you must have suffered here. And I know I cannot say anything that would take away your pain.”

She let those words hang in the air and burn away in the flickering embers. Marius’ eyebrows rose inconspicuously.

“But I can offer you my thanks for helping us escape the clutches of that evil bird,” she said with renewed fervor. “And I can give thanks to you in the only way I can: I swear I will kill that beast, and his minions. I will stop them before they can cause you and your people any more harm.”

The Red-Woman held her gaze for an instant before turning away to pet the chirping beetle by her side, fixated on the shadows the fire was throwing up the side of the ruined temple walls.

“The Argents from above are coming wishing to know about us,” she said after a time. “They are wishing to know our names, our ways, only so they could rape our lands and take what they wanted from us as they went below. We would have been better to reject their curiosity and send them back above to their own dead world.”

“You’re wrong,” Yelena said, even as the words of the dream-spirit returned to her ears – the talk about the rape of the land. She stared down now at the Red-Woman and only now realized that she had risen to stand above her, fist clenched.

“Your thanks is not what I am needing,” the Red-Woman said, meeting her gaze without fear. “For good or for ill, you shall do what the rest of your people do: destroy. The prophecy of the Lightbringer is telling us this. You will destroy the problems you yourself made, and then you will leave. This time, for good.”

Yelena pressed her argument even as Marius’ hand flew to grab her wrist.

“We are not all like the evil ones that took this place!” she yelled, desperate. “Above, we fight to protect Averix from evil. We fight to shield the innocent and punish the wicked. We fight to protect the world from…from…”

She felt her voice fail as she saw her own pained reflection in the flames that cut between them.

“Us,” the Red-Woman finished. “I wonder – you are saying you are different from the rest of your kind. But do you think this too of those you hunt – those who hold the keys to the Doors in their hands? Those who are using the Glance?”

Yelena was about to step forward and deliver a retort, when she realized with surprise that she didn’t quite know how to reply. She knew – of course she did – that this woman was wrong, she had to be, and yet she faced her with such deeply seated fury for her order that any counter argument she could conceive caught in her throat and died there. She hated her – Yelena knew it then – not for who she was, but what she was.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Red-Woman saw her shame, and, either out of guilt or repressed anger, she dropped her own head to trace the little embers sparking off their simple fire.

“It is not mattering,” she said, laying down to slumber on the warm floor beneath her bare skin. “All the evil that could have been done to us, your people have already done. The future is all that is meaning anything, now. If you truly wish to give thanks, be fulfilling the prophesy and then leave. Never come back, and never seek to know more of us again.”

And Yelena could do nothing more than watch her bare back as she drifted off to slumber, no doubt haunted by the demons of her own past. Demons that probably looked a lot like her.

“Feel like a hero, yet?” Marius quipped from her side, before she silenced him with a furious glance in his direction.

“I’ll keep watch,” she said, storming away past Edna towards the room’s exit.

Marius joined the beast in looking after Yelena with unblinking eyes, and she heard his final quip just before he lay down to rest.

“We can agree on something at least, big Edna: we wouldn’t wanna get on that gal’s bad side.”