Within the White Sands, there was a grand city, verdant land beyond sense in such a desolate place.
When a guard on the walls saw a shadow moving towards them, they sounded an alarm, but by the time he turned back, the shadow was gone, and not a single ward or array had reacted to the supposed standing shadow.
The guard was told he needed to take a break, that his eyes were playing tricks in the early morning.
Then the alarm sounded on the inner wall, then inside of the city itself.
Yet the intruder didn’t seem to be hiding or attacking, rather, he found the city square and waited, staring at a fountain.
The area was evacuated, and then the soldiers arrived.
He had no pupils to follow, just holes, but each of them felt like they were being glared at.
“I’ve come to-”
Beams of radiance fired into Fomoria, and when they passed through they were tainted, twofold as deadly as before.
The destruction that was behind him brought forth more terrible memories of unintended damages.
“I DON’T WANT TO FIGHT.”
The Golden were born and bred to kill Fae, separating their souls from their bodies.
These soldiers had been trained, but not once had they actually had to fight against Fae, let alone a Fae who couldn’t be touched by spells.
Their training told them that one should never speak with Fae during a fight; one wrong word could spell their doom.
So, they kept throwing out their attacks, and Fomoria was forced to dodge while explaining why he was there, lest their own magic destroy more of the city than required.
Three hours passed, soldiers from across the city, and then those from other Sands all tried to kill Fomoria, not one was willing to even try speaking to him despite his already explaining the situation.
Swaths of the city were returned to rubble when they tried to attack Fomoria, only for their own attacks to just come out the other side more dangerous than when they entered.
He had stopped even trying to dodge at some point, eventually they would get bored of destroying their own city and be forced to stop.
But again, and again, and again, he saw buildings turn to dust, fire melt sand and stone into glass and slag.
Some of them didn’t even seem to care about the collateral damage at all, and other Golden ended up caught in the attacks. Nobody seemed to have died yet, but it was just so… senseless.
So, when one more fired a blast of radiance, he reached forward by some new instinct, subsuming the spell.
It was the first change in the fight since it started.
More and more and more, they launched everything that they had, and what physical spells they had were drained of the magical component, losing the driving force behind them.
Boulders turned back to sand and fell to the ground, rushing winds became gentle breezes.
It was all starting to just feel natural to him.
He looked down at his hands, and all sorts of movements and runes came back to him.
Yet he was not of Aarde, and Aarde’s magic would not work for him.
It was a crushing disappointment to have all of that knowledge be ultimately useless.
But he was something, he had power, that was clear.
He pointed at one of the Golden and thought to himself.
“Pierce.”
The hole was no larger than his finger, but it seemed instant, not one of them reacted to it, other than the one who now had a hole in his shoulder.
It felt, good, it should feel bad to hurt people.
His hand became a messy mass of fingers, and by the dozen the Golden fell under his assault.
He ignored vital spots, shooting the joints of his attackers.
“Do you care to listen to anything I have to say yet?”
His hand returned to normal, and the Golden retreated without a word, leaving some of their comrades with worse injuries behind.
Fomoria felt confidence for the first time in a while.
It wasn’t enough to know that he had some dubious level of power, he needed to express it, to show others that he wasn’t just a joke.
Then Marigold showed up in combat gear.
She saw the ruins around her, and moved in a blur, striking him several times; his body felt sluggish.
He couldn’t feel pain, but whatever she had done, it was wrong; It didn’t hurt, it couldn’t, but he shivered.
“Nobody has begged Aarde to defend one of the Sands since I left, I didn’t even know that they could call me like this. Explain, now.”
“I wanted to talk, they refused my every attempt.”
“So you began destroying the city? Give me a reason why I shouldn’t lock you up until you are whole again?”
“I did nothing. They fired their spells, which passed through me and were boosted. I hit the Golden with direct attacks that pierced their joints, but did not move beyond them. Those fucking fools, those up tight egotistical desert rats…”
He listened to himself and felt himself twist and twitch with anger.
That he had the sense of mind to stop and evaluate himself was a good sign to her.
“I only began to absorb their attacks after hours, it just began to happen. If I had known, I would’ve stopped all of this before they chipped a single brick.”
She removed her mask.
“Look me in the eyes and promise that you caused none of this.”
“I admit to only attacking the Golden so they would be forced to listen. Everything else is just… stupidity.”
She spoke with the soldiers, and confirmed Fomoria’s story.
They all lied to her of course, since they realized that they made a mistake and yet refused to admit it.; the most damning trait of their kind was their pride.
She proved Fomoria’s story by shooting a fireball through his chest and watching it come out the other side, darkened in color, lacking any mana signature, but stronger than before.
It matched her findings of the damage, since so far as her scanning spells told her, nobody had cast the spells that destroyed the section of the city.
When she confronted them with her findings, they tried to cast blame on the other Sands.
Of course it must’ve been the Red Sands, they were fiery, and their lack of control made them unable to control their own magic.
It must’ve been the Blue Sands, their cold attitude meant they just didn’t care about minimizing damage.
And so on and so forth.
Marigold scolded them all like the overgrown children that they were, and demanded a meeting with the leaders of the White Sands, which Fomoria was to attend as well.
The grand council hall of the White Sands was… not as grand as he expected.
It was made of the highest quality white sandstone that one could find, polished until you could see your reflection, but it wasn’t much more than a single 50x50 room with a vaulted roof and a half circle of sandstone acting as a table.
It lacked any designs on the windows, just cloudy glass.
Though they weren’t technically part of the conversation, the leaders of the other Sands were already there so they could be ready to fight against the unknown threat, and they demanded to be allowed to spectate.
“Lady Marigold, Grand Champion of Aarde. Why have you demanded this meeting? And why have you brought that Fae with you?”
“Apologies, but I don’t know your name. When I was here last, the head of the council was Al-Ray.”
“I am Melek. To my right is Coen, and to my left is Al-Reina, descended from Al-Ray.”
“Greetings, Melek, Coen, and Al-Reina. This is not, strictly speaking, a Fae.
This is Emperor Harlan Fomoria. He did not come with hostile intent. Fomoria, why did you come?”
“I assume you all know of Yara? Who left with me some months ago.”
“She was to be my daughter-in-law.”
Melek leaned forward and glared at Fomoria.
“I want her to be allowed back into the city. I-”
“Just a moment.”
Marigold put up a veil for them.
“What are you doing?”
“With Liat’s death, she has nothing to keep her there, nothing but me, and we will both be harmed by the presence of the other. I will forever be a monument to my failures, I don’t need to see them staring back at me every single day.”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“You’re her husband, you have a duty to her.”
“Just like you and Xol?”
She clenched her fist and her eyes blazed with power.
“There are only a handful of people who understand you as well as I do. You always jump to extreme options because they are easier than just doing the simple thing sometimes. Why have a dialogue or face your problems when you can just toss them away.
I also know that you can be cruel, but you always regret it, so I’m not going to do anything about what you just said.”
“What if I don’t regret it?”
“Then you aren’t as mature as the man I knew.
He wouldn’t run away from this.
He wouldn’t abandon his wife when she needs him.
He wouldn’t try to pass this off to someone else.
He would grow the fuck up and do whatever it took no matter how hard it is because he’s past the point of pushing people away to protect himself.”
She punctuated each line with a poke to his chest.
“Marigold. I’m going to make this clear. Yara is a symbiote. She needs other people, she can’t just be on her own. I’m a void without anything more to give. If I let her stay as she is, she will wither and die in her heart. I am doing the hard thing, because I know my limits, I know I can’t help her.”
Finally, Fomoria’s face was clear, his form was solid.
Though his eyes were still erratically moving, without pupils, she saw that he was at least himself.
“It’s easier to tell me that I don’t know, that I’m confused, that I can’t think about what I’m doing.
It’s much harder to admit that enough of me is back that I can make this kind of choice.”
She slapped him across the face, and he felt it.
“How do you keep doing that?”
“Nothing. You are a unique existence, your body and mind and soul are all one thing.
I think, therefore I am. It’s something he told me before, some philosopher said it.
For you, I think it’s true. The more you become you, the more you become something. I can hit something.
Give up on this, go back, stop deluding yourself into believing that this is going to help her.
The Golden are going to be pissed that a portion of the city was destroyed and they got nothing out of it other than me giving you a talk and you reforming closer to being a person, but-”
“Fuck them.”
When Fomoria touched the veil, it popped like a bubble and was pulled into him.
Suddenly, a thought came to him, and he tried to make his own.
Yet the memory of a spell wasn’t enough.
“Lady Marigold, do you vow to handle him should he return?”
“I’ve convinced Fomoria to return to Yara and try to help her rather than trying to bring her back here.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, why did he want her to return?”
“Her sister passed, but she had not been told yet. He-”
Al-Reina’s eyes were veiled with tears and the atmosphere turned dark.
“Were you close?”
“Liat is, was, Al-Reina’s daughter.”
“I’m sorry. Had I know, I would’ve told you before.”
“Was her body recovered?”
Said the mother through tears.
Before Marigold replied, she put her mask back on.
“She was vaporized fighting a foe far beyond her strength. She saved the daughter of her dear friend in the process.”
Fomoria thought that they were a bit more than dear friends, but wasn’t sure how the Golden, or her mother, felt about such things.
“I knew her as a woman with a great passion, and she regained that in the end.
I am sorry for your loss.”
“Yara, how is she?”
“She has been undeniably depressed, even with Fomoria’s return to life. Though they loved one another greatly before all of this happened.”
“Can I… nevermind.”
“If you would like to visit her, discuss it with your council. I would bring you to her in an instant.”
“Clear the room.”
The other Sands instantly erupted into arguments, though their words were cut by just one.
“Silence.”
And so they were.
“This is not your choice. You are not from this place, you are not the family of Yara and Liat.
I will spill blood if-”
Marigold stopped him with her own silencing spell.
“The Sands exist as six cities, each governing themselves. By the laws of the land, none of you have any right to remain in this hall should the members of the council ask to have it cleared.”
Fomoria’s threat would not have done anything, they would’ve simply tried, and failed, to fight.
But Marigold’s words, followed by the waves of golden mana that came from her, made them listen.
Fomoria returned to The Spire of Other, and found Yara in her room.
“We need to talk.”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t been able to face you. I know you’re going to find some way to make me feel better, you’ll forgive me, but that just makes me feel worse.”
“No. I left you for six months because I was too stupid to see that I was being tricked.
And with what else I have to say, I couldn’t ask that you act like you are at fault instead of me.
Even if you hate me, I will understand that I have it coming.”
She could see him move his mouth, but no words were coming out.
“What’s wrong?”
“I… It’s…”
He tightly clenched his fists, trying to work up the courage.
His vision blurred, and remembered the day he was told that Redmond had died.
He floated forward and wrapped his arms around her.
His body was not fully physical, but she felt his weight on her.
“Liat is dead, she has been for a while now.”
Yara pushed him away, or she tried, then buried her head in her pillows as she cried.
Fomoria went to the bed, sat on the edge, and brushed her hair.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’m sorry that I failed every step of the way, that I wasn’t good enough to stop any of this. That I wasn’t-”
“LEAVE ME ALONE.”
“I’m never going to leave you alone again.”
“LIAR.”
He knew she was right, he couldn’t really promise that. He knew that Fomoria needed to be out there, helping people, that he would need to leave her behind again.
“I want to go home, I hate it here, I hate all of it.”
“I…”
He was conflicted about if he should tell her about his visit or not.
“I went to the White Sands to ask if you would be allowed to return with the promise that you never leave again. Marigold told me to come back, but they were going to have a conversation about if your mother would be allowed to visit you for a short time.”
Yara didn’t reply.
When Al-Reina arrived, Fomoria had already left, Amber wanted to take him to a battle.
Xol’s forces moved against the Others, though Xol himself rarely showed up to fight.
Marigold did not join any fight where she couldn’t battle against Xol, and thus his army were allowed to conquer parts of the two empires and expand his own.
----------------------------------------
One month after Fomoria’s death.
Amber, as acting general of the Fomorian Empire, led her troops against those of Xol, the mind controlled masses and necromantic monsters.
There was discussion at the start about if they could justifiably kill the people who weren’t in control of themselves, but it became clear quickly that letting them run rampant was not an option.
Still, things were… not going well.
The hulking bipedal mammoth-like creatures with their black bone armor taken from Fomoria’s weapon sigil were hard to put down even with warmagic.
She leapt into battle, supported by what soldiers she could make fight for her and what weapons were made by Harlan.
Her body held the same sigil as the monsters and soldiers that she had to fight against, and even her armor and weapons were worse than theirs.
But Amber wasn’t some mind controlled citizen given equipment beyond them or created monster with a false mind.
She punched through the armored skull of one of the brutes with a green spear that flew back to her, something Harlan made, and when the smallfry got nearer, she shifted the weapon, leaving double sided blades on both ends.
It was awkward to throw, but with a twist, she could do it.
The weapon flew through the soldiers with ease, moving in a circle around her before returning.
She had lost her hand more than once before she got that trick right.
But no matter how many she cut down, they would just keep pouring in over and over.
Xol had been breeding spinal spiders of his own for decades in a small world that Marigold and the gods knew nothing about, one of many that he prepared.
He cared nothing for most of the Castian citizens, who he considered actively complicit in the atrocities of their empire, and thought little about using his spider hivemind in the half-alive soldiers.
Their wounds became filled with shadows, and they pulled themselves back together, but that was the point, she stopped their advance and made them group up around her.
She got the order to retreat, and cleaved a new path out, down.
Once she was a few hundred feet under the battlefield, she hardened the land around her and carved some dampening spells.
When the rumbling passed, she dug back up and saw the battlefield.
Harlan’s artillery battery was devastating, but anything left with more than a heart was already piecing themselves back together.
She fell to her knees, this wasn’t the first battle of the day, and there was a limit.
Amber just needed a little rest before she went back to camp.
Then something new dropped from the sky.
The simple answer was that it was a dragon.
Without Wyrmwood around to get angry about it, there really wasn’t anything stopping Xol from making them again, and wyverns were happy to accept the work in exchange for being made whole, provided of course no other dragonoids be allowed the same opportunity.
She jumped out of the way, or so she thought.
The dragon stabbed with its tail as it landed.
Her armor barely stopped it from cutting her in half, but barely was the important word.
She repositioned and threw her spear, piercing it in the heart, or rather, a heart.
It was slowed, but the power of the sigil meant that by the time she had her spear back in hand, it was already at nearly full vitality once more, only angrier.
It really was a wonder to see how fast a pissed off dragon could move, just not if you were the target.
It slashed with its claws and stabbed with its tail in a mesmerizing rhythm, and whatever damage she did wasn’t enough, but it was putting too much pressure on her to charge up a really powerful attack and her armor was beaten and weak from the other battles of the day.
It jabbed with a flat hand, she ducked, and severed the hand at the wrist.
The beast recoiled and struck with its tail, but it too was severed.
She thought about how she was going to actually beat it, since she could already see the stumps sealing up and starting to grow new limbs.
Fomoria had taught her what he could about aura techniques, since his enhanced body made them some of his strongest attacks, and one of those moves was the heart stopper.
Her spear wasn’t able to cut through the scales of the dragon with her spinning attacks, but the throws were too slow to get all of the hearts at once, and it couldn’t pierce the skull of the dragon.
She jumped up and threw her spear downward, pinning the other hand against the ground with a five pronged shifting.
The instant she landed she rushed at the exposed chest of the beast.
The heart stopper was really just a fancy name for overloading the enemy with enough force that their inside liquefied, but also keeping the force from following all the way through.
Punching through something was easier than punching and keeping your force condensed enough that it remained inside of your foe.
A mighty burst of snow followed by the sounds of cracking came from her strike.
Her hands were shattered.
Aura techniques were so important for Fomoria because he was physically powerful beyond belief.
For him, the move would’ve worked, for her, whose body hadn’t been replaced by adamant and empowered with the ever evolving sigil which had achieved synthesis with the adamant, it wasn’t enough.
She didn’t remember being hit, which was a bad sign, but she was on her back, seeing the flashing lights where Sepul was fighting half a dozen of these dragons at once, and more kept coming to slow him down.
It was bullshit, he was a champion, of course he could fight so many at once without issue.
But she was just… human.
She lifted her head as much as she could, just enough to see the dragon building fire in its throat.
So, that’s how I die, she thought.
Unless, another voice answered in reply.
Time slowed to a crawl and the face of a beautiful shadowy figure filled her vision.
“Amber, I believe I have a deal for you. Accept my offer of championship, and you will survive.”
“I’d rather be dead than your puppet. You fucked up Harlan’s head worse than anyone. Cunt.”
“Ooh, that is…”
She saw how angry The Darkness was at being called such a thing.
“Very few strings attached. Like I said, I need a guard dog. You will be that until Fomoria’s return, and I won’t ask anything other than you protect his empire as best you can. Once he is back, all duties I ask of you become null and void, I won’t even come for your powers. You will remain as champion without any requirements.”
“You just want me around so you can manipulate him.”
“But is that worse than the alternative? That you aren’t around at all?”
Amber closed her eyes.
“Fuck it.”