Though Rusty didn’t know it at the time, though he wouldn’t find out the finer points of the ambush until much, much later, when he did he would appreciate the cunning of the Alliance of Light.
The grach had long used the water to their advantage. The organisms within it were alien to the elves, and hindered their senses. It was one of the reasons that the grach hadn’t been completely annhilated during the battles to date, that they could still hold their ground against the invaders.
In contrast, the elves stayed out of the water as much as possible. And the satyrs knew that elven bows, made by traditional craftsmen with the strictest of rules, rituals, and ceremonies, did not have strings that could withstand submersion for any significant amount of time.
And the Lion, with his power and experience, had such skill with assensing that even if they hadn’t been running spells, he should have been able to sense their presence from the energy that powered their own variant of magic.
But just like so many other times and events throughout elven history, the elves were only completely predictable until they weren’t.
They’d been saving this trick ever since the grach had first pulled it on them. And while yes, elven bows were constructed in very particular ways that could not be altered without the equivalent of a religious revolution, the litanies said nothing about using a particular type of enchanted wax to seal the parts of the bows that were vulnerable to water. And while yes, they couldn’t see or hear well at all underwater, they saw Reevian in his bright yellow robes well enough, especially when he spread his arms in the agreed-upon signal to strike. And while the Lion’s senses were insanely good, he was currently a ways distant still, and dealing with the overwhelming brightness of the world door. With their own magic suppressed, they were invisible by comparison against the roaring furnace of chakra behind them.
Even then, it was tight. Elves could go without air longer than humans, but not by more than ten minutes or so. They would have had to slide under the surface with a very thin margin of error… but then, Balangor was observing from the sky, and had ample time to use his charms to signal Reevian, who would have told them when to hide.
It almost worked, too. They almost got the drop on the Lion, who had expended no small amount of personal chakra over the last hour, and hadn’t had any real time to recharge.
But the elves failed to account for one thing.
The water still clung to them, in the seconds after their ambush. And elves still have eyes, and eyelids, and the water was no less distorting to them than it had been while they were under it. In the space of the first volley, and the second, they had no time to blink it away.
They were still ELVES, of course. Four satyrs fell in that first volley, and the Lion staggered back, his mane flared with defensive charms, as several bolts found him. More satyrs dropped at the second volley, but enough survived and scattered that the first and foremost goal of the ambush failed.
But the children were untouched, and at this point, wary and on edge enough to drop down, Rusty into the water, Alice and Ken behind a hummock of earth. The satyrs scattered, and the Lion…
The Lion ROARED.
*****
Cyrus gasped, felt moist air enter his lungs. It tasted… green.
Bartleby screamed, from behind him. Cyrus twisted, turned in time to stare right into the swirling mass of rainbow… rainbow with a black spot in the center of it, almost like an eye.
Fruity Sauron, he thought hysterically, and almost broke down laughing. Then he saw the blood, and the laughter was banished, as Bartleby screamed again, rolling around on the ground in a slowly-growing puddle as he clutched his leg right above the stump of where his foot had once been.
“No!” he staggered up, limped over, knelt down. As he did, he looked over, saw Catalina in the corner… corner? Yes, they were in a stone room without a ceiling, overgrown with moss. There were windows and doorways, and Catalina was in the corner with Beth, tearing her dress and trying to stop Dad’s bleeding.
Stop the bleeding. Right. Tourniquet… “Hold still!” Cyrus said, as he undid his belt and cinched it around Bartleby’s stump. The puddle was smaller than he’d thought, he saw. They’d gotten to it within that small window of time. A medic friend had explained it to him, once, that when you lost an extremity, the blood vessels around the cut would clench in shock for a little while. Not LONG, not usually, but long enough to save a life.
“It closed! Oh God it closed on me! We can’t go back! It’s shut!” Bartleby said, trying to grab on to Cyrus’s arm, scrabbling at him with panic in his eyes. “We’re stuck in here with, with…”
“I like my odds!” somebody called from outside, and the windows along one wall flared white.
A nuke? Cyrus thought, as he shielded his eyes… but no, it wasn’t bright enough, wasn’t hot enough. And the flashes faded instantly, then flickered on and off. Weaker than the sunlight streaming through, they’d only shown up because they were white against the green, Cyrus realized.
More screams rose from outside…
And then the stone floor shook, as all sound ceased.
It was like being too near an artillery shell. It was pressure and pain and the knowledge that he was in a really, REALLY bad spot and his survival depended very much on luck and the next few minutes. And oh, did that bring back memories he really didn’t want to remember.
But it did bring back some tricks he’d learned too, so he opened his mouth and covered his ears. If you covered your ears without opening your mouth, you left the sound nowhere to go, and the reverberations could seriously fuck up your hearing. And indeed, he felt his entire mouth quivering, from lips to uvula, and his teeth aching in their sockets. He was pretty sure a filling was working its way loose, it was that intense.
Cyrus knew he’d made it through when a low whine returned, rising, like a radio squeal without the static. There was pain, but he could hear again, even if everything was muffled. Shouting from outside, whimpering from Beth over in the corner, something that must have been the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish from Catalina, and Bartleby’s face full of fear as his eyes shone golden. Golden? Cyrus blinked, then looked down at the belt, saw the steady dribble of blood where it had slackened, and pulled it tight again. When he looked back, Bartleby’s eyes were normal, jaw full of panic.
“How’s Dad?” Cyrus called, and had to repeat it until Beth shouted back that it was bad.
Can’t stay here. Can’t go back. Shit going on outside… his eyes fell on the rifle that Dad had brought through the rainbow connection. Let’s see what’s making all that noise.
“Wait here,” he told them as he limped over and snagged the gun. He wasn’t sure they heard, wasn’t sure it mattered, really wasn’t sure he had the energy left to do anything beyond die if there were bad guys outside, but sitting still and staying put wasn’t working out, and he was probably the most expendable at this point. He’d done his job and gotten them there. They didn’t need him if things went bad… well, if things got worse.
It took Cyrus a second to figure out what he was seeing, once he was at the window.
There were mossy stone steps leading down to a watery swamp, broken up by remnants of carved stone pillars and walls, and hummocks of earth. The flashes of light were coming from green guys, who were weaving between them a mere two hundred feet away, and using bows to fire ray-gun style beams.
Further behind them, crouching behind a wall and standing up every few minutes to point and yell, was some fucker in gold-colored robes. And every time he pointed and yelled, the air in front of him sizzled with black flecks, like swarms of gnats pulling together then rolling outward. Wherever they rolled, the green algae in the water turned black.
As to where they were going… across the way, about five hundred feet off, bodies floated in the swamp. He couldn’t make out the details, his eye was stressed and tired and overworked, but they had bows too, and furry pants. And behind a few clusters of rock, more guys fought back with their own bows, that didn’t seem to shoot ray guns. They were all wearing viking helmets, or headbands with horns for some reason.
Between them, a black-and-gold streak zipped around the battlefield, dodging beams of light and weaving narrowly between the gnat clouds. Occasionally it would pause, revealing a huge man in weird armor, who hurled shiny spears or arrows or something at the green guys and the golden-robed jerk. But he couldn’t seem to get close enough to get a good shot, not with their cover.
Above it all, coming in hot from the right side of the pyramid, some crude airplane was gliding toward the battle.
And then a flash of muddy cloth caught his eyes. There were figures, small figures, sneaking around one of the rocks on the right side of the battle. For a giddy second he thought they were Tolkien’s hobbits, thought that this was a book come to life, or the fever dream of a man who’d died in a cult compound, shot to death by the righteously wicked sinners that were his neighbors…
…but then he saw one turn, and wave, and though he couldn’t make out the face, he knew. He knew.
“Rusty!” he gasped.
Rusty was alive!
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Then a cloud of gnats swarmed his way, and Cyrus’ eye opened wide, as Rusty and his friends fled, a bolt of light narrowly missing them as they went.
Well. That made his choice easy. Cyrus sighted the rifle on the golden-robed jerk and fired.
*****
The only thing that saved Rusty and Ken and Alice was that they weren’t the primary targets of the ambush. Rusty could tell by the way he lived through the first thirty seconds of the fight, swimming through the bloody water, brushing past the satyr corpses between himself and the nearest stone wall, then surfacing, gasping, to shake and shudder as he clung to the wet stone, relieved beyond relief to have a solid wall between himself and the elves.
The Lion’s roar had killed some of them, he’d seen. Green bodies floating in the water, next to shattered stone pillars where the full fury of the sound had reverberated. But enough survived to send light downrange in a constant flickering rhythm. There were six… eight? It was hard to tell, but they had numbers on the satyrs, who had scattered and were returning sporadic fire, but mostly seemed to just be concentrating on staying alive.
Rusty had seen firsthand what one of the elves could do. Now, drained of magic and armed with only a knife, he was under no delusions about what would happen if one of them decided he needed to die.
It would be easy, he thought, to hide there and shake. They wouldn’t miss him. Then if the Lion won, he’d be fine. And if the Lion lost, he could run, and…
…and then what?
“We can’t run, can we?” he asked himself.
“Nope,” Roz said, simply. “Where would we go? This is it, daddy-o.”
He took a breath. Took another. There were worse ways to go than being burned through by a big old beam of light, he guessed. Pushing away images of Gunther’s rotting face, he looked around until he saw Ken peeking out from behind a rock, and pointed left.
It took a bit of convincing to get Ken following him, wild gestures and mouthed words, but finally Ken sighed and hunkered low as he ran after, his spear down and held low to his body. They picked up Alice after they made it to the second shattered wall, and she beckoned them over before they could try to run to the third.
“You get me within a hundred feet, I can throw rocks at them,” Alice told them. “Been savin’ all I can for something like this. I want to hit Reevian right in his stupid forehead.”
“Rocks are good,” Ken said, his voice tight, his teeth gritted. “I guess I… I can try to y’know, pinch a couple of guys apart at the waist. Once we’re… closer. This is such a bad idea.”
“Yeah, but it’s the least worst idea right now,” Rusty said. “Can’t do nothing. Worse comes to it, we pull some shots off the Lion so he can win this.”
“Maybe, but— oh sweet Jesus,” Ken said, straightening up and staring west.
Rusty turned, and the smell of rotting vegetation hit him square in the face.
A cloud of corruption, a destroying swarm of rot just like the one that had killed Gunther and almost taken them all out, was chasing the Lion around the battlefield. And just as the so-called dark lord was clear, Rusty caught a flash of yellow cloth as Reevian rose up from behind cover, and gestured. Within a second, the cloud accelerated, swerved, and was hot on the Lion’s tail once more.
Oddly, the sight heartened Rusty. This was tight enough that they could make a difference. They just needed to distract the wizard, and everything else would fall into place.
Well, maybe. He glanced left, saw Balangor’s carpet-platform-whatever coming on fast. He didn’t know how many more fireballs they had to drop on things up there, but even one in the right place could win the fight.
“Let’s go,” he whispered to the other two, waited for them to nod, then ran for all he was worth.
It had been a very long and tiring day, but adrenaline was a hell of a chemical. Even so, his weariness affected his footing, and he stumbled as he ran.
That saved his life. The elven beam that would have cored his skull from temple to temple only singed the hair on his scalp.
“Rusty!” Alice shrieked, and they dove behind the nearest monolith.
Rusty stuck a hand out, pulled it back in as a beam flashed past, stuck his head out and immediately pulled it back as he gauged Reevian’s distance. “We’re about three hundred feet from him,” he told Ken. “I think we can do this.”
“I think we’re fucked!” Ken said, pointing.
Rusty turned to look where Ken was pointing… and felt his heart drop.
Visible above the rock, a small corruption cloud was floating their way. Fast.
Rusty looked to the sides, and winced as light flashed past one after the other. If they broke cover, they died from the beams. If they stayed in place, or pulled back, they would rot to death.
Rusty closed his eyes, searched for the answer…
…and there came a sound of thunder.
Familiar thunder.
“That’s Cy’s rifle,” Rusty whispered, snapping his eyes open, and staring above the rock.
It barked again, cracked twice more. The corruption cloud had stopped, and the light beams weren’t tracing around the edges any more. “That’s his rifle!” Rusty yelled, and stuck his head out…
…just in time to see Reevian running away from the temple, trying to find some form of cover as the shots rang out again and again.
*****
Rusty would find out later, that every wizard who was fighting in this particular conflict wore charms to deal with missile weapons. No matter how good at magic you are, an arrow through the forehead tends to cramp your style a bit.
In this case, Reevian had been using a charm forged by Terathon as his primary defense against such things. He made sure to keep it fully charged with chakra during the times he was away from the front, and today was no different. A charm like that was good against about thirty arrows from a human or satyr, or twenty from an elf or something else that could send arrows downrange with significant force. The more mass and velocity the charm had to alter, the harder it had to work, and the more energy it consumed.
The first shot from Cyrus’ garand rifle hit with enough force to drain almost a half of its charge. The charm triggered, and displaced the bullet that was about to hit Reevian to a trajectory that passed inches from him. And at the same time, as it had been forged to do so, it flared hot against the skin of Reevian’s neck and let him know that someone had shot at him.
Reevian ran for cover, and Cyrus missed the second shot. Having only a single eye was hell on a man’s depth perception, and moving targets were rough, even at the short range of two-hundred, two-hundred and fifty feet or so.
But the third shot hit his leg, and here the flaw of the charm revealed itself.
The heat flare letting Reevian know that he’d been struck was the same intensity regardless of the deadliness of the attack.
So when Reevian felt that second flare, and managed to figure out that the attacker was at his back, he figured that he had plenty of charge left to deal with the sniper quickly, so he could finish off the Lion.
He turned. He pointed in the general direction where he thought the shots had come, and he held a spell in his mind as he stared, searching for movement…
…Just as Cyrus finished aiming for the center of his mass, and put a round of thirty-aught-six through Reevian’s sternum.
*****
“Ha!” Cyrus grinned, as the gold-robed figure crumpled. Followed immediately by “shit!” as the nearest green figures turned his way, and raised their bows.
He ducked, as light blasted through the window, threw himself to the hard ground, and felt pain shoot up from his knees and belly. He’d knocked the wind from himself, and he lost precious seconds gasping for air.
Then came a different sound of thunder. Short, repeated bursts.
Those are sonic booms, he realized. The plane?
No, no, after a second he could confirm that it wasn’t. He saw the plane loop around, and head off back the way it had come. Retreating.
He took a few more breaths, as the time between the sonic booms stretched, lengthened. Then he planted the butt of the Garand against the ground, and struggled upward, using it as a crutch.
Cyrus was in time to see the armored form backhand the last green man, sending him flying a good twenty feet away before the figure hit the stone and fell into the swamp, lifeless or unconscious. The figure looked up at him, its mask flaring in the light, and Cyrus gripped the window sill with one hand, tried to ready the rifle, just in case…
“CYRUS!” Rusty yelled. “I LOVE YOU BROTHER!”
And Cyrus dropped the rifle, grabbed the sill of the stone window with both hands, as he swayed, heart lifting as he stared at his little brother. He tried to speak, couldn’t find the words for a second. Tried again, failed. Then yelled the first thing that popped into his mind. “YOU ARE IN SO MUCH TROUBLE! THEY ARE GOING TO GROUND YOU FOR LIFE, RUSS!”
Rusty was laughing, Cyrus was laughing, then Dad coughed, wetly, and Cyrus stopped laughing. He looked back, saw Bartleby gasping and blood leaking across the stones, saw Catalina working furiously on his thrashing father, and he felt like someone had jammed a live wire in his battered spine as he realized that this wasn’t over, yet. “RUSTY!” he hollered. “TELL ME YOU’VE GOT SOME MAGICAL HEALING SHIT! WE’VE GOT TWO PEOPLE WHO’LL DIE UNLESS YOU GOT SOMETHING!”
Rusty and the two other kids started running across the swamp. Cyrus looked to Catalina, who shook her head. “Minutes,” was her assessment.
“WE’VE GOT MINUTES!” Cyrus yelled…
…and then the armored man was in the middle of the battlefield, as air cracked, kneeling over the golden-robed corpse. Studying a pair of small, glittering things that were unfurling from his corpse like spiky flowers. “You have enough time, if one of you is brave,” the figure rumbled, and damned if his voice didn’t sound like a nightmare. But his words were hopeful. “Reevian held a rune of restoration,” the giant continued. “We cannot absorb it. But one of you can.”
Rusty immediately swerved toward it, but the figure held up a massive gauntlet. “Not you. You have two. A third would cause you great imbalance, and take at least an hour to recover.”
The kids behind Rusty glanced at each other, and Cyrus couldn’t hear the words they said, but the lighter-skinned one ran over, and slammed his hand down on one of the shiny things. The boy screamed, and Cyrus shuddered to hear it.
Then air boomed again, and a few seconds later metal boots thudded a rapid-fire rhythm on the stairs, as the giant arrived and loomed over all of the new arrivals in the chamber. Cyrus froze, staring up at it. Catalina gasped, but held her ground over Dad. Beth hid behind Bartleby… and Bartleby closed his eyes, resigned.
“Speed is our purview,” said the figure, waving a gauntlet. “Their deaths will be slowed until the child masters the rune. We have enough chakra left to do this much. Now, we must talk. We are called many things, but are most often known as The Lion. The massive figure stared down at Cyrus. “Who are you and why are you here?