When Pirin opened his eyes again, he was half-submerged in a muddy pond. He lifted his head, dirty snow clinging to his face.
He rolled onto his back. Faint morning sun seared his eyes, and a few snowflakes fell, dusting the ground. He shivered and scrambled out of the half-frozen pond. The surface had a thin layer of ice on it, but the water itself was cold. He wrung out his pants and wrapped his cloak around himself until he stopped shivering.
There had been a crash, hadn’t there? He pulled open his haversack, making sure his eyeglasses and unprocessed manabulbs were unharmed. They all were.
For a moment, he scrunched his eyes. Aside from his already damaged arm, he wasn’t hurt. Only cold and soaked in mud. His mind rolled around for a little, trying to recall how he’d gotten here. Gobbarts…then fleeing across the mountains, then flying through the storm while keeping Gray’s exhaustion at bay.
Gray.
She wasn’t in the pond with him. There wasn’t even a glimmer of grey feathers, let alone a mud-soaked gnatsnapper.
Pirin rolled back onto his stomach and crawled up the slope and away from the pond. There was no grass or sand, only a mucky slope. It was more of a crater than a pond.
By the time that Pirin slipped and clambered to the top of the crater, he had warmed up, if only slightly. He trudged up to the top of a ridge, using it as a better vantage point.
All around, there were empty, flat plains pocked only with water-filled craters. There was no grass, no cities, and not even a copse of trees. A sickly brown mist hung over everything. The only sign of civilization was the wreck of a trebuchet, its wood tortured with black stains, its ropes long decayed.
No Man’s Land. Pirin breathed in slowly. This place matched every description that his mind could loosely recall—everything he had even been told about it, accumulating in the back of his mind, just out of reach, though he couldn’t say where those ideas came from.
This was the contested land between Aerdia and Sirdia—where armies clashed, and where the very earth was poisoned. Where hundreds of thousands of elves had died, incinerated by rune-powered alchemical bombs, or cut down by swords and spears.
Pirin shook the mud off his hands. Now wasn’t the time to think about that. To the north, the Varioch Mountains rose up about the height of a finger from the horizon. They’d managed to crash further from the mountains than Pirin initially thought.
“Gray!” he called, trudging through the muck. It was mostly frozen, but no matter how cold the weather got here, they had flown far enough south that the ground never froze entirely. He stayed on the high ridges between craters. “Gray, can you hear me?”
He headed south—that was the most likely direction he would find her. Every step, more mud crawled into his boots. After a few feet, he kicked a hard metal pauldron. It squelched through the muck. Pirin almost bent down to pick it up, but the silver metal had corroded. Swirls of inky darkness replaced its once-ornate engravings.
Elves were not immortal, not like the myths said they were. They could be killed, and they would die of old age the same as men, yet the world seemed to hate when they died. Their bodies and blood decomposed into a dark ash that ate away and destroyed everything around them—given time. That pauldron had to be decades old.
Pirin doubted a single trek across this wasteland would erode his body, but he didn’t want to spend any more time here than necessary.
“Gray!” he yelled again. There was no response.
Pirin ran faster and faster, until the mud threatened to pull the boots off his feet. His head whipped back and forth.
Finally, when he reached the edge of an especially large crater, there was a squawk, followed by a few desperate chirps. He couldn’t see Gray yet, but he heard her. Navigating around spikes of shattered wood and crumbling cobblestone fences, he followed the sound.
After nearly tripping over a split barrel, he came to the edge of a crater. Bloated elven bodies still floated in the water, amidst wooden shrapnel marked with runes—inactive explosion-causing runes, but runes nonetheless.
On the other side of the crater, behind a lip of rent dirt, Gray stood. At first, he thought she was just pecking at the empty air, or clawing at it with her talons. But a cyclone of scrap—wood chips, filings of rusty metal, nails, and abandoned armor—swirled in the air. One moment, it took the form of a wolf, then the next, it was a pony, then an ape. It switched shape so fast that…well, the best he could say was that it had four limbs and a head.
Scrap wraiths. There were two of them. One advanced on either side of Gray, whirling and ready to devour.
Scrap wraiths were like vultures—attracted to death. They formed in areas with high concentrations of natural aura, and this place had a deathly aura. There had probably been a battle here recently, and there would be soldiers nearby. It didn’t matter if they were Aerdian or Sirdian. He’d have to do this quietly.
Since these wraiths didn’t have a set form, they were only around the power of a Kindling- or Spark-stage wizard. He could take them.
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He sprinted awkwardly through the mud, rolling his feet to keep from getting stuck. “Over here!” he hissed, trying to draw the attention of the wraiths.
One of the creatures turned its head towards him. A windy growl escaped its throat, and it bounded across the mud, unbothered by the slippery surface. Pirin ripped his sword from its sheath just in time. He held it out, and the wraith leapt onto it. The steel blade slid through its invisible body, all the way up to the crossguard. For a moment, the scrap stopped whirling. A clump of wooden splinters fell off its body.
Just as Pirin was about to rip his weapon free, the creature yowled in its breathy voice. Its head, feline at the moment, snapped at Pirin. He leaned back and away, just in time to avoid the sharp wooden spikes and metal shards that it probably called teeth.
He tilted his sword to the side, then ripped it out and stepped back. Gray was still pecking hard and fast, keeping the other wraith at bay.
Before Pirin could rush over to help, his wraith scrambled to its feet and charged at him. He slashed through its head, dislodging a swath of wood chips, but the blow didn’t kill the creature. It only hacked a swath of its total form away. If he kept cutting it apart, it would eventually fizzle away and die, but he didn’t have that much time. They’d kill him or Gray before then. He’d have to destroy it faster.
A wraith didn’t have a mind for him to reach inside of. But…maybe, just maybe, there was a technique that he had forgotten about. It was possible he’d forgotten something.
As he slashed at the scrap wraith, he wracked his mind, recalling all of the techniques he’d used before. Despite his damaged memory, his magic techniques seemed wholly unaffected. He could recall them perfectly.
He had nothing else.
But a single instance stood out more than the others: last evening, when his magic had failed so spectacularly that it let out an explosion of blue sparks.
If he could shatter the scrap wraith with a backfiring technique…
It would be a rudimentary Assault technique, but better than nothing.
He drove the wraith back with a sweeping strike, then turned his sword over in his hand and stabbed it into the ground. He wouldn’t need it. The wraith seemed to laugh, though it sounded more like a raspy screech. It didn’t know what it was about to walk into.
Pirin held out his hand and fed as much Essence as he could to the tips of his fingers. The wraith didn’t have a mind to target, so he instead chose Gray. Focussing on her eyes, he formed her mind into a gray orb, and no matter how painful, he maintained it.
The wraith bounded towards him. His Essence rebelled, vibrating in his veins more and more violently until the tips of his fingers glowed blue. The scrap wraith opened its jaw.
As soon as the wraith drew within punching distance, Pirin released the technique. The wraith’s jaw wrapped around his arm, but before its teeth clamped down, an explosion of blue Essence shot out of his palm. He locked his elbow and refused to let his arm recoil, forcing all of the unstable Essence to blast outwards.
It tore the wraith to shreds. Splinters and sawdust flew in one direction, and rusty nails and strips of chainmail flew in the other. It didn’t reform.
There was just one more wraith, and Gray had done a good job of weakening it. Pirin flexed his fingers, ready to muster another explosion of Essence, but his skin still burned and his bones ached. His Essence channels stung with a distant, spiritual pain. He wasn’t sure if he could manage it again without giving himself a chance to rest.
But he wasn’t out of options.
He slid down to the shore of the crater. A small wooden triangle stuck out of the mud—a chunk of a barrel. He snatched it up and brushed the rune off with his sleeve. Khuzel, for…destruction, if he recalled right.
It was the detonation rune for an alchemical bomb.
Pirin snatched it up, then ran towards the other scrap wraith, holding the rune in front of him. The wraith turned to him. It hissed. This wouldn’t work on a wraith at its full size, but Gray had managed to whittle this one down to about half of its mass.
Breathing deeply, Pirin flooded the chunk of wood with his Essence.
When the rune moved through the life-energy fields of the world, it absorbed a bit of power. If it moved fast, if a trebuchet launched it, it would flood with more power. Pirin’s instant infusion of Essence gave it too much.
As soon as the second wraith’s jaw wrapped around his arm, the rune-marked shard of wood exploded. Splinters blasted away from his hand, scouring through the creature and blasting it into multiple small pieces. Mouse-sized tornadoes whirled around at his feet, which he stomped out of existence with his boot.
“Good riddance,” Pirin muttered, then turned to Gray. He wanted to ask if she was alright, but she wouldn’t understand. Besides, he didn’t need to ask. He could see that her right wing was scraped, nearly plucked clean of feathers, and she limped on her left leg. He pressed his eyes shut for a moment, then ran over and draped his good arm over her neck. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.” Even if he couldn’t perfectly recall the conclusion of yesterday’s flight, he guessed that Gray had sheltered him while they crashed.
She squawked, then rested her muddy chin on top of his head.
“I’m…not sure how to take that, but at least you’re not trying to peck my face off.” He stepped away and picked up his sword, then sheathed it. “We should keep moving.”
Right now, moving meant walking. Gray was in no condition to fly, and even if Pirin could block out whatever pain she might feel, that didn’t feel right. He’d turn off her inhibition and risk injuring her even more.
“We’ll get out of this…place,” Pirin whispered, pointing south. “Then we’ll get you all fixed up.”
And so they walked, trudging through the mud until the sun rose high in the sky and burned the sickly mist away. Pirin paused and produced his ration of his supplies—a handful of borea-grain for Gray, and half a breadroll for himself. He didn’t dare to drink any of the water in the ponds, but the freshly-fallen snow wouldn’t be poisoned by the corpses yet.
Pirin ate as he walked. Once he finished his food, he ate two more manabulbs and immediately cycled them.
They continued southward, keeping their heads low. Pirin tried to stay close to the ground, and he scanned in all directions, searching for any sign of a soldier. There was nothing all day, except for a pillar of smoke in the distance—to be safe, he and Gray had taken the long way around it.
When the sun touched the horizon, they reached a steep bluff. It was plain, gray stone, and nowhere near as tall as the Sheercliff. The map he’d stolen called it Kalan-Itroth. It marked the edge of No Man’s Land, with a ridge of trees along its top and fresh, clean snow hanging over the edge.
As soon as they reached the top of the bluff, they would be in the nation of Aerdia, and there would be enemies all around.