Muir found her way back to consciousness uneasily--prodded, she could tell, by Xechi's spirit hanging by her. She was in no shape to fight, and knew it--but she didn't realize how bad it was for a long moment, because her bleary eyes simply didn't want to see straight anymore. Something about using this power of Storms had burned something inside of her, and her sight suffered for it, something fierce.
But the rearguard closest to the cart, seemingly oblivious to her state, reacted with a joyous cry when she sat up.
"It's good to see you moving," he said, his voice too chipper for the bad news that followed. "The enemy are still following, and they've been surrounding us. It may be within the hour that they try that attack again, and this time we'll be caught in the middle of it."
Muir gave a dissatisfied grunt. "Shouldn't they be further back?"
"The terrain ahead is no good for carts, but the leadership refuses to let it go. Of course, they went on ahead." There was a hurt in the guard's voice, but also a fierce pride. "People on foot are fine, but the rest of us... well, I hope you can repeat that performance back there and then some."
The hope in the young man's voice stung at Muir, but it didn't bother him half as much as his double-edged faith.
"Fucking hell," snapped Muir, then paused as she had to grab her head to keep the world from tipping over. "What are you, some silver-spoon brat expecting someone else to win a war for you? The sword at your side is your best hope in combat, kid, and that's the way it's always been."
"You can't beat them?" The boy's tone showed that he wasn't hurt, and in fact it had the stainless quality of a person who had never needed to bleed to win--but had won, anyway.
"Me, nor my god, I think." Muir felt her head wanting to spin, and forced herself back against the side of the wagon. "But s'pose I ought to ask."
She'd never been a prayer-focused Blade, of course. It wasn't really a religion about the Goddess, although there were some who disagreed. She aided your sword arm, of course, but it was always you who won or lost the battle. With... with Miana in charge now, she supposed, that might change, but Miana didn't seem to be the sort for fawning and prayer either.
And this Eyes brat... Eyes and Storms somehow, however that worked...
It took her a long moment just to find enough peace in her aching head to connect to her new God, but it took another moment after that before she felt Ryan-Xethram react. She could feel, in a way she wasn't used to, a strong sense of worry pouring out of the man as he reached back for her, and before she had a chance to object, she felt him wrap her in a big spiritual hug.
Muir wanted to object--physical contact was best left rough and sexual, as far as she was concerned, with Xechi being the only exception--but the contact eased her headache substantially, although her eyes didn't clear up at all. Xethram... Ryan... whatever. That's too much.
Sorry. Ryan pulled back, and she got a sense of a relieved smile. What is going on there? I can't See through you.
I can't see, either, snapped Muir back, mentally. Ever since I used that power it just... just hurts. It's still there, but it's foggy.
There was a pause, as Ryan considered her. With... uh, with my people, I guess... power is supposed to come to those with perspective, those who understand. But, I guess, you used the power without that, and it damaged you.
Well, we gotta get used to that, replied Muir. Cause there's gonna be another fight here soon, and I don't see myself getting any smarter between then and now. Probably... probably won't survive it, but I don't like to think of it that way.
I could pull you out of there... Ryan clearly saw or felt her bristling at the suggestion. ...no. Okay. Let me think about it.
Think fast, bud. Not sure when they're coming.
Muir came out of her trance but decided to keep still, more so she wouldn't be bothered by the naive guard than anything else. With her eyes not doing great, she kept them closed and focused on what she could hear and smell--the smell told her little except that there were fewer people upwind of her than there used to be, and no immediate smell of fresh rain, although the cart around her was still wet. For hearing, she mostly heard the cart squeaking and bumping, but there were also three guards behind and two more ahead with the horses.
After thinking on it a big longer, she realized that there were fewer cart noises than there should have been. Had they left a cart behind? With a cold feeling in her gut, she realized that Xechi's body should have been close by, here in the same cart with her, but...
But it wasn't. She didn't smell it, and she knew Xechi's smell. Her dead friend's spirit confirmed it, easily--it had been left behind, somewhere. Xechi, though, cared far less about her old body than Muir did.
Muir's skin prickled with rage, and she wanted to take the head off the shoulders of the nearest guard, or something... but a war cry in the distance, and the sound of an arrow striking nearby, cleared her head. If the body was left behind, the only problem was that the enemy would torch it--and they would. They'd left her behind because they must.
But the ones who killed her would also defile the body. The enemy were the ones that needed to pay.
Ryan was there, again, as though he sensed the action. I have an answer, but it's not a great one, he said suddenly, forcing Muir back into a trance, but a shallow one. Don't fight the power. You're trying to control the storm; don't.
It won't kill them fast enough. Muir wanted to grit her teeth, and felt herself starting to heat up inside, as she usually did before combat. I need the storm itself to fight them, and it won't.
Trust me. Have faith. Call a storm and let me do the rest. Ryan didn't so much release her as shove her back into consciousness, and Xechi seemed to yank her physically aside, as an arrow landed somewhere close by. Muir cursed and tumbled out of the wagon, her face smashing against the dirt as she failed utterly to get her feet under her in time. Her eyes, still fuzzy, were more than adequate to point her forward, even as she and Xechi tugged at the skies.
She didn't really have enough magic for this, but somehow, the little bit that she tugged seemed amplified by a power beyond her control or understanding. Unlike before, it was like she was pulling on a rope attached to pulleys, smooth and even, rather than being an expression of raw fury.
She sensed Xethram in the skies, focusing his will on the world. Xechi did, too, and Muir could swear that her friend was enraptured by something, something Muir could not spend the time to study or understand.
Still, she had no time to be patient, and yanked on the rope a few more times, each time signalling Us here or Enemy there or something similarly short and brusque. Somehow, the winds became quiet, but with an intensity that she didn't understand--an intense silence that she had so often heard before a storm, but never listened to.
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She heard it, now, a rolling, rushing roar not too different from the creaking wagon wheels of the cart. It was distant, but it was a smooth sound. Her own pulls were violent in comparison--a sharp creak or crack compared to something large, in motion, and coming.
Muir couldn't stop a manic smile from crossing her face and she sprinted after the wagon she'd just fallen off of.
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From the moment Muir woke up, I couldn't get it out of my head just how different she and Raine were. If anything, I would have expected Raine--by sheer dint of her name--to be the one taken by storms, but Muir... she was chaos, where Raine was a stubborn intensity.
And chaos was good for storms. It meant power, drive, and purpose.
The fact that she was going blind made her struggles in my Little God's Room fall immediately into place. The metaphor I'd established--height meaning perspective and also power--fell apart for those who needed power now, or who just couldn't be assed to learn how power worked. And Muir, while I liked her, was no scholar. If I tried to explain storms or lightning to her, I'm sure her eyes would have just glazed over.
Which, I suppose, was happening anyway.
The obvious consequence of the metaphor was that she would drown if she stayed at the base of the waterfall--but she didn't need to be there, did she? The waters themselves were power, metaphorically. As long as she kept her head above water, no matter where in the river she was, she was still swimming in it.
And in the end, it was my job as God of Eyes and Storms to lead my people. It got me excited to think about, honestly. I had so often watched storms in the distance, from floor 20 of a 50-story building. I had watched Weather Channel videos, plus movies (which were no reliable source, of course) and the occasional documentary or informative web video about fluid flow.
The power of a storm was all in the setup, I decided. So this time, instead of letting Muir take control, I set up a system, using more green flame than I should have dared to set up wind flows to grind against each other, pulling high and low winds into and out of alignment, and not merely drawing air in, but setting it up to collide in patterns that were likely to generate a powerful vortex.
My efforts were both helped and hindered by work Xenma had done previously. The old man had watched storms and thought he understood them, but he was wrong in some of the finer points, I could tell. For one, he didn't know where lightning came from--he would set up a storm as though the storm itself was a god he worshiped, and somehow it would do his bidding. He understood the weight of air masses and had some very wide ranging structures in place to move large sections of the sky without draining himself of energy, like large batteries in the sky that stored and released power when he called on them to do so.
Without that, none of this would be possible; divine magic was still magic. To create change, you needed an equal amount of power. And he had more power... but not much nearby. That I could sense easily; after a battle like this, those "batteries" would need to charge again, or I'd need to find a way to transfer power across a large section of the world. Muir's earlier battle had wasted a lot of that power, and to a certain extent, that was what had burned her out: channeling large quantities of Wind magic directly.
Instead, the pattern I set up dumped power into the skies, and as Muir urgently tugged at the connections I set up, the sky rolled into place. I felt the moist air grind against itself and other air, felt static electricity gather and split, building up a mass that wanted to strike, and I teased that power, holding it in reserve. That, again, Xenma had things in place to control, though they were rather crude, and I thought that Erika and I could improve them substantially with a better understanding of the phenomenon.
Us here, Muir said simply. Enemy there.
I cast rain out over the area, wrenching Xenma's system for detecting people into place so that I could feel the army chasing my vicar. Muir had fallen from the cart, but managed to wrestle her way back up, and I smiled to myself, trying to judge where to strike first, and why to strike first.
The enemy had to know why.
That's why the archers were the first ones I let get hit. Xenma's system for targeting certain people with lighting was awful--with a few thoughts, I created a path that egged out the bolts I had been holding back, and two, three, four people were taken out in quick succession.
The enemy paused, but so did Muir's group. There were too many people for me to take out with lightning, not quickly enough to save the soldiers, but it was a clear indication that no part of this was chance. I considered poking a hole in the cloud cover to let sunlight shine on Muir as I did the work, but... better to save that for a time when I didn't need to conserve power.
Or at least, a time when I thought it would actually work.
Bad feeling, Muir insisted, gesturing vaguely towards a group. I felt at what the rains told me--ignoring the male/female and bust size metrics--and got the impression that there might have been blackflame somewhere in there, but it was weak. There was something, that much was certain.
Not wanting to take a chance, I tugged six lightning conduits together, pointed all more or less at the bad feeling, and let them all loose at once.
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Muir had not been blinded nor deafened by the lightning and thunder that her god summoned to deal with the archers, but she had seen and heard it. She could swear, despite going almost blind, that she saw the victims of the storm better than she could see anything else. When those lightning bolts came down, she knew who had been targeted, why, and how.
Ryan was right--he was better at this than she was, by orders of magnitude. Muir's lips curled into a smirk as she clutched at the back of the wagon. Of course, a part of her admitted, I'd have to be pretty damn stupid to think I was stronger than a God--than my OWN God, at that, hah.
But something was off, and it grated at her. Somewhere out in that storm--and she could swear, again, that she saw through the rain better than through dry air--someone was plotting, and she hated them intensely.
She wasn't sure how to communicate it exactly, instead sending her god the impression of her pointing at something and saying Bad feeling!
It had the desired effect.
A sudden squall of rain drenched the people she was struggling to see through the rain and distance, and Muir could almost see Ryan's shadow in the mottled gray of the sky, glaring down at them. Then, six swords appeared in the sky, six knives more deadly than anything a mortal warrior could wield, and they all aligned towards that one target.
There was a wrenching feeling of wrongness, all at once, and a shield appeared in the sky, a shield that felt black and sickly. The six swords crashed against it, and somehow, the shield held.
There was a pause, and Muir felt a sensation from her god that she would never have thought she would feel from him--a feeling that she should have felt before, on the bridge, when she'd gotten Xechi to pull his pants down. A feeling that he should have felt when Xechi was killed, or when her own life was threatened.
She felt hate, and it felt good.
With a singular act of violence, the sky split open, wide and long enough that it looked like a sword had split the sky, not quite from one horizon to the next, but it might have seemed that way to those beneath it. Then, suddenly, the crack slammed shut with impossible violence, and Muir could see a tornado larger than anything she'd ever seen or heard of form in the sky, and she felt energy thrown into it with wild abandon. Within seconds, the sky had gone from a bad thunderstorm to the worst nightmare she'd ever seen--and yet she felt serene, protected.
She stopped holding onto the cart and stood there, staring at the violence that descended, but that black shield appeared again, and this time, Xechi seemed to hang over her shoulder and point out a feeling, laying her finger on a part of Muir's soul that she had never noticed.
Empathy. This was empathy. She could feel the enemy. They were dying, and not from the storm. They felt betrayal; terror, hatred, confusion. Someone was killing them for power. That person was... was... was... incompetent. He felt fat-fingered and panicked, even from this distance. Without seeing the person, without knowing them, even if she'd had her eyes closed, Muir knew she would have the same feeling about the man--that he was chubby, blubbering, had pissed himself, and was trying to stab people with some kind of special dagger to draw out their souls, to power the barrier.
The black barrier flickered, wanting to turn around and stab the man back, but bound not to by some kind of spell. It churned, bound to do the caster's bidding but hating him, hating all life. It was... not actually going to hold up, even if the caster managed to kill everyone there.
Ryan had already opened up the floodgates of the heavens, and the tornado fell to the ground--not centered on the man, but twisting in circles around him, hurling bodies, dirt, rocks, and other things against the black barrier constantly. With each pass, Muir could see ever more ground being swept clean, could see the ground around the man lower, even as the barrier preserved the little bit of grass around him.
And then it broke.
It was not enough indignity that the man be thrown around the storm like a ragdoll, but it was a good start. Ryan seemed to agree, and Muir watched as several times, a bolt of lightning would snap at something swirling around the vortex. Even when she was sure he was dead--and she was sure--those bolts ripped him absolutely to pieces, though now instead of merely being lightning, they seemed to have the taste of flame to them, flame that was somehow green.
Muir watched her god work for a while, barely aware that the other guards were standing behind her--or in many cases, kneeling, offering prayers more for their own protection than for thanks.