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Heart of Straw
Chapter 26| "THE PRIESTS OF HOUSE SWISH"

Chapter 26| "THE PRIESTS OF HOUSE SWISH"

You’re limitless, aren’t you?

Trey replayed Myst’s words in his head. He allowed her thousandth glib comment to massage every atom of his soul. His intangible form granted him further power—that’s what she said—though he’d always gotten his ass handed to him when he went blue. But it was time to rise to the occasion. Because if he didn’t…

Bristles—muscled and solid and full of screaming straw. Trey gulped; he sweated; he breathed heavily as Bristles calmly stood and observed the darkness which Trey’s prone body lay upon. Bristles had drawn Trey’s body from the altar with a clever wish, but he didn’t immediately rush in. He raised his arm in the air to halt the slavetalons, placing them on standby. The birds perched upon the tree branches, brushing twigs out of their wings, experimentally jangling the shadowed shackle upon their legs.

Slowly, Bristles pulled an arrow from a cross-body bag on his back—made of straw, of course—and positioned it onto the bow quiver. The gourd farmer drew the arrow. His tank-like muscles pulled the string beyond its reasonable limits. But as the wheat tore and splintered, it healed, it reinforced itself, it drew from the residual Swish-magic.

“Man,” Trey mused, “I gotta get me one of those.” He waited for Myst to respond—but nothing. For once, Trey couldn’t rely upon her to break the tension.

Trey floated in front ofhis body and raised his finger guns, crackling its static for show.

May as well riff off his cautiousness…

Bristles spoke: “I wisheth…you’d have produced Swishy. I only want the best for our mini-winged deity. Through him, we can achieve a much more desirable world than this place Ruby has created. Now this place…it is beautiful. Ah, the Stormcellar. Lovely, lovely, lovely. But it is not ours. That nest upon that massive tree, that elevated chasm upon which The Last Straw exists—it is not MINE. Tragic. But aspirational. I shall taketh Swishy to the top. And Swishy will grant me, his loyal charge, a seat atop that perch mostly lovely. Work with me, Trey. Do not fight—because thou cannot win. Collaborate…serve.”

“You’ve got a lot of gall asking me to serve.”

“Gall? No. It’s power.”

Trey was rubbed raw inside. He wouldn’t serve Bristles—he wouldn’t serve anyone. Enraged, Trey was enraged. The collected shadows coated him in a black, flaming aura. Static crackled from his fingers. He was determined to be a soul without limit. If Myst believed it, then Trey, friend of darkness, would achieve it.

“Run!” Trey screamed out to the lurking swishlings.

The frantic cacophony of swish-swish, swish-swish filled the air. They were runners; they were track stars; they were kids who understood their one and only assignment—to get the hell away.

Bristles snapped his finger and the slavetalons rose from their hiding places in the treetops. Twigs and leaves rained upon the surface, occasionally phasing through blue-soul Trey. The birds were never shy about attacking up front, but this time they maintained concealment. They sought to scare the prey upon the natural jumpiness of children—psychological warfare at its finest. In that way, Bristles was the perfect general.

“ZLIDE!” Trey followed the rustling sounds of the children and warped to each one. They all reacted differently to the dark portal which opened behind them and expelled Trey. Most of them jumped; Jimena activated SPIKES—to which Trey glared at her; Amie cut her eyes and asked What do you want? You’re supposed to fight that guy!

The blackness swirled in Trey’s curled hands, becoming gold, cohering into a 3-lettered intent: Z-I-P. “Godspeed,” he said, infusing the children with the haste spell. The kid-crows received the spell with a mixed reception: Yay dad-joke! Boo dad-joke! Disgusting—Amie, of course.

And then they zipped away, ditching Trey, and more importantly, ditching the tired-ass slavetalons. Trey smiled at each instance of the children dusting him in cast-off straw bits.

“Tremendous head start!” Bristles called to the woods, unsure of where Trey’s current location. “Let’s seeth how long the children can survive this game.”

“That’s such a sickening thing to say,” Trey had ZLID back to Bristles, knowing he couldn’t leave his body alone for long—which turned out to be a correct choice.

Bristles had an arrow nocked and fired at Trey’s lifeless body—to which ghost Trey deflected with a ZAP. For a moment, Trey contemplated re-entering his body but knew he couldn’t win that fight. Bristles’ farmer strength plus the added vulnerability to the flock was a recipe for defeat. Jeez, I’m gonna have to do something about this…Trey stared down at his body—even breaths and a single, insulting snore.

“Sleeping beauty is sickened by me? Me—an animal?” Bristles couldn’t have gotten more incredulous. “Trey, I’ll repeat myself one more time. I, Bristles, am a wrathraven soul. Understand and know this nature of mine. I am built this way and shall never change. Survival of the fit and fortunate is the rule of raven, the rule of nature—nothing more.”

“I don’t see why we can’t work together. Let us help you get your body. Swishy wants his wings—you want your wings. Why are you being so aggressive?”

“Aggression is victory. Strike fast and kill. Anything less than a full measure gets us nowhere. It gets Swish-lord missing. Where is he? Thou hath not answered. He is gone. Out there somewhere, fighting on his own, striving for wings without help. Perhaps he never needed thy help. Swishy is wrathraven strong. I am wrathraven strong. You…” Bristles shook his head. “You are you.”

Trey didn’t know why he stuck around to listen to that last comment. Weakness? Strength? Useless concepts to him at this moment. He picked one of the moving treetops—“ZLIDE”—and warped upon a few slavetalons. The birds looked up at him in shock.

Trey grinned; he cocked his finger guns; he rained down beams, sending the birds downward in a hail of ZAP fire.

He couldn’t waste time—he couldn’t allow Swishy to come under Bristles’ influence. Accepting his opponent’s might-makes-right psychology was right for this Cearth but wrong for Swishy. Couldn’t anybody see that? The boy was soft-soft-soft. And there was nothing wrong with that. The scarecrow’s plush nature was his best trait.

Care and love were outdated, he’d supposed.

Bristles loaded several arrows into his quiver and shot a sky-high arcing volley. The arrows rained down in unseen portions of the forest, tearing down clusters of mega-thick branches. His attack was two-fold. One—he was breaking the children’s cover. Two—the kid-crows released shocked screams, revealing their locations.

What kind of arrow does that?

Bristles sneered at Trey, reading his expression. “Yes, I am strong. The strongest. Now slavetalons—snatch them!”

A dilemma: warp after the kid-crows and leave his body unprotected, or trust them to fend for themselves. It was Swishy all over again. Trust was the answer, the only serviceable one anyhow. He’d given them their ZIP—so now they were on their own.

The ghostly Trey floated over his own body. His mission was simple: self-defense. He glowered at the root of the problem.

“I’ve never known myself to be an attractive man, but I’m flattered by thy attention, dear Trey.”

“ZLIDE”. A dark portal opened meters above Bristles—through which an action-movie flurry of blue-white crackles poured forth.

Bristles began to dodge so Trey altered his rhythm—three bolts here, two there, and four more here. But no success against the man’s deft footwork. Ghostly Trey flew after him, hoping for an easier shot—no such thing, though. No freebies were given. No prizes were earned.

The aspiring wrathraven shoulder-slipped and sidestepped every bolt. His speed was nonsense. That brick house of a man moved like a soccer star. He had it all: power, speed, cunning, tenacity. And ruthlessness matched by Ruby and Ruby alone.“Impressive,” Bristles chuckled. “Thou has a brain, how wonderful. It’s not helping in any capacity but this is nonetheless respectable.”

Trey switched it up again, heeding Myst’s advice on shaping and molding the dark. The ZAPs became laser beams. Others were whips. The last few were irregular Z patterns.

Bristles shoulder-slipped, sidestepped, deftly backpedaled, and when his back was pinned against a tree, the man finally unable to dodge, he snapped his fingers.

A portal of shadow appeared in the ground from which two slavetalons rose to take the hits.

Trey allowed himself to pause, shocked by the shield birds. He shot several more ZAPS at Bristles as an experiment but the slavetalons continued to dive before their master. No matter how much they suffered, they continued to rise for Bristles, smoky and feather-bald from the repeated strikes.

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“I can shoot them all day. But you know this is sick, right?”

“Spare the judgment. This is what winning looks like.”

The foliage above shook, dropping debris onto them once more. The gloss of their violet eyes appeared within the gaps of tree branches, eyeing his comatose body.

Never a fair fight in Straw City. I’m always getting jumped.

Trey floated behind his body. A counterattack, a swift defense—something, anything. Here, it’s right here! The forest had him covered—literally—with tree shadows. He pressed his hand into the tree shadow at his feet, recharging. The shadow gradually shrank from tremendous elongation to little more than a bonsai.

The birds burst from the foliage in dive-bombs toward Trey’s prone vessel.

“ZZT!” He held an open palm upwards, releasing a bright flash, a meters-wide dome that encompassed the entire clearing. If magic was a product of molding shadows, then the magic itself could be molded. Imagination, expression, creativity—these were his strengths. Perhaps he was a natural-born sorcerer, after all.

The birds cautiously circled the dome, testing the barrier by dipping a feather into it—zzt. They shook their burned feather into the air and awaited Bristles’ solutions.

“Create a wall in front of me,” Bristles commanded. The birds soared in a circular pattern around Bristles, obscuring him as the man walked forward. He was completely concealed within the feathered shield. Yet it progressed forward, towards Trey and his electrical barrier. The man stopped at its edge, still unseen. “Know this, Trey. These birds will bear anything. This diffused, un-concentrated lightning is no different. Behold!”

Bristles stepped forward and the slavetalons proceeded by a proportional distance. The flock gritted their beaks, bearing the singing shocks of the force field. But they tough-guy’d through it. Grit and strength were the order, the mandate. Trey could tell that some wanted to back away—their eyes revealed this desire. But the shadow shackle at their feet flared in aura. And so the slavetalons suffered.

Trey waited. The anticipation choked him.

And then—phooft!—Bristles head-shotted Trey’s soul with a blackwheat arrow.

(…)

TREY DRIFTED IN THE DARKNESS, arms and legs akimbo, letting the current of shadow pass him through the abyss. He wasn’t sure why that attack left his soul-self in such a state. But he was thankful for consciousness—he was thankful for quite a few things, actually:

Firstly, that he was a soul. The arrow phased through his head. No real damage occurred to him. No identifiable pain. He was embarrassed by his enemy hitting him. But also ashamed that in his flesh-and-bone body, it might’ve been curtains for him—maybe.

Secondly, the maybe portion, the fact that the arrow was a blunt tip of straw. Swishy definitely made it, the natural pacifist that he was. Shout-outs to the non-lethal rounds! God is good! But Bristles is not! Screw that guy…

Thirdly and most pressingly: unbearable psychic pain. The attack hurt—in a strange way. He was full of terror and apprehension and caution. His last month in Straw City was full of worries, but now the blackwheat buster had drawn it all out of him at once. Every bit of pain, every bit of failure, every brush with the fact that he’d lose body and soul and heart—it’d burst inside him as one great shock and paralyzed him.

Trey drifted within what he could only experience as the dark. He saw no trees, no sky, no ground. Only shadows. The outer world closed him out.

His hand drifted into his chest, swirling the immaterial matter, swishing it here and there as if his insides were pond water.

Dead inside? Heartless? No…just hurt.

“Boy, he’s really taking it to you.” Myst had returned. Trey never expected to be so happy to see her.

“Yeah…” Trey had more on his mind. He thought he’d at least give her a Hell yeah or No shit or a What is Goliath is this guy. But yeah was all he had, the strength for flourishes beaten out of him.

“Souls are strong but still vulnerable! That was Swishy’s blackwheat, you know. Powerful blight, huh?”

Trey stirred awake then, gathering his senses. The brother mode shocked him to life. “He’s carrying this feeling. He needs me. He needs a better world, mostly. But I’ve got to get back out there!”

“You do, yes. That man blasted you back to the Dark Ages, teehee. Well, just the shadows of your mind. Blackwheat is a hell of a food group, now isn’t it?”

“Oh shoot—my body! Am I dead? Dammit, I’m dead. He killed me, didn’t he? I LOST?”

“If you’re so worried about what’s outside—then go. Shoo, and maybe winning the fight is beyond you, a utility mage. You play well with others. You’re a lover, not a fighter, you know.”

“Tell me about it later.” Sluggishly, his phantom self gathered the letters to return to the outside. Z…L…I…D…E…

Jeez, that took forever.

He dematerialized, swirling immaterially as if being sucked down a drain.

(…)

BRISTLES NOCKED ANOTHER ARROW—“Oh, you’re awaketh!”

“Well, somebody around here has to give you the smoke.”

“Ha, funny. To be quite frank, I expected the arrow to phase through thee—but alas! Thee went *poof*—I couldn’t believe mine eyes. Swish-darts are blessed, indeed!”

“Well, I’m back in the flesh—or in the phantom.”

“No, the flesh.”

Trey realized he’d awakened within his own body—his arms slightly lifted in a scarecrow-ing position. Huh?

Up, up, up—Trey was taken to the skies by a grouping of slavetalons. He was made for ascension, for being a skyborne captive. The birds grinned and cawed.

Bruh, not this again!

Bristles just stared up from the ground with a lively expression, exuding the innocence of a kid at the fair. “Welcome back! Enjoy the luscious view!” He fired at his moving target—multiple shots in rapid succession. The impacts thudded against Trey’s chest and stomach and forehead.

“Aaah!” He screamed in pain as the swish-darts slammed into his soft parts. He hurt in places he didn’t know could hurt. He soared in the skies as one giant ache. After several arrows pelted him, other birds caught the arrows as they fell, retrieving them for Bristles. The pattern of torture went as such: shoot-retrieve-reload, shoot-retrieve-reload. A purely mechanical system, an assembly line of pain. Trey groaned and cried and released his pain. And right then, Bristles proved he was a wrathraven on the inside. A dark aura escaped from Trey with every instance of suffering, which then drifted towards Bristles like smoke. The wrathraven soul inhaled the sorrows. Bristles muscles tightened and bulged. Every arrow hurt more. Trey was only glad that Swishy had the foresight to round the tips—he’d known from games that arrows were sharp, but Swishy had at least known that sharps were pain, sharps were possible killing.

“Now, Trey—Trey of such delicious sorrows. Wouldst thee like to wish upon our dearest altar broker?”

“I have no wishes…” Trey coughed.

“Oh, I must disagree. Please, tell the mistress of thy wish to sacrifice your body and soul for Swish-lord’s second wing. Thou art his cherished friend, flapping with him always, serving as a proper Swish priest. His love for you will make the magic stronger. Delve into shadow such that he may have a greater chance at freedom from curses—freedom of Ruby. What could be greater? Surely thou couldst do such a small thing for our god of straw.”

“No…”

But the torture, the captivity, the humiliation of instant capture—he couldn’t go out like this. He stared at the darkness and searched for Myst, a useless act. Firstly, she couldn’t help. Secondly, she was everywhere; she was watching; she was waiting for her champion to rise to the occasion.

He pictured his elders, his grandfather in particular, the legendary Earth Dimes. Trey hadn’t thought about him in a while but he probably should’ve ruminated upon the greatest adventurer of Clayhearth history sooner. He remembered the stories of his grandfather’s escapades. The pride and power of his traveling arts. The techniques he’d developed to navigate Cearth. One of the only men in Clayhearth who’d willingly defied the cultural taboo against altars and curseworks—and researched the greater world. Yet Trey couldn’t draw upon specific memories. When a possibly useful memory began to come into focus, an arrow pelted it right out of him. Trey’s whole being radiating with pain.

However, Trey was able to draw one thing from his memories: Earth Dimes arching his silver brow, staring at Trey in his time of struggling—be it a school quiz or research item or when as a toddler he was learning how to walk: Well?

Well? Echoed in his mind—20 percent mockery and 80 percent challenge. Clayhearth had its own motto. When once say Well? The implicit answer is: Rise.

Pain was the problem—and un-pain was the start of the solution. “SOUL!” Trey astral-projected from his body, going scarecrow limp into the slavetalons’ arms.

The swish-darts slammed into Trey and his soul winced from the shock, hoping he wasn’t hurt too badly. He knew his ribs were cracked and broken—but at least he escaped the pain, he escaped the need for breath.

He posed his fingers into zix-zhooters and zapped the birds, a hail of bolts frying them at point-blank range. As they released Trey’s body, other birds came to catch it—but he shot them too. Anything that moved, he shot at. His aim was perfect, too, blasting through these shadow-shackled hench-birds.

His body still fell, no one to catch it—no one but Bristles. When did he get here? He held his arms outwards and wickedly grinned. “Come into mine loving arms, dear Trey. Let a fellow priest of straw support thee. What do they call it? A trust fall? Yes, trust. Trust is important amongst devotees…”

He needed a solution—and fast. Wasn’t he a champion? Wasn’t he going to help Swish fly? Wasn’t he going to return every soul to their proper and desired place? His white-haired slick-talker of a grandfather returned to his head. Well?

Rise, rise, rise. But how? He searched his soul, his heart—that’s right, the heart Swishy gave me.

Inside him, the cardiothoracic text glowed, returning to a familiar page: HEART STRINGS.

He flexed his fingers towards his falling body, golden tendrils which wrapped around his arms and legs like jungle vines, yanking his physical self away from Bristles’ waiting arms.

Bristles smirked—then he clapped.

Trey then flew away with his body and disappeared into a thicket. But he was running out of energy—the vines were too thick, too hard to control. This wasn’t the intended use of his strings. The strings weren’t for outside—but inside. Without Trey’s volition, the spell acted upon its true nature: it thinned into golden yarn and phased into his chest, wrapping around his heart.

Molding. Trey hyper-focused on the major clue Myst gave him. He’d created the spell from the shadows and now he’d decide its form. The heart strings were at their base—of heart. They were units of heart, cardiac constructions. Bu-bump, bu-bump. His body stirred from the spell, from the injections of Trey’s intent to build a heart. Blood flowed from the heart to the rest of the body, faster and faster. Trey’s body stood up…on its own. Or rather, Trey himself used his magic to control two bodies, remotely puppeteering his vessel.

Bristles searched the forest. His slavetalons rose from the ground in portals, briefly searching one area, before warping to another. Just as Trey suspected, ZLIDE was a common enough ability type. Darkness and mobility were simply a thing.

“Run.” Trey’s soul whispered to his body. “Find your friend. Get you some gold-straw healing.” And Trey’s body took off, shambling along, clumsily, but functionally enough. His arms flailed, and his legs were akimbo—a bit bow-legged in gait. But he was running as best he could. The heartstrings only wanted one thing. Hearts were unintelligent things. You’d need a soul for proper piloting—one which Trey had detached from said body. He watched his clumsy and injured vessel slam into trees, empty-eyed, bumbling. But at least he was a moving target. At least this was unpredictable in its own way. Stupid, but unpredictable.

Oh, one more thing.

He drew from a nearby tree shadow, conjuring Z-I-P, and blasted his body with the letters. A good idea—or so he thought.

His body slammed into a tree—extra fast, extra hard. But at least he scrambled to his feet like a movie zombie, only to sprint into a shrub three seconds later.

“Well…at least I’m moving. Thank God for that.”