Zagreus was pulling at the annoying collar again as the carriage rolled into a stone gate house and stopped. There were irritated voices outside. He faintly sensed something through the noise, something ominous.
Gwenyr said. “This lord likes to make me wait…”
She kept talking but Zagreus was focusing. He sensed fear and anger and… murderous intent. “Ambush!”
In an instant everything happened. Zagreus changed his annoying clothes for his armor. The sounds of screams and combat erupted outside. Rezu disappeared with a flash of cyan. Zagreus covered Gwenyr as best he could. Something large smashed through the roof where Rezu had been sitting. Countless objects glowing various colors, rained down from the murder holes above. He put as much arcane as he dared into defense as the hits rained down.
It felt like forever but it had to be less than a minute when the attack had stopped.
Rezu reappeared, wearing full plate armor, completely stained in blood. He opened his helmet. “The gatehouse is clear. The others have retreated inward. How is she?”
Zagreus had to force himself to get off Gwenyr.
His Love Eternal was pale and gasping. She had two arrow shafts sticking out of her left shoulder, one in her right arm and three in her thigh. Her face and clothes were stained in blood.
Zagreus was boiling with anger and regret.
“Calm down. Those look treatable. Let me work. Check your own injuries.”
Zagreus’ armor was a bit battered but he had only minor scratches and bruising. A stone arrow head was stuck in the cloth on his arm. The soldiers and horses were crimson pin cushions.
Rezu worked on her for a few minutes then said, “She is stable. The stone arrowheads shattered when they hit bone. It will be safer to take her to the lab to remove all the pieces.”
Zagreus grit his teeth and turned towards the gate as he spawned a spear and shield.
Rezu grabbed his arm. “Stay with me man. Priorities.”
“I WANT THEIR HEADS!” Zagreus glowed aqua.
“You can’t fight this place alone. You don’t even know the defenses.”
“Then help me!”
“The heretics will be dealt with, but first we need to get her to safety.” Rezu held out his hand and spawned a stretcher and set in on the ground. “With the effects of the Monolith, it will be best to carry her to the telepad ourselves.” He climbed up on the carriage to lift her shoulder. Rezu looked at him, “They will pay, but Gwenyr needs you now.”
Zagreus wanted vengeance, he wanted blood but she needed him so he put away his weapons and helped.
“She will be ok.” Rezu said as they left the gate house.
Zagreus was on the back of the stretcher and saw her wince at every jostle. He hated to hurt her, but knew that the longer it took, the longer she suffered. As they got closer he saw the teleporter pad was an Altar on a raised stone platform surrounded by a large circle of two meter thick and ten meter tall stone columns. They entered the circle.
A hail of arrows came from everywhere.
“Get to cover!” Rezu shouted as he snatched up Gwenyr and flash stepped to teleporter. Zagreus barely had time to take a step. A shadow passed over him.
An entire, whole, scarlet glowing, column crashed into the Altar.
He sensed murderous rage and used arcane to dodge the attack, leaving an illusion behind as he did. He spawned a sword and struck with as much arcane backed speed as he could manage. It hit flesh and broke bone.
“OOOH YOU SNEAKY BASTARD!” She laughed at him while she spit blood. Her dagger was stabbing into the lower back of the vanishing illusion. She twisted in a way that stole his sword from his grip. She was a dragonite with scales that had the appearance of little round pearls and horns that curled down under her ears. She wore clothes and armor looked like something Jade would have made from salvage, when she was ten.
Gessil the Undying?! WHY HER?! He still hadn’t recovered fully. Spawning that sword, dodging and making the hit had cost him dearly. Every use now risked pushing him over his limits. ‘Death tends to stick.’
It pissed him off more because that dodge and hit had been perfection. It would have been lethal, or at least debilitating, to anyone else. But ‘Gessil’ was fucking laughing at him. This is not fair! He tried voxxing … nothing. He couldn’t sense anyone to send to. His teleporter couldn’t get the signals he needed for targeting either. “I HATE Monoliths!”
Her bloody smile widened as she gripped his blade and snatched the sword out of her ribcage. She tossed it wildly over her shoulder. “You are putting up a better fight than last time, bait boy. Let’s see how much those old shits taught you.”
He ran, ducking and dodging as a hail of arrows came down on him. He spawned a wide shield and kept going.
“Come on! Stop running! It’s no fun if you don’t fight back!”
He ducked behind a column, the moment he got out of her sight he cloaked and moved three more columns away as more arrows hit his old position.
Her cackling laughter drifted through the columns. “I know your smell. You are a sneaky shadowcat. A leftover from that failed program. They stopped that program because so many went insane with hunger and killed their family. Did mommy and daddy taste good? Or maybe you made a snack of a little sibling.”
“FUCK YOU!” He hadn’t killed his parents directly. The other shadowcats had sensed his pain and despair after he had been driven from his home. They had come to his ‘rescue’. The shadowcats had been just as confused as him, but they treated him as one of them so he went along. It was safer to be with them than people.
“Don’t threaten me with a good time bait boy!”
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He ignored her and tried to find options. There was a kilometer of open ground between him and anything else. North was the wall and the wildlands. West was the open path below the wall. East was the ocean. The town was south and east but there was no one there capable of fighting this monster. A large forest expanded out from the south/southwest. The moment he focused on the forest he felt a disturbingly powerful presence focus back on him. It felt old and ravenous. Nowhere to go and no way to get there.
“Here, here, here little bait boy.” She teased.
A single arrow fell from the sky and landed right beside him.
“Your shadow tricks won’t work with me. The mortals marked you a dozen times in the gatehouse.”
He ran around the circle of columns staying out of sight as much as possible. He was certain that he would pass out if he morphed again. He had to find another way to fight her. But how?!
She laughed as a column slammed into the one he was hiding behind.
He had to arcane jump to escape the debris. How much longer can I keep this up? I don’t see a way to escape. I need a plan of attack. A shadow enveloped him.
“Run little shadow man.”
He arcane jumped as the column fell from the sky and exploded against the one he had been behind.
She had him dead. She was just playing with him now. Columns flew and shattered as he dodged through the increasingly chaotic landscape.
Waves of stone arrows came at him. He dropped the cloak and spawned a large shield blocking most of them but pain in his right leg told him something got through.
As soon as he had a moment, he limped away as fast as he could around a column.
Gessil the Undying came around the other way and drove claws into his chest armor, pressing him into the last standing column. His arms were behind his back as she gloated at him. “I heard about you and the late Queen.” She sniffed and her lips curled back from her stained teeth. “You have been a busy little bastard. I smell marks from two infernals on you.”
Her presence was putrid and her rancid stench turned his stomach.
She sniffed again, slower, closer, deeper, creepier. “Oooh. Cinderella. Someone needed to pluck that cherry. And your energy reeks of that purple cunt’s taint.” She snatched off his helmet and licked his face. “I taste that retched monolith corpse too. You have no standards at all. I smell another energy. Maybe that young cat-girl I heard about?”
He tried to think, tried to focus. Nothing was working. Even if he could wound her there was no chance of escape. There was nowhere to go. After all of that dread about Cinder, he would give anything if she was here right now, he laughed.
She laughed too. “You lost ole Glow Stick and had to go find you some more mancerpussy didn’t ya? Looks like you had to fuck’em all.” She smiled. “This has me curious. I want to find out how you got all those panties wet. Maybe I will let you live… for a while. What do you say? You wanna put that cock in me and move it around a few times before you die? If you are really good I might even keep you as a toy.”
Instincts are a strange thing. It was basically a reflex at this point. He sent as strong as he could manage, backed by years of pent up frustration. He hit his target with an incomprehensible mental force. His whole body burned, but he managed to stay conscious. Then he wallowed in the realization of what he had done.
Gessil stared at him for a moment, confused.
The ground shook. There are safer, cleaner, and less painful forms of suicide.
Gessil snarled at him. “What did you do?” A new, orange, sun glowed over the mountain behind Gessil.
He shrugged. “I pressed all the buttons at once.” He struck out at Gessil with a mental sucker punch as he drove a despoiler into her thigh and another into her ribs. “Die screaming.” The words were cold, drenched pain and regret.
The sky burned as a comet of rage roared towards them.
Gessil howled as dark green energy poured from the blades. She staggered and threw him as she flailed in pain. He skipped and slid across the open landscape, outside the circle, eventually coming to a stop in a cloud of dust. He was spent.
The comet landed almost on top of him. It stabbed through his cloth armor, into his arm, with some strange looking short dagger. It spoke firmly. “Run.”
Zagreus managed a nod.
The comet turned to face her opponent. The view was glorious. She wore her full plate armor while holding a glowing power lance, three times her height. Her six orange arcane wings sizzled as more dense arcane swirled around her. In one instantaneous moment she lowered the lance, set her feet, then launched herself at Gessil the Undying.
The whole world seemed to shudder in fear.
Cinderella, the Queen of Hearts, the Goddess of Skulls, my Betrothed, had gone to war. Glorious.
His heart was now racing. He felt more awake than ever and was on his feet in an instant. Multi-ton column pieces tinted with scarlet arcane were tumbling past him like leaves in the wind. There was no hope of finding a teleport lock. He was doomed.
***
Cinder raced across the terrain. Her emotions were in knots from what Zagreus had just done to her. But under the sensual hit she had felt his fear, his pain. She focused on the rage and everything became clear. She knew some fool was about to die, horribly.
She crossed a ridgeline to see Zagreus’ limp body go skipping across the terrain away from the ruins of the holy site. She felt every hit. The Monolith’s aura had hid the fighting from her, but she saw scarlet arcane still clinging to pieces of stone.
“Gessil.” Cinder meant to fully put her ‘Undying’ name to the test.
Her heart pounded as she landed beside Zagreus. He was in rough shape but still conscious and not bleeding too badly. She wanted to snatch him up and run, but there was vengeance to deal out. She gave him a stim shot, and told him. “Run.” She had spent a lot of energy racing here so fast. Her body already burned.
She turned, Gessil’s leg and chest pulsed with Jade’s arcane as she pulled the empty blades from her flesh. Gessil’s healing factor was countering the corrosive, but she was suffering.
Cinder was thrilled. Gessil had always managed to survive long enough to use her stone moving skill to dig her way to safety. The altar was a decoration. This terrain was deep soil and that is why they had thought Gessil would not attack here. Gessil had proven them wrong. But she had walked into her own trap. No stone to dig and too wounded to run. There would be no escape. One of them would die today.
Cinder lowered her lance and went to war.
A storm of massive stones came rushing at her.
Cinder bounced off the ones in the path towards Zagreus, deflecting them.
Half a column came in from the side.
She bounced off it and went high into the air.
A hail of arrows and small stones pelted her, a minor distraction at best.
Cinder turned and dove for her target, she would not be deterred.
A large chuck of column intercepted her. Her lance shattered it, sending a rain of projectiles along her path. But Gessil was gone.
Cinder scanned the area and found her target again and charged. This repeated a half dozen more times with more column pieces being reduced to rubble.
Gessil sent a series of large chunks at her from different angles which she dodged or destroyed.
Interference from the monolith caused Cinder to slow for a precious few moments until she could stabilize her power flow.
A cloud of fist to head-sized chunks hit her from behind. One wing was destroyed and two damaged.
Cinder fled high out of the swirling cloud.
More stone rained down around her.
Another arcane wing broke, with more damage. Down to four, all of them damaged. Cinder was driven to the ground as she tried to get out of the storm of stone.
Gessil was being smart and just slinging these smaller stones in the general area, not giving Cinder a chance to recover. It was a high energy tactic, but it was working.
Cinder’s flight ability was being crippled. If she got out of range without taking any more hits, she could grab Zagreus and get away.
Gessil laughed. “Fall and die you annoying shit! You are going to die like Sarya! You and all the other women that man loves!”
Other women he loves? Cinder focused all her rage as she readierd her lance and launched for her target. She pumped energy into her wings, adding speed as they screamed alarms at her. Her fury would not be stopped. The head sized stones came again but Cinder’s arcane was so dense it treated her whole body as a weapon. With every hit, her Impact skill shattered the stones into shrapnel exploding away from her. This could only last moments. Moments were all she needed.
Gessil tried to dodge but Cinder was too fast. She hit her in the chest with the lance. Gessil flew back and slammed into the side of the Altar’s base leaving a bloody splatter around her body.
Cinder continued and drove her lance through the woman and deep into stone.
With her armor sparking and every internal alarm screaming at her, Cinder collapsed.