A bird called out in the dawn air, right above the sleeping heads of a handful of people until John shot straight up in his sleeping bag with bleary eyes. As he looked around in alarm, first taking in the prone forms of Matthew and Charity to his right, he soon found himself looking up at the slight form of the skeletal girl staring up at the tree above them. A thick woolen robe hung over her shoulders as a thin wooden mask hung from a leather cord around her neck and a heavy hood fell almost entirely over her eyes, completely obscuring her skull-like forehead. Seeing her like this it was almost funny to watch the girl as she appeared to be staring right into the hood draped over her head as she looked nearly straight up, but John had a strange feeling that she was actually seeing something even through the object obscuring her vision.
He looked up to match her gaze and eventually found a thick looking black bird sitting in the top of the tree above them. The bird seemed to catch his eye in that moment, turned its entire body to address him specifically, and used the full power of its chest as it let out a massive “Caw!” then flew off without another word.
Dei watched it fly away, face not really betraying any emotion that John could tell as she looked into the sky absently. If he had to really guess, John had a feeling the girl had been trying to pull down the bird from its perch using just her mind powers to make the animal implode into a small ball of meat and bones that she could toss to Xei. Where was the guard anyways?
John looked around, grumbling about why he was the only one who woke up to the bird calls as he finally found the Herald's guard standing like a scarecrow some fifteen feet behind him. This time he really was startled to match eyes with the second skeleton of the morning as the apparition stared straight back at him with burning orange eyes. A row of spiked horns lined the front forehead of the skull alongside several jutting spikes that had formed along his shoulders and forearms looking like a particularly strange set of white armor had been draped around the skeleton.
Xei finally started to grin then as the spikes receded into the skeletons upper body within only a couple of seconds and he bent down to pick up the leather cuirass and chainmail the guard had taken from Dei when they swapped outfits a couple of days ago.
“Damn skeletons just like messing with me.” John muttered to himself as he started to untangle his legs from the sleeping bag. Truth be told John wasn't quite sure what to make of the two of them as he thought about the strange individuality to the two skeletons that he had started seeing over the last couple days. Matthew had told him and Charity that the orange skeleton had started calling itself Xei, and that was only the last clue John had needed to realize that the two corpses weren't quite the same person.
Dei always seemed to look through him whenever he caught her eyes, like she was thinking a million miles an hour and her vision was stuck on the horizon. Meanwhile, Xei would stare back with the intensity of another soldier trying to challenge John with his gaze whenever he so much as looked in his direction. Then the damn skeleton would spread that shit-eating grin across his face just to really drive the point home.
John had pulled out some dried meat from his bag to munch on as he waited for the other two to wake up, and when he looked up to glance in the skeletal girl's direction he realized she had moved much closer to him than he noticed.
A pair of blue and purple eyes peered at him from under her cowl as she pointed down at something scrawled in the dirt.
“Favor, spar?” Matthew read, and tried his best to swallow down a tuft of meat he had been chewing that suddenly felt very, very dry going down his throat.
—
The sound of ringing swords drew Charity out of her sleep in all but a moment as she whirled around in fright, trying to find the source of the sound. Twenty meters away from her a naked skeleton hammered down on John with heavy sword blows. Dei was obviously enjoying the fight as she formed a small robed ball sitting down with her knees to her chest watching the two of them fight.
The skeleton, Xei she thought based on the orange flashes, swung down repeatedly with strong overhead blows that rained on the upraised guard position of John as he grasped his sword in two hands, hanging on for dear life. Every blow knocked the sword more and more out of place, until John committed fully to the guard and took his metal plated left glove hand to grasp the meat of the sword by the tip to get some better leverage against the blows.
It appears this was what the skeleton was waiting for because at that moment Xei stopped his overhead chops to hesitate for just a moment then threw out his left arm in a punch aimed at John's head. That half moment of hesitation had been enough though because John whipped his sword downward just in time to snap its edge into the incoming arm and send it wide, missing his body entirely. Strangely enough, the bone didn't break as Charity watched a more vibrant orange glow suffuse the wrist as John connected with it before winking out to the more subdued glow throughout the rest of the body joints.
John didn't seem to be distracted by the lack of a shattered bone, and instead punched forward with the pommel of his sword to connect with the center of the skeleton's chest, knocking it back and off balance. The skeleton toppled to the ground, its left arm still raised in the punching position like an awkward caricature of a human being, before it finally settled into a slow attempt to get up. John wasn't about to let that happen though.
As the skeleton struggled to rise, John took two steps forward to throw his own heavy downward slash straight into its skull, once, twice, three times in a row. The first two times the heavy orange glow returned once again as Xei was evidently working some sort of effort to reinforce the bones even as the blows landed, but the third strike broke through and sheared itself straight through the top of the head only to get caught halfway through the jawline.
Everyone paused at that moment as the skeleton stopped getting up, and gravity slowly pulled the head of the skeleton back as it slid off the edge of John's sword to fall back into a pile of bones at his feet. The soft orange glow that had been emanating from the many joints of the skeleton growing softer until nothing remained. Then everything lit a brilliant Purple color as the skeleton came to life once again.
Charity still wasn't quite sure what the purple flame meant, since she now associated Xei with orange and Dei with her customary blue joints except for the fact that every once in a while her movements would alternate to purple. Still, she felt the influx of power as the skeleton reached up to grab John's sword far faster than it had been moving just a moment ago, then kicked out a leg even from a prone position towards the back of John's knee, sending him sprawling to the ground. The purple skeleton then pushed on the swords edge causing it to obviously cut into the open bone of its hand, but also pushing the pommel of the sword back until it punched into John's gut as he fell to the ground.
Then with a wrenching movement the purple skeleton stole the sword out of his hand and twisted its body to stand up with something resembling grace as it rolled into an upright position. A moment later and the skeleton glowed orange once more as it blazed far brighter than the dull glow she had seen coming from the body earlier as it twirled the blade in a half circle, raised it above its head, and plunged it several inches into the ground right next to John's head.
John rolled away quickly, scrambling to his feet, but it was evident that the bout was over as Xei made no moves to follow the man as he retreated from the killing blow. Dei applauded with sharp smacks of clacking bones from the sidelines, but Charity was having a strange realization that in this moment Xei felt more like the Xei she had been getting to know the last couple days than the dimly lit skeleton that she had seen at the beginning of the fight.
Stolen novel; please report.
Every time she had looked behind her at the male skeleton the last three days they had been walking so far, he looked back at her with a strange grin on his face, so she had started to get a feel for how sharp his typical movements looked and that certainly wasn't anything like the clunky skeleton that had been seen pounding down on John's guard.
‘Just what are they getting after at this point?’ Charity thought to herself.
—
‘Huh, the braindead FIGHT order almost had him beat.’ Xei pointed out.
‘Yeah, but then you got your half effort corpse taken out even with your new reinforcement method. And in front of Charity too.’ Fei got out with a laugh in her voice.
‘What?!’ The skeleton turned around to face the wide eyed human woman as she was caught looking at him with frazzled hair that she hadn't yet pulled into her customary bun. ‘Damn it. Why'd she have to wake up?’
‘Hah, and I even had to step in and save your ass as you started losing control of the body right in front of her!’
‘Fei, that's not even true and you know it. I was letting go of direct control on purpose so we can see how long the passive orders get deactivated. You know, the things that's like half the point of that whole fight?’
‘Doesn't matter, you still got beat in front of your girlfriend Xei!’ Fei responded in sing song as the now orange skeleton almost looked a little sheepish as it started putting on its leather padding in preparation for the day.
Dei merely listened to the other two as they continued their verbal spar, content to let them play among themselves as she had long ago realized the two were practically siblings in a way. The dynamic between the trio had developed over time, as Dei continued to speak less and less directly with the two others, even as they had started to defer to her judgment more since she was the ‘first spark’ as they called it.
Its not that she hadn't wanted to speak with them more. It just felt inappropriate in a way. Like she felt some sort of moral detachment from the conversations that they were pulled into and couldn't quite find any interest in involving herself in their fights. Still, the day's sparring with John was definitely a success, and now they had solid proof that their skeletons could be incapacitated if they suffered enough damage.
It was another thing that Dei had to add to the list for further testing as she made a mental note of things. A heavy “CAW!” sound echoed from the treetops as she settled her gaze upward, quickly locating the bird with her bone vision as she watched it take shallow breaths in between its loud cries.
‘Now why am i having such a hard time finding a bird corpse in the middle of a marsh?’ she wondered to herself.
—
Matthew woke from his uninterruptible night's sleep shortly after the rest of them and they set off on their fourth day of travel as Charity let everyone know that they should be reaching the first outpost by the end of the day.
They had made their way outside of the Marren forest close to the end of the second day, and now they traveled along a solid dirt road raised several feet above what had become a wet marshland of chest high bushes that spread out in every direction. Last night the group had set camp in a small outcropping of trees rooted on top of what could only be described as an island among the endless knee high waters that made this land so inhospitable, counting themselves lucky to stay dry as they slept. Still, the endless highway of the main road through these parts was in of itself a measure of the engineering the people of the Golden Kingdom so prided themselves on.
By this point they had started passing several other groups of traveling merchants and farmers bringing their stock to market before the winter started to really bite into the land. Both Dei and Xei had taken to wearing their wooden masks more or less permanently while traveling at this point, as they covered the rest of their bodies with far more mundane clothes.
The other traveling groups they passed had often looked curiously at the two of them, silently trailing the rest of their companions like a duo of lost children following the group. Thankfully, when someone had actually called their bluff and asked the two why they wore those funny looking masks, Matthew cut in to explain for them.
“Excuse me sir, but my children had a rather unfortunate experience in a house fire that stole their ability to speak as well as most of their faces. I’d appreciate it if you didn't bother them.”
The elderly man that they had been passing at the time looked surprised by the explanation as he quickly stammered out some sort of apology to the two as they continued walking past. Behind her, Dei heard the man mutter to the younger man carrying goods by his side,
“Damn shame to have your life stolen away from you like that when they're so young.”
“Looks like they're in good company though, so I wouldn't worry about them too much uncle.”
The two skeletons exchanged a glance as they had both heard the exchange, slight glowing grins playing across both their faces as they silently thanked Matthew for his forward thinking regarding their backstory.
Several more hours came and went as the group traveled in near silence down the barren dirt road until Dei suddenly stopped to snap her gaze out towards nothing in particular off to the side of the road. The three humans in front didn't seem to notice her strange actions until they suddenly heard a splash behind them as Dei all but jumped straight into the water to start wading out into the depths.
Somewhat at a loss for words, the rest of her group watched her continue further out into the muck until she stopped maybe twenty meters from the side of the road and reached down for something. A second later she pulled up a small ball of mud the size of her head and started walking back towards the road.
John started to look up and down the road, suddenly thankful that no one else was in the area to watch the girl's antics as she finally climbed back up the dirt embankment to re-join them on the raised road. Still, it was hard not to smile at the girl as she nearly hopped behind them in glee, holding up the small ball of grime and feathers in her gloved hands. Xei had evidently seen the question in all their faces, so he bent down on the girl's behalf and wrote something out for them on the road.
“Bird experiment!”
—
Dei had quickly deposited her newest prize into her bag as the group continued their journey, content as she was to figure out what she could do with the creature while the rest of them slept that night. It was almost funny actually, to think that she was carrying a bag just like the rest of the group even though there was no food or sleeping pad in her travel sack like the others. Matthew had insisted that it would do the skeletons some good towards looking like the others, since people would notice if the two of them were less burdened by travel equipment. Now that she had her first prize though, Dei was far more content to look like an average human traveling down the road now that her travel bag could now be used to store a sizable amount of bones if she wanted to.
Day dreams of setting her bag down only for a squad of boney soldiers to leap out of it filled her mind as the group finally started to catch glimpses of something large blocking off the road in the far distance. As they drew closer, the wild looking bushes lining the road started to fade away to be replaced with line upon line of thin grass stalks jutting up from the shallow water in uniform rows perpendicular with the road.
Matthew took the time to explain to John that the farmers in this area relied upon wet water crops such as rice fields, azola, and certain edible reed plants to bring in a yearly harvest despite the terrain. Thankfully for the people around here, even in the winter the temperature never got quite so cold that it froze over the great body of standing water, allowing them to more or less continue to plant year round despite the limited options.
Dei however was far more interested in the wooden palisades that were becoming more and more clear at the other end of the road. A massive wooden gate cut off the raised dirt pathway, walls extending outward from the road in both directions nearly a half mile wide as she realized the fort was cut into a roughly circular shape in the middle of the swamp. Soldiers soon became visible, pacing along raised platforms hidden by the wall and holding long pikes raised to the sky that nearly doubled the men in height. When the group had finally made their way up to the gateway proper, and stopped to wait their turn in a small line of people making their way into the doorway, Charity turned around to address the group.
“Welcome to Camp Miller!”