Eli charged a fireball aimed at the tall grass surrounding the ziggurat.
"No!" Iris called out, appearing on the steps beneath him and shoving his staff upwards.
The fireball roared out into the sky and exploded with a shockwave. The circling birds began to caw and screech, the chorus of cackling jackals briefly turned into fearful whines and yelps.
Eli and Iris felt an unshakable sense of doom. Iris wanted to run. Her eyes darted to a spot far out in the grass. Eli grabbed her arm. Her heart pounded with a reverberating pulse in the air.
"Stay," he locked eyes and commanded.
The jackals scattered, sprinting off in all directions through the tall grass, yelping and whining and barking. The cloud of circling birds above formed a dense ring encircling the ziggurat but didn't fly overhead. Victoria stood on the peak of the ziggurat, her eyes wide and the grey veins around them bulging. A strong aura of magic surrounded her as she held her hands to the sky, presenting three orbiting cards. She gasped and lurched forward, swaying on the small square platform peak of the ziggurat. The cards she summoned dropped onto the rooftop, the winds that caught them stoked the purple hued singes that encroached on their edges. Still, a pulse ran through her eyes as she dutifully surveyed the land. "They're still running," her head swiveled as she spoke aloud, and she noticed a large patch of grass in the middle distance swaying wide and splitting down the middle, "not just from us, there's something big on the way."
On that platform below, Eli helped Iris to her feet with a clasp, then called back to Victoria, "how long?"
"I- I don't know."
"Vic?" He worried.
"This is bad Eli," her voice barely carried below, "the magic. It's all wrong."
"What do you see?" He dashed to the edge of the platform and starting climbing a pillar. Iris watched him go, then glanced to dead jackals around her, and to the trail of blood where the jackal she slashed had fled, leading down the steps and into the grass.
Autumn came rocketing out of the dark opening in the platform, screaming a battle cry as she landed with a thud and ripped two battle axes from the brickwork of the ziggurat. They were a dark grey stone, the sides of the blades were worn with natural patterns of aged brick, and the handles were straight and stout but carved down into a curve in the middle as if from centuries of use.
Titus followed after her, taking the steps three at a time and instantly summoning a light spear in his hands when he emerged. His eyes darted around looking for the others.
Autumn rose out of her battle posture and stood straight, slouching her shoulders, "where's the fight?"
"Uh," Iris blinked, "they left. But there's something big coming." She pointed up.
Titus clapped her on the shoulder as he walked towards the outer steps, "we'll work on your briefing skills."
Titus took the first few steps down from the ziggurat platform, then turned and craned back to see up the slope of the roof with a hand over his brow, "why are you guys always on top of things?"
"Vantage point," They said simultaneously.
"We need a plan," Eli added, low enough so only Victoria could hear him.
"I know. No ideas yet."
"So, are you guys hurt?" Titus called out.
Eli looked down at the bloody bites on both arms and the deep stain of red at his ankle. He quickly looked away.
"Big one's here in 5 minutes," Victoria said, "get healed."
Eli nodded, and eased himself down the slope much more cautiously than he had scrambled up it. A pained grunt escaped with each step of his bloody leg.
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"No, no," Titus said, "stop moving, I'm coming to you."
"Titus it's fin--"
"Absolutely not," he said.
Titus began climbing his way up the pillar. Awkwardly jamming his hands into too-small handholds between the bricks, grunting heavily as he lifted his own weight, and slipping a foot more than once.
"So," Autumn said to Iris, both still on the platform, "any of these yours?" she nodded at a dead jackal.
"No," Iris said, sickened by the sight of death even as she fought a strange yearning she had never felt before, "mine got away."
"Friend," Autumn said with an incredulous smile, "don't let the great nemesis from your past be a jackal." Iris cracked first, then they both laughed.
Back above, Victoria slid down the roof past Eli, who dangled a leg over the edge for Titus to inspect as he healed at a distance from the steps below. She landed lightly beside him.
"How bad is it?" he asked her gravely.
"We have less than 4 minutes until a big one gets here and neither of us have a plan."
"Oh," he said. He turned his attention sternly back on the task of healing Eli's leg, "stop moving."
"Girls," Victoria said, walking onto the platform where the two quickly stifled their laughter. She reached out to take her sword as Iris promptly offered it back, "it's a bad outlook. Autumn, what did you see down there?"
"Mostly stairs, and a bright blue flash. There's something down there."
"Yeah," she said, "its magic is everywhere now."
"That's what riled up the critters?" Autumn asked.
"I think so," Victoria said, "think we can hole up in there?"
"It's stairs as far down as we went and further, but probably."
Eli hopped down from the roof and landed off to the side of them, Titus immediately began tending to the wounds on his arms, waving a glowing white hand back and forth across them. Eli hissed and tensed with pain on the first pass of each wound.
Iris looked at the blood that poured down Eli's arms and caked the surfaces of his gauntlets, running further down to stain even his fingertips with red. His healer still had the gnarled gashes in the backplate of his armor, and still wore the red-stained undershirt that shared the same slashes beneath it. Victoria had largely avoided the blood, but dark purple veins inexplicably encroached on the skin around her eyes.
"Things are really bad, aren't they?" She asked with a worried voice.
Everyone glanced or looked her way, but Autumn spoke first, "we've had worse."
"The tyrannosaur," Eli added, "that was our worse."
"Right, so this is only the second worst thing we've ever dealt with," Autumn said matter-of-factly, "we got this."
"Well," Iris said, holding back her fear to even her own surprise, "I showed up for that and saved the day, so good thing I'm here now."
With an extremely fragile smile, she sat on the ground and placed her bottomless bag in front of her, then reached in a hand. She tried to feel around for different things in the bag, but she kept feeling herself grasp her adventure journal. Annoyed, she pulled it out and tossed on the ground beside the bag, then reached back inside.
The book flipped open and fluttered to a blank page, which then filled with text.
IRIS ORION
INVENTORY - EXTRA-DIMENSIONAL FAMILIAR
- Favorite Walking Stick
- Thin rope, short
- Rusty Dagger
- Damaged Arrow Shaft
- Empty Rucksack
- Rosewart, Medium x2
- Rosewart, small, x1
- Broken Pocket Watch
- Mrs. Rousey's Painkilling Candies x3
- Mrs. Rousey's Medicinal Tea, almost empty
- Autumn's Mystery Meat Jerky x2
- Various books, see next page
- Various stones, see the page after
"Neat," she whispered with a smile as she read over the page.
She pulled out one of Mrs. Rousey's candies and tossed it to Eli, "eat this for the pain." Without looking up, she reached back into her bag and started pulling out handfuls of rocks, which she dropped into a pile. "Whichever way it's coming from, pile these up on the top steps." She continued pulling out handfuls of rocks until there was a pile nearly a foot high, including some rocks that most regular people would need two hands to lift. She started to get a little self-conscious about just how many rocks she had collected in the short time she'd had a bottomless, weightless bag. Autumn set to work piling up the rocks where Victoria directed her.
"We're getting in deep shit real quick here," Eli said, "any more ideas in that bag?"
Iris looked down into the void within the bag, then at the inventory list in her journal. Her shoulders slumped, "unless we have time for a study break, that's all I got."
"Hey, it's more than we'd have without you," he said.
The lumbering mass in the grasses continued towards them. Heavy winds were building, moving like waves across the grasslands, whipping around the pillars of the ziggurat and flapping their clothes. In the distance, the skies darkened.
"What the fuck did we do?" Autumn asked.