Rye forced herself to keep her eyes open, because in these circumstances, nobody else would. Her chances of survival were guaranteed; she had time to spare. ‘Ghosts don’t do fall damage’ Elia had joked once. Now, she was nowhere in sight.
The ground approached behind a cloud of debris and falling architecture. One of the other groups used their stoneshield, creating a dome of granite in a perfect sphere around them. Rye used hers after nearly fumbling it. It only projected a weak wall of wind barely enough to push away the dust nearby.
Even without [Psychometry], she knew she had been handed a rainshield.
Damn that giantess. She really was trying to kill us.
“I’ve got you,” Sam prayed, pressing her face into her neck. “I’ve got you; I’ve got you.”
The ground came closer still and though Sam was brave, bravery alone would not deter an impact at terminal velocity. Rye focused, and conjured a shell of ice through her reservoir, quickly growing it around them until it resembled a thick-shelled egg.
Remember the car-safety commercials. Crunch zones and airbags.
The former she created by layering less dense ice on the outside, the latter by changing the part on the inside to become spongy and springy.
Their chances in the giant hail drop weren’t great, but neither were anyone else’s. The titanic serpent made sure of it, as its open maw sucked in one of the stone balls. Rye felt her drop slow down, then suddenly reverse back towards it as it sucked in a mouthful of air.
“Hang on!” she yelled and pulled on even more reservoir.
With a sudden confluence of influences from the Greater Azure Stream mixed with the Wyrm Minoris constellation, she caused an explosion that sent them veering off path just enough. Their shell impacted one of the great scale-feathers as large as they were and careened off into the distance. Rye tried to control their flight, and once the energy was used up, their descent, but there was little she could do without immediately exhausting what was left of her reserves.
They flew far.
She saw Loften, just a glimpse of the crumbling city beyond the roots of the mountain. She saw other places too, abandoned forts and old valleys where people had once sought refuge on the way up.
The ground approached with a vengeance, this time with no take backs. Sam held her close and closer as they braced for impact. In the last moments, she took the reservoir from her pond charm, and used it to conjure layers upon layers of crunchable-yet-flexible ice at the impact zone.
They hit the ground, and as ice met ice they broke through the water’s surface.
***
Not a long way up the mountain, all was peaceful. Interlopers had been expunged, the dragon consumed, and the gigantic snake had melded back into the snowy landscape, taking the form of a river flowing far below in the valley.
The construction of the gods had finished falling apart. Of the five support pillars as thick as houses there only stood two, and one of them held up nothing but air. The rest was gone, and strewn from everywhere between here and there.
But there was movement. Careful, desperate movement filled with the guilt of having encountered the unlikely, survived the impossible, and come out the other end with barely more than a trickle of blood running down one’s face.
She threw me, Karla thought, clutching the bridge’s edge. She threw me so I could live.
Elia hadn’t just thrown her. True to her word, she had put the lives of her adorable students first, and flung them to what was hopefully safety. Karla could never have reacted so quickly. At the moment, all she could think of was holding on for dear life.
Falling to your death: Unprincesslike, the law of princesses reminded her.
Slowly, one limb after the other, she pulled herself up and over the edge.
Un-damseling yourself instead of waiting for rescue: Unprincesslike.
Karla wanted to cry. She staggered over to where a part of the mountainside had collapsed onto the road. As she leaned against a boulder, she almost missed the shaggy face peeking out from in between the mound of rocks and snow.
“Hello Brod.”
“Hullo.”
“You look a bit stuck.”
He frowned. “Legs crushed. Guts pushed out of butt. Will be better soon.”
Karla blinked. “What?”
“Brod is healing.”
“Do you need help?” she asked, feeling slightly hollow. Here were the two people with the greatest tenacity she knew, and one of them was half-pancake. Karla had gotten lucky, so, so unreasonably lucky.
She looked between the pensive giant and the abyss so close by.
Hurling yourself into the depths after perceiving your lover as dead–
She didn’t even want to know. It was probably very princesslike, or not at all, as the rules were random and unfair, seemingly set to spite her in particular. And there was no hope. Her bags that weren’t hers were gone, the way path was sheared clean off the mountainside, and all that she knew and loved was crumbling away.
Karla shook her head. No, she was being too pessimistic. After all, there were none of Frey’s traitorous friends around, and the snake was returned to being dormant, too. If Karla survived, then that just meant survival was a possibility – no, a likely possibility. If she just kept moving along, she would eventually stumble into whoever else had weathered the storm. Who knew, maybe she would run into Elia?
Eternal optimism: Very–
“Will you shush up!” she yelled. “You are flipping annoying!”
At the silence that followed, she breathed a heavy sigh. It wasn’t all baseless happiness and self-delusion. Elia was alive, that much she knew. It was spelled out right in front of her after all.
You have challenged: Mount Gatheon
Divine power not yet earned has been censured
May your ascent abound with blessings and curses
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
Divine power. That wording was directly linked to greater shards. When she felt for her connection to Justice, was flimsy at best, like talking to someone on the other side of a wall. Elia hadn’t exactly breached the topic with her – heck, she hadn’t asked Karla or anyone about greater shards since Sam’s reveal – but Karla would bet every comic and manga she didn’t have that the greater shard of vengeance was what allowed Elia to go back in time.
Either that, or she had another, bigger shard stuck up her bum. The shard of time, or maybe the shard of renewal. New beginnings, repetition, tenacious and dogged pursuit…
“Nope, not likely.” Not probable, at least. And Vengeance fit Elia best anyhow. You didn’t need to be a scholar or a genius to note as much. And if anybody had earned their powers, it was Elia. “But come to think of it, what is vengeance?”
“Good question,” Brod said. “Rock, please.”
“Right. Sorry.”
Karla got to work unburying the quiet yet friendly giant.
***
Everything just had to go down the drain.
In hindsight, Elia had always expected something to, as punishment for all the peace and quiet. That was why she had hurried along, hurried to outpace fate. She didn’t actually believe in fate so much as in some divine meddlers pretending to play at being the conductors to the world. The leap from there to fate was where they showed their expertise in presentation.
Now, Elia had done her best, and was fairly certain that at least half of the people she cared about were safe. But her best was rarely good enough these days. She kicked herself for not having expected anything worse than a dragon. Now, she was stuck in between a rock and mister Kill-all-your-friends-snake Mcgee.
She held her breath as a scale as long as a longsword brushed past the stone outcropping she was hidden under. It was thick and fleshy in one moment, then hard and razor-sharp in the next, and it didn’t move like one would expect a scale, but more like a small finger. Like many small fingers, as hundreds of them brushed every nearby surface.
You have challenged: Mount Gatheon
Divine power not yet earned has been censured
May your ascent abound with blessings and curses
Elia pushed deeper into the recess. It was looking for something or someone.
I fucked up. Fuck! How could I be so stupid?
All this time she had spent bouncing from one event to another, worrying mundane worries. She had been so distracted she forgot who the real enemy was. Those who lived above the clouds. The Gods.
At least Karla is safe, if they sent this snake-worm-thing looking for me down here.
A finger-scale brushed right where she had been moments ago. They were growing more inquisitive by the moment, some of them extending their length twice-over. They sniffed the ground where her warmth or scent lingered like puppies. Elia scooched further back, where darkness yawned beyond the light. She could have gone further into the tunnel, if she were willing to risk a fall down who-knows-where. But for the moment, she hoped the beast would look elsewhere, giving her a chance to escape and find the others.
Then, a scale-feather-tendril she hadn’t seen licked across her shins. It didn’t matter that she had metal greaves thick as her thumb covering them. The tendril turned solid and sharp, then came away with a hint of blood before she could register what was going on.
The creature pulled away, and for a moment, light flooded her little hole in the stone. The air was devoid of sound, and the world beyond was dust and dirty snow.
She felt the inhalation of air before she heard it. She had only caught that wind attack on her periphery, but she knew one thing: if a dragon couldn’t take that hit, neither could she. A shadow fell over her little outcropping, a shadow so large it threatened to swallow her entire existence. It was time to go, and so she went the only way she could see: down.
Elia flung herself backwards, tumbling down shafts of stone and bouncing off tufts of slimy moss. Then the blast came and shook the mountain like a winter globe. She blacked out – something that hadn’t happened in years – and when she did, she dreamt briefly that she was a galloping horse.
Neigh, neigh, neigh.
Then she tripped, and broke her neck, and woke up with a gasp.
There was a thin sheen of sweat covering her body. Her heart pounded in her ears, but besides that, there was nothing. No sound, no light, and barely the sensation of touch.
“Quibbles? You there?”
Quibbles croaked in affirmation.
“Oh, thank g… thank fuck. I thought I lost you there.” She got up, massaging her neck as she felt for her many things. “Still got my bag. Lucky me. Now, light, where did I have it…”
She flexed her reservoir, and found it almost empty. It was enough for a few sparks. She only used her flame blast when she was sure that she was holding the eternal torch she always carried with her. Elia was terrible at pyromancy, and her fire blast was more of a fire-puff with a soot-to-spark ratio of ten to one, but on her third try the flame did catch.
After carefully nursing it, she held it up over her head, illuminating frighteningly little in the darkness.
Note to self when I get out of here: Get a better torch.
Following the wall to her right for a while, the room opened up, trading sheer rock for bricks of shaped stone. Elia entered through a broken part of the wall. An ancient ruin was buried underground.
The halls went down further both left and right. She followed them along, only to find a bend after some time, and yet more halls. There was seemingly no end to it, and between the looping images and faded inscriptions on the wall, no landmarks either.
No.
Her heart lurched as she realized her predicament.
No, no, no!
She turned around, but could not find the way she had come from.
Why did it have to be another bloody maze!?
***
Hours passed. Maybe days.
Elia walked the maze, roaming in circles. Mazes were made that way. Like the labyrinth in Greek mythology, the minotaur was never meant to find an escape, and neither was Elia. There was no north-duck-cloud here. Even if she had been making progress, it would have felt like the same, mind-numbing drudgery of failure.
And failure was a terrible topic to ponder. Karla was safe, and so were Nathan and Erik. Rye would have taken care of Sam, and if they were alright, so was Hannah. But Otis had been blown off, and there was no guarantee for her other half. The last thing she saw was how the snake had gone towards them, ready to swallow their icy capsule whole.
And it was all her fault. Maybe if she hadn’t gone, things would have been fine for a while. Maybe her friends would have figured out Frey’s deceit on her own.
What if I never see them again?
Elia stopped to lean against a wall. An empty alcove stood where once something heavy must have been; the stone below still carrying an imprint of lighter, less decayed stone.
What if they’re paste, and something eats that paste? What if they’re a dreg?
Her grip around Moonlight grew tighter.
Nowhere to go, nowhere but down. Story of my life – well played, divine dipshits, well played.
There was a way out of course, one old reliable card to play.
But I’m not done, not yet. If they fudge the dice, I’ll flip the board.
Elia knelt down, ignoring the things in the shadows, and put the blade to her throat. Then, she hesitated, and hesitated some more. The past few days, all the way to Cesare coming with his proposal, played back in her mind. The last bowl was up on the abandoned temple. Karla and her had long since run out of rings of grace. If she died here, she would lose her souls, and her shards for sure.
One other part echoed inside her head, the announcement of her handy haze.
Divine power. Not yet earned.
Sam’s words came to mind. Elia had the broken shard of Vengeance within her. She never had bothered to think about why she could reset the entire world upon death, but if it was due to a greater shard, then yes, that would be within reasonable expectations.
But thinking of it like that was grating.
“This is my power, my curse. Not yours, not anyone’s.”
With a defiant yell, she cut her throat.
You have died
Souls distributed to creatures close by
Shards and equipment can easily be looted while you are dead
Time until reconstitution: 08:41:59
03:12:47
00:28:01
00:00:00
Elia woke up with a start. Her throat hurt and the area around her was suffused in the pitchest of blacks. That and the headache that was already ebbing away added to her confusion. Nobody had accidentally killed the sun, had they?
She felt around and found a distressed Quibbles. He couldn’t believe that she would just go and off herself like that. It wasn’t exemplary behavior and besides, it didn’t help them anyways.
He bit her thumb and she let him gnaw as her mind processed one tick at a time.
Oh. So, I’m screwed then.