Gnawen the bekki queen loomed over Elia like some titan sprung straight out of mythology. She must have weighed a metric ton and her skin looked like it was made of bronze, while appearing much more durable. Elia’s grip around Moony tensed; she licked her lips as the woman’s growl reverberated from within her prisoner helmet. This was was the monster Pawil wanted dead.
The woman stomped; Elia hopped and sliced.
Immediately, she found herself hurtling backwards through the air, the impression of a foot sole burning on her chest. The wall of a tower came close quickly. But with enhanced finesse came an enhanced ability to move her own body, and she rotated until her feet hit the wall, then sunk into it as the age-old mortar crumbled away.
Despite the bad start, Elia couldn’t help but feel relieved. She could see, and with sight came a certain sort of right-ness to the combat, like she’d finally replaced a missing foot. It was also the first combat that Elia had fought since setting foot on the mountain that felt like it meant something. Here was not a scramble for survival, here was a challenge.
The tower she had crashed into started to collapse above her, and Elia thought that maybe it was a bit too much of a challenge.
“Everyone alright?” she asked after the last of the bricks had buried her in a pile.
Her snakes answered in a chorus of yes’s
Good catch, OG. That was a quick foot-jab.
Should’ve countered with a fire blast. We totally underestimated her.
“I – ow – get that.” Elia freed herself from the rubble, bricks thick as her head tumbling off her as she rose. “Fuck man, did you see her move? Look at those muscles, where does she get the protein from down here?”
Fish? Cannibalism? Either way, I am more interested by the triple-headed mask on her head. Feels like a an old-timey muzzle.
Without warning, the wall to her side bulged, then caved in. Elia batted the flying rubble aside with her offhand, then countered with an upward strike at the first sign of the queen’s limbs. Her strike met metal, perfectly along the hinges of the unnatural cuff-block, but it did not break. [Cutting Cutlery] was no more, and that was one heck of a solid hunk of metal.
She clicked her tongue. She would need to charge Moony with a considerable amount of reservoir to even approach what common boon had done for free. Elia ducked under a leg-sweep, then used [Frog leap] to propel herself forward knee-to-stomach. The strike connected, sending a thud and a ripple through the woman’s abdomen. The queen slid backwards across the cobbled stone.
Just as she thought she had landed a solid blow, the titan jerked forward with a headbutt like a wrecking ball. Elia jumped, but too late. She had to take it head-on, and found her tenacity sorely tested.
Then she was airborne again.
Oof! Seriously, I felt your ribcage all the way up here.
She’s hurting us, she’s killing us! Murder! Death! Oh whyyy–
Shut UP, Sense. You are distracting.
The voices in her head quieted.
There was a sort of balance now, with the personalities of Mind, Body, and Sense. But even as she ducked under another horizontal hammer blow, Elia felt a sense of wrongness about… everything. A part of it was the increased ability to wield her kitchen implements, which was sorely missing now. But another part was the fact that there was at least one more other-Elia waiting in herself, and she did not know what to expect from someone born of her spirit.
Would it be another caricature, another her pushed down the lane of intrusive thoughts? Or would she finally find an essence of what it was to be Elia that resonated more than she did with herself?
The woman tripped her, then cracked the ground with deafening stomps where Elia just had been, sending her summersaulting backwards like a pill bug.
Probably not a good time for introspection, Elia thought, to much enthusiastic bobbing of her snakes.
And then there was her opponent. She could not get a good hold on Elia, while Elia had barely any time to react and was struggling to learn her patterns like no dreg she had faced before. The titanic woman was handicapped with bound hands and a mask without a visor. The way she kept switching between sobs and frustrated growls that almost approached coherent words was freaking Elia out. She couldn’t find herself putting her everything into this fight.
But she wanted to. She wanted to let loose and find the limits of her new body. She wanted to triumph and feel free. But the only freedom was outside the mountain, and the only way out she could see was through a slim crack in the ceiling hundreds of feet above her.
Hmmm.
An idea began to form in her head. Seeing an opportunity, she hopped a few feet off the ground. Immediately, the bekki pulled her leg in like a coil. Elia’s feet met her sole and as she felt her impart a considerable amount of energy onto her, she activated [Frog leap] to soar through the air.
She flew high, and higher. Higher.
The crack of light expanded until the fissure was as wide as her, perhaps a bit more. It was placed in such a way that even the thought of climbing up to it seemed ridiculous. But just as she felt herself approach the final fifty feet, her imparted energy ran out, and she felt weightless for a long moment, before plummeting back towards the ground.
Aw fuck, we’re totally dead, Body-Elia said.
Oh nooo! Death hurts. It hurts!
At least you tried. A worthy sacrifice for science.
And as she fell, she saw the bekki queen move right below her. She grit her teeth and charged Moony with as much reservoir as it could take. If she was going to die, and lose her souls and shards, then she might as well try and take her out with her.
Her glowing sword arced down, trailing a crescent of moonlight as she aimed for the head. It impacted metal, hard metal, unnatural metal. Something broke, which Elia had point-one seconds to ponder before her face hit the ground and turned her brain into mush.
From this angle, it did not hurt one bit.
You have died
Souls distributed to creatures close by
Shards and equipment can easily be looted while you are dead
Time until reconstitution: 01:11:31
00:22:52
00:00:00
***
Elia woke up with the groggiest of headaches in a while. The jump had been a good attempt, but some part of her always knew she wasn’t going to reach. She felt around for her shards. They were still there. Nobody had looted her during her sleep.
Get up! One of her snakes yelled at her, You need to get up before she eats us!
She looked up and her entire body tensed. The titanic woman was right there, crouching just inches away. A thick crack ran through her mask, exposing a single, piercingly green eye. She must have noticed Elia stir, as she leaned down so far that Elia could feel her body heat on her back like an incandescent pressure.
This person was strong. Very, very strong.
I think she just sniffed us. Why did she sniff us?
Maybe she senses that we’re food! She’s a cannibal, her mouth is barred because people taste like tasty snacks to her, AAAAAH!
The force retreated, giving Elia just enough time to breathe a sigh before she felt two thick arms like fuzzy tree trunks close in around her and pick her up.
“Ack!” she ack-ed, squirming like a slippery snake. But even with her hands locked together, the woman did not let Elia go once she had her in her grasp.
This was it. Yet another death due to impatience and stupidity. But the crushing hug never turned lethal. Instead, it felt like a stuffy massage chair as the woman purred, and that purring turned into a deep inhuman laugh.
“Daughterrr!” came her voice, now freed from her garbling mask as she tossed Elia in the air. “Can see, can hear. Daughterrr!”
Shit, can’t move.
She landed, only to be immediately wrapped up in the bekki queen’s arms again.
“Is back, she is back! My daughter, my yes, my all.”
“Lady, you’ve got the wrong – ah, no, that tickles, AH!” Elia screamed in surprise as the woman tickled her with her feet, playing with her like a cat plays with a ball of yarn.
They curled into a ball and the woman laughed in delight. If it hadn’t been for that, Elia would have definitely felt her life in danger as invariably her stomach or her chest or head was squeezed. If she’d had base stats, she would have been crushed. Happy or angry, the bekkis did not fuck around.
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After what felt like an eternity, there was a lull in the happy grapple. The queen’s giggles and purring noises petered out until all Elia could feel was her thrum deep in her chest. It felt like sitting on an idling car’s hood.
One of her snakes decided now in this time of peace, the time had come for violence, and bit the bekki. Teeth sunk into skin and muscle, releasing a full dose of poison – and the snake reeled back as its teeth had failed to penetrate the impervious bronze skin.
“Oh.” She chuckled and gave that snake a gentle flick that sent it reeling back into Elia’s nest. “Your hair is angry, daughter.”
Elia, in the middle of stroking Body with consoling touches, felt the need to disagree. Every word was stuck in her throat. This woman could kill her with a squeeze of her biceps after all. But a second ticked by, and then another, and she realized that no matter how subtle she had ever tried to be, the results tended to be anything but. Subterfuge was not her thing, not this kind. Better to rip the band aid off early.
“I’m not your daughter,” she said, firmly. “You’ve been locked in Tartazon, a gigantic, fuck-off prison. If you’ve been down here as long as the others, you probably went a little bit… coocoo-crazy, down here.”
She could practically feel the woman’s brows furrow.
“Maybe you are just an angry daughter.” A hand drifted to ruffle Elia’s hair and it took all her willpower to restrain her snakes from biting back. “All are my daughters and sons, the cats and the wolves, the squirrels and the rats, and even those filthy, lying monkeys. Humans.”
She spat those words, her grip tightening involuntarily.
Elia yelped. “Hey, hey, hey! Stop, I’m still here, your daughter!”
As suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. “Am tired. Will rest now, with daughter.”
We need to get out of this crazy woman’s arms. Come on, OG, do something!
“I, uhhh, can’t...” Elia looked around, eyes falling on the metal box around Gnawen’s wrists. “Wait. I can get you out."
“Hmmm. Yes. Out.” The woman snuggled into Elia’s back and Elia tried not to concentrate on all the sensations that caused. Instead, she took a look at the lock keeping the woman’s hands trapped. The metal around it was old and worn, so old that Elia thought… well, if this woman was some sort of mother-of-all, then she must have been some kind of god? A half-god? She was definitely immortal, but how did anybody rank people between here and there?
She felt around, remembering that she had lost her lockpicking set in the tunnels above. Without those, even a simple lock was impossible to jimmy. She would have made do with a nail-clipping set, or some other assortment of thin metal object. Annoyed, she chewed a claw.
Moments later, it hit her. She was stupid. She had retractable claws, long and sharp. A weird thing for a snake to have, but not a Medusa.
You know, I was going to wait and see how long it took you to figure out that you basically have an inbuilt lockpicking tool set.
“Oh shush.” She went to work, fiddling around with a truly ancient mechanism with parts broken down, and other parts refusing to move entirely. After she had accidentally pushed something off its bearing and the whole idea seemed undoable, the restraints clicked and fell to the ground.
“Yesss. Hey, your hands are free.”
The body behind her stirred with a tired yawn. Dammit, she could have slipped away at any point during this entire ordeal!
“Is free?” She raised a hand without raising the other. The purring was back.
“No need to thank me,” Elia said, “Just needed a touch of my magic fingers.”
“Ooh, magic! So proud!” the woman cooed. “My daughter is magic! Yay, daughter, yay!”
“Still not your daughter,” Elia muttered. “It’s just a boon. I’m not always so scaly.”
“Daughter is a boon, yes.” Gnawen sighed. “Now, I can finally go out, and find other children.”
“The only way out is that crack in the ceiling.” The woman turned, and Elia found herself staring up at the ceiling, resting on a comfortable bekki-bed. “There, see?”
“Hmmm. Will climb.”
“And how are you going to do that? Sure, if you can stick your hand into rock, maybe you could reach the top. But then you have to climb along that overhang. Can you climb that?”
The bekki-queen seemed pensive. “Maybe jump?”
“I tried that before. That’s how I went splat.”
The bekki-queen growled in annoyance and pulled her tighter. She was using Elia like a comfort pillow now, legs and arms wrapped around protectively.
“Stupid humans,” she muttered.
Ask her why she thinks that.
“Why’s that?”
“They greedy. They looked at bekki, and did not see brothers and sisters, but servants. Tools. Spit-on-them.”
So, the bekki queen and her people had landed on the losing side of history. Yikes. Suddenly, Elia felt bad about accepting Pawil’s quest without hesitation. She wouldn’t say that she was so biased as to call the bekki monsters. Heck, she liked most of the ones she had met so far, but that hadn’t stopped her from assuming that someone like Pawil held the same lack of bias.
“This is a bit of a leap, but did Pawil have something to do with you landing here?”
“No,” she said it with such casual disdain towards the idea that Elia could almost believe that her issues with him were as important as a child’s spat. “It was the couple of terror, those damn gods. Roosty and Wurg,”
“You mean Ruthe and Worga?”
The name sent a jolt through her body.
“Yesss. I fought them. I killed Roosty, would have, but then there was his stupid wife and his stupid grail. Called me pet, ordered me around.” She whimpered, then snarled at herself. “CURSE THEM! When I get out, I will find them, and then I will RIP THEM TO SHREDS AND TEAR THEIR SKIN FROM THEIR CHILDREN’S FACES!”
The sound of her voice hurt in Elia’s bones and she could practically see Gnawen’s fur stand like a row of palisades, and her claws vibrate furiously. They scraped across her abdomen, and she was once again glad that her scales were tough as nails.
She was still being squeezed like a tube of toothpaste though.
“There there, kitty,” Elia wheezed, patting her newly adopted cat-mom on the arms. “Good cat-mom?”
Slowly, the angry vibrations turned into the happy vibrations.
“We both want out, we both want some answers. I’ll help you if you help me, alright?”
The bekki-queen didn’t need long to ponder. “Ooh, yes. Mother-daughter-slaughter. I will leave you the squishy one.”
“Sssure… Nice. Now, let’s go find you some clothes.”
She tried squirming away again. But she wasn’t getting out so easily.
“Yes. Clothes later. Now sleep, sleep and rest.”
But Elia did not sleep. She waited for Gnawen’s eyes to flutter closed and her breathing to become quiet and even before carefully removing herself from her grasp.
She left, and went straight to Pawil, who seemed to be pondering in front of one of his obelisks of the gods’ lies in classical thinker’s pose. He looked up at Elia.
“I won’t do it,” she said. “Gnawen is not a monster.”
He snorted. “Proof, then, that you aren’t one either. How regrettable, how enjoyable.”
She took a step forward. “You knew! You knew and you asked me to kill her.”
He shrugged. “I have found my life in danger many a time when our paths crossed. She is strong, as you can see, and frighteningly fast. The only thing I have to protect me is my mind, and some small amount of conjuration. Humans could not live where she lived. We had to bind together you see, and even then we were weak.” He shook his head and continued to stare at his stele. “Resent me if you will, but those were terrible times, not unlike today. Little wonder that my fellows were so entranced, little wonder that now we are all paying the price of the gods’ favoritism.”
“So that’s why she thinks humans greedy then?”
He shook his head and continued to stare at his stele. “It is simple arithmetics. The hunter needs the forest to hunt, but the farmer needs the same forest burned to make fields out of. Resent me if you will, but those were terrible times, not unlike today.”
And that was that. Elia stared at him before stomping off to the lake.
“You weren’t there, you don’t know what it’s like to hold a grudge, ugh. So pretentious” She began washing herself, the water cleaning her as much as it cooled her body down. “Hey, Mind. After all this… stuff, do you also feel less special?”
Certainly. Maybe it is because you discovered that not only is our personal history not special, but there are people thousands of years further than us along the same path. People have been being wronged by the gods for just that long. Now, the world is full of hate, and it’s become a self-perpetuating cycle. Like Sense and Body, who keep on trying to bite each other even though they cannot sate their hunger this way.
Maybe if you’d stop smelling so bad, I wouldn’t bite you.
EXCUSE me, but I am fighting for my life here. Ack, stop it!
Elia parted her snakes before they could accidentally deliver some poison to her temple.
What Mind said made sense: Humans were lied to by the gods, enticed by power. Bekki were not and were conquered as a result. Both Pawil and Gnawen recognized the true culprits behind all this, but they could not forgive the past transgressions against one another, could not bring themselves to cooperate, even if it could get them out of this cage.
The simple fact was that as things stood, they would not even give it a try.
Elia couldn’t understand Pawil’s thousand year master plan, nor could she vibe with skinning the children of those responsible. Gnawen wanted to repay in kind, Pawil wanted to make an impact that no one could erase. They were both wrong. What would it take to make them renounce what they’d been working towards for so long?
Elia thought and thought, and by the time clouds darkened the light from above, she still hadn’t come to an answer.
***
The best way to understand someone was to imitate them. It helped that Elia had something to gain from both.
Pawil was a conjurer. He never claimed to be the first, but there were hints that he was among the earliest practitioners. The fact that he didn’t know about staves used as a focus for reservoir was one big hint. The lack of differentiation between frigid and fiery conjuration too. The ease with which he coaxed influences from either side was the one thing that made her feel envy.
“Whether you pull something from above or let something find its way to you from below, it is the same principle,” he said while chiseling an obelisk. “The fact that your so-called ‘fire blast’ creates so much soot is because you are discomfited with letting the flame fill the connection.”
“I’m literally connecting with hell! I saw what happens when you don’t summons ice right. What, should I be sloppier with hellfire then?”
“What do you think of the world of fire below, and demons?”
“Well, it’s a place. It exists, supposedly, but if there’s a worse place than this then I am not risking anything. And demons are just big fuckers who burn but don’t.”
“Hmmm.” He stroked his thin beard. “The hell below us is as potent a fertilizer as rain from the heavens. At the core of the world, a fire burns eternally, a fire which may burn even a soul to ash and mix it with the strata to rise up again after an age. If the world is in the state you claim, with the undead outnumbering the living, then it stands to reason those souls are now gathering within people, thereby incapable of reaching that place beneath the earth anymore. With this pressure of souls, of energy, of potentia, the earth could take no more and fissured into the deepest parts. So my hypothesis.”
“Huh.”
So, hell was like the compost pile of the world then? Oh, and does that make the demons the grubs? What are they doing up here then?
“So what, the demons then crawled from hell because they were soul starved?”
He waved her away, as if that thought was an annoying fly. “They do not live, they do not breathe or even think, for they are made of dead things. They spread like the sparks of a fire tossed into the wind. When the demons first appeared, people thought the same as you, but alas! They are simply worms that have crawled into the wrong nook.”
Double-huh. Hey OG, did that cure your worries?
She made a fire blast. It was as clean as a tire fire.
Pawil sighed. “I see we will require many more lessons like this.”
Elia practiced her fire conjurations, but nothing came of it. At the very least she wasn’t hurting herself with every cast, courtesy of her scaly skin, and that was a big enough win for the conjuration side of the day. She left Pawil to his eternal writing and copying and went to visit Gnawen, who had awoken from her naptime.
“Heya! What’s up, my favorite cat person! Mind giving me a few pointers in melee?”
“Pointers?” Gnawing frowned. “What pointers?”
“You know, we fight, but we try to not kill each other. The goal is to learn how to fight better for real. Unless you have another hobby you’d want to share…”
Gnawen furrowed her brow. “Oh! You mean play-fighting. Gnawen can play-fight with daughter.” Her face split into a grin. “Gnawen very good at play fighting.”
That day, Elia learned what it meant to have fuck you levels of finesse. Her body was like a coiled spring, able to duck and jump with enough accuracy to land on a flagpole. When she twisted her body around attacks, it turned them from lethal into grazing hits.
That was the only reason she survived the full four hours as Gnawen chased her through the old city of Tartazon. The odd dreg swiping her legs only added to the challenge. And as a cold-blooded critter, she needed to redirect the chase into the water every so often just so she didn’t rack up deaths by overheating.
It was a nice time, spending the days with the queen of bekkis and the nights with the conjurer and most ancient of humans. Finally, she was in a place where she could let her guard down.
But the mountain would not let her rest. And every night spent staring at the distant crack in the ceiling only reaffirmed her decision to break out and then…
Well, she could figure that out after the fact. Tomorrow.