So, Elia was in a moving house, a wendigo creature with the lower part of her arm stalking her on the outside and an increasingly panicked Karla on her inside. The girl was putting up a brave face, Elia had to give that to her. The only noise coming from her mouth as she slathered ball after ball of wyckwax on her stump was a high whine. She could have easily mistaken it for the squealing of the rickety windows clapping against their frames as the building jumped and jostled with every step of the creature carrying it.
Elia, speaking from personal experience, I think Karla’s having a panic attack.
A support pillar cracked ominously above them.
“Well, it’s only reasonable. Ow. I’d say this run is pretty screwed. We’re goin’ all the way back to Clearwater Temple then.”
But you’re not giving up yet, are you?
“Heck no, I’ve still got one good arm.” She snipped her fingers in front of the girl emptying entire jars of their wound-sealing crème on her arm. That got her attention as she seemed to blink herself out of a fugue. “Hey, Elia to Karla. Any recent epiphanies or are you just staring at me ‘cause I’m awesome?”
“You have lost a lot of blood.” Her voice was stiff. “And an arm.”
And my staff. My poor, poor staff. I’m worse than useless now. I’m sorry.
“Not your fault.” Elia nodded sagely. “I’m glad to say you’re still in one piece.”
That cracked the girl a little more. “Y-you are taking it rather well. Don’t you feel anything?”
Elia felt everything. Experience just made it easier to ignore. “Girl, this is nothing. Would you like me to tell you how I climbed out of a sepulcher of pearly-white teeth with nothing but my left hand and one big toe?”
“I’d rather you really not.” Karla made the best polite face she could manage. “You’re delirious. You’ve lost at least thirty percent of your blood. Trust me, I know because–“
“Because you’re a blood mage, yeah, I know.” That brought up a rather stupid question. “Can’t you just… blood-magic my missing liquids back into me?”
“T-that would be rather handy.” She seemed to calm now that Elia got her talking and she smiled at Karla politely even as the girl cleaned her wound rather vigorously. “B-but I never trained, I was told it was dangerous. Pulling waves of blood is easy, but spinning a small string, a continuous flow? I’d rupture your arteries, I don’t have the control, I never learned healing magic–”
“Hey. Karla. Look at me. Does it look like I’ll survive otherwise?”
“If I used blood magic, you’d definitely be a goner. I’ve only used my magic on a living person once.” She tugged a wrap of bandages and thread rather tight around Elia’s arm. “I don’t want to do it again. But I know first-aid.”
They had to take the illusion ring off for the bandages because it was constantly trying to make the missing arm wound look more presentable by illusioning healthy skin over it. Just like all her important parts, the illusion was quite tangible, but rather porous as to allow the skin to breathe. Currently, it was rather important that Karla didn’t forget to breathe herself.
Calm her down. Anything, distract her, make her think about anything but this.
“I never got to ask, but you talk very differently from anybody else. Did you know any outsiders, perhaps?”
“My mother was an outsider, from Toulouse. I learned much that I know from her. She was a skilled healing-nurse.” Karla took out a barber’s kit, quickly fiddling thread through a needle before applying both to the skin flaps around her wound. Elia found herself sucking in air through her teeth but by this point Karla was too in the moment to notice. “Father is a local, a prince from the old aristocracy, to be specific, though the title doesn’t hold much meaning outside our lands. What with the undeath and all.”
‘What with the undeath and all’. What a flippant way to put it. I guess that’s how people are when they grow up with a city on fire. Gosh, I’ve even stopped questioning why a princess would bind my – our – wounds.
“It seems to me that you don’t talk much about where you’re from...”
“What’s there to say? My mother’s dead, my aunt wants to control my life and father is just like all the others, drunk on himself and his gaggle of sycophants.” She tugged roughly on a seam. “And besides, I’ve no reason to go back to him or my aunt. I am free now, to do as I’d like and adventure where adventure takes me.”
“And like an abandoned duckling you chose to follow little old me.” Elia watched as the girl put the finishing touches on her arm where she had neatly wrapped the loose skin around the stump’s core. “Disappointed much?”
Karla sighed. “You’re better than most I’ve eloped with. At least you haven’t tried to sell me out to Rhuna, or tried to peel my armor off me. And you are teaching me things, even if you’re a lousy teacher.”
Karla sighed and for a while, Elia felt genuinely sorry. Here was a person with a life and a place to go back to, but it wasn’t the life she dreamt of nor a home she could call home. It felt quite opposite, almost alien to Elia, who had no attachments, no fish hooks digging into her skin every time she thought back.
Rye butted in, taking control of her mouth and face as she always loved to do.
“W-well, for one thing, I hope you didn’t have too terrible a time.”
At that, the girl in plate armor let out a restrained chuckle. “Are you serious? I haven’t had this much fun in my entire life! I get to go on adventures! Fight monsters! Defeat demons and dregs a-and live off the hard-earned souls of the land. I’ve never died before, but I’ve come close eleven times so far and I LOVE IT.”
Eleven. Elia counted a lot more than eleven. There were quite a few failed loops, even if they were careful. Karla didn’t remember, but Elia did. Rye did. They agreed not to talk about it, not to her, not between themselves.
As they were just finishing packing up, they decided to move up a few floors where the planks didn’t heave with every breath of the giant creature they were riding on. They arrived in an attic with the wind blowing in their faces. Much of the roof was gone and looking down they could see chitinous legs moving them forward. A pair of eyes on stalks looked about. One blinked as it peered at them before returning to scouting out the terrain.
Oh, I know what these are! They’re like those crabs with the seashells at the seashore.
“I wasn’t aware they had twenty legs. Twenty-one. Ugh, eldritch giant hermit crab thing. At least it hasn’t bothered with us. We’re too small, probably, or it can’t reach up here. I wonder what they eat.”
“Souls.” Rye’s head turned to Karla, a solid ninety degrees. “They dig up the ground for corpses or places steeped in death. Or dregs, if they can catch them. Undeath is a potent force. It’s what makes these beasts so big.”
“I’ve yet to see a dreg that would ever run from a fight.”
“You’d be surprised. The smarter ones can be quite conniving. But yes, these critters trawl the ground for errant souls. When a dreg dies with no one around, their souls infuse their surroundings. There are thousands of souls per square kilometer, all hidden in the wood of buildings and the earth beneath our roads.”
With every death, more souls are lost, more energy. The cycle of life grinds to a halt further every day. Maybe these crabs were made by the gods to scavenge those souls out of their reach? Maybe that’s how a smaller cycle can happen, rearing crabs and then slaughtering them when they’re fat with souls.
“Hmm.” She licked her lips. “Wonder how many souls the crab is worth.”
I’m just glad we’re on its back where it can’t reach us. Oh, and before you do, don’t think about challenging the crab. You will perish and that will be that –
Rye let out a horrified gasp.
Eliaaa, look down there.
She leaned forward until she had a good view of the streets below. Through the dark alleys she saw it creep, horns and teeth and grasping forelimbs lurking just out of sight. The deer thing was still out there.
It’s coming after us.
“Fffiddlesticks, you’re right.” Karla looked at her, similarly unnerved. “If it comes up here, can you do that chain thing again?”
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Karla shrugged. "Maybe? I can use my boon in two ways. One chain is not going to be enough, but if I want to summon more... here. Look.”
She drew the breath from her blood bag. The letters arrayed themselves in a red haze.
[Body/Spirit] Chains of Tartazon [Rare] [Essence of life]
You can massively strain your spirit to summon a forest of chains from below to grasp at your foes and bind them to the earth. The chains remain for one hour, after which they dissolve into rust. You may not cast the spell again until the previous chains are destroyed. The strength of the chains are dependent on your strength and flow.
You can instead choose to summon a single, living chain for a moderate strain to your Spirit. Its strength is dependent on your body.
Elia stared for a long time, longer than was polite.
Oh my gods, a rare boon! Do you think they have the same with rope instead of chains?
Elia decidedly didn’t want to know where that line of thought ended, nor where it came from. “Should you be showing me this?”
“Oh, pshaw, we aren’t exactly doing well enough to be keeping any secrets. Anything I can help with, I will.”
“True.” They stared at each other in an awkward silence. “What?”
“I want – rather, could I see the boon you use for your large spoon? It seems unusual, I simply have to know how you did it.”
The staring continued for another few moments.
Elia…
“Fine, fine. Here, it’s nothing special.” She drew on her haze, magnified the description for her [Cutting Cutlery]. “Anybody could do it, but on to our current predicament. We need a bowl for my hand and a new staff for Rye. She can’t cast without a focus,”
I mean, I could try.
“… without summoning C’thulhu or some eldritch blobfish on our heads. Here’s the plan: We let the crab carry us wherever it is going and keep an eye out for bowls of respite. We also keep an eye out for the deer thing, or any other landmarks. Then, we jump ship and skedaddle. Where exactly are we headed? Karla?”
Karla just looked at her, then back at the haze.
“It’s COMMON!?”
----------------------------------------
An hour had passed, and the hermit-house showed no signs of slowing down. If it had evolved (assuming evolution was a thing in this world) to use its shell as camouflage, then it ought to have realized how useless blending in was. Not only did it leave a trail of devastation as wide as a four-lane road, but the tavern had stopped fitting into the surrounding scene. Where previously the architecture was a mix of a low-class medieval middle eastern and Indian cityscape, now the rows of houses were starting to become less overtly poor.
“Wow, look at that palace.” Karla pointed to the building with the biggest dollop of architectural cream on top. “It’s almost as large as one of ours.”
“Less gawking, more navigating Karla. Figure out where we are.”
“’Kay.”
Elia was lying on the ground with her one arm draped over her face. Ignoring the pain in her arm was becoming increasingly hard to do. She was getting sloppy, and couldn't focus enough to navigate by cloud anymore.
“Ah,” Karla said and Elia nearly rolled off the rickety floor as she tried to lean on her non-existent arm. “Oh. Nevermind.”
She stared at Karla in annoyance, then at her stump.
I’m sorry.
“Not your fault.” Her wolfbite ring must have been working overtime. Good thing she carried her rings on her right. The first aid was holding as well, though not for much longer.. “It almost reminds me of the good old days.”
Oh, when was that?
“When nothing was good.” She chuckled. “But more seriously, I was a badass once. Had a few sick combos of boons. One made attacks go through me while doing somersaults and cartwheels. The other gave me an HP pool. If anybody tried to cut off an arm, it simply turned into a number subtracted from my total health. When that number reached zero, I died of a heart attack.”
Oh. That sounds… super weird.
“Believe you me, it was weirder living it.”
So… how does losing your arm remind you of that?
She waited for a bit, deciding on whether or not to keep on talking. Karla was listening intently even while inspecting their map. Maybe this would be a good learning experience for her too. Maybe she’d leave if she realized she wasn’t being put through hell by a godsent hero, but by a callous idiot. “I thought I was playing a vid… a game. Everything turned to numbers for me. The amount of deaths. The steps between each bowl. The kills, the boons and dice.”
Well, the way everything looks it sure does lend itself to that.
Elia chuckled, waving her stump. “What, you think your gods gamified the world so we would kill eachother better?”
“It doesn’t seem too far-fetched.” Karla stared her straight in the eyes. “The gods can – could – change many things about the world. Why not how boons work?”
“That would explain a bunch.”
But she didn’t like the explanation. Accepting it would mean accepting a bunch of troubling implications. Mainly, Elia was worried that the people at the lever of the world actually were gods, divine and immortal. She imagined the gulf between Rhuna and them might be as large as the one between Rhuna and her. The thought was rather unnerving. She threw it in a trashcan and was about to move on when she noticed something going on outside the moving tavern.
On the road ahead, the wendigo-thing was standing in perfect profile. Its eyes weren’t on their giant crab-ride, but on an alleyway glowing with ominous light. A dreg emerged from it. The creature didn’t lunge for it, not until the dreg had come close enough to swipe at it with its sword. The unlucky undead flew up onto the nearest roof severely mangled, but the creature kept its gaze down the hallway. It bellowed and at the same moment their ride stopped.
“What the…”
More dregs came out from the left, more basic foot soldiers. A spell was launched, a brilliant comet like Elia had never seen before. It crashed against the monster but did little more than stagger it. It roared, tearing its way through the scattered dregs towards the caster in billowy robes and the monk-looking person at their back.
The dregs suddenly surged forward as one, a dozen swords hacking and biting into the creature’ flanks.
Why are they so coordinated?
“Oh, it’s a heap of violence.” Elia’s head swiveled to watch Karla’s, who was so casually watching the battle. “That’s what we call dregs that roam the streets together with those they felt fealty towards in life. Their fights are clumsy, if entertaining to watch.”
“Are blood games common in this place?” Elia whispered, both to Karla and her cranial companion.
Oh. Well, there are gladiatorial bouts in the arenas if you’re asking. I much prefer theater and drama. My father much enjoyed the horse races; I think it was because he always wanted to join the cavalry.
“A dreg may serve, even in death.” Karla nodded wisely. “It gets interesting when they’ve got a leader who isn’t loopy in the head. You’ve never seen one?”
Elia didn’t exactly enjoy the phrasing of that. “We iced some eleven goop knights back at Glenrock. Their leader knew some adulations.”
“Eleven knights! All on your own!” Her eyes had that signature glow again. “You have to be some sort of ancient hero. Let me guess: Xandria. Are you Xandrian? Please tell me you are.”
Elia gentle pushed Karla’s face back a few inches. “I wasn’t alone. We picked them off from range, I barely managed one on two.”
Uhh, not to be a party pooper, but I think the dregs are losing.
A quick glance out their roof-hole showed that yes, they were. The monster was flinging a large dreg with a halberd back and forth like a dog with a chew-toy. Much of the rest of its fellows lay strewn about in heaps and halves. The mage fired one comet after the other, each blasting against the beast’s skin and leaving ugly frostbite bruises and tears, but none were enough to fell the beast.
It tore through the soldier in its jaws and leapt towards them, a dreg with a shield the final line of defense between the monster, the mage, and the monk who was hiding behind both. It chomped down, just as the conjurer had finished channeling a massive spell. Both it and the conjurer’s arms up to the elbow disappeared down its gullet.
“It’s not a very smart monster, is it?” Elia said as the spell ruptured inside the creature again, shards of ice piercing out of its throat.
The conjurer cried and the monk pulled her away with one hand, desperately warding the beast with a beaded necklace in the other.
“Those two aren’t dregs.” Karla shot to her feet, all thoughts of watching for entertainment thrown out the window. “We have to help them.”
“Nah, we should wait until it’s over.”
“But–“
“Karla, if you haven’t noticed how I work by now, you’re an idiot.” Elia looked her straight in the eye. “Stop pushing your daydreams on me. I am not a hero. Now sit down and wait.”
The words hit her like a physical wall. Karla didn’t sit down, nor sheathe her shortsword. “… you have been very insistent that I shouldn’t call you that. Why?”
“That monster there just took out two dozen dregs and a conjurer in under a minute. I would struggle with that under the best circumstances, and my left arm won’t be useful for much as is. I don’t like those odds.” The fight was closing to its end. It looked to be a close one, but the monster would catch up before the monk could escape. She stopped dragging her companion and Elia’s impression of her went up a few notches, even though it was too late to escape. “But I guess if I had to be general about it, heroes have to go out and win against the odds. I rather like my odds skewed, in my favor specifically.”
“That’s not very… heroic of you.” Finally, it seemed as if she was getting through to the girl blinded by her own imagination. “How… consistent.”
“Q.e.d. girl. Finally doing some thinking for yourself.” She flexed her arm, still feeling the burns constrict her movements. There was no way around it, she needed a bowl of respite.
Elia looked up to the sound of Karla jumping down onto the porch.
“Hey, HEY!” The girl was already on the ground by the time Elia was standing. “God, DAMMIT girl, the monster hasn’t bled to death yet!”
She’s going to make sure it bleeds faster. Or she’ll get herself killed, again.
The beast caught up to the conjurer who had lost both her arms and focus. Still, a shimmer of blue light coalesced a meter above her shoulder.
Wait, how can he think to cast in that state, without a focus as well?
In that moment, its jaws clamped down on the dying mage and a shudder that tasted blue sent everyone’s world sideways.