Bel woke with a start, roused by a nightmare filled with images of long, blood-spattered beaks and cruel voices that mocked her as she was sliced into pieces. She shivered, both from her cold sweat and from the dream’s lingering terror. She passed a few minutes in darkness until she could wrestle herself free from her feeling of helplessness.
Bel clenched her jaw. I’m not helpless. And I’m not dead yet. And I’m going to keep it that way.
It was time for her to crawl out of hiding and kick the day in the teeth.
Each movement reminded her of her injuries, but each spear of pain was proof that she still drew breath. She’d been foolish; she’d pretended to be sure of herself when she’d left James and Beth behind, but the truth was that she very much wanted to live and was scared of something – giant flying lizards or the Dark Ravager’s cultists – ending her. She didn’t want to live at her siblings’ expense, sure, but that didn’t mean that she was seeking death.
Against the Dark Ravager’s cultists, Technis’ enforcers, or some crazed cat-girls, she would fight. She would struggle. And if she came to her end it would only be due to her inability to lift another finger. Bel clenched her fists. I swear to… to my mother, that I’ll keep fighting until I drop.
With a whimper of pain, she pulled herself free of the rocky tomb and thrust her head into open air. Her snakes twitched nervously as she rapidly scanned her environment. It was night; the hovering moons and the planet’s ring brushed the world in soft shades and shadows. She didn’t know what creatures could stalk the night, but she couldn’t wait around all night; Bel slunk along the rock wall, searching for a way to ascend. She didn’t really have a plan, but her first concern had to be getting out of the valley of terror. After that, she could worry about reaching the Barrier.
Getting through the Barrier, well, that was a problem for future Bel.
As she gradually made her way upwards the sky began to lighten, the first hints of dawn painting the far side of the valley in color. I’ve got to find a new hiding place before the day breaks, she realized.
She was exhausted in any case; her limbs were sore, her chest ached, and she was weak with hunger and exhaustion. Bel picked her way through the upward slope for another twenty or thirty strides before finding a dark hole. It wasn’t exactly welcoming, but it was large enough that she could squeeze inside and small enough to block one of the bloodthirsty spearheads from following. If a cat girl found her – well, without spearheads to distract them she would be nothing more than a splatter on the rocks.
She missed her weapons. In their stead, she grabbed a sharp rock before heading into the hole. It turned out to be a shaft long enough to easily swallow her entire body. In fact, she couldn’t see or feel an end to it even after crawling several body lengths into it.
She hesitated to proceed into the darkness, but she needed to make sure that the cave was safe. Bel closed her eyes and felt through the constellation of abilities around her core. One of Kjar’s abilities improves my vision, right?
Bel reached out to the ability with her ethereal senses and scraped the twelve strokes of Kjar’s Sight into her unbound core. She opened her eyes and the world sharpened into a clear view of a round tunnel that proceeded upwards without end.
Bel kept moving up the slightly inclined shaft, determined to reach the end to verify that it wasn’t already inhabited by some toothy menace. The end never came, no matter how many times she pulled her body forward. Eventually, something clicked in her tired and nutrient deprived brain – the smoothness of the tunnel walls, the uniformity of the width, the way that it angled up and out of the valley – the tunnel had been carved out by one of the cat girls’ deadly beams of light, by a far stronger version than what they had deployed against the spearheads.
Bel froze, her mind trying to understand the power behind this particular blast. It was a chilling thought, but after a moment she realized that it was a blessing. If the tunnel terminated halfway through the rock then it would be dry, but the bottom of the tunnel had a fine layer of slightly damp silt, likely deposited by a trickle of water from the outside. The power behind the shaft’s creation was terrifying, but if it went all the way through the mountain then it was the safest way for Bel to ascend.
She was too exhausted to continue though, and slumped down to sleep.
Bel dreamed of her healing ritual. Details and faces of her patron gods faded in and out. Kjar, goddess of corporal punishment, offered indecipherable advice while Dutcha, spirit of chaos, danced around in gleeful anticipation. In the shadows cast by Kjar’s flames of righteous fury, Lempo lurked. The goddess – Bel’s sort of mother – smiled upon her indulgently, but her eyes held only an endless hunger. Once she’d looked at her mother, Bel couldn’t focus on the other two. Her consciousness was drawn into the swirling irises of the powerful goddess, like a sailor sinking into a powerful whirlpool, sinking, sinking, sinking…
Bel snapped awake with a desperate gasp for air. For a moment, she was lost, her limbs lashing out at the tight constraints of her narrow confines. The movement immediately elicited sharp stabs of discomfort from her sore and injured body, but the pain pulled her mind fully from her dream state. She wasn’t drowning as her sleep-addled feared; instead she was partway through a hole drilled into a mountain by a powerful and unsympathetic being. Everything was fine.
Bel tried to stretch, but she couldn’t do more than wiggle. As she reached her hands forwards and scratched again the floor of the shaft she felt water. There was just a small trickle leaking down from above, but it awakened in her a terrible thirst. Bel scratched at the ground to create a small pool no deeper than her pinky’s fingernail and then pulled herself forward so that she could press her chapped lips to the cool water. She slurped at it greedily. She had to wait an agonizing time for it to refill from the tiny trickle making it through the shaft, but Bel was patient enough to wait until she’d filled her stomach with the life-giving liquid.
I hope I don’t have to pee while I’m trapped here. The thought made her laugh out loud, her scratchy voice filling her enclosed space with slightly hysterical reverberations. Her snakes eyed her with suspicion, but she just grinned at them. If she survived all of this, she would return to James with some kick ass stories. Maybe they would even rival the ones he told from the Old World.
Bel grinned at the thought before setting out once more, moving one limb in front of the other as she slowly crawled up the mountain.
She fell into a haze; too on edge to relax, but too tired to concentrate on anything in particular. Vague memories swam in and out of her mind like the tentacles of a toxic jellyfish. Her unmoored thoughts drifted through her past, and she remembered her time in the High Temple, when Technis’ priests would prod and cut her in their pursuit of strange knowledge. She remembered when she’d refused to cooperate and the priests had brought James to her, already beaten and bruised. She remember her joy at seeing the outside for the first time.
Worst of all, she remembered Ventas, the way the old priest would smile as he spooned more food into her bowl, the way he carefully explained details of some ability while James nodded along, and the way he would stop and talk with each villager he passed. These memories were too fresh, too easily juxtaposed with Ventas’ last moments. Bel didn’t want to be responsible for more good people dying.
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The thought became a resolution and then an oath, quietly repeated to herself. The people who had killed Ventas, and who would beat James just to threaten her, they were guilty and deserved to be punished.
The thought made her happy, like a star shining in the darkness.
No, wait, that’s a light up ahead.
She didn’t know how long it had taken, but she had reached the end of the tunnel. She tried to trace her thoughts and found only a jumbled mess.
Well, long enough for me to start hallucinating, but not long enough that I’ve gone mad.
I think.
The tiny pinprick of light her certainly looked real.
She yearned to get outside to bend her spine and roll her neck, so much so that she nearly didn’t stop at the end to listen. Memories of spearheads and cat-girls arrested her before she pushed her head into the sun. She stopped – her hand touching the loose pile of rocks that blocked the entrance, ready to push them out of the way – and listened.
There were voices. They were too indistinct for her to discern their number, but there were multiple. Bel brought her head as near to the tiny gap as she could and tried looking out of the hole, but was immediately blinding by the light.
She cursed quietly, blinking to clear her vision before she pushed back some of her head snakes and made a second attempt. The hole was as wide as her hand and about as long, only affording her a poor view of her surroundings. She strained for a clear view, searching for the speakers.
Bel guessed that dirt and rocks had choked the opening at some point, but then an enterprising animal had opened up its own escape route. She would be able to dig herself out, but not quickly or with any stealth. Whoever was there would see and hear her. With no other choice, Bel stared out of the hole and waited.
A few minutes later she got lucky. One of the voices increased in volume as the speaker drew closer to her hiding spot, so close that she could see him. He was yet another hybrid; maybe of mix or three or four things, unless some lizard also had pincers for hands. What he held in those pincers made Bel’s heart race: a pair of metal rods, identical to the ones that Crystal had used to track Bel down in Satrap. He was tracking her, and by his dark cloak and behavior he was likely working for the Dark Ravager. He practically glowed in Kjar’s Sight, a clear sign that the goddess wanted him punished.
Bel carefully backed down the tunnel, but froze when he looked her way.
She wasn’t an expert, but she had learned words in the Golden Plains’ dominant language thanks to Jan and Flann. She hadn’t realized that it would be so quickly become so vital to her.
“She’s somewhere around here,” the man insisted. It sounded as though he were frustrated.
Someone responded, but Bel couldn’t understand what was being said.
“No,” the man responded, “probably a cave. There’s a hole here, but it’s too small for a person. Maybe there are larger entrances nearby.”
Bel breathed a sigh of relief. They must not have expected an passageway to pierce the entire mountain. She could only guess that they didn’t want to tangle with the cat-girls either, and had avoided that area.
“Sure, I’ll wait–”
Bel strained to hear anything more, but the man said some unknown words before moving away. She cautiously crept forward again, and saw that he’d joined a second person. There were a few more figures, but they all seemed to be walking away.
This is my chance, she thought. If she could get to the man and overpower him, perhaps she could destroy his searching tool. They must be either difficult to use or difficult to make, otherwise everyone would have a pair.
Her plan was simple: leap out of the hole, kill the man, destroy his tools, and get the hell out of there. It was made slightly more complicated by the fact that the exit was blocked and that the man wasn’t alone.
The exit she thought she could handle: an application of liquify to the rocks should allow her to shove her way through, like a parasitic wasp forcing its way out of a doomed caterpillar, and leap onto her unsuspecting victim.
The second person though, would be a problem. She would need to disable or kill them before they could warn the others. Depending upon their abilities that could be a huge struggle; after using her ability on the rocks she could use another liquify or quickly modify a nail into a claw, but she wouldn’t be very dangerous.
I’ll have to stroke quickly. If I wait too long the rest of the group will return.
Bel squeezed her hands into fists and took deep breaths to get herself ready.
She tensed her muscles and took one more breath.
She launched herself forward, liquifying the rock as she pressed against it, and emerged into the sunlight.
The man with the rods had his back to her, but she briefly caught the wide, startled eyes on the second person’s feathered face. Bel blasted glare at perhaps an unnecessarily high strength, immediately draining half of her unbound core’s mana. She didn’t have time to see how effective her attack had been; she grabbed a loose rock and hurtled towards her target.
The man spun, a look of surprise on his face, dropping his rods and reaching down to his belt as he moved. His timing was perfect, and Bel’s rock hit him in the face with a wet thock. Beth had schooled her on proper fighting for too long for Bel to hesitate, so she immediately struck a second time, splattering blood in a gruesome halo as she brought another rock down upon the prone man’s skull.
Then she turned to the second person. Bel’s eyes widened as she saw a cloud of sand rise around the feathered woman. Flann and Jan had taught her all about fighting different abilities. Whereas fire was fast and mana intensive, manipulating soil and sand involved much more finesse. The woman would have to first bring the sand under her control before she could use it, and would struggle to extend her reach farther than a few strides unless she was really powerful.
The wizened old fox had told Bel that most young mages mages couldn’t afford any other abilities beyond their basic manipulation, so they would go down like a sack of tubers if Bel could turn a fight into a brawl. She charged.
Bel opened her core and emptied most of her unbound mana into another glare, but the sand mage turned away, shielding her eyes. That was fine, Bel had just needed a distraction. The woman didn’t sit still of course; a spinning wheel of sand whirled in Bel’s direction. The young gorgon guessed that her opponent expected her to dodge. Instead, she ran straight into it.
She locked her arms in front of her face and activated minor body modification to harden her skin. The sand still cut into her, but her temporary modification, combined with toughened integument, made her momentarily durable. By the time the sand had gone through a finger’s width of her arm it lost all of its momentum. Bel through through to the other side of the sandy attack.
A yell of pure rage escaped from Bel’s mouth as she charged the final steps to her opponent. The mage scrambled backwards, surprised by her sudden ferocity, and began frantically pulling more sand into her orbit. She was too slow.
Bel slid over the rocky ground and swung her fist into the mage’s gut. The feathery person hunched over, bent double from the powerful blow. Bel didn’t let up, immediately swinging her fist into the woman’s unprotected side. A vicious kick to the side of the knee followed, sending her to the ground.
Bel didn’t hesitate to leap upon her would-be captor. She rained punch after punch into the feathered person’s head, refusing to give her a moment to recover. Seeing that she was too stunned to move, Bel stole a wicked-looking knife from her belt and ripped it free.
She lifted the dagger victoriously before plunging it down. The guilty had been punished.
Bel pushed herself away from the fresh corpse and puked into the dirt.
What’s wrong with me?
She’d fought people before, but Bel had never felt so vindictive about it. It was almost like there was something else inside of her…
Bel clutched at her abdomen, the closest she could get to feeling her cores. It was the goddesses messing with her emotions, wasn’t it?
Bel shook her head. I don’t have time for this. I need to escape. I need to survive.
She pulled the essence from the bird woman before checking on the tracker. She took a moment to pull the essence from his body as well.
Then she grabbed his metal tools and used liquify to turn them into a twisted mess.
She’d reached a new threshold, but Bel didn’t have time to worry about new abilities; she had to leave.