Nyxpera
The 18th of Mounichion
The Year 4631 in the Era of Mortals
The wall of the insula shuddered. Ropes ripped free from the hands holding them. The great weight swayed, then began to fall. Someone screamed and the laborers turned to run, but too slowly. The wall was going to crush them. All of them.
Arche was in motion. The ground blurred below and all he could see was the great face of the wall growing steadily larger. Orange light flared in his peripherals and he flew over the ground, each step covering a dozen strides. The Mana rushed through his body with greater clarity than ever before. He channeled all of it into his legs to let him reach the workers before the wall crashed down; no idea what he was going to do when he got there.
One of the men tripped, sprawling into the grass in his desperation to get away. The man twisted onto his back, hands covering his face as he screamed. It was a desperate, blood-chilling sound. More people stumbled in their mad scramble to get away. They fell, arms outstretched as though they would pull themselves to safety with some invisible tether.
Arche hit the wall.
It crushed into his hands, quickly pushing down to his forearms. He laid them flat against the wood trying to hold it back as much as he could. His bones, reinforced by the Mana cycling through him, cracked from the pressure only to be healed a moment later. The weight of it sunk his ankles into the soft dirt, but he held firm. Pain of a kind he could scarcely comprehend flashed through him. It pressed down on him with all the weight of a planet.
Shock radiated from the people beneath the wall, barely able to comprehend that they hadn’t died. Those close to the edges scrambled out and away, but those toward the center, where Arche had positioned himself, only stared. A burning figure of orange light carried a sky of wooden death.
“Go!”
The word tore from his lips. He couldn’t manage anything else. The great weight threatened to drive everything out of him and it was all he could do to hold it back. One moment at a time. The shocked men stirred into action. They clambered out from beneath it, dragging themselves where they had to.
The wall shifted and Arche sank up to his calves in the soft ground. His Mana fell beneath forty percent and dove further still. Even with his newfound control, Divine Body was simply too demanding for him to hold for longer than half a minute, and that was under ideal circumstances.
What could he do? The wall slowly pushed him deeper into the ground and there were scant moments left before his Mana ran out. He was trapped. Once again, he’d jumped in without thinking of how he was going to get out. It took everything he had to keep the wall up and there was no chance of making his way out. He could only hope that he could keep the wall up for as long as it took the rest of the villagers to get out of the way.
Twenty percent.
His immediate future was startlingly clear. Divine Body would forcefully deactivate, the wall would crush him, and he would die. Again. His consciousness would be ripped from his body and flung to that strange world that overlaid Tartarus. Thanatos would be there, waiting to send him back. The cost would only grow. What fresh hell would this death deliver? It had only been four weeks, barely twenty days, since he had died at the hands of the two-headed beastmar chieftain, Eten and Nete. Since his chest and heart had been pierced by the axe that now hung above his bed, a reminder of his own mortality. Now it was the entirety of him that would be crushed. The wall would grind him into paste. Turn him into a bloody stain against the grass field. Would the wall still break him when he returned? How many times would he die here, helpless?
Ten percent.
Arche fell onto his back. His legs snapped below the knee, but the pain was barely noticeable against the weight that pressed against his entire body, pushing him deeper into the ground. He didn’t have room to scream, to cry for help, even to breathe. His thoughts turned to Lyssa, who would find a way to blame herself for what happened to him, and to Tess, who wouldn’t forgive him for it. He only hoped he would get a chance to see them again.
Zero.
The wall hit the ground with a heavy thump. Arche’s body sank fully into the dirt. He didn’t have the time or the breath to whimper. Notifications flooded his vision. Mana Burnout, broken bones, ruptured organs. Every sign pointed toward his demise but he wasn’t dead. His Health plummeted at over fifty per second, but with his massive Health pool at seven-hundred-fifty, he had fifteen seconds before he would die. Fifteen seconds of pure, unadulterated agony.
The one time he wished for the release of unconsciousness, it refused to come. His mind grew fuzzy to the point of incoherency; he could barely string two thoughts together. The only point of certainty was pain and it was compounded by delirium. The disorientation was so intense that he only noticed the pressure was gone when the pain grew worse. Blood, both internal and external, roared in his ears, drowning out all noise. Something cold rushed down his body, flowing from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. The intensity of it made him gasp as his Health shot up by twenty percent.
All Arche could see was his vitals, the rest was darkness. His Health dropped one moment, soared the next. A violent dance between life and death. He could barely comprehend what it meant. All he knew was that someone or something was keeping him from dying. Why couldn’t they just let him die? The pain was too much. He couldn’t take it. His mouth wouldn’t work, wouldn’t let him scream, wouldn’t let him beg.
The battle wore on. The injuries threatened to overwhelm him, kill him from severity, but each time he came close to surrendering his life, fresh life was forced into him. Notifications appeared in the darkness but, addled by pain and Mana Burnout, he couldn’t read them. All he could do was wait. Wait in the void as life and death waged bloody conflict over his broken, still-living corpse.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
Again, Arche tried to call out for mercy, for an end. He wanted death, craved it. Anything to stop the pain. Again, his mouth refused to form the words. For better or worse, his fate was completely out of his control. Every moment was agony, unadulterated and pervasive.
Then, his broken eyes saw something other than his vitals. Light poured in, blinding in its intensity. Arche tried to turn away, to close his eyes and block out the light, but he couldn’t move. He was forced to stare upward into it, unblinking, until the light became its own form of darkness, all-consuming and maddening. When he had thoroughly lost the distinction between light and dark, a new sensation registered on his senses.
“Hang in there, Arche. We’ve got you.”
The words were distant, as though the person speaking was just a voice carried on the wind. A final time, Arche tried to beg for death.
“Titans’ Bane, he’s still conscious in there. Quick—”
The voice faded away, drowned by another round of fresh torture as Arche’s battered Health bar was filled with fresh vitality. He was trapped between life and death, unable to succumb to either.
----------------------------------------
When word reached Lyssa of the accident at the insula, coming in the form of a young, out-of-breath guardsman, she already knew something was wrong. She felt it, a churning deep within her. Arche was involved and he was suffering. As soon as the guardsman gave her a location, she was off, sprinting out of the hall, past tents and bewildered villagers.
The wall at one of the end of the insula had fallen. It swayed, the close edge barely off the ground, lit from beneath by an intense, orange light. Lyssa recognized it instantly.
“Arche,” she breathed.
Before she could even raise a finger to help, the light winked out and the wall settled onto the ground with a thud. Horror etched itself into her heart. She dug her fingers into the dirt at the edge of the wall, forcing a grip as though she could lift it alone, as though Arche would be smiling at her from the other side.
Lyssa strained against the weight. Muscles across her lithe form bulged and the tendons in her neck stuck out like strings from a lyre, but the wall was immovable. She set her feet and continued lifting, refusing to give in. Refusing to acknowledge that she wasn’t strong enough. Refusing to acknowledge Arche’s fate. He was alive, for the moment, but the agony flowed through their Companion connection. He was moments from death.
Another set of hands grabbed the wall on her left, then another on the right. Lyssa didn’t turn her head to look. She didn’t have the energy. Everything she had was devoted to lifting the massive wall. Then the impossible happened.
The wall moved.
It rose to her knees first, then her waist. At chest height, it tottered precariously as people shifted their grip around. Then it raised to her head, then above it. Lyssa collapsed, Stamina dangerously low, but she refused to give in. She crawled forward, beneath the massive shape sloping above her. Her keen eyes spotted Arche near the center. He had been imprinted into the ground, like how one might press a doll into wet clay.
Somehow, he was alive. Broken, bloody, but alive. He needed help and not the kind that she could provide. Still, she couldn’t abandon him, even if it was to get the help he needed.
“Odelia!” she cried out, the name rasping like a shriek. “Odelia!”
“I’m here.”
The diminutive halfling knelt at her side. She wasted no time, taking in Arche’s broken form in a glance, her hands already glowing with biomancy.
Arche was difficult to look at. Both legs broken half way up the shin, white shards of bone sticking out, barely attached to the feet beneath. The ground around him was stained red with smeared blood, as was the wall directly over him. His hands were covered in torn skin, but worse still was the flesh that had not burst apart. Dark discolorations adorned him, speaking to internal bleeding and bruising across all of his exposed flesh, a fate she could only imagine was shared by the entirety of his body.
Last, and worst of all, was his face. That had always been a point of sensitivity for him. The scars that covered his face had caused him horror when he’d first learned of them. Now, if he could see himself, he might long for that particular disfigurement.
He was unrecognizable. His nose held a slit from top to bottom, the bone beneath shining like cracked ivory. His cheeks protruded from the skin in jagged edges; the lacerations reached back toward his ears. His brow was indented and several portions below it were simply shattered. Bone chips pierced his eyes, which were red pools of blood in the hollow of his face. Below his nose, his teeth were cracked and chipped, several missing altogether. His jaw had separated into two pieces at the chin, each forced down and back toward his neck.
Lyssa shut her eyes against it, but it was too late. The image burned itself against her eyelids. Her hands shook as she held the grass in front of her.
“What can I do?” Her voice quaked, small and afraid.
“Secure the wall. Send for more of my healers. We will need everyone to save him.”
Odelia’s orders were fast and sharp, spurring Lyssa into action. With pain in her chest and more of it filtering through her connection, she moved away from Arche’s body. As she pulled herself from below the wall, she plastered on the commanding veneer she had learned to adopt when dealing with the villagers.
“Everyone not holding on, grab loose timber, anything sturdy you can get your hands on. Prop and secure the wall. You there, go to the Healers’ Tent and get everyone. Now!”
The villagers jumped to do as they had been ordered. Dozens of hands held the wall, Tess and Helwan among them, as Lyssa helped others retrieve lumber to use as braces. She threw herself into the work, doing everything she could to block out the image of Arche’s broken form from her eyes. She lost count of how many beams she helped carry, only coming back to herself when the rest of the healers arrived. There was only one other biomancer among them; the rest were mundane menders learning the physical medicines. Altogether, with Odelia as their leader, there were only five of them. Lyssa hoped it would be enough.
“Bandage his arm while I work on his face, we must ensure none of the breaks have damaged his brain.” Odelia’s words were clipped and rapid, separating the logic of what needed to be done with the emotion of who it was being done to. “Apply the sanguine poultice to the chest cavity, we have to slow the bleeding there until we can focus on it.”
Lyssa shut her eyes against the words. Her jaw clenched as her teeth ground together. She joined the others in holding up the wall, anything to block out the words and the shattered picture of Arche’s face. She threw everything she had into it; all of her desperation and fear.
“Titans’ Bane, he’s still conscious in there. Quick, Alcmaes, numb his pain before he goes mad!”
Lyssa felt a hand grab her arm and gently pull her away. She opened her eyes and turned, ready to fight, but stopped when she saw Helwan holding on to her, openly weeping. He opened his mouth to say something, then shook his head, tears streaming from his eyes. He pulled her away from the crowd and over to a clear spot where they could sit and breathe. Tess was already there, sitting on the ground and hugging her knees while she stared at the grass in front of her.
The wall was stable, supported by more than two dozen makeshift pillars of wood and further secured by a score of hands. The village could relax for a moment, though the menders and healers had the bulk of their work ahead of them. Lyssa, Helwan, and Tess could do nothing more but wait.
Wait and hope.