He pulled himself up onto the roof, and parried a glistening arrow aimed at his head. It exploded in the air beside him as it spun away, sending him rolling to the side. He use the momentum to carry him across the ten foot roof. He rolled off the edge into the open square around the temple and sprang up. An arrow clattered against the stone beside him, but he was already halfway across the clearing before it had a chance to explode. He pushed through the wide doors of the temple, as the sound of footstep hurried in the belfry stretching out of the roof, down the stairs across the wide open hall.
Across the room, behind the altar, was a wooden staircase that wound its way up toward the top of the belfry. On either side of it were two rooms that, if they were set up like similar temples on Earth, would lead to storage or living spaces for the priest. The wooden staircase shook as the archer stepped down, and stopped at the top step. It wore flowing white robes, with red accents. The bow it carried looked to be made of a matte horn with golden and silver accents that say something in the unknown script of the Efrans carved into it. The horn itself was highly polished, and in the middle, where the arrow would be nocked, was a bright white, that gradually gradated towards black on either of the bow’s pointed ends.
It pulls the bow back without an arrow set against it. As the string goes taut against the satyr’s temple, an arrow constructed of whipping wind formed, and flew forth once released and howled across the temple hall, and ripped across the space like a dervish. Was the archer the priest? Seth swung upward creating a wall of ice six feet out from the arc of his blade. The wind-arrow collided against the edge of the wall and died in a gale force that pushed back on his steps forward.
The twang of the bowstring let Seth know that the satyr had shot again as he rushed across the room toward the staircase leading up to the belfry. Before the arrow collided against the wall it snaked around and slammed into Seth’s gut; driving all the air out of his lungs. He fell forward, but caught himself before he landed on the ground, and dropped the grip of his sword so that the guard rested in between his fingers, brought it to his shoulder and threw it like a javelin. The sword spun in the air and the satyr jolted as it pierced through the creature’s robed chest. It sputtered as it staggered backward; its hooves resonating off the rotted wood, before it collapsed forward.
“Was that the priest?’ Seth asked out loud.
It was. Came the reply in the ice crystals flittering by in the air.
Good. He hated dealing with ranged fighters. He stepped over to the body, pulled his sword from his body, and took the bow from its dead grasp. For the next hour, he tosses the bodies and weapons of the dead satyrs out of the door before stepping through himself. By the time he was out, the others were already carrying the bodies into the back of the moving van. Seth helped with the last few. In the once empty van there were a few new rifles, among some other things; boxes of books, trunks full of clothing, and several white mattresses piled on top of one another pressed against the back of the van’s trailer.
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“What’s all that for?” Seth asked as he helped slide the door close.
“Make living a little easier for the folks back at the cove.”
It was a little before sunset when they set out again back to the cove. Before we begin unloading, Seth suggested grabbing Lawrence for help. They agreed as the others drove into the orchard, and parked inside of the small underground parking lot and began setting the small arms that they managed to seize on the shelves and racks mounted against the wall while Seth entered the cove.
New strands of lights hung in the branches that illuminated the path out of the orchard, and about halfway down to the beach front area. Chatter sat heavy on the salty air, as Seth turned left up the slopes. Lawrence had been given one of the larger houses near the edge of the town. It was a two story thing, and using some of the money that he had gotten from closing the doors all around the orchard, he bought a few things for himself to make it more comfortable; solar panels that seemed to work here, a generator; a refrigerator, an oven and a couple of lamps. A long with a lot of paper; sketch pads, notebooks, and pencils and the like.
He had drawings of various things he had seen; the apostle he supposedly killed in the same dive he met Nyt in. A city with three floating islands. The view from the very top of his building down. Of Ratmen and dogmen, and deermen; things Seth hadn’t seen before as he spent all of his time closing the doors on this side of the Tule. He drew pictures of satyrs and minotaurs; close up images of their eyes, and listed the parts of their bodies that could be used for different things. One sketch took up a large portion of the wall; it was a childish sketch of a happy face with eight lines emanating from it. When asked about it, Lawrence had told him that it was a daddy long legs. Seth chuckled, and Lawrence awkwardly brushed his hair with his hand.
There was also the constant aroma of alcohol clinging to the air; glistening bottles of wine, whiskey and vodka lined the shelves, or lay scattered on the stone ground outside. Those shards crunched under Seth’s heavy boots as he stepped through them and pushed through the door. A wall of fermentation aroma washed over him the moment he stepped in. Loud snores emerged from the room on the other side of the left most wall. Seth snuck over the tiled floors, and pushed open the new curtains that hung as a barrier between the open hall and the open room. Inside of the room, with pictures scrawled on the walls, on a mattress thrown haphazardly on the ground, was Lawrence; a half-empty bottle of Johnny Walker pooling on the floor beside him. His dog curled up in the crook of his legs, and his cat slumbered on his back, rising and falling with his exaggerated breaths.
Seth sighed, and snuck out of the house and returned to Earth; gathering a few other guys who were lingering around to help haul the mattresses back. It takes the better part of the night to set them up for the newcomers in the village below.