Norhill 716, aft spring
-Back to basics,- figured Benjamin. The royal highway ended in Ellswick's land, and afterwords he tromped on the perfunctory dirt roads the military used. Not that the Elsian military did a lick of good for the numerous pillaged farms he passed. Scorched earth, skeletons laid to bleach on the ash. The living farmers ducked away from sight, as wary of a single monk as a platoon of cavalry. Lord Mingst owned this land, a corpulent blood sucker who never left the decadence of Cove, and his people feared the roving militia who ruled in his absence as much as the bandits.
He slept in the army posts most nights. Crude men, in need of the word of Athos. Ben knew better than to expect miraculous changes in behavior but hoped a handful understood his words beneath their bravado.
Never more than a dot on the landscape, his destination village no longer existed. Scorch marks etched out the depressions where homes stood, no sign of grass invading. Nothing grew in the roasted dirt, and the bed rock that showed through glistened as if freshly melted.
Though keen in books, Benjamin missed the obvious freshness of these fires, lost in reverie.
Yet the church itself, sturdy adobe, stood despite the blaze. The steeple of wood had collapsed, and the brilliant plaster chipped away. As he approached, he noted a fire pit and dozens of footprints. -Someone squatted here pretty recently. No sign of them now, though.-
Crunching over the gritty remains of camp, the monk called out. No answer except the drift of clouds.
The church emanated heat like a kiln. Spectral voices rose in the wrong hymn, accompanied by the stink of sulfur and iron...
-No. Now's not the time to go crazy, Ben.- He bit his tongue and forged inside.
Altar and pews gone, the church resembled Norhill more than a holy retreat. Hot inside, too much for a spring day. Spires of frozen lava pushed from the floor like a stone congregation, taller than Benjamin and reflective shades of black. The largest, situated on the altar's ashes, spread in a wide arc at the top like an angel growing wings.
Closer inspection revealed sculpture in all the pillars, like a set of dancers who froze in their whirls. They transformed the sanctuary into an obsidian ball room.
Two heartbeats later, the floor began to glow and the air sizzle. Caught in a heating oven, Ben broke for the door in a panic.
Searing white color raced up the pillars, and creatures of legend erupted outwards. Slender dancers with the torso of a maiden and undulating mermaid tails whose skin shone shades of molten metal with excitement. Baubbles dangled from wrists, nestled between breasts, and pierced lip or slender ear.
Sylphs. -Creatures responsible for the destruction of Norhill. Sinful, Havoc loving children of the Shaitan!-
The little devils leaped from pillar to pillar like dolphins, curious red-hot eyes drinking him in.
They darted across the doorway before Benjamin could escape, and he slid in the dirt. His pack rolled free of the church, and the hair burnt off his arms as a sylph coasted overhead. Sweat baked off his forehead, lips cracked to deserts in two breaths, and his utter foolishness crashed down. A spoiled, naïve, royal brat on a charmed mission to cure nightmares by dancing in the husk of its origin! -Please, Athos, let my scorching death be quick!-
A sylph swayed close, suspended on a rope of fire, and kissed him. Soft, supple, spicy. Was that the floor giving way or his knees? They tumbled, bathed in light, and the heat tapered, suddenly a warm bath instead of death. Her skin against his – clothes vanished. She had no bellybutton. They glowed the same orange-white hues like twins.
He breathed to swear and caught a mouthful of coppery liquid. Mineral-heavy, too thick on his tongue.
Wiggling free of her, Benjamin found himself adrift in a nest of the fiery mermaids. Like snakes in winter, a dozen coiled and slithered in a knot, the scales of their tails tickling at his shoulder where they brushed.
His captor wrapped an arm around his waist, planting another kiss.
Pressure constricted his legs together. Compressing, cracking, merging. A mermaid's tail, sensation of toes lost as his flukes twitched instead. Translucent webbing shot between his fingertips, and his eyes burned as amber coated them. Adrift in the world's crust, the sylphs claimed him as one of their own.
Now he twisted in bone-defying contortions to escape the girl, and strange organs pulsed in his forehead, mapping the currents. Elsia above rumbled; a jagged hole shot into its belly, presumably leading to that cursed church far above. Eye sight pierced a few murky feet of the glow, but the sense in his forehead stretched hundreds of hands.
-Dragon?-
Roars echoed through the magma, confusing the monk's new sonar and rousing an instinctive desire to swim. As one with his knot of sisters, he oriented downwards and snapped his new tail into action. They flew. How strong these sylphs must be, pushing through a soup of molten metal like dolphins in water!
Deeper, drawn onwards by curiosity and need. This new world spun in a perpetual trance of shifting colors, dancing currents, and the steady rhythm of pumping tails. No sun to give time meaning, and his mind dipped in and out of consciousness. A dream, a vision, from which he would surely wake soon.
First a blot on the horizon, an immense island resolved into a series of curves and coils. Shaped like a serpent in repose, sylphs swarmed over its surface by the thousands. Closer, the picture became stranger yet. Each sylph waited by a pot mark in the island's surface where on occasion a bauble erupted. The sylph would yank the bauble from its mooring, clutch it tight, and swim away.
“What are they doing?” Benjamin gasped to his captor.
Oh Great Athos above! The island twisted in place with a low, volcanic rumble, settling a head as large as Cove!
His knot of sylphs slowed, approaching an unoccupied section of dragon where a forest of baubles waited.
“Ooooh, we real behind. Hurry, hurry!”
The knot attached themselves, yanking until each acquired a bauble, while Benjamin stayed back, quivering.
-This isn't a dream. Great Athos, I'm dead. This is the Pits. How can this be?!-
He fled, or tried to. Faster than any thing had rights to move in this soup, a great claw rose from under the island and scooped him to the giant snout. Fangs like small mountains towered in hungry rows.
-Stars?- The new sylph straightened, ever curious if terrified.
The island had naught else to distract it from the strain of supporting the world. After all, Talinda was awake, Andreas dead. It may hope that she knitted the world's wounds but could no more move to help than a tree uproot itself. So it spun a tale for Benjamin about an Arc of Heaven and the peoples it carried...
By tale's end, he floated in a daze. -Could such a story be true?-
“But why...why did the Ceremony ruin the world instead of create it?”
Thousand and one waiting questions. -Where did the Arc go? Will they be back? What happened to a dead star?-
But the dragon exhaled the touch of magic onto Benjamin, and the new sylph slid back to his knot and sisters. The questions in his mind cooled and froze, leaving him in a state of peace outside of time and awareness. He smiled to his siblings, yanked a bauble free, and swam.
**********
Thoughts came intermittently, bubbles prone to popping.
Time passed, measured by trips between the construction areas and the dragon.
Each knot worked as a team, stringing the baubles together along the ragged Edges where land met Havoc. They attacked the problem from the ground up, establishing a lattice to capture and funnel the elemental chaos into progressively more stable forms. Hand over hand, they reclaimed the planet from chaos.
Grand elder sylphs organized and oversaw the work of their child-like siblings. They flaunted numerous baubles and bangles – the remnants that floated down when a section of earth finally coalesced – and mastered control of the magic. They wielded lava and stone in grand dances while Ben swam cradling one dragon scale at a time.
A uniform color, men and women nearly identical slender figures, peppering the construction sites with sonar songs as their hands toiled. Constant work, never sleep.
Content little bees, building a planet.
-Never getting out. No where to run...-
Another bubble popped, and he swam for a new dragon scale.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
**********
World's heart hosted its own dangers. Sylphs died when crushed in the sudden, titanic shift of continents. Havoc-fueled creatures punctured into the magma flows, rapacious with hunger, and elder sylphs dispatched them with shows of force to awe any Wizard. Foolish young sylphs – like Benjamin – strayed too close to lava channels and found themselves cut off by a change in current.
Thus the monk ended up like a fish in a waterfall, thrashing for his life to return to his knot below to no avail. His human mind panicked. -No escape! No escape!- The simple sylph flailed, darting in frantic circles through the magma pocket.
Then sly fingers molded the obstructing rock away, easing the current. They tugged him free and adjusted a row of dragon scales around their neck. Such jewelry belonged to an absolutely ancient sylph, entrusted by Earth himself to oversee the children.
“What's up there?” his human mind queried, fighting the innocent guilt of that other part of him.
he blabbed.
She pursed her lips.
He ran a finger over fine scales and twitched his flukes.
She sighed and clasped his hand in hers.
“How many of those years have you been working?”
The sylph wept silver droplets that floated downstream where his siblings poked them.
“Your work is incredibly important, but...” He was a scholar, stubborn as a mule. “There are people in the world above who need to know what I've learned. Stars, sylphs, and Maidens – the world deserves to know where it came from!”
First twirled her necklace.
Then the First swung her bangled wrists into motion. She snaked in sharp turns, leaving a white-hot wake. Soon lines connected into sigils, sigils to runes, and Benjamin braced himself.
The spell roared open, a whirlwind, and devoured him. Fire purged his limbs of scales and separated his tail into legs. It punted him up, through stone and dark. He erupted from the earth, spewing rock, snow, and dirt. Suspended at the apex of the spell, Benjamin surveyed the bountiful beastman valley below.
He fell, hit, and tumbled quite a ways until he smacked across a pine's trunk, fist clenched tight around the dragon scale.
-By Athos, so cold!- Like jumping naked into a glacial stream. -And light!- Every motion felt effortless, weightless.
Letting go of the bauble momentarily, the naked monk -
Ember-red scales started growing on his feet and knees.
- quickly latched a hold of it again.
The scales receded.
-That could complicate things.- Shivering but whole, he picked his way into the spring forest. Tents and cabins littered the valley below, circular clumps separated by fields full of tiny figures. A large task force applied itself against the western edge of the valley forest, felling tree and stealing stone to build tiered fortifications that followed the river down. Short of swimming upstream, any invaders would face a brutal climb, open to attack from the higher levels.
-Where is this? It can't be Lydia. Not enough smoke.-
Why did some of those figures far below move in foreign rhythms? Troubling...
Fifteen minutes later, the monk bumped into a gaggle of beastman children picking daisies. They stared.
“I'm lost,” he blurted in Lydian. Beastmen rarely reacted well to his native language. “Where's town?”
One adolescent girl looked to another.
Niana flicked her tiger ears back.
“He's a spy?” This said with an undercurrent of excitement.
Benjamin sagged. -Beastman brats. I guess all races have snotty children.-
“He's got a jewel!” a little magpie boy crowed.
“Wow!” his twin repeated. “Its so huge!”
The children formed around him like a guarded escort, though the hum of strength in his muscles made Benjamin doubt they could actually overpower him.
Soon, the entourage entered a beastman city, every species and blend staring as he passed with a growing wake of curious children. The inhabitants eyed Ben like an arrogant cockroach who dared walk into sight. Naked and flushed, he marched across the valley to a ritual clearing.
Council waited for him. The Alpha of each tribe crouched, sat, or perched on risen tree stumps as they found comfortable, and Niana prodded the monk forward to a circle of chalk in the center.
(From the corner of his eye, Benjamin swore he thought he saw flickers of strange ghosts behind each Alpha, animals grown huge and strong.)
“What?” Ben asked, heart racing. An offensive answer meant death, but what did free beastmen have in way of culture?
Impatient snarl. “Are you struck daft? Are you a Wizard spy, for I smell the magic in your jewel. We will remove it.”
The feral thugs who approached to forcibly enforce the speaker's wishes flexed claws.
Benjamin swallowed and straightened. No different than a speech. The scale pulsed against his palm, and somewhere Aurora and Marcellus would depend on him to return.
Like wheat in the wind, ears flicked, listening to a beastman song. Telepathy, maybe, as they listened to the invisible?
***********
Norhill 716, fore summer
Marcellus and his pack passed the Elsian border in peace. They traveled with the Norhill scavengers, dirt farmers and obsidian hunters who sold their fertilizers and trinkets in the Lydian markets. How the pack thrived, the former dolls full of energy and learning at an astonishing rate. With Arctic Howl as the bridge, they literally learned from Marcellus' fighting memories, and the Elsian military proved a laughable threat within days.
The Blademaster began to feel that humans suffered a distinct disadvantage versus the other two races.
Around the night's fire on the borders of the Waste, Marcellus listened to the dirty men rumormonger.
Many glances Marcellus' way. He arched an eyebrow, leaning on his elbows against a wagon. Everyone in camp knew the pack were escaped slaves, but a little strong arm diplomacy mollified them.
No one laughed.
Conversation turned to the Blade Guild. At least three men claimed the title of Blademaster to replace the vanished Marcellus of Lydia, but Lynia Guildmistress refused to cede the seat without evidence of his death.
Marcellus' iron heart creaked at the bolts. -Dammit, Lynia. You should know better than to hold out like that, even for me.-
Red nuzzled against his side in consolation. Several of the campers threw disgusted glances their way. The literate farmer pulled out his Testaments of Athos and began to recite a section on moral impurities with exaggerated meaning and pointed stares.
The farmer raised his voice as he recited.
The Blademaster took two big steps across the fire and kicked his teeth in. Campers leaped to defend the man, and Marcellus distributed his fists fairly, seized by a broiling anger. -What the Pits do these little shits think they know? Backwoods hicks casting judgment on me?!-
When the rage and dust settled, the mercenary stood in a small field of groaning bodies. Shamed again, he rubbed his face.
-Dammit, Marc, stop flying off the handle like a horny kid.- On sudden impulse, he reoriented to the north and walked. Wilderness, solitude, purity – he hungered to be truly alone, no spying Totema and pack trailing behind.
Two hills appeared continuous until he crested the first. In the depression, cleared of weeds, a beastman sat on a stump in the dark. Mostly man but for the flattened, reptilian face and baldness, he whistled on a harmonica.
So close to the dirt farmers...probably following them. How had the beastman hidden his scent from a wolf's keen nose?
Perhaps...-You set this up.- Maraccused his Totema.
You skip down the road of destruction. Steps must be taken. Howl's tattoo on his skin began to disintegrate. The particles flew like sand across the hill to reconstitute on Red's breast, and something vanished from the Blademaster with them. His strength diminished and senses dulled.
I cannot trust you with the Alpha's Blessing, Howl explained. I will not risk the pack for you. We will return after your...therapy.
Red and the Howl pack departed into the night.
“So who are you?” he demanded of the beastman.
Judas bowed his head.
Given no other option, he knelt on the ground at a healthy distance. His enhanced smell still carried traces of information – currently the overriding tingle of a lightning storm – but far less than before. He scowled to realize how much of his strength came from the Alpha Blessing, taken for granted.
The hills shimmered, and clouds swept across the sky to block the moon.
Howls of loneliness echoed the plains, and shadows twisted out of sync with their owners.
A Well of mana. Dangerous like a fire dancer in dry fields.
Marcellus leaped backwards. The beastman shot over and latched onto his wrist.
“Unhand me, beast!” Being polite, instead of breaking his neck as the mercenary craved to.
Judas struck him as one would a child.
That inner Beast yearned to taste snake's blood. “That thing you so praise eats people. Its a slavering horror.”
His heart rolled like the clouds, strung out between anger and impotence. What good would killing this serpent do?
The beastman retreated, and Marcellus decided to take his argument to Red. Forcibly, if need be. Except when he backtracked, no tracks, no trace – not of her, nor the dirt farmers, or even the road. No people, no animals.
A long, blooded howl. It warbled into notes like metal grinding. Others answered from every direction of the compass.
-Have you brought me to these shadow lands to die, Howl?-
The Totema did not answer. Truly alone, no spirits and no pack.
-Ha. Ha. You ripe bastard.- both to the Totema and Marcellus the arrogant fool.
He found a defensible nook in the remnants of a grove and hefted the hammer from its hiding place along his thigh. A present to himself from the campers which he hoped would last more two good blows.
The creatures bayed their approach, twisted and mangy things from the nightmares of deer and hare. Slavering, fanged predators that nipped at each other for blood. They crested the horizon in a wave, easily a hundred strong; they stopped a dozen strides away, encircling, and waited with something akin to feral reverence.
Attack came from above. Incandescent fairies streaked from the clouds, screaming, like hail wielding daggers. With precision they sliced away every bit of defense he held, from his clothes to the hammer, all without shedding a single drop of blood.
Perhaps a wiser man would have recognized the players in a dance of initiation as old as the world. Youth of the People prayed to enjoy the honor of the dream walk, spending months to understand the creatures that lived there and the rules that governed. Marcellus reacted as Blades learned: overwhelming force. He clubbed fairies from the air, drawing first blood with his clawed hand.
As the droplet splashed onto grass, the dark horde sent up their roar of delight.
-Welcome, brother,-they bayed. -to the eternal night, for you are lost.-
The fairy swarm glinted, tiny daggers and tiny sad faces, and fell upon Marcellus. They butchered him.
Each chunk lost slid away to reveal a darkness underneath. The pain drove even a Blademaster's hardened sense into a gnashing, flailing shock, and through that the Beast swelled unabated.
As fairy surgery drew to its gory close, revealing the shadow Beast of fang and claw and endless rage, Marcellus fell down and down...
-And for a moment there...- Fading, a ghost forced to watch his former body joining the pack of howling monsters, a coldness rushing into his mind and soul. -I lost myself. I lost myself.-