A huge cloud of dust rose into the air, larger debris landing kilometers away from the detonation. The ground beneath Jack began to descend, slowly at first, but picking up speed as the entire slope gave way into the wound that had been wrought from the mountainside.
There was no time for thought. The stones of the earth had been disturbed and their motion could crush him in an instant of inattention. Jack threw himself forward, a clumsy lunge downslope that gave him the height to charge his sky-leap combo. A boulder the size of an ambler crashed less than a meter from his head upon his landing, peppering him with chipped rock before continuing its charge.
Jack flung himself away from the breaking mountain, surging forth even as the entire cliff he had been atop began to tilt and fall. The first charge had been desperate; a simple flight away from the doom below, but the second was purposeful, sending him towards another peak where he could see what was transpiring.
The mountain had been rend asunder but the worst had yet to come. They were hidden at first by the voluminous dust, but soon the scale of the elementals precluded all obfuscation. The glow of their animus crystals shone through the densest clouds of grit. Inert rock crumbled as they struggled to the surface, as the mountain's core rose from ancient slumber. The mountain, titanic and ageless, dissolved and became a tide of flowstone elementals.
Their basic form was common, a central crystal embedded in a core of stone, from which long limbs of flowing rock surged and retracted to pull the creatures forward. They moved unlike anything animal, more amoeba in their motion—liquid despite the hardness of their form. Every motion spilled threads of shining dust as they wore away at their own unnatural bodies. Anyone following their path would walk that dust and send it billowing with every step to rise and coat them in a glimmering residue. An unearthly beauty, incongruous to the ravaging they wrought.
They surged through the forest, focused by the trail of flame that had been so carefully crafted by the conspirators, their wave deviated little from the predetermined path. Hundreds of thousands... a legion greater than any army, it was more akin to a natural disaster than any work of man. The sound of grinding stone carried for leagues, surpassing even the cracking of ancient timber as the trees fell like twigs.
Jack could only watch as the tide of stone raced onward, faster than even the noble's nimbles, towards the doom of Calamut. He stood silently, knowing the end of everything he cared for had come, until the last of the elementals had left the mountain and all he could see was the plume of dust that rose behind them.
A despair so enveloping that Jack could not feel the pain of his chest, which had grown crusted with grit and dried black and rough. Earlier, when the elementals still crawled forth from the black chasm, he had lifted the ancient water to his chest and asked a terrible question. The answer confirmed his fears—his leaps had been straining the limits of Vital Flow, the time he had eaten away bit by bit until his life hung by slipping threads. He could no longer reach the ancient healing chamber before his time ran out—even if his further leaps did not strip away those remaining minutes all the quicker.
So he sat, and waited to die.
A nightbird, black feathers refusing the shine of the fading sun, landed on Jack's knee.
"Not so soon, little one. Be patient, it will only be a few hours." Jack weakly shooed the scavenger away.
The bird maintained its perch, unconcerned with his gesture of life. It turned its black head, encompassing Jack entirely in the mirror of its obsidian eye. Jack's words slipped from his tongue, stolen away by the gaze he found himself subject to. A look directly into his eyes, a focused stare that could not be understood as anything but a challenge: recognize me. And Jack did.
Jack remembered the nightbird that no more than a few hours ago had startled him and drawn his gaze to the man approaching silently from behind. The feeling of feathers brushing against his face breaking his cover as he hid among the bodies of the hivers. The calming look he'd shared, that steadied him when the suffering of the umbrar's victims threatened to overwhelm him. The inspiration for the taunt that drew the umbrar to him, when it meant to escape and harry them again. The sound of Neavie's improvised chime, clattering false at the motion of a nightbird, seen only by Racket as it flew away.
“Every time I...” Jack whispered, drifting off as recollections assailed him, “you shaped... everything.”
Time and time again, at critical moments, the nightbird had been present. It had not been a gentle pathfinder, it had not coddled him. He had been driven, Jack realized, to a destination that had never really been of his own choosing.
Even in his despair, Jack felt a touch of fear. Power was on display, quite unlike the raw fury of the elementals, but no less awesome. But a dying man can manage anger, especially in the face of fate.
“Why?” Jack laughed a kind of pain, “To what end? Here,” he gestured to his broken—breaking—body, “is your servant! Have I measured well? I can’t imagine so!”
The nightbird adjusted its wings, as if to say “that has yet to be decided.”
“There is nothing left! After all this, I haven’t carded! And what could it matter if I did? There’s nothing on this earth that could slow them!”
Its black head tilted to the side, in a manner that could only be read as quizzically.
Jack froze and, through his anger, began to wonder. ‘If this were truly the end, why is it still here?’
The nightbird lifted off then, flapping hard to rise in the chill air. In moments it rose to the limits of his perception. It began a dive—no! Jack realized it was out of control. It possessed none of the grace it had shown before. This was a reckless plummet to its end.
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Jack reached out and, in the moment before it struck the earth, caught the nightbird in its fall. In an instant it was up, hopping up his arm to tidy its ruffled feathers atop his shoulder.
Jack knew what must come next. His carding, and the refinement of his broken cards, had both arisen from the crisis of a fall. The inevitability of death. The nightbird, whatever it was, had incited him to recreate the same again—and trust that he would find salvation.
On that desolate slope, Jack struggled, straining his body again to charge his skyleap. He leveraged every trick he knew to scrape more speed together, collecting the momentum of the strongest dash he'd ever managed.
"You might want to go somewhere else," he called out, "if this doesn't work... it's going to be very messy."
Until now Jack had always waited for his speed to slow before triggering his second momentum charge, careful to keep the second charge as both a safety measure and to keep his speed within a range he knew he could react to. This time he used both in the same instant.
White silence. Jack felt dampness on his body, the chill of water suddenly enveloping him from nowhere. An instant later a tremendous boom shook him and the vapour that clouded his eyes finally cleared. He realized then, the sound of his leap had only just caught up to him.
Below him rested the clouds that he'd passed through. They'd arrived so quickly, he had no time to greet them. Still, he rose. His limbs were locked to his sides as the wind of his passage gripped him with fury.
Thirty-seven seconds he ascended, while the pull of the earth nipped at him inexorably until finally he was, for an instant, aloft and weightless. The air was thin, he noticed it more with his failing heart, and each breath came with difficulty. But it was the sight that left him breathless. The set sun had risen again, cresting the horizon as he peered around the curve of the earth and claimed the day of the sky.
'It's only lonely if I never share it.'
But the moment could not last.
'There is nothing on this earth that can save me but a carding. Now I must simply trust.'
Jack closed his eyes and listened to the wind. His descent was slower than his rise. He was tired, and it was a long fall.
----------------------------------------
He only drifted off for a few moments, enough time to fall a thousand meters. He didn't have much longer, by his estimation a bit less than a minute before he hit the ground. He'd be traveling fast enough that there'd be no chance for pain. Barely even time to feel fear. The earth would simply arrive, and with it, his exit. There was still a method by which he could save himself. Playing his cards correctly, throwing out an enhanced dash at just the right moment could possibly see him landing safely.
Such opportunities had to be removed. His hand cycled and he played two dashes in short order, wasting both without a thought. There was now no time to draw his dash before he hit the ground. He was helpless, utterly at the mercy of fate.
Jack could feel it then, blooming in his mind like a fractal of impossible infinities, the carding had come. He did not rush it. Unlike his primary carding, when the pressure of the fall forced his hand, he could let the process proceed naturally.
Five cards, coalescing in his mind. Their complex possibility slowly collapsing into precise structure, into focused purpose.
When they arrived, complete and perfect into Jack’s hand, he took his time examining each of them in turn.
They hummed in his mind, overflowing with potential. Their formation, allowed to occur properly, had instilled in him a greater sense of their function and purpose.
“Vector Sight,” Jack spoke aloud, christening the cards as he played them for the first time.
In an instant his perceptions exploded. The precise motion of his body in space was a knowing so fundamental it made all his previous mastery seem the fumbling crawl of an infant. He could see the path of his fall, the exact location of his landing. A twist of his body and the route changed, a drift of angle that would send him hundreds of meters further, to the precise location he intended.
He knew the currents in the air by how they buffeted against his skin. He could see lines, stretching out hundreds of kilometres, vast webs of connection and flowing air all coalescing on his form. He could tell the distance between himself and any point in his vision, instantly. It was as if he had lived his whole life in shadow and only now saw light.
“Flow.”
The world became silent, the whistling wind—as omnipresent as breath, was gone. Jack’s new perceptions told him that the ongoing battle between the buffeting friction of the air and the pull of the earth had just been decisively won by the latter. He was accelerating once again, but it did not trouble him. He stopped breathing. He didn’t need to anymore. The air was repelled by him as surely as oil from water.
“Return.”
A point of light bloomed in his mind, a marker in space that drew his attention like a lodestone. He was falling away from it, an abstract limit being approached with every meter travelled.
“Fast Cycle.”
Jack’s hand immediately discarded, and drew again. The relentless beat of his card cycle ticked faster. Twice the normal rate.
In his new hand, resting comfortably was the star. The card that started it all and every one of these others would enable.
“Gotcha Dash.”
Jack was travelling faster than Gotcha Dash had ever taken him. Previously, activating the charges would be useless at this speed, charges nullified as soon as they were activated. That was before, when he still had a terminal velocity.
‘What’s the speed limit of an object untouched by air?’ Jack asked an imaginary Neavie, wondering what expression she would make.
‘There isn’t one,’ she would answer, her brow crinkling cutely in confusion.
‘Precisely.’
He triggered his dash. Jack plunged to the ground, unhindered by the grip of the air he accelerated faster and faster. He was still a thousand meters in the air, but it didn’t matter. His dash-shadow touched the ground regardless.
He landed as delicately as a petal on a pond. The air pushed aside by his passing was less elegant. A cloud of dust exploded as the wind he had generated caught up to him and shoved every loose object aside in a dramatic gust.
Jack ignored it and took a single step. His calculations had been precisely accurate. That movement crossed the threshold he originally set upon playing Return, and upon reaching the limit, its effect triggered. He was in the sky, falling once more.