Climbing over the field of debris without Issi was strangely calming. It reminded Elach of before he bonded with Flow, just wandering through the wisp garden with Kayvee and enjoying the time he had off from working at his family’s shop. There weren’t any sheer drops into the nothing below back then, but falling from a twenty foot bluff was potentially just as deadly.
It took all of three minutes for Elach to find a way up to the blurred person perched on the end of a fallen tree that reached out over the void below. A sound like water lapping up on a lake shore emanated from the figure, and Elach could feel a mass of Issi hidden inside of it. Like a container that wasn’t constrained by flesh.
With a probing hand, Elach felt as the distance between him and the figure grew impossibly vast before his mind was filled with wordless thoughts and sensations.
Whoever this was, their mind was a spider web of cracks that made any rational thought an impossibility. Elach saw the underside of a mountain, the smell of two colours mixing into a fourth, and heard the inexplicable wailing of the primal spring freezing over in the summer heat. And to all those sensations, the person feeling them had only a numb desire to obey the wishes of something greater than themselves. They thought it was too hot. Then they remembered that it was cold. Their hands came up into view, and Elach saw tiny, near invisible strands of Issi dancing in the breeze that went to the top of the fixed point of view and up. Then, in the last moment before his mind was forcibly expelled from the illusion, he felt something shatter over his container and all the figure’s sensations came back to making sense. And then…
They were suddenly back in their home. Making a cup of tea for a man that sat rocking a small child to sleep. The man accepted it with a warm, content smile, and whoever Elach was seeing through sat down next to the man and put their head on the man’s shoulder. Cracking noises. Shattering glass. The low rumble of shifting ice. A terrifying flash of power, and a fast-forward through events that culminated in the explosion he’d witnessed seconds ago. Then utter nothingness. Elach was suddenly standing before a woman with crashing water-like tattoos all over her upper body and face, a light blue towel tied around her waist and a white tank top that went down to just above her belly button.
“My name is Cama Freshetfall. I was taken by a force greater than myself, worked for months towards an unknown end, and died without knowing a thing.” The woman said, shaking out muscular arms as a stream of water began circling her from one hip to the opposite shoulder. “I gave my life to destroy the primal spring and prevent the primal manifestation from breathing its first breath. Yet the world piece has completely forgotten me. Please.”
Cama raised one arm forward and shifted her posture. “End me.”
That was all the warning Elach got. Cama lunged forward in a spray of water, the hard droplets pelting Elach like wicked hailstones and covering her approach. Elach grunted as he pulled himself backwards, small bruises already forming all over his body, the near-emptiness of his container rearing its ugly head against the overflowing Issi that was Cama. Compared to someone like Brynn? Cama was weak. He couldn’t quite explain how he knew, but Cama’s Issi just felt weak. Underdeveloped. The Issi of someone who had a bond, but never bothered to get stronger.
With a shiver, Elach realized what it was. This was the Issi of a regular person. Someone who went to work every day, didn’t even think about fighting, and went home to a family where they may have used their Issi to help them around the house. Even Cama’s fighting style felt like someone imitating what they’d seen from a public performer; blows with too much effort behind them and an utter absence of footwork beyond the initial pose. The image of that small home flashed in Elach’s mind, of the man and the child resting in comfort.
One pull to the side dodged Cama’s next unskilled blow. She hopped forward a step on one foot, not ready to miss, and was surprised with a swift kick to the kidney. Elach chained his leg to a point beyond Cama and pulled as hard as he could, changing the damage from slight bruising to bone-shattering as the world slid under him. Cama cried out and curled up on the ground, cradling her side as she coughed and sobbed in agony.
Elach felt a sickening anger bubbling up in his throat like a mixture of bile and fire. This woman had been plucked from her home by something from his side of the veil, was used up and thrown back like a broken, rusted tool after she’d served her purpose. Someone was destroying primal springs. And they were using unknowing people like tools to serve their ends. How many of the cultists that invaded his primal spring had been manipulated just as Cama had? How many of them were friends that had simply been plucked from the world piece’s collective memory and now lived in the memories of nobody? With gritted teeth Elach stepped up to Cama, forcing the last bit of Issi out of his container to stir up a technique that would give her a mercifully quick end.
“Do you want to be remembered?” Elach found himself asking as he felt his chains connect to a spot just under Cama’s head.
“There is nothing to remember me for.” Cama coughed, tears streaming down her face in a mixture of pain and sadness. “I died in that explosion, but Cama ended the moment I was taken away. Please. Don’t let anyone else die like I did.”
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“Never again.” Elach said with grim conviction, and the chains pulled downwards. Grey water sloshed out of broken bone, mixing with thin blood, the earth below greedily lapping everything up with a mindless uncaring. “Cama Freshetfall. I swear on my life this will never happen to anyone ever again.”
A high-pitched whine cut through the silence, and suddenly any evidence that Cama had ever existed was gone. Elach felt something shift in the air, but he couldn’t tell what it was. As he lifted his boot from the ground, he looked to the shattered sky and felt the weight of he’d just done settling in his gut. He wasn’t ready for this. Any of this.
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“Are you ok?” Y’talla asked for the… tenth? Eleventh? Time that day. Elach flexed his fingers as he looked down at his hand, still feeling the young man’s skull cracking under his knuckles. Ten apparitions, ten merciful ends. Murders wearing a different coat. All bearing the name Freshetfall. Emotionally, it had never gotten easier.
Physically?
Elach had had more trouble with an angry crow than that last unfortunate soul. But they all begged him to bring exactly what he brought, and Elach was delivering it as quickly and painlessly as he could. He could have done it quicker, and with less pain, if they’d just lie there and accept their end, but they all insisted on fighting. Each and every one of them. He was quickly becoming an expert on fighting weak water Issi practitioners.
“I’m fine.” Elach said, giving Y’talla a smile he didn’t feel. He didn’t want to bring her into this portion of remaking this place. “Just not sleeping very well.”
“Yeah, the ground here isn’t very comfortable.” Y’talla agreed with a nod. She kicked at a pebble as if to make a point. “We’re making pretty good time, though, so could we maybe take a longer break this time? Take all of tomorrow off?”
Elach wanted to say no, but his body screamed at him to say yes. He’d been working nonstop for seven of Y’talla’s sleeps, however many days that actually calculated out to be, and he found himself looking for any reason to say yes. Y’talla’s pleading expression was that excuse. “That does sound like a good idea.”
“Great! This place’s Issi is healing up nicely, so maybe you can get in a little bit of practice while we rest. It should be a lot easier to do things with ambient Issi here.” Y’talla said gleefully. “Oh, watch out for that tree trunk. It’ll get in the way.”
“Thanks.” Elach grunted, locking onto the far end of the trunk and pulling as hard as he could to try and yank it up. He didn’t force his Issi into this technique, only using his raw strength to ever so slightly shift the trunk. “See anything else?”
Y’talla gave Elach a thumbs up from her position up in a tree, then frowned and gave him a thumbs down, and swapped again before muttering something and lowering her hand. “I don’t see anything else. You’re all clear.”
With the heaving strain and sudden emptiness that came with using his technique that were starting to become routine, Elach held his eyes open as the floating debris was slammed together with the rest of the island he was standing on. “Done. Now we just have to get the dust river back into the riverbed.”
“Probably easier said than done.” Y’talla giggled, jumping from branch to branch as she made her way down.
A high trill cut through the relative silence, and the emptiness between the shattered sky became unbearably bright. Y’talla let out a startled cry and thumped to the ground somewhere behind Elach as he raised his arms to cover his eyes, but the event was already over before he could get them up. The unbearable brightness was replaced with a single, omnipresent colour. Royal purple.
“What was that?!” Y’talla yelled as she sat bolt upright, picking leaves and twigs out of her hair while she stared up at the sky. “And what are those?”
‘Those’ were beams of silver light, sputtering and sparking as if they would go out at any moment, slowly making their way down from the shattered sky. Everything about this intrusion felt familiar. Elach could barely remember why.
“That’s Prisoner’s Issi.” Elach said in confusion. “How did that get in here?”
“He must have concentrated the Issi around your body enough to get an influence here.” Y’talla said reverently. “That takes a whole lot of power, in case you were wondering.”
“Great. That means my corpse got dragged back to his cell.” Elach sighed and shook his head. “Looks like my journey’s over. How short and mediocre it was.”
“That doesn’t feel… ELACH!” Y’talla cried, pointing off behind Elach as a deafening low ringing reverberated through him.
He swung around and reached out with a chain, and came face to talons with the lower half of an enormous bird. He felt them dig into his shoulders, ripping through flesh but getting caught on bone, and then he pulled upwards.
As the top of his skull met bird chest, Elach felt the telltale signs of touching one of the apparitions. But this bird wasn’t a powerful Issi beast to have developed conscious thought, so all he got were snippets of the bird’s last moments. Circling the people in black, tentative dives, and the sudden confusion as its life was stripped away from it. But the lack of thought wasn’t the only thing separating the bird from the captured practitioners. This bird had no desire to die.
“Headbutting a bird.” Elach muttered as he tumbled back down to the ground, the bird continuing it’s path forward but with an added burden of a crushed chest cavity. “That’s a new one.”
A splintering crash accompanied the bird’s final moments, feathers and shrieks transformed into razor-sharp Issi that rained down, cutting into the dirt and sticking straight up like bladed grass. Elach groggily pulled himself out of the way, watching in curiosity as the Issi spears blinked multiple times before reappearing in a ring around Y’tallla, where they shattered and absorbed into her.
“Ungh.” Y’talla groaned, staggering to the side and clutching her head like she had a splitting headache. “What’s happening? Why does my head hurt?”