The destruction of the Proving Whole expelled sand and debris to the sky, hanging just below the sun still seen through a suffocating shroud of black sand. Two storms had arrived within the same moment - the black sands binding themselves to a mass grave’s impact, and the madness swirling in our minds as we dashed across the sands. Grains of black pelted the brown expanse below our craft, striking with enough force to create a swarm of explosions all around us, obscuring the mockery momentarily as it crawled with its tentacles at an increasing speed. With nothing in front of us for miles and unsure of where we were going, my copilot summoned a torrent of flame, making liquid sand and solidifying glass. The mockery tripped and recovered through the obstacles, pieces of glass and rock flying through its face, shattering their porcelain smile and fragile eyes in an instant - their bits joining the torrent of painful rain.
The mockery siphoned the sand beneath its form, restoring that broken face and expanding their arms for bigger strides while the tendrils adjusted direction. Even with a face stitched up with hardened sand and thin bones made from stone, that sadistic smile and fervor persisted.
Shouting commands to each other through our thoughts, Alu took over the sails and summoned a brush of flame above the ship, shielding us from the black hail. As it approached faster and faster, I threw my hands together, furrowed my brow and concentrated. Pops, cracks and sparks made themselves known across my flesh, the sand between us became hardened walls, erecting one after another as it charged through, stumbling and losing that false flesh once more.
With every charge however, my manipulations tugged at my very bones and muscle, feeling my own lungs compress as the bone shrunk. The Emperor’s hand left me weak when the toil of the arena barely stimulated my fibers. Stumbling and losing more of the unnatural skin gave me the spite needed to keep going, the aching in my arms and spine be damned.
Twelve walls of stone meeting one mockery of a human left only the bare construct still galloping on its legs of sand and the chestbound blackness of void. My grip gave, collapsing backwards as I felt my ribs sink further in my chest and threaten to pierce me through the back if I continued. Sensing my plight, Alu came and redirected the umbrella of flame to our enemy.
Looking forward, a horrid factor ruined our plan of a speedy escape. “We’ve got company!” I shouted, taking stock of the merchant’s market splayed out before us. Dozens of rows and countless mounds of merchandise littered the sands with their benefactors hiding beneath their shrouds and tents. The flinging sand cared not for their defense nor our boat as Alu had to redirect his power back to the veil above. “Hang on!”
The wind dislocated all corners and stands of the market, the lighter parts flying over our heads while the heavy boxes slid and skipped into view. The wind change forced the skid into one of the walls of booths, eliciting a scream from some unlucky bastards. Some were running into the lanes ahead, forcing a jerk of the steering handle to just clip their ankles. A man in a green robe was dragged by the skid when his garment caught onto the edge.
“Sorry!” Alu shouted before kicking the cloth away, sending the pauper sliding and yelling as the sand from below cut his skin and hail above cut his clothing into tatters.
The mockery was still in pursuit, its limbs rebuilt from the sands and grabbing what it could from the stalls to add onto itself further. Glass vials broke apart from stalls and restored the chest, sand and stone for the arms, cloth and buttons stitched up on the abdomen, with nothing but a mass of faceless black adorning the top. Slamming its fists into the ground, it catapulted itself forward, nearly grabbing Alu before I slammed the steering peg to the left, making a harsh turn around one corner and through a meager stall nearly gone. Alu grabbed onto my right foot as I slammed the peg to the other side, digging in the left edge of the craft momentarily as we bobbed across the desert. The black sand drew blood from my exposed skin. A yell escaped my lips as I pulled my leg up with Alu, clawing his way underneath me. Kneeling upright, I pushed my remaining strength into my breath, summoning a gust into the sail, for I saw the passage of blue that separated the continents in my purview.
The sail expanded, the tip of the craft dipped before pulling to the sky, lifting us off the ground for a moment. My ribs grazed my spine and squeezed my lungs, prompting a gasp before air left me entirely. Alu squeezed from under me and pushed between my legs, blasting with his hands the force of a canon; dissembling the craft but sending us across most of the water before we crashed prior to the shore.
Hitting the sandbar gave insult to injury, robbing the breath I attempted in the second after my loss. Before I could drift further underneath, my exhaustion overwhelming my sense of fight or flight, his hand graced my back and I could feel him try the impossible. His hands made their way under my shoulders, draping my buoyant form onto his back and marching to the shore. The cruelty of gravity collapsed us together as the water left us. Turning us around, the storm gathered a mile from the other shore but stayed there. Winds were still felt upon our wounded skin but it was relief for now, especially with that assassin’s presence no longer felt.
He grabbed my scratched arms and asked to seal them with his fire-kissed fingertips. Nodding and gritting my teeth, it was one of the few things that hurt the same no matter how many times he did it. It's not his fault that he can’t do healing with tethers all that well, and I wouldn’t hold it against him no matter how many cuts he would have to seal. As five wounds closed and blackened, I felt my vision fade and all I wanted to do was sleep.
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She thought herself as invincible, and maybe she was in my eyes. The worry wart in me persisted regardless until the snoring came. She’s looked worse after a hard night of drinking at the Guild of Gold Intent, but I doubted she’s felt something like this in a long time. Blood painted her right arm from shoulder to wrist, and I’d rarely seen her bleed, forgetting what the color of her essence even was - a harsh blue that turned black the longer it spread outside.
The white rays of the sun would soon vanish, night under the Mainland sun was only a few hours away - our safety net was limited. The chill of the approaching night brought up thoughts of relaxing up north with Morrigan, taking hold of my sensical self. She mentioned some strange sport her people had that involved racing down their snow draped mountains on planks of wood and bending the snow around themselves to make enormous structures as they came down. Experts in the craft even showed off for their many festivals. I could imagine making quite the image with her crafting skill and my noticeable flare, literally.
Begrudgingly shaking her awake, the pain in her chest became secondary upon realizing how close we were to dusk. Suddenly she hobbled and held her arms tight over her aching chest, charting a route in her mind as we followed the nearest river and went up north. The wet green was of little comfort to our feet. The bandages on my healing arm was my only clothing, shivering and biting my lip as the giant beside me strode with pissed off indignity instead of hampered progress. Being arrested for nudity was the least of our concerns: the cold was coming for me, the stress of a tether and siphon master was coming hard for her, and the idea of the mockery coming back weighed on us both equally.
“How far away are we from a village?” I asked, shivering as the cold soil kneaded between my toes. A thicket of low hanging trees ahead promised at least some roots to step on.
“Shouldn’t be too far, we should be coming along Monument Pass.” She adopted a sarcastic tone upon saying the name of an engraved stone. “One of many names that hasn’t held up to the test of time.” I remembered hearing about the Monument Pass from other bandits in my more lonesome days, being a general marker for going too far south to be considered safe. Empress Ekatara was the name defaced from the stone nowadays, the entire visage being nothing but a plowed ground with rubble and fallen trees covering the notion.
“Born close to void, damned to destroy.” became a common adage after the former empress of a seabound kingdom became utterly mad with power when the first spire of ice was discovered beneath her throne. The city became the cushion for the weight imposed by the tethers upon the spire, and when people started to leave, that’s when the problems became painfully aware to those upon the shore. Ekatara forbade departure from her freezing abode, trapping those who tried to follow the first on boats. Impalements of ice and mass drownings involved the Wardens and the Colossi or so we were told - an evacuation was ordered. The colossi tread the shallow waters with ease but when the last of the refugees were taken over the western sea, the spire had finally consumed the entire island Ekatara claimed dominion. Large as they were, the center of a spire was more than they could handle, killing dozens of colossi and breaking the truce between man and mountain - where the second felt they were not informed of the dangers when the first had seen at two spires before that day and studied them.
The Wardens and the villages they reigned over would make us all think they did no such thing but pilfered texts from Morrigan’s castle sackings revealed that the center of a spire kills anyone that doesn’t master tetherwork. Perhaps they thought once the task was done, the help was no longer required in the most grave of manners.
Footprints of a colossi, round and stumpy littered the monument’s path - taking revenge royally or otherwise. Afterwards, the prints were absent from the landscape - as far as they would go hopefully. Onwards we trekked and I had to occupy my brain just to not succumb to what my skin wanted to scream endlessly. I chose to believe Morrigan’s effortless stride was impeded by the thought of petty anger at her state of undress, just because laughing was one of the best distractions I knew. With the light fleeing the sky even faster than my tired mind expected however, the need for survival suffocated my complaints with ruthless hands.
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Picking up my pace, I walked a few steps in front of my companion, keeping a flame in my hand to light the way through the dimming world. Its heat was only felt by me when it left my being but starting a forest fire for warmth is a lesson my adult self didn’t need to revisit. The shine of the stars in the river was too faint for comfort, and I even expanded my contribution so we wouldn’t fall in and insult our bodies further.
The trees surrounding the path were jumbled, leaving random detours to other splittings and desolate dirt. The dark on full display, we held our hands together and stayed on vigil. The sound of breaking branches from far above and far off threw us back to back, holding our grip tiger with our free hands pointed forward. A pain erupted in the back of my head as we hit the halfway point of our trek. Without warning, my right eye clouded and gave sights I knew were not there in front of me. I saw the top of our heads from the branches above. With a sudden descent, I released her hand and demanded she move before I sent flames to the sky. The creature of muck and protruding bones was severed in half, its crumpled heap still crawling and reaching for Morrigan’s ankles instead of the man standing in front of it. Drenching it in flame, the bones and stray bits of random victim clothing are all that remain before they too turned to ash.
A careful dual stride turned into a frantic series of lunging legs and grabbing of trees for support. My right eye clouded once more, with the left threatened by fog at the outer rim. I blasted another arrangement of darkness and heard the ground break apart as Morrigan summoned the rock beneath our feet to push back another. Shouting for me, I faced her way and incinerated the temporarily pinned foe as it slowly pushed the rocks through itself and reformed the holes it tore through its own chest. Fire spread from the top and bottom of the thick. I grabbed Morrigan’s hand and pulled her through the passages we could find between. The vast green fields were then beneath our feet, escaping the pass but still dragging up mud between our toes and slowing our pace still.
The visions forcing themselves upon me persisted, but I still held onto Morrigan tight, even as she took the lead and started lifting me up to keep pace. The sounds from that nightmare back at the tavern made themselves known, all inside me. A chorus of whispers too rapid to understand and the churning internals that struggled to keep themselves within the frame of their host.
Even as that became overwhelming to a point where the outside world became mute, her voice came through. Duck!
Just as I did what I was told a rod of luminescent white flew over our heads and impacted the ground; an extended arm at the bottom of the shaft spun rapidly before a bell sound rang, summoning an explosion. The flood in my mind halted in time to hear the wind sing as another arrow came. Morrigan raised her fist to summon a shield of earth to deflect the spear, but it broke right through, slashing up her left arm and landing just beside us. Her blood marked arm summoned another shield, sending us flying from the blast that came afterwards.
She’s still out there. Morrigan spat as she raised herself with the one arm not currently letting her blackening blood. Hurrying to her side, she bit her lip and let me cauterize the wound shut. That thing is more than an assassin.
Setting ablaze the ground behind us for a mile across, I ran with her down the rest of the plains until we could find a village. Wardens have a reputation to keep up, they wouldn’t just tear apart a few dozen homes for two people.
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The wound burned in a way unlike Alu’s fire, a cold inferno that smoked beyond the scabbing and towed through the bone. Barbs breached the surface of the skin, spreading bites of poison through the rest of my arm. The muscle atrophied and twisted to the blackened smudge’s beck and call, the bone grinded and flaked to its demand.
I kept him pulled to my side, my mind in two places at once, between the strands trying to suffocate what that spear inflicted, and the lines surrounding my frame, sending feelers to determine where the shot came from. The bell extension acted like a makeshift propeller, pushing it forward by air or a braid’s worth of stored force. Elevation wasn’t a factor to worry about, they didn’t have to consider the arc it would fall through. Clearly not human enough to care in the first place.
But since I had to raise my arm to defend us from the first shot, it's clear they were on a mountaintop or in the trees to our east. Can’t be that far, we would have heard a spear taller than Alu from quite a ways off. Some whistle, some drag on the air, I’d be able to hear it unless every piece of ammunition had a braid hiding it until the last moment.
Just as Alu said his resentment towards not seeing any civilization, my eyes picked up the faint haze of tether lights. The Warden’s wares used to repel the set of shamblers behind us in the woods, and makers of that abomination they themselves disallowed. We’d never be able to tell the truth because it would have us dead before a public hearing under the guise of arrest.
“The rustling!” Alu spoke aloud, even with his gaze elsewhere. “Someone’s moving from the trees over there!” I looked over there and confirmed his observation, the tops of trees less than an hour’s walk from us were moving, losing leaves and branches.
Less than a minute after we noticed, another spear came across the horizon. I summoned a wall that extended from our stance to a mile in front. The wound stung significantly more, and the shrinking of my bones around my lungs made the breath reserved dissipate into the cold night air.
Dashing forward, the spears kept coming, breaking through the stone but faltering enough to slow down, allowing another wall to be summoned. The closer we got to the village, the faster the spears came until they stopped a stone’s throw away from the tether’s lights. I tripped and fell as I pushed open the wooden gate guarded by a drunken pair. No mechanism, no protest, save for my forearm which cracked and splintered the longer I pulled out my siphon and reserve.
Collapse was mandatory right then and there, with Alu trying and failing to hold me up with his hands on my falling shoulders. A grunt of exertion before he adjusted and was able to let me down softly on the cobblestone ground. His words couldn’t motivate my legs to work, becoming blurry as I felt the tightening in my chest, the stabbing in my back and the poison in my arm.
The drunken pair only inquired about my health and lack of clothing, with even one of them offering the bottle they held with their teeth. “I need some remedies right now, we were escaping Vacuous and she exhausted herself.” Alu spoke, likely hoping that they wouldn’t ask for the gold we no longer had.
“Georgie, see if we got some of that leftover spirit from that Havenfolk that came through.” The bottle holder nodded to the other, still vocalizing through the glass.
The younger of the two, a blonde man with pure eyes but a ragged face aged by his habits, rushed into the post station sitting by the gate, lacking a roof and enough nails to hold it all together. He stumbled out with a clear bottle holding bright blue fluid. That wasn’t exactly what I needed, but it would do - a quick remedy to restore my reserve and stop pulling from my own flesh and bone. Alu snatched the bottle out of their hand and held the ring to my lips like I was some helpless child.
The cold blue released a vapor down my throat and filled my stomach with a weightless presence. It became easier to breathe and to feel my chest fill up with lung and bone again. The wound on my arm remained concerning in how it spread, with even Alu wanting to seal it up but fearing the guard’s reaction to his flames.
“Wait a moment…” Alu said aloud, the vapor sensation throughout made it hard to hold my own thoughts but at least the pain subsided. “Why do you have Havenfolk spirits? I thought this was a Warden home.”
“Ahh, ho ho.” The blonde one chortled before dropping his drink. “We were but we helped some of those siphons from the Havenfolk a while back and they’ve excommunicated us. They still let us keep the lights, but our mayor has to let them know where those outsiders went off to.”
“Then this isn’t…” The grim realization that our safe spot was only that in one aspect hit Alu like a boulder, as a figure in an improvised robe appeared down the road from us, wielding a bladed arm on one side and a tendril adorned hand on the other. “Get out of here! Get to safety!” He pushed the guards down into the post and posed himself in front of me, hands outstretched. A twitch of the tendrils on the mockery summoned a cry of pain as the wound burned, the vapor subsiding only to be replaced with those barbs all over. My legs brought me upright, but not of my own doing. Sparks flew between my teeth, my warnings went unsaid as my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. Lightning flew from my mouth and into Alu’s naked back, he bucked over and yelled. The mockery walked forwards and readied its blade, the time for prisoners now long past.
“Burn, you freak.” He sputtered before vomiting out the liquid bile of a dragon. The pile engulfed his hands and feet but also the mockery’s, melting away instantly and tipping over. Its grip weakened, my mouth finally closed, but he wasn’t done, leaping from the pile of lava with fire soaked hands melting through its neck, before releasing more bile onto its torso. Even as the chest caved in, it tried to fight back with its disintegrating tendrils and remaining blade, but he kept on spitting, hurling and coughing like he was ridding himself of his own weight, pound by pound.
As the liquid red twitched and pulsed over the mockery’s body, the hold it had released entirely as I backed away from the approaching pool. Alu stood up with tears streaking down his face, and the town very quickly caught ablaze as the bile touched the corners of houses, people screaming and pouring into the streets in various states of undress and weaponry. The sparks from behind my tongue started a few fires, but Alu’s muck sealed this town’s fate. He said nothing but dashed forwards, knowing I would follow as our minute long haven burned.
Another long stretch, another forest, another arrangement of dirt roads for travelers, we found a place familiar eventually, but for how long, neither of us could guess.
The Wardens had our names for something we did not understand, and we just eroded our chances at ever proving innocence, setting mass destruction to the southern province of the mainland.