Were Tree. “I suppose all that’s left to do is this…” Woid began clicking away.
“You’re not actually going to… I suppose we have to, actually?” She drank something medicinal from her harness and offered Woid the same.
After she resigned to the fact and sat on the floor to rest her beatings, letting him get on with it and to have his fun.
∞
“Come in Shuttle Eight. Why’re your shutters down?” Woid spoke to the monitor, holding his mouth after to give his laughter a barrier.
“It’s been a long shift.” A voice crackled back.
“I hear that.” Woid agreed, wearing proudly his swollen eye.
The comms snapped off with some static. He concluded through his giggle:
“And now…”
∞
Shay stood to watch, having had not nearly long enough to rest. She heard the scraping hangar doors opening and faint alarms ringing. And all the events played out as they had before: the red tree covered in countless Were’s crashed splintering into the hanger, its roots and branches burrowing through the metal. Integrating with the steel and oakenstone. Lupine wizards attacked every light source, allowing their Duke, The Black Terror, his fullest power. His huge, sharply-furred blurry shape even sniffed at the glass Shay and Woid hid behind. Eyes red as rubies burned inside the black shape.
∞
‘Not to worry over The Duke of Everwere there…' keyboards clacked and lifeless screens blinked awake. '...his quarrel is older than you two.’
∞
All the events played out as they had before. Until. The Black Terror vanished with his tribes deeper into the facility, and as Shay and Woid’s shuttle outside entered the hangar, the age changed again. Just as it had before. A blink of their eyes and sounds distracting them from the inner workings.
∞
Gargarensyr was now limping his way towards the control room Shay and Woid were resting inside. Not a tree nor werewolf to be seen; a quiet hangar bay, cold and vast below. Argus and Gargarensyr separating earlier was terribly relevant now. The two assassins watched as the Heir-Scholar neared the sealed door.
“We can hope the age changes as he steps though. If not…” Shay nodded at Woid and the two of them though battered had an unspoken sort of plan.
∞
There was no such luck, as the steel doors of many overlapping layers slid open to Gargarensyr’s presence. His bloody sleeves dripped as he walked with his eye shut, wondering in mind somewhere else entirely. Shay from the shadows landed a cheap shot slicing down his back, avoiding his retaliating elbow. Anticipating that Woid was close, Gargarensyr slammed his heel into the steel floor, sinking himself inches deep a crater, throwing off Woid’s umbra-step. He tried to punch and finish off his foe, though Shay used this opening to slice Gargarensyr again in the same trench. The two shadows slipped away into the darker corners of the control room. Watching their prey bleed, themselves being his own prey.
∞
“Such hubris…” Gargarensyr flowed through his stances calmly with a bloody mouth. “… that Reality is not enough for you. Is Truth not enough for you?”
As Shay planned their next move, through the window behind Gargarensyr laser rounds were firing throughout the hangar. Light sources were being snuffed and shattered again. A loop had come to revisit them.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Run?” Woid suggested quietly to Shay.
Bare branches of a weird tree grew drifting into view behind the control room's glass. Reaching like fingers. Bulbs were covered. Darkness reigned more and more. And howling from every dark place was The Black Terror, ripping all with overwhelming fear. Shay and Woid doubted all they knew of darkness as The Black Terror howled. Any remaining light appeared almost holy.
∞
Woid was already gone as Shay ran insane with fear never before - fumbling far from sense and away from the roaring she sprinted down an alloyed Corridoor as alarms spun ever and ever louder. Leaving Gargarensyr bleeding. The control room door they had left behind sealed with a great clunk; with Gargarensyr unfortunately on this side, running not only after Woid and Shay but also away from The Black Terror. The two sets of footsteps stampeded. Gargarensyr and Shay’s echoes. Woid was already up ahead, keeping the next door from closing, out of breath from his own panic. Eyes wide as the caught. Alarms screaming lockdown. As Shay almost reached the door she tried to go back for Gargarensyr, remembering that dearer ‘daresay’ soul from the museum. Wanting to explain everything to him. To help him understand.
“Are you off your bonkers?” Woid pulled her through the threshold and the air-locking door sent its sequence of steel layers overlapping each other, sealing shut the way back.
∞
Everything around them shook - a fist punched almost through the steel door from the other side. Gargarensyr chanted grunting, channelling all his faith into force. The second punch tore the entrance completely open, though as he emerged through pursued by Werewolves robed or armoured, there was not a trace of Woid or Shay for him to find; the page had turned. And so he turned to meet the claws of Were’s behind him. Chanting a focus through his stances, finding serenity across the libraries of his mind, where Ba’yt Al-almaerif was the house of all knowledge Courtdom-known.
When his sister Arensis had not yet joined Greed’s arenas and Passag’wyr Ironbane kept tipsy watch over the library. That was the palace his memories could make, and in that alloyed corridor far from home it was history he defended. Yours and mine.
∞
How many doorways had they our assassins run through in their momentum? We are trying to catch up. How many until Shay noticed the more modern steel and curves gave way to the interior of an older castle, their shadows visible in the old light of flaming torches clutched at by the stone walls. Narrow chimneys for the smoke too small for their frames. Shay was gathering her breath as Woid leaned next to her by a hole in the wall.
∞
Shay observed the hole covered with ornate bars, and the spaces between the bars clung to shards of many-coloured glass. Unable to move on. A temple turned incarcerate - a landscape beyond the window. Moonlight struck Shay’s mask and that same lunar majesty shone across a wet marsh below.
“How can we be on a planet? We just entered this station?” Woid was questioning his good eye, as both assassins stared across the landscape below.
“Look at how the stars are moving…” Shay remarked.
The stars were streaked, their trails entangling with each other as the prison or palace moved with immeasurable speeds through inexorable distances, as to remain out of any unwanted reach. The moon flickered once, twice and more - like a bulb that needed changing.
“It’s a prop.” Woid said, discreetly adjusting his own fake teeth, his props made loose by a whack or two-many and umbra-stepping more urgently than he was accustomed to.
∞
Shay could not see the dimensions of this farse, unable to tell if it was a painting that at first had tricked them or a physical - (albeit tiny or far away?) - reconstruction of a moonlit swamp. Gravity rolled in its sleep and both assassins fell to the bricked ground. Bog-stinking wind now rushed at them through the scaffolded hole in the wall, and the prop-land no longer looked fabricated. The slimy trees creaked as they swayed in the claggy breeze, and stale pools showed the moon back to itself more shimmering than smooth.
"I guess it heard us..." Shay groaned.
"Something did." Woid had changed his shirt for something darker and was trying out an eyepatch to cover his swollen eye, though he soon gave up the idea.
∞
They tended to their wounds together a while in the quiet, speaking seldomly. Scared that the walls were listening to them and had adapted to create a yet more convincing dream of seams, Shay moved swiftly on. She had to pull Woid away from the open scaffolding for he was staring blankly, his busted lips moving or speaking with the bog-winds. Mumbling inanely about loyalty. Only as thunder struck the Corridoor from on ahead did he truly wake and he was already ahead of Shay: leaning on the way she had been heading towards:
“What’re you waiting for?” He smirked, as though completely oblivious to having almost slipped away. “That must be Serib.”