Water and light. Woid explained to Shay where they had been and what they had seen. “Her robes were still sopping from the rain, so with the lightning… it wasn’t so good for Argus when he grabbed her. Nonetheless…”

It had only slowed The Ersecutor down, and Serib had been taken through the holy window into who knows which era. Shay hid behind her mask, her heart refusing complete despair. Woid lifted his fancy shirt ruined with blood for her to take a look at the wound.

“I should be looking you over, really?” He stared at her arm or what remained of it to the elbow, where continued a strange bony prosthetic, hanging not dead but moving alive.

“Long story.” She concentrated.

Woid bit his lip as Shay padded with powder and herb his wound, stitching it then shut, and he wondered what weirdness was making her dead fingers move:

“Aren’t they all.” He replied, seeing another of his fingers was becoming invisible.

∞

“I’m sorry for losing her.”

Shay grabbed him by the shoulder with her dead hand, her mask staring into his eyes. Before she could speak, she noticed his eyes were looking bewildered at her arm, and he jokingly mourned:

“It was a good arm. One of the best - nothing wrong with it at all. I know you’re smiling under there.”

She was until she said:

“I don’t know what we’re up against. These aren’t the rules we know.”

∞

“Now we’re wondering what’s going on in the shadows!” He stood up by the window, stretching into his stitches, seeing what he could get away with. “When I’m against Argus next, you should put some bets on that, you’ll get a lot more for it now.”

“We’ll face him together.” Shay dismissed, seeing pasts and futures into one.

∞

She crouched almost out of that same window she already passed through in chapters past, wondering again what would await. The lineages began a harsher flickering movement as passing pages will, or layers of fabric unfolding their darkness.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“That’s new…” Woid peeped, his nose and cheek pressed to the glass.

∞

Shay watched closely with him the flickering or floundering lineages. Looking for patterns. What most united or divided the scenes.

“Clouds?” Woid offered.

“And lack of. I think so.” Shay had also considered.

They nodded at each other. Shay leapt into the open light at a certain moment and Woid was already sitting on the other side, legs hanging with ease off the edge of a sloping roof, watching cloudy tumours growing in the sky and Boiled Angels fly from uniform formations into attack positions, diving as spear-forth falcons down onto the museum grounds, impaling the beauty. He looked sick or hopeless.

“That’s not what we’ve operated from darkness for, is it?”

He could little hear himself over the rushing panic of souls below.

∞

Shay saw young Gargarensyr distantly - heroically leading the defence as there at the foot of the anciently-gathered steps lay chunks of The Great Freedom’s statue, having crushed the front line of angels with its tumbling fall. Souls ran away from the steps, helping up those that tripped or were slow with panic.

“Thankfully, I’ve been here before.” Shay went as a shadow down from the roof to the stones below where gardens ran trembling.

“Oh, good…” Woid sat deeper into an arms-folded sigh, haunted by the tumours growing in the sky, unable to tell what they were growing on, how far or close away. Things without dimension. “These are not the rules we know.”

∞

There were many shadows for Shay to step into, travellers and tourists rushing so. She made quick her unchallenged sprint through the fleeing garden. Woid shouted over the louder hurdles as Shay stepped past him in this place and that place throughout the crowds:

“I’ll keep an eye out.”

“Try to keep an ear out - can you hear the thunder?”

And indeed the two of them felt a rumbling from the swirling clouds battling with sunlight, each shaking of thunder giving greater panic to the running masses of travellers and tourists. The air having a rusty taste.

∞

There-or-where through the mess Woid spotted a small ticket booth wide enough for a soul or two to sit inside. The booth shook more than anything else with each smack of thunder.

“The thunder is coming from there?” Shay realised with Woid’s help and he began to explain:

“Serib mentioned something like that…”

Quick as their foes would dislike, Shay stood by the booths’ splintered door while Woid kept lookout, and as she went in so too did he vanish.