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In the empty quiet, she knelt beside a small pond that festered within the serene night. The woman tried to stare out of her tiny two-dimensional world, trying to break out in a higher direction she could not fathom, but that window within which she existed was a transient domain. The world shattering, defiling her very life, every few seconds with the vile intrusion from a greater world. Out of that impossible third direction, a god drop would kill, her life would reform, and god would smite her again with another drop of water. The inconsequential woman looked out to god, the monster in the form of herself with its puffy red eyes spawning those destructive tears of terror.
The droplets fell from the eyes of her greater self and killed her again. The two-dimensional woman waved and scattered in her small puddle before reforming for eternal torment. She wondered briefly what sort of complicated and terrifying life must exist outside her small puddle's confines to bring god to tears. A part of the woman in the puddle could empathize with the struggle; she had no need for breath yet found herself following god in hysteric hyperventilation. It seemed that no matter how hard and how quickly she sucked in and out, no air would flow, no salvation would fill inside.
The snapping breath transformed into a hacking cough. Her body contorted and ripped, trying to purge the horrible wrongness within. No spittle or spite could dislodge what was so core; it hadn't allowed itself to be expelled for the past twenty-eight years, and it wasn't allowing itself to be expelled tonight.
The harder she searched into herself to pull the wrong out, the harder it clung, the more easily its hungry fangs could hook in. God's wrenching cough metamorphosized again into malignant gagging. The woman in the puddle wanted to help god, wanted to tell her that she would always be there for her, but the woman could not speak and was finally slaughtered in a torrent of stomach acid and half-digested meat.
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The woman peeled off of the small woodland, collapsing onto her back and wiping the bile from her lips as she gazed up to the sky. She had to wipe her eyes first to see anything beyond a vague blur, a little vomit smearing across her brow. She had to wipe her eyes again because they seemed to blur again rather quickly. Once she managed to sustain visibility, she could see the beautiful, uncaring sky with its dazzling stars accompanied by eternal black. She wondered if they were far; if she tried, perhaps she could visit one. Of course, she knew that would never happen; she would be too worried that someone lived on the star, and she wouldn't want to intrude into someone else's home.
The woman raised her left arm with her palm facing the ground. Her arm was quite thick. Many would tease that a woman should not have such toned muscles, but she ignored such insults. Her left arm was completely hidden in dense, dirtied bandages. She thought that perhaps she should replace them with cleaner ones. She eventually decided against it. She didn't want to see what was underneath, not now, at least.
The forest floor was slightly damp; the mud oozed around her, her body sinking ever slowly into the ground. She dreamt for a little while that the mud would keep separating, and she would keep sinking down, deeper and deeper, dreaming that roots would spread, entwine and entomb and turn her flesh to fertilizer to unite in a symbiosis with trees and fungus and only dream on of starlight and water. Her powerful soul and magic would course the ground, infest into the myriad rivers of the Sodality of Rain, the sick wrongness would blossom from the poison, and a second Cruor Swamp would rise and end everything in poisoned beauty.
It was so easy to come up with whimsical dreams when embraced by lonely nature. The truth was much blander. She wouldn't sink into the mud more than a few inches, and no monstrous swamp or fungal rulers would sprout. Her head arm fell back down, and her gaze slowly followed as well. Looking at its reflection in the water was easier than the limb itself. Maybe that's what a human was for.
Sometimes, she would get overwhelmed by this sense of apathy and lethargy. She thought that she was just going to stay exactly where she was with the irritating prick of broken twigs crushing against her hardened back, but her will was stronger than even she realized at times. The overbearing doubt never lasted long, and she eventually managed to cast it aside, embarrassed that she ever even had them in the first place. She desperately tried to move her mind onto a less defeatist topic.
She started to become increasingly aware of the painful twigs stabbing into her back; rather than move and solve her problem, she decided to distract herself by analyzing the treetops in search of the story of the twigs. A broken branch here, a drooping canopy there, leaves delicately bent and twisted out of the way; she started imagining what kind of animal would cause the disturbance. Was it clumsy prey or careful predator? Her eyes narrowed as she focused as hard as she could to see through the darkness of night at the story overhead, clumsy prey or careful predator, prey or predator, it was: predator!
The woman hurriedly rose from her mucky bed and rushed back to her camp. The darkness eventually abated to campfire light in the distance, and a muffled, inebriated cheer could be heard across the woodlands between. The distilled celebrity stopped the hurried girl in her tracks like a wall, all fight within her draining to a fearful flight. She threw a couple more swipes at her eyes, desperately striking away any dampness as if the force of her palm could wipe the act itself out of history. She closed her eyes and took a few calming breaths before steeling herself and walking into the light.
A group of rugged friends sat half-undressed around the heat of the campfire and halfway down their jolly ale as they reminisced on old adventures had. The Banausic Cardinals, in their customary red garb, had just recently arrived to help the militia and had firmly captured their inebriated audience in their countless tales of woe and wonder.
The second she met the Banausic Cardinals, she realized they were nothing like how she imagined the famous group. She always pictured them as stoic and grand paladins, a serious bastioned opposed against the forces of evil in an unending conquest of eradication. Turned out they were just a bunch of kids having fun and trying to make their way through life in camaraderie and laughs. She couldn't decide at first if that left her disappointed or relieved. The Cardinals' upfront and friendly personalities allowed them to puncture through her more introverted disposition, and they quickly became good friends, as shallow as that statement may really be.
Twelve people were sitting around the fire, six of whom formed the Cardinals. Being new entrants into the realm of war and adventure, the Cardinals were distinctly younger than the other soldiers around. Their team was made of four men and two women, and it was their tall blond leader who noticed her approaching first.
His initial reaction to her sight had been one of concern, which immediately sent her mind crashing inwards, bloating upon the red on her cheeks, coiling around the choke of her heart, stinging across her bandaged arms, but his face quickly changed, and her worries left when he spoke. "Hey, Weltschmerz, you were out for a while. Take a big dump?"
The blond could be quite crude and knew not the meaning of restraint; his mind and lips were of one being, and one could never act without the other. She thought if she had to actually know him, she might have found him a little annoying, but as simple acquaintances for only a brief time, he instead just came across as a little awkward. He managed to get a laugh from the drunk crowd, though.
The girls on his team reddened. One began scolding his indecent behaviour, while the other apologized to Weltschmerz for her friend's incredulousness. In all honesty, the specifics of what he had said hadn't even registered in her mind. She was still out in that forest, trapped under a broken canopy, twigs in her back and bile by her side, a fire igniting in her bandaged left arm.
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She spoke so quickly that each word was barely distinct from the one before. "I think there were mokoi scouts around here. We need to scan the forest." She was ashamed of herself, of the woman in the puddle, of the imprint in the mud. She could really kill some mokoi right now. This was her usual pattern.
One of the older veterans barked back a laugh, "You're probably just psyching yourself out, feeling vulnerable with your pants down. Nearly all the mokoi are out hunting somewhere."
It seemed that most of the people didn't believe her hypothesis, or perhaps they just didn't want to believe it. The militia was comprised mostly of volunteers, random men desperately escaping the nagging banality that was their peaceful homes. They had no sense of urgency, no sense of stakes or consequence. If it wasn't for her constant watch and paranoia, this whole battalion would have died ages ago.
She could feel the panic rising up, feel the wrongness like blood stealing the air from her lungs and then powered by her heart to flood her, to suffuse everything, intoxicate her. "The latest report said that they had lost track of the hunting unit. Perhaps they knew a route that we weren't aware of and slipped by."
The older man tried to calm her. "This is our territory; we know of all the routes."
"It hasn't been our territory for nearly a millennium now. We can't know!"
Weltschmerz shouted at the top of her lungs even waking some soldiers slept by full bellies. A few of the soldiers grimaced at her antagonizing shout, at the words the sodality would rather ignore. None were willing to admit the state of their nation. None were willing to accept that it wasn't their own, that it hadn't been for a long time, that they had been bested. Weltschmerz wasn't afraid; she knew what was really happening. She felt she was the only one who was willing to acknowledge war and fight the famine of morality. She was the only warrior amongst children.
The leader of the Banausic Cardinals, although crude, was always confident and rational when things got serious. "Alright, we still need some soldiers stationed at this checkpoint to make sure the 'mokoi' don't waltz by while we're gone, so how about we look around instead, just in case." The blond quickly chugged the rest of his drink before placing his mug down on the tree stump where he had previously sat. "Will that make you feel better?"
Far from feeling better, she only heard skepticism, a lack of action. Her breathing grew erratic once more. She was trying to remain impartial, but as her mind swam through all the things the mokoi could do when their full power returned, she couldn't help herself. "We have to tell the main garrison to strike now. If the mokoi hunting unit gets back to the valley before the invasion tomorrow, then there's no way we'll win!"
The blond leader calmly placated her, "Let's not say anything to the garrison yet. If you were mistaken, we don't want to cause an unnecessary fuss, and if you're right, then they could have already made it back to the valley, and it'll be too late." His companions had been silently watching the debate, but upon their leader's signal, the whole of the Banausic Cardinals stood up with a unified purpose and started gathering their equipment.
She was desperately holding back her tears from exposing themselves to the world; she clenched her fists so tight that they bled. "But they can't come back yet. We were so close." Her left arm felt like it was about to explode, she could feel it being touched again, she could feel the leather hands handle and tug, she could feel the cold steel.
"If they really did make it back to the valley, and that's a big if, then we'll just wait for the next hunt. There will always be another chance. Now let's go do our job and actually figure out IF they are back." The blond went into his tent to quickly reemerge in an eloquent set of leather armour, holding onto a pristine and magnificently adorned bow. Every member of the Cardinal was fantastically dressed and equipped. It was clear that they were a very successful group.
Weltschmerz waited impatiently for the group to prepare themselves. The second the last boot was strapped, she was straight off to guide them back to where she had been the entire time: a broken canopy, twigs in her back, and a glass woman lost in the reflections of stagnant waters.
She showed the Cardinals the broken twigs on the floor and the disturbed treetops above. One of the group's girls, Mortise, a mage dressed in an intricate and bright red robe, was confusedly staring at a human-shaped groove imprinted in the mud. "Uhm… what exactly were you doing out here?" She asked while inspecting the human notch.
"I was… powdering my nose." Mortise was wholly unconvinced, but the rest of the group seemed too distracted in observing the treetops up above and were thankfully pushing the conversation forward. Well, most were looking to the treetops; Errant was instead gazing into a murky puddle on the ground.
Errant was by far the largest member of the entire group, and his weapon reflected that fact. It was a massive slab of metal nearly twice his height and just as thick as he was. The slab of metal was shaped like that of a sword, but it convinced no one; this behemoth was so unwieldy that Weltschmerz couldn't possibly imagine how it could be used as a weapon.
The blond leader noticed his distracted partner, "Errant, do you see something?"
Errant blankly stared at a small puddle of water without responding. The blond walked up behind Errant and shook his shoulders to try and get his attention, and he finally responded. "No, it was nothing."
While Weltschmerz was distracted by the twigs below, Fetter, the other female Cardinal, had somehow climbed to the treetops and shouted to the group below. "Bad news. It definitely looks like something big that didn't want to leave a mark was here. But there's no trail or anything. I'm looking all around, and I don't see any signs of where they came from or went. Like it just flew in and out."
The blond responded in an attempt to be hopeful. "That's a good sign at least. If it was some sort of bird, then it couldn't be the mokoi."
Fetter commented back skeptically, "That's one big bird."
The blond was quick to take control. He clapped his hands together to gather everyone's attention and then spoke. "Well, whatever it was, it clearly didn't want to be found. So maybe it just got better at hiding itself and the twigs here were a slip-up. We should go ahead and do a perimeter check just in case and see if we can find any more spots like this. Mortise and Way, you two go with Weltschmerz up north. Infirm and Fetter will go south with me. West is camp, so fingers crossed there's nothing that way. Errant, you'll be fine searching east on your own?" Errant nodded his head in assurance. "Alright, let's just do a quick search. Lucky for us, the day star has decided to come say hi, so it should get easier to track as we go on. Chances are it's just a bird, but If you find something, don't initiate a fight; just head back and alert camp."
All three groups then split off in their respectful directions. Weltschmerz was grouped with Mortise and Way neither of which were particularly great trackers so Weltschmerz would have to do all the scanning. Thankfully, the two of them were fast and quiet, so the group could make plenty of progress without delay.
The empty dawn left only the sound of footsteps to fill their ears. Mortise and Way, although taking the threat a little more seriously, still seemed too relaxed in Weltschmerz's eyes. She knew that the tracks were more than just a bird. It must have been a mokoi! She could feel it: the wrongness. It mocked her every step, goaded her every fear. Weltschmerz accelerated even faster.
"Woah! Slow down, Weltsch. How are you even able to track at that speed?"
Weltschmerz stopped in her tracks. The day star exposed the thick forest of all its secrets. It would appear that it didn't have any secrets. Mortise was right; she was getting lost in her own head. Perhaps this foreboding feeling was simply in her head; maybe the wrongness was hers. Perhaps nothing bad was going to happen: then two bells chimed. One bell came from far out in the distance, nearer to the rest of the Cardinals, the other rung from in the middle of the three.
Mortise readied her staff, preemptively forming a spell. Way unsheathed his rapier, poised for combat. Weltschmerz raised her fists, prepared to cleanly strike anything that dared approach.
Between the three of them, where that bell had chimed, a pink rhombus suddenly grew out of thin air. Or it was a rhombus, but its body would reject any stable state. It would shift and transform, shrink and grow, continuously morphing into other shapes. The pink shape finally locked into a form resembling that of a featureless human with only one limb. The arm was outstretched towards Weltschmerz, holding a glowing parchment: It read.
You have been invited to The Tournament You are The Asset