Iris was melting. The noxious red gas ate away at her exposed skin and gnawed at it like a starving animal, jamming its teeth against hard rock. But like hard rock, Iris was inedible. Her body was Spirit mimicking human flesh. It couldn’t be consumed, but that did not stop the gas from trying.
Iris screamed silently as the crimson gas filled the bathroom and doused her eyes in red. A scarlet sheen, like blood had seeped over her eyes and permanently stained them.
She armoured herself, locking her skin under airtight plates she squeezed together with the curling of her fingers and toes. The relief was substantial but fleeting. Her lungs struggled for air and her skin felt as though it were being torn apart by millions of fishing hooks.
With all her strength, she hauled Crestana upright and over her shoulder, her knees buckling under the weight before her beast could come to her aid, propping Iris back upright with a nudge of its snout. Iris waved her hand, and the beat continued ahead of her, opening the bathroom door.
Then came the screams. The grinding screeches of voice boxes straining to translate the untranslatable, pure outbursts of sincere terror. Iris trudged through it, barely recognising the untouched tables and decorative flowers, many of which hadn’t survived the rushed exodus from the restaurant. Beaks navigated for the exits in a frenzied panic, tripping over themselves and each other.
No humans. None at all.
Iris could feel her eyes closing and her consciousness slipping while the only feeling she could discern from the sea of excruciating noise was the weight of Crestana on her shoulder, the weight of that responsibility.
She marched with anvil feet, a world marred like a battlefield in mud. The screaming filtered out, and a deathly silence descended on the place. Just her breathing and the pounding in her temple, percussion that teased her death.
She outstretched a hand through the pain and commanded a purple limb forward, wading through the mist for the rotating door. She heard glass smash and felt her limb impact something. Iris drove the pointed end into the ground and used it as her guide, morphing the rigid limb into malleable rope.
She knew she could do more, escape quicker, but manipulating shapes needed creativity, which needed energy she could not afford to waste.
Her eyes shook in their sockets. She filtered out the painful static, doing everything in her power to clear her mind. But she could see something else waiting in the light at the end of the tunnel.
Is this what you want?
She shook her head, desperately trying to free herself from the voice as she exited the building, only to see the outside world was no less corrupted. The crimson lines burrowed underneath the hotel walls and onto the pavement, spreading blood mist into the street.
But Iris could make out an end to the red world, a patterned dome, behind which stood buildings, familiar and untainted.
Is this pointless world really worth sacrificing yourself over?
Iris kept her eyes on the roof of that building, her best shot at salvation in secrecy, coming out of the wreckage unscathed and anonymous. Even facing death, she thought about the consequences of being born a Witch. She cursed, despising how well she’d been trained.
Aren’t you forgetting your father?
Elliot.
Iris’s heart leapt into her throat as she began to search around her, knowing it was futile.
Payphone, he had said. Iris had no clue where that was or if he’d made it in time.
Lost. Maybe dead. Her own father.
The red gas began to shift, its colour deepening into an intense purple. The gas was her own, and Iris could not escape it.
She choked, choked on herself as the mist forced her eyelids open to watch figures emerge from the monochrome landscape. People long dead, the same that had feasted on her flesh and lapped her blood like dogs.
It was a trick, the Spirit in her taking advantage of a hopeless situation to burrow into her head and break her.
What would Evalyn do? What would Elliot do? What was a Witch supposed to do?
Do as she was ordered.
She ordered her beast to press for the rooftops and clear a path, which it did with another mechanical snapping of the jaw, tearing a piece from the dome-like flesh from a neck. But the dome began to recover immediately, reclaiming lost space like a feverish infestation. Iris grit her teeth and strengthened her grip on Crestana with loops of binding rope. She ordered her beast back to her side, and let her armour mould and sink into its body.
Haphazard at best, but so was her escape route. She needed to move, and fast.
“Go!” she shouted with all the strength left in her, and the beast diligently followed, speeding for the opening in a winding motion that drilled into a single, small point. Iris closed her eyes and prayed beyond all hope that the next breath she took would be of clear air.
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The next thing she felt was her side crashing down onto terracotta tiles and her lungs involuntarily gasping for air. Iris coughed and spluttered like an old car engine as her vision tripled and blurred. She heaved, relief washing over her as she felt the absence of pulling across her skin. Crestana was still within her grasp, arm's length away and still unconscious.
“Are you Evalyn Hardridge?” an unimpressed voice mused from the periphery. “Different colour from what I’d heard, but the armour unmistakably matches.”
A distorted speech, like several voice boxes out of tune, speaking all at once. Iris couldn’t talk, and even if she could, it would only blow her cover.
“How did you do it? Placing your apprentice a stone's throw away at all times was obviously how you got to the girl, but how did you undo my Sigils?”
It was Caynes. Iris could not see through her compromised vision or the figure’s draping hood, but it was Caynes.
“No human has a right to such magic. This is why you people make me sick.”
Iris placed a shaky hand on the tiles below her and raised her head, watching as the figure walked closer to Crestana, the metal heels of their boots crunching into the snow as distant sirens began to wail. The screaming was coming back to her, a chorus that she could only hope included her father's voice.
Her father. Elliot. Where was Elliot?
The figure waved a hand, and a red projection of lines scanned over the tiles towards her, like the frame of a slideshow. “But I got what I wanted out of this. You were my only problem, so thank you for handing yourself in.”
Her father. Crestana. He’d take them away. She still had years with both of them. Years.
Iris wanted to kill him.
She raised her wrist, and jets of purple matter jutted from her body, coagulating at the figure’s feet and glueing them to the rooftop. Iris felt the lines reach her body and begin to burn, but something higher than cognitive thought was manipulating her body.
She kicked off the floor and out of the way as the area inside the circle disintegrated into a perfect crater. Iris raised an arm as another projected Sigil scanned towards her. The movement summoned a simple barrier, enough to avoid the spell and give leeway to lasso Crestana, bringing her behind the wall before ducking as the spell exploded on the barrier’s surface.
Iris swung her fist, firing a cannonball with one motion and a series of flechettes with another, covering both the figure’s flanks. Both attacks were met with Sigils, one to destroy the ball, the other to block the projectiles. Two more shattered the bounds around the figure’s feet as Iris swung a horizontal blade at her enemy, a cleaver metres long that the figure caught with its hand, the lines of another spell already imbued into the glove.
Iris pounced forward, mindlessly looking for blood as her arms conjured four walls around her opponent, and her fingers brought them together. But a circle projected into the snow below, and the roof inside its perimeter disappeared.
Iris pursued, carelessly jumping through the circular hole, and into the building’s attic. She was in midair but already caught in another projected Sigil, her armour casting a shadow into the red lines behind her. The figure was at the far end of the attic already, arm outstretched.
Iris swiped her right arm, and the purple matter at its fingertips raced towards the figure’s hand and knocked it off course, redirecting the Sigil away from her and into the side of the attic. The Sigil activated, and the attic's side was blown to pieces.
Iris landed on the floor in one moment and cleared the distance in the next, the spikes in her armour extending into teeth that stretched until they found its target. The figure’s outstretched hand was too far from his centre to be of use, but the other was poised to put a hole in Iris’s side.
Iris could not reach it in time; her attack had required too much commitment.
Help me.
Help you do what?
Help me kill him.
Her beast returned from thin air, jaws already poised around the figure’s free arm. It clamped down just in time for the Sigil to shatter and the pair to enter a deadlock.
“You….”
“Destroy him,” Iris muttered.
Her beast obliged, but her opponent acted faster, drawing a Sigil across their chest that activated immediately. He disappeared in the ensuing flash of red light.
Sirens and screams. Sirens and screams instead of silence. Iris’s knees buckled, and she collapsed, the adrenaline trading places with pain. Her beast caught her, nestling her in its coils.
“Up,” Iris said, and her beast mindlessly followed. Iris watched its puppet strings as it floated through the attic and ascended through the hole in its ceiling. She landed on her feet, but barely, her armour and her beast disintegrating as she stumbled towards the unconscious body.
The scene below them was garnering more and more attention. Nearby residents crowded the area as the police began to arrive, slowly closing off a perimeter. She needed to descend before anyone saw her, she needed to stay in cover, retain anonymity, remain—
“Iris!”
A familiar voice. One that made her cry.
“Iris!”
“Dad!”
Iris shouted with everything left in her lungs. She couldn’t see him, but she could isolate his voice from somewhere in the crowd.
“Dad!”
She was so tired, her joints ached and her muscles were shredded. She stumbled towards Crestana and looked over her body. Beaks didn’t breathe, telling if they were alive was harder at first glance. But Iris felt it, the small oscillation of Aether at her fingertips when she touched her skin.
Crestana was alive, and Iris felt her eyes watering.
“Dad!” she called again, closing her eyes before she could cry and resting her head on Crestana’s chest.
She couldn’t take it. Something was snapping in her and she couldn’t bear it. The unresponsive body of an abused child, the cries of her own father unsure if his daughter was still alive. She held Crestana tighter, unable to stop herself from wondering how much of it had been her fault, how much destruction she could attribute to her own carelessness, her inability to hold the situation and the lives it entailed on her shoulders.
She couldn’t take being a Witch.
And yet she was.
A realisation that struck her not as some inspirational last stand but as a cold, cruel fact of life. A matter of survival, the weight on her back forced her forward, even if that March forward was nothing more than a desperate stumble.
She lifted Crestana’s body upright and pressed it against hers, summoning her last ounces of strength to venture to the roof’s edge step by laboured step. Then, she let herself fall.
She closed her eyes and felt her hair disintegrate, pooling around her body as she kept Crestana cradled in her arms. The matter materialised, and Iris felt her insides press against her back as she slowed to an almost immediate halt, free-falling the last ten centimetres as her hair retreated back to its place.
They lay face to face on the snow, Crestana’s mask lying in between them. Iris studied her client’s blank face, taking in every detail as though there were more than just dark contours adorning it. But there wasn’t. Like a veil, there was nothing but black shapes, as true to her client as she could reach. Iris outstretched a hand and touched her cold, cold face, running her fingers along it and feeling her head skip a best with every wafting pulse of Aether.
Iris smiled and closed her eyes.