Sansir sat hunched in the small living room. The house was cramped into the tail end of the veterinary shop and the owner had given every inch she could to the animals in her care. On the one hand, Sansir applauded her for the effort. On the other, he wished she might’ve spared enough room for her kitchen that he wasn’t intruding on the cabinets’ area.
“Mom,” Amalia said, grasping the veterinarian’s hand in hers. “What is it?”
Amalia’s mother appeared as if cut from the same cloth as her daughter, only more worn. Her hair was a shade paler than Amalia’s and her skin a tad more worn. However, Sansir wouldn’t assume this pair to be mother and sister. Niece and aunt perhaps, sisters if he was stretching it.
A cat yowled in the shop. Theoni had swept them inside the moment she’d seen them. Barely sparing a glance for Sansir, despite his strange appearance—relatively speaking. With a slightly harried look, though one tinged with hope, she’d sat them down at the table as she fussed over some light snacks.
Theoni’s was not a foreign expression within the capital city. Though it was hardly common, perhaps one in ten had a similarly worried air about them. Whether glances over their shoulder, checking their pockets, or a more obvious worried frown. It seemed Amalia’s mother fell into the latter category.
“Amalia,” Theoni whispered. “I wish I knew. There’s.,. Unrest in the city. Half the people can talk of nothing else.”
“Talk about what?”
Theoni shook her head and waved her hands miserably around. Gesturing at everything, yet somehow making it a question. “I wish I knew, Sweetie.”
Sansir looked at the two of them, fidgeting with the gray ball of translation mana strung around his throat. “I’ll leave you two to talk,” he said, scooching away from the table. “Can I look at the animals?”
Theoni smiled, somewhat comforted by the familiar subject. “Don’t touch the red-tagged cages. They aren’t pets. And don’t feed them anything, most are on specialized diets,” she smiled at him as he nodded. “Oh, and watch out for the fish. They can’t survive outside of the water. And the turtles might try to snap at you, but they don’t mean harm. If a cat—“
“Mom,” Amalia said, pulling on her hands to regain her attention. “I think it’s fine. He gets it.”
Theoni smiled and nodded. “Oh alright,” she waved Sansir off and he ducked out of the kitchen. “He’s not another lover Ione’s tried to stuff onto you, is he?”
“No!”
“I’m just making sure. You don’t have to take any of that, you hear?”
Sansir slipped into the animal doctor part of the house and didn’t hear Amalia’s follow up. The building was split into four parts roughly. The ‘doctoring’ area, clinical and locked off, a kennel area where most of the animals lived, a small reception where she met with the clients, and the house portion.
She doesn’t know where the fear comes from, Sansir pondered as he entered the kennel. The biggest of the three spaces. Yammering immediately started up, attempting to drown out his thoughts. Birds yelled, cats yowled, and all the animals in between also cried for attention.
Small lizards akin to the ones he’d seen in Ankiria—the smallest no bigger than his hand—crawled in glass cages on top of a tank holding a lizard bigger and clearly heavier than he was.
The four-limbed creature was resting at the bottom of the water, one eye open and watching him. Thick scaly hide covered its features, turning to ridges along its back, uniting down its sweeping tail. Its closed mouth was a sinuous line, teeth sticking alternatively. A clear red sticker marked the glass.
Vicious creature, Sansir thought, turning away. Its presence unnerved him, though he sensed no mana within it. A primal instinct told him to fear such monsters. Could that be what was happening in the city? A long buried instinct, emerging in so many people?
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
But the issue isn’t the tension, that’s just a symptom. He glanced at the scaled creature once more, long snout and narrow eyes glaring back at him. Sneering, he sent a lash of his tether-sense to the creature. A simple tap of blood lust, a simple and easy to sense emotion. Even civilians, dead to most other sensations, reacted to this one.
It jerked away, knocking its head against the back wall, its tail slapping the window. All the other creatures went suddenly silent. Sansir looked around. All of them watched him, retreating into their corners. Or they were watching the monster.
The apex predator, the most dangerous creature in this tiny territory, reacted to him, and so everyone else did.
“Could it be?” he wondered.
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Dovar sat quietly, letting the chatter around the campfire fill him until it spilled through the grin on his mouth. The people were relaxed, getting along, and most importantly, their exercises were going well.
He looked up to see Morphos winking at him. The old military veteran had practiced some simpler version of the exercises they were currently doing. Combined with Kasos’ detailed and technical understanding, the entire group was making progress in leaps and bounds.
Things were finally heading the right direction.
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Kirs wiped her forehead, wincing at the dry feel of her chalk covered skin. It almost seemed to grind against the grain of both hand and head. The ritual was laid out in its essential form. They didn’t have the space needed in the test room, so they had to use shorthand.
The random pebbles each represented a basin, where a space-tethered could charge the array with mana. The bricks, gray, old, and slightly crumbly—she’d found them at back to the building—represented interaction arrays. Those were the least elegant part of the ritual. She needed at least three other people to control it and would prefer a minimum of six second-stage generators to fuel it.
“Think it’ll be enough?” Es asked. He was meticulously noting down each circle and array, marking their locations in the notes. She would’ve done it, but was still far too clumsy to get the notation right.
“No,” she admitted, wincing at the bright light. She felt like an invalid, her back barely able to support her. “But we’ll need to deploy it to test further.”
Es looked at her for a long moment. There was something in those faintly rainbow-striated eyes. Saying nothing, he returned to the notes.
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“I just wanna talk,” Ayvir said, keeping his hand passive out by his side. The rain was hammering into his face. Water plastered hair to his face and crawled into his eyes. Exhaustion racked every inch of his body.
The rain deadened all sound, yet he could see the lights change in the distance. Guard shift, he realized, dawn was breaking.
“I don’t.” The flesh-torn replied, the strange energy coalescing around its arm, yet not unleashed. Ayvir’s eyes flicked to the distortion. He’d never seen such a thing before. Yet, the creature wasn’t pointing it at him. Only the spear which was now steadily approaching.
Chilled to the bone, days of travel laying heavy on his back, muscles aching from the crawl here, and the relentless rain like a drumbeat against his skull pounding his brain into a fury. Ayvir’s patience was running low.
“Last time,” Ayvir said. “All I want is to talk. I’m not here to fight.”
“You are,” it spoke with certainty. “And so are we. On this dawn, you will die.”
Too late, Ayvir heard the splash of mud behind him. A sharp point poked into his back. His heavy jacket was not immediately penetrated by the tense pressure.
“Run him through!” commanded the tall flesh-torn.
The reply came in the harsh tones of their strange language, but Ayvir recognized the acknowledgment of orders. As well, he recognized the hesitant speech of the unbloodied.
“I should’ve died a long time ago,” Ayvir whispered, shutting his eyes. For a moment, long buried memories raced in his mind. Then he returned them to the soil.
Opening his tether-space had always been easy. He could tear it open in a fraction of a second, and often did so if even slightly startled. Only the careful grip on his emotions stopped him from obliterating the child behind him when their spear touched him. For him, deliberately and carefully accessing his tether and gently letting the pressure in had always been more difficult.
Light awakened to his senses. It played over the entire field. A quantity so vast he could never use it all up, yet so little to make him as if starving. More flooded out by the moment, the sun encroaching on the horizon, its glory seeping into the air.
Clamping pressure seized him immediately, the drowning touch of the flesh-torn attempting to tear away the hold on his powers.
“I should be dead,” Ayvir said, opening his faintly smoldering eyes. “Near to here, less than ten miles South. Everyone else I knew died, but I didn’t.” He locked eyes with the flesh-torn commander. “Tell the kid to remove his spear before I make him wish he only had one arm.”
It had staggered back, the distorted energy glommed onto Ayvir. The presence was a feeble weight against his soul. It wouldn’t have broken his hold five years ago, and it certainly wouldn’t now.
Harsh words were exchanged, and the kid backed off, spear slapping the mud with a wet splash.
“Y-you are him?” the creature asked, falling to its knees. “I did not know, I swear. We have not heard from you for so long.”
“And now,” Ayvir said, wondering what the creature was talking about. “I will have my questions answered.”