((At first I was like sure, but now I’m wondering what was the point of doing all of this? Just a display of B movie horror?))
What is this darkness?
"Another body…"
Lawrence had been numb for a long time, numb to all good things in life. His flesh, he could feel it down to the very pathways of his blood, the whole network, and from the first time he had changed his form till now, he had felt the nerves dwindle away. Physical pain muted might be a blessing, but the mind could supply pain in any spine shriveling amount.
"So this is where he ended"
Of the good in his life, he could take stock and find himself endlessly wanting. Touch, as good as dead; taste, something he knew more by rhetorical definition; sound, he could still lend his ears to music. To be Lawrence Spades is to be a statue with hinges, to be an automaton and worse; a machine that knew no rest as it slaved for its master, and would know no rest forever.
"Is he…alive…"
Yet, here he lay, senseless, wondering if he were dead with the ease one wonders about the weather.
"Heavier than he looks…"
‘Bound to happen, heh, I never thought it would take so long, though…’ He thought, sincerely hoping that now would be the end of everything—the end of everything, forever. ‘No light…no sound…good...’ None of the planes fabled had hold over his soul, an infinite relief that he might not have deal with anyone he encountered, befriended, betrayed; and no punishment either from gods who failed to protect while managing to judge.
"Jus-just a little more…"
But if this were eternity, and he had been blessed with solitude, why did he feel air—hot, forceful air—pressing into his lungs, and why did the “thump” resound from his chest when it had been years since he had heard his own heart beat at all? ‘No…’ It seemed that the nightmare had not ended, and that this was not the safety of eternal rest.
"Huuff…"
Opening eyes, bloodshot and weary, Lawrence peered up past the emerald hair that lightly fell across Tablas’ face; beyond those emerald locks flew the starry night. He saw her mud stained, pale skin, and caught the pointed bobbing of her ears. She breathed into him, her lips capturing his own. Without knowing how he had come to lie in the muddy banks of the swamp, or what had knocked him from weary consciousness to thoughtful oblivion, he lay paralyzed in this intimate embrace.
"Okay…okay…"
She broke it, her slender hands beating flat against his breast with wet thuds at some frantic imitation of restoring a drowned man to life. Her hair hung disheveled, he did not recognize the storm of worn clothing, mud splatter, and tears that battered him, all he knew was she smelt of the iron tang of blood, the salt of fresh sweat, and the roses of perfume...
We these pages are empty, we fill them with our loss.
Tobias did not know what to do.
Fear and pain had been her world hours earlier that day. She had had nothing to bite down on, when she with her daggers pried open the steel jaws of Ciato’s trap; three molars across either side of her mouth had shattered under her strain, and the nerves were lightning agony for every step and breath; a pain only dwarfed by layers of flesh and skin revealed from white skin to ivory bone.
Sei, the hero she knew, the man she loved, the single most vexingly stupid person she had ever met; she had dragged herself through the forest and swamp searching for someone to help her save him. What she found were bodies, and bodies dismantled perfectly. Even know, as she kneeled and cried over the single whole corpse, behind her were filthy legs of a man who ended in a diagonal line from should to hip, and beside him the vomit that her discovery warranted.
When Tablas face had surface, she had been afraid to touch him. She had waded into the water with the aid of a branch she had found, she had waded through gory mirages made from the flesh of dead men and women. She felt hands brush her ankles, and saw eyes give her league long stares. She had prodded him gently to move him aside, but when his bits and pieces failed to fade back into the murky water, she had dared to feel with her own hand how much of him remained.
She saw so signs of Ciato’s sword, and hope is always most radiant in darkness. Filth intimate with even her open wound, the flow of blood tied off with a tourniquet of her own severed sleeve, on one leg she had dragged Tablas from the water. And there, on the banks of the swamp’s edge with open prairie visible through the copes of trees, she couldn’t bear to accept that this next hope, too, was dead.
“Please, don’t leave me here!” Going this road alone, now obviously too much to bear. Ciato was what Sei was not, cruel and intelligent and strong. Doubtless, Ciato knew what he had done, and this sensation of blood pouring from her skin and the hitching tremble of her breath as exhaustion crept into her lungs: stark anguish. There is nothing like knowing that evil exists, and that today or forever it won soundly. “Ah!” The thought alone stole her breath, and the air from her lungs.
A weight dragged her down, it settled on her shoulders like the one that remained from before and, before she could push the water from her eyes, pressed her head into Tablas’ expanding chest. She struggled, but she couldn’t escape Tablas, and she realized that she didn’t want to.
There is no greater relief than the assurance that you are not alone.
Time passed as they lay together, and finally finding something familiar, no matter how little, Tobias lost herself first in tears and then sleep, leaving Tablas to stare up toward the sky as the seasons rolled and the storm clouds swept by overhead. The sky was dark, and ready to burst it seemed by the gentle thunder.
‘What was that?’ Tablas thought, thinking of the dramatic dismantling of his flock and shield from more than fifteen to none at all. ‘Nothing should ever be that fast…’ And worse, it had been utterly fearless, and cared nothing for meat, so that when it whipped from the darkness its sword and carved from an old farmer much of his shoulder and arm it passed only to fall on another. ‘And why am I not in pieces when so many others instantly were…’
Events had been chaotic before, demanding lightning speed and perilous effort, but never before had Lawrence been so swiftly beaten. He had been weary…but just the same, it had crushed him.
From the map he’d seen, it would be a day to the temple of V’dralla, where he would thieve from a goddess of vanity; the only certainty. There were a few things left to address: the enemy that had made the same of Lawrence, and elf the shape-shifter held in his arm.
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