The Restless Fugitive (Closed)

[Duffy]

Part Three

“This really is not what I was expecting,” said a strange, huffing and puffing as he climbed over the last ridge that surrounded the crater.

If he were to be truly honest with himself, he did not think he could ever have imagined the sight before his eyes. It was not really a crater, now he thought about it; it was more a scar in the surface of the world, a hole into hell. If he had choice to do his own voice over, he would have called it a cosmic ripple with a deep, overly dramatic voice. It looked like someone had dropped a large piece of land onto a quite solid and substantially larger piece of land. Somewhere in all the tectonic movement and the confusion, the land had decided to turn to lava.

When it reset, cooled, and reformed it left…this.

“What do you think, Jana?” he asked his companion, without looking over his shoulder to check she was still behind him. He set his heavy boot onto a rock as if he were the first man to discover this strange land, and set his hands onto his hips to take in the view.

“I think I am knackered,” spat the crimson haired priestess, rising up over the ridge behind the bard like a creature from the swamp. “Wet, hungry, and above all,” she slapped her hands on her knees with relief at finally having climbed the rise, “utterly unimpressed by – whoa” the words fell on deaf ears and into silent syllables as she clocked the crater.

“Pretty, is it not?” the stranger said smarmily.

“Nemo…what…,” she fell silent in admiration.

At the centre of the impact, there was a pool of luminescent blue liquid, which they could clearly see even at such a distance. Set two thousand or so feet away, and four hundred or so feet below their current position, was the last existing mark of the little known cataclysm, which had resulted from the birth, and quick death of a bastard god. The man was still a little sceptical about it all, but from the rising verges and cracked ridges that broke the fallow earth around that little pool, it certainly looked magical enough to have warranted Caden Law’s involvement.

“You would think he would have at least left, I do not know, a business card or something…,” Lill mumbled, appearing with considerably less physical distress than her sister does. The journey had not tired the assassin an inch, and she remained impeccably dressed against the gentle and occasionally howling breeze that swept down from the mountains to the north.

“I am not sure that is how he operates Lill. In fact, I am almost certain he is not the sort of person that likes to go around bragging about it.” Nemo tried to sound like he admired the wizard’s efforts, though history’s ironic sense would place him a thousand miles away or more, bragging quite loudly to every orc, slave and dog he crossed. Without realising it, Caden Law told the world who he was and what he had done with his remarkably short life every time he waved his wand.

[Duffy]

“He is a wizard, of course he tells taller tales than the pinnacle of his stupid hat.” Lill spat her contempt before she slipped a dagger from beneath her obi. With non-chalant observation of the routine awe and wonder moment before danger ensured, she went about cleaning the mud from her nails. She was a practical sort of assassin-lady-about-town.

“I guess now is not the time to discuss the man’s moral indignation,” Nemo curled his lips. He was losing the battle to try and sound impressed, Lill, cold as ice, was having none of it.

The trio stood in a little row atop the ridge, arms pressed on hips to display their swagger, hair blown eschew in the breeze. If anyone had happened to look their way at that precise moment, they might have considered the trio to appear heroic. In their drab grey garb, functional and practical attire, they might have given the impression they were going to explore the cavern network rumoured to extend deep below the scar. The only thing they were going to do whilst dressed like this, however, was sing.

Nemo doubted any heroic party in all the long years of Scara Brae’s relatively short life had attempted to put back together an island. He doubted even more that anyone who had attempted to do so had done so with his or her voices, a bit of a dance and a ritual sacrifice.

The one thing they had to do was simple; put tomb back into catacomb.

“Do you think the gods will hear us over the wind, sister?” Lill stepped closer into the inner rings of the crater, dancing over the dangerous ground with nimble footwork. She continued to clean her nails, bringing Nemo to ask exactly how many hidden talents Lill had. She appeared to be concealing a third eye somewhere.

“It will have to do, though I dare say we should perform the ritual closer to that,” she jabbed a finger at the pool. “What do you suppose it is Nemo?” Jana pulled back her hair and tied it into a ponytail with a length of darn she pulled from her eternally well-stocked bandoleer. Many had often wondered, to no avail, how sane a woman that carried a sewing kit next to her sword could be.

“It appears to be moving, so it is likely to be some sort of magical residue.”

If it indeed were Caden Law who did this, it would be fewer residues and more ‘some I left in case of emergencies.’ It would be volatile, extremely harmful to the touch, and best left unhampered. Normally, Nemo would have been comforted by the fact he knew it was dangerous. The accompanying titbit to his thought train, the one that told him to wade about in the pool as he slit a chicken’s throat on the other hand did not.

[Duffy]

“Will you…be alright?” The slight hesitation in Jana’s voice came through concern for her companion’s current appearance, and less so for his life.

None of the troupe feared for their mortal coil in dedicating themselves to repairing the wound on the face of their island home. There was no danger to any of them in that respect. Whilst Lill would lament the loss of her porcelain skin, delicately washed in jasmine and lotus oils twice daily, and Jana would have to explain to her wife why she was no longer a red headed bombshell, the troupe would carry on trying to put things right regardless.

“It is certainly going to sting a bit, maybe even render me cockles’ empty shells,” Jana rolled her eyes at the youth’s candour, “but it should not do any lasting damage.”

“You sound woefully uncertain,” Lill mumbled, finally showing some small degree of emotion at the prospect of the coming confrontation. Somehow, she knew that whatever was in the crater would make her skin crawl. It glowed with a deep, vermillion aura, like a shadow of oblivion cupping the world.

Nobody felt comforted by that fact.

They each took that as a sign to advance, slowly and together, down over the ridges. They felt the wind leave them behind as they fell into the crater, which offered a natural shelter against the voice of the Windlacer Peaks. It did not take long for the wind to chatter with whispers of another kind. However, the sky was overcast and on the cusp of turning to dusk and then eventual night, dancing ribbons of light began to spiral up from the pool to accompany the cackles and Fae like giggles.

“Jana…” Nemo stopped, feet tucked together and a spritely bounce coiled in his knees. He looked constipated, “can you see anything down there?” He used his readiness and cleared a small ravine. His boots scrunched the dirt underfoot with a heavy but safe landing. He did his best to avoid thinking about how deep the cracks were, how deadly and dark the abyss could possibly be.

The crimson woman took a moment to cover her eyes against the glare and to focus them, before she scanned the shore of the glowing pool. They had made swift progress and already she could make out the rocks and broken strands of earth that fell into the pool like lapping tree roots into a swamp’s haven. The crater seemed to melt into the pool, and the pool kept pulling in new chunks of rock by the second.

“The crater appears to be flowing into the residue, like sand into an ant lion’s nest.” She was suddenly thankful that she had paid attention to her travels through the desert kingdom of Fallien. “It must be a deep whole for it to be able to consume it so quickly,” she added, a useful fact that brought no comfort to any of them.

[Duffy]

The lecture from the il’Jhain guide had proven invaluable when she and Mina, her long-standing wife, had managed to avoid certain death on the precipice of one such pit. When you fell into it, the ant lion would awake, and swallow so much sand you could not possibly outrun its greed. It was a remarkable creature, Jana had thought. She did not think so now.

“What on earth could it is swallowing the sand fo-” Nemo’s jaw remained half-open, sucking in an enlightening cold pang of air. It tasted faintly of almonds.

A little light went off at the back of the trio’s collective mind.

“Oh fuck,” was all they could muster in unison.

Whilst the Fireside Company made their ascent to heaven on the far side of the world, the stranger’s party found himself or herself rather swiftly descending into hell a little closer to home. Their mutual cry of realisation seemingly served as a declaration for proceedings to begin proper, as the second they screamed, the pool at the centre of the crater moved.

It did not move as if you would expect a pool of liquid to move.

“This does not seem like it is going to be an afternoon jaunt through an adventure Nemo,” Jana screamed, accusing the captain of lying, whilst at the same time, expressing her swelling concern for her newly stitched dress.

Instead of rippling, swishing, and rolling waves, the very centre of the pool rose up. Something floated like a ball pressed against a taught sheet or cloth up through the surface of the pool. It continued to rise, monstrous in size until it formed a smooth tipped cone a hundred feet tall.

Whilst the crater’s eventual destruction was slow, the party could feel the earth beneath their feet move quicker, as if the orb unseen in the swirl of magical refuse was willing them closer.

“Should we run?” Lill barked, legs spread and tanto unsheathed. They glinted in the luminescence of the pool’s light, which shifted between all the colours of the rainbow. It made them all feel quite nauseated.

“No point,” sputtered Jana, who had drawn her sword from its sheath with a wilful pull of her shaking fingers. “Save your strength for whatever trials lay ahead of us.”

At that moment, the ridge they teetered on slipped towards the pool in a trio of sudden movements. They rocked on their heels each time the ridge sunk another fifteen feet or so, but remained upright through their own volition. The air, which had smelt vaguely of rock and sulphur and almonds up until then started to resemble Nemo’s armpits, and a fear soaked rag pressed politely against one’s nose.

“If you know a song for ‘just about to be eaten by goo’ Jana, now would be a spiffing time!”

“If I think of something, you will be the first to know!” she replied with equal swathes of sarcasm swaddling her words.

[Duffy]

The sky turned black, or at least, something overhead turned black. None of the party could make out wherever or not it was in fact the sky, or just a trick of the light. A powerful radix of energy rolled out from the cone, which tingled up and down their spines and made them each feel intoxicated and suddenly sleepy.

“I have a really. Bad. Feeling. About. This,” Lill fell backwards and disappeared into the furrow of the crater’s ridges. Jana screamed, and Nemo leapt over to where she vanished.

A second blast of energy hit him square between the collarbone and he too vanished.

“Nemo, Nemo!” Jana screamed, sword flashing silver streaks through the air as she flailed her way to attempt a rescue.

A thunderous crack of lightning burnt the air and embedded into the sky a sense of doom and danger. The pathetic fallacy was the sort of dramatic attempt by nature and Fate to bring a heroic confrontation to life, and it was the sort only true heroes have to see. In the cracks in the clouds, the spheres in heaven shone. Jana was too busy looking down into the gutter to notice such ominous stars overhead.

In the shadows, there was movement, but not the sort that was pleasing to the spell singer’s heart. In the cracks of the crater, the shadows lived. Nemo and Lill had seemingly fallen through them, down into the earth, dirt, and mire that had scared the island in the wake of the wizard’s gumption.

“Nemo…Lill…,” she shouted a cry. Between the howling winds, the vibrant eruptions of magic and the beat of her heart in her chest, she did not notice the third blast of energy bolt from the pool at her back. There was a whelp as she too fell into shadow, and was gone from the surface of Scara Brae.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Everything fell into darkness.

“This land be mine now; my child shall reign over the pinnacles and furrows of this cursed realm, and claim its discoveries for its own machinations.” The voice pierced Jana’s mind, and seemingly tore her sanity apart in speaking. She felt a familiar need to vomit, to crawl, and to be free of a thick web.

She cocked her head, though as she moved in the nothingness, she realised she had become nothing more than a metaphorical concept. Her heart bleated without flesh, her limbs flailed without motion, her fear grew without fluxing nerves into jittery knots. Whatever dwelt in the magical refuge had flayed the very reality from the troupe’s souls, and down into hell three sparkling pinnacles of light fell.

They fell into the deep, dark, and sundered catacombs.

[Duffy]

Without motion but with plenty of screaming, they fell into the cracked earth and carnal playground of the fallen gods.

"Praise the spawn of N'Jal," it roared.

For what seemed like an age, the three lights swarmed about the pearl white sphere that engulfed all attention and presence in the abyss. Like moths to a candle’s flame, they bounced against the rippling surface, and fell away.

When the bastard god had risen from the wake of the wizardly meddling, and promptly died in the fallow promises of his Company, it was just part of a greater plan.

“Mother…I am ready.”

On the surface, the crater returned to its relatively peaceful state. The orb fell back into the pool, and the ripples swiftly faded from the world. The cracked earth settled, and the ridges and farrows of the crater returned to literal depths without bottomless hearts. The sky returned to its overcast state, devoid of lightning and brimstone.

“I shall awaken and feast on the bodies of weaker gods.”

At the mention of cannibalism, Nemo expressed his disagreement.

“Who are you calling weak?”

The larger of the lights burst into a bright array of ribbons and colour. Nemo appeared a little dishevelled, chipper, and suspended wearily in the oblivion. He was white in the casted glow of the pearl, like an apparition in the night. His arms stretched wide with daggers poised formed from the light itself, an instinctive reaction to defend himself, his friends, and his family.

Nemo had no idea who he was talking to, or, in the case of non-specific entities, what.

“You are Nemo, being of mischief and swords, correct?”

There were only four people in the world who knew Nemo had a more important past than he let on. He was an avatar for heroism. Those four people were the avatars themselves, and they had been most careful with that secret. Nemo raised a glowing eyebrow.

“We are he,” though he did not like the mischief part – that was his own identity, not the providence of the god who gave him life.

Somewhere in the heavens, entombed within a comet somewhat ironically the same size as the shard of earth that had shattered the beautiful countryside of Scara Brae, a dark mistress watched.

“A god dead to the world with worthless prophets is weak.”

“Worthless prophets?” Jana appeared this time, her sassy mouth sparking her body with life. She hung to Nemo’s right, sword still swinging in her right hand as if her sword arm was singing her defiance. Even amidst the glow of the pearl, her hair somehow appeared fiery and sentient crimson. “We are not worthless, who the fuck do you think you are?”

Nemo had heard about the exploits of the Fireside Company through the drunken rants of barbarians in taverns. Though he hated their bravado, uncouth nature, and general masculine excess, it was massively amusing to him that they had taken on their mantle as if they were the new successors to the heroic titles god killers and badasses.

“I am Naris, seed of Sijar Jhar and the mistress N’Jal.”

[Duffy]

Even as the creature spoke the titles, Nemo felt himself vomiting in the real world. His spiritual form, which he now realised, was a facsimile of his real self-suspended in another plane. His spirit flickered in rage, containment, and rejection of his bonds. It was always funny to hear about mother’s impregnating their own sons for kicks in plays, but to hear it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, just made him queasy.

“Did the wizard Blueraven not kill you?”

“Only my father…in the destitution and chaos, I was born and have lain dormant until now.”

“This sounds terribly like the plot to Macbeth,” mused Jana, half expecting a trio of witches to appear in fire and brimstone to proclaim the strange sphere to be Macduff, carefully bred to take revenge.

“Wait a minute,” the bard cocked a smile at the woman, but plastered a serious look across his face with a snap. “All that humdrum and epic heroism from the Fireside Company was a diversion…for a double bastard in white?”

The pearl began to shudder, as if something inside was trying to break free from its opalescent shell.

“I do not think it is interested in our questions Nemo, but I do have a song handy, now that I think about it…” Jana slowed her statement, as if the awakening monstrosity was somehow pressing against her mind, dredging all the will and gumption out of her usually vibrant soul.

Nemo nodded in agreement, and clapped his hands together. An ethereal clap of thunder broke the dense nothingness as non-existent flints sparked in the shadows. The magnesium white flashes dimmed by the glow of their own souls, but they kindled hope in their wake.

“Sing your own obituary, sing your own damnation, and sing the rise of N’Jal’s true progeny.”

Nemo and Jana had heard that claim far too many times in five centuries of fighting vagabonds, gypsies, vampires, and thieves. Everybody it seemed was somehow magically a seed of N’Jal; she had, it seemed, been more around the block than Lill had.

“Show yourself!”

A crack rolled into view about the sphere’s outer shell, widening with every passing second and every swell of energy that rolled out from the orb. Nemo and Jana floated closer together and clasped hands. His right into her left, a pledge that bound their energies and souls into a single, brighter spark. Even without true bodies, the bard felt the wave of air wash over him as the crack broke the outer shell and dropped fragments of eggshell, which is what it now apparently, was into the shadows below.

“Is that…a spider?” Jana asked inquisitively.

Nemo nodded.

“The evil gods are never two legged…,” he grumbled.

[Duffy]

It also turned out that evil gods, or evil bastard sons of evil gods, never did anything with an ounce of subtlety. As the writhing mass of darkness continued to break free of its birthing sphere, each long leg stretched out and seemed to fragment the shadow into different shades of impenetrable darkness. There was ominous oblivion, a callous night, a noxious depth to its arrival. Its bones were clad in chitin and abyssal midnight, thick hide of oil and sinew.

“I will devour you piecemeal,” the creature’s voice, which up until now had been hallow and strained, burst into threatening rumbles of words. It half seeped into the trio’s memories, to prey upon them in nightmares.

“Oh please, we have heard this all before,” Jana spat.

This was the truth, though she left out the part about who was telling them. Kālu was a true terror, a primeval foe that sundered the party and gave them something to fear. He was the only being alive who could take their immortality from them, save Nemo himself. Now they feared only for the civilians, for the orphans, vagabonds and nobles of Scara Brae who would suffer in their failures.

They were also, by now, quite good at killing spiders.

“An unending nightmare shall befall your souls, eradicating hope before crushing dreams,” Nemo shook his head as the creature continued in its egotistical delusions.

The creature grew as it freed itself from the pearl, and by the time the shards had disappeared altogether, its eight legs extended. It was no different from any house martin or wall crawler, the likes of which inhabited the troupe’s playhouse in swarms in the summer. Of course, its monstrous size and the glowing lights that passed for its eight piercing eyes told of something greater and more prominent in this particular spider’s destiny. Jana would not be able to swat this one with a well-aimed heel.

“No light, no lie, no remedy,” Jana had enough, and belted out a choral verse which was augmented by the ethereal nature of her being.

Nemo, smiling at the chosen song opened his own cheeky smile and called a response.

“No love, no truth, no elegance,” his own voice wrapped around Jana’s, and their dual nature gifted the words a life of their own.

They shone bright, bright, and brighter still.

“For an eternity we have waited, protected what is true.”

“For an age we will stand on this island fair, and kill creature’s foul and black.”

Jana let go of Nemo’s hand and cut a cross through the air with her sword, which sang its own mystical line in a language neither of them could understand.

“No Fae song can hurt me, I am the darkness!”

“Oh please, spare me from this fucking idiot,” Lill finally flickered into life, unable to stomach the scene any more.

[Duffy]

Before the verse could rattle into being proper, the assassin flicked two ghostly tanto at the creature’s eyes. The first hit nothing but fur, but the second struck gold, and slipped into the luminescent sphere of one of its many eyes.

The scream that erupted from the spider’s maw rocked the spell singers stride and tossed them rolling through the gloom. They broke apart, unable to maintain their grip set against the motion. Lill looked over her shoulder and watched them shrink as they continued to spin.

“Mother, give me providence over the shadows!” the spider rushed forwards, its legs moving as if an invisible floor of glass rested beneath its monstrous bulk.

Lill felt the rush of air caress her cold skin and turned to meet her attacker head on. Its cankerous motion instantly sparked warning signals in her mind, a sixth sense that drew her attention to the floor beneath her suddenly solid feet. Whatever nightmare they had fallen into faded, and the assassin took a jab from the leg to the chest.

When she landed on the cracked earth twenty feet behind where she had been, the sky, dark and ominous as ever focussed starkly into view.

It was an illusion.

RUMBLE.

RUMBLE.

CRACK!

A peal of thunder roused Nemo and Jana, who had fallen into a heap on the verge of the crater. In the distance, they rose, slowly and awkwardly, until they could focus enough to peer back to the glowing pool and the great shadow that loomed over their sister.

“I think we angered it…,” Nemo said half-heartedly. He dusted himself down, his physical form battered and bruised from their spiritual harrowing.

“It is pretty good at that psychobabble pseudo duel shit. Let us not fall for that again shall we?” Jana patted Nemo on the shoulder, before she skipped into a run down the slope to re-join the fray.

Nemo half wanted to turn around and stroll down the verge to the safety of his bed. He was getting too old to throw his weight around against evil and far too old to be running around like an idiot.

“No…let us not,” he mumbled, before he broke into a run after the Spell singer, demi-cloak flapping in his wake, fire wand sparking gouts of licking flame against the dusk sky.

The spider’s front legs rose defiant as Jana advance down the slope towards their enemy. She ducked, span, and sliced across chitin the very second they descended. With a grace and speed Nemo never knew the sword slinger had, she stepped out of harm’s way, sliced backwards with her blade, and then side-saddled into a third that pierced the bone and caused the demi-god to scream with rage.

“Look out Jana, up overhead!” Lill screamed.

[Duffy]

As the spider retreated with thundering treads, its twitching maw, a festooned mouth of mandibles and slime descended like a hellish dream, hoping to snatch up its prey with a more bestial method. Jana glared up just in time to see two flashes of steel slice through one of the few soft spots on the creature. The snick of tanto into flesh sent a chill of pleasure down her spine. With her hair eschew, her sword hand singing, and her knees bent to embrace the added weight on her shoulders, she prepared a verse to add her strength to her sister’s attack.

“You will know no victory,” it trilled, gibbering and mimicking a thousand voices with one single line. A hundred, if not a thousand protagonists had said similar things in similar circumstances, real and fictional throughout the ages. The troupe had acted out most of them, lived through every aeon of torment witnessed by man. They could only smirk wildly back.

“You will know no peace,” a wad of spider silk, a thick, grey, and perilously toxic liquid fired from the creature’s mouth. A strand of razor sharp silk followed from a quickly tucked thorax and a roar of defiance that caused the creature to rush back and upwards onto its hind legs.

Nemo sprang into Jana just in time to knock her clean sideways to the right. They slammed into the rugged ground, but the bard bounced up in a monkey roll, flames still licking the dusk, eyes still piercing the stars. He ran and leapt over the smouldering slag pile, bounced on thick leather soles, and began to clamber up the nearest leg. His claws flashed into view mid-air, slicking like the creature’s legs, but finding better ground in flesh than in the arid landscape crushed of its life by magical excess.

“Lill, use a hexagram. Jana, the song!” he screamed over his shoulder. Dodging and dancing around the smashing legs, each one sharp to a point and weighing several tons, the two sisters recuperated from their charge, eyes upward, and prepared their next attack. Both kept a half eye on the bard as he climbed, hoping, praying, and dreaming he would succeed.

The lightning began to crackle in that moment, and the floating islands, detritus from the explosion caused by Caden, shook and swayed dramatically in the heavens. The blue pool, a thin, liquimetal coating to conceal the tomb of the creature rippled and bobbed like a pre-tidal wave.

“No light, no lie, and no remedy,” Jana recounted. This time, her song voice was pure and full of conviction. The sweat on her brow, the dust and dirt on her scarred knees, and the smell of iron in the air gave her purpose a sense of urgency. It gave her pitch, power, and potential.

Lill cross-crossed her hands, touched together her wrists, and swayed and chanted ancient Akashiman monograms in between evasive steps. Each one added another layer of mysticism and majesty to the over-arching strength of her spirit warder magic.

“Cease this whittling,” the spider-god roared. Seven voices echoed in its attackers minds.

Seven lines of song returned the call, defiant, hateful, and burning brighter.

“No heart or home or hearth denied, no love or soul or motion tied.”

The lightning cracked overhead, burning the ground in diamonds, coal, and nothingness. A spear-leg rose and fell once more, splitting the earth between Jana and Lill. As the rubble knocked them both flying, Nemo reached the knee joint, drove his claw deep into the chitin, and leant out, as if surveying the view from above a dense and thick canopy. He cackled madly, the smell of burning fuel thick on his nostrils, and unsheathed a dagger with no name from his belt.

The spider god’s death scream pierced the heavens.