Scholar's Mate

[Whispers of Abyssion]

The partitions rose from between them, like curtains parting to signal the first act of a play. The theatre of war lay unveiled on three stacked boards crafted from the finest teak, populated by fearsome armies sculpted lovingly from gleaming ivory and polished ebony. Mythical beasts and armoured men faced each other across stylised terrain, their weapons primed for the impending battle.

Gallievo Malvae, known as the Mistress of a Thousand and One Masks amongst Ettermire’s intellectual aristocracy, bared row upon row of serrated teeth in a sure sign of hungry pleasure.

“You gamble with your magi… in front of your mountains,” she observed flirtatiously, blinking third eyelids in a crude imitation of fluttering lashes. Not that she had lashes to flutter. No wyrmkin, not even outcast enchantresses like Gallievo, had lashes to flutter.

“You pre-empted me,” her opponent parried with nary the faintest sign of emotion, inclining his head to indicate the templars in her vanguard. Aside from that one bold move she had placed her terrain conservatively, deploying her armies around it in seamless, mutually supportive ranks. His eyes flickered like arced lightning as they played across her pieces: the clouds of harpies escorting a mighty dragon in her half of the skies, the token force of elementals holding her underworld loci. “My play to begin, I believe?”

Corone had its fast-paced monarchs to teach tactical mastery, Nippon its strategic shoban with its emphasis on capturing and reusing enemy pieces. In elvendom the military scholars studied the understated elegance of taefl, and in the dwarven halls longbeards huddled grumbling over gnukdarr and mead. But none of the games of Althanas came as close to capturing the intricacies of warfare quite like the esoteric stacked battlefields of spectrussa.

They played out their first moves in silence, their focus unwavering as the permutations unfolded. Gallievo’s templars marched forth to meet her opponent’s magi, goblins and elementals eyed each other cautiously in the caves below, and overhead her mighty dragon led the charge against the meagre force of eagles pitted against it. The third presence in the smoky parlour, a motionless mountain of stooped muscle, paid little heed to the steady clack of dancing pieces; his eyes, milky white orbs set in ebony skin, bore disinterestedly through the centre of the brewing conflict.

Within minutes the enchantress drew first blood. Gallievo captured the first of her opponent’s magi with a flourish, coquettishly teasing it about the translucent webs bridging her dextrous digits. Her opponent grunted noncommittally, and only the closest of his associates would have noted the faint touch of irritation in his mannerisms. He disguised it well, with a question.

“Does it work?”

“Hypothetically speaking… under certain controlled conditions… it should induce a positive response analogous to the desired effect.” Gallievo smiled again, forked tongue struggling to enunciate the syllables of Tradespeak even as it toyed suggestively with the tip of her ridged nose. Candlelight played upon green-hued scales, glimmering in eyes of liquid pitch-black as beautiful and as volatile as the alchemic elixirs she dabbled in. “Unfortunately… the samples I was provided with were… insufficient to determine the precise properties of the substance.”

Her opponent paused, brow furrowed faintly as he lingered over his hero. “You require more?”

After studying the situation for a moment more he retreated his piece underground, abandoning the increasingly desperate situation on the central board for the relative safety of the caves. Gallievo’s bared teeth sparkled sensuously as she pressed the offensive, pausing only to languidly nod her response.

Her dragon, ebony claws brandished wide, swooped from the skies to annihilate the phalanxes sheltering in his forests. Her mangonels broke down the walls of his stronghold, paving the way for her warriors to storm the breach, and…

Gallievo’s smile vanished.

“Very well,” he said as his hero emerged from the caves onto a mountain top, just close enough to challenge her dragon. Before she could reposition to meet the threat her most powerful unit had first been captured, then converted against her. Her aerial superiority dissipated in a heartbeat, morning mist before the rising sun.

“I am afraid… I cannot spare the time…”

“Find an expert to go in your place. Somebody good at their job, somebody who won’t be missed.”

If he took any notice of Gallievo’s loosely gaping jaw, or of the bright flash of the muscled mountain’s perfectly pearly teeth, he showed no sign. His clerics sacrificed themselves in the bowels of the underworld… and in three swift moves the daemon prince that took their place slaughtered Gallievo’s elementals and placed her own stronghold under siege.

“The road… the land is treacherous… full of danger… and the denizens there…”

“In which case, your expert will need a bodyguard.” A small, self-satisfied smile played about his lips as his daemon, his dragon, and his hero worked in tandem to corner her queen. His pleasure even reached his eyes momentarily as he leant away from the boards, fine leather armchair squeaking softly beneath his weight. “In the meantime, Gallievo, Ginuvo, I have work for you two.”

She sighed resignedly, pouted – an altogether terrifying expression upon her sleek reptilian features – and toppled her piece in submission.

“Very well…”

[Pyralis]

Pyralis knew why Gallievo hired her: she was disposable. If anything happened out here in this notorious place, few would miss her, and none would come looking... but that didn't stop her from appreciating the scenery.

The Tular Plains seemed another universe altogether from the smog-ridden, industrial mess of Ettermire. Their long voyage south taught her many things –– that the world stretched vastly larger than she'd ever imagined, that books weren't lying when they called the sky "azure" –– but most of all, she learned that she could never again rely on a library for an educated estimation of the rest of Althanas ever again. No engraving could ever capture what it was like to look out on an expanse so wide and flat that it stretched beyond the grasp of the eye's perception, formations shrinking away to pinpoints before fading into a fuzzy blur where hot earth met cool atmosphere. After only knowing the dirty gray-brown the city cast over everything, the vibrant emerald of Khu'Fein's forests shone enough to make her eyes bleed.

But, even after that, nothing compared to the salt plains. Shimmering and endless, Pyralis could look down from her horse and see her frumpy form vaguely reflected in the millions and billions of minuscule crystals, along with that delightful azure. It was like they were trekking a glass replica of the sky itself.

The dark elf's traveling companion –– "body guard", rather –– appeared far less enchanted with the geography. He slumped in his seat as they meandered onward, whistling some lazy tune. The pair had done a fine job of ignoring each other for the majority of the journey. Pyralis generally did well in maintaining her grumpy façade to compete with Kaburagi's perpetual indifference, but something about the plains undid her. Glancing to the young man, she spoke her first unsolicited words since his mistress hired her back in Ettermire.

"You must be nearsighted," she said, shielding her violet eyes from the bright sun with her left arm. She was sure she'd never get used to such concentrated light. As always, her right hand remained tucked securely into a deep pocket, the compartment modified almost like a sling. Gallievo never mentioned such an impairment; the youth played it off well.

Kaburagi turned languidly in his saddle, breaking off his tuneless whistling to suck his teeth as if seeing her for the first time. Something opaque lifted briefly from his eyes, and one eyebrow struggled to rise as if exhausted. "All the kami in Akashima," he drawled. "You can talk."

Pyralis was already bad at people, and having her poor attempt at a friendly jab returned sent her burrowing into her oversized coat as if to hide. She shrank in on herself as if made of nothing, the only hints of elf offered under that mound of dark, rumpled fabric being two thin legs and those wide eyes, peering intently from below a mess of pale, ashen hair. Frowning mouth obscured by her high collar, she floundered in awkward silence before mumbling a reply. "Have you been here before?"

He allowed himself to turn away again before replying. "No." He yawned slowly, muffling his throat against the scorching heat. "You?"

There was something about him that she didn't quite believe, but then again, that applied to most people. Her skepticism was a detriment to most of her relationships, but at least she was always honest about it. "No. This is my first time outside Ettermire."

His lips curled upwards, but if it was a smile, it did not touch his eyes. He allowed the silence to build ominously before answering over his shoulder. "Then you've chosen quite the destination, dearie. Quite the destination."

The girl didn't offer a response, but the fact of the matter was, it had chosen her. Gallievo's offer was the only chance Pyralis had to make the funds needed to do her own independent research, and she'd have taken it even if it required her to face the Tular daemons themselves.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Were it not for the jagged spires of rock jutting like the fangs of a Fallien flame-dragon into the heavens, the twin expanses of glistening white beneath their feet and cloudless pale blue overhead would have stretched boundlessly beyond the indistinguishable horizon. Thankfully the immeasurably tall towers scattered upon the sandscape provided at least some point of reference by which they could navigate. Their guide from the frontier town of Olcontre had turned back at the edge of the salt plains some two days ago, flatly refusing to venture into ‘lands infested by daemons and savages and everything in between’, and Kaburagi found himself in the unenviable position of pathfinding for their paltry party of two. The Akashiman mercenary took advantage of the swaying gait of his dun steed – unlike his companion, he preferred the sturdy plodding roll of a stubborn smart mule – to take another look at the faded parchment clasped gingerly between his grimy fingers.

After all, it was written in flowing calligraphy smaller than his little finger, and Kaburagi didn’t particularly enjoy focusing so hard.

He paused to think, and with a wheezy bray the beast beneath him did the same. He scratched his head, resting his cheek on his shoulder and frowning as if the very effort pained him, and the mule yawned lazily in turn. He returned his brown-eyed gaze to the nearest of the pillars, trying to match it to the quill-scratched markings in front of his eyes, and his steed bared its yellow teeth in sardonic mirth.

A piping voice from behind him interrupted his fruitless deliberations.

“Are you sure…”

It trailed off before it could finish, lost in the vastness between salt and sky. They’d spent the entire steam coach journey from Ettermire in prickly silence: she bewitched by the open scenery flashing by outside the window of their compartment, he taking advantage of the opportunity for lengthy slumber. Even after exchanging mode of transport for the flea-bitten nags provided for them in Olcontre, they hadn’t spoken to each other directly, instead communicating with one another by using the poor guide as an intermediary. The words he’d beaten back offhandedly not so long ago had been her very first attempt at making direct conversation, and he hadn’t exactly done much to encourage her since.

After all, if he wanted to converse with her he would have to concentrate on what she had to say, and Kaburagi didn’t particularly want to learn so much about her.

He sighed as though trying to release all the tension from his muscular chest, scratching his head once more, forehead furrowed as he searched for the right words. Flakes of dry skin fell like snow onto tattered Akashiman robes of dirty maroon, where they disappeared amidst the caked filth of a long path from home. Bushy brows knitted in an expression that could be taken either as boredom or puzzlement, and for a fleeting instant his broad features resembled something ridiculously bovine, like one of the water yaks that inhabited the river deltas near Etheria Port.

“Ummm…” he drawled, half grunt and half groan. His mule yawned again in mocking mimicry. “Should be beyond that peak there. Or the next one, maybe. No… the first one. Beyond the first one.”

The fingers of Kaburagi’s left hand played upon the hilt of the long slender blade he wore at his waist. The map fluttered forlornly in his right as he gestured in what he assumed to be the correct direction. His features distorted even further as his eyes crumpled into folded shadow, and she joined him in squinting in the same direction. Not that either of them could make out anything beyond the harsh mineral glare. The blanket of brilliant, relentless white fought back against their probing senses, refusing to give up the secrets hidden in its mirror-like depths. Unsurprisingly, Kaburagi gave up the ghost fairly quickly.

After all, focusing on the shimmering haze allowed it to seep into his skull like some insidious plague – no matter how the dark elf girl proclaimed to admire the manner in which he dealt with the sun – and Kaburagi didn’t particularly enjoy dealing with waxing headaches.

“Best be careful,” he continued slowly, lazily kicking his heels into the mule’s flanks. It snorted coarsely, recalcitrant for the briefest of moments, before obediently resuming its steady plod across the crusty flats. “At best, we only have to deal with quagmire and quicksand, maybe the occasional roc or sand wyrm. At worst…”

He allowed the dearly departed guide’s fears to dwell unsaid in her mind, to mingle there with the waves of heat rising headily from the ground.

“Now, maybe if we’re lucky enough to make contact with the natives, you’d be able to talk some sense into them before they riddle us with poisonous darts. Or maybe we’d be lucky, and they’d only be coated with some sort of paralysing toxin rather than one that kills you twice over in three seconds flat. Or maybe… but I digress. At least then we won’t have to deal with the daemons. I’ve heard that their hospitality can be most… unpleasant.”

There. He’d talked enough for a while. Perhaps he’d even successfully satisfied his quota for conversation for the day. Salty sweat beaded and frothed in his mouth, and he had to force himself not to take a sip from their precious water bottles. He didn’t know when they’d be able to fill them again, especially if he hadn’t managed to read the map correctly.

He only hoped that he had, and that he’d successfully located an entrance to the underground caves favoured by the indigenous savages. Their long, incessant war with the invading daemons had driven them from the land they had once called their own, simultaneously transforming it into a barely-hospitable shadow of what it had once been. But at the same time the caves they had fled to hosted a veritable menagerie of exotic insects and fungi, and the tribes had quickly learnt to cultivate and harvest the most useful for their purposes, including the particular specimen that the Mistress of a Thousand and One Masks had tasked them to find. The success of their expedition rested in great part on finding such a cave and gaining the cooperation of those who tended those subterranean gardens.

Or else they could be stuck out in the open for a great while longer. Which couldn’t be a good thing given that they couldn’t really return to Ettermire without the requisite samples… and the further they travelled into the Tular Plains, the greater the risk they ran of encountering something deadly with lots and lots of teeth.

After all, he found dying to be nothing short of a major pain in the backside, and Kaburagi had enough of the latter simply sitting in the saddle all day, thank you very much.

[Pyralis]

Pyralis' butt hurt. Tense hunch gave way to resigned slump as the hours crept by in that miserable saddle, hours which somehow turned into days, all blurs in the frayed edges of her awareness. To her relief, Kaburagi's inspirations to chat occurred few and far between, but she found the more time that passed, the easier it was to converse with him. Energy she might have spent on social anxiety redistributed to a feverish series of silent philosophical musings only wrought by the truest state of ennui. And then, when she tired even of that, she found herself concentrating wearily on the sheer effort required just to exist in such mind numbing nothingness.

About once per day, the landscape shifted. Salt flats tapered into a coarse, glittering silt speckled with some ebon mineral, and by the end of the current afternoon, sparse vegetation crept up through the shadowy cracks. Pyralis silently mused that each measly patch of yellowed green marked the spot where someone like her, at the brink of losing every damn they had ever possibly given about their errand on the Plains, simply fell off their horse and died. The wiry grass represented the last struggle of their will, stretching for the sky as if the wind might sweep them up and deliver them home. She never thought she'd miss the perpetual dankness of her sewer kip until her balm ran low and her skin threatened to crack open in painful imitation of the parched earth.

During one of their brief stretches, the elf caught Kaburagi staring at the ground with his back turned to her. One single thread of grass peaked through the crumbling dirt, brushing the tip of his toe.

"In the winter, it rains," she said without thinking, voice cracking from disuse and desperate dryness. "Parts of the plains flood for weeks, sometimes months. This must be a seasonal lakebed."

He redirected his dark eyes to the spires in the distance and raised his hand to them, the closest now as tall as his thumb. Such progress seemed satisfactory, as he betrayed no discouragement. "And where'd you hear that?"

"Book," she replied simply. This was shaping up to be the most natural conversation they'd had yet.

"And in the summer?" he prodded, now staring at his faded map. It crinkled in the breeze, something which might have eased the heat, but instead stirred the insufferable air like a convection oven.

Certain he meant to turn this into another laundry list of the dangers they faced, Pyralis hesitated to bite. "This is it. Dry, and…" she trailed off, though the intonation didn't suggest it was out of the usual fit of conversational awkwardness. This time, it was distraction.

"And?"

"Kaburagi…" Pyralis muttered, and finally he looked up from his parchment. She gaped, and he glanced past her stirring mass of ill-fit clothing toward the approaching storm. "Black blizzard."

It rolled toward them from the east in a horizontal avalanche of doom, clouds of dust so thick and high that it overcame the spotless sky with premature night. It flew silent, the still earth giving no warning to its heedless inhabitants, as if playing part in an intricate snare orchestrated by the Plains themselves. The elf could have sworn she glimpsed something move within the shadows, independent from the turbulence, airborne –– but then, leaving her in doubt, it faded away into the terrific darkness.

By the time she managed to pull her eyes away, Kaburagi had abandoned his navigation and discovered new occupation in tearing the luggage from his mule. The nervous energy incited it to dig at the ground with its hooves. "The tent," he commanded his slower colleague. "Get the tent."

[Pyralis]

When it finally fell over them, the pair of travelers had buckled down under a tarp of waxed canvas, utilizing pikes and their own body weight to pin it down. Pyralis huddled alongside the sternly silent man within the meager pit they'd dug in haste, hoping to burrow just deep enough that the fierce wind wouldn't simply turn them into non-aerodynamic tumbleweeds. She coddled her bad arm against her stomach, the other curled protectively over her head.

They knew the storm had fully descended as they lost the last bit of sunshine that filtered through the cotton weave to blackness. This abyss possessed a limbo between the conscious and subconscious, real and surreal, existence and the void. Pyralis contemplated nothing as she floated through, her mind blank until she almost imagined she'd open her eyes and be back home in the tunnels under Ettermire… almost.

The elf knew not how long it lasted, only that it eclipsed the remainder of the daylight hours. They emerged from their half-submerged cocoon into crystalline night, bitterly cold and endlessly empty. The landscape had shifted and the grass long gone, ripped from the roots and buried under black sand. Every inch of her felt coated in grit and Pyralis peeled away her layers of clothing, removing enough that the sharp angles of her boney shoulders gave away her great secret: that there was, indeed, an actual elf beneath the multitudes of tunics and overcoats and scarves. With some difficulty, she shook a miniature maelstrom of sand from each article, then layered them back on. Through all of this she took special care to keep her lame limb from the man's line of sight, but even if he noticed, he carried on with the same defining indifference he'd borne since the beginning.

As Kaburagi took stock of the supplies they'd managed to save, the elf went for a walk, retrieving bits of forgotten packs they'd left to the mercy of the storm. She didn't feel particularly guilty about having abandoned the animals until she reached the edge of a drift, a shallow peak of silt and sand which flowed gently down into a cradle for the mangled remains of her horse. The wrong end of one knobby, white leg jut from the embrace of its untimely grave, the coagulated maroon and black of its stump speckled with bright stars of that fine, glistening ebon.

She didn't know how it went just from looking, but she had a feeling she and Kaburagi had narrowly missed a fate much worse than death by dust.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

“We don’t have enough food left to go back,” Kaburagi told her bluntly when she returned. Casting a critical eye over her beneath the wan sliver moon, he noted that she had somehow managed to grow even paler in the past few minutes. On the other hand, he honestly neither cared much for what she might have seen, nor did he have any desire to coddle her from the stark truth of their situation.

“What does that…”

A humourless grin creased his features. He turned back to the salvaged supplies laid out in front of him, and began wrapping them in the tent that had saved their lives.

“It means that I really do hope you can talk to those natives, because otherwise we’ll never get back to beds and baths and beers. Speaking of which…” Pausing for only a moment to toss her a flask, he didn’t see her very nearly lose it in the tricky shadowcast starlight. “Be careful with how much you drink, because we don’t have any more of that left either.”

Having separated the meagre remains of their expedition into two bundles, one considerably larger than the other, he stood to languidly stretch a niggling crick in his back. She took the opportunity to fix him with her best glare, likely as not trying to determine how serious he was. He watched calmly as her expression flickered through a swift spectrum of surprise, disbelief, anger, and fear, before finally settling in resigned acceptance. Stifling a yawn and trying not to breathe too deeply of the gritty sand, Kaburagi nodded in patronising approval when she stomped silently over to retrieve the smaller pack.

He hefted his own bundle over his shoulder, giving her a coarse wink of encouragement in the process.

“We’ve got one path now, and it’s...”

Fishing into the folds of his bedraggled robes, Kaburagi retrieved the one item that had never left his side even during the darkest and most desperate minutes of the black blizzard. A quick glance at the stars overhead pointed him in the correct direction.

“That way.”

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Right foot forward. The bundle of supplies slapped sweatily against his back.

Left foot forward. Lacquered wood, the scabbard of the blade he wore at his waist, batted in bruising impact against his thighs.

Right foot forward. The ground at the top of the rise gave way, and he sank in the salty sand up to his ankles. Steadying himself, he braced his left leg to pull free.

Right foot forward. This time it held, and he looked down and back over his shoulder to make sure that Pyralis had taken note of the patch of treacherous ground.

She met his gaze defiantly, exhaustion obvious in the cast of her eyes but the set of her jaw stubborn and unyielding. They’d barely stopped walking since the storm, save the two times they’d had to drop dead in the shimmering sands to evade an overflying roc. She’d stuck doggedly to his shadow during the searing day, prowling in his footsteps during the bone-chilling night, and had made her water last for nearly thirty hours before he’d tossed her a second (and last) flask.

Now, at last, he could make out their destination.

A lone jagged spire speared into the pale cloudless sky, casting a long shadow upon another of Pyralis’s seasonal lakebeds. Years of harsh wind and rain had smoothed its surfaces until it burnt like the burnished bronze of a Berevaran basilisk beneath the twilight. Approaching from the north, they had a good view of the stark contrast between light and gloom, a dichotomy that reflected the very beauty and danger inherent in the Tular Plains. The stench of rot and dead fish lay heavy upon the windless flats, and aside from the crunch of pristine salt beneath their feet the silence lay equally tense.

Shielding his eyes against the glare, he peered closer at the base of the dragon’s fang. There, the layered redrocks parted in a number of natural arches, leading onwards into darkness unknown. His brow furrowed in thought as he contemplated the scene, lips pursed above the grimy gristle on his chin. Beady eyes flickered from parchment to landscape to parchment again. He turned it upside down, but it only made the situation worse, so he turned it back again. Then he nodded, firmly, as if he had been sure of it all along.

An outstretched arm indicated the direction as Pyralis joined him in cresting the dune. She gave him a queer look, no doubt having witnessed his antics of a moment ago, but she lacked the energy to argue. Shaking her head in resignation, mutely she began the slow trudge down. Words were a frivolous luxury here, swallowed whole by the blinding sun and the boundless sky, especially given their swiftly dwindling supply of water.

Kaburagi paused for a moment before following, tasting upon his tongue the bitter rankness of lands left to swelter and decay. The glistening sands spread from his feet to the far horizon, reflecting in their mirror-like sheen the flaring cloudless skies overhead. Scattered rock spires bridged the gap between earth and heavens, and once again he convinced himself that the pattern they formed matched the landmarks upon their map.

As he gazed out across the open flats, flickering blackness caught his eye, the vaguest of smudges in the distance. As if on a whim he removed from the folds of his robes a shard of glass, carefully adjusting his wrists such that it reflected the dying sun in the direction of the onrushing blizzard. Nothing responded, of course, and he shrugged wryly as he replaced the trinket in its inside pocket.

Grunting in effort as he re-shouldered his burden, he tapped his scabbard twice, relishing the hollow harmony his fingers played upon the lacquered wood. Then, before Pyralis disappeared too far in the distance, he picked up his feet to follow.

[Pyralis]

At first, Pyralis disregarded it as a trick by desperate eyes, nothing but a mirage… but as they neared, the shadowy entrance under the monolithic spear of stone grew unmistakably deep and dark. With the last of the sun's light to guide them through its threshold, they reached it, and Pyralis shared a glance of wordless relief with her ever aloof companion.

Such a feeling was short lived, however, as this native outpost appeared to be deserted, and the stench that had reached them so many yards away boasted more than the rot of ill-fated fish.

While signs of civilization were spare outside the cavern, within its entry, culture flourished –– or at least it had, until recently. Intricate murals of beasts covered every inch of the walls and ceiling, scrawled in shades of red and brown and a rich indigo-black, save parts which had been blurred by smoke. Ashes danced with the wind across the earthen floor, cold coals strewn amongst charred shards of pottery, bone, and other remainders of an undoubtedly uninvited bonfire. Few manmade artifacts had survived it in a recognizable state.

What had survived, to Pyralis' dismay, were the corpses. Several occupied the heart of the mess, very little left of them aside their blaze-blackened skeletons. They piled together, indistinguishable from one another in a molten heap. Two other elves, too young and small to have put up much of a fight, laid crumpled against the cavern wall where they'd been gutted. Though the most whole of the lot, scavengers had abused what was left, leaving festering gaps where they'd infested their ashen flesh. As the travelers disturbed the macabre sanctity of the space, she could have sworn she saw a handful of unidentifiable critters skittering back inside their gaping torsos to nest. Most disconcerting of all, however, were the remaining three souvenirs of the massacre: skins, discarded as if nothing but dirty laundry, and much older than the others could possibly have been. Leathery from exposure, the husks would have been difficult to recognize save the carefully preserved bipedal proportions. They were people once, murdered and mutilated into the horrific guise of elf-shaped costumes.

Pyralis found herself truly speechless as she took in the ruin. She'd lived in Ettermire's sewers amongst mutants, beasts and elves and in between. She had witnessed many a tragedy through her precarious closeness to the dark city's underworld, the young elf was no stranger to graphic scenes… but she'd never witnessed something quite so harrowing. Perhaps it was the alien environment, the lack of control, the pervasive strangeness. Kaburagi remained silent next to her, but she couldn't tear her eyes away from the children to gauge his reaction. They reminded her too much of Lufe and Virny. She missed her family of foundlings to the point of pain, and it settled over her chest as if it might crush through her ribs and do her in right there.

Seconds became minutes as she stared, all ticking past deaf ears. They felt like hours, but she knew it hadn't been long as the light hadn't quite disappeared. The sun merely sunk lower on the horizon behind them, casting longer shadows over the little elves' restful features. One convulsed, twitching as something writhed invisibly within his cold body, and a maggot escaped one of his breathless nostrils. Pyralis made a noise, something between a retch and a sob, and finally broke her gaze. She turned away.

"What now?"

[Whispers of Abyssion]

A hollow eye socket writhing in grisly infestation.

A blood-caked shadow gnawing on a half-eaten skull.

Empty husks of what had once been sentient beings, drained of life and tossed aside like so much rubbish.

Monsters with the shape of men, savagely warped by the despoiled depths of the underearth.

The stench of damp and rot and latrine pits.

A funeral pall of smoke and ash, rising from a field of charred flesh and molten bone.

The stark horizon between sooty spell-trace and the painted cavern wall.

The seething mass of panicked innocents, and the mindless wordless screams as they died in their droves.

Shards of darksteel, glimmering like specks of obsidian in the blood-churned mud.

Sticky tar clogging his blade, dripping to the floor in an uncertain battle beat.

It wasn’t so bad. He’d seen worse before…

It wasn’t so bad. He’d seen worse before…

… the day the Utsusemi, Those who Rise from the Depths, overwhelmed the realm of Choson.

… the Night of Nefarious Flame, the night Natosatael obliterated Naniwa.

Kaburagi blinked once, clearing his mind of the nightmares that nobody else could see. Then, with no more emotion than if he were taking tea at a roadside stall in Akashima, he cleared his throat, spat precious saliva into the earth at his feet, and spoke.

“They must have had a water supply somewhere. We look for that.”

For those who had died here, the mercenary spared nought more but one last parting thought. Keen brown eyes settled upon a shapeless mass of skinless seared meat and bone: a dozen flailing limbs mangled into one. A grim smile touched his pale lips as his mind drew the correspondence with the abandoned skins.

But the dead were dead, and first he had to look to those still living. He and Pyralis too would perish within the day if they could not refill their drained water skins. Left hand wrapped taut about lacquered ebony scabbard, he stepped with deliberate precision through the gruesome ruins of the indigenous community. Cinders crumbled beneath his sandals, sending dusty puffs into the pooled glow of his torch.

“Keep an eye out for those samples,” he called over his shoulder, words echoing discordantly as he ventured deeper into the cavern. “Gallievo would be mighty displeased with us if…”

Flames flickered.

Something moved in the corner of his vision.

Something large. Something looming.

Something with a glowing white glare, couched in an ebony visage of sheer fury.

“Abomination!”

[Pyralis]

It took Pyralis a long moment to catch up to Kaburagi, as if she had feared to cross the threshold and join this realm of the tortured dead. The elf focused on picking her way over the wreckage, eyes fixed on the ground as she avoided her compulsion to get a closer glance of the children. She finally reached her comrade's side and looked up to him with hesitance, his own gaze fixed in the shadows.

"Kaburagi?" she reached, her voice small and tentative in the cavern.

He looked over to her, not a single twitch of muscle betraying his thoughts, and pushed them onward. "Water."

The cave tapered into a tunnel, which split into few others. Naturally formed crags of stone and earth offered perfectly human sized passages for its unlikely inhabitants, as well as innumerable places to hide. They saw everything through the lantern's wash of muddy gold-gray, dramatic shadows harkening ominously in the distance, hinting at company no matter how isolated and empty it all seemed. To their relief, the air grew cooler as they descended under the plains, clean and so perfectly still along the well-trodden paths.

Eventually a draft brushed past, and Pyralis shuddered. "Did you feel that?"

The man grunted, holding the torch up and out, and they watched the most subtle of breezes catch at the flame and pull it back from whence they came. It was as if the fire knew where they headed and wanted no part of their foolhardy mission, attempting unsuccessful escape to the surface. "This way," he said, taking them down a narrow offshoot.

Lo and behold, it led to a small cavern, and within it, a deep, impossibly dark pit. Above this, the natives had built a frame, a great length of precious rope coiled around a simple crank and ending in a hook. Multiple vessels sat at the edge of the drop, some clay, some devised from what appeared to be hollowed out insect carapaces. Someone had strung heavy cord over the tops of each, and Pyralis couldn't help herself. She gasped, and it echoed down into the abyss. "A well!"

Kaburagi approached with caution, the draft holding him back from the pit like an invisible wall. He pushed through, hair and clothing tousled, and knelt in an attempt to peer down into it with his torch. It revealed no information, too deep to contemplate, and he pulled away before it extinguished the flame.

"Do you think…" Pyralis hesitated, as if angry with herself for thinking it. "Could they have done something to it? I've read about massacres before, kill off who you can and spoil the water supply to take care of the rest."

The man considered her words for a moment, perhaps knowing something she didn't, and reached for one of the clay pots. "We shall have to find out," he replied simply, and hooked it onto the contraption. It took minutes to lower it, to the point that Pyralis began to wonder if there was anything at all. But eventually, as they began to run out of rope, Kaburagi noticed a stark difference in weight. He cranked the lever until the vessel returned, something beautifully cool and clear and wet dripping from a crack in the base. The elf could have wept from gratitude, but held herself back for caution's sake. Her partner did no such thing, drawing it directly to his lips and taking a long draught as she watched on in horror.

"It's fine," he assured her, offering it. She accepted it, not appearing particularly convinced, and with his hands free, Kaburagi retrieved the water skins for refilling. "If you don't drink it, you will die anyhow," he reminded her, "so what's the harm?"

With a curt little sigh, Pyralis gave in and pressed the damp pottery to her lips. The water was so cold it shocked her teeth, but she'd never tasted anything so delicious.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

It took all of Kaburagi’s considerable willpower to maintain outward composure, and thus, to stay in character. Cold sweat trickled down his haughty brow, mingling with the drops of clear water spilling from his bristling chin. His eyes, empty mirrors into the dark soul that lay within, fought to keep focused and contracted. He clamped down on his breathing so hard that the effort nearly asphyxiated him.

He couldn’t allow his expression to betray him to Pyralis. He had no idea how she would react, and he couldn’t allow her to jeopardise the mission. They’d come too far for that.

Forcing his fingers not to tremble, he twisted shut the last of the stoppers on the water skins. He could feel blank white orbs boring unflinchingly into the back of his skull from somewhere in the nearby darkness, the pain and heat of the abomination’s attention drilling a growing hole in his mind. He could sense that it no longer travelled alone, the pheromone trace of its passage attracting its kin like a pride of Kebiran arachnoant nymphs stalking their prey. He could imagine the pack of daemons closing in through the deflagrated ruins, the figurative hangman’s noose around their necks.

They could not go back. Even if they could somehow evade the daemons, returning to Ettermire empty-handed would still mean their death. They, or rather their benefactors, had risked too much.

They had to head on.

He turned back to Pyralis, absently noting how she savoured every sweet drop as she drained the vessel. Having spent so long in polluted Ettermire, no wonder she appreciated the purity of the water from the underground reservoir. Straining his hearing, he even caught her mumbling beneath her breath about how she wished she could save some of it for “the kids”.

By the time she looked up, her eyes swimming dreamily, his attention had returned to the well. Scratching lazily at the coarse hairs on his chest, he braced against the draft again to peer into the bottomless pit. Like a swarm of hungry Haidian imps the wind tore at his scalp, preventing him from getting a close look.

But if his hunch was correct…

“Let’s say that you’ve been living here for years. That you’ve been at war for all that time, and you have no idea when you might be attacked and decimated. What’s the one thing you wouldn’t be without?”

“… some sort of warning alarm…?”

Kaburagi shook his head impatiently, dry flakes of dandruff falling upon his dirty robes. He took a deep, patient breath of the rot and damp.

“Something more important. Something that would actually allow you to survive and live on.”

Comprehension dawned in eyes the colour of a cloud caught in the first rays of sunrise. The shadows upon Pyralis’s hollow cheeks flickered haphazardly beneath the wavering torches.

“A bolthole.”

“Indeed,” he confirmed, stepping back from the edge of the precipice to rummage through his pack. He emerged with another pair of torches, and immediately set about lighting them. “And where would you build such a bolthole?”

“Umm…”

“In a desert like this? Where the most precious resource is…”

“Water.” Pyralis’s stunned expression turned to the wet clay held between her hands, her whispered realisation almost lost amidst the howling draft. “You don’t mean to say…”

Now holding no less than three lit torches, Kaburagi stepped back to the edge of the well. “And what does this wind mean?”

“That there’s another exit somewhere below.” Try as she might, she couldn’t prevent a hint of excitement from entering her voice. After all that had gone wrong in their adventure so far, he couldn’t really blame her for seizing on probably the first thing to fall in their favour. “So you’re saying that…”

In response, Kaburagi nonchalantly tossed the first of his torches over the side of the pit. It didn’t last long before the ceaseless wind put out the flame, and a further eternity passed before a soft plop echoed from below. But both he and Pyralis knew what to look for this time, and they found it together: steps, slick with some form of cave moss, cunningly carved and concealed into the side of the well.

He tossed the second torch, more carefully than the first. It landed heavily on a camouflaged step not so far down, and for a moment he feared that he would have to try again as its flame sputtered and choked. But eventually it held, casting merry silhouettes upon the smooth pit walls as shapeless somethings scuttled clear. Pyralis answered for both of them when she exhaled in echoing relief.

Hefting the third torch high and bracing himself once more against the updraft, he pointed to the first of the steps. The sightless orbs of his daemonic shadow followed the movement briefly before reverting to drilling through the back of his skull.

“That way.”

[Pyralis]

Pyralis had encouraged herself with the reassuring line of wisdom that the first step of anything is always the hardest. But unfortunately, as she took her second and third and fourth, she realized with increased anxiety that such a saying did not apply to this particular trek.

The tiny elf clung face first to the smooth, stone wall as she followed Kaburagi, his attitude ever-infuriatingly stoic as he ambled on ahead. She thought for sure this abyss was out to kill them. The wind whistled louder as they descended until the noise grew disorienting; the mossy stairs felt strange underfoot and Pyralis couldn't help but wonder if her next step would be her last, sending her plummeting into the seemingly bottomless darkness. Her skin prickled, every bit of stimuli overwhelming.

The descent felt like it lasted an age. Eventually, their torches threatened to give out against the unrelenting breeze, their precarious flickering only making the journey more perilous. Pyralis wondered if they'd erred, if they'd soon find themselves at a dead end and, worse, wit's end.

But, as the enigmatic man predicted, they did not. At long last, the pair reached a landing, a slab of stone so deep that Pyralis could finally relax enough to realize her legs were trembling.

Before them stretched a tunnel, narrow and deep and so very dark. Air pressure coaxed them in more effectively than the elf's stunned reasoning, and before they knew it, they were climbing further down into the belly beneath the plains.

Another age passed.

This tunnel reminded Pyralis of the ones she called home back in the sewers of Ettermire. Cramped, dank places had become a comfort through the years; claustrophobia simply wasn't in her nature, at least not anymore. But she grew so dreadfully weary as they walked with no end in sight.

"Light," Kaburagi muttered so quietly she nearly didn't catch it over the distant howl of the well.

Pyralis peered around his narrow figure in disbelief, her eyes struggling to catch this detail through the haze of the torches. They needed a moment to adjust to the darkness down the tunnel, but soon enough…

"Light!" she echoed, louder than appropriate as she earned a sharp glare from the serious man. For the first time, she sensed him to be on edge. She couldn't blame him; their first encounter with the elves who'd made this place their home could make or break not only their mission, but whether they'd ever see home again afterwards. "I'll walk ahead now," Pyralis volunteered.

Kaburagi didn't stop her as she squeezed by him in the tight space. After all, her appearance was half the reason she'd been selected for this mission. Resources didn't exist for whatever language these plains dwellers spoke, nor their culture or customs –– at least not in the famous libraries in Ettermire. All they could hope that seeing another dark elf in a place populated by daemons and beasts would be enough to earn their trust, or if not that, at least their consideration.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

How far had they descended into the very bowels of the earth? The weight of the world pressed down upon his shoulders, crushing his languorous mask beneath tonnes of rock and soil. The urge to jump at every flickering shadow, to squirm at every unheard echo, nearly choked the air from his lungs. Only the flaming torch kept the insanity at bay, brandished before him like a fencing sabre.

How much further did the tunnels lead? Even sewer-bred Pyralis soon tired of their endless length. Jagged rocks pressed in upon them and threatened to swallow them whole, sometimes even succeeding in scouring skin from their limbs as they forged forth their path even deeper into the ground. Every step spilt cold tears from the tunnel ceiling, every whisper baiting the ominous silence into encroaching.

Who would find them first, the predators or their prey? Had they successfully lost the daemons on their trail, or did their pursuers simply bide their time? Would the natives they hoped to find down here welcome them into their midst, or had they already been hunted and decimated? And the rats he had sent dancing upon their threads, ploys within schemes within ruses… would they hold true when the guillotine finally fell?

Still, at least they had water now, and some rations. If their sanity held, they might survive for days. If they stooped to scraping the mossy lichens from the walls and gathering the sickly brown fungi…

And now light. Warmth and hope beyond the meagre protection offered by their torches. A sickly pale glow in comparison to the relentless beat of sun on glimmering salt pan, but light nonetheless.

Pyralis pushed forward to take point.

And only then did Kaburagi realise the bristling wall of sharp points that surrounded them.

“Pyralis…” he began slowly, unused voice catching hoarsely in the depths of his throat. Only words of steadying calm would keep them alive for longer than the next five heartbeats. Bloodlusted daemons whooped and hooted, screeched and screamed, but never spoke in languid, mellow tones. “Whatever you do, do not make any sudden moves.”

“What are you…” Pyralis’s understandably confused retort met a sharp death. Her eyes went wide, caught like amethysts in the half-light. Poison-tipped flint spearheads jabbed threateningly at the jewels, poising just a hair’s breadth from her face.

“Step forward. Very, very slowly.” He wobbled on the last syllable, torn between cursing their luck and blessing their misfortune. At least they had reached the natives before the daemons had reached them. Crucially, though, would they survive the encounter? “Slowly now, only as far as you dare…”

She raised her hand to hush him, in control of the situation once more. Stepping up to the hedge of spears, she very carefully raised empty hands to show that she meant no harm. Unblinking eyes tracked her every move, gleaming hungrily in the shadows. Then, in Alerian enunciated clearly enough for even Kaburagi to understand, she spoke.

“We mean you no harm.” Pausing to gauge their reaction, she received only hostile silence in return. Frowning slightly, she changed tack. “We are travellers from the distant north. We offer what aid we can to your struggle.”

Her words, or perhaps the language she spoke in, sent a belated shiver of fear and apprehension through the circle of hunters. Bent of back and long of digit and limb, unkempt scraggly hair spilling from pallid pates, they still possessed the pointed ears and lithe frames and slanted eyes of their distant elven kin. The pigmentation of their skin, sickly green in the underground glow, hinted at how long ago they had branched off from the ‘fallen’ elves who had fled Raiaera during the War of the Tap. Dilated pupils, brilliantly adapted to their lives so far from the sun, gave them the appearance of filthy grey tarsiers transported from the jungles of southern Dheathain.

At length, one of their number stepped out to meet Pyralis: a woman naked save for the tribal tattoos adorning her face and torso. Kaburagi guessed that their intricacy marked her out as the leader of the patrol, perhaps even quite a high-ranking member of their society. Gaunt and shrivelled, she would not have been attractive even if scrubbed clean and dressed in the most provocative of fashion. Here, however, she commanded the men as if a goddess.

“You bring the darkness.” They could barely understand her stilted speech, her lisp pronounced and her grammar archaic. “You bring the doom.”

Kaburagi frowned, and gambled. In halting Alerian of his own he said, “We were not followed, if that…”

His jaw snapped shut as every last spear in the wall bristled in his direction. Obviously a matriarchal society, they assumed that Pyralis held the reins of leadership here.

“You bring the doom,” the woman repeated, saucer-like pupils hemming the elf from all directions.

[Pyralis]

"No," Pyralis disagreed, her palms still upturned to emphasize their harmlessness. She watched as the flickering torchlight incited squints from those pupil-dominated eyes and wondered what amazing sensory adaptations had surfaced in their time underground. It made her feel unashamed of her lame arm, the stony texture of her affected hand visible in the dim light. These people may not have been so different from she and the rest of her mutant gang who hid under Ettermire, after all. "We bring help."

Perhaps the empathy came through in her voice for their leader's posture eased nigh imperceptibly, just enough to signal to the others to lower their spears. Unfortunately, Pyralis' relief didn't last long.

Something ached within the earth, a low groan which sent tremors through the walls and shook droplets of water in a rain upon their heads. One of the guards winced at the sudden chill; others turned their heads, though it appeared that they angled their ears more than their eyes. Pyralis earned an accusatory glance from the shriveled woman before she turned, and the other elves swept past her to flee down the remainder of the tunnel.

"The doom?" Pyralis ventured, eyes wide and brow creased as their torches struggled through the misting.

The woman stared at her pointedly over her sharply angled shoulder, as if she finally grasped the intruders' naivete. "No," she said, and then she tossed Kaburagi a cold glance. "You may come only without flame."

Pyralis relinquished her torch first, lifting it to catch one of the many small springs which originated in the ceiling. It sizzled and smoldered, then as she set it down onto the ground, went cold in the puddle which had collected there. Kaburagi followed suit, and soon the pair found themselves floundering after the strange elves in the darkness. Just as Pyralis began to fear that they'd lose them, their pace so unnervingly swift as they scurried through the shadowy depths without misstep or question of their hazardous surroundings, her eyes adjusted and her breath caught in her throat.

A sheen coated the surrounding stone in patches which glowed like light shining through a frosty pane of glass, tinted ever so slightly in an alien blue. Some of the mold had rubbed off onto Pyralis' hands and coat as she'd groped her way through the tunnel and she realized with fascination that she now glimmered along with the walls. A warning briefly flashed through her mind that the substance may have been poisonous, but she was too focused on the trek to pay it much heed.

Now that their eyes had adjusted, the yellow light just steps away shone brighter, transforming from jaundiced glow into a wash of true gold. And then, at the edge of the vast cavern beyond, the strangers finally witnessed its source.

Luminescent mushrooms studded the sides of the organic cathedral, each meager in radiance on its own, but collectively effective enough to deliver a low but functional ambient light to the immense space. The walls bore nearly two dozen holes and curious faces peered out from the inky eyelets, each shadow-obscured profile as uncanny as the last. If Pyralis didn't know better, she may have mistaken them for the daemons.

Here, where fungi flourished as one might cultivate herbs in a garden, the overwhelming odor of must was many-faceted. It wafted almost florally through the oddly unstill air, offering hints of musk and earth and decay. It churned Pyralis' mind as well as her stomach.

"Thank you for welcoming us," she said gratefully in her carefully enunciated Alerian, offering the woman a half-bow of compliant respect. "My name is Pyralis. This man is Kaburagi."

The cluster around the crone had dispersed, filtering into the shadowy crypts where expectant faces continued to watch on. She stood as straight as her crooked body could manage, much more regal than she'd seemed in the tunnel, and offered her own name. "G'eld," she placed her palm on her chest. "Hive Mother."

[Whispers of Abyssion]

G'eld.

Kaburagi stifled an involuntary snort, recognising the name from its proto-elven root. It meant 'spider', and although not entirely inappropriate for their unwitting hosts, it was not quite the word he himself would have used to describe them.

Bla's.

Termites. Colonies of scavengers, feeding off dead plants, fungi, and dung. Hiding from the sun in their labyrinthine nests, scurrying from the predators that hunted their delicate flesh. The moist cave breeze, cool upon the subterranean slime coating his forearms, carried with it the stench of their barbarism and their paranoia.

Smiling at his own private joke, vaguely he tried to pay attention to Pyralis's earnest explanation of who they were, why they were here, what they could offer, and what they wanted in return. But though he admired how she stirred fact and fiction into a believable cocktail of half-truths suiting everybody from G'eld to Mistress Gallievo, he soon found himself drifting aimlessly away from the two elven women. He didn't particularly enjoy making introductions. Or small talk. Or talking in general, for that matter.

His saving grace was that the opal eyes had retreated for now from his consciousness, which indicated that the abomination had stopped stalking him and that they were safe here. He didn't know how he knew, he just knew. Relief at his newfound safety almost caused him to leak his bladder. Instead, he scrunched up his brow, wiped his hands on his slick filthy robes, and tried to study his surroundings.

The holes in the wall that the hunchbacked natives called home intrigued him. Crouching low for a closer look, he retrieved from his robes once more the shard of polished glass, using it this time to redirect some of the golden glow into one of the deep clefts. His amusement only increased as its inhabitant squealed in pain and fear, trying to bury its face into the earth away from the shining light. Claw-like fingers scrabbled furiously until the jagged rocks drew pinkish blood.

"Hey! Stop playing with that!"

Pyralis's hiss from the corner of her mouth distracted him from the creature's torment. He shrugged, stood, and nonchalantly flashed the mirrored glass at the far wall of the cavern. Focused illumination played prettily upon the patterned fungi, heedless of Pyralis's struggle to keep a thoroughly disapproving glare from dominating her expression. But his movements caught G'eld's attention.

"Ay! Soul-stealing glass!" Anger flashed through the crone's unnaturally wide pupils, somehow conveying disapproval as stony as the mountains of rock over their heads. "Not allowed! Destroy!"

"Why?" Kaburagi frowned slowly, twisting his broad features in ludicrous confusion that mirrored his growing headache. "It's only a trinket..."

G'eld's arm snaked forward like whipcord before he could finish the sentence. Sinewy fingers smashed the glass from his hands. For ages it seemed to hang in the humid cavern air, until it shattered upon the stone floor into a thousand sharp splinters, each reflecting a chosen facet of the ongoing congress overhead. Not satisfied, G'eld's calloused heel then ground every last shard into dust, until the mud and the filth swallowed the glimmering crystals whole.

"... damn, that was my favourite trinket, too," Kaburagi spat sourly, somewhat appalled at the destruction wanton and absolute. His coarse mien clouded and furrowed as he bunched up his meaty fists, making to square up to G'eld. The Hive Mother, shorter than Kaburagi by two whole handspans and wiry where the mercenary was muscular, glared back with equal dislike. "Why did you have to..."

Pyralis stepped between them, making frantic hushing motions at Kaburagi at the same time as trying to appease the smouldering G'eld. "I'm sorry, so sorry, for my companion's rudeness," she placated the former, simultaneously hissing, "their home, their rules," at the unrepentant mercenary.

Sulking, and mindful of the spearheads that glanced interestedly in the direction of the confrontation, Kaburagi muttered a few choice Akashiman obscenities and withdrew. Searching around for something else to distract him from his loss, he found what he sought at the far end of the underground chamber. Curtains of dripping water and veils of spilling shadows parted before his exaggerated stalk. As unerring as the charge of a Sindhian hornbeast, he didn't stop until he arrived at the largest clump of luminescent fungi that lit his environs.

Mindful of Akashiman folktales of mushrooms that left those who unwarily fed upon them in curious states of distress and shame, as well as Gallievo's careful admission that they didn't really know enough of what they sought, he didn't quite reach out to touch them. But his dark brown eyes studied them closely, perhaps slightly more closely than a mere hired sword might have otherwise done. Had the unassuming glowcaps really evolved in such a way as to not merely negate, but to thrive in such mana-rich surroundings? Did they really promise to confer their resistance to those who consumed them as well?

His other senses remained warily attuned to his surroundings. The mere thought of the abomination's return kept him squarely on horror's edge. He didn't particularly wish to be caught by surprise again.

By this time, Pyralis had just about succeeded in mollifying G'eld and repairing the strain caused by Kaburagi's faux pas. Sighing with the thought of how closely they had flirted with disaster, and shivering at what Gallievo might do to them if they returned to Ettermire without the prize they sought, she chanced a glance at her companion just to make sure that he wasn't committing any further diplomatic suicide. G'eld followed her glance, taking up the conversation from where they had previously left off.

"You are interested in our kuttra, yes?"

The surprised frown on the crone's pinched features displayed just how odd she found that notion. Why would outlanders travel so far, into salt flats and dark caves so dangerous, seeking unremarkable fungi that served as light source and food only because they could procure and cultivate no better?