Relt Peltfelter Rides Again

[Relt PeltFelter]

There is a small beach on the coast of Corone, where the grey waves beat against the weathered cliffs with a ferocity unmatched by any but the surliest of drunkards, futilely jamming his house-key into a neighbor's lock. The beach itself is a mere strip of grit between the churning, spittley surf and the rugged, sheer rock; nothing has crossed it in maybe a hundred years, save a few determined horseshoe crabs and the occasional profoundly stupid gull. It is as forsaken as it is possible for a place to be.

An unfamiliar sound splits the roar of the tide; the creaking of stone on stone. Pebbles begin to tumble away from the cliffs unbidden, and cracks begin forming into a rough approximation of a human shape. The cracks spread, the whole cliffside shaking madly, as horseshoe crabs and gulls scatter from the unprecedented disturbance. A chunk of cliff falls away in a cloud of dust, and a ragged, human shape staggers forward. It drops to its knees, head turned to the sky.

“I...LIVE...AGAIN!” Relt Peltfelter shouts to the universe, her voice hoarse, a bong raised to the sky, defiant.

It had been some time since her victory in the Serenti Invitational, more than a year; since then, she had gone on a number of amazing and enthralling adventures beyond the scrutiny of mortals, all of which are so fascinating and engaging as to be impossible to safely recount here. Nonetheless, they led to her living entombment in this hidden place.

Coughing and spluttering, Relt pulls herself upright and nonchalantly dusts her clothes off. “Damn,” she wheezes, “Gotta admit, feelin' pretty badass right now. Okay, so, first order of business...where is here, and how do I get outta here?” Relt looked around; a narrow, overgrown path led up to the top of the cliffs; no foot had trod it for longer, even, than Relt had been trapped between worlds, and it didn't look particularly stable. Nonetheless, it was either that or swim for it, and Relt had no real desire to test the turgid waters before her.

As she clambered through the thick growth of thorny blackberry bushes and cloying Aleran moss, a thin and insidious drizzle began falling. It was distracting, and the slickness of the vegetation made Relt have to concentrate that much harder to keep climbing.

She can be forgiven, therefore, for failing to notice the indistinct black shape which crept out of her recently vacated cliff-hole and dove into the ocean.

- - -

Relt was finding her attempts at hitchhiking were hampered by an absence of shared cultural context. People on Althanas simply didn't understand the gesture of the hitchhiker's thumb. If not for this fundamental semiotic disconnect, Relt would have been halfway to a warm bath and a big sandwich by now. It may also have helped if any actual carts had come by in the time that she had stood by the sad little dirt road by the sea.

The weather had also decided not to be obliging; the thin drizzle had officially graduated from Precipitation Community College with a major in Rain (Sheets) and a minor in Windiness, and was beginning to pursue a master's degree in Ominous, Distant Thunder. Relt sighed, toes curling in her sandy flip-flops. It was an oddly comforting feeling, a reminder of the beaches back home in California. She'd been back, actually, in her pandimensional journey beyond the ken of man and moderator alike. But it hadn't been any big deal; she pretty much just had some pizza, caught up with a few friends, called her dad and let him know she was okay, and stocked up on the essentials: clothes, weed, food, weed, video games, weed, and food. Nothing to write home about; or rather, nothing to write the mysterious fantasy universe about, from home.

Relt was pretty sure she was back on Althanas; the air smelled a certain, familiar way that it didn't seem to anywhere else. Sort of...minty and thymey, but so faint as to be almost hallucinated. She sighed again, with the manner of the supremely put-upon teenager, and slumps sideways against an old willow tree which was doing all it could, but not enough, to keep her dry.

At last, miraculously, a cart pulled up. Relt hustled over to it, feet squelching against the rapidly muddifying soil. “Oh shit, awesome,” she said, “Buddy, you have no idea how happy I am to see you. Mind giving me a lift back to...any town?”


((WHO COULD BE IN THE CART? COULD IT BE...YOU? It might be! Contact me in some arcane method if interested in joining the party. You need not be limited to the role of the mysterious buggyman! The situation is flexible. Good to be back!))

[Roht Mirage]

Roht Coincidence

Who in their right sand-blasted mind thinks an empty road is less lonely than a city? she thought with a sad twitch of a smile. Stella does. Her brow furrowed. Stella was yesterday's name. It had earned her some odd looks. Maybe she hadn't lightened her skin tone enough to pull off a 'Stella', or maybe she still acted too foreign. She certainly didn't feel like analyzing that right now, as the clouds above spit upon her hood and her fat old horse's spotted rump bobbed lazily ahead.

The beast was in the same situation; not owning a name that could be said in cordial company, though her own reasons were for personal safety, and the horse's was a simple lack of imagination on her part. When she looked at the tired, dim-witted mutt of a stallion, all she could think about were Farohtian slurs. Only a few in Fallien would have known the meaning, and if anyone in soggy Corone did, she'd gladly bury herself to the waist... upside-down.

“That's settled,” she called, in Farohtian, as if it were important for the horse to hear, “Your name is Kor'Loo.” Kor, meaning small, and Loo meaning... Let's just say it had been hard to determine the horse's gender from a distance.

Kor'Loo flicked an ear, likely a gesture of irritation at the rain rather than her clever insult. The foreigner felt her bottom lip yearning for a pout, so she bit it and looked away from the animal.

Through the trees, she could see the ocean having its tantrum. Whether it was because of the coming storm or just the way the ocean liked to be, she didn't know. Her voyage to this dreary new world had definitely been one long tantrum, or felt like it. She had been 'on deck' once... for a few seconds... before passing out. After some weeks -Two? Four? It was all a nauseous blur- she was finally back on land. Not 'dry' land, but land nontheless.

The forest on the ocean side seemed to be getting thinner and thinner, as if the overgrown road were a subtle agent of the water, guiding a small, forgotten morsel back to its master's sloppy lips. That made sense, and the rain was just the drool slathered about by that hungry blue monster. Very deliberately, she tugged the reins to urge her very soggy horse onto the left edge of the road, as far inland as the trees and briars would allow.

The beast snorted, a sound nearly imperceptible against the patter of rain, the hum of wind, and the squelch of rapid footfalls. Awareness began to stir in the driver's water-logged head, then slapped her across the face like a scorpion's sting. Well-taught instincts kicked in.

Tradespeak? Strange dialect. A bit younger than me. Bandit? The girl approached quickly, shouting with relief. Few weapons... fewer clothes. Not a bandit. An idiot? The voice of her mind had slipped from Farohtian to Tradespeak. For one whose whole life was about changing identities, the mode of thought could be as fluid and instinctive as a combat stance. However, it could also lapse.

Sucking in a quick hiss of air, she sensed for the layer of sand over her skin. It had slipped back into the depths of her sleeves and collar, no doubt a subconscious impulse. As well trained as she considered herself, the combination of rain and an 'empty' road had been enough for her to let the disguise of a light-skinned local slip away. She only had time to dab a finger into the collar of her bulky cloak, collect a ball of Fallien brown from the languid, multi-hued grains, and smear it across the intricate Roht mark on her forehead with a pang of shame.

Bury me. Applying it by hand... Children in Faroh learned to control sand through simple will by their twelfth year. I was just startled she thought forcefully.

“Hello! You... need help?” she asked with the broken pronunciation of someone stringing unfamiliar words together. The slow-minded foreigner ploy had become familiar over the last few weeks; so familiar that she had forced herself to tone it down when it became more a spectacle than a disguise as she moved deeper into the continent. However, with her skin more or less bare and her nerves rattled, it had come naturally.

The stranger was suddenly seated next to her in a move that, by any culture's standards, was a bit presumptuous. “Where, uh, do you...” she began brokenly, playing the role more out of shock than anything. She faltered, though, just looking into the poor thing's face, relieved and hopeful under a thick sheen of water. Without another word, the traveller reached into the open bed of the cart, pulled up one of the few lengths of oilskin canvas not currently wrapping her assorted belongings, and draped it over the strange young woman's head.

“You're going to turn into a fish, sand-brain,” she said as smoothly as a native Coronian and she didn't give a sand-blasted spit about it. This was just one bewildered girl on some abandoned road in the middle of nowhere. A girl who reminded her of Lisere, if older.

Don't need to think of her, right now, she grumbled at herself as she grimaced and look straight ahead at Kor'Loo's spotty old rump.

With a stiff snap of the reins, she got them moving again.

((Hindsight OOC edit: Bunnying is kosher. Boy-howdy do we do alot of it.))

[Relt PeltFelter]

It is very much like Relt to hop onto a stranger's cart before getting the all clear, regardless of inclement weather. The stranger's kindness in proffering a scrap of oilskin to act as a makeshift umbrella was merely icing on a soggy, store-bought cake. "Dude, thanks so much," Relt said, taking the skin and arranging it over her wet hair like a hood, "I have had a real fuckin' corker of a day up in here. I'm pretty sure I was stuck in a rock wall for like...more than a year? I dunno, time got screwy for a while. But yeah, I smashed out of it like...it was kinda like that scene in Army of Darkness, where zombie Bruce Campbell gets resurrected because regular Bruce Campbell fucked up the words when grabbing the Necronomicon. Only I think he was buried in the ground, all chainsawed up...whatever, that's just what came to mind,"

Relt fell quiet for a moment, fishing around in her (fortuitously waterproof) bag. "Aha!" she shouted at last, withdrawing a metal thermos filled with formerly-hot-but-now-merely-lukewarm chocolate. "Forgot I had this," she added, taking a swig. Lukewarm it may be, but it was like a shot of warmth to her rainsoaked frame. "Oh, shit, manners. Did you want some of this?" Relt said, offering the the cocoa to her generous benefactor. The displaced girl peered at the wagon's driver. "Dude! Sick ink on the five-head, bro, not a lot of folks with tatts around this dump,"

It probably should not come as a surprise that Relt, the most talkative person in the history of ever, would find her mouth running away with itself after more than a year's silence.

- - -

There is a small fishing community some miles up the road from the above encounter; a cluster of cozy wooden shacks surrounding a long pier and a large pub. It doesn't see much in the way of visitors, save for Ol' Gus, who came through town once every two weeks to buy up stock for his fish shop in Underwood. As it happens, he was there at this very moment, haggling with a fishwife over a brace of squid. But this story does not chiefly concern Ol' Gus, and so we continue on.

This little town could hardly be described as busy at the best of times, but even on a dreary day such as this, the beaches aren't deserted. Children scamper around unattended, digging out clams and crabs for the stewpot; teenagers hang out under the pier, sharing pilfered tobacco and watered-down ale away from the prying eyes of their parents; and a single dark figure staggers out of the waves. It is an undefined shape, looking almost blurry around the edges, and made of stuff as dark and insubstantial as a shadow. A gaggle of children bustle up to it, agog as it begins taking on a more clearly human shape. "E-excuse me!" one of the tykes squeaks, "Are you alright? Where did you come from?"

"Don't be stupid, Wendel," one of the other children says, "We saw her come out of the ocean!"

"I..." the figure rasped, snapping between defined and blurred, but always black. The children back away, startled but not terrified; even such a small village as this sees nonhuman traffic, and children learn rapidly not to flee every strange creature they meet.

"I..." it tries again, a voice like obsidian dragged across black velvet.

"Y-yes?" one of the children hazards.

"I am Relt Peltfelter," the figure says, raising her pitchblende head, dripping with shadow, and fixed the children with a white-hot stare, "I am hungry,"

[Roht Mirage]

If she was going to blend into the populace, every scrap of information would be useful; names to drop when you need authority, others when you need to appear familiar in that friend-of-a-friend way. So, it was with secretly rapt attention that the foreigner casually glanced from her passenger to the road and back again.

She hadn't many occasions to use Tradespeak until recently, but she knew it well. Or... she thought so. Just three sentences out of the hyper teen, her shoulders either shivering or vibrating excitedly under her cover, and Tradespeak might as well have been Draconian. At least three words I've never heard of. And 'wall'... Does she mean a 'house' of stone? How could she get stuck in a wall... for a year?

Her nonchalant glances became a baffled stare as the storm of words threatened to overwhelm the storm of water. It was the exact expression she'd expect of anyone else if she tried to namedrop Bruce Kor'Bell or Necrocancan while playing the role of 'neighbor from a few towns over... really'. This stranger was three -no, five- times the foreigner she could ever be.

Then, in one instant, she didn't mind at all.

“Chocolate?” she almost whimpered. After days of smelling nothing but moldy trees, horse sphincter, and her own unwashed clothing, the scent wafting out of the strange bottle was like being in the presence of Roh herself. Her and Akashere had travelled all over Fallien, gathering wood and spices and the rarest of cloth to bring back through Faroh's veil, yet he had never shared with her the secret of where he traded for those wonderful morsels of chocolate he would give to her once a year on her firstday.

“Th-thank you,” she stammered as she dropped the reins over one raised knee and accepted the metal tube as gingerly as if it were made of egg shells. She kissed the rim, braced herself, and drank down both the sweet nectar and a bittersweet memory. With her head tilted back, water flowed down her cheeks, adding the tiniest hint of salt to the taste... as if she were crying.

Somewhere beyond the chocolate memories, her new friend was talking again. She glanced over the rim of the tube, unable to force it away from her lips just yet. I think I love you, but I didn't understand any of that. One word slowly made sense. Head.

She felt her companion's gaze like a hot brand between the eyes. She can see?! The sand was still there, just within the shelter of her hood. No... The chocolate tasted terrible. It tasted like poison. “No. No. No,” she lamented quietly. There were definitely tears, now.

Lightning blossomed over water as the metal tube left her lips, and its thunderous voice boomed the instant the gift was slammed against the girl's chest, splashing its contents up into the face that had seemed so honest just moments ago.

A memory returned with none of the earlier sweetness, just a blank face mouthlessly decreeing her death.

“You may change your face and name as many times as you wish, but we will always know you. You are naked before us. Run, if you find it soothing, Astarelle Set'Roh. The end is inevitable, and mother Roh's patience is as immaculate as her anger.”

Astarelle kept pushing until both her and the girl were no longer seated. Her staff of lataro reed jumped from the bed of the cart into her questing hand. Violently, they splashed down into the mud and grasping brambles, her staff now in both hands as she pinned the girl by the throat. “I travelled the ocean,” she screamed in Tradespeak skewed by the most gutteral of Farohtian accents, “a whole venom-spitting, claw-raking, child-swallowing ocean, and you still can't let me go!”

Thunder sounded again. The light was turning a fathomless blue. But, all she could see was red.

[Relt PeltFelter]

"Aw shit, careful!" the ever eloquent Relt stammerd as half a thermos of lukewarm chocolate spilled all over her. This stunning bon mot was followed up by "Holy fuck!", the perfect rejoinder to being suddenly and violently shoved out of a cart and into the mud, a stick pressing your throat into the soggy mud. "Dude!" Relt spluttered, "I was just trying to compliment your kickin' brow tatt, c'mon!" With a single strong push, Relt managed to submerge her (mercifully, still oilskin-covered) head further into the mud and wriggle like a slippery moray out from under her assailant. The girl with the forehead tattoo would not be so easily denied her quarry, however; Relt raced over to the stalled wagon, the horse taking the stoppage as an opportunity to defecate massively on the road.

Relt managed to scramble, in a manner not dissimilar to that of a waterlogged dragonfly nymph creeping out of the water to molt and take flight, into the cart. she lay panting for a moment, but a year of miscellaneous undisclosed adventure and subsequent lithic imprisonment was hardly enough to dull her combat senses. The girl jumped to her feet, hoisting a decent-sized wooden box over her head and chucking it at her savior-turned-attacker. It was knocked aside by a swipe from the foreign-sounding girl's staff, not slowing her a jot. Relt panicked, grabbing the reins and cracking them inexpertly in hopes it would shift the horse. As it happened, it did, sending the hoofed geriatric loping on at a pace describable only as "ludicrously slow".

"Oh you gotta be fucking kidding me, horse-dude," Relt groaned, looking back behind the cart fully expecting a stick to the face. She was surprised, then, to see the tattooed girl simply standing there, watching her abscond. "Hmph," Relt grunted, her suspicions aroused. She let the horse continue on until the road curved enough to obscure her recalcitrant would-be pursuer, then performed a tactical roll out of the cart and into the undergrowth. Which is to say, she flopped like an epileptic sturgeon onto the ground and scrambled into the bushes. The horse stopped again, nibbling dully on some ferns by the road's edge. "Let's get to the bottom of this shit," Relt whispered to herself, creeping back through the dripping brush.

In a few moments, Relt was staring at the girl's backside, the Californian's inexpert sneaking concealed by the continuous roar of falling rain. She watched the girl who had offered her, in order, a ride and a beating as she seemed to be thinking. She eventually stopped staring into the middle distance and went to pick up the box that had been thrown at her; it presumably contained something of enough value to make its recovery valid. Relt saw her chance; flip-flops sliding in the thickening mud, the displaced girl leapt with the grace of a rhinoceros ballerina, roaring "NICE TRY, ASSHOLE!". The foreigner turned, just in time for Relt's busy fist to slam into her astonished face.

[Roht Mirage]

A Kar'Roh puppet wouldn't run...

Astarelle didn't move as the cart and nearly all of her belongings trundled away. With a few seconds of jogging, she could have undoubtedly closed the distance... to continue whatever this was. A fight? An assault? A mistake.

Bury me, I'm senseless, she groaned as the cart disappeared around the bend. Her shoulders felt heavier, as if the storm were a gratuitously overweight child having a ride behind her head. I should just sit here in the mud... wait for them to find me. She moved to throw her staff away, but it didn't leave her hand.

She looked down. Her white knuckles stared back at her. Thinking back to the blur of those few moments, she didn't remember when she had seized it so tightly, nor how she had managed to swat the wooden box out of the air. Most disconcertingly, she didn't know what she would have done if the girl had stayed to fight.

One deep breath, almost a sob, and she managed to creak open her fist. The staff slapped down into the mud right next to the only remaining piece of cargo. Through the cockeyed lid, she could see the festival day silks and farmer woollens, once pristine when she had snatched them from their lines, now spoiled by mud seeping below and rain pelting above. All the rest -wood, food, three different kinds of camp shelters, wash stones and small farming implements (none paid for)- were gone. It had been a stupid plan; stocking up and making her own little homestead where no one could find her.

She scrubbed at her face with one hand, wiping away nothing that the rain couldn't replace instantly, and leaned down to the box. The thought of returning it and its contents crossed her mind, a small measure of atonement before her final disappearance into the woods... but even the box was ruined. One hinge hung precariously over the edge of a jagged split spanning the entire side. The fall hadn't done that.

“My fault,” she breathed, tracing the fissure with her hand.

Suddenly, the girl was behind her, screaming something that Astarelle understood well before comprehending the words. She only had one thought in response; a phrase from her victim's peculiar vocabulary.

Aw shit. There was a connection, but no pain.

~

Astere rubbed at his jaw, stopping in the middle of Faroh's central sandstone street. Bury me, what was that? He pulled his calloused hand away from his cheek, then just shrugged. No blood, no problem. He walked on. With a grunt, he adjusted the bundle of wooden beams on his thick shoulder. It smelled sickly sweet. Lataro didn't bleed sap like that. But, that was the way of all things from beyond the veil; always oozing and smelling weird.

He looked back to the head of the street, where the gatherer Akashere had just finished delivering the final bundle to the furniture shaper's sand-molded home. There was no greeting, no thank you, and rightly so. Who knew what you could catch from someone who walked among the outsiders? He certainly smelled like he had picked up something... alien. There was also that cough, the rumors said. He hadn't seen it himself. But, Akashere was a strong man -not as strong as Astere, of course- and they said the cough would make him kneel and cry for his long-dead mother.

Astere definitely didn't want any of that.

Years ago, Akashere had asked him to be his apprentice. The fool seemed desperate. Astere had given that a good laugh before saying, “Go sting yourself. There's as much chance of that as the Set'Roh apprenticing under you.” It was funny because there was no Set'Roh.

He remembered, when he was young, the whispers that a void in the priestess ranks was an ill omen. Never happened before. Some calamity coming or whatever. Then, Lisere had been born with the Roht mark, and everyone shut their stupid mouths. She was still Kor'Roh, though, cloistered in the temple. They said, maybe, that she would take the place of the nonexistent Set'Roh and begin her 'tutelage among the people' next year. Kirelle, the glass shaper, seemed confident that Lisere would choose to apprentice under her. So, no luck for smelly Akashere, from either the common folk or the temple.

~

I'm sorry, Astarelle apologized for the callous oaf that was not her... but could have been.

Then, thought faded as she assumed another potential life. She was a tree in the Red Forest. Blood vines wrapped her trunk, protecting her, and occasionally consuming their prey. It was a good life; uneventful, quiet, pleasant. Only seldom did a scream wake her in the night. Thankfully, meals began and ended quickly in that place. Silence again.

~

The body between her knees stopped moving. “Thank Roh,” Astarelle breathed shakily, too relieved to pay attention to the blood running in rivulets from the hand trowel. Just that morning, after swiping the implement from a tool shed, she had debated whether to throw it in the cart or hide it under her cloak. It wouldn't be comfortable, but you could never predict what would happen on the road. She could have decided either way, yet had chosen the path that led to her safety and her assassin's death.

She didn't feel victorious, though, as she looked down at the wide, rain-spattered eyes of the girl. The Kar'Roh had left much of her personality behind after making her a puppet. All the better to set the trap, of course. And chocolate. Too obvious. Still, Astarelle wished she had known the kind stranger before her -first- untimely demise. She must have been a real dune-raiser. Even the life she had shown in these last moments, cursing and all, seemed almost too perfect to be one of their walking corpses.

“What if...” She dropped the trowel -it plunged into the mud as it had into neck flesh- and ripped at the dead girl's shirt, snapping buttons into the downpour. Realization dawned like a thunderclap between her ears, and clamping a hand to her mouth, she screamed.

No scars!

The girl's chest was unblemished, motionless, and porcelain bright under the pattering drops. That couldn't be right. The Kar'Roh always created their puppets with a tainted dagger through the heart. Always!

Astarelle pressed her forehead to the girl's chest and wailed.

And wailed.

~

And choked on mud.

She was lying on her side in the storm's earthen slurry. Her skyward cheek hurt so much it felt afire. She expected the raindrops to sizzle into steam just from touching it. Through gaps in the thunder, she could hear a very lively and very livid voice berating her.

“Get up, you piece of-”

BOOM

“so I can-”

BOOM

“out of you, you-”

BOOM

“muncher!”

Astarelle forced herself up on one elbow and painfully stared into the falling rain at the girl, color raging in her face, fists ready to go again. Relief flooded over her, as did mud and water and a torrent of self-loathing.

She raised a hand pleadingly. “I'm- I'm-” One last blast, and the thunder died for a spell, leaving the rain's low howl to fill the void.

“I'm Astarelle Set'Roh! I'm a scared little girl running from monsters I brought on myself. I am so sooo sorry... and I'm very very VERY stupid.”

[Relt PeltFelter]

Relt stood panting in the rain for a moment, watching the girl who she had just assaulted and shouted at apologize. Her hand hurt like a motherfucker, as if the punch had jammed all of her metacarpals up into her elbow, and at least one knuckle had split; before the pain had felt dulled, oddly satisfying. Now, however, it was just guilty pain. Relt sniffed, swiping her thumb across her nose and rolling her shoulders. "Yeah, well, uh. Hm. Apology accepted, I guess, man, I don't fucking know. We all got monsters and shit, I can relate to that biz," Relt weighed her options a moment, then offered her hand to help Astarelle up. "I guess I'm probably sorry too for punching you in the face like a sucka then shouting at you and calling you some, uh, pretty nasty shit while you were, you know, knocked out," Astarelle tentatively took Relt's hand, and the shorter girl hauled her upright. Relt coughed and looked away, idly trying to brush a bit of bracken out of her spiky hair and somehow managing only to tangle it worse.

"Anyway, your dumb slow horse and all your stuff is just, like, only a little ways up. We should probably get somewhere which is not out here where the rain is happening? I mean, if you still wanna do the hitchhiker thing. I'm still down, even if you shoved me out of a moving wagon and jammed me all up with your stick deal," Relt felt awkward. It was rare for her commiserations to be so immediate following a conflict. Generally, a bruised opponent just climbed back up and returned to the business of smashing faces or eating souls or whatever the hell monsters and dumb people did. Post-tussle apologies (at least, those not ordered by a teacher or parent back in the child times) were a new thing; the Californian girl was having a hard time weaving this experience into her psychological tapestry.

She glanced over to the tossed box, seeing the stained fabric through the cracked wood, and felt a renewed stab of guilt despite her lingering anger. "Aw, shit, man, I totally fucked up your clothes. Fuck, lemme get this, we can probably get 'em dry cleaned or something," she said, splashing through the rain and mud to scoop the stricken box up in her wiry brown arms. "If they're goners, shit, I got an assload of extra clothes in my bag from when I was home last, I'll let you pick out whatever you feel like. I mean, you're way taller than me and kinda built different, but we'll make it work,"

"Thank you. What's, uh, your name?" Astarelle managed, apparently still trying to find her stroke against the logorrheic torrent of Relt's inimitably voluminous speech, with its swirls and eddies of slang and curses.

"Oh, shit, sorry, I still keep thinking everybody knows me, even though I guess that was a while ago now. I'm Relt Peltfelter," the former champion said, already stumbling back towards the cart, "And shit, now I am fuckin' hungry,"

[Roht Mirage]

“There's food and a shelter in the cart,” Astarelle offered a little too enthusiastically. She felt that she owed the girl something (a meal at the very least) for giving her a second chance along with the throbbing cheek; which she wholly deserved.

She hurried, high stepping through the muck, to catch up. The rain felt good... for perhaps the first time ever. What had been a horrible mess on her face and hair was quickly disappearing. Or, in her hair's case, plastering heavily to the back of her neck. It was out of the way, even if it leeched a river down the back of her shirt. Shivering, she pulled her hood up, and the river was joined by a whole lake that had collected in the fabric.

Thunder and the angry sway of trees drowned out her expletive. “Sick corker Army of Kor'Bell!”

Akashere had once called her a 'culture sponge', and as usual, he couldn't be more right. Astarelle finished with a wheeze, admittedly a little exhilarated from the shock, as she gestured back toward the muddy imprint of herself. Her reed staff shook free of the mess and threw itself happily into her waiting hand. She held it as a far-too-tall walking stick, both to alleviate the earth's suction and keep it in a nonthreatening position.

Relt was well ahead now, still carrying the box of clothing with undeserved care. Astarelle hurried after, not just to tend to her... friend?... but to distance herself from what could have happened in that sinkhole of mud and regret. She reached the cart just as Relt had finished settling the box amid the mess and was tentatively investigating bundles for anything resembling food.

“I'll get-” Astarelle began, then seized up as an uncovered hand trowel glowered at her in the lightning. Without thinking, she tossed in the staff, grabbed the trowel and hurled it high into the treetops. The storm gobbled it up, permanently erasing it from history, she hoped. “I... hate gardening?” she said with a forced laugh, only to be interrupted by a loud scrap.

Kor'Loo, either in search of shelter or a patch of green he hadn't masticated into mush, was wedging the cart against the roadside trees. Astarelle sighed, gestured “one moment”, and felt for the harness lines in the cart's gloomy shadow. In a few quick motions, she unhooked the animal, grabbed a bundle of canvas and rope from the cart, and led her equine elder into the trees. Expertly, as if the knots were tying themselves, she looped Kor'Loo's reins around a thick tree, then fastened the canvas at four points in the branches above.

She jogged sloppily back to the cart for another rope and canvas shelter, this time unable to keep Relt from lending a hand. The girl talked the whole time about a prior camping trip in some foreign forest, the name of which Astarelle couldn't make sense of, and something about 'toking it up' and 'spray cheese'. The canvas went up even faster than before, stretched at the perfect angle due to their differing heights, and the ground below was already partially trodden down by their footfalls.

“Wait here,” Astarelle said into the girl's verbal torrent without actually interrupting it. Then, she lopped back to the cart and plucked out one of the sturdier boxes. A smile, lopsided from what might have been bruising, spread across her face as she squelched back under the canvas and settled it into the soft, but not soaked, earth. “I've never had... whatever this is... before,” she chattered as she removed the lid and lay it between them like a table, “But it smelled so good.” She almost added, “... on that window sill,” then counselled herself to shut her sand-blasted mouth.

With a flourish, she produced her treasure, cold yet undamaged, from atop the pile of still-dirty root vegetables and torn strips of salted meat. “Madoo!” she intoned -though she would have probably said “Tadaa!” had she known the translation- as she laid it gently on the impromptu table.

Unbeknownst to her, the sweet smelling, crumbly crusted delicacy was known around these parts as... pie.

[Relt PeltFelter]

Relt beamed with pride at the sight of a well-pitched awning. It wasn't much, but the sound of rain dropping onto fabric over her head made her feel sheltered, and made the frigid air around her seem a bit less so. A thought occured to the girl, and she fished around in her backpack for a moment, before extracting a much-folded towel. She spread it carefully on the trodden ground, then plopped down on it. Being made from the latest space-age nanopolymers, not a jot of mud stuck to the towel's plush fibers. Everything felt better with a roof over your head and a towel under your butt. These are all things Relt talked about, at some length, while Astarelle slipped away to grab something. "Anyway, yeah, Dennis was totally shitfaced," Relt continued as the girl returned, "So we just zipped the tent up from outside and left him in there with-"

The pastry barely had time to settle before, mid-sentence, Relt flicked open her switchblade, sliced the delicious pie into eight pieces, extracted one, and jammed it whole into her mouth.

"-the raccoon," she said through a spray of crumbs, "That thing fucked him up, it was hilarious mmm oh my god blackberry pie,"

Relt swallowed. "Oh man, that ruled. Thanks for that, totes makes up for choking me out with a grandpa cane. Maybe we can heat the rest up if we start a campfire or something. Oh, except that I guess everything ever is soaking wet right now,"

Other than the mud and rain, it was actually rather a nice day. The breeze carried the salty aroma of the ocean up over the bluffs, even to their little campsite by the road. It was enough to get Relt to stop and look out at the sea for a moment, before turning back to Astarelle.

"So what's your deal, exactly?" Relt asked, "I mean, I've been on this planet for a while, then off it for a little while, then stuck in a wall, and now I'm back. But I mean, what happened while I was gone that would make a chick beat up another chick for tryin' to lay the complimentations on her about her bitchin' face-ink?"

The Farohtian girl was quiet for a moment. "It's... complicated," she said around a mouthful, "I wasn't fit for the role I was marked for." Astarelle wiped her messy pie fingers on the grass, then gestured gently to her forehead. "I thought I could go through the motions and everything would be fine. It didn't go that way. In fact, I got neck deep so fast that I... did some things I regret. The ones after me, well, they don't understand forgiveness. Not that I really deserve..." She shook her head, clearing away some intruding thoughts, then forced a smile. "Anyway, I had the mark hidden, so you scared me when you... how did you?"

"I got good peepers, yo," Relt responded. This seemed the only explanation she was willing to offer. "Well, whatevs, I guess I can respect that. If this rain lets up at all, we should probably keep going towards town. Uh, there is a town this way, right?"

"That's what I heard," Astarelle responded, "I was planning to grab, er, buy a few things there, before..."

"Right, you picked me up then tried to beat me up, then I very slowly ran away and came back and punched you in the face. Sorry, again, for that,"

"Thank you," the girl said wanly, gingerly touching her bruised cheek, "But really, it was my fault! Anyway, I think the town isn't far, we can leave, well, whenever you'd like,"

"Eh, no rush. We got a pie,"

"Is that what this is called?"

- - -

It was past noon when the pair trundled into town. The rain hadn't let up, but Relt had managed to help Astarelle improvise a covered wagon out of her little cart. She had also tried speeding the horse up using the old food-on-a-fishing line routine, but the animal had not been terribly motivated by a piece of soggy pie. Really, the bait had merely slapped against its big stupid horse face, splattering it with blackberry juice and flaky pastry. As such, the two travelers may actually have made worse time than they otherwise would have, even if it was dry time.

"Welp, thanks for the lift," Relt said, hopping out of the cart, "Hope you find what you need, and keep the douchebags chasing you off your trail. I'm gonna go get a big...fucking...sand...wich..." Relt said, drifting off. She looked around, at the empty market stalls, empty boats, empty porches. "God fucking damnit," Relt sighed, "Hold up, Asty, something ain't right,"

Relt bent down and picked up a small stone. She hucked it through the pane of a nearby window; it shattered, loudly. Relt tensed automatically, a lifetime of intentionally breaking windows in San Francisco having tuned her body into a perfect early warning system for police sirens and shouting neighbors; but nothing happened. Not a barking dog or a shouting grandparent split the quiet hissing of the insistent rain.

Relt groaned loudly. "For fuck's sake, why does every town I wander into have to be creepy and deserted?"

[Roht Mirage]

Astarelle's heart tied itself into a knot at the sound of the breaking pane. The words, “Just Astarelle, please. 'Nicknames' aren't... my way,” died on her tongue.

“I don't know,” she quietly responded, though she knew Relt's question wasn't meant for her, “The other towns were... normal enough.”

She pulled her hood up, but didn't bother with the sand disguise. Relt's ability to see through it had shaken her formerly certain -and perhaps naive- confidence in the technique. Anyway, if the Kar'Roh were here...

Would they take a whole town?!

Astarelle spun down from the driver's seat and snatch up her staff. She pressed her back to the cart's side, taking in the abandoned dwellings and puddling streets with a much more critical eye. There were five squat homes around them, and just the rooftop hints of three or four beyond, all silent. Only the aggressive patter of rain and the creak-thump of moored boats kept the space from being an audible vacuum.

She circled the cart until she was at Relt's side and whispered words that felt too loud. “It hasn't been abandoned for long.” She pointed with the staff to the partially washed-out footprints all along the narrow dirt street. “Though I have no idea-”

Light flickered behind the window Relt had smashed.

Astarelle motioned to stay low and silent, though her slow, cat-like strides made enough squelching and sucking sounds to announce their approach to all but the deaf. Kor'Loo snorted loudly and wetly, then stamped his hooves as if impatient to get out of the downpour. Sighing, Astarelle straightened, mounted the porch, and flattened herself against the window frame, peeking around slowly.

The hearth was lit, though nearly burned out, and the stew in the pot above looked as if the surface had long ago cooled to a lumpy skin. On a table to the side were vegetables half-chopped, while many more hung in an orderly row from the solitary rafter. Only the bed's goat-skin cover seemed out of place, frumpily kicked away by someone who wasn't in any particular distress, just not a morning person. Nothing stirred in the shadows. Nothing rustled through the two interior doors.

Astarelle turned away, frowning. Dropping all pretence of stealth, she slapped her muddy shoes along the wood and jumped to the next home's unrailed porch.

Through the first window, she saw by only what light the cloudy sky offered. A rod leaned against a table, the morning's meager catch upon it, though one very still fish had slipped to the floor. She crept back from the window, peering and listening for a few moments longer.

“Nothing dead but some fish,” she reported to Relt, who had joined her on the porch.

The girl seemed more annoyed than worried. “Why d'you think they'd be-”

“It's been an ugly journey so far,” Astarelle said solemnly, somehow managing to interrupt the torrential wordsmith. She looked out over the street again, blank windows and empty porches staring back at her. Everything was ripe for the taking, if she wanted it. But, her cart was already stuffed with ill-gotten necessities, and this opportunity felt far too fortuitious. Perhaps it was a test, one last chance to correct her path. She hadn't been a thief until stepping off that ship. She wouldn't have even considered it at all if Akashere were still with her.

She gave her head a shake to clear the gloom.

“In Fallien, the village chiefs and elders are good at spotting incoming sandstorms. I was once caught up with twenty people running for a nearby cave. I should have been the one to sense it first...” She drifted off for a moment, then looked out toward the dock. The boats bucked on the water with the same feral, barely-contained rage that the storm had bestowed to its thunder earlier in the morning.

She turned and put an urgent hand on Relt's arm. “If the locals thought it was a good idea to drop everything and go... somewhere, we'd be smart to do the same. I'll take you to the next town.”

[Relt PeltFelter]

Water dripped down the back of Relt's shirt. She reached into a pocket and pulled out her sunglasses, slipping them on for reasons entirely unrelated to brightness. Astarelle's theory made sense, but it didn't really sit right with Relt. Some kind of bad jim-ju was going down here, but Relt was seriously not feeling it. The whole spooky empty town thing, it was old hat to her. She'd been there, done that, stole the t-shirt off of a mutilated carcass. After an indeterminate amount of timeless duration trapped in a seaside cliff, the girl was not about to compromise her chances at a hot meal to investigate The Mystery of Fuck-Off Holler.

"Yeah, screw this. Let's try our luck elseways," Relt said. She tossed a rock through another window pane. "Somebody's gonna have a bad day when they get back," she said, carefully neglecting to add 'if they ever left.' The girl clambered back into the cart alongside Astarelle, and with a click of the reins the two were off again. Then the horse stopped, ate a clump of potted plant, then started off again. "Your horse is mad undisciplined, yo," Relt said.

"Please don't remind me," Astarelle said, "This flea-ridden wretch hasn't moved faster than sand going uphill all day,"

- - -

The pair had gone farther up the coast, chatting intermittently. The sea and rain roared as hungrily as ever, shaking trees and loosing stones, but the general malaise of decay which had so arrested Relt in the town had faded, and her anger at the misunderstood altercation had abated alongside it.

"So I've been thinking..." Astarelle said, cautiously, "I've used a lot of aliases, but your name...'Relt Peltfelter'...it just sounds..."

"Sounds what?" Relt said, mouth full of masticated Skittles. She'd offered some to Astarelle, but the potent flavor of synthetic fruit had nearly knocked the poor girl out of the cart, so she had turned down a second handful.

"Well..."

"What, fake? Are you gettin' up in my grill 'bout names?"

"Well, yes, very fake. Are you saying it's your real name?"

"Yeah! Why would I make up a fake name? My name's awesome!"

"I'm sorry! It just sounded a little odd..."

"Pff, are we doing this right now? You telling me Aston Martin Seth Rogen is your real name?"

"Astarelle. Set'Roh. And yes, it is actually,"

"You told a random person your real name, with monsters or whatevs chasing you?"

"It's not as if it matters, you didn't even remember it!"

"Sure I did! Ashley Rolls September, right?"

"Now you're doing it on purpose!"

"You can't prove that. More Skittles?"

"No! I told you, they don't even taste like real food. Can you remember anything?"

"In my defense, I have been getting REEAAAALLY high for the last few miles,"

"What does that even mean?"

"Bet you wish you knew," Relt said, chuckling a bit. There was nothing like this kind of thing, messing with some poor Althanian's head. They were all just so...easily agitated. She tossed back another handful of wretched, waxy ovoids of congealed syrup, and nearly choked on sludge. Astarelle patted her on the back until the candy bolus was dislodged.

"What's the matter?" she asked Relt, "Did your horrible almost-fruit go down the wrong hole??"

"No, I just...something ain't right. Does this stretch of road look familiar to you?"

Astarelle looked around, perplexed. "A bit, yes," she said, "But all of this sodden seaside looks pretty much the same. Why?"

Something was gripping Relt, something she couldn't shake, but it may have just been a passing paranoid thought. She shook her head, but couldn't manage to similarly shake the suspicion of repetition.

- - -

The suspicion was overwhelmingly confirmed as the cart pulled into town again. The same town. The same empty streets and creaking timbers; the same pair of shattered window panes; the same muddy footprints left by Astarelle as she snooped from porch to porch. And of course, the same terrible, pressing sensation of lingering danger. Relt gaped, feeling her suspicions evolve into dread.

"This is...impossible. We were going straight, we didn't turn once, how can we be back here?" Astarelle asked, possibly rhetorically.

"See? I knew some shit was up. These people didn't run off 'cause they were worried King Neptune wanted to piss on their faces. Astro, this is fucked,"

"Astarelle," the Farohtian responded, "But other than that, I think you may be right..."

"Alright it's officially go time," Relt said, pulling her heavy truncheon from her bag and hopping out of the cart, "Asty, it is legit cloudy with a chance of monsters up in this piece. Grab something heavy or sharp, we need to get to snooping. Stay together, none of this Scooby Doo splitting up shit,"

[Roht Mirage]

“I don't know who Scooby and Doo are, but they'd have to be idiots to split up during... whatever this is.”

“Every damn episode, man.”

Still seated, Astarelle raised one hand. Her staff bounded out of the cart, rolled over her shoulder and fitted itself into her fist with a smooth half-flip. She was feeling a little -to borrow a phrase from Relt- badass. Either the enthusiasm for 'go time' was infectious, or she was still riding her own 'high' from their earlier back-and-forth. It seemed like a sand-blasted decade since she had had a good squabble.

She splooshed down next to Relt and, together, they crossed the empty, rain-pelted street to the first house she had investigated earlier.

“It can't be the Kar- my monsters,” she said as if she needed a bit more convincing herself, “We would have walked into a town full of people offering us dinner, with a knife in the back for dessert. Not-”

She opened the flimsy wooden door and stepped through, staff first. The scene was just as she remembered. A few resilient bubbles from the half-prepared stew greeted them, though the fire had died down to little more than glowing coals. The air was thick with the smell of over-cooked herbs, hiding any hint of blood or decomposition that might have wafted underneath. Two separate curtains at the back wall, hung in place of doors, shifted ominously with the breeze of their entrance.

“Definitely not this,” Astarelle whispered to herself.

Shoulder to shoulder, they slunk around the table, each pair of eyes watching a different corner in turn, until they were at the left-most partition. Astarelle teased the tip of her reed staff against the fabric, then recoiled for a moment and ran her free arm over her hip until the too-long, farm-stained sleeve was up to her elbow, baring a bracelet woven of the same foreign wood. Sand began to well from underneath the crinkled cuff, as tentative as a small animal emerging from its burrow. She gave her arm a snap, and the golden grains tumbled down as a thin, churning skin until they had encased her from elbow to clenched knuckles.

With tension creasing her Roht mark, Astarelle gave Relt a nod. Then, she pulled back her stiff gauntlet, raised her staff, and swatted the curtain clean off its rings.

[Relt PeltFelter]

Relt's eyes widened enthusiastically at Astarelle's formation of a sand glove. "Dude, you have dirt magic?" she whispered, "Raaaad...I don't have any kind of magic biz. I wind up just like...smacking stuff with a stick while everybody goes around shooting fire and traveling through time to murder dragons while they're still eggs or something," Astarelle waved a hand irritably, and Relt rolled her eyes and slapped a hand over her mouth with pantomimed fervor.

The curtain tumbled awkwardly to the floor at the tugging of Astarelle's staff, the brazen rings holding it up as a bulwark betwixt bedroom and kitchen jingling emphatically. Relt winced at the sound, but no ravening madmen seemed to emerge screaming for blood. The two girls looked at each other; Relt offered a shrug, the shoved past Astarelle and into the room. And immediately regretted doing so. There wasn't a corpse; a corpse would be easy by comparison. Relt had seen a fair few corpses in her travels, and while her stomach still churned at the thought of each one, at the end of the day it was just a piece of meat that somebody used to live inside of. But this...

It was a bit like a hole where a person should be; a jagged wound of nothingness hanging in empty air, roughly man-shaped, with tatters of space-time flapping in a nonexistent gale. The object squirmed and writhed as though in agony, and occasionally the limitless void visible through it would part momentarily to revealing a ghostly, grasping, desperate hand or single frightened eye. The shape as a hole seemed to be shrinking slowly, as if the universe were healing over. "Jesus tittyfucking waffle house..." Relt hissed, keeping her distance from the thing. "You uh..." Relt retched a moment, "You ever seen one of these before?"

"Not...exactly..." Astarelle said slowly. She stared at what was evidently the last evidence of a person's life, and began stretching her staff towards it. Relt slapped it down absently.

"This is so fucked," Relt grumbled, "This is fucked! What like...what is this? Monsters eating a dude, sure. Monsters jamming a parasite into a dude's face and using him as a meat taxi, whatever I can roll with it. Even monsters turning a buncha dudes into a freaky magic glass statues and sticking them in a labyrinth, I mean, I've been there. But like...what the fuck even am I looking at?"

There was movement outside the window; a black shape peering in with piercing eyes for a split second before darting away. Relt's back was turned, but Astarelle jumped, startled. "Dude, what's up?" Relt asked.

"Th-there, at the window!" Astarelle said, pointing vaguely. Relt turned to look, seeing only pouring rain beyond the dirty glass.

"Dude, Asty, you gotta use like...a noun or something," Relt said.

"It...it looked like..." Astarelle stared at Relt oddly for a moment, a skein of suspicion in her eyes.

"...what? What's up?" Relt asked, starting to get antsy from the attention.

"...no, nothing," the Farohtian said dismissively, shaking her head, "It, er, it wasn't there long enough for me to make it out..."

Relt nodded, confused, and turned to examine the unconventional remains again; it barely managed to maintain its shape any longer, and there was no longer any evidence of a person within. The San Franciscan could feel Astarelle's eyes on her back; she bit her tongue, not wanting to get all up in the grill of the only other person apparent in this town.

[Roht Mirage]

The Kar'Roh would be...

Better? She couldn't bring herself to even think it. But, they were a known threat. Their command of rizak dwarfed hers -she clenched her sand gauntlet self-consciously- and their control of the dead made her skin crawl like a bug-filled lizard corpse. There was logic to it, though. Bury it all, there was sand-blasted logic!

This... hole in the air, like someone had fallen through a paper screen into what could only be described as 'outside'... it was nonsense. She couldn't fathom what or even how this 'outside' was, but she knew it was a grave. That flash of an eye, nearly bursting with fear, had to be someone's last moments. Astarelle pressed her back to the wall, her staff held close to her, as she watched both the window and the front room, all while trying not to imagine what would have happened if she had poked the tear.

She should have been grateful, but suspicion constricted all else. That face in the window...

Part of her wanted to play indifferent, ask Relt, “Do you have a sister? A beady-eyed, black as the depths sister?” Another part of her wanted to push the ridiculous girl toward the shrinking tear; cancel out strangeness with strangeness and just return to her water-logged wandering and pilfering.

Suddenly, she remembered waking up in the desert, a stranger silhouetted against the moonlight, one arm full of their supplies and the other holding a knife over her waking body. She squawked like a child, and somehow Akashere not only awoke, he stormed from his bedding and kicked the bandit clear over her. The young man spilled everything across the sand, then found himself ankle deep in it... knee deep... hip deep. He screamed and clawed at the sand uselessly. Akashere bent over and slapped him hard across the face. The earth stopped swallowing him. His screams turned to whimpering. Then, normally-gentle Akashere said in the harshest voice Astarelle has ever heard from him, “What kind of animal are you, boy?”

What kind a animal am I?

Astarelle dabbed at her eyes with the hand that wasn't encased in sand, clearing her vision just in time to see the frayed world-wound close into nothing.

“What the fuckin' hell was that?” Relt asked, clearly uneasy to the point of nausea, as she turned.

Astarelle was already moving, thumping her muddy shoes against the kitchen floor and jutting her staff toward the front door. It slammed hard. Without drawing any closer to the front wall, she sidled across the room with her eyes trained on the windows; nothing but rain and shifting cloud shadows beyond. There might have been a flicker of... something... in the fractured edges of the broken pane, but that could just as easily have been her pacing reflection. Still wary -and wishing she had an eye in the back of her head- she turned to the last room. Its curtain hung with dead weight now that the door was closed.

She heard Relt come up behind her, but couldn't bring herself to make eye contact. She was certain she looked guilty.

Gingerly, she poked the curtain aside. What the room contained made her heart as heavy as a rock. Her feet moved of their own accord as she slipped behind the curtain and squatted in the middle of the floor.

“Burn you,” she hissed.

There were two small beds, their covers as disarrayed as the small wooden toys about the room, and below the one farthest from the door were two flickering holes. Despite the tattered, convulsing edges, she could still make out the short appendages as each tear clung to the other. She might have reached out for those small hands if her ankles weren't so wobbly that the white-knuckled grip on her staff was all that held her upright.

Either imagined, or from that grave beyond, she heard their small cries. The tears pulsed a few more times, fading heartbeats in unison, then disappeared, leaving the room lit only by the uneven light of the rain-pattered window.

Astarelle pushed herself back to her full height, her ankles growing stronger as her voice rose from a hoarse whisper. “When my people's territory is invaded, our soldiers swear riza takla kador,” she said in the rapid tempo of Farohtian. “They swear to hunt until the sand is perfectly clean.”

She left her staff standing on its own, a boot of sand having formed at the base of the porous wood, as she pushed her hood well back and gathered the flowing cloak around one side. She wrapped it around her gauntleted hand, tying it off with her teeth to make a water-proof sheath that encased the limb all the way to her neck. Six small, narrow gourds were now visible, belted to her chest over the simple farmer's shirt. With her free hand, she smoothly undid the buckles and dropped the containers, harness and all. They clattered emptily, knocking a few stray grains of sand from their narrow, well-worn spouts. The shimmering specks danced to her neck and disappeared into the twisted cloak-turned-arm-sheath to join their kind.

With a brush of her hand, her staff drank its sandy foot back into its core and rolled into her grip. Her eyes, still damp, found Relt's as she said sternly, “We will hunt this thing until riza takla kador.”

[Relt PeltFelter]

Relt looked under the bed. There was a long, lonely moment, punctuated only by the steady drizzle of rain. She stood, and turned away from Astarelle. Relt walked over to the window and stared blankly out it for a while. "I have no idea what that means," she said after a while. "But I think I can fucking figure out the gist of it. You think...something or someone did this. To that guy out there. To those kids. To probably everybody in this...stupid little village," Relt turned again, sunglasses down, mouth set in a tight grimace. "And you wanna find 'em and just kill the fuck out of 'em. Well shit, let's do it. Haven't been back for a day yet. Might as well get to kickin' some ass,"

With a flourish which barely avoided becoming a fumble, Relt snatched an iron poker from a rack by the fire and slammed it against the wobbly driftwood table. Dishes shattered against the walls and floors. "You ever see that movie-...wait, no I guess you wouldn't have. If we come out of this alive, maybe we'll watch it. But anyway, it's got like...well uh, so Nicholas Cage is dead right? And he escapes from hell to save his granddaughter from some cult or whatever, but you don't know he's dead at the start, oh, except that uh I think they show him escaping from hell so nevermind...but like, he goes on this violent rampage and...okay, point is, I'm Cage, you're the waitress who helped him, and we are gonna get some serious murder on. Uh...I feel like maybe this got away from me a little, but..." Relt trailed off, rubbing her neck. "Your story was better," she admitted.

- - -

The pair emerged from the house, weapons at the ready. The rain poured relentlessly, as if it had a grudge against the abandoned seaside town and its two living inhabitants. Relt kept close to Astarelle, not quite back to back but nearly so, keeping their eyes peeled. "Pssst, Asty," Relt whispered, "Can you use your dirt magic to like...ask the mud what happened? Mud's probably pretty chatty,"

"It's not dirt magic!" Astarelle hissed, "And it doesn't really work that way, alright?"

"Geez, settle down! God damn, it's not like I laughed at your badass speech about rising tackle a door, you gotta get up in my grill 'cuz I don't understand how dirt magic works,"

"That...none of that was right. Not even a bit,"

"Well whatever! What are we supposed to do now? Wander around until we get torn out of reality too?"

"I don't know! I...might have seen something..."

"What did it look like? Come on, chief, spill those fat tasty knowledge-beans,"

"...I'm not sure. It doesn't matter, after all, anything moving around is likely to be the culprit, right?" Astarelle said hastily. Relt sniffed suspiciously; clearly there were some beans still rattling around in Astarelle's sand gourds.

"A'ight, whatevs," the San Diegan said at last, "You're probably right. Just let me know the details if you spot it again,"

- - -

The Relt Peltfelter watched the Relt Peltfelter and the Not-Relt Peltfelter explore the town. The Relt Peltfelter didn't truly feel anything resembling emotion, or think anything resembling thoughts. At most it could be said to be aware of the two entities, and to have some sort of reaction; the Not-Relt Peltfelter made it hungry, to eat and to swallow and to tear and to mend. But the Relt Peltfelter...the Relt Peltfelter made the Relt Peltfelter aware of something else. There were two the Relt Peltfelters. There was only supposed to be one Relt Peltfelter. The Relt Peltfelter wanted to be the one Relt Peltfelter.

The Relt Peltfelter would eat the potential usurper, absorb its reality, sate its hunger and become whole and only. The Relt Peltfelter walked away, seeking something without a name to satisfy an impulse other than hunger. Hunger would be satisfied in time. Wholeness would be satisfied in time.

[Roht Mirage]

Astarelle had spent time with her people's equivalent to soldiers, but she was not one of them. She lacked their iron-wrought focus. So, even with adrenaline widening her vision and tensing her reflexes, she could not help but entertain a stray thought from the part of her -the dominant part- that wielded words rather than weapons.

Culprit...

Strange word. It felt as awkward in her head as it had on her tongue. But, it had settled Relt's curiosity... for the moment. She had other words on the edge of her tongue, words heavy with unanswerable questions, but now wasn't the time.

Scuttling and squelching through the muddy streets like a four legged insect, staff and poker twitching about as feelers, they made their way to each house in turn. Taking turns at each door, either Astarelle would bash it open with her cloaked sand gauntlet, momentarily hardened to a solid and devastating mass, or Relt would kick it open with hinge-popping enthusiasm while shouting phrases that Astarelle assumed were quoted from her strange Cage demon.

Each room they came to was a stark, blue-toned picture of someone's last moments. Some bore signs of struggle, furniture toppled or tools strewn about, no doubt having proved useless as weapons. But, many were unnervingly serene. It was as if they had been abandoned without the residents truly understanding their peril. Whether that abandonment had been achieved through the front door or a grotesque wound in reality, only the scars would tell, and many of them had faded to nothing more than the burning afterimage one sees on the back of their eyelids after gazing at the sun.

Quickly, they began to run out of doors to bust and rooms to scour clean with their rage. Astarelle felt herself moving faster and faster until she was breaking formation with Relt just to answer the oppressive question sooner.

The answer was always, “No one here. You're too late.”

Relt, her shorter legs locking her a step behind, would punctuate the realization with a hard rap of the poker against any furniture or walls within reach. If she were trying to shake their prey from the rafters, it didn't work.

Finally, soaking wet and stubbornly furious, they worked their way to the last house. It lay beside the pier as a sentinel, waves almost touching at its back wall in their determined frothing. Some boats clunked against the dock. Others rode in and out on the undulations of the sea, their lines left untied.

At their feet was the focal point of the footprints-turned-puddles. Each track seemed to point toward the storm-churned beach, and each track ended abruptly.

“It began here,” Astarelle said dourly, the first words that had passed between them since the futility of their hunt became apparent, “The first ones to respond were... pushed out.” She grimaced. The taut frustration within her began to shudder under the weight of one more niggling annoyance. In all the languages and dialects she knew, there were no words that encapsulated the wrongness of it. There was only the acrid smell of something 'other', a presence that could not be washed away in the downpour.

The tension finally snapped, spurring her legs to run for the last door so hard that she splashed mud up to her waist. Relt was right beside her, eyes glaring over her odd glasses as if that house hid her greatest enemy. Feet falling in unison, they stomped onto the first of three porch steps, then clear up to the porch itself, and kicked the rickety door with the weight of two water-logged bodies.

It snapped clean off its hinges and sailed into the room, where it quickly clipped the corner of an overturned table and clattered end over end until coming to rest against the unlit hearth. The room was a mess of thrown furniture and assorted rusty swords fanned out across the floor from the chest against the right wall. The village chief's home, Astarelle reasoned, and that pathetic box of old heirloom blades was the only armory the villagers knew.

Above the hearth, and lit only by the muddy light coming in the windows behind them, a curved sword was mounted in its sheath. The half-drawn blade shone with polish, and the oiled sheath leaned askew on its rack from the sudden force of the hilt being seized by a panicked hand... that had suddenly disappeared.

Astarelle walked forward until her shoe bumped into an abandoned sword, scraping the untended metal against the rough plank floor. “They!” she began with a jump, still riding the wave of tension that was denied an outlet. “They saw- These ones here, the village chief and... some others,” she continued as her words felt somewhat less like they were being wrung out of her soaked form, “They saw the ones on the beach. They tried to defend themselves, but... they were gone before they could get word to anyone else in the village. Those who didn't run at the first noise, however much there might have been, wouldn't have known what was coming.”

“So fucking what?!” Relt shouted with a harsh rap of iron against the door frame, “Tell me something I don't know, Sherlock. Or at least something god damn useful. You won't even tell me what the fucking thing looked like!”

Astarelle spun on her, though the motion felt slow under the weight of more than just sodden clothes. “You!” she snapped. Her cloaked hand was curled up to her chest and her staff was thrust forward as assertively as when they had prowled the streets. “It looked like you. Dark as thirty spans below. Like your shadow had come off and started cutting people out of the world.” Clearly, Relt still had her shadow. It stretched from her feet into the center of the room, riding the light from the doorless frame.

Knowing it was nonsensical, but also that nonsense was the only thing constant in this slowly-drowning cesspool of a continent, Astarelle backed away from the shadow.