“Get up! Get up!” Raylene bellowed. Bouncing with her fists white-knuckled on the railing.
“Do it, Roht! Just like her!” Tabin shouted, pointing at the rising form of Kyla. He wasn't the only one.
Master Kotra frowned. Nothing more than I expected. He gave his two elder students each a glance, catching them as they shared a look of begrudging camaraderie. They're getting along, at least.
Unmindful of the spectacle and the crowd's rolling cheers, he shot a cautious eye over his shoulder for the hundredth time. The ferals that lined the railing to either side kept most of the other spectators far enough away to be featureless against the meager torchlight. But, he needed only to identify color. Where are you, my tribesman? he pondered into the crowd, Are you trying to draw me out? Aside from Astarelle and one other combatant, he had seen not even a shadow of anyone from his homeland. They were either disguised or... he dared not suspect it. Is it you, boy? If you're alive, oh how you must have grown.
A sudden movement caught his eye. While the crowd leaned ever farther forward, threatening to spill onto the barrier like birds into a clean window, one shape moved away. He caught just a pale, soft-featured face. Short. Hair in a high tail. A woman? His tribe would never share their secrets with a pale woman. But, if Astarelle's tribe was as serious about keeping its secrets as his was, or worse, truly as dangerous as she warned.... It was long said, from many wise mouths, that Fallien secrets rarely survived beyond the desert. His heart tightened as he started to turn back toward the bloodsport. Burn you, woman. If your showiness brings assassins down on us-
He hadn't even spun completely around when the crowd gasped and pointed to some spectacle above the arena. “He'll fall!” a woman shrieked. Kotra twisted to look farther along the railing. A lone feral, one-third of the quietest bunch, was wobbling on the very top bar like a drunk acrobat, and on his head was the most ridiculous, over-wrought hat that had ever been birthed into creation. A wrinkly hand shot from low on the crowd, seizing the back of the boy's shirt as an old woman's furious face followed like a troll mask floating in a sea of bodies.
For one brief, serendipitous moment, the boy looked down upon all the lowlings, his crown waving opulent frills and fake flower petals. He gripped the brim in both hands, tilted his head back and -with passion to overshadow the most downtrodden of revolutionaries- crowed something absolutely unintelligible. The old woman reeled him back like a guppy, her other hand already raised to swat his behind, but the battle cry had been sounded. And it spread. All the children around Kotra, save Dahvim, returned to their primordial, gutter-crawling forms with loud woops and screams. They disappeared under the surrounding bodies like poison leeching into a thousand open wounds.
“Horseshit,” Tabin breathed, then looked at his master expectantly. Dahvim reached up for his brother's hand.
“Their dead mothers will be mortified,” Kotra intoned with a sardonic sigh, then turned to his lanky student and belted out orders above the rising screams for violated pockets. “Round up as many as you can. Promise them candy, no bedtimes, or that we'll throw away the tub, anything. We're leaving before our hosts pin us down.” Tabin bolted in one direction with Dahvim scrabbling as his heels. Kotra went the other. He gave only a cursory glance for Raylene and found her gripping the hands of the pudgiest feral. No orders needed. Good girl.
What he didn't realize, as he set about plucking beast-children off pant legs and shouting them into obedience, was that Raylene was not leading the child. The child was leading her. They both disappeared quietly into the dark entrance hall as the scene dissolved into utter purse-clutching chaos.
~
Astarelle knelt, frozen. The pain of her cooked fingers luxuriated all up her body as the flesh began to swell and blister. “Please be worth it,” she whispered as she forced herself to stop looking at her hands, forced herself to ignore the thick man's threats, and looked up through the flame-licked gloom to see Kyla using the tool of impalement as a crutch. She looked as if she had turned her back to a dragon, but she stood. Astarelle smiled as a tear -either from pain or relief- rolled down her sweat-glazed cheek.
Then, the battle's heartbeat kicked in again. Explosions wooshed beyond Kyla, sending a dead rat skipping from the shadows to stop in front of Astarelle. One beady eye pointed at her ominously. A blur of shadows shot by, making her look up from the rat hopefully. “'I'm with you, Shadow,” she promised as she shifted her feet under her. In that moment, the behemoth who, it seemed, would have liked nothing more than to run right over her, recoiled on the force of Talen's bolt. A wing of blood sprouted darkly from the man's back and continued on to spray the bars.
Astarelle gripped her staff in one charred hand and stood, her voice rising in an anguished scream. The pain pulsed through her anew like a second heart beating fire and shrapnel into her veins. In step with that new tempo, she ran. The twice-wide man was closing on Talen, swiping at the crossbow. Astarelle's split skirt swept wide as she planted her left foot and launched herself over the carpet of stinking ash and blood. Her right shoe, iron-plated at the toe, arced toward the man's face, and her staff whipped overhead imprecisely. She was not trying to strike him with it, but to scrape it down his back where glass still protruded like prehistoric plates.
Cover me, she willed toward Talen as she realized that her underside was totally exposed to the monstrous arms. He hadn't moved, even as the man's swipe came dangerously close to disarming him. Instead, he just disappeared, crossbow and all, back to the shadows from whence he came. Astarelle's mind staggered, Or don't.
Out of Character:
Bunny was approved by Hysteria. Bunny permissions have been granted to Warpath for his next post.