The Restless Fugitive (Closed)

[Duffy]

Part Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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