Whatever the reason was, I’d have time for philosophy later (hopefully). Right now it was simply running time. Or fleeing time, I guess. Same thing. Cardio o’clock.
As much as my legs and lungs were burning from said cardio, I figured it was still preferable to whatever would happen if we stopped. Sadly, the universe decided we should be blessed with the chance to find out exactly what that was. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, just the nature of the thing. A right turn and the immediate next left brought us on to a wide boulevard, where the joy we might have felt at getting a clear area of running was immediately trampled by the sight of 4 more shadow-people loitering, dare I say ‘with intent’, smack-bang in the middle of the path.
We all skidded to a stop on the dusty ground, barely keeping our footing as we did. It would have been fittingly cartoonish in any other context, and I think it would have benefitted from a tyre-squeal sound effect. We looked around frantically, seeing if there was an alternative path. We’d committed to this one, and by the time we turned around, our pursuers had closed off the route back out. Sadly, there weren’t any convenient side passages. We were truly sandwiched.
Very kindly, the ones chasing us had slowed down when we did. I assume it was to make their slow approach feel more menacing, but it still had the helpful side-effect of letting us get some of our breath back.
“So,” Nalfis whispered between ragged, panting breaths, “when this all kicks off, are we going loud or still aiming for quiet?”
“Whatever makes you happy,” Tove replied.
Nalfis began tuning his lyre. “Loud it is,” he chuckle-wheezed.
If loud was allowed (heh), then that widened my envelope a bit. I unhooked the hemisphere of the turret from my belt, and siphoned some magic, a tiny fragment of my soul, into it. As it began to whir and click, coming to life in just a few seconds, I tipped it upwards out of my hand, pivoting the flat side onto my forearm. Before it could fall off, the leg-like clamps sprang open, and coiled around my arm like the talons of a hawk. The barrel and remaining assembly took shape barely a couple of seconds later, the final pieces telescoping and latching into place. The turret was ready. It made my left arm a bit heavy but kept the hand free, like strapping on a small shield. Except it was a gun.
Since it was my magic, my soul that powered it, it shared my intent. Not my whole brain, but enough of ‘me’ that we were of a like mind, letting us act together, and making sure the barrel pointed the right way without necessarily following my arm. It was cool like that.
I try not to ‘humanise’ it too much, but it was kinda challenging. I know it’s an item, not a living thing, but it could walk a bit, and do things quasi-independently, and it just sometimes felt like it was a small, violent creature. I empathised. That said, it did get damaged… quite frequently. I tried not to let that get to me too much, but if you’re the kind of person that attaches feelings to objects, you might be in for a rough time as the story unfolds.
I had a moment to choose what spell I was going to open the batting with, and since it was clear there was no point in holding back or rationing myself, I decided on ‘spell which is basically a magic grenade’. I didn’t have a good name for it, so I was sorta just calling it ‘bang’. It fits, alright? As a spell, it was also thematically consistent with the turret, which is a big deal when you’re trying to craft an image. I just hoped I lived long enough for people to notice and appreciate the vibe I was striving for.
Alf and Tove had now put their shields on; Alf’s paired with his staff, Tove’s with her glowing bead-string thing, which I sadly noticed was glowing much less than usual.
{Hi, it’s Tove. Because Indy apparently doesn’t want to explain anything, I will. The ‘glowing bead-string thing’ is a star chart, or star map. By twisting, looping, and folding it at various points, you can make it correspond to various constellations and such. In use, it looks a little bit like a cat’s cradle, but it’s one strand, not a loop.
It’s a way of taking readings from the night sky for directions and prophecies and things like that, and it’s how I craft most of my magic. The ‘string’ was a leather cord that my dead best friend had made. The ‘beads’ were precious and semi-precious gemstones, handpicked based on how well they matched the most important stars. It takes years of practice and studying to use them effectively. My whole school of magic is nearly a lost art, with only a handful of teachers, and items like these are a crucial part of our culture and our powers. “GlOwInG bEaD-sTrInG tHiNg,” I swear to Emrys…}
Since everyone was suited and booted, we formed into an awkward square, trying to look both ways at once.
Conventional wisdom suggests that when you’re caught in a pincer like we were here, your move should be to try and break one side of it, before you’re fully encircled. Pairing off to fight would’ve been disastrous, and since we wanted to keep going forward anyway, our best bet was to try and smash straight through the ones in front, before we could get bogged down too much with the ones behind us.
Of course, ‘conventional wisdom’ had long since fled, having taken a look at our circumstances and deciding to go and hang out with some more sensible people, like lion-tamers, BASE jumpers, and the criminally insane.
That’s not to say we were crazy, or stupid. We all knew that was the best course of action, it’s just that fate would rather tell a good story than an easy one. This meant that our good plan became a horrible one, roughly 1/100th of a second after we put it into action.
The plan was hasty but still sensible. Nalfis would keep the ones behind us occupied, while the other three of us fought the four in front. Once we’d broken through, we’d extract him and keep running. This was communicated mostly by gesturing and pointing, but we all got the gist. There were also reasons that Nalfis was the poor soul who got the 1v6 fight, most of which I didn’t know at the time, but they were all fairly insistent in their gesturing so I let it go. One key reason though, I did discover a few seconds later. Nalfis is really good at getting people’s attention.
For a whole host of my own neuroses (reasons! I definitely mean reasons), I’ve never liked having people pay too much attention to me. In my mind it feels awkward and embarrassing, but he made it look easy, natural, and above all else, good. There’s definitely a joke in there. Anyway. He plucked the first chord of his lyre, and the sound echoed into the darkness, into streets that hadn’t known music for a thousand years. And as soon as that chord turned into a song, he was glowing. I don’t mean that in a ‘gorgeous pregnant woman’ kind of way, I mean that he actually radiated light. It was faint, but it nevertheless stood out in a place this dark. It wasn’t like Sera’s glow, which had been ethereal and sourceless; this was coming from inside him – like his body was hollow and filled with fireflies. That’s a horrible mental image, now that I think about it. Just imagine a glowing elf instead.
His voice joined, singing along with the music. The lyrics were Elvish, and even though I couldn’t understand the words, I could still hear how beautiful his voice was, so at odds with where we were. It was entrancing; practically hypnotic. I wanted more than anything to sit down and listen for as long as I could, but that wasn’t an option right now. I tore my eyes away, and even as I did I could hear a clattering noise coming from his direction, a sound like stones being kicked around. I still didn’t know what he was going to do other than sing, but everyone else seemed reasonably confident, so I left him to it.
I took a deep breath as the three of us faced off against the four shadow-people, maybe 30 metres ahead. Our job was to break through as fast as possible so that we could relieve Nalfis, so there was no time to hang about and wait for them to come to us. That meant maximum aggression, and the moment we committed to that was the same moment things went sideways. That wasn’t our fault, just an annoying coincidence.
Alf’s staff lit up like a torch, flames gathering around the end and pushing back a fraction of the darkness, Tove’s hands swirled, turning still air into swirling winds, kicking up dust and pebbles. I rolled a small wooden bead into a tube. We met each other’s eyes, nodded, and unleashed.
Tove flung her arms wide (for a Dwarf anyway), and the wind dissipated. A miniature tornado sprang to life around one of the shadow-people, made visible by the dust and rocks it gathered. The victim began spinning like a demented windmill, carried to-and-fro by the twister. I raised my left arm, willing the turret to find a target. It obliged; there was a short whine as it condensed power, before firing a shimmering bolt of magical force. The bolt was slightly visible; it warped the air and was surrounded by a faint blue haze, meaning I could track it as it slammed into the rightmost enemy. They were pushed back a short distance, evidently staggered, but sadly not destroyed.
As I plotted my next move, fire leapt from Alf’s staff, lancing towards the shadow-people. Being magical, or at least made by magic, it had some mass. It might not have been the ‘pure light’ that would have been so effective, but it would still be like getting hit in the face with a frying pan that was on fire. Happily, that had the sort of result you’d normally expect. Unhappily, it had another result. A sliver of flame went wide, flying off into the empty street behind. Only it wasn’t empty; and that was where our problems lay.
The errant flame may only have been as bright as a couple of candles, but that was as good as a bonfire in here. Propelled into the darkness, it threw the faintest outline over dozens more of them. There could be any number more in the darkness. Fuck.
“Oh for Sól’s sake,” Alf groaned, “can things go our way once?”
Tove was much more succinct. “Run!” she cried. It was a compelling argument. I’d already taken half a step back in shock, and now performed a swift about-turn on my heels. Nalfis had looked our way as Tove yelled out, and surprise was now written across his face. He kept the music up though, and to my complete amazement, something actually managed to puncture the bubble of panic that was rising in me.
“The rocks are dancing,” I blurted. I wasn’t quite struck dumb, but I was definitely struck stupid. There was no other way to put it though. Somewhere around a dozen rocks, from small pebbles to fist-sized chunks of masonry, were bobbing around Nalfis in time to the music. They were interposed between him and the shadow-people we’d left him to delay, and seeing as I got to watch one of them get smacked by a brick, it looked like it was working.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Yes yes it’s all very exciting,” Alf hurried, “but we need to go.” His staff was lighting up again, and he started lowering the tip towards the group blocking our retreat. Tove had kept her eyes on the horde for those few seconds. “They’re getting closer~,” she said in a nervous, sing-song-y tone. I recovered my wits, and lowered the barrel of my stave towards the smaller group. I didn’t even know which way counted as forwards or backwards by now, only that our new route was back the way we came.
I want to say I had a cool line ready to go, and even though I’m the one writing this and I could just lie and you’d never know, I like to think I’m better than that. Sadly, I was busy thinking I was going to die, so I yelled “get ready!” or something equally boring, then levelled my staff and fired. Unlike the spell I’d used for getting through doors, this one was a projectile – the bead fired out of the barrel, landing a metre or so behind the shadow-people. This was deliberate, because it then immediately exploded.
The explosion was made of magic, not gunpowder, so there was no fire, just a concussive wave and a fucking loud noise. The two closest shadows were immediately mangled, and started disintegrating like paper in front of our eyes. The other four were knocked aside in a cloud of dust and pulverised stone fragments. A couple of buildings nearby developed alarming new cracks.
Through the ringing in my ears, I heard someone shouting. For all I know it was me. Regardless, all I caught was a “-t’s go!”, which sounded like it was underwater. Whoever it was, they were right, and we dashed into the dust cloud. We turned right at the corner, passing the road we’d come up initially, and chose the other direction this time.
The pressure in my ears subsided as we ran, and I could hear my own breathing again, but the high-pitched noise didn’t go away. It took me a while to realise that this wasn’t coming from inside my ears. It was behind us. I dared a glance behind, frantically wiping dust off the lenses of my goggles. It wasn’t a pretty picture. The horde was tearing after us, many of them dropping on to all fours and scampering across ruined buildings like a malformed pack of wolves. The haunting screech that they were giving off could be their howl, for all I knew. It was about as bone-chilling, and was doing a great job of activating my fight-or-flight response. I was more than happy with ‘or-flight’, and I had no intention of being caught by them. As far as I’m concerned, nothing good has ever screeched.
All of us were trying to delay our pursuers, or thin their numbers. The flame at the end of Alf’s staff surged higher and brighter, then detached entirely, soaring in an arc into the shadows. It landed behind a small pile of rubble, which was just as well, because I could feel the heat it gave off as fire cascaded in waves from where it landed. For a moment, the street around us was bright as day. Dozens of them must have just roasted, and we never stopped running all the while. To be fair, neither did they.
Tove swept her right arm in a cutting motion behind us, and the wind picked up again. This time, it blew directly upwards at gale-force or greater, across the width of the street we were on then. The first hapless shadow-creatures slammed into it, and were launched into the air as if gravity had just switched for them. More piled up behind though, and by sheer weight of numbers some began to make it through, anchored by their fellows behind them. Others simply melted into the ruined buildings either side of this new wall, flowing around it like a river around a rock.
Impressively, seeing as we were running for our lives, Nalfis plucked a short tune on his lyre without stopping. It was no more than a handful of chords, but enough that on the final flourish the air behind us shimmered, and when it resettled, it was as if a new row of ruined buildings had been placed directly across the road. To all the world, it looked like a dead-end street. Sadly, whatever these things were using to ‘see’ wasn’t their eyes, and Nalfis swore in a violent and uncharacteristic way as they simply poured through the illusion, heedless of its presence.
I have to say I was as impressed as I was exhausted. This was apparently ‘below full strength’ for these people, and it was pretty strong as far as I could tell. I’d made an explosion, sure, but Alf’s had blown mine out of the water in terms of power. Tove could apparently control wind as a backup power, while Nalfis… yeah I still didn’t know what he could do or was doing, but it was damn impressive.
I tried to figure out how I could best help, and settled for letting my turret take potshots into the horde while I scrabbled around my dozens of pockets. It could hardly miss, and I was pleased when I looked behind that I could see it taking a few of them apart. It was still like trying to empty an ocean with a spoon, however, and the magic that powered it wasn’t endless. All too soon it began to peter out, the shots becoming weaker and weaker. I commanded it to collapse back down, and hooked it back onto my belt as we kept running.
Normally for scenarios like this I have spells to make me run faster, but I’m not that much of a bitch, and also I didn’t want to get separated and then run the wrong way alone. For now, I had to settle for hurling as many of the ‘bombs’ as I could; shattering buildings and eardrums while I lamented the hours of work they represented. Oh well. It’d be worth it if I lived to be able to do the work again. Plus, I didn’t have to aim with these.
For all of our efforts though, it was clear they were gaining. Whether it was the terrain, the fact we didn’t know where we were going, or the fact they didn’t tire, I don’t know, but I knew they were getting closer. We just kept running. Some people like to go on about how the journey is more important, or more meaningful, than the destination – and while I can understand what they’re trying to say, I’ve gotta tell you that right now the destination was looking mighty important. Still, I’d keep going with the journey as long as that journey kept me out of reach of screeching shadow-things.
The distance between us and them was really shortening now. Our lead had started at fifty or so metres, and was now about half that. The rate at which the gap was closing was also increasing as we tired and they didn’t. We were also matching the pace of our slower members, which were unfortunately the Dwarves. It’s not a physique for endurance-running. Much better over short distances. It probably wouldn’t have done Nalfis and I any good to go off on our own anyway, so it wasn’t something to be bitter about.
As much as I had to devote all my effort to running, I still couldn’t help but look back every now and again. They were closer each time I looked, but morbid curiosity demanded that I keep doing it. Twenty metres now. Fifteen the next time. Ten at my last check, and the screeching was echoing around us now. Every muscle and sinew in my body was burning, my lungs were trying to extract every last speck of oxygen from my panting breaths, and my stitch had a stitch. None of this stopped me running just as hard as I could.
I snatched another glance back, and almost stumbled in fear. They were barely five metres behind us now, and I reckoned I could see them reaching out towards us. Whether it was psychosomatic or real, the temperature was plummeting, the darkness deepening, and the screeching was rising in pitch and volume, until it was a thin, piercing whistle.
We rounded another corner, pretty much at random by now, and immediately the sight was different. At the end of the street, maybe a hundred metres away, there was light. The darkness we were shrouded in gave way in a straight line like the wall of a house, and beyond it was a boring, cloudy day. It was the best weather I’d ever seen. First though, we had to get there.
Each of us redoubled our efforts, digging into our fourth or fifth winds, but they were right on our heels. We didn’t have time to waste on fancy tricks to slow them down – anything we had to slow down to accomplish would mean they caught us. The cold was overpowering. My skin was going numb, and I swear I could feel my blood crystallising. With each step closer to the light we got, the darkness pressed in closer around us. My peripheral vision was completely pitch-black, but I was only focused on what lay ahead anyway.
It was as poetic as it was inevitable that one of us would fall at the final hurdle. It wasn’t even a complete fall. Alf just stumbled on a shattered brick strewn across the path, but for all our toil, that was enough. It broke his stride, and barely 5 metres from the light, he dropped behind the rest of the pack, and the shadows were on him. Like wolves that have finally separated their prey from the herd, they lost interest in the rest of us almost immediately, swarming around him.
The three of us didn’t even have time to stop before we passed through that invisible wall, and shot out into the light. I immediately squinted at how bright it was, even though it was the light of a drab afternoon.
“Shit!” Tove screamed. Her eyes were already pricking with tears, and her hand now glowed bright with what I could tell was starlight. We looked back, but all we could see was an opaque wall of darkness. Tove flung light at it, screaming Alf’s name over and over again as each attempt failed, dissipating impotently as soon as it touched that malignant darkness. Her face was contorted between rage and terror, but she was refusing to give up on her efforts. Her voice was hoarse, yelling for him to get out of there.
There was no reply. We all knew as well as each other that she’d be next-to-useless if she tried to go back, but I could see her weighing it up, deciding if the risk to her life would be worth it. Nalfis was practically stock-still, tense and taut but not sure what to do with all the nervous energy flooding him. His reaction was obviously less pronounced than Tove’s, and I later learned he hadn’t known them as long as the two Dwarves had known each other. Even that wasn’t a long time, they’d just been through so much together. I don’t think Tove was ready to give up another friend so soon after the loss they’d all experienced.
I could see the moment the resolution crossed her face, when her eyes sharpened and she took a deep breath. I knew what she was readying herself for. Since I had absolutely no intention of letting it happen, I did the only thing I could: I beat her to the punch. For a moment, I was possessed by the spirit of that suicidal camaraderie which posthumous medals and war movies are made from. I ripped the last bead from the pouch I’d been dipping into as we’d run, and as I rolled it into the barrel of my stave, I whispered a miniscule prayer. I don’t know which God I was praying to, but it’s the sort of thing you’re meant to do.
I leapt forward, shoulder-checking Tove as she’d been about to take a step towards the dark, and knocking her over. I dove back in without a second thought, and immediately wished I’d had second thoughts. It was like I’d plunged straight into an ice-bath, and all the faint colours that had existed outside were whisked away immediately.
The shadow-people were gathered in a mound, no further than arms’ reach, huddled over my friend and doing Gods-know-what to him. Their heads looked up as I crossed the threshold, and their screech started again, shocking me right down to my bones. It was now or never though. I had one shot, and probably only one second, before they decided 2 victims were better than one. Time seemed to slow as I raised my staff, pointed the tip just behind where Alf lay, and fired.
I went limp the moment I fired, collapsing in a boneless heap – deliberately. A fraction of a second later, a crashing wave of magical force slammed into me, picking me up like a doll and throwing me back. I caught a flash of real, cloudy sky before I hit the ground again, tumbling a few metres and hitting every single bruise I already had.
If that hadn’t worked, I’d basically run into a wall for no reason. I had to hope though. I was pretty dazed, but I felt hands on my body as Nalfis rolled me onto my back.
“Can you hear me?” he asked. “Indy, can you hear me?!”
I groaned. I was still massively dizzy and in quite a lot of pain, but nevertheless I was lucid.
I couldn’t bring myself to seated, but Nalfis helped lift me, and I could do nothing but stare as I saw Tove’s hands light up once again, before she slammed them down onto Alf.
It was like her attempts to break through the darkness. Her hands lit up over and over again, and her tears were sparkling in the light, as she tried over and over to rouse Alf. He was still and silent, and each effort brought a primal, desperate scream. My heart was breaking just to watch, and the light was getting dimmer and dimmer.
I can’t express the depth of relief I felt when we heard him breathe.
Sammy xx
