Kiravi's Travelogue Ch. 07

The strange light exploded with power, and out came tumbling a single shape, resolving itself from a swirl of silver light into a vast humanoid. The light faded as the figure became more solid and real until the being had the same silvery, oily look as the priestess's glamour.

"Timal sprung from the raw magic of the universe and went about ordering the nothingness into something," the priestess said, her voice a harsh whisper that slipped through my ears and into my mind like ice water. The shade of Timal in our vision waves his hands broadly, and the glowing haze separated and tore apart, transforming into worlds and stars, moons and glittering clouds of dust. "He ordered our world and the stars before creating the rest of the gods from his own flesh."

Timal reached into his semi-solid form and scooped out his essence, molding it with hands the size of planets into smaller versions of himself. These new gods did the same thing to themselves, and those new gods did the same. Over and over, the gods divided and created, until I saw what looked like a human and an Archian amongst the endless ranks of gods and goddesses.

But I could barely see any of it through the throbbing, blinding agony in my skull. My body trembled in this not-place, thrumming with some unknown power churning in my conduit. I reached up to hold my temples and brush away the pained tears from the corners of my eyes, but I paused. My skin was glowing with golden light from within. As I reached backward, the energy boiling higher inside of me, the priestess didn't stop.

"Timal is the father of all! From those gods that claim to equal his might, that petulantly left the light of his presence, to the lowliest peasant girl from the smallest desert hamlet. He is not just father but LORD of all, and his power knows no bounds!"

I bent double, the pain filling me just as the power finally erupted out through my conduit to fill the rest of me. She spoke to me now, my goddess' words sweet honey to my ears. Her words didn't make sense to me, but I felt something creep across my mind, a glowing sheen like the light from my flesh. It built in my chest, swelling, becoming.

The priestess' shade finally turned to look at me in this place, recoiled at my growing transformation, "W-what?"

Words formed in my throat, not fully mine, and my voice thrummed with something beyond my understanding.

"No, priestess, that's not what happened. Not exactly, anyhow. Your Timal has lied to you."

***

I blinked, shook my head to slow the world's spinning for a moment, and saw a goddess.

A goddess of blood and rage.

Leotie still stood on the broken mud-bricks just above me, but now two twitching bodies lay at her feet. She hadn't had time to string her bow but still wielded it in her left hand as a long club, and in her right was one of her fine flint knives from the Ketza. Blood dripped from it and onto the bricks, bright and fresh. I watched, vision still slowly spinning, as another peasant rushed her.

Like a javelin of fangs and wicked claws, Niknik leaped onto his back, sinking his teeth into the base of the man's skull.

I tried to stand, barely aware of the crush of feet around me, but the spinning came back, and nausea churned in my gut. She swung the unstrung bow backhanded at the next assailant scrabbling up the rubble, snapping his head to the side and sending him tumbling away. She leaped forward, plunging her knife through his ribs. Her face was wild, as savage as Niknik's; lips curled back over bloodstained teeth, eyes wide and brilliant white against still-wet blood, her braids whipping around her rictus mask.

Niknik tackled another man who'd been propelled into the melee by the combined energy of the mob and terror, but he broke into horrified wailing the moment claws sunk into his flesh. Two more mobbed Leotie, one stabbing with his knife and the other wildly swinging with a boatwright's hammer. She twisted, body glowing like water, dodging the hammer and letting the flint knife shatter against the stones set into her breastplate. She lashed again with the bow, snapping it over the knife-wielder's thick skull, before shrieking with rage and stabbing the other man upwards through the jaw, the blade punching through his palate and into the brainpan.

I had to help her, dear readers, and a wellspring of self-loathing and anger filled my guts. But, even as I strained to push myself up, I could feel the knot of pain throbbing on the back of my head and the swirling vertigo return. I tried, I tried with everything I had, to push myself up from the rubble. Slowly, too slowly, I rose, and a growling roar of frustration and self-hatred bubbled from my throat. This was all my fault, and I was doing nothing.

Leotie jabbed the broken half of her bow into the next man's face, sending him reeling away, shrieking and clutching his eyes. The others had begun to realize just how dangerous this avenging goddess was, scrabbling up and around her on the rubble pile to swarm her from all sides. The broken bricks shifted beneath me, and my painfully slow rise to my feet faltered.

"Get up, gods-damn you, you useless man!" She whipped her broken bow at another assailant before gathering her limited magic around her newly free hand. The greenish-blue energy coalesced into a soft beam that she launched at me, just as she had in that shit-filled alley in Atala.

This time, though, I wasn't filled with a wave of cold sluggishness. Instead, my heart began to thunder in my chest, the blood roared in my ears, and the world finally stopped spinning. I'd heard of magic like this but never seen it. It only made sense that if she could slow and frustrate an attacker, she could also invigorate an ally.

I managed to rise first to one knee, then the other, before anyone noticed I'd recovered. A man with a soot-stained face turned to see me clambering up amongst the tangled, sweating mess of limbs. His eyes widened, brilliant against the smeared ash, before my hand tightened around my sword and brought it slashing across his midsection. His cotton shirt provided no resistance to the sharp bronze edge, and his belly didn't fare any better. He fell, shrieking like the damned, trying to pile his roping guts back into his stomach.

Trembling with Leotie's borrowed power, I climbed from my knees to my feet, a sudden breakwater in the rushing tide of hostile bodies.

All of the shame from the last hour, the last week, my whole life. All of the panicked realization that I'd signed Leotie's death warrant and usurped Serina's life. All of the minuscule morals that had kept me from becoming a true, gutter-dwelling criminal. It all poured into my next swing of the heavy, unfamiliar sword.

A swing that messily opened one throat and crumpled the skull of the next man in line, all in a cloud of misted blood that seemed to expand so slowly.

I was in the middle of them, assumed to be a helpless captive but now a spinning, roaring mass of muscle and revenge. I slashed twice more, opening a gap and forcing the mob back a pace or two. For a moment, I searched for the so-called Nobles that had instigated all of this, but like the cowards I'd suspected they were, they were hidden at the back of the dwindling pack of less and less eager rabble. I was torn, dear readers, between diving into the mob to chase the bastards down or clambering up to stand shoulder to shoulder with Leotie.

She decided for me. Slipping and sliding down the blood-slick bricks, she stood at my side. Niknik crouched at my left hip; the blood-crazed woman, goddess, stood at my right. Hands clenched on weapons, lips pulled back tight over teeth or fangs, blood thundered in our ears.

And the swarming mob stopped for a moment, paused; wondering just what in the Akagi's hells had just changed.

I leaped forward and down, swinging the sword over my head at no target in particular. Bodies scrambled out of the way, but one couldn't move fast enough and took the sharpened slab of bronze between his shoulder and neck. He let out a sound between a cough and a gasp and crumpled away to be stepped on and over by the others. Niknik snarled, and a man squealed like a dying rabbit as he sunk fangs into soft flesh. Leotie hurled a cracked knife into a man's face, the jagged flint disfiguring his already twisted face before Leotie plunged her next knife into his heart.

The time had passed to try and escape from this murderous pack. All that was left to do was try and break them on the edges of my sword and her knives. There was no space left in my mind for the mouth-drying, gut-souring fear: all that remained was mindless, animal rage. We both should've died in those first few moments, and now death demanded the payment it had been cheated.

I barreled into them, not waiting for the cowards to make their next move, knocking one man aside with my shoulder before stabbing forward to skewer another one in the belly. He reached down, grasping the blood-slick blade, slicing his palms open, and barely keeping the sword from sliding in further. I roared, punching the pommel of the weapon with my free hand and impaling him further. Blood poured from his mouth, and he cried weakly, trying to topple backward with my sword, but he was held up by the crush of bodies. These weren't soldiers, warriors; they were just an angry mob, and their anger, that had propped them up against fear, was waning.

A knife came stabbing in from my left, and I grabbed the wrist attached to it, forcing the magic from my conduit into my strangely scarred arm. My hand and his wrist glowed for a brief moment before the spell discharged. He was left with the bloody ruin of a stump as bony shrapnel rained across the mob.

"Who's next?!" I roared as the man shrieked and reeled away, and I kicked my sword loose from the corpse trapping it. "Who's next, you fucking bastards?!" The bricks below us were dangerously slick with fresh blood, slowing the men climbing to their deaths. "Cowards!" A club smashed into my shoulder from somewhere behind me, but I heard a yip and felt a body crumple and knew Leotie had dispatched them. Pain flooded my left arm, but it didn't matter. "I'll fucking split open every last one of you traitorous pieces of shit!" I bellowed to ignore the pain, to make them feel the fear I'd buried, to make them flinch before I cut them down.

The sword flashed again in a great arc, no longer unfamiliar to me but instead feeling like an extension of my arm. You may not be aware, dear readers, as I wasn't until that moment, that bronze doesn't hold an edge for very long. My blade had become little more than a long club, but that just meant the wounds I doled out were that much messier and more brutal.

A man piled at my feet, his skull bashed open by my blow, and I kicked him aside to wade further into the melee. Three of them, finding some reserve of courage, launched themselves at me all at once. Two went for my sword arm, grabbing at skin slick with sweat and blood to restrain my deadly blows. The third slashed at my guts with an obsidian knife. I twisted awkwardly away, saving myself from the worst of it but still earning a long, deep gash in my side through the boiled hide of my breastplate.

I snarled, grabbing his filthy shirt and yanking him towards me before viciously head butting him in the nose. Bone and cartilage crunched, and coppery blood splattered across my face. He shrieked and reflexively threw his hands to his face, so I grabbed his knife hand and bent it around, jamming the blade into his eye and twisting.

Pain flashed up my sword arm; one of the two men struggling to pin it in place had sunk a flint knife into the straining meat of my bicep. "Gods-damned cowards," I snarled, gathering magic into the hand still clutching the knife plunged into the third man's eye. "Cowards! All of you!" I roared, letting more and more energy surge through my conduit. More than I had for a long time. More than I should have. "Shedia take your gods-damned, raping souls!"

I jabbed my fingers, knife-like, towards the two men, and a rippling wave of burning magic whipped outwards. It caught them all across their heads and chests, charring skin into black, cracked ruin and roasting fat and muscle beneath until smoke and steam billowed away. My two initial targets didn't even have time to scream; their lungs boiled as they tried to draw their last breaths, but the wave of magic wrapped and bent around them, tearing down across the rubble. And that next rank of the rabble, dear readers...they screamed. They certainly screamed. My spell, one of the most powerful I'd ever managed to learn, lost strength quickly but caught their cotton shorts and hair ablaze and blistered skin into weeping ruin.

I knew in that first moment I'd pushed too hard: my insides heaved against the effort, and the skin on my arm was pink and raw from the near brush with my spell. But my arm was now free, and the last knot of foes before us had been reduced to a wailing pile of burning, soon-to-be corpses. Risking a glance over my shoulder, I saw that Leotie and Niknik had butchered the men who'd tried to flank us on the broken bricks. Her sandstone-colored eyes widened at seeing the rippling fire, reflecting the hungry flames brightly amongst a mask of dust and blood. Her body was tense, coiled, ready to launch herself at her next foe like the bloody-handed goddess she was. Her generous chest heaved with eager breaths underneath the once-beautiful armor that had lost or broken dozens of its glittering stones.

A surge of hate pumped new energy into my limbs at seeing the four so-called Nobles hesitating at the bottom of the rubble pile. They'd been moving forward to finish us off before my spell has gone off but now seemed unsure in the face of the obliteration of their mob. So, I decided that I wouldn't let them make up their minds.

Howling as much to bolster my own abused body and exhausted conduit as to damage their resolve, I sprinted down towards the nearest man.

He, the seeming leader from before, lunged forward to meet my charge, his sword drawn and flashing in the dying flames. Though not as tall as me, he was broad and well-muscled from a life training to fight the Empire's wars and had certainly mastered the sword with far greater skill than I. His compatriots hesitated, perhaps to give the man some sort of honor from single combat, perhaps because they were gutless cowards. I didn't know and didn't care, slipping on tacky pools of blood that my sandaled feet splashed through.

Whatever sense of honor they might've observed from the back of some chariot was of no concern to me. They'd thrown that away when they'd threatened to rape Leotie to death simply for being Bhakhuri. "Leotie!" I shouted breathlessly, "Do what you did to me in the alley!" I could only hope she understood what I meant.

A beam of green energy lanced past me and speared into his gut, and a savage grin split my blood-black face. His limbs slowed in an instant, sluggishly turning as if trapped in river mud, and his face twisted with sudden fear. I cackled, shouting something I don't remember and might not have even been words, smashing the skull-blunted sword down into his face before I could even stop on the bricks.

He lived, dear readers, for the long moment it took me to draw my aching, shredded, burnt arm back up to savagely hack into him again. The first blow had split his forehead beneath the headdress, cracked the skull underneath, ruined an eye socket and splattered his eyeball into bloody jelly, and split both lips over a mouthful of shattered teeth. My second screaming, two-handed blow smashed into the eye that widened in abject, helpless terror and cracked through to the brick underneath.

I hated them. I hated them because they'd so casually decided our lives were forfeit. I hated them because they'd presumed to take my life, and Leotie's, and no one was going to kill me without my bloodying them first. I hated them as I snatched up my victim's unbloodied sword in my left hand and stomped down to street level.

The blood had drained from their faces, but they didn't turn to run, not yet. One carried a staff like Sata had and finally stepped forward with a spell at the ready. What an arrogant fool, that could've blasted us down so much earlier in the battle, I thought. His reward for his foolish delay was Leotie's knife punched through his neck, thrown over my shoulder the moment she'd seen his spell. The third rushed forward, thrusting at my belly with his sword, clearly hoping finesse would overcome the blood-soaked monster in front of him.

I parried wildly with my right, deflecting his blade so that the still-sharp tip gouged a bloody groove in my left leg. The point caught in my thick breeches, his arm and torso awkwardly extended, and it was too simple a matter to my enraged mind to bring the gleaming blade in my left hand down against his arm. The bronze bit through cotton robes and flesh, splintered and smashed bone, and thrummed when it cracked into the road cobbles. He wailed, sobbing and clutching his ragged and splattering stump, and I shoved him back with my foot before stabbing down into his chest with the sword that had taken his arm.

At seeing his last companion casually cut to pieces, the last of the Old Nobles finally broke and ran. His feet slapped loudly against the cobbles, echoing from the silent tenements. The sound masked the faint rasp of Niknik's claws against the road. Leotie's beast ran him down with almost pathetic ease, bunching predatory muscles before pouncing on his back. Teeth and claws tore into robes and the flesh beneath it. He wailed pitifully, the sound echoing long after Niknik's squat jaws had snapped his neck and crushed his windpipe.

I was faintly aware of the sound of something dripping. Was it raining? Wasn't the season for it, I remember thinking. Maybe someone had the bad timing to hurl their filth into the street as we'd dispatched the mob.

"Kiravi?"

I blinked, turned to look at Leotie. Gods, she was beautiful, dear readers. Gone was the avenging deity of carnage, lithe and sharp and savage. Now, her face was a mask of concern beneath the crusted blood and dust.

"Yes?"

"We have to get you out of here," she said simply, swallowing nervously.

I blinked again, and the roar of my blood slowly began to fade from my ears. Why was I so tired? I looked down at my body and hands and realized what was dripping.

Blood ran in thick rivulets from my left leg and right arm, cascaded from the throbbing knot on the back of my head. Something had hit my left eyebrow, and another wound on my scalp leaked blood onto my face to mix with the splatter from our foes. It puddled in my breastplate where the knife had gotten through, soaking into the hide and tattered remnant of my shirt.

My legs buckled for a moment and Leotie steadied me, "I suppose you're right," I mumbled.

She pushed me up against the side of one of the tenements, propping me up before binding the worst of my wounds with scraps of fabric torn from the dead mob. I took a much-needed swig from a water skin she found somewhere as the last of the light faded over the city. "Where can we go?" She asked, anxiety ringing her voice.

I shook my head, biting the inside of my cheek to add a new jolt of pain to keep my mind going, "The palace, maybe? I'm sure Serina will be fine in the temple." I could see faces peering out at us from behind the shrouds covering doors and windows, and I was unsure what the rest of the city would think about coming across the scene of a blood-soaked massacre and the battered survivors.

It started faintly at first, so low and quiet I wasn't even sure it was there. But, as Leotie grabbed my arm and draped it over her shoulder to steady me, it grew. Screams. So many of them that they blended into each other in a constant, sussurating wave. With the sun slipped beyond the horizon, I could see the faint glow of a handful of fires on both sides of the river. Had the mob and the Old Nobles leading it been on their way to starting some small piece of the anarchy growing around us? I hadn't thought to ask.