(no subject)

[shadowstrikes]

Dust always had a very particular feel upon the tongue: a mixture of the instinctive need to spit out the taste of something that did not belong in the mouth and the awareness on every level that it was one of the flavours of defeat. Hakkyuu had felt the wrongness of dirt against his lips before, sometimes from gravity alone, sometimes with an angry pressure upon the back of his skull, sometimes mixed with copper and pain, but he had always resisted both the presence of it against his mouth and whatever the cause that had put him there. But as he lay upon the dry floor of the Crystal Desert so many miles from the confines of Ebonhawke and stared up with huge, terrified eyes, it didn't occur to Hakkyuu to think about the grit getting sucked in against his teeth with every panicked breath he drew in, nor to lift a hand to wipe a messy, wet trail of saliva away to rid himself of the wrongness in his mouth. There were more important things for his instincts to focus on in that moment, like the form hovering a short distance from him.

There was no part of that moment, winded and sore in an uncharted area, that did not feel like a bad dream to Hakkyuu. He'd watched from outside of the stronghold that he had lived his entire life in as the Elder Dragan swept up from the south and transformed the land beneath it to crystal and death in the wake of the breath of its thunderous roar and in the shock of bearing witness to the destruction he could only think that it had to be unreal because these were the kinds of images described in legend and book, not seen with the eye like a storm cloud rolling across the mountain. But watching fawner and charr forces instantly transformed to deathly moving formations of black and amethyst crystal stumbling their way from the scorched land that would soon be referred to as The Brand toward him instilled the only clear thought Hakkyuu could muster clearly through his shaken and shattering psyche.

Run.

And he had. A fast as he could for as long as he could, and then pushed even longer until he fell upon his knees and let the contents of his stomach burn up through his throat and hit the dust ground hotly between his splayed hands, the image blurring through watery eyes and the sounds of his own choked sobs muffed behind images of shambling crystal horrors.

After the immediate euphoria of throwing up wore off and the adrenaline that had sent him tearing from the Branded faded out, the shock truly set in and without knowing where he was, which direction he was headed, and with no sense of agenda, Hakkyuu walked. He didn't know how long or how far he'd walked after watching the dragon take flight, or how long and far he'd run after the Branded spotted him, and again, in the flats of the desert, he'd walk again with no clue how far or long he'd go with is sense of self held away from his consciousness as the haze of shock was the only force driving him forward.

It was impossible to say how long it may have taken until sheer exhaustion forced him to stop, but instead the encounter he had with another being was what interrupted the otherwise unrelenting forward path Hakkyuu had unwittingly forged for himself. The creature seemed to melt upward from the desolate ground, a bright flash of purple movement in the sandy backdrop, with golden spear in hand spinning to capture what little light poked through the clouds against the long edge of the blade and length of the hilt. The world spun, Hakkyuu's mouth felt dirt, and the image that swelled into view in his eye filled him with a third dose of the cold, unbelieving dread he'd felt in such a short space of time.

The figure loomed, tall and menacing and clearly not of--or no longer of--the realm of the living, and Hakkyuu choked on an attempt to get air into his lungs as his wide eyes drank in the sight of what he was sure in that moment was nothing other than glorious, fiery death. For what else could a creature formed of spun tarnish and flaming purple wings bring to him? What else could he possibly expect to find behind the metallic-looking face that bore three pairs of eyes and sharp protrusions like a beetle's mandibles? What else could he expect but for that golden spear to be the weapon used in his execution?

When the Margonite extended a gaunlet-esque hand toward him, the grey muscles in the bicep shifting unnaturally as a talon brushed upon Hakkyuu's forehead. He must have made some unholy sound of terror as a searing pain unlike any he had ever known rolled through every nerve in his body and drove him to his feet only to stumble and crash backwards once more against the sand. Perhaps he meant to say words to warn the creature off, perhaps he even thought he said them, but they were only guttural sounds of primitive distress as he waved one hand furiously in front of him as if to ward the Margonite away and grasped his head where the creature had touched him with the other.

He was going to die here. After everything, he was going to die in the desert, far from his home.

Comments

[entheogens]

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Henry David Thoreau had never lived in Tyria. Walden was a book that Aurus had never read. But if anyone could have encapsulated the reasons that he went into the desert, it would have been this man. Ironically, for Aurus, the woods had felt too alive, too busy for his purposes. The woods were too much like home. The desert, at least in theory, had offered what he thought he was after.

In point of fact, deserts are a lot more full of life up close than they appear to be from afar. They’re just not particularly full of plant life, certainly not of a ferny sort. They require a different kind of resourcefulness than other environments do. So what Aurus’s life in the desert turned out to be, was not precisely what he’d planned for. And maybe that was what he liked about it.

There was one routine that he maintained faithfully since arriving here, and that was the perimeter patrol of his “territory” (a loose term for the span of sand where he eked out an existence). This was a distinctly animal-like practice, he felt, but it was a practical one. He made the circuit, which was a little over three miles from start to finish, twice a day—near dawn and near dusk, staying inside in the worst of the heat in a cave where a natural stream of water trickled down the back wall into a little pool.

The cave, which had high hollow ceiling of smooth, pale sandstone, was airy and light, and Aurus had very much made it into a home, growing the necessary furnishings out of the sandy earth and making creative use of the space’s natural contours. Once the location had been found and the home there made, his routine had taken shape around defending it.

This was where the patrols came in.

One never truly cleared the desert of threats, but within the three mile perimeter that Aurus maintained, there were fewer giant bugs and beasts. After enough weeks spent clearing them, they began to respect the boundary lines more. Those that appeared on his turf were summarily exterminated.

And after enough weeks, he knew every rock and bone and ruin in his circuit. He knew which birds and desert creatures would pass each day and at what time. He knew every ruined structure, every neighbouring cave, every path between the buttes. This was how he knew when the strange trio of apparitional humanoids first appeared.

They were not within his territory per se. If they were, he would have confronted them directly. But he’d glimpsed them for several days near a rocky promontory a few hundred metres off to the west, and he’d begun to watch their movements. There were, he now felt certain, three, though he’d never seen them all at once. He could spot the differences in their bodies though, their armour, the different purple glow of their exposed skin, the difference in how they moved and floated.

There was a malevolent feeling about them that made him wary, even without having encountered one up close. He had no name for them, but he sensed that they portended ill.

Was it the same ill which took wing in the northern sky some days later? He couldn’t say. But that did make him strike out from his usual patrol, forging his way across the sands towards the screeching sounds of battle that filtered down, echoing from the crystalline beast that swooped and dove through the sky on the horizon.

The battle had been long over by the time Aurus had got to its site. It was the better part of a day's walk before he arrived, and what he saw when he got there changed him in ways he wouldn't fully understand for years: he knew, without knowing how, that the body on the sand was Glint, just as he knew that the dragon he saw in the sky was Kralkatorrik, now active, though it was long gone by the time that Aurus had arrived.

He lingered through the night by the site of the battle near the mouth of Glint's lair, wakeful and watching, thinking about the things her body had made him feel, the presence that remained here even after her death, and long before dawn by the soft white glow of the moonlight, he headed towards home again.

The whole desert itself felt different now. The impact of what had transpired seemed to reverberate subtly in every stone, every creature, every grain of sand. The night felt otherworldly.

It was near the end of that night when the cresting of a dune brought the gleam of purple again into sight--a recognizable beacon on the rim of his territory, though far from where he'd seen it before. He saw the purple wings and the three rows of eyes beneath the helm before he saw the boy the creature raised its hand towards, and he saw them both before the Margonite saw him. Not before the boy screamed though. Aurus didn't need, nor did he wait, to ask what was going on.

Drawing his hammer, he leaped towards the Margonite with an earthshaking force, aiming a blow to land against the thing's head. Amethyst and crystal had done more than enough damage to the world for one day. He would not stand by now and see it do more.