by Eric Vall
No sooner had we stepped into the swirling vortex of the Shadowscape than I wished that we had never stepped foot inside in the first place.
The cobblestone streets of Bathi Highlands were lined with bodies. Some of them were mangled, others charred. A literal blood rain poured from within the confines of the village as the sacrificial pyrewyrm bled out. There was no light to speak of thanks to the giant wings that covered the area, but the fires that had raged through the streets were enough to tell that what we had walked into was the absolute worst-case scenario.
This wasn’t an ordinary Shadowscape, not by a longshot. I was no banisher, but even I could tell that there was something different about this place.
“Maker, no…” Nia trailed off, horror-stricken, and I instinctively pulled her close. Teammate, lover, whatever the title, I needed to hold onto her, to someone. I needed to keep myself grounded.
“Holy hell,” Orenn breathed as he ran his hands through his hair.
Varleth gasped and put a hand over his mouth as though he were going to vomit.
Arwyn walked past us to the front. She surveyed our immediate area, then turned to us, eyes fierce, angry even. I didn’t see it, and I was fairly certain my friends hadn’t either, but a bandersnatch leapt out from one of the buildings on fire and snarled as it went for Arwyn.
That was clearly a mistake. With one flick of her wrist, Arwyn’s blade separated the bandersnatch’s head from its shoulders. The monster disintegrated before I even got a good look at it.
“Keep your guard up,” Arwyn commanded as she marched forward. “There will likely be more like this one lurking nearby.”
The four of us nodded. I summoned back my wallerdons and mounted daggerdillos, and they marched beside us as we walked through the dead streets.
We found out quickly enough that the monster threat wasn’t as severe as it could have been. There should have been swarms, but the only ones that seemed to linger were low-grade minions. Chatteroshi and trolls were the most common, but they were nothing that a single hit from any one of us couldn’t handle.
We did occasionally run into more of the bandersnatches. They varied in color, but their general features remained the same. Their skin was coarse and tough while long purple tongues wagged out of their abnormally large mouths. As a whole, the only challenge they offered was that they were fast. I dodged one with its gnarly teeth bared at me that pounced from atop an old florist shop with the windows broken out of it, but my daggerdillo easily put several spikes through its head.
We entered a small square that looked to be the center of the village. What used to be a quaint fountain was now nothing more than a pit of molten tar with a decapitated angel adorned in the center. The cobblestone was cracked at the surface. From beneath it, the tar-like substance bubbled and hissed. Shops and homes alike were blown out or caved in. Fires burned brightly every several feet and turned what I could imagine was a cute little mountain town in the wilds into a black pit of despair.
Arwyn turned to us again. “Put out these fires, Kenefick. Varleth, Orenn, search for the catalyst stone. The sooner we get out of here, the sooner we might be able to distinguish what the hell is going on.”
My teammates had their orders. Orenn and Varleth went right, and Nia, though reluctant to leave my side, veered left and started with a small fire above what looked to have been an old trinket shop. I looked to Arwyn, who caught my gaze and held me there.
“You and I are going to search for survivors,” she commanded, and I nodded.
We combed the streets as blood and ash soaked and stained our clothes and skin. Above us, the sacrificial pyrewyrm swirled with essence, though unlike the smoky consistency it was the last time we fought one, the essence was more like a black tar that dripped from its wings and landed to the ground with a slick splatter. I kneeled and touched the substance with a finger. It was sticky, and when I brought it to my nose, it had a similarly putrid stench that the rift did.
I turned to Arwyn, who watched me curiously.
“What do you think it is?” I asked as I smooshed the tar-like essence between my fingers.
“I can’t be sure of anything,” she said with a grimace. “However, my best hypothesis would be that the essence has coagulated with the blood and created the substance you have so willingly dived into.”
I glanced back to the aforementioned substance and laughed a little at her disgusted look before I wiped it on my pants. A little blood never hurt, right? I stood again, and we continued our search.
Each body we found had met a terrible fate, and each one seemed to be more grotesque than the last. There might have been monsters that roamed about, but they were not the cause of these deaths. There weren’t any signs of an invasion here.
“These people didn’t die from a monster attack,” I commented.
“They certainly didn’t,” Arwyn agreed, “though that leaves us to wonder what did take their lives.”
“Ms. Hamner,” I began after a moment of thought, “the rift gate, from what we could tell, had fully surrounded the village.”
Arwyn quirked an eyebrow as she examined the cobblestone street. Blood dripped from the tip of her nose, and she wiped it away in annoyance. “It appeared that way, yes.”
I faltered. I didn’t want to sound stupid in case I was severely wrong in my hypothesis. Arwyn looked at me expectantly, though, so I ventured forth.
“If the rift gate was surrounding the village, and we are in the Shadowscape, then how are we here, in the actively burning village of Bathi Highlands?” None of this made sense.
Her gaze pierced me as she locked eyes with me again. I could see the ticks and tocks of her brain as she worked through what I tried to say.
“If what we saw was indeed true to our eyes, then that would mean…” As Arwyn trailed off, her eyes shot wide open.
Nia’s voice sounded from behind us to complete the horrible thought I had already had. “Our Bathi Highlands has fallen completely into the Shadowscape mirror of it, and we are in the middle of the two world’s integration.”
The color drained from Arwyn’s face as she turned to look at us both as she gasped. “No way.”
Chapter 19
I squatted and took a deep breath as I nodded in agreement with Nia. Even with my suspicions confirmed, it left us with a mountain of questions that we might never have the answers to. There was a chance that we might have lost an entire village today.
“The implications of this are…” Arwyn shook her head as her voice trailed off. “I can’t be sure. If Bathi Highlands was swallowed by the rift then there’s no telling what happened to it.”
“The Shadowscape is something of an alternate reality, right?” Nia thought aloud, “So then, if the village already exists in that realm, then would it create a new one?”
That was something to think about. We all knew that the Shadowscape showed an alternate reality, a dark mirror of our world, and I knew that time passed differently here than in the real world.
“So then maybe having two Bathi Highlands existing in two different places isn’t so farfetched,” Nia hypothesized.
I nodded in agreement. “So, not all hope is lost. There is a high probability that the Bathi Highlands that once existed in this space is still intact, along with all of its inhabitants, that what we are seeing is the mirror of Bathi from the Shadowscape.”
That brought a smile to Arwyn’s face, and I matched it. If there was a chance that we could still save this place and restore all of the lives that were lost, then I would do anything it took to see it through. I stood again, and as I did, I heard the unmistakable pop of a flare gun to the northwest. Our heads snapped in the direction of the sound and my stomach sank.
“A red flare,” Nia gasped.
“There’s a high-grade monster in pursuit.” Arwyn squared her shoulders and motioned for us to follow.
Before we even managed a step, though, what had to be the monster in question rose over the rooftops.
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“Maker, it’s huge!” I exclaimed, and it was. He was blue, furry, and shaped like some kind of yeti with six eyes, three on each side of its gorilla-like head. What I noticed more than any of its other fine features was the fact that it had a blue glow to it, the same kind of glow that the king fire-eye had when I fought it in Bedima, which meant that this one was being controlled, too.
“Nia, do you see that?” I pointed it out.
“Of course I see it, Gryff,” Nia scoffed with a roll of her eyes.
“Obviously, but I meant the glow around it.” I pointed more exaggeratedly and Nia looked harder. “It’s not just me, right?”
“No…” she trailed off with a frown. “No, it isn’t just you. It’s the same glow.”
“Excuse me?” Arwyn asked with a faint frown as she squinted at the towering beast.
“The blue glow,” I reiterated. “Like the angel monster we encountered in Bedima!”
That was all Arwyn needed to hear as our debriefing session came back to her. “I see, then we have even less time to lose.”
We all broke into a run then and raced towards the yeti thing and the flare. We wound through the stone streets and dodged bodies and small fires alike as we did. When we passed the fountain again, we heard a loud and familiar screech that pierced my eardrums, but we pressed on as we pulled on our earmuffs.
The pyrewyrm was still suspended in midair, still unmoving, but the essence that had surrounded it before had intensified significantly. What had been small dregs of smoke before now billowed in large puffs from its wings.
“I thought the one above the town was dead?” Nia yelled as she was about to slip her earmuffs into place.
I nodded at her as I secured my own, but as suddenly as the sound came, it was gone. We pulled our muffs off, but the screech turned into the rumble of the ground beneath our feet as hundreds of low-grade monsters began to stampede toward us. They burst forth from every alley, every window, and every crevice they could fit into.
“Oh no,” Nia gasped as she shifted into her fighting stance.
There was no need for words as I slammed my speed slug crystals to the ground and attached one to Nia and myself. As I sped up, I grabbed Arwyn and jumped out of the way before we were overrun. My wallerdon kicked a few out of its way as he trudged back and forth across the street and tried to clear a space, as we all landed on the nearest rooftop, safe for a brief moment.
“You okay?” I asked Arwyn as I set her down beside Nia.
“Yes, fine. Thank you, Gryff.” She batted her lashes at me, and I winked coyly.
“Happy to be of service.” I grinned and stood.
As Nia conjured a massive storm of ice shards to hurl at the horde of monsters, I climbed atop the miraculously intact roof to see if I could spot Varleth and Orenn and get a better view of the battle in general.
“Ahhh shit,” I cursed as soon as I reached the top.
From my new vantage point at the roof’s crest, I could see everything. The monsters were everywhere now. Hundreds, maybe closer to a thousand monsters crawled from the depths of where the pyrewyrm was chained. If they made it out of the rift, Maelor would have his hands full. What we had to do now was find the Catalyst stone and hope that whatever time was spent in here had tripled out in the real world. At least then the old man would have some back-up.
I spotted Orenn and Varleth in an alley several blocks away, hidden from sight of the giant yeti monster. Orenn was doing his best to shield Varleth, who looked as though he was in a severe amount of pain as he took cover behind a crate.
While my wallerdon still kicked around the stampede of bandersnatches, Arwyn had managed to lure several of the monsters who had snuck up to the roof to one spot. She unleashed a series of powerful sword blows, and her fabricated sword sparked with mana that devastated the group with a single clean slice. Her body sagged afterward as she struggled to catch her breath. I could only assume it was from the amount of mana she had lost, and she was forced to retreat further up the roof as another wave rushed up in their wake.
We were severely outnumbered, but we had to hold out and find the Catalyst.
First order of business was some crowd control. I tossed my tiniest crystal to the ground and my little kalgori appeared. I found more and more that this little thing was easily one of the most versatile monsters in my possession. The small creature fluttered around my head before it took off into the fray.
“Multiply,” I thought, and soon enough, there were two, then four, eight of the monsters, until I lost count of them. I commanded them to swarm, and they swirled about like a twister made of razor blades, brutal and deadly. With a fair amount of concentration, I focused them to where Arwyn was desperately fending off the pack of bandersnatches, and the dog-like monsters were soon turned to dust before the kalgori’s fury.
Arwyn waved up to me and I waved back as I called off my kalgori for now. I needed to reserve as much mana as I could, and the kalgori were draining to control in their full numbers.
I snapped my attention back to Nia, who had created a defensive barrier consisting of a firewall and a molten rock tornado. She really was quite resourceful, and she was able to hold her own in a fight, but even Nia Kenefick wasn’t all-mighty. There were too many monsters, and she would run out of mana too soon if she kept up what she was doing.
With a quick flick of my wrist, I refocused my mana and ordered my wallerdon to help. The massive walking wall was a force to be reckoned with and had proven itself on multiple occasions, but he was just too slow. I took the speed slug that was attached to my back and heaved it over my head. It landed on the back of the wallerdon’s neck, and suddenly the speed of its attacks increased tenfold. It kicked, swung, and absolutely crushed any monster that got in its path as it barreled down the street like a bull in a china shop.
A loud crack and a sharp cry of pain drew me back in the direction of my other teammates. Varleth crumpled and writhed on the cobblestone, teeth clenched and eyes squeezed shut. His sword was forgotten beside him as his hand gripped the opposite arm.
My jaw dropped. His skin was deathly white beneath the stain of the blood raining above us, and it looked as if the essence had somehow entered into his body. His whole arm had turned black and the skin cracked, though it was hard to tell the extent of the damage.
Orenn grabbed him and ushered him into a nearby building, a bakery if the half-charred sign was any indication. He put his metallouge abilities to good use and pounded monsters left and right and batted them into structures and already dilapidated buildings with his free arm.
Shit. This wasn’t good. If Varleth couldn’t destroy the catalyst, this invasion might never end. As quickly as I could, I slid down the roof back to where Arwyn and Nia were still slaying monster after monster. I hastily grabbed the speed slug off of Nia and rushed it over to Arwyn.
“We need to go, now,” I explained. “Varleth and Orenn are in more trouble than we thought, and that monster is still on the loose.
“You know where they are?” Arwyn asked as she narrowly dodged an imp.
“In a bakery to the west,” I replied. “Follow me!”
I hopped on the back of my flailing wallerdon and motioned for Nia to climb down with me. When we were both securely on its back, I steered the accelerated beast to where I knew the rest of my teammates were, and with the speed slug attached to her, Arwyn was able to evade the hordes and keep up.
As we made our way to the bakery, I noticed that, for some reason, the monster army started to thin out. In fact, Nia and I watched as a whole street of them vanished before our eyes without a trace. I thought it was odd until I remembered that the yeti monster was still out there somewhere.
I whirled around, and sure enough, it had all six of its spider-like eyes fixed on us. It roared, and the whole Shadowscape seemed to tremble as it started its slow but no less terrifying chase. Even with the speed slugs attached, it felt as though the yeti monster was able to gain on us with each of its im
mense strides.
When we rounded the fourth corner to the bakery, a cluster of chatteroshi was bunched up that continued to claw at Orenn. I could see from the blown-out window that he looked beat and washed out from mana depletion but still managed to cling onto his metal form.
With the monster still on our tail, Nia leapt from my wallerdon’s shoulder and conjured up a giant fireball in mid-air. By the time the beasts turned to stare at their new opponents, she let the blast fly. It detonated with a soft whump and turned the chatteroshi to ash in a wash of flames that rolled off Orenn’s metal skin.
Orenn fell to his knees as we rushed to him and Varleth. He dropped his metallic form and I could see that he was covered in scratches, some minor, others deeper. I was no healer, but there was nothing that I could see being a dire hinderance.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Fine,” he nodded, his breath labored, “just look after Varleth.”
Arwyn had already knelt beside the banisher, and his eyes searched for hers. Black lines circled the outer rim of his irises, and she pressed a hand to his forehead to calm him.
“You’re looking worse for wear, friend,” I teased as I too knelt beside him.
Varleth wheezed a harsh laugh. “Believe it or not, this isn’t the worst thing I’ve been through.”
“That’s a story for another time.” I smiled and clapped his leg.
Varleth nodded to what I left unsaid, that we would have that other time.
“Shhh,” Awyn soothed, and it was as though she were an angel herself as she glided her hands over his cheeks and whispered in a tongue that I’d heard her use before. Maybe it was while I was being treated for mana depletion earlier in the school year, but I couldn’t recall.
White tendrils swirled about her fingertips, and the darkness around Varleth’s eyes receded, but that was all. I wondered how much Arwyn’s magic could actually cure.
“This is only a temporary fix, Varleth,” she sighed softly. “It should last you until we find the catalyst and get back to Varle but no longer than that. You’ll need more intensive treatment than what I can do for you here.”