Deflecting a dart with his cast, Storgen grabbed another one by its tattered collar and performed a shoulder throw, sending it flying over the side. He ducked beneath a powerful swipe, side-stepped a volley of darts, then grabbed the next one by the neck. Rolling onto his back, Storgen kicked with his feet and sent it soaring off the mesa. The final one attempted to jump on top of him, but Storgen rolled out of the way. Ending up behind it, he pushed as hard as he could, and the thing tumbled off the edge, crashing down with a sickly metallic splatter among the remains of the others.
Checking to make sure there were no more, Erolina watched Storgen disapprovingly as he stood up and dusted himself off.
“His stance is all wrong, he leaves himself wide open, the way he moves is completely inefficient, he fails to follow through. He’s the most sloppy and undisciplined fighter I’ve ever seen.”
Philiastra looked on approvingly. “And yet, he just defeated six of those things with his bare hands.”
“Seven,” Storgen corrected as he drew near, running his finger through his hair. “You’re forgetting the one I smashed with the rock.”
“A rock is not your bare hands.”
A great shadow fell across the mesa. They looked up to see the sun blotted out by a great figure, cloaked with magical robes that rippled like the deep ocean. In his hands he held a staff made of finger bones, a great crystal like an eye affixed to the top.
As he landed before them, the ground sizzled at the touch of his white albino skin, his pink eyes looking around at the remains of his creations.
Storgen felt his heart go cold when he saw those eyes.
“Who is this?” Erolina asked, gripping her weapon.
Storgen gripped his chest. Every scar seemed to burn fresh, as if the wounds had reopened. “His name is Skotádi the Flesh Tearer. I’d call him a scumbag, but that would be disrespectful to actual bags of scum.”
“He’s a demi-god? Why does he look like that?”
“When a human and a god mate, it doesn’t always go smoothly.”
Skotádi gave a little curtsy, his robes shifting along the ground like tentacles. “I am also known as Ruler of the Beltline, Scourge of Lower Town, and the Savior of Erotan.”
Philiastra crinkled her nose. “Savior?”
“All those alchemic devices that power your cities, that clean your water, that grow your food, and protect you from the shadows. Who do you think invented them all?”
Philiastra spun the tumbler on her wrist to a new setting, her tattoos glowing blue. “No, that is nonsense. Alchemy was invented by philosophers to benefit all peoples.”
Skotádi laughed. “My child, I invented alchemy to further my own glory. Why, before I came along, the greatest mode of transport any human had utilized was the shoe. Just look at them now. Am I not a benevolent god to them?”
“Alchemy is a pure science. Those monsters you made just now, you perverted something good into something wicked.”
Now the albino really laughed. “My dear, those children were made from the same magic you wield. There is no such thing as good or evil, only energy and the application of it. And you have me to thank for it. Why, even the very language you speak was first conceived by me during the second age. Before that, your people only communicated by sharing lice with one another.”
Philiastra took a step back. “You’re lying.”
He shrugged. “I suppose a demonstration is in order.”
He tapped his staff and the dragon’s eye gemstone dilated, ghostly rivers of energy flowing out and coiling around his arms. The air grew cold, and the sun began to dim. The shimmering mist slithered out in several directions, caressing and teasing the remains of the clockwork creatures. Storgen felt his insides twist to look at them, tortured faces writhing in and out of the warped and twisted air.
Each of the components soaked in the spectral energy as if it were porous. With disgusting cracks and snaps, the severed parts began to stir, unfolding from within, fresh gooey pistons, sleek bony protrusions of brass, cables like intestines, and eyes like the void.
Storgen felt frozen in place, overcome by fear.
The top half of one construct began to grow and form new hips and legs, while the lower half began to grow a new torso. Shrill metallic moans began to rise up, and the ground grew dark and scarred everywhere the dark energy touched.
“We may be in trouble,” Erolina admitted. “I never imagined they’d send a demi-god after us.”
Philiastra looked around in abhorrence. “This is not alchemy. Alchemy is math and balance. It draws strength from the motion of the planets. This is…some kind of black magic.”
Skotádi grinned. “Is that what they taught you? Well, I suppose it is true enough. Our Fates are tied to the motion of the planets, after all.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Celestial magic is powered by worship and devotion. Did you think those were the only emotions that could be used as a source of power?”
They closed ranks as all around them, fresh constructs began to take shape and rise to their feet.
The demi god held up his pale hands to the darkening skies. “Alchemy draws its strength from the most powerful emotions of all. As plentiful as air, as omnipresent as ether. Can’t you feel them? They’re everywhere, even around us right now. You mortals radiate them all the time. Oh, you may try and distract yourselves, lie to yourselves, ignore it, but it changes nothing. It runs through you and around you, for the moment you are born you begin to die, and that knowledge fills you with fear. You know that one day you will be gone, and once you are gone nothing you did will ever matter. And that fills you with beautiful despair.”
He leveled his staff as all around them, the horde looked on with ravenous hunger. “Alchemy harnesses the power of fear and despair.”
Storgen licked his dry lips, forcing himself to speak. “You got a plan for getting us out of this?” he whispered.
“I was hoping you had a plan,” Erolina whispered back.
His fingers felt cold, his eyelids felt heavy. “My plan was to have him keep talking until you came up with something.”
“Maybe Philiastra could try and seduce him,” Pops suggested.
“Shut up, Pops!” Philiastra shouted.
When Skotádi laid his eyes on Storgen, the most revolting grin crept across his face. “Oh, my lovely little XVII, how I have missed you so.”
His words slammed into Storgen’s ears like shards of glass. Storgen screamed and grabbed his head, his senses scrambling, the world blending around him.
He was naked in the dark, his head shaved, machines drawing out his blood, slimy hands placed along his shoulders.
“My most precious little child. I have come to take you home.”
The clawed fingers penetrated his skin, digging inside with excruciating rapine. The fingers wormed around, dreadfully stroking his tissues, plucking his veins like an instrument.
“Nooooo!”
Storgen could feel the numbness spreading, like roots of icy hot pain, viscously penetrating deeper, defiling his body, stabbing his heart. His feet froze to a cold metal floor.
“Help me…”
His mind bled away, his thoughts and memories sloughing off of him in great moist chunks, falling free into the darkness beyond. Layer by layer, his consciousness was unbearably peeled away from him. Icy bars rose up around him.
“Help me, please…”
It was a scalding violation, a throbbing pain that bounced around inside of him, waves of agony crashing down. He felt his soul begin to crack under the pressure. A steel lid closed down on top of him, rusted locks clicking into place.
“SOMEONE HELP!”
Suddenly the darkness shattered and Storgen was back on the mesa. Philiastra stood before him, a trio of summoning circles drawn into the dirt projected a dome of flowing energy around them.
“You stay away from him, you monster!” she shouted.
Something unseen pounded against the b
arrier, like great thick worms, flopping wetly, the air warping around them ever so slightly, betraying the silhouette of a pair of clawed hands.
“So, you can see my occult? You’re a more perceptive alchemist than I had thought.”
The wormy appendages withdrew back into his cloak.
Erolina stepped forward as well, her scythe blade bathed in lightning. “My goddess commanded me to keep him safe, and I will do so.”
The two girls looked at each other caustically.
“You know, finding my lost novelty put me in a splendid mood. Had you asked, I might have let you leave with your lives. But, since you insist on being killed, I will, of course, oblige.”
Skotádi snapped his fingers, and Philiastra’s alchemic tattoos evaporated away from her body. The circles on the ground burned away, and the dome flickered and vanished.
“No way,” Philiastra said, looking at her arms and legs. “He destroyed my magic circuits. That’s impossible.”
Storgen leaned forward and dry heaved, his body wracked with pain.
Skotádi crooked his head to the side. “Don’t be ashamed, XVII. It’s perfectly natural to fear death. It’s what makes you mortal.”
Storgen spit out thick saliva, his muscles shivering. “No. I’m not afraid of you anymore.”
“Yes you are, my child. I can smell when humans are afraid. It is a very distinct scent.”
Skotádi vanished in a puff of smoke. Storgen froze when he felt a humid breath on his neck.
“Yours was always the most delicious of them all,” the albino whispered into his ear tenderly.
He licked his tongue along Storgen’s neck.
Storgen howled in fear and kicked his elbow back, but the demi-god disappeared in a whisp of smoke.
The horde charged from all sides, and Erolina became a whirling dervish of steel and blade. A storm of metal. Majestic and confident, she was like an angel of battle. She destroyed them two or three at a time. Copper and brass limbs flew off in all directions, oily ichor spraying everywhere in foamy globs. She released bolts of lightning that arced through the crowd, pitting the constructs as the tines smashed through their chests and eyes.
One managed to slip through and jumped onto Pops. The old man screamed in fright as he fell to the ground. Storgen forced his body to move, grabbing the black cables that made up the thing’s throat and yanked them free, black fluids gushing out as its glowing eyes died out and its body went limp. Every droplet that touched him made Storgen feel like vomiting anew.
With a mighty war cry, Erolina slammed her haft into the ground, the earth tearing up in a wave of destruction that threw back the constructs like ragdolls. They slammed against houses, crashed into barns, and scattered over the edge of the mesa.
She stood there, breathing heavily, splattered with black droplets, surrounded by a field of fallen enemies.
“THAT is why champion’s train, human.”
Storgen grabbed his knees to keep from falling over. He felt sluggish with fear.
“What? To fight legions of undead?”
With a shriek, a sparking construct with only one arm and one leg leapt up at Storgen.
Storgen snapped his head around and lifted up his arm, but he was too late. Just as the construct began to bite down on him, it was smashed to pieces by Erolina’s hair mace. The creature fell to the ground and went still with a crackle and a puff of smoke.
Storgen turned back to Erolina in awe. She stood before him, confident, powerful, radiant. “You’re amazing,” he whispered.
She spun her scythe in her hand and planted it in the ground. “NOW you notice?”
The air grew colder. The sun darkened even further, the sky becoming an amber twilight of glowing clouds and a veiled sky. Storgen hugged his body, he could feel the cold seeping in.
High up above them, Skotádi hung in the air like a vile marionette, his watery cloak swimming about as he raised his staff. The dragon’s eye at the top opened wide, and fresh rivers of spectral faces slithered down and began caressing the remains of the ghoulish clockwork soldiers yet again.
Erolina held out her palm as the ground around them began to stir unnaturally. “Nymph, give me another blast, I need to launch myself up there to get at him.”
“I can’t, it took months to make those circuits.”
“Bah, so useless.”
“I am not!”
Erolina jumped in the air, spinning her entire body, her scythe lashing out, releasing blade after blade of crimson energy that struck out into the sky at Skotádi. With a flick of his arm his cloak shielded him, the powerful attacks splashing and submerging into the surface as if they were deep waters.
He threw his arms out again, opening his cloak like ghastly wings, and the waters stirred. Thousands of tiny arrowheads poked free from the waters, then launched in unison.
The people on the ground scattered to dodge them. Erolina landed and spun her staff, deflecting several dozen back into the air. Philiastra managed to jump beneath a wagon, the arrowheads thudding above her like hailstones.
Storgen forced his body to move. He jinked and weaved, allowing the bolts to slip past him, the ground around him filling with black arrow shafts. Pops ran for a doorway, but tripped over the twitching remains of a dípsa tou aímatos and fell to the ground.
Quick as thought, Storgen grabbed a table and held it over the old man, saving his life as a dozen arrows impaled the wood instead of Pops. Storgen winced as he took an arrow to the shoulder, and another to the thigh.
Skotádi snapped his cloak shut as soon as he saw it, ending the attack before it could hurt Storgen further. Raising his staff, the rotting clockwork soldiers began to rise again.
Erolina jumped before Storgen and fought off the horde as it pounced anew. With blade, heel, elbow, fist, and mace, she smashed them to pieces by the dozens, but on they came.
“Even I can’t do this forever,” she warned. “We need to change tactics.”
Two broke through her wall of steel and jumped onto Storgen. With a hoarse yell, he yanked the arrow out of his shoulder and jammed it into the eye socket of one, then grabbed the other with both hands, tearing its arms clean off. His mind was racing, looking for something, anything they could do to escape from this situation. There he was, a demi-god floating over them. The immortal being who had tormented and tortured him to within an inch of his sanity…and it was about to happen all over again.
Storgen fought against the encroaching despair wrapping itself around his innards. What could they do? They would lose and Skotádi would take him back to the tower. Storgen’s mind screamed in denial, the inevitability of their defeat looming over him like a night sky without a star.
“M-maybe we could throw water on ‘em and hope they rust,” he blurted out.
Erolina released a bolt of lightning, reducing a handful to steaming heaps. “Sweet mother of Oedipus, copper and bronze don’t rust.”
His body resisting him, Storgen forced himself to duck under a leaping metal corpse, allowing it to collide with another sneaking up from behind. “They don’t?”
“No!”
Erolina threw her scythe, the spinning blade arcing like a boomerang, cutting a great swath through the pressing masses around them, heads and torsos flicking up into the air like cut grass. Sensing an opportunity, several of the vile dripping machines gathered up and unleased a swarm of poisoned darts.
Tapping a sigil on her armor, Erolina’s gauntlets unfolded into a pair of shields. She stepped into the path, protecting Storgen from the hailstorm. Many pinged harmlessly off her greaves, but two managed to hit the seam of the knee joint, penetrating the chainmail beneath and plunging into her joint.
Erolina grunted, stumbling to remain on her feet as the venom began to spread, her leg going limp, but she fought on nonetheless.
Beneath the wagon, Philiastra threw open her pouch and managed to find the jar amid the chaos.
“I’ll show you I’m not useless, stupid amazon.”
/> She took out the still-burning arm band and slipped her hand through it.
“You should not underestimate the people of my tribe.”
The band slid to her upper arm and gripped into place, the cool blue fire rushing into her body.
She yelped in shock, her veins glowing blue beneath her skin like a root system.
Suddenly the world shifted, and time seemed to stand still. The town, and the people fighting around her all became colorless, the sky was grey, and the air thick. Philiastra crawled out and rose to her feet. Erolina and Storgen looked like statues, the leaping corpse machines hanging around them in the air, frozen in mid-lunge. But while the rest of the world had lost its color, the forest surrounding the valley shone brightly, the colors twice as vibrant as they had been before. The voices, formerly only whispers, now rang strong and boldly in her ears, colors weaving and rising like the aurora borealis. A thousand thousand harsh remarks and criticisms, a chorus of displeasure, unified in their objection to her.
Philiastra turned around, terrified at what she heard. She wasn’t just listening to the hate, she was feeling it. It poured into her, her soul absorbing it up like a sponge. Her heart beat wildly, her body began to tremble. It was agonizing, like a weight crushing down on her, squeezing her. She could barely breathe.
She reached up to remove the arm bracelet, but it held tight, unwilling to be removed.
The spirits of the trees circled around her like great shadows, looking down in judgment and disapproval. The light between their held hands grew dark and ominous.
“Go away. Leave me alone!”
She tried to run, but her feet became rooted in place. Their eyes burned with authority, and her body obeyed them.
They released their branchy hands, the light flowing through their bark like pulsating veins. Reaching out with their branches, the tips became barbed fingers, closing in on her from all sides.
“Okay, I know you guys don’t like me,” she said, the thorns drawing nearer. “I know you think I’m a traitor, and I’ll be honest, I’m not overly fond of you, either. You’re so judgmental, you’re so rigid.”
“Why?” the forest asked.
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