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Descent of Nightmare (Chapter Forty-Seven)
Chapter list: https://tanadin.dreamwidth.org/650.html
Map of Kaldriel: https://i.gyazo.com/332b0c0172dcc60acb46
Rough map of Hatu: https://i.gyazo.com/ea4f9f51b9dc7b9d8b86
Chapter Forty-Seven
Circles
Akrar, Kaldriel. November 20, 2277. Time instance 842N.
Jack stepped lightly through the warehouse, keeping his footsteps from echoing and focusing on keeping the glow of the magma patterns on his body faint. He gripped his grimoire tightly, instincts kicked into overdrive as he looked around and strained his ears for the slightest sound.
He’d seen someone duck in here. He knew he had. And their wings had been just like Geek’s, green and reptilian, lacking any ashen pigmentation or glowing flames. Their skin had been dark, unnatural in its grayness, and their eyes had burned green, a beacon against the dark monotony of their skin before they vanished.
How could Jack resist following?
He heard a rustle and he turned, eyes flicking upwards in time to see the figure drop down. They landed easily in front of him, straightening up and baring their sharp teeth in a self-satisfied smirk.
The demon had long, dark hair, matted and unevenly cut. Her eyes were a blazing green framed by ashen gray skin. She was very obviously missing one of her teeth, a conspicuous gap giving her the feeling of unbalance, although her wings- one raised slightly higher than the other- and tilted head likely contributed to that. Her left arm was badly damaged, scarcely healed wounds covering up the loss of two fingers and chunks of flesh along her forearm. She was tall, but Jack towered nearly half a foot over her. Her horns were longer, but less curling, and one had its final inch snapped off in what looked like a wound a couple of months old at the most.
Jack recognized a labkid when he saw one, even if it wasn’t one he knew.
She must be from the A-team, he realized. It would explain why I’ve never seen her before.
“Hello,” she said in even Dranonic, her voice struggling to be smooth but rising slightly in the middle of her second syllable. “You’re Jack, right?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“My name is Tera Frost, your half-sister.” Her grin grew wider, only emphasizing the missing tooth more. “And I have a proposition for you.”
Jack blinked in surprise. “A proposition?”
“Yes. You’re tired of how things have been going recently, right? Twelve’s just kind of let things happen, expects you to learn a whole new language, wants you to make friends with people you’ve never met before and figures it’ll all turn out just fine.”
“It’s bullshit,” Jack grumbled, claws gripping his grimoire tighter. “She’s too preoccupied with things that aren’t our concern, like this stupid angel war. I’m not taking another step into someone else’s battle, and neither will Exadae if I have anything to say about it.”
Tera adjusted her wings slightly. “Yes, that makes sense. So why don’t you involve yourself in your own battle?”
Jack tilted his head. “My own battle?”
“Twelve is unfit to lead the B-team, is she not? How many of you really want to stay here like this?”
Jack’s tail lashed uncertainly. “I don’t know. She’s a good leader, she’s just...not making the right choice here.”
“Oh, no, of course. But here, right now, wouldn’t it be better for someone else to lead? You could take over, just long enough to get this all sorted out.”
“I mean…” Jack’s wings shuffled. “I guess. There’s no one else that would get us the hell out fast enough.”
“I thought not. So, here’s the proposition. You help me get rid of a couple… problems of mine, and I’ll get you un-involved with Kaldriel’s affairs. Deal?”
Jack opened his mouth to agree, but hesitated. “You won’t hurt Twelve, right? At least not permanently. She’s a good leader, even if I don’t personally like her.”
“No, no, of course not. I wouldn’t do that.” Tera’s grin grew impossibly wider.
Jack nodded. “Very well. What problems are you having?”
“Oh, nothing much. Just a few old… teammates, of mine, have been eluding me...”
~~~
Sylondra stepped carefully around a hole in the street, perhaps left over from one of the previous battles with the angels or an event before she passed over from the Timewarp. It was odd, finding such damage so close to the buildings- in fact, upon closer examination, the front steps to the building had been blasted apart as well, and the missing door and dark interior hinted that it hadn’t been occupied in many years. The wood of the steps was half-rotten, overgrown with plant matter and left to the elements.
Sylondra quietly wondered why someone had bothered to set off an explosion here before moving on, tracing her fingers over the edge of the paper in her pocket, trying to ground herself. An unpleasant itch ran under her skin, digging small claws into her muscles and tugging at her nerves in increasingly irritating ways. She was tired of snapping at Kallen and Lucy because of it, and if she was honest with herself she didn’t want to snap at them, she liked them. The pleasantries of friendship had been left long behind with Mala, back somewhere between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. After Castra’s incident, everything had gone to hell.
Not that things had been too stellar before.
Sylondra shook herself, slightly, as if trying to dislodge the heavy fog falling on her limbs, paralyzing her long enough to let the itch devour her. She increased her pace, the heat generated by her movement enough to keep the fog at bay.
She navigated streets blindly, trusting that she’d always be able to find her way back eventually. She passed a B-team girl that she hadn’t bothered to learn the name of chattering excitedly to two women who must have been her parents and a man with a scorpion tail.
Sylondra did a double-take, freezing mid-step and turning to look at the man more closely. Yes, he did indeed have a scorpion tail curling near his feet, extended out from the base of his spine. His fingernails were thick and brown and his eyes were odd, reflecting light in a bizarre way that Sylondra couldn’t ever place seeing before.
He noticed her first and nudged one of the women beside him, the one in the purple mask. She glanced up and scanned Sylondra’s face, as if seeing a stranger that looked familiar.
That was likely the case, Sylondra realized. She looked an awful lot like Tanadin, or even Twelve, her half-sister. She looked sufficiently like Shawn that anyone that knew him well could see the resemblance, but no one had mentioned him to her in reference to her appearance out of the blue.
They exchanged a quiet word and Sylondra debated over whether or not it was worth staying in the situation. She could leave without being too weird, she knew, but they might follow her, and she’d rather not deal with a small crowd of curious idiots. She directed her gaze at the B-team labkid, who grinned at her apologetically, her expression slightly hidden due to the white mask on her face, and gave the rest of the group a satisfactory explanation.
“Hello!” the unmasked woman, a demon, called. “What’s your name?”
The unfamiliar cadence of English took a moment to register, and Sylondra struggled to translate her reply. “My name is Sylondra Hitedramon. I’m the leader of the A-team.” Even in a language that wasn’t Dranonic, the words felt odd upon her tongue. Eldran is our leader. Not me. Eldran.
It was hard to believe that it wasn’t still true, despite everything. Her fingers traced the edges of the paper more obsessively, wearing its worn corners down even further.
The two women exchanged glances, while the man tilted his head. The B-team labkid introduced herself as Korrah Squalus, which struck a chord in her memory. She’d met her before, briefly, and vaguely recalled something about fighting with cards. It seemed silly, but if she had survived so far…
Sylondra staved off further conversation by telling them that she was very busy and had somewhere to be, or at least she tried to. Based on how confused everyone looked, she hadn’t done a very good job, and she crossed her arms in annoyance.
“Can you repeat that?” Korrah asked, thankfully in Dranonic. “It’s a tough language, I know.”
“I hate it. Anyway, I said I’m busy and have somewhere to be.”
Korrah raised an eyebrow. “Do you really or are you just trying to avoid conversation?”
“Avoid conversation,” Sylondra admitted, a rueful smile pulling across her face. “Between my thoughts and the awful language, I don’t really want to stick around.”
Korrah nodded. “Understandable. I won’t keep you, then.”
“I appreciate that.” Sylondra turned and continued down the street, leaving Korrah to explain to the others and resume their previous conversation.
Eventually, Sylondra found herself back at home, pushing her way through the door and flopping down on the couch. She couldn’t see anyone anywhere, so she figured they’d all left to go do something productive. She shut her eyes and lay on the couch for about a minute before the sound of a small explosion made her sit up, eyes wide and muscles tense.
She quickly realized that it wasn’t directed at her, but it didn’t keep her from getting up and grabbing her gun, disabling the safety just in case. She listened intently, following the sounds of grumbling and metal on metal to a door she’d somehow managed to miss before. She pushed it open and descended down the stairs into an unfinished basement filled primarily with a crappy old table, stacks of boxes that had been shoved aside, and a healthy amount of ash covering the center of the room and Avery.
She wasn’t even surprised. She flipped the safety back on and sighed. “What are you doing.” It was hardly even a question, more of a disappointed statement, but it got an answer all the same.
“Engineering.” Avery’s head turned to face her, slowly, without any apparent twisting of his body. “Obviously.”
“Well, yeah, I’d figured. What are you doing, specifically?”
“Trying to make some ammunition.” He tapped his metal arm with his free hand. “I’ve got both an energy weapon and a conventional firearm in this thing and I’m out of ammo.”
“Out of ammo.”
“Out of ammo,” Avery repeated, turning back to what he was doing. “It happens.”
“No shit, Avilena. How did you manage to run out of ammo without a single damn thing to shoot at since we ran into each other?” Since we saw Tera, her mind suggested, but she ignored that entirely.
Avery shrugged. “I don’t think I had any then. Don’t think I had any since before the big bullshit.”
“Is that what you’ve been calling it?”
Avery’s head snapped up to look at her, the movement abrupt and startling. His shades slipped down his nose and he peered over them at her, mismatched icy and earthen colors rooting her to the spot. “I figured it was more tactful than ‘the bloodbath’ or ‘the day all of our friends and teammates murdered each other and left the corpses to the birds.’ I’m trying to be considerate.”
“For once,” Sylondra mumbled, feeling a painful shiver run through her bones at the memories of that day. Blood marred her vision, momentarily, and it took a few moments of blinking for it to subside. When her vision worked properly again, Avery was back to working on the casing for a bullet, as if he’d never even noticed her at all.
Sylondra left him be and retreated back upstairs, shutting the door to the basement behind her and sitting down heavily on the couch. She put the gun back where she kept it and summoned an ice crystal between her fingers, anchoring herself back to the present with its sharp corners and smooth surfaces.
It had almost completely melted when a loud knocking sound knocked her out of her trance. She growled and dissolved the crystal, getting up and answering the door with a barked, “What?” in English.
An unfamiliar man stood on the other side, one that she knew she’d never seen before because she’d remember him.
He was tall, around Sylondra’s height with piercing blue eyes and blond hair. An intense air hummed around him, a deep-seated focus and drive to do something obvious in his very being. A jagged scar ran down his face, starting below his right eye, and two smaller scars crossed the left side of his mouth. He had an odd grouping of scars running up his forearm from his left hand, starting in the spaces between the fingers and deliberately carving pale marks up the arm, grouping up about halfway and stopping once they reached his elbow joint.
Sylondra’s own scars pulsed, but whether it was in sympathy or the desire to outdo him, she didn’t know.
He raised an eyebrow at the sight of her, quickly running his eyes over her in an evaluation before saying, “I came here looking for Shawn. Is he here?”
“No. Who even are you?”
“Geluu Narsworn. You?”
“Sylondra Hitedramon.”
“So you’re related to him, then?”
Sylondra blinked a few times, struggling to translate, before mumbling a “Yes” that sounded too much like a question for her tastes.
He asked her a question that she didn’t know a couple of words to, and his rephrasing was longer and no easier to understand. She growled that her first language wasn’t English and that he needed to use words she understood, to which he replied he didn’t know what the extent of her vocabulary was and getting snippy wasn’t going to help anybody.
She was starting to wonder what the hell ‘snippy’ translated to, because it sure wasn’t a word that anyone had used in her presence before.
Fortunately for her, Geluu’s phone chose that very moment to ding, prompting him to check it, notice that it was from Shawn, and thank her for her time. He started to leave before pausing, looking at her oddly, and then asking, “Do you have ice powers?”
“Yes. Fire and ice. I’m half-kirinax but I’ll freeze your toes off.” Sylondra was quite pleased with herself for getting that particular expression down.
Geluu’s eyebrows shot up. “Really? That’s...fascinating, really.” He hesitated. “I know you probably don’t need it, but I’m a good teacher and could help you to use your powers to greater effect, if you wanted. If you’re anything like Shawn, then you have untold potential.”
“Potential. Yeah. Heard that one before.” Sylondra subconsciously slipped her hand into her pocket and felt the paper again. “I…. appreciate it, though.” She pronounced the unfamiliar word carefully, struggling to remember how it sounded, but Geluu didn’t remark on it so she figured she got it close enough.
“Just ask Shawn where to find me.” Geluu raised a hand in farewell and left, leaving her to close the door and return to the couch in silence.
That was an odd man, she decided, summoning another ice crystal to feel along the edges of.
But I like him.