“Priscilla?” Leda whispered, eyes darting around with fear and worry.
She had finally found the dragonoid. It hadn’t been difficult. Priscilla plowed through the trunk of a tree, sending it toppling to the ground, and then left a massive gouge through the dirt for a good hundred paces, crashing against another few trees in the process. All Leda had to do was follow the destruction. The hardest part had been getting out of the harness in the tree.
One of Leda’s wings was broken. She hadn’t even noticed at first. The adrenaline kept the pain down and other pains, such as the stabbing ache in her chest, only served to cover up the relatively minor pain in her wing. The first she noticed her wing was when she unlatched the harness and went tumbling straight to the ground, unable to stop her fall.
She was out. On foot. And now stood beside Priscilla’s unmoving form.
Kneeling down, Leda tried pushing against the dragonoid’s shoulder. Her good shoulder. The other shoulder was… not exactly present anymore, along with a wing and arm. Were this anyone else, Leda would have taken one look and dismissed them as being dead.
Priscilla was different. Ever since hearing about Company Al-Mir and its supposed magic-granting contract, Priscilla had been Leda’s constant companion. There was Camilla as well, another fairy who joined at the same time, but they had always been assigned different tasks. That just left Priscilla.
It wasn’t always easy being the grouchy dragonoid’s spare eyes. There had been several points, practically after every outing, where Leda thought about asking to be reassigned to anything else. But she never had. For as much trouble as Priscilla could be, for as terrifying as flying with the dragonoid was, there was a thrill to it. A glimpse into what might have been had fairies possessed natural magic.
Now, because of Priscilla, Leda could feel that magic. It swirled around her, inside her, fueled from the distant tower Heart. She could use magic now. Not just the little parlor tricks that contracting with Arkk brought, but full, actual magic.
Leda couldn’t just abandon Priscilla. Not after all that. Maybe if she was actually dead.
But she wasn’t.
Every so often, a faint dusting of ice coated the plants and brush in front of Priscilla’s mouth. Every shallow, pained breath sent a flurry of snowflakes through the air.
Priscilla was alive.
Glancing back over her shoulder, Leda squinted at the glowstone lights. They were distant still. There was time. It was a good thing Priscilla had been flying at such speed. It got them away from the army that now searched for them.
But that distance wouldn’t last for long.
Leda rubbed her hands together, closing her eyes. “I can do this,” she whispered to herself. “I can do this. I’ve got this. It’s easy. I saw Hale do it a hundred times…” She took a deep breath. Then another one. She focused on the words, trying to remember them. “Okay. Okay. Tenun bebarengan otot lan daging lan balung, gabungke rong bagean sing kapisah kanggo nggawe siji wutuh.”
For a moment, she thought she got a part of the spell wrong. Nothing happened. The Flesh Weaving spell didn’t leap to her fingers like the lightning bolt from earlier. A sick feeling in her stomach threatened to spill over until one tiny corner of the back of her mind reminded her that the long spells required more than just words. They required focus on certain themes and, occasionally, specific hand movements.
Leda closed her eyes again, this time muttering the incantation while keeping her mind focused on the idea of knitting, the element of flesh, and focusing her hands.
This time, the warmth of the magic swirled around her fingertips. Leda sucked in an exhilarated breath. Even in the situation she was in, she couldn’t help but feel thrilled. Especially at trying out a new spell. Flesh Weaving was something she had seen Hale perform over and over again in the past few weeks, modifying her body to be more like Priscilla’s. A lot of it squicked Leda out—she didn’t like the way Hale just mushed about her own body like it was a clay pot she was shaping—but she had seen enough to have an idea of how it worked.
Leda didn’t need to get it perfect. Hale could fix it up if they got back. When. When they got back. All Leda needed to do was get Priscilla back on her feet.
Leaning over the uncomfortably still dragonoid, Leda pressed her hand into Priscilla’s shoulder. There was no way she would be able to regrow the arm or the wing. If she had them on hand, maybe she could try reattaching them. That seemed simpler. But it was dark, neither limb was nearby, and searching would take more time than Leda figured they had.
So she just smoothed over the wound, hoping that the spell would do most of the heavy lifting. The gristly, twisted flesh, bone poking out, blood pooling everywhere… all of it slowly coalesced back into Priscilla. Leda’s fingers felt sticky and gross, her stomach was already churning from the situation and putting Priscilla back together wasn’t helping. She powered through anyway.
She couldn’t just leave Priscilla behind.
“Come on,” Leda muttered. Even as she continued sealing Priscilla’s wound shut, she started rocking the dragonoid back and forth. “Wake up. Wake—”
A twig snapped behind Leda. She jolted, losing control of the spell. The magic dissipated into the ether as she spun around, the lightning bolt spell on the tip of her tongue. “Elec—”
She expected to be surrounded by those knights in black armor. The Eternal Empire. Or maybe Evestani’s more sand-gold-hued armor. But neither were around. The glowstones searching the forest were still off in the distance. Closer, now, but not close enough.
Instead, two people stood in front of her. A human and a spider beastman.
A familiar human and spider beastman.
“Joanne?” Leda whispered, trying to squint into the darkness.
“Yo. Not exactly the rescue I was hoping for—”
Leda shirked in on herself, feeling guilty.
“But I’ll take whatever I can get at the moment,” Joanne finished. She was leaning on the spider beastman—Kevin, if Leda remembered right—using him for physical support. Blood covered the mail and leathers of her armor but she didn’t look like she had any open wounds. “The dragon girl alive?”
Leda squeaked a little, spinning back around. Priscilla hadn’t moved. Her shoulder looked… less gristly. That was about the biggest compliment Leda could offer at present. At least she wasn’t bleeding out.
But that was okay. She wasn’t on her own anymore. Leda was beyond happy to see anyone friendly, even if it was some of the people they were supposed to be rescuing. A fairy couldn’t do much on her own, phenomenal magical power or not. At least not with the limited amount of spells she both knew and felt confident in using in a high-stress situation.
But a human and an arachnoid?
Leda drew in a breath.
She wasn’t just another employee anymore. The Heart wasn’t just a magical device funneling power into her. She was supposed to be more like Arkk. A leader. As soon as he dealt with the avatar, she was supposed to march her tower into Evestani and stomp their capital city into dust until they finally gave up. She couldn’t just keep going like she had been.
She had to turn around and take charge.
Leda drew in a breath and turned around.
“Joanne, Kevin. Are you able enough to carry Priscilla?”
They looked at each other. Eight eyes met two.
“I don’t know about carry,” Kevin mumbled.
“We can drag her.”
“I can spin up some rope if that helps.”
“Good,” Leda said. “Do that. Do either of you need healing?”
“We patched ourselves up,” Kevin said even as a pair of his arms reached down to a spinneret to start pulling thread. Leda forced a grimace off her face a the sight. “It isn’t perfect.”
“It’ll do for now,” Joanne said as she crouched down over Priscilla, looking over the dragonoid’s prone body.
“Good,” Leda said, trying to keep the relief off her face. If she never had to mush about someone’s body with Flesh Weaving again, it would be too soon. “Good. There’s a ground team coming in. More than one, actually. Two through the tunnels and a specialist team over land. We need to meet up with the latter. I mean, the former would be safer, but unless either of you has access into the tunnels…”
“Sorry.”
“Nope.”
“Overland it is,” Leda said with as much confidence as she could muster. Despite that confidence, she wasn’t exactly… confident. The big problem was that she didn’t know exactly where she was.
Riding on the back of Priscilla, it got extremely easy to get turned around, mixed up, and lose any kind of spatial awareness. Doubly so when the final moments of that flight had been erratic movement trying to avoid orbs of death careening across the sky. Triply so when they had landed in such a spectacular crash.
She needed to get a perspective of her surroundings.
Her wing was broken. Just remembering that little fact sent a jolt of pain through her back.
For a moment, she considered asking Joanne and Kevin if they knew where they were. But that wasn’t any more likely. The briefing said they had been in the middle of an explosion. That had to be disorienting.
More relevant, Leda remembered something.
She wasn’t just a simple employee.
Following the link to her Heart, Leda slightly turned her head. It was halfway across the country, but she knew exactly where it was. And if her tower was in that direction, then… She turned. It was the blinding beacon of her own tower, but there was a faint link toward Elmshadow. It probably wasn’t exact, but heading in that direction would at least get them closer to more reinforcements.
“Are you two ready?”
Although the rope Kevin had formed was merely a thin string, Joanne used it to heft Priscilla up onto her back and keep her there despite the human’s injuries. Kevin, meanwhile, forwent his threads and simply used his multitude of lengthy arms to help relieve some of Priscilla’s weight. One of his hands kept her wing pinned down, keeping it from flopping about and getting in the way of their movements.
“Ready,” Kevin said, his voice soft, almost a hiss.
Joanne didn’t say much of anything. She just grunted.
“I’ll watch our backs. I can use magic like Arkk. You two just focus on getting yourselves and Priscilla away. Okay?” Leda waited a moment, looking at Priscilla’s slack face. Neither said anything. She wasn’t sure why. Did they not trust her?
Leda clenched her fists. She had to give them a reason to trust her.
“Okay. This way,” she said, pointing her finger in the direction she hoped was safety.
If there was one thing Arkk had learned since stumbling across Fortress Al-Mir all those months ago, it was that there were some very scary people out in the world. All of whom wanted something. If he could figure out what that want was, communication, partnership, or even friendship wasn’t out of the question.
Duke Levi Woldair was one of the first names that came to mind. A man granted power by the King to command armies, levy taxes, and—through barons and other lesser nobles—generally manage the territory of Mystakeen. He could have been much more dangerous, but he was a lazy slob wanting little more than to coast through life on the backs of others.
The gorgon certainly counted. Between their caustic venom, petrifying gaze, and natural strength, they were deemed highly dangerous. So much so that a small colony had been allowed to almost destroy a city by blocking that city’s economic flow. As it turned out, they only wanted a safe place to live and, with their needs satisfied, were fairly laid back and easygoing.
Darius Vrox stood tall as an agent of order, doing his best to keep the world safe from dangerous magics and the individuals wielding them. He had been after Arkk, believing Arkk to be one of those dangerous individuals, basically right up until the beginning of the war. At that point, there were more dangerous individuals to worry about, especially because Arkk felt he had done a fair job of convincing the inquisitor that he meant no harm.
Related to Vrox, Purifier Agnete, or perhaps Avatar Agnete, freely wielded flames that could burn just about anything not already infused with powerful magic. Arkk hadn’t known her much prior to hiring her, but after, she found herself enjoying her time down in the forge, tinkering with whatever new ideas popped into her mind. Even now, a world apart, she tinkered away in some massive workshop, building things that Arkk could barely wrap his head around. Or she would have been if she wasn’t trying to assemble a miniature portal frame with the aid of the lesser servant in the Anvil.
Avatar… The Golden Order’s avatar was another subject. Despite all their interactions, Arkk still didn’t know his name. Or even if he was a he. It was a minor concern. Of a far more pressing concern was the fact that he was powerful and wanted Arkk wiped off the face of the world. Unfortunately, that was a desire functionally opposed to Arkk.
The orcs wanted a good fight and a good job. Lexa wanted gold—or she used to, nowadays, she spent most of her time plotting vengeance against the Golden Order’s avatar. Like Lexa, Sylvara wanted the Golden Order’s avatar dead for good. Zullie wanted to crack the mysteries of magic. Richter Porter wanted to defend his homeland from invaders. Lyssa wanted vengeance against slavers. Priscilla wanted to restore the glory of the dragons and dragonoids. Savren wanted his curse undone. Yoho wanted a fresh breath of life in his domain of undeath. Kia and Claire… actually, it was probably best not to think about what they wanted; Arkk liked to fool himself into thinking they were good albeit intense people.
Vezta, Arkk was a little less certain about. She wanted someone in command of Fortress Al-Mir and wanted help in carrying out her former master’s final order. Neither of which really sounded like her desires. But then, she was a Servant from the Stars. Having been literally inside her head on a handful of occasions, Arkk knew that she didn’t exactly think like most demihumans or beastmen. If he were to guess, Arkk would say that she just wanted to serve.
The point was, Arkk had done a fairly decent job of figuring out what people wanted. Sometimes he couldn’t do anything about it, like with the Duke and the Golden Order. They were fundamentally incompatible with him. But, in the vast majority of cases, he had been able to turn most people to his side. Even if they started out as enemies, like Darius Vrox, the gorgon, Agnete, Savren, and even Priscilla—arguably.
Arkk stared down his clone, looking into his own face. He couldn’t move. Despite the clone looking like him, it wasn’t him. He was pinned to the ground with a strength far beyond anything Arkk could manage. It felt more like he was sparring with a fully grown orc. Maybe someone more like Priscilla, not that Arkk had ever dared try to spar with the misanthropic dragonoid.
The point was, Arkk was alive.
Against a being that could crush him as easily as it had pinned him down, Arkk was alive.
That meant it wanted something. That something wasn’t his immediate demise. Depending on what it was, perhaps Arkk could hire another strange sort into his ever-expanding mercenary company.
If not, Arkk still had a chance. All he needed was for the being to release him. Just for a brief instant. A slip of its fingers for one second and Arkk could teleport himself out, reevaluate the situation from afar, and come up with a proper solution.
Failing that, Arkk could still teleport others to him. He might be held in captivity, but nobody else in his employ was.
What happened to Kia and Claire made that prospect less appealing than it should have been. Not everyone should collapse like they had, but that would almost be worse. If the fake version of himself convinced someone like Dakka that he was the imposter, he would lose his head to her shadow scythe before he had a chance to correct the misunderstanding.
“What,” Arkk ground out, glaring at his own glowing red eyes, “do you want?”
A cruel grin, the likes of which Arkk would never have tried, split the clone’s face in two. “What do I want? Don’t you mean to ask what am I?”
“What or even who you are doesn’t interest me,” Arkk snapped back. “All I care about right now are your intentions. Why are you here? What do you want?”
That smile shrank a hair, making Arkk internally wince as he feared he accidentally insulted the creature. Insulting the being pinning him to the ground didn’t sound like the best way to escape the current situation. He needed tact.
“My apologies,” Arkk said with as conversational of a tone as he could manage in the situation. “I merely assumed you had something you wanted beyond assaulting me. If not, it would be best if we simply got out of each other’s way, right?”
False-Arkk slowly tilted his head from one shoulder to the other, adopting a look of bewilderment. “You know what I am, do you not?”
“I can guess.”
“Quite cordial, aren’t you? Are you sure your guess is correct?”
Arkk stared back, eyes narrowing.
False-Arkk’s smile returned wider than ever. It disturbed Arkk to look at it. Some malevolent creature wearing his face, accosting him while his employees were in danger…
He needed to get away.