The Tears of Kas̆dael

Gūla, Tsia, and Ihra had clustered behind him, accompanied by a fourth person he didn’t recognize.

With skin as pale as hoarfrost, slightly pointed ears, and long black hair, he immediately guessed she was the Moon-kissed mage they’d come in search of.

She’d seen better days: her cheeks were wan and hollow and deep bags pooled beneath her eyes, but it was the sorry state of her armor that told the most poignant story. Two long, jagged cuts had shredded straight through her woven tunic, revealing skin beneath that was an angry, puckered red.

She bowed stiffly, unsuccessfully attempting to disguise the wince of pain that flickered across her face. “Gūla told me I have you to thank for my rescue, Lord Yas̆peh.”

Standing up, Jasper waved aside her thanks. “There’s no need to be so formal. I'm just helping out a friend and, besides, we have an ulterior motive,” he added with a wink.

As the Moon-kissed straightened from her bow, she clutched a protective hand over the angry-looking wounds, and Jasper cast a glance at the others. “Did you not give her a healing potion?”

“We did,” Ihra replied, “and this is all it could do for her. You should have seen how bad she was before.”

“There's some sort of poison in her wounds,” Gūla explained. “Something I haven't seen before. There's not much we can do here, but when we get her back to camp, we can hire a real healer to finish the job.”

His eyes met Ihra’s with an unspoken question - what about your runes? - and the girl shrugged. “She’ll live,” she replied, and he understood. They had already used many of the supplies Aphora had left them, and the price to replenish them was enough to make one weep.

“Well, then, shall we get the hell out of here?”

The trip up was slow and treacherous. With five people to ferry out, each trip between platforms took at least thirty minutes, waiting for the cooldown on Spectral Wings - and those waits were not entirely uneventful. On the final trip, they were attacked by another of the mutated dorēsah, but this time they weren't caught napping. Tsia spied the beast before it closed in on them, and she fired three wind blades off in quick succession. Each one hit the creature's neck in the same place, and it fell lifeless into the void, bereft of its head. No more dorēsah emerged from the darkness, and they reached the final platform unharmed.

But Sels̆arrat was not doing well. Even though her body was cold as a corpse, her flesh was also as clammy as a fat man’s back in a tropical jungle and she struggled with every step she took. As they trudged up the hall, Gūla and Jasper kept an arm tight around her waist to keep her standing up.

As he stepped out of the crypt, Jasper winced at the bright light that bombarded them. They’d been there longer than he realized, long enough for the sun to rise again, and he blinked rapidly as his eyes adjusted, trying to make sense of the blurry figures that were waiting for them

It took him a second longer to remember his name. “Attila?”

“Attalû,” an icy voice corrected him. As the heir of the House of the Eighteenth Daughter stepped forward, his hand lingered on the hilt of his sword, and the dozen or so men around him began to advance, their faces hard and unfriendly.

Jasper’s hands were already occupied with helping the wounded mage, so he was slow to react, but Ihra was faster. An arrow buried itself in the ground an inch away from Attalû’s foot. “Don’t come any closer,” she growled.

The man yanked his foot back with a yelp and looked up with what was either genuine befuddlement or top-notch acting. “Why did you do that? We're just here to help and clearly you need it - what's wrong with S̆arra?”

Ihra’s eyes narrowed. “If you just came to help, why did you have your hand on your blade? Didn’t look friendly to me.”

“On the way here, we were attacked-“

"WARRRAGH"

The noble’s words were drowned out by a mix between a howl and a roar that echoed in the forest a few hundred feet away. Attalû rested his hand on the hilt of his sword again with an expression that Jasper recognized this time as nervousness, and glanced over his shoulder before continuing. “That’s why. A small group of s̆algū have been trailing us for the last half hour. We managed to fend off one attack, but Nūril and S̆ams̆ābu were hurt.”

Glancing at the men surrounding Attalû, Jasper saw the man was telling the truth. Two of the Moon-kissed had torn and bloodied clothes, though their injuries had been healed.

"WARRRAGH"

The cry sounded again, though this time in the opposite direction from the former.

“Sounds like they are encircling us,” he noted, as he shifted the weight of the wounded mage enough to allow him to free a hand.

“I don’t think it’s us they’re after,” the Moon-kissed replied. “I think they’re here for the village."

“They attack villages?” he asked in surprise. He and Ihra had fought a s̆algu when they first entered the province, but Jasper hadn’t encountered any of the shaggy troll-like creatures in a while. He wasn’t quite sure whether they were an animal or simply a savage humanoid - the one they’d encountered had been able to speak - but the beast hadn’t seemed like it cared much for the trappings of civilization. “Why would they do that?”

“Food.” Gūla replied shortly. “It’s pretty rare, as the s̆algu live deep in the mountains, but if the winter is unusually harsh sometimes they will raid nearby settlements for food. Or women,” she added with a shudder.

“And Ḫengal is overflowing with grain,” Attalû agreed. Recovering his nerve, he hastened over to them and placed a hand on Sels̆arrat’s brow. “She’s burning up with fever,” he noted worriedly. “What’s happened to her down there?”

“Poisoned,” the girl croaked out, drawing away from his hand. “You don’t have to treat me like a child.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have wandered off by yourself,” he replied testily. “You’re the best mage in our House, Sels̆arrat. What would we do without you?”

“WARRRAGH.” This time it was clear that the howls were moving away from and toward the village. Abandoning all attempts to help the wounded mage walk, Jasper bent down till his shoulders were almost level with Sels̆arrat and tossed her over them like a bag of flour. Ignoring her cries of protest, he turned to the rest of the group. “We've got to help the village out. Ihra, Tsia, can you run ahead and intercept them? I’ll drop the mage off somewhere safe and be with you in a jiff.”

“Got it.” Darting to the sides of the crumbling pit, Ihra quickly began scaling up the sides, covering the rough ground with an easy grace that Jasper envied. Tsia followed close behind, though rather than climbing, she simply summoned enough wind to boost her to the top.

Weighed down by the mage slung around his shoulders, Jasper trudged more slowly, forced to choose his footing carefully as he ascended up the pit, flanked by Gūla and the Moon-kissed warriors. “Can you keep her safe?” He asked Attalû.

“Of course,” the man began to reply, but Gūla cut in with an exasperated sigh.

“Don’t let your pride get the best of you,” she scolded him. Turning to Jasper, she explained, “None of his men are mages; if more than one s̆algu attacks them, they’ll be hard-pressed to keep her safe. If I go with them, can you handle the s̆algu in the village?”

He nodded mutely, and grabbing hold of the dirt ledge, pulled himself the last few feet out of the pit. A dozen new horses were tied up beside their own mounts, and he hastily draped the mage over the fanciest one, judging it to be the nobles before leaping onto Dapplegrim’s back and taking off toward the nearby village.

Abandoning her attempts to fly, Tsia dropped back to the ground and began to run. With her sloppy attempts to fly, she'd experimenting with other means of boosting her speed, and she'd found more success with running. As she raced toward the town, the wind roared at her back, pushing her further and faster with every step than she had any reason to go, and she quickly left Ihra in the dust.

She reached the village in less than two minutes, but that was already too late. The bucolic settlement they’d seen the night before had descended into chaos. Thick black smoke billowed into the sky as fire leaped from one thatched roof to another while high-pitched screams mingled with bestial roars.

WARRRAGH

With an earth-shaking thud, a s̆algu leapt from a rooftop to the ground and, looking her straight in the eyes, screamed a howl of defiance.

She responded viscerally, flinging an unstructured blast of wind at the beast that caught the s̆algu up in the air and tossed it straight through the wall of the nearest cottage. Whoops.

A blur of white emerged from the building a second later, headed straight toward her. Wind propelled her off the ground, carrying her out of harm’s way - or so she thought - but as the beat neared her it launched into the air. Its long white air rippled in the wind as it extended its arm long enough to snag her lower leg with its sharp obsidian claws. She landed a volley of wind blades on its head as she fell, but the beast refused to let go, slamming her into the ground with an angry roar.

All breath was forced from her lungs as she made contact with the ground, and she could feel the splintering of bone in her cheek. The beast was the first to rise. As it staggered to its feet, it refused to release its grip on her leg, dragging her across the ground as she tried to regain her senses until, that is, a pair of arrows embedded themselves in its arm.

Letting go, it snarled at the new threat, giving Tsia time to shove herself shakily to her knees. She blasted it with wind again, sending it flying into a field of winter wheat, but the s̆algu was on its feet in an instant, and its barely untouched condition was enough to make her despair.

While the white fur had been stained here and there with small blooms of blood, only the wound on its head had penetrated enough to be visibly noticeable. Its skin is too tough. With enough control, Tsia knew her blades could probably pierce the creature’s fur and skin, but control was not her strength. Screw it.

The winds roaring around her fell silent as Tsia pulled on the only other spell she had - the one Imḫullu had gifted her. The s̆algu broke into a dead sprint toward her, effortlessly bounding over the broken stone wall fence without missing a beat. It was fast, but lightning was faster.

The bolt intercepted the s̆algu and stopped it in its tracks, but she didn’t relent. The s̆algu writhed on the ground as she poured more essence into the bolt, not releasing it until it was little more than a charred husk.

Only the shadow at her feet warned her of the incoming danger. With steps sped by the gathered winds, she darted to the side as a s̆algu charged her from behind. With a grace no creature that large should possess, it took just three steps to pivot in her direction. She leapt out of range of its claws, firing off a wild gust of wind that staggered it. Carried aloft by the currents, she landed 30 feet away and began to charge her lightning.

But the s̆algu was not as dumb as it seemed. Seeing her hands writhe with the spell, it turned and darted behind the cover of the cottage she had destroyed. Tsia darted after it, still charging the spell, but when she reached the corner she slowed down, expecting the cunning beast might be waiting just out of sight. What she did not expect, however, was that it had circled all the way around the cottage.

This time, there was no shadow to warn her before a mass of white fur attacked from behind and, as she was tossed to the ground like a rag doll, the spell she’d been preparing went wild. Lightning exploded around her in a ten-foot radius, paralyzing the s̆algu, who landed on top of her.

Tsia struggled to pull herself free of the twitching beast, but the creature, who was far larger than the first s̆algu, was not entirely incapacitated. Its arm shook violently as it lifted its body partly up and lowered its head toward her.

Its face was a cross between a monkey’s and a man’s, with eyes that possessed hints of intelligence and high cheekbones that could have made a model jealous, but all she could focus on was the twin pair of fangs in its open maw and the smell of rotten meat as it lunged for her neck.

Fueled by fear, power and control came together for her in a rare moment of cooperation, and a spear-shaped cone of wind blasted up from her fist. The s̆algu’s fangs shattered like glass, and then its head disintegrated in a shower of gore. Decapitated, the beast’s full weight collapsed back on her, breaking a few more bones in the process.

With both arms trapped beneath the body, trying to drag herself free seemed a hopeless endeavor, but she tried anyway. She managed to squirm perhaps a half-foot when unexpected deliverance came. Two men emerged from the ruined cottage and, after casting cautious glances all around, began to pull on the body. It was an easy task for the farmers, whose strength had been honed by years of hard labor in the fields, and she was free in moments.

WARRRAGH

Fumbling with her only good hand, she downed a potion before pulling herself to her feet. Flashing the two a thankful smile, she rose into the air jerkily, scanning the village for the remaining s̆algu. It was hard to see through the thick smoke that choked the air, but one thing made it easier - the brilliant flash of white flame. Covered in fire from head to toe, Jasper and Dapplegrim charged three s̆algu that were busy beating on the doors of the village tavern.

The beasts, immune to fire, ignored him - but they weren’t immune to this fire. His glaive pierced the first in the back, and the force of Dapplegrim’s charge drove it straight through his chest. Ripping the glaive out, he spun it in a wide arc, slicing both beasts in their raised forearms. The blow itself did little damage, but the inferno that quickly spread across their white fur was another matter. He’s got it handled.

With a sigh of relief, she dropped back to the ground, and leaning against the wall of the ruined cottage, allowed herself to slip into unconsciousness.