Heartwood District – Fortuna
Rumors abound in the lower districts of a phantom airship creeping about at night!
Locals are reporting sightings of what they claim is an unknown airship that has made itself seen several times over the last weeks. According to one tailor (who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retribution), the vessel is much larger than either of the other two which have blessed our fair skies so much recently, easily out-scoping the voluptuous ‘Parotodus’ and the sharklike ‘Tabulata.’
Perhaps more concerning, the distinctive clunking and banging of the sky-whales that has accompanied our morning birds is also reported to be conspicuously absent, the monstrous thing moving completely silent above our beautiful city.
Attempts to reach the Oxycarpa engineering department in Keeptown for comment went unanswered prior to the printing of this report.
-Scribe Sifakas, Avium Cherry Chronicle
Fourth Squad erupted into the sanguine-tinted courtyard with little remaining regard for stealth, spurred on by increased urgency in the lamenting calls and suddenly finding themselves in a wide square of decaying red stone surrounded by dilapidated multi-story buildings.
A bare few of the stripped frames were standing, the majority a chaotic tumble of smoking architecture strewn about what must have once been a grand square. A long-empty fountain stood proud; cracked and defaced, in the center of the square. Seedy gardening beds and flower troughs, broken stone benches, and the remains of shabby ancillary structures were scattered throughout, placed tastefully along what were once main thoroughfares through Old Avium. This used to be fine housing in a time long passed, Pica thought as he envisioned the small complex in better times long ago, picturing lives flitting by from home to market to work and endless and timeless weave. Almost all was ablaze, engulfed in roaring eruptions of flame that twisted and tickled the night.
Images shifted suddenly, as if a wandering cloud cast new perspectives with the withdrawing of its shadow: beneath the flames, he recognized this place.
‘Heartwood.’
The words escaped his dry throat in a voiceless rasp, years of playing, fighting, and scrounging in places just like this flooding from his memory and bringing a sudden twisting to his stomach.
‘Gods, Pica…’ Simen stared into the hellscape awestricken.
Both blanched under the onslaught of reminiscence and horror before them, Alces didn’t; the gargantuan Populan was already halfway across the square, black hair hastily tied and streaming ribbonlike behind him as he charged into the firestorm.
‘Stop!’
Pica’s warning went unheard; it mattered not to the rest, and the group propelled across the littered plaza after him without a second thought beyond facing whatever awaited them together.
Alces came to a skidding halt outside an uneven plank door in a far corner of the square where the fire had not yet spread. He beat the clinging smoke away from him, calming his breathing and listening carefully. The cry, now-gone-soft and whimpery, continued weakly from within. He took a quick look over his shoulder and nodded to the group dashing headlong after him, and winking to his siblings confidently he slowly eased his shoulder into the crooked entryway.
The building front disintegrated, a blinding light filling the plaza followed by a loud, wet crack and a resounding BOOM that flattened the adjoining walls on either side. A great WHOOSH followed as air blasted down into the square, the conflagration devouring the oxygen for a block around in a massive breath. The soldiers were scattered as cast die. Their lungs burned, pounding and empty as they lay randomly atop the cracked cobblestones. The troopers had been stopped in their various states of pursuit, caught in the shockwave and brutally flung away across the plaza. Stone, planks, and globs of fire rained indiscriminately over the area, splatting loudly and spreading the fire in flying arcs all around.
Alces caught the door-turned-cloud in the chest, disappearing into a mist of splintered timber and propelling with it into the fountain’s tall rim behind. He somersaulted over the edge and against the desolate fountain centerpiece with a sickening series of wet cracking noises. He disappeared into the ornament’s deep basin and was silent.
Simen had been the closest on the man’s heels; he lay still, sprawled on smoking paving and his armor burning as bright white sparks attempted to burrow inside. His face burned across the right side and his hair smoldered, unnoticed to the prone man.
Sily and Pica were hit hard with shrapnel and became as if boneless under the shockwave of the blast, their headlong dash stopped dead in an instant by a flying wall of smoking shards and licking fire.
A scream issued unheard from the deep shadows of the dense rooftops behind the squad.
Pica could hear ringing, it bounced around his skull and he curled into a ball reflexively under the internal assault, clutching at ears already mangled in a similar attack. It felt like forever before it faded to introduce the cacophony meaningless shouts that floated around him intermittently. He stumbled blindly, attempting to regain his feet with eyes gone sightless.
He could breathe and was doing so with relish, drinking it in with shuddering, broken gasps. There was blood in his mouth and his tongue hurt tremendously, he thought he may have bitten it off, there was no time to think about it. His eyes were filled with grit and tears and blood and sweat, making a perfect glue that rendered his eyes useless and easily resisted his efforts as he pawed at them with fumbling, deadened fingers.
Water, he needed water. He felt along his belt desperately, finally finding his canteen hung limply against the small of his back. Water rushed down his arm from a hole in the vessel’s side as he lifted it to his face, quenching an unnoticed ember lodged in his chest plate as he splashed his eyes. His lids loosened as the concrete-esque paste was washed from them, he opened them blurrily for a second, catching a snapshot of unfocused carnage before the stinging forced them closed again. Footsteps approached him at speed, he recoiled instinctively.
‘Pica!’ Sily’s voice rasped in the opaqueness.
She snatched at him, pulling him to smoking cobbles and inspecting his wounds with savage efficiency; she removed her own canteen, popping it open quicky with her mouth and pouring it slowly into the man’s blinded eyes. She noticed bright crimson falling onto Pica’s face and the canteen as it shook in her white-knuckled grip; blood rained from her scalp, she ignored it for the time-being.
Pica’s eyes cleared enough for him to behold the hellscape that surrounded him, he flinched as flames roared and smoke rode thickly from every possible surface; alive, dead, animate, and otherwise. He looked in vain for anything he could recognize, any sign of their squad; he lifted bloodied eyes to Sily as she looked down at him concernedly, he was horrified at what greeted his newfound vision.
Sily’s face was a mess of scarlet and fine, grey cobblestone dust; she was mostly blinded herself with thick dust and sticky blood from multiple head wounds, but to his eyes she looked like the front of her face was missing entirely. She was mouthing words through gashed lips, but he couldn’t hear them and he couldn’t focus enough to read the movements of that broken mouth. Her nose was broken, snapped askew to the left and forming the origin of a jagged, diagonal tear from the bridge and into her scalp somewhere. It hung open as she leaned forward, the flesh flayed and bleeding heavily, exposing skull between the swollen pink and white interior of the gash. She had almost lost her head to a brick, her heavy helmet deflecting it but becoming a razored-edge mass of scrap under the impact and instead marring her beautiful face as it sheared from her head.
Pica sat up gingerly. Placing a hand he wasn’t sure was actually there on her shoulder, he eased her back onto the smoking ground as he fished for the bandages at his hip. Rubbing his eyes clear a final time for a better look, he inched forward to cradle her head slightly forward on the end of his knee. He noted that he wasn’t bleeding into his own eyes anymore and thanked the Gods for his own helmet in this new age of exploding buildings.
‘I’ve got you Sily, I’ve got you,’ he mumbled. She recoiled instinctively from his fumbling. ‘Your face,’ he gasped, gesturing at her with the med-pack he clumsily ripped from his belt. He began attempting to unsecure the clasps of the small bag.
Understanding dawned on her, clarity entering her eyes as she snatched the kit and began probing at her face with scorched fingertips, careful to keep her head tilted back to keep her loose skin in place as she did. She frowned deeply as she felt her crooked nose but remained motionless as she explored the open gash from end-to-end; she produced a roll of gauze and unrolled it, handing Pica the roll while keeping the end for herself. With a deep breath, she grabbed her nose and yanked it forcibly downward to reset it. Blood spurted violently down her face with renewed vigor; she ignored it as she wound her wounds in the linen with the efficiency of a spider sealing away fresh prey.
An arrow whipped past Sily with a hum, flying out of the darkness above and burying itself in the chest of a creeping man who loomed over the fallen pair with a raised axe. He stumbled backwards, grasping at the shaft planted like a proud, feathered sapling in the bottom of a lung. Another whipped in, hitting the man in the heart and dropping him instantly and without further dramatics.
He wore black leather armor and solid light-metal plate blackened with fire, the kind favored by assassins and spies. It clashed distinctively with the muddied, khaki pants that he wore beneath blackened plate-and-leather leg guards. Pica stared at the scene in disunderstanding, eyes moving between the three slate-rose-slate stripes on the arrow shaft and the motionless figure it protruded from. There were more of the assailants, he noticed. They emerged from the darkness to their rear, creeping from the very alleyway from which the troopers had sprinted.
Spreading out as they fearlessly moved into the conflagration, the attackers chose their targets from the groaning heaps of Mellivora scattered about the square. Some were slow and limped as if they had sprained an ankle or knee, others rushed forward madly through fire leaping greedily at their tight clothes as they passed.
‘…told you we’d catch some dirty bastard Badgers’ a big, bearded one said in a thick, guttural accent. ‘Look like we got us some baby Badgers at that, boys.’
He was in a uniform matching the first man’s and Pica held his gaze as he approached the wounded friends, pulling a thick short sword from a worn scabbard and raising it to the pair. He pointed it at them with raw menace, eyeing his prey and savoring their helplessness; he grinned a crusty, yellow smile at Pica, leaning in to grab a handful of Sily’s hair as they sat motionless under his blade.
Where was the archer? Pica looked into the darkness fruitlessly; a shadow fell over him and Sily.
The bearded man was thrown backwards under the charging momentum of Rusa running him through with a low shoulder into the solar plexus. He gasped deeply as every ounce of air was ejected from his body, bouncing off the odd cobblestone and coming to a crumpled stop eight feet from where he had been standing. Sily’s massive brother stood over them like a heaving bull, breathing hard and a silent roar on his lips as turned to snarl at the encroaching assassins. He stood with his massive, now crooked zweihänder at his side, point planted firmly into the ground as he taunted his foes and dared them to try to get inside his guard.
To his rear, there was a sickening noise as a lung opened to fresh air, bubbling as it filled with blood in wet sucking sounds. Scribe, his robes smoking from his entrance through an enflamed alleyway to the north, stood over the gasping man. He plunged the dagger a second time and with practiced precision, piercing up and high behind the skull as the breathless man thrashed and impaled his brain fully upon the long, thin blade. The body flopped feebly once and went still; Scribe, flicking the matter from his knife, turned to face the advancing attackers now eyeing him and changing course to deal with the new threat.
Pica returned his attention to Sily. She had finished her triage in moments and was securing the grimy bandage behind her head with a few quick tucks. With a brief glance about, she grabbed the discarded helmet of the dead man from where it had been thrown from him a few feet away and pushed it firmly over the wrapping.
‘Sily are you okay? Can you hear me?’ Pica recoiled from his own voice, cringing slightly as it reverberated strangely between shell-shocked ears. She nodded at him, grimacing at the pounding in her own skull.
‘Mmmmm… doesn’t feel good. But I’m alright.’ She chuckled raggedly, ‘how do I look, baby?’ She made a show of winking her uncovered eye at Pica while blowing a kiss into the air.
‘I’m winking both eyes,’ she assured, ‘didn’t know I could do that, did you?’ She jested, forcing the edge of a smile over Pica’s shocked and abhorred expression. ‘Think Simen will be disappointed when he finds out I’m still the pretty one?’
It was something that he had loved about the Populan woman since the first time they met five years prior, she always laughed; no matter the circumstance, she led with humor instead of panic, keeping her peers strong under the worst of conditions and distracting them in their worst moments with a stupid joke and a pained laugh that might twinge a cracked rib or bruised eye socket, but more than made up for it in lifted spirit. It kept you sane in the worst moments, Pica believed fully in that; even if she had to be insane to do it in the first place, nobody was going to think about it too much at the end of the day.
‘We have to get up!’ she shouted at him, suddenly standing over Pica in a blink and pulling at his arm desperately. She yanked him behind Rusa, dragging him along the ground and underneath the towering man’s guard. She pointed to the fountain where Alces lay unconscious and slumped on his side against the shattered fountain walls, gesturing the need to get to him and the small protection offered by the low walls.
‘There, to Alces, we can make a stand there! Rusa!’
The brother roared mightily in response; with a solid kick of his boot, the massive, two-handed sword sprang to life in his large hands. It swung up in a sweeping arc, trailing a fine stream of dust behind the needle tip as it left the ground before being pulled in a wide circle around the swordsman. He slotted it into a perfect routine of upward strokes that cut diagonally across his path before sweeping down and back up again at the opposite angle. Cutting two large, looping crosses before him, he stepped in sync with Pica and Sily, back-stepping them to the side of their fallen brother with machine precision. He pivoted on his heels and lashed out with sweeping upward and head-level strokes of his heavy blade as he took guard over the fallen figure, never once stopping his steel’s momentum and forcing the advance of the attackers to a clustered halt just outside his range.
One of the bastards tried to sneak a lunging shot at Rusa’s legs as the larger man swung at another. He misjudged the flying blade’s path and caught a full half of its sharp length across his stomach and chest. His armor burst open, and his skin parted like rice paper as he was flung backwards with a muffled yelp. He lay crumpled and twitched for a few seconds before his body gave out, nearly clove in two by the legendary Populan weapon which had defined that land’s greatest heroes for generations.
The accompanying assassin, believing he had spotted his opportunity, had also leapt when Alces’ sword was briefly slowed in his foe’s flesh. He took an arrow to the stomach from the darkness before he could make contact with the swinging giant, leaning over with a pained gasp as the flying blade made another arcing course up-and-across, shearing off the wheezing man’s arm before a wide boot kicked him into the debris scattered across the plaza’s shattered pavestones.
There were four of the mysterious foes left, prowling in the growing, shifting shadows as the flames began to let up in their rage. They lurked behind crumbling benches and tumbled statuary as they moved into position to rush the huddled troopers. The arrows stopped their steady flight out of the darkness, the night silent of their buzzing and the attackers confident in their absence.
Rusa huffed loudly with exertion and he gracefully stopped his mesmerizing dance, coming to rest with long, blood-speckled sword standing tenderly on its point in the dirt, just as it had begun; the crimson streaked down the steel, coalescing and gaining viscous speed before falling into the dust below in a gently widening pool.
Pica finally saw Simen, he was poking headfirst out of a pile of rubble, his legs and hips buried somewhere in the stone as he protruded limp and crooked from the mass. Pica scrambled, tripping and stumbling as he tried to regain his footing, ignoring Rusa’s roar behind him as he pushed past and escaped the towering man’s impenetrable protection.
He fell upon his friend’s lifeless form, yanking him from the debris and pulling him to his breast. Simen’s face was a black mess, the skin burned and puffy with thick blood rendering his features indecipherable. His armor was similarly mangled, hanging off his chest in tatters and exposing the dented chainmail underneath. He was breathing, shallowly and with a bad rhythm, but it was there. Pica released a ragged, choking sigh of relief, kissing his oldest friend on the forehead gently before beginning to extricate his legs with machine-like mindlessness, totally ignorant of anything else around him.
The four lurking enemies made their move, moving forward as a unit with three dashing to grab Pica while the fourth attempted to distract the enraged Rusa with a blind charge. It was a good plan and they tackled the distraught man roughly in a wave, pulling him away from the still body he guarded with bared teeth and punching him roughly as they drug him back into the shadows to the west.
Sily howled and leapt among them just as Scribe did, both using the chance to charge fully into the melee. Wielding her long dagger in one hand and lashing out viciously with the metal-sheathed fist of the other, she bowled them over, scattering the attackers and pushing forward into them as Scribe took defense of Pica. She slashed one across the face, popping his eye and opening him from forehead to neck with the blade. He fell back with a howl, clutching at his mutilated face and turning precisely into the swinging zweihänder surging toward him from the darkness behind. His head came off alongside his hands, severed halfway down the forearms, they fell to the ground with dull, wet thumps.
The final two, registering their odds slipping away by the second, turned to run from the slaughter and into the smoke-filled night. One, a man with a wiry little beard and greasy, slicked-back hair, found himself looking into the glaring sage eyes of Scribe who materialized from darkness inches before him. The mute man slipped his long dagger quietly into his throat, flicking it neatly to the left and sending his lifeblood arcing into the night before he could react at all.
The other was a short man with a leg bloodied at the knee and pronounced limp. He hobbled off at surprising speed upon seeing a potential opening through the closing ranks of the Mellivora squad; he sprinted from the courtyard into the darkness, fleeing the infernal slaughter at an off-rhythm gallop. A hissing sound following him as he disappeared into the swirling haze and the muffled thump of flesh hitting cobblestone at speed floated back from the void.
Pellia burst into the square, eyes wide with terror as she found herself immersed in a scene heretofore sanitized by distance. She gaped at the destruction all around her, eyes locking on the collapsed masses and slowly shuffling ghosts of her friends.
With a grunt, Rusa collapsed; a long shard of dark wood poking prominently from rent armor.
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