Somewhere high above them, the wind blows hot and dry off the Merdaine across this tangle of crevasses. But here, down in the shadowed depths of the stone cuts, the temperature is considerably softened and the harsh daylight reduced to muted blues and purples, striations of orange and white sandstone rendered nearly monochromatic save where the passing splash of lamplight (or something like it) plays over it.
The sound of fighting here is shockingly loud. It reverberates through the cut channels, rebounding. A burst of arcane ice turns to shrapnel and explodes across the worn smooth lip of a natural wall cut from the erosion. Behind it, Flint kicks his boot into the lever of his crossbow, and wrenches the bolt back with a murderous mechanical click.
There are six Venatori left in this open roofed chamber, and no telling how many others are crawling through Red Bride's Grave. Only that they must be here for the same reason that Riftwatch is—the rumor of a passage down into the ancient shrine, the Veil stretched sheer, and the promise of a way through to some old rock or stave or Maker knows what of power so long as one might determine how to navigate to reach it.
Presently, however, Flint is less concerned with ancient dark things and more with not catching an knife sharp icicle to the face when he rocks up out of cover to send the bolt spitting.
It snarls through the air. Punches through the breastplate of a Venatori assassin. And then, before the enemy can fall, the whole arrangement of bolt and gore and dying body reverses itself and clocks backwards. Some ripple in the Veil knitting and unknitting itself. The Venatori is stood upright again. Flint's foot reverses out of the crossbow lever. The splash of arcane winter magic unexplodes, sucking fragments of ice back into itself.
Across from Flint, across the narrow corridor of rock that they're both defending and invading, Marcus has his back pressed to stone, staff held in one hand, the other raised. Between his fingers, shining glyphs sparkle and extinguish. In that hard reverse of time, the feeling of that quasi-finite, internal energy he'd drawn on to cast reblooms somewhere under his skin.
And then their hearts beat back into rhythm, and Marcus turns, that measured spell discarded in favour of moving and pointing his staff, and in a direct line between the end of his blade and would-be dead assassin, the air twists, whorls with smoke and ember and a crackle of green energy firing through this whirlwind in an effort to redo what Flint had done faster than it takes to crank a crossbow.
But the assassin has learned his lesson too, escaping with raw magic grazing past his pauldron as he ducks out of the way.
Another firing of winter magic, this time hissing for where Marcus is stood. He moves but is still struck across the shoulder where, instead of sinking its fangs in him, winter magic disperses with a shimmer, felt by Flint as a sharp and sudden gust of icy splinters all around. Harmless, if stinging.
Frost laces across leather and fur, briefly, before immediately melting.
He flinches, a natural response to the spray of ice shards even if the effect is only to catch some cold bite against the back of his neck and across the ear rather than motivating any actual damage. It briefly delays re-cranking the crossbow back. But only briefly. The second go for the bolts aims past the assassin who has bobbed and weaved and resumed the attempt to rush their position, and instead goes whizzung after one of the mages positioned behind the lightly armored Venatori. There it
—chips off a hastily thrown up barrier, ricocheting impotently into the blue shade of the crevasse.
—slips inside the barrier, the second go at the thing too slow, and blooms in the mage's face with a crack of bone that seems to befuddle but not drop them. Not instantly.
And now here is the assassin with their ugly twin kris daggers, leaping across the low slip of cover with both blades ready to do ruin.
Is all Marcus gets to say before they are suddenly beset upon by hooded, knife-wielding figure. It's immediate instinct that Marcus swings his staff, blade slicing the air with a whistle of friction, smoke drifting thick off the super-heated edges where it only slams into stone with a deadly crack of iron against rock. Not for any reason of time working against him, but only that the assassin is a faster enemy than he could hope to be, and simply ducks.
He lifts his chin in instinct when a dagger makes for his throat, good fortune kicking the blow off-angle with the turn of his staff before the second strike that promises to lodge somewhere beside the protective shell of his breastplate only strikes smoke. Marcus, bodily, discorporates into a thick churn of ember-filled black smoke, rushing aside with superhuman speed.
Reappears several feet back, with a small nick to the chin that stripes red down to his collar. Pivoting, already casting as he reorients himself with the intention to send an angry barrage of rock and flame where the assassin was last.
A constant: the benefit of fighting alongside a mage is that there is no version of events in which a practiced assassin with their twin daggers turns for Flint rather than swinging for Marcus. In the hierarchy of targets, the one simply outweighs the other in nearly every circumstance.
Had luck not proven out in Marcus' favor, this tactic would have benefitted the assassin perfectly well. Were they not operating in this zagging choke point off the larger chamber where nothing occurs very far beyond arm's reach, there might have been opportunity to recover even from this bit of trouble. Instead, the second kris whiffs through smoke and ember. And Flint, who had been moving in the direction of the entanglement before the Venatori has cleared their vault, plants a ruthless boot to the hooded figure's knee. Prompts a barked squeal of pain. The assassin staggers, all but stumbling face first into the burst of stone and heat that scours viciously out after them.
Somewhere in the larger chamber, the mage with the arrow in their face has realized they have an arrow in their face and dropped like a stone. One of their companions has hurried to haul them back, while a Venatori with a short sword crackling with some enchantment comes charging up.
—Goes charging back as Flint steps backward out from behind the scrap of cover he has just ducked behind, the heat of Marcus' nearby assault tingling at the back of his neck.
The assassin doesn't unimmolate. The burning flesh scent merely bursts back open, souring the air. And Flint steps forward a second time, determined to find himself cover from the next wave of magic which must now mean to obscure the swordsman's charge. Instead, he is wrenched off center. Doesn't so much lose his footing as have it stolen from him. The Venatori swordsman suffers a similar blow, the pair of them yanked toward a converging midpoint at the behest of the second mage among the enemy's ranks.
One of them has a sword drawn. The other has a crossbow.
Boot falls follow Flint's trajectory on a delay once freed from the thick-feeling paralysis of reversing time. The blade of Marcus' staff sinks into the half-roasted assassin for good measure, just in time to note that sudden lurch of unnatural movement as Flint is hauled forwards. His focus locks in place, the emergence of the other two soldiers, the glimmer of the mage's casting further back amongst the shadowy depths of the crevasse.
With a scuff of boots, Marcus moves forwards while bringing his staff to bear. Brightly volcanic runic marks suddenly flare to life further up from the mid point, and then—
An explosion of deep tectonic noise as fire, ropes of lava, and obscuringly thick black smoke erupt in a vertical wall that cuts off the two mercenaries and the mage from that gravitational pull-point snaring Flint and the swordsman, and the air in the narrow corridor of natural stone kicks itself up several degrees. Immediately, the staff feels heavy in Marcus' hands, and he uses that moment of regathering his strength to dash forwards.
Three beats. Pull, slide, the flash of nearby liquid fire gleaming off the arcane polish of the drawn short sword. They crash into one another. Then, removed from the sight line of the casting mage. The gravitational snare collapses and the resulting jerk of movement:
A shattering crack! as the swung crossbow splits the foot soldier's skull, blood bursting bright red all down the Venatori's shocked face.
The ghastly wet pop as the short sword punches out through Flint's back.
It feels like a rush of cold, the sight of crimson-shining blade stabbed through Flint's chest. Marcus does not trip over it, hesitate, stumble, but does convert the beginnings of casting into something else, feeling a vicious pull of compulsion that sees violently bright, concentric circles of arcane glyph-work suddenly sear around the feet of the tangle that is the foot soldier and Flint as he makes to lunge forward.
Spellwork unwrites itself, vanishing off the dusty ground. Marcus is hauled backwards, watching as bloodied steel slides to disappear into Flint's back. The cracked stone sucks lava and smoke back into it and reseals with an oddly echoed grumble of shifting rock. Restored energy feels like a hit of adrenaline.
Flint is still being dragged in. Marcus turns his staff out of the motion he'd begun, the blunt end of it slamming stubborn into the ground in front of him, and now, instead of volcanic eruption up ahead, pale white-blue spellwork wreathes around Flint in stubborn defense, motes of magic springing off of him when the foot soldier raises his weapon.
And more, like embers off a turned log, when a crossbow bolt strikes his shoulder and clatters aside.
It doesn't hurt going in; there is just a sudden, bizarre sensation of wrongness. An alien arrangement of tissue. Something cold and numb, a frantic pulse of adrenaline that might have seen him twist the crossbow back again for a second attempt at bludgeoning the Venatori's face in.
The undoing burns like an iron. Nothing, and then a radial scream of sensation as tissue peels back together in the retreating wake of the withdrawing short sword. Blood rolls back up the Venatori's face. Bone uncracks. A lung swells full. Two ribs unshatter.
Then he is sliding again. The Venatori's bawl as the shortsword glances off the protective barrier is equal parts frustration of the memory of agony and instinctive blank terror. He knows because he can taste the same impulse in his mouth, metal tang like he'd swallowed the sword instead of taken it to the chest. Then they crash together—an entirely different tangle of limbs thanks to the persistent pull of the gravitational ring. This time when the pull of magic collapses, Flint and the Venatori topple into a scrabbling heap. A clumsy knee. A punching fist. The crossbow wrangled flat across the foot soldier's neck and Flint bearing down with all his weight while the sensation of everything in its place shrieks hot in his ear.
Taking notes from their enemy's tactics, apparently, the next crossbow bolt from the Venatori side of the chamber seeks a target beyond the two men scrapping on the ground.
It isn't deadly. The crossbowman takes a safe bet rather than aiming for the head, disabling rather than lethal, and the bolt lodges deep somewhere around the shoulder, piercing through leathers that still manage to prevent it from too clean a path, but nevertheless, there's a punch of momentum shoving Marcus backwards a step—
And time doesn't skip about, progressing forwards as the marksman draws up another bolt. But there is an odd tang to the air, which Flint will barely notice in his desperate, deadly scrabble on the ground, but nevertheless prickles the skin, an invisible surge that only those who have fought with (or against) mages might recognise as a sudden and violent tearing of magic through the Veil.
Marcus claws the bolt free in almost the same motion as his next casting, and this time, spellwork writes across the ground on the far side of the conflict. The mage retaliates fast with abjurative magics in an attempt to pry them back up, as he'd done some several times, but this time, magic takes hold, and claws in.
Fire, smoke, lava once again erupts from the earth that cracks open not in front of them, but beneath the enemy mage's feet, the sound of quaking rock almost consuming the sound of Marcus' snarl. There's a howl of pain as the robed Venatori is consumed in it, half-collapsed in volcanic crevice.
The gravitational pull fails. The crossbowman has darted for cover, and the swordsman is rushing forwards. Marcus does too.
The swordsman it fit and fast. He will be on Flint three beats ahead of Marcus, which is a negligible point when he might veer wide (—hierarchy of targets—), but relevant when he doesn't. It takes a cold calculation to move past a man crushing the throat of a companion rather than intervening with the quick blow of a sword, and evidently the Venatori doesn't have it in him.
The sword darts out. Hacks into the lacquered wood of the crossbow which Flint has only narrowly managed to bring up from the first foot soldier to repurpose into a desperate shield. Blade scours in close regardless, slipping through the gap between crossbow body and arm in search of a fleshier target. An instinctive yank of the crossbow wedges the sword in the angle of its arm. A twist wrenches the second swordsman with his vice grip on the sword haft to stumble.
He thinks, 'The fucking bowman—' but the barked order turns into a shapeless snarl as he makes to drag this swordsman down with the first.
There are good reasons to focus fire on the mage. One of them manifests now, as Marcus moves around at an efficient clip, and nearby, the thump of his staff against the ground strikes a deeper note than boot heels—
Once again, scrolling protective magic wreathes around Flint, immediately sparking off of him in blue ember-like motes at the desperate strike within the tangle of bodies. Then, a hiss of momentum, and an under-swing of the bladed staff catches in a nasty snarl up the back of a knee, toppling that second swordsman down under Flint's clawing grasp.
A harsh breath out as that aggravates injury. Reminding him.
And so Marcus turns, moving towards the fucking bowman, glowing orange tinging the edges of iron blade. Around him, the dust on the ground lifts in a faint whorl of movement at the beginnings of magical summoning.
If Marcus moves efficiently, dust stirring eagerly in his wake like a loyal hunting dog, the scrabble here on the ground is clipped and mean. The first Venatori is insensate, but not yet dead and the second is keenly aware that if he loses his sword, he's fucked. Flint, holding on to the tangle of crossbow and blade, yanks the shortsword and the Venatori's arm closer. Finds a fist of a handhold on the edge of armor and is rewarding with being bludgeoned in the face with a gauntleted hand for the trouble—pain springing in bright unintelligible spots on his vision.
Across the chamber, the bowman risks stepping out from his cover—
No, the bowman doesn't do that, and Flint doesn't get punched in the face. This time he ducks his head this time, the blow glancing off the top of his head while he and the swordsman roll over in some nasty parody of boys wrestling. A belt knife is produced somewhere in the middle of the fray, fights under crossbow and sword guard and earns a grunt of pain for its burial.
The bowman waits an extra beat. When he darts clear again, it's low to the sandy crevasse floor. Fires with a pop! of the crossbow's thick string that squeals loud to Flint's overturned ear.
Dust reverses. Settles. Then, as time resumes, kicks back up with more aggression.
Marcus doesn't stop his advance, readiness for what he knows will happen with the kind of overwound energy of a man moving through the open. Dust lifts, pebbles roll, and then a vicious clash of movement as soon as the marksman appears, Marcus launching himself aside as the ground between them erupts with stone and dust, the twang of the bolt's release still audible as the shot goes wide.
And Marcus lunges forwards, the air whorling around him to help along his passage through the whirlwind of earth and dust, and there's the sound of a pained grunt in time with the very ordinary noise of a blade slamming into lightly armored body. A clang of metal meeting metal as a blade is pulled free of its sheath
—and dust and smoke all shift in reversed flurries as time drags them both back—
and there is no sharp meeting of metal, but a sharper cry of pain that doesn't sound like Marcus.
It doesn't sound like Marcus, and matches closely with the second more tangled cry as Flint drives his belt knife into the swordsman a second time—blade crammed clumsily under the lip of armor, popping some leather strap. The swordsman falls over backward, grasping at his breastplate in that specific impotent way of a man who is bleeding out into the well of his own armor and clothes.
Flint follows after him. For good measure. Because it seems the reasonable thing to do. Because he isn't thinking. Because there is a gap between leather gorget and blackened steel helmet edge for the knife to be punched through. And then he is scrabbling for the crossbow, grasping at his hip and finding the bolts have been scattered. Blinking away the sting of grit in his eye (its blood, wet down his face from the cut gouged in his scalp by the gauntlet edge), he closes his fist around one of the errant bolts and fumbles it onto the gouged crossbow track.
There is a whistling noise: the first swordsman failing to breathe.
It sounds similar the noise coming from further down the stone corridor.
As the dust hangs in the air, a red-hot iron blade buries itself somewhere deadly. Rather than finishing it with the necessary twist, Marcus keeps the dying man pinned in place, concentrating. Beneath the puncture hole in his leather armor, muscle and skin knits itself back closed with a sharp entropic sting. Even the small cut at his chin is scrubbed away, leaving behind drying blood and the faintest prickle of reddened irritation.
Here, he turns his staff, sloughs the now partially desiccated corpse off the end of his blade. Waves a hand, banishing smoke and dust from the air as easily as flicking aside a curtain, although there is now a film of grey dust and darker soot streaked across his armor, his face, blood and sweat cutting streaks through it.
Marcus moves back for where Flint is squaring with the remaining enemy, where the other one still living is negligible in his relevance. Both are on the ground.
Marcus' reappearance through the smoke and ash renders reloading the crossbow useless. There will be no bowman following our after him. Which he knew somewhere in the back of his head, only the idea has been slow to surface and his hands had been ready.
(Exactly how was he planning to kick into the lever and crank back the string from this position? A problem he would have hammered his way through given cause.)
Instead, he turns the crossbow. Dumps the bolt. Slamming the butt end of it the splintered crossbow down, cracking m the dying man hard enough to knock him insensible for what minutes remain of him being alive might constitute as a mercy if he didn't strike him a second time.
Making to wipe the blood off his face smears it hot and sticking across a wide swathe of skin. He unsmears it. Manages to resist the impulse the second time around, instead blinking rapidly to clear the blood from his eye as he feels around for a handhold while adrenaline trembles through his arm.
"The crossbow." A clumsy gesture back to where Marcus had struck his killing blow. "I'll use it." His won't survive much more use.
(Is an absurd thing to first account for on the other side of this.)
There's a hesitation, first, and then Marcus turns. Back to that narrow chokepoint, back to where the two bodies are crumpled, one with the skin pulled ghastly back from teeth in a frozen expression of terror and the other still flaming where a pool of lava is slowly cooling, the ashen remains of a summoning tome gently smoking on the ground. He searches out the crossbow.
And then time reverses, pulling him right back where he was, and a panting breath of irritation follows.
Rather than repeat his path, Marcus moves forwards, staff held aside as he moves around the battered corpse. A hand goes out, grabbing onto Flint's shoulder. "Look up," he says. Flint's motions are clumsy, his priorities out of order, and there is dirt and blood where a head wound should be.
And he died. There is something to this Veil disruption that reverses the physical but leaves alone the soft matter that remembers and intuits. The crossbow can wait.
It's exertion. The blind, screaming surge through the blood that demands activity from a body that isn't dead. Marcus' hand closes on his shoulder and he realizes at once that he's shaking from the shock of it, sweating hard from the hardscrabble fight on the ground and too sharply aware of the crossbow bolts strewn about him. If someone else were to come up through the narrow passage, he will have to either sort them or wrench the dirk free from the underside of the Venatori swordsman's jaw before he can make himself useful again—
He looks up.
"It's shallow," he says of the gouge dig into his head, sitting back on his haunches. Touching the ground with both hands to balance himself. How the fuck would be know? More blood hasn't poured into his eye now that he's blinked it away once, that's how. "We should keep moving."
The inherent difficulty of that prospect not withstanding.
Then lowers himself down, laying his staff out beside him. "We will," he says, or promises, kneeling aside pieces of shattered crossbow so as to crab towards and snag at the nearest dead body, specifically the quilted edge of a long tunic. He tugs free a knife from his boot, the sounds of tearing fabric following as fabric is sawn through, threads tearing, abruptly mundane after the sounds of cracking earth, flame, shouts, crunching bone.
He has faith that whether Flint wants to or not, he'll stay put for the necessary handful of seconds it takes for Marcus to win himself a scavenged scrape of fabric.
This done, he turns it over in his hand, scooting back nearer. Once again, finding a handhold on Flint's shoulder. His own expression is a closed trap of tension, steely edges like wound coils. He is looking at the gouge while feeling his thumb over the linen, summoning ice crystals into its weave to both become cold as well as melt immediately once that minor enchantment is done.
"Sit," he says.
Edited (alternatively i never make anymore mistakes) 2023-05-06 03:18 (UTC)
Warrants a grunt of protest, but he does. Sit. Sliding sideways off the heel that's shifted in under him, and briefly making an effort to untangle his leg from across the dying (dead) man.
The ground is hard under him. The pale chalky footing that has left white marks worked into the folds of his trousers is going to leave the seat of them comically pale when eventually he gets gets around to clambering up and into his feet. But first:
Shivering like an animal that's been made to run, he once more stops himself from touching the bloody mess that is his face. It should be stinging by now, is a thought he dismisses out of hand. The body is strange and it sometimes is prone forgetting things in its desperation. Focusing on the wrong things like the scrape pop of tearing fabric and how it has grated faintly against the nerves. Sitting now in Marcus' shadow, he can still taste the whine of threads protesting under the knife—
Flint's breath out is heavy and loud, a note of shuddering frustration in it. Stop shaking, for fuck's fake.
Marcus moves his grip from shoulder to somewhere below the nape of Flint's neck. Palm firm and grip tight, something he hopes feels grounding and assuring than anything else. The tremors will stop on their own accord and no sooner.
Gently, kneeling up beside Flint, he goes and touches the cold-damp linen to that head wound, pressing once there. There is a split second of entropic resistance that threatens another temporal loop, which would be rather ill-timed, but it's merely a skipped heartbeat in the scheme of things. That other hand moves up, thumb working alongside spine.
There hasn't been time for blood to coagulate very much, even before factoring in sweat and adrenaline and the free way blood tends to gush from these kinds of injuries, but still, he holds it there for a moment before lifting away. The gash is quick to fill again, but there isn't much else to see save to confirm its presence, and nothing worse.
Reapplies pressure.
"We should call in riders," he suggests. "Send for reinforcements, if they're guarding this passage so well."
And perhaps extract them both, or only Flint, he doesn't say, and he can rationalise how it would make sense for him to take over a griffon, see the Commander back to the forward camp.
"More likely we've just punched past their armor, and will find only scattered resistance from here forward."
He is distantly aware of the cold touch of the cloth, and the firm shape of hands on him. More distinct are the dusty gleam off the man's vambrace, and the shape of the bladed staff on the ground alongside them. A sour tang of sulfur on the air. The blood on Marcus' chin.
And if that's not so—if they wind their way carefully into the shrine from here and find it crawling with Venatori—, then what's to stop them from falling quietly back to call up those reinforcements?
"Nearly had you," he says, and must be referring to the bite from the kris dagger.
There's no reply for this first part. Either Flint will stand steady on two feet, once Marcus lets him try, or he won't.
There will be an acute thrum of discomfort as Marcus turns the cloth in his hand to face it now with its dry side. It signals some transition, swapping hands and shifting where he kneels, resting back on haunches. His spare hand comes to close at Flint's arm above the elbow. It's a ghost of an instinct, like putting his hand at the neck of an uneasy horse.
Flint's remark gets a scoff from Marcus—less cocky, more disbelieving. Yes, he was nearly had.
His focus twitches from his hand to Flint's eyes, a graze of a look, sharp edged but ironic. "He was miles away," he disputes.
That plain side of the cloth does elicit a flinch, which is a kind of relief. The world beginning to flow more or less in the correct direction, the prickle tug of the patchy Veil testing that reaction notwithstanding. These things should, by rights, sting a little.
He hums, a low skeptical noise that slants toward a teeth bared breed of humor—something about the blood on Marcus' face would seem to serve as a convenient counterargument—and closes the bloodied eye against the prickle of pain radiating out from under the applied pressure. A hand pops up under the influence of the same instinct, bicep flexing under the hand on it as Flint twists his arm up to find a similar bracing hold at Marcus' elbow. Grip firm, even while the muscle and sinew behind it twitch and shiver out against being asked to hold still.
Give or take the half seconds that the rippling of the Fade steals away, he counts silently to ten. Then tests unraveling his grip from Marcus' elbow in favor of raising it to cover the hand presently holding the cut of cloth to his head.
"I have it." It's fine. "Fetch me that crossbow. And if the bowman carried a belt hook for it, I'll have need of that as well."
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no subject
The sound of fighting here is shockingly loud. It reverberates through the cut channels, rebounding. A burst of arcane ice turns to shrapnel and explodes across the worn smooth lip of a natural wall cut from the erosion. Behind it, Flint kicks his boot into the lever of his crossbow, and wrenches the bolt back with a murderous mechanical click.
There are six Venatori left in this open roofed chamber, and no telling how many others are crawling through Red Bride's Grave. Only that they must be here for the same reason that Riftwatch is—the rumor of a passage down into the ancient shrine, the Veil stretched sheer, and the promise of a way through to some old rock or stave or Maker knows what of power so long as one might determine how to navigate to reach it.
Presently, however, Flint is less concerned with ancient dark things and more with not catching an knife sharp icicle to the face when he rocks up out of cover to send the bolt spitting.
It snarls through the air. Punches through the breastplate of a Venatori assassin. And then, before the enemy can fall, the whole arrangement of bolt and gore and dying body reverses itself and clocks backwards. Some ripple in the Veil knitting and unknitting itself. The Venatori is stood upright again. Flint's foot reverses out of the crossbow lever. The splash of arcane winter magic unexplodes, sucking fragments of ice back into itself.
no subject
And then their hearts beat back into rhythm, and Marcus turns, that measured spell discarded in favour of moving and pointing his staff, and in a direct line between the end of his blade and would-be dead assassin, the air twists, whorls with smoke and ember and a crackle of green energy firing through this whirlwind in an effort to redo what Flint had done faster than it takes to crank a crossbow.
But the assassin has learned his lesson too, escaping with raw magic grazing past his pauldron as he ducks out of the way.
Another firing of winter magic, this time hissing for where Marcus is stood. He moves but is still struck across the shoulder where, instead of sinking its fangs in him, winter magic disperses with a shimmer, felt by Flint as a sharp and sudden gust of icy splinters all around. Harmless, if stinging.
Frost laces across leather and fur, briefly, before immediately melting.
no subject
—chips off a hastily thrown up barrier, ricocheting impotently into the blue shade of the crevasse.
—slips inside the barrier, the second go at the thing too slow, and blooms in the mage's face with a crack of bone that seems to befuddle but not drop them. Not instantly.
And now here is the assassin with their ugly twin kris daggers, leaping across the low slip of cover with both blades ready to do ruin.
no subject
Is all Marcus gets to say before they are suddenly beset upon by hooded, knife-wielding figure. It's immediate instinct that Marcus swings his staff, blade slicing the air with a whistle of friction, smoke drifting thick off the super-heated edges where it only slams into stone with a deadly crack of iron against rock. Not for any reason of time working against him, but only that the assassin is a faster enemy than he could hope to be, and simply ducks.
He lifts his chin in instinct when a dagger makes for his throat, good fortune kicking the blow off-angle with the turn of his staff before the second strike that promises to lodge somewhere beside the protective shell of his breastplate only strikes smoke. Marcus, bodily, discorporates into a thick churn of ember-filled black smoke, rushing aside with superhuman speed.
Reappears several feet back, with a small nick to the chin that stripes red down to his collar. Pivoting, already casting as he reorients himself with the intention to send an angry barrage of rock and flame where the assassin was last.
no subject
Had luck not proven out in Marcus' favor, this tactic would have benefitted the assassin perfectly well. Were they not operating in this zagging choke point off the larger chamber where nothing occurs very far beyond arm's reach, there might have been opportunity to recover even from this bit of trouble. Instead, the second kris whiffs through smoke and ember. And Flint, who had been moving in the direction of the entanglement before the Venatori has cleared their vault, plants a ruthless boot to the hooded figure's knee. Prompts a barked squeal of pain. The assassin staggers, all but stumbling face first into the burst of stone and heat that scours viciously out after them.
Somewhere in the larger chamber, the mage with the arrow in their face has realized they have an arrow in their face and dropped like a stone. One of their companions has hurried to haul them back, while a Venatori with a short sword crackling with some enchantment comes charging up.
—Goes charging back as Flint steps backward out from behind the scrap of cover he has just ducked behind, the heat of Marcus' nearby assault tingling at the back of his neck.
The assassin doesn't unimmolate. The burning flesh scent merely bursts back open, souring the air. And Flint steps forward a second time, determined to find himself cover from the next wave of magic which must now mean to obscure the swordsman's charge. Instead, he is wrenched off center. Doesn't so much lose his footing as have it stolen from him. The Venatori swordsman suffers a similar blow, the pair of them yanked toward a converging midpoint at the behest of the second mage among the enemy's ranks.
One of them has a sword drawn. The other has a crossbow.
no subject
With a scuff of boots, Marcus moves forwards while bringing his staff to bear. Brightly volcanic runic marks suddenly flare to life further up from the mid point, and then—
An explosion of deep tectonic noise as fire, ropes of lava, and obscuringly thick black smoke erupt in a vertical wall that cuts off the two mercenaries and the mage from that gravitational pull-point snaring Flint and the swordsman, and the air in the narrow corridor of natural stone kicks itself up several degrees. Immediately, the staff feels heavy in Marcus' hands, and he uses that moment of regathering his strength to dash forwards.
no subject
A shattering crack! as the swung crossbow splits the foot soldier's skull, blood bursting bright red all down the Venatori's shocked face.
The ghastly wet pop as the short sword punches out through Flint's back.
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Spellwork unwrites itself, vanishing off the dusty ground. Marcus is hauled backwards, watching as bloodied steel slides to disappear into Flint's back. The cracked stone sucks lava and smoke back into it and reseals with an oddly echoed grumble of shifting rock. Restored energy feels like a hit of adrenaline.
Flint is still being dragged in. Marcus turns his staff out of the motion he'd begun, the blunt end of it slamming stubborn into the ground in front of him, and now, instead of volcanic eruption up ahead, pale white-blue spellwork wreathes around Flint in stubborn defense, motes of magic springing off of him when the foot soldier raises his weapon.
And more, like embers off a turned log, when a crossbow bolt strikes his shoulder and clatters aside.
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The undoing burns like an iron. Nothing, and then a radial scream of sensation as tissue peels back together in the retreating wake of the withdrawing short sword. Blood rolls back up the Venatori's face. Bone uncracks. A lung swells full. Two ribs unshatter.
Then he is sliding again. The Venatori's bawl as the shortsword glances off the protective barrier is equal parts frustration of the memory of agony and instinctive blank terror. He knows because he can taste the same impulse in his mouth, metal tang like he'd swallowed the sword instead of taken it to the chest. Then they crash together—an entirely different tangle of limbs thanks to the persistent pull of the gravitational ring. This time when the pull of magic collapses, Flint and the Venatori topple into a scrabbling heap. A clumsy knee. A punching fist. The crossbow wrangled flat across the foot soldier's neck and Flint bearing down with all his weight while the sensation of everything in its place shrieks hot in his ear.
Taking notes from their enemy's tactics, apparently, the next crossbow bolt from the Venatori side of the chamber seeks a target beyond the two men scrapping on the ground.
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It isn't deadly. The crossbowman takes a safe bet rather than aiming for the head, disabling rather than lethal, and the bolt lodges deep somewhere around the shoulder, piercing through leathers that still manage to prevent it from too clean a path, but nevertheless, there's a punch of momentum shoving Marcus backwards a step—
And time doesn't skip about, progressing forwards as the marksman draws up another bolt. But there is an odd tang to the air, which Flint will barely notice in his desperate, deadly scrabble on the ground, but nevertheless prickles the skin, an invisible surge that only those who have fought with (or against) mages might recognise as a sudden and violent tearing of magic through the Veil.
Marcus claws the bolt free in almost the same motion as his next casting, and this time, spellwork writes across the ground on the far side of the conflict. The mage retaliates fast with abjurative magics in an attempt to pry them back up, as he'd done some several times, but this time, magic takes hold, and claws in.
Fire, smoke, lava once again erupts from the earth that cracks open not in front of them, but beneath the enemy mage's feet, the sound of quaking rock almost consuming the sound of Marcus' snarl. There's a howl of pain as the robed Venatori is consumed in it, half-collapsed in volcanic crevice.
The gravitational pull fails. The crossbowman has darted for cover, and the swordsman is rushing forwards. Marcus does too.
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The sword darts out. Hacks into the lacquered wood of the crossbow which Flint has only narrowly managed to bring up from the first foot soldier to repurpose into a desperate shield. Blade scours in close regardless, slipping through the gap between crossbow body and arm in search of a fleshier target. An instinctive yank of the crossbow wedges the sword in the angle of its arm. A twist wrenches the second swordsman with his vice grip on the sword haft to stumble.
He thinks, 'The fucking bowman—' but the barked order turns into a shapeless snarl as he makes to drag this swordsman down with the first.
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Once again, scrolling protective magic wreathes around Flint, immediately sparking off of him in blue ember-like motes at the desperate strike within the tangle of bodies. Then, a hiss of momentum, and an under-swing of the bladed staff catches in a nasty snarl up the back of a knee, toppling that second swordsman down under Flint's clawing grasp.
A harsh breath out as that aggravates injury. Reminding him.
And so Marcus turns, moving towards the fucking bowman, glowing orange tinging the edges of iron blade. Around him, the dust on the ground lifts in a faint whorl of movement at the beginnings of magical summoning.
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Across the chamber, the bowman risks stepping out from his cover—
No, the bowman doesn't do that, and Flint doesn't get punched in the face. This time he ducks his head this time, the blow glancing off the top of his head while he and the swordsman roll over in some nasty parody of boys wrestling. A belt knife is produced somewhere in the middle of the fray, fights under crossbow and sword guard and earns a grunt of pain for its burial.
The bowman waits an extra beat. When he darts clear again, it's low to the sandy crevasse floor. Fires with a pop! of the crossbow's thick string that squeals loud to Flint's overturned ear.
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Marcus doesn't stop his advance, readiness for what he knows will happen with the kind of overwound energy of a man moving through the open. Dust lifts, pebbles roll, and then a vicious clash of movement as soon as the marksman appears, Marcus launching himself aside as the ground between them erupts with stone and dust, the twang of the bolt's release still audible as the shot goes wide.
And Marcus lunges forwards, the air whorling around him to help along his passage through the whirlwind of earth and dust, and there's the sound of a pained grunt in time with the very ordinary noise of a blade slamming into lightly armored body. A clang of metal meeting metal as a blade is pulled free of its sheath
—and dust and smoke all shift in reversed flurries as time drags them both back—
and there is no sharp meeting of metal, but a sharper cry of pain that doesn't sound like Marcus.
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Flint follows after him. For good measure. Because it seems the reasonable thing to do. Because he isn't thinking. Because there is a gap between leather gorget and blackened steel helmet edge for the knife to be punched through. And then he is scrabbling for the crossbow, grasping at his hip and finding the bolts have been scattered. Blinking away the sting of grit in his eye (its blood, wet down his face from the cut gouged in his scalp by the gauntlet edge), he closes his fist around one of the errant bolts and fumbles it onto the gouged crossbow track.
There is a whistling noise: the first swordsman failing to breathe.
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As the dust hangs in the air, a red-hot iron blade buries itself somewhere deadly. Rather than finishing it with the necessary twist, Marcus keeps the dying man pinned in place, concentrating. Beneath the puncture hole in his leather armor, muscle and skin knits itself back closed with a sharp entropic sting. Even the small cut at his chin is scrubbed away, leaving behind drying blood and the faintest prickle of reddened irritation.
Here, he turns his staff, sloughs the now partially desiccated corpse off the end of his blade. Waves a hand, banishing smoke and dust from the air as easily as flicking aside a curtain, although there is now a film of grey dust and darker soot streaked across his armor, his face, blood and sweat cutting streaks through it.
Marcus moves back for where Flint is squaring with the remaining enemy, where the other one still living is negligible in his relevance. Both are on the ground.
He saves his strength, panting, watching.
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There will be no bowman following our after him. Which he knew somewhere in the back of his head, only the idea has been slow to surface and his hands had been ready.
(Exactly how was he planning to kick into the lever and crank back the string from this position? A problem he would have hammered his way through given cause.)
Instead, he turns the crossbow. Dumps the bolt. Slamming the butt end of it the splintered crossbow down, cracking m the dying man hard enough to knock him insensible for what minutes remain of him being alive might constitute as a mercy if he didn't strike him a second time.
Making to wipe the blood off his face smears it hot and sticking across a wide swathe of skin. He unsmears it. Manages to resist the impulse the second time around, instead blinking rapidly to clear the blood from his eye as he feels around for a handhold while adrenaline trembles through his arm.
"The crossbow." A clumsy gesture back to where Marcus had struck his killing blow. "I'll use it." His won't survive much more use.
(Is an absurd thing to first account for on the other side of this.)
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And then time reverses, pulling him right back where he was, and a panting breath of irritation follows.
Rather than repeat his path, Marcus moves forwards, staff held aside as he moves around the battered corpse. A hand goes out, grabbing onto Flint's shoulder. "Look up," he says. Flint's motions are clumsy, his priorities out of order, and there is dirt and blood where a head wound should be.
And he died. There is something to this Veil disruption that reverses the physical but leaves alone the soft matter that remembers and intuits. The crossbow can wait.
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He looks up.
"It's shallow," he says of the gouge dig into his head, sitting back on his haunches. Touching the ground with both hands to balance himself. How the fuck would be know? More blood hasn't poured into his eye now that he's blinked it away once, that's how. "We should keep moving."
The inherent difficulty of that prospect not withstanding.
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Then lowers himself down, laying his staff out beside him. "We will," he says, or promises, kneeling aside pieces of shattered crossbow so as to crab towards and snag at the nearest dead body, specifically the quilted edge of a long tunic. He tugs free a knife from his boot, the sounds of tearing fabric following as fabric is sawn through, threads tearing, abruptly mundane after the sounds of cracking earth, flame, shouts, crunching bone.
He has faith that whether Flint wants to or not, he'll stay put for the necessary handful of seconds it takes for Marcus to win himself a scavenged scrape of fabric.
This done, he turns it over in his hand, scooting back nearer. Once again, finding a handhold on Flint's shoulder. His own expression is a closed trap of tension, steely edges like wound coils. He is looking at the gouge while feeling his thumb over the linen, summoning ice crystals into its weave to both become cold as well as melt immediately once that minor enchantment is done.
"Sit," he says.
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The ground is hard under him. The pale chalky footing that has left white marks worked into the folds of his trousers is going to leave the seat of them comically pale when eventually he gets gets around to clambering up and into his feet. But first:
Shivering like an animal that's been made to run, he once more stops himself from touching the bloody mess that is his face. It should be stinging by now, is a thought he dismisses out of hand. The body is strange and it sometimes is prone forgetting things in its desperation. Focusing on the wrong things like the scrape pop of tearing fabric and how it has grated faintly against the nerves. Sitting now in Marcus' shadow, he can still taste the whine of threads protesting under the knife—
Flint's breath out is heavy and loud, a note of shuddering frustration in it. Stop shaking, for fuck's fake.
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Gently, kneeling up beside Flint, he goes and touches the cold-damp linen to that head wound, pressing once there. There is a split second of entropic resistance that threatens another temporal loop, which would be rather ill-timed, but it's merely a skipped heartbeat in the scheme of things. That other hand moves up, thumb working alongside spine.
There hasn't been time for blood to coagulate very much, even before factoring in sweat and adrenaline and the free way blood tends to gush from these kinds of injuries, but still, he holds it there for a moment before lifting away. The gash is quick to fill again, but there isn't much else to see save to confirm its presence, and nothing worse.
Reapplies pressure.
"We should call in riders," he suggests. "Send for reinforcements, if they're guarding this passage so well."
And perhaps extract them both, or only Flint, he doesn't say, and he can rationalise how it would make sense for him to take over a griffon, see the Commander back to the forward camp.
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He is distantly aware of the cold touch of the cloth, and the firm shape of hands on him. More distinct are the dusty gleam off the man's vambrace, and the shape of the bladed staff on the ground alongside them. A sour tang of sulfur on the air. The blood on Marcus' chin.
And if that's not so—if they wind their way carefully into the shrine from here and find it crawling with Venatori—, then what's to stop them from falling quietly back to call up those reinforcements?
"Nearly had you," he says, and must be referring to the bite from the kris dagger.
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There will be an acute thrum of discomfort as Marcus turns the cloth in his hand to face it now with its dry side. It signals some transition, swapping hands and shifting where he kneels, resting back on haunches. His spare hand comes to close at Flint's arm above the elbow. It's a ghost of an instinct, like putting his hand at the neck of an uneasy horse.
Flint's remark gets a scoff from Marcus—less cocky, more disbelieving. Yes, he was nearly had.
His focus twitches from his hand to Flint's eyes, a graze of a look, sharp edged but ironic. "He was miles away," he disputes.
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He hums, a low skeptical noise that slants toward a teeth bared breed of humor—something about the blood on Marcus' face would seem to serve as a convenient counterargument—and closes the bloodied eye against the prickle of pain radiating out from under the applied pressure. A hand pops up under the influence of the same instinct, bicep flexing under the hand on it as Flint twists his arm up to find a similar bracing hold at Marcus' elbow. Grip firm, even while the muscle and sinew behind it twitch and shiver out against being asked to hold still.
Give or take the half seconds that the rippling of the Fade steals away, he counts silently to ten. Then tests unraveling his grip from Marcus' elbow in favor of raising it to cover the hand presently holding the cut of cloth to his head.
"I have it." It's fine. "Fetch me that crossbow. And if the bowman carried a belt hook for it, I'll have need of that as well."
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cant believe i set myself up for a tent flap door
me, free of sin
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