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."
Somewhere between Flint bracing his hand at Marcus' arm and then travelling up to manage the improvised compress, there's the flicker of impulse to apply ice-wet rag to face, and smooth back the blood drying by Flint's eye. Maybe, if time looped in on itself, or Flint counted to twenty, he'd have given in.
What happens anyway upon Flint's grasp is a sort of vice-grip in his chest in that span of silence, which had clenched so hard and fast in response to the sound of sword slammed through meat and bone, and in this aftermath, has been slower to reapply. Gallows humour passes and, with less fidgeting to occupy himself with, Marcus' expression resettles back into that overwound neutrality, a pull of tension at his brow.
He gives over the rag, a breath out that communicates some amount of put uponness, but gets to his feet, leaving off Flint's arm. He takes up his staff again, where blackened gore marks up dark iron, still warm to the touch but no longer fiery hot.
Paces off for that narrow chokepoint once more, where it smells like charred meat.
The crossbow and it's associated belt hook are fetched. And Flint, when he is permitted to clamber to his feet with the makedo compress still applied to the cut at his hairline, is steadier on his feet than it seems like he ought to be. There is no reason not to press forward.
So they do, winding through the jagged series of tunnels and chambers that make up the defunct shrine—treading steadily downward until the thickening presence of Venatori, and the boiling up of darkspawn and ancient undead, does in fact demand those aforementioned reinforcements.
It makes for a long, miserable fucking day.
The blood on Flint's face has turned that old, front black by the time they claw their way back toward the forward camp. And he has tossed away the stolen crossbow by then, having relied entirely upon the sword in his belt for the last stage of their work. Sliding out of the griffon's saddle though, he doesn't look tired or ruined—only battered, and lightly at that. The swirl of momentum which follows directs him to the acting division head offices—a single expansive tent subject to the hot gusts of weather coming off the plains to the northwest—into which he disappears for some hours.
Presumably, he washes his face during this meeting. That said, it seems unlikely that he says anything more about the injury.
When the head of your division is your partner on a mission, there is no need for debriefs, further strategising, opinions or perspectives. Flint already has plenty.
And so when Marcus' boots find solid ground, he finds he is free of obligation. Well. Almost. He sees to the griffons, first, freeing them of their equipment, feeding and brushing down, ensuring Monster gets further attention so as not to incite any jealousies, and all of this he is a little too tired to do but it feels good, anyway. Sensible labour that requires nothing from him but a dedication to tasks he knows well.
He gets himself clean, after, and more than just his face. The water in the basin he is using is quick to turn a murky grey, and needs a few refillings before he is satisfied.
It is late. Darkness is slow to encroach. The nights in the desert are colder than you'd anticipate. He has found a place by a fire, hair still damp from determined efforts to clean it of soot and dust and blood and tied neatly back, a cloak over his shoulders, and a scrubbing brush in hand he is using to see to his staff. Beside him, lodged in the earth beside the blanket he is using as his seat, a half-emptied bowl of the slow-simmered stew some Diplomacy members had helpfully seen to over the day.
This spot by a fire also, incidentally, affords him view of the larger tent, where he flicks his attention up now and then.
Whatever conversation occupies the denizens of that tent drags mercilessly long. But eventually, a flare of light in the burgeoning darkness: the entrance to the tent rolling back, and a figure that isn't Flint slipping free. Then, the recognizable shape of him turned into a brief, lingering silhouette—he and someone else loitering momentarily at the threshold to exchange a further word before the tent flap is allowed to fall back and they become dusky shapes in the purple twilight.
The fire is also, incidentally, more or less along one of the most likely footpaths Flint might take to go from the point A of the field office to point B, his own tent. Though if not for some glint of firelight off the staff's sharp edge drawing the eye, he might not have given it so much as a passing glance. He is tired (though looks less so out here in the forgiving slant of the dark), and wants to peel himself out of these gory clothes, and to wash off the stink of murder and sweat. The sticky edges of the poultice one of the healers had been called in to apply while and and the other division heads had still been bent over their table is already beginning to itch, and if he does those other things then maybe he will be able to ignore it.
But the gleam of some scrubbed clean section of blade prompts a glance flickering in the fire's direction. Captures a brief scrape of eye contact. A nod, made in passing.
Once fire-crusted grime has been worked off the iron, out of grooves and runic engravings, it's gone over with oil and a rag. Checked over by light of the fireplace, and then he sets upon cleaning the bowl. There's been no battle that Marcus has been through, no matter how gore-spattered, how sizeable the victory or total the loss, that he hasn't come out the other side ravenously hungry, and tonight is no exception.
He leaves his spot by the fire. There are watch rotations already established of which he is not a part, but he relieves someone of theirs so they can enjoy a break for the excuse of standing somewhere empty and cold and dark at the very fringes of their camp and put a further dent in the limited supply of cigarettes he carries with him. Flips a scorpion off his boot with a turn of his ankle. Contemplates this truly dizzying amount of landscape that is switch to diminish from the scope of his vision, darkness swallowing sand dunes and red rock rendered indigo in dwindling dusk.
When he makes his way back to the camp, he moves towards where there are casks of water and ale both, the latter being of the same instinct someone had when they made sure to pack spices with the cooking supplies. He fills a tankard with it, and upon turning from that spot, and noting the light still on in Flint's tent, he sets a course.
Does not barge through the entryway, folded closed against desert vermin and company.
"It's not tied," is succinct an invitation as any.
The slanting tent is no back country lean-to; it harbors a low cot, a writing desk and a low-backed seat that's more really more stool than chair, a coarse mat laid over the rocky ground, all of which must collapse or roll up to be backed onto a griffon without much imposition. The tent's dimensions require only a slight stoop from any occupant choosing to remain standing. Flint though is sitting posted at the writing desk, and has twisted only partially round to acknowledge Marcus' entry.
It the intervening interval, Flint's washed and changed. If any trace of blood or dirt remains on his person, it's a failing of having to scrub down out of a basin and not a lack of dedication to the task of setting himself back to rights. Even so, the light of the little oil lamp illuminating the page under his pen is less than flattering—renders the man in craggy touches of shadow, and paints wide dark swathes from cheek to under-eye.
The point of his attention flicks, briefly, to the tankard in Marcus' possession, and then makes to rock back to the half written page.
"You would do well to consider some rest."
There will be more work tomorrow. With the Venatori bitten back, further depths of the shrine await exploration. Given what all they faced today, they can hardly hope to send Research there without well-armed and capable company.
And he will. There is no choice in that matter, physically or by way of obligation, but Marcus still enters, letting the flap fall closed behind him. Head ducked and shoulders forward to accommodate the closer quarters. And now there's a distinct familiarity in nearness, but apparently in service to placing the tankard down on Flint's desk.
Smokey cling is far more reminiscent of recent cigarettes, thinner and sharper than the earthier black summonings on a battlefield. Doesn't linger in the air by the time he moves for the other available place to sit, which is at the edge of the cot.
The angle of his face alters by a half degree in answer to the tankard's placement, eye line resistant to being pulled from the page a second time but attention freely sliding sideways in spite of that. To the tankard, to the brief nearness of Marcus' presence and the shadow it paints on the canvas above them. The continued scratching of the pen is slow to resume as that shadow withdraws.
"I don't imagine Rutyer will be going in my stead."
His hand gets as far as completing the end its interrupted sentence before the pen is laid aside in favor of the cup.
Flint is allowed to drink from it without further commentary, first. Marcus' focus lists towards him, snags on something else. The shadow on canvas, or the loose fold of his own hands. Not a restless roving of focus, meditatively cycled through.
When it does cycle back to Flint, and desert-warmed ale is appreciated or otherwise, there's a small moment of study, for the faint streak of dirt or soot or something else that stripes a sickle's curve along the back of exposed neck. Maybe if he'd lingered there at Flint's seat at the desk, he'd have smudged it away with his palm, his thumb, the texture of skin and the starting fade of bristle at hairline easy to recall, and it's the fact that this thought feels like something sharp and broken off that finally prompts him to speak—
"I'm sorry for," and there is a tinge of regret, already, for words summoned into the tent. Apologies are clumsy things, easy to misuse. Nothing for it now. "That I didn't act differently first, today."
There has been plenty of time to consider alternate actions, particularly when twisting time had afforded him opportunity to enact them.
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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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What happens anyway upon Flint's grasp is a sort of vice-grip in his chest in that span of silence, which had clenched so hard and fast in response to the sound of sword slammed through meat and bone, and in this aftermath, has been slower to reapply. Gallows humour passes and, with less fidgeting to occupy himself with, Marcus' expression resettles back into that overwound neutrality, a pull of tension at his brow.
He gives over the rag, a breath out that communicates some amount of put uponness, but gets to his feet, leaving off Flint's arm. He takes up his staff again, where blackened gore marks up dark iron, still warm to the touch but no longer fiery hot.
Paces off for that narrow chokepoint once more, where it smells like charred meat.
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So they do, winding through the jagged series of tunnels and chambers that make up the defunct shrine—treading steadily downward until the thickening presence of Venatori, and the boiling up of darkspawn and ancient undead, does in fact demand those aforementioned reinforcements.
It makes for a long, miserable fucking day.
The blood on Flint's face has turned that old, front black by the time they claw their way back toward the forward camp. And he has tossed away the stolen crossbow by then, having relied entirely upon the sword in his belt for the last stage of their work. Sliding out of the griffon's saddle though, he doesn't look tired or ruined—only battered, and lightly at that. The swirl of momentum which follows directs him to the acting division head offices—a single expansive tent subject to the hot gusts of weather coming off the plains to the northwest—into which he disappears for some hours.
Presumably, he washes his face during this meeting. That said, it seems unlikely that he says anything more about the injury.
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And so when Marcus' boots find solid ground, he finds he is free of obligation. Well. Almost. He sees to the griffons, first, freeing them of their equipment, feeding and brushing down, ensuring Monster gets further attention so as not to incite any jealousies, and all of this he is a little too tired to do but it feels good, anyway. Sensible labour that requires nothing from him but a dedication to tasks he knows well.
He gets himself clean, after, and more than just his face. The water in the basin he is using is quick to turn a murky grey, and needs a few refillings before he is satisfied.
It is late. Darkness is slow to encroach. The nights in the desert are colder than you'd anticipate. He has found a place by a fire, hair still damp from determined efforts to clean it of soot and dust and blood and tied neatly back, a cloak over his shoulders, and a scrubbing brush in hand he is using to see to his staff. Beside him, lodged in the earth beside the blanket he is using as his seat, a half-emptied bowl of the slow-simmered stew some Diplomacy members had helpfully seen to over the day.
This spot by a fire also, incidentally, affords him view of the larger tent, where he flicks his attention up now and then.
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The fire is also, incidentally, more or less along one of the most likely footpaths Flint might take to go from the point A of the field office to point B, his own tent. Though if not for some glint of firelight off the staff's sharp edge drawing the eye, he might not have given it so much as a passing glance. He is tired (though looks less so out here in the forgiving slant of the dark), and wants to peel himself out of these gory clothes, and to wash off the stink of murder and sweat. The sticky edges of the poultice one of the healers had been called in to apply while and and the other division heads had still been bent over their table is already beginning to itch, and if he does those other things then maybe he will be able to ignore it.
But the gleam of some scrubbed clean section of blade prompts a glance flickering in the fire's direction. Captures a brief scrape of eye contact. A nod, made in passing.
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Once fire-crusted grime has been worked off the iron, out of grooves and runic engravings, it's gone over with oil and a rag. Checked over by light of the fireplace, and then he sets upon cleaning the bowl. There's been no battle that Marcus has been through, no matter how gore-spattered, how sizeable the victory or total the loss, that he hasn't come out the other side ravenously hungry, and tonight is no exception.
He leaves his spot by the fire. There are watch rotations already established of which he is not a part, but he relieves someone of theirs so they can enjoy a break for the excuse of standing somewhere empty and cold and dark at the very fringes of their camp and put a further dent in the limited supply of cigarettes he carries with him. Flips a scorpion off his boot with a turn of his ankle. Contemplates this truly dizzying amount of landscape that is switch to diminish from the scope of his vision, darkness swallowing sand dunes and red rock rendered indigo in dwindling dusk.
When he makes his way back to the camp, he moves towards where there are casks of water and ale both, the latter being of the same instinct someone had when they made sure to pack spices with the cooking supplies. He fills a tankard with it, and upon turning from that spot, and noting the light still on in Flint's tent, he sets a course.
Does not barge through the entryway, folded closed against desert vermin and company.
Anyway. "Commander."
cant believe i set myself up for a tent flap door
The slanting tent is no back country lean-to; it harbors a low cot, a writing desk and a low-backed seat that's more really more stool than chair, a coarse mat laid over the rocky ground, all of which must collapse or roll up to be backed onto a griffon without much imposition. The tent's dimensions require only a slight stoop from any occupant choosing to remain standing. Flint though is sitting posted at the writing desk, and has twisted only partially round to acknowledge Marcus' entry.
It the intervening interval, Flint's washed and changed. If any trace of blood or dirt remains on his person, it's a failing of having to scrub down out of a basin and not a lack of dedication to the task of setting himself back to rights. Even so, the light of the little oil lamp illuminating the page under his pen is less than flattering—renders the man in craggy touches of shadow, and paints wide dark swathes from cheek to under-eye.
The point of his attention flicks, briefly, to the tankard in Marcus' possession, and then makes to rock back to the half written page.
"You would do well to consider some rest."
There will be more work tomorrow. With the Venatori bitten back, further depths of the shrine await exploration. Given what all they faced today, they can hardly hope to send Research there without well-armed and capable company.
me, free of sin
And he will. There is no choice in that matter, physically or by way of obligation, but Marcus still enters, letting the flap fall closed behind him. Head ducked and shoulders forward to accommodate the closer quarters. And now there's a distinct familiarity in nearness, but apparently in service to placing the tankard down on Flint's desk.
Smokey cling is far more reminiscent of recent cigarettes, thinner and sharper than the earthier black summonings on a battlefield. Doesn't linger in the air by the time he moves for the other available place to sit, which is at the edge of the cot.
"You'll be going back in?"
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"I don't imagine Rutyer will be going in my stead."
His hand gets as far as completing the end its interrupted sentence before the pen is laid aside in favor of the cup.
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When it does cycle back to Flint, and desert-warmed ale is appreciated or otherwise, there's a small moment of study, for the faint streak of dirt or soot or something else that stripes a sickle's curve along the back of exposed neck. Maybe if he'd lingered there at Flint's seat at the desk, he'd have smudged it away with his palm, his thumb, the texture of skin and the starting fade of bristle at hairline easy to recall, and it's the fact that this thought feels like something sharp and broken off that finally prompts him to speak—
"I'm sorry for," and there is a tinge of regret, already, for words summoned into the tent. Apologies are clumsy things, easy to misuse. Nothing for it now. "That I didn't act differently first, today."
There has been plenty of time to consider alternate actions, particularly when twisting time had afforded him opportunity to enact them.
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