The chill outside licks at Alkara’s skin. She kneels to meditate. A shiver crawls across her flesh. What if she can’t hear Urdima? When she really needs to? She bites her lip and tries to push the thought away.
Urdan life and features surround her. Alkara pushes her hands through the dirt. Rough scents, disturbed by her hands, flood her nose. Damp clumps of dirt cling to her fingers. She senses more than feels the remnants of worms, mites, and other creature’s passing. The air, not just bringing cold, wafts the traces of floral scents from nearby flowers. Alkara looks around, noting the twisted branches of a nearby tree, vines crawling up the side of a building, and birds watching over the street. Scampering of rodents tickles her ears. A soft call of a bird far overhead drowns the scampering out.
An idea sprouts and begins to take root in Alkara’s mind. The city provides its own version of nature. Hard cobbles. Tan daub covering outer walls. The scent of human refuse better described as odor. But even so Three Rivers was its own kind of environment.
The beauty of the forest lay bare for any who might want to view it. Here in the twisting, crowded alleys of civilization the charm hid from all but the most diligent. Patterns of design could be found in the jumbled mess of the whole. But even that mess has its own kind of laws.
Urdima governs nature and Grecians live by her laws. Their cities would too.
Alkara breathes in the scents of the city as well. She soaks up the sights. Listens for those small human sounds in the great torrent of Urdima’s will.
The Wastes bloom on the edge of Alkara’s consciousness, just past that wellspring of magicks borne by Grecia’s archmagi. Trickles of aberrant presence flow into her awareness. Then flood. Innumerable creatures of Chaos dwell there.
Alkara winces, closing her eyes against those things. She halts her awareness, then draws it back into the city.
She stays just so: drawing deep breaths in, a slight hunch to her posture against the wriggling unease caused by the Wastes.
Urdima’s awareness sinks into her. A scuffle brings her vision into a point on a mouse pawing at stale bread.
Alkara sniffs at the air, separating out the different notes of the Mind-Wiper’s fluids. The paralysis spray. Memory drool. Sour sweat fills her nose. All of it fades to a memory. The creature eludes her perception. She can’t pinpoint it.
But she can follow it.
Furrows in the dirt point at the aberrant’s path. Alkara follows them for fifteen paces when they end without warning. Human footprints follow a different path, but stop and several prints overlap. The human had knelt. A shallow depression in the dirt could only be their knee. The aroma of the woman intertwines with the creature’s stench.
Droplets of saliva glisten like a sickly morning dew in the same new direction of the human prints. Trueward.
Alkara stands and turns back to the others, “It’s likely trying to get back to the Wastes. I don’t know how it would get across the river though.” She gives Uncle Iro a nod, “It hitched a ride after all.”
Uncle Iro frowns but turns it into a smile. “I bet we could catch up.”
Guen’s yowl shifts into an abrupt growl.
Alkara smiles, “The game is on.”
The panther bolts into a steady jog, sniffing at the air only a few times less than Alkara, running behind.
The Waste Walkers enter an open air market. The creature’s host’s footprints join with many others. The once-clear tracks now trampled by new feet. Alkara can’t rely on following the woman any longer.
This new prey’s abilities foster an unusual challenge. Even with heightened senses Alkara can’t pick it out of the thickening smells of sweat, waste, garbage, and the various animals living in the city. She needs to stop and sniff out the odd combination of the creature and its puppet. The stench leads them Edgebound instead of toward the docks.
Alkara points to a droplet of greenish liquid. “There.” It glistens at the side of an intersection.
Dre crouches to inspect the liquid. “Yes, some of its saliva.”
Uncle Iro whistles low.
“Damn it’s scary when you do that Alkara.” Chiron adds, shaking his head. “No more hide and seek for you.”
Warm satisfaction spreads through Alkara like an inner fire. She flashes Chiron a fierce smile.
Its stench thickens here. The sensation of licking its blood from her teeth teases her thoughts. Feeling its flesh rip beneath her claws.
Wait. I don’t have claws.
She shakes her mind from the ideas. Captured, not killed. She would resist the temptation when they catch the thing.
An unmarked warehouse along the river shields the thing’s reek.
The door opens without complaint. No boxes, barrels, or even cart break up the darkness within. Dre lights a torch but Alkara doesn’t need its light to see the empty warehouse.
“A dead end?” Alkara’s growl fills the air. She sniff at the air, tilting her head this way and that. “But where did it go?”
The footprints lead them toward a small room with a few bookcases. They don’t challenge the carpet overmuch, being empty of books.
Alkara stamps toward the end of the row. The woman’s prints end much as Alkara’s satisfaction at catching the thing, “Where did it–”
“–go?” Her face distorts in pain as a throbbing burn fills her head. All her senses shout the abnormality of this place. She snaps free from her connection with Urdima and her heightened senses in a daze.
Alkara steps back from the ruined homes and shops before her. Dirt crunches beneath her foot. Grey dirt.
The kind found in the Wastes.
Guen’s low growl pulls Alkara’s attention from where they are to pounding hooves.
Alkara throws herself away but thick antlers pierce her side. An unhealthy crack accompanies the pain.
She sprawls across the rubble. Angry pebbles scrape her exposed skin.
Guen roars and leap toward a grey-skinned monstrosity. Browns ripple through the greys.
Blood drips from its uneven antlers. It parries the panther’s claws with its own pair. A second, human-like set of arms lay lower on its chest. It grips Guen’s neck with them.
Alkara struggles to regain her footing. She pulls at an arrow while trying to ignore the numerous scrapes stinging at her focus.
Chiron rushes into the street from nowhere. With no pause he slashes at the oddity. Dark red blood slathers his swords.
The thing pushes Guen against a half-fallen wall. Its flesh darkens to a black where Chiron and Guen had slashed it.
Alkara grabs at her bow, worry flashing through her chest. Alkara frowns. Chiron has things handled. She doesn’t need to be worried. But even the small distraction stalls her ability to nock an arrow.
Guen squirms against the thing’s grip. She rakes at its chest with her hindlegs.
The aberrant swings its tail around. The knobby end, completely grey, swishes past Chiron as he jumps back.
Shaking herself out of it, Alkara rams the nock home and releases. The arrow flies through the air carrying Alkara’s intent. It buries itself to the fletching.
Again the flesh deepens to a midnight hue.
The monstrosity shoves Guen to a side and throws its head back to bellow. It’s elongated snout flops during the throaty yell.
Chiron steps in and jams a sword into the creature’s side and the creature grabs the blade. Chiron pulls but the aberrant proves stronger.
The creature’s snout moves about. Thin membranes separate the nostrils into a honeycomb pattern. It points at Alkara.
Chiron plunges his second sword into the creature’s paw.
The aberrant slams a fist into Chiron’s face. No expression of pain filters through the creature’s eyeless expression.
But Chiron’s face slackens as he staggers back.
Alkara’s chest tightens. Okay. Maybe I should be worried. She grabs another arrow, leaving only six remaining.
Guen, sucking in air, leaps at the creature again.
Even with its back turned, it flicks it tail into the panther’s chest.
Guen rolls and scrabbles across the rubble.
Alkara’s ribbon vibrates across her breathing. Arrows lay in scattered stacks around her. Goldenrod feathers on one catch her eye.
Ah! That’ll help!
Alkara looses the arrow, which smashes across the creature’s jaw. A reservoir behind the arrowhead explodes.
Purple-green smoke envelopes Guen, Chiron, and the aberrant. Dre once described that smoke as something between rancid cheese and fetid potatoes.
Guen yowls and swipes at her nose with a paw.
Chiron scrunches his nose. The air around him fills with inky shadow mist.
The creature gulps and gruntles. The snout constricts. The aberrant lashes out with claws, antlers, and knobby tail.
Chiron’s sword falls from the thing’s grasp with a clatter.
Alkara grabs another arrow from the ground, this one normal, and let’s it join its brother in the creature’s flesh.
Chiron sidesteps the frantic attacks. He ducks underneath a wild swing and grabs his sword.
Uncle Iro and Dre appear in the rubble. They take cautious steps as the scene unfolds before their eyes.
The creature continues to thrash, leaving itself open to deft slashes from Chiron.
Uncle Iro sweeps Dre behind himself with his left hand as the wave of stench slams into them. He wrinkles his nose.
Alkara sinks another pair of arrows into the creature.
Hurt and slowed, Guen stalks around the creature and Chiron. She backs away as the noxious cloud shifts outward.
Dre squeals. A furious glee burns in her eyes.
Alkara rolls her eyes between arrows. Her sister must want to study this new subject.
If true, Uncle Iro ends that hope without remorse.
He dashes in to join Chiron. Uncle Iro draws long lines of blood across the creature with his rapier.
Chiron stabs the aberrant in the throat.
As it falls its skin shimmers from that grey-brown to a uniform black.
Dre’s sorrow-filled grunt confirms Alkara’s suspicions.
Chiron stares at the corpse. “What was that?”
Alkara stands, wincing at the sharp pain in her side. “Don’t know. Never head of an aberrant… deer… thing.”
The dubious expressions from her family mirror Alkara’s own. This aberrant only loosely matches the idea of a deer.
“The horrors of the Chaos Realms bring new nightmares every day.” Uncle Iro wipes his rapier on the thing’s loincloth. “We should instead ask why a well hidden transfer leads from the city to the Wastes.”
Dre kneels at the confluence of the two spots on Urda, the transfer. She inspects some of the dislodged scree. “The tracks have been obscured by our scuffle, but should be easy enough to find again.” She rises with set jaw and fire in her eyes. “It came straight here. It knew. They have an easy way across the Grecian.”
“It had help,” Alkara’s dark mood rivals the blackened dirt of the Wastes. “Just like the jub-jub birds. And probably others too.” She chucks a rock into the transfer, but it bounces into the circle and disappears. “Two way. At least that solves how to get back.”
Chiron shifts some of his shadowstuff onto his blades. Everywhere the inky haze touch gleamed like newly forged steel from Tharan’s workshop. “Krause is connected. If he exists.” His expression sours into a lemon-sucking grimace. “Or he’s the man on the cot.”
“You’ll have to teach me that trick.” Uncle Iro turns his blade, exposing the various rotted viscera which had glommed onto the rapier. “I doubt he was the man on the cot. This operation is too expansive for an established business to lose its practitioner.”
“Fan out, looking for signs of the mind-wiper.” Alkara searches around a nearby corner. A body lay broken on the pavement. A sharp pain rips through her chest. Not only is this Grecian woman’s body broken, but one of Alkara’s ribs cracked during the battle.
She sucks in a breath which causes even more pain to shoot through her abdomen. She grimaces.
Definitely cracked, but not broken.
Alkara begins to kneel but straightens as the pain surges once more. “Over here-ah!” Her shout breaks apart as her rib slides with the breath.
As she waits for the others, Alkara scrutinizes the corpse. A weak trickle of blood drips from puncture wounds in her collapsed chest. She didn’t have the fortune of Guen’s warning when the aberrant charged. Her feet match the tracks they’d followed.
Blood smears coat one side of the body. They continue into the dirt and fill furrows leading away. Small hand impressions flank the path.
Chiron and Dre arrive first. Alkara points down a Sozzleward road, “It went this way.”
They follow the tracks, but Alkara’s wincing joins her uneven steps. She frowns through the winces. “Where is this thing going?”
Guen pads along the opposite side of the road.
Dre puts a hand on Alkara’s shoulder. “Do we need to follow it now?” Her gaze lingers on the aberrant they’d slain.
“Of course.” Alkara gives Dre a scathing look. “Most aberrants flee straight to the wastes. This one is going somewhere.” She starts at Uncle Iro’s sudden presence on her right.
He speaks in a hush, keeping the words from Dre’s and Chiron’s ears. “How badly hurt are you?”
“It’s nothing,” Alkara clips the sentence off to hide the pain creeping in.
“Stay with Dre, I’ll track it.” Uncle Iro walks forward, putting himself in the lead.
“I said it’s nothing.” Alkara punctuates her protest by pushing forward. She grimaces as she stalks past Uncle Iro, willing the pain to fall away to the focus on her prey.
Murmured prayers flit across her ears. At first she hopes Uncle Iro had decided to heal her, but instead dark tendrils stretch out from her footfalls. The scrabble of shifting rock falls away. Not prayers after all.
Alkara shudders. She hates this kind of magick, but they need every advantage they can get.
The tendrils grip the tiny rocks as she lifts her foot, replacing them in the same mounds they were in before she stepped on them. If a stray hair fell, they would consume it. They drink the small drops of blood that fall from her wound.
The trail continues with intention, turning corners but not in a meandering way. The furrow deepens into a shallow depression. Alkara begins to kneel when Uncle Iro stoops down and wards her off.
“It stopped briefly.” He indicates a deep handprint in the dirt. “With its frame and general physical condition, it’s probably tiring.
“Good,” Alkara grunts like a tyrant. She pushes forward, leaving Uncle Iro at the site of the Mind-Wiper’s respite. “Shouldn’t be hard to catch.”
The next intersection connects the road to a large avenue. Cobbles fill the space between the ruined walls. Remnants of numerous people passing through echo through this once main thoroughfare. And like other sites in the Wastes where once there were people, the phantoms’ danger buzzed in the air.
Grey sand fills the spaces between cobblestones. The cobbles themselves struggled against the Blight. With time the Blight would win.
Another corner onto a thinner street brings the creature into view. It drags itself on diminutive arms toward another intersection. And more rubble.
Watching over the intersection, a not fully collapsed tower stands sentry. A shell of outer walls provide company.
Chiron steps next to Alkara, absorbing the scene with her. “Heh, think this is the main drag?”
A dark purple aberrant, for what other kind of creature would be in the wastes, watches from the tower with head cocked. Its oversized head suggests an adolescent whatever-it-is.
The Waste Walkers and Uncle Iro walk toward the wretched Mind-Wiper with caution.
Uncle Iro gestures at the creature on the tower, “Better keep an eye out for mama.”
As though it heard him, the fat-headed thing flicks its short tail back and forth. It flutters a pair of small wings. Though aberrant, its dopey expression conveys a harmless curiosity.
Taking care to stay together and prevent further injury to Alkara, their slow pace brings them a quarter of the distance when the first rumbles start.
Rocks shift and fall from mounds. Chunks of mortar tumble from a half-ruined wall.
“Shit.” Alkara hustles, pushing the pain down with a grunt. Her staggered steps pull her behind the others as they dash toward the thing as well.
The quaking builds. Walls fall to new resting places. Dre falters in her stride, off-balance.
Dre shouts, “It’s the Tontorrem!”
Chiron and Iroshi halt, turning back with expressions fitting those confronted by a dragon. Alkara stops and the pain in her rib catches up. She clutches at the spot like a drowning man for a rope.
The sallow-skinned creature drags itself forward, seeming oblivious to the shaking. Instead it strains to lift its head toward the still standing belltower, now laying empty.
Alkara’s gut ties itself into knots as she grits her teeth. Any moment the damned tunneler would arrive.
The drive to snatch the Mind-Wiper struggles with prudence. A year ago the thought of stopping wouldn’t have crossed her mind. Now it wrestles with a titan. And wins.
Alkara shakes her head, relaxing her muscles. She wouldn’t hear the end of this.
Dre darts ahead, sprinting past the edge of Alkara’s vision and into view. Her gaze locks onto the creature. The Walkers’ calls don’t slow her. Neither does the enormous rumbling. Instead with the mounting danger Dre pushes further.
Alkara kicks off in pursuit. The cracked rib protests the movement by kicking off more pain. Alkara grits her teeth. She throws a parting command for Guen to stay.
Each strides brings them closer to the aberrant. Each step closes the distance but magnifies the shaking.
The creature they’ve been pursuing stops. It prepares to defend itself, bearing yellowed teeth, even as the ultimate danger of the Tonterrem crescendos.
Despite her injury, Alkara closes the gap. She stretches for Dre’s wrist, grimacing against the shooting pain.
The aberrant sucks at its teeth and opens its mouth to release its spray.
Orange goo shoots from the back of its throat in a thin mist when the ground erupts. Dirt, scree, and loose cobbles spray upward in a dark curtain.
Much of it smashes into Alkara. She tumbles into the ground and a lightning bolt of pain stabs through her.
Black starbursts bloom in her bleary vision. And expand until all her thoughts and focus flee her mind.