11. Tower
General Summary
As Mirage and Cypher headed down the mountain, the terrain became dense with forest. Abruptly, the warlock announced he would be back, and without explanation, left the party.
Nimbus followed at Mirage's direction, but couldn't discern what he was doing or why.
Afraid of pushing too far, Mirage restrained herself from asking.
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When they reached the tower, it felt like the very stone was poisoned, alien, wrong. It took a minute to stomp down the dread and form a plan for getting in.
Mirage used her skills of infiltration and misdirection to pull one cultist away from the rest, tossing him down three storeys to the waiting warlock. Whatever happened when he inspected the cowled one's mind, it jarred him. He scrambled back from the injured body before turning it into a dead one.
They barely escaped notice from that little experiment. It was time to do or die. Mirage filled the third storey with obscuring fog, and swung in, praying the warlock could follow.
He landed in the window behind her, but failed to conceal the terror in his face before she saw it. But there was no time; the cultists were off-balance, but no longer unaware.
Mirage started swinging. She buried her blade in the throat of the first to come at her, and swung a slashing strike at the second, trailing an arc of pink arterial foam behind the blade.
Behind her, the warlock was still. The first one to jump at him with a blade bared fell to the ground, holding her head, blood flowing like rivers from her ears. He stepped over her, scanning the mist. Gestured for Mirage to stay still, and around her, the fog began to writhe, indeterminate shapes stretching, dying, regrowing, reaching, feeling. Then, a horrible, wet, crunch.
After confirming the body count, the two made a cursory check for prison keys, then headed to the floor below, where their friends were held.
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Before descending, Cypher made her promise to hang back until Ta'lok was down. She kept mental fingers crossed behind her back as she agreed, and they crept down the stairs.
The room was as Cypher described it, but with one extra prisoner, a corpulent human sleeping in a fourth cage.
Cri was collapsed in a mass of blood and feathers against the back of her cage, her breathing shakey. Saeldor was cramped in a cage half his size, with bars too narrow to reach through. Both of them looked up when they peeked into the room, but were careful not to give anything away to the room's fourth occupant.
Ta'lok's breaths were ragged, like he'd just run a mile, with no sign of slowing down. A slick sheen of sweat covered his heaving shoulders. He was facing away from them, watching the prisoners, two-handed hammer gripped in white knuckles.
His head was far too high for Cypher to reach from the ground without giving himself away. Fortunately, lift was Mirage's specialty. With a silent one-two-three, she launched the skinny human toward their party leader.
Ta'lok started bucking the second Cypher landed. He held on, but barely, struggling to keep from being thrown, he couldn't seem to get enough of a grip to start casting. In another second, he'd be paste against the wall.
Mirage leapt into the room.
"HEY! Dumbass!"
Ta'lok whirled on her, and for the first time on the receiving end of his battle fury, Mirage felt the room expanding around her - nowhere to hide. The minotaur's huge strides ate the room between them in huge gulps. On reflex, she plugged her ears.
As a result, she didn't hear whatever it was that Cypher screamed, or chanted, or shouted. She only saw that his mouth didn't stop moving as Ta'lok stumbled, dropping to his knees, swaying, then slack. The warlock's voice slowed to a mumble, then quieted. The two were still, one dazed on his knees, eyes shut, the other glazed over, standing over his shoulder with a death grip on his scalp.
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Mirage wasted no time in popping locks. Cri first, then Saeldor. Cri could hardly move, but Saeldor wrapped her in a crushing bear hug as soon as he pulled his cramped limbs into the room.
"Our stuff is in the chest," he told her. She opened it like it was never locked, tossing him his bag.
"We need to move," Mirage warned, as Saeldor gently lifted Cri out of her cage, uncorking a potion and feeding it to her a drop at a time through shaky hands.
"I know, I know, one sec one sec."
Mirage turned to the mysterious third prisoner. The human was making a hell of a racket, having realized what was happening, screaming about heresy. She opened his cage but he was not interested in escape, only in her throat. Saeldor slammed his cage back shut, then seemed to clock what was happening in the centre of the room.
"Is he doing what I think he's doing?" he asked, indicating the warlock.
"We don't have time, but yes. It's the only way I had time to break you out. Follow me now, we're going out the window."
It was past time to move, but Cypher and Ta'lok remained motionless. She sent Saeldor and Cri ahead, hanging back as long as she could.
Seconds sped at triple speed. Footsteps below. Footsteps on the stairs.
Then Ta'lok opened his eyes. Cypher's remained squeezed shut, but he dropped his hands from Ta'lok's head.
Ta'lok blinked, looking around, gaze landing on Mirage.
"Good to see you, kid."
"Can we please fucking GO."
"Yup"
With the warlock's arm in one hand and his warhammer in the other, Ta'lok swung on the cultist just reaching the top of the stairs, turning his head and most of the rest of him into paste before he could yell. They high-tailed it up the stairs, aiming for the open window.
They didn't make it there.
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Blackness without edge or shape spread over the room like ink. Like the gravity of an infested star, their steps slowed, their gazes pulled to the stairwell from the fourth floor above. The figure that stood there was not cowled, but it didn't make its face any easier to discern. The skin is not the black of Asmira's obsidian shade, nor even of jet, but the black of the void behind stars. Strange lights, lurid yellows and sickening greens, wavered and faded within the , impossibly distant depths of its body. It was impossible to tell where their eyes were, but undeniable that they were staring.
Mirage plugged her ears. So did Ta'lok. It probably saved their eardrums, but the command's volume defied barrier, echoing off the insides of their heads.
PROSTRATE
Mirage flung herself to her face, Ta'lok struggling to only take a knee beside her while Cypher's eyes whited out from the force of a desperate counterspell.
Suddenly her arm was in a vice grip, then the room was sailing by as Ta'lok flung her from the ground toward the window as the incoherent screams of the Thing That's Hard to Look At shook her mind.
She angled to avoid the windowframe, but braked as soon as she was in open air, refusing to escape alone. She reached out her hands for the oxygen of the room, and pulled.
In a hurricane of splintering shelves, torn pages, and detritus, her friends were ripped through the airlock. Buffering their landing was simple, but she offered no such mercy for the monster behind them.
in the diffuse light of the overcast day, it looked even stranger, a black cutout of reality; a mockery of the humanoid form. It landed with more weight than its size should have allowed.
On the ground, assembled at last, the party swung and smote, but found their blows rebuffed, reality and perception bending around the creature's impossible form.
At Saeldor's hoarse shout, Cypher snapped to attention and started casting. His coppery skin was ashy pale, he was breathing hard - like early days, when he didn't seem to have a full handle on his powers yet.
And for a second the creature seems unaffected, and then it began transforming. The astral void shrank within its form, and the pale, bone-white skin of a tall, sinewy, ritually-tattood-from-foot-to-scalp, but nevertheless mortal, human was revealed.
Ta'lok wasted no time in pulverizing it.
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After checking that everyone was still standing, however shakily, the party re-used the basement entrance and freed the villagers captured there. Regrouped, they began to walk away from the horrible place when the warlock stopped.
"Wait."
Mirage turned. He was staring at the tower.
"It has to go."
No one wanted to go back inside, but the warlock had another idea.
"Can you do a hurricane?"
And boy, could she.
When they finished, the tower was a crater of wonderfully mundane bricks, layered with shredded paper and splintered wood.
And the warlock's composure wasn't doing much better.
Fic: Flooded
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Report Date
30 Jan 2025
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