Crystaliza sighed, then shrugged, then frowned. “I like to run. I've been doing track since the seventh grade. I would of been in the Olympics if I hadn't been labeled a Subadult. I love to run.”
We all looked at her and she crossed her arms, looking defiantly back as us.
"What? You got a problem with that?"
I shrugged. "No? Why would we? You do you, girl.”
She eyed me for a second before continuing as if I hadn't spoken. Sometimes it's best that way.
“I was a courier, a runner on Neon. I get here after being killed by Overseers and find a race of people designed to run?”
She turned back to David. "I want in. Which Centaurs are the fastest runners? How do I convert? How long does it take? How do I start? Where - “
“Hold on! Hold on.” David put his hands up defensively. "I'm not the expert! I just know you need to find a… sponsor and the correct priest or priestess.”
“Where?” She demanded.
“The temple of the four Gods, in the city center. That's where we're headed.”
Crystaliza marched over to where the girls were still petting the unicorn, much to the mirth of various passers by, before forcibly pulling them away with much cajoling and threats.
After a while we passed a tavern that I knew was a tavern because it had the words “Tavern” engraved above the door. Which meant, that unlike medieval times, most people here could read.
Well okay, it had images of frothy mugs of beer and strumming minstrels carved all around it too, so I could be wrong about that.
Now that I was looking for it, the other shops had words and images carved into the stone as well.
What was interesting about this building was that it looked like a Stonehenge shaped structure overgrown by a massive tree. It looked like it had grown inside the ring of stones, partially absorbed the stone slabs.
I would learn later that the truck of the tree was relatively small and used as a roof while it was the roots of the tree that made the walls.
My nose scrunched up and my stomach roiled the same way it did whenever I had to pass through the perfume section at the mall.
The smells coming from it were almost as bad. It was a toss up as to which smelled worse. The urine, vomit or beer.
“Who would willingly go in there?”
“Dollore!” Cashus called out and I saw the Neon Elf who had run from the fight stumble out of the building while a voice yelling ‘and don't come back without my money!’ floated out after him.
The drunken Elf walked wobbly and smiled sillily as he spotted us.
“Guys!” He threw his arms open wide and I narrowly dodged a fouly smelling drunken hug.
He tripped and fell into Tahaniria, who then fell backwards onto the ground with a sound I can only describe as a “squerk” with Dollore's face planted on her chest.
“Wow, where’s the screenshot function when you need one?” Crystaliza said.
“Get! Off! You… you!” Tahaniria said.
“So soft,” Dollore murmured.
Taren and I pulled the Elf to his feet and stepped back as he looked around, confused.
“Oh dude.” I coughed and held my nose, backing up a few more paces. “What have you been drinking? You smell like the foulest of all beer. Like the makers of haggis decided to take up backyard brewing with the leftover materials.”
He didn't answer but instead watched the Shadow Elf jump to her feet and brush her chest off in disgust. Taren determinedly looked away while Cashus pretended to do the same.
Dollore beamed at her and said, “Pretty Elf girl! You're alive!” Then he saw Aeria. "Other pretty Elf girl! You're alive too!” Then he looked at the other Shadow Elves and said, "All the pretty elf girls!"
“You left us to die!” Aeria glared at him.
His face abruptly fell and his bottom lip trembled. "I know. I suck.”
That seemed to take the winds of discontent out of Aeria's sails of red rage before the boat of imminent violence plowed into the rocks of bad endings.
Okay, note to self: Rein in the metaphors before they take a tumble and face plant.
“Nooo...” Aeria said, reluctant acceptance evident. “Its okay…”
“Nothing's okay! They're gone! I lost. Just like I almost lost…” Dollore abruptly sat down in the middle of the street, pulled his legs up to his chest and moaned.
We all looked at each other. Taren looked at me and tilted his head toward the smelly puddle of sad sitting in the street.
I widened my eyes and pointed at Cashus, who raised his hands in a warding gesture and stepped back so that Aeria was closer.
Aeria was already facing the opposite direction and utterly failing to pretend she didn't see him.
We looked at David, he looked right back at us and said, “Not my department.”
“Oh for!” Tahaniria threw her hands up in the air and stalked over to where Dollore sat.
She hesitated, then sat down next to him and patted him on the back. "Its okay, you don't suck. You were just - eek!”
Dollore turned, wrapped his arms around her, buried his face in her chest and started sobbing. She stared at him for a few seconds, probably debating exactly how hard hard and specifically where she was going to punch him.
In the end though, she started patting him on the back again.
“Its… okay… We know there wasn't much you could of done and we… um, forgive you?”
“Is there a magic sobering up spell you have?” I asked Aeria.
She shook her head. “There is a cleansing spell for poisons that should work on alcohol but I don't have it yet.”
“No!” Dollore pulled his head up and took a few gulps of air, trying to calm himself and said more quietly, “No. That's not it. Man I… I mean. The first thing I did in my new life is think about myself and it made me feel bad. Bad man! Just bad!"
He stared off into space. "They passed me by. The soldiers, the rescuers, and I felt so useless, because I was too tired to follow. I thought ‘So, that's good. They'll be fine.’ and I went on my way. I went to the temple because that was where everyone told me to go.”
He seemed to think that was hilarious and he suddenly started snorting and giggling as he fell sideways into the street. Then just as suddenly he stopped laughing and looked up at us from his prone position.
“They weren't there.” He looked up at us. "They weren't there and they never will be.”
He wasn't making much sense but his words made my breath hitch and it felt like my heart tried to escape up my throat.
“What do you mean? No… you mean your Chain. Don't you?” I asked and I forced myself to breath when he nodded his head.
“The priestess explained… Death… The Goddess of death told her…”
He was abruptly up in the air, staring down at me with a confused expression on his face. His feet dangling a foot off the ground, my clawed hand fisted and twisted into his shirt collar.
“Explain. Now. Or I hurt you. Now.” Each word that hissed from behind my teeth and scraped out of my throat was as hard, as unrelenting, and as final as the ending at the bottom of a cliff.
The very reasonable thought that I might be overreacting, just a teeny weeny bit, was beaten to death by a pack and savage emotions that wanted to burn the world and dance on the graves of those who wanted to hurt my loved ones while I caught the falling ash flakes on my tongue like it was snow as I laughed. And laughed, and laughed and screamed…
“Ruin." The too calm tone of someone trying to reason with a rabid raccoon with a time bomb in its hands came from David. “He can talk better if you put him down.”
I slowly put Dollore, who was suddenly very sober, down and carefully extricated my claws from his shirt.
“Now.” I snarled at him when he failed to start talking.
He talked, speaking too quickly at first, his words tripping over each other in an effort to escape.
“Slooowwwer.” I growled the word, slowly, as
if by example.
After taking a breath, he started again. Telling us how he went to the temple, talked to the priestess of the four Gods and learned that she had communicated with the Goddess of death.
As he explained I grew calmer, his words helping to push back the destructive urges.
“She said that every Subadult was now a Fallen. Everyone who died at the hands of the Overseers survived, well, reincarnated, and fell into this world. The problem is they were drawn to the main concentrations of… equilateral… I don't know. Basically Dwarves fell to Dwarven lands, Elves to Elven, Orc to Orcs.”
Taren raised his hand but before he could speak Dollore added, “In the lore of Aegis, Dwarves were a type of Elf, Deep Root Elves or something. So because of that association you ended up here, just like Midian Dwarves.”
“What about Nymphs, Dark Elves and Goblins?” I asked and when Dollore looked at me wairlily I said as calmly as I could, “Dude, I'm good now. I was just a tiny bit terrified for my friends, who I love dearly and who I’m very protective of. Which means if they're hurt it might trigger supervillain levels of mass destruction and why are you backing away from me!”
He froze and said, “Um… I saw what you did to Cross Creek. You're that Ruin.”
"Yes… well, that video was completely taken out of context. It all started with the kangaroo I set on fire.”
They all stared at me until David broke the silence by saying, “What?”
“Oh, right. Sorry, more context. Well, a kangaroo is an animal that looks like - “
“I know what a kangaroo is!”
“Oh. Huh, you have kangaroos here? I don't know if that's weird or not but - ”
“You set a kangaroo on fire?” Crystaliza said aghast.
“It wasn't a living kangaroo." I said defensively. "It was a stuffed one. One of those taxidermist monstrosities. It was an abomination! It needed to die. It wanted to die. I could tell as it gazed at me with its cold, dead glass eyes that stared into me, all the way down to the depths of my immortal soul… So, I set it on fire.”
More staring.
So much staring.
“And besides. I needed a distraction. And say what you will about flaming kangaroos. They make excellent distractions.”
Okay, so I may of left a few things out. Like how I was a small part of a bigger plan to break everyone out of Cross Creek. That my part of the plan was to make the biggest distraction possible.
I may of gone just the tiniest bit overboard but what kind of guy has stuffed animals in his office anyway?
“Well, now that we've established that I'm going to behave, how about answering my questions before I decide to, you know, not behave.”
“RUIN!” my head snapped to the side so fast I felt a few vertebrae pop.
Outside the tavern door, just coming out was a Nymph.
"CHERISH!”
I don't know who moved first. All I knew was that one second we were standing there and the next we had crashed together. Our arms around each other, both of us squeezing as if we were each other's life raft in a hurricane at sea and the only way to survive was to channel the spirit of a boa constrictor.
Her words were an incoherent squeal and mine were a babbling bubbling nonsensical flow of glee and relief.
Our foreheads pressed against each other, my head bowed down and hers tilted up.
The same way we did in the middle of the night while pretending to sleep in the Grey Hell.
The programs that ran the cameras flagged any physical contact that wasn't accidental and sent the footage to the Overseers.
For whatever reason touching foreheads was labeled as accidental and not flagged. So it was another way to show affection when the Overseers weren't looking.
“Um... David? What's happening?” Talis asked as Cherish and I unbalanced and fell to the ground, both giggling madly.
“I don't even know anymore,” he replied with a resigned sigh.
"It's a reunion." Aeria, Taren and Tahaniria said at the same time.
"They'll be alright." Vicious added.
During this exchange I was vaguely aware of a conversation between Talis and the other other two Shadow Elves.
"David, I'm going to escort these two. You… deal with… that."
They were still walking away when David yelled, "Okay! You two! Get off the road and stop doing… whatever it is you're doing!”
Cherish and I struggled to our feet, a task made much more difficult by the fact that we refused to let go of each other.
“Two,” I whispered and drew in a breath, the familiar scent I recognized from sleeping next to her for three years mixed with the newer smell of wind, leaves, earth and tree bark, “I found you. You're alive. You're alive, Two!”
She nodded her head, making mine nod right along with her before saying, “I know, One. It surprised me too.”
Then her giggles became hiccups and her hiccups became sniffling. The next thing I knew she was crying, quietly at first before quickly dissolving into heartbreaking, gut wrenching sobs.
I stood up straight and the six inch height difference let me tuck her head under my chin as held her.
I just kept repeating "It's okay" and “Everything will be okay" and "We're here for you" and "You're loved. Remember. Loved."
When you lived in a place where any expression of emotion was forbidden and used against you, there were very few ways to deal with heartache.
I hadn't known her on the Outside but from what I gathered, she had always been expressive with her emotions. She laughed when she was happy, cried when she was sad, yelled and screamed when she was angry. She didn't hold back or hide from her emotions.
She lived in the moment. She planned for the future, better than I did, but rarely did she worry about it.
She'd once told me, “The future is a myth. It doesn't really exist. The future will never exist. All there is, is the moment. We can prepare ourselves for the next moment, we can listen and learn from the stories we call the past. But in the end, it's all a myth. Treating it as anything else will only invite fear of the unknown.”
It wasn't her nature to bottle things up and for three years that's what she had to do, over and over. Hide it, keep it contained until she could express it in the dead of night, when the Overseers were at their most inattentive
She would curl up to one of us “in her sleep” and cry as silently as possible, her face turned away from the cameras to hide her tears.
Whenever that happened we dropped whatever we were doing and went to her in Midian. If it happened to anyone else in our Chain, we did the same for them.
This happened to everybody sometimes but it happened more with Two than any of us. Sometimes it went on for just for a few minutes and sometimes hours.
Our avatars could touch but we couldn’t feel. We did our best to sync our digital bodies with our biological ones and comforted each other the best we could.
Luckily, it didn't last hours this time. It only lasted for a couple minutes before her emotions settled. During that time the others ignored us. Talking quietly like they didn't see a thing. That was the common practice when these things happened.
“Ohh…” She wiped her eyes and sniffed, looking up at me self consciously. "I told myself not to do that.”
"I tell myself not to do things all the time, I never listen though. It can get rather annoying actually."
She laughed a little and took a deep breath before stepping back to look me up and down.
I looked her up and down too before saying, “Wow. You gained a lot of weight.”
She blinked. "Really?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Aw… thank you." She beamed at me. "You too!”
As I looked at her, I couldn't help but compare the way she looked now, to the way she looked when I first saw her, just before the intake in the Grey Hell.
Years in the Grey Hell had given her tan skin a sickly, almost greyish cast. And like the rest of us, she had been bald,
without even eyebrows. Her cheek bones had been too pronounced on her angular features and the dark shadows under her almond shaped eyes had been a permanent fixture. Her time in the Grey Hell had diminished her hourglass figure and hunched her shoulders.
Now, she looked the same as she had when I first saw her. Rebirth in this new world had returned the body the Grey Hell had taken. She put Aeria and Tahaniria's own curves to envy and every man's mind into a slightly stupified state.
Her hair was again the dark froth of tight, shoulder length curls that habitually fell over the side of her face, partially obscuring an eye.
Only the colors were different. Her hair was now a green so dark it edged into black and her irises were twin pools of night black darkness. The shape of those eyes and the wild curls hinted at her Japanese and American Hispanic ancestry.
Her skin was the same vibrant shade of green it had been in Midian and the lack of thorns around her joints or leaves growing in her hair showed she had yet to bond to a tree.
She didn't have the same starter clothes we did but instead wore boots, brown leather pants and vest over a white shirt I was sure I'd seen in a pirate movie once.
All she was missing was a sword at her hip to complete the image.
The bright happiness in her eyes turned to serious as she stopped smiling and pulled me close. "The others aren't here and I've heard that only Elves and Dwarves fell here. The Succubi though…”
“We had an Incubus with us," I said gently, "so we know that Five should be here too. I… we never discussed if we were going to use the same names here as we did in Midian. I don’t want to, you know...."
“Jinx it?” Cherish asked.
“No, I mean… maybe? Gods I don't know.”
“I understand,” she said, her expression worried. “I've been thinking of Three and Four the same way.” She shook her head as if banishing the thought. “We will ask them when we see them. I haven’t seen Five though, and when I asked around, no one else had either.”
I heard a sound that reminded me of a very large, very angry pitbull. When I realized it was coming from me I forced myself to calm down.
“I'm sure…” I paused, coughed and tried again without the growl. "I'm sure she's not hurt. She's probably just looking at weapons and armor and obsessing over which to get. You know how she is.”
Dubstep Succubus Page 20
