A Man, A Plan, a Fan

Ash dove to the ground to avoid the man’s swinging fist. In the darkness, it looked little different from a club, and she swore she felt it push a gust a wind through her hair. Ash’s fall was not graceful: no elegant roll or practiced crouch followed, just hard ground. She was given no room to consider this indignity, because the man wasted no time in stomping down at her.

Ash rolled away just in time, and managed to scramble to her feet.

“What now?” she shouted into the darkness.

“I should be asking you that! This was your plan,” Tienne shouted back.

“Well excuse me for not realizing this guy was freaking invincible,” Ash snapped, as she jumped back to avoid another punch.

Ash could still see the last orange Cinders playing around the lamppost, where Tienne had Scribed whatever Words were necessary to convince the lamp that it was bright. She had asked Tienne to make the effect as dramatic as she could, and the Valkyrie had delivered. When the light went off, it had almost dazed Ash, who was around a corner from it, looking away. The rock had been intended merely to finish the job, to knock out the man and leave him at the mercy of the two girls.

But as the man attacked Ash with unstoppable determination, Ash was left wondering why they had even bothered. The men of the Emerald Hand were displaying a frustrating disregard for mortal limitations.

The man’s onslaught was halted when he was forced to avoid a precise thrust from Tienne’s sword. The reprieve was only temporary, but Ash welcomed it all the same, managing to regain her footing and start breathing at a reasonable rate again. Tienne followed through on her lunge to get past the man, finishing with a spin to face the man next to Ash.

“I think we need a change of plans, here,” Ash said.

“Your wisdom is stunning,” Tienne replied.

“Hey, Solenia made her sword do a big blast of wind or whatever back at Gerred’s. Do that.”

Tienne glanced away and, even in the darkness, Ash was quite sure she was blushing.

“I must confess that I am not yet skilled enough for Lady Solenia to allow me to use those Words,” Tienne said, forcing the words out as if each syllable physically hurt her.

The man threw another punch, and Ash jumped back. The man’s movements were not particularly controlled or careful, but there was brutal force behind every blow. The girls could not afford even one mistake.

When Ash landed, she spared a glance at Tienne. There was just enough light remaining to see that her sword was nothing more than a simple, unadorned sliver of metal, without an etched mark in sight.

“Lovely,” she grumbled. There went one plan.

Ash frantically ran through their options in her mind, while dancing out of the way of the man’s attacks. The process took only a second, and Ash realized they were probably in a great deal of trouble. In hindsight, it probably would have made more sense to determine that before attacking, but then Ash figured she could be forgiven for not expecting the man to shrug off a rock to the head.

The only, obvious conclusion was that subduing the man would depend on magic. Ash had seen firsthand that her Cindercraft could take down Emerald Hand goons, but she was not at all confident that she could use it in such a way that would leave much of anything for them to interrogate. That left Tienne, but the tricks she had up her sleeves—if any—were unknown.

“Be careful, fool!”

Tienne’s shout snapped Ash back to reality, upon which she discovered she was about to evade straight into the solid stone exterior of a warehouse. Furthermore, she had allowed the man to force her away from Tienne. Now, even though she was behind him, the Valkyrie couldn’t find a safe opening to attack, not with Ash so close.

Ash hesitated for only a moment, but it was almost too much. She did not dodge the next punch quite in time.

A boulder that somehow looked like a man’s fist clipped her shoulder. The sheer force of the impact overrode any other motion that her body might have intended. Ash tumbled back, slamming hard into the warehouse. Her whole body shook, and her vision did something it really wasn’t supposed to for a second. She barely noticed falling to her rear.

Ash was fairly sure that it felt worse than it actually was, but she was certain that she could not get up immediately, and the man was not giving her any more time than ‘none.’ He was already winding up a savage kick. There was only a heartbeat to respond.

Blessedly, that heartbeat was all Ash needed to hit upon an idea.

“Tienne! Remember my hideout!”

This was all she could do. It was a desperate gamble on Tienne having any idea what she was talking about—and on Ash’s plan even being possible—and Ash was not hopeful. As the Emerald Hand goon’s foot descended, Ash screwed her eyes shut, as if it would delay the inevitable.

The final blow never came. Instead, there was a sharp snap of magic. Ash opened her eyes to see the man hurtling by overhead, as if thrown by some colossal, unseen hand. Then he too hit the warehouse wall, but this time it did stop his progress. He simply crashed through in a burst of sound and sundered stone. He kept on flying a moment longer, until he collided with a support pillar in the middle of the room within. There he finally stayed, pinned halfway up the wooden beam by the same invisible force that had assaulted Carvus back in the hideout. Even then, a spiderweb of cracks spread along the beam, originating from the point of impact.

Outside the warehouse, Tienne was standing just behind where the man had been a moment before, frozen mid lunge, with her arm outstretched. She was holding a small folding fan, covered with neat lines of Words, still glowing with power. Even if it wasn’t clear that this object was the cause of the man’s involuntary flight, that particular question would have been answered by the massive plume of orange sparks emanating from it and minging with the settling dust.

“All Stars Above, do you think you got him?” Ash asked, her voice a mix of awe and shock. She could not find the strength to stand up.

“I may have some trouble controlling the amount of power I put into my Words,” Tienne admitted as she recomposed herself. “You are welcome for saving your life, by the way.”

Ash decided to ignore that last statement as she picked herself up.

“I thought you said you couldn’t use the blow-people-away words,” she said.

“That was not the same thing at all. The Words involved in both require entirely different—”

For a moment, it appeared that Tienne might actually launch into a lecture on the finer points of Wordcraft, but then evidently thought better of it. She cleared her throat.

“That is not important at this moment. We must focus on our opponent.”

Ash finished standing and looked through the hole in the warehouse. The interior was lit well enough by wall-mounted torches, revealing a large, mostly-open room filled with neat rows of crates and other such containers. The Emerald Hand man was still pinned to the support pillar, at the end of the trail of destruction caused by his passage. At the far side of the room, a door opened, and a person poked their head through. They took one look at the scene and swiftly decided they needed to be somewhere else.

Ash started to enter the warehouse, but Tienne put a firm hand on her shoulder.

“What are you doing? Always make sure the environment is secure before entering!”

Ash looked back at the man. Even if he weren’t still trapped by Tienne’s magic, he was completely limp, dangling on the pillar like a wet rag half-off its peg.

“Yeah, no, I don’t think he’s going to be a problem,” Ash said.

She shook loose of Tienne’s grip and walked in, slowed only by navigating the rubble and the need to cover her mouth against the dust. By the time she reached the center of the room, Tienne had overcome her hesitation and joined Ash. One mumbled incantation later, and the man flopped to the ground before them.

Now that the man was at their mercy, Ash realized she didn’t actually have any idea what to do next. Interrogation generally required the subject to be conscious, and Ash wasn’t entirely sure the man was even still alive. They could always tie him up with something and then wait for him to wake up, but after everything she had seen Ash doubted the man would simply accept restraint.

Tienne, however, appeared to have seen something, because she had crouched next to the man, and peeled back the sleeve of his shirt.

The instant she saw whatever was underneath, she dropped the sleeve and recoiled in pure revulsion. Ash didn’t need to ask what the problem was, because she had seen it too.

A lattice of Words had been carved directly into the man’s arm.