It's So Hard to Find a Common Mind, Around Here

Treeline is a quiet place in the dead of night. Very quiet.

I can sense the chill, now, the rot under the gilded golden peace—the kind that slips into homes and silently smothers the inhabitants in their sleep. Not related to my own chill, which seems to have somewhat abated, thankfully. “So you are here. Interesting.”

“Hhrgn. Somethin’s real, real wrong with this place.” Sels shudders, wings half-lifted as she glances from still bridges to dark trunks and the shadows of doorways hewn in them. “It feels sicker’n you.”

“Did this general target Treeline last time?” sister murmurs, clad in loose tunic and stockings with a pair of daggers at her hip.

“No. Not as far as I know.” I was a bit busy being miserable and self-pitying, but, “He trailed along the backs of the hills to loop around from the north, avoiding civilisation. Treeline was destroyed ten years later, this couldn’t have festered that long without someone noticing. I would have noticed.”

Apart from the fact that I was based more south to put out nuisance fissures, and then there was that journey into the east and the ancient ruins of Angrila....

“What is it?” Sister looks at me sharply.

I stifle a sneeze. “Blasted chill. Now’s a good time to tell you how to use the chain. It’s a walk from here to the grove.”

“Now, of all times?”

“Now.” I tug at them, feeling the chink twinge. “You need to anchor it—”

“You could have chosen any earlier time, you know.”

“Quiet. If you send me back to Devil’s Mouth when you die, or resurrect me into my own mutilated body if I die, I will kill you.”

“That seems somewhat counterproductive.”

I ignore her, grasping the faint glint of the chain and meeting her eye. “All you need to do is anchor this to a point in time. You can see these chains— attach them to some point like yester-morn. It’s intuitive. All you need to do is concentrate. Try it.”

“If you insist.” She narrows her gaze into the distance, and after a long moment the chains flash in my mind’s eye through my chest to some point behind me. “Hm, that is easy, actually.”

“You’re a natural talent.” I make a mental note not to die, or let her die. She’s probably anchored it somewhere ridiculous.

The quiet of the woodland city slips behind us, a simple imbuing opening a gap in the fence between the blue lamps of the guards, absolute silence enforced to avoid those with keener gryphon hearing. There seem to be quite a few for such a supposedly peaceful place.

Settling it back, I gesture the others on again, and we slip into the slightly smaller trees of the forest, following the trail beside a stream.

“How,” sister’s voice breaks the quiet of clicking insects and the soft hoot of an owl, “did this general take the capital last time?”

“He tried; he didn’t,” I correct her, listening to a rustle deep in the trees. Going away from us—probably not a fissure beast. “The palace was destroyed, and much of the cliff-face— some of the city below closest to it, too. We had to do a lot of work to reshape it.”

“Very interesting, I’m sure. So how did he manage this?”

“Temper temper.” I duck under a low-hanging branch. A twig snaps, a rustle in the distance. My scars don’t twinge, but something about it doesn’t sound right.... “You know a gryphon renews his spiriscence from the spiritual energy around him, rather than having to wait for it to renew, don’t you?”

“Hey, I’m right here.”

“‘She’, too, then.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” sister says frostily. “How does that— Wait. No. You can’t really mean—”

I lift an eyebrow back at the glint of her wide eyes in the faint light bobbing between us. “There you are.”

“You guys gonna stop talking riddles and just say somethin’ for once?”

“Ilempo... but he’s a devil—”

Something crunches softly, a faint light catching the corner of my eye. I snap my hand up, cutting her off.

“Waitta minute, that’s not a demon,” Sels hisses. “That smells hu—”

I snap Atsukute out in time to deflect a blur whizzing for us. An arrow pings off, clattering into a tree.

“Wait! Hold your fire, we aren’t devils!”

Sister’s foolish shout rings painfully through the trees, and brings nothing but a wave of arrows whizzing through the trees. Forcing her to the ground, hoping Sels’s yelp doesn’t mean she’s been hit, I grit my teeth. “They’re not here even to arrest us. Save your breath.”

They must have been waiting for us to come here—

A sharp arrowhead grazes my shoulder. What fortune. Lashing out, I hear a cry in the direction it came from, a shadow stumbling between trees, bow rustling to the ground. With one snap it breaks in two, its owner’s legs following a similar fate.

The gryphon diving from the trees meets the same end. But not before sister gasps, the thwock of a hit registering a moment later. I need to finish this quickly.

Shoving her behind a fallen tree trunk, hopefully out of view of the majority—most on our left—I imbue the wood, cutting a dozen splinters and whipping them across my arms. Cords ripple like teeming eels from under my tattered sleeves, thin lines shooting into the trees.

The arrows stop abruptly, rush of wings cut off—replaced with cries and hissing, muffled curses. I don’t need to see to sense them and the metallic heat of their blood.

Hobbling and clipping the lot, the sound of snapping bows cracking through the darkness, I let out a breath, drawing my bobbing light to my hand and glancing over the others. Sels blinks up at me, crouched by the tree, tail lashing. Sister grips her lower leg, face pale and lips drawn tight, a wooden shaft between her fingers.

I kneel, scooping a wad of spiderwebs from the crannies in the tree trunk and pushing her hands away. “You’re fine, it’s only in the muscle.”

“Did you leave them alive?” she grits. “You should make sure—”

“I think they’ll take a while to crawl here if they’re that determined.” I yank the arrow out, ignoring a bitten-off cry, and imbue the webs, packing them neatly across both ends of the wound and wrapping a torn strip of sleeve around it. “Can you stand?”

She laughs, weakly hysterical. “No. I can’t run through the forest like this.”

“You’ll find you can do a lot when a fissure devil’s behind you.” I heave her up. “You asked to come along. You can limp or you can try making it back without running into more of the magistrate’s assassins.”

“How much,” she grinds through her teeth, managing a decent hobble anyway, “do you hate me, brother?”

“Oh, don’t ask me that question. You wouldn’t like the answer.” It’s unlikely any of these people would know where Akir or Jeanu are. I can only hope our magistrate friend hasn’t managed to kill them somehow, though I doubt he could unless they were really caught unaware.

If he did, I’ll have to reevaluate how much lenience the influence of a devil allows him....

In any case, with all that noise we’re bound to have woken up everything in the forest. I can already hear rustlings, an eerie whistling rumble ringing out in the distance. “Sels, stay beside me. Don’t go out of sight.”

“Yeah okay sure.”

With Treeline’s citizens compromised, the safest place for her is at my side. Weaker I may be, but I won’t let any harm come to her.

The quiet sounds of injured bowmen fade behind us as we limp and puff quick as we can, leaving only the eerie quiet of the stream babbling, the hiss of wind through increasingly sickly trees....

And the rustling of a thousand bony legs.

“Company’s here.”

The glow of millions of hellish eyes surging towards us like a tide cut off whatever sister was about to say and give us all a much-needed burst of speed. Seems Ilempo’s been busy brooding spiders.

“That’s a lotta—!”

I hit the ground, a flicker of pain shooting through my hand, still gripping Atsukute. Must’ve— Can’t move my leg, it wrenches when I instinctively kick at something twined around it. Ichor web. Fissures—

Sharp stings surge up an instant before the black spikes disappear under crimson cords, lunging shadows with too many scuttling legs and eyes squelched by rigid red spikes. Free donation of ichor.

Now that’s a nauseating mix of black-tainted life and lightheadedness.

I stumble back to my feet in spite of the consuming urge to gag, slashing Atsukute’s burning blade across black-headed cords. Stretching my battered body thin, dancing on the edge. Gritting a rictus grin, I skewer a multitude of bulbous bodies through a wave of ichor webs, blue fire searing my vision.

I hear them squeal like oysters on the coals as their skins swell, a vicious honk coming somewhere to my right. With one flick, I toss my improvised bombs into their fellows.

Slicing a web trying to dig into my face and consuming it, I find the last of my nightvision blinded by another explosion of blue-white flames. At least the forest is nicely lit up now.

Sister’s voice sputters somewhere past the violent shadows as I slice neatly through the remainder of many-legged, many-eyed, many-fanged abominations trying to mob me. I still hear Sels’s honk in the shrieking; see her through the flickering light next to sister. Good.

I also see dark glinting ropes as thick as my waist swell through the trees, rippling to surround us. The thud of bony limbs holding up something massive approaching means we might be in deep trouble. Size isn’t everything, but it can be a pain.

Especially when a thousand whipping cords all shoot for me, and I’m not in the greatest shape to dodge.

Which is when a great shree bursts my eardrums.