The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Six: Eddelin City]

Show Content

SpoilerHappy one year of me not having made a post in this, jesus

Also happy approximately-5th birthday, this fucking game

This is Pt 1/2, the latter up when I hopefully sooner rather than later get it finished up

The clock towers about Eddelin began to chime in the new hour, the vague warble of their collective asynchronicity jostling Jen from all sides. A final church bell sang out across the rooftops, better late than never, from Jen’s three o’clock; she turned in its direction and saw Kath perched on a observatory. She caught her breath, clenching her fists and feeling the bite of her restraints around her wrists, before parkouring over the nearest alleyway. Kath, fish-bitch she was, knew better than to try make the leap.

There was a closeness to the air; a small-town drear of inescapability that compelled Jen to run until her lungs burned from anything else. She felt watched. Jen closed her eyes, counted to green, and when that didn’t work counted back down from there to blue. She got halfway when Kath shoved her from behind, a knee in the small of Jen’s back and the faintest huff - too many stairs, too quickly climbed - in the whisper at her ear. Jen screamed until the merqueen slammed her face into the blacktop, hissing something about tied hands and not manatowing to Her Majesty like the rest of them. She fished out a dagger, halting Jen’s obscenities with its prickle on the side of her neck as the maid sought the jugular.

To the casual observer, this would’ve been the indubitable end of Jen the First, and by anticlimactic extension the Battle. Clearly, someone hadn’t factored in how damnable impossible it was to herd cat(h)s.

Unfortunately for this Kath, the Observer was all business (if, admittedly, a filthy casual). Jen noticed him first, and he waited just long enough to catch the mermaid's attention. Kath looked up (squinted a bit, of course the jackass had placed himself with the sun at his back), managed half the supercilious assassin’s laugh reserved for the ghosts of those who'd put up a good struggle, and was promptly disintegrated with a snap of the Observer's fingers.

Jen snatched for the knife, only to find that that too had been blasted, and also her hands were still bound. Damnit. The Observer adjusted his cuffs, indirectly focussing on her in the kind of way that takes practice. Jen, not caring to make an effort to look effortless, merdusted herself off best she could with bound arms and took an unabashed proper look at her saviour. She had little familiarity with 20th-century fashion, but the general estimation of the Observer’s “look” as used-car-salesman found its comfortable way to contempt anyway. He was distinctly reshevelled, and looking back at her as if to prove he could.

"You’re welcome," he pointed out. Jen raised her wrists, a haggle-shrug; the Observer raised a pre-lecture finger and decided instead to give it a twirl. The bindings fell away like sand with a faint coppery scent on the breeze. “You owe me.”

“Fuck off, Serviette,” rubbing at where the ropes had dug in. “You should know good as I do how naked I feel without a sword handy.” The Observer shrugged. “So, does this mean Xadrez gets a free pass as well before the round’s done?”

“That’d be special treatment,” said the Observer, a little too quickly.

“Right, and rescuing a damsel in distress totally counts as affirmative action. If you were looking for some kind of, I don’t know, decisive stunning epic etcetera conclusion between us, you could’ve picked a spot with a bit more gravitas, you know?”

Jen motioned across the rooftops with a hand, gesturing an arc that complemented the understated geometries of Eddelin’s streetplan. A couple final stragglers were wandering into the lecture hall, and Jen imagined for a moment Xadrez, muttering a testy running-down of the clock into asphalt. Beyond the city, Arkal’s world unfolded itself all farmland and borough and ridge and dale, noon-haze lending a sense of distance, of far lands teeming beyond and no place to call the centre of everything.

The Observer wasn’t listening, shielding his eye as he squinted into the still-high sun. “Seriously, if you just want to mulligan this last round, Xadrez couldn’t possibly think any less of you, and I can think of a couple places-”

Jen had a split split second to notice the incoming rush of Magic, slingshotting over the horizon like a comet with a grudge. She had even less time to notice the Observer’s reaction - or lack thereof - and even if she’d wanted to get the jump on him, she didn’t have a weapon to hand.

Like that’d stop her. She lunged, the Observer caught her fist, and time stopped again.

“Really?” he asked, almost amused. “Wait, what the-”

---

Mnemonocyst-class Bio-satellite Verrestra Mare-9 was a couple generations behind being state-of-the-art Bio-wyrm expansionist-kit, orbited by a couple low-security genetic archives and a processing centre for cyst-assisted “printing requests” made accessible for non-Wyrms. The universe it serviced was nothing to write homeworld about, ecologically speaking, which suited the dozen or so wyrmsonnel stationed upon it. A home away from home for a species without a terrific amount of attachment to the whole concept in the first place.

Three wayfaring hominids, a pear, and a prophet walked into a library. It smelt like an old but well-maintained fridge, and laid out in a way mostly amenable to the party’s navigation, other than Sen’s bulk and skittery footing. Holly stood on guard, skeptical and mostly watching Algernon, who was taking a look at the plugs lining the walls (“don’t touch anything”, cautioned Fantha). Jeremy seemed reluctant to follow out of the beige and the trees, though he was still processing the utter lack of repercussions for (and he could feel it, no question) opening a door between universes. Fantha gently headbutted a leathery inset in the wall, peeling Sen’s face off it after a moment.

“Not the universe I asked for, but it appears both dark and live, so it should suffice. Come.” The doormage still balked. “If you’re not going to, close the door, at least. The station’s been alerted to our entrance, and I’ll need the other-”

“Wait, what?”

“No ok I changed my mind I’ve already got enough space worms in my life to deal with”

Fantha rolled Sen’s eyes, made a snap decision, and grew a sapling-switch of World Tree behind Jeremy, slamming it into his back once it bent enough upon some Ovoid protrusion. The doormage collided with Holly, scrambling to his feet just in time for Fantha’s arborisms to swing the door closed again.

Holly flinched. The color drained from Jeremy’s face. Algernon yelped as his worm clenched its teeth on his skull.

Jeremy clawed at the now-handle-less door, heedless of Fantha’s pleas to get back; at some accidental gesture of his it slid up and away, opening into a hallway. A half-dozen insectoids, carapaced police-issue black but large as wolves, flanked the exit. Jeremy froze; gestured the door down and closed again.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked Holly. Jeremy slid down the door and into some kind of uncomfortable resting position at its foot, curling up like someone had tossed salt on him.

“I can’t feel the doors,” he mumbled into his knees. Holly wheeled in Fantha’s direction, clenching thin air instead of fire, accusation sublimating into dread with all the frightening normalcy of ice melting.

“I’ll confess, I hadn’t considered that,” Fantha hummed, as the guards burst in.

---

“Your homeworld.” Xadrez looked up from the guest list; Kath had rested her head on the pool’s edge and was admiring the crown-turned-bracelet. Pretending he’d been hearing things, the tactician returned to slicing discs off the end of a handrail, laying out the freshly-arrived-and-seated Mamikonean contingent on his board.

“Any nice bodies there?”

...Avak-yaw was never an easy crossing
persistent rimward currents dragged unwary ships into the wings of Her cloak
Well provisioned they may wander the veil for months
gasp deep lungfuls of ghosts before a beacon on some coast of the Realm might draw them again into the world of the living

The dagger murmured in his fist.

On the day the news came the Kilnkin capital had been overrun by the Legion Witch
you could not see the ocean for the ships
Entire cities fleeing damnation setting sail for the edge of the Realm
not that I can blame them
With Scout erstwhile a warrior’s soul had the slimmest chance of all in finding its way to the Cloak

So

these Mamikoneans-

“You know how these things go,” yawned Kath. “Verdant Queen of the Place one day, High Empress of New Sealand the next.”

Sanjegorian Scrolls, nodded Xadrez.
these Mamikoneans as you called them look well-travelled

Collaborators, then
correspondence spanning this realm

Xadrez looked around for a bookshelf. An atlas, at least. Failing that, checked the lining of his faterobes for some trace of Arkal’s past. Something had been feeling off about this place, like the acoustics were wrong to the point they registered as a flavour, perhaps, instead of a sound. He hauled himself from the pools, sloughed water off the board with a sleeve, flung open the doors back out into the hallway and looked out across the university grounds. Eddelin spread out before Xadrez, curves reclining upon all the wrong axes, invoking existential vertigo.

The Church of Cynisca’s clock began the hourly toll, lulling Koule out of a daze and leaving half a syllable in his throat. Blinking the sun from his eyes, he glanced up from his notes and across the courtyard to Pang Hall’s clock. It told him three more minutes, and the deep gongs of the First Bank fading out across Eddelin confirmed to Koule the same, and homely familiarity in the disorder of the day.

Perhaps, Koule thought to himself, he should go and try living in Nakharis a while; escape his desk and go see the ancient kingdom’s remains firsthand. His contemporaries at West Nakharis (revolutionary discovery or not, Koule was amazed and humbled they’d made the trip for his presentation) had all but arranged a position at their university for him; it occurred to Koule just then that they’d come to seal the deal, hand over a contract personally. Even at conference-size, an hour on a scrying stone would’ve worked out far cheaper than the contingent settling down in the hall, right now.

He’d meant to raise the possibility over lunch with Eselt, and could only hope now that his brother would have a moment between curtain call and the inevitable afterparty. The scholar glanced down at his notes, lingering at the lecture hall’s outward-creeping shadow, running over a particularly troublesome bit of Sanjegorian script aloud. It irked him, the way this particular passage struggled off his tongue. The passage itself was charming in its own right, he supposed, but to Koule more majestic and far more untranslatable was the logical journey he’d set off on - destination unknown at the time - to decipher it, and with it as his entranceway the rest of the Scrolls in turn.

“<and here exalted Golgoriath and her wise counsel ensure/no realm should suffer impotent under gaze indignious coveting fell/but bear it witness their own destinies, seized>”

Xadrez waited at the window until Koule disappeared below, into the lecture hall. No sign of the sword.