RE: QUIETUS [S!5] [Round 3: Deluge]
07-11-2017, 11:38 PM
Its hour passed, a rough beast slouched its way aimlessly through the city. In the muddy streets it left tracks as wide around as car tires. Rain dripped and rolled off its scarred metal hide. Old dirt and dead blood sluiced slowly away.
Arokht walked on autopilot. To say he was lost in thought would be an understatement. At the moment, he had at least five or six trains all trying to run on the same track in eight different directions, simultaneously. He was thinking too much to think of anything else.
He thought Anila. He thought Outsider. He thought Failure. He thought Sonora. He thought Rain. He thought Disgrace. He thought Anila. He thought Wounds. He thought Sonora. He thought Weapons. He thought Outsider. He thought Rain. He thought Disgrace. He thought Anila. He thought City. He thought Voices. He thought Music.
And then, very suddenly, he thought SONORA.
Voices. Music! A toxic flood of emotion set every nerve in his body singing, sweeping away the confusion in his head -- a sudden, wrathful clarity. There was rage, of course. There was hate. Old friends both, but now they turned inward as well as outward, like barbed wire snaking through his intestines. There was bile in there too, now. Bitterness. Grief. Betrayal, the worst of a soldier’s sins.
SONORA, he thought. SONORA. Arokht stood stock-still, the wedge of his head high and as tense as a live wire. He strained his ears, struggling to hear (his hearing had yet to fully recover from the Godsworn Valley) the sound of patchwork voices. Where? WHERE?
This was a ramshackle part of town. Wood and brick and plaster sprawl, tenements for poor porters and dockworkers. The rain had seeped deep into its cheap construction. A song’s faint refrains bounced around it as if from everywhere at once.
...and it was hard swimming once and now you’re daily diving in…
Damn his useless motion tracker! It wasn’t designed to detect something like Sonora. Arokht tilted his head, trying to triangulate through hearing alone. If he had pinnae they would be quivering. The echoes were the key. Track them to their source. From there, it was bounced to there, and from there...
From a break in the tenement row, where another street intersected with this one
Arokht burst into explosive motion. Puddles splashed under feet and fists. He slid on rain-slick cobbles, braking hard on metal-shod hooves, one arm lashing out and seizing the pole of a flickering streetlight, swinging himself around the corner. The street, intersecting, became a bridge over a canal. And in the canal was --
-- not Sonora, was the first thought that flashed into Arokht’s burning brain, even as he raised the huge cannon of his arm. Sonora had never been so leviathan. Sonora had never dwarfed him like this. But that dark shape slithering through the canal could be nothing else.
In that instant of hesitation and shock, Sonora turned its head towards him incuriously.
“It ate the traffic cone! Banana new shoes.”
Arokht fired.
Sonora made a sound like trumpets and dove, part of its flank suddenly replaced with dull black ice. Not enough. Not nearly enough. Arokht shot and shot again, but Sonora was down too deep, invisible in the murk, giving nothing away. He fired blind, randomly. Cylindrical new icebergs bobbed up in the water and began to drift.
Arokht snarled, lurching up towards the water’s edge. The raw blue rage pounding in his head screamed for release, so hard it made him dizzy, so hard he felt like his skull might crack open from the inside. His cannon fired twice more into the water, hitting nothing. Past a certain depth, the tiny still-rational part of his mind knew, its radiative emissions would only make the water uncomfortably cold...
Water splashed behind him. Arokht spun and leveled his cannon as Sonora, its amorphous form whirling, crested the other side of the bridge. He moved as fast as ever but this time not quite fast enough.
In the fraction of a second between muscle impulse and weapon fire, Arokht watched a not-insignificant chunk of dull black ice whip out of Sonora’s mass like a stone from a sling. He had enough time to think his way through half of an Iceworlder curse before the head-sized lump met his head head on.
Arokht’s head snapped to the side. Digital artifacts crackled across his eyepieces. His arm cannon jerked off-target and spat fruitlessly into the sky, turning rain into sleet. He was lucky: the angled plates of his helmet deflected most of the force, and impact padding and Iceworlder carapace absorbed about half of what remained. It still rang his head like a gong. And as Arokht staggered, Sonora, churning, wings spread wide, washed over him like an oily wave.
The power of water is often underestimated. Flash floods can carry away cars, boulders, houses. It’s just a matter of mass and force. Few things can be as heavy or as forceful as water.
Arokht’s feet left the ground, swept up by the flood that was Sonora. The world tumbled -- became a blur of browns and greys and blacks and blues -- became a jarring impact of splintering wood, shattering glass, shattering brick. Arokht rolled to a clumsy halt, smeared with new mud, trailing water and debris. Naked mannequins and empty clothing racks broke beneath his bulk. More were hurled across the long-dead shop by Sonora’s thrashing, its vast length shoved crudely into a storefront too small to hold it.
“It’s a wash!” it bugled, climbing the walls, climbing the ceiling. Wooden planks and tiles rained down. “I hope you know what you’re doing, because I sure don’t.”
Arokht was struggling to rise. Stumbling, head spinning, he found his feet just in time to see a wriggling black tail vanish into a hole in the ceiling. From above came the sounds of splintering and breaking.
No escape!
Blue light flared as his cannon discharged into the ceiling. Three shots, three circles of glittering ice. More glass shattered. A second-story window exploded outward, and Sonora splashed back onto the canal embankments outside, slithering towards water. Arokht shifted targets from ceiling to ground. He was just about to fire again when he realized the splintering sounds from above hadn’t stopped.
Some animal or warrior instinct of danger prompted him to move, and he did. He was still moving when four stories of rain-weakened and Sonora-sabotaged tenement building fell on top of him.
The city was too damp for dust, but the roar and rumble of collapse still echoed across it, turning heads in more inhabited quarters. Some of them even saw the building fall.
None of them saw Sonora, slipping back into the canal, singing.
I can’t compete with no one else, he’s thinking of me when he’s by himself...
Arokht walked on autopilot. To say he was lost in thought would be an understatement. At the moment, he had at least five or six trains all trying to run on the same track in eight different directions, simultaneously. He was thinking too much to think of anything else.
He thought Anila. He thought Outsider. He thought Failure. He thought Sonora. He thought Rain. He thought Disgrace. He thought Anila. He thought Wounds. He thought Sonora. He thought Weapons. He thought Outsider. He thought Rain. He thought Disgrace. He thought Anila. He thought City. He thought Voices. He thought Music.
And then, very suddenly, he thought SONORA.
Voices. Music! A toxic flood of emotion set every nerve in his body singing, sweeping away the confusion in his head -- a sudden, wrathful clarity. There was rage, of course. There was hate. Old friends both, but now they turned inward as well as outward, like barbed wire snaking through his intestines. There was bile in there too, now. Bitterness. Grief. Betrayal, the worst of a soldier’s sins.
SONORA, he thought. SONORA. Arokht stood stock-still, the wedge of his head high and as tense as a live wire. He strained his ears, struggling to hear (his hearing had yet to fully recover from the Godsworn Valley) the sound of patchwork voices. Where? WHERE?
This was a ramshackle part of town. Wood and brick and plaster sprawl, tenements for poor porters and dockworkers. The rain had seeped deep into its cheap construction. A song’s faint refrains bounced around it as if from everywhere at once.
...and it was hard swimming once and now you’re daily diving in…
Damn his useless motion tracker! It wasn’t designed to detect something like Sonora. Arokht tilted his head, trying to triangulate through hearing alone. If he had pinnae they would be quivering. The echoes were the key. Track them to their source. From there, it was bounced to there, and from there...
From a break in the tenement row, where another street intersected with this one
Arokht burst into explosive motion. Puddles splashed under feet and fists. He slid on rain-slick cobbles, braking hard on metal-shod hooves, one arm lashing out and seizing the pole of a flickering streetlight, swinging himself around the corner. The street, intersecting, became a bridge over a canal. And in the canal was --
-- not Sonora, was the first thought that flashed into Arokht’s burning brain, even as he raised the huge cannon of his arm. Sonora had never been so leviathan. Sonora had never dwarfed him like this. But that dark shape slithering through the canal could be nothing else.
In that instant of hesitation and shock, Sonora turned its head towards him incuriously.
“It ate the traffic cone! Banana new shoes.”
Arokht fired.
Sonora made a sound like trumpets and dove, part of its flank suddenly replaced with dull black ice. Not enough. Not nearly enough. Arokht shot and shot again, but Sonora was down too deep, invisible in the murk, giving nothing away. He fired blind, randomly. Cylindrical new icebergs bobbed up in the water and began to drift.
Arokht snarled, lurching up towards the water’s edge. The raw blue rage pounding in his head screamed for release, so hard it made him dizzy, so hard he felt like his skull might crack open from the inside. His cannon fired twice more into the water, hitting nothing. Past a certain depth, the tiny still-rational part of his mind knew, its radiative emissions would only make the water uncomfortably cold...
Water splashed behind him. Arokht spun and leveled his cannon as Sonora, its amorphous form whirling, crested the other side of the bridge. He moved as fast as ever but this time not quite fast enough.
In the fraction of a second between muscle impulse and weapon fire, Arokht watched a not-insignificant chunk of dull black ice whip out of Sonora’s mass like a stone from a sling. He had enough time to think his way through half of an Iceworlder curse before the head-sized lump met his head head on.
Arokht’s head snapped to the side. Digital artifacts crackled across his eyepieces. His arm cannon jerked off-target and spat fruitlessly into the sky, turning rain into sleet. He was lucky: the angled plates of his helmet deflected most of the force, and impact padding and Iceworlder carapace absorbed about half of what remained. It still rang his head like a gong. And as Arokht staggered, Sonora, churning, wings spread wide, washed over him like an oily wave.
The power of water is often underestimated. Flash floods can carry away cars, boulders, houses. It’s just a matter of mass and force. Few things can be as heavy or as forceful as water.
Arokht’s feet left the ground, swept up by the flood that was Sonora. The world tumbled -- became a blur of browns and greys and blacks and blues -- became a jarring impact of splintering wood, shattering glass, shattering brick. Arokht rolled to a clumsy halt, smeared with new mud, trailing water and debris. Naked mannequins and empty clothing racks broke beneath his bulk. More were hurled across the long-dead shop by Sonora’s thrashing, its vast length shoved crudely into a storefront too small to hold it.
“It’s a wash!” it bugled, climbing the walls, climbing the ceiling. Wooden planks and tiles rained down. “I hope you know what you’re doing, because I sure don’t.”
Arokht was struggling to rise. Stumbling, head spinning, he found his feet just in time to see a wriggling black tail vanish into a hole in the ceiling. From above came the sounds of splintering and breaking.
No escape!
Blue light flared as his cannon discharged into the ceiling. Three shots, three circles of glittering ice. More glass shattered. A second-story window exploded outward, and Sonora splashed back onto the canal embankments outside, slithering towards water. Arokht shifted targets from ceiling to ground. He was just about to fire again when he realized the splintering sounds from above hadn’t stopped.
Some animal or warrior instinct of danger prompted him to move, and he did. He was still moving when four stories of rain-weakened and Sonora-sabotaged tenement building fell on top of him.
The city was too damp for dust, but the roar and rumble of collapse still echoed across it, turning heads in more inhabited quarters. Some of them even saw the building fall.
None of them saw Sonora, slipping back into the canal, singing.
I can’t compete with no one else, he’s thinking of me when he’s by himself...