Re: The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Three: Water...place!]
04-28-2011, 01:07 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
To say that Maxwell was having a crisis of identity would be like saying that the sun was burning—it seems to be a bit of a tautology, but an astute reader will understand the emphasis. The sun, coincidentally, was burning. Barring the wind chill, it was a good ninety degrees above the surface of the endless ocean, and Skullbeard was grateful for the brim of his hat and the spray of salty mist against his elaborate facial hair situation.
It was a beautiful day, and with his best nemesis likely in his cups John Skullbeard was content to have the heat and the cool, the ocean and the sky, and all the other miraculous contradictions of the pirate’s life, here in the middle of the end of the world.
There was a sound like a change in the tides as the merfolk arrived.
In other oceans, where the water was just shallow enough to shine green, the sun was setting red. It was a beautiful, complementary red, reflecting off the ocean in shards like the very incarnation of Kaleidon, Cubist God of the sea.
Moneptune, who depending on your school of thought-belief was either a different God or the same God in a different style, in a fit of envy whipped up a storm and threw the waters into an impressionistic blur of violent motion. The redness, which might have been viewed as a portent were any members of the Virate watching the sunset, passed into a grey and murky night. Like everything in the Place that wasn’t beautiful, it was sublime.
Maxwell saw red. It was a sharp, complementary red, like blood, and he momentarily thought he was having a stroke before it told him her name. Fanthalion had a voice like red velvet, a sharp compliment from the blue-black curses and orders he was used to hearing from Sikarius. She told him disjointed truths like a Picasso painting, and he believed her. He was dead. Jen was dead. He was Jen. Death was not—necessarily—death.
Predictably, Sik cut in—or maybe it was just a memory of Sik—or maybe both, a preserved voice, now just another victim of the Wyrm. Maxwell appreciated the ironic comeuppance, but like all abuse victims, made the mistake of listening.
The doctrine of Sikarius was simple and direct, as always. Hunger. A thundering hunger like a storm.
Sprocer admired the storm from up in the grand hollow of the Tree House and found himself swaying. He gave a rustling sigh. Negotiations had been going poorly. The Tree Party was rather fond of tradition, and there wasn’t much precedent for reinstating a reincarnated monarch, at least not one who had died abroad. If only Jen had died along the Crossroads like Old King Phoelix...
No matter. If the General held up his end of the bargain, the once and future queen would certainly be able to put things into order, or at least throw things into a more sensible sort of chaos.
Yes, all would be well, so long as Jen restrained herself from up and dying again…
Arkal rushed after Maxwell, who had rather adamantly failed to follow whatever command had told him to “take a minute.” The lad had sprouted wyrm-wings and flown off into the innards of the hydra without so much as a what’s-going-on-there-was-this-light-was-I-sleeping, and Arkal had gotten just enough of the look on his face to suspect that this meant ill tidings for the prospect of “getting her back.”
Arkal felt he had some stake in the matter. She was perhaps the only other person in this battle who appreciated a good weapon, and he had grown fond of her.
Kracht adored a good weapon, not that anyone had ever bothered to ask him.
The term “mental breakdown” seems a bit strong when applied to somebody whose head is literally a rock, but the increasing devolution of all precedent or even logic to what was going on in this round was beginning to take its toll on the mineral. Kracht was even beginning to radiate just a little faster, which in defiance of all science was his equivalent of breaking a sweat.
He made a stern resolution that he just wasn’t going to deal with this shit any longer and then he dropped into a column of Ovoid.
Rather than just popping out somewhere convenient as is the amalgam’s usual modus operandi, he found himself in a tan place, pulled downwards through infinity at about 6 Gs. The complete vacuum of the space-between-spaces he inhabited meant he couldn’t really feel himself accelerating, but this was somewhat familiar ground, and he knew what was coming next. The Ovoid loved to do this...
Kath was mildly apprehensive about what was coming next. The surface of the water was clear, phlegm-free, and sparkling lightly in a way that made her strongly suggest she was being lured somewhere. She didn’t know if she was in the heart yet or what she would find when she got to the middle of it, but she was vaguely aware that at some point she was going to become queen of what, given her luck, would probably turn out to be a landlocked nation.
None of these grand adventures were really improving Kath’s life. She wanted to kill something.
Kath dipped a toe into the water and flicked a few droplets into the air. The resultant ripple had a somewhat meditative effect on the maid, until something deep inside the water started growling. It wasn’t a conventional growl but rather the kind of layered electronic noise that suggests a mouth designed more to hurt or intimidate than to vocalize or even properly kill.
Kath visualized ribbons of blood cutting the beautiful surface of the pool. The effect was more calming than revolting and she realized that even in her darkest imaginings, it was never her blood. She drew her sword, fused her legs and penetrated the water, making only enough of a splash to mark her passage. Descending into the depths, there appeared to be a green light following the mermaid, and she looked all the world a queen.
Fanthalion wasn’t quite sure what was going on in her head, but was somewhat aware that she was losing.
Letting in Maxwell had been a mistake not because she was letting in Maxwell—the boy was charming in his own way and they seemed to share the same goal of getting Jen back—but because she was also letting in Sikarius. The elder wyrm hailed from an age that was less tactful but nonetheless more effective at the psychic stuff, and his presence pushed aside her own like a gorilla fighting an accountant. Sik didn’t care a lick for Jen (Fantha wasn’t quite sure why she was bothering herself—maybe she just didn’t like to leave anything half-finished) and was instead drawing Maxwell towards a much more primal goal.
Sik wanted to eat the Hydra.
Despite the obvious temptation, this was a monumentally stupid idea for any one of a dozen ideas Fantha attempted to telepathically outline. First of all, getting a usable gene sample for something so complicated would take hours, which was longer than the round was likely to last. Secondly, the hydra was psychically as primal and stubborn as Sikarius, as sexually frustrated as Maxwell, and as clever and magically-infused as Jen, a combination that might easily overwhelm any wyrm or two who tried to devour it. Thirdly, Fantha was simply more anxious than hungry and wanted to get this whole Grand Battle clusterfuck over with before Jen got old. And obviously it was going to end in the heart.
Fantha had picked up enough magic to reason that whatever door opened when Kath completed the labyrinth would be infused with enough green energy that a hasty spell could be devised to bring Jen back into the fold—at which point it was simply a matter of kicking the mermaid’s ass to the curb once and for all, returning to the Place (where hopefully even the Observer would have to give due obeisance) and becoming Special Advisor to the Queen in Matters of Devouring the Flesh of the Living. She imagined the magical beings, chimaeras and spirits and things that photosynthesized using only the sunlight they had trapped and killed themselves. It would be… delicious.
Sikarius disagreed. Sikarius impressed upon Fantha that they were currently inside the greatest most powerfullest creature he had ever seen and can I have it can I can I can I don’t answer that of course I can. Fantha felt like an ineffective mother and wished there could be some wyrm equivalent of getting Sik diagnosed with ADHD and shutting him up through medication. Alas.
Maxwell was listening to his first wyrm, out of force of habit, and had found a gland far enough away from all other signs of life that he could chow down on a city’s worth of flesh in peace. Fantha prayed for a miracle.
Xadrez believed in miracles, in that he always tried to account for the possibility, however slim, that his enemies would produce one. The plan that the tactician, the Ovoid, and the series of messages that called itself “Ouijen” had cooked up (the first providing all the actual strategy while the latter two simply handled matters of clairvoyance, of course) was almost completely foolproof, but there were still three main ways Kath could pull this out.
First Miracle: Arkal or Maxwell die before the operation concludes. This whisks everybody who stands in Kath’s way away, allows the mermaid to assume the throne without any further interruptions and sticks Xadrez in an unpredictable fourth round in which Kracht would probably kill him.
Second miracle: Ouijen, or the Ovoid, was lying to him. Xadrez was forced to admit that, vague hunches about writing style aside, he had no way of knowing whether the entity communicating with him through the grid of letters on his chessboard were actually the spirit of his co-battler, or if she was, that she wasn’t simply messing with him about all this Maxwell being alive business. As for the Ovoid, Xadrez still wasn’t quite sure how the two were communicating, except that he was nearly certain the amalgam was in on the plan. There was a very slight possibility that the tactician was simply insane, but of course that had been a constant for a long time.
The third miracle, which Ouijen seemed to be stressing over but which seemed rather farfetched to Xadrez, was that Kath had somehow figured out the secrets of magic. Xadrez wasn’t much of a mage, but he knew that these things took time, and honestly, what were the odds?
It took Skullbeard a good deal of yelling and promise of gold to convince his crew to allow two hundred merfolk aboard the good ship Merfucker. Once it had been firmly established that this was going to happen, God be damned, the crew voted in an overwhelming majority to only let the women aboard, despite minority protestations that mermaids’ bodies “leave you nothing to grab onto.” Guiltily, Skullbeard took this proposition back to the mayor of Hydresther, who was almost too incensed to consider it, but eventually Skullbeard took out his musket and through some passionate orations and bullets convinced the men to let only the children aboard for a place to sleep and we’ll work things out in the morning.
The first merboy climbed the rope rather adeptly, but by the time he reached the deck the winds had crystallized the water on his skin and he was shivering with cold. Skullbeard groaned with a mixture of pity, exasperation, self-pity at his exasperation, and exasperation towards the fact that he was feeling pity, and offered the lad his coat. The merboy looked up at the pirate with those lashless, murky eyes that had haunted Skullbeard’s dreams ever since the day he had first set sail, and looked at the coat as though unsure as to what to do with it.
The captain helped the boy into the coat. “It’ll keep you warm, see,” he muttered, worried about looking too maternal in front of his crew.
“Sea above and sky below,” called the first mate. “Look at all of ‘em.”
Skullbeard looked over the edge of the boat to see that another group had arrived. Merfaces gazed up at him from the hull to the horizon, salt in all of their eyes, tears in most. For all intents and purposes, their city was gone. These waters would never be the same.
The monster wasn’t as big as Kath had been expecting it to be, honestly.
No, no wait. She’d simply had her perspective wrong. It was huge.
Then again, suddenly it swam behind her and grabbed her shoulder roughly with a hand only twice as big than her own. Merely eight feet tall, it was somehow even more frightening than it had been when she’d thought it to be a giant—
A tail the size of a skyscraper hit Kath’s sword arm and nearly, but not quite, knocked the sword out of her hand.
She had been expecting it to be green. In the clear blue water it stood out in a menacing complimentary shade of red, black as a cherry.
Suddenly five reptilian arms grabbed onto her torso from different angles. Something seriously messed up was going on with this monster.
Kath stopped trying to make sense of things. She closed her eyes and listened to the water. The water seemed to be screaming.
Something sharp came at her and her sword cut through the water and hit it with an uncomfortable ringing noise. She felt something hit her tail out from under her and she smashed her head into it, drawing something that smelled more like moss than blood.
A sharp heat stung her back and forced Kath to open her eyes. She was surrounded by a ring of fire, and all around she saw leathery wings silently flapping.
A single tooth the size of Kath’s head whacked her sword, almost playfully. Kath had lost all sense of time.
There was blood in the water. It was her blood.
Arkal decided, probably wrongly, that the best option was to take something blunt—specifically a mace he’d forged from a tooth on the way over—and whack Maxwell in the face with it.
Before the discussion commenced, there was a fight. Arkal lost, and not in a way he found comfortable, but the losing afforded him an opportunity to talk.
“Maxwell!” he grunted. “Dammit, I don’t know how to say this without resorting to clichés. You don’t have to do this! Remember that she needs you! You’ll regret this for the rest of your life!”
A fleshy claw hit the tissue an inch away from Arkal’s head. Maxwell was covered in blood and had absolutely ruined Jen’s clothes. With a shocking degree of optimism Arkal thought to himself that the queen would probably be upset about that.
Maxwell settled down as though it were part of a script. “It really is just like every movie, isn’t it?” he said. “I never meant to become a tragic hero. But I don’t think there’s really an option where I don’t… sacrifice myself.”
Arkal shrugged. “I don’t know what’s going on in that head with you and that worm, boy. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen to you.”
Maxwell shuddered. “Me neither. Everything’s… hectic in here.” The boy shot his head over to one side as though having a conversation with the worm… but it was the opposite shoulder from the one the worm was sticking out of. That disturbed Arkal more than anything else he’d seen in the last few minutes. ”I… I think everything would have been okay if Jen hadn’t… gone off. But the part of her that was her is just… gone. She didn’t even wait to die, really. Must be a queen thing. Or maybe she just… wanted to go.” Maxwell sniffled, and Arkal put an arm on his shoulder, unsure of what to say. He wasn’t very good at advice even in situations within his realm of comprehension.
That was when the pirate ship showed up, riding a wave of Ovoid. The captain wore a priest’s collar and a heavy ivory cross hung around his neck, only partially obscured by his magnificent beard. He was holding a strangely familiar scythe. “Blessed Easter!” the captain growled. “I be granted a vision of a smith and a lad with a red demon on his back. And here y’are, true to life! Aboard, then, for we’ve a green whale to catch, so to speak, and a leviathan also, or so the Lord tells me.”
This was the sort of proposition that Arkal had learned over the course of this battle not to say no to. He grabbed Maxwell by the arm and rushed towards the rope that was lowered for him. Even before they had gotten on deck, the sails were raised and the innards of the hydra were replaced by an endless river of tan.
Xadrez was the first person that the Ovoid dumped in the heart, floating on a tan platform high above the surface of the water. He admired for a moment as the mermaid battled with something ugly, mercurial, and only vaguely dragonish. He didn’t know why he was expecting something more conventional.
Either way.
Xadrez pointed his dagger at a point in the air, and the Ovoid made good on the promises it had somehow managed to make. Traveling at a speed most mortar shells only dream of, Kracht shot out of an Ovoid-portal directly at the leviathan, smacking it squarely on the head and knocking it prone.
Xadrez got a warm feeling inside. There were plenty of things that could have been used as a projectile—Arkal’s hammer was probably the best choice—but this was… satisfying.
The tactician pointed at another spot in the bottom of the heart chamber. The Ovoid opened up space again, and water began draining out. Rapidly. Xadrez noted with some satisfaction that Kath, master swimmer though she seemed to be, struggled against the whirlpool that begin to form.
For perhaps the first time in this whole Grand Battle, Xadrez felt that a plan was finally going well. Phase three.
At a point of the dagger, the pirate ship emerged into the spinning whirlpool and began to circle. Crossbones’ crew kept its cannon trained on Kath and the leviathan.
The tactician teleported on deck. It was mostly up to Maxwell now.
Kracht wasn’t blessed with the faculties to fall unconscious in any meaningful way, but smashing into a monster that seemed to be simultaneously roughly his size and two hundred feet long was one of the few instances that reminded him he was capable of pain. He reminded himself that it wasn’t really Xadrez’ fault.
He opened his eyes and saw somebody he’d never seen before.
There was blood in the air, a thick red that complemented Kracht’s rocky skin and made him feel very green and anthropomorphized and vulnerable. Kath’s pupils went wide with possibilities and a sparkling green look came into her eyes as she looked upon Kracht. It was a look of magic.
Ignoring the cannonballs whizzing past them or the monster that was quickly rousing itself for round two, Kath kissed the mineral on the mouth. Her lips were like water and Kracht suddenly felt like a pebble somebody was about to skip across the surface of a pond.
The red blood in the water turned to green. Then it turned to silk. Then it wrapped itself around Kracht’s neck. Kath wrapped her tail around Kracht and told him he was going to do what she said now.
Kracht had forgotten about eternity and priorities; he had forgotten what the word “magic” meant except for this. He decided it was a good thing. “Yes, of course,” he said.
The monster roared as though upset that it had lost the mermaid’s attention. Kracht turned towards it, radiating rage. Mistress and slave both lunged at the leviathan, and blood filled the water.
To say that Maxwell was having a crisis of identity would be like saying that the sun was burning—it seems to be a bit of a tautology, but an astute reader will understand the emphasis. The sun, coincidentally, was burning. Barring the wind chill, it was a good ninety degrees above the surface of the endless ocean, and Skullbeard was grateful for the brim of his hat and the spray of salty mist against his elaborate facial hair situation.
It was a beautiful day, and with his best nemesis likely in his cups John Skullbeard was content to have the heat and the cool, the ocean and the sky, and all the other miraculous contradictions of the pirate’s life, here in the middle of the end of the world.
There was a sound like a change in the tides as the merfolk arrived.
In other oceans, where the water was just shallow enough to shine green, the sun was setting red. It was a beautiful, complementary red, reflecting off the ocean in shards like the very incarnation of Kaleidon, Cubist God of the sea.
Moneptune, who depending on your school of thought-belief was either a different God or the same God in a different style, in a fit of envy whipped up a storm and threw the waters into an impressionistic blur of violent motion. The redness, which might have been viewed as a portent were any members of the Virate watching the sunset, passed into a grey and murky night. Like everything in the Place that wasn’t beautiful, it was sublime.
Maxwell saw red. It was a sharp, complementary red, like blood, and he momentarily thought he was having a stroke before it told him her name. Fanthalion had a voice like red velvet, a sharp compliment from the blue-black curses and orders he was used to hearing from Sikarius. She told him disjointed truths like a Picasso painting, and he believed her. He was dead. Jen was dead. He was Jen. Death was not—necessarily—death.
Predictably, Sik cut in—or maybe it was just a memory of Sik—or maybe both, a preserved voice, now just another victim of the Wyrm. Maxwell appreciated the ironic comeuppance, but like all abuse victims, made the mistake of listening.
The doctrine of Sikarius was simple and direct, as always. Hunger. A thundering hunger like a storm.
Sprocer admired the storm from up in the grand hollow of the Tree House and found himself swaying. He gave a rustling sigh. Negotiations had been going poorly. The Tree Party was rather fond of tradition, and there wasn’t much precedent for reinstating a reincarnated monarch, at least not one who had died abroad. If only Jen had died along the Crossroads like Old King Phoelix...
No matter. If the General held up his end of the bargain, the once and future queen would certainly be able to put things into order, or at least throw things into a more sensible sort of chaos.
Yes, all would be well, so long as Jen restrained herself from up and dying again…
Arkal rushed after Maxwell, who had rather adamantly failed to follow whatever command had told him to “take a minute.” The lad had sprouted wyrm-wings and flown off into the innards of the hydra without so much as a what’s-going-on-there-was-this-light-was-I-sleeping, and Arkal had gotten just enough of the look on his face to suspect that this meant ill tidings for the prospect of “getting her back.”
Arkal felt he had some stake in the matter. She was perhaps the only other person in this battle who appreciated a good weapon, and he had grown fond of her.
Kracht adored a good weapon, not that anyone had ever bothered to ask him.
The term “mental breakdown” seems a bit strong when applied to somebody whose head is literally a rock, but the increasing devolution of all precedent or even logic to what was going on in this round was beginning to take its toll on the mineral. Kracht was even beginning to radiate just a little faster, which in defiance of all science was his equivalent of breaking a sweat.
He made a stern resolution that he just wasn’t going to deal with this shit any longer and then he dropped into a column of Ovoid.
Rather than just popping out somewhere convenient as is the amalgam’s usual modus operandi, he found himself in a tan place, pulled downwards through infinity at about 6 Gs. The complete vacuum of the space-between-spaces he inhabited meant he couldn’t really feel himself accelerating, but this was somewhat familiar ground, and he knew what was coming next. The Ovoid loved to do this...
Kath was mildly apprehensive about what was coming next. The surface of the water was clear, phlegm-free, and sparkling lightly in a way that made her strongly suggest she was being lured somewhere. She didn’t know if she was in the heart yet or what she would find when she got to the middle of it, but she was vaguely aware that at some point she was going to become queen of what, given her luck, would probably turn out to be a landlocked nation.
None of these grand adventures were really improving Kath’s life. She wanted to kill something.
Kath dipped a toe into the water and flicked a few droplets into the air. The resultant ripple had a somewhat meditative effect on the maid, until something deep inside the water started growling. It wasn’t a conventional growl but rather the kind of layered electronic noise that suggests a mouth designed more to hurt or intimidate than to vocalize or even properly kill.
Kath visualized ribbons of blood cutting the beautiful surface of the pool. The effect was more calming than revolting and she realized that even in her darkest imaginings, it was never her blood. She drew her sword, fused her legs and penetrated the water, making only enough of a splash to mark her passage. Descending into the depths, there appeared to be a green light following the mermaid, and she looked all the world a queen.
Fanthalion wasn’t quite sure what was going on in her head, but was somewhat aware that she was losing.
Letting in Maxwell had been a mistake not because she was letting in Maxwell—the boy was charming in his own way and they seemed to share the same goal of getting Jen back—but because she was also letting in Sikarius. The elder wyrm hailed from an age that was less tactful but nonetheless more effective at the psychic stuff, and his presence pushed aside her own like a gorilla fighting an accountant. Sik didn’t care a lick for Jen (Fantha wasn’t quite sure why she was bothering herself—maybe she just didn’t like to leave anything half-finished) and was instead drawing Maxwell towards a much more primal goal.
Sik wanted to eat the Hydra.
Despite the obvious temptation, this was a monumentally stupid idea for any one of a dozen ideas Fantha attempted to telepathically outline. First of all, getting a usable gene sample for something so complicated would take hours, which was longer than the round was likely to last. Secondly, the hydra was psychically as primal and stubborn as Sikarius, as sexually frustrated as Maxwell, and as clever and magically-infused as Jen, a combination that might easily overwhelm any wyrm or two who tried to devour it. Thirdly, Fantha was simply more anxious than hungry and wanted to get this whole Grand Battle clusterfuck over with before Jen got old. And obviously it was going to end in the heart.
Fantha had picked up enough magic to reason that whatever door opened when Kath completed the labyrinth would be infused with enough green energy that a hasty spell could be devised to bring Jen back into the fold—at which point it was simply a matter of kicking the mermaid’s ass to the curb once and for all, returning to the Place (where hopefully even the Observer would have to give due obeisance) and becoming Special Advisor to the Queen in Matters of Devouring the Flesh of the Living. She imagined the magical beings, chimaeras and spirits and things that photosynthesized using only the sunlight they had trapped and killed themselves. It would be… delicious.
Sikarius disagreed. Sikarius impressed upon Fantha that they were currently inside the greatest most powerfullest creature he had ever seen and can I have it can I can I can I don’t answer that of course I can. Fantha felt like an ineffective mother and wished there could be some wyrm equivalent of getting Sik diagnosed with ADHD and shutting him up through medication. Alas.
Maxwell was listening to his first wyrm, out of force of habit, and had found a gland far enough away from all other signs of life that he could chow down on a city’s worth of flesh in peace. Fantha prayed for a miracle.
Xadrez believed in miracles, in that he always tried to account for the possibility, however slim, that his enemies would produce one. The plan that the tactician, the Ovoid, and the series of messages that called itself “Ouijen” had cooked up (the first providing all the actual strategy while the latter two simply handled matters of clairvoyance, of course) was almost completely foolproof, but there were still three main ways Kath could pull this out.
First Miracle: Arkal or Maxwell die before the operation concludes. This whisks everybody who stands in Kath’s way away, allows the mermaid to assume the throne without any further interruptions and sticks Xadrez in an unpredictable fourth round in which Kracht would probably kill him.
Second miracle: Ouijen, or the Ovoid, was lying to him. Xadrez was forced to admit that, vague hunches about writing style aside, he had no way of knowing whether the entity communicating with him through the grid of letters on his chessboard were actually the spirit of his co-battler, or if she was, that she wasn’t simply messing with him about all this Maxwell being alive business. As for the Ovoid, Xadrez still wasn’t quite sure how the two were communicating, except that he was nearly certain the amalgam was in on the plan. There was a very slight possibility that the tactician was simply insane, but of course that had been a constant for a long time.
The third miracle, which Ouijen seemed to be stressing over but which seemed rather farfetched to Xadrez, was that Kath had somehow figured out the secrets of magic. Xadrez wasn’t much of a mage, but he knew that these things took time, and honestly, what were the odds?
It took Skullbeard a good deal of yelling and promise of gold to convince his crew to allow two hundred merfolk aboard the good ship Merfucker. Once it had been firmly established that this was going to happen, God be damned, the crew voted in an overwhelming majority to only let the women aboard, despite minority protestations that mermaids’ bodies “leave you nothing to grab onto.” Guiltily, Skullbeard took this proposition back to the mayor of Hydresther, who was almost too incensed to consider it, but eventually Skullbeard took out his musket and through some passionate orations and bullets convinced the men to let only the children aboard for a place to sleep and we’ll work things out in the morning.
The first merboy climbed the rope rather adeptly, but by the time he reached the deck the winds had crystallized the water on his skin and he was shivering with cold. Skullbeard groaned with a mixture of pity, exasperation, self-pity at his exasperation, and exasperation towards the fact that he was feeling pity, and offered the lad his coat. The merboy looked up at the pirate with those lashless, murky eyes that had haunted Skullbeard’s dreams ever since the day he had first set sail, and looked at the coat as though unsure as to what to do with it.
The captain helped the boy into the coat. “It’ll keep you warm, see,” he muttered, worried about looking too maternal in front of his crew.
“Sea above and sky below,” called the first mate. “Look at all of ‘em.”
Skullbeard looked over the edge of the boat to see that another group had arrived. Merfaces gazed up at him from the hull to the horizon, salt in all of their eyes, tears in most. For all intents and purposes, their city was gone. These waters would never be the same.
The monster wasn’t as big as Kath had been expecting it to be, honestly.
No, no wait. She’d simply had her perspective wrong. It was huge.
Then again, suddenly it swam behind her and grabbed her shoulder roughly with a hand only twice as big than her own. Merely eight feet tall, it was somehow even more frightening than it had been when she’d thought it to be a giant—
A tail the size of a skyscraper hit Kath’s sword arm and nearly, but not quite, knocked the sword out of her hand.
She had been expecting it to be green. In the clear blue water it stood out in a menacing complimentary shade of red, black as a cherry.
Suddenly five reptilian arms grabbed onto her torso from different angles. Something seriously messed up was going on with this monster.
Kath stopped trying to make sense of things. She closed her eyes and listened to the water. The water seemed to be screaming.
Something sharp came at her and her sword cut through the water and hit it with an uncomfortable ringing noise. She felt something hit her tail out from under her and she smashed her head into it, drawing something that smelled more like moss than blood.
A sharp heat stung her back and forced Kath to open her eyes. She was surrounded by a ring of fire, and all around she saw leathery wings silently flapping.
A single tooth the size of Kath’s head whacked her sword, almost playfully. Kath had lost all sense of time.
There was blood in the water. It was her blood.
Arkal decided, probably wrongly, that the best option was to take something blunt—specifically a mace he’d forged from a tooth on the way over—and whack Maxwell in the face with it.
Before the discussion commenced, there was a fight. Arkal lost, and not in a way he found comfortable, but the losing afforded him an opportunity to talk.
“Maxwell!” he grunted. “Dammit, I don’t know how to say this without resorting to clichés. You don’t have to do this! Remember that she needs you! You’ll regret this for the rest of your life!”
A fleshy claw hit the tissue an inch away from Arkal’s head. Maxwell was covered in blood and had absolutely ruined Jen’s clothes. With a shocking degree of optimism Arkal thought to himself that the queen would probably be upset about that.
Maxwell settled down as though it were part of a script. “It really is just like every movie, isn’t it?” he said. “I never meant to become a tragic hero. But I don’t think there’s really an option where I don’t… sacrifice myself.”
Arkal shrugged. “I don’t know what’s going on in that head with you and that worm, boy. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen to you.”
Maxwell shuddered. “Me neither. Everything’s… hectic in here.” The boy shot his head over to one side as though having a conversation with the worm… but it was the opposite shoulder from the one the worm was sticking out of. That disturbed Arkal more than anything else he’d seen in the last few minutes. ”I… I think everything would have been okay if Jen hadn’t… gone off. But the part of her that was her is just… gone. She didn’t even wait to die, really. Must be a queen thing. Or maybe she just… wanted to go.” Maxwell sniffled, and Arkal put an arm on his shoulder, unsure of what to say. He wasn’t very good at advice even in situations within his realm of comprehension.
That was when the pirate ship showed up, riding a wave of Ovoid. The captain wore a priest’s collar and a heavy ivory cross hung around his neck, only partially obscured by his magnificent beard. He was holding a strangely familiar scythe. “Blessed Easter!” the captain growled. “I be granted a vision of a smith and a lad with a red demon on his back. And here y’are, true to life! Aboard, then, for we’ve a green whale to catch, so to speak, and a leviathan also, or so the Lord tells me.”
This was the sort of proposition that Arkal had learned over the course of this battle not to say no to. He grabbed Maxwell by the arm and rushed towards the rope that was lowered for him. Even before they had gotten on deck, the sails were raised and the innards of the hydra were replaced by an endless river of tan.
Xadrez was the first person that the Ovoid dumped in the heart, floating on a tan platform high above the surface of the water. He admired for a moment as the mermaid battled with something ugly, mercurial, and only vaguely dragonish. He didn’t know why he was expecting something more conventional.
Either way.
Xadrez pointed his dagger at a point in the air, and the Ovoid made good on the promises it had somehow managed to make. Traveling at a speed most mortar shells only dream of, Kracht shot out of an Ovoid-portal directly at the leviathan, smacking it squarely on the head and knocking it prone.
Xadrez got a warm feeling inside. There were plenty of things that could have been used as a projectile—Arkal’s hammer was probably the best choice—but this was… satisfying.
The tactician pointed at another spot in the bottom of the heart chamber. The Ovoid opened up space again, and water began draining out. Rapidly. Xadrez noted with some satisfaction that Kath, master swimmer though she seemed to be, struggled against the whirlpool that begin to form.
For perhaps the first time in this whole Grand Battle, Xadrez felt that a plan was finally going well. Phase three.
At a point of the dagger, the pirate ship emerged into the spinning whirlpool and began to circle. Crossbones’ crew kept its cannon trained on Kath and the leviathan.
The tactician teleported on deck. It was mostly up to Maxwell now.
Kracht wasn’t blessed with the faculties to fall unconscious in any meaningful way, but smashing into a monster that seemed to be simultaneously roughly his size and two hundred feet long was one of the few instances that reminded him he was capable of pain. He reminded himself that it wasn’t really Xadrez’ fault.
He opened his eyes and saw somebody he’d never seen before.
There was blood in the air, a thick red that complemented Kracht’s rocky skin and made him feel very green and anthropomorphized and vulnerable. Kath’s pupils went wide with possibilities and a sparkling green look came into her eyes as she looked upon Kracht. It was a look of magic.
Ignoring the cannonballs whizzing past them or the monster that was quickly rousing itself for round two, Kath kissed the mineral on the mouth. Her lips were like water and Kracht suddenly felt like a pebble somebody was about to skip across the surface of a pond.
The red blood in the water turned to green. Then it turned to silk. Then it wrapped itself around Kracht’s neck. Kath wrapped her tail around Kracht and told him he was going to do what she said now.
Kracht had forgotten about eternity and priorities; he had forgotten what the word “magic” meant except for this. He decided it was a good thing. “Yes, of course,” he said.
The monster roared as though upset that it had lost the mermaid’s attention. Kracht turned towards it, radiating rage. Mistress and slave both lunged at the leviathan, and blood filled the water.