It was midway through the morning when the small party set out again.
Simo had been insistent on dissecting all of the thralls’ corpses before they moved on, recording whatever knowledge she gleaned from the bodies in a small, leather-bound volume propped open on one of the hall’s tables. The anatomist worked patiently throughout the evening and night to dismantle the thralls down to the smallest organ, storing those she seemed to find particularly interesting in jars of murky liquid and discarding others to join a growing pile of offal in a salvaged chest. Occasionally, she would call for Degel or Sorus – usually to aid her in moving the next corpse into position for examination, but just as often to ask for their opinions on some of the anatomical oddities she had uncovered, or to query the Hand of Planegifts on a particular element of biology that she thought to resemble that of his.
By the time they finished with the last of the thralls’ bodies, it was early in the morning and both mercenaries were feeling the strain of the night’s work. Sorus was yawning with almost every word and growing more and more snappish as the lack of sleep took its toll; Degel, who had handled much of the more physical work, was breathing hard and leaning heavily upon a table’s edge for support. Only Simo seemed unfazed by the night’s work, her features showing no trace of weariness. If anything, she had been eager to continue on the way before the sun rose, but a particularly irate response from her hirelings had put paid to that course of action.
And so they had stayed in the empty hall for the remainder of the night, the two mercenaries taking the opportunity for rest from their labours while they still had the chance to. Both had been risen a few hours later thanks to their employer, the infuriatingly unruffled scholar unceremoniously half-shaking, half-calling them into wakefulness as soon as the sun crested the horizon. She had been busy, stowing her specimens in her seemingly depthless backpack and wiping down the tables until they were free of the gore that had coated them scarcely a night ago. With no further reason to remain, she was quite eager to get underway to their next destination.
It was that which brought them to their current predicament – trudging through the snow of the Tundra of Heroes in the low, dull light of a winter morning, beneath a sky shrouded by an impenetrable cover of clouds and heavy with waiting snowfall. This region of the Tundra was almost entirely flat, and bereft of any plant-life beyond the occasional leafless tree-trunk or frost-speckled mass of lichen clinging to their sides; here and there a snowdrift rose from the flat land where the wind had blown particularly strongly, or the low curvature of a small hill rose briefly from the ground before sinking back down into the soil. Nothing stirred from the undergrowth at their passage; whatever natural fauna called this place their home were either absent, or driven underground by the gathering storm.
(There was another possibility, of course, but Sorus pointedly refused to consider it. She doubted they would come this far out, anyway.)
Shaking her head to herself, Sorus continued to press on through the snow, only to nearly run straight into Simo’s back. The scholar had stopped abruptly in front of her, head turned slightly to the side, like that of a curious bird.
“What-?” Sorus began to snap, only to be cut off by a raised finger.
“Look.” Simo raised a hand to point directly ahead. Looming out of the gathering storm and gloom was an indistinct mass of shapes and colour – a squat, brownish smear on the near-horizon. “There’s something out there. Can’t tell what.”
“I’ll go ahead.” Degel was already in motion toward the distant smear, unable to disguise his eagerness to please the scholar through his proactive action. “Find what’s over there, and come back quick as I can.”
Simo nodded her approval. “Mukca’s wings speed you.”
The Hand gave a momentary salute before dashing off into the snowy fields ahead, leaving Sorus and Simo standing alone.
Time passed. The wind began to pick up in earnest, and the snow, casting a translucent white veil across the fields around them. Neither spoke. Simo seemed determined to keep her own counsel; Sorus was still irate from a lack of sleep, and did not trust herself to speak without showing it. The minutes stretched on, seeming to become hours, and then days. Her fingers drummed up and down on the hilt of her sword as her patience began to fray, embers beginning to burn in her chest. Sorus Chantscar was not a patient woman at the best of times, and this need to simply stand out in the freezing cold sat ill with her. It was a relief when she picked up the rapid sound of snow and grass crunching underfoot.
Degel was returning at speed, quickly striding across the powdery snow to rejoin his comrades. His mouth was fixed in a grim line, and one gauntlet rested around the handle of his battle axe, as though fearing something would leap up from beneath the snow he was walking upon. At the sight of his grim-faced expression, Sorus felt herself instinctually tensing up, one hand going to her weapon in readiness for whatever warning he would provide.
“Looks like the remains of a camp,” He announced, without preamble. “Fire’s long dead, and the tents’re rent through where they aren’t choked with snow. Looks like whoever was there took off in a hurry – they left enough baggage for at least a couple mules behind, with more spilling out’a one of the tents.”
“Probably animals,” Sorus muttered, though she could not hide the note of uncertainty in her voice. “They’re usually desperate, ‘round this time of year.”
“Any sign of foul play?” Simo appeared unconvinced by Sorus’ suggestion, fixing Degel with her odd, hawkish stare. “Violence?”
“Maybe.” Degel shrugged his shoulders, eyes flicking uncertainly. “Just a’fore I came back here, I saw something in the snow – definitely big enough to be a body. Couldn’t get a good look at it.”
“Then we look closer.” Sorus stated, her voice taking on a hard, sharp edge. She did not wait for a reaction from either her partner or employer, instead striding forward into the gathering blizzard with her jaw firmly set.
The campsite itself was a small affair – a series of cloth and leather tents, arranged in a loose circle around a small, stone-ringed campfire’s ashes. Whatever shelter they had once provided was now gone: their sides were white with built-up snow, or else rent open at the sides to leave their inside bare to the Tundra of Heroes’ freezing winds. Ice-encrusted bones tumbled at the mouth of the nearest tent, its ragged flap stirring as the breeze picked up once more. Worn bags and sacks were strewn around the snowy ground, fraying sides ripping open to spill their contents out to the soil; much of it looked to be antiquated coins or armour, rusted and worn down by the passage of time and the harshness of the surroundings.
There was a figure in the middle of the camp, kneeling in the snow right beside the long-cooled remains of the fire. A tall, broad-shouldered figure, kneeling in the middle of a circle of unmistakably human bodies.
“That man was not there before,” Degel whispered, suddenly alert.
“A survivor? Another traveller?” Simo’s voice was similarly hushed; her fingers hovered cautiously about her daggers.
“Can’t tell.” Degel carefully drew the axes from his sides, gripping the oak handles tightly as he exchanged a wary glance with his employer. His heartbeat sounded terribly loud in his ears, in the near-silence that had fallen over the tundra and the three of them. “Not from here.”
“Then hold here.” Sorus said, a trifle more sharply than she’d intended. Her sword was already in hand, and a sudden, reckless fire in her chest. “I’ll go ahead.”
Before either of the others could get a word in edgewise, the swordswoman strode forward through the bluster and snow until she was a dozen steps away from the man, before raising her voice to call out to him.
The man did not respond. He was of the living, of that there was no doubt – even at a distance, they could discern the rapid, heavy rise and fall of his shoulders, as of a man exhausted by a chase or great emotion. The bronze and iron plates of his armour were speckled with fallen snow and frost, the whitish deposits now falling from his armour as he began to move once more, pressing his hands against the ground and beginning to push himself to his feet. Sorus grew closer, hesitantly reaching out to touch his shoulder with her free hand.
“Are you…?”
Quick as a whip, the man’s head snapped toward her, a low growl tearing its way out of his throat to accompany the movement. The pallid skin of his face was covered in sores and shot through with discoloured veins, black lips drawn back from the teeth in a rictus snarl. At the sight of Sorus, the low growl ratcheted up to a sharp snarl, and the man finished lurching upright even as the mercenary flinched backward in recognition of the growing danger.
“He’s a bloody thrall!”
That shout was the pebble that started the avalanche. The bodies forming the circle burst into sudden, frenzied motion the moment the words left his mouth, kicking up white clouds of powdery snow as they scrambled to their feet and rushed forward. The air filled with the hollow clicks of teeth snapping together and the roaring of the attacking thralls, infected man after infected man practically tumbling over one another in their sudden haste to bury their teeth in living flesh. One of the leading thralls’ copper-bladed axe met Degel’s with the shriek of metal on metal; the Hand of Planegifts quickly responded with a hard punch to the throat that sent the infected man reeling backwards, then a swing of his own axe that barely missed destroying the lumbering thrall’s face.
Sorus faced the snarling form of the man who had lured them into this trap, her sword gripped in both hands as she circled warily about. The thrall was well-armoured, the leather and bronze plates still strong despite their obvious age, and had been swift to draw a longsword from a tattered leather scabbard at its side the moment it rose to its feet. Working her sword through the armour and into the vulnerable body beneath would be no easy task.
As if sensing her distracted thoughts, it took the opportunity to lunge at her with its longsword arcing down toward her shoulder. Sorus met its blade with her own, a quick, deft parry that she managed to smoothly transition into an outright lock. Up close, its monstrous features were even more pronounced – the snapping, olive-stone teeth; the bulging, black-tinted veins; the pallid, stretched skin that hinted unpleasantly at the workings of muscle and tendon beneath. It stank of blood and rotted meat, the fluids weeping from the open sores only adding to its noisome stench. In such close quarters, it was hard to believe that it had ever even begun to deceive her, and that thought stirred a sharp flare of anger in her chest as she broke the lock with a hard punch to the thrall’s stomach, knocking it back a few steps.
Seizing the advantage, Sorus strode confidently forward, her sword flicking out to slice into her foe’s right shoulder. A thin line of dark blood fell from the gash as the blade bit, but the armoured thrall lurched away before it could penetrate deeply, the motion pulling Sorus’ blade from its wound. Another two blows landed, tearing gashes into the bronze plates that protected the thrall’s chest and right shoulder before it could respond with a wild thrust of its own sword. The swordswoman deftly stepped aside to evade the strike, only to grunt in surprise as something struck hard against her shoulder with enough force to stagger her; it was long enough for the thrall to hammer a strong punch into her mid-section, driving the air from her lungs in a wordless
woof and pushing her several steps backwards.
Grimacing, Sorus managed to suck a breath into her chest despite the painful burning, turning her head for a moment toward her shoulder. The sight there almost sent the breath right back out of her – a copper bolt, protruding from the plates of her shoulderguard. Not deep enough to hit flesh, or even to break through the leather, but the fact it was there at all was enough to bring a dozen unnerving possibilities whirling to the forefront of her mind and leave her blood running cold. Thralls didn’t
use crossbows. It couldn’t have been Degel or Cosmoscleaned. There was nobody else out there. It –
A roar from her opponent brought her back to reality, along with a swing from the thrall’s sword that barely missed taking off her nose.
Think later. Sorus mentally snarled at herself, swearing under her breath as she turned the thrall’s next strike away before lunging toward its trailing knee.
Kill the bastards now!To the right of Sorus’ duel, Degel was busy facing two thralls at once. A third lay slumped in the snow it had sought to rise from, a steady flow of blood staining the snow pink; he had scored a lucky blow in the first moments of the battle, splitting its unarmoured head apart down to the chin before the swinging blows of the other two had forced him back. Grunting with the effort, Degel ducked beneath the punch of one before jerking to the side as its fellow rushed forward to deliver a clumsy thrust of its dagger, feeling the rusted blade skim past the edge of his shoulder guard as he turned out of its path. A retaliatory strike brought him a moment’s breathing room as the weighted pommel of one axe crushed the thrall’s nose and sent it staggering back, toppling to the ground as one leg caught on some detritus hidden among the snow.
The other did not wait for its comrade to rise, instead rushing forward with a throaty snarl and snapping teeth. Its limbs jerked uncontrollably as it ran, the arms windmilling around to become crude flails, the legs flying about beneath it. Light shone off the frost-speckled bronze mail that clung to its torso. One hand dragged an axe along the ground behind it, the weathered blade leaving a red-orange trail through the snow as flakes of rust peeled away from the metal.
Perhaps, Degel thought, the Blight had rotted whatever nerves it had into the point of near uselessness. It would certainly explain its lurching, uncoordinated movements. He stepped about its clumsy, crooked limbs with almost scornful ease, retaliating with hard, heavy swings of his twinned axes that tore great gashes into its exposed flesh and sent blood arcing through the air with each motion.
Amidst the chaos of the ambush, Simo darted in and out of the individual battles at a run, her daggers opening veins and tearing gashes into exposed flesh with every blow before she darted away, leaving the enraged thralls to grasp at thin air with their crooked fingers and black nails. She had seen an oddity among the horde, and was rapidly homing in on it for study.
Thrusting her right-hand dagger through the throat of one thrall, Simo quickly turned on the balls of her feet to slash another’s grasping hand off at the wrist. Two more blows finished the wounded thrall – one sliding between the sore-speckled ribs to cut through a lung, the second barely missing the heart to instead bisect a critical artery. The diseased bandit crashed to the ground, blood spilling from the cuts in his chest. Fast as lightning she was away again, ducking below the extended arm of another to plunge a dagger into its exposed armpit and another into the side of its neck as she rose upright. The thrall crumpled to the ground as she tugged the dagger across, neatly slitting its throat.
Hearing a cry from her right, she turned her head to the side in search of another target. Instead she found Degel and Sorus, still engaged in their respective duels.
Simo took a moment to assess the pair’s situation. Both were tiring, though they still held the upper hand – neither had taken a true wound, though both bore small scratches on their armour and exposed skin – though they were both sheened with sweat despite the cold, and their stances were beginning to betray their exhaustion. The thralls they faced were hardly in a better state, blood pouring from the wounds ripped into their flesh, limbs hanging in ragged tatters of torn meat, but they were as fresh in stamina as had been the first moments of the battle. They pressed closer with each passing moment, growing bold now that their opponents had begun to tire.
Simo hesitated. In all likelihood, they would be fine – they held the upper hand, and their foes were both wounded. There was, however, a definite chance that either could be wounded, possibly to the point of crippling or a fatality. That would be… quite the loss, even to the point of jeopardising her mission. She took a step away, trying to focus on the target she had picked out from the thrall-horde, but her treacherous eyes kept turning back toward the raging duels. She gritted her teeth.
“Storm damn it all.” She muttered to herself.
Grimacing, Simo raised her blades and began to step forward to engage the thralls, when a low growl behind her alerted her to a rising threat. She span on her heel with just enough time to dodge a speeding shaft of bronze metal that whipped through the air, passing inches away from her right eye to pierce through the hide of the nearest tent. With the decision made for her, Simo wasted no time in charging full-force in the direction of the strike’s source, weak sunlight gleaming off her daggers’ bloodied blades.
Degel staggered slightly as he turned aside another blow from the howling thrall. His muscles were burning with exertion; his bruises and scratches throbbed painfully. Not enough to stop him, not by a long shot, but enough that he knew he must disengage or otherwise finish the fight – and soon, before it could overwhelm him.
“Sorus!” He shouted, looking back over his shoulder to catch her eye. He jerked his head toward the thrall he was facing. “Trade ya!”
The swordswoman needed little encouragement to accept. Degel span out of her way as she came charging forward, her sword already wheeling around to strike at the snarling thrall’s bloated legs; he matched her charge with one of his own, cannoning shoulder-first into the chest of the axe-wielding thrall. It grunted and staggered slightly at the blow, more of a reaction to the force than out of any pain, but it bought him enough time to slam the blade of an axe down onto its right elbow. The blade trembled slightly from the force, but it bit nonetheless, cutting down through a chink already opened by Sorus’ sword and splitting the thrall’s right hand down to the wrist.
The thrall staggered backwards, shrieking in rage as blood poured from its ruined palm. Degel stepped forward with a snarl of his own, axes raising to sever the creature’s head from its shoulders, only to stagger as something slammed into his breastplate. It was strong enough to force him a few steps backwards before he could compensate for the force; he whipped his serpentine head back and forth, seeking out the source of the attack. He saw nothing, but that itself proved nothing – any marksman worth the name would have displaced, and the snowfall was starting to hamper his vision again.
Whatever had delivered the blow, it had not been enough to penetrate or even draw blood. What it had been was enough to distract him, and the one-armed thrall did not hesitate to take advantage of that distraction. It crashed into him in a blur of motion that bowled him over to the ground, fist catching him across the jaw with enough force to leave stars flashing behind his eyes, its bloodied stump rebounding uselessly from the same.
The thrall leaned in closer to his face, jaundiced eyes rolling, teeth snapping together inches away from his flesh; fetid saliva dripped from ragged, frostbite-blistered lips to land warmly on his cheek and throat. Degel snarled and spat in response, struggling against the weight pressing down on his chest, but the thrall was solid and heavy as a boulder even without one arm. He tried to thrash his head forward against his opponent’s to buy time, but the thrall responded with jerky movements of its own head that kept him from landing a solid blow; his arms were pinned by his sides, and his legs were kicking uselessly, unable to find any purchase on the ground.
And all the while, the carious teeth projecting from its rotting gums came ever closer to sinking into his scales.
Fear’s freezing hand closed around his rapidly beating heart and began to squeeze, sending waves of cold rushing around his body. Degel strained and pushed with everything he had against the thrall’s weight as one bite came perilously close to tearing into his flesh, but it simply would not budge. He gritted his teeth hard. He feared death, like any living thing would, but worse than that was the nature of this death – becoming a prisoner in his own flesh, condemned to watch his body devour anything in its path until violence took it or the Blight finally consumed him.
The thrall stopped mid-motion. It shuddered violently for a moment, an almost confused look passing over its face, before the broad blade of a bronze dagger emerged through its face, the bloodied tip coming to rest inches away from his own. The thrall’s eyes blinked once or twice as though surprised by the fatal blow, before the owner of the weapon wrenched it upward with enough force to cleave the upper half of the thrall’s skull in two; blood misted his vision as it flew from the wound. A boot rammed into its side, forcing the twitching body to roll off the trapped man.
Degel scrambled to his feet with thanks on his lips, finding himself facing the grim-faced figure of Simo. The remaining thralls lay around the campsite where they had fallen, their blood slowly staining the snow a deep scarlet. Sorus went from corpse to corpse with a snarl on her reddened face, slashing each fallen thrall’s throat with her sword to ensure they were truly dead, rather than seemingly feigning it as the first one had. Simo quickly extracted the dagger from the downed thrall’s broken skull, wiping it clean on its tattered jerkin. She seemed preoccupied, looking toward the bodies with an oddly-focused eye.
“Fascinating…”
Degel turned his head to face Simo, grimacing as he wiped some of the thrall’s blood from his eyes. “Something interesting, doctor?”
“Aye,” Simo gestured with a hand toward the broken bodies on the ground. “You noticed the way these thralls fought, yes?”
“Hardly.” Degel returned, grimace tightening as he gingerly touched a finger to his jaw. He could already feel a bruise forming under the scales. “I was more concerned with the one trying to take my face off.”
“Well, then, attention is certainly something to work on…” Simo muttered, her features creasing in slight irritation. Degel glared sharply at that and began to work up a protest, only for the scholar to plough on. “These creatures did not fight as a mindless mob. There was an element of strategy to this attack, and in the way they fought against us.”
“What?” Sorus couldn’t keep the surprise and slight disbelief out of her voice as she joined the conversation, eyeing Simo as though she had grown a second head. “You’re saying these things can plan ahead?”
“Quite.” Simo pointed to one of the corpses, singling it out for their attention. It was dressed in lightweight plates of leather and bore a half-empty quiver on its back, complimenting the crossbow still clamped firmly in its blistered hands. A crude bronze bolt lay half-buried in the dirty snow beside it. Sorus whispered an oath under her breath at the sight of it, her fingers almost unconsciously rising to touch her damaged shoulderguard. “This one, for instance – it stayed behind the rest of the thrall-swarm, let them soak up the blows to better make use of its crossbow from a distance. Accuracy leaves much to be desired, but the fact it can use such a weapon at all beyond a bludgeon is telling.
“And these –” Here, she gestured to the rest of the fallen thralls with a wide, sweeping motion of her arm. “You saw them in the first moments of this battle. Dead to even a close glance, let alone a casual observer. Yet when the first one rose up, they came to life and struck with it, taking advantage of your surprise to press their attack.” A gleam flashed in the scholar’s narrow, grey eyes. “Awfully convenient for them should it be coincidence, would you not say?”
“Issha’s blood…” Sorus murmured.
The idea of thralls that could think, that could plan ahead and lure the living into traps seemed like insanity; something out of a mummer’s tale, or out of the nightmares in the ancient Black Scrolls of the Law-Giver Sugrith. But for all that, she could not deny what she had seen during the battle, and the scholar’s words made a disturbing amount of sense. Those men
had seemed dead and lifeless at the battle’s beginning, only to spring to life as they approached. Her head turned, again, toward her shoulder – the copper bolt still protruded from the metal plates, wedged into a seam between two of them.
"Indeed." Simo nodded quickly, her hawkish eyes narrowing almost to slits. Already she had withdrawn her book and quill, making notes in it with quick flicks of her fingers and hand. "It seems we are not alone in the pursuit of knowledge, astounding as that might seem from these... creatures."
“Issha’s blood…” Sorus murmured again, though there was a more thoughtful note to it this time. “Then we are all in danger. If more of them become like this –”
“Which is precisely why my mission is of such importance, Cosmosclean.” Simo interrupted, voice surprisingly firm. “Now come – let us keep moving toward our destination.”
She re-sheathed her daggers at her sides, and nodded toward the horizon. The clouds had finally begun to part, and the horizon was becoming clearer with it – distantly, she could make out the deep black-purple smear of several dozen towers, rising from the earth as though to beckon them onwards. Almost unbidden, a smile touched her lips.
“I fear these goblins will be quite… unwelcoming to a house call.”
The meat was fleeing across the grass, its legs swinging around under it in frantic S-shapes. It stopped. Pressed its back to the wall, whole body trembling. There was no way through. Its head snapped left and right. Again its path was blocked. Another turn, and another blockage. It was terrified, so terrified she could smell it. Its hands left bloody marks on the stone as it beat against them, shrieking in its high, thin voice. Her head twitched. It hurt to hear. It wouldn’t put her off.
She raised the sword in her hand, and brought it down hard.
It crawled away from her, one leg dragging behind it, baying at her friends with a high, irritating tone. One of hers stepped forward and kicked it in the face, driving it back to her grasping, strong hands. She twisted it in her grip to show the others. Saliva dripped from their mouths, clawed hands reached for her prey. She smiled, widely.
She was proud of them. They were working together. They were a team, a group, an army of few.
The meat thrashed in her grasp, shrieking, scratching, struggling against her fingers. She raised her sword and bought it down on its neck, cut deep. Blood foamed out, and she bit down hard, drinking it down, feeling the hot liquid pulse on her tongue and lips. One of the others came forth, and another, sinking their teeth into the sweet flesh. Eating their fill.
She pulled the sword loose. It felt good to hold. It was helping her think straight. She felt strong – strong, clear-headed, more able to hunt and kill and serve.
She rose up, held the blade up to the sky. Sunlight gleamed, stained brown-red. Her eyes fixated on it, blinked as she forced herself to focus on it.
It was a tool, just like what the meat used. What made them so strong, so able to kill. And now it was hers. Simply holding it had cleared her head of the fog, strengthened the will and intelligence that had made her a core part of the pack. There was a power to it, a thrilling pulse that brought back memories of the time before. Memories of the things she had lost. A glimpse into the world she had known before the sickness wormed into her flesh, taking root like the blade did in her hand. She could see the binding in her hand – thick, black tendrils that worked their way under her pale skin, tracing their way over the flesh.
She growled, shaking her head. She reached out with her fingers, trying to grab the memories, pin down her thoughts like she had the small, fleeing prey. They were all tangled up: the roots of the disease, the threads of the binding, the dark lines under her flesh, all running and knotting together until her vision swam and her head stung.
They weren’t threads. Not all of them. They were veins. Arteries. A black scrap of cloth around her wrist. Her friends had something similar around theirs.
What had happened to them? She had the image of a hollow, numbed face. The smell of decay and blood. A body sheathed in boils. A woman, shrieking in terror and pain. Bones snapping. She shoved the memories aside. Looked for happier ones. A stone cell. A handsome young man. A scarred young woman, swinging a weapon with glee in her eyes. Laughter and words, around a burning fire.
She tried to cling to the good memories, but the bad pushed them out. Disease. Death. Fear. Swords ringing from swords. Beds and halls choked with the dying. People in black robes and armour, talking…
The pain pulsed again, and her mind blanked for a moment. She blinked through sore, ringed eyes. All her thoughts were gone. There was a black smear on her wrist. She raised a hand to rub them off, and realised there was something in it.
A sword.
She gripped it tight. Never let it go. It was power. It was memory. Power over the others and herself. She sucked in a slow, shuddering breath. Her lungs burned. Her skin itched, the blisters weeping. Her eyes were raw and red, like they’d been peeled; liquid was running down her cheeks. Her brain felt like it was shifting, like it was twitching, like it was rotting from the inside out. Blood pooled in her mouth as she bit down on her lip. Fingers long stripped of meat curled upon the handle, bone ticking on metal.
The black figure approached. She recognised it. She was strong, but not stronger than he. He was the boss, the lord, the master of the pack. She was pleased to have remembered that much.
She bowed down, low. Her sword met the ground, but she didn’t let go. Never would. He stared down at her, hollow black eyes unblinking, mouth unmoving. For a half-second, her vision flared red with rage at the sight. He smelt strange. Like the meat, but not. Like something bad. Rotten.
Why?
She reached out for a moment, but the voice intruded. It shook her to her roots. Any thoughts were driven from her mind. She bowed her head, hissing in submission. The words were nonsense, but the meaning impossibly clear.
Tools. Use tools.
That was how it worked, wasn’t it? What made her strong. Why the boss trusted her to lead the pack. The others were slow to understand. They struggled to recall what they had; how to work together; the way they had once used tools to aid each other, fought together, spoke together. She would re-teach them. Hold them together. Keep them together.
They would stand or fall together.
Author
Topic: Museum III, adventure succession game (DF 0.47.05) (Read 409570 times)