LIII
Ashe
ASHE GROANED AS she rolled onto her back, staring at the dawnbreak sun streaking the Sea of Mist on the desert dunes.
The air was blessedly cool, not the normal stifling acrid of the barren sands. She blinked a few times to verify she was still alive (she was) and then sat up gingerly. Her entire body felt as if she had fallen from Gargantua and hit every sky-risen apartment complex of Drenth on the way down. Every bone ached, her muscles were like sun-dried fruit, taut and twisted. She rubbed a hand against her forehead in a futile attempt to quell the splitting pain in her skull.
“Zenith’s cock.”
Two dozen feet away, the airglider was little more than a pile of kindling. The wings, or what was left of them, stuck out of the dunes, oil spurting from one of the hull’s multiple interior pipes like a cut artery. All told, it was more a smoking pile of slag instead of an airglider.
A rustling in the sands to her left drew her attention as Ruane dragged herself into view, bent over on claws and talons. Purplish blood dribbled between a plethora of the drakken’s exoscales and her tail swished experimentally as she dug through the wreckage to scavenge her longknife, coming up with a pointed grin when she procured the serrated blade.
Suddenly, Ashe burst into laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
Ashe shook her head, still laughing. “Zenith’s cock, Ruane, we survived a crash which surely should’ve killed us!” She stuck both hands out like she was gripping the steering device of the airship. “Arghh,” she mimicked flying the ship, “we’re crashing! Arghhh!”
Ruane grunted. “Remind me never to get in another of those godsdamned things again.”
“We made it,” Ashe said with a triumphant smile. It was a while before Ashe’s laughter subsided, but the stabbing in her side kept pricking her. She surmised it might be a cracked rib or two. “Not bad if I do say so myself.”
“There is seriously something wrong with you, humir.”
“That’s what I always hear,” she countered, trying to stand. But her knee buckled and down she went. “You hurt, Ruane?”
“Fine enough to kill the Fallen when I see him.” The drakken thrust her longknife out in demonstration.
“My knee is proper buggered,” Ashe said. “And I think I broke some ribs. See if you can find anything to help me wrap it up.” She pressed her hand to her tender side and choked upon a gasp. Ashe dug into the folds of her gaudy pink stola and found her flask, but it was empty. “Sonuvabitch.”
She heard Ruane rummaging through the wreckage. Loud the drakken was, almost too loud for the Sea. She was about to tell the draconem to knock it off, but something came flying through the mist. Ashe recoiled as it bounced on the ground, which sent further shouts of pain through her body. It was a glass-breathing mask.
“Put it on,” the drakken said. “Hear the Sea is bad for you humir.”
Ashe lifted the breather and thought better of it. A cough ached to come up, but she tried her best to keep it inside with her ribs and all being shattered like a clay pot. “Fuck it. I’m already dying of the godsdamned pulmo.” She tossed the breather back into the dunes where it was claimed with a slurp.
Ruane must have found something as she moved over toward her. “Let me see the damage.”
Her entire left side was slick with blood. There were no protrusions, so that was good, but there was a considerably deep cut from her pelvis to her underarm and it bled freely after she peeled away the hideously colored stola. Her knee was a swollen mass of red and purple, and looked like the backside of a hag’s thigh.
The drakken began tearing strips away from what appeared to be a linen bag, slowly tightening it around the wound in her side. Ashe glanced away and took deep drags of the mist the best she could with her battered ribs. The poisonous grey swarmed her insides, her pulmo flared quickly in her lungs, but she could feel the mist flouncing through her veins, heading straight for her injury, the aether within healing along her bruised and cut flesh, warm and tingly. Aether at its finest.
The haze above shifted, and a massive blur filled the void. The sound of engines whirred through the desert calm. “Is that?”
Gargantua.
An itch pulled her toward the direction of the floating fortress, the mist around her swirled like an arrow the same way. A warmth below her and she dug the Seal of Terris from the sand, holding it in her hands. The Seal and the diamond in the bangle both gleamed aether. A pulmo cough. “Fuck.”
“What?”
Godsdamn you, Father. “That is where the Pentax is forcing me.”
She rose to her unsteady feet and began to walk toward where Gargantua hovered.
The Sea of Mist sizzled with the unmistakable sensation of aetheurgy as Ashe crested a dune that swooped downward into a canyon that housed a monumental temple. The impressive lump of stone and metal that was Gargantua hovered directly over the domed shrine, the undercarriage of the hulking fortress a stone’s throw above, smoke pouring out of it. Her father had seriously done a number on the floating fortress.
The mist turned from opaque grey to the inky jet of a seagandr’s blood. Aether surged with such a force, Ashe knew it wasn’t borne from anything other than Nocturne’s Pit. There was a feeling of hatred bound within the mist, a desire for necrosis. The icky feeling prickled at her flesh. The mist surrounded the canyon, almost as if unwilling to move any closer.
“Did you see that?” Ruane was squatting with her clawed talons resting upon her knees as she scanned the canyon below. Her claw holding the longknife thrust forward toward the temple. “See there it is again.”
The tattoos along Ashe’s left arm flared as she burned her aetheurgy. A clarity came, expanding the scene below as the Sea disappeared as if nonexistent, but the aura of necrosis remained, stronger than ever. The temple rushed to the forefront in her sightline as if she was standing on the grounds themselves. A man in a red robe stood with hands stretched outward toward a shorter man and a large drakken with some epic horn action. Aether burst from the robed man’s hands, striking the smaller man, sending him flying backwards into the temple’s cella while the drakken roared.
Ashe took off down the dune at a mad sprint with a shout, her janky knee giving her discomfort, but she ignored it as the frayed train of her rose stola trailed behind because Lu Har had just pummeled her father with aether borne of the Pit.
“Stupid humir.” Ruane came flying down the mound on all fours, sending granules of earth flying. It took half a yard before the drakken overtook her and forced Ashe to nearly trip into a stop. “What are you doing, you foolish child?”
That primal urge bloomed inside of her, the same as when she was aboard Gargantua during the party. It was the darkness within the mist. What had her father called it? Noctis. Father… “That’s my father down there.”
“And so is my brother. But this place is crawling with Imperium soldiers. I’m all for finding a way to stick my knife into Lu Har’s black heart but running around screaming like a chicken on fire is not going to solve our problems. There’s only two of us.”
She tamped down a pulmo cough and looked between the drakken’s arm and torso toward the temple. Her father was nowhere to be seen and Lu Har was ascending the stair to the raised porch. Circling the domed top was the daemon firedrake. “Then what do you suggest? Pray to Zenith and ask Him to magically whisk us down there? Or would you rather we take the long route in, punching each and every soldier in the seedpods or privies on the way down?”
Ruane rolled her eyes. “The fate of the world rests on you? By the Arbiter’s bloody axe, this world is buggered if that’s true.”
“Hey now.”
“Come on, humir. Let a drakken show you how this is done.” With that, the drakken darted into the compressed curtain of black mist, swallowed with nary a blip.
