#Half of Balamb and Hot Dogs

[thesuccessorchallenge]

The Successor Challenge Submission: Half of Balamb and Hot Dogs

Written by bunnimew (ChibisUnleashed on AO3)

Synopsis: Everything about them was inevitable.And the hot dogs should have been a clue.

Genre(s): Fluff/Humour

Featured Character(s): Zell Dincht, Raijin, Seifer Almasy, Squall Leonhart

Current Word Count: 580

Rating: M

Theme: Distance

Status: Complete

Links: 

Chapter 1 

[dunmerofskyrim]

27

A great cavern of atrium, sides trenched like the kernelpit of a peach. In red and lambent violet we saw what tunnels led off it. Veins and arteries off from an old stiff heart; roots from the bulb of some tuber’s slow growing. We didn’t venture far. There was no need. Miner-baskets lay in piles against one strange-grooved wall, each heaped into the one beneath it so they stacked in fives and threes, sixes and eights. Tiers of coiled roughshod wicker.

“Think they found this wild?” I asked as we worked. “The kwama just set into the city when it emptied of people?”  Sweat on my arms and in the spine-furrow that cleaves my back. In the heat of the mine, I forgot that the world above was all winter. “Or did people set in and plant all this, for food? How’s it work? Is an egg-mine something you seed or something you stumble on?”

“Ask the farmer,” Medis said.

And we gathered what eggs we could. What eggs we could mattock and trowel out from the lodgings where they grew bubonic against the wall-grooves and floor, and hung stalactite from the ceiling. The egg-lodgings disgusted me worse than the eggs, the kwama, the tight and blood-warm darkness of the mine itself. Not quite meat nor quite earth, they raised like proudflesh, like scar-tissue, in growths and beds from the dirt of the place. Tooling free the eggs from it felt more like surgery, butchery, than mining.

Kwama milled about us, in all the seeming aimlessness of intense and focused labour.

The come and go of foragers, long and shorting the plates of their shells to writhe forward. Not like snakes who tacks towards progress, sideways, then sidewards, then sideways again. More like some nameless muscle, moving in throbs and contractions as they left off down the side-tunnels.

And the hunchbacked workers, four-footed and sturdy, with their chins like ploughshares and their hollow tunnel-faces. Their two pairs of petty arms beneath the great lob of their heads. Blind jade eyes down the length of their plate-jagged bodies. Around us they dug, and scaled along the grooved walls, and daubed the cavern’s sides with black secretions that shone in our magelights and set hard as lacquer.

But we filled our baskets. One each, with leather-shelled eggs some big as melons, others small enough to hold in one hand. Pushing them ahead, we stooped and crawled back down the tunnel. Up the tunnel. Around the tunnel as it screwed to the surface.

I feel the air first. The cold of the real world, where winter still reigns, outside the mine’s strange dream. It breezes against my face and I think the wind-chime chimes again.

The light that breaks across my eyes is little light at all. The sun’s begun to sink already. Ablaze, my first sight of sky. The tunnel spits us out and onto the temple wreckage, and above the night spreads like a bruise while orange clings to the west. Long shadows stripe the ruin floor, lean and smooth as ink over all the rubble-roughness.

“Believe you were more’n two hours,” says Shurfa, leaning out from one of the shadows. “We waited anyways.”

“Goes deep,” I say by way of explanation, if not apology.

“Thank you,” says Medis.

“Fucking tunnels,” I say. “Worth it though for what we found. It’s a fucking egg-mine down there. Tamed. Look!” Our two baskets are fuller of eggs than any one person could carry without aching, rest-stopping, sweating through their clothes even in winter. “Shunted them all the way back up.”

“Not a bad harvest for two cityfolk,” says Shurfa.

“Think it’ll do for the rest? How many meals in a kwama egg, anycase?”

“How long’s a rope. How tall’s a tree. But biggest you got there, well I’d say as it’s a sixty-cell egg.”

“So that’s a yes then. Least until we make the mainland.”

“If we’re chary.”

“Reckon we’ll have to be.”

“I don’t understand,” says Balambal. He’s been chewing something over in his head, maybe since before we came back. His words come like a worry he can’t keep in anymore. “This place would feed six families well. Here, that’s more valuable than anything. Why is it not guarded?”

“It’s hidden,” I shrug, but take his point. “Did you see anyone up here? Anything?”

“Silence and the moving sky.”

“Maybe they’re gone. Something happened to them.”

“What they deserve,” tuts Shurfa, “egg-mining a temple of the old Tribunal. What we deserve too, like as not.”

“Admissions and atonements will feature in my prayers tonight,” says Medis. “But for now we’d best not ling—”

The air breaks with a thupp. A stout wooden something stands out from Medis’ neck and the tunnel-ragged front of his pilgrim’s robes are coming in black. A growing stain like a lengthening shadow. He paws and presses at the crossbow quarrel, an agony of surprise in his searching hands, and on his blank sudden face. Tries to pull it out. No telling if the raw suck of sound that comes is the voice of the wound or him trying to speak.

His magelight blinks out. He slumps forward. The world’s lit only in red now.

Curse and clamour, we split off from each other in panic, exploding towards what cover we can find. Shurfa to the temple’s one standing wall. Balambal to the gloom of the tunnelmouth.

I bound up the wreckage-slope that leads towards the spire. Try to remember Medis’ facing, the bolt’s angle. Coming up almost empty, I trust myself to a half-guess and corner round the spire’s nightward side.

“No flights!” Balambal’s voice calls from below. “No flights on the quarrel! It came from close!”

My light’s come with me, leaving the temple-floor in half-darkness and me haloed round like a beacon. “Fuck…” I close the spell in my mind and stand obscure, against the towerside and against the purpling sky. I pull my sword and hold it ready.

In the shadows a steamlike hissing comes running through the black. Closing it starts like a harsh whistle, many-mouthed, to the sound of scurrying feet. Not a dog, but knowing nothing of nix, I default to the same fear.

“They’ve got nix!” I shout. My second trust to guesswork of the night.

“Simra!” I hear Shurfa bellow. Hear the sound of bodies shuffle-struggling against stone. “Light! Unkill the light, blight it!”

I turn towards the scurry as it gains on me. Third guess. I bark a calling word. Flames glare out from my left hand. The shape of something many-legged and lean scuttled on itself sears into my eyes after the flare’s gone out. Half-blind, I still see sparks clinging to something moving. I strike for it, Hlaalu blade singing long through the air as it clacks against hardshell, softshell, sharp but not heavy enough for the work.

Limned in sparks, the shape writhes round, awful and catlike, streaming and shedding glints scraps of itself as it turns. It pounces through my second gout of fire and chokes off the calling into a yelp.

Panic.

I fall back into the towerside and crumple flailing onto the ground. Fall down the slope, fighting limbs, not knowing if they’re mine. Hear screams, and don’t know if they’re mine. The darkness, the reek of smoke, the reek of bad sour candles, as tight around me now as the tunnel was below.

I scramble onto my feet. I’ve lost my sword; lost the hound-shaped thing that jumped me. A senseless scream leaps out my mouth as I spin a circle and trace a wake of sparks and scalding air around me. Fend off. Everything that might be, could be — I won’t let it touch me. But I’m wasting my reserves; spending more than I ought to. The fear puts an excess in me. I lose my measure.

Spinning again, body low in an animal crouch, I catch sight of my flames catching something. The same nix-shape as before, or another — no matter which, for it writhes back, air shrieking hot from its shell. I remember the wolves of the Rift, the pack’s closing circle and my widening circle of fire in the night. I wish there was more here to burn.

But as things are, the sprays of flame bright the night into frozen pictures.

Shurfa caves in the side of a nix-hound with her longclub. Sends it flying to crack against the facade wall. The sound of her roar outlives the image blazed into my mind.

Balambal bursts from the tunnelmouth like a heron up from the reeds that hid it. Flashing curve of sabre takes one shadow in the shoulder.

No peace in my mind to call light with. Only fire to shriek out at the dark. What comes at me next has a cudgel raised. No, something between pick and sickle — a farmer’s tool against my empty hands. They yell for courage. I scream for fear and fury, and half-leap backwards. A scything arc of my arms as I go – one savage move of a dance I scarcely know – and flames thrust, crest, and curl like a breaker at sea towards the coming figure. Golden edged with a foam of copper sparks and spitting as it shatters, the wave of flame has a red heart and a black manshape inside it.

I land bad and blind though from the hap and hazard of my dodge. A sharp pain as my ankle threatens to twist. Rather than let it, I fall into its angle, tumble along the ground. Maybe I try to roll. Maybe the rubble and wreckage stops me, grabbing and bruising, objecting hard on my elbows, shoulders, sides and thighs. My scalp is sharp and bloodwet. My ankle throbs too hot.

But the temple-ruins are painted now, in a glaze of orange light and brown shadow. At its center, a figure thrashes, ragged clothes gone all to flame. Its arms rise up and it shrieks, like a celebrant, eaten up in an oil-reeking ecstasy of fire. It goes to ground, rolling against the blunt-tooth scree and wreckage. Torch one moment and bonfire the next as it collapses. Wailing thin one moment, then sounding like spitted meat; airless, voiceless, crackling.

The burning body gave out enough light to show how Balambal died

A bolt stuns him, sticking smug into the side of his ribs. It hammers the air from his lungs. The attacker whose shoulder’s grit wet round Balambal’s blade fights him to the ground as I try to struggle up. A long straight knife sinks into Balambal’s belly, hooks up; breaks into his thigh as he raises a leg, an arm, anything to fight off the other mer. Blood pools round them link an inkblot, livid-black on the stones. Their struggle sounds like the gurgling of two drowning men.

I saw Balambal die and know how death met him, but Shurfa died in the dark that came after. I don’t know which is worse.