littleblackgoldfish - Tumblr blog

littleblackgoldfish · 4 years ago

Text

Sunfall Ch. 3

Previous Part

Chapter 3

Soli stared at the point of metal pointed at him. Over and over he drew a line between the vicious tip and his heart as it beat, thundering in his ears, against his ribs so violently he was surprised he couldn't see them bending.

Around him he heard voices mixing with the shing! of drawing blades and the whistle of spears swinging through the air.

There was an eternity that stretched itself through him between heartbeats. His feet were frozen to the broken paving stones and his thoughts wrapped around the point of an arrow like the flickering light of fire and lamp glinting off its blade. If he'd had anything to drink in the last… however many hours, he might have wet himself.

After a moment Soli slowly came back to himself.

In the seconds — had it been seconds, and not minutes or hours? — between all the initial shouting and now, not a single one of the people in the group had taken more than a step back in movement. Shock and fear washed in equal measures across their faces as they stared back at the line of rangers drawn tight as their bowstrings behind the wall of overturned tables and doors. All of them stood still and silent, waiting.

Until finally the shorter of the two boys of the group gathered his courage and called out to the rangers, "We're just- " he stopped, uncertain. What were they just; kids? Scared? Looking for answers?

"We're unarmed..."

He held out his hands, palms, palms up, nodding for the others to do the same. Put a spear or bow in Soli's hands and he would have been more of a threat to himself than any one of those rangers. And he didn't think any of the others would have been much more of a danger to the soldiers before them.

But, the rangers disagreed obviously. They wouldn't be pointing arrows at them otherwise. He still couldn't quite manage to tear his eyes from the closest arrow, not even to see who was holding it. When he tried the glinting point dragged them back.

He couldn't help wondering what it would feel like. To be shot with an arrow. Would it hurt? Would he feel it at all? Or would it be like in the stories where the Captain's friends didn't even notice they'd been hit until it seemed like they were safe again.

Kids never died inthe Captain Thellere stories. Not kids like Soli. Frontier villages kids, without names or personalities beyond hero worship, sure. And it was always tragedy.

But this wasn't a story and Soli knew he could die. Just like his mom. And dad. Probably his sisters and- no, he swallowed that though and tried to force his gaze up the shaft of the arrow.

Slowly, agonizingly, his eyes followed the arrowhead back thin shaft up past the fletching — black feathers, shining in the flickering light — to the hand holding the string of the bow — sun kissed, a shade or two darker than the girl in the sundress — and then up to the face behind the hand. He was surprised at how young the ranger looked, they probably weren't even as old as Ostra, and how naked the fear he saw in their eyes was. A twitch of the fingers and it would go flying. Soli watched the ranger's hand, white at the knuckle, grib the bow

And… a second later he watched it drop away, tracing an arc away from his heart and towards the ground. Soli watched as the ranger's face slackened, tiny crinkles around their eyes moothing out, and the lump of their throat bob slightly. Distantly he heard a voice grow clear.

" —about that. It- we're all a little on edge," a new ranger was saying, a fringe of auburn hair just peeking out from beneath the bottom of her helmet,"Especially with them out there still- doing, Lythra knows what."

Them? Did she- was she talking about the people in the black armor, Soli wondered.

While the other rangers had relaxed and started drifting back to whatever posts they had occupied before, they're eyes kept drifting in her direction before flickering away. She didn't seem to notice. Or at least was deliberately making an effort not to 'notice' if she had.

The taller boy in the group, the one with the glasses, frowned. His own thoughts running along the same lines

"Are you talking about those people in the black ships?"

For a second her expression and gaze sharpened, falling heavily on him before sweeping across the rest of the group. But only for a second, then she forcibly relaxed herself again and simply nodded.

After that Soli wouldn't have had the courage to ask anymore questions, or even open his mouth again. Of course he hadn't been to muster more than a hum or grunt in response to anything said to him in hours anyways, so maybe his own instincts weren't exactly a good measure. Whatever the truth, the other boy had seemingly no compunction.

"Do you know who they are?"

With a brittle grin that did not reach her eyes at all the ranger said, "Bad guys. But, don't worry about them, you'll be safe inside with the Company of Seven Claws standing guards," then, her gaze turning to the men and women beside her and her voice rising to reach out to all of those not, "Isn't that right!?"

As one, the rangers' voices rose to match hers. Soli noticed a flash of metal at her collar, a little silver leaf on its side.

"Catch 'em seven times! Bleed 'em seven times! We know what we're for!"

"Go on," she said to them as she smiled again and made the sign of Cieliel (Eldest Daughter, Patron of Glory), fist over her heart with the thumb out, and thrust her head to the side in the direction of the camp.

With that they were allowed in behind the barricade, a couple of rangers had been busy clearing a way in while they talked, and through the ranger's section into the camp beyond. Some of the group relaxed immediately on getting behind the wooden palisade, others took until they reached the rest of the camp. All except Soli. Being around so many people didn't make him feel safe, it did the opposite. His skin itched, like something crawled beneath its surface.

What could those rangers do if those big black ships came? Throw spears and shoot arrows at it? He doubted they would even scratch it. Maybe some of the Rangers knew a spell or two. But was it something powerful enough to break through the black metal of their shells and burn out whatever was inside?

He didn't think so. But… they would be so confident without reason, right? Two thousand years of keeping the Homelands safe from monsters and division and schismatics, helping to end the strife with the Temples, pacifying the Underdark, they knew what they were doing. Rangers had seen worse than this. Whatever or whoever those people were couldn't possibly win against the Rangers. Not once they got their feet under them and could fight back.

They just couldn't.

Leaving behind the rangers the group finally saw the camp proper; set in what had been an open air market place, what would have been full of crowds and stalls and the shouts of people buying and elling was still full of crowds, but of a different sort. Ragged, exhausted people in torn, bloodstained, and dirt caked clothes. They sat by flickering campfires overwhich nondescript stews bubbled. They walked, listlessly and without direction, between tents for all shapes and sizes and colors. Children, old men, young women, families, lonely beggars, the injured and the healthy, the camp was full of people of all sorts. It was impossible to glimpse the edges of the camp from within, all there was was the endless sea of faces and tents.

Moving single file the group crawled slowly deeper and deeper into the press of bodies. No one met their eyes or so much as acknowledged them. Though there was a constant noise it was not from interaction, it was just the sounds of people breathing all together (and talking in low, slow voices) to those they already knew. Sometimes through the ebb and flow of the crowd and the uneven terrain of the tents a gap would open up for a second through which Soli could see a glimpse of the market's edge and when it did he saw open doors leading into the adjoining buildings and within more people pressed, if anything, closer together.

Soli followed the group because what else was he going to do. Go off on his own and get lost? Whoever these people were, they were safe.

Part of him wanted his sisters (and, he added, his brother. Though the latter was so young he hardly counted) but even thinking about them brought him close to thinking about what had happened to him. That he was not ready to do.

When they finally stop, some minutes later, Soli finds they've reached a clearing of sorts in the crowd of tents and people. It wasn't the edge of the camp itself, that was still off a distance guarded by yet more rangers in another isolated camp like the one they'd come through. At least ahead and to the right. To the left and ahead were mostly buildings, low single story ones that would have been either warehouses or rented shops. There were figures walking along their roots carrying bows and spears. Off to the right hand of this section a series of taller warehouses took up much of the space and behind that was the park which had been entirely taken over by tents (and presumably more rangers guarding the flank). Another smaller camp of strangely dressed rangers had formed around the entrance of the warehouses.

Some scattered tents had built up along the edges of the clearing and there were people wandering around, some of them carrying baskets full of...stuff. Food and wood and cloth and all sorts of other things Soli couldn;'t make out. The group was brought up short by the sight. For several long seconds they just stood there dumbly staring out at the space in front of them, not saying anything.

"I guess we can set up here," said the girl who'd first helped Soli.

No one argued. But no one made any move to do anything either. None of them knew what to do. They looked around, searching for some sign or clue.

There'd been no instruction of guidance from anyone the entire time they'd walked through the camp. None of the wandering rangers or residents had so much as looked at them, much less taken the time to greet them and walk them through what they were supposed to do now.

That didn't look to be changing either.

Finally after another long few moments the boy with the piercings and the long black hair sighed and said, "Miriel, Kieran, you should go see if you can find a tent or something for us."

He pointed to Soli's rescuer and the other boy, who both nodded and after a moment of uncertain and helpless glancing around picked directions and started walking. She headed for the edge of the camp, where the entrances to the buildings were and he went back into the mess of tents behind them.

"Uh, I- I'll look for some food or something," said the other blond with all the piercings. Pierced boy or, as Soil had started thinking of him, 'leader,' nodded.

Which only left Soli himself, leader, and two of the other girls.

"We'll look for the best place to set up."

Leader said it like it made sense, like it was the logical thing to do.

One spot seemed as good as any other in the market to Soli. They'd get wet all the same if it rained and when Kiestre rose in a few hours (or maybe it would be Caithr, though he shudder to imagine the darkness lasting so long) there was little hope of staying out fo the sun. Only one spot would provide shade for more than a few minutes and that was already occupied by that small camp of strangely dressed rangers.

But the other girls were already nodding along with him and Soli didn't actually have a better idea of what to do and so he simply followed along as they wandered around.

All the markets Soli had been to were those covered ones, the ones that sometimes had two or three stories, with lots of water features and spaced out courtyards where you could sit down. This was nothing like those. Away from the crowd and up close he could see more clearly that it had been built like a big, long plaza butting up against warehouses and storefronts on three sides (except for connections to the street) and a strip of park on the last. Soli saw what might have been fountains, though small ones, scattered about. Empty. Dry.

There were also occasional stone posts sticking up, forming rough rectangles. About half his height, they had small holes in their center. The few overhangs that stuck out from the empty storefronts had already been snatched up by other groups. Not that they would give much cover anyways, even standing directly under them Soli didn't think they would stop anyone from getting wet in the rain.

He even caught a few glimpses inside the buildings bordering the market-plaza as they made their circuit around it and it didn't seem any better inside to Soli. Except that they would be dry if it rained. But then they'd also be crammed in with all the sad, lifeless people sitting inside. Also it stunk.

Just passing by Soli could smell it.

They passed close to the rangers for a little while and Soli eagerly took that opportunity to spy on them. He was less circumspect than he imagined. Though, it was not as if anyone else in the refugee camp had disguised their curiosity any better over the hours it had come to exist, so the rangers guarding it did not react or even particularly note Soli's examinations. Unlike the other rangers scattered around the rest of the camp, most of those within this one went about without any armor. Dressed in robes of bright turquoise or soft navy-blue or vibrant purple run through with long swooping, whirling, twisting, designs in glittering thread woven along the arms and backs there seemed to only be a few of them. Or maybe, many of them only occasionally coming out in small groups.

He only caught glimpses of them with their heads bent together whispering over little chalkboards or muttering to themselves as they paced, with their hoods up obscuring their heads and faces. Mostly they remained inside their tents or hidden within the warehouse. Appearing briefly before disappearing again.

At first he'd just assumed they were rangers because… well what else would they be? Now that he was looking at them more closely though he did see the same bits of leather armor peeking out from beneath their robes and one or two even had the same little metal leaves at their collars that the ranger lady out front had had. Soli assumed that had something to do with being in charge.

Clearly they were mages. Pretty important too from the way they were being guarded, and maybe even secret; like the Children of the Thorns that Captain Thellere worked with sometimes.They must be working on some sort of spell or ritual to bring down the black shell ships, or maybe enchanting weapons and armor for the other rangers.

While Soli contemplated the secrets of magic going on behind cloth and walls, Kieran and Miriel came back, having met up again after splitting up at first, with their arms full of bundles of fabric and rope. They'd just found the 'best' spot, as decided by Leader, a little ways down from the magic ranger camp along the southern facing wall of the warehouse structure. While the guards had given them some looks as they'd wandered by, they didn't stirr from their posts even after the other two returned and they started setting up. Or at least as much setting up as they could do.

Mostly it was clearing away what dirt and trash had accumulated in the area.

"It was just sitting in a big pile," frowned Miriel as she dropped her load on the ground in front of them. Kieran nodded and set down his own burden on top of hers.

"Some guards standin' over it all, glaring at everyone who came near. Don't think they were rangers."

Soli stared at the collection of fabric, some sort of thick stiff looking stuff the same dark green as the leaves and needles of the trees in the forest around grandfather's estate. He'd hated the place for the first few days.

Grandfather didn't have any good books, just ones about history and war; but not the fun sort where heroes stabbed monsters. And they'd been all alone except for his family (minus his younger brother at the time, who was still a couple years away) and the staff who were just as old as his grandfather and twice as boring because they didn't even have his grandfather's hunting stories to tell him. Not that those were much better, he always focused on the most boring parts of everything. Soli and his sisters had to invent all sorts of games to keep from dying of boredom.

One of them had involve- Soli cut that thought off behind a steel vault door and then threw it into the dark Beyond.

Everyone stared at the collection of fabric and rope laying on the ground.

"So," the other girl, who'd stayed with Soli and Leader, started, "How do we, uh, put it together?"

A beat.

"I- I don't know," admitted the dark haired boy.

He glanced back at the mass of tents back the way they'd come, looking maybe for some hint. After a moment he shrugged to himself and turned back.

"Let's uh, spread it out first."

So they did that.

Which left them with a large square of thick, scratchy dark green fabric and three coils of rope to stare at.

Thankfully in the midst of their staring at the collection of materials the last girl returned with three canteens slung over one shoulder and a cauldron stuffed with a small basket half-full of potatoes and wilting vegetables. She ignored the spread out cloth and set her spoils down by the wall.

Shaking out her arms she looked at the rest of the group, "This is all I could carry by myself but there's more; sausages and flour and wood for fires, so if we go..."

That was when she noticed them staring at the disassembled tent laid out on the ground and her voice trailed off for a moment. She looked between the other five of her friends and asked, "Is that supposed to be a tent?"

"Parts of it, yeah. We're trying to figure out how to set it up," said Leader.

"Oh."

He sighed and frowned at the uncooperative pile fo stuff for a few seconds longer before turning back to the others.

"Look why don't you — " he looked to the blond girl with the shaved sides of her head " — take Miriel and Duna and Ava go back and grab more stuff while we," he gestured between himself and the other boy, Kieran, and Soli, "Figure out… this."

All four girls exchanged a look that Soli had no idea how to interpret for a second and a hot little flush rose in Leader's cheeks for a moment, but they didn't object. Seconds later they were heading back in the direct the shaved-head girl had gone.

Truthfully Soli would have liked to go to get the food, but… even thinking about opening his mouth made his throat tighten down to a thin straw that made it painful to breathe for a second.So he let them go without comment.

What followed was several minutes of fruitless attempts to tie the ropes to some small wooden beams jutting out of the warehouse wall involving Soli climbing up on Kieran's shoulders and looping it through the convenient slats in said beams. Fruitless not because they didn't produce something that might, generously, have been called a tent, but because it would never fit all of them. Also because it would definitely collapse at the slightest breeze.

As they stepped back to admire the frustrating results of their work, Soli once again down solidly on his own two feet, a voice interrupted any coming disappointment.

"You need poles."

They turned and saw an older woman in a plain white robe that seemed at least a size or two too large for her with a frizzy mane of soot stained pale-blond hair pulled back into a long tail behind her thin swoopingly pointed ears by five battered bronze rings. Something about her didn't fit with the rest of the camp. Not her dress which felt about right for the rest of the camp, though the robe was recognizably white it was far from clean; patches of dirt and grass stains littered the hem while streaks of dried blood trailed up the arms. And though she had fewer bruises than many of the people, she had still clearly been through something in the previous hours and had the bumps to prove it. No, there was a sort of weight to her.

Everything seemed quieter around her. Like the air was weighted. She felt old. Not old like his grandfather, always complaining about how people were doing things 'these days' or wishing for how things had been when he was young. But more like… like the forest around his grandfather's estate, as if she had seen things.

"What?" asked Kieran dumbly.

"Poles. Wooden ones, to go into the sides of the canvas," she pointed at the sagging vee of fabric hanging desultory from the sloppily hung rope, "See where it loops at the edges? In those. Didn't you wonder why they were made like that?"

Soli hadn't. He'd been distracted by trying to slap together rope and fabric to make a tent. But now he did.

And so did the other two.

"Oh," breathed the dark haired boy with the piercings.

He stood stockstill for a moment staring at the 'tent' in front of them and then started laughing. Crouching low he buried his head in his hands.

"Daughters char my— we're such idiots."

"Nnn," the woman shook her head, "You're city boys."

To that the boy snorted and countered, "Everyone else figured it out," He flung his hand out towards the rest of the camp. Kieran frowned and shook his head as he came to stand beside his friend.

"Everyone else got here when there was light."

"Maybe," he said, then to the woman, "Where do we get these poles?"

She raised one of her finely sculpted eyebrows at him, "Same place you claimed the canvas and the rope."

"Right, figures. We'll wait for the others to get back and you and me— " he nodded to Kieran " —can go and get them," then he looked at the woman again, "Thanks for your help. Some of our friends are getting food, if you want to join us for a meal?"

Glancing over her shoulder at the camp the woman hesitated for a moment. She probably had things she needed to get back to doing. Or maybe just a family somewhere back in there, people she needed to get back to.

Soli swallowed against the lump in his throat and blinked back the sting in his eyes. Something itched against his chest. Again the vault and the tumble into the dark Beyond.

"Not that- you don't have to. We totally understand— "

She turned quickly back around, her hair swinging at the sudden movement.

"No, no. I- everything that- I was just," she cut herself off and mustered a weak smile, "I would love to join you all. My name is Au'Liestra, but you can call me Lise."

"Right, I'm Dax- I mean, Anad'du'raxiel, that— " he pointed to the other boy, who gave a shy wave " —is Kieran and the kid is, um… actually we don't know his name."

The dark haired boy, Dax, frowned at Soli. Not angrily, or like he was upset, but as if he was seeing something familiar for the first time in a long while and not quite recognizing it. Soli opened his mouth.

Maybe to give his name or just to say hi. Nothing came out. Still the words died in his throat as if bore down on them like a hungry dog after a meal. He sighed and smiled tightly at the woman.

Dax opened his own mouth, his brow scrunching hard over his frown, but he could not find the right words and so he sighed and shrugged, looking at Soli contemplatively.

"We have to call you something, can't just go running around saying 'boy' over and over, now that it's safe to talk," he paused, "Safer. How about Delyn?"

It wasn't his name. But it wasn't a bad one either, so he shrugged.

What did it matter what they called him anyways. They might as well call him 'Boy' or 'Kid.' But apparently it mattered to Dax, because he was shaking his head even before Soli had responded.

"Nah. Haldin? Ferion?"

He discarded each name as quickly as he chose them.

"Adun?" offered Kieran, then, "Etholas? Logir?"

None seemed to satisfy, as Dax and Kieran both shook their heads in unison. They began to go back and forth in turn, paying more attention to each other's reactions than to Soli's, with the taller boy going first.

"How about Lindon… or, Estir? You know, from tun-Bar Thalaharn's play; the one about the orphans?"

Lise watched their exchange with her brow raised in amusement as she moved to stand beside Soli himself, though not so close that he got nervous. Just close enough that it felt like they were almost standing together watching the two play off one another.

"Bit morose don't you think?"

Kieran shrugged, "Morose feels a bit right, with… you know things," he flung his hand into the air and swung it wide

"Legomir, maybe," but then Dax looked at Soli and shook his head yet again, "No. Feels like it should be shorter. Quicker. Snappy."

"What has to be snappy?" Miriel asked as she and the other three girls strode over.

Arms laden with even more baskets full of food and wood for the fire. Two of them, the blond that wasn't Miriel and the dark haired girl with the jacket, looked at the slowly collapsing disaster of a 'tent' with concern but kept quiet for the moment. Soli saw mushrooms and onions and jerky and sausage in the baskets. His mouth immediately started watering.

"Name for the kid... and don't worry about that," he gestured to the 'tent,' "We need poles apparently."

"Oh. Meni."

Dax blinked and Miriel thrust her chin at Soli.

"For his name."

There was a beat and then all five of them looked to Soli, eyebrows raised. He shrugged. Again, it wasn't his name, but it would work as well as anything else.

With that the other blond girl stepped forward and fixed Lise with a steely gaze, "And, you are?"

Kieran jumped in, "Right, everyone this is Lise. She's joining us for dinner."

Bouncing up from where she'd been settling down her pair of baskets, the red haired girl in the sundressed bounded over to Lise and thrust out her hand, "Hi, Lise! I'm Duna." While behind her the other three looked between Lise and Kieran and Dax, raising their eyebrows in unison.

The taller boy simply shrugged and answered their questioning looks with one of his own. Dax colored faintly. After a long moment the two girls finally relented, sighing and turning to Lise, who had been ignoring the exchange and greeting Duna, with strained expressions.

"Avu'llya."

That was the girl with the jacket, her arms crossed self-consciously for a moment before she forcibly relaxed them to her side.

Miriel stuck out her hand, "Miriel. A pleasure."

"Caria," said the last girl, the blond with the shaved head and the impressive number of earrings, and following her friend's lead held out her own hand. Stiffly though.

After that Kieran and Avu'llya went off together to get the aforementioned poles for the tent while the rest of them went about setting up the fire. Or at least tried to.

None of them knew how to start a fire.

It took only a few minutes of Dunal and Miriel fumbling around blindly with the wood for Liseto to snort loudly and step in, "Here," she held out a hand for the firestarter in the former's own.

Kneeling down beside the red haired girl, the older woman simply waited out Duna's subsequent pout. Relenting after only a few moments. Lise took the loop of metal at the same time as she reached over her lap and into the small metal box beside her to pull out a piece of sooty, black something. It was almost cloth-like.

"Unless you know a spell, start with some kindling. Kits like this come with char cloth, but dry grasses and twigs and all that will work if you out in the wilds," again reaching over her audience Lise dug around in the basket and pulled out some straw and sticks from the bottom.

Arranging it into a small mound, she continued, "It'll just take longer— "

Soli had just thought that was like padding. A thought shared by the others given their startled looks.

" —then you take a bit of char cloth," she tore off a piece, laying it next to the mound, before reaching back into the small tin and pulling out a little black rock, "And use your flint and steel to light it."

With the metal loop held close to the mound she raised the rock over and brought it down quickly, striking them together. A tiny shower of sparks showered down over the grass and cloth. Most of the group, Soli included, squawked in surprise.

"Sometimes," Lise said, striking the metal again, "It can take," again, more sparks, "A few tries-"

Finally a few landed directly on the char cloth and caught, burning slowly out in a glowing irregular ring, turning the black of the cloth gray-white slowly. It went out after a moment. Duna's shoulder sagged.

But Lise leant down and blew gently on the patches of ashy gray and they flared momentarily into orange-white brightness. Carefully pushing the char cloth into the grass and sticks, Lise kept on blowing and soon enough there were tiny little curls of white-gray smoke curling out from the mound. After a few seconds actual wisps of flame poked through the debris. Lise prodded at the blackening bits of kindling, revealing unburnt portions underneath to the growing flames, before she started laying some of the larger sticks from the bottom of the basket overtop. All the while continuing to blow occasionally, causing the flames to flicker and jump, until it had grown into an actual (small) fire.

"There you go. Fire."

Everyone stared at it for several long seconds, taking in the licking flames and the warm glow.

"And when do we- when should we add the logs?" asked Dax.

Lise added a few more sticks on top and shrugged, "Once you're sure the smaller stuff is burning good and well. Just be sure not to smother the fire."

Lise and Duna continued to build up the fire. Meanwhile the rest of them started preparing food under Miriel's watchful eyes, tearing up vegetables and throwing it into the pot with some of the water from the canteens. A little bit later Kieran and Avu'llya came back with the poles and Lise started helping them figure out how to set up the tent. Soli helped.

They worked slowly; watching the pot boil and joining in the brief, occasional spot of conversations that sprang up. Mostly involving asking Lise questions about innocuous subjects; What the tent fabric was called (canvas), if the fire was burning alright, did she think the soup/stew needed more salt or maybe more meat or potatoes?

Nothing that invited deeper conversation. Or that ranged too close to acknowledging that Lystra had set hours ago and Kiestre still had not risen or that the rangers looked scared and that no one was sure they would live to see tomorrow. It was stilted, but it filled the silence.

Soli found the soup bland when it was done. He ate it ravenously of course. But as he scooped out the chunks of meat and potatoes, and slurped down the broth he found himself longing for home all the harder. The warmth of his fathers arms and his mothers smile. Ostra's quiet musings on whatever she was learning and Euma's grumbling about not being allowed to go to whatever party was going on next weekend or Idith's exciting chattering about her friends. Even Timik's nonsense babbling. He missed it all.

He swallowed down those thoughts and shoved them behind another vault in his head. But he didn't send it tumbling over in the metaphorical dark Beyond. He didn't know what happened next. If the black shell people—

Suddenly the air was split by a wailing roar that shook their half assembled tents and wrenched everyone's attention into the sky. Which remained black and silent as it had been for hours.

A second went by. Two. Then a third.

There was a funny whistle in the air.

From across the camp Soli heard shouts and cries go up, and felt more than heard a huge surge of people moving all at once through the dense press of tents. Lise was on her feet, staring back into the crowd of tents intently. So were the others.

Something bright shot out of the darkness, a tiny little ember, and fell to land in the midst of the camp. Half a second later there was a loud whump and the spot where the ember had landed exploded into a roiling ball of fire and scattered burning scraps of canvas and wood and… other things in all directions. Dirt and smoke filled the air. And a rush of hot stinking wind rolled over them. Soli blinked up at the group from where he'd fallen.

More people were screaming and running. Pushing their way past and through and over tents and people as the crowd pushed in every direction simultaneously. Many of them heading straight for the back of the camp (and thus them).

But a second later, after another loud whump had lit up the rear of the camp in a burning cloud of dirt and debris, the part of the crowd heading their way broke up into a dozen smaller waves. Figures danced in the cloud; rangers cried out in agony as flames licked at them. But Soli hardly had time to take in the horror as another explosion lit up the camp behind him and sent the crowd into even further panic as they tried desperately to get into the surrounding buildings.

"Run!" yelled Lise and Miriel and Duna all at once, though none of them said where to run too.

Not that it mattered, in an instant their group was caught up in the pell mell of the crowd, their fire trampled underfoot, pot overturned, and the remnants of their meal dashed to the ground with a clang. Soli managed to stay close to someone familiar for a few seconds. But the crowd was too dense and chaotic, the press of people too panicked, and he was carried quickly away.

He thought he glimpsed either Miriel or Caria through a break in the crowd but it closed almost as soon as it appeared. It was as he was casting around desperately for any sign of a familiar face that Soli saw them, the people in the black shells, dropping down from the rooftops (hadn't there been rangers up there? Where were they?) all around the camp, wielding spears with gleaming points or swords with sweeping serrated edges. People screamed, angry, pained cries and he smelled a hot tangy something in the wind.

Then Lise was beside him, pulling on his arm, shouting, "This way!"

Towards the warehouse, towards the camp of strange magicky Rangers. Through the crowd he saw some of them shove their way out from behind their guards and the tents of their camp, hands full of fire and lightning and the cold light of death.

With a crackle and a flash something hot and wet peppered his back. He almost turned back but Lise kept pulling and Soli's legs pumped, keeping pace with her.

Something whipped past his head with a whistle and Lise grunted, her steps faltering for a second, but she pushed him on.

Now the strange Ranger's guards were pulling down their tents and the other doors of the warehouse opening, letting out more rangers with spells on their hands and lips to toss at the black shell people, who were still dropping over the lips of the buildings. And beyond the rangers, inside the warehouse, Soli saw… he didn't really know what; a dark empty space littered with empty arches of metal. Like doorways. Except they weren't empty but filled with glass- no water.

Not, not water.

A field. A forest. A river.

Clear blue skies, wispy clouds drifting along lazily and songbirds flitting through the air. Rangers in heavy armor — like out of the stories of the Integration, when elf fought elf to bring the light of the Daughters to all the Summerlands — yelled at them from the warehouse entrances, waving their hands even as they hefted fearsome spears and nocked arrows to enormous bows.

"Go! Go! For the gates!"

Lise shoved him ahead of her, past the line of mages. Soli stumbled but caught himself and got his feet under him. He picked one of the doorways, one that looked calm and friendly and safe (sunlight peeked through the trees of a forest of pale trees, their bark; black dappled on white) and pumped his legs as hard as he could for it. Soli glanced to his left, out of one door of the warehouse, he saw a trio of rangers locked in combat with twice that of the people in black shells. Blood running down their sides.

The ground shook and a whole wall of the warehouse ripped open in a shower of shattered stone and splintered wood. He looked over his shoulder and saw Lise standing beside the mages at the front, surrounded by the glow of a clear, dry spring day.

" —andra! Set your eyes to me! Heed my prayers! Make of me— "

And then she was swallowed up by a void of pure black, darker even than the sky outside, that grew and grew and grew until it had eaten the whole front of the warehouse and left nothing but itself.

Soli was just opening his mouth to shout… something, when he felt a cool pressure engulf his arm and a tugging drag him backwards. Then he was falling back, back, back, but instead of meeting hard dirt he just kept falling into nothingness and the world shrank down into first a pinprick of light and sound and then into nothingness.

Next Part (Coming Soon)

#fic #story #mine #Sunfall #Chapter 3 #apocalypse #fantasy #original fiction #original story #original characters #Soli #comments and critique are greatly appreciated #long post #6.6k #running becomes something of a 'running' theme #heh

1 note · View note

littleblackgoldfish · 4 years ago

Text

Sunfall Ch. 2

Previous Part

Chapter 2

They left behind the strange not-rangers in black and the compound in silence. Not the same tense, anxious silence that had hung over their journey before or the fearful, heart in the throat, hush of those few brief moments as they waited in shadow either, but something more lonely. Like the quiet of a graveyard. Creeping from the alley they picked their way across the street, splitting their attention between what was in front of them and what might be following.

No one dared look to the sky.

Half afraid that if they did they would see those impossibly graceful bulbous ships hovering above them.

It was silly. With the racket they caused and the wind they kicked up there was no chance of their sneaking up on them. But still it was not one that Soli could shake easily.

Gradually the group worked its way in a broad arc away and around the compound through crumbling sidestreets and shattered avenues strewn with the wreckage of the city. Though the damage was less than what he'd seen firsthand, this part of Deylos had still been hit by the same calamity that the rest of the city had, just a lesser form of it. Scattered patches of glass shards from blown out storefront windows littered the unsettled surface of the street between piles of rubble strewn about where columns or walls had fallen into each other were everywhere.

All the people though, even the sad and pitiful huddling in fear, were absent.

Or at least Soli never saw them.

While carefully picking their way across a plaza that had once been the centerpiece of a collection of theatre halls, galleries, and greenhouses the boy with the glasses spied several bodies in the distance by the collapsed remains of a tunnel. Using significant looks and nudges he chivyed the group in a more northern direction so that they came nowhere close to the corpses. There was also the suspicious stain spread out from the ruins of a schoolhouse they passed right before leaving that everyone refrained from commenting on or noticing while forming a living screen between it and Soli.

For the most part though the devastation they saw was material rather than corporeal.

Streets cracked — their paving stones upturned and cast about like pebbles — and sunshades tossed about, statues of local heroes toppled over, shattered windows, and the collapsed walls of buildings spilling out into the streets. But not the utter ruin and destruction. No streets here were buried under the weight of spires or unexpected yawning open into canyons belching smoke and flame and screams.

As they crept from one alleyway to another Soli spotted the silhouette of the temple he'd seen earlier, a grand arch set against the low outline of Deylos' outskirts. Lythra's fading light it was approaching dos'lya now, struck the temple's rainbow clad surface of its dome and set it glittering like a beacon against the slowly purpling sky. He wanted to pray though he didn't know what for.

That he would find his sisters? That this would all turn out to be some terrible nightmare? Or maybe he should just pray for his own safety? His own survival?

He wasn't even sure how. In the past he'd always just mumbled along with his mom or dad as they knelt for prayers; hands clasped in front of his face he would say 'thank you for... the good weather, for the rain, for his mom, for his dad, for his sisters' and on and on. Whatever he could think of.

The Daughters and their divine gifts had always seemed far from Soli's needs.

Lythra continued her descent through the heavens as the group slowly continued to wind its way through the city, and the shadows lengthened creeping fingers then into pools.

And behind them, her sister Kiestre would be rising from the east out of the depths of the dark Beyond to herald a new day and burn back the shadows with her clear light. It would be a couple hours yet. Kiestre would not even begin to crest over the horizon until well after Lythra had nearly slipped past it, that was where the dos'lya came from. Or so his teachers had told Soli.

Not that it wasn't easy enough to see with his own eyes.

But according to the priests of the temples it was meant to be a reminder of the power of the Daughters and their beneficence towards the people in driving away the cold and dark each day so that it did not take root in the world. Supposedly before the Daughters the Summerlands had been dark like the inside of a room with no windows and cold like the mountaintops or the inside of one of those spelled chillers. Beset by evil creatures — supposedly the dosrowi — from the bottom of the world which had wormed their way in from the Beyond to steal the shapes of people and torment them. That part he wasn't so sure about.

Darkness and cold without the Daughters? That made sense. But how was something supposed to tunnel through all the stone and dirt beneath his feet when it took all the most advanced magic and tools to go in the opposite direction nowadays, besides which they knew what was at the other end and it wasn't some twisted shadowy nightmare land of madness and black emptiness like the Beyond was supposed to be. It was just the Underdark.

Which was dark, but not empty. If anything it was the opposite. So full of stone, which was why it was dark. And what made it worth going to, for all the ores and minerals and crystals and even strange creatures that lived there.

Most of the combines dealt with the Underdark in some way. Whether they mined it directly or used the materials from it to make things.

And there were definitely no dosrowi in it. Not even people.

Just weird monsters that never saw the light of day.

This was where Soli's thoughts went as the group continued to slip farther and farther from the center of Deylos' center towards its outskirts. Buildings grew shorter and the damage… actually didn't become all that much less, though the center of the city seemed to have been hit the worst, all of Deylos had been affected by the disaster. In fact if anything the structures they were starting to pass seemed to be in worse condition.

Perhaps it was just the creeping shadows though, heightening damage that might have gone unnoticed otherwise. Some of the windows and doorways they passed seemed swallowed by them.

"Getting real dark," whispered the boy with glasses.

Despite his efforts his voice seemed to carry impossibly far, echoing down the empty street and off the silent walls all around them. With a start the whole group slammed to a stop, scanning all around them.

Soli flinched too, half from the unexpectedness of his voice and the reaction of the others.

After a long moment the others all turned to glare at their friend, who flushed and shrugged. It was hard to disagree with the statement, he'd never seen a dos'lya this dark before.

That seemed to break whatever spell for silence had fallen over the group and as they continued some quiet, hushed, conversations picked back up. Someone asking someone else how they were doing, vague assurances. There wasn't really much to say.

Soli didn't pay much attention. He didn't really know any of these people.

Still, it was nice to hear something other than silence and the muted whistle of the wind.

"I have still have that essay due for Professor Nathil," began the girl with the mohawk in the sundress to the girl in the ranger jacket as they squeezed through a narrow alley between a pair of clothes shops, before shaking her head, "Can you imagine, worrying about that now? With everything- well, like it is."

There was a beat of silence in which neither of the two girls said anything, then the dark-haired girl shrugged.

"What keeps going through my head is that I forgot to water my flowers this morning. That stupid blood lily Cieriel got me for the end of last term will have already started wilting."

Mohawk girl nodded back, though her gaze was trained ahead and her expression did not say that she had taken in a single word her friend had said.

Slowly the shadows kept lengthening and deepening. Throwing the city into a stark contrast as the last linger rays of Lythra's light retreated lower and lower, the sky cast in darker and darker shades of blue and purple. Soli kept looking into the shadows and expecting to see eyes peering out at him.

It was like those old stories. Every bit of darkness seemed a threat.

He wasn't the only one that was nervous about the weird lack of light either, because the rest of the group kept glancing behind them to the eastern horizon. Kiestre must just be below the horizon. She would crest any minute now.

But one minute passed, then two, then five.

Ten. They kept moving, crawling along as the world sank in a second form of nightmare around them. Fifteen minutes.

Finally, the boy with the piercings in his nose and eyebrows said the words, "Kiestre's not rising."

Behind them the eastern horizon remained stubbornly dark as Lythra continued her descent into the west, already nearly a quarter of the Daughter below it with more slipping past with every second. Above the sky shifted into a deeper and deeper blue. When Soli's eyes gazed into it, he almost imagined tiny little eyes staring back at him.

He shook his head and stared anywhere but up.

Hearing the words said out loud, though they'd all thought it at some point over the last few minutes, held a strange sort of finality. Like a window being closed shut on a breeze. As it they made it real.

The others looked back and forth between each other, no one else daring to speak for many long minutes. Then, the blond girl who'd first helped Soli up, said, "We should keep moving. It's not safe here."

Whether it was safe anywhere went unasked.

They started moving. Quietly again.

Shadows lengthened and deeper even further into black pools in the world. Before long Lythra had slipped below the horizon and only a thin little haze of light peeked over to cast weak, pale rays across Deylos' skyline — such as it was — and then that too was gone. In its place a black pall lay over the sky and Soli could not help shuddering as he walked through darkness.

Moving mostly by feel, the group continued on. Slowly. Even just keeping track of one another was difficult, an effort of discerning shifting shadows and barely discernible hints of color in the plaid dark that hung over everything, and brought them to a snail's pace. Keeping a hand to the walls they walked beside helped.

So did whispering. Though it was more making sounds which almost approached words with the least noise possible.

They walked for minutes. Or hours.

It was hard to tell without seeing one of the Daughters overhead. Not that Soli could do that normally — Captain Thellere did it all the time when he was invariably stranded by some shipwreck or ambush — but it was impossible to do without even that.

Gradually, over the tops of the buildings, there grew a glow in the seemingly perpetually darkness ahead of them. Not enough to really see by. Not at first.

It grew so slowly in fact that at first Soli thought he was imagining it entirely, but the others saw it too. As it brightened from an uncertain aura floating vaguely in a direction south and a little further west into a distinct haze burning faintly against the deep blue of the sky, perhaps four streets over, the others whispered to each other frantically.

Snappy little exchanges, full of sharp and hissing tones.

Eventually, inevitably, they decided to head in that direction.

There was a moment, as they continued on, that he had the wild notion that it was Lythra coming back; the sun reversing course in the heavens. It was what he would have expected if this were all a story being told by at temple; a daughter breaking the cycle of time and nature to save the people as darkness fell over the world.

Picking their way down alleys slowly they at last came to the street where the glow was, just two blocks down from this source.

As it turned out, the glow was people. Quite a lot of people actually.

Or rather the lights (opens fires on the ground and torches hanging off the walls) that the people were using to stave off the strange darkness that had fallen. Packed into an open air market pressed up against a thin strip of park, they looked... bruised and battered and bloodstained, as they huddled beside their tents and stared listlessly into the flickering flames or milled aimlessly between the rows upon rows upon rows of tents that had been crammed into the space. Soli saw young kids alone and families and old grandparents all squeezed up against each other without really acknowledging each other.

There was an empty stretch where the market and park both met the street and then another line of tents and fires and people, though these were more widely spaced and the people looked less injured and listless. Maybe that was just because they were covered head to toe in ranger armor. Not the shiny stuff they wore during parades, all polished silver and oiled leather.

And not the imitation of the jacket the girl wore either, but real armor.

It almost didn't even really look like leather, instead it looked almost like a piece of knitting, like someone had taken strips of leather and woven them together. There was something funny about the way they looked too, like each of the rangers had put on three or four extra shirts underneath. Though their dark-green hoods and cloaks almost hid it, Soli could see that each of them wore a small metal cap. Crystal lamps filled with orange-white flame lined overturned tables and torn off doors they'd used to make a crude wall at the edge of the camp.

Stopping when it was still too far for them to be spotted — they hoped — the group crouched in the shadows of a set of stairs leading up into what had once been either a library or maybe a museum of some kind, and watched. Each carried a bow, clutched in hand if they were standing watch and against their back if they weren't, but beyond that their weapons ran the gamut; spears, axes, shields, maces, and even a few swords. Their gazes swept fixedly across the darkness beyond the camp. Mouths fixed in frowns and grimaces, that only broke on the occasion that one or another whispered something to the rangers beside them.

Soli was surprised they hadn't been spotted yet.

Rangers went out into the wilds beyond even the frontier towns to hunt monsters and chart the world for the future, braving danger and uncertainty for glory and duty and faith. Or that was their motto. They went into the Underdark too, hunting worse things.

Crawling horrors and mad sorcerers. Depraved cults. That sort of thing.

A few years ago, when he was eight or so, Soli had been very insistent that he was going to be a ranger when he grew up. Thankfully he'd discovered the Adventures of Captain Thellere, which satisfied his need for thrilling adventures plenty these days.

Which had also taught him that being a ranger was dangerous. Someone always died in the first pages of a Captain Thellere story, usually pretty gruesomely too,to show that whatever the Captain was about to face was serious. And when it was an actual character, someone the Ranger Captain had met in some other story, well that was when you knew it was a serious story.

Maybe it was all made up like Ostra said. Soli still found them fun to read.

He didn't think any of these rangers were having fun.

They watched the camp for several long minutes. Just watched it.

Without a sun overhead it was hard to make out much, even with the light cast by their torches and crystal lamps. Also it was starting to get cold. Those fires looked very inviting. Especially when Soli spotted people cooking food over them, his stomach grumbled (luckily his wasn't the only one) loudly in response. And as they sat there smells wafted over, filling their noses with the scents of meat and oil and herbs It had been hours since Soli had eaten, since before he went to the park with his- since that morning.

There were so many people though. Dangerous things happened around other people.

But… they wouldn't have all gathered together if it wasn't safe, right?

Did the danger follow people? This camp must have been there for hours though, for all those tents to get set up and for the rangers to have built their wall.

Silently they all turned to one another and started a silent argument. It wasn't like anyone was exactly objecting to approaching the camp, the rangers were clearly protecting the camp, it had to be safe to approach. None of them were exactly enthusiastic though. Not after everything that had happened.

More than anything it was a process of who would take the lead. Several eyes, including Soli's, drifted to the girl wearing the fake-ranger jacket who shrank away and shook her head. There wasn't really a logic for it. They all just looked at each other for several long moments until finally the owly looking boy with the glasses and the blonde girl stepped forward together. With deliberate and anxious slowness they led the group out from behind the stairs and began creeping along the street towards the camp.

As they approached the edge of the camp's glow, where the street faded from indistinct blackness to a sort of muted greying expanse of colorlessness, they slowed even further. To a crawl.

Soli felt his heart beating against his chest as he kept one eye on the blonde girl's footsteps and another on the closest group of rangers.

She took one step into the light, then another. And another. She was four or five steps into the light before any of the rangers noticed them. They all reacted at once.

"Contact!" "Nock!"

"You! Stop right there!" "Don't-" "Stop moving!"

"Hold it!"

Next Part

#fic #story #mine #Sunfall #Chapter 2 #apocalypse #fantasy #original fiction #original story #original characters #Soli #comments and critique are greatly appreciated #long post #3.1k

0 notes

littleblackgoldfish · 4 years ago

Text

Sunfall

Soli lives in the sun-drenched city of Deylos with his mom, dad, three older sisters, and younger brother. His world is about to end, in fire and terror and darkness. And once it has ended he will be cast off on a journey to places strange and wild, where everything he has ever known is nothing more than a memory of kinder days. Go on this journey with him; see what he sees and meet who he meets, in Sunfall.

Chapter 1

His feet pounding against stone Soli pushed himself up and onward even as he heard the distant sound of another of Deylos' towering spires of glass and spell-wrought metal crashing to the ground. Once the wide promenade would have been a smooth ascent up to the crest of the hill, now it was broken and uneven; its careful masonry jostled into a treacherous tangle. Thick dust choked not only the air — tasting faintly now of copper, like those medallions Kiestre's priests handed out on High Mercy Days — but his throat as well. Heart hammering up through his chest and into his throat Soli struggled up the rise as dust and sweat mixed in a cake of grime on his face and arms and legs. Around him other people ran too, some stumbled and fell behind while others overtook Soli and dashed ahead.

Then there were the people who weren't moving. Those shaking, huddled shapes in the lees and shadows of buildings. Those too tired to move or too broken by what they'd seen. Figures sprawled in the rubble, bodies reduced to mangled collections of limbs and meat that no longer housed even the faintest spark of life.

He ignored all those. Soli focuses mostly on the way ahead, at the rise of the city beyond the hill looking still so quiet and tranquil and undisturbed that he knows if he can reach it he will be safe.

And so he misses the bit of the street sticking up in his path; a bit of brick dislodged by the tremors, one of thousands, that the edge of his sandal catches on. He stumbles forward and falls, just managing to catch himself palms out. Tiny shards of stone cut into the soft flesh of his hands and sharp bolts of pain shoot up from his knees.

When he scrambles back Soli leaves behind faint smears of blood.

His knees protests, screaming in agony as he struggles forward at a hobbling run. But he doesn't stop. Won't. Can't stop.

Stopping is death.

Overhead the sky is clear and blue as Lythra, middle Daughter of the Five and Patron of Genius, burns bright and high just as she would on any other day of high summer. Had he any attention to spare for such details and were he perhaps more devout than most boys of twelve Soli might notice and muse that it is not fitting that such death and destruction to happen under such an auspicious sky, that instead the sky should be dark and shrouded, storming even. But it was instead a fine morning.

Perfect for a family jaunt to the park — named after some hero of the Days of Illumination Soli thinks, or maybe a famous battle? History is not his best subject — with his mother and father. Ostra and the others were going to meet with them later, his older sisters and younger brother coming back from a trip to the theatre and Soli just back from staying the night at Talwyn's. He had just been telling his parents about the crystal array his friends' father had showed them, meant to help track weather or something, when they first heard the boom. At first he hadn't really paid attention, figuring it was just someone setting off fireworks or some construction or something like that, but then it was followed by another.

And then another.

That was when the first spire started falling. People started shouting and pointing and that got his attention. It didn't make sense to Soli's eyes, things that tall… that big didn't sway like that; like thin trees during a storm or tall grasses in a breeze.

But it wasn't actually swaying, it was falling over, just slowly on account of its size. When it finally hit the ground there was a huge crash, drawn out like a peel of summer thunder echoing over the city and a huge cloud of dust went up. Then another of Deylos' spires started careening towards the ground and then people really started screaming. What had before been a gently milling and diffuse crowd of people in the park became instead a surge mass of people churning in every direction.

Soli's mother and father each grabbed a hand and started moving. They weren't screaming. He can remember looking up at them, glancing between his mother's long oval of a face frozen in a mask of stony silence and his father's hawkish features locked into a wide-eyed stare, and feeling his words lodged themselves in his throat like the knot of a tree root. Looking back it might have been better to stay where they were. But with the crowd wild about them there was no chance for that, it was either move or be crushed beneath the stampede. Soli locked between his parents as they maintained an irongripped lock on his hands and dragged him towards the eastern edge of the park. They made it in just a few minutes and there joined an ever greater flow of people.

Not just people coming out of the park but others going towards it from the surrounding blocks. Everyone moving just so they wouldn't be trampled underfoot by the people all around them.

Somehow throughout it all Soli didn't lose his grip on either his father or mother even as the great mass of people pushed and pulled them this way and that. By then the air was filled with a chorus of screams and shouts that joined together into a wordless barrage, behind which was a now constant refrain of booms echoing through the city.

Every few minutes he felt another spire fall by the tremors they set off. Glass cracked, stone planters tumbled over, loose brick was shaken free, and people fell never to rise again. Huge plumes of dust rose into the sky and colored Lythra's darker, drifting through the streets.

He remembered coughing for what seemed like forever in the alley between a tiny little furniture shop and a restaurant as his parents argued in quiet whispers about what to do next. They tried to keep their voices low enough that Soli couldn't hear but neither had been willing to let go of his hands so he heard it all. His father 'won' and they decided to start trying to circle around the park and head back towards home, where they would hopefully meet up with the others.

They'd only made it a block and a half through the press of people, winding this way and that as the flow of the crowd shifted when a shadow fell over them. Soli looked up and saw the impossible. Glinting light reflected off of windows twice as tall as he was sandwiched between beams of metal as thick around as three of him put together.

It was like looking up and seeing the ground rushing up to meet you.

And before he could process what exactly it meant he felt hands on his back shoving him forward and heard a wordless scream that opened up his chest, grabbed his heart, and squeezed it like a vice. Soli tumbled forward into his father's back and they both crumpled to the ground in a heap.

He had one last glimpse of his mother from that position, her green eyes shining and her mouth flung open as the warm skin of her face pulled taut and the coiled braid of brown hair on top of her head fell loose over the sharp points of her ears.

Then… nothing. She was swallowed by a cloud of dust and stone and shattered glass.

Of the long minutes that followed Soli mostly remembers feelings; his hand in his fathers tight grip, trying to cough out his lungs, and blinking to clear his eyes. Tears carving tracks down his cheeks through the caked layer of grime and dust as he struggled in the wake of his father's long stride. Emerging from dust clouded hell into the relief of Lythra's clear gaze.

He remembers hearing the screams and shouts of those running alongside them mutely, distantly, as if something thick and stuff was stuck in his ears. He remembers his lungs burning. Stumbling. A skinned knee. Then more running.

Soli remembers running for hours, days, years. Feeling as if he was a string stretched too tight across a chasm.

Then he felt a blast of hot wind at his back. Like after a long high-summer day when the winds have been still for too long and then a fresh breeze blows in, stirring up all that stagnant air into a wave of dry scorching heat. And with it a great roar like the crowd at a Pinpoint match when the home player scored a perfect bullseye.

He glanced behind himself, but instead of a rambunctious crowd he saw the street opening open like the maw of those monsters on the covers of Captain Thellere stories. People fell screaming into the jaws of the earth. Tongues of flame as big as trees licked up the sides of the gap. And it was growing.

Soli felt himself being lifted, his fathers long arms gripping him under his arms as he redoubled his pace. He remembered thinking that he hadn't been carried like that in years. All around them people ran and screamed, their faces twisted masks locked into perpetual terror, as the ground behind them continued to collapse in great chunks that dropped away with either groaning shrieks or utter silence. It had to end, at some point it had to end. But it did not, instead seeming to go on forever as Soli's father stumbled forward on aching legs.

Until he could not any more.

As the last of his frantic strength left him he heaved and threw Soli forward. Soli did not see his father fall, didn't even hear it, all he knew was that one moment he was being carried and then the next he was tumbling through the air towards the street below. His back was the first part of him to hit the ground and he skidded to a halt through rubble and dust just a second later. Bruiser and a little more scraped up, but whole.

Of his father he saw nothing. Only the gaping chasm stretching before him, still swallowing buildings and streets to either side but no longer creeping inexorably toward him.

How long he stayed there staring at the destruction Soli doesn't know, he also doesn't remember getting up and resuming his journey or when he made the decision to start running again or even the one never to turn around again. He isn't even sure how long it has been since that moment. Days, hours, minutes. They've all blended together.

It's hard to even remember what it was like to count time in anything but his own (dust choked) breaths and (bruised and aching) steps. There's more dust than air in his lungs it feels like sometimes. And a persistent split in his side like someone has reached in and started tugging on his organs. He doesn't even have a destination except away. The number of other people around him has steadily dropped since then, going from a scattered crowd to a sporadic trickle to the occasional glimpse across the street. Sometimes it's adults trudging along, dust caked and bloodied, and other times its kids his age and younger huddling alone in the shadow of a collapsed and ruined building that was once a home. He's seen people with crudely bandaged injuries and others so covered in dust it was hard to make them out against the ruins.

And sometimes they aren't even people anymore. Just bodies.

He stopped really seeing them a while ago and now Soli just runs on. Until he too can't anymore.

Something, a bit of brick again maybe or maybe a patch of wet… something, tripped him, sending him sprawling. Getting up was too much of an effort so instead Soli simply lay there in the dust as his tired and aching lungs struggled to suck in what air they could. Mostly they seemed to get dust.

Instantly his throat and mouth were coat in it and he could feel it settling into his chest.

He let out a wracking cough which rattled his ribs and bruised his throat. Then another. And another. Each one gusting more dust into the air in front of his face and making the problem worse.

On and on they went, until finally he could breath cleanly with great sucking breaths that pushed his chest painfully against the hard paved brick of the street below him. His whole chest was a single bruise and his throat felt like a raw wound. Every part of him was spent; his arms and legs felt limps useless at his side, his feet like another pair of bruises, and behind his eyes a drum beat against his skull.

Soli decided then that he might as well die. The world seemed to be ending anyways, so he might as well end with it.

And so, as his breathing slowed and the pain receded down to merely a constant dull ache, he simply lay there and waited. For how long he didn't know.

Long enough.

With the same gradual awareness of the Daughters' rise after dos'lya — that brief period between one Daughters setting below the horizon and the next's rise, when the world seemed half-asleep, cast all in long shadows and pale reflections of the Daughters' radiance — he became aware of a pair of feet by his head, then as his eyes drifted upward he saw two legs attached to them and then the rest of the body. It was a girl. Or so he saw her.

She was twenty and a university student who had so far survived the apparent apocalypse by virtue of being at first far from the center of the city where the worst of the devastation had been concentrated and then by moving from alley to alley with her friends. Soli knew none of that. All he saw was a girl untouched (physically) by the devastation around them, her short blond hair tumbling down around her cutely rounded ears to just tickle her shoulders. Dressed in a pale blue shirt and long green pants she looked like one of those paintings of Kiestre in the temple murals.

And behind her five others, two boys (one only a little taller than Soli himself, with a scowl that seemed permanently etched into his face alongside several studs going through the bridge of his nose and eyebrows and wearing clothes as dark as his mood, and the other a lanky enough he towered over most people in a crowd wearing a pair of rounded half spectacles that gave him a distinctly owlish look only reinforced by his rumpled clothes) and three girls (another blond, her hair falling in a long braid down her back while the shaved sides of her head reveal the arc of rings running down her ears to match the one in her lip, next the perfect picture of a farm girl — sunkissed skin and work worn hands — in her sundress if not for her unnatural red blade of hair and the scattering of tattoos running up her arms to disappear underneath the floral fabric of her dress, and at last a girl with a tress of midnight hair that cascaded down onto shoulders hunched underneath a jacket made to look like Ranger garb at least two sizes to big for her) all around the same age. Two of them were looking anxiously around, one each of the boys and girls, their eyes tracking the sky as if it might start falling on them even though there were no spires in the immediate area, just the usual ten to fifteen story buildings scattered amongst lower slung shops and homes of the area. All of them had the same drained expression, but they were all a far cry from the rest of the people Soli had seen about; lacking the despondent gazes and lifeless postures. Whatever they had seen it had not been the sheer death and destruction as further into the city. Somehow that made him feel… not hopeful exactly, but less hopeless.

If these people had survived his sisters and brother might have too. He wanted to see them again.

Even if their parents were- even if it was just the five of them they were still a family.

"Can you stand on your own?"

Her voice was low, sort of rumbly, though he couldn't tell if it was her normal voice or the result of something else.

There was no mistaking it for anything but a real person's voice, and with that his faint hope of everything having been some horrible nightmare disappeared. His scattered thoughts slowly came back around to the present moment as Soli took in his immediate surroundings; the shattered, scattered landscape of Deylos spread out around him like something from one of those old paintings about the Illumination. Only transposed onto a modern city of metal and stone and glass. Smoke, it looked too dark to be dust, rose in black columns to spread a haze across the clear blue sky.

If he strained Soli could just make out the distant shouts and screams of other people over the persistent booms that echoed across the city. Though most were distinctly different from the original ones, he could tell because those still came occasionally to shake loose whatever fragmentary shards of glass still stood in the windows.

Apparently taking his halting movements as an answer the girl stooped closer and put her arms beneath his shoulders, lifting with a single great heave. They stumbled together.

"I- I can't carry you, kid. You've got to stand or you'll…"

She didn't say what would happen.

He understood anyway, after all he'd been ready to accept it just a few moments before. Part of him still was ready to just lay down and die.

Not enough of him to do it, it turned out, as his legs finally caught underneath him and after another moment of shaky stumbling steadied against the uneven street.

"Good, good," she didn't let go all the way as she moved back towards her friends, leading him by the shoulder with a tug and pull.

The rest of them accepted him silently into their midst with little more than a nod as they, just as silently, moved back into the alley that they'd come from (he thought at least).

This group did not run with terror-born endurance, but rather slinked with the anxious gaits of the hunted and eyes cast towards the sky. Over the next hour or so they alternated between creeping through darkened alleys and sprinting across ruined streets picking their way further and further away from the Deylos' city center and closer and closer to its outskirts. He wondered if they were trying to get out of the city entirely. Soli had only been beyond the city once before, to visit his grandfather's estate when he was a few years younger.

Maybe it would be safer there. Without all the tall buildings to fall on them.

But then again, how would they feed themselves or find water to drink or even just stay dry if a storm rolled in? If they found a town maybe? One of the little outlying 'burbs that clung to Deylos' fringes like raindrops.

That was a long way away. Deylos might not be like the older cities (only just two centuries from its founding) of the Summerlands, which stretched from horizon to horizon and rose so high into the heavens that the taller spires shaded the shorter, but it was still a far cry from some dinky little frontier colony. Tens of thousands called it home. Tens of thousands more worked within it everyday, travelling in from those same outlying little towns everyday to the towers and spires at its center in enchanted cart-trains pulled along by spectral horses. There were, throughout its many kilometers of sprawl scattered compounds, clusters of towers and parks, belonging to the various combines and concerns that called Deylos home.

In fact one such compound seemed to be their immediate goal. Locate in one of the newer portions of the city towards the southeast that seemed to be relatively untouched by the devastation otherwise wrought on the city Soli could make out the distant forms of a number of middling towers. The sort that the big combines liked to use for office space. Big, blocky things that loomed over the surrounding streets with imposing power they looked eerily pristine from a distance.

Just beyond them he also glimpsed one of Deylos' grand temples. He didn't know to which Daughter in particular it was dedicated, though given its proximity to the compound he would bet it was Lythra. Combine adverts were always thanking Lythra and such.

Soli and his family prayed mostly to Kiestre and Kauvandra like most people did. Everyone gave some prayer to each of the Daughters of course. But unless you were a Ranger, glory and honor were pretty far from most people's lives and unless you were a mage developing spells or an artist, genius wasn't something most people needed much of. People needed justice all the time though, whether you were hoping for someone to catch the pickpocket who stole your coin purse or praying that all studying paid off on your next test, and mercy… well everyone made mistakes or got sick.

As the group approached closer and closer to the collection of towers, sneaking through quiet streets and dashing past shop windows hanging open like yawning mouths, complete with rows of glass teeth, the peeking shape of the temple disappeared though. In its place more and more of the ground level came into view. Between the towering edifice of stone and glass that stretched farther and farther above as they grew closer, smooth paved plazas stretched out underneath the clear light of Lythra. Lined by trees and bushes and even occasionally run through with trickling little false rivers they broke up the monotony of the compound.

Eerie did not begin to describe the deadly silence of their surroundings combined with faint and fading booms and the distant cries of the city, only a whisper on the wind howling overhead as they walked beneath the shadows of the towers at the edge of the compound. It was almost peaceful. A graveyard sort of peace.

Had it not been for the scattered signs of hasty flight Soli might have been able to fool himself into thinking everything was alright.

But everywhere he could see where people had left food lying about, or dropped papers and jackets and all other sorts of things. An enchanted door kept trying to close automatically on someone's dropped luggage.

As they crept slowly deeper into the cluster of towers the others of the group grew increasingly more anxious, craning their necks more and more towards the sky. Conversations had been sparse the whole time but not it ceased altogether. No more whispered conversations or low chuckles at some private joke.

Soli wondered what they were looking out for. He'd never been the most observant, his middle sister Euma always complained that he stole her pairs and triplets whenever they were paired together for Twos-and-Threes on family nights. No one else seemed as bothered to be paired up with him, but Soli didn't know if that was just because they weren't as competitive as Euma or if she was just making excuses for losing. Either way he didn't see what the others saw.

Then again, maybe they hadn't seen it yet either, he thought, just in time for the scowling boy to curse.

"Cieliel's puckered assh— "

His tattooed friend stopped him before he finished. Soli almost rolled his eyes; he was twelve, not six. He and his friends said worse. Out of earshot of their parents at least.

Or maybe it wasn't because of him, because all the others had suddenly tensed up and their eyes had swiveled across the skyline in the direction of scowly's gaze. He tried to see what had caught their attention but couldn't. It looked like any other patch of sky, hazy from the dust and smoking swirling through it but otherwise clear of anything except the towers.

Which were plenty interesting, sure, with their crystal prisms, wire-webbing, bronze discs, and all other manner of magey stuff. But none of that seemed to warrant cursing.

A second later it didn't matter how unobservant Soli was because he heard it; a long whispered roar in the distance that echoed back and forth between the canyons between the towers. Like the droning of thousands of insects it broke the eerie quiet into a million little pieces. Without discussion the group rushed for the nearest alleyway, sweeping Soli up into their middle and pushing him along with half a dozen different hands.

Quickly, with the suddenness of a spring rainshower, the buzzing grew into a dull roar that shook the windows in the towers and set the hairs on the back of Soli's necks on end.

Just as they reached the mouth of the alley he saw them, not that he knew that at first, a pair of black dots in the sky that grew from the sizes of birds to the size of an entire building storey in seconds. Dancing between the buildings with incredible grace the… things swept through the compound and circled around it once in the seconds it took for the group to crowd into the alley way. It was as if someone had scooped out balls of blackish-purple stone and strung them together into a sort of caterpillar before sticking spikes all over the underside like dozens of legs or arms.

Something like water or flames shot out from little slits in between the spikes and out of the back. And in certain parts he could see bits so black they hurt to look at for more than a moment.

They came to a stop at the tower one over and across the street from the alley Soli and the others were hiding in and just hovered there in the middle of the air. He'd read stories about ships that could do that, but he'd never seen anything like it before and Soli had never imagined that they would be so big. Each of them could have fit more than a dozen of the big passenger carts inside.

Barely a second later Soli was smushed up against the wall as the whole group tried to slink as deep into the shadows as it could even as they all craned their necks to see as much as possible.

A seam on the belly of each of the flying stone-caterpillar things opens and out drop dozens of little shapes. For a second he thinks they might be shedding parts of themselves like shutu birds in summer, but then the shapes unfold into figures, people figures. Each dressed in a shell just like the stone-caterpillars, with slightly fewer spikes.

They look almost like Rangers, dressed up in their green and silver armor to march in the Illumination parade every year. They didn't move like Rangers though, there was none of the swagger and cheer that the Rangers had, these black-shelled people prowled like the panthers in Deylos' zoo hungrily baring their teeth at the watching crowds. A shiver went through Soli. Each of them was carrying a funny little bow, like they'd taken the practice bows they handed out at school and stuck them to a wooden stake. Some had shortswords at their hips.

None had spears. Or proper bows.

They looked… he didn't want to say that they looked silly, but Soli didn't have a better way of describing them.

Like an actor from one of those silly skits the school used to be put on when they were kids all in black makeup and with ridiculous white hair pretending to be storybook monsters. Even when he was a kid dosrowi stories had never scared him. Not even when told by crinkly old priestesses of Cieliel visiting from Miithraith. Dead things just weren't scary.

Squeezed in between two of the group — the blond girl who'd helped him up and the jacket girl — Soli couldn't see much, just a thin slice of the world; pale white-grey pavement of the plaza glowing in Lythra's bright light, edged by splashed of green and brown. He did not see the black shelled people prowling out from their landing zone in ones and twos. And he did not see their hovering transports lift away to soar back into the sky.

That he merely heard as whatever drove them roared out greater and greater until they drifted far enough away that the distance swallowed it some.

Forming a loose and irregular circle the black shelled people began sweeping through the courtyard holding their stubby little bows like warding amulets before them, poking through bushes and trees and peering into windows. Not all of them. But most of them. Back where they'd first been dropped off a handful remained, their armor sleeker and fancier in ways that were too subtle to notice at a distance, huddling in a tight circle around something on the ground.

Slowly the expanding wave pressed closer and closer towards the group hiding in the alley. Though none gave an indication they'd notice them.

And just as slowly the group edged away from the mouth of the alley, trying to hide deeper and deeper in the shadows, but they did not turn and flee. Fear kept them tightly bound in place. Moving things were easier to notice, even in shadow. And people that ran got chased.

So, if they didn't run they wouldn't get chased. Hopefully.

But the not-rangers in their black armor, with their strange weapons, did not seem to be turning back. With every second they took another few steps forward. Two of them were within shouting distance of the alley, one looking at the lobby of the tower directly adjacent to them while the other scanned the plaza. At least three more were within shouting distance of those two.

Then, at some silent signal, without warning or any seeming sense they stopped. Retreating away from the group they began making their way deeper into the compound, roughly in the direction of the temple Soli had just barely glimpsed earlier. A sigh of relief went through the group.

They hadn't really gotten all that close and none of them had any reason to think they were anything other than some secret Ranger force (whatever their fears, the group Soli had fallen in with knew nothing more concrete than he did), but… still they were glad to pass by unnoticed. After a moment of waiting to see if anything else would happen another wave of relief passed through the group.

Next Part

#fic #story #mine #Sunfall #Chapter 1 #apocalypse #fantasy #original fiction #original story #original characters #Soli #comments and critique are greatly appreciated #long post #5.1k #cw: death

1 note · View note