► Show Spoiler
It went pretty much exactly as she'd thought it would.
For one shimmering instant, her Pact shield was outlined against the great incandescent expansion like the moon before the sun, casting a shadow backwards over the entire proceeding. In the hazy slow-time, she watched shimmering cracks run through it, spreading like frost on a pane of glass. Incomprehensible force met with her soulforged plane, and it yielded with no more resistance than a shield of spun-sugar candy would offer a hurricane. Were it not for the eldritch untime surrounding the rude void, perhaps she would not even have been able to see that before it disintegrated.
Then it broke.
There were three kinds of pain which hit Imogen Ward in that moment. The first was an ordinary suffering; her skin split in a hundred places, fire erupted across her flesh, erupting pustules of mad aether crystalized on the storm and were driven into her skin and muscle. The lacerations were agonizing, indisputably so, but it was a very mundane kind of suffering. A young aspirant to the Sunsingers would endure pain regularly; an initiate, even more so as they struggled to wield their own spirit offensively. True, it was not usually on this level, not spread to every part of the flesh in a single instant, as though a giant had just slapped her with an eight-foot long pillowcase full of razors. Still, it was just pain, endurable as any other.
Next was regret, a creeping thing of dark roots which spread through her mind in the same pattern as the cracks which tore apart her weapon. The shield had been a relatively recent pact, to be sure, but it had saved her from insects and giant lizards, from giant mist-mutant plants and shadowy dream monsters and monkeys with flaming poop and enormous cats, and now it was gone in the space of a handful of seconds. Even now, she could picture herself and her shield, sitting on the beach, laughing into the sunrise.
Lastly, of course, was the broken pact.
Breaking a pact weapon wasn't unheard of among the Sunsingers, of course, but neither was it very common. Swords break less often than swordsmen die, after all. Anything which could sunder a Sunsinger's weapon would, in all probability, slay the mage along with it. Still, it happened, and she'd read the accounts... but it was all broken prose, groping towards understanding, illumination. It was one thing to write that breaking a Pact weapon cracked the wielder's soul, but the words failed to quite signify. It was a deep, dark, primal revulsion, like the terror a condemned man must feel as he is helped into the guillotine's brace. It was wrong for a Pact weapon to shatter, wrong in a way which would never be righted.
She could feel the breaking. It was there... then gone. A shield-shaped hole in her soul.
(In this case the shape was a circle, since it was a circular shield)
“A prisoner does not choose the bars of his cage. The only trap, young Orakai, is the one you made for yourself. Still, I am a keeper of my word, for at least one of you accepts aid when offered. You will not die, Orakai. Your sun shall yet sing its song. At least, for one more sunrise.”
Her beautiful inner agony was interrupted once more by the words of some snide asshole, and she tore herself away from self-reflection to focus on the world around her. Imogen's vision swam as she opened up her eyes, the all-consuming sphere of expanding light still superimposed upon her vision, all the more distracting for the fact that it was suddenly very dark. She blinked rapidly, breathing hard, but it didn't help much in the short term.
Somehow, she'd ended up on the floor, though she couldn't tell exactly when or how she'd fallen. Every surface of her body hurt as she pushed herself into an upright position, but the burning sensation was a welcome one. If every limb hurt, that meant all of them were still attached!
"Achgkl." Imogen vocalized experimentally, then coughed as the random syllables dislodged bloody phlegm from her throat.
The world slowly began to resolve itself in a gloomier aspect than she was really accustomed to. If she'd been in a right state of mind, she might have adjusted her eyes to improve her night vision- but perhaps it was luckier for her that she didn't think of it in that moment, given the amount of aetheryte currently stuck into her skin. One by one, she saw Mr. Aoren, looking shocked. Hector and Mr. Vergil stood just beyond him, looking entirely unharmed, and past them...
One of the elves, the one she thought was a captain of some sort, was in dire straits. Something was wrong with her face, her eyes sunken and dark as though they weren't even there at all. The human woman who had come with them seemed just as badly-off, her arms appearing terribly blackened and charred. Two of the other elves were missing entirely.
The Ork staggered to her feet, dizzy and burning, but determined to take stock of the situation. She tried speaking again:
"Fuck-" oh yes, that was much better, "Mr. Vergil, there's wounded back there!"
