Searing, 40 122
She’d worried that preparation would take a lot of time. When it didn’t, she sort of wished it had.
The plan was, in the vein of all the witch’s best ideas, simple and stupid, but it did take a bit of set-up. She’d thought the outfit would be the hard part, but it turned out that there was an expert weaver in the nearby village. Spider silk was expensive, but ideal for her purposes; stretchy, tough and easy to move in even when padded. The mask was similarly easy, as the mawoiden used a dizzying variety of ritual masks, and kept a good supply to hand.
(The third part of the plan was more challenging, as the mawoiden had little livestock.)
Ultimately, though, things came together quite quickly. Two days after she’d formulated the plan, the only thing left to do was walk into the jungle and try to fight an invincible nightmare monster.
From the little she’d been able to glean thus far, Kegumu Rakaka preferred to be active in the darkness; just as well, since the Eclipse had thrown a great shadow over everything in any event. It made little difference to Imogen, who possessed supernaturally good night vision in any event. She waited for nightfall to enter the forest.
When Imogen entered the jungle, she was dressed from head to toe in a thick spidersilk garment, heavily padded. Her face was hidden by the mawoiden death mask, though her bright purple eyes were clearly visible in the wooden hollows. Apart from those eyes, not even her hair was exposed to the elements.
The heavy padding made movement a little tricky, but it wasn’t much more weight than she was used to. Within half an hour, she’d adjusted to the awkward drag on her gait, the jiggling where she hadn’t quite managed to get the cushion tightly bound around herself. It was going to throw her off in combat, no doubt, but she didn’t expect to win the fight to come anyway.
If the hunt had been a challenge, she might have managed to relax over the course of the time spent tracking. But the tug on her soul was easy to follow, and it took her less than an hour to locate the primal.
The Silent Fisher’s presence was felt long before it was seen. Day or night, the jungles of northern Ecith were a riot of noise- skittering paws, calling birdsong, swaying brush. As Imogen closed in, however, all those noises faded, until the background was so muted that it seemed only the sound of her footfalls upon the earth below could be heard. She almost winced as each step crunched and thumped on the rock and branches and soil below, as if the very act of making noise in this place was somehow… profane. An imposition. She was not supposed to be here.
"I’d rather be elsewhere myself" Imogen told the silent dark, the holy quiet, "But I’ve a duty to attend."
She half expected the silence to reply, or perhaps for the primal to burst, enraged, from the brush. Instead, Imogen’s wry comment simply fell into the silence and was lost, swallowed up. She grunted, and continued forward.
It wasn’t long before the witch came upon the expected scene. The Silent Fisher had chosen to spend this night at the edge of a small, shallow pond. It was algae-filled, of course, and choked with vines, but the moon above cut beautifully through the trees and bathed it all in a serene, silver light. In another context, it would have been the perfect place for a rendezvous of young lovers, or perhaps for children to stumble upon, eyes wide with wonder.
But there were neither lovers or children on the banks of this pond. Only Kegumu Rakaka.
It was diminutive by the reckoning of Primals, but by that reckoning only. It stood taller than any Orkhan she’d ever met, save perhaps the Dragonborn. Two birdlike legs descended into the pond, supporting a body covered in dark grey feathering, an eerie mix between humanoid and avian which (unlike the Avialae of the north) chose to favor neither. Where arms should have been, great grey feathers bent away from the green water, forming huge wings. Its head, similarly, seemed like a perverse combination of humanoid anatomy and a crane’s, ending in a great curved beak.
It did not move a single muscle as Imogen barged into view. Beneath its thick coat of feathers, she could see no movement; if the chest rose and fell with breath, if the heart beat, it was imperceptible. The head was tilted towards the pond, but there was no hope of tracking its gaze. Kegumu Rakaka’s eyes were twin circles of absolute white, like portals to another world entirely. What it saw… even if it saw… impossible to say.
This still figure was the source of the silent forest, the terror of generations. She could not believe it hadn’t noticed her approach, but it seemed unperturbed. Perhaps this was some sort of grace it was extending her, as an outsider. ‘You’re mucking about with things you don’t understand’, it might be saying, ‘go away and do not return.’ Then again, perhaps that was just her imposing her own thoughts on something which generally preferred to eat fish to Orks.
Either way, it seemed that it fell to Imogen to break this silence, to address the nightmare herself. She drew in a deep breath.
"Oi! You goddamn bird! Look over here!"
Imogen did not see the Fisher move to attack. One moment she was shouting at it, the next moment she couldn’t see the pond at all, and there was a great ringing noise in the night, like a gong had been struck. An instant later, pain rushed through Imogen’s mind, a confusing, white-hot pain, carrying the memory of watching herself begin to disintegrate beneath a torrent of light…
That sharp, sourceless pain clued her into what had happened; her Pact shield had interposed itself between her and the primal, intercepting it faster than she could see and react. There was a shifting noise from the other side of the enormous instrument as the Fisher pushed itself lightly off- but nothing from its landing on the ground. Apparently the primal was entirely silent even in movement.
The witch summoned her sword to hand, gripping it a little awkwardly in the padded silk glove, and turned to scan her surroundings. A moment later, the pain hit her again; again, the scene of the exploding Spire tore through her mind. Her shield had shifted once more, deflecting the Fisher’s rush from the side.
This was unsustainable. Imogen’s Pact shield could withstand the blows, but to maintain it burned through her aether, and the wound its first shattering had left on her soul was too distracting to rely upon. The Sunsinger needed to observe Kegumu Rakaka, or all this was going to be pointless.
So Imogen drew upon Animus, altering her eyes and brain as she’d been practicing for the past year with the aura of the housefly.
The humble fly, she’d observed, saw a world in slow motion. It could detect movement and react in a fraction of a fraction of the time that even a trained warrior could. The downside, obviously, was that this super-fast system worked entirely off the most base instinct; one could not avoid the trade-off. If you wanted to be a lot faster, you had to think a lot less.
So it was that the witch slowed the world down enough to see the Silent Fisher’s next attack. Having been blocked twice, the Kegumu Rakaka had apparently come to the conclusion that Imogen’s shield could only block in one direction at a time- instead of a head-on assault, the Primal had gotten behind Imogen and extended its wings to full length, ready to bring them in on both sides.
Rather than block, Imogen dodged, knees practically collapsing as she threw herself to the ground. The disadvantage of the housefly’s mind was its reliance on pure instinct, but Imogen Ward had twenty years of practice swordfighting, and her instincts were pretty good. As in a dream, she felt herself swing at the Silent Fisher’s leg with her seven-foot blade, a blow which could have bisected an orkhan.
But she felt not the telltale bite of the blade into flesh and sinew and bone, but a metallic tang! as the weapon slid on impact. The sword was tossed out of her hand, spinning and vibrating wildly, and the Silent Fisher pivoted, grabbing the grounded Ork with its other leg and slamming her into a tree.
She had little time to understand what had happened; the creature’s cruel, metallic beak was already descending upon her. She Blinked.
Imogen fell out of slipspace just behind the tree, stumbling quickly to her feet and calling her Pact sword back to her. It had nearly returned to her hand when a sudden blur struck it midair, sending it flying until it was embedded, edge-first, into a nearby tree. If she’d had the time or the presence of mind, she’d have cursed the creature’s cleverness.
Well, that might have stymied a novice, but the witch wasn’t nearly ready to give up. The creature had taken a hit from her Pact sword head-on without any damage, but even a primal was still subject to physics. She let the balance in her brain shift from speed more to sentience, and immediately Blinked again, just to buy time as she forced the creature to reorient and reposition itself.
This time, when the strike came, she let her shield interpose itself, gritting her teeth through the pain, and she filled her aura with the strength of the elder hydra’s totem. As soon as the Fisher’s weight slammed against the shield, she dismissed it, the massive weapon blinking out of existence.
Kegumu Rakaka, which had been about to push away from the shield anew, was forced to drop, which meant that, for a moment, it had no leverage whatsoever. Imogen swung for its head with her fist, feet digging into the ground as the totem of the Hydra added weight and muscle beyond her frame’s natural capabilities. Her punch hit the creature like a train, while it was yet in midair.
This should have sent the creature flying, or at least toppled it. Instead, as the dust settled, it appeared she had managed to push it back only a few feet. But worse than that…
For various reasons, Imogen felt no pain, but it was immediately clear to her that her hand was not in good shape. Even with protective magic, it felt like she’d just punched a metal wall with all of her strength- a matter of small consequence to the wall, but not necessarily so for her.
"Fuck me." the Ork muttered.
Kegumu Rakaka turned around, for a moment as still as it had been when she’d first met it. It cocked its head, in the manner of a bird, its eyes still white circles in the world. For a moment, it looked like the primal was asking her if she wanted to simply call it quits now.
Two strikes had been proven useless, and Imogen wasn’t going to be using that hand again today, but she was far from disarmed. In fact, while the Silent Fisher stood there, still, it practically invited her to bring many more weapons to bear.
She complied.
Imogen summoned her Pact spear, an eight-foot-long bronze lance ending in a truly nasty spearhead. It fell easily into her uninjured hand, and she shifted her grip down the lance to point it directly at the primal’s empty eyes. It did not move.
The spear was the second weapon she’d trained to master, inspired as she had been by her master, Ansel Gerhard. The style he’d taught her was utterly inapplicable here- it focused on preserving the combatant’s advantage at range, but the Silent Fisher had command over the battlefield and knew it. It would not be kept back with a stick, howsoever pointy.
So instead, she poured aether into the spear until it shone like a star and could bear no more, and hurled it into the moonlit sky above.
The glowing weapon arced upward into the sky and erupted, exploding like a firework… except that the shimmering sparks falling away suddenly turned, all shooting towards the silent primal below. As they got closer, it became apparent that Imogen had summoned hundreds of spears, each trailing a line of thin silver light, and all converging on Kegumu Rakaka.
As the first spear neared it, the primal finally moved. It looked almost lazy, as its wings struck one, then another, then another spear out of the sky. It bisected a half-dozen duplicants, but eventually even it could not keep up with the sheer number of spears. After a moment, it disappeared from sight, entirely concealed by silver light and flashing brass.
Imogen clenched a fist in front of her, drawing the hundreds of descending spears into a thick pillar, then fell to her knees, slamming the palm of her unwounded hand against the earth. The remaining spears all fell at once, the sounds of thudding and slashing so loud that for a moment they formed a roar.
When the last spear had landed, Imogen rose, then made a slashing motion through the air, allowing all of the aether to dissipate. The forest of spears disintegrated into a veritable fog of sparkling silver light, and then even that died away.
Where the spears had fallen, the ground had been torn to shreds- near the center, it was almost a foot lower than it had been. Every inch of vegetation was destroyed, the canopy simply vanished in a perfect circle around Imogen’s target.
And there, in the very center, stood Kegumu Rakaka, entirely untouched.
It cocked its head at Imogen.
Imogen ran through the darkened forest, but the outcome wasn’t in doubt. If any of those pauses had been meant to let her simply retreat alive, the Silent Fisher was no longer extending the offer.
There was a rustle in the bushes to the side and Imogen blindly hurled spears towards it. They hit, but it didn’t matter; Kegumu Rakaka tore out of the vegetation like a comet, slamming into the fleeing witch. It led with its shoulder–or more specifically, one of the strange golden spikes growing from its shoulder–and knocked Imogen sideways into the dirt, pinning her there. She heard a squelch as the spike ripped through her special suit and tore her arm open. Blood spattered across the hillside.
Imogen Blinked once again, staggering to her feet, and began to run in the other direction. Not ten seconds later, she felt a sudden wind as the Fisher passed behind her. This time, the sound was more like a riiiip as the primal’s wing passed through the ligaments behind her kneecaps. She tumbled forward, rolling.
Another Blink, this time back to the pond. Imogen crawled forward, towards the water. If she could hide at the bottom of the pond, completely still, maybe it-
Her forward progress was arrested by sudden weight above, as another spike crashed into her back. A moment later, she found herself being rolled onto her back. The Silent Fisher was almost gentle as it repositioned itself above her, empty white eyes staring down into fearful purple.
Hopeless as it was, Imogen reached upwards, her hands now claws, each trailing silver fire. She tore at the primal's feathers, trying in vain to dislodge even one- he squealing sounds of claw against metal filled the glade, disturbing the Silent Fisher's silence for the last time.
And then the primal brought its cruel metal beak down into Imogen’s eye.
In time, the night ended. The sky brightened, though the sun did not rise. As the shadows twisted and grew in the gloaming, one of them congealed slowly into a more defined shape. It scrabbled against the rocks for a moment, then tore its way free of the shadows.
The juvenile shadow jaguar, Kitty, padded slowly over to the edge of the pond. Scraps of spider silk, some still stained with blood, formed a tattered mat, on top of which… was a bleached-white skeleton, perfectly clean. Just as the mawoiden legends told.
Kitty leaned forward, sniffing the skeleton’s ribs for a moment, then licked the side of the skull.
A violet rune, signifying something only in the secret language of dreams, blossomed to life within the skull’s eye-hole. It migrated about the hollow for a second, then a similar purple light flared on the other side. The skeleton shifted, and slowly rose, pushing itself upwards into a seated position.
It looked down at the cat. "It’s gone?"
The cat looked up at the canopy. Faint birdcall was audible. The skeleton let out a sigh of relief.
"Thanks, Kitty. Let’s get back to Drathera, I’m going to need someone to look at my hand." Imogen stood up unsteadily, surveying the ruined spider silk. The cat gave her a plaintive ‘mew?’, clearly inquiring about something.
"Yeah, I learned something, all right. I just hope it’s worth what I spent on all that sausage meat."
The little cub slipped into the thin shadow cast by the skeleton, and in turn, she stepped into the space between worlds, and was gone. Silence returned to the little grove.
She’d worried that preparation would take a lot of time. When it didn’t, she sort of wished it had.
The plan was, in the vein of all the witch’s best ideas, simple and stupid, but it did take a bit of set-up. She’d thought the outfit would be the hard part, but it turned out that there was an expert weaver in the nearby village. Spider silk was expensive, but ideal for her purposes; stretchy, tough and easy to move in even when padded. The mask was similarly easy, as the mawoiden used a dizzying variety of ritual masks, and kept a good supply to hand.
(The third part of the plan was more challenging, as the mawoiden had little livestock.)
Ultimately, though, things came together quite quickly. Two days after she’d formulated the plan, the only thing left to do was walk into the jungle and try to fight an invincible nightmare monster.
From the little she’d been able to glean thus far, Kegumu Rakaka preferred to be active in the darkness; just as well, since the Eclipse had thrown a great shadow over everything in any event. It made little difference to Imogen, who possessed supernaturally good night vision in any event. She waited for nightfall to enter the forest.
~~~
When Imogen entered the jungle, she was dressed from head to toe in a thick spidersilk garment, heavily padded. Her face was hidden by the mawoiden death mask, though her bright purple eyes were clearly visible in the wooden hollows. Apart from those eyes, not even her hair was exposed to the elements.
The heavy padding made movement a little tricky, but it wasn’t much more weight than she was used to. Within half an hour, she’d adjusted to the awkward drag on her gait, the jiggling where she hadn’t quite managed to get the cushion tightly bound around herself. It was going to throw her off in combat, no doubt, but she didn’t expect to win the fight to come anyway.
If the hunt had been a challenge, she might have managed to relax over the course of the time spent tracking. But the tug on her soul was easy to follow, and it took her less than an hour to locate the primal.
The Silent Fisher’s presence was felt long before it was seen. Day or night, the jungles of northern Ecith were a riot of noise- skittering paws, calling birdsong, swaying brush. As Imogen closed in, however, all those noises faded, until the background was so muted that it seemed only the sound of her footfalls upon the earth below could be heard. She almost winced as each step crunched and thumped on the rock and branches and soil below, as if the very act of making noise in this place was somehow… profane. An imposition. She was not supposed to be here.
"I’d rather be elsewhere myself" Imogen told the silent dark, the holy quiet, "But I’ve a duty to attend."
She half expected the silence to reply, or perhaps for the primal to burst, enraged, from the brush. Instead, Imogen’s wry comment simply fell into the silence and was lost, swallowed up. She grunted, and continued forward.
~~~
It wasn’t long before the witch came upon the expected scene. The Silent Fisher had chosen to spend this night at the edge of a small, shallow pond. It was algae-filled, of course, and choked with vines, but the moon above cut beautifully through the trees and bathed it all in a serene, silver light. In another context, it would have been the perfect place for a rendezvous of young lovers, or perhaps for children to stumble upon, eyes wide with wonder.
But there were neither lovers or children on the banks of this pond. Only Kegumu Rakaka.
It was diminutive by the reckoning of Primals, but by that reckoning only. It stood taller than any Orkhan she’d ever met, save perhaps the Dragonborn. Two birdlike legs descended into the pond, supporting a body covered in dark grey feathering, an eerie mix between humanoid and avian which (unlike the Avialae of the north) chose to favor neither. Where arms should have been, great grey feathers bent away from the green water, forming huge wings. Its head, similarly, seemed like a perverse combination of humanoid anatomy and a crane’s, ending in a great curved beak.
It did not move a single muscle as Imogen barged into view. Beneath its thick coat of feathers, she could see no movement; if the chest rose and fell with breath, if the heart beat, it was imperceptible. The head was tilted towards the pond, but there was no hope of tracking its gaze. Kegumu Rakaka’s eyes were twin circles of absolute white, like portals to another world entirely. What it saw… even if it saw… impossible to say.
This still figure was the source of the silent forest, the terror of generations. She could not believe it hadn’t noticed her approach, but it seemed unperturbed. Perhaps this was some sort of grace it was extending her, as an outsider. ‘You’re mucking about with things you don’t understand’, it might be saying, ‘go away and do not return.’ Then again, perhaps that was just her imposing her own thoughts on something which generally preferred to eat fish to Orks.
Either way, it seemed that it fell to Imogen to break this silence, to address the nightmare herself. She drew in a deep breath.
"Oi! You goddamn bird! Look over here!"
~~~
For three nights, the battle raged; first they fought to kill it…
Imogen did not see the Fisher move to attack. One moment she was shouting at it, the next moment she couldn’t see the pond at all, and there was a great ringing noise in the night, like a gong had been struck. An instant later, pain rushed through Imogen’s mind, a confusing, white-hot pain, carrying the memory of watching herself begin to disintegrate beneath a torrent of light…
That sharp, sourceless pain clued her into what had happened; her Pact shield had interposed itself between her and the primal, intercepting it faster than she could see and react. There was a shifting noise from the other side of the enormous instrument as the Fisher pushed itself lightly off- but nothing from its landing on the ground. Apparently the primal was entirely silent even in movement.
The witch summoned her sword to hand, gripping it a little awkwardly in the padded silk glove, and turned to scan her surroundings. A moment later, the pain hit her again; again, the scene of the exploding Spire tore through her mind. Her shield had shifted once more, deflecting the Fisher’s rush from the side.
This was unsustainable. Imogen’s Pact shield could withstand the blows, but to maintain it burned through her aether, and the wound its first shattering had left on her soul was too distracting to rely upon. The Sunsinger needed to observe Kegumu Rakaka, or all this was going to be pointless.
So Imogen drew upon Animus, altering her eyes and brain as she’d been practicing for the past year with the aura of the housefly.
The humble fly, she’d observed, saw a world in slow motion. It could detect movement and react in a fraction of a fraction of the time that even a trained warrior could. The downside, obviously, was that this super-fast system worked entirely off the most base instinct; one could not avoid the trade-off. If you wanted to be a lot faster, you had to think a lot less.
So it was that the witch slowed the world down enough to see the Silent Fisher’s next attack. Having been blocked twice, the Kegumu Rakaka had apparently come to the conclusion that Imogen’s shield could only block in one direction at a time- instead of a head-on assault, the Primal had gotten behind Imogen and extended its wings to full length, ready to bring them in on both sides.
Rather than block, Imogen dodged, knees practically collapsing as she threw herself to the ground. The disadvantage of the housefly’s mind was its reliance on pure instinct, but Imogen Ward had twenty years of practice swordfighting, and her instincts were pretty good. As in a dream, she felt herself swing at the Silent Fisher’s leg with her seven-foot blade, a blow which could have bisected an orkhan.
But she felt not the telltale bite of the blade into flesh and sinew and bone, but a metallic tang! as the weapon slid on impact. The sword was tossed out of her hand, spinning and vibrating wildly, and the Silent Fisher pivoted, grabbing the grounded Ork with its other leg and slamming her into a tree.
She had little time to understand what had happened; the creature’s cruel, metallic beak was already descending upon her. She Blinked.
Imogen fell out of slipspace just behind the tree, stumbling quickly to her feet and calling her Pact sword back to her. It had nearly returned to her hand when a sudden blur struck it midair, sending it flying until it was embedded, edge-first, into a nearby tree. If she’d had the time or the presence of mind, she’d have cursed the creature’s cleverness.
Well, that might have stymied a novice, but the witch wasn’t nearly ready to give up. The creature had taken a hit from her Pact sword head-on without any damage, but even a primal was still subject to physics. She let the balance in her brain shift from speed more to sentience, and immediately Blinked again, just to buy time as she forced the creature to reorient and reposition itself.
This time, when the strike came, she let her shield interpose itself, gritting her teeth through the pain, and she filled her aura with the strength of the elder hydra’s totem. As soon as the Fisher’s weight slammed against the shield, she dismissed it, the massive weapon blinking out of existence.
Kegumu Rakaka, which had been about to push away from the shield anew, was forced to drop, which meant that, for a moment, it had no leverage whatsoever. Imogen swung for its head with her fist, feet digging into the ground as the totem of the Hydra added weight and muscle beyond her frame’s natural capabilities. Her punch hit the creature like a train, while it was yet in midair.
This should have sent the creature flying, or at least toppled it. Instead, as the dust settled, it appeared she had managed to push it back only a few feet. But worse than that…
For various reasons, Imogen felt no pain, but it was immediately clear to her that her hand was not in good shape. Even with protective magic, it felt like she’d just punched a metal wall with all of her strength- a matter of small consequence to the wall, but not necessarily so for her.
"Fuck me." the Ork muttered.
~~~
...then they fought to stop it…
Kegumu Rakaka turned around, for a moment as still as it had been when she’d first met it. It cocked its head, in the manner of a bird, its eyes still white circles in the world. For a moment, it looked like the primal was asking her if she wanted to simply call it quits now.
Two strikes had been proven useless, and Imogen wasn’t going to be using that hand again today, but she was far from disarmed. In fact, while the Silent Fisher stood there, still, it practically invited her to bring many more weapons to bear.
She complied.
Imogen summoned her Pact spear, an eight-foot-long bronze lance ending in a truly nasty spearhead. It fell easily into her uninjured hand, and she shifted her grip down the lance to point it directly at the primal’s empty eyes. It did not move.
The spear was the second weapon she’d trained to master, inspired as she had been by her master, Ansel Gerhard. The style he’d taught her was utterly inapplicable here- it focused on preserving the combatant’s advantage at range, but the Silent Fisher had command over the battlefield and knew it. It would not be kept back with a stick, howsoever pointy.
So instead, she poured aether into the spear until it shone like a star and could bear no more, and hurled it into the moonlit sky above.
The glowing weapon arced upward into the sky and erupted, exploding like a firework… except that the shimmering sparks falling away suddenly turned, all shooting towards the silent primal below. As they got closer, it became apparent that Imogen had summoned hundreds of spears, each trailing a line of thin silver light, and all converging on Kegumu Rakaka.
As the first spear neared it, the primal finally moved. It looked almost lazy, as its wings struck one, then another, then another spear out of the sky. It bisected a half-dozen duplicants, but eventually even it could not keep up with the sheer number of spears. After a moment, it disappeared from sight, entirely concealed by silver light and flashing brass.
Imogen clenched a fist in front of her, drawing the hundreds of descending spears into a thick pillar, then fell to her knees, slamming the palm of her unwounded hand against the earth. The remaining spears all fell at once, the sounds of thudding and slashing so loud that for a moment they formed a roar.
When the last spear had landed, Imogen rose, then made a slashing motion through the air, allowing all of the aether to dissipate. The forest of spears disintegrated into a veritable fog of sparkling silver light, and then even that died away.
Where the spears had fallen, the ground had been torn to shreds- near the center, it was almost a foot lower than it had been. Every inch of vegetation was destroyed, the canopy simply vanished in a perfect circle around Imogen’s target.
And there, in the very center, stood Kegumu Rakaka, entirely untouched.
It cocked its head at Imogen.
~~~
...and at last they fought only in the hope of slowing it.
Imogen ran through the darkened forest, but the outcome wasn’t in doubt. If any of those pauses had been meant to let her simply retreat alive, the Silent Fisher was no longer extending the offer.
There was a rustle in the bushes to the side and Imogen blindly hurled spears towards it. They hit, but it didn’t matter; Kegumu Rakaka tore out of the vegetation like a comet, slamming into the fleeing witch. It led with its shoulder–or more specifically, one of the strange golden spikes growing from its shoulder–and knocked Imogen sideways into the dirt, pinning her there. She heard a squelch as the spike ripped through her special suit and tore her arm open. Blood spattered across the hillside.
Imogen Blinked once again, staggering to her feet, and began to run in the other direction. Not ten seconds later, she felt a sudden wind as the Fisher passed behind her. This time, the sound was more like a riiiip as the primal’s wing passed through the ligaments behind her kneecaps. She tumbled forward, rolling.
Another Blink, this time back to the pond. Imogen crawled forward, towards the water. If she could hide at the bottom of the pond, completely still, maybe it-
Her forward progress was arrested by sudden weight above, as another spike crashed into her back. A moment later, she found herself being rolled onto her back. The Silent Fisher was almost gentle as it repositioned itself above her, empty white eyes staring down into fearful purple.
Hopeless as it was, Imogen reached upwards, her hands now claws, each trailing silver fire. She tore at the primal's feathers, trying in vain to dislodge even one- he squealing sounds of claw against metal filled the glade, disturbing the Silent Fisher's silence for the last time.
And then the primal brought its cruel metal beak down into Imogen’s eye.
~~~
It was only when they finally learned humility and stopped fighting that they realized that the death they so feared was really the strength they needed all along to live.
In time, the night ended. The sky brightened, though the sun did not rise. As the shadows twisted and grew in the gloaming, one of them congealed slowly into a more defined shape. It scrabbled against the rocks for a moment, then tore its way free of the shadows.
The juvenile shadow jaguar, Kitty, padded slowly over to the edge of the pond. Scraps of spider silk, some still stained with blood, formed a tattered mat, on top of which… was a bleached-white skeleton, perfectly clean. Just as the mawoiden legends told.
Kitty leaned forward, sniffing the skeleton’s ribs for a moment, then licked the side of the skull.
A violet rune, signifying something only in the secret language of dreams, blossomed to life within the skull’s eye-hole. It migrated about the hollow for a second, then a similar purple light flared on the other side. The skeleton shifted, and slowly rose, pushing itself upwards into a seated position.
It looked down at the cat. "It’s gone?"
The cat looked up at the canopy. Faint birdcall was audible. The skeleton let out a sigh of relief.
"Thanks, Kitty. Let’s get back to Drathera, I’m going to need someone to look at my hand." Imogen stood up unsteadily, surveying the ruined spider silk. The cat gave her a plaintive ‘mew?’, clearly inquiring about something.
"Yeah, I learned something, all right. I just hope it’s worth what I spent on all that sausage meat."
The little cub slipped into the thin shadow cast by the skeleton, and in turn, she stepped into the space between worlds, and was gone. Silence returned to the little grove.
