Wraith's Lament, chapter 6: Chapter 1

Under normal circumstances, ‘the Sol Museum is currently up in flames’ would have been fantastic news for Pandinus, but ‘the stryx who destroyed it is heading right this way’ does much to dampen any celebrations.

The golden-furred feravo poked his head through the curtains. Out in the distance, he saw the elite riders of the Legio Sol swooping and diving through a blood red sky, battling a swarm of angry red wisps and the massive harpia they circled. Its eyes and breast glowered red, like the rhakos they’d been dragging in through the arena district, but there was a distinct purple aura about it, too, like a thick, probably-poisonous fog.

Vita was usually the one who handled these situations. He literally just ran the gift shop. Where was she, anyway? Hadn’t she mentioned something about going down to the docks for a quick stroll? Gah, and she’d taken Vesper with her!

He glanced back at the doorway leading into the museum gallery. Like many independent museums here in Outer Sol, their artefacts were authentic, not cheap wax replicas like some establishments were so fond of using, and the ancient Audacian weapons were still perfectly functional. He pulled a Rikarisk crook-spear off its hooks and hefted its weight in his paws. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be. Except the tyto throwing spears, which had to be weighted on one end, of course. But everything other than that.

He pressed his nose against the window again. The mounted celeres, the brassy idiots, were driving the stryx in a spiral down towards the buildings, as though there weren’t dozens of civilians cowering in their homes there. Wisps and bits of wisp were falling onto the streets outside, so that was out. 

Wait, Vita always liked to climb onto the roof instead of using the door like civilised ken. Could he do the same?

Tucking the spear into his belt, he scrambled up to the second floor and slid the bedroom window up. Oh, the smell was overpowering now--  like rotten eggs and… lavender, for some reason? They made a horrific combo together. But there, just past the window sill, he saw a track of subtle nicks in the masonry-- made by his sister, who really needed to trim her claws more often-- that went up the wall and over the edge onto the roof. It was an odd feeling to flex his own paws, feel the knife-thin points slip out of sheathes that were much more used to grasping a pen, and see them fit perfectly into those tiny holes in the wall.

Oh, Nokt… here’s hoping all those Quincenturiae burgers hadn’t gone right to his thighs…

Bracing his back legs against the windowsill, he pushed off and swung himself out over empty air. No, no, too much momentum! He lashed his tail around until he felt himself straighten out again. Now one paw over the other, that was it… and in no time flat he felt the rough mudbrick turn to smooth tiles under his palms.

Okay, so maybe Vita had a point about him needing to go outside more.

He clambered up the roof tiles until he could see the battlefield laid out before him. Things weren’t looking too good over inside the walls, mostly because an entire chunk of the hundred-foot wall had broken down entirely. That wall hadn’t fallen in over two hundred years: not to invading armies, not to last year’s wisp incursion. Things were getting serious, and once again, the common people were going to have to deal with the fallout.

He heard the whoosh of air seconds before it whipped up his mane, and he ducked as one of the legionarii zipped by overhead, hefting her mace in her hand and yelling a battle cry. The corrupted harpia heard her a mile away, and it waited until she and her mount had gotten in range before whipping her tail around and slapping them away. The mace went flying out of the soldier’s hand and slammed into the neighbours’ wall with a shower of plaster.

“Oi! Watch where you’re swinging that thing!”

“Crawl back in your den, beast!” she hollered back.

Good old Legio ‘banter’. Scum.

Pandinus took out the spear and braced it against the roof. It occurred to him at this point that he’d never even touched a weapon before, let alone a six-hundred-year-old one, and he didn’t know where his paws should go or how to get from point A to point B. Unfortunately, the corrupted beast seemed to have sensed it too. It was coming right this way!

Nokt-Nokt-No-no-nope!

Pandinus squeezed his eyes shut and pointed the spear aloft. He felt the hot wind of the harpia’s wingbeats sweep over him, the cloying scent he’d now come to associate with corruption, and then the air became heavy, sulfuric, reeking of death. Then a deep breath, a small, almost chick-like chirp, and the smell seemed to disappear all at once.

He opened one hesitant eye. The harpia was still standing over him, her beak poised to bite his head off, but the pulsing red growth on her breast seemed to be fading, receding. She leaned in close to the spear’s tip and breathed in again, and now her eyes flashed a sudden golden through the red.

‘Parvus. Sweet cub. Thought I would never see you again.’

The voice seemed to come from somewhere inside of the corrupted flesh itself. Pandinus raised one trembling paw and pressed it against her keel. Overlapping voices roared in his head, each one clamouring for attention. Some were harder to decipher than others, but one voice was absolutely clear.

‘They took everything from you. Kill. Tear. Destroy.’

There was another one that seemed to repeat itself, rise and trail, rise and trail away, before it could finish its sentence. But he heard enough to know one thing for sure.

“‘Veleda’… is that your name?”

A rumble somewhere inside her breast, and Pandinus heard the muffled voices start to grow louder and drown out the ominous order. Then a spike of white-hot pain and a scream, and he was flung out of the mindscape as the harpia collapsed on top of him, an arrow lodged in her back.

Those damned celeres!

He pushed and shoved and crawled his way out from underneath two tons of dead weight and yelled up into the air.

“Hold your fire!”

The arrow didn’t seem to have penetrated deep enough to wound her, but he could see her eyes starting to darken back to red again…

One of the riders landed on the roof with an ominous boom, apparently not caring about the effect of unnecessary weight on cheap roof tiles. Great, it was the racist one again. Hey, where did she get that axe from?

“Stop! I said stop! Can’t you see? I’m getting through to her!”

“Shut up, mutt. The only one getting that medal of honour is me.”

It was around this time that Pandinus realised that some of the harpia’s weight had lifted off of him. One dinner plate-sized eye, more yellow than red, was peering down at him.

‘Parvus? To what base should we retreat?’

He knew this one… come on… surely he’d picked up at least something from Vita’s guided tours?

Oh, OH!

“To Hale Steppes!” he yelled out.

As the celer raised her weapon, Pandinus saw two golden-brown wings brace against the roof. He wrapped his arms around the harpia’s neck-- not a moment too soon, as she pushed herself off into the air with a roof-shattering leap and snapped out her wings, knocking everything in a ten foot radius flat on their backs.

As Veleda spiralled high into the air, he chanced a look back at their caved-in house and the cursing soldier. He saw a flash of a scene through Veleda’s eyes: a werreken fleeing, her bondmate at their head, hounded by humans in white uniforms; her standing brave against a red-robed mage; a beam of golden light, then a heavy coldness spreading through her chest…

And then the image was gone, and he was back in a world of midnight sun and wailing sirens, with nothing beneath him but a blanket of soft, breathing feathers.

He had to find Maja, fast.

*

Prendergast and the gang crawled out of the manhole into utter chaos. The Theia district was in ruins, the piazza pillars knocked over, fires raging in the thermopolia, corrupted wisps floating amuck. Fire sirens blared into the empty streets, and all the while the solar eclipse glared down at them with its red-rimmed fury. Most bittersweet of all, the Sol Museum was missing its pretentious glass dome, and also half of its wings.

‘Oh, Nokt,’ Vesper whimpered.

“Nokt had nothing to do with this,” Kali said, unsheathing her sword. "This is a monster of our own making."

“So the Undersol was the safest place in the city, after all. Oh, how the tables turn.”

And that was Vita, wisecracking as usual.

‘What’s the plan?’ Prendergast asked, shifting straight into urban cohort mode.

“We need to find Maja.”

The casua sat down so the general could climb onto his back. Vita leapt up into Vesper’s saddle, and they took off together down the Via Prima.

“Remember what the Rat King said. Iron repels wisps.”

The two riders waved their weapons about, clearing a path for their stryx through the neck-deep swarm of wisps on the road.

‘Where should we look first?’

“Find Wraith, and we’ll find Maja.”

Well, that was easy. All they had to do was follow the trail of crushed buildings and corrosive pools of drool heading approximately… south-west.

“The arena district,” Vita said.

“Where they’re keeping the corrupted stryx… oh, Doy blimey.”

In hindsight, putting all their metaphorical eggs in one basket was probably not their proudest moment.

Kali tapped the flat of her blade against Prendergast’s leg. “Gee-up, now! Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of pedigree runner?”

‘You know, all this time I thought the gaslighting was a Decima thing. Nope, turns out it’s just a me thing.’

Out the western wall (or what was left of the wall, anyway) and through the ruins of the ex-asclepion, and in no time, Prendergast felt the cobbled roads of the arena district underneath his feet. Just as Kali had predicted, she was there.

Wraith was absolutely massive, nearly as tall as two gryphs standing on each others’ shoulders, and the mere impact of her footsteps was enough to flatten trees and collapse walls. A cloud of wisps circled her… wait, on closer inspection, he saw that some of the wisps weren’t wisps at all! They were runes, written in an unknown language, circling in rings about her neck and limbs and tail.

Stryx of all stripes and tack surrounded her like mosquitoes in summer, each one taking out perhaps dozens of wisps per minute, but even they could barely make a dent in her ‘living’ armour.

Prendergast grumbled as Kali pulled on his neck, but then he saw white robes and a whiter lycan under a tactical tent, flinging ingredients into a cauldron and arguing about ‘no, this clearly says “lemon powder”, not “demon dander”’.

Kali politely waited for the casua to get close before launching herself off his back and running over. “Maja, report?”

“Spell’s almost done. Just need to figure out these damned cantatrices’ handwriting.”

“And the runes?”

“Rhett looked them up. Ancient Reamerean spell, to reverse death and conquer it, but some of the words are wrong. Probably why the corruption appears to be spreading through direct contact.”

“And do we know who did this to her?”

“I’d have to examine the rune’s signature to be sure.”

“And she’d have to be dead for that?”

“Yes.”

Well, the stryx army was doing its best, but Wraith was drawing ever closer to the main arena, slowly but surely.

“How much longer?”

“According to this manuscript, once the dry ingredients have been added to the wet, we just need to let the mixture rise for… forty-five minutes to an hour.”

“...Damn those dead mages.”

Just two more steps and Wraith would be crashing through the amphitheatre… all the corrupted stryx would be set free, and all their hard work would be lost…

“WAIT!”

Vita perked up her ears. Her eyes widened, and the whole team looked to the skies right as a corrupted harpia swooped by overhead, carrying… a golden feravo on its back?

“Don’t shoot! The corruption can be reversed!”

“Is that stryx corrupted? How is he…”

“Pan!” Vita yelled up. “How is this possible?”

“It’s simple, actually. I overcame my fear and touched her chest, and we had this cool moment of connection and everything--”

“No, I mean how are you outside of the house on a weekday?”

“Wait!” Maja shouted. “What was that first part?”

“Touched her chest, heard some voices in her mind, saw a flashback of her getting petrified…”

Ghost muttered something to her, and Maja leaned in and whispered back. They went back and forth like that for a few frantic seconds, and Prendergast caught a few phrases like ‘amplify the connection’ and ‘break through the spellwall’ ‘be a lot faster than a 400 year old cake recipe, at least’ before they turned back to the group.

“Alright, new plan. If the elf did what we think he did, then direct contact with the source of the corrupted flesh disrupts the spellwall and opens a telepathic channel between souls. If Ghost and I stay out here and channel a passive source, we might be able to take a small team into the Wraith’s uncorrupted mindscape.”

“In common?”

“Touch the glowy bit, talk to Wraith, break the spell, big question mark?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Alright, sir,” Maja called up, her voice amplified by the same magic that the arena commentators used for matches, “we’ll try it your way. Not like we have much of a choice.”

Pandinus patted Veleda on the neck, and she tucked in her wings and glided down to land before them.

“Hop on.”

The group surged forward, but Maja held up her hand.

“Look, this isn’t some school field trip. Three souls, tops.”

“Veleda has to go,” Pandinus said, sliding off her back. “Wraith needs to see that the corruption can be fought. I’ll sit this one out.”

“And I think we’ve got some catching up to do,” Vita said, playfully messing up her brother’s mane. Vesper chirped her agreement.

“So that leaves you and the casua. Are you sure you can do this?”

Prendergast thought of the Rat King’s parting words, of the glimmer of hopeless sorrow in Eidola’s eyes. Pain begets pain. Show her the kindness that no one in three hundred years had ever thought to give her. Break the cycle once and for all.

“Yeah. We’re sure.”

“Good lad. Get on the harpia and watch for my signal.”

The two of them climbed onto Veleda’s back, and with a quick touch from Pandinus, they took off into the sky. Clouds of corrupted wisps swarmed around them, but Veleda’s presence seemed to act as an invisible force field, and they parted like slugs from salt as she flew up to the Wraith’s glowing chest. Unlike most of the rhakos they’d encountered, her corruption was subtle, almost invisible under her shaggy black coat, like cracks in a glacier. Far below them, Maja’s amplified voice called out a countdown, and Kali leaned forward and hover-handed over the rift of corruption.

“One, two, three! Now!”

White light filled Prendergast’s vision, and when he blinked, he awoke somewhere far away from the hellish nightmare of reality.