MIRRI
"I... charged the rock?" Calen replied, jolting Mirri out of her silent prayer for forgiveness. "Poking the fire rune to bias the power output worked, and you said the rune needed a lot of power to actually use all that paint, so I—"
"I didn't mean it like that." Mirri dropped his hand and fought the urge to run. "Oh Gods I'm so sorry."
Not that words mattered now. There was no fixing this. She could feel the apprenticeship slipping through her claws already. There might even be a Judgement leveled against her, if he took issue once he understood.
Calen was too close to miss the whispered apology, frowning at her.
"I feel like I'm missing some context here." The Arrival briefly said something intelligent, before undercutting the impression. "Am I about to melt in the rain, or is this a 'later' kind of problem?"
The ridiculous question, layered with the Warlord's orders to focus fire on Sariel, jolted Mirri out of her stupor. Calen's words made a kind of sense, if she ignored the first part. They were still on a battlefield, her failures of faith needed to be set aside.
The consequences for both of them would happen afterwards.
"Later. We need to earn our next tomorrow first." Mirri confirmed, letting go of her manasight so that evidence of her failure would at least be hidden.
Undue distraction would be lethal, right now.
"Great, how are we getting Em out of there?" Calen's not-glowing thumb jutted askance at the rest of the field of battle.
Mirri's view of the Venatrix was only partially obstructed by terrain. The duel was... progressing. The Warlord had just distracted the Venatrix with another strike at Emma, only to attempt a bodily tackle. Mahira's seraph steel shield gonged, buying her space, but not before the defensive artifact on the warlord's chest ripped another fireball out of her palm.
Mirri winced, seeing that much mana disappear. It was hard to tell who had truly 'won' the exchange, but Mahira was already visibly wounded in several places, fighting without a weapon. Any trade was a loss, if she had no way to finish the fight or make a safe exit.
"Stay low and crawl, the archer is still looking." She instructed him. "The Venatrix can't finish retreating until we're out, not without condemning us."
"Follow the gully, grab Em, and dip out so everyone else can retreat." Calen repeated, with his own twist on the instructions. "What do we do if the big gray bastard jumps on us instead? The Venatrix can't exactly save us with a fireball, unless his armor is still busy chewing on the last one."
The distinctly human term briefly curled Mirri's lips, but the casual insult to the Warlord's bloodline served as further confirmation of Calen and Emma's noble status on Earth. The Arrival had already turned away, scuttling sideways and turning his neck to continue the conversation as he began shuffling along their shelter.
"If that happens, we say goodbye to second chances." Mirri paused her speech to pick her way over debris, and pinpoint her puzzlement at his phrasing. "Chewing?"
"Well it's not staying charged when she hits it, even when it eats the mana. Just passing it to the next link in the chain, spreading it out to vent faster." Calen's speech was hurried. "Is there a way you could like, overload it? Put too much power through for it to handle, help the Venatrix outdo it until it pops?"
Casting aside the absurdity of the question, Mirri took a sense of her own power. She found it wanting, to say the least. She had one good bolt to her channels, perhaps two if they were given more time, which seemed inevitable, crawling low and slow like this. Not enough mana to matter.
She shook her head, when he glanced back.
"I'm not an Immortal of that measure. Adding more fire mana wouldn't do much." She admitted through grit teeth. "If the artifact is as you described."
And that was the sticking point. 'If'. Because there shouldn't be any way Calen could see the mana in that much detail from this distance.
Mirri might have been able to detect something like that from half a dozen lengths away. On a clear day. With time to study the equipment in question. And she had some small knowledge of how defensive enchantment functioned, knew how to filter her sight up and down bands of density to even look for the flow of power.
The Arrival wouldn't have any of those advantages, sixty lengths away, pressed to the ground in the rain and peering past—
"Did she stop blowing them up early so the shield would work?" Calen asked as another fireball disappeared. "She started the fight like, twisting the mana and making those shockwaves, but now she's just laying power into his chest and bashing away after."
Which made perfect sense and aligned with what Mirri understood. If Calen, who had never seen mana on 'Earth', was actually assessing the item correctly.
Linked power sinks were terrible at handling varied types of mana simultaneously. They were notorious for being simple to disable by cooperative means, or even by casters skilled enough to manage multiple alignments of mana at the same time.
But that wasn't the purpose of a linked array in armor, especially not one made to such clear excess, studded with gaudy gemstones rather than practical metals.
They were counter-assassination measures. Excellent at absorbing singular, overwhelming blows. Even repeated spikes of the same alignment would have to stack up, filling the whole power capacity before more than half of the energy got through to the wearer.
Heat lightning flashed, and Mirri understood the trap.
The archer had put every single arrow into a stone or dirt backstop, never aiming high. Never giving away their true range, by never overshooting. The Horde wasn't just taking a desperate gamble to hunt the Venatrix and retreat through the mountains afterwards.
They were aiming to survive the Warden's wrath, or remove her from the fight entirely.
"It takes a lot of power to modify an array at distance. She might be running low on mana," Mirri droned, tearing herself away from the horrifying realization that her mother might not be able to solve this after all. Might be in real, imminent danger. She needed to know the truth, right now. "Calen, have you been running your manasight persistently? Since you arrived?"
The arrival briefly looked up from where he was fumbling through the rocks at the bottom of the gorge.
"Mostly?" He shrugged so fast Mirri nearly missed it. "Hey if I like, clog that thing up with a bunch of light mana, do you think she could win? Woulditmatter?"
"Only if it were empty." Mirri started.
She didn't get to finish, barely got the words out before Calen was replying again. The entire time, the Arrival was running his finger over the glistening surface of the stone he had chosen from the ground, leaving platinum streaks in a near-perfect recreation of the original rune.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
"Sowebuyspacebyhittinghiminthevest, Mahiragetstothrowhimorfireballpastthevestorwhatever." Calen's words spilled out in bursts, like he had forgotten to pause between them until forced to rein in his voice by a lack of breath. "Youcounterthearrow, Emgetsup, weallgohome. Well, outofthisfield. Howdowetimethis? Dowetellher?"
He was occasionally scratching at the back of his neck and returning to the stone with fresh paint, to Mirri's rising horror.
She stopped listening and started looking, immediately finding exactly what she had just suspected. What should have been obvious, had she not filtered her manasight to avoid looking at her other failure.
Calen was busy babbling reassurances about how he would wash his fingers in a second, how he just needed a workable projectile, and finally veering off into a panicked series of questions about how to turn 'it' off while she seized his cloak by the hood.
At least he had caught his own perceptions wobbling, by the end. Not that either of them had been in time.
Tearing his hood back revealed the paint that had smeared down the back of his head, aglow with the distinct buzz of mana now that Mirri was looking.
"Get it off." She snapped, releasing him as if stung and reaching for her waterskin. "All of it. Calen listen to me. All the platinum, off your skin, everywhere."
The Arrival was babbling the entire time he dragged the tainted clothing back over his head. Mirri didn't catch a word of it. She was busy pressing his face into the embankment and dousing the back of his neck with what remained of her water ration. The rain was causing the paint to bleed, widening and worsening the problem of the silver smear that must be touching his skin through the cloth.
Calen's struggle was incredibly brief. He quickly switched his efforts to wiping away the thicker sections of paint with his fingers, then the discarded clothing itself until Mirri fumbled a bandage from her pouch and pushed it away. Carefully, so as not to get any on the channels in her fingers.
By then they had gotten... most of it. The rain and her efforts with the bandage would have to do the rest.
"Amistuck? Willitstop?" Calen's voice was shaky, but Mirri could almost hear the pauses between the words themselves now.
Her shoulders still relaxed at the intelligible nature of the frantic questions. He had gone silent and still for a full four seconds. Just long enough for her to begin to worry oversaturation had truly set in.
Dragging his catatonic body across the pass would have been a suicidal notion. If she had entertained it, instead of properly assessing that hiding him and retreating for help would have been the smart decision. The other defensible option would have been sheltering in place, if she were a coward looking to guarantee some form of leniency when Mahira issued a Judgement for this.
Not that Mirri had considered that until now, but sheltering in place was suddenly their best option. Luckily, if anything today could be called that, he was at least alert. And had been waiting for an answer far longer than she had been considering one.
"I don't know yet." She croaked over the rain tap-tap-tapping on her helmet. "It will take time for the buildup to subside."
And they wouldn't be going anywhere outside this gully until the slingers were forced from the northern cliff. It would be too dangerous. One errant rock would mash Calen's skull like an overripe fruit tossed off the Spire, and the weak point would scream to anyone with manasight.
Mirri had no desire to know what kind of Judgement Mahira would be forced to level if she failed in her duties to that extent.
A fireball and the ring of Seraph Steel coincided, setting stones to patter down among the raindrops. The archer fired again, and Calen panicked, bucking under Mirri's grip.
"Put that down. You need to stay low." She ordered as Calen grasped for the rock he had been working at. "We can't—"
Someone was screaming.
Mirri looked, and felt the full weight of the sky press on her shoulders.
The Venatrix was writhing on the ground, clutching fire while the Warlord regained his feet under a barrage of bolts from the Seraph.
But that didn't make sense. Mahira had been under pressure, certainly, but not overwhelmed. She couldn't be churning up the mud, scrambling to cauterize her own stump of a knee.
Sanctum's warriors didn't fall like that, not when properly bolstered by their allies.
Mirri found her feet, a bolt springing to her clawtips. This could still be salvaged. The Venatrix wasn't dead, only endangered.
All she needed to do was make a difference.
"Sariel'sgoingforit." Calen blurted, pointing at the light show. "Weneedtodothething."
Mirri's mouth was only half open to tell him to stay back when the Arrival began bounding up the embankment, a gentle glow already suffusing the stone in his hand.
"Calen stop!" Mirri screeched.
The human ignored her.
Moving with a mana-lattice in her hand took the barest hint of focus, under the best of circumstances. With sheets of water pounding from the sky, treacherous mud underfoot, and blood roaring in her ears, it took power too.
She poured her mana pool into the bolt carelessly. She would only get the one real shot, Calen didn't have enough power in the stone to matter. Mirri needed to be the one to enable Sariel to overwhelm the artifact.
Calen threw the rock, but the Warlord just leaned, letting it pass by. Mirri dumped more power into her bolt, holding up the threat of fire even through buffeting winds.
The Warlord barely gave her a glance. He had reached the buttress of stone the Venatrix was leaned against, words lost to the wind. Emma was frozen, prone in the mud. Calen was—
The fool was still dashing forward, fumbling through one of his pockets as Mirri stumbled up the embankment and loosed her bolt.
The archer fired again, and Mirri saw death reach out in two places, for two lives.
She ripped at her power through the aether, choosing the coward's way. Saving who she knew she could save.
Her bolt turned, all sharp corners and streaking fire, slicing through the air to hover in front of Calen's face before one last burst of power sent it slamming into the indigo arrow in a shower of splinters.
Mana exhaustion hit her instantly. Mirri recoiled from the burn in her fingertips when she tried again. Anerean's Measure. She needed time, it would be seconds before she could summon even a spark.
Calen stumbled backwards, looking at her, reaching out, but she had no time, she had to help.
Mahira's head rolled off her lap into the mud, gaze blank, snout frozen and twisted in ways Mirri couldn't read because that was her chin, facing the sky.
She was too late. She had failed. Viran was doomed, the Highlands were lost, and Mirri would die here, in this field, under the silver-eyed gaze of a monster from half the world away.
Emma then, Mirri would keep Emma from dying. Buy her time, in her second chance. The Arrival was pressed to the ground, not running, not moving her legs, frozen while the Seraph threw a futile bolt at the invading Immortal.
Frozen like Mirri was, until something crashed into her back, dragging her down into the ditch.
The undignified squawk was lost in the rain, and Mirri panicked as the mud rushed up to meet her.
Arms wrapped around her from behind, the membranes of her wings trapped against her back when the rest of Calen's weight hit her, high and fast. Mud slid out from under Mirri's boots. She had turned her back to the human, and he had instantly tackled her.
She was going to die, writhing in the mud, restrained by a weakling she had let the Venatrix die to save.
Seraph-light drove away the rest of the world, humming close enough for Mirri to feel the bolt in the aether against her back. Rain hissed to steam, mud bubbled in the heat, Mirri's membranes screamed a warning, and Calen screamed for real, releasing her before she could finish drawing her knife and turning.
The smell of burning human flesh filled Mirri's nostrils, and she retched, letting Calen roll off her. She was no longer restrained, at least.
His screams were shorter now, interspersed with gasps for air past the mud his face was pressed against.
Mirri looked, and almost retched again.
There was no more thin tunic covering his back, no more skin at all on his upper back. Just boiling flesh and nubs of bone where Sariel's reflected bolt had shaved away flesh, exposing parts of the human's spine.
The flesh was still boiling, bubbling as if regenerating, but Mirri knew better. Knew her potion would have expired by now. It must be leftover heat. If that much heat was still left in him after the near shave with the bolt, Calen's organs would be cooked through.
These gasping breaths would be his last.
Mirri thought she had no more room for horror, realizing the human had taken the injury driving her out of the way. She had saved his life instead of helping the Venatrix, and he had turned around and thrown it away saving hers.
She was immediately proven wrong about the limits of fear, feeling more helplessness well up to deaden her limbs when the Warlord began to speak.
"Tell me, little priestess, should I take the Seraph-cooked meal, the Warden's daughter, or the null the Venatrix died for?" The lazy question belied the darkened skies above, but her mother wasn't here. Not yet. Not in time.
Silver-flecked eyes were already on her when Mirri looked up, realizing she was being addressed.
The Warlord was asking Mirri who else was to die. Giving her a choice.
One last mockery of the faith she had failed today.
Mirri opened her mouth to volunteer, but the words caught in her throat. Stuck, as she failed to produce even a spark from her clawtips.
Her thoughts almost turned away from the sacrifice, but she tore them apart.
She tried again, inhaling, gasping for any level of power she could pull from the aether.
Emma stood, and spoke her challenge first, cementing Mirri's failure.
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START II agreement, which would have banned .
