This place feels like it goes on forever. Fitting, I suppose, considering the void energy dripping from nearly every surface like grease. Liquid pours endlessly from trees like bizarre fountains, and each pool this makes looks like the night sky. Like I can jump in. Riley insists I cannot. Or at least, I won’t survive the attempt. Some part of me still wants to try. Not irresistibly, but they are pools of space. I toss another stone in one and watch it continue to travel, losing gravity the moment it passes the surface of the ‘liquid’. It keeps its momentum and looks as if it will keep flying forever. I can see the tree trunk behind the flowing liquid, which makes the experience a bit surreal.
“How many times are you planning to do that?” Riley asks. I shrug as we keep walking toward the feeling of relief emanating from . . . her.
“Until it stops being cool, I guess,” I reply. It’s not like we have a lot else to do as we walk through Radiant Woods Two: Night Edition. It makes me think of all the sci-fi shows I watched as a kid.
“Cool?” She asks.
“As in neat. Nifty. Entertaining but like . . . in an admirable way. You know, cool. Like me,” I explain. She scoffs.
“You apparently know even more about their creator than I do, and you still think that shitheads' creations are cool?” She asks.
“Nah, fuck Oakley. He’s too desperate for praise to ever actually earn it. But this? This isn’t his creation. The destruction it’s used for certainly belongs to him, but if he were capable of creating anything on his own, it wouldn’t result in destroying anything. This belongs to . . . her. He’s just putting his name on it and demanding worship. But the energy itself, when separated from him? Dude, that shit is cool as fuck,” I reply.
“Like you?” she says, and I laugh.
“Yes, exactly,” I agree.
“Okay, so the nature of that magic makes it ‘cool’ as you say. What makes you the same?” She asks, finally allowing herself to entertain some levity.
I point at my head as if it’s obvious. “Well, my haircut, obviously. I’ve had dudes whip out slurs just at the mention of it. I bet you’ve never broken a person with your hairstyle alone,” I joke. She gives me a side eye with half a knowing smirk, and I realize my mistake. “Oh, right. You’re also a woman. Fair point. I guess you’re cool too.”
“So aren’t all women cool, by that logic?” she challenges.
“No, all women are hot. There are plenty of women who aren’t cool. The uncool ones only sometimes have good hair,” I explain easily.
“Hot?” she asks. Her curiosity is genuine, but I can see signs of amusement on her usually stone face.
“It’s in the ‘pretty’ and ‘sexy’ quadrant of the attractive political compass,” I say. I gesture at myself again, as if in explanation, which attracts another roll of her eyes.
“So all women are pretty?” she asks, raising an eyebrow and offering a comically skeptical look at me.
“No, only anarchists are pretty,” I answer, pretending not to notice the implication.
“What the fuck does that mean?” she balks.
“I don’t know, it’s a song lyric. Catchy one, though,” I return. I start humming the tune to demonstrate, but she only shakes her head.
“You’re kind of a headache to talk to, you know that?” she sighs.
“Yeah, but I’m a hot, cool headache to talk to. So it cancels out,” I respond with a wide grin.
“No, it really–” she starts, but I stop, putting a hand on her shoulder and freezing in place. Movement. Brief and distant, but caught by the compound eye in the small of my back. Something moved a moment ago, which is probably not a good sign in a hell world occupied by exactly two women and one sapient ball of emotions.
My breath catches as I scan the endless, dense woods for another sign of an interloper. My human eyes catch nothing, but just as I am beginning to believe I imagined it, the eye on my shoulder catches another flicker. Then another, and another, until I am not only certain something is out there, but something both massive and quick. Something only hidden by the density of the woods, but is also approaching us rapidly. It won’t be hidden for long.
“Welp,” I say, pausing only for a brief moment, and catching a glimpse of its face for the first time as I do. “Run.” Riley reads the change in my posture before I say anything, and as soon as I say ‘run’, she doesn’t hesitate for a single breath. We are both moving quickly, although I quickly realize she can’t come close to matching my pace. She may be muscular, but apparently in the way a regular human is. Which is obvious, in hindsight. Whatever my old mana circle did to me, in addition to my recent enhancements, my muscle density and strength surpass anything a living organism should be capable of reaching.
As I slow my pace to avoid leaving her behind, I look over my shoulder. The image in the compound eye wasn’t pretty, but I don’t really process that information the same way I do with my original eyes. The image I get with a proper look is far, far worse. I have seen many so-called ‘monsters’ in the Radiant Woods. Modeled after horrors and creatures of every variety. Usually designed to hurt themselves as much as anyone they attack. This . . . is different.
“How many people is that?” Riley gasps as we run. I can’t tell. There are too many faces, decorating the front of the flood of flesh like boils. They’re no longer distant, and they’re not trying to hide. They’re rising like a tide, literally flowing through the woods like a river. This isn’t a horde of monsters. Rather, they are one monster created from a horde. The faces. The grimaces and cries of horror dressing each of them . . . they were calculated. The sage who did this didn’t have to leave their eyes, and teeth, and minds intact. They would have been just as deadly regardless. This was done for my benefit. An accusation, of sorts. Or a threat. Either way, it’s designed to throw me off.
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Riley doesn’t wait for an answer, and her white void mana is already forming around her. Not surrounding a weapon, as when she fought me, but ready for a wide-range attack. The kind she couldn’t use before, with too many allies surrounding her. “Wait,” I shout before she can cast, “They’re innocent!”
She pauses her spell, but doesn’t dismiss her mana. Both of us are still running, still forced to pay attention to the world in front of us, and the innocent pursuers are getting closer. “They are suffering, and they will kill us,” she challenges. I shake my head.
“They have to make that choice! You can’t make it for them!” I scream, but she doesn’t dismiss her mana.
“And how the fuck do we ask them, all of them, to make that call?” She replies. I nearly trip over a root in the road and stumble a bit as she catches me by my shirt.
“We’ll figure that out, we just need to get away now,” I reply, even as she saves me.
“Get away where?” she cries, “Lillith, we can’t save everyone. We don’t get the choice. Sometimes you just have to take the only route in front of you! We can’t always help the people around us! Sometimes we don’t have that option!” She ducks beneath a loose branch as soon as she finishes lecturing me. I growl.
“I fucking know that! But that doesn’t absolve us from trying!” I snap back.
“Well, they are going to catch up with us! How do you suggest we survive long enough to try?” she gasps. I look back again, then at Riley.
“You’re right,” I answer. Her face is awash with relief until I speak again. “You’re too slow.” I then shift, running toward her, diving at her legs, and picking her up. I then continue to run, now with a woman over my shoulder. It must look almost comical, considering how much taller she is than me, but I can now put all my strength into running. And run I do, faster and faster. I can no longer avoid every obstacle, instead holding my steel arm up and simply tanking the rapid impacts of branches and rotten fruit.
Riley is squirming on my shoulder, but our distance from the pursuers is increasing. “What the fuck?” she grunts as I continue to accelerate.
“You were too slow. This is better,” I answer through heavy breathing.
“And what exactly is your plan from here?” she protests. I shrug, drawing another grunt out of her. Oops.
“I thought maybe our new ethereal bestie might have some insight on that front. You know, since she failed to warn us about the eldritch horror playing surprise hide and go murder with us.” As I say this, I feel that same aimless emotion we’ve been following. This time a mix of apologetic and desperate, like a prisoner struggling against chains. She is responding not to the words directly, but to the emotions I feel as I say them. I get the picture. I suppose if she had complete control here, these stones wouldn’t serve their purpose.
“How is she supposed to help? Feel sad about it?” Riley counters, screaming so I can hear her past the wind displacement.
“Fuck if I know,” I reply. “But the last time a flesh monster pursued me, I hit on her back. And the next thing I knew, we were making out and trying on hats together. It’s worth it to hope for as long as possible,” I call back. As I do, the woods start shifting around me, trees falling and walls erecting in front of me. I tighten my left arm around Riley as I shift, barely weaving out of the way of a jagged pillar of stone. My right arm collides with a trunk, steel, and unnatural bark, competing for the space I am dodging into. I win as the tree splinters, but some of the unnatural void oil splatters across my arm.
Riley seems to catch most of this with her own void, mana meeting nexus and preventing most of it from making contact. It literally is space, impossibly distributed in liquid form. Some of it rests on my body in an unsettling way, while other bits attempt to swallow me and leave me in the emptiness it offers. For these, I protect myself with air mana. The other I use to my advantage, catching small obstacles and branches with the infinite space it provides.
“Do you think that’s likely to happen again?” Riley groans. I scoff.
“Of course not! Sarafyna and I are happily monogamous! I’ll try and set this one up with my brother,” I joke. I feel unsettling movements from her gut, moments before I hear her vomiting behind me. Probably from the motion. Definitely not because of my terrible sense of humor in a tense situation. Definitely.
The fleshy mass chasing us is growing more distant, until, from the liquid splattered across my body, black spikes emerge. Riot spikes. “Oh fuck,” I whisper, just before my limbs fail and my inhuman momentum throws us forward toward a more literal spike of stone the world erects in front of us. “Move us!”
The message is vague, but clear enough, apparently, as she writhes in place, catching the ground with her foot and redirecting us at the last moment. Thank god, now we can just collide with the regular stone and dirt at a dangerous velocity. We do this in short order, tangling together and sharing the nasty scrapes, bruises, and unsafe amount of blood the impact draws from both of us.
The pain is numbed a little, as hope and urgency strangle us before we can even groan. “What the fuck happened?” Riley grunts, pulling herself to her feet as I lie face down in the mud, struggling to get my left arm out from under my torso.
“Legs stopped working,” I explain. “Care to return the earlier favor?” Riley pauses, and I can feel skeptical eyes on the back of my head. If I focus, I can see the strangely UV colored look of consideration through my back eye. I can see her look back, where the horror chasing us is almost certainly closing the gap I created. Another wave of hope and urgency tries to drown us. She bites her lip, clenches her fist, and spits.
“Fuck it, we do it your way,” she curses. She picks me up and throws me over her shoulder, which is a quick explanation for her grunting and wriggling when our roles were reversed.
“Yay, my way,” I groan as I’m jostled like a sack of potatoes while she starts to run as quickly as she can. A much slower pace than previously, but that makes sense.
“Shit, you’re heavy, why are you so heavy?” she complains as, even as muscular as she is, she finds herself trembling under the weight after only a few minutes of running.
“That’s just the weight of my sins,” I quip. None of my various eyes are positioned to see her roll her own, but somehow I can still feel it. And it’s not very polite. I look up and see the wave of flesh. It is, in fact, closing the gap. Unfortunately, spikes continue to fall out of the void energy still dripping from me. I won’t have my legs back until I can get it off. But how the fuck do you scrub the void of the cosmos off your shirt?
I don’t have to think for long, however, as the world stops around us. Relief washes over us, and cool air showers us. Wherever we were headed, I think we’re there. “So what? Do I just jump in?” Riley asks.
“Huh? Jump where?” I ask. Instead of answering, she just jumps, failing to describe where she is jumping to the confused sack of lesbian on her shoulder. A moment later, we are underwater.
I’ve had dudes whip out slurs just at the mention of it.
Fun fact, this quote is literally true, lol. In the chapter where she first got her side-shave, I had a guy start using slurs about people who get the same haircut in the comments.