Chapter Text
The grass was tall, about knee height mostly, the tops twisting into soft springy curls. Soft moss covered the ground between. It was dense and spongy beneath her feet. The fog was as thick as ever, like all the other times she’d found herself in the vast, unending, empty place. She could see a short distance ahead of or around her but nothing further. There were no landmarks, no remarkable paths, or anything to show her where to go. She’d tried pulling up clumps of grass to leave a trail telling her where she’d been but it never worked. As soon as she turned around everything was as it had been.
So she walked. There was no point in running when she wasn’t sure where she was going. She considered staying put, just sitting down and doing nothing but there was something within her telling her to keep going.
She was looking for someone, afterall.
She couldn’t recall who she was looking for but she knew whoever it was, they were important to her. If she could just figure out a system of some kind to escape the fog that kept her going round and round.
She tried to yell, however when she opened her mouth not even a whisper of a sound came out. She realized suddenly that there wasn’t any sound. Her feet made no noise as they trod through the grass. The tallest pieces swayed in a soundless wind. It was suddenly quiet in a way that was deafening. A roaring silence that crashed in her ears and disoriented her. She felt dizzy and somewhat queasy and then she lost her balance.
She found herself falling but she never hit the ground. All she could see in any direction now was that thick, white, fog. The grass and the field were long gone and so too was any hope of orienting herself. She had nothing but the swoop of her stomach and the feeling of freefall. She wasn’t sure if it would ever stop. Maybe she would fall forever? She couldn't though, she didn't have the time.
She was looking for somebody.
She tried and tried to think of a way out of freefall. She looked for anything, anything to orient herself, to slow her fall. She tried to imagine herself standing, standing on solid ground. She tried to imagine herself drifting slowly and suddenly she felt light as a feather, floating on an unseen current, drifting through the unending ether. She realized she had no form here and she told herself: perhaps she wasn’t limited to the capabilities of one either. She reached out, stretching past herself and further into the unknown. She became as wisplike as the fog around her, twisting and curling with the mist.
Perhaps this was how she would find them, whoever she was looking for. She wished she could remember. It felt like it was on the tip of her tongue, just out of reach. She felt like she should know. How could she have forgotten? She drifted, aimless, for some time. Trying desperately to remember someone she didn’t know.
A noise crept into the roaring silence of the empty place, barely there at first. She didn’t even notice the soft rise and fall of it. Then it became more and more jarring, blaring louder and louder, shaking her in her dream, until finally she was shaken from the dream all together. She was ripped back into consciousness when the TVE itself shuddered and jolted, throwing her into the wall of her bunk. Her eyes flew open and the sound of the ship's alarm was suddenly overwhelmingly loud in its screaming. The ship shuddered, throwing her into the wall again.
She righted herself as quickly as she could, realizing that everything was slanted and uneven. Engine one was definitely down but from the feel of things they didn’t seem to be sinking. She remembered Vell's news that they’d been close to landfall. The steady rise and fall of the alarm was the only background noise as she shoved her feet into her boots as quickly as she’d ever done. Her heart hammered in her chest and she could feel herself shaking lightly as she hurried, breath heaving in panic. She’d been down doing maintenance recently, it didn’t seem right that the engine could have failed.
With the way the ship was tilted it was difficult to get her door open, the power-based mechanics were shot and she was fighting against the weight of the door as she slid it just far enough to get out. Engine four must also be down, she thought to herself. The door clanged loudly behind her as it slid closed on itself with a snap. The alarm blared even louder in the hall than it had in her room, the sound grating on her ears and the beginnings of a headache setting in. Outside of her room now she could smell the acrid stench of something burning. The nose of the ship was pointed down so she began making her way up toward the opposite end. Her instinct was to go to the engines but she needed to find out what was going on first. Where was everyone and who was already working on it?
She managed to make it to the staircase at the far end of the hall and she still hadn’t heard any indication that any others were present. The further she got the more fear trickled icy into her veins. She heard no footsteps, no echoing shouts from above. Where was everyone? She thought these things frantically as she clawed her way up the hall. Why wasn’t there any commotion around the fact at least two of their engines were down? As she reached the bottom of the first flight going up, the door on the landing above her opened, sending voices spiraling down to her. She raced up the steps, relief flooding her and questions ready to tumble from her mouth only to be met by faces she did not recognize.
There were three people standing at the door. One was dressed in a long, heavy looking cloak of gray, adorned around the chest with an ornate golden filigree. The other two wore what appeared to be a uniform of some kind. They wore the same long sleeved gray jacket and black pants. Mezalie saw them at the same time they saw her.
“What’s going on?” she asked at the same time the man in the gray robes sucked in a breath.
“We need all of them. Get her,” he hissed as he narrowed his eyes at her. A look crossed his face that Mezalie wasn't sure she understood. The way he looked at her made Mezalie’s blood run cold. There was something just a touch crazed in his eyes. She felt the pressure of the man's fen bleeding into the space around them, immense in its force. “Make sure there aren't any others left either,” he ordered. Mezalie took off at a full run, two steps at a time, back down the stairs. She did not waste time to check if they were following or not.
The robes he wore were similar to those of Arlenaschian Oracles, she'd noticed, but she didn't recognize them as any branch she knew. Whoever they were, they weren't there to help her, of that she was sure. She half-ran, half-slid back down the stairway and threw herself into the door, desperately shoving it open to get out. When she hit the hallway her feet missed just slightly on the uneven flooring and she went sliding down toward the nose of the ship. She could hear someone fighting with the door behind her and she picked herself up from an uncontrolled slide into a deliberate half-tumble, half-run, the rest of the way down.
She managed to make it into the other stairwell before her pursuers caught up with her and she was up the stairs before they’d managed to make it to the door. Up and up she went, trying to get out of the belly of the ship, trying to find anyone that she could to make sense of what was happening.
Breath heaving she burst through the door to the deck. She was so focussed on her singular mission of ‘up. out. get out,’ that she was blindsided when several pairs of arms reached for her all at once. She fought to break any grip on her, kicking and flailing and biting down hard on an arm around her neck and chest. She heard several curses shouted as they tried to take her down. She immediately recognized the Yoshkish, telling her they had indeed made it to Arlenasch.
In her panic she didn’t think twice about using her fen, releasing it in a hot burst from her core. She felt it flood her extracirculatory system, shooting down her hands, fanning out to her fingers, then down her legs and to her toes. Her body came alight with heat and she felt the fire pool at the surface of her skin. Shouts followed as the places where strangers tried to hold her burned and her tears ran boiling where they streamed down her face. Places she bit down sizzled as they burned. A man’s scream could be heard as the heat increased with her panic.
She hit the deck hard, shoved from behind and at least one person’s body weight on top of her as she screamed and kicked as hard as she could to shake them off. Someone else grabbed her feet, yelping as they did and she felt helpless as someone haphazardly shackled a pair of large cuffs around her ankles. She tried to twist out of their grip but it was no use, she couldn’t get any traction to get away. Her arms were wrenched behind her and another pair of cuffs were fitted over her wrists. These ones fully encased her hands and immediately she could feel the fen being drawn from her body and to the cuffs like a magnet.
They were nolstone and they were forcing her fen to divert from its natural flow to flood to the cuffs instead. It made her lightheaded and dizzy, slumping and momentarily unable to fight. The cuffs were heavy and the weight burdened her movement as she was hauled up from the deck by at least one person on each side of her. She tried to wriggle her way free from them as well but from somewhere behind her she received a strong blow to the head and everything went dark.
***
Mezalie swam back to consciousness in bits and pieces.
She jerked her head up only for it to slam it into something behind her: a solid beam. It had been driven deep into the sand where it stood, sand she felt shifting beneath her as she tried to sit up. She felt the solid weight of the cuffs holding her hands behind her, still draining her fen at an alarming rate. Her shoulders were stiff and ached from their continued position. She tried again to lift her head, slower this time, and leaned it back against the beam. Her head was throbbing with a tight, pulsing pain that made her feel sick to her stomach.
The first thing she noticed, after the pain, was the smell. It was smoke and burnt hair, acrid and tangy in the air. It burned in her nostrils and seared her lungs forcing her to cough but she could barely get enough air in without gagging. The next thing she noticed was that someone was shouting, several voices in fact.
She blinked her eyes against the pale light of the small moon Ahraan, as she tried to look around her. Most of what she could see was in blurred double vision. She noticed several people in those drab gray uniforms moving around nearby. She saw an old woman wearing a rich, deep blue robe pass nearby in front of her. She followed the movement as the woman moved and when she managed to get her head to roll to the side she saw Klia was there, bound to a beam just like she was but she looked…off. She wasn’t moving.
“Klia?” Her voice was hoarse and came out in barely a huff. She didn’t think the other woman could have heard her over the noise and commotion but she was desperate. Mez wanted to say something else, to call out again and she opened her mouth but all that came out was nonsensical noises around the burnt taste in her lungs. Her head hurt so bad it was hard to clarify the jumble of what she’d even meant in the first place. A man in gray seemed to notice that she’d awoken as he stepped between her and Klia. He kicked her hard in the leg.
“Kivey o lomi ki,” the man commanded in thick Yoskish. Get on your feet, her mind supplied from somewhere, at least that’s what she thought he said, her Yoshkish was decent but rusty. He stood over her waiting for her to comply. When she didn’t immediately respond he kicked her again, “Up. Now.”
She tried her best to gather her legs beneath her despite the position. It was a multiple attempt process to shimmy her way to standing, her arms still bound painfully behind her. Her legs immediately began to tingle as the blood rushed back to them. She shifted her weight from foot to foot momentarily. Her head swam even worse for several tes, her vision tunneling and going dark around the edges, before finally, thankfully, clearing.
The tide was out, the waterline quite a ways down. She could see the TVE down the beach. It sat unevenly with its hulking mass perched downward on a sandbar, explaining the tilt. There were several large, dark spots on its side and front hull that, as she stared, she realized were not spots, they were holes.
They had blown holes in the TVE.
She remembered the smell of smoke in her brief scuffle.
Her breath caught in her throat and she felt her body go numb as her vision focused again. Between her and the TVE, all down the beach, were other wooden beams standing tall. Each of them had what was obviously a body bound to them. The furthest ones she couldn’t see clearly, but closest to her, she could still see the smoke rising from the charred husk that was once a member of her family- her annura. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t. She couldn’t feel anything. She swung her head clumsily back toward Klia and saw that there were others past her- Virda, Arden, Drenna and the horror of what was happening began to unfold in her mind.
This was a massacre.
"Let it be the will of the Universe to grace us with salvation.” A booming voice cut through both her horror and the noise. The gathered group of grays quickly silenced themselves and parted for the man in the ornate robes and he stepped slowly, casually, forward. He turned to face the crowd, arms skyward and palms flat to the heavens. The crowd was silent other than the shuffling of several dozen bodies gathered round. The man approached Mezalie.
“This will all be over soon,” he said. He had the thick accent of someone from northern Arlenasch. Mez’s anger suddenly boiled over her numbness as she realized the man looked perfectly pleased, a small smile on his face. Under different circumstances she’d have thought the heavy laugh lines and upturned lips made the man look kind. Mezalie said nothing in return, glaring in hopes that maybe the man would combust from sheer willpower alone. When, disappointingly, nothing of the sort happened, she opened her mouth and spit in his face instead, letting out a quick snorting laugh when she managed a direct hit despite her head trauma. The crowd around them gasped and several people made to move toward her at once but the old man held a single hand aloft, stopping them in place. He looked taken aback for only a moment before returning to his pleasant composure. He used the heavy sleeve of his robe to wipe the spit away.
Mez was furious that it hadn’t even burned him.
“I understand your resentment but this is for a greater purpose you cannot understand.” His words were cold and devoid of any emotion as he stared her down.
Without another word he turned away and raised his arms skyward again. The man turned and motioned to a person standing beside Mez. They raised a staff aloft and Mezalie turned her head to meet eyes with them, glaring.
The robed man took the staff then and placed the end of it above Mezalie's head on the post and suddenly bright sigils appeared along the wood, slowly lighting from top to bottom. A strange ringing hum emitted from somewhere and it made her head spin and her teeth feel like they were chattering. The glowing marks increased in brightness as they went and Mezalie could barely see against the light anymore.
“Stop! Please! Please!” her voice rang out between sobs. “Stop!” She cried again. As she said it the post, and her, exploded in bright, searing, flames. Mez desperately wished she couldn’t hear her own screams, the sizzling and popping of the fen fire as it began to lick at her.
Her heart was pounding and her vision was beginning to tunnel but for very different reasons. Her breaths were choked in her throat. She could feel her fen responding to the pain and the fear. Each time she felt the swell of fen bubble up in her chest though, it was quickly wicked away by the nolstone.
She felt the moment that the foreign, wrong, fen began to leech into her. The pain was excruciating, like she was being unraveled, like someone was stabbing her over and over, like she was being peeled down to the very last layer. She could no longer hear anything over the roaring sound in her own ears as the fen worked its way through her, meeting her own fen in an internal struggle that felt like it would overflow from her body, tearing her apart. It was too much for her to contain. She didn’t know if the ringing in her ears was from the fen or her own screams as it all mingled together. Suddenly there was a loud crack all around her and everything went dark.
…
…
…
When Mezalie opened her eyes again the brightness of her surroundings was too much. She slammed her eyes shut and tried to remember where she was. There was a gentle quiet around her, a soft rushing. She felt a light breeze tickle over her skin. She was lying on her back, wherever she was. It wasn’t her bunk, she had far too much room. She was warm, comfortable, and something smelled vaguely sweet around her. She blinked her eyes open slowly this time, acclimating to the brightness.
She sat up, all around her was tall grass as far as she could see: a field. She had the feeling that she’d been here before but couldn’t quite remember. Out in the distance she could see that a thick, mist obscured anything further. The sky above was hazy and overcast, like she existed in a bubble. Everything there was muted, the sounds of grass shifting in the sweet, soft, wind, even the colors were dull. Everything seemed dampened by the haze, even her mind. She couldn’t remember how she’d gotten there.
She pushed herself to her feet and despite laying in the grass, she was neither damp nor dirty when she bent to brush herself off. The grass where she’d been laying didn’t even appear disturbed. She turned in a full circle, looking for any indication that told her which way to go but she found none. Every part of the horizon looked like every other; grass and then fog.
So she picked a direction and she walked.
She padded along and the soft ground beneath her feet quieted her steps, barely audible. She reached a hand out at her side and felt the long grasses bounce against her palm as she passed. They didn't feel like much of anything, like a whisper of a touch, the remembrance of a feeling. She brought her hands up to inspect and discovered she could see them but she could also see through them. She could vaguely see the horizon through the haze of herself.
She reached out again to touch the grass and was pleased to find that if she pulled hard enough on the end, both forms of her hand and the frond blended together in a puff of mist before drifting apart from each other, neither entire corporeal. In the transference there was a sense of coolness and peace.
She continued onward, wandering aimlessly forward for an eternity, an unknowable amount of time. As she walked she began to feel lost even though she didn’t know where she was going to begin with. Was she supposed to be looking for someone?
Yes.
She couldn’t remember who she was looking for but she’d been walking an awfully long time now so she must be getting close. She remembered a pathway. A staircase? No, not a way up, a way in. It was a doorway and it existed somewhere beyond the fog. She was beginning to recall, she had been here before.
There was a crossroad, she remembered.
She was meeting someone at the crossroad and as she thought it a pathway through the fog began to disperse before her. As she approached she saw that beyond the edge of the field were great big stepping stones that led the way. The space below was incomprehensible, either there or not there depending on if she was looking directly at it. She carefully placed an unseen foot onto the first step and the impression showed and the footing felt stable. She gingerly picked her way across the steps, driven on by a memory just out of reach.
She realized about halfway across that she wasn’t sure how to introduce herself. Both because she couldn’t recall who she was meeting and because she wasn’t sure who she was either. She’d had a name, she was sure. In fact, the more she thought about it, maybe she’d had many names. She paused on the last misty step, contemplating. Would it matter if she couldn't remember?
In the end she felt like if it had been important she would have remembered. She found herself hopping off the last step and onto a foggy plateau. There were no long grasses here, no sweet wind or peaceful gentleness, here it was just
empty.
She turned back the way she’d come and she somehow knew the stones she’d followed would already be gone.
The place she found was so vast and devoid of anything that she felt so, so small and lost in the emptiness. She couldn’t remember anything. Who was she? Who was she looking for? How was she supposed to find someone when she didn’t even know where she was?
A swell of emotion rose up through her, a powerful grief suddenly erupting from her in a noise she wasn’t sure was a shout or a sob. Maybe it was both. The sound of it echoed long into the void. She meant to bring her hands up around herself but they’d faded to nothingness long ago like the rest of her. She hugged the impression of her arms around herself instead and she crouched down, huddling in on herself as she wept. The sense of loss was enormous despite not being sure what she’d lost.
Her tears felt hot on her face where they tracked down her cheeks. It was more than the barely there feeling of the grass on her palm. They were not wet, just warm where they fell. She let the heat comfort her until the tears soothed themselves away. It could have been only for a moment or it could have been for the rest of time. She stayed there, curled in on herself in the void.
Quiet and still like the space around her she felt it: the gentle thump-thump of a heartbeat that wasn't her own. She listened, over the roaring, disorienting, silence and she heard something else. It wasn't a whisper, it was softer than that. It felt like a fleeting thought across the back of her mind but it hadn't come from her.
She felt another fen flow through her, overwhelming in its suddenness. She looked around herself and saw nothing. Instead she pressed herself into the empty space around her in a desperate attempt to orient herself. Her awareness shifted and the direction she felt the fen coming from was the right way forward. She scrambled along to follow the feeling. She followed a path up then down and around in circles it seemed like but the landscape never changed.
Finally there, in the distance, she was shocked by the suddenness of their appearance but there was another person. They were faced away from her it seemed but they were definitely there. They were the only other thing that appeared to exist in this limitless, empty space with her.
As she approached she felt herself shifting, trying to resemble something she once was. She saw that the person who stood there was also semi translucent, a shimmering transparent afterimage of someone that once was. They turned to her as she approached and as she stood face to face with them she felt the strangest feeling that she was looking at herself. She recognized it in the dazzling brightness where a face once was. That other being held out a hand to her and she knew immediately that she would take it.
She heard the crack and smelled what reminded her of a desert after rain. She felt the backlash of fen as it exploded outwards and coursed into her, throwing her back and nearly ripping their hands apart. Quickly she scrambled upright to see that the other being hadn’t budged from their original position, now bathed in a blinding light she had to close her eyes against. She moved to take their hand more firmly and images began to flit past behind her eyelids.
Images of lives she didn’t know but felt sure she’d lived flew by. People she knew nothing about but felt indescribably connected to all drifted past. For just split seconds she saw through each of their eyes and the almost-person across from her wore another face too, different but still somehow recognizable. She felt a bond reach out between them, connecting them again and again. The visions flashed and flickered so quickly that each time she’d managed to grab onto one it was already gone. Each passing vision was harder to keep up with than the last and soon she wasn’t sure where they ended and she began.
The sudden tickle of words against the back of her mind brought her to attention. They had no tone, no voice, but she felt the cold chill of fear jolt through her. The feeling of urgency was turning into adrenaline and they needed to go now. The other being tried to pull her after them and she tried to drop their hands then but they held tight to her, shaking their head and pulling her along. She followed because she didn’t know what else to do.
For the first time since entering that place Mezalie heard a noise, a real noise. They both heard it because they came to a stop and they both looked around and then at each other. A chill ran down Mezalie’s spine. The sound came again and she had to wince against it. It was a sound like nothing she’d ever heard, like ragged screaming or metal against glass. It was a terrible, agonizing, wailing.
She was almost afraid to but she turned to look over her shoulder, following their gaze. Behind her was a smudge on the otherwise blank backdrop they were in. That inky smudge was dragging itself out of the emptiness on elongated, overly jointed legs that looked both solid enough to walk on but liquid enough to bend at angles they shouldn’t. Its oozing body had no defined shape at first until a single, large, white, eye peeled open and centered itself at the front of the monster. It had no pupil but Mezalie was positive it was looking right at them. Below the eye the shape began to bubble and stretch and a jagged hole tore open to reveal a mouthful of crooked teeth that matched the rest of the grotesque body.
A sudden pull tore her attention away from the grizzly monster and she looked back in time to see the other press their free hand into the emptiness and suddenly a door of light yawned open. They quickly bolted through the door, pulling her along behind but she slammed into an invisible wall right at the threshold, her ability to cross through the door stopped at her shoulder. The other person immediately turned to see what was wrong, why she’d stopped and she saw through a distorted haze that their body was no longer light. She wasn’t sure what it was but it seemed much larger and strange in shape but she couldn’t see it well enough to tell much more. They pulled but she couldn’t cross the doorway.
She heard the ear splitting scream of the monster again and finally pulled her hand away in order to cover her ears. It was the only noise in the otherwise absolute silence and she wished with all her being that it would stop. She turned to face the monster and saw that it was dragging itself closer, slowly as if it was in no hurry. She took a step backwards, and then another, pressing her back to the doorway. She turned to look over her shoulder and the other being was pounding on the doorway from the other side, unable to cross back it seemed. The monster came closer still with its bubbling, impossible, mass moving in a way she couldn’t describe. It simply moved.
The closer it got, the more she wanted to run away but where would she even go? It moved closer and she stayed in place. The creature was almost upon her and she felt fear in her veins. This close she could see the oily slime oozing out between its gnarled teeth. She felt like it should smell, it looked like it should smell foul but like everything else in this vacuum there was nothing. She fell to the ground, knees giving out and back pressed to the door as the other being beat uselessly against the divide.
The monster loomed over her, inky darkness beginning to drop down onto what was left of her body. There was no pain but she watched as the splotches seeped into her and dark veins webbed across her ghostly silhouette where they did. She kicked out violently as the monster placed grotesque ‘hands’ on her legs and dragged her forward. She reached out for anything, trying to find purchase but there was nothing to hold onto. She scrambled and called on her fen, quickly throwing her hands up and she released a burst of fiery heat toward the creature. The monster however was unfazed. It seemed to absorb the energy into its body and continue spreading its oily darkness over her, slowly swallowing her.
She fought and struggled and pushed back at the substance until it had nearly engulfed her and she could no longer fight back. The monster seemed to stop then, bringing its large eye close to her face, examining her. It suddenly reared its head back and let out another piercing wail and Mezalie was only thankful that it sounded no worse up close than it had at a distance. It looked back down at her, heaved its body closer and opened its awful mouth, dripping ooze down onto her face. She saw, at the last moment, a bright burst of light explode from behind her, washing over her and the monster, the sound of something immense shattering and a voice came, crystal clear in the silence.
“No!”
It was a voice she recognized but she couldn’t see who it had come from. It was the last thing she heard as twisted teeth came down and the monster snapped its great maw closed around her and then there was nothing.