Silent One’s right leg felt like it was trying to tear itself in half as he flipped in front of Amberosin and Patri. The trallenblade dust he’d used as an adhesive was shifting far too much, not given the proper time to bond, and it was sending shockwaves of flaming needles up the inside of his thigh. He kept moving. Just another pain for another time. Silent One spread his framework hands into twelve pieces and sent them into the air before him. He willed his essence, along with essence pulled from beneath the marble road before it regenerated, to create a wall of sand, metal, and swirling air just in time to stop a third coin, cast with a glow of orange and purple once again. Harmless separately, the two colors could interact in a way that crystallized any blood that it came in contact with, and stop a heart dead in minutes.

It was quite the blessing that Amberosin had inadvertently started an effective treatment with the herbs he’d left in the extra pouch for her on the road into Blancana. It was a near miracle that Patri had cast his essence so brilliantly that his whole body shone, slowing the spread of the invasive orange and purple enough to spare his life. By another few minutes, at least.

Silent One hoped he was as blessed as his companions as he called upon Mother Noctra once more. He slammed his makeshift shield into the ground and willed it to grow in height until it stood five stories tall. Silent One released the structure and began to siphon essence through his legs. At the rate he was taking it all in it became impossible to hide the shining colors beneath his bandages and skin. It was also impossible to hide when he cast. A swirling mass of colors ranging in hue, intensity, opacity, and frequency climbed his body in a dizzying rainbow before it shot out of his body as one large stream coming from each limb. Everywhere the essence touched began to rumble as he willed it forward.

Grasping at the marble of the roads, white granite bricks of the buildings, and the sand beneath it all, Silent One willed the natural materials of Blancana to bond with him. The green essence borrowed from the mother planet called forth the decorative plants about Blancana’s decadent market, binding the stone and marble around his body like a makeshift suit of armor. Silent One was immediately recycling the essence given to him by Noctra in a way that it was still tethered to him. The strain of exercising such control was unbelievable. As soon as the stone laden enclosure was sealed on his body he could feel his muscles begin to knot from tension and his right leg nearly gave out from the extra weight. Luckily the dust binding his leg together reacted well to the other earthen elements and had numbed quite quickly.

Silent One wasted no time looking back at his companions or the strange woman laying beside her own severed leg. Extending the reach of his will to the ground beneath them he shot all three back on a wave of marble, dirt, and stone that crumbled nearby buildings as it roared past, siphoning their structures to propel itself further. Each building that fell was followed by wailing from within. Silent One’s heart ached as he wondered how many families lived on those streets; how many depended on those now decimated shops. How many people had he killed to save three strangers? One of which he knew absolutely nothing about other than the fact that he had definitely maimed her during his unconscious rage.

Another pain. Another time. Move.

Silent One’s tears bled through his bandages unseen as he shot forth, absorbing his five-story tall shield into the mass of land about his armor. The end result looked like a faceless, stone golem, standing at least five feet higher than your average Blancanan. The second body about him was covered with living veins of sand that circled the torso of his golem, prepared to defend against any attack. He used his essence to carve the stone and foliage into gears and cogs, pipes and beams that he could manipulate more easily. This allowed him full control of the golem suit and lessened the tension on Silent One’s body so he was able to cast much easier. He reached out with the silver essence bound to marble and tore out five pointed boulders from the crumbling port road. Silent One situated them around him in an arch and made them spin fast enough that their whooshing winds blocked out a horrid symphony of screams rising from the ruined shops and homes.

He fought through a torrent of tears as he slid to a halt in front of Schuri’s decimated storefront. Each shallow teardrop that soaked his bandages was accompanied by horrid images of Blancanan children standing in their parent’s blood. A sickening tint across their golden umber skin, their bright honey-hued eyes spilling rivers over the mangled bodies around them. Every single scream that broke through the fierce winds about him bore into his very being. Still, Silent One refused to relent. He knew he would remember every name called out by terrified loved ones emanating from the crumbling buildings nearby for the rest of his life… but it didn’t matter. There was no turning back. Not anymore.

I am so sorry!

Silent One threw his arms forward, mimicked perfectly in time by his golem body, and thrust all five pointed, spinning boulders into the shop before him with a might not entirely his own. The essence he had absorbed, the things he was still connected to, lent him more power than he could have ever imagined. Silent One was able to follow the unseen silver strands of essence that connected to the marble boulders he’d summoned as they crashed into Schuri’s poor shop. He could see the path of all five at once as if flying beside them. A sensation that was equal parts exhilarating and nauseating. With every small collision, Silent One’s will was cast to a new shard, following hundreds at once, guiding them as much as he could to turn so he may see his enemy.

Silent One saw Schuri dart for the shattered entrance first, the round-bellied merchant carried a large metal box in his arms and his face was nearly purple from exertion. Silent One willed his boulder shards to avoid the man, narrowly veering one away from Schuri’s large arms, before he turned his attention back to the carnage before him. Carnage that he was solely responsible for. It was a shock for Silent One to see his destruction from so many angles at once. All across the remaining fragments of the storefront, there were seared slabs of stone and smoldering framework supports. Remnants of his own subconscious fury. Worst of all were the bodies. The remains of those he’d slain in an entirely conscious rage, some of which were turned towards him. All of their eyes begged the same question. “Why?”

Because they’d sided with Lord White. Simple… wasn't it? Should it be? Should I be… no. They damned themselves. Focus. Find him.

Lord White was nowhere to be seen.

Aside from the dead haunting SIlent One with their dull eye’s questions, there wasn’t a body left in the shop.‘Grand Councilor White’ seemed to have either run away with inane speed or hidden expertly well. The thought enraged SIlent One to a nearly unbearable degree, though this time he felt the pulsing of essence calming him. Directing him onwards. When his heart rate slowed and golem fists unclenched, Silent One could hear it. Shallow, even breathing. Lord White may not have stayed in the shop but there was someone nearby… someone who was casting poisoned coins with damn near perfect precision.

Silent One focused himself back into his own body, feet deep within the living parts of Noctra that surrounded him. His golem was faceless but with his venerable sight, he could see through nearly anything. He could follow essence from anywhere. The sapphire light shone within Silent One’s mobile fortress and revealed to him the intricacies of materials that had amassed around him. Some small insects skittered about, following the plant life to their sources of soil, trying to find their way home once more. Though there were hundreds of them, SIlent One hardly noticed the small world before him or it’s tiny inhabitants.

He was seeing things as they truly were, seeing them without their physical body. Everything became masses of swirling energies, lines of essence, and streams of what he believed could only be the life-force of Mother Noctra herself. Silent One’s people had held different beliefs about the exact origins of essence that he was seeing but in the end, it didn’t matter much. Wherever it came from, whatever it truly was, Silent One could track with it like no one who’d ever lived. Even his father hadn’t been able to beat him to game on their hunts, much to the envy of Ta’Jir. And damn near everyone else.

It was simple, really.

Everything on Noctra, sentient or otherwise, emitted a unique trail of essence; however, all essence followed certain... Guidelines. One of those guidelines was that all living people and beings on Noctra had a large amount of red or red-based colors in their essence trails. The different hues and intensities of red coupled with flecks of one or more other colors within their streams meant people and most animals were pretty easy to track. Especially when there was no crowd and they had just cast two different types of essence.

Silent One locked onto the coin thrower instantly.

A thick red stream with small rivers of orange and purple swirling throughout it was looped about the sky above him. Whoever it was they were jumping from roof to roof, changing positions after each shot of imbued coins struck. He heard two quick thuds as more coins lodged inches down into top of his golems head. Directly from above nonetheless, as if to confirm his suspicions.

Silent One counted.

One… two… three… four…

Two more quick thuds resounded from the top of his golem, deeper than the previous coins had been. Silent One refused to move.

One… two… three… four…

This time he could feel the impact of the coins just above his own head.

He grasped at around the metal fingers and palms shifting through his stone barrier with his will as the ground started spinning open beneath his feet. Deep enough for him to stand. That was all he needed.

One.. two...three-

Silent One simultaneously shot himself downwards into the sand that once dominated Blancana and cast his framework hands upwards with as much power as he could muster. A bit more than he could muster himself if he was being honest. The force of Silent One’s imbued casting had sent a good third of the golem suit skywards with his metal fingers guiding each shard-like little shepherds at exactly the fourth second. Directly above where it had stood… hopefully in time with his attacker. Once more he waited. Surrounded by the still, quiet sands of a world long forgotten to Noctra’s inhabitants, Silent One should have been as blind and deaf as the corpses now scattered about the port district, though his venerable sight wouldn’t allow him such a weakness. It adapted his focus and senses to the task at hand with brutal, surprising efficiency.

Sapphire blue flashed from his framework eye and sparked to a bright turquoise for just a fraction of a second within his man-sized hole that faded to deep cobalt, leaving him in near-total darkness. Silent One could hear the framework eye in his skull shifting with decisive clicks preceding each change in color, but he was too enamored with glimpses into the hidden realities before him to process what the sound was.

When turquoise illuminated his small crater, the essence of the stone, sand, and dirt around him disappeared. Only that of living beings was still visible to his sight. Thousands of insects accompanied by millions of other microscopic beings emitted enough essence to block his view of anything above the ground; until cobalt filtered through them as well.

Silent One had never experienced anything like it.

The deep, dim cobalt that his eye had settled on erased everything before him. It replaced every last visage of essence, of life- Noctra in entirety, with abysmal darkness. So black it chilled his spine to see it before him, expanding outward endlessly. Much like being within himself in Schuri’s, Silent One could not actually feel his physical body anymore. A small fear had begun seeding in his mind, reminding him that he didn’t know how to turn off the cobalt sight. He’d purposely activated and deactivated sapphire many times... the cobalt had come on more like the emerald light, with a strong will of its own.

Then he saw it.

Saw them, whomever they were. Silent One saw only the essence of his attacker. He couldn’t pinpoint an exact distance in the world of soundless obsidian but they were there, above him. A mass of scarlet-orange-purple essence about the shape and size of a slender person wearing a hood was crouched down above him, some red essence seeping out as the mass conjured up blue. The color of healing. This told Silent One that he had definitely struck the coin thrower. Hopefully, it proved enough to send them fleeing after their master. It took more than a few minutes for the panting entity to rise, awash in a light cerulean sea, but once they had risen, they simply stood there.

Silent One figured they were taking time to think on whether he was still there beneath the street, which was the smart move…. but he needed them to leave. The shock of activating cobalt presence within his framework for the first time had started to wear off and Silent One could feel the rising heat around his body, trapped there beneath the ground while his consciousness rode the waves of essence. He could feel how tired and worn his limbs were, knew that soon enough they would give out on him. There was also a burning sensation building within his limbs, waking him to its presence more and more; a mutiny in response to his excessive casting, he knew. Also telltales signs of es-sickness. An illness that could affect any level caster. It was hardly fatal, sure, but the pain was excruciating. He could hear himself gulp in the darkness at the thought of living through that… again.

Silent One really needed his attacker to leave. Now.

After all that show, all those dead... orphaned… Here I am hiding, hoping for an easy out… but I am so tired… so tired. And I’ve lost a lot of blood...

His arguing with himself only exposed Silent One’s fatigue all the more and no matter how strong his resolve or adept he was at casting, he could not hold on anymore. The others were safe.. enough. That's what really matters. The others-

Silent One heard the golem crash above him.

His body jerked as it started to release all the tethers of essence he made and Noctra took back what was hers. She was returning everything to its rightful place and it would only be a few moments before she healed the man sized crater he stood in. Silent One could siphon no more essence, his weariness reaching its pinnacle as the borrowed energy subsided. His venerable sight also failed him, killing the light within his metal eye that went out with one lone *click* . The absolute darkness that followed granted Silent One a chance to hear everything he had ignored before:

Every last grain of sand shifting back into place.

I really need air.

All thousand tiny creatures tunneling to more stable land.

My lungs are on fire.

Each piece of stone that shifted and fell; the screams beyond them.

I’m delusional… or already dead. Unless…

It was there. Over the ebbing heartbeat in Silent One’s ears he heard the slow creeping of marble. The street above him hadn’t fully reconnected! He wasn’t quite sealed in the tomb he’d created, not yet. He had to be fast.

Move! Now, Ta’k! Now!

They were his brother's last words, resounding in his head. They sprang his body back to life. The framework hands he had crafted and imbued with his own essence reassembled and tore through the ground above him, drilling through the dirt and stone towards their owner as he pushed his slowing body upwards. One inch at a time. Air seared deeper and deeper into his lungs, lighting his chest aflame as he struggled to unearth himself. The framework hands finally tore through above him after what seemed like hours and opened a passage wide enough for him to stick his neck out and take in a horribly hot breath.

Between the air that tore through his empty lungs and the blinding light that struck his bandaged eyes as he emerged, he had nearly fainted. Bile threatened to scorch his throat on the way up but he forced it back down with what little might remained and pulled himself onto the rubble-ridden marble road. There was no hope of him standing on unsteady legs, so he crawled. He didn’t know where to; just forward. Through the shattered thicket of dizzying spots that took up all of his vision, he inched onward atop piercing shards and stones aplenty. He went on like this, simply moving away from where he had been until he heard voices ahead of him. Even though he knew it was likely no one that was looking for him, he decided to hide. One flop at a time he rolled himself into a filthy alley, away from the voices, and laid upon his back.

Laughing and crying, full of regret and hope the same, he faded out of existence and slid into a dreamless sleep. Thankful for the slight drizzle that had started.

Ta’Jir had always loved lazing about on rainy days...