Elephant Pond 11:

Blood and Horns, Daggers and Stone

The Bloodless

The druid named Greyum looked more like cornered prey than ever. He had initially come to the druidess’ aid, fusing the black stone wall onto his left side to make the half armor it was now, before taking a swing at Ayva’s head with a massive axe. But Ayva had managed to overpower him, leaving his axe and the woman he had come to save unconscious and bound in the house she had literally kicked him out of.

Now they were at a standstill in a fairly long stretch of empty ground between two houses. The Rot Tusk shaper’s body lay still where Darriyon and the other soldiers had slain it; both its heads smashed into the cobblestone ground. Even with the mysterious chameleon shaper somewhere among the houses, the odds of the rebels winning the battle were close to none. A fact Ayva could see the druid was painfully aware of.

She took a step towards him. He responded with a step back and a glance behind himself.

For a second his eyes lingered there. He saw the last of the homes of Cask Village just before the outskirts of dense forest. There were few places easier to lose Harcovians in, especially since he’d have the lay of the land and possibly an escape route planned before the battle had even begun.

His prospects of survival were slim and shrinking by the minute, and he had a viable escape route. All Ayva had to do was pressure him a bit further, give him more reason to doubt his survival and he would run. Then only the chameleon shaper would be left before Ayva could retrieve the druidess and take her back to their camp for questioning.

She took another step forward. She pulled back her crimson cloak to expose the silver throwing daggers hanging on the left side of her hip and placed her hand on the long sword on her right. She’d had her cloak specially tailored to be a half-cloak without a right side; to leave her blade exposed, while hiding the daggers on her but she only needed intimidation here.

He took another two steps back. He was a second away from fleeing until his eyes found the druidess behind Ayva.

In that house, he must have found some sort of resolve when or remembered an obligation that had been lost in fear, because he halted his retreat. He took a single slow breath and began chanting in the unintelligible language druid’s wove spells in.

Druids were powerful casters, able to bend the earth and flora to their will to create devastating acts of nature and wield powers even beyond the natural. But they needed to claim the land first, an incantation that required time and concentration that were hard to come by in battle.

Ayva hoped whatever he saw in the druidess was worth his life, because he was going to pay for his transgressions with it. She pulled throwing daggers and fell into a hard sprint toward him. She threw dagger after dagger, one by one, trying to buy herself time to get closer and break his concentration. But he just shifted his left side forward and the daggers bounced right off the stone.

Finally, in a voice made of many that came from all around them, called wild speech, he finished his spell with the word: “Domain!”

The earth below his feet shuddered, not in one massive motion but in a wave of a thousand individual tremors that began below his feet and then cascaded out, mostly moving forward toward Ayva and as far as the house the druidess lay in. The earth in that area was now his to command as he saw fit, not to mention he could cast spells considerably faster than before. So Ayva would take his breath before he could speak them.

Half a second after the word left his lips, she was on him. Ayva swung her long sword with all her strength at his right side, intent on divorcing his torso from his chest.

But with no prior incantations, he cast again: “Expand!”

The black stone on his body swelled and thickened as it moved to cover his right side just as Ayva’s blade connected with it, hitting him with enough force that the slash physically moved him, while it penetrated the stone.

Her sword cleaved through more than half of it until it was halted a hair from his flesh. It was wedged in the druid’s armor. Ayva had guessed from the number of tattoos he had, that he would be capable of casting a few spells without their usual prior chanting, instant wild speech as they called it, but she had hoped to execute him before he had the chance.

The druid took a moment to grin and relish her surprise but Ayva didn’t. She abandoned her sword in the stone and grabbed him by the forearm instead and yanked him towards her. Ayva drove her knee up into his face, his nose making a sickening crunch as the cartilage shattered.

He staggered back hands over his nose. Twin streams of blood leaked out from below his cupped him hands onto his shaggy brown beard. Too little to trigger her blood frenzy, but the faint smell of it in the air piqued her appetite for more.

“You’ll pay for that!” he shrieked. She took a step towards him again. He answered by stumbling backwards and falling onto his rear.

Then Ayva heard something heavy land on a thatched roof behind her. She turned around and saw what looked like a ram, standing upright. It had a muscular man’s upper body covered in dark brown fur and in place of hooved forelegs, it had massive fists along with large coiling horns to complete a body oddly disproportionate with its slim legs. Its appearance fit what had been described to Ayva as a glaisator, a species that could only be found on one of the isles surrounding the Plains, and as a result she had no idea what its powers were.

The shaper had shown himself before the soldier Ayva had commanded to follow her did. It was best to assume he had met his end by his hand and she was on her own, at least for a while. That was how she tended to prefer it, either way.

“Your sister is in the house right under you, she’s unconscious but she’s fine.” Greyum said as he tried to staunch the slight bleeding with cloth he’d torn from his shirt. “The savage here is the one who knocked her out.”

If that was his sister, then he was likely to be the younger brother that had approached their camp with her, and worth questioning as well. Although that meant she would have to subdue him without killing him, something Harcovians were typically less than exceptional at.

“I’ll make her pay for it,” the shaper said. The words didn’t come from his mouth but in the odd pseudo speech that seemed to come from around the shaper, in their voice.

“You sound too young to be fighting, as gifted as you might be to have that form at your age,” Ayva said. “Come quietly and I’ll let all of you live, the druid included.”

He snorted derisively, “I’m old enough to have killed a half dozen Harcovians on my own. And together we’ve killed well over double that.”

“I’m a Commander,” Ayva informed him.

“Then your death will mean that much more to our cause.”

“This is your last chance to surrender. I generally prefer not to kill children, but I also do what my title requires,” Ayva said as she drew daggers from her hip.

He grumbled.

“I hope you keep that charitable spirit after I’ve knocked your head off your shoulders. Maybe I’ll use it for a few rounds of toll ball later.”

“Take your sister and run,” Greyum interjected as he wiped the last of the blood from below his nose. “I’ll handle her.”

The young shaper leapt from the roof onto the ground in front of the door way.

Ayva took off at full sprint towards them. If she let him take her, all of their efforts and lives lost up to this point would be wasted. She watched him crouch and force himself into the open doorway, as she pumped her legs as hard she could. However, instead of picking her up, he plucked the axe large enough to look sizeable even in his hand from the wall and then exited the building, and then he threw it over Ayva’s head to the druid, where it clattered onto the ground in front of him.

He gave the shaper an annoyed look but then conceded. “Fine, but I won’t be making any apologies to your sister. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it right, so follow my lead.” Greyum shut his eyes and began chanting and the glaisator shaper charged Ayva, horns level at her.

She leaped backwards, just barely out of his way as he smashed into the ground head and horns first, where she had just been. He was much faster than she had expected.

He lifted his head up from the hole and gave chase. His hind legs were like springs that made his bounds and leaps frighteningly fast, he was constantly narrowly missing her. Ayva managed to avoid them with sidesteps and rolls and faking him out every so often as his agility itself was quite poor and he was slow to recover from his impacts with the ground. But if she veered off too far in one direction he charged where she would be if she continued, guiding her back to where she was before.

“You run around a lot for a leech. Aren’t commanders supposed to be the best of you?” the shaper taunted.

He was obviously trying to keep her occupied here, away from the druid, who had been chanting behind them the entire time. Leaving the druid alive before she came running to stop the siblings had been a mistake.

She had immediately lost control of the situation as soon as she did it. Not only was she now a fair distance away from a druid with essentially all the time in the world to cast, but she was too occupied with a shaper she couldn’t kill to stop him. Her mother would award her with floggings if she heard about it, or likely when.

Either way her blood frenzy was her only out.

She ran directly towards him, new daggers in hand and just before they clashed, slid between his legs. His horns destroyed the ground where she had just been, clipping the end of her crimson cloak. Then, before he could turn fully, Ayva threw four daggers at his hind quarters and lower back, non-lethal areas likely to bleed and immobilize him.

On command, his fur puffed up, the individual strands standing up and hardened like needles that deflected the daggers.

“Come on leech, I’m sure you can do better than that.”

“Keep running your mouth, you’ll be a limb lighter before you realize,”

“It’s too late for that now,” the shaper said, “He’s ready.” Ayva could hear the giddiness and anticipation in his voice.

The glaisator shaper dropped to all fours and grunted as a second pair of horns erupted from his skull, pointed and sharp like a bull’s. She glanced behind herself and saw dark green light rippling off of the druid.

In the booming disembodied voice of wild speech, he cast: “Earth Shaping: Molder’s Bog!”

The ground below them seemed to melt. The cobblestone and earth, in the area Greyum had established as his, softened into cold wet mud and then a layer of muddy water seeped up from the earth, on top it. Ayva’s feet sunk into it, the mud reaching above her ankle and the water on top of it stopped above her knees.

Greyum raised his hand and mud shaped into two small cylinders rose above the water. Then he pushed his hand outward and they flew towards them, dipping into the water after a short distance. They gradually picked up more and more mud until the soft cylinders grew out of the water, taller than the houses around them. Then they solidified into stone pillars, knifing through the mud side by side toward Ayva and the shaper.

She ran and then dove to the right narrowly avoiding the pillars. The mud and water clung to her legs slowing each and every step she took. She almost hadn’t made it.

When she stood up she realized another was already on its way to where she stood now. She dodged this one too and saw even more of them following and glimpses of Greyum with a queue of mud cylinders behind the pillars. They were only individually large enough to block a third of the path to the druid at a time, which meant Ayva would have to find the gaps and spaces where they weren’t if she intended on making it to him.

She turned to see how the shaper handled the pillars that had nearly bludgeoned her and was surprised.

The glaisator shaper bounced off the centre pillar, just in time for the new one on his right. With his perfectly suited hooves he was able to perch on tiny indentations in the stone pillars just before he leaped to the next, going higher as he did.

Ayva was sick of the two of them already.

She focused on the pillars, pushing herself to dodge while, getting closer to Greyum, wary of the sound of the glaisator bouncing around above her head.

When two pillars on opposing sides of Ayva came, she was grateful for the chance to just run forward till she heard hooves push off of stone particularly hard above her. Ayva instinctively leaped to her left, narrowly slipped between an oncoming pillar to her left and where the young shaper’s splashed down and pierced the mud with his horns. Wasting no time, he leaped and began his ascension again while was forced to dive out of the way of a pillar in the centre, panting hard from the sudden added exertion.

Now she understood. The pillars were only part of a much larger trap. While she pushed herself to dodge them in muddy water, the shaper bounced around at the top, waiting to drop down and impale her at the most opportune time. And if he missed he simply leaped back up to repeat it until she either became too tired to dodge the pillars or his horns.

It had taken most of the soldier’s she’d brought, half of her personal guard, to take down the Rot Tusk by its lonesome with sizeable losses. If Ayva hadn’t been here to take on these two herself, the rebels would have annihilated her soldiers with little resistance.

The situation as a whole mildly annoyed her.

The shaper repeated his attempts a second and third time. On each occasion he got better at timing her dodging and predicting exactly where she would dodge to. A few times more times and his horns would find there mark before Ayva reached anyway near the druid.

Think. She had to think of a way out of the situation before she ran out of energy. Trudging through the mud and water while dodging pillars and the shaper’s horns was leading her nowhere, she needed an out.

She had a firm grasp of the pattern the stone pillars came in now. And he was unlikely to deviate because the glaisator shaper needed the pattern to dodge them and make attacks of his own.

As a new pillar came racing down straight toward her, she heard him bounce from pillar to pillar again, to get another shot at her. Just the out she needed.

The same two pillars came side by side to her left as expected and Ayva produced two of the six daggers she had left. She threw the first dagger into the side of the pillar coming directly towards her and then moments before it arrived she threw the other into the pillar coming to her right.

She jumped, as high as she could while pushing her herself out of the mud, and stepped onto the dagger. But when she pushed off it to leap again it snapped under her weight. In that moment the shaper flew past, in front of her in the air between the oncoming pillars where he had expected her to be at that moment, the only option she was supposed to have.

Ayva hadn’t gotten to the height she needed to push off of the other dagger. So, the second dagger, meant to be a foothold, became a handhold that Ayva grabbed with her right hand to swing herself forward into a somersault above where the shaper had landed.

He cocked his head up just in time to see Ayva falling; new daggers brandished in either hand as she fell on to him. She stabbed them into his long snout as she landed in the mud pulling his head down with her momentum, into the water.

He let out a hoarse wail and he coughed out dirty water, as blood gushed out from both ends of the wound in his snout. Ayva saw fresh fear uproot the smug defiance in his side-slanted ram’s eyes while the grey of hers was consumed by red. The metallic smell of his blood flooded her nostrils and burrowed into her lungs where they gorged themselves on the aroma and triggered her blood frenzy at last.

Ayva’s fatigue vanished as her body was flooded with new strength and adrenaline that sharpened her mind, filtering out the unnecessary to produce unmitigated focus. It made her feel whole, yet better than, satiated yet unappeasable.

Right on cue, a freshly formed pillar sped through the mud towards them. He tried to pull away but with her new strength, Ayva who wasn’t even a quarter of the glasiator’s size, held his entire body in place as he bucked his powerful legs. Their fight was already over.

“You should have taken my offer.”

She lifted his head with relative ease and bashed his head into the oncoming pillar, shattering the rock and his horns in the process.

Blood Charges were expendable energy, physical manifestations of lethality made possible by the Blood Mother’s blessing unique to the Blade class. However, as a Blade Commander just short of becoming a Slayer, Ayva’s mastery gave her an alternative. She expended what would have been a blood charge to form the same intangible crimson glow. Then Ayva solidified the blood charge, coating the daggers in crystalised dark red; blood sheathes. They were a compromise between the explosive power of blood charges for a more sustained enhancement.

She broke into a full sprint, running through the mud significantly faster, and wove between the oncoming pillars with ease. Those she didn’t care to dodge; she sliced to pieces with her blood sheathed daggers.

Greyum swore bitterly as he watched Ayva charge at him, now unfazed by his pillars and his comrade dazed and beaten in the mud behind her. The druid clasped his hands together and the cylinders he had already prepared fused into a single massive cube of mud. Then launched it, pushing with both hands his hands and great effort.

The cube deformed the terrain with the amount of mud it pulled into itself as it sped towards Ayva, even faster than the pillars a fraction of its size.

Ayva stopped in the shadow of the cube, while it was still a ways away. When it finally reverted into stone, it was so wide that instead of displacing the water in its wake it pushed it all forward in a wave and towered so high above everything else around them that it blocked out the sunlight in the space they occupied. It was like the druid had sent a cliff side to crush her.

But she’d had enough of him and his stones. She charged the two daggers with an ordinary blood charge for each, albeit much stronger than an ordinary Blade’s, cloaking them with a thick veil of crimson and then threw them.

As the daggers left her hand, Ayva’s and the shaper’s eyes followed them as they glided through the stone effortlessly, leaving gaping holes. And again they watched, as the daggers found Greyum’s chest on the other side and did the same.