Datasets:

mickume

/

alt_dnd

like 1

"Something so precious..." the male says, his voice low and husky. "Will she be able to protect it as well as you?"

Karsha smiles, slight and secretive under her hood. "Kosei?"

Kosei nods to her, then looks back up to the harpies. "I’m an oni," she says in explanation. "My kind can forge a bond with a weapon, to keep it with us no matter what form we take. The koto will be mine."

"Doesn’t look much like a weapon," the smaller female says doubtfully, but the leader snorts and extends one clawed leg to shove her roughly.

"Chick! You would say that? A harpy? You who lure your dinner into your claws with your song alone? Huh! Get back to the nest!"

Stumbling, the rebuked harpy sniffs with ill grace and takes off, flapping back up into the darkness.

The leader rolls her eyes and looks back down on the musicians. "It was a good performance," she says to Kosei. "Though it would be better with some singing."

Kosei inclines her head, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. "Thank you for your ear." She removes the fingerpicks and begins to re-cover the koto, one careful layer of silk at a time.

"Will you play again?" the male asks, his talons shifting along the cliff edge. Kosei looks to Karsha for an answer.

"Not tonight. We should be getting back," her teacher says, and stands gracefully, her sword hanging lightly in her right hand. "But," she concedes, "perhaps before we leave, I will allow her one more performance."

Wrapping the red cords around the instrument, Kosei permits herself a small smile.

"Kosei, this is very important and I need you immediately."

Caught in the middle of a training session with the caravan’s guard captain, Kosei looks up mid-mace swing, blinking.

Kinya floats down towards them, her lambent hair casting orange light all across the dim walls. Her skirts, each of them dyed to a different gem-shade brilliance, settle around her long legs as she lands.

Kosei lowers the weapon. "What is it?"

"I’ve found something in a crevice up there, and I want a second opinion on if it’s worth prying it out." Kinya delivers the words in a level, serious tone, almost wholly convincing, save for the way her eyes glitter with anticipation.

Behind Kosei, Eru makes a skeptical "hm’ in his throat. "Want to take a pickaxe up there with you?" he asks, but Kinya shakes her head.

"No need. If we can’t get it out between fire, claws, size reduction magic and intangibility, I hardly think a pickaxe will make the difference. Kosei?"

Kosei hides a smile as she turns back to Eru. "I’ll come back as soon as I can," she assures him, passing back the mace. He waves her off.

"If it’s something valuable, don’t make a rush-job of it on my account. Go on."

Kinya extends a preternaturally warm hand to her, which Kosei takes, pushing lightly off the ground to fly after her. The two of them drift up along the stone walls, past the lower level graffiti and into the old mychonoid murals. The artwork—a pictoral history of the time the colony had spent here—blooms in bright colors against the dark bricks, sketched out in biomatter decades ago and left to flower forth into patterns of lichen.

They leave the illumination of the wagon’s torches below, a soft ring of lights in the darkness well beyond the range of either of their darkvision. The lichen begin to peter out soon after, leaving the murals only visible as discolorations on the stone, pale lines floating like thinning smoke against the dark. A new warden takes over, the pictures say, and the prison grows colder; the colony leaves to find warmer climes, a paradise of steam a passing band of prisoners once spoke of.

What a fascinating meeting that must have been, Kosei thinks, and wishes she’d been alive for it.

"There," Kinya says, breaking Kosei’s attention away from the murals. "The lanterns."

A lamp has been unevenly wedged into the brick and abandoned, its glass walls cloudy with age, its brass base gone umber brown with tarnish. Kosei glances around and sees two more like it, spaced some fifty feet away from each other along the walls, at similar heights.

"They’re very interesting," she says, looking to Kinya with a raised eyebrow. Kinya has an ulterior motive here, obviously, but for the life of her, Kosei can’t see it. "But not, I think, very valuable."

"They’re magical, just a bit. Put a drop of blood in one," Kinya suggests, and though Kosei doesn’t pull away, her eyebrows both arc considerably higher. "It’s perfectly safe," the efreeti goes on. "I found these the last time the caravan came through."

"Why didn’t you show them to someone then?"

Kinya smiles her ulterior motive smile—impish, crinkling her eyes and just barely showing teeth—and tugs Kosei closer, into the aura of warmth she emanates simply by virtue of existing. "Because I wasn’t together with you then. One drop of blood. It’s child’s play."

"Then why don’t you put a drop of blood in one?" Kosei asks, feeling her own smile begin to tease at one corner of her mouth.

"Because I don’t regenerate like you do, obviously."

Other people might beg, prettily, or say please, but Kinya is a prideful creature down to the flame at her core. She simply goes on staring, amber-bright eyes glowing and expectant.

And—well, by this point, Kosei is well and truly curious. She eases open the lid of the lamp, then presses the point of her thumb’s claw into the pad of her middle finger, harder and harder, until the skin tears, and cobalt blood spills down to bead and fall from her knuckle.

For a moment, nothing happens. Kosei’s wound closes cleanly, leaving nothing but the fleeting memory of pain, and she stares at the dark spot inside the lamp, just visible through the murky glass thanks to Kinya’s faint glow.

There’s no flare of light, no burst of flame, but slowly, slowly, the inside of the lamp gets brighter, filling up with some sourceless illumination. It spills out past the glass, a clean, warm light not quite like anything Kosei’s ever seen.

Beside her, Kinya releases a low, satisfied sigh. "Sunlight," she breathes.

"Sunlight?" Kosei asks, surprised.

"Or something very close to it. Here, look at me," Kinya demands. When Kosei does, she floats around her, looking her over, head to toe, eyes roving over every inch, lingering at the base of Kosei’s throat, her wrists, her horns, the nape of her neck. "Mm. Beautiful."

Amused despite herself, Kosei smiles at her, ruefully. "Was that what all this was for? Getting some time alone?"

"Oh, there was more to it than that," Kinya answers, and slides her arms around Kosei’s waist from behind. "I wanted to see what you looked like in a different light. A natural light." Her voice drops into a throaty, heated whisper against Kosei’s neck. "I’ve never seen a shade of blue quite like your skin."

A shiver races across Kosei’s flesh, and she wraps her hands over Kinya’s arms, leaning her head back onto Kinya’s shoulder. "Is that so?" she murmurs.

"Mm. Yes, it is." Kinya gazes at her face, then her eyes slide down, as her hands begin to tease and pry at the edges of Kosei’s kimono. "Someday I intend to find a way to dye silk the same color. I’ll name it for you. Kosei."

Hot fingertips find her skin, and Kosei’s breath catches. She turns, allowing Kinya to push the kimono off her shoulder. In the lamplight, Kinya gleams more brightly than ever, a clear golden flush to her skin, rosy color standing high in her cheeks. Sighing in pleasure, Kosei cups her cheek and pulls her in for the first kiss.

The last of them, she never meets—or at least, not in Carceri.

One day, soon after lunch, and for the first time in months, the prison slams into lockdown. Twice inside of a single hour, paralysis seizes the caravan, every person, every mount, every caged creature. Only a handful of the members shake it off the first time, and most of them fall to the second round. Eru hits on the idea first—someone must have challenged the warden, battling her for the control rod. Mondon decides to stay camped for an hour longer, to let the matter resolve itself. They prepare defenses, ready for shifts in temperature, gravity, air flow, or anything else.

In less than the hour, far less, Karsha twitches back her hood, one ear flicking.

"Do you hear that?"

Kosei, her belongings shouldered, straightens and looks around. After a few silent seconds, the hum in the walls rises enough in pitch to enter her hearing range. Confused voices sound through the caravan; they turn sharp with alarm when light bursts out of every crack and crevice in the stones around them. Carceri itself shrieks a protest, and for one moment of sheer dread, Kosei wonders if someone is awakening all the prison-dimension’s dead, the myriad throngs of trapped souls barred from their natural planes of rest.

Then she hears a sharp curse, and snaps her head over to see Orthin floating up off the ground.

"Gravity shift!" Mondon yells. "Everyone stay—"

"No!" Eru interrupts. "Not a gravity shift; not with all the racket! This is something else!"

"Everyone grab onto something, then!" Mondon snaps, and, for his part, pulls himself into his wagon, where he keeps the chest with the caravan’s rarer magic items.

Everything—no, not everything, Kosei realizes, everyone—is lifting off the ground at a slow drift. Even she, already floating under her own power, is rising towards the distant ceiling. She’s already carrying her chest and the koto case; she looks back to Karsha, opening her mouth to call for something else to be tossed to her.

And then the ceiling vanishes, and she begins to rise much faster.

Gaping, Kosei spins in place, staring past the members of her caravan at the teeming throngs of prisoners likewise filling Carceri’s orange skies.

"Kosei! Kosei!" Someone calls out to her, unidentifiable over the rising roar of mingled sounds, the confused voices, the whipping wind, and the howling of Carceri. Kosei catches a glimpse of copper before Kinya tackles her, locking one arm around her shoulders. Kinya’s bright hair glows incandescent in the white glare bursting from the prison walls below them; her arm points insistently upward. Kosei looks up.

Five silhouettes carve black holes out of the sky—three of them humanoid in size and shape, a fourth a round spheroid, awkward, skinny limbs emerging from it like half-sunken arrows. The fifth... Kosei’s mouth dries at the size of the fifth, huge, as tall as the giants that make their homes in the uppermost levels of the prison. It stands before the other four, the details of its form obscured beneath long robes, but in the brilliant light, Kosei can see the bare skull beneath its hood. The name comes to her from a lifetime of learning every scrap of history anyone in the caravan will teach her: Zalivance, a wizard hero from the earliest reaches of mortal time, imprisoned in Carceri for endangering the balance of all.

Kinya tugs on her arm again, and, when Kosei looks to her, points down.

Maximum Security, the war cube, has twisted out of its alignment and is slamming itself, clumsy and ponderous, into the walls of Carceri, the scrape of stone-on-stone adding to the deafening roar. Faintly, faintly, Kosei hears Kinya’s delighted laughter.

They’re rising faster now, and everywhere Kosei looks, prisoners are blurring into streaks of light, lancing away across the skies like, as her mother once described to her, stars falling from the heavens. Humanoids, goblinoids, great beasts, monsters—the power, Zalivance’s or otherwise, has made no distinction she can see.

There’s another tug on her arm, and then Kinya’s elbow hooks around her neck, inescapably strong, and Kosei turns into an insistent kiss that burns through her in an instant, a bolt of white fire, before Kinya is torn away.

She can’t see anyone she recognizes—her mother, Orthin, Karsha, Kinya, all of them gone, and as the horizon darkens to blue, Kosei closes her eyes, and lets herself fall, up and up and up...

It will be several eventful days later before Kosei learns the truth of this. First, a landing with hundreds of others in a village poorer than most and plainer than any she ever saw in Carceri. Second, a pair of minotaur princes, a zenythri boy barely into puberty, and a human girl, a villager, declaring the freedom of the prisoners and the villagers alike, and fighting for it when the prison gangs rise up to test them. Third, searching and talking with the others to learn the one thing they all had in common: all of them, from the minotaur brothers, the clutch of harpies, the tieflings and the aasimar, Kosei herself, every one of the varied races that have landed on the Prime Material village of Goat Path, had been born in the prison dimension.

The Phylacteries of Zalivance, the four figures who had stood before him in the sky, had been offered their heart’s desire, and one of them, Keinan, unable to find a way to distinguish between innocent and guilty, deserving and undeserving, had wished for the freedom of all of the prisoners of Carceri. Those with homes to return to had returned to them; those without, those born in Carceri, had come back home with him.

And now—rather predictably—the planes are in chaos.

She knows Niniver’s return by the sound of the air outside—there’s a shift in the wind, a gentling, and footsteps so quiet she wouldn’t even know to listen for them if she didn’t already know how the air bends around him these days. And then a knock on the door, the sound of it creaking open and, "Fienna?"

She swirls the brush around in the bucket at her feet then shakes it out, water streaming and glittering in the sunset light Niniver lets into the stables with him. Coppermane shifts, her head turning to look at the new arrival, and Fienna clucks her tongue behind her teeth, scratching the mare behind the ear.

"So what did that glorified marble treetrunk have to say?" she asks as Niniver approaches, looking him over out of the corner of her eye. He’s in one piece, still, and doesn’t even look bloodied—he’s gotten quite good at navigating Mechanicus, and the modrons bother him a little less each time—though his tired smile in response to her jab pricks her to annoyance.

"Primus said that everything’s in place," he answers, hopping lightly onto the edge of a stall. "I just need to decide on some kind of trigger."

Fienna goes on wiping down the mare, waving a hand at him over her shoulder when he trails off.

"For my memories," he elaborates. "For them to come back as strong as I need them to, they can’t just be..." He searches the eaves of the barn for whatever word it is he’s looking for, and settles on, "ambient. They have to be tied to something specific, and when I come across whatever it is in my next life, it’ll trigger them, and I’ll remember everything all at once."

"Sounds distracting," Fienna snorts, plunging the brush into the water again. "Don’t pick anything violent."

Niniver hums in his throat, leaning on a beam, his hands limp in his lap. "I want to make sure it’s something that has a good chance of happening no matter how many times I reincarnate. But Primus says it has to be something specific to me, too. Something important from my life."

His gaze weighs on her, and she looks up at him, raising an eyebrow. He stares back at her plaintively with troubled golden eyes, and gods and demons on all sides, he still looks so young.

She throws the brush at him. It’s as much to hide her wince as to watch him deflect it with one hand while his other gathers the errant water with a coiling gesture of his fingers. The brush clatters against the wall and slides down into the scattered hay, and Fienna pulls a towel from around her shoulders and starts patting down Coppermane.

"Don’t tie up some future friendship with yours and mine," she says, voice brisk. "It’s rude. Though," she amends, shooting him a grin, "as a way to pre-emptively emotionally blackmail someone into joining your cause..."

He makes a face, and mimes throwing the water ball at her, though when she ducks behind the towel, the orb stops halfway across the stall and returns to his fingers. "No, no, you’re right. But what, then?" He frowns into his lap, passing the orb back and forth across his hands in the even, swaying rhythms he used to practice by the riverside back when they were both children. "I want—I want whoever I’m going to be next to have a chance to be themselves for a while first." Pale blue fingers trace delicate ripples across the water’s surface. "I want a chance to grow up knowing what the sky looks like."

It shouldn’t have to be this way. He shouldn’t be the only one making a sacrifice like this—the dozen, hundred, thousand sacrifices he’s setting himself up for. It isn’t his responsibility. She feels it in her bones, a burning lead certainty. But he feels the opposite with every bit the strength she does, and the arguments are old, familiar, and tiresome.

Fienna feels age creeping up on her, in the chill mornings, in the middle of long nights when her knuckles and knees ache with a throbbing, dull heat. Her children are grown. Her grandchildren are now the same age she and Niniver were when they met, half a century ago and in a different Goat Path than this one is becoming. When she was twelve, in that first maelstrom of a year, she’d once sworn a vow of revenge on Primus the One—

—Keinan’s shredded remains frozen in crystal, barely recognizable as her brother; Niniver, her best friend, devastated by the truth of why his mother’s line was imprisoned in Carceri to begin with—

—and she’s old enough now to know that, however strong she’s gotten since then, mortal strength could never be enough, and she values that mortality too much to sell it away. All the same, when the time comes...

"Something with animals?" she suggests, putting the thought away, back in the closet with her demonic armor, her chaos diamond, her seldom-worn crown. "You’ve still got those ridiculous fiendish chickens from when you first got out. And who doesn’t come across animals at some point in their lives?"

"Actually it’s been all different fiendish chickens for at least twenty years. They don’t live all that long."

"Niniver, if you start nitpicking legalese with me under my own roof, I will carry you all the way to Two Cows and throw you to the dragon turtle."

He grins back, finally, and laughs in spite of himself. "Sorry, sorry. Well, I don’t have to come up with it today. And anyway, Collane told me to tell you dinner’s ready."

Fienna nods. "I’ll be in soon. Go ahead. I’m sure those gremlins I call grandchildren will want to hear everything."

He nods and hops down—for a moment, his feet don’t touch the ground, then gravity catches up to him, and he settles. The ball of water bobs in his hands and he looks down at it, seeming to remember its presence.

He smiles, gentle and rueful, and holds it up to Coppermane, who gives it a long, skeptical look before she takes a bite of it. With the comfort of a horse bred for adventure, she eats the thing like she does the apples Keinan sometimes brings back from his and his comrades’ latest delve through the color pool into the Abyss.

Fienna folds her arms together and leans back on the wall, watching.

Gemma lurks behind the far side of the tent, watching anxiously as the guards drag her sister towards the figure in the cloak. A crowd is drawing closer, stifling under the noon-time heat, and she weaves through them, squeezing her way to the front. When she finally pushes between the last clutch of people, it’s to see Tereza being forced to her knees while the taller of the guards returns the cloaked figure’s purse to them.

"Well, you’re the victim," he says. "What form shall the punishment take—a fine, time served, a lashing?"

Tereza’s dark eyes scan the crowd in wild desperation, then return to the front as the figure lowers its—her—hood, revealing long, pointed ears and skin the color of ebony wood. She wears a sword on her hip, a sapphire glinting in its pommel, and looks down on Gemma’s sister with pale green eyes, thoughtful.

Gemma holds her breath.

"Lets just call it a scare, shall we?" the elf-woman says, smiling inscrutably, and the crowd releases a brief murmur of response before they begin to disperse. Gemma sags in relief. A feathery sense of déjà vu tickles the back of her mind.

"A—scare?" the younger guard asks, but the older shrugs, releasing Tereza’s arm.

"It means—" he begins, and that’s the last of it Gemma hears as—

"We will free you!" the stranger shouts, and the words echo all the way up through the central cell block to Niniver’s hiding place, flooding through him with the force of resolve. "There’s no crime you could have committed that would earn this! When we get to Zalivance, when we get out; we’ll come back for you. I swear it! I won’t let this stand!"

—she falls to her knees, her breath frozen in her lungs—

"Justice and right, even in the absence of all possible reward," he recites, injuries stinging, and behind him his father sighs, but his mother smiles, slight and proud and sad, and pulls him into her arms.

"That’s right," she says. "It’s the places where your actions matter least that your choices matter most, Niniver. Even here—especially here—you have to live in the way you believe is right." She rubs his hair, the same white as her own. "Come on. Lets get you patched up."