Archer's Paradox

"Archer's Paradox" is a [SEASON NUMBER] thread written on [IRL DATE].
==Summary==
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==Full Text==
A bright white-gold light flared up from the inside of the inside of the dungeon and shot towards the sky through the ceiling of latticed iron bars holding the building together, and it continued up high into the sky, brightening as it did so, for the benefit of those standing guard miles away. 
Liam stiffened and grabbed Verdandi’s shoulder in shock, his eyes reflecting the flare as it burst into the clouds above. “Fuck. That’s the warning signal.” They were crouched on one of the walls of Castaway, and the corner guard tower several hundred yards down from their position lit up with activity as they rushed out and pointed up at Kendra’s signal, shouting to each other. They began to move out down each wall, the men loading quivers of arrows onto their shoulders and stringing their bows in a hurry. “We gotta do something.”
aroleplayingcephalopod
Verdandi sucks in a breath, staring up at the flare. She gives herself a shake. “Right,” she whispers. “Should we take out the archers?” she asks, readying her own bow.
tree-the-cat
“Before they take us out.” Liam took aim and took a breath, his arms shaking slightly while he stuffed down his panic at seeing his sister’s distress signal. “We can’t let them get to the keep. Ready?”
aroleplayingcephalopod
“Ready,” she confirms, loosing her first arrow at the guard nearest the keep. The arrow strikes the man in the chest, and he falls with a scream of pain. Before he’s down, Verdandi is already drawing a second arrow and taking aim at a second target.
tree-the-cat
Liam’s arrow didn’t strike quite as true, but the momentum of the blow thumping into his armor and skidding off into the other soldiers caused the man he shot to stumble backwards and fall off the outside of the wall, his horrified yell trailing behind him and fading away. Liam stood a bit taller behind the crates they were crouched behind and continued to take aim and shoot, over and over. The returning fire narrowly missed him and he inhaled sharply, ducking back down and nocking another arrow. “There’s a lot of them,” he said harshly, looking over to see if he could see anything happening within the keep. He heard a deep grumble of what was most likely a dragon, and a bit of noise, but that was it. “Got any ideas to take a whole bunch of them out at once?”
aroleplayingcephalopod
She thinks of that power, that strangeness in herself, but – she doesn’t know how to control it. In a situation this dangerous, it’s not worth the risk. Verdandi shakes her head. “No. Just keep shooting?” She turns to do just that, only leaving the cover of the boxes long enough to loose another arrow.
tree-the-cat
He laughed dryly and cupped a paw around his ear. “What was that? I think I heard, ‘get on top of them and make their bows useless.’”
Before Verdandi could react, Liam laid his bow at her feet and curled his fingers into fists, and dark smoke bloomed around his claws and melted down his forearms. He vaulted over the crate, his tail lengthening into a banner of shadow and whipping over Verdandi’s head, and he began racing on all fours towards the Central soldiers, who yelled and began firing on him instead. The arrows hissed through nothing as Liam dissolved into a black cloud and pooled along the ground towards them, and it rushed past their greaves and re-formed behind a row of them, and he drew his knives and used his black half-paw feet to kick one of them in the chest and send him over the edge to his death, as well. 
He turned, catching another by surprise with two blades up through his ribcage, and by then the others had started fighting back. One of them pulled her bow over his head and around his arms, trying to stop him long enough for someone to land a blow, but he grabbed the length of wood with both paws and drove his entire body forward, sending the soldier’s head towards the ramparts and smacking her forehead into the stones with a painful crunch. He pushed her body away, ripped off the bow and scooped up his daggers again. A few soldiers were escaping towards Verdandi, hoping to make it to the ladder behind her to alert the others in the keep, even though they were already under attack.
aroleplayingcephalopod
“YOU GODS-DAMNED IDIOT!” Verdandi yells after him. Still, seeing the few soldiers rushing her way, she drops her bow and draws her sword, ready to intercept them as they come by. Almost as an afterthought, she draws her dagger with the other hand, flinging it at the approaching soldiers with deadly accuracy. 
It spins through the air, metal flashing in the light, before the blade strikes the leader of the little escape party right between the eyes. Her corpse crumples to the ground, but Verdandi doesn’t have so much as a moment to celebrate the throw – seeing their comrade fall, the other two rush at her with their own swords drawn. She loses sight of Liam as she ducks, parries, and strikes back.
tree-the-cat
There were a lot of them, but they were slow, caught off-guard and untrained. Liam managed to dispatch several of them before getting his first wound, a frantic lunge of a shortsword past his ribs, which left a long nick that stung more than it slowed him down. He locked the sword down with both knives but they were quite strong; they pinned him up against the stone behind him, both of them breathing heavily into each others’ faces, and Liam slowly pried the blade away from and gave a hefty shove, giving him a moment to breathe. He saw bits of curly fur poking out from their helmet around their face and he tightened his jaw grimly, looking them in the eye. He knew he must look frightening by now, covered in dark shadows and rippling smoke.
“You can get out of here,” he said meaningfully. “Get a move on and start a different life.”
They stared with wide eyes at him and he pointed towards the guard tower. But that was all they had time for before another soldier was on top of him with a spear, and he dodged, sheathing his knives and grabbing the shaft of the weapon, charging forward and throwing his new attacker off-balance. He flipped the spear around and ran it through their belly, then looked back at Verdandi to make sure she was doing alright.
aroleplayingcephalopod
She seems to be doing fine, to judge by the two dead soldiers. The remaining soldier is looking battered, but he seems to have gotten in a lucky hit or two. A cut across Verdandi’s cheek drips blood down her face, and there’s a tear in her sleeve. With a well-placed kick, she sends the soldier in Liam’s direction, and further away from the ladder he still wants to reach. She draws her other dagger and throws it, impaling the soldier in the chest.
tree-the-cat
Liam grinned to himself, happy with her ease at killing now, and turned to face the guard tower.
A blast of both heat and cold shot through his left-hand chest and he gasped, the force of it yanking his shoulder back and making him stumble backwards and trip over one of the bodies he’d left behind.
Up on the tower, one of the higher captains narrowed their eyes and lowered their crossbow, sniffing as the lanky figure fell back and clutched one of his paws at the bolt now speared through his scarf, armor and ribs. 
“He can be killed,” the captain said stiffly. The woman standing behind her gave a small, nervous titter, her gauntlets tucked military-style behind her back.
“Good…I was worried it was a demon…”
The captain pinned her crossbow against the ground of the tower with her foot and started to reload it.
Liam struggled fiercely for breath. The cold metal of the bolt was burning his insides like fire, and his hand was shaking violently as he wrapped his numb fingers around its entry point. Air escaped in a thin stream from his throat as he struggled to say something, anything. He was light-headed. His heart pulsed and he bared his teeth in a silent yell as he felt it wound itself further on the metal head buried in his chest.
Nala…Verdandi…!?
aroleplayingcephalopod
“LIAM!” Verdandi screams. She entirely abandons the safety of the crates as she rushes to him. “No, no, no,” she whimpers. “You’re not allowed to die, you bastard,” she tells him, her eyes brimming with tears.
Now she reaches for that energy, relieved to find it at her fingertips. The now-familiar golden light starts to seep from her fingertips before she stops. She can’t heal him with the bolt still in his chest, and – “I’m sorry,” she says, the only warning he gets before she yanks the crossbow bolt from his chest.
tree-the-cat
Everything went white. Liam arched his back and kicked both his feet, his hand finding Verdandi’s tunic and twisting into it, tearing it slightly as he roared in agony. 
i’m dying i’m dying i’m dying
He coughed wetly, blood spilling over his lips, and he pulled Verdandi closer, unable to articulate anything in his state. His vision was going fuzzy. He couldn’t feel his limbs. The captain on the tower pressed her mouth closed tightly as she pulled the next bolt back until the latch caught it. “A healer.”
Her right-hand soldier nodded once, eager. “Kill her, ma’am.”
The arms of the bow leveled at Verdandi and then the string snapped and released.
aroleplayingcephalopod
The bolt flies straight at her, and it seems like it’s going to hit, before it shatters in midair. Golden light suffuses the air around her, and then it seems to burst, exploding outward like a small sun.
When the glow dims, Verdandi is no longer crouched next to Liam. She’s straightened and turned to face the tower. The injuries on her own body and Liam’s are healed quickly enough to burn with a fierce pain, but Verdandi, at least, doesn’t seem to notice.
Her eyes fill with golden light, until the natural color of her eyes, and then the whites of them seem to be replaced by molten gold. Incorporeal wings unfurl from her back, and she uses them to propel herself upwards, leveling with the top of the tower.
“Don’t you touch him,” she snarls, in a voice unlike her own; this voice is heavy with an ancient power and reverberates across the wall. Heavy golden chains form in her hands, and she whips one at the soldier and captain.
tree-the-cat
The two women gaped up at her with wide eyes, and the right-hand soldier gave another doomed, nervous giggle. “Oh. That’s not a dem–”
The top of the tower exploded in a shower of dust, rubble and molten energy and light, and back on the wall, the soldiers that had been moving in on the two rebels whipped around and gasped at the sight of Verdandi hovering above them like an otherworldly deity. On the ground, Liam arched his back in pain once more, but light encased his body and his wounds especially, floating upwards in several more chains of bright energy that broke and dissipated as they rose above him, and he dug his claws into the stone bricks below him while gasping for air. His lungs were blessedly, suddenly clear. Tears ran down his face as the burning in his chest worsened beyond comprehension, but it started to fade, and he blinked and focused on a huge set of wings above him. His sudden fear was replaced with shock.
“What…the…?”
aroleplayingcephalopod
The entity – because this doesn’t seem to be Verdandi in control, anymore – lashes out at the encroaching soldiers next, the golden chains flying through the air with a deadly precision. 
They slash through soldiers and stone alike as though they’re made of paper, and rubble rains down among charred corpses. With a sweep of her arm, the chains cut through the base of the tower, sending the entire structure tumbling down.
tree-the-cat
Liam managed to roll to his feet to avoid a shower of rocks of a size that wouldn’t be healthy for him to be hit by them. He began running down the wall towards her, the opposite direction of the fleeing soldiers. His black paws left pools of shadow with the force of his sprinting and to avoid crashing into people, he would briefly use the ramparts as points of momentum, striking his feet into them and continuing to dash towards the tower, which crumbled at its base and began to fall. The wall itself began to splinter and slowly started to crumble in Liam’s direction, and he skidded to a stop, staring wide-eyed up into the sky. 
“Verdandi!!”
aroleplayingcephalopod
She twists sharply, glowing eyes staring directly at Liam. Noticing the wall crumbling towards him, she swoops down next to him. One of the glowing chains vanishes and she throws up a hand, creating a shield that the rubble shatters against.
Liam was getting uncomfortable shudders all the way through his back, and he reached for Verdandi, feeling a little unstable on the partially-destroyed wall. “Vee…come on, we have to get back to the others…!” His mind was still reeling from being fatally shot. He was afraid. And he was afraid for her.
* When Liam’s fingers close around her wrist, the wings keeping her aloft falter, and she drops to the ground. She lands heavily, but the blank expression on her face remains, as do the golden chains still in her left hand.
* “Verdandi, snap out of it…” Liam grimaced as his shadowy hand burned around her skin, but he pressed on, catching her other arm with his left hand and pulling her a little closer. He shook her very slightly, trying to see past her blank, glowing eyes. “It’s me.” He wiped a hand across his face, smearing the black magic across his face and making it drip slowly down his cheeks. His eyes faded from white back to green as he did so. “We gotta go!”
* She blinks once. Twice. The chain and wings dissolve into nothingness. She blinks a third time. The golden light seems to drip from her eyes, leaving glittering tear-tracks on her cheeks. Verdandi looks back at him. “Liam?”
* “Hey there.” He cupped her face and tried his best not to bite his lip as the molten gold stung his hand like acid. A few involuntary tears welled up, but they mixed with the oily black smearing down his cheeks that was dripping down from his short horns, and he gave a wry, relieved grin, rubbing a thumb across her chin before kissing her gently. “Come on. You did enough damage to make everyone shit themselves.” Sure enough, the wall was empty of soldiers, as they had begun to either escape to the keep or simply flee the dungeon entirely.
* Verdandi twists to look at the destruction around them. “I did that?” she asks. The memories come back in a flood, and all she can say is, “Oh.” Then she looks down at Liam’s chest, letting out a relieved, shaky breath when she sees a new scar rather than a gaping wound.
* Liam shook out his scarf over the hole torn through his clothes, hiding it. “I’m okay. We need to get into the tunnels so Akkey can get us out of here.”
* “Right,” she says in a tight voice. “Let’s go, then.” She grabs Liam’s hand tightly, looking around for the safest path back to the tunnels.
* Liam squeezed her hand, and as the golden light trailed from Verdandi and the shadows from his arms splattered on the stone in their wake, they raced back towards the way they came, scaling down the wall and headed back for the keep, where the fight was only just beginning.
Category:BOTGD 2
Category:Events
Category:Act I
Category:Liam Arnason
Category:Verdandi Østergård