#misc writing

The girl edged to the edge of the roof and peered down at the city, at the labyrinthine streets and the colorful, waving flags and the gaggles of University students, out for a morning drink and/or light sabotage of academic rivals. No danger there. No danger anywhere, so far as she could see.

As far as she could smell, though… A whiff of rotting meat and kerosene wound through the air, lurking just below the typical dust/sweat/fruit/blood smell of the city proper. 

She drew back, closer to where her master still knelt, writing away, positioning herself between him and the oncoming trouble. When she slid her hands into her sleeves the welcome weight of her knives greeted her, their blades honed to a shine and their hilts fitting easily into the hollows of her palms.

 “It’s the Void. We should go.”

In response the Ink Mage inked another line. Half the roof was gray slate; the other half was aswirl with protective runes, all written in his signature slanting scrawl, the small knots thrumming with potential energy. When they were finished, anyone crossing them would be so much ash on the pavement below. But only when they were finished.

“Now,” she tried. 

A single bird took flight, wheeling in small, tight circles above the rest. The whiff became an odor, thick and choking. 

“I believe the order I gave you was ‘change its mind,’ not ‘tell me what to do.’”

Seven more runes. Two more shingles. More and more of the birds lifted off, feathers flurrying as they flew the alarm. They swooped around her wrist, spiraled up into her thumb, winged along her lifeline until her skin felt tender-bruised with their panicked fluttering.

And then the Void spat an Infernal out onto the non-runed section of shingles. 

Smudgy. That was the girl’s first impression of it—smudgy, and smeary, and smoky, embers where its mouth should be and its hide spewing grayish smog, its outline flickering in and out of reality. Horns sprouted from its head in jagged cobalt corkscrews. 18th level, perhaps, or 31st; the physical similarities were too great, the differences too internal, to be identifiable at a glance. 

The girl threw one of her knives. It arced in a deadly, glittering  blur of metal to clatter off of the Infernal’s side in a shower of sparks. She revised the level up (52? 67?) and leapt forward to meet it, ducking past its many-armed attack.

Blow one missed. So did blows two, three, and four. Five connected, those smoke-wreathed claws hooking into her jacket and hurling her up into the air, her body re-tracing her knife’s path. When she landed something in her shoulder crunched. 

“If you’re going to fail, at least be interesting about it,” the Ink Mage murmured. He hadn’t so much as glanced up at the brawl, still scribbling away. 

The Infernal moved closer, closer, more calculating than cautious as it approached. Fetid air rolled over her, coating her throat with the taste of rot, making her retch. A single claw found her chest. The bone there didn’t crunch so much as cave wetly in, skin ribboning out in fleshy, bloodied strips.  

At her cry the Ink Mage actually paused. 

“Keep it down,” he said, and returned to his work. 

The girl wheezed something that wasn’t an apology, because her master had promised to cut her tongue out if she ever gave one again, and endeavored to bleed more quietly or, failing that, to bleed in a way that would distract the thing long enough for her to get a better angle at which to stab it. 

Another claw joined the first, hooking around one of her ribs and tugging until the bone splintered. Her scream followed a second behind.

The Ink Mage glanced over. A single eyebrow raised at the sight of her, bloody and mangled and splayed on the rooftop, the Infernal hovering over her like some dark, fiery vulture.

“Did you lose?” he asked, surprise coloring his voice. It was the most emotion she’d seen from him since he’d won the Astre Fellowship over Dr. Miller last month, and the least welcome. 

The girl shrugged. The Infernal claimed another rib. The Ink Mage sighed and stood, brushing the dust from his coat. 

“Honestly, little knife, what am I even paying you for?”

Spells swam to the surface of his skin. A coil of curses around his forearm; barrier spells arraigned down the column of his neck, all of them still runic, caught between the unformed state of the Void and the formed manifestations of the real world. 

With a flick of those long, long fingers the Ink Mage activated the first. It peeled itself off of his cheekbone and became a swan, feathers shedding blue droplets as it winged its way toward the Infernal, beak open, talons extended, making a bloody froth of its eyes as it tore into the jelly of them. Next was a swarm of glassed butterflies; then ropes to bind; ropes to lash; thimble-sized blades and a localized earthquake and drops of lightning that popped and fizzed across the beast’s scales, leaving behind swathes of discolored craters. 

The Infernal staggered back from the onslaught, stepping off of the girl’s body. She breathed carefully in, ignoring the way her lungs spasmed, the way she could see them twitching in the shredded mess of her chest. 

“Get up,” came her master’s order, so she picked herself up inch by painful inch. Swayed, violently, her vision blackened at the edges, little dots spinning past. “And get ready.”

Failing paper, her master wrote directly onto the air itself—each bead of ink hung suspended, forming long, elegant lines that gleamed wetly purple. Bitter-cold overlaid the scent of decay. A sheet of water washed across the roof and over the Infernal, extinguishing it with a sad hiss.

The girl hurled herself forward and sank her knives into its now-flameless hide. Steel scraped bone. Oily not-quite-blood gushed over her hands, her wrists, and splattered down her shirt, reeking of carrion. Birds raced up her arms to settle on her shoulders, beaks opening and closing in mute indignation, shaking their tiny wings to rid themselves of the smell. 

Now it was the Infernal’s turn to scream, a single note of pure agony that spun out across the city. She stabbed it again, angling up where to its heart had the greatest likelihood of being, and was rewarded with another flood of liquid. 

The Ink Mage drew a semi-circle of banishing runes in the air and, with a final flick of his pen, the Infernal vanished back into the Void, the only thing to mark its existence the blood-and-scorch of the shingles and the girl’s birds, still fretting on her shoulders. 

“If you die,” her master said, “I will be most displeased.”

Without waiting for an answer he knelt back down and began, once more, to write. The girl endeavored not to die, or fall over, or do anything overly loud or annoying like scream again.