#ninzja

The mist was what woke her, the night it happened. Thick, cloying and choking, she woke coughing so hard she felt like her lungs might burst. For all of half a moment, she thought it might just be her, some dirt or dust she’d inhaled in her sleep – but when she opened her eyes, the whole world was a haze of green, the sickly-green of stagnant water and disease and poison, turning her vision into a wavering, eye-watering haze..

And then she heard the screams.

She was in the air in a heartbeat, two – it was an automatic reflex, to snap her chestnut-glossy wings out and kick off from the ground, the powerful muscles in her back and wings working in tandem to carry her fast and easy high above the clearing. There was danger on the ground, and her instinctual reaction was to take to the skies. Though, sleep-disoriented and confused as she was, she had no guarantee it was safe there, the skies were where she belonged. Up here, she was free, weightless and agile, in her element. The skies might not be safe, but for her, they were at least safer.

The rest of her comrades, however, were less lucky. The sky was not a haven for them, despite the fact they belonged there just as much as she did. Without permanent wings, they were limited in a way she wasn’t – stuck on the ground, having worn out their flight during the day’s battle against the forces of the undead in the hours before.

And the ground was chaos. When her vision cleared and her chest stopped burning with every gasp of clean, mist-free air – stopped aching and cracking like her ribs were crumbling within her sternum, as though her bones were flint and her muscles granite – she could see that much. There was- something, moving in the gas-smoke, sending it gusting and billowing, thickening and thinning in random swirls. Something huge, snorting and bellowing, huge enough that even a full fifteen feet above the fight she could still hear the dull thunder of each step it took, hear its heavy breathing, hear the odd, grating creak it made as it moved.

A gust of wind cut through clearing, shifting the greenish smoke just enough for her to peer through, and she near-instantly wished it had not, as soon as she got a closer look at the thing attacking them. She knew, instantly, instinctively, her lizard-brain recoiling in raw horror, that it was the thing of nightmares – that it would haunt her nightmares, more likely than not, even as it turned the present into a waking one.

It was huge, easily taller than most of the platoon-members at its shoulder, and looked something like a monstrous bull, or a crazed artist’s wild re-imagining of one. After all, she’d never seen a bull with a line of wave-like, razor-edged spines down its back, patinaed iron-grey plates of metal in the place of skin and hair, wicked-sharp horns almost as wide from point to point as her wingspan. Even the creatures hoofs looked to be metal, greyish, with a faint shine to them despite the crusted mud and gore across their surface. The only colour on the entire beast was the brilliant acid-green of its eyes, narrowed into angry slits as it pawed at the ground in preparation for a charge, and the diseased-looking smoke curling out of its flared nostrils.

She knew this creature. Had seen it before, in books and illustrations, had heard hushed whispers from her comrades of a friend-of-a-friend who’d fallen foul of the beast.

Gorgon.

Worse still, she knew there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Helpless, weaponless and out of magic, she could only watch with horror from above as the gorgon took down comrade after comrade, methodical and ruthless. The lucky ones were killed quick and clean, thrown hard and far enough with a toss of its huge head to cleanly snap their necks, or crack their skulls open. The less lucky ones were gored on its wingspan-wide horns, or trampled, left mangled and bloody and crying out weakly in the crimson-streaked mud of the battleground – or slaughterhouse, more accurately. The platoon were fighting back as best they could, but they were disoriented, surprised, and exhausted from the legion of undead they’d encountered earlier. It wasn’t even close to a fair fight.

Valos could feel the horror of just watching it freezing her, choking her just as surely as the mist had, shock and fear pinning her in place even as she screamed at herself to do something.

“Val-!” howled a voice from below, and her heart turned to ice as she caught a glimpse of the speaker. The distinct reddish hair, the bright white eyes – even half-encased in the sickly green mist, Preit was unmistakeable.

As was the sheer, naked terror written all across her face.

The cry seemed to break some kind of dam in Valos’ mind, unfreeze her. Suddenly, she could move again, think again – as if life had turned slow and silent for an infinite heartbeat, and then abruptly sped up, switching back to technicolour and surround sound.

“Preit!” she screamed in return, eyes widening and reaching desperately, futilely, for the other aasimar. She dove without a second thought, ignoring the danger, the fact she was weaponless, the wind whipping the rose-violet of her hair into her eyes. Those were her platoon members, her comrades, her friends down there, suffering, hurting, afraid… Tucking her wings in close, she hurtled downward towards the trees, towards Preit, the wind roaring in her ears.

The minute she touched the mist, though, her fingertips stretched out in front of her, reaching for her friends, for Preit- she knew something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.

Her hands began to ache, crack, the joints feeling arthritic and the bones fragile, crumbling. It started in her fingers and then crawled over her palm and up her wrist, slow at first, and then faster as it reached hungrily for her elbow, her shoulder, her chest. The mist coiled around her, probing at her, as if searching to sink below her skin – and all the while, the ache intensified, creeping into her muscles, her veins, feeling as though it was turning her very blood thick and sluggish.

In the end, she couldn’t help herself. The instinct towards self-preservation, no matter how badly she feared for her friends, was simply too strong. The mist was wrong, and she knew it, her instincts knew it – and she reacted without thinking. Her wings snapped out, aching already from their own contact with the mist, pulling her out of the steep dive just above Preit’s head.

Before she could get more than a foot, though, a hand clasped around her wrist in an iron-tight, bruising grip, weighing her down. Another aasimar – badly injured, pale-faced and soaked crimson from sternum to knees, with wings out but too badly injured to do more than flap a few feet off the ground – had grabbed her, she realised, with an instinctual stab of horror and no stop need to get away. Their eyes were wide, full of a fear and panic that seemed to reflect Valos’ own feelings back at her, and their legs… their legs…

From foot to ankle, their flesh and clothes were a dark, dull grey, speckled with the rough, pitted texture of stone.

“Help me,” the aasimar gasped wetly, blood sheeting down their front from their torn-open stomach, the grey immobility creeping slowly but inexorably up past their knees, their thighs. “Help me.”

Valos screamed.

There was nothing else she could think of to do, other than scream, and to frantically try to throw them off – but their grip was strong, had the kind of strength only the dying and truly afraid could muster. She was stuck, wings beating frantically at the mist that was choking her, getting in her eyes, making her ache, pinned too close to the ground by the hand of a terrified comrade around her wrist. The stone had reached the aasimar’s chest, their collarbones, their throat, and they were still begging her to help, and she was still screaming, screaming, she could hear the howls of the dying in her ears, thought she heard Preit-

She heard the gorgon’s bellow, too, suddenly far too close. And then the huge creature was on top of them – or, rather, was passing through them, through the space where the aasimar dangled below Valos, on its charge to gore another platoon member. The lower half of the aasimar, stone as it was, crumbled instantly beneath the force of the beast’s lower head impacting its hips, shattering into so many chips of stone as Valos watched in numb shock.

The aasimar didn’t even have time to scream before the stone reached their face and covered it, freezing them with their mouth open and face crumpled in an eternal rictus of agony.

Frantically, Valos tugged at the now-stone hand wrapped around her wrist, scrabbling in a desperate attempt to get it off. It was tight, bruisingly so, and unyielding – when she eventually managed to slip her wrist free, she’d clawed the area around the hand bloody, grazed the back of her hand and her fingers raw where the stone had scraped it. Her thumb felt bruised, maybe dislocated.

The remains of the aasimar dropped like… well, a stone, those horrified eyes and wide-open mouth hurtling towards the ground and shattering into so much gravel in the crimson mud below. Valos saw none of that, though, as she shot upwards again, away and free, into the sky, without any conscious decision, driven by an almost animal need to escape.

When she finally stabilised in the air again, catching her breath with lungs that still crackled and rasped from the mist’s angry touches, the cries of her platoon had begun to quiet and fade. The snorts of the gorgon were still loud in the eerie silence that was slowly settling amongst the trees, but all that was left of the aasimars’ screams were gasping sobs and wet, dying gurgles, the horrible last breaths of the mortally-wounded.

Heart in her mouth, Valos braced herself, and looked down into the clearing once more.

Preit was nowhere to be seen amidst the dissipating mist and carnage, and for a moment – a single, insane, deliriously hopeful moment – Valos was delighted. Perhaps her friend had run, perhaps she’d managed to use her wings, perhaps she’d defended herself somehow, against all odds?

There was no distinctive shock of red hair, white eyes, and dark skin in the clearing below, regardless, so she must have done something. Even if others had died, at least Preit had made it out. At least one other person had made it out.

And then Valos saw the statues.

Below her, in the steadily-clearing mist, figures were becoming visible as the wind blew the last of the clouds of green away. Frozen figures, an eerie stillness to them, scattered amidst the weak, crimson-spattered struggles of those unlucky enough to have not been killed outright. As the mist thinned further, she could see the colour of those frozen shapes – grey, the same dark colour of the gorgon’s plating, but without the shine. They were dull and pitted, instead, and even if Valos hadn’t known the fate that befell gorgons’ victims, it would have been easy enough to recognise the effects of petrification.

Lifeless, stony statues. Her entire platoon was down there, amidst the mud and blood, either gored or turned to rock. Dead, either way.

One statue in particular caught her eye – a solitary figure in the middle of the clearing, away from those closer to the trees that the gorgon was in the process of methodically destroying. That was how it ate, Valos remembered, in the faint, quiet part of her mind that wasn’t howling silently with shocked horror. Crushing the stone remains of its victims with its hoofs and horns, and eating them, piece by piece. In a way, the gorgon’s prey died twice; once when they were turned to stone, and then again when they were crumbled beyond all hope of recovery, devoured piecemeal by their murderer.

This statue, though, was as-of-yet untouched, face upturned to the sky and stony eyes wide. One hand stretched up, fingers splayed, as though reaching for Valos herself, mouth open in a now-silenced cry… and its face… the curve the jaw, the shape of the nose, the familiar messy bun…

Even without colour, Preit was unmistakeable.

“Preit,” Valos gasped, a fist clenching bruise-tight around her heart, crushing it, bringing it to a standstill in her chest. “Preit, Preit no- no-!” Her cries went unheard, though, over the noise of the gorgon’s snorting and stamping, the steadily-weakening cries of those wounded still left alive, and the shattering crunch of stone. Alone in the sky, there was no one to hear her weep.

Suddenly, she could stand it no longer. The death, the screaming, her own helplessness and uselessness – she felt sick, terrified to her very core, and pathetic with the way her own fear had frozen her. These were her comrades, her friends, her family in everything but blood, and they were dead. Dead, all of them, and she’d sat and watched, let it happen, let it happen-

It takes them all a moment to notice she’s gone, a crumpled form on the floor amidst the chaos of the battle, but Grog’s bellow of alarm is enough to make everyone look. “Grog, get back!” shouts Scanlan, almost immediately, despite the wild look of almost-fear in his eyes, as Grog takes a huge swipe at two of the jovoc clamouring to strike a blow in front of him and almost immediately roars in pain. “If you hurt them, it hurts you too, you need to get back-”

The creatures, jovoc, are small, but there are a lot of them, and trying to disentangle from them, get some distance, is like trying to escape a tidal wave. Keyleth is next to fall. Even as she turns to run, to get behind Vex and Percy so they can pick the jovoc off from a distance, the creatures are on her.

She screams as she goes down, one jovoc slashing at her legs with its long, clawed fingers and another on her back, biting down into the soft meat of her shoulder. It’s an awful sound, bad enough that Vex’s hands stutter on her bow, and she nearly drops an arrow – before her face contorts in fury and she looses one arrow, two, three, and takes down the two jovoc that brought Keyleth limp and bleeding to the floor.

She forgets, in her fury and fear, that Grog is still in range. He takes the hits along with the jovoc, bellowing rage and pain – but he stays upright, stays standing and fighting. The brief fist of utter terror that had clenched around Vex’s heart at the thought of killing one of their own loosens, ever so slightly.

It becomes clear, though, moments later, that jovoc are not all they’re facing. The small tanar’ri are dangerous enough, but there’s something else, something fast and quiet and good at using the shadows when Grog’s yells of rage are abruptly silenced. It’s too quick for the few of them remaining on their feet to see it happen, a blur of motion – but one minute Grog’s upright, and the next he’s not, red drenched down his front, stomach slashed open wide by a wickedly sharp blade.

A humanoid wearing black, gleaming leather armour, with a dagger in one hand and a scimitar in the other, grins. Then it’s moving again, heading towards Vax with a silent speed and dexterity beyond anything natural.

“Vax!” yells Percy, no time in the heat of battle for calling out to Grog. Protect the living, first, then worry about the maybe-dead. He’s raising his gun towards the new threat even as he shouts, squinting down the sight to take careful aim before squeezing the trigger and bracing himself against the boom-crack and jarring retort of the pistol.

“On it!” calls Vax back. He waits for Percy’s shot to hit, to force the creature to stagger backwards, before darting forward to meet the creature, engaging it on its own terms – face to face, blade to blade, with footwork so fast and light that it’s dizzying to look at.

Vax is fast, and good with his daggers, weaving around the creature Scanlan identifies with a yell moments later as a kelvezu – short, for a tanar’ri, barely five foot high with purple-red skin – but not good enough. The creature’s weapons are enchanted, and it has its own magic as well, and Vax staggers with its blade through his gut and then crumples in a loose, fluid way that’s sickening to watch.

Not before wounding the kelvezu, though. With Scanlan’s ever-present musical inspiration as guidance, he’d landed several blows, some of them distinctly nasty-looking. The kelvezu’s breathing hard, moving sluggishly, despite its bared teeth and persistent aggression.

Maybe, thinks Percy, looking at his fallen friends- his fallen family, with fear in his heart and murder in his eyes. Just maybe, they have a chance.

Vex darts past him, bow notched, hair whipping around her head in a dark halo. “If my brother’s dead, I’m going to slaughter every last one of you,” she calls to the creatures, sweet and dripping with menace, and then spins away in her light-footed dance, pulling back far enough to loose an arrow into one of the jovoc that had broken ranks and lunged for Percy.

His stomach plummets, a sharp free-fall that leaves him feeling sick at the thought of Vax dead, any of them dead – but he squares his shoulders nonetheless, raises his gun, takes a shot. Behind him, Scanlan raises his voice in encouragement, a brief line of song that wavers with fear when he glances at Pike’s crumpled form. The shot strikes true even so, hitting the shoulder of the already-weakened kelvezu and sending it reeling back with the force of the impact, hissing and snarling.

A half-second later, one of Vex’s arrows sails past his ear, missing him by a hair’s breadth, and buries itself in the kelvezu’s eye socket almost up to the fletching. The head of the arrow breaks its way through the back of the creature’s skull in a shower of bone and gore, and the kelvezu drops like a stone.

“And stay down,” shouts Scanlan, from somewhere behind Percy, the bravado somewhat dampened by the crack in his voice, the way his eyes immediately dart to Pike’s still form.

Their leader dead, the jovoc scatter, disappearing as quickly as they’d come, barking and chittering in Abyssal as they run. They vanish back into the trees, blue-black bodies blending easily with the shadows, rendering them almost invisible within seconds. There one minute, gone the next.

In any other circumstances, Percy would have pursued them, hot on Grog’s heels and Vex shadowing the pair of them. Vex would already be at the fallen kelvezu’s side, rifling through its pockets for loot. Scanlan would be loudly proclaiming their victory with one of his improvised, wildly inappropriate songs.

Instead, the minute the enemy are gone, Vex is on her knees at Vax’s side. Scanlan, with shorter legs and less practice running, takes a half-second more to get to Pike’s

Percy hesitates, torn – neither Keyleth nor Grog have someone by their side, and both are corpse-still and deathly pale and for a moment he can’t breathe- but then the world starts moving again, and he runs for Keyleth, grabbing at the pouch on his hip as he does so. Keyleth is closer, and smaller, and though Grog’s chest is still rising in uneven little flutters, Keyleth’s is not.

The healing potion’s in his hand before he’s even hit his knees next to her, ripping the cork out with his teeth and pushing the neck of the cool glass bottle into her mouth. It clacks against her teeth, his hands shaking too badly for it not to, but he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care-

Keyleth gasps, draws in a sharp, hacking breath as the potion hits her stomach, suffuses her in warmth as her wounds slowly begin to close. Percy’s on his feet in an instant, before her eyes are even open, running over to Grog with another potion in hand, tipping it down the goliath’s throat and watching as his stomach seals itself back up.

Nearby, Pike eyes are fluttering open as Scanlan whispers magic over her, one hand creeping up to clutch her holy symbol and add her own voice to the spell when she’s strong enough to speak. Vax makes a noise of pain, short and sharp, as Vex heals him enough to haul him up into her arms and clutch him close. He reaches out to Keyleth, and she crawls over, collapsing heavily against both of them and just breathing.

Last of all is Grog, who opens his eyes with a half-shout, hands grabbing wildly at Percy’s coat, half-convinced there’s still a fight to be won. As he slumps back to the ground, realising the enemy is gone, Percy exhales – quiet relief written in the slump of his shoulders, the slow closing of his eyes.