#orilium

It’s like there’s a threshold, a moment in time or space which separates the Ruins from everywhere else she’s been so far, even though there is nothing really distinguishing it. Even if there isn’t a visible border – a visible line that says she shouldn’t cross, that she should go around, that she should turn back and go home – she feels it the moment her foot falls onto the land inside the Ruins. The ground is dead, but saying that would imply that it was ever alive in the first place; it’s grey and covered in a crust of ash, despite there being no volcano or sources of fire anywhere in the nearby area.

Her skin prickles, and not for the first time on this quest does she think about going back, back to the Inn, back to Cabbage, back to Aela – back to clearing tables and only practicing her element when she’s hidden by the blanket of night. This time, it’s not a longing pang that is telling her to forget the quest. It’s desperate, animalistic, with screaming alarms echoing over and over inside her head telling her to turn around and forget everything you saw here. It’s as if her entire body, her entire subconscious is on alert ever since that first footfall into the Ruins, it’s like she’s seeing herself from somewhere else, but she knows that’s not possible. She squeezes her eyes shut, holding them closed so tightly she sees starts swirling around the blackness, and when she opens them everything is normal again.

You need to get through this as fast as possible.

She fumbles as she pulls the map from her pocket, the same map that she had snuck from the Elves table in the Inn that day… how long ago was that now? She can’t remember, she can’t think, she can’t remember what Cabbage looks like, which makes her breathing quicken like someone much larger than her has grabbed her torso in their hands and squeezed – squeezed until her rips popped and her heart burst – because how can she not remember what he looks like?

To ground herself, she grasps a fist full of her cloak where it rests over the left side chest, the buckle over her right shoulder just like Aela had taught her so many years ago. She wraps the old fabric around her fingers, fisting it so tightly she’s afraid she’ll set it on fire – her fingertips are already starting to smoulder just the tiniest bit and she forces herself to calm down. She brings the cloak to her face, burying her nose into it and taking a deep inhale. It smells like the Inn; it smells like smoke and ale and the lavenders that Aela leaves in her room every couple of weeks, it smells like the same cheap, sickly soap that she uses to wash Cabbages hair, it smells like the air surrounding the Library.

It hasn’t been that long. It hasn’t been that long.

She waits until her heart slows, until she can’t hear the blood pounding through her ears, before she straightens up, suddenly remembering that the map had fallen from her pocket. It lays on the ground, it’s thumbed corners blowing slightly in a non-existent wind, and as she crouches to pick it up, she spots a figure standing in the rubble of the old temple. They’re shielded by half of a fallen column and the darkness that surrounds it, unmoving. They’re stood very awkwardly, one shoulder held much higher than the other, as if one of their legs was abnormally short, and she can’t tell whether they are facing towards her or away from her.

She picks up the map, cringing when the ashy ground crunches beneath her shifting weight, but the person – or thing as she would prefer to refer to it – doesn’t startle.

Maybe it’s dead.

According to the map, it should be a straight route through the Ruins, but the scrawled note beside the drawing makes her skin crawl.

Three steps forward and you’re not sure if time is linear, or if things you see are of this dimension.

She swallows, folds the map back up, and slips it back into her pocket, making sure the clasp secures properly before she begins. Each step seems to echo forever, the blinding white-grey fog swallowing it in the distance before sending it back to her, as if it’s trying to communicate. The further into the Ruins she walks, the more things she sees, hidden amongst the rubble or shrouded by the ever-present mist, each one unmoving, each one more unnerving than the next. Some of them are stood with their backs to her, some with awkward gaits like the first one that she saw. One of them was laying in the middle of what she could only assume was a collapsed house, his toes facing up towards the sky.

This one she stares at for a moment, and she is reminded of a time when she was younger, when her temper got the better of her far too often, when she would run away from the Inn at least once a month, always being dragged back to Aela by an Iltirian, a scowl on her face and flames in her eyes. The last time she had attempted to run away, the one time she didn’t need to be dragged back to the Inn because she had ran back on her own, she had seen a man laying in an alleyway near the Library, the toes of his boots pointed towards the sky. A human, a traveller – the kind they didn’t get many of in Darkmeadow – his mouth unhinged and his eyes wide, his hands claws at his throat. Her stomach had lurched, splattering her dinner over his boots, before she had stumbled blindly back to the Inn, her new shoes covered in her fear, her fingers smouldering and sparking.

She doesn’t feel that fear now, only looks on with her mouth set into a line.

Fear makes you stronger.

That person didn’t manage to create the same heart-stopping panic she had felt when she was younger, but the next one does.

They are sitting upright facing away from her, and from the angle she’s approaching at, she can see one of their legs stretched out in front of them. When she passes, she feels her breath stop dead in the middle of her chest, and as she tries to scramble backwards trips over her own feet, landing heavily on the ground behind her, her sword making an awful clang that seemed to make the already still surroundings even stiller.

The other leg is missing, not a clean cut or a healed one – it looks as though it’s been ripped from their body, dislodged at the hip and torn away without care. The skin is ragged and black with decay, and yet it still bleeds thick black blood onto the ground surrounding it. She watches the blood drip down in strands, sticking to itself even when it hits the puddle. Their hands are gnarled, not unlike the hands of the body she had found when she was younger, only the fingertips on these hands are blacked – not in the same way as the ripped skin of the hip, but in the same way as her fingers get when she gets too angry, setting alight and staying that way for too long.

An Earthling.

Of course, she would’ve noticed if she had followed their arms more, would have seen the bright red marks that had adorned her skin since the day she turned ten, but her attention was too focused on the Earthling’s face, or lack of one. Where the face should have been, was a crater like hole, also dripping that same stringing blood down itself, and she is reminded of the time she had found Cabbage leaning over the balcony, letting gobs of spit drop onto the people leaving the Inn. He had turned to look at her with wide eyes and the faintest beginnings of purple spots, the string of spit dribbling down his front in the same way that the blood is dripping onto this things ruined tunic. There are shards of bone protruding from where the eye sockets would have been, snapped sharp by whatever it was that had attacked them.

There’s nothing nearby that could suggest a possible weapon, and it made her ears ring with the realisation that this probably meant that the attacker had taken it with them, and was potentially still prowling through the Ruins for the next victim.

Get through this as fast as possible.

She pushes herself up, wincing at the pain from her now cut palms as she puts all her weight on them, and goes to step around the body, before noticing a piece of paper fluttering weakly inside a pocket on the Earthling’s jacket. She digs her nails into her ruined hands to stop them shaking, quickly pulling the paper away without lingering near it for too long.

Across the top of the paper is the same flowing script that she had seen every day since leaving the Inn. The Novice Path – the words still distinguishable despite the blood that had gathered on the edges of the page.

They were going to Orilium, too.

She doesn’t think on it for too long – she can’t afford to worry about it – instead dropping the map back beside the body, continuing forwards at a faster pace than she was before.

After about five minutes, hearing the whistling of the fake-wind through the Ruins many arches and alcoves, she becomes aware of another noise: a scraping stumble, as if someone was struggling to climb across all of the rubble, dragging their feet and digging up crusts of ash with each step, landing heavily as they tripped forwards. She doesn’t turn around, even though her skin prickles, because there is nothing here to be afraid of, this place has been dead for centuries, there is nothing in the Ruins that could possibly mean any harm to her.

It’s probably just another traveller on the Path, one that isn’t well acquainted with walks like this – maybe from Daerune.

“Treya.”

It makes her stop, not freeze, just slowly stop. It was as though the word was whispered into her ear, as if they had said it stood right beside her and not from however far back they really were.

They. He.

She turns, her mouth still that same stoic line – the same line she had managed to hide every emotion behind when Aela told her she needs to control her temper – despite the way she wants to scream and sob and drop to her knees and run towards him all at once.

Cabbage stumbles over another dislodged piece of ash, longer than his own legs, and lands with his hands outstretched in front of him, a little oof leaving his lips as he hits the floor. He looks up at her with watery eyes and a wobbly lip, and she forgets everything to run towards him, dropping in front of him and not caring about the noise she makes in this decaying place. She hooks her arms under his and pulls him into her, pressing his head into the crook of her neck, her nose in his still baby-soft hair, her tears dripping onto his skin.

She underestimated how much she would miss the two of them, her fake-brother Cabbage, and her boss – and also her sort-of adoptive mother – Aela. She thought of how difficult it must’ve been for Cabbage’s ten year old body to have to endure the trek, to have to follow her through so much, just trying to find her.

“Hi, Cabbage.” Her voice is harsh from days of no use, scratching her throat and coming out not sounding like her at all. “What’re you doing here, hey?”

“Aela told me the Skaimorn had taken you to be their ward instead – said that they needed a mean-tempered girl like you – and I didn’t believe her, not one bit, because why would they want you as a ward when I was right there! I followed you, saw your cloak as you were leaving, so I followed you all the way out here, but you’re so fast and I’m not tall yet so I couldn’t keep up that well.”

She runs her hand down his back, sniffling to herself despite her anger at him being so stupid as to follow her to Gods know where. “This was very silly of you, Cabbage, you should’ve stayed with Aela. She’s probably worried sick about where you are.”

“She’s not, I know she isn’t. Let’s go home, Treya – please. It’s so scary out here, I don’t like it.”

She keeps rubbing his back, and she suddenly frowns, moving her hand towards the top of his back, to the space just under his shoulder blades where the first nubs of his wings should have been. She remembered him running into her room with a grin missing a front tooth as he had launched himself onto her bed, proudly jutting his thumbs behind him towards the start of the bony spikes that would one day become a beautiful pair of wings.

Cabbage’s back shouldn’t be this smooth.

She pulls away from him, smiling, hoping he doesn’t see that it doesn’t quite reach her eyes, and cups his face with her hands. She rubs at his cheeks with both thumbs as he keeps talking, and she notices how his eyes are just the slightest too wide, his hair just the slightest bit too dark, his nose just the slightest bit too crooked. The spots on his skin aren’t the bright shade of purple they had been the day before she had left, but instead a sickly dark yellow.

“Or – Treya, we don’t even need to go back to the Inn at all! We could stay right here, couldn’t we! It’s pretty here, and I bet we could even build our own Inn, just like the one back in Darkmeadow!”

She curses herself for dropping her guard, for forgetting the old lessons – to not take anything at face value, to pay attention, to never let her feelings get the better of her, to always be on the offensive.

“I’m sorry, but you and I both know I can’t do that.” She doesn’t refer to it with Cabbage’s name, because it is not Cabbage. It is not her sweet fellow ward who cries with excitement every time a Skaimorn enters the Inn, it is not the little boy who followed her around like a stray puppy, even when she glared at him with her burning eyes.

It is not Cabbage.

And as soon as it registers she knows, her fingertips pressing harshly into it’s skull that’s wearing Cabbage’s face, her mouth back into that line, her eyes dark with black fire, the act is dropped. The wobbly lip disappears, the eyes become lidded as it stares at her with a bored expression that doesn’t fit Cabbage’s face at all; it’s the expression that makes her fury spike, the fact that this thing is tainting Cabbage’s image with an expression of disinterest and annoyance, and she longs to dig her nails into the skin just before its ears and just rip it off.

Her hands are already beginning to heat up; she can see the smoke coming from its skin in thin ribbons. The wrong coloured spots begin to muddle, rippling across its skin, flowing across the surface like water.

It still speaks in Cabbage’s voice, the boredom drawling his words and smearing them together. “Fine. Let’s try it my way, shall we?”

She ignites, her fingers burning with the type of heat that she can’t feel, that she’ll never know the true power of unless she sees it. The skin bubbles, warps, dripping off the skull in gobs as the hair catches, swallowing its face in a blaze of red and yellow. It doesn’t scream, doesn’t give any indication that it’s in any kind of pain, but even if it did she wouldn’t have cared. She wouldn’t have stopped, would’ve only pressed her palms further into its face as she is doing now, not even unnerved when its cheekbones crack and fizzle, not even when its blood splutters and hisses.

Only when there is no remnant of Cabbage left, when his baby-soft hair has burnt to ash and his skin lays in waxy puddles surrounding her, only when she’s staring at the blackened skull does she let go, letting the body fall backwards, looking not unlike a doll dropped by a child who longs for a new, more enjoyable plaything. She doesn’t lurch, doesn’t cry, only stares on with the same lidded eyes it had stared at her with, a smirk playing on her lips.

Look how powerful you have become.

She wipes her hands on the things tunic, longing to unbutton it and take it because it doesn’t deserve to lay there in a crude imitation of Cabbage’s ward uniform. She doesn’t because she has the feeling that as soon as she leaves the Ruins, as soon as another traveller enters, the thing will merge into someone else, trying to convince them to stay forever too. Rocking back onto her feet, she continues, now hyperaware of every slight noise, every piece of rubble dislodging and falling down a pile, every creak and groan as the old pillars are battered by the not-wind, every gasping breath and scratchy yell.

At those, she turns, at the same time surprised and unsurprised to see masses of bodies making their way towards her. The one that had panicked her, the one missing a leg and a face, dragged itself over the ragged ground with it’s clawed hands, being overtaken quickly by others, among them the first one she had noticed with the awkward gait, which she saw was because it was missing the bottom half of one of its shins.

It wasn’t so much fear that got her heart pumping, but annoyance and frustration. She set her feet, drawing her sword with her right hand and spinning it once, twice, three times, her brows furrowed with determination. Her hands were still hot, but she didn’t allow herself to let go yet. They had to get closer – the closer they were, the bigger the explosion, the more could be taken out. She tried to count them, gave up when she realised they were moving too fast for her to be able to not count them twice.

“Going in blind,” she murmurs to herself, shifting her cloak so that her right arm is just a bit freer. “The old way.”

She doesn’t even register the first one. It’s as if her body moved on it’s own, as all she registered was it dropping onto the floor beside her, sliced up the middle, it’s head split into two and leaking black blood onto her boots.

The second one she registers because it dodges her first swing, lunging at her from the other side, but she is nothing if not prepared. She raises her left arm, unleashing an inferno in the things face. Even if it doesn’t feel the pain, it catches it off guard for long enough for her to detach its head. It snaps at her heels with rotten teeth, and she brings her boot down with a crunch, not caring about the sudden silence of the thing.

The majority of the mass is almost upon her, the main body that she was waiting for, and she sheathes her sword back at her side, her lips turning up in a grin.

She cracks her knuckles, presses her fingertips together in a mockery of the prayers they used to do to the Old Gods when she still lived in Irtheria, her palms not touching, her fingertips barely kissing. She was proud of this display of her raw talent, a party trick that was unsuitable for most parties, something she had coined herself in her more rebellious years.

This is going to be fun.

Her lips part in a wild grin as they fall into the right distance, which she knows from many sleepless nights of practice, challenging herself to find her maximum distance – but also her maximum destruction.

She doesn’t need to say anything, she just needs to will it, and for once she thanks herself for having such an untameable temper that required her to let of steam more often than most her age.

The ground erupts, catching the middle of the crowd in a column of fire as wild as the hair on her head and the smile on her face, her eyes flashing with the same bright flame. She doesn’t bother to hide her excitement at the carnage, doesn’t care if she looks crazed because it worked.

Some emerge from the blaze, their clothes and skin alight, their features melting in the heat, eyes popped and dribbling down their faces, continuing to advance upon her without any need of their sight.

Time to go.

She spins, sprinting as fast as she can towards the boundary of the Ruins, towards the Falls. With each footfall, another burst of flame splits the ground on either side of her, her control waning as her heartrate increases. The normally tame flames on the ends of her hair grow, licking their way down her back, catching her cloak with their damning kiss, igniting a section of it to her dismay. Still, she doesn’t stop, whipping her head to the side to dampen the flames enough for them to not be damaging to the one thing she cares about.

As she runs, the cloak billows, the flames extinguishing – to her relief – leaving only a gaping hole that travels from the middle of her bicep to her elbow. It’s better than losing the whole cloak; she can deal with a hole. She doesn’t stop, the gurgling behind her enough to spur her despite the pain in her legs, despite the sword clanging harshly against her with every step, despite the fact that the boundary of the Ruins seems to be the edge of a cliff.

It doesn’t look this way on the map, but she knows from listening to the Ilterians in the Library that maps can lie just as much as men can.

If she stops, they’ll kill her. But if she continues, she might kill herself.

The Path is not impossible if you listen to its warnings.

They wouldn’t send you into the Ruins just to die.

She takes a deep breath, giving herself that last push, that last burst of speed to get just far enough in front of them to take the leap, her arms pinwheeling, her legs still moving as she falls before she angles herself so as not to paralyse herself on landing.

The drop is not as deep as it had looked from inside the Ruins, ten feet at most, and her landing is mostly softened by a thick layer of underbrush that has been creeping out of the forest and began its ascent up the cliffs face. She rolls off heavily, landing on her back on an old dirt path, her chest heaving and her vision blurring as she talks to the Old Gods for the first time since she was ten, thanking them for giving her the strength to survive, though she knows that she alone is the cause of that strength.

Only when she sits up on that small path, only when she looks towards the cliffs edge and sees the creatures gathered and staring down at her, unable to follow past the boundary line, only when she is certain she is safe (from that task at least), does she let herself scream.

She screams until her throat is raw, then screams some more, clutching at her chest with her left hand, fisting the black fabric of her shirt as her voice breaks from anger and pride and that thin layer of fear that she has finally allowed to crest the surface.

For a moment, she just sits, panting, her mind spinning, her fingers smouldering. She thinks about turning back now, finding a way to go around the Ruins and back to Darkmeadow, collapsing in the doorway of the Inn and holding the real Cabbage close to her as she whispers her apologies to the both of them. It would make the most sense to turn back now, with how close Deaths fingers came to grasping her around the throat and dragging her down with him.

But she stands, brushes the dirt from herself, and starts down the path, her mouth set and her eyes lidded.