#sunfury

The felblooded elf cracked open an eye, sticky and crusted over with dried blood to survey the immediate area. Netherstorm’s horizon tilted beneath the swirling, nebulous purple sky, like a ship heeling in a storm. All around her, the Sunfury camp stood in a ruin of tattered silken banners on smouldering matchstick supports. Corpses—some bearing resemblance to people she’d known—lay strewn and broken across the charred wooden frames like a macabre garland. A few remaining embers flared angrily with the arcane wind, carrying with it the scent of memory written in ash and burnt flesh.

Some of it, she realised, was hers.

The eerie silence broke with a shuddering groan from her own lungs; a sound that both surprised and annoyed her. Why wasn't she dead already? It was taking far too long, and she didn't even have the strength left to hasten it herself.

Searching for a mental reprieve, one eye swept the area slowly, fixing upon a shape on her left. It was blurry, framing her field of vision in a strange, crooked way. A few experimental blinks and a narrowed gaze brought the shape into sharper relief. Her arm? It looked…wrong. Cautiously, she tried to move a finger.

It worked, but at a cost.

A lance of agony shot up her arm, causing her to gasp and wheeze, simultaneously cringing in some places and freezing up in others. A curse hissed out from between her teeth, sending a spray of dark red onto the barren, rocky ground.

It had taken an eternity, but inch by inch, the felblood had an inventory of her injuries; what could move, what couldn't.

She went still, waiting for the pain to recede.

Every nerve, every last cell had screamed when she shoved herself upright into a sitting position, teeth bared in a mute grimace until her back felt the splintered wreckage of a crate poking through fabric and feather.

Left arm, shattered. The right seemed okay. Both legs could move, though one ankle, or possibly her lower leg was certainly broken, and she'd actually laughed when she’d discovered that both wings—diminutive, useless, ugly things—were perfectly fine and intact. That had only managed to piss her off.

It didn't matter. None of it mattered. Too many mistakes had been made, alliances broken, and loyalties thrashed and shredded like sheaves of wheat. By now, her prince was dead—just as dead as the field of carrion surrounding her. Just as dead as she should be, if her body would actually remember that it could die.

They'll take trophies, she mused derisively, too wretched for anything like proper fear. Perhaps the raiding party would finish her off if they bothered to come back through this way.

A sudden shift drove splinters into her back as she slumped to one side.

No. They'll pay.

The thought came and went before she could stop it, gaze falling to the hard-packed dirt where her claws had dug narrow trenches.

A flicker of fury rose in her heart again, like an idea too old and stubborn to die, and with it, a poisonous tongue of green flame. It wreathed her fingers, kissing her skin with heat and a desert-dry thirst that she loathed and loved in equal measure.

A trace of a smile curved her cracked and bleeding lips.

She had been left for dead.

But not finished.

Just ahead, a smouldering tent frame collapsed under the weight of a charred body that had been leaning against it. Aeliora forced her eyes away, stomach protesting with an uncomfortable lurch.

You have lied, fought, bribed and prayed your way to this Light-forsaken place, Liora—you will not let it break you now.

Navigating over a tangle of scorched timbers, Aeliora had just stepped onto the main path through the camp when she heard it—a sound, barely human, coming from behind a stack of crates that had been reduced to kindling.

It sounded…pained.

Holding her staff defensively, her heart pounded as she changed course, heading towards the sound. A slight movement caught her eye—a misshapen figure, almost folded forward on itself. It jerked towards the sound of her steps like a puppet on strings, half-hidden in shadow. A flicker of green light guttered out between its clawed fingers.

“Who are you?” She demanded, her voice small under the hush of dry wind.

The figure groaned again, stirring more slowly now as their head tilted uncertainly.

Their features were covered in soot and blood, but what the priestess could see made her blood freeze: long, dusty purple hair hung in twisted ropes framing a familiar face with delicate features so like her own, but the woman’s eyes—Sun’s mercy—once grey like a rising storm, now twin furnaces of fel-light.

It was her sister, but not the one she remembered. Aeliora tightened her grip on the staff as she felt her stance waver.

“…Iantha? What have they done to you?!”

“You took your time,” Iantha rasped. She gave the priestess a sardonic smile, a fang just brushing her cracked, dry lip. “As for this,” she continued, motioning to herself. “Well, let’s just save that story for the ride home.”

Aeliora staggered forward despite herself, simultaneously wanting to reach out and recoil. It was like she was looking at her sister through a nightmare lens; the same woman she’d studied with, grown up with, shared a womb with—twisted into something demonic. She shook her head in disbelief, dark blue eyes stinging with dust and tears.

“You’re…you’re hurt. Here, let me—”

The Light came instinctively, enveloping the priestess’ hands in a halo of warmth, pressing the radiance towards her broken body.

Iantha reeled back with a strangled, snarling sound, hunched over and clutching her arm where the Light had touched her—but there was no smoke, no searing burns. The dark-haired sister just looked her as though suffused with a visceral sense of wrongness.

“Stop! Stop,” she pleaded, breath ragged. “It feels—” Iantha broke off, baring her teeth in a grimace. “It doesn’t belong in me any more.”

Aeliora felt a slow, torturous rend tear through her heart as she allowed the Light to fade from her hands.

“Okay,” she whispered, reaching out to her. “Let’s just go home.”

The journey out of the camp was much slower going this time around.

Iantha leaned heavily against her as they picked their way up a hill towards the edge of the camp, eager to make their exit. It had been hours since Sunfury Hold had been razed to the ground, and they’d both agreed they didn’t want to get caught out should anyone come back through knowing the way had been cleared. Regardless, every step across the fractured landmass was a labour, even after Aeliora had found a relatively decent path through the wreckage.

They hadn’t gone far when they heard the first one.

A weak, rattling breath and shifting movement caught their attention just a few feet from the path ahead. Someone alive.

Sorrow clutched the priestess like a fist. A human mage—likely a would-be raider—lay sprawling in the dust, leg bent at an unnatural angle where a dark pool seeped into the cracked ground beneath. She moved to kneel, raising a hand in benediction when Iantha’s shot out, fingers curling around her wrist.

“Don’t.”

Aeliora’s mouth opened in protest as her sister crouched over the dying man, wings twitching over her back like a carrion bird’s, one fel-blackened hand hovering over his chest.

“Iantha, what are you—”

Her words cut off sharply as the mage gave a sudden, agonised gasp, his body arching violently up off the ground in writhing coil of sickly green magic. Aeliora watched with dawning horror as the last threads of his life twined with the fel like an unholy skein, knitting Iantha’s wounds closed with unsettling speed. Her sister inhaled deeply, eyes blazing brighter as her features settled into something uncomfortably close to satisfaction.

Aeliora stumbled back, watching the man’s lifeless body crumple to the ground, little more than a dessicated husk.

“Light preserve us.”

Iantha gave herself a little shake. “We’ll preserve ourselves,” she corrected. “Unless you preferred me to crawling out of here?” Stepping over the body, the felblooded woman pressed ahead. Aeliora followed in stricken silence.

It did not stop at one.

Each broken victim they came across, Iantha’s face twitched with that same hunger, crouching to draw out breath and life from their bodies into herself, twisting it into something corrupt. The magic hummed like discordant harp strings, every note grating and wrong. Aeliora’s eyes fixed on the path ahead, but she flinched each time she heard that sigh of satisfaction.

They’re beyond saving.

It’s their lives, or hers.

Her survival is worth it.

…isn’t it?

By the time they heard the first shouts echoing from across the ravaged landscape behind them, Iantha was no longer leaning or stumbling. Her stride was firm, and her fingers danced with a flicker of emerald flame.

Aeliora spun towards the sound with a snap of her staff, dark blue eyes hard. “They’re coming.”

The poised shape of her sister glided to her side like a liquid shadow, the licking flame in her hand coalescing into a roiling ball of fury.

“Good.”

She studied her twin: lips curled into a predator's smile, cloaked in corruption, and felt a trickle of dread slip down her spine.