Midnight Mercenaries Prompt #1
One of the small comforts in Tycil’s life in Eversong since her return from the Nether was that the land held a quiet, lingering radiance in the Lightbloom plants that appeared here and there after the Sunwell’s return.
Their pale stalks shimmered with a gentle warmth. They were beautiful, and to the hunter, they felt like something more. A touch of the Light she longed to keep close, so she sought them out.
They could not be cultivated, she had tried more than once, and they could not be pruned, so she could not figure out their alchemical properties. And so she left them where they chose to grow.
Instead, she would go to them. Sometimes she brought a small picnic, lingering for hours as the golden light pooled around her, softening the edges of her thoughts. Other times, she simply rested in their midst, closing her eyes and breathing it in, the warmth, the stillness, letting their quiet radiance settle deep within her, if only for a little while.
Curiosity stirred in the alchemist, urging her to understand them. In her experience, everything in nature served some purpose, there were even potions that called for shadow, or void essence, reagents she kept on hand for rare brews and careful experiments, though she kept the void sparingly and only in certain circumstances.
And yet, these plants defied that certainty. They offered nothing she could distill and offered nothing in the way of a food source. It seemed that all they wanted was just to exist.
That fragile peace did not last nearly long enough.
Rumors were that the Amani were meddling in the forest once more, wandering out to cause trouble as they always had. As if the void incursion were not enough, the Farstriders had to contend with the trolls striking while forces were stretched thin, their strength divided among too many growing threats within the forest.
They felled one of the trees the forces against the Void attacks had begun calling Lightwood. What followed was not simple destruction, something twisted took root in its wake. Growth turned hostile, warping into something aggressive and unrestrained, until it surged outward in a wild botanical incursion that pressed hard against Suncrown Village.
Tycil moved with the gathered forces through the forest, and when they made camp near the Shan’dor Runestone, she settled among the unaffiliated fighters. From there, she made a brief return to her home, which was already threatened by the creeping edges of the wild overgrowth, and took what she could carry, including her small alchemical burners, her tools and her carefully kept reagents.
In her mind, the answer had to be simple. If this threat was living vegetation, then it could be treated as such. She began with what she knew in small batches, familiar formulas, testing them in the space between the runestone and Suncrown Village. She worked at the edges of the overgrowth, never straying too far, there was no reason to take unnecessary risks.
Her first mixtures failed, so she adapted. Tyc tipped her arrows in stronger compounds, harsher distillations she had once used as weedkillers. When those proved ineffective, she turned to more dangerous reagents, plants and essences known to disrupt or counter the Light itself. It was a gamble, one that sat uneasily with her and her devotion to the Light since her return, but the growth they faced was nothing that could be left to grow unchecked.
When word came that the forces would push toward the village in full, she gathered every vial she had prepared and moved with them.The hunter was not ready for what they found.
At the outskirts of Suncrown Village, the destruction ceased to be a distant sound and became something immediately horrific. The village was torn open, its structures splintered and overrun, but it was the people that stopped her.
They were still alive. Light-touched growth, that held a faint glow, had pierced through them, lifting some bodies fifteen feet into the air as if they weighed nothing, or roots that seemed to have captured people midstride to envelop them. They did not scream anymore, what remained were thin, broken whimpers, pleas for help that barely carried, trembling on the edge of silence.
All of the town was ravaged, it looked as though the forest had reclaimed it centuries ago. Buildings stood hollowed and broken, trees thrust up through their floors and roofs alike. Great roots coiled across what had once been streets, sealing pathways she had walked many times. Spores drifted thick through the air, catching the light in a pale haze. She was grateful for the mask already secured over her face, meant for her own alchemical work, but even so, it felt like a fragile barrier between both airborne threats, it didn’t feel like enough.
Fighters pushed forward through the ruins in organized groups, several driving straight toward the village center, toward something that held its ground there. Tycil did not follow on the ground, instead she climbed.
She pulled herself up into the warped remains of a building until she reached what had once been its first floor, now lifted and tilted by the growth beneath it. A fractured wall gave her cover. From the broken window, she looked down into the heart of Suncrown Village.
And then she saw it. At first, her mind refused to understand, a mass at the center of village shifted, the motion rippled outward through layers of bark branches, the shape became clearer.
A colossal mandragora, if the word still applied to this abomination, made of tangled growth. Three heads had split bark as they emerged, within the mouths were rows of teeth that promised pain to any that dared venture close enough, making Tycil very happy with her decision to take to the heights.
Then she saw the bodies and her breath stopped in her lungs, refusing to be forced out. They were not caught in it, not simply trapped, it looked like the creature had dissolved parts of the corpses, drawing them seamlessly into the living wood, all she could think, disgustingly, was that they had become human fertilizer. Having been formed in with the shape of the mandragoa, faces looked caved into bark, their mouths open looking like they had been carved by a sculptor while screaming.
One of the bestial? vegetative? heads snapped downward with sudden violence, its jaws clamping shut on something Tycil couldn’t see but she could hear. The sound that followed was a wet, sickening echo of armor, bone and flesh of a fighter having been crushed.
She didn’t wait, Tycil loosed an arrow, the motion one of pure instinct. It struck deep in the tangled mass behind one of the creature’s heads, lodging into the writhing growth. Only after the shot did the realization hit, no poison, just a bare arrow. A mistake.
She reached for a vial at her belt, uncorking it with practiced speed, the liquid inside was thick and dark, threaded with shadow. She drew another arrow and dipped its tip into the toxin, watching it cling to the serrated metal head. Firing again, this time, when it struck, the reaction was immediate. The wood of the body recoiled away from the impact, not much, just a subtle shifting, expanding from around the wound. Where her first arrow had lodged like she was shooting at a child’s target hung on a tree, this one sunk in to almost the fletching, leaving a dark mark around it.
Arrows rained down alongside her own, from the heights around her all the others that had taken to the trees for safety and sight advantages. She caught flashes of them in flight, fire trailing embers, frost leaving pale streaks in the air. Even faster than the twang of the bows was the report of rifles bounced off the unnatural trees around her.
And there were ones infused by Light, but when they hit the mandragora there was a flash, and they were instantly absorbed, drawn inward as though the thing were feeding on their power. Tycil’s grip tightened on her bow, the Light that had given her peace for years, now had turned malevolent.
A fighter moved forward through the chaos below, and at once, her senses flared. The awareness she sharpened on K'aresh, ignited with sudden intensity. Void magic clung to him and he moved into the range of the disjointedly weaving heads.
Her next arrow came up without thought, drawn and ready, for a fraction of a second, she hesitated, watching him. Her mind knew that void was not corruption alone, like anything else, it was a tool but she had feared it for too long not to be affected when it was called. But she still watched, slightly wary.
Then the air split with an explosion of magic. Instinct took over. And she dropped behind the broken wall, the force of it rattling through the structure. A voice cut through the chaos. “Core’s open!” Tycil moved as the words registered, she rose, already drawing firing towards it without a pause.
Her arrows came in rapid succession, each one driving into the exposed inner mass where the creature’s armored form had been torn apart. All the fighters focused on that spot, dozens of others steeped in magic she could see, and with certainty, other poisons and enchantments that she couldn’t.
As she fired, her attention was drawn to the fighter below. He met the creature head on, each of his attacks answering the creature’s violence in kind. Where the mandragora lashed out, he overwhelmed it. The air around him warped with each strike, the energy tearing into the creature in brutal, decisive bursts.
One of the heads came free with a sickening wrench. Vines stretched, snapped, and recoiled as it was torn from the body, the remaining growth shuddering inward, trying to contain the damage.
The assault did not relent and she went back into action. From many directions, she could see arrows and spells flying through the air, bright traces coloring her vision. With a final, shuddering collapse, the mandragora fell the writhing of the vines ceased. It fell apart like matchsticks dropping across roots that still dug into the paving stones that cracked the rocks below.
There was a sense of satisfaction that filled her. Not just in the kill itself, but in the fight, the precision, the adaptation of all the forces coming together to bring the thing down. She had worked with a few mercenary companies since she had stepped from the Nether to help support herself and there was always a feeling of satisfaction in the way she was able to move in concert with others to take down different threats.
Tycil drew in a slow breath,her hand trembling, remnants of adrenaline refusing to fade. Movement pulled her focus back from the space where the mandragora had broken apart. Something surged forward, one of the florafaun, its form created from the same Light twisted growth. Pivoting she loosed an arrow in one smooth motion, punching cleanly through its shoulder. She was already drawing again, sighting down her next arrow as Light flared from within it while it convulsed, then fell. It’s form collapsed in on itself as its connection to the magic was severed in an instant. Tycil held her aim for a beat longer… then lowered the bow.
Around her, the fight still lingered in the village, survivors were being pulled free, fighters calling out, regrouping and reclaiming space that might never recover. She shifted position, continuing to provide cover where she could, her arrows finding targets with centuries honed on hunting these, and other lands, even other planets.
When the eventual call came to fall back, she climbed down from her perch dropping the last few feet, her knees giving way and she swayed. A fighter to her right steadied her arm and she nodded her thanks, her eyes locking onto a man with presence that screamed danger. He looked into her strange eyes for a moment, then released her, moving with others from the village.
( @themercenaries )
(Mentions of @xylaes , @talonoa and @inistellan though they were not named)
