When the spear swung forward, Thal felt the muscles along his legs bunch up, flexing against long bones. His tail kept loose but stuck out behind him, and he felt his spine leaning him forward. When the tip of the spear was only a few long strides away, he stepped to one side, dropped his shoulder, and grabbed for the length of the spear while pushing forward and up all in one motion.
K'ile had been holding back a long time. He wasn't going to hold back here. K'thalen needed to die. Again. And then he could get rid of K'aijeen as well.
When Thal went to grab the spear, K'ile allowed it. He let go of the weapon and spun away from it, dropping down close to the ground, his smile body bundling up. Light and heat swelled against his chest from something obscured by the harness on his chest, moving through to his collar and shoulders, sliding down his arms. His hands hit the sand, and there was a rush of ignition. Heat like fire burned up from beneath him, and the glass around him glistened. It moved. It stuck to his hands, crystalline, boiling hot, glowing red and white.
When he lifted himself and dove at Thal, he was holding globs of searing matter, trailing drops of viscous molten quartz from the melted sand. He slammed these into Thal's flesh.
Eyes widening, Thal brought the spear lengthwise in front of him, and K'ile's chest collided with the wood as the miqo'te brought his attack to bear. He grunted in vague disbelief as something blindingly hot crashed against his side and shoved as hard as he could with the staff, kicking out with one leg for good measure to knock the other man away from him, though he staggered backwards simultaneously.
Being very small, K'ile was thrown backwards by Thal's shove. He fell into the melted quartz left in the sand beneath him, but it didn't burn his body. As he rolled to his feet, the sand vitrified in an instant, turning into a smoothed glass with a strange orange color to it. It cracked and crumbled, falling into shards seemingly without cause.
K'ile spun. His tail ran over the sand, cause it to melt and cool in an instant. Sand stuck to his arms and shoulders, melting, glowing hot and exhaling nearly invisible fumes. Small sparks of flame danced on their borders. His blue eyes were narrow and hard, his face twisted into hideous anger. He crouched and took up more sand in his hands. The sand beneath his feet melted and vitrified around his toe, giving him a perfect spring block with which to throw himself forward again.
"Will you just calm--down!" Thal dove to the side, rolling his body around to give his arms the momentum they needed to swing the spear around like a long, thin club, stricking it against the other man's back.
K'ile turned, and ducked. He lifted a hand and struck it against the spear absently, causing the entire length of wood to burst into fire in an instant. This delayed his momentum for only an instant. "The last thing I needed to see was that face of yours again!"
"The hell did I do to you?!" Thal threw the spear off to one side, not bothering to watch it burn. His side felt strange, the detailed sensations of his muscles numb there. Not wanting to give the other man more opportunity to summon any more of the molten sand, he dropped low and charged, barreling against K'ile to tackle him to the ground. His arms would move to clasp around the other man's neck.
K'ile was overpowered by the larger man's charge, slammed to the ground and pinned there. It reminded K'ile a bit too much of Yohko, and his anger burned all the hotter because of it. Unable to free himself, K'ile's blue eyes smolder up at Thal through his veil of fiery hair. The sand beneath them melted into fluid quartz and he began to sink into it, millimeter by millimeter. A very slow process.
Clenching his jaw, Thal steeled his nerves and jerked the other man to the side, rolling away from the molten sand. Where his skin touched it, however briefly, he felt it go numb, though there was no immediate pain. When he was on his back, he bunched his legs up and drove his knee into the Tia's lower abdomen.
What breath K'ile had left was forced out of his lungs by the blow to his gut, and it had the side effect of leaving him nauseous and dazed. The lack of air, something he had been able to deal with moments before, was suddenly paramount. His dazed senses were not coming back. His fingertips were languid. The man writhed, claw at the ground, pushing at it with his feet. Everywhere he made contact, the sand melted, leaving boiling hot fluid quartz in shimmering pools. Fire lit upon his skin and on the surface of the pools.
Grimacing, Thal brought his knee up again, driving it into K'ile's gut, and then twisted to one side until he could straddle the Tia. He straightened with his knees on the ground, pulling K'ile up by the hold on his neck. "Stand down," he bit out.
He didn't have much of a choice. The second knee did him in. His strength waned. He pushed against the ground, but it didn't melt beneath his hands. He couldn't even glare. His eyes were half-lidded, and he was silent. His tail writhed still, but the rest of him was too heavy.
Thal didn't ease up his hold, though he did drop one arm down to wrap around K'ile's arms and torso as he stood and dragged the tia with him. "I'm not looking for a fight, friend," he muttered, "but you can't just go trying to kill people." Part of him wondered where the girl had run off to, but for now he figured as long as it was "away", then she'd be fine.
The Tia hung limp, still dazed. His eyes watched the pools of molten quartz on the ground as the cooled into glass and then crumbled into small shards.
Stepping back from the slagged sand, Thal let out a heavy sigh. "Are you going to try and kill me again if I let you go?"
After a time, the Tia managed grudgingly. "You're already dead."
"Maybe," Thal muttered. Why everyone on Eorzea seemed to know of this, even before him, he had no clue. "But I'm not some mindless voidsent, so put your big boy pants on and get over it."
"I have too much invested in you being dead." K'ile answered, coldly. "She only brought you back to ruin everything. And it'll work, too. One person gets one look at your face, and everything'll fall apart."
Blue eyes closed, and Thal tightened his grip around the Tia for a moment in frustration. His tail lashed behind him. "No one brought me back but me," he forced out after some seconds of silence. "I don't care what you've 'invested' - though I'll admit that's kind of disturbing. I don't know who you are, but I guess I probably should."
K'ile's tail lashed. He remained limp, and his scowl deepened once more. He glared at the sand, pondering. "People don't come back to life by accident. Or without reason. You ask her why?"
"You can't just believe me, can you?" Thal groaned. "Look, an old Duskwight - good friend of mine now, actually - pulled me out in the Shroud. That girl was nowhere near." He nudged at the back of K'ile's legs with his knee, not roughly, just as a gesture that he couldn't make with his busy hands. "And I've been doing pretty fine on my own the past five years. So maybe you should just let me keep on doing that, huh?"
"The Shroud? Then why are you here with the dead girl, huh?"
"What, you want my whole life story? Maybe I got tired of the forest." Blue eyes rolled. "I found her, not the other way around. Wasn't intentional, trust me, but it's not like I could just leave a dying kid be."
"You just happened to come back to life out of nowhere?" K'ile scoffed. "And you just happened to wander from the Shroud back home. And you just happened to find your daughter, who just happens to be dead too? No way."
"Suit yourself, I guess," Thal muttered. Then he pushed at K'ile's back, releasing him suddenly and with great forward energy. He took a few steps back himself. "I'm not gonna fight you. Maybe under different circumstances, I'd try to get you to tell me just how the hell you know me, but for now I'll settle for: don't attack us."
K'ile stumbled, but recovered within moments. He shot up straight as a rod, his tial switching behind him, and he turned to glare at Thal. "Don't you realize what you are? What she is?"
"I'm me," he said simply, frowning towards K'ile, but it was a relatively neutral expression compared to the Tia's anger. "And she's... whoever she is. Doesn't have to be any more complicated than that."
"Good to see you still don't think about anything. Yeah, you're still you, and that's exactly the problem." The ground beneath the Tia started to heat again, the sand left on his body turn into shining fluid. "If it was just the face, maybe. But it's still you. If it wasn't K'aijeen, but it is."
"What're you afraid of?" Thal demanded, feeling the nerves along his spine light up, his muscles tensing. He didn't drop into any sort of fighting stance, though, instead letting out a rough breath and shifting his gaze to one side. "There's a reason I didn't go digging into what was missing beyond those five years. Nothing good would have come of searching out people who'd probably already mourned."
"Then you shouldn't have come back! You should've stayed away from K'aijeen." K'ile ducked his head forward and growled, audibly. The sand beneath him turned fluid and bubbled, small flames alive on the top of it. His bare feet sank centimeters into it. "I can't let this be any more than I could just leave a tent burning down with my family inside. I can't, understand? K'aijeen can't be allowed to keep doing this."
"How the hell was I supposed to know some guy who apparently knew me would be wandering around?!" He gestured sharply with both arms to either side of him. "She was hurt and confused and asked me to help take her home. I'm not gonna say no to a sad kid like that."
"Still not thinking. Pretending everything's so simple. I guess..." The Tia thought for a moment, and then laughed again. "I guess, yeah, I hate that! I can't do it. Man, you got all the best of everything, didn't you?" His laughter faded. His hands fell to his sides, and the pool of melted sand around him expanded. It seemed deliberate. Like he was preparing it for something. "And then you died. And now yo-"
The earth moved behind him, hard clay pushing up through the sand like a beast surfacing. It was visible, stationary, for only an instant, before it solidified and shot from the ground as a missile, striking the Tia hard in the back of his head. he stumbled in the fluid sand, silenced suddenly, dazed.
The girl in the tattered red dress stood back near the pass, that broken branch in her hands. Green light moved around her fingers and the wood she held. More missiles began to rise through the sand at her feet.
Thal startled, eyes darting past the Tia, and then twisted his mouth. "Damnit," he muttered, and then shouted, "Kid, get out of here!" He wasn't quite sure what to think about her at the moment - certain facts were slowly aligning in his head that pointed towards something very uncomfortable - but he did know he didn't want her involved in this fight.
There wasn't much fight left in the Tia. He fell to one knee in the viscous quartz, stunned by the ferocity of the blow. Blood ran down his jawline from a wound on the back of his neck. Then more missiles struck him. In the head. In the back. The girl had become frighteningly efficient at that particular spell, and the Tia collapsed under the assault.
"Hey, stop!" Thal felt his legs break into a run, around and past the tia and right for the girl. "No one else is gonna die, kid, y'got that?" he barked, reaching out for the arm holding the wand.
She dropped the branch and jumped back from it as Thal rushed her. Her arms pulled up near her chest, she retorted in a scratchy voice. "Wasn't killing. He's killing." She rolled her head and put a hand ot her head. "Was going to attack."
"Yeah, right," he grunted, setting his foot on the branch and holding one arm up, palm out towards K'ile, the other towards the girl. "Fighting's done now."
K'ile didn't stir. The quartz around him vitrified.
The girl reached out and grabbed Thal's hand, pulling on it, eying him with distress. "Okay?"
Moving his free hand to run through his hair, Thal let out a sigh. "I'm fine, kid. Just hang back for a bit, okay?" Then he turned, pulling his hand from hers, and approached K'ile.
The girl pouted at this. She croaked, "No! He's..." She coughed and began again. "Murderer! Killed you!"
"I don't know about that," Thal muttered. His tail hung still behind him as he walked, feet crunching across a thin film of glass as he neared the fallen form of K'ile Tia. Grimacing at the visible blood, he dropped to one knee and carefully rolled the man on to his side. "You alive there?" He resisted the urge to snort at the phrase. At least one person here wasn't dead.
The Tia breathed, but didn't move. His eyes were closed. There was a lot of blood.
Working his jaw, Thal eased the man onto his back and pushed back his hair, using one thumb to lift an eyelid. "Really did a number on him, kid," he said, likely too quietly for the girl to hear. "Not what I was going for."
The girl waited in the pass, looking worried. Like she expected K'ile to pop up and destroy Thal in one sudden instant without warning.
The Tia's pupils were clearly dilated unevenly. Thal wasn't an expert, but he thought he knew enough to understand that wasn't good. Shifting the man's head, he felt in his hair for the wound, pulled his fingers away wet with blood and grimaced. "Okay."
He bent then, lifting one of K'ile's arms over his shoulder and wedging himself beneath the Tia enough that, when he stood, he took the Tia with him. Then he turned to the girl. "Change of plans, kid. I'm taking him to the town. He's not dead yet, so I'm pretty sure they won't burn him."
She flinched at that, her eyes shaking. Then she lurched forward and extended a hand. "No!" She choked shook her head, and put both her hands to her throat, pressing hard. "He'll kill you!"
"He already tried that." Thal was getting tired of this. He turned towards the pass, back the way they'd come. "Just wait outside the hole out of sight."
She whined, a rough sound rattling from her throat. "Daaad!" And gave chase, picking up the dropped stick as she went.
Thal froze, one arm over K'ile's back, the other holding the Tia's own arm over his own shoulder. He blinked away from the pass for a moment, and then leaned his head back, looking towards the sky. "Oh. I get it now." He breathed out, shut his eyes, and then just started walking. "Wait for me outside, K'aijeen," he said, using the name he remembered the Tia calling her.
She groaned, again, looking distressed, but nodded.
K'ile had been holding back a long time. He wasn't going to hold back here. K'thalen needed to die. Again. And then he could get rid of K'aijeen as well.
When Thal went to grab the spear, K'ile allowed it. He let go of the weapon and spun away from it, dropping down close to the ground, his smile body bundling up. Light and heat swelled against his chest from something obscured by the harness on his chest, moving through to his collar and shoulders, sliding down his arms. His hands hit the sand, and there was a rush of ignition. Heat like fire burned up from beneath him, and the glass around him glistened. It moved. It stuck to his hands, crystalline, boiling hot, glowing red and white.
When he lifted himself and dove at Thal, he was holding globs of searing matter, trailing drops of viscous molten quartz from the melted sand. He slammed these into Thal's flesh.
Eyes widening, Thal brought the spear lengthwise in front of him, and K'ile's chest collided with the wood as the miqo'te brought his attack to bear. He grunted in vague disbelief as something blindingly hot crashed against his side and shoved as hard as he could with the staff, kicking out with one leg for good measure to knock the other man away from him, though he staggered backwards simultaneously.
Being very small, K'ile was thrown backwards by Thal's shove. He fell into the melted quartz left in the sand beneath him, but it didn't burn his body. As he rolled to his feet, the sand vitrified in an instant, turning into a smoothed glass with a strange orange color to it. It cracked and crumbled, falling into shards seemingly without cause.
K'ile spun. His tail ran over the sand, cause it to melt and cool in an instant. Sand stuck to his arms and shoulders, melting, glowing hot and exhaling nearly invisible fumes. Small sparks of flame danced on their borders. His blue eyes were narrow and hard, his face twisted into hideous anger. He crouched and took up more sand in his hands. The sand beneath his feet melted and vitrified around his toe, giving him a perfect spring block with which to throw himself forward again.
"Will you just calm--down!" Thal dove to the side, rolling his body around to give his arms the momentum they needed to swing the spear around like a long, thin club, stricking it against the other man's back.
K'ile turned, and ducked. He lifted a hand and struck it against the spear absently, causing the entire length of wood to burst into fire in an instant. This delayed his momentum for only an instant. "The last thing I needed to see was that face of yours again!"
"The hell did I do to you?!" Thal threw the spear off to one side, not bothering to watch it burn. His side felt strange, the detailed sensations of his muscles numb there. Not wanting to give the other man more opportunity to summon any more of the molten sand, he dropped low and charged, barreling against K'ile to tackle him to the ground. His arms would move to clasp around the other man's neck.
K'ile was overpowered by the larger man's charge, slammed to the ground and pinned there. It reminded K'ile a bit too much of Yohko, and his anger burned all the hotter because of it. Unable to free himself, K'ile's blue eyes smolder up at Thal through his veil of fiery hair. The sand beneath them melted into fluid quartz and he began to sink into it, millimeter by millimeter. A very slow process.
Clenching his jaw, Thal steeled his nerves and jerked the other man to the side, rolling away from the molten sand. Where his skin touched it, however briefly, he felt it go numb, though there was no immediate pain. When he was on his back, he bunched his legs up and drove his knee into the Tia's lower abdomen.
What breath K'ile had left was forced out of his lungs by the blow to his gut, and it had the side effect of leaving him nauseous and dazed. The lack of air, something he had been able to deal with moments before, was suddenly paramount. His dazed senses were not coming back. His fingertips were languid. The man writhed, claw at the ground, pushing at it with his feet. Everywhere he made contact, the sand melted, leaving boiling hot fluid quartz in shimmering pools. Fire lit upon his skin and on the surface of the pools.
Grimacing, Thal brought his knee up again, driving it into K'ile's gut, and then twisted to one side until he could straddle the Tia. He straightened with his knees on the ground, pulling K'ile up by the hold on his neck. "Stand down," he bit out.
He didn't have much of a choice. The second knee did him in. His strength waned. He pushed against the ground, but it didn't melt beneath his hands. He couldn't even glare. His eyes were half-lidded, and he was silent. His tail writhed still, but the rest of him was too heavy.
Thal didn't ease up his hold, though he did drop one arm down to wrap around K'ile's arms and torso as he stood and dragged the tia with him. "I'm not looking for a fight, friend," he muttered, "but you can't just go trying to kill people." Part of him wondered where the girl had run off to, but for now he figured as long as it was "away", then she'd be fine.
The Tia hung limp, still dazed. His eyes watched the pools of molten quartz on the ground as the cooled into glass and then crumbled into small shards.
Stepping back from the slagged sand, Thal let out a heavy sigh. "Are you going to try and kill me again if I let you go?"
After a time, the Tia managed grudgingly. "You're already dead."
"Maybe," Thal muttered. Why everyone on Eorzea seemed to know of this, even before him, he had no clue. "But I'm not some mindless voidsent, so put your big boy pants on and get over it."
"I have too much invested in you being dead." K'ile answered, coldly. "She only brought you back to ruin everything. And it'll work, too. One person gets one look at your face, and everything'll fall apart."
Blue eyes closed, and Thal tightened his grip around the Tia for a moment in frustration. His tail lashed behind him. "No one brought me back but me," he forced out after some seconds of silence. "I don't care what you've 'invested' - though I'll admit that's kind of disturbing. I don't know who you are, but I guess I probably should."
K'ile's tail lashed. He remained limp, and his scowl deepened once more. He glared at the sand, pondering. "People don't come back to life by accident. Or without reason. You ask her why?"
"You can't just believe me, can you?" Thal groaned. "Look, an old Duskwight - good friend of mine now, actually - pulled me out in the Shroud. That girl was nowhere near." He nudged at the back of K'ile's legs with his knee, not roughly, just as a gesture that he couldn't make with his busy hands. "And I've been doing pretty fine on my own the past five years. So maybe you should just let me keep on doing that, huh?"
"The Shroud? Then why are you here with the dead girl, huh?"
"What, you want my whole life story? Maybe I got tired of the forest." Blue eyes rolled. "I found her, not the other way around. Wasn't intentional, trust me, but it's not like I could just leave a dying kid be."
"You just happened to come back to life out of nowhere?" K'ile scoffed. "And you just happened to wander from the Shroud back home. And you just happened to find your daughter, who just happens to be dead too? No way."
"Suit yourself, I guess," Thal muttered. Then he pushed at K'ile's back, releasing him suddenly and with great forward energy. He took a few steps back himself. "I'm not gonna fight you. Maybe under different circumstances, I'd try to get you to tell me just how the hell you know me, but for now I'll settle for: don't attack us."
K'ile stumbled, but recovered within moments. He shot up straight as a rod, his tial switching behind him, and he turned to glare at Thal. "Don't you realize what you are? What she is?"
"I'm me," he said simply, frowning towards K'ile, but it was a relatively neutral expression compared to the Tia's anger. "And she's... whoever she is. Doesn't have to be any more complicated than that."
"Good to see you still don't think about anything. Yeah, you're still you, and that's exactly the problem." The ground beneath the Tia started to heat again, the sand left on his body turn into shining fluid. "If it was just the face, maybe. But it's still you. If it wasn't K'aijeen, but it is."
"What're you afraid of?" Thal demanded, feeling the nerves along his spine light up, his muscles tensing. He didn't drop into any sort of fighting stance, though, instead letting out a rough breath and shifting his gaze to one side. "There's a reason I didn't go digging into what was missing beyond those five years. Nothing good would have come of searching out people who'd probably already mourned."
"Then you shouldn't have come back! You should've stayed away from K'aijeen." K'ile ducked his head forward and growled, audibly. The sand beneath him turned fluid and bubbled, small flames alive on the top of it. His bare feet sank centimeters into it. "I can't let this be any more than I could just leave a tent burning down with my family inside. I can't, understand? K'aijeen can't be allowed to keep doing this."
"How the hell was I supposed to know some guy who apparently knew me would be wandering around?!" He gestured sharply with both arms to either side of him. "She was hurt and confused and asked me to help take her home. I'm not gonna say no to a sad kid like that."
"Still not thinking. Pretending everything's so simple. I guess..." The Tia thought for a moment, and then laughed again. "I guess, yeah, I hate that! I can't do it. Man, you got all the best of everything, didn't you?" His laughter faded. His hands fell to his sides, and the pool of melted sand around him expanded. It seemed deliberate. Like he was preparing it for something. "And then you died. And now yo-"
The earth moved behind him, hard clay pushing up through the sand like a beast surfacing. It was visible, stationary, for only an instant, before it solidified and shot from the ground as a missile, striking the Tia hard in the back of his head. he stumbled in the fluid sand, silenced suddenly, dazed.
The girl in the tattered red dress stood back near the pass, that broken branch in her hands. Green light moved around her fingers and the wood she held. More missiles began to rise through the sand at her feet.
Thal startled, eyes darting past the Tia, and then twisted his mouth. "Damnit," he muttered, and then shouted, "Kid, get out of here!" He wasn't quite sure what to think about her at the moment - certain facts were slowly aligning in his head that pointed towards something very uncomfortable - but he did know he didn't want her involved in this fight.
There wasn't much fight left in the Tia. He fell to one knee in the viscous quartz, stunned by the ferocity of the blow. Blood ran down his jawline from a wound on the back of his neck. Then more missiles struck him. In the head. In the back. The girl had become frighteningly efficient at that particular spell, and the Tia collapsed under the assault.
"Hey, stop!" Thal felt his legs break into a run, around and past the tia and right for the girl. "No one else is gonna die, kid, y'got that?" he barked, reaching out for the arm holding the wand.
She dropped the branch and jumped back from it as Thal rushed her. Her arms pulled up near her chest, she retorted in a scratchy voice. "Wasn't killing. He's killing." She rolled her head and put a hand ot her head. "Was going to attack."
"Yeah, right," he grunted, setting his foot on the branch and holding one arm up, palm out towards K'ile, the other towards the girl. "Fighting's done now."
K'ile didn't stir. The quartz around him vitrified.
The girl reached out and grabbed Thal's hand, pulling on it, eying him with distress. "Okay?"
Moving his free hand to run through his hair, Thal let out a sigh. "I'm fine, kid. Just hang back for a bit, okay?" Then he turned, pulling his hand from hers, and approached K'ile.
The girl pouted at this. She croaked, "No! He's..." She coughed and began again. "Murderer! Killed you!"
"I don't know about that," Thal muttered. His tail hung still behind him as he walked, feet crunching across a thin film of glass as he neared the fallen form of K'ile Tia. Grimacing at the visible blood, he dropped to one knee and carefully rolled the man on to his side. "You alive there?" He resisted the urge to snort at the phrase. At least one person here wasn't dead.
The Tia breathed, but didn't move. His eyes were closed. There was a lot of blood.
Working his jaw, Thal eased the man onto his back and pushed back his hair, using one thumb to lift an eyelid. "Really did a number on him, kid," he said, likely too quietly for the girl to hear. "Not what I was going for."
The girl waited in the pass, looking worried. Like she expected K'ile to pop up and destroy Thal in one sudden instant without warning.
The Tia's pupils were clearly dilated unevenly. Thal wasn't an expert, but he thought he knew enough to understand that wasn't good. Shifting the man's head, he felt in his hair for the wound, pulled his fingers away wet with blood and grimaced. "Okay."
He bent then, lifting one of K'ile's arms over his shoulder and wedging himself beneath the Tia enough that, when he stood, he took the Tia with him. Then he turned to the girl. "Change of plans, kid. I'm taking him to the town. He's not dead yet, so I'm pretty sure they won't burn him."
She flinched at that, her eyes shaking. Then she lurched forward and extended a hand. "No!" She choked shook her head, and put both her hands to her throat, pressing hard. "He'll kill you!"
"He already tried that." Thal was getting tired of this. He turned towards the pass, back the way they'd come. "Just wait outside the hole out of sight."
She whined, a rough sound rattling from her throat. "Daaad!" And gave chase, picking up the dropped stick as she went.
Thal froze, one arm over K'ile's back, the other holding the Tia's own arm over his own shoulder. He blinked away from the pass for a moment, and then leaned his head back, looking towards the sky. "Oh. I get it now." He breathed out, shut his eyes, and then just started walking. "Wait for me outside, K'aijeen," he said, using the name he remembered the Tia calling her.
She groaned, again, looking distressed, but nodded.
![[Image: AntiThalSig.png]](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/179079766/AntiThalSig.png)
"Song dogs barking at the break of dawn, lightning pushes the edges of a thunderstorm; and these streets, quiet as a sleeping army, send their battered dreams to heaven."
Hipparion Tribe (Sagolii)Â - Â Antimony Jhanhi's Wiki
