RESONANCE
ACT II, SCENE IV
(continued from above)
ACT II, SCENE IV
(continued from above)
Natalan, east of Dragonhead - at the Ixali aetheryte
He wiped traces of the ambient hoarfrost from the lute, and set cold fingers to the strings.
The music sheet popped unbidden into his mind's eye, but he didn't need it. The parchment itself was still locked away, now lost to him, for all he knew. It didn't matter. He knew these notes, knew them like he knew his own hands.
The first strummed note pierced the air, and the opening bars followed hard upon, deep and piercing, staccato more than rhythmical, at this point in the song. The mage watched him quietly; her staff had fallen to the snow beside her. Perhaps the air around them shimmered a bit, or perhaps it was simply his fancy.
His fingers danced over the strings, and the low and bass notes of the piece began to feel more tangible, resonating in his gut. The feather in his hat waved, as if there were a breeze, but there was none. A light sheen of sweat appeared on his skin, despite the cold that seemed gleeful to freeze it, and a pair of droplets fell to crackle on the snow.
The mage clapped her hands to her ears, and fell to her knees, whimpering, though the sound was no louder than a lute outdoors could truly be, and it was not enough to mask the squawking shriek that began to arise within the settlement's core. Was he still imagining a shimmering haze in the air, as if the snows were giving off rising heat?
But then the keening began. Sharp, but faint, whisper-faint. It did not slow his fingers, for they seemed enslaved to the performance, unhesitating; it also was not enough to screen out the obvious and bestial battle cries beginning to arise from within the settlement's center.
However, both of these were drowned in volume by a cry from the mage; she gripped her temples, moaning, and her hair began to lift as if affected by static.
The bard - for any remaining desire for hunting or archery this day had been wiped from his mind by the song - noticed but little of this, for his struggle, his gaze, was bound to the crystal itself. The song raised in pitch and tempo as the notes flowed through his consciousness, and his fingers may have well been separate entities. The crystal's reaction lifted from sharp whisper to perfectly audible, rising, a keening whine that filled the clearing, impinging upon the rest of the settlement, and drawing to it a cacophony of shrieks and crunching snow. The Ixal had heard, and if they had thought before that their attackers had designs upon the nests, no such illusion seemed to remain. A dozen of them were in the first vanguard, coming in two groups around the edges of the mage's protective icewall, spears raised with unmistakable intent as they clambered around the obstacle.
The mage seemed first to notice the intrusion. She reacted with a scowl at the crystal itself, and forced herself to stand, and rose a hand, one held more steadily than the rest of her form. Her earrings seemed to crackle and emit aether, which swirled around her, intensifying, and forming sheens of ice in a split path, flowing towards the charging birdmen, breaking and shattering against them in their charge. The Ixal howled as if they were themselves an angry wind. Frostbite seared them, but seemed only to slow their charge; their hesitation from before had dissipated, replaced with a furious, barbaric resolve. Yet, it would not be enough for the first wave. She growled from her throat; her hand seemed to lock into a grasping claw for a moment, as aether coalesced around her, and her shaking form knelt to slam a fist into the very snow at her feet. The skies reacted with a crack, as if she had punched the very firmament, and lit blue as arcs of lighting dropped from the clouds and enveloped the frosted beastmen, searing them anew and dropping them as steaming, sparking corpses.
It was the lightning, and the dying shouts of the birdmen, that seemed to permeate part of the bard's mind. His eyes narrowed, as if he would stare staggers into the keening aetheryte. "Yessss...." His voice, deep as it was, was still largely drowned by spell, war and the lute. "You don't like that, do you, you feathered scum?" Most of his form stilled, as if he were himself part of the rock formation upon which he perched.
The crystal seemed to respond. Its resonating whine became as much a reverberating hum, and the very tips of it came to visual life: purple-black motes of aether sparked from it, and danced around the whole as if they were moths attracted to their own light.
The mage pulled herself back to her feet, and stood still and steady enough to eye the wall. The battle cries still sounded from behind it; she shivered, and clutched tightly at the support of her staff.
"Shake and quaver, devils! Shudder!" The bard's voice rose to match the challenge of the crystal's wail, and the powerful notes arising from the lute. In apparent response, another score of Ixal dashed from behind the icewall, ten to either side of it, several kneeling to nock arrows to shortbows.
Fingers and song accelerated both, and the shimmering haze hinted at, earlier, became impossible to dismiss as illusion. The air itself seemed to blend with them, and form a vortex around the aetheryte, whipping the purple motes around like leaves in a hurricane. Yet, as if the crystal itself had made a decision, its wail subsided in volume, only to be replaced by a crackling, a glassy, high-pitched tinkling.
The clearing illuminated. A beam of corruscating purple radiance projected forth from the very top of the crystal, shooting straight up into the overcast sky, reaching for the heavens. The beam's baleful light fell upon the clearing: aether made visible, if sickly, light.
The mage's mouth dropped, and she flung out her hands, fingers splayed. Sheets of frost emitted from them, solidifying another wall, a translucent one, between them and the Ixal. The birdmen crashed upon it, squawking, hammering it with their speartips. She turned to look at the bard, bathed in the crystal's glare, and barked, "Nathan! Whatever it is you're doing, do it now! It won't hold!"
The bard belted out a reply, but it was directed not at the mage, not at the Ixal cracking at the icewall, but at the nemesis he had chosen, the crystalline target for which he had come. "Yes! Your time is now!" He screamed over the music, still playing. The crystal, too, responded, its hellish violet glow pulsing from within, and there was a crack, one that somehow pierced through all the other sounds, one that he felt in his guts, in his very brain...
Visions lit up in his mind's eye, in a parade of forming and dissolving images. The faces of sisters... gone, vanishing. The sounds of a summer concert, harmony and hope... drowned out to silence. The face of a lovely older woman, with eyes that seemed to dance and lips that promised freedom... shattering. A curse against him, in an angry female voice, accusing him of being an angry child... silent. But then, there was a laugh, gutteral and grating, that seemed to arise from below, and set him to shivering, and with it came another image - a man of impossible height, within a dome of ornate walls of blues and golds, hands raising, laughing, laughing, and turning to face him; he saw a sphere appear in the air before it, a sphere of crystal, and yet, of blues and whites and greens and browns, the colors of life... and there was a sharp crack that drowned out all else, and the figure began to bow at the waist...
He felt a snap in his consciousness, and shook his head violently. The fingers drooped, and the notes died in a final twang from the lute, which he but held limply. "Gods..." The word barely made it from his lips.
He blinked. The crystal still hummed, still strobed purple light over the clearing, still fired its radiant beam into the heavens. He felt a seizing in his chest, and the cracks of the crystal's tips were like a shock to his bones, a shock to everything... the bones of the world, even...
He stood, with a suddenness, as if his very form rebelled against the reality around them; he faced the mage, and composed himself enough to stuff the lute roughly into its case, and shout at her. "By the gods, we have to GO!"
But the mage was not looking at him - she was staring at the aetheryte, her form still as stone, before her mouth dropped open again, and the hard gaze moved to the bard. "It was you... IT WAS YOU!"
And then the world cracked again... no, it was the icewall. The Ixal, raging and fuming, had damaged the wall enough with spears and fury enough to send it falling into frosty shards, each mirroring the baleful radiance and filling the air with frost and dry mist. Tight shouts arose from over a score of the beastmen as they struggled to see their foe, obscured as they remained behind a fog of indigo mist.
The bard's body felt like a weak tangle of limbs, but he struggled to ensure that the instrument case was closed, and to take up the bow, fumbling with hands that felt well and truly numb and cold. "We've got to run, for Twelve's sake! It's... I don't know if it's going to stop!" The crystal's keening became a wail, as if it were some banshee brought from the void.
He took a clumsy step towards her, but her hand shot up as if it had a will of its own, the flat palm demanding he stop. "Don't move. Do NOT move!"
She dug her feet into the snow, and from her robe, she withdrew the dark, crescent-shaped stone, and nearly flung it over her head as her arm lifted. The pulsing beam of radiance from the crystal flickered and danced, like a massive candle in a breeze, and a stream of the violet energy snaked towards her, coiling around the dark form of the mage very like a snake would. Then the energy in the air around her rippled, oozed, and rose in a cyclone over her head, around the stone she held aloft. Her eyes closed, and the twisting aether crashed into the stone, like a wave breaking upon a boulder. The mage's hair and coat whipped around her, the whirlwind of magical energy becoming akin to a true storm.
The bard, indeed, did not move. He did not feel able; it was as if a smothering blanket had wrapped his form.
The sky overhead, at least as far as they could see, turned from purple to blue, heating and warping, and sparks and ice formed and crashed over the silhouettes of mage and bard alike. The mage's raised arm quivered, struggling to hold the stone as it absorbed the massive ambient energies, and then she shrieked, drowning out all other sounds, carrying the pulsing hint of a shockwave in the aether-rich air. The wave froze in the air at the edge of the clearing, hovering for the briefest of moments as a torus of energy, and then began to collapse in liquid fashion. It pooled around her, morphed into a globular mass in the air, and vanished, sucked into her crescent stone as if it were a thirsty mouth.
For a moment, a silence enveloped the encampment, stilling even the crystal itself, leaving the Ixal gaping and shaking their heads, and the bard wide-eyed...
...and then the sky erupted. Incandescent flame poured from the blue heavens like a wash of liquid hell, white hot and fluid, and fell upon the Ixal.
The fires ate the snow, and made steam of the remains of the icewall. The Ixal were consumed, one by one, each smothered by the bright flame, their agonized shrieks filling the air; flesh was seared from bone, and then bone alike was seared with beaks and feathers rendered into char. The flash-heated air spread the smell of roasted flesh, and the visual hell of the flames was matched by a cacophony of the beastmen's damnation. The mage screamed in response, her own wrath, rage, fury fanning and fueling the flames. The conflagration continued to fall from the sky in a river, growing and growing, and flowed into the center of the settlement, scarring the land underneath it, turning the buildings and fences into ash and charcoal, and flooding towards the very nests that the Ixal had thought to protect, converting them into unnatural blue bonfires. Licks of flame rose into the air like foam from crested waves, and their rising sparks caught hold of the floating balloons here and there, lighting the whole night azure, and those balloons which felt not the direct touch of fire still bobbled and weaved at the scorching air that flowed upwards.
The bard managed to remember his legs, and shuffled behind her, stumbling in the melting slush to keep his balance, eyes caught by bursts in the dance of heat and light as if he were a nervous squirrel. He swallowed hard, feeling the gorge subside into his guts, and he held the bow with a grip strong enough to have broken his instrument, had be been holding it instead.
The firestorm from the heavens cut off, as if a dam had been slammed before it, and the last wash of inferno swept through the settlement, and then blinked out of reality. It left only the smell of ash, the stink of bodies and the embers of once-buildings visible; no recognizable bones, even, remained, only black earth, scorched in some places, sizzling in others. Little else was visible in the thick smoke... smoke which had been blue, and now black, and now, showing the first hints of a purple reflection again.
The mage stumbled, and the bard, feeling hot in the face from more than fire and ash, stepped quickly to her. She wobbled, and leaned against him, and violet eyes, quivering, looked up at him.
"Nathan...?" Her form went limp, and it was all he could do, in surprise and weariness, to slow her fall into the slush beneath them.
He knelt next to her, stiff and still in shock, and could only stammer a few sounds, nothing that bore any relation to the wasteland she had... they had... just invoked upon the settlement. Settlement, no - the village. It had been rendered into ashen waste. Deep within himself, the bard felt, rather than heard, a cry, a call for help, for anyone, a plea that once led only to faint memories of fleeing through wood and underbrush, running, escaping, heat and screams behind him, a thought that burned for revenge for... this.
A tinkling sound above them chased away the thought, and he glanced up. The aetheryte, quelled during the firestorm, was starting to throw off a purple glow again, and fresh cracks snaked through it. The light flickered, and faint, but visible, purple motes began to arise, anew, from the crystal.
The bard shook his head; his senses were numbed. He slung the bow over his shoulder, calling upon his limbs for strength, just one last day of strength, and he stooped, hooking his arms under the mage's, hoisting her limp form. He grunted, bowed, and hoisted, lifting her to his shoulder. He'd done it to many women in the past, carried them off, but always in fun, in comradeship, or excitement... never until now in desperation, and never with a blacker chill in his heart. Puffs of mist emerged in slow cadence from her mouth... thank the gods, thank the bloody gods.
He stood, and took a final look at the remains of the village, setting the weight of the unconscious woman on his shoulder, as gently as he could muster.
The bard, laden with the sagging form of the mage, stumbled towards the remains of the charred gates, his skin taut from frostbite, from heat, and from a thousand bleak thoughts. Behind him, the crystal continued to glow, casting a violet gleam upon his back. He did not look backwards.
"But in the laugh there was another voice. A clearer laugh, an ironic laugh. A laugh which laughs because it chooses not to weep."