Pale Blank Skin XVI.

            “What marks are those,” whispered Belleneix, pointing at a spot where the pale cave radiance cast a beam of light along the stone floor.  They had just caught their breath from the battle with the lake thing and hid in the darkness provided by the old, dead apartment block. 

            The Rottie girl spoke in regards to an inky footprint without partner or trail, nothing to describe from whence it came or where it went.  A cold bit of fear came with the sight of the small footprint.

            “A child’s,” began the Trumpeter, who was hushed for his volume, “like that of the creature we saw on the far shore we now tread.”

            “Does this grow our mysteries or condense them?” murmured Lumnos.

            “Vapid tongue-waving,” huffed the Fencer.  “I have a growing conviction that the child is the necromancer we seek.”

            The pursuit they were convinced would follow never came.  Climbing to the high rooms and looking out showed the vast entrance to the tunnels beyond the lake of blood and bone to be teaming with marrowmere and doad, but none of these abominations walked or drifted their way.  For some minutes they stood at the edge of the hideous and frozen waters, watching, but finally, after some internal determinate was satisfied, wandered off, returning to their charnel tasks.  Despite the loss of the lake thing the necromancer’s program churned on, tantalizingly vague, like that single footstep down below.

            “Black and white, good and evil,” mused the wordseller.

            “What is that down there?” asked the Trumpeter, pointing further into the city, down to the avenues below.

            “I don’t see anything,” replied Laxa definitively.

            “The fluid inside those marrowmere and doad is of utter black, and the umbirae are themselves shadows of purest jet,” continued Lumnos, thinking out loud, somehow needing to trouble the minds of everyone else with these words. 

            “Wait,” said Laxa, “I do see it, something whitish.”

            “And then there is that crystal which weeps the very same darkness, I’ve never read its like before.  Not jet, not obsidian, not carbon or naphtha, nor any other mineral or oil describes the inky depths of that strange substance.  Wouldn’t you agree?”

            “Too many words,” admonished the Fencer, who went to see what all the activity at the window was about.  “There’s nothing down there.”

            “You said that before even looking,” laughed the Trumpeter.  “Look again.”

            “And then there is the White, because duality needs its partner,” continued Lumnos, considering the components of his recent troubles.  “For an avatar I propose that mage Loce and this strange blade creature, this Phyox.  Yet in broader scope the White lacks that same insidious pregnancy of the Black.  I’m missing something.”

            “Be quiet for our arguing,” snapped Belleneix, and her sharp words finally closed the verbal book the wordseller was writing on the air with his tongue. 

            “This is important business,” he said indignantly, getting up because it seemed the proper sort of thing to do when one’s words were questioned.  “If I can arrive at the heart of the matter then we might know our adversary and what we may do about him, her or it, as the case may be.  What is that?”

            In his rage he had gone to the window and there looked down into the shadowy streets where something looked back up.  At this height it was difficult to say, but he was certain that a pale, white humanoid peered at them, half hidden by the corner of another tower block.

            “You see it too?” exclaimed the Trumpeter.

            “Of course, but what am I seeing?” asked Lumnos as the Fencer dashed down the stairs, the others close by, racing towards the white thing amongst the black pavement.

            The wordseller followed as close as he could, the way down being far easier on his joints as the way up, but curiosity got the best of him.  He discovered many more of those footprints, as if something airborne had followed their trail, setting down randomly.  He jerked his head upwards, thinking he heard a noise, but there was only shadow there, broken on occasion by the pale underworld phosphorescence spilling in from the windows.

            By the time he finished descending his noisome band was in the midst of violence.  The Fencer stood above a whitish figure that scrambled awkwardly to get away.  The Phyox trembled.

            He blinked and a stray thought became a sudden movement.  There was a clang of unwholesome metal on inviolate stone.  He held the Phyox blade in his hands, parrying the overhand strike the Fencer had brought down on the stranger.

            “Those books have rotted your brain,” huffed the swordsman.  This was a coping mechanism.  Never had another’s weapon survived Dhala’s atom edge. 

            “It’s another of those dead things,” explained Laxa, gesturing with her own sword.

            Lumnos glanced down, and indeed the girl thing seemed all ghostly pale, with ashen skin and colorless eyes.  From the top of her head unhealthy hair spilled in thick waves.  She moved with a certain twitch, like one affected by the palsy. 

            His resolve wavered but then redoubled with a word.

            “Why?” asked the white creature.  “Why?” 

            The Fencer sighed and let his sword rest while Laxa hesitated, gauging the situation.  Everyone waited for the girl to say more, except Lumnos, who always had more words.

            “Now, now, my dear,” he began, extending one hand out, not realizing he still had the white blade in his other.  “I apologize.  We have had a trial in coming here and are not fit for civilization at the moment.  When in our right minds we wouldn’t think to harm you.”

            He saw now that she wore the tattered remains of a stately gown, faded to an almost imperceptible pink.  Against the cold smell of dead stone she gave off a slightly acrid scent, something just at the edge of description.

            When he finally put his weapon away she let him help her to her feet and asked, “Are you usurpers?”

            The question astounded most but the Trumpeter was prepared.

            “If it is good sense, then yes we are,” began the musician, stepping forward, taking her hands, and looking into her pale eyes.  “I would tumble a dictator just to hear them fall, in fact my friend and I have made it a habit.  If you could only direct us to your despot then we might begin.”

            She threw his hands aside and he almost cried.

            “More pretenders,” she spat, and stepped away to consider something.  A twitch ran through her body.

            “We are most serious about the trouble we can cause,” said the Fencer, backing up the musician’s strange, half-bluff.

            “That I see,” she said properly, glancing back at Dhala’s indigo blade.  “I had a pretender once.  Split my empire in two, but it will always mine.”

            “Can I have your name?” asked Belleneix.  This meant something entirely different than the way the pale girl took it.

            “I am the Emperor Zoxx,” she explained.

            Laxa went for her sword but only drew it halfway, confused.

            “Don’t you mean ‘Empress?’” asked Lumnos.  The girl flinched.

            “Why does everyone ask that?”

            Raw confusion threatened the scene.  The wordseller gaped, the musician pouted, Laxa was about ready to stab this being for her name, as Belleneix grew bored.  It was the Fencer who calmed all this.

            “There are others?  Please, show us.”

            It may have been some lingering aspect of the poison, or the discord of choosing action over contemplation, but Loce was finding it difficult to understand the energies fuming below Ruin.  All he felt at the unfiltered seat of the world stage was potent, generalized negativity.  A yawning hate, secure in its goals, justified, vengeful, all too human.  It was a darkness which gnashed after the city, not just its buildings and peoples, but every aspect and element.  Even this metaphor was incomplete, some quality missing from this word which did not exist.

            Fueled by the Black Lattice he sensed from the second he returned to Ruin, this mystery both tantalized and disturbed the Abjurist.  Old things welled up along its crystalline metaphysics.  Old things which were better off buried under the rubble of the past.  Bad memories.  Power, odd and terrible, bled from this wound in the greater matrix which described the magic coursing through up from Winter’s heart.

            Blue resounded to one side, western seas and clear skies, brilliant in the afternoon light.  Along the other stretched the land, over which whorls of cloud systems moved at that pace which was invisible at a glance, change becoming evident only through the course of time.  All of this below him, subjective, like a map of a far off land. 

            For a moment his heart remembered the state of white everything and peace, before the travelers had tripped the wards in his old estate, left as it was during the Uplifting when he joined Sol in his endeavor to split the world in order to save it.  The red mage could spread his hands and a thousand infinities would open up, spaces which existed but were never colonized; places where dreams might jostle without violence.

            Summer would soon arrive.  This thought spurred the Abjurist into action.  With a step he arrived back in Ruin, at the center of the city, where the great square told the glories of heroes long dead.  He sought a way down.

            The dark below the city revealed itself at his command.  The stones and works shifted apart without breaking, providing a way down.  He had to walk from here, the energies below too troublesome to risk anything more nuanced, and the Phyox was in another’s hands, so flight wasn’t possible.

            As he descended the stones behind sealed up and he pulled his cloak a bit more tightly about him.  It wasn’t that it was cold down here, in fact it was fairly warm, no, it was the thrill of the Black Lattice which made him shiver at the thought of all it might contain.

            The Emperor showed them through the quiet streets of the miner’s city with many apologies that they wouldn’t be treated to gold cushions and drugged pleasure-slaves.  It was vast, this carven metropolis, the work of centuries and the home of lost thousands.  It was also picked clean, with nothing to indicate the teaming workers or their history. 

            She introduced them to two children, one with a slit throat, the other with her heart cut out.  Each was as pale as she, with that same vague scent.  They wore fine, tattered cast-offs with all the air of deposed royalty.

            None of them were alive.  Zoxx moved and spoke but failed to breathe, except to bring air across her vocal cords for speech.  The sight of these other two, dead by their wounds, but still animate, confirmed their suspicions.  Lumnos soon realized he was the only one willing to engage the creatures as an equal.

            The Emperor introduced the boy as Magister Sysyn and the girl as the Grand Arcanist Theb.  Their pale, white-on-white eyes were suspicious of the newcomers.  The place where they met was a wide square between towers.  Circles and occult diagrams lay etched across the slate floor.  Each child held a bit of chalk.

            “Watch where you step,” growled the little girl called Theb as she went back to her work.

            “What is it you do here?” asked Lumnos, carefully moving about the designs. 

            “Research,” said Sysyn, “A competition of sorts.  We are trying to find a way to ward off a particularly troublesome apparition.”

            “The Inky Child,” explained the Emperor Zoxx, fear in the words. 

            “I’ve seen the thing from across that bloody lake,” said the Fencer warily.  “All of black, in the shape of a child.”

            “Who are these icebound?” asked Sysyn, the question directed toward the Emperor.

            “I don’t sense the Lattice about them,” said Theb dismissively.

            “This is because—.”

            “This Inky Child, I will destroy it,” interrupted the Fencer, growing impatient with these undead. 

            The assorted creatures went silent for only a moment.

            “Do you have any idea whom you interrupt?” huffed Sysyn as he threw down his chalk and stalked up to the much larger Fencer.

            “A corpse full of words,” smiled the Fencer, who then he considered this.  “Though I suppose that describes all things under Winter’s sun.”

            “I am Magister Sysyn!  For ten centuries have I worked the laws of the Lattice so that now I may peer into the minds of men and bend their thoughts according to my grand enchantments!”

            “Tell me what I’m thinking then,” reasoned the Fencer.

            All this time the Trumpeter strutted about the square, investigating the careful drawings and touching them up.  This unnerved the pale people just as much as the Fencer’s aggression.

            “What color do you claim?” Laxa asked, bringing politics into the fray.

            “Sunglow yellow is worn by all my charges and topaz adorns my estates,” said the boy defensively.  He was trying to glare a hole through the Fencer but had failed so far.

            “Please!” shouted Lumnos, his voice echoing far louder and further than he would’ve liked.  He felt a pressure on his mind, a knot at the edge of solution, though if a cord was pulled in a certain way it would only entangle the mess more tightly.  “Allow me to organize our arguments.  You claim ownership to names of great mages?” he began, but was instantly disappointed.

            “I am Theb, but all these others are pretenders,” squeaked the heartless girl.  “Zoxx isn’t even male.  Should be ‘Empress’ at the very least, though I doubt that any sort of Zoxx could claim an Empire anymore.”

            At this the Emperor hissed and lifted her hand into the air.  The unmistakable workings of magic played through her finger movements, but nothing happened.  Instantly the others all grew quiet and sullen.  Zoxx twitched sadly.

            “Have you found cause for our malady?” she asked the throat-torn boy, all previous rage forgotten.    

            “My calculations are ongoing,” he said, but all there heard the truth, that he had no clue.

            Realization dawned on Lumnos.  His mind opened up, layering that first vision of Zoxx, along with Theb and Sysyn.  Wound and twitch, death and life, transposed across the broad spectrum of strangeness which had befallen him since he had awoken that night in his biblio to the sound of breaking glass, and that stray phrase poisoned Loce had said to him far up on the white tower.

            “Please!” he sputtered, interrupting the dead mages for the second time.  “Tell me, does the Inky Child ask you questions?”

            A chill ran through the air and if the dead could tremble and go pale, these did, and from their wounds he could see slight trace of something oily course like ink.

Pale Blank Skin XV.

            Within Summer’s comfortable grandeur Loce developed his dual philosophies of white and black.  While sharing much with the binary thinkers who preceded him, he clambered up these past treatises in order to show others the nuanced difference between mystery and possibility.  In the mysterious past the unknown had hungered in the dark of unknowing, preying upon people, a monster wreathed in shadow.  Yet through his experiments white was revealed to contain all visual vibrations, yet hid none in its honesty.  He was mostly ignored.

            The Phyox was a grand expression of this ethos, a living thing created by the charging of inert strange matter with the purest white magics.  It lived and flowed around him, inoculating the bizarre theorist from the violent mysteries which stalked the new world of magic.

            Now he wore the white creature again and flew above a patchwork armada of gardens.  Beyond the green realm there flowed a vast plain of clouds, as if the land was the top of some abrupt plateau, the surrounding lowlands hidden by storm and mist.  His journey veered to one side and beyond the garden there was the City where darkened doors opened into mystery.

            The Phyox trembled and Loce knew its fear, an unwanted failure of the second skin.  He alighted on the Avenue of Cloves, where the air was thick with the smell of herbs, where visionaries went to stew their incensed thoughts.  Each building was alike and new, ancient as forgetting, eternal, waiting to be destroyed. 

            Shaking confusion from his head, he wondered where all the people were and found a shadow stretched upon the ground.  Up from it stepped a woman with ashen skin and raincloud hair, long and elaborately decorated.  Her eyes were gold. 

            She was all wrong.  He knew her, and he knew her again.  There were two minds within him and both had met this woman before, though in vastly differing capacities.  Loce couldn’t seem to focus on this other self, a child being layered over his own.   He could only stare, past her gold iris, past the form as illuminated by the somber twilight, into the dark of the woman’s left pupil, into that swarm of mysteries.  This dark violence suffocated him.

            In the city a storm of light raged.  It never stormed there without good reason.  It was all he could witness before waking up.

            His fever broken, his hand still missing but no longer infected by the vile poisons of the nightmare blade, Loce took account of the day and saw that the icebound city of Ruin survived.  The white tower where he had been left overlooked the metropolis and flocks of white ravens took advantage of the view.

            In his sleep he had instinctively woven a new garment for himself from magic, a cloak of grey fur reminiscent of the things rumored to hunt the ice plains of his boyhood.  Pushing the past aside he leaned out over the edge of the balcony in search of the future. 

            Previous fires smoldered quietly in the noontime sun but there was no conflagration.  The city lived, which was another victory.  The dark hand from beneath had failed in its attempt to feed the city to itself.

            Palace-tribes roamed in bands, setting their estates in order, their fear lessened in the light of day.  Cries of city life drifted to his ears, vendors selling, children playing, people quarrelling, all echoes amongst the ruins.  He allowed himself a smile.  It might just have been worth it to break his vow of nonviolence against the flow of causality.  Still, the ends remained to be seen.

            Troubled by the strange dreams he had under the effects of Dhala’s poison, Loce worked the Lattice and flew through an angle invisible.  His psyche and nous alighted on the world stage, breathed on by clouds, showing all the blue of sky and dead white of icy Winter, as if one could see the whole sphere of the planet from a single vantage.  A grey smudge described Ruin below, like an inky blot.

            From here the writing of the world might be illuminated.  A proper sense of scale was necessary so that he might cast his mind along the conduits propitious for the results he sought.  Yes, he risked the violence of action now, but soon strange Summer would act, making the Necromancer’s actions seem small and quaint in comparison.  

            In the underworld, beneath city, sewer, catacomb and dungeon, a light reframed the darkness.  Those thousand tons of falling rock had been stopped, and Lumnos removed his hands from his eyes and saw that a new support held up the ceiling. 

            It was the Phyox’s doing.  Even now the white entity, that living tool or weapon, worked to finish their salvation.  From the broken steel of the machine-thing it had sculpted the supports and brace which arrested the cave-in, working in a splay of tentacles.  Finished, it reformed into a sphere and drifted back to the wordseller, becoming a sword at his side once more.  Corpse bits and a murky mixture of glistening black crystal and fluid were the only remains of the two metal monsters.

            Lumnos picked up a sliver of crystal the size of a finger.  It felt exceedingly heavy, and though the inky fluid fell away without leaving any wetness there showed smudges of the black stuff where the material touched, all smelling like salt and other, stranger chemicals. 

            “The Black,” he muttered.  “Just as Loce mentioned.”

            “What’s your meaning?” frowned the Fencer, eyeing the ceiling with suspicion. 

            “Sometimes I see shapes in the marrowmere, or the doad,” added the Trumpeter.  “I’ve seen black shapes, like double diamonds, peek out from the dead flesh.  There are silhouette things too, like the one which tried to step into you.”

            “All of black, this inky substance, mixed in with the blood, hiding in flesh, moving like a skeleton, not in a physical sense, but still providing some kind of animating frame, some reason,” breathed the wordseller.  “But, strange as Summer, I can’t say what it is or why it does the things it does.  Ink though, hmmm.”

            “All that noise, we must be moving away,” hissed Belleneix after she grew bored of watching the Fencer consider the strange things Lumnos and the musician were hinting at.

            “So it comes from some sort of rock they mined up?” asked Laxa, but they had no answer.  True, it could be something left over from the mining days, but if it had such properties then surely the red demon would’ve taken it away with the rest of the preying horrors he found.  Such a puzzle.

            They fled, but more quietly this time, down into the earth.  They used no light, that strange, grey radiance provided just enough.  The pale energies of death hung in the air so at a distance the rooms seemed brightly lit, but up close the gloom was only that of a waning moon.  Each of the travelers seems made of stone, expressive granite statues without blemish.

            Behind them came snuffling, clanking sounds as more of the machine things given semblance life inspected their violence.  Herds of doad wandered too, busy at the Necromancer’s inscrutable work.  Occasionally drifting marrowmere floated across a distant opening, gasping more air into their bloated lungs.

            A few floors down a winding, claustrophobic passage the smell told them they were on the level with the city of the miners.  The Necromancer’s lake of blood and bone filled the air with a rotten tinge.  Following this unpleasantness they at last came to the city by tunnels which seemed to have completely changed since their last venture.

            Before them opened the vast cavern, towers rising from floor to ceiling beyond the lake.  No fire danced on the far shore, no tiny figure of black awaited, but still there was a presence.  It had been growing the whole way down as they followed the city’s run-off, which dripped into the reservoir.    

            They watched as a massive engine with a hopper full of bodies shuddered its way to the lakeshore.  A series of bellows in its undercarriage began to labor, wheezing and gusting.  Then a terrible noise of fast metal on fast metal and the bodies began to disappear as the thing pumped out a frothing red and white mixture into the lake.  Doad came lugging more raw materials, fresh bodies from their forays topside, and their little band, so safe in the far shadows where nothing bothered them, grew restless for violence.

            “You should stop them,” smiled Belleneix to the Fencer with her white, little teeth.  “You could you know.”

            The Fencer did not know, but now his pride was kindled. 

            “Not now,” rasped Lumnos.  “We can do nothing to save the dead.”

            “But it must stop,” said Laxa, for once agreeing with the cannibal.  “Who better than the one with the magic blade?”

            “I could collapse the cavern,” added the Trumpeter helpfully.

            “I don’t like being pulled about,” said the swordsman, but in his eyes he had that look of the demon again.  Despite the girls, it was the scene which provoked him.  Winter’s callous touch drove him to madness, this scene to the very edge.  The two harpies threatened to push him over.

            “You must see it’s like the Riddle,” argued Lumnos. 

            “In what way?” demanded the swordsman.

            “In that through our action or our inaction those bodies will remain dead,” reasoned the wordseller.  Then another thought took his mind.  “Indeed, they are dead, but I am not sure of the thing in the lake.  Its blood is red, not black, it thinks, as proven by the fact that is makes its thoughts known in our own heads.  Perhaps it gains life and power from the composted flesh of the recently deceased.”

            This proved the wrong thing to say, the words pushing the Fencer up and out of the trench in which they hid.  He dashed from shadow to shadow, finally breaking out into the dim light to assault the abattoir engine at its work, doad turning towards him with ragged talons.  

            Along the uneven floor numerous mounds of ancient mine refuse lay in piles.  The Fencer dashed up one, leaping over the ring of corpse creatures, as the bloody machine ground on, uncaring. 

            Atop the metal beast a number of secondary limbs tended the charnel hopper.  One flicked like a scorpion tail against the oncoming swordsman, who blurred with sudden motion.  A single sharp note rang out as the arm shattered itself against the flat pane of enchanted glass he raised in defense.  Fragments rained about, the Fencer continued on, possessed.

            Dhala arced upwards, splitting open the heaving bellows along the machine’s underbelly.  Immediately the wheezing stopped and it began to shudder violently.  Even so, it now lumbered with surprising quickness to face the offending little man, who barely managed to scramble out from between the legs which shattered stone with each step.

            It turned its horrible, dripping red mouth, circular, like a lamprey or a leech, filled with grinding, rotating teeth used to spit out the grisly lake mixture.  With a single kick it knocked the Fencer back into the doad he had just dodged past.  They took him and tore at him.  To Lumnos surprise he leaped out of the safety of the trench to come to the savage’s aid.  It seemed to do no good.

            Before he was even half way to the melee the monstrous machine dove into the crowd where they held the southern warrior and a pluming geyser of blood spewed forth.  The machine rocked and trembled, bodies and parts of bodies tumbling out of the hopper in a mad and sloppy avalanche.

            The Phyox lead the way, suddenly in the wordseller’s hand, pulling him along.  It added grace to each swing.  Where it struck the dead fell in pieces, black blood oozing. 

            Perhaps it was some effect of the strange matter life form, or his personal way of dealing with deathly fear, but Lumnos seemed to reside some feet above his body as the combat raged, drifting there, watching, some buffer between himself and the tooth-and-nail battle.

            When over half the doad were felled he had yet to find the remains of the Fencer.  Then he noticed that the machine beast wasn’t in the melee.  Scanning about, he saw the monster’s end.

            The Fencer stood, beaming, pulling out his blade from the bloody wreckage.  As he did a sheen of frost covered the mountain of metal, the material screaming with the change in heat.  Its shuddering stopped.  The great and terrible snout on the thing had been cleaved all the way through to the body.  That was the cause of the red geyser Lumnos witnessed before.

            All this while his body was methodically cutting down the undead.  This seemed to be some function of the Phyox, an economy of mind and body where the flesh worked efficiently in a purely intuitive state and the mind was unbound from physical distractions, able to observe and consider under even the worst strains. 

            The others were slower to arrive, but soon Belleneix and Laxa and the Trumpeter appeared, gesturing behind them.

            “I hear the moaning marrowmere,” said the Trumpeter.

            “And where were you when the bookworm and I did all the work?” demanded the Fencer.

            “The Trumpeter said that it was customary for his people to be accompanied by at least two female bodyguards at all times,” said Laxa, smiling and amused. 

            The thing in the lake heard them and rose up sputtering and red, towering over a dozen meters into the air, much of its bulk still hidden beneath a sea of separating blood and bone fluids.  It seemed to be a single massive muscle, swollen in certain areas to provide locomotion, puckered near the top to show a mouth full of glistening white teeth, while above, numerous eyes, huge and colorful, human, but on a titan scale, glared with obvious pain.

            Its mind was full of hate, unfocused and potent.  Thoughts preceded its horrible crawl from the cradling lake, seeping into them all.  Belleneix fell crying, Laxa screamed and hid in its shadow.  Lumnos was struck worst of all.

            It may have been his already sensitive mind, though perhaps the Phyox was to blame, opening him up to such clarity.  With a shock his dual state collapsed.  He was frozen with fear, the Phyox shifting form uncontrollably.

            The lake thing rose out of its lake and now they could see it was formed something like a giant snail.  Its head was that of a blubbery, fat human, though with far too many eyes and no nose.  Along its body rows of hands grew, some no more than flippers, others reaching out on long arms.  On its back a shell of porcelain bone shimmered with an inner light.  It cried and babbled and reached out for the Fencer.

            The cunning savage had pressed his head against the flat of Dhala’s cold blade at the first tingle of psychic assault.  He shrieked but kept his mind, turning to face down the mutant gastropod.  It grew a crown of fleshy tendrils.  One whipped into the swordsman, opening up his chest.  Blood sprayed and he tumbled back, even as it lurched forward after its prey.

            Then a note rang through the air, crisp and clear like the sun over an ice plain.  The blood snail’s flesh ripped apart along its left side, showing its inner supports were a nasty mesh of bone material, itself flexing as if muscle.  The Trumpeter played with his eyes closed, not wanting to see.  The cavern quaked under the onslaught of his aria.

            More than anything his playing cleared the mind of the thing’s hate-filled thoughts.  Now it was only a distant menace, like a low and permanent hum. 

            As the group shook free of the effect the Fencer was already plunging his blade into the creature’s chest.  Strange fluids poured from the wound as it flailed at the offender.  He dodged about and took fingers and hands, cutting them off with quick, arcs of blue-black ice.

            Howling to the sound of the trumpet, it redoubled its efforts, scrabbling with its foremost limbs.  These fell to either side of the swordsman, hemming him in, scrabbling with pink flesh after the little human.  While he hacked off one thumb the other grabbed him about the midsection as its brought its head down to better acquaint him with the drooling maw of teeth. 

            Just in time he fought his weapon free from its grasp and instead of a still-living treat the monster’s weight pushed the nightmare sword point-first into a vast green eye.  To the sounds of painful, shrill screams the ocular organ burst, covering the Fencer in vitreous fluid before he was violently flung away.

            As the Fencer groaned the blood snail focused on him once more, short an eye.  Already the sword’s poison showed livid and purple on the creature’s wounds, but this had an unfortunate effect.  The psychic projection grew in strength as those feverish nightmares caused by the toxin colored its singular mind’s radiations. 

            Lumnos stood and gaped.  His mind was caught open and he was merely an observer, a reader of the tableaux before him.  Laxa, now mostly recovered, stood before the monstrosity as it sought revenge on the swordsman.  The Trumpeter struggled against the mental assault with his song.  New flesh puckered fresh and pink where the monster had been wounded, taking away even what little they had done to it.

            So intent it was on the one foe that it failed to notice another.  Belleneix snatched up the Fencer’s sword, and though grimacing at the painful weapon, ran along its side, flitting past the arms which grasped after her thoughtlessly. 

            Laxa put her blade through the first searching hand, but the wound healed around the wound immediately before it wrenched the long sword out of her grasp.  Shrugging, she merely took out another of her weapons; she had plenty enough to distract the thing.

            The Rottie girl didn’t even flinch as she climbed the side of the flesh beast, using a few twitching fingers as handholds to lift her up before running along its back.  She reached the glowing shell just as the thing opened up Laxa’s good sword hand with a wicked strike of its crowning tendrils.  There Belleneix raised the nightmare weapon and plunged it in, shuddering with cold. 

            The bone froze and shattered, revealing a grey-pink mass beneath.  The shell housed a massive brain, spiraled and looped, pulsating with vile psychic energies.  The nightmare sword dove in and a squamous blast of terror filled all their minds.  Lumnos blacked out for a moment then as his breath went short and he remembered another’s memories, fragments only, of suffocation and those golden eyes.

            When he came to, mere seconds later, the scene was entirely changed.  The Fencer limped towards the lake of flesh.  Along the outer shore where the blood snail had just been, was now a mound of putrid slime, a few icebergs of broken shell floating along.  The Trumpeter trotted after, tending to Laxa who was on the edge of shock. 

            Dhala had frozen the lake of blood and bone.  Lumnos ran across its lumpy surface to Belleneix’s still body.  He turned her over and she was giggling, shuddering cold, but giggling, her hands stripped raw and bleeding. 

            “Now I am best,” she said and meant it.

            Dhala lay where it had fallen, blade half sunk into the frozen lake.  The Fencer snatched it quickly.  Marrowmere cried in the tunnels behind them. 

            They raced into the cold dark of the miners’ city and hid amongst the towers, vast shadows eagerly swallowing them up.  In their haste they didn’t hear the soft footsteps following, white feet leaving black prints behind, when it chose to walk.