The hallway before me was cluttered with haphazard furnishings and memorials of life before the fall. They would be ruined regardless of my interference, so there was no shame in contributing. I shoved over a decorative suit of plate armour and toppled a cabinet with a surge of mana. I glanced over my shoulder, my heart pounding, as my pursuers crashed through the obstacles, landing in a tangle of limbs. Despite being satisfying to witness, it hardly mattered to the overwhelming number of ghouls flooding the bastion’s hallways.
My chainmail swished with each stride along the shrinking passageway. A ghoul flew into my path from an intersecting hallway and slammed into the wall, nearly colliding with me. I leapt over its crumpled form, catching a glimpse of the ghouls following behind it. The two groups merged behind me, tripping over one another and giving me more space to work with.
I flipped through ideas. Escaping out a window or hiding away without my armour would be easy. However, there would be no point to Yistopher’s inevitable rebuke if I ran now without doing something to distract the ghouls from focusing on the staircases. I had half a bastion to work with, the centre already occupied by the creatures and perhaps another turn before I encountered them.
I jerked to a halt, the carpet nearly giving way beneath my boots. The ghouls had begun to recover from their collision but still obstructed those beside them. A display case narrowed their path until it was knocked over, shattering in their stampede.
Pushing mana into my gauntlet and claws, I swiped at them, doing my best to direct the air blades towards the creatures rather than the walls. The weaker ghouls dropped as the deep gashes accumulated, while one remained unfazed, blocking the slashes from reaching those behind. The ghoul from the inner city charged across the dozen steps between us, but I stood my ground.
With the next set of blades, I focused on its legs, tearing up the carpet around its footfalls. A blade caught the ghoul's knee and exposed the bone, the creature falling face-first into another strike. Cuts lining its face and torso leaked black blood while it tried to crawl the remaining step, arms outstretched towards me. I slammed a fist down onto the back of the creature's skull as it tried to lunge with a bad leg.
The others were catching up, so I left it as yet another hindrance, its clawed hand outstretched as I renewed my run through the halls.
The next corner led me into the last quarter of the bastion before I completed a full loop of it and into the path of another group coming directly at me. I glanced at the window beside me. Yet, I could still do more. I slowed down, relieved that the nearest door was unlocked, and shouldered my way inside, locking it behind me. The sweat-drenched garments beneath my armour clung as I pressed my back against the door and surveyed the chamber.
Empty racks that would have held weapons on any other day stood in rows between the bare stone walls. Thumps reverberated through the wooden door as the ghouls fought amongst themselves to claw at my barricade. I wasn’t sure what attracted them, whether they understood I had gone inside, or if it was by scent or the mana in my armour.
A worrying crack echoed through the empty room, and I didn’t believe my weight and the small iron bolt would be enough to stop their assault. I pushed off the door and ran to the far wall, heading deeper into the bastion. On the opposite side were wooden furnishings and another stone divide, which I stepped away from to search for a stone block wide enough to fit through.
I loosened the binding around a suitable chunk and pushed the stone into the adjoining room with a heaping of mana. My helmet’s antlers proved to be the biggest impediment, so I tossed my helmet through the gap before diving after it.
I rolled onto a grey tiled floor, marked with various coloured stains from the food prepared in the kitchen I found myself in. The door was open to a dining room filled with the not-so-distant clamour and snarls of ghouls. I crawled around the preparation counter in the center toward the flimsy door and pushed it closed. It didn’t have a lock or handles and slowly swung back open.
I sat against the wall and stopped allowing mana to flow into my gauntlet, my helmet already drained of mana on the floor beside me. Its weight increased, and the steel plates became more rigid, catching on one another as I flexed my fingers. If I left it for too long, the enchantment would completely fail and gradually revert to its standard design, which wouldn’t fit me at all.
The lock on the door of the room I’d escaped rattled from another impact. It was sturdier as it guarded something more important than vegetables and blunted knives. Yet it still splintered inwards from the next blow while a clawed hand reached underneath and scratched away the wood.
The kitchen door burst open, and a ghoul stumbled into the counter, surprised to find no resistance from the door. I didn’t want to cast and attract more. I stood and punched the ghoul, my gauntlet unable to form a fist without mana to assist. My fingers bent awkwardly from the impact, sending a jolt of pain shooting through them.
The ghoul recoiled for a heartbeat before recovering and lashing out. With my face exposed, I backed against the wall counter, leaning down to search for my helmet. Before I could retrieve it, the ghoul lunged. My fingers caught the brim of the helmet, and I swung it, driving the antler into the ghoul’s shoulder. I redirected the charging ghoul headfirst into the countertop beside me.
I struck it four more times in the spine with the helmet-turned-weapon until the ghoul stopped thrashing and yanked the tip of the twisted antler from its back, frowning as it dripped with miasmic blood.
The weapon’s room door cracked and bent in half, the wood giving way before the iron lock. The first pale creature to squeeze in fell flat on its face, the next stepping over to get to the gap in the stone. I pulled my helmet on and grabbed the closest utensil on the counter, a small knife Haily would sometimes bring with fruit.
The ghoul started to drag itself into the kitchen, squeezing its body through the gap. When the back of its neck showed, I stabbed the finger-length blade into it, twisting the knife till it went limp. The ghoul behind tried to push through, but the body blocked the way for now.
Outside the kitchen, the noise of approaching ghouls grew louder. With the windows to the outside gone, I felt less confident being surrounded. It was time to leave, and passing through another wall would likely lead me into the same ghouls I was trying to escape. I climbed onto the counter but couldn’t reach the wooden panels above. I pulled a large pot from the sink and flipped it upside down to stand on, then reached up to dig my fingers into the boards. I weakened the first with a hopefully unnoticeable bit of magic; the second came off easier, and I removed two from where they were nailed to the support beam running across.
There was another set of boards for the floor above, but I’d been found. While the dead ghoul with a fruit knife in its neck was pushed out and another crawled through, the kitchen door burst open. I gave up on being discreet and forced the boards out of the way, dislodging the old nails driven through them. Grasping hands reached for my ankles as I pulled myself up onto the next floor. I silently thanked Instructor Daniels for his training as I rolled onto a carpet with symmetrical silver patterns woven into the blue fuzz.
I let my unarmored hand run through the soft, tightly packed fibres. One step to the left, and I would have had to tear through it to climb up. Sadly, the back of my head and most of my body felt only steel pressing against them, so I instead sat up to watch the ghouls struggle to understand that they couldn’t reach me.
Jars shattered and pots clattered to the floor as the kitchen was quickly overrun. The pungent smell of vinegar mingled with the bodies of creatures that had relied solely on the rainy season to wash for decades. I reached my gauntlet through the gap in the floorboards, lifting it out of the way as one leapt for it. I taunted them with purposeless mana arts, like splashes of water in their faces and wooden cupboards swinging open, keeping them and all those pressing into the doorways and stone crevices occupied.
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The office I found myself in was stocked with more alcohol than some of the inns and pubs I had visited. A glass liquor cabinet was more thoroughly locked and secured with iron and enchantments than the weapon storage. The books and treatises on the shelves lining the back wall were on mundane and pointless topics, yet their spines were beautifully crafted and inlaid with mana crystal. The desk taking up the rest of the room looked to have never been sat in, going by the neatly laid out paper and stationary.
I shook my head, looked back down at the eyesore I’d created in the untouched office, and decided I could do better than distract the ghouls. This floor felt and sounded clear of ghouls, so without anything to worry about for a while, I played with lightning.
I restrained the arcing sparks within my gauntlet, just as Alp did with his feathers. He was clumsy with the element—as with most of his morphs—so his magic wasn’t as helpful to replicate as that of a full-blooded storm hawk.
Unlike mages, who would have hidden away from the buildup of mana, the ghouls were drawn to it. They clambered over each other and onto the countertop in an attempt to reach the growing source of mana. The gauntlet’s enchantments didn’t appreciate the tainted mana flowing through it, as it was unable to access the fuel for its intent. My hair stood on end, and my arm went numb. Rather than arching along the steel, a bolt flared into the kitchen. The ghoul it struck collapsed, unable to fall to the floor because of the beasts clustered around it.
More bolts threatened to slip from my grip, their arcs along my gauntlet expanding. I had reached the limits of my clumsy control over lightning. I turned away from the impending flash since I enjoyed the advantage of sight even if I trusted my healing and expelled the agitated mana, indifferent to where it landed in the kitchen.
Unlike when Alp and other mages used the element, my casting produced a deafening thunderclap. I jumped in fright as if I were young again, flinching after waiting seconds for the distant lightning strikes to rumble.
However, instead of a distant echo, the thunderclap erupted in my ears and reverberated through my helmet. My eyes were unharmed, but I worked my jaw to get my inner ear to pop. The smell had somehow intensified, adding burnt hair and flesh to the previous mix.
Despite the many living targets, the bolt had struck the countertop and cracked the stone. All but three ghouls lay in a smoldering heap as more pushed inside to replace the fallen. While lightning was deadly when enough mana was consumed, it was noisier than it was effective—especially when achieving a hit was based on luck.
I pulled my arm out of the way of a leaping ghoul, wondering if the mages were right. Maybe it was a disadvantage not being able to use their formulated spells. Or were they wrong in thinking I couldn’t cast them? Either way, someone needed to help me learn better ways to fight than stumbling from one unplanned travesty to the next. I hadn’t felt trapped inside a building made of stone and wood until escaping into a room without a lock to give me time to escape.
I could have braced something against the door, warped the stone in the way, or escaped out the window early… or avoided putting myself in that position to begin with. A voice that sounded annoyingly like Yistopher agreed with the last assessment.
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked the empty office, struggling to hear my own voice. It wasn’t that I wanted to get hurt; I detested being hurt. And while death was nothing to fear, I didn’t want to embrace it.
I kept the ghouls occupied with less deafening displays of mana while my hearing recovered. I trusted I was helping since the floor I was on hadn’t been swarmed yet since it seemed the knights could hold the stairs. Unless another elite had slipped out of the castle, the army would likely progress steadily through the city and reach us before any of the civilians left on the upper floors were in danger. It felt wrong that the best decision was to wait for them.
The only thought on my mind during the last few days of waiting was getting into the city. Now, being in the city centre, I had no other distractions and too much free time to consider what to do next. Once the city was free, the combined army would push past the crater I’d made with dragon’s breath into the capital to rid it of the lure runes. Would they want to continue towards the witches?
If so, Tometh and I would need to discuss what to do with the tunnel and Marchland Inn. Then, after everything, I’d get dragged back to Drasda despite arguing to stay and help cleanse the capital.
I shifted around, sitting more comfortably as I toyed with the ghouls.
It was admittedly unproductive to stay in the city, evident from my inability to efficiently kill the ghouls below me—without burning down or destroying the bastion. All my magic was repurposed from animals who had learned to use theirs very selectively: to crack seeds, hunt prey, and navigate their environment.
Alp was surprisingly helpful, albeit unintentionally, by using more destructive elements for me to imitate. If only he weren’t a headdress-obsessed oddity, he could be more useful.
I let go of the water blob I kept out of reach of the ghouls, letting it splash onto one’s face. Footsteps pounded down the hall. The mage was covered in steel plating and checked the wrong room before opening the door to mine, a look of surprise before his eyebrows knit in confusion at the hole in the floor.
“Valeria,” Yistopher said, unsure how to start his earful once checking we were safe from the ghouls below.
“Save your breath. The stairs were easier to fight on after I left, correct? Then I’d do it again no matter what you say,” I mumbled, unwilling to share my recent doubts.
Moving to stand over me, he dragged a hand down his face, mixing and spreading the pieces of soot and sweat. Yis leaned over to check the hole in the floor, his expression softening. “I’ll take it that was your lightning spell?”
“Mhm.”
“I don’t remember you knowing how to do that in Drasda.”
“Because I didn’t.”
He didn’t ask the question he was supposed to: How had I learnt it? Instead, Yistopher silently loomed over me before stiffly patting my shoulder through the chainmail. “Nicely done… I hate to say it, but the fighting is considerably easier without as many going for us after a chance to reposition. Though, I will argue to my dying breath to never let you near the fighting again or to become a soldier.”
I chuckled against my will. “I don’t want to be one if it means people being mad I made a good decision.”
Yis took his hand off my shoulder, folding his arms. “Because it went against orders and all common sanity. You’re not trained for any of this, nor do you have a duty to.”
“I’m thinking of staying here then,” I lied, eager to make him convince me to leave instead of admitting I was being foolish. “Learn from some of the looters how they get by.”
He clicked his tongue, unhappy with the idea. “They dance with death for a sack of roe, then go back inside the next day despite becoming wealthier than most. And a good portion of them don’t return. You went off on one dead-end errand—”
I spread my arms. “Clearly not.”
“Clearly,” he deadpanned, pulling at the antler I’d bloodied on the back of a ghoul to remove my helmet. “What’s it going to take?”
“To do what?” I asked, keeping my voice even.
“Get you to come back with us,” he said. “Willingly. No sneaking off or us having to drag you.”
I hummed as if considering the offer for the first time. “We’ll stay till the threat is gone? No leaving early.”
He scoffed and shook his head. “Only the threat of the ghouls leaving the capital. And not if you run—”
“I promise not to run off again,” I said, flicking a gust of wind at the ghouls.
Yistopher sighed but nodded.
“I also want more training with spells and magic, not just a bit of endurance and weapons.”
“And,” I continued as he opened his mouth to agree. “I want to come back here after I am better trained.”
Yistopher narrowed his eyes. “We’ll see how things progress, and I could agree to support that with the right safety precautions, but no promises on what the duke decides.”
“Acceptable, I guess. I’ll think about coming back to Drasda with you then,” I said, motioning towards the desk full of paper and pencils. “Do we have to write this down?”
“No?” Yistpher asked in confusion. “Why would we?”
“I don’t know. People find it easier to make agreements with me when I scribble my name next to it.”
“Valeria,” he asked slowly. “What have you signed?”
