Slowly, painstakingly, Krahe picked herself up, dusting the black grains from her scraped skin. Not long ago, she would have taken this moment to catch her breath, but that was no longer a limitation she needed to work around. Akin to a bird’s lungs, the Dead Man’s Root provided a continuous flow, and her body was still far from being able to use it faster than her lungs could provide. If this whole exercise was meant to help her work through any dead-ends and blockages, then… Why not give into the unreasonable? Why not let flow that which would usually go stemmed or redirected to more productive purposes?
“What am I to do, then? How am I to find the dragon sleeping in the swamp if I do not hunt down those feeding it corpses first?! How am I to slay the dragon if its flame would melt my sword! And even if I were to strike it, my sword would dull against its scales! I nearly killed myself to defeat a fuckup like Semzar Hashem, how am I to stand against Damrus Hashem or whomever stands behind him?! With these hands, how am I to assail the forces of those who regard me as little more than a nuisance?! Tell me! Two decades, I spent scurrying around, fighting for the sake of a world that feared and hated me!”
While she spilled what she had genuinely thought on occasion, Krahe brought out three talisman papers — two Schwarzfausts, one Wandrei Faust — one each between the fingers of her right hand. Forming the first shell around her left arm, she bit her tongue and sprayed the blood over the talismans, pouring thauma into them to substitute the missing thaumine-gunpowder. Meanwhile, she extruded two thick Tar tendrils, forming the Schwarzfausts around them. The trick was twofold — the actual Wandrei Faust was on the right-hand Tar tendril, not her left arm, despite the fact doing this increased the difficulty significantly. She wouldn’t do it in a real fight, not yet. The second trick was a Smoke Eruption Breath, as dense and Isotope-laden as Krahe could make it, the living smoke already writhing in her chest before she even released it. The spoke spilled out, but with it, the words kept coming too. Having begun the torrent, her hands lacked the strength to shut the dam again. A cloud of glittering black surged from her mouth, writhing with serpentine shapes and menacing with teeth as it swam over the sand. As if alive, the smoke moved to obscure Krahe’s movements from Favonia specifically. She advanced, releasing her three theurgic missiles, whose forms blended almost seamlessly into the cloud as they closed the gap with Favonia. Favonia, in turn, scattered swaths of the encroaching cloud without much effort, only to find that it swarmed back into place in a manner more befitting insects than the mass of smoke and ash it was. Despite being able to disperse the whole cloud with ease, the saintess elected to put up only a token resistance, finding that while the smoke proved smothering even to her sight, it failed to suppress her other senses in any significant way.
“Two decades, I spent carving away at myself and searching for weapons that could slay any dragon!” Krahe bellowed. “Even then, even having clad myself in steel, even having stripped from myself the weakness of flesh, even having become a monstrosity unequaled in violence throughout the skyless hell of concrete that I called home, the dragons of my world still won! All my life, my struggle, my crusade for what?! A spectacular failure, all because I made the mistake of trusting myself to a coward who bent to the promise of an easy life! Whoever you are now, whomever you were in your past life, I couldn’t possibly care less! How dare you, how dare anyone insinuate that I am not doing all that I am capable of?!”
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The words and emotions that spilled forth were not new, they were not something suppressed suddenly geysering out when given the opportunity. These were all old things, well-worn linens that Krahe was more familiar with than the unmarred flesh she dwelt in. But if the purpose of this exercise was to dig through things, to determine the best method by which to overcome her present shortfalls and mend the cracks in her strength, then this, too, was necessary. All these insecurities, doubts, the history of self-inflicted pariahhood and suffering, they were all close friends to her, cornerstones to the foundation of who and what she was. Time and time again, throughout her long crusade of a “mere” quarter-century, Krahe had considered the path she had walked until that point and the path ahead of her, she had spent many hours of subjective time simply thinking while a fraction of that time passed by in reality. Countless times, she had considered and reconsidered her doubts, and in spite of the occasional consideration of whether it might be best to resign herself to the coward’s way out, whether to simply hide and “live well,” she had concluded it to be impossible.
“And yet you persist upon this path, even given the chance to start from naught, you continue in this struggle!” Favonia countered. She met two of Krahe’s flying fists in a contest of strength, mustering enough of her own to equal them and not an iota more, while the third circled. Expecting the third fist to fire a beam, Favonia simply willed her hair to defend her, but it was in fact the fist grasping her right hand that poured sufficient fire into her palm to carve through a stone wall. Not an unforeseen outcome, but a pleasant, if small surprise.
“What good is a road, painstakingly laid out, if I don’t walk it? What good is a sword, carved from my own bones and oiled with my own blood, if I don’t slay a dragon with it?! So what if I am to crawl in the mud pulling up weeds and squashing pests for a few weeks, a few months, a few years or decades!” Krahe reasserted. She had walked this far, she had made of herself what she was, and with her self-given purpose unfulfilled, she couldn’t bear to relinquish it. She was much closer to Favonia now, and, following the sound, Favonia had no issue tracking her position. Krahe, knowing this, immediately moved when she fell silent. Knowing that her movement disturbed the smoke, she drew out a dagger and astro-dived, blending into the mass. Favonia could still track Krahe in this state, even as she moved far more quickly and erratically than someone of Krahe’s own weight-class could reasonably track. Like a rabid animal, Krahe leapt out of the smoke at Favonia, enveloping her dagger in a layer of ash and black glass as she flew. A burst of heat erupted from the diminutive blade, turning it into a flaming sword for just that moment. A bundle of Favonia’s hair moved to defend, but in concert with a whip of black glass from Krahe’s left hand, the attack cut through and struck the banisher across the face.
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