Warrior of the Void Book 1, Chapter 45

Faced with nearly half a dozen creatures bearing down on her, Muur and Lilira, Kofle tore her weapon out of its sheath– just in time to catch a glimpse of the kind of creatures they were facing. A shiver went down Kofle’s spine at the sight, a revulsion and hatred for their kind born of the hundreds of thousands that they slaughtered during The Fall.

A pair of wings as long as they were tall beat the air to keep them afloat. “Blanga!” She shouted with barely restrained bloodlust. The only response her cry garnered from the Voidsents was another round of cacophonous laughter as a wicked smile split the sharp, elongated beak of their horned heads.

“You sure are noisy for meals on wings.” Muur grumbled, frustration and adrenaline bypassing her usual filters as she licked her chops at the sight. She still remembered how good their wings had tasted after she ripped them out, like the best smokehouse steak of her life. Which, of course, meant she wasted no time giving them a good sear as she released the built up Fire aether on her staff in a massive fireball.

They, obviously, made to dodge. Fliers were annoying like that. Which was why she followed it up by spitting a small lance of lightning from her mouth, destabilizing the fireball so it’d airburst on the fools like flak shot.

The ploy worked– so far as it sent one of the creatures crashing down to earth with a screech and ruined wings. Bouncing once against the ground, it fell not even two meters away from Muur. To the mage’s dismay, its graceless fall barely affected it. Its scramble upright was less of a coherent struggle and more of messy, uncontrolled flailing of its spindly limbs, but the result was the same.

There it stood, looming over her and too close for her to cast another spell.

It tried to swipe at her with a nub crowned by two sickly, shriveled fingers that could only be called a hand by the broadest of definitions. The glowing disk of aether that smashed into its vaguely avian face, and stunned it for a split second, saved Muur the trouble of blocking that rather clumsy strike. Instead she was given all the time in the world to take a good, long look at the rest of it.

It was as tall as the average man, but only because of its posture. A hunch so pronounced that its neck was taller than its head and its spine a true question mark, even its knees were crooked things. They looked as if they were permanently bent in a shape meant more for perching than waddling around, let alone walking.

She smashed it upside the head with a Fire-charged focus crystal encased in mythril flanges, spiking up the potency of her aether a second notch as the fireball exploded point blank to compliment the certainty of steel to the skull.

Metal met obsidian-coloured flesh of the creature’s neck, and shockingly? Flesh did not lose. Not to the mythril that bashed it, nor to the flames that bloomed on contact. That wasn’t to say that it won, only that a strike that would have snapped the neck of any man in Muur’s previous home failed to do so here.

The Voidsent pushed past the remains of the wizard’s spells with another swipe– Or attempted to, as it was stopped in its tracks by another shield-missile. Though, this time with an attached cat-gladiator payload, “No time to explain, but they’re made of animated stone!” Grabbing a horn, Kofle pulled. An act that came to absolutely nothing at first– but just as it seemed to be a futile motion, Muur could swear that her girlfriend’s neck tattoo almost glistened for a split second. Before she could even wonder if it had been more than the moon’s light playing on the Mi’qote’s skin, the Voidsent’s weakened neck gave out. 

Yet, rather than the sickening sound of tearing flesh, it was the sound of breaking masonry that filled the air, “Magic’ll serve us bett– Fucking–!” Dodging an aerial lunge from one of the fliers, Muur’s girlfriend didn’t even hesitate to throw her newfound possession at the would-be assailant, “Get down from here you piece of–!”

It needn’t be said that Muur got on with the programme, slinging fireballs and lances of lightning liberally to accomplish her girlfriend’s wish, her aether roused as high as it’d go with her pyromancy.

As Muur quickly learned, flames proved to be relatively harmless to the flying gargoyles. Wherever they licked at the Voidsents, it inflicted mostly cosmetic burns and stained their stone-flesh with soot. But that wasn’t where they excelled. 

No, in an inverse of the usual role Fire and Thunder served in her kit. Instead of felling the creatures, her fire spells showed themselves to be perfect in forcing the creatures to the ground, where they were greeted by Kofle’s flashing steel.

As for her thunderbolts? Whichever area they’d hit, the obsidian flesh of the monsters would turn a pale, sandy yellow. In the case of one particularly unlucky blanga, her spell must have brushed against something especially important, as the whole Voidsent turned to stone and fell to the ground, shattering in the process.

“How many of them–,” Gritting her teeth, Kofle bashed one of the grounded monsters with her shield, somehow also managing the feat of firing off an aetheric copy of it at one of the flying Voidsents, stopping a swoop attack aimed at Muur in its tracks by hitting one of its wings and sending it crashing down, “–are there!?” But even as a Muur kept on blasting with her aether at full burn, the pair of adventurers found themselves pushed back towards the Sultantree as more gargoyles flocked to the battle.

“Enough that I have to switch to Ice soon.” Muur replied as she reduced a gargoyle’s skull into a plume of dust with a Lightning-infused bash. “Cover me for a second!”

Rather than answer, Kofle placed herself right in front of her girlfriend. With a deep inhale of the rapidly cooling evening air, the gladiator held her shield arm to her side and away from her. Sensing a weakness, two blangas rushed towards her, “May my flesh,” The miqo’te recisted, seemingly unaware of the attack coming her way, “become the rampart upon which evil shall break itself-!”

The swordswoman entire body glowed just as the voidsents claw would have dung deep into her and– Clunk

One was shorn off, a strike worthy of a cheetah severing the Voidsent’s arm at the elbow. The other thunked uselessly against Kofle’s armour– no. Not her armour, but rather against a lattice of small hexagons that hung barely a millimeter off of her.

“Sanity and insanity. Blue heat, black heart. Instinct and intellect.” Muur chanted, little more than a crutch to help steel herself as she gripped her aether with an iron grip and wrenched, forcefully shifting its alignment and polarity, “I want the freedom of calm!”

Static Fire gave way to Dynamic Ice, salty spice replaced by smoky umami and razor sharp mint mingling on her tongue as her aether surged and multiplied. Muur swung her staff like a baseball bat, spraying icy shrapnel in a wide arc at everything that dared fly in her airspace, hoarfrost quickly encroaching on Voidsent wings and limbs.

In violation of almost every physical principle, and at least of dozen aetherical ones that Muur had been taught and observed herself, her ice seemed to do very little to the creatures. Not nothing, as she could see the sandstone that formed their bodies crack and splinter from the inside as frost creeped into them.

But it didn’t stop any of the Voidsents, whatever dark magic animated the gargoyle’s lithified flesh it didn’t yield to things such as ‘physics’ and stubbornly kept the monsters whole– if slightly crumbly. Worse, they almost seemed to relish her newest spell.

“...Hah, I knew it. Same taste, same stuff. If you were Ice and Darkness aspected you’d have healed right then and there, wouldn’t you?” Muur grinned, simply shifting her focus to polarity-neutral Lightning and the odd Scathe mixed in as she speared and smashed the troublesome things. All the Dynamic Ice motes orbiting around her needed to do was recharge her aether faster than she could spend it. “Now, why is Lightning doing that to you? You’re Earth aspected, so you should be countering it, is it destabilizing your connection to the statues you’ve been summoned into?”

That was a native property of Lightning, as far as she could tell in her personal experience. Disrupting aether and whatever system it was introduced into. How that would change when she figured out how to aspect it to Dynamism or Stasis remained to be seen.

In response, one of the Gargoyles swooped down and tried to claw the lizard wizard. A plan that her sword-wielding wild cat took offense to and answered by jumping up and grabbing one of its legs as it passed above her. The sudden weight brought it down to the ground, where Kofle’s quick follow up took the shape of shattering its knee with her armoured boot and a decisive decapitating strike.

“Alright. Next one–” A deep scowl formed on the Miqo’te’s face as the remaining seven voidsents chose to hang back, rather than throw themselves at the pair, “Muur, something’s wrong.”

This entire time, the horde of gargoyles hadn’t batted an eye at the possibility of death. Almost as if the idea of being killed was held on the same pedestal as the chance of feeding off of the adventurers’ aether. They’d thrown themselves at them without so much as a single thought, a dozen of shattered sandstone sculptures attesting to that single fact.

But here they were, choosing to wait. To observe…

“Is it over?” Lilira’s voice came from the mass of roots at the Sultantree’s base. As soon as the fighting had begun, the noble had dove into their protective embrace and, being a Lalafell, had managed to stay almost completely hidden until now. With the sound of constant fighting gone, she’d risked a peek at the situation outside– clearly against her better judgement, if the look on her face was anything to go by.

“It isn’t. Something big’s coming.” Muur grit out as she licked her lips, the taste of Darkness increasing until it felt like someone had poured liquid smoke on her tongue, “Kofle, I may try for a long shot. Be ready to roll with some real weirdness if it actually works.”

The gladiator made to ask what her friend meant, but was stopped in her tracks when dark wisps of aether started to pour out of the broken Gargoyles. At first, what danced on Muur’s tongue was the same umami-smokiness as before… But then came the orbs.

One by one, the corpses released a sphere of pure darkness. They too oozed dark aether, clearly being their source in this situation, but their core was a nodule of sickly, pulsating purple.

Perhaps they were the Voidsent’s souls, or maybe clumps of aether similar to the arcanist's carbuncle. They could even be the physical manifestation of the creatures’ rancour for all the thaumaturge knew. The only thing she was certain of, was that the instant they’d broken free of the shell that had enclosed them, rot and decay had invaded her mouth, flooding it like she was being drowned in a pond of stillwater and scum.

“What the Fu–,” Kofle’s quiet swear was cut short when the dark tendrils of the orbs began to converge into a single point right in front of them, “Voidgate!”