120 Ashan 722
It started just as everything ended: in darkness.
The sky above was stygian and nearly opaque with murky shades of a nebulous storm. Lightning flashed between the foreboding haze, offering brief bursts of deep purples and blues to break up the blackness of it all. Thunder growled through the night. Thick, heavy rain drops spilled from the acrimony above to pelt the world below. The air was dense with more than the humidity of a present, ominous storm.
A claustrophobic sensation crept into Maxine's mind as the world around her became real, as though she was just born into it. A large, suffocating presence descended upon her. The sound of foot steps behind her rang out faintly against the raging thunderstorm. Then more, and more, until she turned her head and spied a crowd larger than any she'd seen in some time moving quickly up at her heels. In the pouring rain and darkness they looked like naught but shadowy wraiths, but with a flash of lightning, she recognized a familiarity in their strange, uncommon bodies and wild eyes.
Instincts, even without understanding, took over and her feet quickened into a run. The wave of bodies swarmed with speed. She pumped her arms faster, willed her feet to pounce off the ground harder, but the swell was formidable. Like a hive mind it moved together, a ravenous amoeba of people, to overtake her. The malevolent rush crashed into her. She flinched.
No hands grabbed for her. No arms wrapped around her to spear her to the earth. The crowd moved around her, enveloping her within it with little more violence to her body than shoulder bumps that rocked her frame when she stood against its tide. All sorts of demographics slipped past her on this unknown path.
A general hodgepodge of races from across Idalos made up the march: mages warped by their disciplines in varying degrees of visible humanity, and marked bodies baring their blessings and curses for the world to see. In a flash, as they passed her by, Maxine thought she recognized a few: Naerikk sisters, giggling devilishly betwixt themselves, a robust Ithecal with elemental power oozing from his scales, a Sesser with ruined talons, a blonde Rupturer with a broken pick-axe, and a shaggy-haired man with flames encircling his fists.
She tilted her head, watching the uncanny silhouettes and others of familiar likeness mix and move on without her. She found her feet moving with the crowd rather than against it. No one seemed to pay her any mind. She was neither their enemy or their friend. They were neither trying to kill or ally with her. It was then, as she walked in their center, that she realized she was a part rather than apart of this herd. While each member was different than the other, as a group, Maxine was indistinguishable as an individual from the rest of this macabre. The animus that traveled with them belonged to her, too.
Pieces of this roily scene began to fall together in her mind. Memories and connections linked, and as she continued to walk with her pack while she sorted through this perplexity, the confusion did not linger too long. She knew this crowd and they knew her even better. The Naerikks, Ran'dar, the Sesser, and the mages all had belonged with her in one place: Level Seven of Slags Deep. Her heart quickened in her chest. While she didn't quite know exactly how large Level Seven was or how many living occupants it ever boasted at one time, she knew their number was large enough it must have included every level above, too.
Another crack of lightning illuminated the sky, revealing the path’s destination. The modest skyline of Scalvoris Town loomed ahead. The pace of the march’s drum seemed to accelerate, an excitement great and terrible urging them on. The cadence of the pummeling rain quickened. They started to spill into the town.
Max was wholly within the embrace of this army of kin now. She kept up, feet moving nearly mindlessly as though muscle memory and animalistic urge wired her actions. Her ears were deafened by the maniacal shrieks and rambunctious, unhinged laughter from criminals buried and crudely warped beyond recognition. It raised the hairs on the back of her neck and called her home all the same.
They invaded Scalvoris Town with overwhelming force now. Whooshes of flame filled hands and spread along shared torches. Windows smashed and doors were defeated. Pieces of her likeness invaded sleepy homes and businesses in small, disorganized groups in loud, predatory blitzkrieg. She knew the sounds of butchery when it hit her ears.
Citizens started to pop out of their residencies, dragged out like woodland prey and torn asunder by a pack of salivating wolves battling over who doled out what carnage. Flames spread across roofs and filled the smoking insides of ransacked houses. The boom of portals and grumble of summoned earth rang out over the screams elicited now from others besides the criminals.
Max watched all of this as she continued to travel with the war-party sized calamity. Everywhere she looked, they ravaged, boasting such speed and ferocity in this attack she saw no hope any of it could be stopped or a casualty spared. She walked on. Until the shadow of government buildings emerged ahead.
More lightning, and she could see now that a mysterious plume of ash had started to rise miles high over the island like a new thunderhead in the storm. The wind whipped and whirled like a separate, vengeful entity. Somewhere in the distance she swore she made out the sound of protesting wood groaning and whimpering under the crushing, merciless pressure of a flood carving its own entrance into the town.
Maxine’s head swam. She observed all of these things, the wrathful elements and the shadowy savages slowly turning their full attention to the true object of their ire. She planted her feet in the street and stared at the government buildings she knew housed the powers of the island. There was more familiarity here, not just in the actors but in the destruction.
She wasn’t using her Rusalkis. She wasn’t the culprit of these higher powers at work, both great and terrible. This orchestrated cacophony of criminals and killers descended here was not her doing. At least she hoped that was the case. She felt that was the case. There were other marked and mages here capable of all of this. And yet a feeling of uncertainty and dread filled her.
The riot. Faldrass. Was she not both traitor and conspirator? Hadn’t she lost control? Had she ever, even for a fleeting moment, possessed any concept of control? Hadn’t she done all of this, in some capacity, before?
Rooted in place in the street, the shadow of the powers that be here cast upon her, the energetic bodies of other criminals knocked into her like river rapids against a giant, stubborn boulder rolled tall into the water. More malevolent whoops and cries rang out as the government building was put to flame. Careless entities swarmed the inside to hunt for its occupants.
Everything had happened so fast. Max had been taken in by the swiftness and the violence of it all, a willing and thoughtless participant who had marched ever onward like she couldn’t stop herself.
But she was stopped now.
The smell of burning and death filled her nostrils. Screams, chants, wails, and the crumbling defeat of structures all around lived in her ears. A tightness entered her chest.
Wasn’t this what she had wanted? Isn’t this exactly what she wished for, planned for, prayed for every single trial she survived in Slags Deep?
Didn’t she still want this?
Maxine tried to remember all that...anger. All the spite, and bitterness, and rot that she let fester within herself until the blight infected so deep within that it couldn't be shucked off again. If her punishment had been just and virtuous, she should wear this crown of righteousness upon her head while she spoon fed it back through the unwilling mouth of the island who deserved the same medicine. Sending her to the gallows would've been more of a mercy. Now, with her affinity, she served as a manifestation of gallows walked straight to their doorsteps. The nooses came tied in angry knots, ready and hanging.
Isn't this right and just and sweetly cathartic now?
She watched smoke plumes throughout the town waft high into the sky. The firelight of arsons flickered against her face. She wrestled with the sensory overload and the question of her role here, searching for answers both outside and within herself but finding little enlightenment. Scalvoris Town continued to burn and fall. Shrills of fear and madness still echoed out, each note reaching the soul of the listener with its raw realness. Alarms of a reactionary force rang out, dulled by the devastation they set out to duel.
The Elements were formidable, but their fortitude was dulled by the delay of a dastardly descent that came with a ferocity that should've been fictitious. In one singular stroke of misfortune, either through chance or beautifully orchestrated, the criminal occupants of Slags Deep had been freed in mass. The most terrible shades of this populace had been liberated. Worse, they'd unusually unified under the banner of the most monstrous of the prison’s deepest underworld.
Apex predators that once hunted only one another in a bloody, lightless cavern coliseum now banded as one. They were the same that had taught Maxine cruelly to give no quarter. Even if the Militant succeeded in rallying his troops to beat down the depraved division of banished denizens, there would be little to salvage by the time it was done. They would be trapped between two critical tasks: fighting the killers and preventing the collapse of the burning, ravaged town. Time was running out.
The eyes of her criminal brethren fell upon her as more passed her, noticing her stillness in the wake of their assault and appraising its meaning. Another set of windows on the upper level of the government building blew out with a great ball of wielded flames. More screaming. Maxine could feel adrenaline in her blood, filling her nervous muscles fed by her pounding heart. Her grace period was over. She could feel it. Limbo was not a destination she had the privilege of staying. It was time to make a decision. She had to take a side and play her part, whatever it may be.
Who are you?
Maxine sunk into the darkness of herself while she searched for that answer. Her fingers curled into tight fists. Her breathing slowed like she'd just let out a long exhale of held Ambrosia. An eerie calmness took over her demeanor where she stood in the eye of this new storm. Her mind accepted exactly where she was and meditated on it. She took it into her lungs, held it, owned it, and breathed it out again. One last look at the scene as a whole and every other actor within it. She held it up like a mirror to herself.
Then she made her choice.
And acted upon it.
....And with the sudden, cold-sweat awakening that swept her from this dream, the answer was reaped and forgotten from her awareness all the same.
