“Wait,” said Naomi, the tension in her voice causing all three of them to snap their gazes toward her. “What’s that?”
She was pointing into the distance, across the length of Bastion, their high vantage point giving them a perfect view of the city in its entirety and the opening to hell at its very end.
Scorio’s gaze was drawn to that circular portal, which had shone an alluring blue, betraying a cerulean sky that had always felt right.
But now the sun-wire’s distant anchor, held in place by three great bridges, was being engulfed by undulating shadows. Great tendrils were creeping in ahead of a vast cloud that blotted out the sky.
“Is—is that Coal mana?” asked Lianshi, stepping up alongside him.
“No,” said Naomi, voice tense. “I mean, I don’t think so.”
“Fiends?’ Leonis took a few steps toward it. “Is Bastion under attack?”
“Could be.” Naomi licked her lower lip nervously, her brow furrowed.
They all did the same. Watched as an ocean of shadow slowly flooded into Bastion, causing the far end of the sun-wire to dim, entering an artificial First Rust, then darker yet to First Clay, then its very terminus disappearing altogether.
“Should we get back to the Academy?” asked Lianshi, glancing at Naomi.
“It doesn’t look like it, but it’s coming in fast,” said Scorio.
“But it’s not filling the whole city,” said Leonis. “See? It’s moving through the air but not smothering everything.
Like ink dropped into water, the darkness unfurled into countless gyres, its pushing edge thin and ethereal, its heart impenetrable. But it wasn’t flooding out to press against the buildings that encircled the sun-wire. Instead, it projected ever farther into the sky, spearing out alongside and around the sun-wire, enveloping it in places and in others furling around it.
“Look,” whispered Naomi, raising her hand to point. “In the center. Do you see that?”
Scorio squinted, sharpened his darkvision, but it didn’t help against the cloud’s darkness. For a long moment they simply stared, straining, and then he saw.
A dot emerged from the growing cloud’s heart and moved to the fore, arms extended out to its side, a cloak undulating behind it.
“Long hair,” whispered Lianshi. “Looks like a… woman?”
“Who…?” Leonis cleared his throat. “Who could do something like that?”
“Nobody I’ve ever heard of,” said Naomi, taking a step back. “Maybe… maybe a Charnel Duke? A Crimson Earl? I’ve… I’ve no idea. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The figure was drawing ever closer. Though she appeared to hover, unmoving in the air, in truth she was sweeping forward at a terrible speed, borne before the coiling cloud of night, her face resolving into a pale speck, her clothing so black as to cause her to blend in with the shadows around her.
Something within Scorio quailed at the sight of her. An intangible part of his being, wiser perhaps, more attuned to threats than his conscious mind. With every passing second, she drew closer, and the closer she drew the greater the pressure he felt mount upon his soul.
“Should we… it looks like she’s coming right for us,” said Lianshi, voice cracking. “Should we hide?”
“We should get out of the open,” said Naomi, tone decisive. “Come on!”
Scorio didn’t want to tear his gaze away from the figure. Others had risen into the air from different parts of the city—other Great Souls with the power of flight. But none of them were moving to intercept the dark stranger.
“Yes,” said Scorio, voice quiet, turning his body away from the approaching figure even as he kept his eyes locked on her. “Out of sight is good.”
They rushed around the side of the Academy toward the great tear in its walls and slipped into the welcoming darkness within.
For a moment Scorio felt relief at the coolness of the interior, but then his brow began to prickle with sweat and he found himself swallowing again and again. Losing sight of the woman was somehow even worse than watching her approach.
“We should move deeper into the Academy,” said Leonis, striding to the back of the large chamber.
“Should we check if she goes to ground somewhere else?” Lianshi had her arms crossed over her stomach. “How are we to know what’s happening?”
Impulsively, Scorio darted into the great rend in the wall and stared out over the city. He felt a sickening lurch in his gut as if the bottom had fallen out from his stomach at the sight of the woman. She was only a few hundred yards away now, flying toward them at the peak of a roiling pyramid of darkness that extended all the way back toward the far end of the city.
And she was staring right at him.
For a moment he could only stand there, a heavy weight crushing his chest, heartbeat slowing, turning sluggish, his breath catching in his throat. He stared at the woman, her gaze searing into his even at this distance, her beauty perilous, her hair and form looking to be half-shadow.
Her face was narrow, her cheekbones raw and prominent, her eyes ringed with darkness under arched brows. Her lips were full, painted a deep burgundy, but her skin was pallid to the point of looking unwell, the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks standing out starkly against her waxen skin.
But her eyes. They seized his attention and gripped him tight. Held him against his will, drained him of thought, of motive power. He felt like a rat, frozen before a serpent, cold spreading through his body, unable to do anything but watch her draw ever closer, her gown fluttering, her hair melding with her cloak and the greater darkness.
Terrible and beautiful, overwhelming and fey.
Someone gripped his arm and hauled him back. The moment he lost sight of her some measure of his sense of self returned, and he gasped, hands moving to his throat.
He’d ceased to breathe the entire time he’d looked upon her awful majesty.
“Run,” he rasped, struggling free of Leonis’s grip. “Run!”
He led them deeper into the Academy, fighting to not hyperventilate, jaw clenched, a terrible, sour taste in the back of his throat. Ran, not choosing which way he went, but simply fleeing, deeper and deeper into the old Academy.
She couldn’t be coming for them. For him. Who was she? What did she want? Why was she here?
These questions repeated themselves endlessly in his mind, a desperate patter that he couldn’t answer but couldn’t stop asking.
They tore through the hallways, leaped over fallen columns, took the detours around the collapsed rooms, until at last, they burst into the Aureate Hall. The light of First Bronze was filtering in through the cracks overhead, but even as they stepped toward the white, desiccated trees, the light wavered and began to darken.
“She’s overhead,” whispered Lianshi, hand rising to her mouth. “Is she following us?”
“No,” said Naomi. “She must want something with the Academy, or perhaps the Portal. We’re… it’s just an accident that we’re here.”
“Then we should hide,” said Scorio. “I don’t know who or what she is, but the less attention we draw the better.”
“Look,” said Leonis, gaze fixed on the ceiling. Tendrils of shadow were insinuating their way through the cracks, occluding them one by one, sinking like the roots of some ebon tree.
“Keep moving,” croaked Lianshi, rushing toward the giant-sized doors. “Come on!”
Wordlessly they fled across the Aureate Hall, the light dimming with each passing moment, and through the crack in the doors into the massive basilica beyond.
“What if we hide in the Gauntlet?” asked Scorio, leading the way between the biers. “Wait this out in there?”
“Not a bad idea,” said Naomi. “Though if she wrecks this place, we could be trapped there for eternity.”
“Or till we die and return to the Archspire,” said Leonis moving out wide, palm ghosting over the surface of each bier he passed as he frowned up at the huge dome overhead.