[The Twining] 30. A City Aflame (Patreon)

In the moment of its demise, the pearlescent serpent glared into the eyes of a young girl possessed by a dead queen. The half elf girl was barely dressed, a bloody bed sheet wrapped around her waist, and her hair was in disarray. None of that mattered.

Just as the serpent’s tail lashed the sky, forming a scythe of wind, a beam of molten white gushed from the girl’s hands like a blade, stabbing through the beast’s mouth. Pillars of fire rose all around her like a ribcage. Within that fiery cage, the elven civilians appeared so small. The little girl herself was the most diminutive of all, but she was also the center of the scene, the focal point of the shielding fire and the penetrating lance.

Isen had borne witness to the power of monster cultivators countless times, but this was his first time seeing a mage pushed to their limits. The moment felt… magical. It was as though crystallized in time, branded into his memory.

Isen hadn’t been directly in front of the serpent’s wind blast when it whipped its tail at the elves. That barely mattered. If he hadn’t swung himself to the side, twisting his hands over the sword hilt protruding from the serpent’s tail, he might have lost his entire lower body.

Instead, he received the most delicate of glancing blows. Even that was enough to tear him from Druinala’s borrowed sword and launch him into the air, hurtling through the dark sky over Shevenar.

The world went by so quickly, he could barely process the sight of the carnage beneath him. Buildings were on fire, the smoke trailing up into the sky, melding with the dark cloud from the blue-green pyre. Civilians ran through the streets, drayavin chasing them. He also saw some people fighting back, though far too few.

He hadn’t seen what had happened to everyone around the returned queen, but he felt a horrible sinking feeling in his chest. There had been gaps in the pillars of blazing light that manifested in front of the elves. The serpent’s scything energy should have swept through the gaps like an unstoppable blade.

A terrible pain wracked Isen’s body, distracting him from such concerns. He felt a burning sensation across his waist, along with warm wetness. He pressed a hand to the injury. It was a deep cut above the bottom hem of his red tunic. It started just above his hips and ended around his naval, cutting through viscera. He frantically tried to cycle energy, but it was hard to gather the ambient mist when he was moving so quickly, and it was less dense so high in the air.

His arc reached its peak and he began to plummet, closer to the other side of the city—the front gate. He saved himself from falling to his death by conjuring energy balls, one in his mouth and the other with his left hand, blasting them downward to arrest his fall.

The abrupt change in direction alone nearly sent him into unconsciousness, but he held on, his tempered body pulling through as he circled energy through his meridians. He bounced once, then skidded across the stones, picking up scrapes and badly battering his right arm, held protectively over his abdomen. Every movement was agonizing and provoked the injury across his waist.

Stunned, he lay on his back for a few seconds and breathed, just thankful to be alive and in one piece. That was all the time he had before drayavin approached, their eyes glowing like hot coals in the dark. Muddled from the impact, their forms appeared blurred; he could hardly tell what monstrous features they possessed.

But Isen didn’t need to see them properly to react. He didn’t have much strength left, but still he stood. He snarled at the mutants and moved as though to brandish Druinala’s blade, only to realize it was still embedded in the serpent, halfway across the city.

He glanced at his surroundings—he was alone. I could draw the divine dagger, he reasoned. No one will see. But that was his last resort.

What else did he have? He glanced at his left hand, only to realize that it was covered in pale ichor—the tier three blood of the serpent. He brought the limb to his mouth and licked the blood clean, desperate for even the smallest amount of healing.

He felt a small jolt of relief, but the volume of blood was less than a mouthful; it couldn’t do much.

That’s when the first drayavin lunged at him, its fangs snapping at his injured side, going straight for his vulnerability. Isen didn’t have time to draw the dagger even if he’d wanted to. He reacted on instinct, clawing at its face with his left hand and pushing it away with his right.

His nails cut deep, destroying one of the eyeballs, but his push was less effective. The drayavin cried out over its ruined eye, but it pinned him to the ground. As its lupine jaws came for his head, Isen released an energy ball from his mouth. The mutant yelped as it soared up, smashing hard onto the stone.

There were two more in the wings, but they froze upon seeing Isen’s attack. Isen staggered to his feet and conjured up another ball of energy, just holding it in his palm. It took all his waning concentration to do so.

The mutants stared at him with wary, sinister eyes, waiting for him to move.

Isen sent the ball forward and they scattered.

Though his stomach was a mess of pain, his limbs worked just fine. He jumped up and caught the gutter of a building, pulling himself up—his stomach screamed—and landing in a stumble. He sprinted over the rooftops, trusting the sixth sense to take him where he needed to go. Even with all the proof he had that it really did work, he second-guessed himself the whole way. It was so easy to doubt something that couldn’t be perceived.

Glancing behind, he saw that two of the lupine drayavin were still following him, though they kept their distance. They were waiting for him to get tired, or at least tired enough that he needed to stop.

Shevenar’s roofs were slanty and ended in multiple curving points, as though modeled off lily flowers. They were smooth, with thin, interlocking shingles like scales. In Goldbounty, the roofs were often made of rough thatching and were shaped like upside down books, pointed and rigid. Isen wasn’t sure which roof style he preferred, but he was far more familiar with Goldbounty’s variant. On the sloping roofs, he kept almost missing his steps, almost mistiming his jumps, but he never made a fatal error.

He kept hoping his pursuers would give up, but the opposite happened. More joined them—other wolfish monstrosities. Isen noted that drayavin of other monster types didn’t join the chase.

When the seventh lupine mutant joined, the impasse shattered. The mutants rushed toward him, abandoning caution. One of them lost its balance and slid forward ahead of its brethren, bowling Isen over and knocking him off the roof. He twisted to adjust his landing, but still rolled his ankle. Thankfully, his tempered body was resilient to that kind of injury, so he ignored the pain in his joint—which was already dwarfed by the agony of his stomach—and dodged to the right to avoid the drayavin’s heavy body.

Sounds of battle lay past a corridor of houses and shops. He had mere seconds before the closest drayavin reached him, and he was so drained it was an effort to form even a weak energy ball between both hands.

He was at his limit, but he pushed on. He hoped to find a better path to survival, but if all his running led to a dead end, he still had his trump card.

When he rounded the corner, he met with another scene of mass carnage. But this time, it wasn’t half elven corpses who littered the ground, but drayavin and monsters, their bodies like clotted blood in the seam of the gate. A team of warriors tangled with drayavin that pushed past the deceased to enter Shevenar. Ten frontliners engaged with spears, while from behind—Isen figured on the fortified wall and the rooftops—archers pelted the enemy with arrows.

But there was an entirely separate fight going on in parallel between a man in dark metal armor and a slight woman, every inch of her covered in cloth save for her clawed hands and feet, and the furred wings that protruded from her back. They both appeared moderately injured, the man’s black armor slashed and dented, with blood seeping from his left gauntlet. The woman’s wings were folded behind her back, and blood dripped from them onto the cobblestones.

Just looking at the two warriors required active effort. It was as though their twin wills to murder were manifest as actual forces, suppressing those who were weaker in the vicinity.

Isen shuddered in instinctive terror, his hand tightening on his waist.

Tier threes.