Chapter 11 A Return to Form (Patreon)

Khall woke, groaning. The air was choked with ash, smoke, and soot. She wasn’t sure where exactly she was, but it was sure that she was no longer in the Second Step. The air was no longer rich with the feeling of arcanite, and the smog was again keeping her vision clouded. Maybe it wasn’t so bad that she couldn’t see around herself, though, since she had evidently been able to escape the flying beasts. She could feel the branch still impaling her shoulder and keeping her from settling comfortably onto the ground. Looking over her shoulder, Khall saw that the stick protruded maybe .5ft from her back, where it ended in a sharp, jagged point where it had broken from the tree. The entire thing was coated in her rusty dried blood, and every scale of her body throbbed in agony.

With another whimper of pain, Khall rose to her feet. The sharp part of the branch that still protruded from her chest had lightly hit against the ground and sent another wave of agony through her, and Khall couldn’t help herself from piteously crying out from the pain. Somehow, she seemed to have escaped the bird’s pursuit, but that didn’t mean that there was no danger to Khall now. First and foremost, the thing that had speared through her. Though every movement was agony, Khall forced herself to try to reach back or forward to pull it out with her jaws. She barely couldn’t reach, it was nearly long enough for her head to reach. On top of that, Khall didn’t even try with her hands to reach the thicker end of the branch that still protruded from her back. There was no way she could reach it, since her forelegs weren’t built to twist and turn around like that. 

For a brief moment, she considered trying to pull the branch through her chest, where the thinner, sharp end jutted out. She could reach it there, but Khall realized pretty quickly that doing so would require that she pull the thicker end through her, and that was even worse than pulling it out her back. But how could she pull it from her back when she couldn’t reach it? Unsuccessful, Khall tried several more times to stretch out her head and neck enough to dislodge the offending and soul-rendingly painful branch. Eventually, after repeated attempts and no luck, Khall collapsed to the ground in defeat, her neck cramping.

The impact against the ground as she flopped to the ground set Khall’s mind to reeling, as she had unthinkingly smashed the tip of the offending branch into the earth. She felt the wood scrape inside of her against her ribs and shoulder blade, and the sudden surge of agony caused her to cry out in pain once again. Though it was uncomfortable, she flopped over onto her side to keep the stake driven through her from jostling on anything else. As she looked down at her wounded body, Khall realized that when she had let herself fall to the ground, she had moved the root enough to cause herself to start bleeding once again. As her blood began to make the dirt under her into a thick slurry, Khall realized that her stupidly dramatic fall to the ground seemed to be the only solution to her current problem.

Before she could convince herself otherwise, Khall stood once more before throwing herself onto her back feet. She wasn’t built to stand on her hind legs, and immediately her thick tail pressed forcefully into the ground and forced her upper body, currently arched into the air, to swing back towards the ground… exactly as she had planned. Khall spread her arms wide as if she were trying to scratch her back while holding her head as far back as she could. Just as soon as she was able to get herself into the position, Khall’s chest smashed into bone-shuddering contact with the ground. Well, there was something that hit the unforgiving earth before her chest was able to.

The tip of the stake hit the ground, and it was just as well that Khall couldn’t stop herself, because the explosion of agony that erupted when the stake was pushed forcefully through her torso immediately crippled her mind. Different from the searing heat and bubbling flesh from her encounters with flame, the localized, sharp agony of the wood scraping through her insides was deeper and more profound, more indescribably agonizing. Regardless, there had been a purpose to this suffering, and as soon as Khall was able to gather herself (several self-pitying minutes later), she turned her head and hoped and prayed that this suffering was going to come to an end. 

Stretching out her head as best as she could, Khall could barely reach the very end of the branch with the tip of her snout. Desperately, she tried to make meaningful contact with her tormentor, but she couldn’t. Her lips were just too rigid, and her neck too short. No matter how she ground her teeth or stretched her shoulder or thrashed her tail, Khall simply couldn’t reach the stick. It was too far. She wanted to weep, and could feel the desperation begin to bleed to hopelessness. Looking down, her chest was steadily leaking blood, and Khall could feel herself beginning to weaken.

Before she could truly lose herself to wallowing in self pity, though, Khall saw there was a faint glimmer of hope. The slightest bit of the branch remained protruding from her chest, and Khall again resolved herself. This needed to be DONE. She couldn’t dig a safe burrow with this stick sticking out of her body, she couldn’t heal or hunt with it still there, and, frankly, she hated the stupid Void-created branch. Trees sucked, and if she ever had the opportunity, she would tear them all down. How dare they be beautiful and then do that to her! Trees didn’t deserve to be thought of as beautiful, and she never would think a tree was beautiful ever again!

With that righteous fury still bubbling in her heart, Khall took both her hands and began to press them hard into the sharp tip of the branch. She felt the scales on her hand begin to split under the pressure, but still she pushed. She felt her blood, both from her chest and now her hand, begin to spill and cover her hands, and still she pushed. She felt her arms weaken and her determination falter, still she pushed. Finally, Khall’s pushing hands reached her chest, where she could feel her ribs beginning to cave slightly at the pressure. The stake was finally pushed as deep back into her as she could manage, and all that she currently had to show for it was her own spilled blood, thick with the scent of iron, covering her arms and chest and steadily dribbling down to the earth beneath her.

This was it, Khall couldn’t be sure that it had worked, but if it hadn’t… then she’d need to accustom herself to living with the massive, ugly, painful, terrible, horrible stake driving through her. With more forced confidence and strength than ever before, she twisted her neck and head and stretched out as far as she possibly could. There was an agonizing pulse that ran through Khall as she made contact with the end of the branch, but she had made contact! The last little bit of the stake that had still been protruding from her chest had been enough, and her teeth bit into the branch and slowly, painfully, Khall began to pull it out. 

She forced herself not to rush or pull the branch too quickly, for fear of breaking it while any part of it was still inside the wound. Every second that passed was a new torture, but the longer it went on, the less miserable Khall was as she felt herself grow ever closer to success. Finally, with a victorious twist of her head, the branch was pulled completely free of her body. She sagged to the ground and felt her blood continuing to flow out of the massive hole in her chest, but Khall let herself lay there, glorying in the victory of freedom. 

As she gloried in her newfound renewed freedom, Khall didn’t notice when she passed out.

She dreamed of climbing higher, to the Third, Fourth, Fifth Steps and beyond. Khall felt herself grow larger, stronger, more intelligent. She could feel herself better embodying volatility as her path continued to the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Steps before reaching the final, divine Ninth Step. She stood among the stars, something she couldn’t see but knew were majestic. There, she felt… welcomed. Comfortable. Relaxed. After all, reaching the pinnacle of the Ninth Step was every creature’s dream. The dream of every Stine. Completed.

Every dream came to its end, though, and Khall was forced to painful wakefulness. Even before she could open her eyes, the little words greeted her as they did every time she woke up.

[Proceed towards the Divine Summit, Ascension awaits. The System guides Stines. Ascend from the Void below. The Stars await you.]

Khall couldn’t even bring herself to groan in frustration at the repeated words. The letters meant the words, but the words themselves meant nothing to her. Maybe the words had something to do with her dream from before, maybe not. Regardless, the words were stupid. She didn’t like them. They didn’t give her food, they didn’t keep those birds from trying to eat her, and they didn’t keep the branch from stabbing her. Thus, the words were worthless.

Disregarding the words and their useless selves, Khall finally gathered enough strength to groan and open her eyes. The movement of her eyelids felt as if she’d had sand scrubbed under her eyelids, and Khall was tempted to close them tight once again, but she was able to push the temptation away. Instead, with another pained grunt, Khall stood up enough to look at her wounded chest. Sand had clumped and coagulated with her blood under where she’d laid for however long, and more of the sand had dried and stuck to her wound. She tried for a moment to turn and look at her wounded back, but as she did so, Khall could feel her barely scabbed over chest beginning to crack and pull apart. As she pulled her head back to simply looking forward, the pain stopped, so there were no further attempts at investigating the wound on her back. 

Then, Khall’s stomach rumbled. Or, maybe more correctly, whined. It was too weak to rumble or roar as it had before, but instead, she just felt too weak to do anything. Even so, Khall needed to eat, and in order to eat, she needed to hunt. But how could she do that when she could only barely walk? She’d been fortunate to be in a deserted area of the First Step as she’d passed out for so long to begin to heal, but now that she was starving and hurting, Khall mourned every step she would need to take to find food. Even so, she needed to. With plodding steps, Khall began to trudge back to where she hoped she could find something to hunt or eat.

Fortunately for her, Khall quickly encountered her old nemesis. A lavaline saw her beautiful glowing form, or simply just happened across her, and seeing her current weak state, and decided it was time to hunt. As they always did, the lavaline tried to surprise her, but she was able to catch it quickly approaching from behind. It was fast enough that it leapt to begin raking its claws over her back while Khall shifted her body to ensure that its claws didn’t reach her wound. Unfortunately for the small, weak, fuzzy creature, scales remained the superior covering, and since Khall’s evolution to a Moltenscaled Drake, her scales had grown even thicker and stronger.

With a piercing scraping sound, the lavaline’s claws skittered off Khall’s back and down her right thigh. Her scales held firm as she thanked the Stars above that the lavaline’s jump had been easy enough to avoid well enough to keep from hitting her stressed and lightly bleeding back wound. Though it pained her to move so abruptly, Khall forced herself to whirl around and catch the lavaline in her jaws before it could begin to flee. After all, she knew the cowardly thieves–they would run whenever they got the chance. 

Khall hadn’t caught a lavaline since her evolution, and the only one she had killed since then had been an evolved form that had put up much more of a fight than this one. This was a juvenile, and in a single bite, Khall’s teeth chomped through bone before she got the notification.

[Juvenile Lavaline 4 slain. You have gained experience. Current Racial Designation: Juvenile Moltenscaled Drake. Current Occupation: None. Total level: 7]

With a grin, Khall began to eat her prey. Finally, things were going her way again.