78: Fractured
Cold water trickled down Eris’s skin as she sat on the edge of the shore- staring out at the pool. She didn’t speak. She didn’t want to speak. She just wanted to be quiet for a little bit while letting out shaky breaths.
Her lip hurt from where it was busted open.
Her lower regions were still sore.
Her neck throbbed because of how the fake Jaxie had been clenching it.
Her chest still felt like it was full of nails from the damage of the smoke bomb.
Her left wrist screamed at her any time she tried to move it, so she could assume it was fractured or something similar and left it resting on her thigh.
Meanwhile, the only sounds were that of a few hundred unnamed people cleaning up the sight of the battle behind Eris, occasionally coughing from the aftereffects of smoke inhalation.
So she sat. Silent and still and sore.
It let Eris look forward, at the wall of the cavern on the other end of the ocean, curling up into the roof that stretched over the entire kingdom. The spots of embedded Lightstone still looked like stars in a stormy sky, but now the rocky thunderclouds were split with lightning frozen in time. Jagged forks of golden light stretched over everything- the ceiling, the walls, the floor. It even sparkled through the water like luminescent bacteria. As if everything was broken in a way that wasn’t quite physical, and the magic within was leaking out.
Elmas was sitting just in front of Eris, a thick rag held in her good hand as she gently dragged it along the redhead’s face. It came away with a mixture of colours- some of it the same shade of grey-slag brown mud covering the completely immobile Warden everyone was working around. The rest of it was thick and red. Eris tried not to look at it too much. It was what was left of the women that tormented her for the last three weeks. The woman that raped her. The woman that threatened the safety of everyone she cared about if she got out.
But it was also the woman that only ever tried to do what she genuinely believed was right, and was willing to sacrifice everything- even her own morality- for the sake of the world. The woman who gave up all she was and succumbed to madness out of guilt for good she never had the chance to bring. The woman who was considering the possibility of staying in the Obelisk willingly and letting Eris and the others walk free.
Gods, Pravala was going to stay in the Obelisk.
Pravala wasn’t going to be a threat anymore, and Eris killed her. She killed her just because she wanted to. Eris not only planned out this entire premeditated murder of a woman who simply wanted to help, but even risked her own chances of being able to escape just to make sure Pravala died. Now, Pravala was a smear underneath the foot of a giant rock ball with legs, and there were several other bodies lying around including the man whose entire throat and chest opened up meaning that Eris murdered him too and there was blood everywhere and-
Eris felt it lurching up in her throat, prompting her to twist her body to the side and send a sputter of bile across the stone beside her. She was almost thankful she didn’t have breakfast that morning, since that would have been gone now. Instead, it was a few thin trails of sour liquid and dry heaves that hurt her stomach and scratched against smoke-scarred lungs. Elmas pat Eris gently on the back.
“I’m not going to say that it’s okay, because I would be lying. It isn’t okay. It won’t ever be okay. You took a life, and that’s something you can’t ever get back.”
Elmas’s good hand rested on Eris’s thigh right beside the redhead’s injured wrist. Just a few inches lower, the woman’s own wrist was a completely different tint. Where previously was a tattoo so dark and so potent it may as well have been charred flesh, there was now skin that was only a few shades darker than a stormcloud. While Elmas spoke, Eris could watch the pigment fade ever-so-gradually. Yet another sign to remind Eris that the woman she murdered really was dead.
“It also won’t ever get easier,” Elmas continued. “Every time it happens, it’s gonna hurt. It’s gonna make you feel like shit. We shouldn’t have the right to choose when someone gets to stop living, but sometimes we have to make that choice and it’s never fair.”
Eris coughed, a trail of spit and bile still clinging to her bottom lip while she was curled over. Her voice was raspy in her throat. “She- she was going to stay.”
Though she couldn’t immediately see Elmas because of their positions, Eris could hear the soldier shake her head.
“Maybe, maybe not. We can’t know what she was going to do- only what she’s already done. She almost murdered you in your own workshop, assaulted and violated you, then nearly gut Bailey like a pig over insults. She-”
Elmas was cut off by a string of coughs. When they ceased, Elmas took a long, shaky breath.
“Look, I would have completely understood letting her live and come back with us so she could help in the fight against the Hollow if she was sane. Sure, she impaled me and destroyed my class, but if that was what it cost to get an ally like her, I would have done it years ago, ten times out of ten. But this wasn’t one of those times, and it wasn’t the same circumstance at all.”
Elmas squeezed the cleaning rag in the water to rinse it out a bit, then started wiping the bile dripping down Eris’s lips and chin. The brunette continued.
“Pravala was completely unstable. Her mind was lost, and so was any ability to trust that she wouldn’t turn on the same people that needed to rely on her. Even if she had been a completely good person who never did anything bad previously and only had the best intentions, the fact of the matter is that a powerful but unreliable weapon is more dangerous to everyone than no weapon at all. Had she gotten out with us, she would have been a liability and a threat the Syndicate would need to deal with.”
Eris stayed quiet for a moment before letting her voice out in a whisper. “How many did I kill?”
“Eris, you only killed one person. Pravala killed the rest of-”
“How many did I kill?!” Eris growled, reaching her non-sore hand up and clasping onto Elmas’s wrist holding the cleaning rag. The woman stared into Eris’s eyes for a moment, then let out a sigh.
“Aside from Pravala, eight of the kingdomfolk are dead. Four seem to have been crushed by the Warden during the scuffle when nobody could see anything. Though, the Warden didn’t appear to be actively targeting any of the enslaved, so it seems that they were accidentally stepped on.”
As the guilt rose up in Eris’s stomach like another ball of bile ready to pour from her throat, Elmas continued. “One other lost a leg from the wound transfer skill, and the man who was working the winch still has a broken arm. Both are still alive and seem to be getting stabilized by the other enslav-... the others. Other than that, any injuries appear to be minor bruises and general smoke inhalation.”
“Nine people,” Eris spoke solemnly. “I just killed nine people.”
“No, you only killed eight. I killed one of them.”
Eris furrowed her brow. “W-what?”
Elmas’s jaw was squared. “I was working to release the winch, and someone was running at me through the smoke. I didn’t know if they were being controlled or not, and I wasn’t going to take that chance, so I struck first. Then, I made sure they couldn’t stop me from releasing the Warden, because that’s what I had to do.”
Eris looked back down at the glittering water of the shore just in front of her knees. Elmas leaned in closer.
“It couldn’t be helped, Eris. In truth, this was probably the best outcome that could have happened. If she got out and turned against the Syndicate, I can all but guarantee that a lot more people would have died trying to stop her. I know that logic won’t reduce the burden- trust me, I know. I’ve had to take lives before, and not all of them were guilty. Some of them were simply cases of ‘wrong place, wrong time’, and I have to live with that.”
Both stayed quiet for a moment. Eventually, Elmas did something that caught Eris by surprise. She hugged her.
Elmas pulled the redhead in close, doing a bit of an awkward, sitting, half-hug that only lasted a few seconds before the soldier settled back down into her spot and gave a sigh. Elmas idly twisted the silver ring on her right hand.
“The two hardest things to live with are the guilt and the consequences. It’s even harder to do it by yourself. You don’t have to.”
“Damned right you don’t!”
Eris turned her head just a bit to see Bailey walking towards them. She was still covered in mud from the digging session where the three of them had to carve into the Warden’s shell, though the three people keeping pace behind her were clean. Furthermore, they were holding piles of cloth, a few small boxes, and a few other bits and baubles.
“You may have pulled me in here accidentally, but I’m gonna tell you this right now, Cutiepie; I’m still your sex teacher, and you’re still my star pupil. You couldn’t get rid of me even if you wanted to. On an unrelated note- do you know how to swim?”
Eris raised an eyebrow. “I know how to stay above water,” she coughed through her abused throat, “but that’s about it. Not a whole lot of swimming opportunities in Kelshiir.”
“That’s good enough,” Bailey chirped, placing her hands on her hips. “Because that ocean water’s already gonna be cold as a frost giant’s cameltoe and I don’t want to have to worry about trying to keep you afloat.”
“A frost giant’s what?”
“Not important, sweetheart. A bunch of the villagers put together some aid supplies for us. There’s some bandages, blankets, food, boiled water, clean clothes, and some kind of fish oil stuff that may or may not be hair gel. I dunno- the guy that gave it to me just kept motioning that it goes in hair but I couldn’t understand a damn thing he was saying.”
Bailey tossed the little wooden jar of mysterious hair product back onto one of the piles of clothes, then took off her makeshift glasses to squint at the mud flecking over one of the lenses.
“Either way, we all need a damned bath. Especially…”
Bailey trailed off, but Eris knew exactly what the blonde was going to refer to. It was what she herself was distinctly trying to avoid looking at. After all, the man who tripped over Eris and subsequently had wounds transferred to him dumped so much blood onto her pants it was impossible to tell what their original colour was. It was sticky, horrendously warm, and made Eris’s stomach wrench just thinking about it.
Between that, digging through the Warden and scrambling around in the crater with the Altar and the modification runestone, and lastly Pravala’s explosive finish, Eris was a mess. Elmas’s cleaning rag was probably like trying to clean up after a tornado with a pair of tongs.
Eris swallowed, then gave a small nod. “Can… can you help me get undressed? I can’t move my wrist.”
A handful of minutes later, and a few garments of ruined clothing literally getting cut off Eris because it would have been too much work to clean them, Eris was holding onto the thick chain still hanging down into the ocean with her good hand and letting herself float. Meanwhile, a nude Bailey- also lightly holding onto the chain and floating- was cycling through an assortment of rags just beside her on the rocky shelf of the metaphysically-shattered shore glowing with light. Any time one of the rags got too dirty to keep using, she switched it out for another that then gently but insistently scrubbed away the filth on Eris’s injured arm. It was already turning shades of red and swelling.
Meanwhile, Elmas was sitting on the rock beside Eris, her lower half in the water but her bare, dirty upper half exposed to the world. She wasn’t focusing on cleaning herself, however. Instead, she was using the fish-oil product that Eris Inspected as an extremely rudimentary soap made with the aforementioned fish oil as well as ironwood ash and some of the grain that grew in this place. It most certainly wasn’t anything special, but it seemed to be doing the job nonetheless. Every time Elmas had Eris dunk her head and rinse out the mixture, more and more of the mud was floating away when Eris resurfaced for another round of lathering.
The water was cold- so much so that it riddled Eris’s skin with goosebumps. However, that was also a good thing, since the chill was beyond soothing for her aches and pains- specifically her nethers. With one hand and one foot on the chain to support herself, Eris could simply let herself float and be taken care of by her two companions. Well, and answer some questions.
“So I can wager that the smoke bomb’s Lust effect made it so that if someone in the smoke cums, everyone else in the smoke does too?” Bailey asked while massaging Eris’s chest. Not to play with her boobs- simply to scrub the rag against the stains of mud that really didn’t want to come off. Eris nodded.
At least fake-Jaxie’s attempts at choking seemed to be focused more on the ‘restrict air flow until Eris fell unconscious’ kind of choking instead of a ‘crush her windpipe and her spine’ kind. That meant Eris was already feeling better in regards to speaking more especially after a long, healthy swig from one of the metal water bottles given to her.
“Y-yeah. I didn’t think much of it when I made it and thought it was useless. I was just gonna use it to block vision around the Warden so that nobody could see it, then the winch would release with enough reverse pressure letting the Warden out. When Pravala-” Eris swallowed. She didn’t want to say it- didn’t want to acknowledge that it happened.
“After that whole thing with Pravala, I realized she felt everything her tethered did. Then the bomb went from ‘useful’ to ‘crucial’. I didn’t exactly think far enough ahead though, because I was too sore to try and trigger the Lust effect myself. We’re lucky that you did, Bailey.”
Bailey shrugged. “What can I say? I’m used to getting lucky.” Her face turned a little more flat. “It was hard to hear over the shouting and the Warden and all that stuff, but did you call out for Jaxie at one point?”
Eris’s throat clenched. Based on the way that Bailey hesitated, the expression on Eris’s face definitely wasn’t neutral.
“Uhh, yeah.”
“Was it… an instinctive thing? Like, you got tackled and screamed for her to help you?”
Eris took a shaky breath. “No. I called for her because she was there.”
That made both Bailey and Elmas pause entirely, their hands holding still as their brows furrowed. Funnily enough, they spoke in perfect unison- almost like a mockery of how they did when being controlled by Pravala together.
“Excuse me?”
Both of them looked at each other because of the simultaneous comment, but Eris swallowed.
“I heard Jaxie calling for me, so I called back. We found each other and she hugged me, and I was asking how she got here but she was saying it was a long story. I told her that she needed to cum because I couldn’t, but she said no and I thought it was just because of her… you know, feelings and stuff about what’s down there so I tried again but she said no again and then-”
Eris’s voice faltered, the images replaying in her mind. Jaxie’s eyes, so completely full of sorrow and dread while her hands were clenched around Eris’s throat. Even though it was just a fake that had been actively trying to kill her, seeing that expression of pure, complete loss on Jaxie’s face made Eris want to weep in response. It was awful to see her like that. Eris’s breath was strained. Thankfully, Elmas chirped in.
“It was a summon trying to trick you, right?”
Eris nodded, to which Elmas did the same. “I was wondering if she could do that- create summons of specific people.”
Eris continued with a shaky tone. “Well, she could. And it was perfect. It wasn’t a beast in Jaxie’s body, or Pravala pretending to be Jaxie, it was Jaxie. From the way she spoke to how she looked at me and held me- it couldn’t have been more accurate. Even when she started trying to choke me to death, she was crying and saying she was sorry.”
Bailey rested a comforting hand on Eris’s shoulder while Elmas continued to knead fish-oil-shampoo into Eris’s scalp. Elmas cleared her throat.
“I imagine that Echoes are able to do things that regular classes can, just to a much, much higher degree. For example, you have a natural, unspecified ability to put enchantments on items whereas other crafters need a specific skill for it that most don’t get until higher levels.”
“I got mine at level six,” Bailey added.
“Exactly,” Elmas said. “I imagine the same thing went for Pravala’s summons- they did things and were capable of things normal summons aren’t.”
Elmas shifted, her knees slightly pressing into Eris’s sides as if holding the girl in place for the shampooing.
“Take Conjurers, for example. They are the closest comparison to a Summoner, and yet a Conjurer’s summoned creatures don’t have the autonomy that Pravala’s did. That horned beast that dug through the Warden’s shell? If a Conjurer had made it, they would have needed to focus almost entirely on making it do every little action. Nothing it did would have gone without the Conjurer’s direct command, for each and every course of action. It wouldn’t even look at movement or follow a target unless the Conjurer forced it to. They are a puppet on strings, and every string has to be pulled by the master. Just like Meghan Leghume and her mist wolf… thing.”
Elmas scrubbed a little harder. In all honesty, it felt pretty good as a scalp massage so Eris just leaned into it.
“For Pravala, that beast was acting completely on its own.” Elmas spoke thoughtfully. “Obviously it was following a direct goal that Pravala had set- being ‘dig through the Warden’, but it was following that goal as if it were a living creature. By Grihm, I could even see the damned thing breathing.”
Elmas’s hands stilled. “My theory is that any creature Pravala summoned was a perfect copy of that creature, with everything about it replicated; all the way down to personality, instincts and behaviour. The only thing is, they’re still being controlled to follow a certain goal that Pravala would have set, and it’s something they can’t go against. So even though the fake Jasmine was being forced to kill you, it was doing so in the way that the real Jasmine would have.”
Elmas leaned forward a bit, resting her elbows on her knees while resuming her kneading of Eris’s hair. “Truth be told, that might have been a downside to the ability more than an upside. Sure, she could use it to make a summon of Jasmine so realistic that it fooled even you, who knows her better than anyone. But that also meant that when Jasmine was being forced to kill you, she didn’t snap your neck right then and there and be done with it. She would be gentle- relatively speaking. Choking you instead of breaking you.”
“That’s…” Bailey seemed to struggle to find the words. “That seems cruel, more than anything. Making a person watch the one they love try to kill them?”
Elmas shrugged. “It was also the only move Pravala had, I would imagine. Either she could try and fail to find Eris the old fashioned way, or she could see if she couldn’t make Eris come out of hiding herself.”
“Well, Jaxie started disintegrating while she was choking me. If I had to guess, the Warden hit Pravala and Hindered the skill, making it unusable and thus ending the effect.”
“I’m guessing that has something to do with that little runsestone you put in the back of the Altar?” Elmas asked. That made Bailey do a double take while Eris raised an eyebrow.
“The what-now?”
“You knew?”
The roommates look at each other, then back at Elmas. She shrugged. “When Eris was finishing the Altar, one of the ichryte runestones was put in a different way and a little loose. It was also what you were hiding in the leg of the shelf, I’m assuming?”
“Uhh… yeah. How did you…?”
“When you do what I do, you pick up details everyone else misses. So what did that rune do, exactly? How did you stop the Warden from trying to keep Pravala alive?”
Eris let out a breath, her throat suddenly feeling a little tighter. “Err… the rune let me slightly change the way that a different magic item worked. It would also give whatever I used it on additional features based off Lust and Envy, since Pravala helped me make the thing without her knowing. I changed the Warden so that instead of avoiding her death at all costs, it did everything it could to- umm… you know.”
“Speaking of the Warden,” Bailey interjected. “Did you really tell the truth about it? Was that really what the Inspect window said?”
“Yeah,” Eris nodded. “It was.”
“So there’s a chance that Pravala was right? A bunch of Echoes are stuck in the Obelisk, all being used to power a prison holding back the end of the world?”
Another nod. “I don’t think it’s a chance she was right, I just think she was right in general.”
Both Elmas and Bailey raised an eyebrow. Eris let out a breath.
“You know, right before we got in this place, I could see that the Obelisk was covered in golden runes and stuff, and I could see the magic leaking and dripping from the cracks?”
Both girls nodded. Eris continued.
“Well, as soon as Pravala- err… well, the entire cave cracked. All the walls and ceilings are fractured, and golden light is pouring from the cracks. Getting rid of Pravala broke something in this place.”
Eris watched Bailey and Elmas both look up to the ceiling, the former squinting heavily and even grabbing her glasses off the shore next to her to try and see better. Eventually, Elmas huffed. “I don’t see anything.”
“I figured,” Eris said. “And I’m hoping that’s a good sign that this place is going to hold together at least until we get out. It might even mean that the enchantments are breaking down more, meaning it’ll be even easier for us to get out.”
Bailey furrowed her brow. “But if the enchantments are breaking and that makes it easier for us to leave, doesn’t that mean if that Avocado-fuck-nuts is really stuck in the Obelisk, it makes it easier for it to get out, too?”
Eris sighed, a deep frown set on her face while she held onto the chain and floated.
“Yeah, it does.”
“But we won’t know anything until we get out,” Elmas said definitively, “and I think there’s still about six hours before we’re supposed to use the Key.”
“Yeah, there is.”
“The Key, which requires Eris to cum at the same time as someone on the other end when she’s way too sore to play with herself and has a fractured wrist?” Bailey asked. Eris rested her forehead against the chain and mumbled.
“Yep.”
Bailey blew a raspberry. “Looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me, then.”
“Huh?” One of Eris’s eyebrows raised in confusion. Bailey smirked.
“Oh please, Cutiepie. You can’t really think that diddling with the downstairs is the only way to get off, right? Even if it’s just from the waist up, I can have you cumming your brains out when you need to.”
Elmas nodded. “Well, that solves that problem. Now we just need to worry about draining the Warden to fill the Ichryte so we can power the Key.”
Eris turned, finally giving herself a good look back inland that wasn’t delegated to her peripherals. Hundreds of people were scrambling around, moving all sorts of things and even laying out thick swaths of cloth that Eris could only assume were to cover the bloodstains and some of the puddles of mulch that used to be people. Almost a dozen of them seemed to have dedicated themselves to a different job- one that Eris was definitely happy she wouldn’t have to do again. They were taking pickaxes and shovels to the shell surrounding one of the Warden’s tree-like feet.
The Warden stood completely still and unmoving, which Eris could make reasonable sense of. After all, if the entire purpose of the creation was to trap the first Echo of Alda that entered this place, and there no longer was that Echo of Alda, then the Warden had no purpose whatsoever. A tool without a function. Now, it loomed like the world’s filthiest statue- a building of rock and mud suspended on six crooked pillar legs. One of those legs was the target of the digging crew as they chipped away layer after layer of solidified ocean floor to try and reach the metal underneath.
“Well, we have plenty of time, at least.” Bailey hummed, then turned her attention back to Eris and started scrubbing down the redhead’s sides. The water around her was starting to get a little bit murky. “For now, we’ll just get you cleaned up, then get you dressed, then see if we can’t get a splint on that wrist in the meantime until we get back and find a healer.”
Eris took one last look at the Warden, then looked off to the side where the Altar had been tossed aside during the blind scuffle and was overturned. A couple of people were using shovels as leverage to lift the multi-hundred-pound stone block right side up, as well as scooching it onto a new platform with wheels since the previous one was crushed. The Altar seemed to be in… decent condition, but Eris could see a number of cracks and splits running down the marble faces. A quick Inspect directed at it revealed the Durability to be holding steady at fourty-three percent.
Not horrible, but not exactly inspiring, either. Eris would be needing to drain a lot of magic from the Warden, and that much going through the Altar would definitely put the creation under strain. That was why general maintenance and upkeep was so important for good magical equipment- they were resilient, but fragile at the same time. After all, tugging hard on a brand new shirt probably wouldn’t get it to tear. Tugging on a shirt that was weathered, with lots of holes in it? One of those holes was going to get a lot bigger. Adding magic to an item was the equivalent of always keeping that same shirt under at least a little bit of tension, no matter what. The more magic, the more tension, and the more damage, the more tears in the cloth. Cross the point of no return for the damage threshold, and the item rips itself apart.
It would have been fantastic if Eris could bring the Altar back with her, so she could keep abusing the Envy boost that let her turn magic energy directly into Desire.
Now, Eris was just hoping that the Altar could hold together long enough to charge the Ichryte so they could get out in the first place.