Chapter 89: Graveyard of Adsagsona (1)
The march up the barrow was… calm.
Not a single monster followed. Not even the little ones.
The sounds of the distant fighting were muffled by the forest. Even the regular animals had gone silent, with nothing scampering through the foliage.
It was entirely… peaceful.
Finally, after a short three-minute walk up the hill, the treeline thinned and opened into a clearing. Dozens of graves, most marked by little more than piles of stone, dotted the sloping ground beyond.
As the thirty-five approached the edge, Zayn ordered:
“Spread out and look for abnormalities.”
The others nodded and began to do just that, knocking over graves and upturning stones.
As for Zayn himself…
His eyes settled upon a glorious statue at the very top of the barrow, half-consumed by overgrown vines. A stalwart-looking woman in robes stood upon a stone pedestal, a scar running from above one eye all the way to her chin. One hand reached outward while the other clutched a book against her chest.
‘That’s her.’
It was the statue of Adsagsona.
Zayn wasted no time heading straight for it, with three others following close behind.
‘If the Larzac Tablet’s going to be anywhere, it’s going to be there.’
The statue was the only thing that truly stood out among the countless graves. If something had been hidden up here, this was the obvious place to start.
‘If it’s here at all.’
Zayn immediately inspected the base of the pedestal, only to find nearly every inch buried beneath thick vines.
“Crystal, and… you two. Help remove the vines.”
Zayn bent down…
Something whistled through the air just above his head.
In the next moment, he heard an odd gargling.
Then…
Something wet landed on his head. Another soft, slimy mass slapped against his shoulder.
Confused, Zayn pinched the thing atop his head between two fingers.
His stomach twisted.
Then the rest came down.
Organs rained around him, splattering across the stone and smearing his clothes with warm blood. An intestine draped across the top of his head, slid down over his face, then peeled away and slapped wetly against Adsagsona’s pedestal.
Zayn slowly turned.
The three people who had followed him were still standing.
Only their legs and lower torsos remained.
“Ah… aragh raaagh!”
Zayn immediately threw up.
His scream snapped the attention of everyone who hadn’t already seen the attack toward the statue.
Panic spread instantly.
Some turned and ran.
Others dropped to their knees or simply froze, staring at what remained of the three bodies.
Only a handful had the presence of mind to draw their weapons.
Then the Aether around Zayn distorted.
Fear still gripping him, he kicked off the pedestal and hurled himself sideways, tucking into a roll across the grass.
A razor-thin distortion sliced through the space he’d occupied a moment earlier.
The wind blade continued across the clearing and struck a tree near the treeline.
The trunk split cleanly apart.
Zayn came out of the roll on one knee and snapped his head toward the attack.
Two pale specters hovered several meters to his right, just beyond the nearest row of graves. Long hair flowed around them despite the still air. Their translucent skin carried a faint light-green hue, and pale dresses drifted weightlessly around their bodies.
He didn’t know why he felt the need to scream it, but he did:
“It’s the specters!”
Pushing himself upright, he frantically added:
“Take hold of your weapons, we must defeat them!”
‘But where’s the third?!’
Worse…
‘How?!’
How were they going to defeat something Adsagsona couldn’t? The same Spellweaver had erected a barrier that endured for an untold number of years.
The specters shot into motion.
One swept her arm from side to side in an almost rhythmic motion. Each pass sent another blade of compressed wind screaming across the clearing toward whoever happened to be in front of her.
The second raised both hands. Stone ripped free from the graves and surrounding earth, compacting into large spheres before being hurled one after another into the scattered group.
There was no formation anymore.
No opportunity to counterattack.
All they could do was dodge and pray.
A man several meters ahead of Zayn threw himself flat as a wind blade passed over his back. Another twisted sideways between two graves just before a sphere of stone smashed into the ground beside him, spraying dirt and shattered rock across the clearing.
Zayn barely had time to watch.
The Aether warped again.
He pushed hard off his right foot and threw himself left, slipping behind Adsagsona’s pedestal just as another invisible blade carved through the grass where his legs had been.
Zayn began focusing on sensing Aether.
Sight was nearly useless against the wind attacks. There was only the faint whistle they produced and the subtle distortion they left in the air, neither of which gave him enough time to react reliably.
But the Aether inside them…
That, he might be able to feel before they reached him.
The instant he concentrated, however, his senses nearly overloaded.
Aether filled the area. It was everywhere, thickest around the statue and toward one corner of the graveyard. He could distinguish the larger concentrations, but there was so much ambient Aether that the individual attacks disappeared inside it.
There was no way to isolate a wind blade before it reached him.
As Zayn realized that, his instincts went wild and told him to gather all the Aether in his body at his midsection…
Just as he did, an invisible force smashed into him.
It wasn’t the most powerful slice of wind the specter had unleashed, but it was by no means weak.
Instantly, Zayn was sent flying backward. His body tumbled down the slope, crashing through grave after grave.
He only stopped when his back slammed into a tree, his body half-curling around it.
‘Gak!’
Scared, his gaze slowly descended to his abdomen as he patted at it. It was all still there.
There was a cut in his shirt and a thin line of blood, but he’d preserved his life.
From this newly gained distance, the carnage bloomed in full view.
Mutilated bodies were scattered across the barrow. More than half of the thirty-five were already dead.
Zayn pushed off the ground and sat against the tree’s trunk.
As his vision grew blurry and he drew laborious breaths, he returned to trying to sense Aether.
Now that he wasn’t at the center of the Aether maelstrom, he wasn’t instantly overwhelmed. The individual concentrations were clearer from here.
‘That’s… weird?’
There was a large concentration at the statue and another around each of the specters, but the largest wasn’t aboveground at all.
It was beneath the far-right corner of the graveyard, across the slope from him.
‘Wait… is that it?’
The specters were made of Aether. The massive concentration beneath the graves had to be connected to them somehow.
‘To kill the specters… do we have to obliterate their corpses?’
But that was simple enough… why couldn’t Adsagsona do it?
‘Either she didn’t know, the specters were too strong… or she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She kept holding out hope that her saviors could truly be resurrected as their true selves.’
Zayn shook his head as he considered the third possibility.
‘Ever dreaming of peace…’
Actually, that seemed the most plausible of the three. After all, she’d never detailed asking the Larzac Tablet how to send them back to the afterlife, suggesting she already knew how.
As for being unable to defeat them…
Adsagsona had written that their Aether was naturally dwindling over time and that they would eventually fade.
‘How strong were they to stick around for so long?!’
Not to mention still be this strong!
Still…
As loudly as Zayn could, he screamed:
“Far right of the graveyard! Their tombs should be there! Obliterate the corpses! …Protect Jarlock!”
He was likely the only one capable of even destroying the corpses.
Their hopes of winning rested on his shoulders.
Thankfully, he was still not only alive, but fighting instead of fleeing.
Using the tree, Zayn managed to drag himself upright. The moment he found his footing, a woman came literally flying across the clearing directly toward him.
‘Shit!’
With little time to react, he planted one foot against the tree to stabilize himself, reinforced his body with Aether, then braced to catch her.
It was only when she slammed into his arms that he realized something.
Unlike he’d expected, she was alive. Not even badly injured, either. She’d simply been tossed across the clearing by the updraft from a particularly brutal wind blade.
What greater proof of life was there than…
[Disaster: Cali Bracknell – Identified]
‘Why does it always happen in such shitty situations!’
He’d spent an entire day or two bumping into people only for a Disaster to end up makign contact with him.
Zayn gently set the girl down, and she rubbed her back before squealing:
“Thank you.”
Grunting, Zayn immediately left her behind and rushed to retrieve the falx he’d dropped sometime during his flight, then ran for Jarlock’s side.
He could worry about this girl later.