Chapter 129. A Remnant Weapon
The hand clawed at the earth, fingers curling up on the surface of the earth, and a figure emerged from the filth. Rhys stared for a second, struggling to compute what he was seeing. He’d expected a giant skeleton to climb out of the well, but instead, there were three long bone fingers connected to a small figure’s back, then three on the other side…
Rhys blinked. He rubbed his eyes, then stared. “Sable?”
Ernesto’s ex-champion clambered out of the Impure Well. She gazed at him with haunted eyes, gunk dripping off her body-sock-and-black-leotard clad body, the bone armor that seemed almost a part of her gleaming in the low light. Like an animal, her eyes reflected the light, empty and devoid of human intelligence.
Rhys put his hands up. “Sable, it’s me. Do you recognize me? Rhys, from the tournament?”
She whipped around, glaring. A thousand questions ran through his head—what was she doing in there, had she survived the Empire’s march uninjured, where was Ernesto, did she know where Straw was—but Rhys choked them all back and just kept his hands up, silently waiting for her to react to him. She was in fight-or-flight mode right now. If he made a quick motion or too much noise, she would attack, so he waited for her to calm down and breathe. Sable looked around, left and right, then finally registered Rhys. Her shoulders un-tensed, and she blinked. “You’re not the Empire.”
“No, I’m not,” Rhys agreed. “Are they who put you in there?”
“Put me?” she frowned at him. “No, I hid in there to escape the Empire.”
It was Rhys’s turn to frown at her. Even he wasn’t crazy enough to just… hang out in an Impure Well for an extended period of time. They were horrifically corrosive and they smelled horrible. Sure, he could nullify most of the danger, but even so, it was a disgusting proposition, and for anyone who wasn’t Rhys, incredibly dangerous. Why would she go into one deliberately, and not only that, but hide there?
Sable shook herself, shedding the last of the filthy liquid. She gestured. “I’m the daughter of a Remnant Weapon. If not for Ernesto, I would have been imprisoned under the Alliance. What do you think the Empire would do to a monster like me? Especially when the Empress can’t take my core and control me.”
Rhys pressed his lips together. She had a great point. The Empress allowed Lira to be thrown into the sewers, and Lira was just another race of humanoids. Sable was the child of a construct built to be a humanity-destroying weapon. There was every chance that they’d execute her on sight.
But that didn’t answer all his questions. “How’d you survive in there?”
She pointed to the fang dangling from her beaded headdress. “Father’s fang. It creates a barrier that keeps out the worst of the impurities and filth. When I was little, I used to live near a well, and hide in it whenever someone got too close. It’s how I survived before I got strong enough to hold my own.”