Arc 7: Chapter 28: Burrow
Vicar led us through the otherworldly forest. There was something like a path, though it wound and twisted through strange patterns so it became impossible to tell what progress we made, if any. Strange lights and sounds bubbled out of the rainforest, and I felt an awareness on us every step of the way.
“How is the pain?” Delphine asked me quietly, her voice full of a doctor’s professional distance. It seemed the intimacy of our earlier conversation had run its course.
“Manageable,” I told her. I felt sore and raw, and my aura was mauled. I doubted I could so much as summon a flicker of aureflame if we were forced to fight. I wondered if it had been permanently diminished by Delphine’s spiritual surgery. Ager Roth used my own essence to create the parasite, hadn’t he? If it’d been removed, didn’t that leave me with less of myself?
No way to take proper stock for the time being. I focused my attention forward.
We walked for hours, and eventually Delphine begged for rest. I think she did it for my sake more than her own, watching me sweat and struggle the whole way. I didn’t argue, though Vicar grumbled.
While Delphine napped inside a mismatched web of dream charms and scented oils to keep the spiritual predations of the Wend at bay, Vicar sidled up next to me and sat on a mostly dry stone. He’d taken a human shape again, and not the burnt revenant he sometimes appeared as. A weary sigh escaped his lips.
“What is it you found ahead?” I asked him, busying my hands checking my gear for hitchhikers. There were curses hiding in this forest, many of them in the shapes of leeches and ticks.
“This path ends some ways ahead. I am certain the demon that got away from us went there.”
I paused, feeling my heart quicken a beat. “You think he’s there?”
“I do not know. This might have just been a bolt hole, but if it’s a burrow…”
“Then we have him cornered.” I started buckling my armor back on. The filigree on my cuirass was different, the artful motifs and lines of text in old Oroion script taken on a more liquid quality. The Wend had soaked into it. I’d had it made for that purpose, as a curse trap so that wild od didn’t infect my flesh. Just like my golden armor from my days with the Table, only this set was black.
Color aside, its maiden foray into the Roads had proven successful. I didn’t feel any changes in myself, none from this realm anyway. I’d been worried about it, considering the exorcism.