Tallah

The Sanctum whimpered, seemed to gather its remaining strength, and screamed; Anna’s children were coming.

Sil crawled in the dark until her fingers wrapped around the shaft of her staff. She breathed out a sigh of relief, gathered her courage and summoned a light sprite to face the horrors that had survived.

The boy was nowhere to be seen in the small sphere of light, but she felt him tug on her for strength. Whatever he faced, now that Tallah had likely failed, would tear him limb from limb. She was keenly aware of every effort he made to buy them moments of life.

Her nose bled and the illum siphon was a physical ache now. It projected the beats of her heart into her ears. In a few more minutes she would be spent, and they’d all be dead.

With considerable effort she moved the sprite around. Shadows leapt and squirmed out of its light.

Tallah was in a corner, collapsed to her knees among a throng of flesh dolls. Looming above her, Anna was revealed at last—a near corpse embedded into a cradle in the wall, kept alive by a nightmare myriad of tubes and flesh tendrils, mother of the monsters leering at the edge of the light. Wisps of shadow clung to her exposed viscera like a tattered mantle.

Sil found the strength to pick herself up and stumble forward. If not for the staff, she would have crawled.

Tallah’s unleashed Devourer seemed to have hit Anna full on. It had also consumed every light in the room, shattered the glow-globes and the lit eyes, and plunged them into the suffocating underground dark that Sil’s sprite was no match for.

Vergil flew in from somewhere and crashed against the wall a pace away from her, tossed like a doll by something she dreaded to imagine. He bounced back to his feet, twisted his horned helmet back in place, and rushed back into battle wielding a broken sword and howling his inhuman war cries. Sil gasped with the tide of illum he demanded of her.

She obliged. If he fell—

“After all that,” Anna’s ragged voice said, each word a gurgle of effort, “I’m still alive, whore. You’ve failed.” It whispered from the mouths of the dead and the dying.

Anna laughed bitterly and her head rose with shuddering effort, her face a flayed mask of bloody horror that tried in vain to knit back together. Tallah did not meet its yellow gaze.

“You’ve slain so many of my children, but more come. I’ll—” she forced herself to draw a spluttering breath. The flesh dolls around her dangling feet jerked but did not rise. “I’ll still claim the day.”

Tallah’s sword lay by her side, discarded in a spreading puddle of red. A dark gash trailed off halfway across Anna’s throat and bled black. Blood bubbled and gurgled out of the wound as the monster kept forcing herself to speak.

“I will hav…”

Anna’s ruined head slumped forward, and she breathed out her last sputtering exhalation. A black, jagged gemstone erupted out of her chest and dropped to the floor with a dull splash, finally sated and filled to bursting. It crackled with power as the soul it had been fashioned to imprison settled inside.

The Sanctum wailed as its mother was ripped from it. Deafening echoes of its wordless cries mixed with the braying of beasts in horrendous cacophony, each heartbeat bringing it closer.

Sil slipped on the blood, fell, and crawled to Tallah’s side. She set two fingers to her friend’s throat, hoping against hope for a pulse. A moment passed.

Another.

The sorceress had a pulse. It was faint and slow, but it was there, pumping out her life through the penetrating wounds in her chest and side.

Set up barriers, drop the siphon to conserve illum, and let the boy be torn apart? Or do I risk a healing spell so you can fight again? Can you still fight? Why do you do this to me?

She dug through her satchel. Two of her vials had shattered when the boy had pushed her out of danger earlier, and the last one was half-empty. It would have to do.

A hulking beast rushed out of the dark howling in mindless fury. She put up a barrier in blind panic and the effort left her head spinning. Claws raked at the wall. More of the creatures stepped into the light, finally past Vergil’s last stand. Was he dead?

He came leaping at them out of the dark and body-slammed the decaying creatures into her wall. He fought tooth and nail, gauntlets and boots against blades and spikes of bone, but he was losing. More arrived from the furthest reaches of the Sanctum. They all howled, barked, and brayed their bloodlust, still so bloody many.

Skinless masks of suffering glared balefully as Vergil set himself between the tide and the cracking invisible barrier. He growled in answer to their calls, crushed a skull beneath his ghostly armour, and raised his fists to meet the charge.

Sil tipped Tallah’s head back and forced her clenched jaw open.

“Drink, you mule,” she whispered in urgent frustration.

The sorceress was in the throes of illum burnout, the second since they descended into Anna’s domain. She wouldn’t react to the words and Sil had to hold her mouth open as she poured the healing draught down her throat. The thought that Anna might have poisoned her was too terrible to consider, so she prayed instead.

For now, the bleeding stopped. Tallah’s coat and armour hung off her in ribbons, but no more blood seeped from under them. Sil touched the fresh scars and breathed out wordless thanks to the Goddess.

“Come back,” she called to Vergil as he threw down a creature and stomped it into a bloody pulp. “I need help.” She corralled the beasts just an arm’s span away from his reach and her wall immediately began to buck and crack under the weight of bodies.

Vergil growled as he retreated to her side. Only the mad whites of his eyes showed through the visor, looking at the inert sorceress with hatred so pure that it froze her sweat to Sil back. If he turned on them…

No. She squashed the traitorous thought and fought to keep the fear out of her voice. “Pick her up and be ready to run when the portal opens. No—”

The wall shattered and the mass was upon them. Vergil’s punch flew out like lightning and smacked the first horror in the mouth. Its head nearly snapped off its mismatched shoulders. Its claws raked his pale armour in a dying spasm.

Sil put up as many barriers as she dared. The toll climbed into blackout exhaustion. Lightheaded and nearly giddy with terror and illum consumption, she struggled to focus and find the way back to Valen. A moment of carelessness could see her as insensate as the sorceress. She teetered on the very edge of that precipice.

Something angry slammed into her walls when Vergil picked up Tallah on his shoulder. More, ever more of Anna’s children came and encircled their small pocket of safety. Far from the throngs they had fought on their way down, but too many to handle in their depleted state.

She held up her staff and white light pulsed around the blue jewel on its top. Time crawled by and barriers started failing with deafening crashes. She couldn’t reinforce them while attempting the connection. Blades and drooling maws stuffed with fangs glinted beyond her flickering sprite. A riot of malign limbs reached for them like a thicket of skinless red flesh and glittering white bone.

Another barrier shattered under the weight of bodies. She still couldn’t reach Valen’s Illum Hearth. Panic convulsed in her chest. Blood flowed into her mouth, thick with the taste of iron. It dripped off her chin and under her shirt, sticking her clothes to her chest.

A white gateway opened in the air just as cracks began forming in her last line of defence.

Vergil ran through without waiting to be told.

After a moment’s hesitation Sil rushed to Anna’s corpse, and stooped to pick up the soul gem. Revulsion wracked her at its touch, but she gripped it tight in numbing fingers. It would all have been for nought if she left the dreadful thing behind.

The final barrier shattered. Four paces and a forest of claws, scythes, spears, and swords of bone separated her from the portal.

She swung her staff at the first chimera that rushed her and brained it. Its skull shattered like an egg and dregs of brain hung down the ruin of its face. It kept coming, a mountain of overgrown muscles that barely even resembled a man anymore. Old training came back to her as she twisted in place with her staff and lashed out at two more enemies, knocking them back. The jewel on top of her weapon stained from blue to purple.

Three paces to the portal. The wall at her back. Her entire world reduced to that pocket of failing light. Just enough room to swing the staff but not to push ahead.

Another of the Anna’s brood, some perversion of an aelir, wrapped clawed fingers around the haft of her staff and pushed her into the wall with strength that beggared belief. With a cry of anger and terror, she forced the staff between the jaws of its maw and kneed it in the groin. It did nothing but lance pain up her own leg.

White human eyes speckled with blood bore into hers, mad with fear and anguish. Arms fashioned into a pair of bone spears reached from the crowd to impale her. Hands pawed her from the dark, grabbing clothes and hair, pulling with inhuman strength she could not match.

I don’t want to die like this, she thought in panic as she gagged on the decay stench of so many bodies crammed around her.

The boy ran back through the portal, howling as he smashed into her assailants. The one on her stumbled sideways and nearly dragged her down with it. Vergil caught her arm and wrenched her back. Hair and clothes ripped painfully as he pushed her to the white gateway. His attention was already on another foe as he readied to pounce.

“No. Go through. I need to be last.” It would close otherwise.

She marvelled at this impulse as she swung her staff in time with his fists. Tears stung her eyes and half-blinded her as she rallied one last effort. She should have gone through and leave the wretch to the monsters; but didn’t. He had come back for her. The will needed to cross a portal backwards was titanic, she knew from bad experience.

Vergil grabbed a beast’s scythed arm and ripped it off to use as a makeshift blade. He fought like nothing she’d ever seen before, a howling mad tempest of violence on her side.

She made a final effort of will and put up one last barrier in the small space his efforts gained them.

Vergil ran through the portal and Sil followed right behind.