Ven: Part 2

Ch. 17 Deafening loudness

I walk up to the largest of the horses. It snorts and flicks it's head. I climb up awkwardly and settle as best I can on the bare back of the horse. It shakes and tosses me around. When it stops I'm seated more comfortably.

"Thank you," I mutter, stroking it's pitch black mane.

I look around at the veritable mounted army around me.

I draw my sword.

The blade comes out flat and blunt, but still more than a fuller.

"Let's go!" I shout.

"YEAH!" A deafening chorus takes up as the horses take off, working up rapidly to a gallop.

I cling on with thighs and hand as I bounce around.

The landscape streams by, fields pass in the blink of an eye and soon we're all in open grassland. The horses seemingly know where to go, they charge mercilessly onwards.

Something appears on the horizon.

A jagged structure stabs into the sky at even angles.

Tasma's horse comes up next to mine.

"What is that?" She yells over the cacophony and rushing wind.

"A castle!" I yell back, "I took it down and this must be where it ended up!"

"Ended up?"

"It used to fly!"

I scowl and lean forward. The great beast beneath me responded in kind, its neck extended forwards and its feet hit the ground harder and faster.

The world was loud, every sound felt amplified, I could hear my blood pumping in my ears, every hoof beat sounded like rolling thunder. In this moment where everything is drowned in a sea of sound I can see through the charge in the air once more.

I can see a pale man with jet black dreadlocks pulled back from a pointed face, a victorious smirk slashed across his face as he gestures excitedly at footage of him beating the life out of Grimmoire.

The same man that took me from my home 2 years ago.

I bare my clenched teeth.

My horse leaps over the rickety barricade set up around their camp, I strike it with my sword on the way over, shouting a long, angry note. The barricade erupts into lightning, dissolving and striking the ground and soldiers alike leaving them completely unprotected from the stampede behind me.

I leap from the horses back as it rears, its huge hooves kicking brutally at any soldier in range. I storm past the canvas tents, scattering red clad men and women, my burning rage set squarely on the pale man in the centre of it all, his red coat flapping in the wind, a great black two looks shiny and newly added.

He sees me, greasy flames roll off him, the dense oily smoke obscuring the recording playing behind him.

I don't break my stride.

I can see the rest of the horses storm the camp, the screams and shouts of the defiant. Of my defiant.

The defiant fighters of the Caravan Palace.

"We meet again, Vendolyn!" He calls, "I've been looking for you!"

The grass burns around him, the flames licking at the tents, the underside of a skyscraper from the castle behind him blackens with soot.

I step through the flames, unperturbed.

"You've made quite the reputation for yourself, Vendolyn. Such a high bounty for someone so young, I intend to claim it of course, and the position your sister came into will be mine, as it so rightfully should! This teenager you took in," he gestures to the obscured screen.