Discordant Note | TBATE

Chapter 123: The Mist

Toren Daen

I barely managed to push aside the attack as it tried to clip my vitals. I stumbled, my senses going haywire as this strange new mist enveloped me from all sides. My senses constricted as if I were shoved into a tiny box, all light, sound, and touch abandoning me and leaving me dry. Empty.

I gasped as something hard impacted my gut. My telekinetic shroud splintered but didn't break. I was thrown across the roof, rolling over the concrete. The mist swirled, casting me in even deeper darkness.

What in the hell?

"Toren!" Aurora's voice thundered through my head. But it was muted like a dozen blankets covered my ears. "This mist is–"

I raised my hand to ward off another attack, deflecting a flying knife with a backhand on pure instinct. But something I hadn't sensed smashed into the back of my knee, making my stance buckle. I stumbled forward, and I got the first glimpse of something solid in the fog. Karsien's masked face appeared for the barest of instants.

"Do you know what the Doctrination preached when they paraded themselves around?" the Rat asked. His voice came from every direction, assaulting my enhanced hearing.

His fist–wrapped in the same swirling mist that was robbing me of my senses–connected with my jaw in a pulping uppercut. I tried to roll with the punch, but my broken stance made me lean into the attack instead. The shroud around my jaw crunched as my teeth clacked together. I saw red as I hurtled upward.

Another barely outlined face popped into my vision. Feeling panicked, I thrust my hand out, throwing a flurry of soundshot at the appearing figure. But as my attack ripped through the vague outline, leaving penny-sized holes that swirled with fog, I realized the ploy too late.

A mist clone.

I felt something grasp my ankle. Then I was slammed back into the ground.

Crystalline lattices flashed over my body at the impact, a small crater appearing in the stone beneath me. The breath was ripped from my lungs at the crash.

"They said all they did was for the lessers under their care," Karsien's voice said. It sounded like he was right beside me, and all at once far away.

I reached my hand out, trying to feel for something. To steady myself with anything.

And I brushed the threads tying Aurora to her relic.

For an instant, it was only me and the threads. In the infinite time before sensation pulsed over those cords, I realized something. I'd always thought that the heartfire tying my bond to her relic was like a rope. Aurora piloted her craft like a puppetmaster, these whips of heartfire her puppet strings.

But that wasn't true at all. In that moment where I could feel nothing else, the warmth in those intangible cords conveyed the truth. They weren't puppet strings.

They were veins carrying blood. A highway for sustenance and aether. I felt understanding on the tip of my tongue. A truth I was just about to–

Sensation returned to me like a heatwave. Sight and sound and surety washed over me. The weight I'd felt on my telepathic tether to Lady Dawn vanished like fog under the glare of the sun.

Move forward, Toren! Aurora said. Even as my hands left the relic's threads–veins?--our connection was no longer burdened by the mist.

I scrambled to the side, narrowly avoiding another attack that impacted right where my head would have been. I lashed out with an unfocused nimbus of fire, attempting to burn away the mist around me.