Echoes of the Reach

[2.3] | Of Tea and Trials

    "No! Stop!"

    Driven by her racing heart, Talwyn threw her hand out towards the descending axe. The force of her willpower flowed through her every fibre, halting the weapon's fatal fall a shield's depth away from Kerensa's body. It was heavy, almost too heavy for her telekinetic grasp to hold, but unabated adrenaline kept her body from buckling.

    Kerensa carried herself clear of the axe, finding herself separated from her friend by its lurching bulk. Pulses of burning golden light glinted off the weapon's pristine metallic edge, and a matching glow flickered on the room's opposite wall. "Talwyn, watch out!"

    The panic in her friend's voice told Talwyn all she needed to know. She threw herself towards Kerensa, her eyes on the single exit from the room. A sharp whistling sound cut past her ear, the rough burn in its wake seizing her every thought. Through the space she had just occupied, a slender crossbow bolt protruded from the wood-panelled wall, green and gold strokes marking its length.

    A leaden mass thumped into the floor. In the chaos, Talwyn had lost her concentration on the axe, and its edge had cracked the floorboards less than an inch from her foot. Like the staircase and landing that led to it, the study was riddled with lethal traps, and they had walked right into the middle of them.

    Steadying her balance, Talwyn fixed her eyes on the jewel-green armchair. It had shifted back from where she remembered it being, as if frighted by the rising flames before it, and its seat lay empty. There was no sign of its former occupant in sight, nor did any sounds breach the ravenous crackling from the fireplace.

    The ghost of a fleeting step overhead was all the warning Talwyn received. Before she flinched, a dense weight buried into her shoulder, crashing into her joint with a deep crunch. Hot pain flooded from her arm to the length of her spine, and she collapsed to her knees, a wave of nausea hitting her stomach. As the jittery blur faded from her vision, Talwyn looked up to see a short, stocky figure wielding a dark, heavy cane like a brutal club. 

    An older dwarf by appearance, flecks of grey swarmed through Sir Branning Steele's flame-red beard, and he dressed in a green silken doublet and gold-accented black trousers that befitted his alleged knighthood. What did not match that status, however, was the stunning blow he had landed on her shoulder, nor the almost otherworldly speed with which he hurtled towards Kerensa next.

    She had to do something. "Stop!" Talwyn cried, using the call less as an appeal and more as a word of power, a trigger to turn her many-layered hurt into a weapon. "Get away from her!"

    The dwarf stumbled a step or so from Kerensa's recoiling body, stolen from his vicious charge by invisible strings. Shaking his head, Steele's free hand snapped to his temple under a wound that had no obvious source, just pound after pound of an uninhibited, alien anger. He pushed through the pain to glance over his shoulder at Talwyn, a lively glint in his grey eye.

    Though the pause in Steele's assault was paper-thin, it gave Kerensa all the space she needed. She muttered a short incantation under her breath, and a shadowy pearl formed between her hands, its shape impossibly round and smooth. With a single swirl of her arms, the pearl shot into Steele's side and exploded into a writhing, bleeding ball of pure darkness. There was no light, no sound, no heat – nothing escaped the devouring void.

    A loud snap broke behind Talwyn. Tossed from the sightless sphere, Kerensa's spindly shape slumped down the front of a bookcase, volumes tumbling to the study floor. Steele's hefty cane lay beside her, specks of inky ooze clinging to its gold-trimmed length.

    Talwyn dashed to her friend's side. "I'm here, I'm alright," she said as she wrapped her hands under Kerensa's thin shoulders. "You need to tell me when you're doing that, okay? We can't all see in the dark like you can."