Tales of a Shifter (P6) - Child of Sun & Moon

Chapter 61 - Death Defying

Chapter - Death Defying

Ann stood up. She wanted to run, but as the soft heat spread over her spine and belly, she was acutely aware that she was exceptionally weak and sleepy. She was so cold and run down that nothing, not even the healing tingles in her core, could inspire the burst of energy she knew she needed in that moment to break into anything but a mild limping lurch.

Ann turned away from the cold, dark room that suddenly felt so empty. She didn't want to think. She couldn't quite center her reeling mind and senses enough to think clearly. All she knew was that she was slowly but surely feeling the pressure of her awareness of Mana all around her starting to return... With this awareness, she knew that she was mere minutes away from having a face-to-face conversation with a dozen or more Saviors.

The Strum of Mana in the back of her consciousness came to her in the form of voids in the general Mana all around her. She felt the bodies closing in, and she thought she could even sense the almost palatable violence simmering all over.

The red rock held tight in her fist was clamped to the front of her bloody chest, the wounds that had been cut into her flesh were still leaking sluggishly, but the deep fang punctures in the two sides of her neck seemed to have partially healed along with the intense burning cold that had been slowly eating away her soul. Gasping in cold air that frosted all around her face as she moved, Ann's eyes briefly danced around the cold, silent space; they fell for only a split second on the Lion, who was no longer skewered to the wall like a live taxidermy.

Instead, when Brandon faded, so did the intense spear of sheer light that he had used to impale the beast to the wall.

Now Jacobs's beast was curled in a huddle. She couldn't see and didn't care to know if he was breathing.

But something...something about the strange interaction between the Lion and the Druid made it clear to her that the Lion King was not someone Brandon would have killed easily. So, she surmised that the Lion had fallen unconscious from his grievous wound, and being that he was a Shifter, he could awaken soon and make her pay for interfering in his attack.

So Ann dragged her feet and shuddered as she clomped over to the side of the room where the double doors remained decrepit and cracked open.

Pale stones and almost pitch darkness peaked back at her through the opening, but Ann had no other options but to move back out into the eerily silent and decrepit roads of the abandoned City.

Ann's sense of foreboding remained. She slipped quickly out, and using her dulled, exhausted senses, she tried to rush tepidly towards an area in the City where she could possibly get her bearings and suss out a route that would allow her to climb down from the Plateau of Ishtar.

Climb? Can I climb down? This mountain is massive, and Brandon dropped up miles below the City, and yet even that valley had been miles away from the base. And can I manage to evade Jacob and the Saviors while I do it?

The Alchemist put out a hand as her tattered feet knocked hard into uneven stones. She had to reach out towards one of the crumbling walls of a simple-looking home that was missing a door and windows.

I've just got to run for now. Maybe now that Brandon's Mana essence has disappeared, they will focus on trying to find his trail, and that will give me some time to create distance. Once the cost is clear and I've been able to gather some energy, I can risk creating a Portal. I just need to move fast and stay hidden.

Should I....should I make for the Wirmist Forest again?

Ann shuddered at the idea as she crouched down and stepped carefully and with termination over the stones, taking care not to get blood smears on different surfaces from her still-healing wounds. It was possible that the wounds wouldn't heal at all, and she had no clear understanding of what Brandon's Blood could do once it was in her system. She believed that simply averting the burnout had been what most of the Druid's essence had repaired inside of her because her surface-level wounds, like her twisted ankle and claw marks over her belly and back, still burned with raw openness with each flex of her muscles and skin.