Tallah

With a glance to confirm he was still on the floor and not attacking them, Tallah knelt and extracted a vial of accelerant from the thigh pouch Sil wore for emergencies.

It was a struggle to get Sil to drink the mixture.

“I…” Sil choked on blood as it was forced out of her lungs by the healing draught. Tallah helped move her palm to her chest while she coughed and struggled to form words between gasps of pain. “I require… this one… be mended.”

The draught stabilised her condition, but the prayer got her back to her feet in a burst of healing light.

“Bones of my sisters, that hurt,” she complained as the healing incantation completed its work. “Nearly cracked my skull open.” She ran a hand through her hair and grimaced when her fingers came away bloody. “Did crack my skull open.”

Unassisted, she stumbled forward to where her staff lay. “Put that away. He’s not dangerous. Give me some space to find my wits.”

Tallah put out the fireball she’d kept floating just above their heads. Whatever the bastard had done, he could take it with him into the ashes.

Sil had other plans.

“How are you alive?” She approached the bugger and poked him with the butt of her staff. “Why are you even here?”

He howled with laughter punctured by cries of anguish whenever his blessing fired off. Now that Tallah looked at him more closely, she could see the exact moment when it activated.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Well… you won’t believe this.” Sil poked him again. “This blighter’s an Other.”

Tallah stared at her, and then at the man. She must’ve misheard. “You can’t be serious.”

“Happens that I am.” Sil shrugged. “Either he’s an Other, or he’s gone so far over to the mad side that he’s conjured up stuff the theatres of Aztroa would pay fortunes for. He’s not from Edana.”

“Maybe you’ve hit your head too hard? Heal again?”

Sil gave her a level, steady glare and pointed the staff’s blue jewel at her. “Maybe I’ll whack you once over the head and you can tell me if it makes more sense to you then. Guy’s alien. And to top it off, he’s enchanted too. Got a strange mesh in his head protecting something. I touched it and you saw the rest. Not aelir or human made.”

A man, locked in a cage, half-dead, who was an Other and touched by the divine?

It stank of destiny malarkey. For a heartbeat Tallah considered burning him to ash and forgetting she’d ever laid eyes on the wretch.

“Interesting Other?” she asked instead.

“I don’t understand most of what I’ve seen in his head from his life. From the more recent however…” She turned in place and studied the walls. “There’s a secret door over there. People were brought in, taken through, and never brought back out. May be of interest.”

Now the temptation to burn him became overpowering. Christina rose to the surface of her thoughts, the ghost tempering her fire with her own infectious curiosity.

“Can you heal him?”

“No. Maybe the Sisters could. But look at him. Barely still alive. I can’t heal malnutrition, dehydration, and whatever flavour of crazy’s gripping him.”

Tallah scrunched up her nose and regarding him. If she ignored the stubble and the overgrown hair, now that she really considered him, he couldn’t have been more than… fourteen Summers? Sixteen? A boy that had gone in over his head likely and ended up in an impossible situation.

She slit open a rend and dug her hand inside.

“Have you gone daft?!” Sil gaped at the helmet she pulled out. “Keep that thing away from me.”

“It’s not for you. It’s for him. I need a siphon to power it.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“It’s inhumane.”

“He’ll live and he’ll be mobile. What else would you want? If we can’t find what I’m looking for in this secret passage you mentioned, then we portal out and we get him to the Sisters.” She rolled the bi-horned helmet in her hands thoughtfully. “You got a name from him?”

“Vergil. And it’s still no guarantee the helmet’s going to help. You know what it did last time,” Sil said.

“Then I hope it remembers what it got the last time it acted out. Heal him so I can stick this on his head. Think I broke every bone he’s got when I pulled him out.”

She could feel Sil’s disapproving glare on the back of her neck as she stuffed the helmet over the boy’s head. A snug fit though she had to pack in his ears or risk clipping them off.

“You stay between us. I don’t want to get thrown again.”

“Just get it over with. I want to see this secret tunnel.”

Sil invoked her prayer over Tallah’s shoulder and together they watched together the boy spasming as the Goddess’s grace healed whatever ailed him. Anatol’s blessing was a stupid stopgap that barely did much healing at all aside from scrapes, bruises, or internal bleeding. And even for those it was wholly unreliable. Pretty much like Anatol itself.

Next came the tether. Sil tied her to the helmet via a thin illum thread that transferred her reserve to the artefact. For some heartbeats, nothing happened.

The boy—Vergil—screamed and jerked on the floor. He rolled with some difficulty on his stomach, then brought up his hands under him. After several false starts, he managed finding his feet to stand up.

“Did I also manifest that?” Sil asked, peeking out at the result.

“No. You were dressed at the time. Possibly just contextual. We never did study this thing properly.”

A translucent set of plate armour covered the desiccated half-corpse.

“Interesting enchantment. Does pull a lot of illum.”

That ridiculous helmet housed an insane spirit—or echo of one, Tallah wasn’t entirely sure on the details. Fuelled by illum, it could take over whatever host wore the stupid thing as Sil had found out on her own when they’d found it.

Vergil banged fists against his armoured chest, screaming at the top of his lungs. If that was the ghost’s madness, or his own, Tallah preferred not to know.

“I hope you’re happy. You’ve let that thing run loose again.” Sil kept Tallah between herself and the boy. She’d first worn the helmet and suffered its possession.

At least this time the possessing ghost didn’t seem inclined to challenge Tallah. It instead rushed some half-burned verman corpse and attacked it with fists and armoured feet, mulching it into a paste of organ meat and shattered bones.

“Oy, bugger,” she called. It turned slowly in place. Only the whites of the boy’s eyes were visible through the t-shaped visor of the helmet. He growled, the language as alien as Sil claimed him to be. She thumbed in the direction of the wall. “There’s a door somewhere over there. See if you can find it.”

Had it understood her? Maybe. It turned away, stomped over a couple more rat corpses, then bolted for the wall.

Straight for the bloody thing. And through it with a deafening crash.

“He’s found the door,” Sil pointed.

“That’s certainly one way to do it.”

Sounds of a struggle echoed from the dark chamber beyond. The ghost howled. Something answered it and then screamed out in pain.

“Draws out quite a lot of illum. A staggering drain if it fights.”

They passed through the gap opened by Vergil and, a short way forward, by the light of a sprite, they found the boy mashing underfoot a strange corpse. It would’ve been twice as tall as a man, maybe just as wide, and had the head of a beast grafted atop a corded mass of muscle.

“Chimera,” Tallah noticed. “Well, this is finally promising.”

Three more similar creatures tried barring the way forward. Two died to her fire. One collided headfirst with the horned helmet and came away brained. Four guards to oversee a short corridor of barely twenty paces that ended at a cylindrical unlit pit. It bore down into the mountain with signs of some mechanism available for… something.

“I can’t see a way to activate this.” Sil studied the walls around the pit for the usual secret lever. The Valen-Drack passage was lousy with secrets and lairs.

“There’s illum woven in here. Like the old platforms in Hoarfrost.” Tallah looked into the depths and sniffed in annoyance. “If I were hiding beneath a mountain, I would be paranoid enough to make sure I control the way down. I’ll bet you that if there’s some clockwork here, it’s locked at the bottom. We’ll jump it.”

Sil scrunched up her nose at the notion. Vergil merely growled as he prowled the edge of the pit. He’d picked up a nicked sword from one of the chimeric guards and was testing it against imaginary foes.

“Be. Gentle. At least this time.” Sil complained when Tallah lifted her in the air. “Last time you bruised me black and blue; in very unpleasant places I might add. I may return the favour if you do it again.”

Vergil struggled against her invisible grip, kicked out and flailed his arms about like an animal caught in a snare. She considered smashing him against a wall to quiet him, but expected the living boy within the magic armour may not survive the violence. Shaking him up and down a few times, though? That did the trick.

It took the better part of a bell to reach the bottom of the shaft in slow, steady descent. Here and there small windows had been cut in the rock like vents, too narrow and low for any of them to fit through. It only left the descent and the unnerving silence. Even after almost half of Wither spent beneath the Valen-Drack mountain range, the eerie underground silence still managed to get under Tallah’s skin.

Air felt somehow thicker the more they descended. It stank. Blood. Offal. Like an abattoir in mid-Summer. Sil gagged loudly.

“Right path,” Tallah said.

“I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”

“Only if you breathe through your mouth.”

The mask’s sight showed power woven beneath. Not just the natural flow of illum, but something stagnating, shaped, and set into stone. She could recognise a Sanctum’s overall shape easily enough even from that. Yes, definitely the right path and the right place. This was a Vitalis’s domain. Old one. Powerful even from afar.

They touched down at the bottom uncontested. A single wide door led them out.

“Blood of the Goddess,” Sil exclaimed.

Tallah removed the mask and got a real look at the scene stretching away from their spritelight.

Flesh on the walls. Flesh on the ceiling. Skinless. Shivering. Undulating. Moving and crawling, extending feelers to them. In the Ikosmenia’s sight it was all woven power, illum stored in networks of sinew and nerves. In real-sight, a fever dream.