B4 Interlude 28: Bitter Return

The grasslands rushed past with an indistinct green smear. Every desperate pounding step was another stone’s weight of exhaustion upon his back. His bones ached, his muscles burned. His lungs felt like he’d been inhaling glass dust.

Yet despite the sting of sweat in his eyes, and the throbbing of his blood like his arteries were about to burst, it all paled in comparison to the heartbreak.

Dross let out a heaving sob, disguised as an exhausted pant, as he drove himself onwards.

The hammer-blow of fatigue was a good thing. It slowed his thoughts, hammered out that iron grasp of loss.

Gods, those utter bastards. Why? Why now? They were so close. It was a new leaf. They’d just gotten a bit of that fire back. That rush. They couldn’t be gone. Why him? Why should he be the one to live?

Every thought, every line, another dagger carving its way deeper into him.

Vicious thoughts that had hooked themselves deep circled through his mind over and over again as his feet droned a monotonous tempo — a sound that only made him more mad.

He’d barely made it out of Strangspine alive. Even with all of his skills and all of his abilities, there had been too many damned beasts!

He shouldn’t have made it. Not with the way he’d been beset on all sides, carved up by leaping hunters and swooping watchers, as a teeming carpet of living flesh had roiled on the ground below him. Three quarters of his Health gone. Mana halfway. Stamina utterly empty.

Every step was harder than the last.

Blast the gods, and their fickle and rat-faced favour. They’d abandoned him. Abandoned them all. Sneering down at him with contempt while he killed himself with a death-sprint.

He could feel it — the crawling itch all over his body, his racking cramps spread through his legs as fibres snapped and rewove over and over again. His heart beat too fast. His vision was a bare tunnel, wrapped in a tinny whine.

Without the supportive properties of Stamina to fend off exhaustion, his body was eating itself. Only the maddened pike of grief at his back and the soul-deep duty to the city that had been his home for so many decades keeping him moving. The strain was bad enough, but he could feel his Health ebbing away inexorably.

What would give out first — the final leagues between him and Deadacre, or his resources? He didn’t know.

He had to do it anyway. They were coming. Oh gods, they were coming. A single mass, slaves to a hungering will.

His worst fears were realised. His friends were dead. They had failed. Oh gods, they were dead.

Dross remembered that crushing weight as he tore his way out of the jungle and into the surrounding bush. He’d only had a bare half an hour left of his final charge of Airstep. Somehow, he’d broken away from the beasts.

No. Not somehow. He knew exactly how he’d escaped. He’d been allowed to. Not unmolested, unpursued, or uninjured, but allowed all the same.

It was that damned weight. It had been so suffocating, smiting him out of the sky with the gods’ own fury.

Her eyes, watching him from the edge of Strangspine, burning and terrible and far too many.

Her words burned.

She was coming. For him. For Deadacre and everyone who lived in it. For the challenges she so desperately craved.

He ran. Not as a survivor, but as a man reduced to being a Tyrant’s herald.

Drowning in an ocean of fatigue, in all too much pain, Dross kept running.

Just a few more leagues.

He would make it. He had to. It was the only bloody thing they’d asked of him.

…

Dross fell to the dirt like a dead man, his heart fluttering in his chest.

He failed. The leagues were too many, and his body too worn.

Earth and dust coated his mouth, and the weight of loss crashed over him.

They had chosen wrong. Bronn could have done it. Yan could have done it. Even fucking Julis could have done it. Why him? Why pick him? He’d failed. For nothing.

Over and over, he saw their parting looks — before they had walked face-first to their deaths.

Too strung out to cling to any semblance of conscious wakefulness, Dross mumbled in the dirt. His world was reduced to a small section of yellowed grass pressed close to his face as his breath came in shallow gasps.

He heard it pounding. It could have been feet or his heart.

“By our blighted lands, is that fucking Dross?”

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Something rolled him onto his back. The light was blinding.

“By the gods it is. What the fuck happened to him?! Where are the others?”

He heard the meaty sound of a hand striking flesh.

“Fucking look at him, man, and don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to. Come. Call in the others. Whatever did this is too much for Iron to handle, and we need to get him back to the city.”

Something hoisted him up; he couldn’t tell what. They still held his weight easy.

“Fuck. He’s delirious. Do you think that Yas will be able to keep him stable with her skill?”

“How the fuck should I know, man? He’s bloody Silver!”

“Goat’s piss, we best hurry.”

…