A/N: Sorry about the delay... I kept deleting and rewriting this one. Still not very happy with it to be honest.
Year 332-4, 2nd Day of the Third Month
Lufthalrian Academy of Science, Basement of the South Storage Building
City of Lufthalra
Distance From Earth:
12,452.3 Lightyears, Scutum-Centaurus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy
Alorast Arizin
A swirling vortex of shadow enveloped the corner of the storage room all at once, sending black tendrils arcing upwards towards the stone ceiling above, splintering the limestone overhead into hundreds of pieces. A black veil descended over the awestruck girls, and a tremendous crack echoed in calamitous thunder as the floor shattered beneath their feet.
“Silla!” Alorast shouted hoarsely, desperately grasping for his little sister. He was only half a step behind Ilyashka, the man having taken off towards his daughter half a moment before him.
He needed to get to his sister.
Alorast had to get to Silla.
“Silla!” he cried out again, stumbling over rubble that was already scattered about the ground. Alorast felt the weight of the world crashing down on him all at once as he tripped and fell to the hard floor.
He only just managed to catch his fall, cutting his hands on splintered rock as he flailed about in the process, but the wind had been thoroughly knocked from his lungs.
Alorast tried to call out yet again, but no words would come. By the time he looked back up, the vortex was gone, along with the person he cared about most in the entire world.
Silla was gone.
Alorast shot up to his feet and whirled his head around. “Ilyashka!” he gasped in desperation, finding the shocked man standing not three paces from him, covered in dust, eyes wide with horror.
“Ilyashka, where...? We must get them back!” Alorast shouted, stumbling towards the foreign lord.
His chest heaved as air slowly made its way back into his lungs. Alorast grasped Ilyashka by the shoulders with tears in his eyes. “Ilyashka, we must get them back!” he shouted again, his ears ringing.
The dazed man hardly acknowledged his presence.
“Ilyashka–”
The man snapped from his stupor at once. “My key!” he shouted, turning towards the once innocuous table centered in the room. He scrambled over to the tabletop and threw his hands down on its surface, his eyes scouring every inch of the thing.
Alorast followed after the foreign lord with his eyes locked on the man’s expression. He didn’t think the man could look more crestfallen than he already was, but he was proven wrong almost immediately.
“No, no, no!” Ilyashka shouted, slamming his hands on the wicked artifice. “The fucking thing took my key along with it!”
Alorast grabbed a fistful of his own hair, all but ripping it out. “What does that mean?!” he shouted, waving his free hand.
His eyes scoured the corner of the room, as if Silla might somehow reappear. It was only then that he realized there was still a human soldier in the room, and Rafferty Mainz had disappeared along with Silla and Aralia.
Actually–
Alorast’s head whirled around the room. The girl with the bad eye had disappeared too. Her sister was standing in a corner, crying with her hands covering her ears. The human soldier, who almost certainly couldn’t speak the language of the Sahkhar, was gripping his rifle tightly with a look of alarm.
Fuck, if Rafferty Mainz disappeared… Alorast needed to sober up quickly. He turned back to Ilyashka and grabbed the man’s shoulders once again.
“Ilyashka, the human girl, she’s missing too. This isn’t good. The Leiftenburgians will not accept this.”
Ilyashka ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. “It already isn’t good for the humans.” He looked at Alorast with grave concern. “You remember what I told you about Simirika. If she’s already here…”
Alorast took a deep breath and tried desperately to unscramble his thoughts. “Damn Simirika and the humans – that’s not important right now.”
He shot a glance at the human soldier standing but a few paces from them. The young man was entirely bewildered but had yet to point his weapon in their direction. Alorast knew that could change at any moment, however.
He instead turned his attention back to the man that hailed from another world. “Please, Ilyashka, please tell me we can get the girls back.”
“Without my key…” Ilyashka shook his head. “I don’t know – I would have to use another.”
“But your people surely have more, yes?” Alorast looked at the man with desperation. “You have more keys, yes?”
“We do, but uh.” Suddenly a look of realization washed over the foreign lord’s face. “My grandniece. Her key is entangled with Aralia’s.”
“Your grandniece?!”
Ilyashka swallowed. “Yes, Simirika’s daughter. Her key is entangled with mine… And Aralia’s.”
Alorast’s brain felt like it was pounding against the side of skull. He needed to get his sister back. He needed to get Rafferty Mainz back. He needed to warn Lady Mainz of the danger Simirika posed.
He looked over towards the human soldier. The young man still had a look of bewilderment on his face – as though he couldn’t possibly comprehend what he’d just witnessed. Alorast spoke the only thing he could think of to get a message across.
“Mathilde Mainz,” he enunciated, speaking the name of the human noblewoman as clearly as he could. He inflected his voice as if asking a question, hoping the man would understand that he needed to fetch her, or something.
Damnable things, he was drunk…
The human’s eyes widened, and it seemed as though he understood what Alorast was asking of him. He nodded once, and turned to leave the storage room, but before he even reached the threshold, another human soldier burst into the space with his weapon held at the ready.
He shouted something Alorast couldn’t understand, but it was clear enough that he wasn’t pleased. Another soldier, this one considerably more mature, fell in behind the first. Drunk as he was, Alorast could still tell – based on the look in the human’s eyes, a look that betrayed years of experience – that he wasn’t to be trifled with.
He took a step towards the older human, only to be met with the raised barrel of a strange weapon. Alorast raised his hands to show he wasn’t a threat, but the human didn’t let his guard down even a single iota.
Before Alorast could speak the name of the human once more, the woman herself walked into the room with a look of abject fury.
Her eyes snapped around the room like a predator might case their own hunting grounds. When her eyes fell upon Alorast’s own, the woman scowled deeply.
“Where is my daughter?” he growled in perfect Sahkhar. She took an aggressive step in his direction, her eyes accusatory in every way imaginable. Her attention snapped to the young soldier that had been accompanying them, and she spoke to him tersely in the guttural human language.
Alorast could see Lady Mainz’s eyes widening in alarm as the human soldier doubtlessly relayed what he’d just witnessed in harsh tones.
For the briefest of moments, Alorast could see the color draining from the woman’s face, but she composed herself with astonishing rapidity and turned to look at Lord Alamayla with cold fury. “What happened to my daughter?!” she growled. With the snap of her fingers the three human soldiers present raised their weapons, pointing the strange artifices in the foreign lord’s direction.
“She, she was standing next to my daughter when the grand-gate opened.” He gestured helplessly towards the obsidian table in the center of the room. “She’s… I don’t know… elsewhere,” the man responded dejectedly. He eyed the weapons turned in his direction and looked up at the human woman with pleading eyes. “Please, I need to confer with my grandniece. Only then might we retrieve them.”
“Might retrieve them?” Lady Mainz growled. “There is no might, Lord Alamayla. You will retrieve them, or I will ensure your people will suffer the consequences.”
Alorast had no doubt the woman wasn’t bluffing, but she wasn’t apprised of the threat the otherworldly Sahkhar posed.
“I… I will do everything in my power…” the man responded after a moment’s hesitation, looking at the ground like a child scorned. “But I don’t know where they ended up… It’s possible they were sent somewhere where…”
Lord Alamayla’s voice caught in his throat. “It’s possible they were sent somewhere that is incompatible with life… Somewhere desolate, a place without air. A vacuum of black…”
At that, the human woman’s resolve faltered. Alorast could see her squinting in the dim light of the room with dull eyes, and he suddenly recalled that humans couldn’t see as well in the dark as Sahkhar could.
“Are you telling me my daughter might very well be dead?” she asked, hardly able to keep her head lifted.
Alorast looked around the room and steeled his own resolve. He needed to remain on the humans’ good side. “Lady Mainz, you need to leave the city,” he sputtered out before thinking better of it. “We will retrieve Rafferty, but your people must leave.”
The woman’s attention snapped back towards Alorast. “Like hell I do. I’m not leaving until I see my daughter,” she spat. “Alive.”
Lord Alamayla shook his head. “You don’t know what’s coming, Lady Mainz. My niece – Lady Simirika – she’s not to be trifled with. She’s–”
A peal of thunder off in the distance outside interrupted the man, garnering the attention of all present. Lady Mainz glared at Ilyashka like a hawk. “Your people pose no threat to the imperial army of Leiftenburg, I can assure you as much.”
The foreign lord shook his head. “You don’t understand. My family is not of this world. Our capacity for warfighting far outstrips yours. I have not the time to explain it, but you must believe me.”
At that, the woman’s face screwed up in a mixture of confusion and derision. “Not of this world?” she repeated.
Ilyashka nodded. “By the same means of transportation by which your – our daughters – have disappeared, my people have arrived to Letura.”
The woman spoke again in her own language, and at once, the younger soldier that had accompanied them to the basement nodded once and slipped through the lone doorway that led into the hall.
“We will see about that,” she said with terse anger.
…
…
…
Mathilde Mainz
Dread and anguish tore at Mathilde’s heart.
What these infernal drunkards were speaking of, she hadn’t the faintest clue. She had been upstairs, continuing Leiftenburg’s plans to convert the mostly empty academy building to a hospital, when the entire building shook and cracked, as if being ripped asunder and swallowed into the ground.
And now, standing in the basement, her daughter evidently missing, the corporal relaying something utterly unbelievable in nature…
She shook her head. The small human contingent in the city had to be warned. She didn’t know if Lord Alamayla was speaking the truth, the but the manner of his dress – his accent – the way the Alstaran prince had looked to him when her husband had laid out Leiftenburg’s position of power over the city…
It was possible he was speaking the truth about their apparent power…
She scanned the dimly lit, rubble-strewn storage room. Over in the corner, there was a scarfed section of floor completely missing, forming a near perfect circle of excavated flooring that looked completely unnatural.
A chill ran down her spine. What had these people done? In another corner of the room there stood a dark-haired girl, her hands clamped over her ears as she cried.
“Who is that?” she demanded, looking at both Lord Arizin and Lord Alamayla.
“She’s the twin sister of a poor girl from the eastern flats that’s staying at Arizinkas house. We only encountered–”
“She’s the bastard daughter of Lord Lufthalra,” Lord Alamayla interrupted, shaking his head as he tentatively stepped closer to the human noblewoman.
“What?!” Lord Arizin practically shouted, turning to the other Sahkhar lord. “Lord Lufthalra has children? How is it that I’m hearing of this just now!”
“Very few people know. I assumed you knew?” Lord Alamayla responded, confused. “Why else would you be sheltering the girl and her twin?”
“That was my brother’s doing,” Lord Arizin snapped back. “He’s free to make his own decisions now.”
Mathilde snapped her fingers. “This is a waste of time – I don’t care who the girl is. You need to be focused on retrieving my daughter!”
She turned to Lord Alamayla. “You say you need to speak to your grandniece? To retrieve the girls by means of this darkveil artifice I can’t hope to understand?”
Mathilde pointed to the table centered in the room – its construction was unlike that of anything she’d ever seen before. It took every ounce of her will to keep her composure in check. She couldn’t contemplate the fact that Raff might be gone forever… That she might be under threat.
She must not allow herself to falter in front of the Sahkhar lords…
“Yes, she has a key that I need in order to activate the grand-gate,” the man finally responded, pointing to the strange table centered in the room. “If we are to get them back, wherever they are… But–”
“Very well. Then you are to take me to her, now,” Mathilde growled, cutting the man off.
Lord Alamayla raised his hands. “I don’t know where she is; if she’s even on this world yet.”
“Didn’t Simirika mention she was in the city when we encountered her upstairs?” Lord Arizin offered meekly, the man withdrawn into himself as he stood weakly by Lord Alamayla’s side.
Lord Alamayla rubbed his temples. “I, uh, yes, I think so? I’m too, I was too drunk – I don’t remember.”
Mathilde let out a deep breath and looked to her guards. “Then you best figure it out, Lord Alamayla. “Your well-being depends on it. That, I promise you, was a threat.”
…
…
…
Several excruciating minutes later, Mathilde was standing outside in pouring rain. Lightning and thunder echoed about the Sahkhar academy as the deluge pounded the impromptu campground that had sprung up on the central courtyard.
The trampled ground had quickly turned to a slurry of mud, and she could feel water seeping into her boots as she plodded along after Lord Alamayla. It was no matter, she came from a family of sailors – wet feet were the least of her concerns.
“You aren’t safe here,” Lord Alamayla stated once again, turning towards her, the man’s blond hair slicked with rain. “Your people need to leave the city as soon as possible.”
He’d repeated the same warning several times by that point, and Mathilde was struggling to believe the man’s utterly wild claims.
“You let me worry about that,” she responded coldly, tossing his apparent threats to the wayside. “You, on the other hand, need to worry about finding your grandniece.”
She turned around and shot a pained glance at Lord Lufthalra’s daughter. The girl was following after her, repeating “Millie?” and “mama?” over and over again, and it was extremely apparent that she suffered some kind of impairment to her mental faculties.
Mathilde shook her head. She didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with the girl, innocent as she evidently was. “Lord Arizin, is there anyone who can bring this girl back to Arizinkas house?” she asked, more of a demand than a question.
The half-drunk lord turned to face her. “Does it look like it to you?” he asked brusquely, gesturing to the soaked camp around them. “I will take her there once we are finished here.”
The utter fool…
It couldn’t be more clear that the man was way out of his depth.
“So be it.”
She beckoned to the girl, and – Lyla, Lord Alamayla had said her name was – stepped closer. “We’ll find your sister in due time,” she said, more of a reassurance to herself than anything else.
The sight of the poor young woman was pitiable to the extreme. She was completely alone and couldn’t comprehend what was happening around her. Waves of dread washed over Mathilde much like the powerful swells that sometimes crashed against the coast back in Stuekbroad.
She’d thus far managed to maintain her composure, but part of her wanted to collapse to the muddy ground then and there. She’d already lost a son – years ago, by that point – and even contemplating losing her daughter…
No, she wasn’t going to let that happen.
“You say Simirika is staying in the martial history building?” she called out to Lord Alamayla, water running down her face.
Like the two Sahkhar lords before her, she was already soaked completely through.
“That’s my assumption–”
A peal of thunder echoed throughout the courtyard, rendering the man’s words indecipherable. Mathilde turned around instinctively, looking in the direction of the lightning – in the direction of Arizin House where Leiftenburg was currently setting up base.
Through the heavy downpour she saw…
Her heart dropped.
A red flare had been fired into the air in that direction, meaning only one thing.
“Captain Roessler!” Mathilde shouted at once, grabbing the attention of the officer tasked with her safety. “Arizin house is under duress!” She grabbed at the man and pointed in the direction of the burning flare.
…
They’d always known taking only 50 humans into Lufthalra was extremely risky, but contingency upon contingency had been made to ensure their safety.
As such, Leiftenburgian artillery had tailed the party earlier that morning and was to be emplaced just under ten miles from the city, under the express command that they begin firing down on the city should they receive the word.
Their word in this case was a signal flare. Should the Leiftenburgian envoy to Lufthalra find themselves under duress while in the Sahkhar city, a red flare would be fired into the air, and carefully planned arterial shelling would commence at once.
“Lady Mainz, we must head back to Arizin house at once,” the imperial army officer shouted, having seen the flare with his own eyes. We need to–”
Before he could finish speaking, Captain Roessler’s skull opened up, sending a spray of brain matter splattering across the muddy ground.
Mathilde froze in place for only a moment before diving towards the ground, having no idea as to where the shot had come from. There was no report, no sound of gunfire, nothing. In desperation, she reached for the captain’s rifle, the weapon lying on the ground next to its unmoving owner.
She didn’t need to check the officer’s pulse to know he was dead before he even hit the ground. She clawed towards the corpse, reached out and got a firm grip on the weapon’s wooden stock, and–
A sharp pain shot through her entire arm as a boot struck her in the wrist with a crack. She let out a muffled cry as someone kicked her in the arm hard enough to break the fragile bones of her forearm. Mathilde immediately clutched at her arm, writhing in pain as she did.
Through the splatter of mud now covering her face, she looked up to see a figure standing over her…
“Now, now, dear,” a woman’s voice chided through the din of the pouring rain. “I’ve been instructed to ensure you stay alive – for the time being. In keeping matters rather simpler, it would behoove the both of us if you remained unarmed.”
Mathilde wiped the mud from her face with her good arm in order to get a clearer view of the Sahkhar woman standing over her with a darkveil bolt thrower in hand. Her blood ran cold. She was dressed in a similar manner to Lord Alamayla, wearing a uniform…
Realization dawned on Mathilde as she squinted upwards in the rain. She’d seen the woman upstairs in the very building they meant to repurpose as a hospital, but she’d slipped away before they had any chance of introduction.
“Your snipers have already been taken care of,” the woman said in thickly accented Sahkhar, smiling cruelly.
She hardly raised her voice despite the heavy downpour. She didn’t need to.
“Don’t think we weren’t watching where every single one of your degenerate little soldiers trod about this territory that was never yours to claim.”
The woman stepped back and holstered the bizarre weapon. “We’ve already taken care of the vermin that traitor allowed refuge in his house. The woman gestured towards Lord Arizin, who was staring at her with a dumbstruck expression.
Before Alorast Arizin could even choke out a single word, a pair of similarly dressed Sahkhar soldiers grabbed him from behind, binding his hands in one swift motion before pulling him away into the night.
The woman turned towards Lord Alamayla and shot him a look of utter derision. “Now, uncle, I would ask what nonsense you’ve gotten up to, but given that you aren’t wearing your key, I suspect I already know what your astoundingly useless ass managed to fuck up. I know what sits in the basement of that building.”
The woman jabbed a finger at the structure located on the south end of the courtyard where they’d just come from.
“There’s a reason why we didn’t tell you it was there, uncle. My father-in-law didn’t think it prudent to let you know. So, tell me. To where did you manage to open the gate? Where is my little cousin? Where is your dear daughter, Ilyashka?”
“Simirika, please,” Lord Alamayla pleaded. The shocked lord shook his head and began speaking in a language Mathilde couldn’t hope to understand, linguist or not.
The pair argued back and forth for half a minute before the woman – the woman that had just killed Captain Roessler in cold blood without so much as flinching – looked up to the sky and let out a bark of laughter as water poured around them.
“Oh, it seems my uncle has made quite the blunder,” she said in Alstaran Sahkhar, looking back at Mathilde. “And it seems you’ve been on the receiving end of my uncle’s incompetence too.”
She knelt down in the mud, moving her face closer to Mathilde’s own. “It’s a pity. Your daughter had spunk, least from what I could tell, given our very limited interaction.”
The woman grinned wickedly. “Yes, I did run into her a little earlier, you should know. I rather wish my own daughter possessed as much fortitude. I’m sure she’s drunk somewhere in a tavern in this shithole city right about now, the useless fucking whelp.”
She stood back upright and ran her hands through her rain-soaked hair. The woman seemed to be enjoying every second of her well-practiced malice. She adjusted her strange jacket and looked Mathilde in the eye as water dripped off the garment.
“Oh, and I wouldn’t count on that artillery your people had emplaced miles south of here,” she began, gesturing towards one of her soldiers that had bound Lord Arizin. “The flare was a nice trick, I must admit.”
She grinned yet again. “Your people should’ve paid more attention to the railway between Alstara and Lufthalra. I suppose there’s no harm in telling you that we offloaded quite a bit of kit halfway between the cities. I wouldn’t anticipate any shelling from your end, to be honest.”
Mathilde looked at the woman helplessly. “Arizin House. My husband…” she choked out, clutching her wrist, that hand rendered completely useless.
It was only then that she noticed the other two Leiftenburgian soldiers that had been escorting them were lying dead several paces away. She also realized the girl – Lord Lufthalra’s apparent bastard daughter – was nowhere in sight.
“Oh, Edouard?” Simirika said with a smile. “That was his name, I think?”
Mathilde felt the weight of the world pulling her into the mud, and there was nothing she could do. “Was?” she whimpered. “Where is Edouard?”
Simirika – to her utter shock – sat down in the muck right next to her as if she were a child told to sit cross-legged on the floor of a classroom. The woman tilted her head, as if pondering what she wanted to say – or how she was going to say it…
“Where is your husband?” she repeated, as if Mathilde were a child.
Mathilde lifted her head, feigning as much dignity as she could. “Where is Edouard?” she sputtered out.
Lady Simirika scratched her chin in mock contemplation. “Well, that’s one for the philosophers, I should think.” She slapped her thighs sending out a spray of water and laughed. “Yes, surely one for the philosophers.”
Mathilde could feel herself sinking further into the muck as she lay prone. “What do you mean?” she whispered hoarsely.
Lightning – and then the thunder that followed – echoed throughout the courtyard as the deluge continued unabated.
Simirika sighed. “Well, it’s hard to say – I’m not exactly attuned to your peoples’ cultural practices, for what it’s worth. Body versus soul, mind versus heart. That kind of deal.”
Captain Roessler’s blood soaked into Simirika’s breeches as she sat in the muck, and it didn’t seem to bother her one bit. The malicious woman cleared her throat and smiled, water pouring off her matted hair.
“It’s difficult to say where your husband is, I’m afraid. You see, his head and body are in two separate places. If you’re wondering where his body is, I’m afraid I can’t help you – I haven’t the faintest clue where my soldiers dumped his corpse.”
Simirika reached out and grabbed Mathilde by the hair, wrenching her head upwards so that she had no choice but to look the Sahkhar woman in the eye.
“But your husband’s head, you should know, is stuck on a pike outside Arizin House’s front entrance – right next to Lord Lufthalra’s.”