Of course, the thing about tides is …
Rose unleashed a blast on a dead dwarf that was wrapped around Decima. She’d had two on her, trying to wrap her up. Rose’s third eye had just taken one dwarf leg off and the thing was still standing! Fuck! Decima was too busy removing parts of the second dead body to pay attention. Fortunately, that was when a strong gust of wind rose up. It smelled of cooking meat and turned the air around the zombie an ashy grey, singing a faint song and took the first ex-dwarf down.
Rose was feeling good about their odds when voices started to sound. Living voices. She glanced up ahead across the small creek and saw figures emerging from the huts. Too far to make details, but they didn’t look like the cavalry. At least not their cavalry.
She shouted to Decima, “the cult is awake!” but there was no time for a response, because the next round of dead fucking dwarves were coming up the path. And for a moment, Rose saw it. This round of undead would slow them down. The cultists would join the fray. Could they win? Unlikely, but maybe. Decima was a skilled fighter, but she was a soldier. She was used to having a dozen other soldiers to watch her flanks. Rose could blow holes in the ground to trap the undead, maybe turn the bridges into glass to prevent the cultists crossing. Emery would keep conjuring the air spirits, but for what?
For her mother? Her shitty mother who made her life miserable? Her mother who had gotten so drunk that she thought Rose was a demon and shoved her into the ravine? The woman who had taken her legs? No. She wasn’t worth this. Decima was her friend. Even smelly Emrys was her friend. She wanted to do the right thing, but her mother wasn’t worth their lives. She called out, “Pull back!” There was a hut they’d just passed with a short fenced off area around it: Rose figured it was for small animals like goats or whatever dwarves kept. She pulled herself into it, not inside the hut because stairs, but close to the small porch. Emrys and Decima closed in on her shortly thereafter.
“Okay, look, I know this is the wrong time to bring this up, but …. maybe we should just leave.”
Emrys was blank. Decima looked confused. “To regroup?”
Rose wasn’t sure. Was she even saying this? “I mean to just go. Look, you guys …. There’s three of us. When I thought there was like ten zombies, that was one thing, but they seem to have a lot more plus a whole cult and, look, my mother isn’t worth this.”
Emrys looked both confused and sad. “But if they wake their god…”
Rose wasn’t eager to hear that. “Fuck that. Look, this is not about you or her,” she said, indicating Decima. “This isn’t on us. If they raise their stupid god I’m sure some other god will step in. I am not about to risk your lives for my stupid mother!”
Decima nodded as if she understood. Or maybe she just sensed new orders. Emrys looked less certain, but it was at that moment that a wisp of smoke entered the room and spoke to him in the strange spirit language she’d heard before.
<laqad wajidt alrajul walfata>
Emrys blinked and responded. There was a back and forth that Rose felt really killed the mood, though the sound of the dead dwarves trying to get over the fence did that, too. He turned to look at Rose. She couldn’t quite place his expression. “Rose, I’m afraid that we have misunderstood the situation. My friend has returned, and he has found the man … and a young girl.”
“Well, tell it that it found the wrong hostage. It’s looking for an older woman who looks like -” Oh. Oh shit. Rose’s brain caught up to her ears. He didn’t have her mother. He’d never had her mother. “Can your smoke thing show me the girl?”
It turned out it could. After a brief exchange it reshaped itself into a small shape. A human girl for sure, and the smoke obscured a lot of the features, but there was a recognizable poof of hair sticking out at all angles. Her sister’s hair.
He had Hester.
And that changed everything.
Rose wheeled around to face the dwarf bodies clumped together and trying to get over the fence. The blast that erupted from Rose was like nothing she’d ever unleashed. She could feel the blood running from her nose, but it cleared the whole wave of dead fucks out of her way and the majority of that section of fence with it. It left a furrow in the dirt and kicked up stones from the path. She turned back to the others. “Come on, then. Let’s go get my sister.” Decima smiled broadly and Emrys …. well, he continued to look sad and terrified, but he nodded.
Decima looked from the bodies of the dead to Rose, and back up the trail to where the cultists were gathering. “Can you do that again?” She was clearly looking at Rose’s bleeding face.
“That big? Maybe once, but …. Decima -” Rose couldn’t say enough fast enough, so she said nothing. Decima nodded.
“Then save it. Use the small ones and do what you can to get me up front. Watch my flank and we’ll see what I can do.”
“They probably have magic, yeah?”
Decima gave Rose a brief but exasperated look. But a thin voice behind them said, “I might be able to assist there a bit.” Emrys, of course, the glorious doughy bastard. Rose almost wept.
“You can do something about that?” Decima asked.
Emrys nodded. “They need air. I’ll take what I can from them.” His look was grave. This was clearly not a thing he enjoyed. Rose nodded, understanding the offer.
Four dead dwarves were dragging themselves up the hill toward them as they rounded the corner. Across the creek at the end of the trail the cultists were advancing and were much more visible. She could see their half masks. Well, most of them had half masks. Some hadn’t put them on. Some had red weeping wounds where the left sides of their faces should have been. The Sundered Countenance. And beyond that, a red masked man pulled a girl along behind him toward the gate, her poofy black hair a halo around her head. Her sister. She was struggling. Good girl.
Together, the three of them moved and turned their own fucking tide.
The dead weren’t that hard. They were tough, sure, and not just because they used to be dwarves (but if you’re going to make a zombie, you might as well make it out of someone with bones that are almost as solid as stone). They were also hard to kill because they didn’t seem to care about little inconveniences like being stabbed or disemboweled. Only structural damage seemed to work. Rose dug deep into her talent and reworked the ground into a few holes under them. Even normal living dwarves sometimes had trouble climbing. These shits stood no chance. The holes weren’t big, but they stymied them long enough for Decima to wrench the heads off hard or for Rose to blast holes in their connective parts.
Near the bridge Rose saw the cultists on the other side. Mostly human and mostly male, which was not a shock to her, but she saw a woman, probably human. An elf, of all things. Two grey skinned orcs who were probably male, but she honestly wasn’t sure how to tell the difference. They were a bit shorter than the humans, but not as short as dwarves. Neither wore a mask. Rose regretted that.
The cultists hadn’t crossed onto the bridge. Clearly, they understood that whoever stepped foot on that thing was at the magical mercy of the others. She hated it when the bad guys had brains. Both Rose and Decima looked to Emrys. Then Decima kicked out hard at the arm of the chair, tipping Rose ass over teakettle. “Hey!” she cried, but then she smelled the bile and sour. Was that acid? She craned her neck. Those fucking assholes had conjured some big fucking blob of acid. It was eating away at the grass. She couldn’t see Decima, but hoped she was safe.
She heard Decima cry out “Emrys, now!” She got a look at the cultists and opened her eyes. And then opened her eyes again. Light poured out of them. In the dark, this would be super helpful for illumination, but here it made for a solid distraction. It also illuminated Decima crashing into the middle of the group of cultists. Seems like she’d avoided the bridge problem by leaping over the thing entirely. Her left leg was burned and the pant there was gone and crispy around the edges. The skin was cracked and red, but she was moving on it. The glare also provided the time Emrys needed.
The group across the creek began to cough and choke as smoke poured from Decima’s left arm. Some of them were smart and ran. The elf ran, leaping like a deer out of sight. Two more, maybe. The orcs and two of them masked men tried to push ahead, one towards Decima and one across the bridge. Rose tried to get herself upright in time to blast them to the afterlife, but by the time she was up and pulling herself back into the chair the orc was already there. It placed both hands on her armrests and leaned down, its breath stinking, its right eye a sick yellow and the other a sticky bloated grey. Rose tried to blast it, but she had a real moment where she simply couldn’t focus. Her talent needed a certain amount of calm, and she did not have it. She was fairly sure she made a whimper. A tough one.
The orc’s throat started to bulge, blowing up like a frog looking for a date. Rose prepared herself for an acid shower. And then a blade was rammed into that bulbous throat. Acid leaked weakly from around the blade while the throat continued to bulge. Rose shoved out by reflex and revulsion more than any sort of tactical choice. She had strong arms thanks to her teacher’s relentlessness and, of course, the chair, but she wasn’t stronger than a full-grown orc. She knew that. Thankfully, he was not only distracted, but clearly in pain. He stumbled back, clutching at his throat and then started to simply dissolve. The acid that had been meant for Rose ate him away until the right of his face began to resemble the left. Eventually he dropped to the ground, clearly dead, but not willing to accept it yet. With the sour smell of his magical acid overwhelming everything, Rose would never have noticed the vomiting behind her if not for the sound.
Turning about, she realized what had happened. Emrys had taken the blade from her chair handle, stabbed the orc, and was now being noisily sick. How had he even known the blade was in there? She’d ask later. Right now, she was more worried about Decima. She cast her gaze back across the bridge.
Rose hadn’t had much time to watch Decima really fight other thinking beings before this. It was something else. One of the men who had advanced tried to croak out a word and reached his hand out, clearly expecting something to happen that didn’t. His belly opened up so fast that it almost looked like it had already happened, and Decima was just reminding it. Reflexes could get you killed just as much as they might save you, Rose supposed.
The other man, though, was either smarter or more advanced. He took off the mask covering half his face and palmed it, coating his left hand in the blood that seeped there. He dragged his right hand across the palm and flaked it at Decima. She ducked more or less in time, but still found herself spattered by the globs of blood which rapidly expanded into a thick black tar, trying to bind itself to other globs. Inside a few seconds those globs had grown and solidified and if Decima had stood still, she’d have been trapped inside. Rose unleashed a blast at that one. He was too smart to ignore and since his focus was entirely on Decima, it took him right in the head. It didn’t kill him, she thought, but it put him on the ground where he was still not breathing very well. A matter of time. The smoke seemed to be avoiding Decima, which Rose thought was considerate. She wondered if that was part of Emrys’ negotiation or if the spirit was clever somehow. Or maybe Decima was just so badass that she avoided it entirely.
That left one man and one orc. Decima only had one hand that could move, at least until the black goo calmed down, if it ever did.
It was enough. Oh, it didn’t stop her from getting bitten by that fucking orc. Rose hadn’t been expecting that and she guessed neither had Decima, but the fucker let the human looking one (Opal had been right, Rose wasn’t sure these guys still counted all the way) take her sword to the belly so that it could lay its teeth into the woman. And then he simply fell down. It took Rose a moment to realize that he’d passed out. Too much exertion, not enough clean air.
Upright and seated again, Rose said, “Let’s move!” and pushed forward toward the masked man and her sister.
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