Snippet #1608285

"Casualties are a very real, very necessary aspect of war." The words crashed against Faera’s hearing like a wave against the shore, tempestuous and blind to their consequence. The little dark elf stilled in her movement and inhaled slowly. Her hands found one of Beelzes’s and clasped tightly. She could feel her friend’s pulse at the base of her thumb, and exhaled just as steadily.

“Necessity… I wonder if any of this is really necessary,” she confessed, laying Beelzes’s arm upon the ground and standing. She placed a hand on her shoulder, and Zek climbed onto her forearm obediently. “But even if it isn’t, we’ve chosen it, haven’t we?” Holding her hand out, she silently bid her little pet leave, and he trilled plaintively, but settled onto Wrath’s shoulder anyhow. “Look after him for a minute, would you, Captain? There’s something I have to do.”

So saying, Fae focused, this time seeking out that part of herself that held what relics her divine ancestor had left her. Normally, she avoided it, because it felt so foreign, but now she actively embraced it, breaking the barrier that separated the two bits of consciousness in her mind with a sensation reminiscent of breaking glass. She was rewarded with an influx of strength, spilling out into tangibility as though her limbs and very skin were brimming with magic- as though she were magic. Perhaps she was.

Kneeling again, she apologized in a low murmur to her tutor and gripped the arrow in the deep human’s side, wrenching it out and immediately laying a hand on the wound to will it closed. “Not yet, my friend,” she said fondly. “The world would miss your sense of humor too much.” Smiling, Fae stood, turning away from her friend and her commander, and listened. Except… it wasn’t really listening anymore. She was simply aware. Every life on the battlefield burned with some kind of inner fire, and she could distinguish between Children, dragons, and Legionnaires by some intuitive method that she would not have been able to explain. The information was truthfully more than she was meant to handle, and a splitting pain started in her skull and rippled through the rest of her, following the power, a symptom she diagnosed with an agonizing clarity. It must be done.

Pushing it back for the moment, she dug through that pristine corner of herself, searching for something that she knew was there, but didn’t truly understand. Like everything else, it was as if she were moving through the dark, but her ears and nerves and nose and tongue burned with it. Her mortality, her essence, was scoured away in the pursuit, and what was left was at once Faera and nothing at all like her. No longer did she entertain mortal perceptions and mortal thoughts. No longer did all of those things that had once seemed to matter so very much hold any weight in her mind. Nothing mattered but protecting them. Protecting Talae and Beelzes and Wrath and Kisikoni and Lily and everyone else. The understanding of this single fact was so sharp, so acute, she wondered that it had not come to her before.

I… am willing to give everything I have. And this, she knew, wasn’t enough. But it was as close as she was ever meant to come to enough. Homing in on those presences, those beings that she knew to be the Children of Fire, she removed all other awareness from herself until they were all she sensed. Plunging into that connection as though it were a lake and she a fish, Fae allowed that awareness to ripple over her mind. Memories, instincts, feelings flooded her, but by now Fae was a singular, empty vessel and capable of containing all of it. Who she had been mingled with who they were, until there was no difference any more. They, too, would be scoured of their sins, of their deeds, and of everything they were. She willed it so, and pushed that power outward until it overcame those presences, extinguishing the flames.

Externally, what had begun as Fae standing in the middle of empty space was quickly becoming something else entirely. A luminosity escaped her, roiling too brightly to look at directly and growing in magnitude until it covered the entire field of battle in nothing but whiteness. “I’m sorry, sister,” Fae whispered, and gave it one final push, pouring all she had into the spell. The Children, each and every last one of them, dropped to their knees and clutched their heads, screaming soundlessly as that same purging flooded whatever they called a consciousness. The sensations of bright light and absolute silence lasted for the dragons and Legionnaires but a moment, and then everything returned to sensibility again.

But the Children of Fire here were no more. They had simply vanished without a trace into that white, burning void, leaving behind no evidence they had existed at all. The only units left on the battlefield were the Legion of Ashes and the hatchlings they fought.

Less noticeably, save perhaps to Wrath and Beelzes who may have known to look, Fae too had vanished into nothingness. The mortal body was not a suitable vessel for divine power, after all, and tapping into her own had destroyed the young mage, beyond recovery.

---

Neira laughed as she smashed through another one of the dragon’s hastily-constructed barriers. “Oh my; someone has abandonment issues,” she mocked, lashing out with another mental pulse. Ah, but it did feel nice to cut loose. Xeron certainly seemed to be enjoying himself, and to his comment, she could only roll her eyes.

“And someone is rather pleased with himself,” she continued with a shake of the head. “Nobody said the world was fair.” She had been about to insert something snarky about how he had been more efficient when he wasn’t talking, but she was stopped when her vision whited out for a second, and she looked down to the battlefield, which had apparently become much less populated while she wasn’t paying attention. “Well now,” she murmured, but did not dwell on it for long.

“Xeron, I do know how you love to toy with your prey, but there are several more dragons here…” she actually wasn’t sure if he was planning on helping with that or just leaving when this one was dead like a smart person would do, but, well, you never gained anything if you didn’t make an effort.

Hmph. Her making an effort on behalf of the Legion. That half-breed general had better appreciate this.