Fan Fiction ❯ Aftermath ❯ Aftermath ( One-Shot )

Drake never did figure out what hurt more; the screaming lance of pain in a left elbow that was dislocated and had to be popped back into place, the biting vice of a half-dozen bruised ribs that snarled at him in protest once he sat up, the tremulous ringing in his ears that accompanied what had to be a moderate concussion, the stinging pins that rushed through his right leg every time he moved it, or the vicious, gnashing crush that surrounded his heart when he realized Karen wasn't moving. She was a pale red and yellow splotch against the ash-blackened furrow in the snow the colossus had left as it fell before it slammed into one of the obsidian pillars that marched across the landscape. Not far, just a few dozen meters ahead of him, but with his broken body, it might as well have been a mile. Lungs burning with cold, he all but threw himself upright in defiance of his sullenly uncooperative body, dragging himself towards her, lurching ungracefully through knee-deep powder. His habit in situations like these was to utter an endless string of profanities, but at the moment it seemed trite and pointless and selfish.

 

Around him, the broken grey trunks of fallen trees littered the otherwise level plain, acres of once-beautiful violet forest reduced to lumber by the inexorable, unstoppable steps of the stony golem they'd been fighting for the last two days. For all its immense size, he never saw it, an immobile, mountainous corpse still flickering with flecks of fire and slowly regurgitating black smoke into an otherwise pristine blue sky. Instead, he was still fixated on Karen's unmoving body, still sprawled where she'd landed so ungracefully after landing one spectacularly violent coup de grace.

 

Ahead of him, his breath whispered a pale veil as it condensed in brittle air, a minor counterpoint to the white streak he left in the black mar behind him, each step bringing him closer to her without seeming to make any progress whatsoever. He was vaguely aware that Lunaris was missing, his scabbard empty, and if the monster stood again, he wouldn't be able to do much until he found it again. It wasn't likely now, but it wouldn't be the first time, either.

 

What seemed like an eternity later, he finally reached her, dismayed at how much paler she looked against the nasty splotch of blood stretched out over the snow and the stench of it which assaulted his nostrils. Dozens of profound lacerations stippled her exposed flesh, and her breastplate was newly scarred by at least a hundred small scratches. Still, this was nothing against the fact that she was still breathing, however shakily. Her armor looked intact, at least, the enameled reds and yellows still incongruously cheerful against the blacks and purples of his own as he gingerly lifted her and began a slow trudge towards a small copse of fallen trees beyond the edge of the ashes -- there, at least there would be shelter. He couldn't help notice then how pronounced her freckles were against the exaggerated whiteness of her skin, or how much darker her auburn hair was.

 

"Don't you dare stop breathing," he whispered, setting her down as gently as possible in a drift, then stood to look for their other companions, undoubtedly just as scattered as he was. Phoenix, well, he'd never find a tiny black bird in all this waste, but they needed her right now. And Fenris...Fenris had to be nearby.

 

"'m down here," Fenris muttered, spitting out Lunaris' hilt as he sat at Drake's feet. "She doesn't look too good."

 

"No, she doesn't," Drake muttered back, kneeling to run a hand through Fenris' pitch black fur and through the grey streak that ran along the wolf's muzzle and up over the top of his head between pricked ears. "Can you keep her warm for me?"

 

"Sure." Fenris padded over the snow, curling into a black ball and resting lightly against Karen's narrow frame. Exhausted, Drake dropped down cross-legged at the base of the nearest tree, carefully lifting her head and resting it in his lap.

 

"You haven't seen Phoenix anywhere, have you?"

 

"Nope. She looked drained, the last time I saw her, though...she's probably gone off somewhere to immolate herself."

 

An insulted caw clattered down to them, indignant, and Phoenix landed, three kilos of jet-black raven trailing a pair of long, thin crimson tail feathers.

 

"I wouldn't do that until I dealt with her. You might be a terrible friend, Fenris, but I'm not," she said, wading through snow far too deep for her to deal with.

 

"Yeah, sure. Whatever." Fenris sunk his snout back under Karen's still arm, breathing warmly against a cold palm.

 

"Enough, both of you. I'm not in the mood." Reaching over with his good arm, Drake lifted the bird closer to the most severely injured of the lot for inspection. "So?"

 

"I can seal the wounds, maybe build you a fire. But Fenris is right, as much as I hate to admit it. I'll have to leave you for a bit after."

 

Never one to waste time, Phoenix tipped her head back to the sky, a pale vermillion nimbus coalescing around her head as she gathered the dregs of her power, focusing the what little thermal energy she could draw from this desolate environment onto herself. Her beak circumscribed a perfect circle in the condensing cloud of heat, and she pecked and smeared at it, inscribing the sigil with forgotten runes and forgotten words until it became a physical entity, a rubied tiara of frozen fire. Plucking it from the air with her beak, she set down the seal on Karen's haggard chest, her own breath now coming in bothered pants.

 

"Thanks," he said, watching the cuts seal themselves, leaving nothing behind but crumbling black streaks of dried blood. Carefully, he reached down to her face and brushed away at them, chasing them away with quick finger strokes.

 

"You're welcome. You're much more polite when you're panicked, you know," Phoenix rasped, spreading her wings in preparation for flight.

 

"And you're always sanctimonious," Fenris snorted back, leaning his long, grizzled head up over Karen's thigh as Phoenix set fire to one of the trunks near them.

 

"Don't get me started on your case, dog."

 

A flutter of feathers later, she was gone, vanished over the edges of the bowl shaped depression that would serve as the nameless colossus' mausoleum until the end of all things and the enormous, featureless black spires that crossed the landscape in a perfect, razor straight line.

 

Sighing in spite of his abused ribs, Drake leaned back against what was left of the glassy, smooth bole of what might as well have been a conifer on Earth. It was still bitterly cold, but the fire looked like it could burn for a while. He'd just have to think of it as winter camping, just without a tent. At least it wasn't windy. The air had been clean and still ever since they'd arrived here, wherever here was, and the sun had been bright and uncovered both days so far.

 

He let his hands tangle in her hair, silently letting himself revel in its softness, even though parts of it were matted in her blood. The healing sigil itself gave off some warmth as well, and surprisingly, he wasn't too cold. He hoped she wasn't, either, and he was thankful that the tunic and pants under their armor was insulated to some degree as well. Not that it prevented him from shivering every now and again.

 

Karen smiled in her sleep, the slightest upraising at the corners of her mouth, her head shifting by degrees in his lap.

 

Despite the collapsed monstrosity squatting on this blasted taiga and the suddenly profound and muted silence that fell over them, despite the pain and the discomfort wrought by his injuries, he found himself surprisingly at peace. Every now and again the burning stump would flare up again and sizzle as the drift around it thawed and fled in runnels beneath the snow. For as long as he could remember, he'd always had something on his mind, always something he needed to do or get done just to get by.

 

Strangely, right here, right now, wherever and whenever that was, he could not think. There was only him, and Karen resting away her injuries, and Fenris curled up nearby. For the first time in as long as he could remember, his mind was clear, unfettered, unsullied, as he listened to the faint crackle of burning wood and the steady pulse of breathing in a world without anything else in it. This world, this plane, was completely dead, and he was oddly and completely comfortable being the most infinitesimal pocket of life remaining in it. For once, the silence wasn't a portent of anything. Here was Desolation, a place so devoid, so empty, so quiet and unruffled that time had no meaning.

 

He didn't want to break the peace, the comforting blanket of silence, but he did anyway. Enlightenment was starting to feel like it might stick around for a while.

 

"Where'd Phoenix go? She's been gone a long time."

 

Fenris didn't bother to look up. "She does take a long time -- probably still gathering wood. She'll build a pyre the size of a small house before she sets fire to it."

 

"Huh. How'd you find that out?"

 

"Followed her once. She's so picky about being watched I couldn't resist." This time he raised his head, licking his black lips with his tongue before settling his long face into a faint approximation of a smile. "She's uuuugly when she hatches. Like a baby bird. No feathers, all scrawny and gross. Takes about three hours for her to bulk up and molt."

 

"That why she hates you so much?"

 

Fenris' laugh was closer to a long wheeze than anything else. "Among other things. She has no sense of humor, and I doubt she's forgiven me. Don't tell her I told you, or she won't forgive you either."

 

Drake smirked, prodding the burning trunk again to keep it hot, watching the ember flakes of burning bark twist off and tumble to the snow, staining it black with soot amid the fallen purple needle-flakes.

 

"Yeah, I get it."

 

"What about you? Any more dirty laundry you'd like to air?"

 

"You're incorrigible."

 

"I am. I was also called Loki once, and from what you've told me your people believed about me, it's very appropriate."

 

"It is. All right, I'll spill. What did you hear about last time?"

 

"The rotten eggs under the floorboards."

 

Technically, they hadn't been under the floorboards, but in a ventilation duct, in a life a long time ago and very far away. He'd edited the tale for Fenris' sake, not wanting to explain the meaning of central heating and janitors and detentions.

 

"Right. If that idiot Rob hadn't bragged about it, we'd have gotten away clean."

 

He went on to relate the story of one recent April Fool's day -- Fenris was enamored with the holiday, an entire day devoted to making one's neighbor into a caricature -- when he and some friends had staged a false arrest in rented police costumes for sexual assault on one particularly lewd and uncouth coworker.

 

"...funny thing, too, is that he tried to run, so we ended up tackling him into a bush outside the office. Cuffed him there and read him his rights while he was still caught in the branches."

 

Fenris just lay there, eyes closed and a beatific smile plastered over his square muzzle, nose twitching in faint amusement. None of Drake's pranks were anything approximating the kind of crap Fenris had pulled in his lifetime, but then, he wasn't a creature of myth anyway. Still, the wolf had recognized a kindred soul in him and was more than interested in anything he had pulled off and was constantly pestering him for new stories or details of old ones: night raids at summer camp, short-sheeting all the beds in the house, relabeling cans in the pantry, all the childish stuff he was vaguely embarrassed to remember.

 

"Sounds terrible," a new voice interjected, soft and tired and tinged with her lilting accent, and Drake's attention found a new, angelic focus. "You left him in the bush for as long as possible, didn't you?"

 

Fenris' ears pricked and he shifted his weight off of Karen's body as she stirred, drawing her legs up and trying to roll onto her side. Snow clung to her back in fragile fractal tufts as she faced the fire, sometimes falling away in little handfuls and pooling back into the shallow depression she'd left where she lay.

 

"Yeah. Didn't let him stand up again until we frisked him and drove up a car, and one of the guys starting telling him he was going to jail for a long, long time."

 

"I hope I never meet your friends," she said, smiling up at him.

 

"Well, the girls at the main office got a kick out of it. He cleaned up his act for a couple months afterwards, too. How are you feeling?"

 

"Like crap, sweetheart. How long was I out?" She tried to stretch, then winced as she realized she was still in pain.

 

"A couple of hours, I think." The sun drifted high overhead, familiar and foreign all at once, the right shape and the right brightness but just barely the wrong size and color. "What have you been telling me for the last six months about starting self-sacrificial heroics?"

 

"Not to?" she offered, meekly, cringing at her own hypocrisy. "At least it worked, didn't it?"

 

"That's my excuse. Oh, yeah, it worked. You killed the big bastard all right, and nearly yourself in the process."

 

Karen took a breath, holding it in her cheeks a moment before blowing it out, bleeding off the aches and soreness that undoubtedly still held sway over her still fragile frame.

 

"It's bloody cold here. Where's Phoenix?" she asked, finally, carefully dragging herself into a sitting position and settling back against Drake's chest, folding his arms around herself. He didn't stop her.

 

"Committing suicide," Fenris and Drake muttered in synchrony, before settling curious looks on each other, two sets of black eyes locking in mutual, silent hilarity.

 

"Oh."

 

He let her take a few minutes to take in their surroundings, wondering if she found it as oddly satisfying as he did.

 

"Now that we're done fighting for our lives, where are we?"

 

"No idea," he said, resting his chin on her shoulder.

 

"I didn't ask you; none of us has any clue where we are anyway. Fenris?"

 

"I'm just as lost as he is. This isn't anywhere on Miza that I've ever been, and I'm pretty sure I've been everywhere you can be there." Standing slowly, he shook off the snow stuck to his fur in the same supremely unselfconscious way dogs do, then shambled up closer and curled up against them again. "I can't feel anyone we know, either, and that does worry me."

 

"If you're worried, then we're in big trouble," she sighed.

 

Fenris snorted, burrowing deeper into them. "Yep."

 

"Does Phoenix know anything?"

 

"Maybe...but we can't do anything until she gets back."

 

"No...I guess not."

 

Karen folded her frozen fingers together, blowing on them to bring some life back. Curling them into a shallow-half sphere, she quietly spoke, drawing on her core to fill her hands with a slow flicker of indigo flames. Almost immediately, they started to wane.

 

"I'm too tired...damn."

 

Reaching up, Drake grabbed a short branch from the tree and snapped it into thirds, offering it to her.

 

"Still glad you're here. Try this."

 

"Could work...drop them in, let's see."

 

The sticks caught immediately, flaring into a ball of tiger lily light that she confined to her hands. The smokeless conflagration gradually brightened until it became a white globe of white-hot plasma, feeding on itself and shedding just a little heat at a time, but none of them shivered any more. Drake watched silently as her discomfort fled and she took in their surroundings for the first time, properly. Blue eyes traced the distant demarcator between a range of craggy granite mountains and the cerulean dome of the sky at the horizon. She apparently accepted the row of black towers with the same resigned equanimity that he'd cultivated over the last few months -- the understanding that they were essentially stuck here, far from home, and that nothing would really surprise either of them any more.

 

"Well, wherever we are, it's beautiful. I've...I've never seen snow before."

 

"It doesn't snow in Australia?"

 

She turned her head, giving him a small sad smile. "Well, it does, further south. I don't live in the top end, but far enough it doesn't get cold at all in the summer. I suppose you're used to this."

 

"Kind of. If we were closer to those mountains and I had my snowboard, this would be awesome." He paused long enough to brush his chapped lips against her forehead before they settled back the way they were before. "You should try it, if we ever get home again."

 

"Never. There's something I don't like about the idea of strapping both feet to a piece of wood and then hurling myself down a hill covered in ice."

 

"Skiing then," he laughed. Fenris snorted, undoubtedly finding the idea just as ludicrous as she did.

 

"Maybe. But that's just the same thing with two pieces of wood instead."

 

"This from the girl who swims in krait-infested waters?"

 

"I only saw one, and it was only once. It was pretty." She leaned back further, craning her neck to look up at him, but the most she could see was the deep chestnut fringe of his hair.

 

"Pretty, ha. You're nuts."

 

"No, you are."

 

"You are."

 

Fenris slapped down a paw. "Both of you are nuts."

 

"You're worse than either of us, you sorry biter," she laughed, juggling the ball of fire to her left hand so she could put the big animal in a headlock before sobering. "God, we're so lost."

 

Drake sighed, holding her tighter. "We'll see. Maybe we can figure out something from that big corpse, or maybe from those pillars. And we still have Phoenix who hasn't weighed in yet. All we can do now is wait. I'm still hurting, you're still hurting."

 

"I'm still hurting," Fenris choked out. "Can't breathe."

 

She let him go, settling on scratching him behind the ears instead. "We're doubly lost now. Not only are we out in the middle of some godforsaken snow field out beyond the black stump, we're completely separated from our friends who are also lost. We're not getting home again."

 

Karen shivered, not necessarily because of the cold, and turned in Drake's arms, burying her face in his shoulder. He knew she wasn't going to cry; she rarely did, but it didn't mean she wasn't hurting.

 

"Hey, hey. We're going to be okay. We'll wait until Phoenix gets back, and then we'll worry about it, all right? Besides, I'm sure everyone else is looking for us too. If we don't find them, they'll find us."

 

"Don't try to make me feel better. I know you; I know you don't think we'll get back either." She let out another long breath. "Sorry, I don't mean to be snappy. I miss home. And everyone there."

 

"I know."

 

Together they lapsed into a shadowed silence, and the burning log launched into a long, gentle oratory of soft hisses and clicks even as it was outshone by Karen's silently roiling portable star. In the distance, a gout of flame mushroomed up over the edge of a hill, a marker of Phoenix' clockwork demise. Somewhere over that white crest, an indolent black plume of opaque smoke marked the location of a charred corpse containing a single red egg the color and density of ruby. It rose straight up in the still air, dissipating slowly and staining a narrow wedge of the sky with gray. Drake was never sure what to do or say the few times Karen lost hope, and she was right: he was scarcely a bastion of optimism and cheer. That was what Tamara offered their little cabal, and he was ill-equipped to deal with it. True, he wasn't sure they'd ever get home, but it was possible, and maybe one day they would. Until then, he'd just keep trying, and that's what was hardest to put into words. Instead, all he could do was give her someone to hold onto.

 

Fenris dozed off as he always did, drifting into the obscure and arcane dreams that haunted him, making small noises as he drifted around the universe's fevered imagination. Sometimes he'd wake up with a burning insight, and maybe that's what his unnatural friend was hoping to do. In the meantime, he had nothing to do but wait and wonder. That, and pack a snowball.

 

"What are you doing?" Karen asked, curious and probably desperate for an excuse to stop thinking along the same lines she had been.

 

"Since you've never been around snow before, I figure this is a good time." He paused, reaching over her to finish packing down the snow. Originally powder, it had softened in the light of the fires both she and Phoenix had started, and was gloriously malleable now. "This is a snowball," he announced holding it up for inspection.

 

"I can see that. You'd better not throw that at me."

 

"Ha, no. I'm not that desperate to die. But I am going to stockpile them until he wakes up."

 

"You're evil, you know that?"

 

"Yes, I do. That's why you love me." He couldn't help but grin, setting down the first finished one by his side, then reached down to grab another handful of the cold white stuff. He'd never admit it, but when she returned the grin, he was faintly glad she was as mercurial as she was. If nothing else, she was never boring, even if they were at each other's throats when push came to shove.

 

"Make me some. I can't wait for Phoenix to get back, now."

 

"Done and done."

 

When he woke, Fenris took a twin barrage of snow directly in the face from point-blank range. Instantly, he was snarling and bristling in a whirlwind of canine fury, snapping at the air with his hackles raised as he danced away across the snow, shaking his head to dislodge what had landed in his eyes. It wasn't until he heard them laughing that he stopped, and spent the next five minutes dodging their volleys, awkwardly thrown from where they sat.

 

Finally, they stopped, and he circled them warily, eying the not-yet-depleted magazine they'd created during his slumber.

 

"That," he barked from standoff range, "was awesome."

 

"C'mon back in," Drake shouted back, "we're done with you."

 

"I doubt it."

 

"We're done, Fenris, really," Karen added, "I promise."

 

"It's not you I don't trust, it's him," but he stalked in anyway, dodging one last throw that came at him when he was under five feet away. "Now I wish I had hands...or not," he sniffed, plastering Drake in the face with a snowball that had hovered into the air without the mundane physical manipulation the use of hands entailed.

 

"When you lot have finished with your horseplay," Phoenix announced, alighting reborn on what remained of the charred stump, "we have work to..."

 

Her sentence died in an aggrieved screech as both humans let loose with their improvised projectiles and the rest of the stockpile shot up from the ground at her in one concentrated, telekinetic strike.

 

"...do. Hmph." She muttered, shaking herself off from where she'd ended up in the snow. Fenris' shaking wheeze was cut off as the snowbank the bird was perching on vanished and reappeared directly over him.

 

"Hi, Phoenix. Feeling better?" Karen asked innocently, holding out her free arm to serve as a perch.

 

"Oh, absolutely," the raven shot back, giving her a dirty glare. "Traitor. As I was saying, we have work to do."

 

Karen's face lit up. "You know where we are?"

 

"Not exactly, but I had a chance to look at those columns up close. We're still on Miza, there's no doubt. After all, they're absolutely covered in a modified version of the Miza's script." Phoenix' eyes glowed a pink tinged white, and Drake felt his bruised ribs ameliorating under her gaze. Karen, for her part, seemed better as well, less tense, less pale, and far less fragile on the whole.

 

"That can't be right," Drake interrupted. "The Miza are two feet tall apiece, recently discovered iron, and virtually all of them believe their world is flat. There's no way they built those."

 

Phoenix, shuffled her wings around, her equivalent of a shrug. "It looks to me like they did. I read some of it...it sounds like a history."

 

The edge of the snowbank she'd dumped unceremoniously on her counterpart slid away, and Fenris emerged, licking his lips. "Guess I had that coming. I think we're still near the equator -- when I started napping, it must have been about noon, and there weren't any shadows. We might even still be on the temple grounds, somewhere under all this snow."

 

"Wait..," Drake added, closing his eyes to think. "So it's not where we are, it's when we are?"

 

"Yes," Phoenix concluded, hopping off her arm onto the snow again. "That was my suspicion. I suppose that our opponent over there transplanted us into his time."

 

"Oh, wonderful! I guess we're right rooted now!" Karen stood and stalked off through the snow, pausing to gather a snowball and fling it impotently at the fallen hulk she'd killed, her features contorted in rage. "Screw you! Now I can't even make you take us back! You bloody huge mongrel!"

 

"Oh, shit," Drake muttered, picking himself up off the ground to follow her, leaving the wolf and raven to sort out problems.

 

They watched as he caught up to her and grabbed her while she tried to break free. She swore at him, slugged him in the gut and pushed him over into the snow. He never let go of her, though, and she followed him to the ground unceremoniously, where she finally gave up.

 

"At least now we know what we're looking for," Fenris sighed, dislodging himself from the snow completely and shaking himself off. "Think we can find anything in that big corpse that might help us?"

 

"Maybe. Our best bet might be Wyrm, though."

 

"That old geezer? I know he says he can see through time, but come on."

 

Phoenix spread her black wings. "We may as well try calling him. Have some faith."

 

"I'm not sure I'm the one you should be telling that. Here goes."

 

From where Drake and Karen lay, Fenris' body seemed to shudder, the air around him twisting as his reality began to warp. Phoenix, for her part, fluttered back into the air, but her trailing crimson feathers never left the ground, somehow growing as quickly as she rose. When she settled back down on the burnt stump, they coiled around the tree's remains, accompanied by the rest of her tail feathers that fanned out behind her in a wave of brilliant red. Her wings spread away from her expanding body, the rest of her body rushing through a gradient of blacks into grays, and then into vermillion. Twin horned crests emerged from the peak of her head as on a lark, and she finally burst into flame, her core being exposed to the world at last.

 

Fenris hunched over sharply, as though in pain, and his body erupted from within, muscle and sinew multiplying exponentially as he grew, braced paws sliding outwards through the snow. Daggers of matte black flitted through his fur, proliferating uncontrollably over the surface of his body until they consumed him in shadow. His physical size stopped putting on mass once he'd reached the size of a workhorse, but his presence was as incredible as Phoenix' violent beauty. When he opened his eyes, they shone like stars against the abyssal pitch black of his body. He was, for all intents and purposes, a hole in the fabric of reality, a creature of void, and where he breathed, you could see the air disappearing into him and vanishing into the vacuum.

 

Neither Drake nor Karen breathed. They'd seen this all before, but it never lost its currency or the implicit sense of menace and unfettered power their two friends barely contained.

 

When Fenris spoke, it was a voice of thunder, profound and quaking. "Found him," he growled, shattering sound. Phoenix merely nodded; anything more was unnecessary.

 

"Found who?" Karen whispered, sitting up and wiping snow and maybe something else away from her cheeks.

 

"Dunno," Drake replied, "but it sounds like good news to me."

 

"Sso there you are," added a third voice, behind them. "We were all wondering where you'd disappeared to." Wyrm's curiously sibilant voice snarled out of the snow behind them, and they turned to see his slender, emerald scaled form slither out of a crackling green pentagram.

 

"You'd all best hurry," he continued, flashing venomous fangs, "the temple groundss are under sseige, and there are twenty thoussand Mizssa counting on you for help. Juliette ssaid to ssay Paul is holding the gatess, but I can't ssay for how long."

 

Drake found himself laughing as Wyrm split the portal wide even to accommodate Fenris' newfound bulk, and he could only laugh harder when Karen joined him, her mirth the pealing of bells over the snow.