Tuesday 22 November 2011

78) Last Stand

    The crystal medallion pulled hard against the fabric of her being and tried to return to the ground from which it had come. Inside her chest she could feel it push her living components around. When she scraped by a torch on the wall she could see it gleaming through her dark flesh that was pulled taught and thin around the damned thing. She thought that carrying it through the Roster fields and across the Essen swamp was hard, but this was madness. The higher she climbed in the mountain fortress the harder the medallion pulled against her.
    Goblins raced several floors below. She couldn’t hear them, but she could feel them. And they were getting closer.
    She wished that Aton was still with her, that obnoxious human had been a good host, but she wouldn’t have gotten this far without his sacrifice. She felt her face grow thin with sadness. He would have smoothed over her frustration by telling some stupid aimless joke or…
    She screamed out in pain and fell against a rough stone wall. The darkness binding her body together had ripped inside.
    With no supplies and no companions saving the world was all up to her, but she didn’t think she could make it. She fell, shuddering in pain and curled against the wall. She stopped and tried to pull all of her strength inward. She remembered her parent showing her healing spells and fortification methods. She tried to pull herself together, sacrificing other parts of her body to shore up the broken parts. She pulled in her left arm, pushed it down to support the medallion and replace the structure inside her that had turned into lifeless shadow. Her left hand became a sad stumpy version of its old self.
    She concentrated hard and the world snapped back into focus. Though she felt stronger panic set in. The goblins were even closer, probably just around the bend. She twisted off what remained of her hand and threw it as a brute darkness spell down at the torches on the wall. The torches sputtered, she held her breath, and finally they went out.
    Aton’s lasts words echoed in her head, “I believe in you.”
    She knew that flakes and strips of herself were undoubtedly falling off from the exertion, but she got up and didn’t look back. She had a mission to complete, a fate to fulfill. She propped herself up against the wall and groped around in the dark for the staircase she had seen earlier. She slid up it towards the roof, towards the altar and the salvation of her world.

No comments:

Post a Comment