Xephyas paused on the trail, pulling his hood back and letting the light breeze cool his scalp. For a spring day, it was surprisingly warm, and the inside of his armor was already a bit steamy. He pulled out his canteen and took a swig, contemplating the path ahead.
It wasn't every day that a Citadel mission needed an S-class guild member assigned to it, which was lucky, for not all S-classes were easy to find. And sometimes—he sighed, and took another drink—it took one S-class to find another.
The copy of the two-week-old mission that Teava had shown him was a materials request. Ergs were rare, valuable, and necessary to many trades of the towns, and the merchants' guild sometimes assembled a bounty request when supplies ran low, as they often did these days. Such a mission could take weeks in the field, and a group large enough to watch each others' backs during the dangerous-yet-tedious work of erg hunting—or it took someone who didn't leave any enemies alive long enough to get behind him.
Xephyas was within a few miles of the base of Misty Summit, that warren of tunnels and rickety bridge work that was a breeding ground for dangerous vermin at the best of times, let alone now that it had been abandoned. The vertiginous cliffs were a nightmare to many, but were his-and his quarry's-destination.
Tracking Sol was a bit like tracking your cat; the trail would go smoothly for awhile, but eventually you were going to have to climb a tree. Xephyas, being the best tracker in the guild, often got assigned the job of pulling Sol in for an S-class mission, but even he sometimes ran into terrain that stymied him. But today, he had a new weapon in his arsenal.
He stopped, shrugged off his pack, and pulled out a dark jumble of straps and leathery shapes that whispered with a dry sound as he strapped it on. Within a minute, a pair of dark wings spread themselves over his shoulders, their small size belied by the powerful enchantments that Brynn had pronounced them to possess. Such artifacts were incredibly rare, and Xephyas blessed his good luck, bearer of so many strange gifts, for this one.
When he'd taken them in for Brynn to identify, the mage had been puzzled, or at least not as arrogantly assured as he usually was. "The enchantment," he'd said, "lets you use the demon wings in flight for a total of one hour per day. This is an unusually strong variant, with some subtleties I haven't seen before. For instance, based on my analysis, the enchantment grows stronger at dusk and dawn. Quite unique." He had lightly rubbed one of the wingtips between his thumb and forefinger, as though he were reluctant to let the item pass out of his hands, then looked up sharply. "This item is also very old, and thus the enchantment may be somewhat fragile. Don't get carried away with them, or you'll find yourself stranded wherever the wings drop you when the charge runs out for the day." The icy recluse was a master of belittling the intelligence of non-mages, but Xephyas could have cared less; he had simply nodded and departed with his find.
Now, he straightened up, retrieved his pack, and invoked the magic with a shrug of his shoulders. The wings spread, curled, and caught air, and he found himself rising effortlessly. They seemed to anticipate his movement, responding to intent as easily as his own feet did. He set his sights on the summit, got his bearings, and set forth.
Old they might have been, but the wings' slow beats bore him strongly as he sped just above the trees, following the foothill's rise toward the mountain. It was disorienting, unfamiliar…exhilarating. Xephyas took a deep breath of the wind in his face, pine and moist grass, the musk of spring.
It was hard, after a quarter of an hour, to let himself drift back down to the earth again, but he did it anyway; it would be the Misty Summit itself where he'd need the wings most, and he didn't want to use up today's charge just enjoying himself. Plenty of room for enjoyment when he saw Sol's expression in the precise moment he realized that he wasn't the only king of the heights anymore.
On the ground, the distances stretched again. Walking, he'd be at the base by early evening, the perfect time to test that other property Brynn had mentioned. Just how much stronger would the enchantment be? Could he carry more? Fly faster? The wings, now loosely folded at his back, twitched as though they heard him.
The sun was sinking in the west, painting the top stretches of the mountain white-gold and making the surface erg deposits flash like mirror signals, when he reached the base of the mines. The wings stirred almost before he invoked them, and he rose with a surge of power that made him grip his bow tightly in the rush of air. He aimed for one of the higher entrances, the sort of place that Sol may have picked for a camp. The wings responded like a dream, and the wind on his face made him squint. The ledge approached swiftly and Xephyas prepared to land again.
But when the rocky scrum was just under his feet, something yanked at his shoulders, and instead of touching ground he found himself several feet above the stone, the distance widening. "The hell…?" he muttered, and pushed downward with his will, felt the wings respond for a moment—and then pull harder. He was a dozen feet above the ledge and approaching the next switchback of the wooden ramp, and made a lunging grab as he passed one of the rails. His hand clamped on it and he stalled, the wood creaking under the pull. His shoulder might have creaked too.
His heart was pounding—no, that was something else, a deep, rhythmic thud that seemed to be resonating in the wood. He twisted, managed to hook one foot under a board, and looked right, where the ramp led to another ledge and another entrance. The thudding was becoming louder, booming like a massive metronome.
Sol rocketed out of the mine entrance in a flash of black and white. He somersaulted, came back to his feet in a stop that left a puff of dust, and snapped his head around. The quarry found, but not quite as he'd expected, Xephyas started to call out but Sol was already galloping down the ramp toward him. Their eyes met. Sol's widened in surprise, but it was clear that something else had most of his attention. A cacophony of screeches made Xephyas look over just in time to see a small hoard of gremlins, winged and otherwise, come pouring out of the cave mouth.
Sol pulled up on the ramp, looking up at him. "Xeph! We need to—what in the Goddess' name are you wearing?"
The timing was diabolical; at exactly that moment one of the boards shifted, groaned, and released, leaving him hovering, wings beating with a mind of their own as he struggled to keep his grip on the loose rail. His fingers were sweating, which helped, but not quite enough.
"Enchanted wings," he gritted. At that moment, the rail pulled free of its rope, and the wings bore him up a dozen feet in the space of a second. "Magic's gone bad," he called. "Got rope?"
"Little busy now," Sol reported, just as the wave of gremlins started down the ramp. His hands blurred as he shot, and the first wave fell in seconds, final squeals reaching Xephyas' ears. There was a jutting piece of an ore crane above him that he might be able to reach if he…just…could steer forward…
A deep grinding roar from below focused him on the ground again. The source of the pounding had finally revealed itself: a massive, rusted steel homunculus, one of the mining golems that had gone mad along with every Fomor in the land. Erg energy glowed around its head, a sickly violet nimbus that highlighted the whitewashed letters etched into the breastplate: M. NO.17.
"'Ware!" he called, but Sol was already shooting. It was clear now what sent him fleeing from the mines, and it wasn't a dozen gremlins. Xephyas couldn't watch for long though, because the end of the girder was within a whisper of his grasp, and he pushed…his fingers brushed the surface, enough to twist him a little in midair…he thrust his bow out and hooked it around the broken pulley array at the tip. It caught. He reeled himself in, got a grip with his other hand, holstered his bow and started hand-over-handing his way down to where he could brace well enough to slice the damn wing harness off. By the sound of it, Sol was getting busier.
Preoccupied as he was, he still spared a glance for the combat. The Muspell, too heavy to try the wooden ramps, was confined to the plateau outside the mine entrance, and Sol was sending shot after shot at it from the ramp, having taken out the gremlins in seconds. Good, he was on top of things down there. Now Xephyas just needed to the bottom of things from up here.
Holding hard against the upward force of the bloody damned glitchy magic wings strapped to his back, he got a knee locked around the crane arm, grabbed for his belt knife, and started sawing at the harness. The leather was thick and hard, but parted under the razor edge, and the loosening grip of it on his chest was a welcome sensation.
Or it was, until the crane arm began to shift, groaning as the strange vector of pull forced long-frozen hinge assemblies into movement. The arm tilted upward, and he was sliding inexorably toward the skyward-pointing tip. He had time to vent one frustrated yell as the pulley broke off in a shower of red rust fragments, and then he was airborne again.
As he tumbled upward he caught a brief sight of the massive construct crouching at the top of the ramp, sparks jittering from where Sol's arrows had hit, but still looking disturbingly animate, even predatory. And..was that..? Yes, sure enough, Morrigan save them all from easy fights, a horde of gremlins was pounding and fluttering up the ramp behind Sol, called by the noise, and perhaps by the prospect of an easy meal if the construct was in the habit of dispatching intruders for them.
The number of options between him and the infinite sky was dwindling quickly. He just had breath to shout a warning to Sol, but the wings had been imbalanced by that first cut he'd made, and he was tumbling in the air, rudderless. He clenched his teeth, and just managed to get his knife under the strap again. If he had to fall, best do it soon and take injury, rather than the guaranteed death of falling from whatever height the wings would reach when the magic died. He slid the knife, pulled, felt something fall away, a moment of weightlessness.
Then a yank, a shuddering vibration, a screeching thud.
His shoulder felt like something was gnawing it. He was hanging in the air. One wing was still flapping, repeatedly slapping his ear; the other was pinned to something behind him. There was a long arrow shaft jutting next to his face. It was one of Sol's, he realized, one of the enchanted steel specials he used for distance sniping.
Xephyas twisted his head, and saw that the arrowhead was buried four inches deep into the lip of a mine cart, one of the ore elevators. It was at the top of its cog rail, and his feet were dangling over far too much air. He reached around, got a hand on the edge, twisted, flipped into the cart, and-thank the Goddess-slithered out of the last strap of the cursed wing harness.
When he stood and looked over the edge, he saw what Sol's crack shot had cost: the archer had been forced into melee with the new gremlin mob, twisting, kicking, punching with his bow folded into its short range configuration, the faded pink darkened with blood.
Colors were fading from the world, but the violet glow of the Muspell washed the area with spectral light, more than enough for Xephyas to aim by. He'd never needed much to hit his targets. He pulled his bow off his back, reached for an arrow, and touched air. Groped, then with dawning realization and rage felt where his quiver strap had been: sliced off along with half the wing harness, his arrows lost somewhere below. He hissed through his teeth, reached behind him, slammed the elevator lever, and gave thanks, when it jerked and began juddering downward, that one thing on this ill-omened mountain still worked as it was meant to.
The cart was only a quarter of its way down the cogway when the fight below went ugly. The Muspell, still crouched at the head of the ramp, reached out to its arm's length-and further, the limb unfolding with a metallic screech but uncanny speed. Sol, half-hidden in a scrum of wings and scrabbling claws, was grabbed from behind and dragged backward, struggling in a grip that could crush rocks.
The elevator wouldn't do now. Xeph leaped to a perch on the lip, flung himself to the frame of the cogway, jammed his boot against the rail, and slid downward. A breathless three seconds later he hit the platform with a smell of burning leather and a thud that shook the planks. He snapped his bow, feeling the limbs lock inward, and raced down the switchback.
The gremlins were alerted to his approach by the rickety wood of the ramp jouncing under his feet, and he soon had his own melee to deal with. Sol had thinned the herd for him, but without arrows Xephyas was forced to leap, grapple, and sometimes kick squealing enemies over the edge. His progress was nightmarishly slow, like a dream of running through mud, but as he finally punted the last attacker with a twisting kick, he found himself on the edge of the plateau.
Sol had been reeled in to the construct's body. His bow arm was pinned, and he was pounding at its clenched fingers with his free hand, twisting furiously to get free. There was a snap as his quiver was scraped loose, scattering a handful of arrows across the ground, and he seemed about to wiggle out of the huge fist-then the Muspell tightened its grasp, and, horribly and relentlessly, clamped its other hand around Sol's legs.
His best rival was about to be torn in half before his eyes. Xephyas rolled forward, groped, felt the long shaft of one of Sol's arrows under his fingers, came up to one knee already aiming-only to find he had no clear shot. The Muspell had no brain, no weak point but the erg core power source kept shielded in its chest. And Sol was in right in front of it, his body eclipsing the shot.
Sol saw him. Their eyes met, and Sol gave a fractional nod. Xephyas gritted his teeth and released.
The arrow gave a brief, unearthly wail as it flew, leaping from his string to lodge in the center of the Muspell's steel breastplate. The construct jerked backward as though hit by a much larger missile, and the violet light flared, touched with blue-white bright enough to send starbursts through Xephyas' vision. In that brief spasm, Sol was a black shape that rippled free of the great hands, flowed upward and lit on the Muspell's shoulders. There was quick movement, like a single beat of a raven's wing, and another flare of light, even brighter, as another arrow punched into the Muspell's core from above.
For one hushed instant, the thing still stood, looming and flaring, then it toppled, slow and majestic as a felled tree. The final impact pushed a shock of noise that hammered Xephyas' bones, but left a ringing silence behind.
Xephyas jogged over, panting a little, to where Sol knelt in the dust. He was pressing his hand to his shoulder near his neck, but there was no blood.
"How bad is it?" Xephyas asked.
"Uh…fine, actually." Sol slowly took his hand away. "Just feels a little…strange."
Xephyas, feeling a rising unease, looked over at the arrow that jutted upward from the Muspell's chest. "Oh. Good news, then. The bad news…" Sol had looked up now, followed his glance, and blanched, "…is that that was one of your specials."
Sol stood and strode toward the construct's husk. Its light was fading, leaving them in the dimness of the mountain's natural twilight. He ran his fingers over it, identifying the arrow by touch.
"That one. Yes. I'd found it a few months back. Hadn't taken it to be identified yet. Odd…" he rubbed again at his shoulder.
"Where'd you find it?" Xephyas asked.
Sol shrugged. "Mad kobold's stash. Weird mission, a kidnapping case. Got the girl back alive at least, no worse for wear, aside from being kept in a snow cave and fed charred icebear meat for a couple of days." He rolled his arm in its socket, found nothing wrong, and shrugged it off. "I thought you'd tagged me, but I suppose not. Good thing, seeing what it did to this junk." He nudged the defunct Muspell with his boot.
Xephyas cleared his throat. "So, you're uh, alright?"
"Yeah. Everything's good." Sol paused. "Good shot. Thanks." Both men relaxed slightly.
Sol looked upward now, to a distant angular shape, black on gray: the elevator where the wings hung and fluttered, still trying to fly.
"So…did you want those back? It's not too much of a climb..."
"Leave the cursed things," Xephyas growled, then paused, and smiled. It felt evil even to him. "No, actually…I do want them. When we get back to Colhen, I'm selling them to Brynn."