Chapter 8: See the local loves a fighter, loves a winner to fall
"Grayris-Mrelliks, where will we go?"
"Away."
"What of the Great Machine?"
"Let it die. We can only look to ourselves and no further."
- Conversation between Klyfiks, technician of House Light, and Grayris, Baroness of House Winter
Therin skidded to a stop, staring through the translucent screen of cold Stasis, and watched as Grayris motioned to the Hydra. Motioned - didn't open fire, didn't lash out, just... motioned. Like it were a real living thing as opposed to some maddened radiolarian thing, soulless in and out. Norovoi had the decency, the reason and self-awareness to stumble back, to aim her Mythoclast up at the construct, but Grayris just... gestured to the thing.
Spoke to it.
The crystalline wall abruptly melted away. The Hydra disappeared in a flash of geometrically-drawn lightning. Grayris turned about, marched past him and lifted her head to behold the darting lights of ships familiar and foreign manifesting some distance above Nessus's thin atmosphere. The Kaliks-Fel was closer yet, just within the clutches of the tiny stratosphere and sailing through the odd, wispy cloud. It was torching closer, coming for a pick-up, but Grayris went and onlined her commlink to bark, "Change your heading, Dunraven. I'm sending you coordinates now."
"Gray-"
"Divert all available power to shields - yes, even that of life-support. Instruct everyone to don rebreathers. This is an order."
"Understood," the Exo sullenly acknowledged. The brief call hissed to a close, static flying out the receiver like sparks.
Therin... he floundered. "Gray, what the hell was that thi-"
"If you're right," Norovoi interjected, ignoring his scowl and aiming her words at Grayris and Grayris alone, "and if they're, she's... serious about this, then... this could be our chance."
Grayris nodded. She tilted her head and pointed. "There. The Ketch."
She was right. Up, up high, basking in the odd ray of sunshine reflecting off Nessus's surface was the other Eliksni-built ship Dunraven-9 had warned them about, hanging in the sky as a tiny, needle-thin blade. Smudge took control of his visor's HUD and zoomed in on the distant frigate. "Scornship," he breathed.
Grayris snarled not a moment later. "They bear his mark."
"Fikrul's?"
"He is here. He must be"
"Ghoul-Archon," Norovoi muttered. "That's just wonderful." She glanced around. "What now?"
Grayris gestured to the Skiff. "Quick. Our time-window is short. Quick!"
"Window for what?" Therin asked, but neither answered him. Just hurried to the dropship and left him to catch up on his confused lonesome. The moment he climbed up into the Skiff's hold, with Gaelin dragging him in by his shoulders, the ship took off and torched through the air.
"Away," Norovoi gasped, barely glancing at him. "They're offering to take us away."
Therin didn't like that. Not even a little. "Why?"
"They want something." And she pointedly looked at where Grayris was, leaning against the bulkhead leading into the cockpit, speaking with Nivviks.
"What're you talking about?" Gaelin was dragging the length of hastily-packed cabling into a more manageable loop, and once finished he dropped it atop the near-empty Arc batteries. "Wait a second, who are-"
"Vex," Therin told him.
If he was still made of flesh-and-blood, Gaelin would have probably paled. As it was, his optics brightened and his mouth snapped shut. Therin might've found it funny if the situation wasn't so dire.
Grayris's panicked new tact - because Therin was certain that below her cool, calculated exterior, the Baroness was as desperate as the rest of them to get away now - was to lead the Skiff and Kaliks-Fel into the ruptured mess indented in Nessus's crust as left by the Leviathan so long ago. Not to hide, no, their pursuers knew exactly where they were going if the brightening plasma-burn trails carved across the sky were any indication. It wouldn't even take them that long to catch up, particularly if Dunraven was right and they had a Dredgen turncoat with them, but that wasn't what Grayris intended.
No, she wanted to avail of the Vex's offer - a preposterous idea that, one only the madness of glitching Splicer tech could come up with - and to at least wedge themselves into a semi-defensible position. The notch in Nessus's mantle which Dunraven slipped the Kaliks-Fel into was just that - open space flanked by platforms of winding, hideous Vex brass, branching away from crumbling foundations of sheer rock. The core of the tiny planetoid burned on one side, and on the other they were faced with the crust of the centaur. Only one way in, one way out.
Trapping themselves like rats.
But that was if Grayris was wrong. And loathe as he was to admit it, to acknowledge that the Vex were anything other than a deadened force of malignant semi-conscious bacteria, he trusted Grayris not to gamble all their lives for nothing.
The Skiff came to a halt, hovering over the platform on the left side of the Ketch and turning about to keep its cannons aimed at the entrance. The sheer mass of the Ketch boxed them in on the side facing the core, and the ship was sturdy enough that Therin was confident the Hive and the Scorn wouldn't get through. Not unless they brought a Tombcarrier. Or a clever Guardian-
Which wasn't out of the question, was it? Depended entirely on how resourceful the Yor-wannabe really was.
Therin dropped out with Grayris and Gaelin. The Baroness had waved Norovoi back in, much to the Awoken woman's dismay, and snapped, "Remain! Assist Nivviks!"
"I don't know how to work a-"
The Skiff's hatches snapped shut, stealing her words away. They all landed ably enough, and Grayris ran towards a nearby Vex node while shouting to him and Gaelin to provide cover. The Ketch on their left rumbled angrily, cannons bristling, and Therin tried to assure himself that they had enough firepower to last themselves a little while - that it wouldn't devolve into a close-quarters melee anytime soon. Still, though - not forever. And eventually, War's conglomerate of savages and monsters were going to get inside.
They should have ran, he thought. Oh, sure, the dream of escape was nice, but this was Vex tech; this was unreliable, this was going to get them killed. And Grayris was going to see them through. The Vex were leaving them to die. She would arrange their continued survival, like always. Fikrul was going to tear them apart.
Therin just didn't know anymore. He trusted. He didn't trust. He had hope. He was hopeless.
"Breathe," Smudge ordered. "Slower. Breathe. Breathe."
Therin did as he was instructed, heart still hammering away. "We're dead," he whispered.
"You die, I'll get you back up again. I promise."
"I don't want-" Therin gulped. He looked to the side, hoping for a familiar face - but it was just Gaelin, fellow Hunter and Lightbearer and acquaintance, but not family.
His family was gone. War had seen to that.
"I wish it hadn't come to this," Therin sighed. "Traveler above, I wish... I don't know anymore."
He paced along the empty platform, forming tripwires of Void thread and lodging them into the surrounding metal hidden explosives cast from stray Solar sparks, and he stepped back and waited - Symmetry onlined and braced against his shoulder, hands bright with Light ready to burn.
They would have still died running, Therin knew. But the act of it - of moving, of fleeing, it would have given him the illusion of a having a chance. Oh, sure, he was aware the Dark's sycophants had their scent, that they would never be shaken off because death was all they had to eat and the crew of the Kaliks-Fel was the last living things to eat in the entire system, but the fantasy of riding on until they collapsed still appealed to him.
Still enticed him.
Though, with the Bandwagon the way it was, there was no way he was making it off on his own - not that he'd have dared even if it was.
Nadiya was dead, Micah-10 was scrapped, Conar and Lee-4 were in pieces, and Shinobu was gone, but he was still standing - still a Guardian, even to the last.
A thought struck him and Therin chuckled nervously. Smudge sent him a questioning pulse. "What?"
"Just..." Therin lowered his head, the glass of his visor tapping against his rifle's scope. "Remember our sixth day?"
"Your sixth day," Smudge corrected, "I'd been around a whole lot longer, but yeah, I do. We were lucky."
"Always have been," Therin whispered. "Never ceases to surprise me."
"Pilgrim Guard. They gave you food."
"Yeah, honeyed chunks of fried rabbit and water that didn't taste like irradiated sand. Fuck, I miss that."
"What, the sand?"
"The Guard," Therin corrected.
Smudge hummed. "You left them."
"I'm a Hunter. My place was in the wilds - on the edge. They were just bringing people home. Good work, that, but not for me."
He remembered telling them about his urge to roam. No one had been surprised. No one had complained or given out or tried to convince him to stay. The parting had been on good terms - with everyone involved. Therin smiled to himself; he missed that. The simple camaraderie of being alive, of being alive with others equally alive, of exulting in the dawn of a new, better age and knowing they each had a part to play in making it that little bit brighter. Those had been the good years.
"They said I could stay with them from the get-go," Therin murmured. "Orin said that - and she knew it wasn't going to last. Knew I was going to leave. Gave me a home for that short time anyways."
"They were kind. She was kind."
"My hero."
"Thinking of taking up the hammer?" Smudge teased, her voice echoing around the inside of his head. Her presence calmed him; her chatter gave his traitorous mind pause.
Therin snorted. "Would never have been able to lift it."
"You could have tried."
"Yeah, no, not my style."
It was easy to admit it.
"Hope she's still... okay, wherever she is," he said more quietly. "Or... with what's left of her, anyways."
The Nine had gone to ground when War had charged in, swinging that monster sword of Hers. No one knew where. Xûr and the Emissary had followed them out. Strange and enigmatic as they were, the Nine had been a friendlier face than most - even if the face they wore was the mask of a woman hollowed out of free will. Strange to go on in a universe where they simply... weren't there. A periphery force they may have been, but at least they'd been a constant - if a relatively unknown one at that.
"What's got you thinking about this?" Smudge asked at last.
Therin paused, looked at the Ketch, at the Skiff, at Gaelin setting up a sniper's nest and Grayris frantically interacting with the terminal bearing strange Vex mechanisms - and he said, "We're the last of the Guard, I 'spose."
Smudge didn't say anything. She didn't need to.
They were both content with the quiet from there on out.
-X-
"'Ere they come," Gaelin murmured. His optic was trained on the flickers of pre-emptive soulfire mists through the scope of his rifle; Tombships carving a path through Ascendant will-space to their location. And, if the broad flickering of ill-fitting Darkness roughly falling over his Light was any indication, their Dark Guardian confederate was with them.
Now that was a fight he wasn't looking forward to.
The Hive landed first - Tombships ripping out of un-reality into realspace, only to be dashed amidst Arcfire by way of the Ketch's cannons. They kept coming, though. Husks of burned out dropships fell away into the centaur's core, feeding the broth of molten metal and indescribable heat with blasted chitin and broken bodies, and they just. Kept. Coming. That one of them managed to hex out a number of warrior morphs onto the edge of the brass platform was inevitable, and the moment it did, the moment it planted a pack of skittering Thrall onto the metal, Gaelin opened fire. His fire shot killed three - the Void-wreathed microrocket tearing through brittle shell and emaciated bodies. Therin followed it up with a barrage of Arc seekers, each tracking shot bursting the moment they impacted and splashing searing energy all around.
Suffice to say, the pack didn't last. Neither did the next, what with Nivviks tearing them apart via bouncing mines and concentrated Arc blasts. The Skiff swayed overhead, weapons systems engaged and online, firing sequences dialled in again and again. Once, perhaps, Gaelin would have feared the sight; Skiffs used to be a mark of danger, what with them being arguably the most effective gunship known to man - and to alien - but no more. No more.
Except, of course, when Scorn were piloting. Then it was back to the old days - except that his new opponents were as dead as he was. At least all that experience with the Devils of before came in some use; Gaelin heard the quiet, distinct noise of a cloaking field, spotted the faint distortion in the air, and felt foreign Arc signatures play against the skein of his Light - and he knew. He dropped his Trophy Hunter, drew a Duskbow and let loose. The Shadowshot grabbed the Skiff out of the air, caught another one in its tethers and smashed them together to a single mighty burst of jagged shrapnel and belching ether-flames.
Pop, pop, pop. Bodies, little more than ruined bones and spare exoskeleton, tumbled out the rupture points in both vessels and fell away - more fuel to Nessus's seemingly eternal pyre. The sight of four-armed corpses stabbed right into Gaelin's nonexistent heart.
They weren't Eliksni.
They weren't.
But all he could think of, watching them, was that if he failed, if he slipped up and died at the wrong time, he'd only rez back to the reality where Vynriis and Nivviks and Klyfiks and, hell, even Grayris were among those trying to kill him. Slathering mutant beasts where people, with feelings and emotions and thoughts and histories and lives, had once stood.
A jumpship soared out of the cascading inferno where once the Skiffs had been, slick as a knife blade. Gaelin shot again, he hit again, and it dragged the ship to a stop long enough for the Kaliks-Fel to annihilate the damn thing, but a flash of transmat amidst the next load of summoned Hive warriors caught his attention. Gaelin picked his Trophy Hunter back up, picked through the shrieking Thrall, yelling Acolytes and baying Knights to find the traitor, the turncoat, the monster in human skin, and there.
There.
A Hunter. One of his own kind - his own people. Flanked by a pair of immaculate Wizard attendants, their claws glowing with Dark spells and their very bodies bubbled within warding hexes built from Solar energy. Screaming incantations wailed from their skeletal jaws. The Knights roared in tandem, towering over the not-human in their midst and still affording him a healthy distance and bowed helms. A four-armed Scorn Chieftain clad in stolen chitin-plate dropped to his knees, bore a hadium-forged cleaver across his upturned primary palms, and sung in a blathering, gurgling manner as the once-Guardian took up his sword and beheaded the undead creature in one fell swoop - grinning all the while.
He wore no helmet. The man was a baseline human, his face once young, once noble perhaps, but bloodied runes had been carved into his cheeks, a jagged chainlink of Hive design looped through one of his nostrils as a piercing, and his eyes were a bright soulfire green. His cloak was Witchskin and Wormsilk, with monstrous fangs at the base of his hood to clasp around the edges of his jaw and mouth like the caress of some abyssal thing, and the rest of his armour was similarly macabre and forbidden - Hive shell interwoven with ragged, threadbare cloth. More soulfire danced around his torso, over his arms, and it pulsed with an evil light.
The Hunter shouted something, and in the Hive's own language no less. He raised his sword and gestured forth. The beasts surged on with a hunger renewed.
"Yes, yes, very inspiring," Gaelin muttered. He watched the front ranks of Thrall cross the hidden tripwires and plummet the entire brood in toxic Voidsmoke and flaring Solar fire. Their screams took on a new note - horror and pain, with some righteous anger to boot. "There we are..."
The Hunter emerged from the smog unscathed, if a little sooty. He pointed his sword in Gaelin's general direction and screamed something incomprehensible. His Wizards took up the call.
"I think he's bringing your parentage into question."
"Yeah?" Gaelin-4 harrumphed. "Well, he's welcome to. Doesn't bother me none."
"Going to kick his ass?"
"Hell yeah."
Clip snorted. "I love you so much."
Two long knives of glittering indigo-blade grew out of Gaelin's clenched hands, wickedly sharp and slick with matter-venom. He flexed his neck and shoulders, delighting in the crack of aged cranial supports, and Blinked all the way down. Therin's shooting abated the moment Gaelin teleported in the way. Nivviks' did not, but then he trusted the Eliksni to make the right shots. The old guy, crotchety as he was, was still good for some things.
Gaelin blurred forth, snagging hold of the Voidsmoke billowing across the platform and using it to mask his approach. It wasn't subtle, and he was almost certain both the turncoat and Wizards could feel it, but it was enough to reach them before they could physically react, to leap up, crack through the first Wizard's ward with a flying knee and jam his Spectral Blades into her skull. She disappeared as a fine layer of glittering dust and purple miasma, atomized and then some. Her sister screamed, feeling her death, and Gaelin tossed his knives - one after the other, destroying the remaining Hive sorceress's shield and form in quick succession.
The Voidsmoke cleared. The Dark Hunter beheld the decaying silhouettes of his attendants, twirled around to face Gaelin and snarled. "You-"
"Me," Gaelin agreed. He pulled a Void arrow out of his Orpheus Rig's quiver, drew it back on a bowstring of pure inevitability, and fired it point blank. The other Hunter moved, fast, and briefly manifested as ash and soulfire in a method not unlike that of a Scorn Raider - swiftly closing the distance as a human-shaped cloud of choking fog rather than doing the smart thing and retreating. He rematerialized, swung his cleaver, and bit out a curse as Gaelin ducked beneath the frantic, weighted blow. Gaelin jerked back up the moment the alien sword was past him and planted a hidden blade up under the traitor's chin - jamming all twelve inches of factory-forged steel into the bastard's head, crunching through bone and brain.
The Dark Hunter's eyes boggled and his mouth fell open, soundless and unseeing.
"You've forgotten what you are," Gaelin informed him, but he was beyond hearing anything as well. Gaelin dropped him, jerking back as a dagger-bearing Acolyte swung for him, and he lost himself in the heart-pumping exhilaration of the fray. Three Thrall, four Acolytes and a single reckless Knight later, he spotted the Dark Guardian standing up on his lonesome, something disappearing in a green flash over his shoulder, and he allowed himself a small, grim smile.
Which died the moment the entire centaur fell on top of them.
His head was pounding. One of his optics was out. Gaelin-4 coughed, or tried to, and retched through his synthetic throat - dispelling a great plume of choking residue. He rolled over onto his back, groaned, and dialled down the sensitivity on his ringing audials. He heard... shouting. Screaming. Roaring. Fires raging. Gunfire. The cackle of Hive taken mind and soul with violence and bloodshed. He saw...
He saw the splintered prong of a Ketch-blade emerging from above, tearing through crust and Vex-ium alike to skewer through the platform and glance off the shield around the Kaliks-Fel. The scrap metal of the Scorn vessel hadn't fared well at all, and he doubted the frigate would ever fly again, but at that moment he didn't think they cared very much about that. Not when their prey was already within reach. Screebs, Raiders, Stalkers, Chieftains and more spewed out from the brutal cracks fissuring around the shattered ship's prow, spreading out across the hull and ceiling of the massive cavern like a swarm of hungry beetles. They'd stabbed their ship through the hollowed shell of the broken centaur just to get to them, to offload their packs of slathering killers in close proximity - twinning Eliksni persistence with the mindless destruction that came so naturally to those enthralled to the Dark.
A silhouette stepped over him - highlighted through the smoke by the eerie green glow crisscrossing their otherwise normal, humanoid body. They held a sword, rife with energies that just didn't feel right being that close to him. They were lifting it up, planting a boot on Gaelin to keep him down, and smiling through broken, bloodied teeth.
And a hand, three-fingered and clad in the insulative, protective material of a biosuit, closed around the Dark Hunter's head, froze his cranium into solid Stasis, and crushed it like an egg.
Gaelin-4 opened his mouth, to warn her that the bastard was still immortal, he could still come back, but the moment the chitin-shelled Ghost manifested into existence to give rise to its Guardian once more, it was shredded apart in a burst of burning scrapfire. A crashing torrent of sizzling Arc took out the revived Dark Hunter all over again, just as he was taking his first gasp of his newest - and last - life. Just for good measure, Gaelin supposed, Grayris crushed the dead man's ribcage underfoot, twisting her sabaton to be sure, and she turned her attention over to the rest. Her weapons - a shrapnel launcher and an Imperial shotgun - blazed into the gathered Hive and encroaching Scorn without a single moment of hesitation on her part.
"Get up!" she barked.
Gaelin got up. It was instinct, at this point. Her orders meant life or death - and he very much wanted to live. He pulled the Void back to him, reforming his Blades, and he caught a leaping mace-wielding Raider who'd thought to try and flank the Baroness. His knives cut into the mutated, bulging blue-white flesh of what had once been an Eliksni, and the undead creature disintegrated into nothing.
More Hive were being summoned. More Scorn were manifesting from clouds of wretched Dark Ether. Gaelin wasn't even sure it had just been the single Dark Guardian. Even with Nivviks providing cover, ripping through a majority of each howling mob, and with the Kaliks-Fel annihilating every attempt by the enemy to fit their own aerial support into the skirmish, they were being overrun. There was too much Dark, too many beastly creatures barreling towards them, too many spells being flung this way and that - they were being slowly drowned in a new Dark Zone, and no matter how hard they fought, how fiercely they burned, how desperately they kicked, Gaelin-4 knew, he knew they were just about done for.
So-
"You have a way out?!" he called.
Grayris growled an affirmative. She smashed a Knight's helm beneath a swing of her Imperial shotgun, the barrel crunching the chitinous armour and head below in once savage blow, and she went right back to shooting through the next warrior-morph. "A trade! They want a trade!"
"Who-"
"The Persevering Mind!" Grayris stopped, plucked something from the side of her helmet and tossed it to him. "Bring this to the node!"
Gaelin caught it, gave it a once over and cursed. "You can't be fucking serious!"
"Go!"
It was a Splinter. A Dark Splinter. For the Vex. Were they really-?
Yeah. Yeah, they were that desperate.
"Shit," Gaelin hissed. He dropped a smoke bomb, Blinked back two consequetive times, and floundered in front of the node. It was just... more Vex stuff, a latticed tower of glowing white telemetry. He'd never been a Splicer, never tried to understand the workings of machines like the House of Light did, and he was currently regretting that decision. Helpless, wary, doubtful - he thrust out the hand holding the Splinter and tried not to cough as the fumes of battle and Dark chafed against his Light, his very soul. Tendrils of radiolaria reached out, towards the thing. Gaelin flinched as they brushed over his hand, not yet biting in but oh, he could feel the Vex's temptation. It dragged its spindly fingers around the Splinter, around-
A flash of powerful Arc tore him away.
Gaelin-4 rezzed to the sight of a massive Scorn creature hanging over him, clad in the ragged regalia of a once-Archon and grasping at a staff topped with a crackling blue Arc crystal. The ghoul's head was clad in an all-encompassing helmet of crude yellowed iron. It held with one arm, up in the air, the struggling form of Therin and closed its cracked claws around him - crushing him in its grasp.
Therin screamed.
And then, quite suddenly, the arm wasn't there anymore - cut away by a needle-thing blade of glittering Stasis. The ghoul-Archon, bloody Fikrul himself, turned around an arm short to face his assailant and growled, "Time-Bane."
Grayris roared. Her shotguns, both launcher and Arc-shredder, had been relegated to her secondary arms so she could wield twin crystalline swords. Her great helm's orange optics burned with a crazed fury. She swung, and Fikrul caught the blow on his staff, unconcerned that he was lacking a limb or that she was filling his belly with burning metal fragments and brutal Arc pulses. The gunfire didn't bother him at all. But the Stasis she swung, the Dark she brought to bear - that he cared about, that he was wary about.
A glaring bright light lit up their subterranean world. Gaelin-4 had only to glance at it to know what it was: a Vex timegate, massive and framed with a ragged ring of bronze and radiolarian mites. Golden lightning flashed around it, thrumming with power the machine collective could ill afford to waste.
Apparently, they'd never devised a reason to learn how to lie - how to weave subterfuge - because this was exactly what they needed, exactly the escape everyone was hoping for. Or maybe they were lying, and there was worse fate on the other side of the portal.
"Go!" Grayris bellowed - both into her commlink and to them. The wave of Hive and Scorn behind was swelling, rising, coming their way and fast. Gaelin even spotted a couple of sheening, spindly metallic limbs rising up above the press of mangled bodies - Darkspurs, at last, and coming their way at blinding speed.
The Kaliks-Fel groaned loudly and torched past - prow disappearing into the swirl of data first, the rest of it beginning to follow. Nivviks's Skiff swooped low, dropping mines in its wake, and darted over them. Gaelin Blinked to Therin's side, hooked an arm under the man's shoulder and forced them up into the air with a boosted leap to catch hold of one of the unfolding climbing bars beneath the Skiff's tail. He huffed with the weight, and Therin reached out to grab hold and support himself, which gave Gaelin a chance to crane his neck around and call out, "Gray!"
Grayris was still roaring, still swinging, beating against Fikrul's fearless defense with ill-fitting rage. She locked their weapons together, froze his staff to her swords and headbutted the Archon - not once, not twice, but thrice and with power too. Fikrul staggered back, blue blood running in streaming rivulets down under his helmet and down his neck, and Grayris disengaged. She ran to the edge of the platform, jumped and caught the fin at the end of the Skiff's tail. They flew over nothingness, platform behind them, and the core loomed oh so close, close enough to sear the blood and Alkahest splashed across his armour away as a fine mist and cook his internal components up to a dangerous degree. Gaelin winced, adjusted his grip, and only caught sight of the oncoming dart of sizzling Arc too late to call out a warning.
Fikrul's thin strand of fired lightning raced right for them, and Nivviks, perhaps noticing, swayed the speeding Skiff to the side - crashing the nose of the dropship against the side of the rapidly disappearing Kaliks-Fel, buckling at the front and skidding forward. Gaelin braced himself against the pull of gravity and dangerous momentum, and only noticed too late that the missed shot of the Archon had hit the edge of the timeportal's ring instead. The swirl of solid data jittered and hissed, winking at them, and then it enveloped them entirely - just around the moment the Skiff's tail followed the front and the entire ship slammed against the side of the Ketch and tumbled over sideways. Fire bloomed - white fire, Vex-data caught alight, encasing his entire world in heat beyond reason, beyond comprehension.
Gaelin saw the scratched, patchwork hull coming up to meet him, fast, and...
That was the last he saw.
AN: Huge thanks to Nomad Blue for editing!
