Author's Note
Here's the fresh stuff, stick with me! I promise, past me got the hang of writing legibly relatively quickly. (I'm putting out two chapters right now just to forge ahead a bit)
Lumine
Her head was a mess. A tangled web of information, latticed and interwoven to illegibility. She couldn't figure out what was real, what was fake, and what was a combination of the two. She remembered most clearly a shining golden light. Oh, and there was a boy, her brother, one eye ablaze with golden fire. The feeling of falling through the air was fresh in her memories as well. Another sensation came to her, a blade ripping across her collarbone. She saw the broken body of her little sibling. She had tried to crawl towards him, to grab him because maybe it would help. Which one of them was she trying to comfort? She didn't remember. It didn't matter. The darkness had taken her before she got to him. Didn't she have something to do? What had happened?
Someone yelled something, off in the distance and Lumine felt the earth flicker. It seemed to roll beneath her, shoving her shoulder blades upwards as her ankle painfully bounced on the ground. The noise was so loud… it was like a sourceless grating, a rumble.
AETHER- the world rushed into place and she woke up. She threw her eyes open and bolted up into a sitting position. She saw first that there was an interlocking shield of semi-translucent crystal plates rising around her. That geo magic must be what was causing the tremor. A young woman with long black hair pinned back by a silver hairpin was kneeling right outside the rising amber dome. She must have been creating it. There was a glowing metal egg in her right hand, her left palm was pressed flat on the earth, and her left arm was trembling with exertion.
Lumine then took in the unwelcome fact that pain was still coursing through her body and an unnaturally freezing sensation had taken root deep in her head. Crouching beside her was another young girl, not much older than Lumine. Orange butterflies of fire drifted from her fingertips and circled the inside of the dome and an orange glyph had appeared under them. The girl's eyes were shut, and she held a softly-glowing scarlet flower in her teeth.
On the other side of her was a sight that rebroke Lumine. Something hollow rose in her throat, and a cold chill washed over her body. She couldn't tell if it was from the magic or the sight of her brother. She had seen the injury happen, but that didn't make it easier to take in the bloody clothes and the burned scars healed by Hu Tao's healing technique, cleansing lepidopterans. Did she know its name? Why? And what about the girl's? She clearly understood the magic, but how?
The glyph beneath her was a death ward, meant to keep Aether and her alive. Hu Tao wouldn't be able to snap out of her concentration easily, hence the second layer of protection, the amber bulwark. It was for the healer, not Lumine and her brother. The girl who had cast it was named Lim. Lumine's mind raced, but there was too much data, and it was flowing into her mind too fast. As soon as she turned away from Lim another flood of information rushed to her, overtaking the hasty retreat she tried to make from the forced enlightenment.
There was a woman leading the group that had surrounded Lumine. She was tall and imposing, with long dark hair whipped in every direction by the winds around. She was wearing a black tank top and had a maroon uniform coat knotted around her waist. The pants she wore matched the coat, and she had tall black boots pulled over them. In her left hand, there was a long, silver, shining trident. The crosspiece was elaborate and azure blue sapphires were inlaid upon it in the shape of slender bolts of lightning. Her hair was being thrown about by raw anemo magic flowing and swirling in a sphere around her.
Her hair wasn't the only thing the wind had taken hold of. Three crossbow bolts were streaking across the ground from the tree cover 30 feet in front of the dome, but as they approached the wind they were hurled off course. They harmlessly dropped onto the ground, all momentum stolen from them by the whirlwind. That must have been what happened to the arrow on the ground in front of the bulwark. When had that one been fired?
She snapped back to the present. There was too much happening and not enough time to ponder what already had. The people around her all seemed to be protecting them and seeing as she wasn't in much better shape than Aether to fight she would have to let them. Not that she even knew how to fight, if she wanted to.
Two other strangers ran towards the treeline from either side of the amber shelter, having apparently been behind it. On the left was a magenta-haired woman wearing a black breastplate of what must have been boiled or lacquered leather, dark gloves, and white pants bedecked with sheats and pockets. She was spinning a number of slender objects between her fingers as she ran.
Through the slight blur of the amber, Lumine was reasonably sure they were throwing needles.
It was much harder to make out her fifth and final defender from the other side of the dome. They had black hair and wore a navy uniform, like the red one that the captain had modified, beneath heavy armor and there was the sound of metal clanking as they ran.
As the pair moved from behind Lumine her eyes were brought to the tree's edge by more movement. In front of Beidou, a name that sprung intrusively to Lumine's mind as she glanced at the wind mage, three full adults in black uniforms burst from the underbrush. They had heavy, black, fur-lined coats buttoned over their torsos. From underneath their large hoods gleamed iron masks that offered few clues as to their physical appearance.
They moved in a tight V-formation. Both of the flanking soldiers carried heavy crossbows while the head of the charge bore a hefty, one-handed war pick in one hand and a white gemstone resembling a chunk of quartz in the other.
Suddenly, Lumine's head throbbed painfully and she fell backward onto the ground, scraping her left shoulder blade and painfully jarring the barely-patched wound on her collar. She gritted her teeth and pushed onto her right side, looking past her knees at the ensuing conflict.
The formation had closed in on Beidou. Lumine's heart dropped as the heavily-bundled figure in the lead swung at her head. The storm mage didn't move an inch, but as the spiked hammer hurdled toward her ear, a massive thunderclap resounded. Wind from the point of impact and made a broken, keening sound as it pushed around the amber shelter.
The three soldiers had been hurled backward across the ground, and the leaves around Beidou had blacked. The woman still hadn't moved, but purple tendrils of electricity now flickered up and down her trident. Lumine hadn't quite made out the details of the magic, it had been too quick.
"Aw, that looked like it hurt," Beidou taunted. "Would you like to try it again?"
Whatever thunderous rebuke the wind caller had dealt out seemed to have protected her from the blow, which brought Lumine some momentary relief.
The trio had pushed themselves to their feet and the two with crossbows managed to fire their already-loaded bolts, but the wind merely threw them into the ground once more. They stooped down to reload, but as soon as they diverted their attention a thin needle whipped through the air and drove into the arbalist on Beidou's left, burying itself somewhere under his coat. He cried out in surprise and pain.
The magenta-haired and armor-clad fighters had fanned out to either side. The knife-thrower was closing in on the other soldiers now but the man was simply holding a crouching position. What-?
At that moment he tensed his legs and Lumine saw a purple wave of force pull in around him. He was modifying the gravitational pull in the area, but why? Suddenly, Adam, for Luminr had gleaned his name as well, threw himself into the air, soaring in an arc and falling down behind the crossbow wielder on the right.
Before he landed, Adam spun in the air and swung with his mace but he only hit the edge of his opponent's coat as they rolled forwards, out of reach.
At that moment the back of the Amber Bulwark fully solidified. The spell had been completed. Lim exploded forwards in a full sprint, and two chunks of the earth were pulled from the ground to float in her wake. Orbital stones, as it seemed. The same kind of magic as the dome. As Lumine processed this, her left eye began to sting more. Ebbing waves of a deep pain behind her face began to wash into the rest of the general ache and malaise she was wracked with.
Lim made a rapid throwing motion with the hand holding the metal egg, but didn't release it. Instead, one of the head-sized stones behind her catapulted into the air. It rapidly closed the 30-foot gap between the girl and the soldier Adam had dive-bombed but, as it curved down to impact him he flicked. His body seemed to rapidly shift between a few places, overlapping itself and blurring his image. Right before it would strike him, he disappeared, and Adam was suddenly in his former position. The black-clad individual was now standing where Adam had been, and Adam, without the time to react, was thrown to the ground by the stone as it crashed into his shoulder.
Lumine tried to absorb the name of the technique the soldier had used to swap their places, but as she looked, her left eye flared again with that same sharp pain. Out of reflex she threw one hand over it and shut it. She realized quickly that she was breathing heavily as if she didn't have enough oxygen. She was shaking slightly too. There was pressure on her eye like someone was pushing it back into her head and no matter how tightly she shut it was not helping. The pain, fortunately, abated soon enough but as she tried to open her eyelid it began to swell up in intensity once more, so she left it closed. With only her right eye she couldn't process the arcane particulars anymore, She squinted back at the fight.
Adam was on the ground. He struggled to get up but his arm wasn't obeying him, and three limbs weren't enough to get him to his feet when they were faced with the full armor suit weighing him down and the intense pain he must be feeling. His opponent was now standing over him. They raised the crossbow and swung it towards the struggling boy's unprotected head. Then, a thin needle slammed into their hand and they dropped the weapon.
The soldier cried out in pain and screamed something in a language Lumine couldn't recognize, or clearly hear, at the needle-throwing woman, but their yell was answered only by another projectile. They managed to dodge this one, it only snatched at their sleeve as it passed.
The leader of the attackers raised a fist into the air, and the crystal firmly held within it began to glow. Beidou jabbed with her trident and a thin bolt of purple lightning snapped towards them, but she was too late. Before the lightning impacted the bundled-up warrior, the other spell was completed, and a thin layer of clear, grey ice suddenly materialized on the ground.
The maroon-clad woman slipped, and as she did so the lighting forked, fizzled, and slammed into the ground to no great effect.
The swath of ice didn't quite reach the dome, but it extended far enough to encompass the small battlefield in its entirety. The attackers didn't seem to mind much, and when Adam's aggressor whirled for the dome he was unhindered as he ran.
It was a very different story for Lumine's protectors. The needle thrower had fallen, and Adam's attempts to get to his feet were betraying the severity of his injuries. Just as Beidou got up, the ice mage reached her. The sound of a trident clashing against a war pick rang out violently across the frozen ground and echoed again and again as the two warriors locked into a rapid melee. Beidou seemed from a distance to be a far better duelist than the other fighter, whoever they were, but she was on very unstable ground and neither could really take the advantage. The attacker was batting the captain's polearm with enough strength to slide her back across the ice, but the reach of her weapon meant that while the terrain forced her onto defense, he couldn't actually hit her without opening himself up to a lethal blow.
As the crossbow user ran towards Lim, the needle-thrower launched a third missile in his direction. However, this one missed as well. The magenta-haired woman was still on the ground and not able to properly throw, and for delaying getting to her feet she was dealt the reward of a crossbow bolt to the back. The dull slamming of the weapon's limbs back into place rang in Lumine's ears as she strained to make out the shot woman's expression. However, all she saw was her form go limp as she fell fully to the ground. The projectile had been fired from the soldier that had been knocked down at the beginning of the fight by the same woman they just brought to the ground. They hadn't gotten up, and instead they had managed to get the shot off from the ground.
At that moment the other soldier cleared the ice, still running toward Lim. She lifted her hand towards him and the ground shook once more. The ice near her cracked and splintered from the tremors. A shelf of rock in front of her shot upwards from the ground, suddenly forming a 10 foot high wall that was about 10 feet wide. At the top of one edge there was a four-inch section of ice replacing the earth. The wall slammed downwards onto the ground, and the aggression of the spell startled Lumine. It wasn't exceptionally fast but still there was no way the soldier hadn't been crushed, it was too large to dodge.
Then she noticed that he was standing 30 feet away from where the construct had hit, his profile just now solidifying from a blurred smattering of reflections. He must have teleported again. Lim's attacks all seemed to be rather slow, this was not a good matchup. Lumine began to grow even more nervous. At least the three of them would be fine in the dome. Unless he could just teleport into it. Would a physical barrier stop the magic? Lumine started to panic, and she then realized that the cold sensation had vanished.
The death ward glyph had blinked out. Hu Tao had gotten up to her feet and was quickly assessing the battle. She must have been shaken out of whatever sort of casting trance the death ward required by the crash of the wall. The girl noticed that Lumine was staring at her and met her gaze. Lumine couldn't deny that she was quite pretty. Her eyes were bright orange and glowed like candles. There was a maroon flower at each of their centers where a pupil would be, and they kept drawing Lumine's attention. Her hair was faintly dyed red at the tips and slid gracefully over her shoulders as she turned her head to look right at Lumine. She was wearing a dark grey uniform jacket and black shorts. Despite the situation, the excitement and playful happiness brimming in those floral eyes was contagious...
Lumine realized she was focusing way too much on the healer's appearance, as entrancing as it was. The teleporting arbalist had closed the gap between themself and Lim. Their crossbow had been discarded near Adam after the needle speared their hand, but they had at some point drawn a curved blade from inside their coat. They were holding a black silk pouch in their injured hand. Lim had somehow transformed her left arm into grey stone, and as the now-swordsman swung their scimitar towards her she caught it between her middle and ring fingers.
"The Snezhayans can't get in here. Let me clean this up, stay here okay? I'll be ~right~ back," a bright voice interrupted Lumine's frightened transfixation on the skirmish. So Snezhanyans, that was what the attackers were called? She looked over at Tao, but the girl had faded and started moving, her body now partially opaque. She strode through the bulwark then silently rematerialized outside it, behind the Snezhnayan.
Lumine crawled over to Aether, and sat beside him. She took his head in her lap. His eyes were closed and his expression relaxed. His wounds didn't look dangerous anymore, now that she could see them up close but the blood that had soaked into his clothes made Lumine even more stressed out.
Lim grasped the sword, and tried to wrench it from her foe's grasp but they planted a spiked boot in her stomach and she was forced to let go as she stumbled backwards. Lumine noticed movement above Lim's head, and realized it was an arrow flying towards her. There was a fourth opponent, hidden in the trees. Of course. There had been an arrow on the ground, and none of the original three had a bow.
It flung past the area of the wind without any alteration to its course, and it was then that Lumine realized the signs of the anemo magic were now absent. Beidou must have lost her hold on it when she fell. Had that been the purpose of the ice in the first place?
It didn't seem at first like anyone else saw the new threat, but Adam must have because at that second the Snezhnayan captain was suddenly yanked upwards towards the sky as if falling in reverse. At 10 feet he spun weightlessly, all gravitational influence seemingly retracted. Unfortunately, the arrow barely missed him. It shot right under his flailing arm. Whether Adam's spell was accidentally well-timed or he had actually noticed the arrow, Lim clearly had not, because she then was thrown off her feet as the wooden shaft buried itself in her shoulder. The geo mage's cry of pain was cut off as her head slammed into the amber dome, and she fell to the ground unconscious.
As the geo mage rolled onto the dirt, her hair matted and dampened with blood from deep scrapes on the side of her head, the silver hairpin she had worn fell beside her. It made a soft dinging sound as it bounced on a rock before clattering down, and as the chime sounded the dome disintegrated. Orange dust vanished from the air as the spell was cut off from it's caster.
The swordsman turned. Without the hazy orange tint, Lumine could clearly see her face. She grinned, grey eyes looking down at Lumine. She circled the scimitar, stepping over the border of where the dome had been. The siblings were left in the open and unguarded. Unguarded that is, except by Tao. A black garrote slipped around the woman's throat, and she was pulled backwards by the healer. A strangled sound croaked from her lips as Tao pulled the silk cord into her neck. Tao twisted so that the woman was blocking her from the archer in the trees.
As she opened her mouth to say something into her enemy's ear, Tao's image blurred. The swordsman had reached one of her hands down to touch the healer's thigh. Suddenly, Tao vanished. In her place was the other Snezhnayan crossbow user. He was still on the ground, and was in the process of extracting the needle he had been hit with from between his ribs.
He yelled in Snezhnayan what sounded like some exclamation of surprise and almost injured himself with the partially-removed projectile as he jumped. He yanked it out and began to wrap the wound in a bandage as he muttered something to his ally. He had opened his coat and pulled up his undershirt to reach the wound, and Lumine could see the blood pouring over his ribcage and pooling on his stomach. The other soldier rubbed her neck and turned to look down at Lumine.
She laughed aloud. It was cold and hollow, the victorious first sound from a throat that was almost mangled and choked to death. She gripped her sword firmly and stepped over beside Aether's body.
Lumine became aware of how helpless she was. Her head was throbbing, she only had one eye to see from, and she was barely managing to sit up. Her throat and lips were dry from hyperventilating, and she was still very much aware of all of her injuries. Yet still, she pulled Aether to the other side of her, glaring defiantly at the still chuckling woman. She slowly struggled to get up, trying to pull her legs underneath her. But it was so slow, and so painful. She really was useless in this state.
At that moment a crash drew their attention. Adam had let the captain fall, and they had slammed down onto the ice they created. The fallen figure was lying still on the ground, and the ice retracted. They were still positioned roughly in the center of the circle and it seemed to almost suck into their body from Lumine's perspective. Though of course, it had in reality simply dispelled.
Lumine looked back to the Snezhnayan. Her companion rose to his feet, and took his crossbow back into his hands.
"Hurry. Just finish it already," he groaned in whatever language it was that Lumine could understand. He gestured with his weapon towards Lumine to emphasize his request.
"How pitiful you are, angel. Here I was thinking you would be the greatest danger. But I see you've already been broken in," the Snezhanyan's voice was even more condemning than her laugh. It slithered into Lumine's mind and drew a kind of sobbing gasp from her.
A kind of morose acceptance settled over Lumine. It was grim, but in its own way it was also reassuring. She wasn't able to fight back. She wished she knew why this was happening. She wished she could protect her brother. But neither could come true. So she might as well accept her death with some dignity. She sat back on her legs, kneeling as high and straight as she could. She dropped her hand from her eye, which started to burn as she opened it. But, there was no sense in witnessing her own murder halfway so she left it uncovered. The pain would be irrelevant soon enough.
As the Snezhnayan raised her blade over Lumine a harsh crackling sound resonated from the center of the battlefield. Lumine looked over to where she saw that Beidou had summoned lighting to her polearm once again, and she was pointing toward the soldiers.
Relief flooded through Lumine, emotion came rushing back to her and that solemn despair now seemed alien. But, it was short lived. Her would-be executioner's friend, before the lightning could be fired off, pointed at the wall still lying on the ground with a carved bone. A runic clock appeared around his fingers and as he twisted them the wall reversed it's fall. It rose to its previous height, at enough of a horizontal angle to block Beidou's line of sight to the soldiers.
Well, for what it was worth the technique was a chrono enchantment, Reverse Arcanum, and it's caster was named Nikita Morozov. The lightning exploded across the stone surface, dissipating harmlessly. That one had been Storm Lance. The Snezhnayan looked back down to Lumine and hefted the sword up once more.
"Good try on her part, but not quite quick enough to save you," she sneered. She began to swing the blade downwards for the second time.
Suddenly, Lumine's left eye flared with pain. It felt like a hot knife had skewered it and driven it all the way into the center of her skull, she screamed, her voice ripping past a damaged throat and into the ears of her attacker, who seemed momentarily taken aback.
Sparks gathered, and before the sword slashed into her neck a blast of purple lightning erupted from her hands. It coursed through both of the soldiers. The first one, the woman, took it to the stomach before it unfurled across her entire torso. As it whipped her face and blacked the skin there she lurched to the ground, lying still as blood flowed from the seared, cooked skin. The shock continued through the air to catch the ground in front of Nikita. He was thrown off his feet as the lance exploded. He landed on the rocky ground 15 feet away with a nauseating crunch.
The storm spell faded from Lumine's fingers, and she looked down at them to see that her palms were twitching and shivering with the energy they had just discharged. She barely had the time to be relieved. The pain had not subsided, she had lost the vision from her left eye and what was left of her point of view was slowly darkening. She twisted, she had to know if Aether was safe. But she lost her sight before she could see. Lumine collapsed on top of brother, and as she slipped into unconsciousness it was instead the rise and fall of his chest that let her know that she had succeeded.
