Taffer Notes: *wiggles about excitedly*
In which Ghost finds out just how stressful being a bound Ghost can be, and Nicole finds her wolf.
The Young Wolf
She didn't go fast enough.
She tried, the wind stinging at her eyes, her chest almost flat against the sparrow, and her feet pressed hard into the pedals to keep herself from falling off — but it wasn't enough.
"Left ahead!" Ghost called, his voice muffled by her pocket and instantly snatched up by the wind to get carried.
Left. Left?
She looked left and saw nothing but tall, wild shrubs and trees, blurred by tears stinging at her eyes. And then — a dip in the road. A gap.
Nicole threw her weight to the side, slinging the sparrow off the main road and down another, hurtling for the ruins of a town. Just in time for a bolt of blue energy to come searing over her, missing her head by nowhere near enough. It tore up the air with the stench of ozone so thick she almost choked on it.
The next bolt whipped past her right, where it slammed into the base of a bent over, rusty street sign. In an almost comical display of the world hating her and having a good laugh at her expense, the pole got snapped clean off and the sign sent tumbling over her. She even caught a wink of the city's name spelled out on it as she steered the sparrow through a cloud of sharp debris. Black on what-used-to-be white... and then it was gone. Ripped right into the air and into the slipstream of the airship bearing after them. She knew because she'd chanced a look. One brief glance over her shoulder, passed Bjarte's helmet pressed to her back, and right at the airship keeping up with them.
"Keep going!" Ghost urged. "Into the ruins, get us into the ruins!"
"What do you think I'm doing!" she shouted into the wind whistling by her ears. "Why don't you drive!"
"I would if I could but I can't navigate a sparrow without throwing you both off, I—"
Nicole yelped and tore right, narrowly avoiding her knee getting clipped off by an empty, rusted car husk. And then another. And another. The entire road turned into an exercise of trying to keep her damned knee caps on while the city crowded in around them.
This place used to be tiny, she remembered. No more than a village. Then, sometimes between her dying and the world going absolutely mad, it'd grown. And then got smashed to bits. Ruined walls began to rise to the left. More to the right. Didn't take long and she ran out of space to drive the sparrow in. Not unless the thing could actually fly — a question she should have probably asked before they'd gotten chased.
"What was that? Why— why are you slowing down!?" Ghost popped into view, the weight in her pocket suddenly lifted. "Oh. Okay. Stop and get off the sparrow and— movemovemove!"
Nicole choked the sparrow's brakes. It pivoted sharply when she didn't keep her weight straight, the back of it smacking into a car. Sent them spinning.
Good thing, too. A bolt of that air-splitting energy cracked into the ground where they'd been a second ago.
But now her neck hurt fiercely and oh god she hated this.
Groaning, and with the sparrow still whistle-humming idly, Nicole threw her leg over its front and jumped off. She bolted two steps. Then half of another before she remembered Bjarte. Her heart pinched. Twisted. Like someone'd driven a thorn into it. And from the gash in her heart bled a cold and heavy haze.
The vertigo. Or a promise of it anyway. A promise of it wanting to pull at her.
Pull her apart. Pull her god knew where to.
Please, no. Not now.
She swallowed it down best as she could and turned on the spot, snatching Bjarte off the sparrow even as the girl was already halfway off it. Bloody hell, she was heavy. A lot heavier than earlier and definitely heavier than skinny little girls ought to be. But Nicole half carried, half dragged her along anyway.
They chased after Ghost and the sky came down around them.
He led them into an alley. It was tight in here. So tight, Nicole had to push Bjarte on ahead. And it got tighter. And tighter.
Tight enough to bruise her shoulders. Soon she couldn't even breathe it got so narrow.
She stumbled over debris. Over discarded history. And with every other step, Nicole threw a look over her shoulder, half expecting the entire airship to squeeze itself through the gap behind them.
Except that was exceptionally silly, wasn't it?
She would have laughed, though then the alley walls shook and she bit her tongue instead. Flakes of paint and brick dust rained from them. Stung her eyes. And overhead, the airship blocked out the sky, its engines ringing her ears and the sheer bulk of it casting a heavy shadow over them. A shadow too heavy to fathom. So heavy, Nicole couldn't struggle out from under it. She tried, but her legs wouldn't move.
"Guardian!"
Through the ringing in her ears and the thumping of her heart, Nicole heard the notes of a melody coming together. Haunting. Calling. A promise not much unlike the one that'd bled from her heart.
It'd welcome her back to the Deep, it sung. All she had to do was let it.
His Guardian had been doing so well. At least she had for two hours, forty-six minutes, and twelve seconds, which was not actually adequate time to recharge himself entirely, since she was not doing well any more.
Not her fault though. Technically, it'd been the Fallen's fault.
"Guardian!" Ghost flitted back, right over Bjarte's head, and swung into his Guardian's field of vision. She'd stopped with her back pressed to the wall, her knees half folded and her eyes turned up.
Fair enough, because that was where the Fallen skiff hovered, its deployment hooks extended. One by one, Fallen (one-two-three-four-five-six) dropped from them to land on the roofs. Four shanks detached after them.
They hadn't seen them yet.
His Guardian's eyes were set on them though, but they lacked focus. Like whatever she stared at lay way past the skiff. Galaxies away, really.
"Guardian," he repeated, loud as he could possibly get, and flashed a bright burst of light at her eyes. What? It'd worked once.
And it did again. She jolted. With a small, faint noise coming up her throat, she pushed herself off the wall.
"That's right, we need to keep going," he encouraged her. "Right this way. Keep walking. Or, ah, you know. Maybe run. Running is good."
He swung around her head once. Glanced a scan off her — and almost tripped over his sensors blaring nonsense back at him.
Analyse later. Flee now. Then never tell anyone about the fleeing part. Ever.
"I've been running for days," she snapped, a pulse of something riding in after her words, stoked like a dying fire getting prodded with a stick.
Light. That was what his sensors supplied him with anyway. Kind of. If he squinted and used his imagination to make sense of the wildly oscillating readings. They rubber banded between frequencies as if her Light couldn't make up its mind. Right now, for example, it seemed adamant to be Void Light, but had somehow forgotten how it was supposed to go about coming together right. So it just shivered off her in ripples, invisible to the naked eye save for a pale manifestation of purple tendrils trailing her hands. Bit like faintly coloured smoke puffed from a pipe.
When she pushed and pulled herself forward along the walls, snatches of it lingered on the brickwork, torn off from the rest. And when she clenched her fists, the Light was choked out like a flame starved of oxygen, leaving only the tendrils that'd detached behind. Where the confused Light touched mortar and brick, moss grew.
Literally.
Grew.
Right now. This very instant. Soft puffs of green sprouted from the tiniest cracks in the wall to spread like someone had spilled watercolour on paper and it all happened impossibly fast.
Ghost almost froze next to one of those wisps of Light curling in the air. He wanted nothing more but to take a long reading, the need to shove his proverbial nose all the way into it overwhelmingly strong.
Almost, because the universe had a different plan altogether: a Dreg. It'd spotted them and came crawling down the walls like a six legged spider, barking in Eliksni that it'd quite literally eat them.
Ghost did not fancy getting eaten. Neither, he reasoned, did his Guardian. Or their little charge. So he hauled forward like his core had been set on fire, looping a frantic "Run-Run-Run!" all the way, and hoped they'd keep up.
They tore out of the alley. He flew straight ahead, across a deeply scarred street upended by a bombardment hundreds of years ago. Miraculously, the assault had left most of the buildings standing, even if some were worse off than others, their facades pulled down and roofs collapsed. And he had to find one that'd offer them shelter while he figured out how to get them all out of this alive.
All of them.
He identified the buildings one by one as he sped for them, turning up a total of four bars on just this street alone. Well, no. Strictly speaking they were pubs. That's what you called them in Scotland. Scottish pubs. Why'd they need so many though?
Focus.
Halfway across, he paused. Not for long, naturally. He was a Ghost after all and what self respecting Ghost couldn't absorb a situation in a split second? That's all he needed to twist around and take stock.
Guardian? Almost right behind him, check. Little girl— attached to said Guardian's front like a monkey as she got carried —check. Fallen coming down the walls. Check. Shanks swooping in and laying down fire?
Ah-crap-check.
Thankfully, the streets here were narrow. So narrow, they made it to the other side without loss of life, limb, or parts. A miracle, really, what with superheated slugs tearing into the ground around them where they tore up very, very old wounds. Which was great. Not the superheated slugs — the lack of limb severing. Absolutely and without a shred of doubt great, and where in the Traveler's fat afternoon shadow was he going again?
Into a garage, apparently. The only building his scans hadn't declared unfit for shelter — and even then they'd been generous. He flew under halfway open shutters, bounced up into a dark space large enough to fit at least two Golden Age vehicles, and took another second to reorient.
There was a halfway raised vehicle lift on one side, though it was empty. And so was the rest of the space, like someone'd swept through and picked everything clean, from spare tires to the most basic of tools.
But they'd not taken the distinct smell of oil and lubricant that tickled at his sensors, still clinging on strong even hundreds of years after they'd soaked into the ground.
None of that was important though. His Guardian coming in after him, that was. She struggled considerably, the extra weight of Bjarte hanging off her front almost dragging her to the ground, but she was here. Good. Then two of those superheated shells clapped into the shutters and that was less, ah, good.
Wow. Being a bound Ghost was stressful.
Ghost spun on the spot.
Shelves. Rails. Stairs. There. A door, at the far end. Blue paint on wood and that was so irrelevant why'd he even register it...
"Get out the back!" he called, and while his Guardian lugged Bjarte through the room and up the steps, he flitted back to the shutters.
They were old. Solid, but old, their electronics long busted, and so closing them was going to require a little transmat here — he shot up to the left, dismantled the brakes on the chains — and there — and rushed right, vanishing those brakes, too.
The shutters crashed down with a deafening rattle. And a second later came the first heavy (and distinctly fleshy) thump as a Fallen threw itself against them. It tried again and again, but the shutters held. All it managed to get through were a couple of frustrated barks.
Ghost puffed out his shell. "Ha."
"Ghost!"
Oh. Yeah. Right. Guardian. Mortal danger still not over.
"It's locked," she shouted from across the room. "Did you just bloody trap us in here?"
"I did not." Goodness. Did he have to do everything around here?
The door didn't budge. Nicole had kept pushing down the handle like she'd expected the second— third— fourth— try to miraculously be different. But it hadn't been. The locked door remained locked.
So she took a step back and rammed her shoulder against it.
"Stopat," Ghost blurted and got between her and the door. "Never," he added as he dipped lower to hover by the lock. "Use your shoulder."
Nicole settled back on her heels and stared at him. Bjarte's small, clammy hand took that moment to wrap around some of the fingers on her idle hand. She squeezed when the shutters banged and rattled again, louder this time than the first time around.
"What," Nicole managed, her voice scratching up like a needle riding over an old vinyl record. Then her eyes flicked from Ghost to the shutters and back. They had a dent in them now. Any moment now and they'd break.
"Never use your shoulders," he repeated. A cone of light poured from him to light up the handle and the lock. It was almost blinding bright in the dark room. "You'll just hurt yourself. Kick it instead. Right by the doorknob."
The light winked out and he backed away from the door.
"After you."
Dumbly, Nicole raised her knee half an inch before Ghost got in the way.
"I got it. It's open," he said. "And look at the frame, always look at the frame. This one swings the wrong way and—" His shell exploded, the back of it spinning wildly, turning the fin with the tape on into a blurred, red line. "—nevermindGo!"
Behind them, the shutters broke.
She yanked the handle, expecting it to just fall right off and leave her stranded here. But it worked. Pulling the door open and grabbing for Bjarte, Nicole fled. Right into a hallway dipped in darkness.
They didn't make it far.
He noticed the ping delivered to his coms unit right as his Guardian made it to the front of the house. Or what was left of it anyway. Which wasn't much. The entire facade had come down, been reduced to rubble strewn into the streets and exposed the insides of the house to too many years of wind and rain.
And the Fallen had beaten them here.
A message followed the ping: 'Need backup?'
Ghost spun, counted the Fallen, blasted a resounding 'YES' back through the ping's frequency, and felt… defeated.
There were three. Fallen. One dropped from the sheared off edge of the floor above them and landed on the only thing that'd still been standing. A fridge. Now even that toppled, crunching to the floor with a thump, the Fallen riding it grasping its edges with four hands.
Another landed to their right. And the third stood in the street, its shock rifle raised and ready. They didn't waste time gloating.
Nicole's first thought was to turn around. Bolt back into the house and, miraculously, find a cupboard under some stairs she could hide in. But the rows of glowing, slanted blue eyes rushing from the dark hallway froze her on the spot. They were everywhere. In front of her. Behind her. Around her. There wasn't anywhere left to run to. Nowhere to hide.
The Fallen opened fire — and out from under her heart welled a cold, dark vertigo. It tore on every fibre of her, made ready to unravel her. Take her away, to where they couldn't hurt her.
One of the shots was meant for him, and Ghost dodged it with a sideways twist, vanishing in a wink. That was the right thing to do. Every Ghost knew that. He knew that, yesterday's theatrics notwithstanding. You didn't make yourself a target, because at the end of the day, you could bring your Guardian back. But him? No one was going to bring him back. And no one was going to bring the girl back, either.
So he hid and hoped that whoever'd been on the other end of that ping got here fast. There wasn't a damned thing he could do any more.
The other shots were meant for his Guardian. And they didn't miss. Though neither did they — hit?
At first, when he picked up the flare of Void Light pulsing away from her, he expected her to blink. Vanish. She'd done it before, after all. Except all she did was drop to the ground, pulling Bjarte under her with a hard yank, and then the shock bolts— all three shots of them —slammed into a pale dome of Void Light.
His Guardian screamed. The dome flickered. The Fallen fired again. Two more shots exploded against her Light, their white-blue energy dissipating around it like cracks in a pane of glass. The third made it through. Hit her. The dome shattered.
And then one of the Fallen's heads snapped to the side and it fell over dead.
Around her, chaos reigned, but Nicole's world was made of white-hot, searing pain. It webbed across her back, pulling and tearing with every breath she took, and turned her screams into miserable, weak whimpers coming up between choked gasps for air.
And yet she was immeasurably cold.
The pain— and Bjarte pinned under her —were the only points of heat on her. Everything else? Ice. Like all the warmth had leaked from her when the vertigo had flung outwards, rather than pulling her in on herself. And now she was freezing and hurting and she really didn't want to die again.
"Stay down," Ghost told her, his voice sharp and clear despite the chaos all around.
He was down in the rubble with her, where the soft, electronic tic-tic-tic of his shell tickled at her ear, and so she did as told. Not like she could have gotten up anyway, not with how she'd been snap-frozen to the ground like that.
Nicole's fingers curled into the dirt. Then she noticed how she wasn't dead yet.
She swallowed hard and turned her chin up. The Fallen in front of her, and the one to her left, were lying on the ground. They were dead, rather than her. Then three sharp cracks snapped at the air, whistled by overhead, and smacked into the third Fallen in quick succession. It spun on the spot, jerked around by bullets tearing into its side before slumping against a turned over fridge. Dead, too.
She could tell because it fell with its face turned her way and close enough for her to see the eyes wink out. Like someone'd flicked a switch. Which was kind of what dying was, wasn't it?
Here now. Gone then.
On. Off.
And then back on again, in her case.
Her mind limped on, told her how the Fallen's entire head was encased in a spiky, insectoid helmet. Thick tubes protruded from its chin like it was wearing a rebreather. But they weren't underwater, she tried to reason. Why was nothing making sense?
A beat later, large, bulbous drones began falling from the sky. THUNK-THUNK-THUNK they went around her. One of them landed only a few feet from her. Screeching horribly, it spun wildly on the ground before going up in a dull explosion. Fortunately, most of the shrapnel missed her. Unfortunately, some didn't and came down on her like nails being hammered into her back.
"Watch where you drop those shanks!" Ghost complained, while all she managed was to grind her teeth. There weren't any screams left in her to spend.
After that? One more of those shanks fell from the sky and then there was silence. For the most part, anyway. The lull, underlined by Ghost's ticking shell, was eery. As if a storm had rolled over her and she lay right in the centre of it, waiting for the rest to hit.
But rather than a storm, she got Ghost appearing from his shower of light. He hung so low, the tip of one of his fins scraped at the ground while he swivelled on the spot.
When his eye fixed into a direction, Nicole looked that way, too, right as a man vaulted over the hips-sized remains of the house's front wall. An armoured man, whose boots crunched down heavily when he landed. He had a rifle slung from a strap at his front — and wore a large, tarnished bronze helmet, the sides of it adorned with a pair of large horns curving downwards.
Horns.
Nicole stared.
He took one step. Paused. And lifted his left arm, a finger on his gauntleted hand extended. Hold on, the gesture read.
His hand curled into a fist, and with an auditable creak of leather squeezed purple light out of nothing. Nicole's insides churned like she'd swallowed a bucket of grit and he'd just twisted his hand inside her gut rather than up in the air.
The light reminded her of what'd fallen off her when she'd run for her life. Except its purple was darker. Vivid. Almost alive, coiling up and around his arm like living rope. And then, with a flick of his arm and his fingers splayed, it whipped from his arm like a chain. It arched through the air, sailed right over her head — and when he yanked his arm up, the chain snapped back.
It came back dragging a Fallen like a fish on a hook. The thing flew over her, arms and legs flailing helplessly, and met a hollow explosion of purple light at the end of the chain. It dropped like a sack of rocks and stayed there.
"That," a voice called dryly, "was entirely unnecessary, Shephard." A Ghost, as it turned out. He popped out of a shower of light not unlike the one she'd almost grown used to, and hovered by the man's shoulder.
And, she noted dumbly, he looked absolutely nothing like hers. Where hers was all angles and points and fins and whatnots, this one was perfectly round.
"Shush, Darrow," the man —Shephard— said while shaking out his right hand and flexing his fingers.
Who'd have thought? Turned out punching something his own size to death smarted.
His Ghost, in the meantime, did some flexing of his own, his shell puffing out in frustration.
Then they both looked at her.
"How you doing down there?" Shephard asked, his voice coming out hollow from under the helmet, tinged with concern. When he started walking into her direction he moved slowly. Carefully.
But there was nothing slow or careful about Ghost buzzing around her all of a sudden. "Are you okay, Guardian?" He echoed and swung in front of her face. She blinked. Huffed at him. And winced when all that did was reignite the fire obviously melting her spine away. Ghost darted out of sight, vanished up around her shoulder and blurted a very unhelpful: "Oh no. This looks like it hurts."
Nicole gritted her teeth. "No shit."
Ghost's "Don't worry, I can fix that." barely registered before a warmth pushed down on her and promptly washed away not only the white-hot pain, but thawed the ice in her bones, too.
Just like that.
It left her feeling lightheaded. Almost weightless. So maybe— maybe —she could get up now. If her shaking noodle arms permitted, anyway.
"Guardian, huh?" Shephard said, sounding surprised.
When she finally looked up and pushed herself back onto her knees, he'd taken his helmet off. The large, horned monstrosity hung off his hand for a second before his Ghost (Darrow?) flicked a beam of light over it and unceremoniously reverse printed it out of existence.
"And hey, there's two of you," Shephard added with a lopsided grin while he swept his gauntleted hand through a spiky mop of black hair. Not much good that did him though. By the time he reached her and offered her a hand, the hair he'd tried to flatten had sprung back up.
Nicole stared dumbly, her vocabulary reduced to jumbled letters. She barely managed an awkward "Uh—" before he grabbed her by the elbow and hauled her to her feet.
"What she means is Thank you," Ghost said.
"I bet she does." Shephard's grin ticked up a notch.
It was friendly, the grin. Genuine. Lit up his sharp green eyes and all that. Very green eyes.
And while he went on to help up Bjarte and inquired about who this young lady was and if she'd like a chariot to the Big City, Nicole found herself rooted to the spot, all colour draining from her face.
Because of all the possible things in the world this man could come bearing on his dirty gold chest plate? She intoned a quiet, numb whimper stuck halfway up her chest.
It had to be wolves.
Two of them. They had their heads turned to each other, their teeth bared and ears slanted back. Wear and tear and polish had worn down the coat of gold from their bevelled contours to bare winks of steel. Like giving the wolves a dusting of white hair.
Nicole couldn't help it.
She thought they looked awfully familiar.