In Their Time of Need
The one eyed woman spoke.
"You just came out of the ground."
Sollux looked down at his buried waist and processed.
"Yeah. Yeah, I guess I fucking did."
The woman lowered her weapon as her grin turned into a toothy smile. She opened her mouth to say something, but a mechanical sound broke the silence from behind her. Her eye went wide as she suddenly pirouetted off to the side, just barely dodging three arrows that proceeded to lodge themselves along a screaming Sollux's arm.
"Sonofafuckingbitch!"
Sollux struggled to thrash his way out of the dirt. The one eyed woman stood to his left, her back to him. Ahead of her a staircase rose up against a sharp rise in the ground, leading into some ruins sheltered beneath the branches of an impossibly giant tree. At the top of the stairs stood a wild-haired red and black phantom, barefoot and in robes and aiming down the end of an impossibly elaborate triple-headed crossbow.
The device fired another triplet of arrows off in quick succession, which the one eyed woman cartwheeled to avoid before taking cover behind a row of tombstones. Sollux took advantage of the mysterious aggrievants need to reload to thrust himself up out of the dirt and take cover behind his own chuck of gravestone.
"Who the fuck are you people!" Sollux shouted to whichever of the two felt like answering.
The one eyed woman responded with a psychotic grin, and the phantom responded by launching three iron tipped bolts at the tombstone she was hiding behind. The bolts should have bounced harmlessly off the solid stone, but instead they penetrated all the way to the other side, iron tips just inches away from one-eye's head, wiping the smile off her face. Sollux decided then would be a good time to explain to crazy bitch number 2 that he wasn't here with crazy bitch number 1.
Careful to keep his perforated arm from swinging Sollux shot to his feet while the arbalest was reloading and yelled at her.
"Hey you psychotic bitch! Whatever your beef with her is, I've nothing to do with it!"
She answered with another triplet of bolts aimed right where Sollux's head had been before he threw himself to the ground, careful not to get to close to the tombstone to avoid getting his head split open if and when the latter half of a bolt starts tearing through it.
"I don't think she cares!" The one eyed woman shouted, back to her toothy smile even as the face of her tombstone was studded with another onslaught of arrows.
"What was your first fucking clue?"
"What's your name?"
"This doesn't seem like good time for goddamned introductions!"
The next triplet of bolts came Sollux's way, and he had to go prone against the ground when the top half of his tombstone just slid right off.
"You have somewhere else to be?"
"Fuck it. Sollux! My name is Sollux!"
"Alright then Sollux, my name is Terezi." She looked at him with one wide eye as her hand slipped into the flowing black coat she wore, " that's the wackjob whose been chasing me ever since I arrived in the city. And in the future, when you decide to tie yourself to someone's ship, I'd recommend you choose mine!"
She pulled out a thin, ornate dagger out and held it in her free hand as she stood to face he next volley. Having seen what those bolts could do to solid stone, Sollux wasn't expecting the one-eyed woman's impractically long rapier and thin dagger to do much. He was surprised then, when she slashed away two bolts in quick succession with the rapier and swatted the third away with the dagger before charging the staircase. The phantom tucked and rolled off the side of the raised section of ground as Terezi approached, apparently unwilling to fight her in close quarters. Terezi gestured towards Sollux and shouted, "come on!"
Sollux didn't waste a second dashing out of cover and following her as she headed into the ruined structure, the phantom no doubt hot on their heels. His injured arm hung awkwardly at his side; he was having trouble trying to remove the durable little shafts, and any thoughts of slowing down to concentrate on what he was doing vanished when the wall across from him was struck with a grouping of impossibly hard iron tipped bolts.
Terezi led him full sprint through a large room flooded ankle high with murky rainwater and out the remnants of a doorway, cutting two sharp lefts to head into the comparatively intact ruins of high-ceiling structure and climbing a narrow set of stairs to reach what Sollux recognized was an elevator rising up the side of the cliff beyond the tree branches. Terezi turned into the elevator and out of sight, her head reappearing around the corner so she could yell at Sollux to catch up. Just as she did so a bolt came flying through the window, lodging itself deep in Terezi's good eye. The phantom stood just outside, somehow standing atop the buttress of the adjacent building.
Terezi flew back screaming, hands going up to clutch at her face even as she crumpled against the divider between the two elevator shafts. Sollux unceremoniously kicked her inside and began looking for a lever. He panicked for a second when he couldn't find one, but Terezi slammed one bloody fist down on a plate in the center of the platform, which immediately depressed into the floor as some mechanism spurted into life and they began to rise. Just before they rose out of view he saw the phantom launch herself from the other building and land grab hold of the wall just outside the window, contorting herself and her weapon through the small opening. A few seconds later in what Sollux hoped was a final fuck you volley of bolts poked their heads up out of the floor at an angle, coming out nowhere near either of them.
A tense few seconds passed as Sollux stood there with a bleeding Terezi, who was gasping and snarling and clutching the shaft of the bolt with one black gloved hand. Sollux could hear her muttering curses to herself, and he swallowed down a worthless instinct to ask if she was okay. Instead his hand went to his belt for his talisman, thinking that maybe in her extreme pain she might be amenable to finding religion and at least letting him help her ease the pain or stop the bleeding. He felt the world drop out from beneath him when he realized his talisman was gone.
The elevator ground to halt, and immediately Sollux decided his missing talisman was another problem for another time. He reached out towards Terezi, who moved away from his touch and cursed at him.
"Get you fucking hands away from me." She said as she rose to her feet, one hand bracing her against the wall, staining it with a bright bloody print.
"Fine, navigate with no fucking eyes then." Sollux said, faking a slow walk away.
"…wait."
He turned to see her holding out one hand, which he took, and led her out of the elevator by.
The chain reaching down the other shaft began to shake.
"The fuck is this?" Sollux asked mostly to himself, stepping closer to the edge of the shaft.
"What?" Terezi said, her head turning back and forth. "What is it?"
Sollux peered into the gloom below and almost jumped out of his skin when he spied the phantom climbing up the chain hand over hand, crossbow slung across its back.
"Oh you have to be fucking kidding me!"
Sollux broke out into a run through the spacious room, some sort of church he thought at a glance, dragging a stumbling Terezi along behind him.
"It's coming after our asses is what!"
Sollux did his best to analyze their surroundings while running through them full speed, and what he found was not promising. They'd wound up in what was functionally one long corridor from the main entrance of the church down through a wide, winding street punctuated by sections of declining stairs. Minimal cover, long lines of sight, perfect terrain for that arbalist freak. He turned at the bottom of the tall staircase leading down to the street and looked back, debating backtracking and looking for more narrow side paths to hide down, but he spied the phantom running full kilter out of the church entranceway and went back to fleeing.
He and Terezi briefly took cover behind the ruins of a wagon to avoid another cluster of bolts before following the road as it turns into a series of stairs that rounds the base of a tower before emptying them out in a large room at the head of a bridge. On the other side of the room he could make out some sort of balcony, but more importantly, between them and the balcony sat a bonfire nestled at the foot of a stagnant fountain with statue rising up out of it. Sollux deposited Terezi near the bonfire but out of the sightline of the staircase and turned back the way they came, thinking to catch the phantom at close range when it rounds the corner up top, guessing from its earlier retreat from an advancing Terezi that it's not so great with hand-to-hand encounters.
It's then he noticed the lever set into the wall next to the entrance on his side, and he thanks the Allfather and whoever else may be listening for it. Large exposed gears leading back into the wall grind through years of rust and disuse as he pulls the lever back, and when the phantom hits the top of the stairs it's to the sight of a thick iron gate slamming down. A few bolts zoomed harmlessly through the bars. Sollux flattened himself up against the wall and waits.
A hand appeared through the grating, one middle finger raised high in the air, and it disappeared before Sollux could get a hold of it to try and break the arm. A moment of silence followed, broken by the sound of the triple headed crossbow going off again. No bolts come flying through the grate however, and a small gasp is heard from where Sollux has assumed the phantom is standing. When he peeked around the corner, she was gone.
He gave it a second to assure himself it wasn't some sort of trap before rushing over to check on Terezi, who despite sitting next to a lit bonfire was not healed. Sollux noticed his own wounds remained as well, the torn flesh not mending and the bolts refusing to leave the holes they'd torn in his arm. Terezi sat up against the edge of the fountain and, aside from exhausted gasping, didn't make a sound. Sollux assessed her wounds, saw that the running jostled around the bolt still sticking out of her face, turning her eye socket into a bloody, swollen mess. He removed a tincture of coagulant from his bag and makes her drink it, but the bloods mostly stopped flowing anyway. It's most just so he can feel like he's doing something, because he genuinely has no clue what to do about this. The bolts were clearly magical in nature, or something, but he couldn't do much without removing the damn things first.
He looked about the room, praying to the Allfather and every god of Anor Londo that the bonfire was just taking its sweet time. It's then that he got his first clear look at the bridge, and the massive corpse of a red dragon sprawled across it.
~)~)
A good chunk of the dragons scales simply collapsed inward when Karkat grabbed one of the swords sticking out of its sides, revealing that aside from dry bones and dust the innards of the beast had long since rotted away. Karkat briefly examined the blade, a fine longsword that shone in the sunlight despite the few errant scratches running down its sides, before turning to look through the crater into the dragons chest cavity he'd just opened up and eyeing the brown and black bones arrayed within. He lamented that the days when money meant a damn thing were long behind him, because he was pretty sure he was sitting atop a fucking fortune at the moment.
"Hey Kanaya, we should bring some of this back with us." He said, not taking his eye off the bones and scales arrayed before him. Kanaya did not respond.
"Kanaya?"
"I think I see someone."
Karkats head shot up, his hand gripping the handle of his scavenged sword. "Where?"
Kanaya pointed to the far end of the bridge, where she and Karkat could just make out what seemed to be a pair of bodies sitting up against the foot of a statue. One of the figures waved. Kanaya waved back. Karkat was about to demand that she stay put while he went to investigate when she reached out an expectant hand towards him.
"Give me your shortsword." She said.
Karkat complied and, both of them armed, they began making their way toward the figures at the other end of the bridge. The waving became more insistent, and was joined by shouting.
"Hurry the fuck up goddammit! If you're here to help then she really fucking needs it, and if you're here to kill us then, fuck, I don't know, just get it the fuck over with already!"
As they neared the saw a figure in black with an empty scabbard at her side and half her face covered in blood. Something seemed to be protruding from her eye. Neither the wound on her or the bolts running up her companions arm were healing despite their proximity to a bonfire. Both Karkat and Kanaya hurried over, Karkat's immediate response being to ask, "Holy fuck, are you human?"
"Who are these clowns?" the blinded woman asked, head inclining towards the figure sitting at her side.
"Fuck if I know." He said, rising.
He opened his mouth to say something, but was silenced by the a sickening squelch as the woman grabbed hold of the bolt sticking out of her face and wrenched it out, blood splattering all over her front. She tossed the offending bolt to the far corner and covered her wound back up with her hand, the glove more red then black at that point.
"Pain's gone." She said, as an afterthought, to her companion.
Karkat was the first to speak up
"…Well fuck, okay then. Should I even fucking ask?"
"We were attacked." The male said.
"And my fucking eye won't heal."
"We may be able to help with that." Said Kanaya. Karkat looked over at her incredulously.
"What do you mean we can help? What could we possibly do that a bonfire can't?"
"Where are the flasks?"
"Back at camp. You think they might do it?"
"Worth a shot, I think. And if not we can ask Rose for advice."
Karkat groaned at the mention of Rose's name, while Kanaya awkwardly attempted to shake hands with the standing stranger, who merely inclined his head toward his wounded arm in answer..
'I'm Kanaya." She said. "And that is Karkat. Of Carim and Thorolund respectively."
"Sollux."
"You should come with us back to our camp. We or a friend of ours may be able to assist you, um…"
"Terezi." Said the woman, who rose to her feet and took hold of Sollux's arm.
"Lead the way." She said, jabbing Sollux hard in the back. A grimace briefly fell over her face as she got farther away from the bonfire, the pain returning and radiating across her head from her wound. Together the four made their way back to Firelink.
~)~)~)
"Hello? Rose? Are you there?"
"Hello Kanaya. I trust you've made contact with our soon to be mutual pair of insufferable fools? Sollux, and Terezi?"
"And you know their names. Of course you know their names. Should I just skip the part about Terezi's eye then, do you already know about that too?"
"Wait, what's wrong with Terezi's eye?"
"So you don't know then. Well, ignoring the series of questions your limited foreknowledge implies, I'm afraid we're having a bit of an emergency here. Some sort of phantom, according to their report, shot her eye out with a crossbow. And it's not healing."
"What do you mean it's not healing?"
"I mean her eye isn't regenerating. We've tried everything, bonfire, estus. I even cut her throat with Karkat's sword. She reincarnated totally eye-less."
"Well that is, disconcerting."
"I was hoping you might be able to offer up some insight, especially since you just made clear it was by your machinations that we came across them in their time of need."
"Okay, I'll admit I knew you'd run into them up there, but I had no idea they'd be attacked. Where are they now?"
We've taken them back to the Firelink Shrine, though I'd be shocked if Sollux is still there when I return. He seemed to be in a bit of a hurry. He claims to have been separated from some people he is travelling with."
"Don't worry about him for now. Do you mind waiting here for a minute?"
"Why?"
"I need to go have a little chat with an old friend."
"I thought you said you were trapped under the bridge?"
"Oh I can leave whenever I want, it's just very inadvisable. But desperate times call for desperate actions. If I do not return, it was a pleasure to make your acquaintance again."
"Wait what do you mean again? Rose? Are you still there?"