He let his hands run along the black metal of the cross, it was cold to the touch of his fingertips.
He’d seen it change length, and now it was about the size of his entire body. A spear with three blades at the end, disguised as a religious symbol. It was covered in filigree depicting skeletal hands and macabre imagery. In the center of the arms was an engraving of a human mother and child, the only portrayal on the weapon not related to death.
He sucked in the knowledge greedily.
Longing for Penance
charges: 0/100
Expend flame to change the weapon's size. As a creature is killed by the cross, a charge is added. Expend flame to deplete all charges, launching them outwards as projectiles.
Carrying this item will instill a growing longing for the final rest.
______________________________________________________________________
Wretch blinked. “Elenya… this is the real deal.”
She reached out to touch the weapon, giving him a blank expression.
“Sure is,” she said with a sigh and shuffled toward the former owner of the cross, a light glowing in the armored chest.
“I wonder how big it can get?” he continued, limping back to the well overflowing with fresh water.
A painful burst of heat came from his nearly spent flame, rushing through his veins with raving whispers slithering at the edge of his consciousness. He didn’t break his gait but gave a satisfied nod.
The eighth time, it was worth leaving the city after all.
“Did you just kindle?” he asked.
“Yup, second time. This custodian must have been a real menace if we kindled even after a two-on-one,” Elenya answered as she pried a glowing rock from the chest of their fallen enemy. “Let's gather some water and find a place to hide. We need to rest.”
She held the coal between her fingers, and a trickle of flame flowed from the rock toward her chest. A moment later, it crumbled to ash.
They collected water in the canisters fastened to their former adversary and headed back toward the entrance they had come from. Elenya’s cleaver was still locking the massive doors, and the light of dusk filtered through the gap.“I don't see a reason to move away from here, better to rest where we know it's safe,” Elenya said.
Wretch gazed down the narrow stairs leading into the abyss beneath the platform and shivered. “The big bird is probably on top of the tower, but I haven’t seen any of the smaller ones.”
He stopped in the middle of a step. A sound tickled his senses.
Elenya opened her mouth to reply, then followed his gaze. From the darkness below came a sound like wind through cloth, the fluttering of feathers—thousands of them.
“Shit,” she whispered.
They both lunged for the gate. Elenya grabbed her cleaver, and the sound grew into a deafening wave of beating wings. Elenya squeezed through the gate first, Wretch pushing her from behind while holding the cross in one arm.
He glanced back just in time to see a wave of black feathers explode upward from the abyss. Eyes, claws, and beaks packed so tightly they moved like liquid, almost defying gravity as they poured into the tower.
“Come on!” Elenya shouted.
Wretch tore his gaze away and slipped out into the courtyard littered with corpses. The dying light of the suns vanished as the flock spread over the city.
They sprinted toward a house at the edge of the square. Wretch limped as hard as he could, falling behind with every step.
Something small and feathery slapped against his neck, a beak scraping his skin.Elenya kicked a decrepit door, and it burst open, a trickle of sand falling from above.
Wretch held up a hand over his face and spun the cross. Still, beaks and slapping wings battered him. He threw himself into the room, clutching the cross, and Elenya closed the door with a slam.
They looked at each other, neither daring to speak. The walls vibrated with beating wings.
A moment later, caws of frustration ebbed into the distance, and they breathed out collectively.
“That solves that mystery,” Wretch whispered.
On the black cross, three black birds were impaled, hanging lifeless on their arms. He reached for the weapon with his mind again.
Charges: 3/100
So animals work too, Wretch thought, looking around the room. A few broken pieces of wooden furniture lay scattered, the only intact piece was a cupboard made from the same black stone as the walls. Toward the back was a large furnace, covered in a layer of dust and sand like everything else.
“A small fire and some roasted birds? We need to eat to fight,” Wretch asked.
“Yes, I am starving.”
A while later, the two of them huddled around a tiny fire in the furnace. The black cupboard was placed to bar the door. Elenya and Wretch tore into the meager meat by the flickering light of the fire in the windowless room.
Outside, it was quiet, not even the distant storms surrounding the desert reached the city.
Wretch took another chunk. “Do you think Captain and Astrid are looking for us?” he asked.
Elenya was polishing her cleaver with his ripped shirt. The stump was healing nicely, and the previously burned skin had hardened and was gradually being replaced with pink scar tissue.
“I think they want to. Edmund is a sentimental old bastard, but he isn’t stupid,” she said. “They’ll inform the strongholds if we ever find our way back.”
Wretch nodded. “I hope they leave some Gulschaks for the rest of us. I’m closing in on Blaze.”
Elenya chuckled. “You are a little killing machine, aren’t ya? We are out here in the middle of Saint knows where. Probably the first living souls to walk around this cursed city in a few hundred years. And you are already thinking about the next thing to hunt.”
Wretch turned his gaze away from the roasted bird and looked up at Elenya, where she sat crouched, almost twice his size, with a severed arm.
“I am going to kill that man, and everyone who was in that manor. Sooner or later, they’ll come out of hiding, and I’ll be there. If not as a Fireling, then as a Blaze.”
Elenya noticed him staring and looked up from her new weapon. “You're creepy in those eyes, sometimes.”
He tilted his head. “You don't like them? I would change to one of the hounds if we had a day when we didn't fight for our lives.”
She shook her head. “No, I like them. They suit you.”
“Do you remember that time we fought that dead, shriveled man in the catacomb?” Wretch said.
“The Datlovich guy. I threw you across a horde of those dead, we were both embers back then,” Elenya said, looking to the shadows of flame flickering across the roof.
“He said he had the Flame of Ends, or the Death Flame. Do you remember?”
Elenya shrugged as he continued. “I think she by the fountain had the Flame of Ends too. Maybe this whole place does,” Wretch said.
“What Flame do you think I have?” Elenya asked.
“If there is one for murder or war, that’s the one,” Wretch said without a moment of delay. “Don't you agree?”
Elenya didn’t answer.
As the fire died down, they slept in shifts, huddled into the corner of the furnace’s base. Elenya sat toward the wall in her linen shirt, while Wretch slept soundly, crouched in the sand by the heated stove, his head resting in her lap.
“Like a cat,” she muttered.
During Wretch’s shift, it was her turn to lie in the sand. Elenya’s chest rose and fell. Wretch didn't say anything but watched her. They had grown closer, both in power and as people, both of which were new experiences for him. If they survived and continued to grow, he’d outpace her. Would that matter?
Wretch shook his head and turned to experiment with the cross. With a trickle of flame, he could change its shape down to that of a pendant. For now, he left it the size of a dagger to be stowed in his belt on the opposite hip from the Blinking Blade.
“Don't worry, I won't forget about you,” he whispered to the weapon that had been with him for what felt like ages.
Before daybreak, the sound of the flock returning shook Wretch awake. Their caws vibrated the stale air as they descended the central tower into the abyss below. An hour later, two figures moved with careful steps across an empty square.
They snuck back into the black tower, squeezing through the entrance to reenter the room with the ever-flowing water. Beside the platform, two stairs led downward into the dark.
“Strange,” Wretch said, looking over the edge of the platform. “I kind of want to go down.”
Elenya was filling a metal canister with water. “You dumb? Who knows what is down there?”Wretch let his fingers run over the filigree of the cross in his belt. “You're probably right,” he said and stepped away.
A similar set of stairs led down from the platform on the opposite side that they had entered, leading to an identical closed door. It took both of them to force it open. Beyond was a narrow stone bridge of black obsidian, lacking a railing and spanning a gaping ravine whose bottom Wretch couldn’t see.
“It's too much in the open. The big bird will destroy us,” Wretch said as he peeked out under Elenya.
“We have to go east. We’ll have to outrun it,” she said.
“It did bleed, but I think we should wait for nightfall, head over the bridge while the flock is occupied,” Wretch said finally.
“Sure,” Elenya said as they backtracked up to the platform. There was a window above the western door, shining light onto the platform. Wretch studied the floor, the white stone was marked with symbols flowing in a spiral towards the fountain.
“Astrid might know what these mean,” he muttered to himself. He didn’t have any parchment, but he had other ways. Pulling out the cross, Longing for Penance, he began carving the symbols into the dark skin of his clawed arms.
“What are you up to?” Elenya asked.
“I am copying the symbols,” Wretch responded without looking up.
Elenya blew air through her nose but did not question him further. An hour or so later, he was done, streaking marks of different kinds lining his arms. He had healed each one into a scar but not further. His reservoir of flame had grown significantly, and the tiny trickle he had used for the task wasn’t even visible to him.
A sensation snapped him back to the present, a tremor from the top of the tower. They both looked up. A moment later, an ear-piercing shriek rattled the air. Elenya was on her feet in under a second with the Blinking Blade raised in her only arm.
“The big bird!” she said through gritted teeth.
“It can't get down here, right?” Wretch said.
Through the window, a black silhouette flew westward.
“It’s heading the way we came from!” Elenya said with palpable excitement. Wretch strained his eyes. Through the glass, he could see the dunes and the ruins to the west.
His eyes shot wide. A lonely little dot moved across the dunes, its long fur leaving a trail in the sand.
“You have to be bloody kidding me,” he whispered.
“What? This is our opportunity!” Elenya answered.
“It’s that damn dog! It followed us.”
“They can kill each other all they want. Let's run for it!” Elenya said, fastening the water bottle to her belt. They took off, descending the stairs to the west and squeezing out onto the narrow bridge. They ran as distant shrieks, and howls swept over the city of black stone.