Thanks again to Liter Knight for her careful editing!
Chapter 14
Carla's eyes snapped open, staring at the ceiling of a tent. It was a sight that had become all too familiar in the last few weeks traveling with the army. After a week she had come to hate it. The ceiling of her and Gwen's room had become a long lost eden. A fond memory of a home that was long gone. The only thing that had made waking in the tent bearable was the comforting presence of Gwen's arm across her chest and Lily's leg draped across her waist, but she didn't feel the comforting presence of her family right now. She was alone, staring at the plain canvas of the tent ceiling.
She sat up suddenly, desperate to look at something else, and saw she wasn't in her tent at all. She was in a small curtained off section of a larger tent, in a plain cot that would have been very uncomfortable if she had still been human. She looked down and saw a long needle in her arm, connected to a bottle of blood. She recognized it from when Gwen had been recovering from Languor, it was used to give her blood and help her wake up faster. She realized she was in a medical tent, and once she knew it she could feel it. The air had that particular tense, desperate quality of a space where people were suffering, both personally and in worrying for the ones they loved.
Then the curtain twitched aside and Lily was there. their eyes locked and Lily froze, beautiful blue eyes widening and mouth dropping open. She looked tired, and Carla imagined long nights sitting by her side. She knew Lily was the one who had stayed with her for her Languor. Gwen would have found it too painful.
"Carla," Lily's voice was a rough whisper.
Carla didn't say anything, she just held her arms out
Lily threw herself into them and Carla held her close. She bathed in the warmth, the sweat of the tiny woman in her arms who she had come to love so much. Carla held the embrace for a long beat, enjoying the gentle swell of her breathing, then gave her an extra squeeze and pulled away
Lily touched her cheek and smiled.
"I knew you were going to be fine. The nurses all said it, but it was so hard to see you like that."
"Is Gwen okay?" asked Carla
"Yes! Yes, she's fine. She was injured in the battle but not badly enough to go into Languor."
Carla got a flash of Lily's aura. The vermillion and dark green she would expect was there but there was a lot of silver there too, more than Carla liked. Silver was the color of true sorrow
"And Elaine?"
"Of course, she didn't get within a mile of the battle."
"How long was I out?"
"A little over two weeks. The battle didn't go well and we've retreated back west. Do you remember what happened?"
...
The battle was just as awful as she had dreamed it would be. A shifting mass of men in the distance. Pushing desperately against a hoard of gibbering, fanged monstrosities. The air smelled like fire and gunpowder and sections of the battlefield were obscured by the smoke of the Tallisian's guns. Behind her was the tent where she was supposed to be repairing skeletons with Stephanie and the other revenant assistants, but the endless screams of the battle had drawn her out, a slowly unfolding disaster she couldn't look away from.
There was a hum to her right and her eyes sought out the sound. About a hundred yards away were the army's engines, manned by blooded and swarming with attendants. The battery of tempest engines was the source of the hum. There were a dozen of them, each with a Dracul with hands placed over them. Attendants were pouring blood into the intakes and as she watched bright, actinic blue light began to play across the brass and iron surfaces of the arcane machines. The hum grew louder and higher in pitch, then suddenly rose to a crescendo as bolts of lightning, too bright to look at directly, flowed up from each of the engines, striking the clouds overhead. Carla saw the lightning flow into the clouds, snaking through the sky and towards the front lines. A moment later there was the crash of thunder as flashes lit the battlefield. Carla refused to look too closely at where the lightning struck, and felt like a coward for not facing what was unfolding.
"Are you alright?" asked Stephanie.
Carla turned and saw the revenant had followed her out of the tent, looking concerned.
"I... I guess I needed to see it."
Steph nodded, "It is hard to look away from."
"Like a carriage accident," said Carla.
Steph sucked in her lips and nodded.
Then there was another hum, this one deeper and somehow even more ominous, and when Carla looked back she saw the necros engines were powering up. This time the light was a sickly green, and the smell in the air was a foul mix of bile and rot. Carla didn't know the Draculs who were running the tempest engines, but she saw Isabelle, Felicity and Anika each standing in front of a Necros engine, chanting the words of a necromantic spell. Carla was too far away to hear the words, but she had heard Isabelle practicing the spell earlier. It was going to fill the air with acid mist, to eat anyone who breathed it in from the inside out. The Tallisians would die choking on their own melted lungs while their own troops, who didn't need to breathe, would be untouched.
Suddenly Anika jerked and fell. Revenant attendants rushed to her and knelt by her side. As Carla watched Felicity also collapsed, writhing on the ground in agony as smoke poured from her. The blooded manning the engines were falling everywhere and the entire battery was thrown into chaos.
Carla ran toward Anika in long, ground eating strides. The world blurred by her, a confusing mashup of panicked people getting in each other's way. As she approached Anika she felt the hum of the engine in her bones. And she realized that Anika had already finished the spell and was just about to unleash it when she had fallen. The spell was stuck in the engine, feeding on blood and cycling endlessly back on itself. The engine started to smoke and the smell of rot became overwhelming. Carla realized with no one to release the spell, the engine was going to go critical. If it did it could feed on the magic in the other engines. The chain reaction would kill everyone within a mile. It might even reach back to the camp, to Elaine, to Lily.
She burned blood to go even faster, shoving thralls and attendants out of her way to get to the engine. She tried not to look at Anika but she still saw the hole in her head out of the corner of her eye, but she refused to think about it. The engine was pulsing a bright green that was painful to look at, it was more than painfully bright, the light coming off it made her bones vibrate with toxic resonance. She put her hands on the brass control plate and the spell was in her mind, furious and mad and chewing at the bars of its cage. It was barely holding together, the structure Anika had woven into it fraying under the torrent of blood that had been fed into it, beyond the capacity of the spell or the engine to hold. Her own magic roared in response, treating the fraying spell like a challenge. She worked with her magic to bring the spell to heel, drawing on the deep reservoirs of blood in the engine to stabilize and control the spell rather than empower it. It was like giving a scared dog a bath but through a mix of subtle cajoling and brute strength she was able to wrestle the spell into submission. Her magic howled in triumph as they gained mastery over the great war spell together, and Carla released it towards the army. Behind her, she felt the other engines firing as well, somehow tied together to Anika's engine so they worked as one.
Carla pulled her hands from the engine and came back into herself. As she watched the spells combined with the ones from the other engines together into a solid wave of horrible green light. It raced towards the front lines. Carla realized she had just done what she had most feared; turned her magic on men to take their lives. She had only done it to save her friends, the people she loved, but that didn't matter, all those men would die because of what she had done.
Then her chest lit up with agony. A burning spike of fire burrowed into her, spreading from a single point in her sternum up her throat and into her stomach, tearing her apart. She felt herself falling and through the pain and the sorrow there was a feeling of relief that her part in this horror show was over.
...
"I... I remember," said Carla
She squeezed Lily's arm, "The spell. Did it work?"
Lily shook her head, "No! No, the Tallisians had a circle of war mages. They countered it."
Lily put her hand over Carla's "You didn't hurt anyone."
Carla closed her eyes and took a long deep breath, relief flooding her so powerfully she felt her eyes get wet. She felt Lily's finger brush her eye and when she opened them Lily was smiling at her, wiping her tear on a handkerchief. Carla felt a moment of gratitude that Lily had been the one to greet her upon waking; of her family, only she would have been as relieved as Carla that the spell had failed.
"Is Anika okay?"
Lily licked her lips, "She's still in Languor. Apparently the older a blooded is the harder they are to kill, but the longer it takes them to wake from Languor. It could be months."
"Months?"
