The undead marching down the winding road that cut through the reclamation zone glowed like purple torches to Cinder -- visible clearly to her dark adapted, magic sensitive eyes. She leaned against the small, wooden doorframe of the cottage and heard Markova cursing under her breath and the labored breathing of Kaleb. That sound, that sound of raspy, crinkling breaths, were like knives, digging into her spine. Her whole life, Cinder had been dogged by the story of the backstabbing, sneaky t'row. Hell, she was pretty sure a t'row wizardess stealing the life and vitality of someone she slept with was one that she had actually been accused of, back on the steppes of the Sur.
She stepped back into the cottage and swung the door shut. The owners were nowhere to be seen -- Markova said that it was most likely they had been in at a local enclave -- what the Starkers called their villages for some reason. But with the undead out in force, it was unlikely that they'd be returning any time soon. Markova didn't blink at helping herself to their food, to their computer terminal, and to their 'wi-fi', but that was proving to be balky and uncooperative, something that struck Cinder as rather odd. Most Stark technology worked with a worrying precision.
When she said that out loud, Markova glared at her, as if she had been making a very poorly timed joke.
"What?" Cinder asked.
Markova sighed. "They've taken the local internet infrastructure into their control. All I'm getting is some propaganda that looks like it was written by a twenty year old whose never done any political thought outside of a message board." She frowned, her scar twisting the feature into an even more fearsome expression. "Cinder, explain to me, how can this fascist raise and control this much? It is too much for a single person, is it not? You had to draw on the strength of the orc..."
"W-Well, I'm just a sellspell," Cinder said, her ears drooping ever so slightly as she rubbed the back of her neck. "My main job is to throw fireballs downrange during a battle, not to raise the dead. But...well, the Dark Lord
was
famous for being a master necromancer. And..." She chewed her lower lip. Her hand lifted and she looked at her fingers, focusing as she tried to draw on the mana surrounding her. More than she expected flared around her palm and her fingertips, swirling like a blue haze. She gritted her teeth, feeling the sting, the burn of magical power. It took a concentrated effort to bleed it off without singing herself.
"And what?" Markova asked.
Kaleb let out a wracking cough. Cinder's eyes flicked to his age-ravaged features and she tried to clamp down on the swelling guilt inside of her as effectively as she had bled off the excess mana. Trying to sound professional, she said: "This world has a bare fraction of the number of wizards as Arcadia. But it seems to have the same amount of magic -- flowing from the portal? Maybe?" She shook her head. "That means that we all get more, as you say, thrust for our remass."
Markova nodded, curtly.
"But where did he get all the
dead
?" Cinder asked. "And those flying machines -- how many flying machines did you build and then destroy?"
"In war?" Markova shrugged. "Enough."
She stood, then. "We need to get into contact with the local military. Unfortunately, that would be the EUDF and we are not exactly what you might consider friends. I do not know their ciphers. They do not know mine -- or if they do, the intelligence boys have fallen down..." She clicked her tongue, then picked up the pistol she had laid out on the table. Sliding it into the holster by her hip, she said. "However, we must try. Can you disguise us?"
Cinder blinked. "I...can...try..." She said, slowly, chewing her lower lip. Camouflage had been a purpose that she had been set to before. But it was one thing to make an army seem like a company -- or, more often, the reverse -- and another thing entirely to cloak her elven ears and midnight black skin. She looked over at Kaleb. And him. Even if she could conceal the wrinkles, she wasn't sure if he was going to
survive
the night, let alone any kind of tramping about the French countryside, looking for some military unit to throw in with.
Markova, seeing her hesitation, pursed her lips. She jerked her chin to the door and the two of them stepped outside. The undead were gone and the night was silent, save for distant hooting, the occasional drone of those undead flying machines. A glow lit the horizon -- one that made Cinder think of great forest fires, blazing and out of control. Save that they were glows without smoke, and the light was not quite the hellish flare of a wild blaze. It was something harsher and yellower -- but more...appealing for all that.
"Paris," Markova said, bluntly, jerking her chin in that direction. "The City of Lights, they call it." Her tongue slid along her lips. "Kaleb is dying."
"I..." Cinder gulped. "A healing spell could fix him -- but it'd need to be more powerful than anything I'd ever cast before."
"Powerful or complex?" Markova asked.
"Powerful. The body wishes to
be
well," Cinder said. "It does it by itself most of the time. But it is fighting against the slow creep of the void in this case..." She crossed her arms over her chest. Her voice was soft. "Or the
fast
creep of my own incompetent stupidity..." Her eyes blurred. "I don't even
like
him. He's just some...blunt headed sword slinging orc..." She whispered, sniffing. "I just...I don't want to be the t'row, damn it..."
Markova placed her hand on Cinder's shoulder and squeezed her with some strength. Her voice was soft. "You said yourself we have more power here, do we not?" She asked, her lips quirking up. "Well, it's better to try than to sit around moaning." She gently turned Cinder around and pushed her back inside with a little shove on the small of her back. For just a moment, Cinder thought her hand would dip down -- it would be a very human thing to grope her butt at a moment like this. But Markova instead simply swung the door shut.
Cinder sighed as she stepped over to Kaleb. Her fingers touched together and she closed her eyes, reaching out with her magical awareness -- feeling the flow of magic around her body. It was strange, casting here in Stark. The magic was here, but it was less like the roiling, pitching ocean of magic on Arcadia. There, the motion was so common and so all present that she had learned quickly how to ignore it, to dive beneath the waves so to speak and grab for what she needed before it was whisked away. But here, on Stark, magic felt so still, so vast, so untapped...even with the power coursing through it and into the hands of the Dark Lord, she felt as if she could drink her fill.
But still, Cinder balked.
That power, that amount of raw energy, could burn her from the inside out. She wasn't Dalethraxius, to casually draw power and fling it out as if the world owed her that. She was just Cinder Spiderblood. Her fingers tightened and she opened her eyes, hissing. "I don't even have a material focus, a gemstone or a-" Her back straightened and she hissed. The ocean of magic around had begun to roil and flow, great troughs of power being dragged out of it. It was as if a massive, skeletal hand was reaching out and scooping up magic.
