Final Retreat

All that Mepka had left in this world was the sound of the door coming unbarred. Leaping from her crouched position, she thrust through with a crack and a crunch.

Niolette cried out in high pitch as Mepka knocked her to the side. Not waiting for the shock to wear off from her captor’s reedy features, she dashed up the ladder through the hatch and into a display room of intricate stonework and relics recovered from the ruins of Myarsa. She pushed past a dividing pillar into a hall. Her vision caught a dead-end right into a sitting room, fire crackling menacingly from lit braziers. She started left towards a dinner table crammed by food and around a blind corner into an adjacent hallway.

“Wretch!” Screams pitched back off Mepka’s tail as Niolette crested from the buried cell. “You insolent bitch!”

A worry darted across Mepka’s mind that Anzaw, infernal man that he was, would surely know that something was amiss now, but she had to put that thought out as she clattered down the long and labyrinthine halls. She passed a commode, a bedroom with windows showing an impossibly high view over the swamp and the city below. She hung left and quickly right, moving over a cabinet with a clatter. Niolette was still out of sight behind Mepka, but her fuming chase could be heard through her shrieks and snarls.

An oncoming draft broke the choking stagnation of the air, and a pang of hope washed over Mepka as she knew the exit must be close. She found it at the end of the next corner-turn, a three way intersection of a foyer, and with it the dark and waiting silhouette of Anzaw. She had only ever seen him in the imposing figure of his armor, and now in draping robes he looked somehow skeletal. In his hands was a ceremonial axe, the swing of which she barely managed to dodge with the thought that it looked almost identical to the one her father used to carry.

“Fuck,” she let slip, stumbling back into the untreaded hallway as Anzaw bared a grimace towards her.

“Ah, there you are, husband.” Niolette caught up from the path Mepka had previously escaped along.

Mepka’s eyes darted between the two of them, and then to the open entryway behind Anzaw as the three squared off.

“Ah-ah-ah,” Niolette’s tongue clucked across the roof of her mouth, tracing her fingers together in a sickening gesture before releasing them to point at the exit, “Pel’h Q’ot”.

A shimmering wall of billows light apparated to cover the way out. Mepka felt in her bones that to pass through it would spell death.

“We have further answers to pull from you.” Anzaw grunted, lunging forwards with the axe in an upwards swipe that slashed across Mepka’s breast and shoulder in searing pain. He pivoted quickly to come down for a heavy blow, but Mepka managed to lunge sideways and the momentum of the swing lodged the axe in the wood of the floor between them.

Sprinting back and away in the moment that the weapon was indisposed, Mepka burst through a set of double doors into an armory, heavy weapons presented in honored fashion all around. She snatched the nearest sword, but its unfamiliar weight gave her no comfort. Anzaw rounded the corner behind her, Niolette in tow, and with him came an aura of malice so potent that it was almost physical. 

“You’ve nowhere to go. Submit, child.” Anzaw gloomed, his presence a testament to dread that Mepka’s wits could only barely hold together under.

“Drop that silly little lizard-sticker and we’ll handle this as civilized peoples should,” Nicolette added from behind, her face creeping into a smile while retaining all its sickening fury.

Mepka looked behind her, into a dark corner and another interior door. She looked to the figures closing in. She looked to her side, and saw through the thick foggy glass of the window the vastness of the Aether with only open air and miles of swamp between. In a flash she had dropped the sword and gone diving for the window. She felt the slam against her head and shoulder, the cutting of the Abbot’s home as the glass shattered, and the freefall that sent her out of reach of the Abbot’s choked cries.

“Ahtr’ul” she plead between her corporality and the impending impact as she sailed from the highest point in the city. She felt her entire body fade for the barest moment as she impacted and tumbled down a stairway of wooden planks. Bruised, but alive, she scrambled back to her feet. From above, a sudden wash of green nearly struck her, instead causing the solid staircase that she had tumbled down to fall to horrid decay in an instant.

“Return at once!” Anzaw bellowed, overtoned by Niolette’s incoherent cries of vexation. For a moment Mepka felt her limbs go rigid, compelled by some unheard word of Anzaw’s demanding prowess, to stay put, before breaking free and stumbling down the stairs as fast she could.

From this high perspective, the squared levels of the ziggurat city of Peyr laid themselves out in front of Mepka. Wide, ramped walkways below buzzed with the press of the populace, though here amongst the peak the streets had a more open feel to them. Mepka sliced down through the district, feet slapping against the muggworn wood. 

Conservators from the highest noble families stood agape as she blew past, their rotten peace broken by the sight of her so ragged and frantic. She muscled around them, their judgement a repulsion.

“Stop her!” Niolette's cry rang out from some distance behind, “Stop that demon, in the name of all that is holy!”

The hands around her turned forceful, but before they could restrain her she hand shoved through. Another crowd loomed up from the ramp ahead, this one more alert to her predicament and their role as her adversaries. Darting right, Mepka hooked over the platform’s railing and slid across the roof of a building sticking out from a lower layer.

The city here was more familiar to her, below the uppermost reaches. She dropped down the side of what appeared to be a small home, the dull throb of her injuries flaring with her landing.

Two deputized citizens appeared in the street ahead of her, and from the first moment she met their eyes Mepka knew they were foul in intention. Backing up and turning on her heels to sprint, Mepka launched herself down the alleyway behind her and underneath the weighty overhang of the level above. The dark opened up to her, embracing her as she ran between shadowed market stalls and folk of mundane business.

She strafed around a corner and for the barest of moments, she knew that she had broken her pursuer's sightline. Focus daring around wildly for the next escape, she landed instead on a figure frozen in the middle of the way, a woman leaning heavy on a walking stick. Mepka strode to her quick through the flowing crowd, grabbing her gruffly by the upper arm and pulling her though the door of the closest building. The sound of boots thudding on wood passed, as Mepka and Estrid stood just inside of what was apparently a weaver’s shop, staring at each other.

Estrid, for her part, hung bewildered in her daughter’s still-clutched grasp, mouth agape.

“I’m leaving.” Mepka was blunt, motioning only to the spar of wood that Estrid had been using to hold herself up. “I’ll need my staff in the swamp. Give it to me.”

“I- I don’t-” Estrid’s mind clearly raced behind her eyes, “You’re on the run from the Abbots. I should call them, I should take you back.”

Mepka clamped a hand over her mother’s mouth. The way Estrid had spoke made the words limp, more automated response than real threat, but Mepka would not chance any further betrayal. There was a moment of surprised pushback from Estrid, jolting her to the present moment from some other space she had been occupying in her mind. That shift in awareness settled on a resignment that belied clear sight of her daughter’s intention.

From her held position, Estrid proffered the quarterstaff. Mepka took it, releasing her mother into a pained slump. She remembered the twang that disappointing her mother would have brought on before, but did not feel it any longer.

She slunk out the door and onto the street again without another word, now armed with her familiar weapon. Estrid mumbled something from inside as she went, some half-hearted goodbye, but it was not loud enough to be anything to Mepka’s ears.

She slunk quickly away, keeping her her head lowered carefully so as not to attract attention. Moving as such through Peyr’s wheezing ebbs and flows, bound for the lowest levels of the city, she found a surprising lack of conservator guardians. As she approached the edge of the shadowed undercity, she looked a quite nook. She poked out a grime hole, with just enough of a rot across its boards to allow for sight out into the exposed streets.

Surveying, she found a rank line of conservators out searching the docks. They had the numbers on her, by far, but they were spread well out. It was clear that the message of an escapee had gotten out, but that they did not know where she was exactly. Off to the right from where she crouched a link in the chain broke to go and hassle a small group of swamp-scrapers that had not been wise enough to evacuate from the now-contested area. A path to burst through opened ahead, and Mepka could not help but indulge herself a moment to envision her escape out into the swamp through it.

She darted out from behind the line, feeling the distance out in the open. A dark-haired man was the first to spot her, his eyes going wide as he bellowed out, “Prisoner!”

Mepka kept for the weak point in their line, seeking to dodge their grips but unable to evade their attention any longer.

In her last steps towards escape, she felt a rocketing impact from a figure unseen. A wiry boy, a conservator younger than she was, had slipped her view and tripped her to the ground just steps past where the force had set their barrier. Enemies raced towards, their hands outstretched for her, and her wild wild eyes met the boy’s who had taken her to the ground.

“Ahtr’ul” The word was flung off her tongue with force, and with it a pulse that rocked back any who had dared approach. Swatted, the line cowered from her display of Aether magic just long enough for her to regain her footing. 

She was past, though they were at her heels she was past the conservators. They were a scrabbling, rabbling mass of pursuers. Still, over their din it was impossible not to hear the howls of fury that Mepka knew in an instant meant the Abbots had hooked themselves back onto her trail. The ground slammed into Mepka’s heels, sending a vibrating malevolence into her body from their chase behind.

Her head start afforded her her life, but also the refilling of a panic that she could not measure. She spared only a glance behind, seeing that the conservators chasing after her had been scared into organized effort by their leaders, now fanning out effectively to catch her should she let up. They drove her across the last of the docks, matching her for her sprint.

Ahead, the city gave way off a steep platform to the fen that hungered for their presence. Mepka leapt into it’s clutch, needing for anything other than the structure of Peyr. She carried her rush from fallen branch to belched stone, tracking overtop of the swamp as she had been practicing all her life. From behind splashes and thuds into the ground were less graceful than hers, but still the people of Peyr kept on her. They lurched forwards, through muck and moss, frictioned against the natural and unnatural fen they lived to defy.

It was not long before her outpace levied the sounds of her pursuers calls quieter and quieter. She was out of sight, but still they rang in her ears, and so for hours she refused to let up. She felt her lungs burning, her heart beating heavier that it had ever beaten before.

It was her view out over the treeline that eventually slowed her, her final destination coming into view. She set her pace over the distance, and felt her feet sink further into the muck at each lingering step. She tried to extricate herself, and found panic return to her as pulling her leg up and free revealed legion hands of mire scratching her back down into the very center of the plane.

The swamp held it’s grip on Mepka with all of it’s vast, baleful might. 

Emerging from the heart of mire, a myriad of mephits began to hiss their way up and out all around. They scratched and clawed with finger bones of snapped boughs and ligaments of muck. Mepka swept at them in a wide arc with her staff, feeling a jagged squelching head splatter only to be replaced by a newly congealing body of dragging dread. 

“Why are you doing this?” Mepka yanked a leg out forcibly, taking a single belabored step. “Let me go!”

“You can not leave,” their voices called out in chittering swarm, voices layered on top of voices, “You have abandoned your home, human, and it has abandoned you. This we know. They will keep you from us no longer.”

From behind, Mepka could hear sudden hoots and hollers, cries from her conservator pursuers underscored by the elated terror of the hunt.

“You are ours, now as you have always been.” The voices continued to slop out as she felt a crust of earth dry and harden around her feet, her calves, her knees. “All comes to us, laid low in time.”

Twisting in place, Mepka caught a glimpse of a stream of robed figures rushing forwards, and then suddenly stopping as they recognized the demons of their blasphemous nightmares embracing the quarry they sought.

The wind rushed through the boughs of the trees, as though in an anticipatory snarl.

“Herd, who follow this bait so easily.” The belching of the fen came through as a chorus of jeers. “Our heart thrums everlasting, at the center of our world. We are the name of your god. Now join it, as you so dearly wish.”

The approach of the conservators in Mepka’s view stuttered in backpedaling fear. For one ominous moment the swamp receded, it’s water and sludge pulling down and away as the trees bent back with creaking wails. In the next, a drowning torrent raised up and rushed over them all. 

Plunged under the spate Mepka could not see, could not come close to drawing breath. She heard the screams cut short by muffled choking, a horrid sound of flesh rent asunder by earth and water forced inside.

She felt a sleight laxness to the earth holding her in place, the swamp legion’s focus now divided between her and the revelatory slaughter far behind her. She kicked panicked kicks, and her legs came free just in time to be tumbled through the repulsive tide as it drew out.

The swamp’s grasp had slipped just enough for her to survive a breath longer, and under the power of her own body she began a wading sprint away. She could see the aetherline. She could see the aether, and she made for it with everything she had.

She felt an injurious roar filter up from the ground, and knew that it was for her escape. She fled through rocks and water, evading vines reaching for her at every stride. She felt the pain of the whipping branches and knew that the others behind her felt that same pain tenfold.

Every frantic leap and tumble drew her closer to the aether, closer to release from the horrors of this world.

She sensed a presence behind her, on her tail. Swiveling to see it she found not a person but a hideous disembodied hand the size of a boulder, fingerflesh strewn together from clumps of moss and muck and rainwater. It reached for her, unwilling to let her go. It moved faster than it should have, the swamp shearing across itself at a greater clip than she could match in her fight forwards.

She leapt just as it did, leapt past and into the aether, bellowing out every sheer desperate hope she had left to her in one great and instinctive word, “Ahtr’ul”!

The hand of the swamp lunged after her, grasping for her leg, but where she slipped through the fog it collided against a misty wall of implacable conjured force. Recoiling back, the swamp pounded and beat and struggled to reach for her, but in the place she had reached with the spell she had cast the vast power of the malevolent world she had been held by all her life was rendered totally ineffectual.

The eyes of hundreds of mephits swung to her. The forces of the Peyric conservators, dead and dying, paid her no more mind than they did in life.

She was spent, having poured more than all of herself into the spell that saved her. She retained barely enough consciousness to crawl away, away from her life, away from her torment, as she levied her final retreat back into the depths of boundless and eternal nonexistence.