Chapter 650: Ther’Abella, The Wandering Soul

The descent abruptly seized as the weightless drop vanished, replaced by the bone-crushing jolt of her mangled spine striking solid ground.

BOOM!

The breath exploded from her lungs in a wet gasp, spraying dark crimson across coarse dust.

"Ugh..."

She lay there, half-buried in dry earth with every nerve ending screaming in white-hot agony.

The dark above her was no longer a dimensional rift.

It was an open foreign sky that looked flat and utterly indifferent.

"I... I really want to die."

Her eyelids fluttered shut with her pulse slowing to a weak irregular crawl... Right now...

To close her eyes and let the dust settle over her face felt so easy, it felt like the only merciful thing left in the world.

’Get up.’

The voice echoed inside her skull... the voice kept on saying it over and over again, it was annoying... why was it so annoying? Who owned that—

...It was her own voice.

’GET UP!’

Ther’Abella’s eyes snapped wide.

SKRRRRR-SNAP!

A shadow fell over her face, carrying the foul sulfurous stench of rot and saliva.

Looming directly above her was a silhouette was a desert stalker with mottled sand-colored chitin and four unblinking milky eyes.

Its mandible was parted wide, revealing rows of translucent serrated fangs dripping with digestive acid, lunging straight down to bite off her skull.

Her body had no strength to roll. Her left arm hung limp, and her legs were useless ribbons of ruined muscle.

’Move!’

With a feral scream that tore her throat raw, Ther’Abella reached into the bottom of her withered core.

The microscopic dregs of her wind-mana flared into life and hissed along the cracked pathways of her right arm as she thrust her open palm straight into the beast’s descending maw, and a needle of compressed air detonated inside the creature’s palate.

BANG!

The shockwave blew the top of the monster’s skull apart in a spray of thick greenish-black ichor and shattered carapace.

The heavy twitching carcass collapsed over her legs, its limbs spasming in the sand before going limp.

"Haah... Haah... Haah..."

Panting heavily, her vision swimming with dark spots, Ther’Abella shoved the dead weight off her knees with the heel of her hand.

Silence rushed back in as she lay flat on her back, drawing in short shallow drafts of air that tasted of dry salt and baked earth, and looked around.

There were no emerald leaves and there were no clean singing springs either.

As far as the horizon stretched beneath the pale, washed-out sky, there was only a desolate wind-swept expanse of gray dunes, jagged stone ridges, and cracked barren flats.

The air was dry and scorching and carried none of the rich vitality that had nourished her soul since her birth.

’A desert,’ she thought, her lips cracking as she swallowed. ’An outer zone...’

She turned her senses inward to assess the damage.

Her spiritual circuits were scorched, their walls paper-thin and trembling from the violent spatial expulsion.

Her mana pool, once a deep reservoir that could fuel days of high-speed maneuvers, was practically hollowed out.

She closed her eyes, bit down on her tongue to focus through the pain, and began to weave what little mana she possessed.

A pale-green thread of restorative energy crawled slowly across her fractured bones.

"I’m going to survive..."

It took agonizing minutes just to set the alignment of her left arm, and the bone knitted with a slow grinding ache.

Next came her shattered kneecap, which she dragged together just enough to support her weight.

She could not afford to heal the lacerations on her ribs or the deep gouges along her thighs.

Every drop of mana spent on flesh was ether she wouldn’t have if another scavenger crossed the ridge.

By the time the green light sputtered and died, the sun was sinking, casting long bleeding crimson shadows across the dunes and she was alive... barely.

Ther’Abella reached to her side, and her dirt-caked fingers wrapped around the familiar leather grip of her silver-bladed polearm.

The metal was chipped and smeared with dried blood that was not her own, but the shaft remained unyielding.

She drove the iron butt of the weapon into the hard-packed sand and, with a low groan, forced her trembling legs beneath her, leaning her full weight against the polearm until she stood upright under the alien sky.

She looked north.

...It was just sand.

She looked south.

...It was endless barren stone.

Behind her, the path back to the World Tree was gone, collapsed into the void by the hands of a traitor.

Ahead lay an untamed lawless wilderness where ancient entities and ruthless people carved their domains from the marrow of the weak.

She had no home, she had no sisters and she had no Lady to answer her morning salute.

The elf was an unclaimed weapon left behind in the dust.

Ther’Abella raised her chin with her long silver hair whipping across her face in the rising desert wind.

She lifted her blade, wiped the sand from the steel with the torn hem of her sleeve, and did the one thing she knew how to do...

Ther’Abella began to wander.

...

The desert had no seasons... It had daylight that cracked the skin and nights that froze the spit in a traveler’s mouth...

In the first year she learned which lizards could be eaten raw and which would turn her bowels to water.

She learned to drink the dew from a corpse’s ribs at dawn and to sleep standing up, leaning on her polearm like a scarecrow, because anything that lay down in the Calcid Basin did not get up again.

Her boots wore down to thin leather, then to raw cord, then to bandages stripped from the hides of dune stalkers and bound tight with dried sinew.

Ther’Abella notched each day into the shaft of her polearm until the wood became a field of tiny wounds, and somewhere past thirty thousand notches she stopped counting because the number no longer meant anything... she would be here for a log time.

A century passed in a blur of dust and severed meat.

When a three-headed sand-drake reared from the dunes of the Calcid Basin, its throat swelling with liquid copper, she did not bother weaving defensive spells as she would have done.

The first head spat, and the molten spray hissed across the sand where she had stood a heartbeat earlier.

She ducked beneath the sweep of its lateral horn, planted her left heel into the shifting grit, and rammed the butt of her polearm upward into its soft lower jaw.

The beast bucked, and she rode the recoil, twisting through the air like a spinning leaf.

The crescent blade came down in a single vertical cleave that sheared through the central cervical vertebrae and the two remaining heads screamed in unison before the body fell.

Black blood hissed against the hot sand.

She landed, wiped the edge against the creature’s flank, and kept walking before the carcass had finished twitching.

’I’ve become stronger...’

In the second century she tried to go home.

She crossed the Glass Wastes, where an ancient sun-flare had fused the desert into mirrors that burned her eyes through closed lids, and she followed a dimming memory of the road the Guard had patrolled in the first year of her service.

She found the place where the Outer Boundary Gate should have stood.

There was only a scar of petrified root and a ring of dead blue crystal, and above it a ward of cold green light that hummed with a familiar signature.

...It would not let her within a mile.

She stood in front of that shimmering place for three days.

On the fourth, a merchant caravan passed along the old road, and she listened from behind a rock as the drovers laughed around their fire and sang.

It was a ballad about the Elven Overlord.

It had a second verse about the Betrayer of the Roots, the Goddess who had murdered her own brother with dark magic and was buried alive for it, and a chorus that rhymed her name with a curse.

The drovers all knew the words... They were children’s words, the kind that would be taught to the next generation, and the generation after... but she did not draw her blade.

She walked into the Glass Wastes and kept walking until the song was too far away to hear, and then she walked a few miles more, just to be sure.

Her wind-mana, once clear and sweet like the mountain boughs of Yggdrasil, began to curdle and freeze in the endless dry void.

She felt it go, the way a tooth goes loose before it comes out and in the deep salt caverns beneath the Black Scarp, cornered by a swarm of blind chittering carapace-crawlers, her lungs seized from sulfur inhalation.

The tunnel behind her was collapsed and the tunnel ahead was a river of carapace and clicking mandibles... She was going to die in the dark, and her last coherent thought was that she had not even cried out for the Lady.

So she stopped reaching for the absent life-force of the great bough as her spiritual pathways tore themselves open out of rabid desperation, and she reached upward, past the cavern roof, past the cracked ceiling of the realm, dragging down the cold unfeeling glare of dead constellations.

The air inverted.

Her eyes burned with cold violet fire as delicate stellar markings, fine cosmic constellations, etched themselves permanently across her high cheekbones like silver scars.

With a flick of her wrists, the silver polearm in her grip dissolved into a concentrated needle of white starlight, and when she swept it across the dark forty chitinous horrors were cut in half without making a sound with their vitals cauterized by the freezing heat of dying suns.

Ther’Abella stood in the silence afterward with steam rising from the cooling stone as she discovered that she was no longer afraid of the dark.

The third century was a blur of necessity.

Combat stopped being a discipline.

It stopped being an art she had practiced with Captain Kaelith on the green terraces while the others giggled over tea... It became an unthinking reflex as basic as chewing or blinking.

She swung, something broke, and she stepped over the mess.

Her shoulders broadened under the weight of it, her forearms hardened into cords of lean muscle, and she grew into the tall hard-edged warrior frame of a creature that had never once been allowed to rest.

Her level climbed past two hundred, past three, past four too...

She killed wardens of dead kingdoms and rift-beasts the size of cathedrals.

She killed warlords who tried to press her into service and bandit kings who tried to rob her.

When a famine-wraith took the oasis town of Sedgerun by the throat, she walked into its fog alone and walked out the next morning with its antlered skull on her shoulder and eight hundred villagers alive behind her.

They tried to give her gold, a cottage, and a bride-price in saffron but she would not take any of it.

At Ashgate, a warlord who called himself the Iron Sovereign met her at the head of nine thousand men and offered her a captaincy, a harem, and half his plunder.

She asked him a single question, whether he had ever kept a vow, and when he laughed she walked down the line of his champions one at a time.

The first fell to the flat of her blade and the second discovered that a starlight lance cannot be parried while the third dropped his weapon before she reached him.

By the time she stood in front of the Sovereign himself, the nine thousand had sat down on the sand, one rank after another, as though somebody had cut their strings but she did not kill him.

She took the war-banner from his tent, cut it into bandages, and left them on the doorstep of the nearest healer’s hut with no note.

On clear nights she lay on her back and traced the constellations etched on her own cheeks in the dark. She had learned their names from a drunken astronomer in a ruined observatory who died two days later in his sleep with a smile on his face and her cloak laid over him.

The elf could not be thanked... Gratitude was a leash, and every leash she remembered ended at a knife...

Every dawn she did one thing that had nothing to do with survival.

She planted the butt of her polearm in the sand, turned toward a horizon that held no tree, and brought her right fist across her collarbone in the salute of the Viridian Guard.

"Good morning, Lady," she would say to the empty light.

Then she waited, the way she used to wait on the green terrace for the small calm voice to answer, and when no answer came she lowered her hand and went to kill something.

...She did it for four hundred years without missing a morning, and it never once got easier.

Centuries bled into four hundred years.

Across the outer fringes of the Sovereign Realm, past the lawless free-zones, the mercenary camps, and the trading posts where exiled vagrants bartered scrap iron and void-pelts, whispers gathered like blowing grit.

They called her The Wanderer.

They spoke of a tall, silver-haired elf with sunken bloodshot eyes that burned with lilac starlight when she drew steel.

She carried no house crest and she wore no sovereign sigil either.

She butchered Tier 4 abominations and roaming warlords alike if they crossed her path, but she never claimed territory and never spoke two words where one would do.

"She’s a mad dog," the caravan masters would mutter over their campfires. "She’ll step between an iron-boar and an orphan without batting an eye, but try to hand her a gold coin to say thanks, and she’ll look at you like you’re dung beneath her boot..."

On the first night of the four-hundred-and-first year, the evening gale carried the smell of baked clay and old pipe smoke to the lip of the Southern Ridge.

Ther’Abella crested the last dune and saw, below her, the crooked lantern-lit shape of a frontier outpost.

It had a well, a corral, and a tavern with a wooden sign that swung on rusted hinges and read... [THE SAND-SKIMMER’S REST]

She looked at the lights for a long moment then she started down the slope.