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As far as preparing for contingencies went, being abducted by a Mindflayer ship had not been anything her lord father had prepared her for. Still. A kidnapping was a kidnapping, and when faced with one she typically had few choices: escape, kill, or both. This situation calls for escape. These ships did not travel often in the worlds above, and were scarcely ever heard of or seen, except in legend and history. She has little attachment to her own world, but what these creatures planned for her, she knew, were far worse than something familiar and tolerated.
She'd felt the first twisting flex of the thing inside of her head as she'd blurrily taken in her surroundings, at the way the walls pulsed and flexed like the tensing of a muscle. Red light, red walls. Red like broken capillaries. A wretched thing, this: a thing both alive and dead. Like her.
In any event, the thing had flexed in her skull and wriggled, burrowed into the flesh of her mind. There was not pain, not precisely — the brain had no nerves to feel pain. She knew this from her work. The feeling was nonetheless deeply unpleasant. She thinks right then to drive the pin holding up her hair into her eye, but the thing predicts this, and her hand freezes in midair. She stares at the uncooperative limb in a bland and cold confusion.
If fear in Akeha still existed, it was buried in a place that she could no longer touch, burned away to the ash that had long since settled over her heart. This emotion overwhelms her now, in the living body of this dead machine, for the first time in many years. The feeling settles, knifelike and cold in the very pit of her stomach.
It doesn't speak. But she feels something that would, in some sense, be thought of as comfort. She feels it flex and shudder like a new muscle in her brain, and all of a sudden, she knows where to go. The thing was not interested in her death, it seemed. Of course it wasn't — she was its host.
It wanted her to escape, and so she does.
The rest is largely a blur. She will remember the great scaled form of a dragon, an army of dragons to blot out the hellish sky, magnificent and terrible both. She will remember burning, acrid heat, the ship writhing and twisting in the shadows left in the light of flame. Then falling — she's knocked cold, tumbling through open sky. It's the creature that wakes her at last. It stirs in slow and pained movements and the alien feeling it leaves her with is enough to wake her as well. Pain came next, but pain was easily dealt with. Her immediate priority would be her head injury. She couldn't afford to be addled any further than she already was.
The air still stinks of blood and burning flesh, but beneath that she smells the ocean. Water meant a settlement at the very least, say nothing of the scattered bodies of the unfortunate fishermen around her.
Akeha begins to walk along the ruined shore unsteadily. The landscape blurs not long after she starts to move: she teeters unsteadily before righting herself. This head injury was perhaps more urgent than she'd assumed. The creature seemed to agree.
She settles on the bank with one of the dead men. Unceremoniously, she begins to rifle through his belongings. She finds what she needs a moment later: rough cloth that looked clean enough to work with and fresh water in a thin necked bottle.
Ideally this would be done in a cleaner environment, but her state of affairs required flexibility. She carefully dabs at her wound with the dampened cloth and the world lurches again. Akeha closes her eyes and breathes in. Listens to the water lick at the bank of the shore. Even the creature goes still.
When she opens her eyes, the world looks a little sharper. She flexes her fingers.
The dead man, her unwitting companion, stares up at the sky. His face is trapped in a rictus of perpetual surprise, his eyes clouded with death. Akeha would lean over to close them, but he's likely too far gone by now. Instead she focuses on her work, unhurried.
Something would need to be done about the bodies. She debates on if she will do this on her own and lets this thought project out to the creature, lets it blare as loudly as she can. She would need to begin building a wall, and this was the first step. But she is unsure. It wouldn't be the same as the other walls. This would require a remarkable amount of effort. It would require pain, either her own or the creature's. She imagines both.
So be it.
With the remaining cloth, she bandages her head.
She'd felt the first twisting flex of the thing inside of her head as she'd blurrily taken in her surroundings, at the way the walls pulsed and flexed like the tensing of a muscle. Red light, red walls. Red like broken capillaries. A wretched thing, this: a thing both alive and dead. Like her.
In any event, the thing had flexed in her skull and wriggled, burrowed into the flesh of her mind. There was not pain, not precisely — the brain had no nerves to feel pain. She knew this from her work. The feeling was nonetheless deeply unpleasant. She thinks right then to drive the pin holding up her hair into her eye, but the thing predicts this, and her hand freezes in midair. She stares at the uncooperative limb in a bland and cold confusion.
If fear in Akeha still existed, it was buried in a place that she could no longer touch, burned away to the ash that had long since settled over her heart. This emotion overwhelms her now, in the living body of this dead machine, for the first time in many years. The feeling settles, knifelike and cold in the very pit of her stomach.
It doesn't speak. But she feels something that would, in some sense, be thought of as comfort. She feels it flex and shudder like a new muscle in her brain, and all of a sudden, she knows where to go. The thing was not interested in her death, it seemed. Of course it wasn't — she was its host.
It wanted her to escape, and so she does.
The rest is largely a blur. She will remember the great scaled form of a dragon, an army of dragons to blot out the hellish sky, magnificent and terrible both. She will remember burning, acrid heat, the ship writhing and twisting in the shadows left in the light of flame. Then falling — she's knocked cold, tumbling through open sky. It's the creature that wakes her at last. It stirs in slow and pained movements and the alien feeling it leaves her with is enough to wake her as well. Pain came next, but pain was easily dealt with. Her immediate priority would be her head injury. She couldn't afford to be addled any further than she already was.
The air still stinks of blood and burning flesh, but beneath that she smells the ocean. Water meant a settlement at the very least, say nothing of the scattered bodies of the unfortunate fishermen around her.
Akeha begins to walk along the ruined shore unsteadily. The landscape blurs not long after she starts to move: she teeters unsteadily before righting herself. This head injury was perhaps more urgent than she'd assumed. The creature seemed to agree.
She settles on the bank with one of the dead men. Unceremoniously, she begins to rifle through his belongings. She finds what she needs a moment later: rough cloth that looked clean enough to work with and fresh water in a thin necked bottle.
Ideally this would be done in a cleaner environment, but her state of affairs required flexibility. She carefully dabs at her wound with the dampened cloth and the world lurches again. Akeha closes her eyes and breathes in. Listens to the water lick at the bank of the shore. Even the creature goes still.
When she opens her eyes, the world looks a little sharper. She flexes her fingers.
The dead man, her unwitting companion, stares up at the sky. His face is trapped in a rictus of perpetual surprise, his eyes clouded with death. Akeha would lean over to close them, but he's likely too far gone by now. Instead she focuses on her work, unhurried.
Something would need to be done about the bodies. She debates on if she will do this on her own and lets this thought project out to the creature, lets it blare as loudly as she can. She would need to begin building a wall, and this was the first step. But she is unsure. It wouldn't be the same as the other walls. This would require a remarkable amount of effort. It would require pain, either her own or the creature's. She imagines both.
So be it.
With the remaining cloth, she bandages her head.
no subject
'I cannot die' and 'I will not die here' are the first and second resounding thoughts she has once conscious. The thing in her brain celebrates this desire to survive and Artoria is angry that the creature finds some inherent joy in this. It would be better to die (the worm all but hisses at this thought, the wet, unpleasant sound echoes all through her head); but to do so would be to shirk her duty and purpose, leave so many to the mercy of an unknown future.
Her memory of the crash itself is hazy, just monochromatic scenes broken up by the worm burrowing deeper into her head. She could have been unconscious for hours or just minutes but the uncertainty of that is what makes her rise to her feet almost immediately. The world is blurry for a moment but it does not stop her from moving.
She pays no attention to the burns scattered across parts of her exposed skin, some of them already gooey with early infection.
Artoria impresses a prayer upon Tyr as she strips the armor from a corpse she'd pulled from the wreckage. She undresses right there, amongst the wreckage. The man is thin enough that she can fill up his armor, and her own she casts into the sea- though not before a moment of grief. Artoria presses the emblem on her breast plate to her face and doesn't even feel guilt for the sacrilege of worshipping this: a lion shaped from steel and blue enamel.
Excalibur she could not bear to part with even if doing so wasn't already a danger. She wraps cloth around the hilt and sheaths it. The dead man's sword would do for now.
She should move fast and find her way back to a city. No one deed could be worth the fall of an empire. But she's already chomping at the bit before she can even stop herself.
"Are you injured miss?" She speaks with earnest concern but keeps her sword at the ready. In this non-descript armor and with her hair pulled up she looks like any other solider, just a scrawny man or a plain woman. And then suddenly she feels as if she is jolted forward even though her feet stay in place. The worm tries in vain to pull her forward, agonizing over the fact that it cannot. Artoria catches glimpses of something that is not hers: something sharp pointed at her eyes, pain from a wound that she did not have. She feels something else run its fingers across her own moments but closes that door before those hands can find anything before the mindflayer ship.
no subject
Akeha feels it then — the alien sensation of seeing herself through someone else's eyes, a vision of the rounded dip of her shoulders from behind. She brings a hand to her temple as if to brace herself against the images that come with erratic speed — another view of that alien ship, the punishing lick of flame. Burning skin, a slight woman retrieving a dead man's armor. Akeha stiffens. Her tail curls defensively around her waist. The larvae tugs in the direction of this interloper, and she ignores it.
She looks over her shoulder when she feels it is suitable to do so. Her eyes are candle-bright, pinpricks of lantern light in shadow. Her expression, as it always was, is unreadable.
"Nothing so dire that you need to concern yourself, stranger. But, thank you." In a normal situation she would turn away. This time she keeps the intense weight of her gaze on this person, having noted her grip on the sword. It would be folly to underestimate anyone in her current position.
"You were on the ship as well." An observation, not a question. Her own voice is calm and without emotion. "I saw a glimpse of it just now."
no subject
"As were you." Her voice is stern and without scorn, diplomatic. She's passing judgement.
Artoria's eyes drop to the beginnings of some indecipherable ritual. She can't parse it but she doesn't unsheathe her sword. They'd already shared something horrifically intimate, and so a seed of personal responsibility blooms.
"I suppose we're not strangers then, at least in some sense." Her gaze drifts down to the bodies.
"I took his armor because the situation called for it." And because she knows now how it might have looked to this woman:
"What are you doing?"
no subject
It's a point of mild concern. However, she's ultimately unbothered — she has no intention on lingering in this place with this woman for very long. All too familiar in the art of disguise and deception herself, her only thought is that she's likely dealing with some sort of fugitive.
"I struck my head during the crash, and needed to tend to it before moving on." As if to punctuate the remark, she stands easily and gracefully, with no hint of her persistent dizziness. Her skull pulses in time to her heartbeat, the larvae squirming in discomfort. With an unsteady sigh, she motions to the shore.
"With this much water, a settlement should be nearby. I suggest you move quickly."
no subject
"We should travel together. Our destination is the same for now." The hand on her sword falls to her hip and that is only partly muscle memory. Again, she mourns the fact that the worm celebrates what it deems acquiescence. As long as survival as her goal she supposed that was simply going to the case.
"There's little point in exchanging pleasantries like this. Where do you intend to go with this affliction in your head?"
no subject
The tip of her tail twitches: the briefest hint of irritation. To the first remark, her gaze slowly frosts over, a certain severity entering the soft and placid elegance of her features. She decides that this conversation has run its course. Without preamble, Akeha turns and begins to walk in the direction she'd pointed out to Artoria a moment ago.
"If it's all the same to you, stranger," she says over her shoulder, her tone level, "I intend to deal with this affliction by my own means." She thinks of her training, and forces her mind into white blankness even as the larvae twists in agony. She had learned through pain, and so she would teach her new hanger-on through pain. Her skull throbs, angry lines of discomfort shooting up through the base of her horns. And she's tired, a bad sign. This was the most difficult aspect of enduring one's own pain. You had to understand your own limits, and then surpass them. But carefully. A weapon struck too often would break.
As she remembers this, her tread is steady and unwavering. She does not so much as stumble. "We'll travel together as far as the next settlement, and from there we will part ways." Her tone softens. "It will be better for you. My kind are not always welcome, as you surely must know."
Even the most well-meaning Tiefling would be treated as a pariah among most. And despite all her efforts, the larvae pushes something through. It's a memory. A tattered white banner flutters above a still and quiet village. The herald bears an insignia in the shape of a dark, stylized wing. And at the base of the banner pole there is something —
something red, mangled. A man with wide, clouded eyes, face frozen in shock and terror. A blade pins the corpse to the ground. Blood pools at the feet of a Tiefling child, their face blanketed in shadow. Except for the eyes, which glow like slow-burning coal in the dark. An empty, flickering candle flame—
Akeha sways unsteadily on her feet, her concentration broken through. With it came the dizzy pain she had separated from herself, which rumbles in her skull like a thunderclap.