Chapter Text
B1. DEATH HANDS
▶️chorus 1
The cannibal cult flees across the desert, and the woman in white follows.
<=\\=
It bears only a passing resemblance to the deserts of most worlds, where exposed rock weathers into sand over hundreds of millions of years. This desert is fresh, not more than five years old. The sand is inconsistently coarse, beach-like one moment and gravelly the next. The remnants of atomized mineral veins leave streaks of red and orange and white-grey across the dunes, like globs of paint mixed lightly on the canvas. From above, it looks like a soup of rust poxed over by black polkadots, what on the surface reveal themselves to be jagged spires of spindly, brittle obsidian. They tower twenty to thirty feet over the landscape for miles, a perverse forest of spider’s legs turned upwards to the sky, marking the shallow grave of this mankind.
It must be a peculiar variety of beautiful, she thinks, at the right time of day. At the present moment however, it’s a blinding death trap. All color is invisible under the gaze of concentrated high noon. The glow permeates from all directions, thrown down by the sun, bounced up from the sand, caught and carried by the dusty air, bringing with it a heat that could boil the unprepared traveler alive in their own sweat hours before they had a chance to die of dehydration.
But the woman in white isn’t just prepared. This is her job.
Sealed head to toe in long white strips of enchanted fabric, masked by a rebreather and adjustable neutral density goggles, she tracks her quarry with patience and caution. Part of her training is humility in the face of capricious nature. She can feel how hungry the desert is for her to make a mistake. Even with the relief provided by her augmented apparel, the heat is an unbearable presence all its own. She pushes through it as though wading a silty, sinking swamp. One wrong step, a loss of balance, even the tiniest stumble risks acquainting her with the razor sharp shards of black glass that shed from the spires like leaves. Though her cocoon of Breathing cloth is more resilient than it appears, it’s no less vulnerable to cuts and tears. Even the smallest break in the seal would severely compromise her ability to traverse the dunes, and that would be getting off easy. Just as likely she’d suffer a grievous flesh wound, a sprained ankle, a broken limb. And then she would be in real trouble.
Under any other circumstance, she would have deployed her mobile shelter to wait out this punishing, shadeless flood of sunlight. But by her own deduction, that risk is the mission. So she gathers her resolve, marches ahead, and focuses on the details she’s been provided.
<=\\=
The planet is freshly-designated Upsilon-1542.UE𐄂 in abbreviated shorthand, meaning unmapped, hostile, and beyond saving. Not typically the profile of a world marked for emergency intervention, but this is a unique case. Most Upsilon-class planets fit the antagonist archetype, your ocean worlds, your lava worlds, monobiomic death traps actively hostile to all but a narrow band of lifeforms, often generated rather than emergent. Within this class, less than one in ten are host to intelligent life; of those, only one in fifty develop language; of those, only one in twenty-one develop agriculture; and of those, only one in one-hundred-seventy-eight will have achieved industrialization at any point in their timeline.
1542 is one such unlikely world, a 178th of a 21st of a 50th of a 10th of a possibility to ever exist in the first place. In truth, its statistical improbability as an Upsilon is more akin to convergent evolution than categorical accuracy. Prior to its Reckoning, the idea that this planet might merit Upsilon classification would have been laughable. Reasonable mass, a stable orbit in the Goldilocks zone, a tidally locked moon, and a wide array of diverse biomes-- the perfect cradle for standard anthrotype humanity. So optimistic was its profile, the likelihood of developing space travel within a notional century was in the ninetieth percentile.
Alas, there’s no accounting for armageddon.
<=\\=
A ways back, not far from where she was hastily dropped, the woman in white discovered a shallow trench. Abandoned, it had been quickly dug and used only briefly, maybe overnight. The sand and bedrock didn’t give her much to go on at first, but the signs are always there for the observant. She noted scraps of discarded rope, a cold fire pit, an uncovered impromptu latrine a few paces away, and scuffs along the base of four nearby obsidian pillars at each corner of the bunker.
And the bones, of course. Fresh, stripped clean. Human sized.
From this, she made a guess. A caravan of nomadic cannibal cultists stayed here. They dug a pit and erected a tarp overhead, so that they wouldn’t be visible from above ground unless you were right on top of them. They did this at night to rest, surely, but they would almost certainly have to do the same in the middle of the day, during the shadeless three-hour high noon.
And here, another guess: with such a short night, the cannibal cultists had no choice but to travel primarily during the day, which they could only do by navigating through the shadows of the spires, avoiding direct sunlight as much as possible. Chances were they’d have lookouts during their nightly rests, but the woman in white suspected they would abandon such precaution at noon.
After all, who would be crazy enough to traverse these dunes in unobstructed daylight?
<=\\=
The woman in white takes slow, measured steps. Rehearsing the data in her mind keeps her focused, eyes on the prize as some might say. The sand beneath her feet is always changing, shifting from tiny grains to thick gravel to unbroken stretches of ice-slick glass and back again all in the span of just a few yards. And everywhere, everywhere, razor-sharp daggers of obsidian chips poke up and out.
A desert with teeth she thinks, deliberately refusing to speculate on the rest of its anatomy.
She pauses to sip from the tube connected to a bladder on her back, beneath the insulation. The cold water electrifies her throat and sits heavy in her gut. Another enchanted tool, less a container than a rate-limited wormhole to an underground freshwater spring on an ice planet several billion lightyears away (who said Upsilons are without their uses?). Even more than the Breathing cloth, she was grateful to have had the bladder on hand when the assignment came in. It acts as a heat sink, and still barely gets the job done.
Which begs the question: if she’s struggling this hard even with the aid of magic, how in the hell have the locals survived so long? Cannibal cults aren’t exactly known for their sustainability, after all. A small mystery, but useful motivation nonetheless. In this line of work, you take every hook you can get.
Adjusting the density of her goggles, the woman in white scans the ground for a trail. She spots it, recent pressure cracks in a long piece of dusty glass, like thin ice after a small parade. No denying the signs. She takes a deep breath, and continues her slow pursuit.
<=\\=
For the vast majority of living things, the rule of reproduction is quantity over quality. Most eggs never hatch; most hatchlings die young. To persist for generations, the dandelion must shed countless seeds to the wind. Every seed possesses equal promise, but if only one in a hundred are likely to take, then multigenerational survival necessitates the production of at least ninety nine broken promises.
The reproductive cycle of the cosmos is no exception.
Of those worlds seeded with the necessary conditions to host the Universe Engine, most never manage to trigger it. Those that do are subjected to a punishing test of strength, ingenuity, intelligence, patience, and tolerance for the absurd. It takes the form of a game, most often picking impressionable pre-adolescents for its players, which rewards the victorious with godhood and a newborn universe to call their own. It has no natural name and manifests its constants around a sea of variables.
The unfathomable complexity of a universe means the gestational viability of any given session is extremely low. But while many sessions do not end in victory, failure is not always tantamount to a death sentence. Skaia, the omnipotent nucleus around which all Universe Engine sessions orbit, provides players a cornucopia of avenues for escape, transformation, and transcendence. This is a mercy which makes the Universe Engine unique among reproductive cycles.
And what a small mercy it is. Of the likely billions of people on a UE seed world, vanishingly few will make it into a session. For everyone else, the fate that awaits them is a storm of meteors destined to eradicate all life as they know it. A storm that, in no small twist of irony, is the result of Skaia defending itself from the very same bombardment.
<=\\=
Does Skaia show mercy to the few because it truly cares for all who pass under its gaze? Or does it just feel guilty for the requisite genocide of the many? The Guilded Philosophisticates have one answer; the Union of Wandering Librarbarians have another.
The woman in white, for her part, is content leaving the matter to the experts. She’s too busy getting her hands dirty to lose her head in the clouds.
<=\\=
According to the report, the fate of 1542 was thus:
At time of initiation, civilization was industrial but only haltingly electrified, still decades out from developing communications infrastructure more advanced than the telegram. Even before the session was triggered, several populous regions struggled under a generational drought. One intrepid inventor saw salvation in translated instructions from the ancient temple of a long dead frog-worshiping religious order. To his immense credit, the inventor managed to build a condition-satisfying UE interface powered by steam and primitive electromagnets. Build-it-yourself kits were thus distributed among prominent social clubs in wealthy city centers, instructions encouraging collaborative assembly and play. Whether any viable sessions emerged as a result is unknowable.
The meteor shower, while easily passing the threshold for mass extinction event, ran its course in only ten seconds-- far below average, and in wildly inconsistent clusters. This led to the survival of far more non-players than average, which was decidedly not a mercy given the climatic apocalypse that followed.
Despite the brevity of the meteor shower, it still knocked the planet wobbly on its axis and permanently altered its orbit towards the sun. The fourteen hour day lengthened to twenty eight, while nights shortened to less than four. A lengthy period of toxic rainfall strangled the flora and fauna, then yielded to worsening droughts, and within a few short years 1542 became a desert wasteland truly deserving of the Upsilon classification.
<=\\=
Under a single errantly heavy footfall, the gravel slips, and the woman in white stumbles. She only just manages to catch herself on her hands in a patch of safe dirt, feet planted, knee halted mere inches from a gnarly jab of hungry stone.
Heartbeat in her ears, adrenaline high, she keeps dead still just to confirm that she’s not injured.
Sloppy. It’s too early for the heat to be getting to her like this, when there’s still so much walking left. She curses herself, curses everything-- and then she sees it. Through the blinding reflected white, she sees the lip of an exposed metal hatch peaking out of the desert.
Carefully, she approaches. No sign of traps, she brushes away a thin layer of sand. It’s bulky, with a crank handle like you’d find on the exterior hatch of a submarine. It’s a matte white so thorough she’s certain it would have completely evaded her attention, had she not taken that fall.
She grabs the wheel, expecting it to be locked. It isn’t. The hinges groan and scrape, every nook and cranny hindered by granular friction, but it comes open all the same. Recently used, then, she notes.
Below the hatch, a cylindrical tunnel boring straight down into impenetrable shadow, featureless save the inlaid rungs of a ladder.
A moment of indecision. Her quarry is unlikely to be down there, given the guestimated size of the cannibal cult’s caravan, so it would be smarter to keep moving while she still has a lead on them.
But if they are down there...
No time to lose. The woman in white breathes deep, and descends.
<=\\=
The process begins some notional hours ago in the heart of a sentient neutron star. An incandescent light bulb blinks, one in an array of millions, and the facility’s domed ceiling boils over in a violent oscillation of color. Its operator, long dead, notices the flag and turns towards the console for more information.
An uncoded and messageless UE distress call, signal weak, barely detectable above background radiation. Reading on, the operator grows perplexed. An analysis of the signal’s known and unknown layers yields untold quantities of information about the planet and its inhabitants to the incomprehensible superintelligence above, and what’s on screen now shows all the characteristics of a low-priority lost cause. But the star pulses insistently, as it only ever does when it has noticed something important.
The operator is skeptical, but knows better than to refuse the call.
Knuckles crack. A report is generated. One instantial survey of entangled shift space local to the signal’s source later, and the nearest Sailor Squad is assigned their rescue mission. When they ping their assent, the operator archives the report and returns to more relevant duties.
<=\\=
Her Squad accepted the mission with a long suffering groan. They were hours, just hours out from completing a monthslong high-stress operation, were already spinning up their engines for an instance dive when the alert sounded.
There’s always something else, unless you have nothing better to do.
Supplies were low after such a long assignment, and they couldn’t afford to restock. Slipping out of 1542’s amphibium shift zone would risk total desynchronization from the notionally-present moment of crisis. No choice but to make use of what was on hand and improvise. Atmospheric interference limited the ship’s ability to navigate the surface, and the weakness of the distress signal itself kept its precise location a mystery. With only enough equipment for one Sailor to descend safely, it became clear that whoever went down there would have no choice but to hoof it.
Of course the woman in white volunteered, and of course none of her peers protested. She always liked a challenge, and they were always happy to leave it in her capable hands.
One of her squadmates, finally skimming the report, muttered aloud in disbelief: Hold on, what the fuck is ghost radiation?
<=\\=
The woman in white concludes her descent cautiously, eyes and ears peeled for trouble. No sounds of shuffling legs or labored breathing, no crazed maniac with a blood-covered axe in immediate eyeshot. She stands at the lip of the open door, staring into the darkness within. Only when she’s practically certain there’s no one else there does she ask aloud if anyone is there. No answer.
Practical certainty made absolute, the woman in white pulls a small orb from her inventory and tosses it into the chamber. It bounces once, twice, and on the third impact floods the chamber with sourceless global luminance.
She lifts up her goggles, and frowns.
Before her is a rectangular chamber, not much bigger than her own bedroom back home. Grey plated walls ringed by red consoles and cubbies, thick wires dangling from the ceiling. She doesn’t even need to clock the telltale spirograph to know what this place is, and frankly she feels a little silly for not guessing it immediately.
It’s a Command Station, a keystone UE construct found on virtually every seeded world. In the farthest left corner stands a computer terminal, nine monitors arranged in an appropriate variation of the houselike logo so common to the Engine. She utters a little “huh” at the implication of a fated nine-player session. Skaia generally prefers even numbers, though odds are hardly unheard of. Just an interesting fact to append to the report when all this is over.
The woman in white approaches the terminal and taps a few keys on the keyboard (lettered in a language she’s never seen, surprising no one). She doesn’t expect anything to happen, and nothing does. Faulty uranium supply most likely, if it hasn’t been outright pilfered.
Place stinks. Someone’s been living here. Empty cans of food, lids jaggedly torn open by a pocket knife ill-suited to the task, are stacked in corners and under consoles. The walls are covered in chaotic chalk scribblings depicting a farmhouse surrounded by flames, stick figures engulfed with their hands and mouths pleading to the sky. On the floor in front of the farmhouse, a white chalk fence surrounds a musty pile of blankets. Whoever lived here must’ve been driven mad by the bombardment, lucky enough to find this place for a well-stocked refuge. Until the supplies ran out, anyway.
She stands in the middle of the room and turns in a slow circle. There was a struggle here, she realizes. Recently. One pile of cans is knocked over and kicked around, crushed underfoot. There are scuff marks on the floor, and--
And blood.
It’s not a lot, but it’s not nothing either. The woman in white traces the trail from the ladder across the floor to a splat on the ground, and another splat on the wall above. A head wound, maybe? Down to her knees in front of the biggest pool, and it’s still wet.
Then she sees it. A blinking red light under the terminal, so faint she never would’ve noticed if she weren’t crouching.
The pieces click together. Whoever lived here had been here a while, maybe six months to a year. Supplies were running low. The resident started prying panels off the equipment to make something happen, though they clearly had no idea what they were doing. Knowingly or unknowingly, they triggered the distress beacon that summoned her and her Squad here.
But something else happened. Maybe triggering the SOS caused a shift on the surface. Maybe the cannibal cult had a means to pick up the signal. Whatever the case, they found the hatch-- and this station’s resident. The survivor tried to put up a fight, maybe knocked some things over in the scrum, but it ended with their head slammed against the wall and falling unconscious to the floor. The interloper then hauled the resident over their shoulder and carried them back up the ladder, seemingly entirely uninterested in the shelter this station provides from the deadly heat above.
Cannibal cultists she thinks with a shake of her head.
No use waiting around, then. She retrieves her Orb of Enlightenment, pulls down her goggles, and climbs the ladder with increasing doubt that this mission will turn out to be a success.
<=\\=
At time of report, the total number of living people on the entire planet was estimated to be less than a hundred. In all likelihood, substantially less. In theory, this simplified the mission by a lot. Find the survivors and get them safely offworld, no game mechanics to fuck with, no errant Black Kings or indignant Jacks to fight, no stubborn players to arduously convince that no seriously it’s not a trick she’s genuinely here to help. After the exhausting diplomatic mercenary shit she just put behind her, this one feels like a cake walk, albeit a grim one.
Except for that last pesky detail, appended to the bottom of the report like an afterthought: “High probability of cannibal cult activity. May possess paranatural proclivities from exposure to ghost radiation. Please approach with caution.”
<=\\=
Ghost radiation isn’t even real, she tells herself convincingly.
Pulling herself up out of the hatch, the woman in white immediately spots what looks like a black potato chip in the sand. It’s blood from the survivor, boiled over and dried into a frail wafer that disintegrates at her touch. Despite everything, this brings a smirk to her lips.
The chase is on, and the clock is ticking on someone else’s life. These are exactly the conditions under which she does her best work.
A cannibal cult has fled into the desert with an innocent prisoner, and so: the woman in white follows.
<=\\=
In situations like these, where hot pursuit inevitably precipitates conflict, the question naturally arises: What happens at the end of the chase? What does one even do with a cannibal cult?
There are countless context-dependent protocols for avoiding conflict, or pre-empting it, but edge cases like this one demand a measure of flexibility. On one hand, the setup is simple: cannibal cult of unknown size, likely no more than a dozen or so people from what she’s seeing, hiding in a hole in the dirt with a wounded captive. Given the state of things on 1542, she doesn’t exactly expect the cultists to be at the peak of physical fitness-- but that’s an assumption she can’t rely on. If the woman in white has learned anything about UE seed worlds, it’s that they love violating common sense.
So she finds their noontime shelter. What then? The most obvious play would be to call down her squad and hold position until the sun finally starts moving again, then ambush when everyone’s occupied packing up their stuff. A fine enough plan if there wasn’t an active hostage involved; unconscionable given what she knows now. Bloodied and blacked out, quite possibly concussed, what are the odds these freaks take their prize as a late brunch? High enough at least that she doesn’t want to wait around to find out.
And anyway, if the cultists did find that control station by some kind of radio signal, she’d be just as likely to give away her own presence trying to contact her Squad. Until she knows for sure, that’s not a risk she wants to take.
Far along the western horizon, a long-dried riverbed snakes down through the dunes to meet a tarry black mass that was once a massive lake. Along its apparent shoreline, the mangled remnants of a small port city. Girder skeletons melted askew, exposed foundations, a few intact brickwork facades. Hardly an inviting oasis to the weary traveler, but it makes her wonder. Why are these cannibals nomadic? Why choose this as their path, instead of turning towards the ruins of a civilization that, if absolutely nothing else, surely had invented the concept of basements? Do they have a destination in mind? A goal? But this desert goes on for miles. There’s nothing out here. Nothing anywhere.
The most obvious explanation, and maybe even a safe one, is that they’re at the end of their rope, desperate and senseless, finally depleted of whatever resourcefulness allowed them to survive as long as they already have. Depending on the religiousity of this particular sect, it could even be a divinely-ordained death wish. A fruitless quest for a salvation that will never come.
Part of her hopes that she can talk them into surrendering. She’s known plenty of folks to come back from far worse than cannibalism. But she isn’t particularly optimistic about the rationality of heatstroke-delirious zealots. It would be safer just to kill them. Safer, at least, for whoever was living in that station.
But no one chooses the life they end up with, not really. No one ever intends to join a cannibal cult, they just wake up one morning and realize they’re already in one. And on a world this bad off, you take whatever community you can find.
So that’s another possible approach: Diplomacy. Historically not an effective tactic against starving cultists, but--
What was that? Just ahead, maybe two hundred feet. Was that something flapping in the wind? She stands still for a moment, watching, mind racing. There shouldn’t be movement from their camp for another hour at least, but there it is again. The unfastened corner of a brown tarp dancing up and down over the dunes like a flag.
The woman in white approaches cautiously, waiting to see if anyone tries to pull it back down. No one does. On hands and knees, she ascends the embankment harboring their shelter and takes a peek.
Well.
Shit.
The tarp is mounted by rope at four points over a haphazardly dug bunker, one of which has been cut. Underneath, she catches brief glimpses of a severed arm, finger twitching. Silence all around, except the whipping fabric. The woman in white equips a handgun and slides silently down into the bunker.
Sleds and backpacks ring the edges of the shelter, much of which has been scattered and squashed in a tussle. Their contents, to her befuddlement, are largely skeletal. Femurs, tibias, skulls, spines, just a treasure trove of bones, bones, and more bones.
To one side of the exposed gap in the tarp, four emaciated adults in chains lay dead, stabbed through the chest. Their clothes are sweat-darkened, thin, tattered-- Another lays face down in the middle of the bunker, keys in hand, with a sixth set of shackles unlocked behind them. To the other side, three unambiguous cultists wearing pieces of human skulls in their beards are hacked apart, their blood caked into the sand but still wet.
This isn’t enough people. The prisoners were, what, their livestock? She never considered they might have prisoners, because it seems so patently inefficient. One of them must’ve got their hands on the keys, unlocked themself and another before the cannibals retaliated. Close to the center, curled lengths of rope lay severed, next to a spot of dry blood. From a cursory glance, none of these bodies seem like the person from the station. Others must have fled in the scuffle, either in fear or in pursuit depending on the--
A cough from behind. She spins, gun ready, and spots another bloodied cultist behind a sack of pelvises. He’s got an axe embedded a foot down the right side of his neck and into his ribs.
When he sees the woman in white, confusion washes over his face. He scowls, and spits blood into the sand.
She asks what happened. He mumbles something about a boy, so she asks what boy, and he says that boy, they were so close to finding the sunheart if it weren’t for that damn boy, and then he croaks. She scratches her chin and lowers her gun.
A guttural scream from nearby. The woman in white steps out of the bunker, wrist to her face. This is getting too dicey, she needs her Squad down here immediately--
An arm wraps around her neck from behind, squeezing hard, a deep voice in her ear making a demand that ends mid-sentence when she puts a bullet in each of his feet. He drops her, yowling, and she gets a good look at him. Big guy, white skin covered in shitty stick-and-poke tattoos, inconveniently muscular, long ratty hair, huge beard, wearing rags stitched together around skeletal hands and feet.
She cocks her head and asks him why they carry so many bones around. He responds by throwing a ghost at her.
She has no hesitation calling it a ghost because that’s exactly what it is: a translucent hovering person-sized figure shrouded in a white sheet with droopy eyes and a cartoony frown, flying towards her with a sorrowful BOOoOOoOO!!!
The woman in white opens fire on the mischievous phantom. Her bullets pass through it harmlessly, which she ought to have expected, and she’s got no answer to its rapid approach. She flinches momentarily when the ghost passes through her, caught by a brief spike of fear. The sensation is bizarre, like someone just opened a window on a cold night, but otherwise she feels... fine?
In front of her, the would-be necromancer falls over dead from his bullet wounds. She lowers her gun hesitantly, then glances behind her to see if the ghost is still there. Nope, no ghost.
Another shriek. A person in dark clothes, the last escaped prisoner by the looks of them, lays prone at the peak of a dune. Another figure in an ornate skeletal headdress disappears down the other side. No time for distractions. She runs as fast as she can while still maintaining balance, sends a message to her Squad as she goes, telling them to be ready above her approximate location for an immediate evacuation on her signal.
She kneels at the prisoner’s side. He’s gasping, blood boiling at the corner of his lip. Eyes bloodshot and spinning. There’s a long bloody knife by his hand, and a crater in his chest.
He sees the woman in white, grabs her, and tells her to save the boy.
When he dies, he leaves a red handprint on her chest.
<=\\=
Throughout the extracosmos, rumors tell of a coven of spacefaring witches. They appear in groups, motive unknown, always meddling. They claim to offer help, but it’s a devil’s bargain. Wherever they go, death follows.
So the whispers suggest, anyway.
Time and again the woman in white has butted up against these misconceptions, knowing full well that they exist for her own protection-- but it never fails to get to her.
They insist that these witches are heartless, cold, deceitful, and manipulative. That they are killers with a smile, worse than tyrants, worse than pirates, worse even than a natural disaster.
They say that death is nothing to them, for they are immortal. They say the witches feast on the blood of the innocent for their own enrichment. They say that children, especially, are a favored target.
There is at least a kernel of truth to the slander. For it is children who most often face violence, and who are least empowered to fight back.
It’s the children, most of all, who deserve a softer world.
And no one but the witches, orphans of the omniverse themselves, are willing to do what it to takes to give them that life.
<=\\=
Over the hill, the silhouette of the cannibal priest garbed head to toe in impractical bone-based attire dramatically monologues with machete in hand, standing over a young boy with a--
With a head wound.
And suddenly, everything gets a lot simpler. She raises her gun and fires, striking the cultist in his shoulder. He cries out in pain, then wheels around to face her. She’s closed the distance between them by then, body checks him hard enough to send him sliding ten feet across the sand.
The boy isn’t moving. She kneels over him and tries to pour some water into his mouth. He coughs, but his skin is reddening fast in the sun. Bruised, bloodied, and catastrophically dehydrated, clothes tattered and mismatched, one shoe missing, wrapped in a jacket several sizes too big for him. Whoever he is, it’s clear that death is looking for him.
She sees the animal flickering in his eyes and decides that death can shove it.
He points and whines fearfully. Behind them, the last three cannibals stand shoulder to shoulder, weapons aloft. Where the other two were hiding, she has no idea. It doesn’t matter. She yells at them to wait their turn.
The woman in white squeezes the boy’s hand, breathes in a last gasp of magically cool air, and tells him that everything is going to be okay.
Then she stands, and undoes the knot holding her Breathing cloth in place. The whole thing unravels around her in a torrent of sparks, swirling around her arms and legs. She throws the spiraling mass of cloth into the sky, where it assembles into a hovering square of perfect shade over their position.
And thus, her uniform is revealed: dark knee-high skirt, short sleeves on a black top, striped knee-high socks and red slippers. Fluffy dog ears protrude from her head, a matching tail peeks out from her skirt. She produces a long red ribbon to tie back her mass of silver hair, then points decisively at her foes.
“my name is harbinger silverbark of the extracosmic witchkind legion! this child is now under MY protection, and any further aggression will be punished with extreme prejudice. lay down your arms immediately, and i guarantee you safety and rehabilitation offworld. this is your one and only opportunity for redemption. refuse it at your own peril.”
The men look at each other and laugh.
Silverbark sighs, shakes her head, then glances back at the boy. He stares up at her, dazed, dehydrated, certainly confused and scared. But his eyes are full of wonder. His eyes are full of stars.
So the woman in black flashes him a confident, buck-toothed smile, and gets to fucking work.
<=\\=
The boy doesn’t comprehend everything that happens next, but what he does comprehend is more than enough to change his life forever.
He watches as this strange woman pulls a rifle out of thin air and fires, blowing a hole in the chest of one of his captors. The priest raises his arms, summoning a vortex of bones from nearby to enclose and crush the interloper.
The bones fly, but meet empty air. The woman, out of nowhere, simply appearifies behind her targets, taps them on the shoulder, and says something witty the boy can’t hear.
He’s feeling light-headed. His vision goes blurry and he slumps down into the sand. The shade is a relief, but it’s still so hot.
When his focus returns, it’s just the woman in black and the skeleton priest, his boney cloak rattling like a xylophone. He swings a knife at her desperately, shouting curses of furious damnation.
And then, this person called Silverbark, she does something-- he sees it unfold, moment to moment. The priest slashes once, twice, three times, and she lets him get closer each time, eyes foreward, unblinking. This goads from him an overhead stab and a screamed demand for her to just die already.
And she smirks, like it was her plan all along. She whips something around from her shoulders, a floppy sort of backpack with a long tube attached.
It catches the knife. Instantly, the priest is enveloped by a column of hyperpressurized water that blasts a valley through the desert for miles. The force of it pushes her backwards by several feet, but it doesn’t seem to surprise her.
When she shuts off the stream, all that remains of the cannibal priest is a trail of steaming bones.
<=\\=
Silverbark wipes her hands clean, fires a flare gun that engulfs the Breathing cloth in blue flame, then approaches the boy. Kneeling next to him, it’s clear he’s rapidly losing consciousness. But he’s staring at her, awestruck anyway, so she smiles and asks him how she did.
He doesn’t respond.
A sonic boom from overhead signals the imminent arrival of her Squad. Trying to keep him awake, she notes the nametag on his jacket.
“straten? is that you?”
He seems confused, then coughs. With her water bladder pierced, she’s got nothing to give him. The boy curls over onto his side, gasping, grimmacing, putting up his fists. Mumbling no, no, no, as if to an unseen attacker. In his erratic rustling, bags of half-eaten food tumble out of his interior pockets.
The ship lands nearby. From the rear bay, two of her comrades rush out with a stretcher.
Silverbark gently touches his shoulder, tells him everything is gonna be okay, just hang on a little bit longer. You’re safe now. The Legion’s going to take care of you. He stares up at her with sudden lucidity, points at his chest, and says before passing out,
“Dane.”