>>5289907“Names.” You find yourself blurting out. “Can you tell me the names of the Daughters that’re the biggest threats to me and my family?”
“Sathriel. Vector, and their people.” They choke out, Alicja’s brow knit with concentrated effort to pull from the collective knowledge of the innumerable entities that lie deep beneath you. “Hephesta, the Living Forge. Schrei.”
‘A’s borrowed body breaks out in a cold sweat, her hand finding the nearest wall to steady herself as she tries to choke out more names. “Scylla, the Mother of Monsters. Or-…O-”
“That’s enough. That’s plenty.” You say, darting forward to catch the unsteady girl before she keels over. She’s burning up, your arms feeling like they’re on fire as you lower her to the tunnel floor. “Thank you…are you able to rest? Or leave Alicja, and continue to exist?”
“Ha…you really are something else.” The beings in her head force her to smile. “Choosing to do this is a one-way ticket. Even if this is all we can do, it was worth it…”
Alicja’s eyes flutter closed, the ghost of a smile lingering on her lips. “...to see such a kind face, at the end.”
The heat leaves her as Alicja’s unconscious form goes limp on the floor, her mouth half-open as she starts exhaling the heavy breaths of a deep and long-overdue sleep. You don’t blame her. Given everything that she’s been through, combined with the regular stressors of her unique existence, it’s only understandable that this would push her to her limit.
You can certainly empathize, and it’s with that feeling tugging on your heart that you and Julia form a protective cocoon of biomass to conceal the sleeping girl while you and your swarmlings get a lay of the land. Sir FuzzBuzz nuzzles up to you in something like solidarity as your vision is split among the suite of swarmlings that now hover both high and low across the forbidding terrain.
Even at this distance, you still can’ escape the carnage. Every jagged peak, every crag and corner contains bloodshed. Teams of Daughters are in conflict, with every corner of your vision plagued by violence that’s either winding down or amping up between two or more groups, each one fighting to cross the treacherous biome. You detect nothing out of the ordinary as far as the environ goes, with the moving shadows at the valley’s nadir revealed to be Daughters as well, hurrying along to skirt the fringes of the slaughter high above them.
You glance back to the peaks and valleys, but your sight can’t linger there for long, in good conscience—flashes of horrified faces, of desperate struggles and lives cut brutally short force your focus elsewhere. Anywhere, but here.
If it’s this bad here, you fear for what No Man’s Land holds for you and yours.
(Continued)
