Chapter 805 (1/2)

Helen sat panting on the ground. Above, the midday sun blazed downward, looking brighter than it had in weeks. The sky was so blue and wide she had a strange urge to reach up and scoop some of it and raise the rich color of the sky to her lips so she could drink.

“Fucking dumb,” Helen whispered.

All across Hastam, the city was almost dead silent. Hissing whispers and tentative laughter were the only infrequent disturbances.

The silence was not because the city had fallen. But perhaps the opposite. Everyone had seen the marshaling Wight forces outside the city. And every citizen was aware of the mounting tension between Hastam and the Northern Camp. Their Masters were salivating for an excuse to strike at the other’s throat. While the Wight army was preparing, Aylwind and Ophelia, the two great leaders, were preparing to head toward the Northern Camp.

Helen was feeling furious and afraid. Her emotions boiled over in her chest until her black flames of rage were wide and maroon colored. Too much was filtering into her. She had lived on the front lines for almost a year. She knew what would happen to Hastam when the protection offered by those two departed to deal with political issues.

And then…

It had seemed like the world itself was ending. Letters crawled across the ground in an invasive, glowing script. It spread on the edge of the wind, sweeping across all of Hastam in all of ten seconds. The letters climbed up buildings and across the Hallat in a snap. Then it had swarmed under the Wights.

It was somewhat strange to see the Wights turn tail and flee from it, but the strange script was too fast even for them. And so quickly did it happen that no spear user could figure what it could mean.

It streamed forth endlessly, driven by some unseen imperative. And following the script, almost a minute later, there was the endless light. It was blinding. So much so that Helen could see through her eyelids closed. The light pierced through those tiny apertures like they were nothing.

In that dreamlike blindness, Helen wondered what would happen to her world. It seemed… too late. The impending doom was beyond her own spear. Violence could not move the implacable number of Wights. Even the great Masters of the world hadn’t managed to turn this doom aside. This was… just how it would end.

And then Helen had awoken from the light to find the world had completely changed during her light-dream. The Wights toppled over. They were still.

No attack came.

Such was the confusion that even Aylwind and Ophelia returned to the capital to investigate. Several bold adventurers eventually ran out from the city to investigate the happening in the Wight camp; they discovered that their eyes weren’t deceiving them. The Wights were still. The hill on which they sat was still and dead.

The whole countryside was silent.

Without the horrid motion of their bodies, they appeared like dolls, strewn across each other in pathetic slumps. After a few hours passed and there was no change, the even bolder individuals stacked them up like firewood to burn. They danced with the frozen bodies of the dead Wights. They found Witch Kings and stitched them together with sticks of wood and paraded them across the city.

A playful, hushed celebration. A cautious spirit of optimism was born in the city by these small acts of control. On street corners, people whispered about what might have caused it. Most suspected that the Spearman had returned and defeated the great Propagator, the Autarch. Yet if it were so, others reasoned, why hadn’t the Spearman revealed himself yet?

And why had he allowed things to grow so dire before moving?

Helen rubbed at the cobblestoned ground with her thumb. Although it had largely faded, there were some spots were the burnt lines of that strange, expansive script could still be seen. It had covered the ground and left its mark.

“Looks like what Randidly did to Skarch’s spear…” Helen muttered. She looked to her left and right, listening as small noises began to grow commonplace. The grand spear-users of Tellus had become church mice after brushing so closely with death the prior night, but they were rapidly crawling out of their hiding spots.

Soon, the streets would be crowded and noise would radiate outward. Basically hell on Tellus.

Nodding to herself, Helen set off across the city. Regardless of the why the change had occurred, Helen wanted to accomplish something that she was very afraid of letting slip through the cracks during the fallout from the Wight offensive: she wanted to do Azriel a favor.

As she hurried across the city, Helen determinedly activated her Tides of Blood Domain. The layering was shallow, but waves of blood energy radiated out from her body to wash against the buildings and people that were slowly coming to life. It wasn’t the most efficient method, but it would give Helen an extra edge to find Azriel.

There were a few places that Helen checked immediately as she crisscrossed the city: the Hall of Stances, Azriel’s personal quarters, and the spot where Helen had met Helen’s master outside of the city. All of these were empty.

Typical

Slowly, as Helen got used to the sensory information that was flooding in, she spread her Domain farther away from herself. The slow beginnings of a headache crawled together and formed a knot by her temple. Still, the greatest distance she could cover was one hundred meters. Beyond that Helen’s vision began to swim and there was a strange darkness in the peripheries of her vision.