“I’m right here,” says a voice immediately above where Saila and Bastion are huddled.
Bastion wouldn’t say he jumps in terror, exactly, but he does give a full-body string-taut hum that makes Saila bundle against him, makes her wind her arms around him and clutch him close. He can feel some dampness against his neck where her face is. For a moment he’s puzzled- she’s faced down a Cat King armed with nothing but a String, hasn’t she?- before he remembers his confused vision of whatever’s after them. He can’t imagine that looking that dead on for any extended amount of time would be good for the heart. “And what use are you if you can’t even see what’s in front of your own face? My goodness, there’s an implication in there, isn’t there.”
“I HAVE FOUND YOU,” the voice coos, dropping low and rumbling.
“On the contrary, I’ve found you, as you couldn’t even find your own strike-box this far down. What did you want, my good fellow?”
The voice is casual and friendly. Bastion can hear the scrape of a chair, then a shift from under him. Somebody’s foot he’d assumed was Saila’s pulls out and away. His heart flutters so quickly that he feels faint as realizes that whoever is pleasantly correcting their monster pursuant knows exactly where they are, and can apparently navigate the space just fine.
“THERE IS A PLACE FOR YOU TO BE TUCKED INTO AGAIN,” the unknown thing says, and while Bastion doesn’t think it seems like the sort of thing to be bashful, there certainly is a tone to its voice now very much like that.
“Oh, how nice. I am a bit tired. What was all the yelling about, though?” Whoever else is talking has an animated, lively tone of voice. Their pitch goes up and down in a bright, songlike lilt.
“YOU RAN FROM ME,” says the thing, the papercut flesh-girder thing, and its voice goes hard and angry, rough around the edges and harder still toward the center. Bastion can feel Saila’s arms flung around him like a band of iron. He carefully draws a hand up to feel around in her clothing with a silent apology and the hope that she won’t assume he’s up to anything funny.
“I did not, what a curious accusation! You burst in here like a lunatic and have me all riled up now. I was just about to drift off, and now I’m alert as a pigeon. Heavens above and rivers below, I’ll never sleep now.”
Somehow, he’s cultivated enough goodwill that Saila lets him feel around as he will. He finally locates the handles of the scissors in a hidden pocket on the side of her shawl and pulls them slowly, ever-so-slowly, loose; Saila doesn’t move.
“YOU MUST,” the monstrous voice, the looming threat, the menacing darkness, objects. It sounds like it’s coming closer: it creaks slowly like a crankshaft gone rusty. “YOU MUST SLUMBER.”
Bastion clutches the shears in his hand, ready to fight to the death if he has to.
“Well go find me a glass of water, then,” says the mysterious new party. Based on the soft noise of fabric and the faint creak of wood, they’ve positioned themselves at the end of the table, between the enormous-voiced thing and where Saila and Bastion are huddled. “Go on, hurry up. I don’t want to be up any more than you want me to. I’d hate to see some others come and investigate why I’m up and about. Oooh, just a dreadful thought, don’t you think?”
“IT WOULD BE,” grumbles the voice, the ground shaking slightly; Bastion assumes that the thing is turning itself around slowly, laboriously, “INCONVENIENT…”
“And we do hate inconvenience, don’t we,” murmurs the person above them. Bastion can hear the faint drum of fingers on wood. Saila has stopped trembling, but her face is still against his neck. He doesn’t dare move, and he’s glad she doesn’t either. This close to the thing leaving them in peace, it feels somehow more precipitously dangerous than when they’d first hidden.
“WATER…. WATER FOR MY STAR BROUGHT TO HAND… A BEDTIME DRAUGHT TO WET THE THROAT OF A SLEEPING BEAUTY…” Creaks out the thing, and off it goes.
Bastion and Saila wait in tense silence.
“I rather think he’s gone a bit off in the head,” says whoever is above them, chuckling faintly as if this has all been a rather silly diversion.
Saila peels her face out from the corner of Bastion’s neck and shoulder to blink at him. She looks, oddly, embarrassed.
“All right, let’s come out and have a look at you.”
“I didn’t know if it could see my eyes in the dark,” she explains to Bastion quietly as she scrambles out from under the table. Bastion’s entire state of being is currently fixated on the tiny flickers of light from her eyes, so he catches it when she rubs away moisture from the corners of her eyes, making his source of light dim in and out of sight. “I panicked. I’m sorry. I was so useless.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” says their mysterious benefactor, making a sound very like somebody fumbling around in a whole lot of pockets. “I think he probably would have died a while ago if you hadn’t dragged him out of the jaws of the beast.”
“Yes,” Bastion agrees heartily, looking in the direction he thinks Saila is in based on where her voice last came from. “This makes a second time you’ve saved my life.”
“I could only run,” she says faintly. He can’t see her, but he has the distinct idea, based on what he knows of Saila, that she’s either wringing her hands or has grabbed her skirts in a death grip.
“And drag me with you. It takes sense to know when to run,” Bastion assures her. “Besides, what else could we have done? I don’t think I could have fought that thing by myself.”
“Aha,” says the third person, and strikes a match between them all. “No, you definitely would have died, or worse! How wonderful it is to have made such a rare and fortuitous choice. To live is grand, don’t you think?”
Saila and Bastion turn to stare at the addition.
He’s tall, but not as tall as Bastion. He has on loose bone-pale academic’s robes in a truly unruly configuration, and some kind of decorative banner looped around his neck that looks like a scarf but Bastion suspects is not. Some of the unruliness of the robes is amplified by the fact that this person is so slim as to be almost transparent. Bastion knows he’s accused of being see-through, but at least he knows he’s healthy; the person in front of them looks like he’s about to faint from hunger. Saila has a lot of hair, but this new person puts even her voluminous waves to shame: he has a truly incredible mane of hair in a peculiar shade of blossom pink.
With a clean-shaven face with delicate features and two big pink eyebrows like caterpillars atop his lively eyes, he looks like somebody from a story, really, not somebody they’d encounter in the impenetrable darkness of the Ivory Spires. Perhaps most fantastically, those eyes of his are a strange gradient of pink-to-lilac, speckled through with little flecks of summer-sky blue that seem to twinkle like opal fire as Bastion watches.
Bastion contemplates the last time he met somebody with normal eyes and gives a little sigh. So long, life of normalcy. Hello, life as Captain of the Leaping Guard.
“Hmmm,” says the academic, putting a hand to his chin. “Hmmmm, well just look at you two. You’re not mages.”
Saila has crept closer to Bastion, and on hearing that she seems to regain a little of her normal vigor: she straightens up and fixes the academic with a hawkish, intense stare.
“Excuse me?” She presses. She sounds like she’s about to lodge a customer complaint. Bastion presses his mouth into a firm line to keep from bursting out into nervous laughter.
“Well,” the academic muses, pressing the match into thin air where it hangs, spreading its buttery warm light out like a balm to the soul. “You’re an artisan, aren’t you, which I would argue isn’t a mage. A bit of an academic distinction, really, and one that hasn’t been settled if I’m being honest,” and still speaking on this immeasurably pedantic topic, he wanders off into the dark.
Saila is clearly watching him as he wanders away, and Bastion can still hear him muttering to himself, so he resigns himself to staying put in the small circle of light provided by the match. Still urgency rides him, digs its heels into his ribs and claws its fingers through his locks: at any second that thing, that furnace-hearted entity could come back, and Saila and he will be just as thoroughly at its mercy as before.
Bastion catches the clatter of metal and strains his eyes, his heart suddenly thundering against his ribs.
“He’s fetching your rapier.” Saila leans sideways to murmur it, her eyes fixed forward into the darkness. If Bastion didn’t know better, he would assume her to be as as blind as he is.
“Quite right!” says the academic, wandering back into the circle of light with it brandished before him clumsily in both hands. Saila jumps back with an alarmed expression. “My goodness, what a fascinating object. I wonder if the maker is of the vintage I suspect…”
“Watch it,” Bastion snaps, putting a hand out to catch his sword and hold it still in the air before the academic can put out anybody’s eyes or, Kings forbid, do any other kind of damage.
“Right, of course, well,” he replies, releasing the weapon so that it rests in Bastion’s hand by the blade. Bastion tries very hard not to be appalled at the total lack of regard for weapon safety, fails, and resigns himself to feeling grimly disappointed with absolutely no way to express it properly.
“Thank you,” he says awkwardly, holding his palm up to Saila when she gives him a concerned look and a little half-flutter of her fingers. He’s got large enough callouses and the academic little enough strength that the blade hadn’t cut him past a minor slice.
“Yes,” Saila agrees, looking between the two of them. “Thank you for sending off…”
“Alkaas-himmel,” the man says, and gives a pleasant, dreamy smile. Some of his hair falls in front of his face, which he shoves absently out of his eyes. It stays there for a second before falling down again.
“…. What is that, precisely?” Saila asks. She’s clearly divided between gratitude and irritation. Bastion, similarly torn, is grateful that she’s taken the lead here.
“My hair! Goodness, now that I have a light on, it is a bit of a pain, isn’t it?”
“Uh, hm. I meant more… Alkaas…” Saila gestures. The academic gives her an interested, pleasant smile but says nothing, perhaps waiting for the conclusion of her sentence. Saila, stymied by this abrupt departure from social graces, sends her eyebrows up so suddenly that they look like little lizards trying to climb off her face.
“Who are you?” Bastion cuts in. Saila’s had a bad enough time today; he doesn’t see any point in extending her misery.
“A very good question! I am….” The academic pauses, still smiling, but as the silence stretches on his smile goes from pleasant to disconcerted. He takes another breath and says, “Why, I am….”
Saila’s eyes flicker in a blink.
“Do you not know?” She asks.
“What a curious point of questioning,” the academic replies, opening his mouth to, likely, expound at length on the nature of knowing.
“That’s rough,” Bastion says dismissively, stalking to the edge of their sphere of light to look in the direction he’s pretty sure they came from. The Spires have always been here, have always swallowed people, and while he’s grateful that this person in front of them kept them from literally being swallowed, he is of the mind that they need to leave, now. Whatever is happening inside the Spires is clearly both unusual and dangerous for Saila and himself, whereas this person is in a much safer position for whatever reason.
“I thought I did,” the academic says softly from behind Bastion. “Oh, I really thought I had it this time…”
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