The Beginning - Part Six
Title: March 26 - Sierra
Series: The Beginning
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence and fighting, yay!
Word Count: 2202
--- - ---
--- March 26th ---
--- Sierra ---
I protected her. I was able to protect Kira...
I saw her there, standing frozen by whatever power the black-and-red haired mage held her with. The mage had no limiter, and even without touching her, I knew her power was greater than that of any other mage I had encountered previously. Even so, I tried to reach out to the woman's magic, to manipulate it enough to free Kira, even as I ran desperately to get between the two.
Time seemed to slow as I forced my way into the mage's mind, past whatever mental barriers she had in place. Everything in me was fixated on the mage woman; the rest of the world faded from my vision. Slowly, her head turned to me as she felt me struggling to enter her mind. Our eyes met - mine narrowed in concentration, hers crazed, a vivid blood-red - and a slow smirk came over her face. She mouthed nine words which only made sense to me later.
“So you think you can beat an angel, human?”
In the brief second it took for me to get between the woman and Kira, I managed to penetrate her mind. There were the two familiar forces twining, her magic and her soul twisting endlessly. Something was different about her magic, however. It was simultaneously powerful, the strongest I had ever felt, and weak. Even if she was the angel she claimed to be, or merely an extraordinarily powerful mage - an unmarked Alindri, from the looks of it - her power was waning. She was dying, and she knew it. This was her last stand...
As I sank mental claws into her twinned life forces, tearing at them indiscriminately, with only the desire to stop her, her right arm came up. There was a flash of light in my vision; a bracelet on her wrist trailed black light, which formed a blade just as it passed me.
I could feel the pain as the black energy sliced through my coat and the skin beneath, and there was a spray of red as my blood was flung off the blade at the end of her swing. Even as I watched it hazily with part of my vision, watching the blood fly and splatter against the white and black of my coat, I still fought to damage her soul.
It seemed to be having no effect, and she raised her shadowy blade again with a smirk of victory. Kira's arms were wrapped around me from behind; it was one of the few things I noticed aside from the death swiftly approaching.
Then two things happened, almost too unreal to comprehend.
The woman's blade stopped dead she brought her hand up to her mouth, coughing violently. There was blood running between her fingers, and her other hand clutched at her chest. A moment later, she disappeared from sight, as a girl, moving so fast as to nearly be a blur, slammed into the woman and knocked her away.
“What the hell?” Kira breathed behind me. The real world came back abruptly as I lost my hold on the woman's mind, and I tried to struggle to stand again, unaware of when I had fallen in the first place. Kira held me still where I was. The woman and girl were moving away rapidly, the girl battling with an identical shadow blade on her wrist.
Before they moved out of sight across the row of abandoned houses, a gust of window blew into my face. The magic in my, already brimming at the surface, caught the images floating on the air and threw me into another vision of the future.
Kira's A-unit was the first thing I saw, lying in a heap on the ground. There was blood running from his body, dissolving into the rain-soaked streets. The street was deathly silent, save for the sound of rain hitting the ground. Slowly, the view changed, rising above the street to reveal more bodies around the fallen Specialist. A massacre had taken place, and the only people standing were a tall, honey-blond mage and the girl that had just flashed before my eyes. They were both grinning as they looked over the scene, and slowly, finally, my view moved out far enough to see the bodies they were standing over.
The man from the cafe was the first, lying on the ground with his neck twisted at an impossible angle. His arm was outstretched, as if he had been reaching for something before his abrupt death. The fingers of that hand brushed against a pale face. The features of the face were hidden, obscured by the black hair falling across her face, but there was no mistaking that red coat, even with a dark hole in the center of the chest, with her blood pooling beneath her even as the rain tried to wash it away.
“Sierra?”
The arms around me were gently shaking me, and the vision faded as she spoke again. “Hang in there. The 230th is here, so the situation is in hand. And it doesn't look like a hard wound to treat. Of course, you'd be able to heal something like this yourself, but you shouldn't exert yourself...”
She was talking to keep me calm, I realized. One of her hands was was holding a piece of cloth to the gash across my stomach; it took me a moment to realize that what I had thought was cloth from her red coat was a scrap from mine, the white cloth already stained scarlet.
As I listened to her talk, the direction of her conversation veering onto a tangent about the cherry blossoms blooming in the city and some disgruntled grumbling about students trampling all the blossoms as they fell to the ground, I closed my eyes. Her touch, her voice....everything about her calmed the fear brought on by my vision and made it easy to ignore the pain. The cinnamon scent I remembered was gone, replaced by the leather of her coat and sweat from the previous encounter. Perfectly emblematic of this beautifully strong warrior woman...
“Serra!” I opened my eyes as the roof shook under the approach of Andreas and Kira's A-unit. “Serra, what happened? Are you okay?”
“Just a scratch,” I told him. I would have gotten up if Kira wasn't still holding me.
He knelt beside me, murmuring, “Let me see,” and Kira moved the makeshift bandage aside.
As he went about wrapped an actual bandage from his bag around my torso, Kira answered her phone again. There was a moment of quiet by apparently urgent conversation, and I was sure I heard the words 'need medical assistance,' but the world was becoming indistinct and fuzzy. The contact with the woman's mind had set off a pounding headache, and each wave of pain only made things worse. Even though I wanted to stay awake and in her arms, it felt better to just let go and slip into unconsciousness.
The first thing I noticed on waking up was the bed. Scratchy sheets, and the blankets on me didn't provide nearly enough warmth as I would have liked against the cool air. The sheets rubbed against most of my torso and the slits on my pants, so someone had obviously taken off or possibly disposed of my coat. The damage to it hadn't been too severe, but with the blood staining it, I'd most likely have no choice but to return to that seamstress again.
As I rolled over, I heard faint music coming from somewhere nearby. A quick glance around showed me the small inn room that the others must have checked into, and Andreas lounging on the other bed with a pair of headphones on. He looked up as I moved, and turned off the music.
I started to sit up, only to be stopped as a hint of the pain from before shot through my torso. Andreas was beside me a moment later, his hand on my shoulder even as I lay back on my own.
“They have a few mage healers working with the 230th, and they closed the wound right after they got to us. But there's still a scar. They offered to come back and get rid of it for you if you wanted when you woke up.” He sat back on his bed.
“I'll see how it looks later,” I told him. Unless it interfered with my ability to use the powers of the tattoo, I would keep it, as proof of this day. A reminder that I had been able to achieve part of what I had set out to do. And Kira carried her scars proudly; why would I not do the same?
“It's about nine PM. Do you want any food? The Eighth Captain and Kiniarel are down with the rest of the section here, giving their reports.” I shook my head in answer to his first question, and he went back to his music, or so I thought. I had just started to roll onto my side to think again about the day's events when he spoke again.
“Speaking of the Captain...” I stopped moving, and turned my head to look at Andreas again. His voice was light, and his hands playing with the little machine, but his face was completely serious as our eyes met. I tried to remember the last time I had seen him without a calm and steady smile. “You've fallen for her, haven't you?”
I froze, hands clutching at the sheets that I was trying to pull over myself. For the briefest moment, I could remember the screams of a young Alindri and her human lover as they were dragged away to the temples, not even a week past...
“I-I don't,” I stammered. “I don't like her, I mean. Not like that.” Andreas only continued to watch me silently, and I took a breath to calm myself. Flailing about would only cast more suspicion on me. “I just...she's done a lot of great work, and she's helped me out a lot... I just want to be like her. Powerful and confident...” I stared off into space as I thought.
It was true that I wanted to be like her. Not that I doubted my own power and abilities, or that I couldn't match her in any competition she cared to name. It was simply... Despite, or perhaps because of what life had thrown at her, she was beautifully strong and assured of herself. She could achieve things with only her immeasurable willpower that I, with all my magic and book learning, could never do. I wanted that for myself.
“I'm actually kind of hungry now,” I told him softly.
Andreas nodded and stood, heading for the entrance of the room. As I started to turn my head into the pillow, already losing myself in thought, he spoke from the door.
“You know what it looks like,” he said softly. “And you know what the consequences will be if you let things go further.”
I said nothing, and the door opened and closed silently behind him.
Of course I knew the consequences. It was the law, after all. An ancient law, possibly one of the oldest, and never modified from its original form. It was simple - absolutely no relationships between people of the same sex. In the old days, the crime carried a sentence of death for both partners, often at the hands on the people. The law had been created after the fall of the mages: in the old era, Alindri, the half-mortal children of demons, had been as numerous as their more common cousins, the summoner Somenre and elemental casters, the Miyana. They were often born of succubi or incubi coming through the then-unsealed demon rift, and carried the characteristics of their demonic parents. They often enslaved humans of both sexes as pets, using them both for pleasure and as an energy source in place of the shadow energy they were unable to get on the mortal plane.
After the fall of the mages, the churches declared that homosexuality indicated the prescence of a demon, and the law was created. Other laws came into place alongside it, the most prominent being one disallowing sexual contact between a human and a mage. That one had been repealed not long after the rise of the city, in order to allow for mage prostitution, and replaced with one denying mage-human marriage, which had never been challenged...
In modern times, the death sentence was rarely invoked for humans. Instead, both partners would be given over to the church for reeducation and would not be released for months on end. Mages, and especially the Alindri, now rare with the sealing of the demon rift, were always killed for the crime.
As I lay there, waiting for Andreas to return with the food, one thought flickered in and out of my head: Would Specialists, with our unique, not-human not-mage status, be given the same status as the race we were born into or the one we had been transformed into?
Series: The Beginning
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence and fighting, yay!
Word Count: 2202
--- - ---
--- March 26th ---
--- Sierra ---
I protected her. I was able to protect Kira...
I saw her there, standing frozen by whatever power the black-and-red haired mage held her with. The mage had no limiter, and even without touching her, I knew her power was greater than that of any other mage I had encountered previously. Even so, I tried to reach out to the woman's magic, to manipulate it enough to free Kira, even as I ran desperately to get between the two.
Time seemed to slow as I forced my way into the mage's mind, past whatever mental barriers she had in place. Everything in me was fixated on the mage woman; the rest of the world faded from my vision. Slowly, her head turned to me as she felt me struggling to enter her mind. Our eyes met - mine narrowed in concentration, hers crazed, a vivid blood-red - and a slow smirk came over her face. She mouthed nine words which only made sense to me later.
“So you think you can beat an angel, human?”
In the brief second it took for me to get between the woman and Kira, I managed to penetrate her mind. There were the two familiar forces twining, her magic and her soul twisting endlessly. Something was different about her magic, however. It was simultaneously powerful, the strongest I had ever felt, and weak. Even if she was the angel she claimed to be, or merely an extraordinarily powerful mage - an unmarked Alindri, from the looks of it - her power was waning. She was dying, and she knew it. This was her last stand...
As I sank mental claws into her twinned life forces, tearing at them indiscriminately, with only the desire to stop her, her right arm came up. There was a flash of light in my vision; a bracelet on her wrist trailed black light, which formed a blade just as it passed me.
I could feel the pain as the black energy sliced through my coat and the skin beneath, and there was a spray of red as my blood was flung off the blade at the end of her swing. Even as I watched it hazily with part of my vision, watching the blood fly and splatter against the white and black of my coat, I still fought to damage her soul.
It seemed to be having no effect, and she raised her shadowy blade again with a smirk of victory. Kira's arms were wrapped around me from behind; it was one of the few things I noticed aside from the death swiftly approaching.
Then two things happened, almost too unreal to comprehend.
The woman's blade stopped dead she brought her hand up to her mouth, coughing violently. There was blood running between her fingers, and her other hand clutched at her chest. A moment later, she disappeared from sight, as a girl, moving so fast as to nearly be a blur, slammed into the woman and knocked her away.
“What the hell?” Kira breathed behind me. The real world came back abruptly as I lost my hold on the woman's mind, and I tried to struggle to stand again, unaware of when I had fallen in the first place. Kira held me still where I was. The woman and girl were moving away rapidly, the girl battling with an identical shadow blade on her wrist.
Before they moved out of sight across the row of abandoned houses, a gust of window blew into my face. The magic in my, already brimming at the surface, caught the images floating on the air and threw me into another vision of the future.
Kira's A-unit was the first thing I saw, lying in a heap on the ground. There was blood running from his body, dissolving into the rain-soaked streets. The street was deathly silent, save for the sound of rain hitting the ground. Slowly, the view changed, rising above the street to reveal more bodies around the fallen Specialist. A massacre had taken place, and the only people standing were a tall, honey-blond mage and the girl that had just flashed before my eyes. They were both grinning as they looked over the scene, and slowly, finally, my view moved out far enough to see the bodies they were standing over.
The man from the cafe was the first, lying on the ground with his neck twisted at an impossible angle. His arm was outstretched, as if he had been reaching for something before his abrupt death. The fingers of that hand brushed against a pale face. The features of the face were hidden, obscured by the black hair falling across her face, but there was no mistaking that red coat, even with a dark hole in the center of the chest, with her blood pooling beneath her even as the rain tried to wash it away.
“Sierra?”
The arms around me were gently shaking me, and the vision faded as she spoke again. “Hang in there. The 230th is here, so the situation is in hand. And it doesn't look like a hard wound to treat. Of course, you'd be able to heal something like this yourself, but you shouldn't exert yourself...”
She was talking to keep me calm, I realized. One of her hands was was holding a piece of cloth to the gash across my stomach; it took me a moment to realize that what I had thought was cloth from her red coat was a scrap from mine, the white cloth already stained scarlet.
As I listened to her talk, the direction of her conversation veering onto a tangent about the cherry blossoms blooming in the city and some disgruntled grumbling about students trampling all the blossoms as they fell to the ground, I closed my eyes. Her touch, her voice....everything about her calmed the fear brought on by my vision and made it easy to ignore the pain. The cinnamon scent I remembered was gone, replaced by the leather of her coat and sweat from the previous encounter. Perfectly emblematic of this beautifully strong warrior woman...
“Serra!” I opened my eyes as the roof shook under the approach of Andreas and Kira's A-unit. “Serra, what happened? Are you okay?”
“Just a scratch,” I told him. I would have gotten up if Kira wasn't still holding me.
He knelt beside me, murmuring, “Let me see,” and Kira moved the makeshift bandage aside.
As he went about wrapped an actual bandage from his bag around my torso, Kira answered her phone again. There was a moment of quiet by apparently urgent conversation, and I was sure I heard the words 'need medical assistance,' but the world was becoming indistinct and fuzzy. The contact with the woman's mind had set off a pounding headache, and each wave of pain only made things worse. Even though I wanted to stay awake and in her arms, it felt better to just let go and slip into unconsciousness.
The first thing I noticed on waking up was the bed. Scratchy sheets, and the blankets on me didn't provide nearly enough warmth as I would have liked against the cool air. The sheets rubbed against most of my torso and the slits on my pants, so someone had obviously taken off or possibly disposed of my coat. The damage to it hadn't been too severe, but with the blood staining it, I'd most likely have no choice but to return to that seamstress again.
As I rolled over, I heard faint music coming from somewhere nearby. A quick glance around showed me the small inn room that the others must have checked into, and Andreas lounging on the other bed with a pair of headphones on. He looked up as I moved, and turned off the music.
I started to sit up, only to be stopped as a hint of the pain from before shot through my torso. Andreas was beside me a moment later, his hand on my shoulder even as I lay back on my own.
“They have a few mage healers working with the 230th, and they closed the wound right after they got to us. But there's still a scar. They offered to come back and get rid of it for you if you wanted when you woke up.” He sat back on his bed.
“I'll see how it looks later,” I told him. Unless it interfered with my ability to use the powers of the tattoo, I would keep it, as proof of this day. A reminder that I had been able to achieve part of what I had set out to do. And Kira carried her scars proudly; why would I not do the same?
“It's about nine PM. Do you want any food? The Eighth Captain and Kiniarel are down with the rest of the section here, giving their reports.” I shook my head in answer to his first question, and he went back to his music, or so I thought. I had just started to roll onto my side to think again about the day's events when he spoke again.
“Speaking of the Captain...” I stopped moving, and turned my head to look at Andreas again. His voice was light, and his hands playing with the little machine, but his face was completely serious as our eyes met. I tried to remember the last time I had seen him without a calm and steady smile. “You've fallen for her, haven't you?”
I froze, hands clutching at the sheets that I was trying to pull over myself. For the briefest moment, I could remember the screams of a young Alindri and her human lover as they were dragged away to the temples, not even a week past...
“I-I don't,” I stammered. “I don't like her, I mean. Not like that.” Andreas only continued to watch me silently, and I took a breath to calm myself. Flailing about would only cast more suspicion on me. “I just...she's done a lot of great work, and she's helped me out a lot... I just want to be like her. Powerful and confident...” I stared off into space as I thought.
It was true that I wanted to be like her. Not that I doubted my own power and abilities, or that I couldn't match her in any competition she cared to name. It was simply... Despite, or perhaps because of what life had thrown at her, she was beautifully strong and assured of herself. She could achieve things with only her immeasurable willpower that I, with all my magic and book learning, could never do. I wanted that for myself.
“I'm actually kind of hungry now,” I told him softly.
Andreas nodded and stood, heading for the entrance of the room. As I started to turn my head into the pillow, already losing myself in thought, he spoke from the door.
“You know what it looks like,” he said softly. “And you know what the consequences will be if you let things go further.”
I said nothing, and the door opened and closed silently behind him.
Of course I knew the consequences. It was the law, after all. An ancient law, possibly one of the oldest, and never modified from its original form. It was simple - absolutely no relationships between people of the same sex. In the old days, the crime carried a sentence of death for both partners, often at the hands on the people. The law had been created after the fall of the mages: in the old era, Alindri, the half-mortal children of demons, had been as numerous as their more common cousins, the summoner Somenre and elemental casters, the Miyana. They were often born of succubi or incubi coming through the then-unsealed demon rift, and carried the characteristics of their demonic parents. They often enslaved humans of both sexes as pets, using them both for pleasure and as an energy source in place of the shadow energy they were unable to get on the mortal plane.
After the fall of the mages, the churches declared that homosexuality indicated the prescence of a demon, and the law was created. Other laws came into place alongside it, the most prominent being one disallowing sexual contact between a human and a mage. That one had been repealed not long after the rise of the city, in order to allow for mage prostitution, and replaced with one denying mage-human marriage, which had never been challenged...
In modern times, the death sentence was rarely invoked for humans. Instead, both partners would be given over to the church for reeducation and would not be released for months on end. Mages, and especially the Alindri, now rare with the sealing of the demon rift, were always killed for the crime.
As I lay there, waiting for Andreas to return with the food, one thought flickered in and out of my head: Would Specialists, with our unique, not-human not-mage status, be given the same status as the race we were born into or the one we had been transformed into?