Tagged by the incredible @converginglives. Thank you so much! My words to find are vision, speed, and gold.
Tagging: @feathered-quill, @starlitesymphony, @jade-island-lives, @forlornraven, @oheoo, @toboldlywrite, and @weaver-of-fantasies-and-fables to find the words ashes, wave, and warm.
Isidor limped to the doors fast as he could. A dark, boxy room of stone met his vision. A staircase wound around its outside edge, constructed not in spirals but ascending squares. Daylight trickled in from thin windows cast in iron. They made the space somehow smaller. Cables ran the length of the walls, connected to gearboxes that chattered softly from their places set into the stone. Verfolgung’s swift passage stirred the dust into wild swirls in her wake.
Vision: Resonant Frequency
Sour nausea bubbled and popped inside him. Like a soda shaken too hard. Orbulon staggered sideways, one hand pressed into his head, the other cradling his stomach. A hard-corded mass of muscle fibers slithered over and between and across one another in some chaotic dance. It burned his hand. He couldn’t feel that, either. Only knew it, like it was happening to someone else.
He blinked. Hard. The shadowy tendrils retreated. Slowly, his vision returned, the details of the room swimming back into focus. Thanks to the combined knowledge of everyone in the building, Orbulon knew exactly how far they needed to go.
Her attacks grew faster, faster, until Verfolgung’s arms blurred together with their speed. She moved as though playing the organ in the cathedral below, each movement precise and designed for grand effect. The mist thrashed alongside her limbs and struck Isidor’s armor hard enough to leave deep dents.
But just as Verfolgung sped up, so did he. Isidor moved as he never had before. Gone were any expectations of what was and what could be. He only fought, all his mind consumed by it and the flames stretched across his blade.
Speed: Resonant Frequency
“I can’t,” whispered Orbulon. “I can’t, I can’t...”
He started to get up. Maybe he could think better if he stood.
But the second he managed to push shakily to kneeling, both Gestori and Affogati moved with shocking speed. Weapons clicked, masks hissed, blue and black blurred with silver streaks. Suddenly, Orbulon found himself at the center of a veritable forest of steel blades and carved braces, all of them pointing directly at him.
Isidor and Verfolgung raced toward one another with the speed of colliding comets. One of them came with ashes in his wake, a sword of molten gold in his gauntlets and a red-spewing scream in his helm. One of them went carried on a wave of mist, wings of gray bone rattling on her shoulders and six eyes open upon her mask.
They fell upon each other like the lightning descends upon the earth: blinding, deafening, cataclysmic. And, Dietlinde couldn’t deny: beautiful.
Pi’s directions led them out of the air-conditioned Kiwi Kitty and down the humid streets of Syricia. They walked over hexagonal clusters of Looking Glasses that tried to sell them new half-capes and sunglasses, underneath solar panels honeycombed with thick gold cables, and through groves of trees whose slick leaves shone iridescent black. Everything was awash in circuitry and electrodes and faintly glowing lines, the roar of the surrounding crowd sounding more like whirring gears than human speech.
It was exactly the same as it had always been. Yet as Orbulon made his way through the rushing crowds, he couldn’t help but think of Ferrare, its clear-water canals and its flowers in windowboxes. It was so much quieter there. So much softer. And though the people here drew his eye and the ocean heat drenched his skin, Syricia’s core was cold and metallic and covered in wires.
