Better The Devil You Know (Zoya Nazyalensky)

Twenty Five

The shadows would never shrink from him. They were his and his only. But they had always been restless in front of the little Fjerdan girl his scouts had found, over half a decade ago now. It had been funny then, laughably curious that the brethren of the night would heed caution at a small wisp of an infant. Then, he had found out what she could do, what she had the potential to do. And it wasn't so funny anymore. Instead, it felt as though the umbra was warning him: be careful of this one. Greed had powered him whilst caution enveloped his senses, and so, from then on, he had only taught Anastajia Børn enough to make her useful, but never enough that she might threaten him. She has been untethered from him for four years. The question stands; is she weaker or stronger than the girl he knew?

The familiar beat of fossilised matter thrums beneath her feet. But it is not reassuring when she knows she has to fail. If the heretic finally conquers the fold and weaponises it to his will once and for all, there will be no sea she can cross that he will not follow. And until she can teach herself the full scope of utilising her abilities, beating him is a futile waste of strength. Baghra's words echo in her mind: "Heroics don't win you the game, girl, strategy does." Aleksander makes no move to attack first; defence allows him the chance to assess her plan of attack and gives him the sense of moral high ground. Let him wait.

"I see you hesitate, little wolf. Do you hold some fondness for me in your heart still?"

He teases, but she doesn't imagine the slight wounds of complacency, nostalgia, that bleed into his tone. He honestly thinks I will not hurt him, not too badly anyway. Just because she has resolved to yield does not mean she can not injure him, though. The thought is sweeter than the first sip of honeyed mead in the summer. Teeth bared she is the desolate wild thing that resides deep in the forest; no pretence of humanity lingers.

"Very well," the man sighs, his mask of gentility still firmly plastered to his face.

The first blow nearly catches her off guard. When she had sparred with him in her youth, he had never started so strong, preferring to lull her into false security. Not anymore. She sends a ripple of jagged remains up through the earth, and they burst through it like an infant ripping it's placenta. They are enough to deflect the single tendril sent her way; the benefit of her abilities is that grisha wielded shadows can do little to matter that is already dead: calcified. Kirigan absorbs the reflected tendrils back into his skin, they are as children returning to the family home. The fronds of black rain down harder now, blow upon blow upon blow. This is a war of attrition. She feels herself getting weaker at each strenuous manipulation of osseus material. Strategy. She feints, allowing a wraith to kiss her skin. In Aleksander's moment of smug appreciation, she uses his distraction to send a folly of small knuckle bones - kept in her jacket for emergencies - at his face. She, too, is more vicious than the mentee he knew once and is not afraid of drawing blood in the most sensitive of spots. He curses, crimson welling from various scratches, but particularly a jagged line bisecting his eye. It isn't deep enough to damage the eye, but it certainly impairs his visibility and will leave a nasty scar. As he tries to remove the smear of liquid shielding his sight, she works on snapping his arm. As effective as one would think breaking bones is in a battle, the reality is that it takes time and leaves her temporarily defenceless against other attacks.

To break the bone, she imagines it, then pictures it vibrating beneath his flesh. Each fragment has its own frequency to tune into. Once you have found the frequency of a material once, it is easier to repeat in the future. Ileska doesn't want a clean break however; she wants this to hurt. His femur crunches in two separate spots as a hoarse roar erupts from his throat. Serves you right.

If Ileska knew how to hone her practise - a goal to which she has dedicated many fruitless hours training in the dismal footnotes of Ketterdam for - then perhaps she could have broken both arms and wrists at once. Even if she could, though, the other grisha has spent centuries cultivating his dark science into obeying his every command. His hand gestures are merely a show; a compass that guides. Either way, the pain buys the thief precious extra seconds. Seconds she uses to drain the limp victims of the undergrowth of their mould and rot, siphon their remaining life whilst ensuring them a quick, humane death. It is an even deal. The fungi and shrubs rapidly accelerate compostation and break down into the protein rich food of the forest. Nothing could be more natural, not in Vieder's eyes anyway. The spores, almost too small to see to the naked eye, dance along to the ministrations of her fingers and quickly begin to swarm their enemy; an enemy of the bone child is an enemy of them all. It appears as a lace-like mesh of grey across bare skin and armour alike: hungry needles that devour breathing flesh with the vigour of starving wolves.

Aleksander tries to stifle his groans as the traitor pours salt upon his weeping wounds; salt upon salt upon salt. He had been victim to her skillset before, but it had been voluntary and with the gingerness of a child loathe to hurt their parent. The plague afflicting his lower limbs pulls itself up his body with alarming alacrity. It burns but is not a deadly dosage. Otherwise, he suspects his digits would have been fully consumed by now. The miasma feels like a thousand fire-breathing ants upon the small areas of skin not left to the imagination. Fucking hell, it burns. "Enough". His spectres reflect the magnitude of his command, swarming en-masse without pattern or constraint as they force Anastajia off the ground and into the solid trunk of a nearby tree. She doesn't wince, ever the soldier, though he doubts she would admit it. The damage no doubt wrought to her internal organs is enough to pause the teenager's attention and the ants blessedly cease their destruction. His world seems to tilt on his axis as past memories of him standing above her defiantly stern face swim through his vision. Before, he would have knelt to her level and offered her his handkerchief. He had needed her to know that pain was learning; nothing can ever prosper without its terrible tug. It is not a defiant frown that meets him now, though; the mulish child-turned adolescent no longer strives for his attention. A few deep breaths that rattle Anastajia's - he scoffs at her given alias, she cannot hide who she is no matter what name she goes by - rib cage, bones fluttering like the limp wings of a dying moth. This is all she needs to retake her ground, ascending to his level with a cooly neutral expression. Perhaps he had trained her too well.

The artichoke bruise upon her sternum hurts like Ghezen, but it is of no vital import. The snapped ribs need little more than a few whispers of encouragement to hold marble hands together once more. Kirigan's gaze is clinical, his eyes assess her like a surgeon deconstructing their latest patient. He is testing her. As though he didn't repeat test after experiment after examination enough during her youth. Ire bursts like a blood vessel within her eyes and she feels herself channelling the rage of nature that has survived millennia: firs crying against felling, women cursing as their babies and then their lives are ripped away by the hands of man. Debris slaps onto the moss of the arena as she crowns its copses generals within her army. Disintegrated, the tiny dust looks innocuous enough. At least until Ileska whips it at the face of her heretic. Grim satisfaction soothes her lips with its aggrieved touch as the corrupter splutters upon ground up marrow that infiltrates his mouth, throat, nose; she is everywhere. The only sign of this engineered infection is a not-quite-silver enamel that paints the areas of himself left exposed by his kefta to the elements: her elements.

This moment of rage, however, provides the account of her detachment. Not because emotions are a weakness - too often they remind us that we are not invincible - but because she is so invested in the throttling of her tormentor that she takes her eyes off of his hands (though only one is fully functional.) It is only the chilling sensation of snakes winding around her ankles that Ileska realises that she has certainly succeeded in losing.

Eyes weeping reluctant tears and face an undulating mass of ballooning veins, the Black Heretic is at his height as he forces his children (gathered in fearful tremors against his feet at the retaliation of the one they thought to have ended) to take the floor once more. Technique is non-existent now, and the strangle of shadows dart like minnows towards the child. So quick, their captive does not notice hands caressing neck, fingers taking the shape of a hangman's noose pulled tight.

Ileska knows he needs to win. She needs him complacent and secure in his confidence. That does not stop her tearing at her throat, yanking nothingness between her palms as she feels breath draining her.
"Only to sleep," the commander orders, voice impassive like he is not manhandling the young woman he knows to hate unwelcome touch.

"Bastard." She spits out her last words, for now, and shuts her eyes against the woeful orbs that trace her fall, wondering if this humiliation is worth it. She signed herself away to a slow death of the mind and soul once already. Never again.