Heroes can fall in more ways than one.
Demigod Xaray is sent on a quest to kill after he massacred a whole town. Weakened by the strain, he falls prey to a haughty vampire and is cared for by a fellow prisoner, the nagi Vasa. Torn between his orders...
Zaheria meets a man who claims to know what happened, but he's only willing to tell her if she does something for him.
The walls of the cave brushed against her wings as Zaheria shot through the dark tunnel, piercing through the darkness fast as an arrow. She passed right through the souls of the dying as they went the exact opposite way. Some recognized her for what she was and cowered in fear. Others kneeled and begged, but she was gone before she could hear their ghastly cries.
Her heart beat quickly in her chest as the glowing crystals in the wall became smaller and with more space in between. She was approaching the surface. Awhana. The realm she had spent her relatively short life as a mortal in, the realm she hadn't visited in decades. Or was it centuries? She wasn't sure. There was no day or night to measure time with down in the Underworld.
She turned around a corner, almost smacking into the wall in her haste, instead only lightly grazing it. The tunnel changed from mostly horizontal to almost completely vertical in the span of metres. Light fell into the cave through a crack far above her and almost blinded her, but she used it to guide herself instead.
Just before she hit the rocks that covered up the cave entrance, she slowed down, eyeing up the crack. The gap was far too small for her to squeeze through. Slowing her wingbeats to the perfect speed to stay in place without gaining or losing altitude, she closed her eyes.
Her consciousness expanded, taking in the ground around her. She could feel the surface of all the rock, see the edges of every loose pebble, feel where every vein of minerals ran in the earth. It all became part of her like her fingers and toes were a part of her. When she willed the boulders covering up the cave entrance to move aside, they obeyed, dutifully moving aside to create an exit large enough for her to fly through.
Opening her eyes again, she shot out of the cave with a powerful beat of her wings. The boulders crawled back to their original place, blocking the passageway in case a mortal was foolish enough to climb all the way down to the Underworld. It had happened before, and that had been an awful mess to clean up.
She looked around with uncertain eyes after landing on the rocky ground. The noon sun almost scorched her skin after so long in the cold Realm of Spirits, the warm air suffocating in her lungs. The forest was filled with so much life, so much soul, that it overwhelmed her senses. She almost wanted to fly right back down to her safe home.
The gentle sound of a bird's song reached her ears. She allowed it to calm her, to let it remind her that this was just a forest, that everything was alright. If she could survive dying, she could survive going back to Awhana, even if everyone she once knew was long dead. She had sorted their souls herself, ensuring they reached the right place.
