The Ghost's Crusade

X: Akkali (cont.)

Amber-orange light crept upwards and outwards from the markings on her arms, casting the entire mine shaft in a strange dawn-like glow that did nothing to startle the approaching homunculi. The veins of light bled out and twisted together to form a wall of solid energy that slammed into the earthen tunnel and snaked its way downwards to where she could smell the filthy creatures were coming from. Connected to everything her magic touched, she could count them by feeling their feet and their hands on the stone ground. Each step felt like a spear of glacier ice being driven into her burning skin, melting away before it could harm her but aching nonetheless. The magic that drove them was foul and unnatural, keeping them bound beyond death in a world that rejected their presence like an infected limb.

“Twelve, thirteen... fourteen...” she murmured under her breath, making sure not to loose her focus. “Sixteen, Drys.”

Sixteen. Through the magic she channeled Enkiri could hear Arathron's voice rather than Drystan's own. The spirit was a lot calmer when under duress than his human partner, something that had always amused her greatly. So many created... what purpose were they to serve? Why do your kind bastardize the lives of your own so?

“I really don't want to hear it from you right now old friend,” retorted Drystan as he pressed on ahead.

Tiernan brought himself up short and looked over at the Inferi. “Who in the name of Junan are you talking to?”

With a ground-rattling crack Akkali pushed the barrier closed at the end of the mine shaft and focused on holding it in place. Manipulating the flood of energy to go where she wished it to when its base will was to flow freely and without direction took a great deal of concentration. Cutting off the flow of power she had tapped into meant dropping the barrier. Unlike humans, Enkiri had no means to store magical energy but unlimited abilities to shape and form it to their will. Human magic relied on channeling energy into hidden trinkets they later drew upon, but the power Enkiri could tap into was unlimited and ever-present. That was why humans feared people like her.

That was why, generation after generation, those Enkiri born able to wield magic within the Empire were enslaved to some petulant power-hungry Oratio or executed before they grew powerful enough to cause trouble. The rebellion lead by a handful of Enkiri mages, though ultimately put down by the combined might of the Inquisition, Knights of the Ordained Father, and the Imperial Legionaries, had certainly gone a long way towards wiping out their ruling class a little more than a century before.

The rest of the exchange between Tiernan and Drystan faded out as she focused on guiding the torrent along the lines she had set out for it and tended it when it seemed to flow out-of-place. A few times great waves rippled through the barrier as things collided with it or tried to grasp their way out, but it held steady just as she intended it to. None of the creatures belched up from the depths of the mine could retreat back into the warrens, and none were making it past the blades of the Inquisitor or the Inferi.

You must admire that man's resolve, Arathron mused with a thoughtful chuckle. For a moment she could see the revenant within Drystan's form. In life he had been taller than the Inferi, broad-shouldered but thin with reddish-blond braids and earthen-tone tattoos along his arms and neck that mimicked the markings of the Enkiri with whom he spent most of his time. He had been a scholar of sorts, from what she could gather, and had died among the last vanguards of his people when the City had been plunged into its eternal winter to keep the demons and thralls of Pandemonium locked away.

Since crossing paths with the Inferi Akkali had always wondered what it must have been like, living in the City of Daeis before the mythical human apocalypse occurred. The religion of Junan named it their heaven, a paradise beyond all others where only the good and righteous would end up when he decided to defrost the place. Antenox trespassed in the City regularly, and everything she had read from them described it as a majestic but dead land of cold wind and lingering, sometimes vengeful spirits. After centuries of persecution and genocide, there was nothing left of the Enkiri stories of the City. Nothing but a few old songs that people were killed for singing within earshot of any church.