Unsleeping Patron - A Blue Fox in the Ruins

Dusk came to the flattened citadel not as a sunset, but as a deepening of the charcoal gloom that pressed down from the Miasma. The air inside the two-meter depression felt thick, smelling of old iron and the faint, copper tang of a hundred thousand lives crushed into the stone.Silas walked near the center of what had been a grand paved plaza. His boots made no sound against the smooth, compressed marble.Then he saw the bubble.It floated three inches above the flat, two-dimensional floor a sphere of clear, distortion-rippled air no wider than an arm’s length. Inside the sphere, defying the crushing weight that had flattened the surrounding stone, sat a girl. She looked no older than twelve, her knees pulled tight against her chest, her thin shoulders shivering beneath a torn tunic of blue silk. A long, bushy fox tail with white-tipped fur was wrapped around her ankles, and her hair the bright, unnatural blue of deep glacier ice hung in tangled matted strands over her face.In her small, dirty hands, she clutched the charred spine of a burnt Relic Book. Its pages were reduced to black leaf-ash, but the leather cover still emitted a faint, dying pulse of blue light the last remnant of a sanctuary anchor that had barely preserved three feet of space.Silas stopped five paces back, his hand resting on the hilt of his mantis-scythe dagger.The girl lifted her head. Her eyes were huge, amber-gold, the pupils slit like a cat’s in the dim twilight. She stared at Silas’s bald head, at his canvas tunic, and at the golden-crimson faint aura pulsing beneath his skin.The last flicker of blue light on the leather book died out.Pop.The spatial bubble vanished. The girl dropped three inches, her bare feet hitting the compressed marble floor. She let out a small, terrified squeak, her fox tail stiffening.Before Silas could take a step, her form blurred. A soft, wet rustle echoed in the quiet air as her limbs shrank, her blue silk tunic collapsing onto the stone in a hollow pile. Out from the collar scrambled a small, slender blue fox. It had three distinct white spots across its snout and large, pointed ears that twitched frantically toward the sky.It didn’t run away across the flat ruins. It darted straight toward Silas, skidding on the smooth stone, and crouched directly behind his left boot, burying its cold nose into his canvas hem, shivering violently.Silas looked down at his heel. He didn’t reach down to pick it up, nor did he kick it away.”I have no food for you,” Silas rasped, his voice cutting through the dead air like a rusty blade. “And I’m walking three hundred kilometers north.”The fox didn’t move. Its small claws hooked into the rough canvas of his trousers, its amber eyes darting toward the grey sky above the ledge.Silas pulled his gaze away, turning back toward the northern edge of the footprint.Before his boot could clear the dirt, the air behind him went completely rigid.It wasn’t the slow, crushing descent of the titan’s foot. It was a sharp, brittle crack, like a sheet of heavy plate glass shattering in a quiet room. Ten feet in the air, a vertical seam ripped open a spatial rift three yards wide that shivered with a cold, silver reflection, mirroring the ruined plaza like a cracked looking-glass.Out of the silver reflection stepped a tall figure.The man wore heavy, overlapping plates of dark basalt armor over robes of coarse grey wool. His face was hidden behind an iron mask carved into the stylized snout of a snarling wolf, and from his shoulders hung a heavy cape trimmed with dark mantis-fur. The air around his boots didn’t ripple; it buckled, the stone beneath his feet cracking in sharp, spiderweb lines despite the compressed density of the marble.An elder officer of the Obsidian Synod.The officer didn’t speak. He didn’t glance at the blue fox crouching behind Silas’s heel, nor did he look at the flattened ruins stretching across the horizon. His masked head turned toward Silas, his gaze locking onto the faint, dual-colored light humming beneath Silas’s skin.He raised a single, gauntleted hand, his iron fingers closing into a tight fist.Silas didn’t even have time to draw his mantis-scythe. He didn’t have time to summon his Mind-Light spears or untie the Blood-Lantern from his belt.The spiritual pressure hit him like an anvil dropped from the clouds.CRACK.Silas’s knees shattered instantly, the thighbones bursting outward through his canvas trousers, driving splintered white fragments into the marble floor. The air in his lungs was forced out in a wet, red spray before his ribs caved inward, flattening his chest into his spine.His vision went red, then black, as his skull cracked open under the sheer, unyielding weight of the officer’s Will.”Trash,” a hollow, iron-filtered voice echoed through the dark.Silas’s body didn’t fall to the side. Under the overwhelming pressure, his muscles, meat, and bones disintegrated into a dark, wet puddle of blood and crushed fragments that spread across the smooth, compressed stone floor.The blue fox shrieked, scrambling backward as the wet red tide touched its front paws.The officer in the stone armor stepped over the bloody stain, reached down, grabbed the blue fox by the scruff of its neck, and stepped back into the silver reflection, the spatial rift snapping shut behind him like a trapdoor.