Chương 12: Blight

The masked man lay stripped to his undershirt, his own coat and trousers torn into strips and wound around him instead. One length wrapped his skull where the pickaxe had opened it, dark through already in a wide stain above his ear. His breathing came shallow and slow, but it came. Kept, to be bait. Solstice and Lere kept chipping. Small strokes, careful ones, the same rhythm they'd held for hours now, the vein slowly going pockmarked under their blades.

Every fleck that broke loose went into the same growing pile between them, not into either of their mouths, which took more discipline than either of them wanted to admit out loud. It took the better part of thirty minutes to gather a full handful. Murren watched the whole time, saying nothing, eyes tracking every grain like he was counting them personally, unwilling to trust anyone else with the math. Solstice gathered it all into his palm and crossed the cavern. Murren looked at him.

At the eyes of a boy who should have been dead three times over by now and somehow wasn't. Solstice looked back. At the cracked lips, the grey skin, the cauterized stump where an arm used to be, still weeping faintly at the edges where the burn hadn't quite finished sealing. He held the salt out.

"This should be more than enough." Murren opened the canister one handed and tipped his head toward it, jaw tight against whatever it cost him just to hold his own arm steady.

"Put it here." Solstice did, then walked back to Lere without another word. Murren stared into the canister a long moment before doing anything else with it, like he was weighing whether trusting a boy who'd already promised to watch him die was a mistake he could actually afford to make twice. Lere leaned in close, voice dropped to almost nothing.

"What are you thinking really?? We've both seen how unstable that man is. Give him this much and it might just backfire on us. He could turn around and use us as bait himself, and there wouldn't be a damn thing either of us could do about it with him standing there at full strength." Solstice rolled his eyes.' If you were so against with this plan, you should've said something before wasting hours chipping salt with me.' Solstice cut his eyes sideways at him.

"What are you muttering about? He's the best chance we've got at surviving this."

"I agree. I'm not saying trust him blindly. I'm saying I've already got another plan for getting out of here, in case this one goes wrong somehow." Solstice's head snapped toward him, sharp with sudden attention.

"What is it?"

"My field sense." Lere glanced at the dark stretch beyond the cavern's edge.

"Whatever's past this chamber, it's crawling with dwellers. We couldn't sneak past that even at full strength, and we're not at full strength."

"And?" Solstice pressed.

"Cant you sense it? There's another way." Lere's eyes drifted to the pond, voice dropping further still.

"Right below the water, there's a gap. I could expand it. My field sense is picking up more space past it, further than it should reach. Maybe we could swim through—" Coughing cut him off. Murren had gone rigid, one hand fisted against his own chest, the salt already swallowed. Solstice caught the colors rising around him before the sound even fully registered, faint threads gathering and pulling tight. Murren slapped his own chest once, hard, like he could beat the coughing back down by force.

He got to his feet slow, glanced at both of them without any clear read on his face, then turned toward the water instead of saying anything. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. He made his way to the edge. Solstice followed, stepping in close behind him. He looked back once at Lere.

"Whatever happens, just trust me. If you want to live." Lere held his stare, pale green eyes set into a face too young for what they'd already seen, and nodded once. Solstice turned back in time to watch Murren drop to his knees at the water's edge, cold lapping against him, his remaining hand braced flat on the ice like he needed the extra point of contact just to stay upright through what came next. The colors moved.

Every thread in the water shifted at once, structure rearranging itself the way Solstice's own light had rearranged the roach's ruined body back in the ice cavern. Pale white bled through it, spreading fast, chasing something through the current. Somewhere inside the white, a patch of black met it and simply stopped existing, eaten whole without so much as a ripple to mark where it had been. Solstice uncapped the waterskin at his hip and looked again. No black left anywhere in the water.

Just clean, scattered points of color, drifting loose like they'd forgotten what they used to be attached to.

'So that's blight. The black.' He watched it a moment longer, filing the shape of it away the same way he filed away everything else that might matter later. If black meant contamination, meant whatever this world's poison actually looked like once you had eyes to see it, then knowing that was worth more than any amount of salt. His stomach tightened around the next thought before he could stop it.' If purifying works by infusing your Salis into the water, is that all Alteration ever was too?'

But Murren's Domain wasn't Alteration. Solstice knew that for a fact, had known it since the wind slash that took a woman's head off her shoulders back at the cave in, the same brutal, blunt-force pull the Saltbearer had used on the abnormal dweller. Nothing careful about it. Nothing that looked anywhere close to what Solstice had felt crawling through his own fingers when he'd unraveled that roach from the inside out.' Then what did I actually do to that roach.'

The whole pool lit soft from within, glowing faint enough that Solstice doubted anyone but him could see it. He glanced at Lere anyway, just to check. Nothing in his face suggested he saw anything but water. Every trace of black had gone, replaced by a faint, drifting blue that hadn't been there before. Murren stood. His legs barely held him. He caught himself against a salt vein at the water's edge with his one hand, fingers digging in hard enough to whiten at the knuckles, and then his whole body convulsed.

He staggered back, coughing violently, and doubled over to spit blood across the ice, thick and dark against the pale. Solstice stepped in front of him and looked down.' You're dying, Murren. You're actually dying.' Murren's head came up slow, eyes finding Solstice's, something raw and unguarded behind the goggles for the first time since the roaches had torn through them all. Solstice's mouth curved.

"Thanks for the drink." He turned and dropped straight into the water, mouth already open, drinking in deep, greedy pulls before the cold had even finished registering against his skin. His whole body went light, pain forgetting to matter the instant something more urgent shoved past it. The water clouded pink almost instantly, blood from his ruined thigh spreading through it in slow ribbons that curled and drifted like something alive. He didn't care.

Lere didn't either, already beside him, drinking like he'd forgotten how to stop. Both of them took it in massive, ugly gulps, the two of them hunched over the water like animals at a trough, neither one caring how it looked from the outside anymore. There was nobody left down here whose opinion of them mattered enough to be embarrassed in front of. Murren tried to push himself upright, legs shaking too hard to hold him, teeth bared against the effort.

"You rat! This wasn't the deal we agreed to!"

"Hold your arse." Solstice didn't even look back at him.

"I'm getting you your water myself." He filled the skin to the brim, capped it, and crossed back to where Murren had sagged against the vein, still hacking wet coughs into his own fist. He held the waterskin out along with a few loose shards of Pale Salt, mouth curling at one corner.

"Exactly what we talked about." He kept his voice even, almost gentle, cautious like he was handling something that might still bolt.

"Your Salis has got to be running on fumes after purifying that much water in one go. So." He pressed both into Murren's hand.

"Here." Murren snatched the skin and drank like a man who'd forgotten what restraint was for, gulping hard enough to choke, salt following straight after, barely chewed before he swallowed it whole, water running down his chin and into the collar of his ruined coat. Solstice watched him with something close to satisfaction, filing this moment away too, next to everything else he was keeping for later use.

"Slow down, now." His mouth curled further still, sharp at the edge.

"You might choke."