Bastion: Sulis #3

Demiurge
In the aftermath of the attack, there was a change in the people of Winter's Edge that was more than just the devastation of grief. It was a kind of subtle sharpening. First shock, then loss, then a new awareness. They'd dealt with hardship before. Death was a part of existence. But this kind of war was new to them. Now they knew what it was that human nature could be capable of.
But they also knew hope and joy. They knew what it meant to be among family - community. And this was their home. This beautiful place that they had shaped and adapted themselves to. They would not sit idle while the land and the people were destroyed. And so it was that the shock and sorrow of loss turned to steadfast determination. To planning and action. For the first time since contact with Earth had been re-established, the people of Sulis were taking the fight to the enemy.
It was the morning after the attack when the riders showed up. Not just some. Not just many. All. Every single dragonrider the planet had to offer, and even a handful of riderless dragons who remained for their own reasons. (This was their home too.) When Grace and Patience woke up that morning (if they managed to catch any sleep at all after their harrowing experience and after the loss of Lena) they'd be greeting with the vision of a landscape blanketed with dragons.
The air around them was alive with the hum of anticipatory tension. In the center of the village, a temporary tent had been erected to serve as Council chambers, and the remaining members of Council were there now, speaking with the leaders of the dragonriders. It wasn't long after the riders' arrival when Lita found Patience and Grace to give them the news.
"The Council wishes to speak with you."

Grace Evans
Grace didn't sleep much that night. The memory of war is just too fresh. Every time she closed her eyes, it just gave her time to replay the events moment by skipped moment.
So, it's with bleary, red-rimmed eyes that she finds the dragons have arrived.
They're a welcome sight. Grace doesn't want vengeance for Lena exactly. What would it accomplish? The 'enemy' is a creation made to be their enemy anyway. The one responsible for all of this is the AI, right? The one they will have to beg to let their world go.
It's all bigger than Lena. Bigger than Sulis. And she has to remember that.
To keep on going is the only path Grace can ever take.
Lita finds them staring out at the dragons and riders, and though Grace is glad to see them, her face shows only fatigue.
"Okay. Lead the way," she says, her voice a dragging monotone.

Demiurge
Sara and Lita had mourned Lena's loss with them. As all of the villagers had. Mourning for them was a thing to be shared, and despite their initial distrust, most of the people who met Lena had grown to like her. But it was not the same as the way that Grace and Patience mourned. For them, Lena was a friend. Someone they knew. Someone from home. Someone they'd been traveling with for weeks.
Just as Grace and Patience could not truly comprehend the loss that Lita and Sara felt for Brandon.
It had been a long night. And now an even longer day lay ahead. Lita was quiet as she led the two women to the tent, and once they arrived she bowed out to return to the side of her remaining partner. Inside the tent, Grace and Patience would recognize Olga and the elderly healer from the day before. Both of them looked exhausted. Likely they'd been up all night tending to the wounded. There were others there as well. People from the village, and a handful of dragonriders. Each of the riders had an insignia sewn into their jackets of a pair of wings stretched out over a star. (Something to do with their rank, possibly.) It was one of these women who stepped forward to greet the two mages. She was in her thirties, with green eyes and light brown hair cut close to her head. Scars from some kind of animal attack showed on her neck and collar bone, like raking claw marks.
She held out her hand to both of them. "Catlyn Redstone. First Wingleader of the Dragonriders. I heard about what you did yesterday. The two of you saved a lot of lives. If you're still interested, your assistance in the attack would be welcome."

Grace Evans
Catlyn sounds like a soldier. It puts Grace's teeth on edge a bit. They wear uniforms over a rather uniform culture, at least what she's seen of it.
Insignias and ranks and uniforms and stone-hard speech patterns do not impress Grace. Soldiers, in her experience, do not bring freedom. How could they? They are almost the definition of oppression. Even Sulisian soldiers, with their happy pretty villages and happy nature dragons -- all a bit too happy, no? There's a reason why the concept is called Utopia. Who knows what the Dragonriders fight when they can't find earthlings?
She glances at the outstretched hand of Catlyn Redstone, but doesn't move to shake it.
"Grace Evans. Grad school dropout. Nice to meet you; I don't shake hands. And yes, we're very interested in assisting."

Patience Mason
Perhaps it was a callousness that the other magi had yet to see, or perhaps it was simply the fact that Patience had burned the candle at both ends for the last three days in an effort to prepare for their assault, that she slept like a stone.
She to was haunted, she too had felt the loss of Lena and shared in the tragedy that was the loss of so many lives...but for Patience, it was a drop in the bucket. But that is a story for another time.
On the eve of battle, upon the arrival of the dragon riders Patience stirred late, she slept until summoned and only then did she try to put her hair to rights, to fix her clothing and her appearance, only then did such things matter. When they arrived and were greeted by Wingleader Redstone Patience doesn't seem at all surprised by their desire to bring them along.
They had after all, truly fought fire with fire, levelling the playing field for the Sulisian's in a way they may well not have encountered before. But Patience looked about at the many dragons arrayed and looked disturbed, because as she took the womans hand and shook she said.
"Assistance shall be assigned, actualized and rendered in effect. Factual data point dissemination inquiry, are these atmospherically movated genus of frotean reptilians capable of sustained and efficient flight with a suitably capable general broad band transceiver attached to their bio-structures? If the direct and equivocal answer is in the negative....a reproduction of our previous aggressive noospheric degrative loop will not be efficiently possible."

Demiurge
Catlyn surveyed Grace with a clinical eye when she refused the shake hands, but the Wingleader didn't force the issue, and if she took any offense, she didn't show it. She was young to be ranked as high as she was. Likely there was a reason for it. People didn't end up with positions like hers without developing a cool head.
Although... a quick look around the tent would reveal that all of the riders present were around the same age. Some of them even younger. How long had the riders been acting as a military force? How much real experience did any of them have under their belts?
The question was moot, at this point. These were the people they had.
Catlyn gave a light nod of assent to Patience. "Don't worry about that. We've got it covered. We'll be keeping the two of you at the back when we make the assault. Once we clear a path, we're going to attempt to break into the ship. The work the two of you did to bring down their firewall yesterday was invaluable. They're bound to have strengthened it by now, but we have a team of technical experts who think they might be able to accomplish something similar... long enough at least to give us a window of opportunity. If the two of you can find a way to use that neural device to get inside the ship, that might get us in faster then trying to melt a hole through the hull. I'm assigning you to my wing. We've got a couple of dragons saddled up for you."
At this, she collected some fresh riding clothes and what looked to be a couple of futuristic firearms and offered these to Patience and Grace. "You'll need these. Go get ready, then meet me on the field. We leave in half an hour."

Grace Evans
Grace nods, but then gives Catlyn a weary glare. Maybe they needed more than thirty minutes to prepare? But did she ask? No. Asshole.
Grace takes the offered gun, even though half an hour is far too short a time to learn how to use it. No matter, really. If it comes to a gunfight, they've probably already lost.
"I hope your dragons are easy to stay atop. We're real good at falling off of them," Grace says, and marches off to change.

Patience Mason
They'd already planned to work around Patience and Graces original plan, this time asking them to use their technical capabilities to break open the shell of the companies ship rather then attempting to disrupt them. It seemed like a great gamble all to rescue one rider, but then perhaps it had become something else entirely, a rallying moment, a great defence of their lifestyle and land.
For her part Patience simply nodded to Redstone, not wanting to bring up the simple fact that to defeat one of these carriers might simply mean the arrival of more. But she took the clothing offered and returned to their room, dressing so that she might somehow ride one of those beasts out in the fields, and at the same time work the sciences required to help the Sulisian's gain victory, and the freedom of Atreyu.
When that was done she gathered what equipment she might need, anything that could be useful in the battle to come, from spare parts, to various computers to the all important neural uplink.

Demiurge
Catlyn was there to meet them at the edge of the field. The rest of her Wing was already saddled up and ready, with riders perched atop dragons who'd been fitted with the same weapons as those that Grace and Patience had seen upon their arrival. The saddles hooked into a metal crest that fit over the dragons' breastbone, and this seemed to serve a dual-function as both armor and weapon, with two large white orbs inset into the plate that hummed and glowed with some kind of power source. Catlyn's dragon, a large gold female whose hide shimmered gloriously in the sun, greeted the Grace and Patience with a blink of her iridescent eyes and a soft croon of curiosity.
There were two other dragons beside her: a coppery red male and an emerald green female, both of whom sat riderless. Catlyn directed the mages' attention to these dragons as they walked together through the grass.
"Hopefully you won't have to shoot anything, but in case you do, I've gone ahead and linked you in so you can control the guns. Tap the bracelet to activate the controls, then they'll follow your hand gestures." She demonstrated with a few quick motions of her own hands. "The firing command is vocal. Just say 'fire left' or 'fire right.'" After a pause she added, in a serious tone. "Don't shoot unless you know you can hit the target. Otherwise, leave the combat to us."
But there were still introductions to be had, and Catlyn smiled fondly as she looked up at the two dragons. "The red one's Rai. Green is Tally. They're pretty good with strangers, so they shouldn't give you any trouble. They know where to go. All you need to do is stay on."
When the dragons greeted them, the mages would feel it like a soft note of warmth blossoming in their minds. There were no words, but somehow it still felt like hello.
If either Grace or Patience needed any help in getting onto their dragons, Catlyn and a couple of the others riders would offer it to them. They also explained how to use the guns they'd been given, and how to properly sit in the saddle. Then each of them mounted their flying companions and got ready to leave.
All around them, the air was silent. Everyone was awaiting Catlyn's command. Then the woman lifted her arm and said, "to the air!" And a sea of wings spread and beat the air into great gusts of wind as they lifted into the sky.
To the North, the tall peaks of those snowy mountains rose up out of the ground to meet them.

Grace Evans
The warmth of Rai's hello fills her synapses, and she looks the red dragon in his large eyes. "You are an interesting one, aren't you?"
Telepathic animals. What will they think of next?
She climbs up into Rai's saddle, hoping he knows what to do, because she certainly doesn't. From up in the saddle, she looks to Patience, the only other left. They lost Maddoc and they lost Lena. Will this Bastion take them down one by one, then? And who's next? She's worried, and her red-rimmed eyes speak of the loss.
But it's time to move.
At least this time, even with a living, moving being underneath her, it's easier to stay on. It's also deeply uncomfortable. Let's face it, Grace was never the equestrian type. She's not used to her transportation being alive. But when they rise into the air together, it's hard not to stare in wonder at the ground's retreat.
It's not every day you get to ride a dragon.
Lena would have loved it.

Patience Mason
Patience looks a little concerned as she looked over the assembled riders, looking for signs of a technical team, with a transmitter or anything that looked like it would be powerful enough to breach the security systems that the company would likely employ on their carrier.
But the commander had said they had it covered, said that they were prepared normally it would not be enough for Patience, but she didn't know their world, did not know their technology intimately and to be truthful, some of it was beyond her. So she moved to the other dragon, the bright green dragon named Tally and tilted her head, offering a smile to the dragon as it spoke to her in her mind.
Thankfully she could offer it impressions and ideas, rather then words...for patience it was likely the most straight forward conversation she had been involved in outside of the Sons of Ether in over forty years.
But then they were aloft, then they were FLYING in a way that Patience had never imagined would be possible.
It was a very unique sensation.

Demiurge
Seated atop the dragons now, Grace and Lena would be afforded proper time to appreciate the experience in a way they had not upon their arrival, when everything around them was chaos and all they could think to do was to try to hang on to whatever was in front of them. This time, they were strapped comfortably into their saddles, and the ride was noticeably less bumpy. Rai and Tally soared into formation with the rest of Catlyn's Wing, hovering at the rear of the group as the other Wings flew ahead. As they flew higher, the ground beneath them shrank until the people in the village could no longer be seen. Until the trees and the buildings looked like tiny models. The air up here was brisk and cold, and it bit into their faces sharply. If Grace had been tired before, she would likely be quite awake now.
It was an impressive sight, all those dragons. Up here in the air, in their natural element, they looked beautiful. Majestic, even. And the riders would have a unique bird's eye view of the clouds that was much more immediate than what one might experience on an airplane.
Beneath them, the mountains rose up, and the dragons soared over the tops of them, until the rugged, rocky landscape beyond came into view.
That was when they saw the base ship. A massive black ship surrounded by squadrons of fighter jets - ready and waiting.
There was no turning back now. And the army of dragonriders moved into battle formation and dove in to meet them. At first, the situation looked grim, as the fighters shot forward and fired with everything they had. But then something happened. Their formations broke, and the jets began to scatter. And the riders took their cue and made their attacks, swooping in to fire on the handicapped enemy.
Catlyn's wing pushed forward toward the base ship, swinging around the worst of the chaos as they fired at any planes that got in their way. The air was filled with the sound of laser-fire and roaring dragons, and Grace and Patience would be able to feel the tense energy of their own dragons' thoughts on the edges of their minds.
"Look out!" Catlyn called out over the comm link. "Incoming attack!"
A handful of jets were hurtling toward them from below. They'd been hiding in the clouds.

Grace Evans
[Wits + Firearms! + WP]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Grace Evans
[Damages!]
Dice: 13 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 5, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 7 )

Patience Mason
[Wits+Firearms]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )

Patience Mason
[Damage]
Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace Evans
The sudden ambush has Rai on edge and, well, so is Grace. But she's also very good at sharp edges.
That tenseness serves to focus her, making the task ahead of her a little easier. Her wrist comes up to eye level, and she flits her way to the firing command menu.
"Fire Left."
It is the first time Grace has had to stare down an enemy with the full intent of killing them. Certainly there have been other times where she has watched death happen, or helped in the process of eliminating a threat -- but these were all indirect results.
And now, she's cooly calculating attack vectors in the span of split seconds, wasting no time in burning a hole straight through a sleek fighter jet like it was made of paper.

Patience Mason
Patience watched as the fighters began to balk and lose their lethal cohesion, any hope of a coordinated assault by the fighters lost to individual dog fights...dog fights that the pilots of the jets would lose without their neural uplinks.
For her part Patience fired as the ambush fell upon them, some cohesion remaining in the enemy battle plan. 'Actualize Right." She would utter, hoping that it would understand her desire before with a satisfying blast, it sent of a shot that wounded a fighter, and left it momentarily disengaged as the pilot regained control.
"Closer geo-spatial locality will be directly and acutely necessary to actualize entrance protocol's and deactivation of the primary, secondary, and tertiary defenses of the primary inter-planetary structure." She called out.
She could do nothing from this distance.

Demiurge
One of their dragons - a heavy blue male - got hit hard in the wing, and he half-fell, half-soared out of formation, dropping down toward the distant ground with an angry cry.
There was no lake there to break their fall. Only hard earth and stone. The rest of the wing could only hope that the dragon had enough control left to survive the landing.
"We're working on it!" Catlyn responded to Patience's warning. The plane that Patience clipped in the wing shot a few rounds at her, and Tally narrowly dodged out of the way, tucking in her wings in a controlled fall before she spread them again and caught them with a sudden jolt. If Patience hadn't been strapped in, she likely would have fallen. But they were alive and unharmed. For now. And a second later Catlyn's dragon dove in and took the wounded fighter out of the air.
Back in the thick of the fray, the odds were beginning to lean in the dragons' favor as the fighter pilots struggled to navigate and aim their weapons without the use of their wired software.
And meanwhile the base ship loomed ever larger as Catlyn's wing took out the attacking jets and continued toward the ship. Another couple of plans shot out in their direction, but they were quickly taken out.
Ahead of them, the thick black hull of the base ship blocked out the sun. They were near enough now to see the outline of one of the docking bays, its door closed against entry. Catlyn ordered the dragons to fan out in a half-circle around Grace and Patience, protecting them so they could work.
"We'll keep an eye out. Try to work fast."

Grace Evans
[Int + Computer, Diff 8 - 1 (Ability Aptitude) Specialization: Creative]
Dice: 8 d10 TN7 (3, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Patience Mason
[Int+Computer, Diff 8 Spec WP]
Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (4, 5, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Grace Evans
Try to work fast, Catlyn says? Well, Grace's fingers shuffle words into the air, and in the readout on her holographic interface, text scrolls by faster than most could read in the effort. She's not reading it all, just the parts that count.
Using the signals generated by their captured neural interface worked the last time. Something like a password built into the device helped sneak them in. This time, it's not working.
"Patience, can you modulate the frequency on this thing? Cycle the passcode around a few million times, and brute-force it?"
Hopefully neural interfaces don't come with a '3 tries and you're locked out' policy.

Patience Mason
A few bits of code here, a few pulses of electricity along the neural links pathways, and a few high frequency bursts saw the device purring as well as one could expect.
The exchange began, and thought it was tenuous at first the computers began their work. Soon they bore fruit and Patience and Grace were rewarded for their work with the sudden and heavy release of the door seals.
"Internal handshakes 100% complete, internal and external movation portals now available for all unathorized personnel!"

Demiurge
When the bay door began to open, the surrounding dragonriders let out a chorus of whooping cheers, and Catlyn radioed into the other wingleaders to announce their success. Her dragon dipped toward the entrance and hovered there, giving slow flaps of its wings while Catlyn unstrapped herself from the saddle and hopped down into the ship, giving the motion for the others to join her.
From this point on, the dragons could not follow. The riders were on their own.
Inside the docking bay, Grace and Patience would be greeted with the site of a large, domed room. The floor was laid out with long, digitally lit runways. The look and feel of the base ship was much more traditional science-fiction than what the two of them had seen back in Winter's Edge. Sleek and cold and technical in design. As the riders scoped out the room, they drew their guns and pressed forward, advancing toward a set of metal ladders that led up to the second floor, and what appeared to be a doorway leading further into the ship.
"Keep an eye out," Catlyn said quietly. "They're bound to figure out we boarded soon."

Grace Evans
[Corr 1: Attempting to generate a map of the base-ship, looking for likely prison-holds.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace Evans
[Extending!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Grace Evans
The riders cheer for them, but Grace does not seem to register it. Joy is an emotion missing from her repertoire at the moment. Above all, she must keep moving, keep going after the real goal of their mission: Atreyu. To do otherwise would invite memories of terror and grief back.
She watches the doors raise with the same tired stone face she's worn all day.
When her dragon lands in the bay, it's like stepping into another world (and by now, Grace should know). She again readies the wrist computer, and begins doing things to it that the Sulisians have probably never before considered.
For a short while, the holographic display fills with what looks like static. It's actually the Code of Bastion, and Grace works at refining it into a map of the place. Bits shift as she filters out the spacial data from the rest, and soon she has a working three-dimensional display of the entire thing.
And there, on the map, a glowing beacon. It looks like a hole, and makes Grace think of a simpler time in her apartment with Gadfly, looking for wormholes. Atreyu.
She takes the map data and shares it with the dragonriders. Through the comm, she says: "I found this in their computer. I think I know where we need to go."
It's a lie. But at least they might not question it too much.

Demiurge
Grace was right on that count. The riders didn't think to question how she got ahold of the ship's blueprint, or why Atreyu would be especially marked out. It had seemed as though she was well-known among the people of Sulis. Perhaps she'd been targeted as a high profile prisoner? It had to be the reason they yet kept her alive.
(Hostages, all of them. But for what? These were clinical tactics. They use a show of brutal force to frighten the enemy, then threaten to kill their remaining prisoners if demands are not met.)
The riders looked at the map and pressed forward, climbing the ladder in single-file to get to the main level of the ship. When they reached it, Catlyn looked at the solid door for a moment, taking in its construction. She was about to ask the mages if they had any suggestions toward opening it, when the barrier slid aside of its own accord.
Behind it was a line of soldiers in black and red uniforms. When they saw Catlyn's face, they raised their weapons and fired.
The Wingleader had quick reflexes. She got hit in the shoulder, but managed to duck out of the way of any lethal damage. A couple of the riders behind her weren't so lucky, but the rest of them fired back. It was so fast, the way it happened. Patience and Grace would barely have time to register that they were under attack before people started dying. And when it was over, the size of their group had been dropped down to five, including the now-injured Catlyn.
She stood up from her crouched position against the wall and spared a final look at the dead riders, then nodded toward the hallway. They knew where they needed to go.
Stepping over the bodies of the dead soldiers, Grace, Patience and the remaining riders made their way down the long corridor. They turned a corner into another section of the ship. Then another.
Finally their destination loomed ahead: a hallway lined with heavy doors marked with cell numbers.

Grace Evans
[Int + Computer, diff 8-1, Specialty: Creative!]
Dice: 8 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 7, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1

Grace Evans
[Extended action!]
Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (1, 2, 4, 5, 5, 7, 7, 7) ( fail )

Grace Evans
Walking through the ship is a tense affair. They're interlopers here, and every corner could hold a nasty surprise. The trained soldiers take the lead, and Grace is thankful for that, until it brings the word 'meatshield' to mind.
They stay quiet until reaching that door, and Grace is going for her wrist computer to try to do something about it when it flies open on its own.
With a jolt, she presses herself up against the wall, almost a reflex reaction, trying to make herself a hard target. Almost as soon as that, it's over.
So much death these past couple of days, and all of it happens so suddenly and quickly and noiselessly. There is the hiss of laser fire, but it's not like a gun, that. Just one second you're alive, and another your insides are cooked. Grace could have done without the designer of this world going so far as to come up with realistic burnt-flesh scent.
She swallows down the sharp fear inside, looking at the newly departed, and then reassuring herself by looking to Patience. Still alive. They're both still alive.
She nods at Catlyn. "We'll get to her," she whispers, unwilling to let any further enemy teams in on their location.
Grace has to step over bodies to get to the cell blocks, but finally it seems that the destination is at hand. This is what they sacrificed so much to get to, right?
She starts working on the doors, mundane hacking this time. Using their technique of using the enemy's neural network signals to interface with it's computers, she gets in. She gets in, and then tries to open the cell block doors. But there's a hitch. Whoever their stolen neural wetware belonged to? He didn't have security access.
"Oh shit."

Demiurge
Oh shit, Grace said. And at roughly the same moment, an emergency alarm sounded throughout the ship. There ought to have been guards here. Perhaps those men and women they'd taken out at the entrance had been left behind to do just that.
Maybe the enemy had never really expected the possibility of a boarding party. The whys didn't really matter now. What mattered was that an alarm had gone off, and there they all were trying to figure out a way to get into a bunched of locked cells with no time to think. Patience was likely to try and use her skills to warp the door's pattern, while Catlyn looked as though she was about to start firing her weapon at the latch until it blew open (if that was even a possible outcome.) But in the end, none of them needed to do any of those things, because just then all of the doors... opened.
All on their own. With no obvious source.
(Like someone was helping them.)
All around them, prisoners broke out into the hall, running to hug their dragonrider friends in relief and gratitude. (They thought it was them who'd released them.) And standing in front of Grace and Patience, the target of their search: Atreyu. She looked like she was in bad shape. Her leg was bandaged cleanly, but the rest of her was bruised and exhausted and thin from hunger. Still, she was just as relieved to see them as the others were, and she let out a rush of breath.
"I thought they were coming to kill me this time."
And in a heart-beat, she rushed forward and pulled Catlyn into a fierce hug. But there was no time to exchange stories or pleasantries. No time to do much of anything but try to run. Atreyu broke the hug and looked at Grace, then Patience, and something seemed to light up in her eyes. This sharp note of confused recognition.
"I remember you," she said quietly. Almost as though she was not sure she ought to believe the memory. "On my dragon. And... from somewhere else. A dream I had of Earth. And of... Gladiators? She laughed at that, like the very idea seemed so ridiculous, and Catlyn eyed her like she'd gone insane.
"We have to go," Catlyn said, and she ducked out of the cell to see to the other survivors and make sure none of them needed help escaping.
But Atreyu didn't go. Not yet. Instead she grabbed Grace and Patience's hands like she had something very important she needed to tell them. Perhaps it was only a trick of the light, but it seemed as though a pin-point glow had suddenly appeared in the center of her pupils.
"It's coming again," she whispered. "You have to go."
Something creaked through the ship's hull. A low, dull sound like warping metal.

Grace Evans
"You remember?" Grace says, breathlessly. "Right. Right. North is..." she says, trailing off as she aligns herself with Patience, to stand facing North.
Goodbye, Sulis. Goodbye, Lena.
"Tu, was du willst."

Demiurge
Things fall apart. First in Rome, then here. The chaos, the violence. And then the storm.
Maybe they were right. Maybe it was the hand of God reaching down to punish them. Or maybe it was something else. Entropy. Paradox. None of them knew. But they could feel it now, even beyond the barrier of the ship's hull. They could feel the current in the air. Could hear the sound of metal being ripped apart. The entire ship vibrated with it like an earthquake. It was breaking at the seams.
Atreyu took their hands, and Grace pointed them North and said the words to activate the portal. And then the symbol on Atreyu's chest glowed once more, and light struck down through the ceiling and enveloped them.
It was the last the two mages would ever see of Sulis. Of the people they'd spent the last few days with. Who they'd fought beside and mourned. The people that Lena had died for. Perhaps this time the loss would be felt more keenly for all that.
But they wouldn't have much time to contemplate it before their minds were pulled away and flung into that now-familiar darkness.