Baying of the Hound

Shishun kept the embrace going for a lot longer than John had assumed she would last. He'd thought she'd hardly be able to endure a minute before she was too embarrassed to continue, but Shishun stayed coiled around John so long that he started to wonder if she was falling asleep. She had laid her head down on her coils, closed her eyes, and even her breathing was now mostly even, save for the occasional shuddering exhale. Her body was still tense, and John could feel the occasional constriction from her coils, but she was so peaceful that it actually startled John when she started to move again.

"Master... may I stop now?" Shishun asked, her expression reminding John of a lost child. She seemed so uncertain and unfamiliar with the situation that she appeared unsure whether she actually wanted to stop or not, and was leaving the decision up to him.

"If you want to," John said in response, not making it easy on the Naga. Shishun's body twitched and spasmed for a moment, obviously conflicted, until she found enough resolve to **** the barest nod and begin to pull herself away.

The process of unwrapping John was a bit faster than embracing him, in spite of Shishun's very obvious ****. Hardly a minute passed before the last of Shishun's tail plopped gently onto the sand below.

"I hope that wasn't too terrible for you," John gently teased when he saw the look on her face. "Are you alright, Shishun?"

"I will be alright, Master. But I really should train a while longer to atone for all of my laziness just now." Shishun was already backing away, but she kept her eyes forward as she slowly shrank backwards, until her spine was pressed into the dune.

"Letting yourself relax and be happy for a little bit isn't laziness!" John said firmly. Shishun only answered with the barest nod as she receded into the sand dune, her body vibrating slightly as she seemed to glide between the grains of sand as effortlessly as if it were just a cloud."

"You know, I'm pretty sure I've seen an old monster movie about exactly this kind of situation," John thought to himself as Shishun's serpentine body disappeared seamlessly into the sand, staying absolutely still, as if suddenly afraid of making any vibrations. When he heard the distant sound of her emerging from another dune, he finally decided to end the silliness and get moving.

"I hope she doesn't overdo it," John grumbled to himself as he started the trek back. His feet lifted off the ground as Elemental Infusion kicked up a gust that carried him into the air, and he managed to wobble only once as he ascended high above the desert. The morning sun had already cleared the horizon now, and he knew the others would be waking soon, if they weren't already.

"Technically I shouldn't train today. It's Shishun's day, but... I think I'll have to make an exception. If we're doing this week-long training session, I need to test my limits ahead of time. And maybe more importantly, I'm going to need every set of hands I can get."

With that need at the forefront of his thoughts, John altered his flight path, dipping his left shoulder as he veered off to the north.

"I think it's time to check on Vallya's progress."

“Not there, no… somewhere nearby, though. I can feel it,” Bella thought to herself, eyes peering deeply into the darkness on the other side of the gateway before her. She did not dare vocalize those thoughts – but she gave a hand signal over her shoulder, making a large circle with her fingers that she slowly shrank down. Bella didn’t bother to turn to see Xanthia’s reaction – if her mistress had a problem with the way she was searching, she would have already called an end to this experiment.

She stood at the center of their ritual chamber, which still bore the scars of its last gathering. The ceiling and walls were cracked in places, seeming disturbed by either Xanthia’s attempts to forcibly close the portal or simply by the strength of the impacts the chamber had suffered. The floor was cracked and broken where arrows had struck or skittered across while chasing their prey. Though the projectiles had dissipated, Bella could vividly imagine the titanic shafts of mana, particularly the one that had once protruded from the hole Xanthia now took up watch beside, peering over Bella’s shoulder.

In front of Bella was a large slab of stone, cut and shaped to perfect smoothness, resembling a full-length mirror in its silhouette. Across its surface was not a reflection, though – rather, it was a window into another world, a smaller version of the gateway they had attempted to open earlier, complete with an identical set of runes to those carved upon the ground. The intricate runes surrounding the circular stone slab’s perimeter glistened dimly as Bella shifted the view, circling the gateway’s exit point through the endless darkness. At times they shone brightly, other times less so, though no amount of light seemed to brighten the dark haze that hung around Bella’s form, only her eyes visible as endless black clouds seemed to pour from the apex of her cloak, drifting lazily over her figure and vanishing into the cold concrete floor.

Xanthia’s body was shrouded in an identical manner, though it was less obvious given her mistress’ lack of a lower half. For all the magical obfuscation, Bella could still feel Xanthia’s eyes piercing the air as she fumbled about blindly in the world of the dead.

“There’s another soul up ahead. So many of them trapped here. I feel as if I’m almost stumbling over them, even though this place seems maddening in its depth. So many damned souls left to limbo by cruel fate or crueler gods. Who are you, I wonder?”

It was just at the edge of what she could see, a ghostly thing, still with all the color of life but only half-opaque, shades and shimmers of the darkness beyond shining through her body. But Bella did not float their vision any closer to the soul to sate her passing curiosity. This ritual was not for the sake of resurrection, not directly, at least. This was for the advancement of their cause, in blood or in knowledge. She wasn’t entirely sure what it was that Xanthia had planned, but she knew her mission well. Her mistress’ words still resounded in her ears, the last thing that Xanthia had said to her before the gateway was opened and they both were sworn to silence.

“Search as long as it takes. Find that creature. It must be dealt with at any cost, if our mission is ever to succeed.”

And search Bella did, though she feared it might be fruitless. Conjuring a soul, even a small piece of one, back from beyond the veil was difficult enough. Doing so without the body of the deceased, or some significant memento of theirs, was nigh to impossible. No one truly knew how sizable the land of the dead was, or even if its size could be measured or comprehended in a meaningful fashion. Bella had been at this for six hours a day since the last ritual had gone awry, and nearly three hours so far today, and had yet to catch the slightest glimpse of their quarry, or of the same soul twice. Bella was beginning to think that this quest was unnervingly like searching the ocean for a particular drop of water.

“But if my mistress demanded it, I would search this ocean of darkness for eternity.”

Another hour passed. Another blur of time, spent slowly slipping the other side of their gateway across the land of the dead, passing by hundreds of ephemeral souls trapped in a seemingly eternal stasis, their eyes shut and souls unmoving.

“You are gone, but not forgotten. Not by us. We do this for you, little ones.”

Bella’s eyes drifted as their window into the darkness beyond shifted past a girl who looked a few years younger than Bella, hardly even an adult and already passed on. Her gaze followed the girl, thoughts meandering away from her task, wondering if the girl was a mage, or if she was mundane and truly as young as she appeared. Hardly even old enough to be called an adult, and already locked in this eternal limbo.

Before Bella realized how much her mind had wandered, she felt a cold hand pressing upon her shoulder. Bella started at the touch and turned to see Xanthia there, pressing up against her back, the almighty necromancer’s gaze locked somewhere beyond.

“F-for-”

Xanthia silenced Bella’s reflexive apology with a glare as icy as her chilled skin, but only gave the daydreaming woman her attention for an instant – then her stare pivoted back to the portal before them, and she gave the faintest of nods forward. Bella could still see nothing in the black abyss before them, not even the flicker of a lost soul, but her heart began to pound wildly in her chest. She could feel the tension of Xanthia’s fingers, see the icy steel in her gaze. Bella did not know what Xanthia had seen, but it had roused something in the mighty woman.

The glimmering glyphs surrounding the stone carving flickered and dimmed, a shadowy haze falling across them that mimicked the cloak of black clouds falling around both of them. Xanthia raised up her hand and began to control the portal herself, winding and twisting her way through the land of the dead toward something only she seemed able to sense. Bella stood at attention, the barest of mana beginning to flow through her, readying herself for what came by preparing what little mana she dared to conjure forth under the concealing protection of their dark mantles.

Xanthia lifted her hand from Bella’s shoulder at length, after several more minutes passed in silence, damned and deceased passing by them at a furious pace. As she raised up that ghostly white limb, Xanthia extended one finger – and at the same time, Bella saw it.

A shadowy creature, standing on four legs. Its body was generally the shape of a wolf, yet it seemed to twist and turn with each passing moment. Sometimes, it appeared to be completely solid, a living creature of flesh just as much as Bella herself was. Other times all but the head seemed to vanish, only the creature’s muzzle and cranium remaining fully intact while the rest became little more than a blur, a black shadowy tendril that slithered in the air behind the head like some kind of ghost. Upon that head, it wore something strange – a mask, one of a dull white with a black spiral on the forehead. The mask was seated awkwardly on the monstrosity’s canine face, but it never so much as slipped, no matter how long Bella watched it. And those eyes. Those glowing, deep blue eyes…

The beast turned its head, sniffing the air. In an instant, Xanthia sent the portal elsewhere, zipping so fast through the landscape that Bella saw dozens of ghostly souls flickering by in a flash.

“It noticed us? But how? It seemed to be sniffing the air. There should be no scent through the portals, even if we had no wards at all. What was it sensing?”

But Bella didn’t know where to begin searching for the answer to that question, and had she, she would have lacked the time. The long journey that Xanthia had sent the gateway on ended as abruptly as it had begun, and with something even more terrifying in its sights now. The backside of a tall, lanky creature, with puffy white fur and an outline that Bella was still seeing in her nightmares every time her eyes drifted shut.

The creature, the spirit, the tremendously powerful being that had interfered with their ritual, which had sought vengeance for the mere act of reaching into the void beyond life as so many necromancers had before, was just before them. This time, though, it seemed unaware of their intrusion. It was facing away, seemingly standing still, though the faint flicker of movement at the edge of their portal gave away that Xanthia was in fact following the creature at what must have been a considerable pace. That being wasn’t standing still, but rather, moving through the vast void as effortlessly and easily as they were manipulating the gateway from which they surveilled it.

“Where is it going? Is it going anywhere at all, or simply… guarding this place?”

That was the simplest of the hundred questions that came to Bella’s mind, some old, some new. But this time she did not dare allow her mind to cloud itself with daydreams or pointless questions with no easy answers – her every conscious thought was locked onto this creature, and her body was just as attuned to it, in a way that she tried to deny, but could not. Her heart was pounding, the sound and sensation so loud she foolishly worried if even their concealment spells could hide it. Her hands shook at her sides, and her jaw was clenched tightly to keep her teeth from chattering. Her breathing was some form of measured, but it took every ounce of her considerable experience to keep it so.

Bella had touched the land beyond more than any other living necromancer save her mistress. She had fought in the territorial skirmishes that earned them the title the foolish peasants of the Abyss gave them – the “Northern Ashes”. And she truly did believe what she preached – that the defeat of **** itself was inevitable, that whether it was measured in decades or millenia, mankind would reach the land beyond and claw back every soul that had been lost to the void. Bella had told herself a hundred times over that **** was not something any necromancer should allow themselves to fear.

But for the first time, that thought, that long-held ideal, seemed to ring empty in her own mind. As her eyes wandered over its white fur and across the intricate designs carved into its unstrung bow, as the memories of its piercing gaze watching over the very chamber they were in now played again in her mind, Bella was not scared.

She was terrified.

It was a deep, instinctual thing – beyond lived experience, beyond even her conscious mind. Before, during the interrupted ritual, she had been too busy fighting for her life to spend much time looking up into the opened gateway. Now, she couldn’t bear to tear her eyes away, a feeling settling over her as if merely losing focus for a single moment would carry the ultimate price. The enchantment concealing their presences and the gateway itself suddenly seemed insignificant, meaningless, like lifting a bedsheet up as protection from an oncoming arrow.

So it was a tremendous relief to Bella when Xanthia finally stretched out her arm once more, this time giving a flick of her wrist, dimming the runestones at last. The portal was quickly rendered into nothing more than a flicker of light that dissipated a moment later, leaving only the smooth, opaque stone behind, unblemished by that frightful sight.

“I had my suspicions, but I did not truly believe it.”

Xanthia’s voice was quiet, contemplative, and filled with more doubt than Bella had heard from her mistress in many long years. Bella turned to face Xanthia, but the elder necromancer was not looking at her. Her eyes were distant, still focused on the stone long after the portal had vanished.

“You have learned something of import?” Bella asked, though the answer was clear already. “Is it something of value in the war, or for all of our kind?”

“Perhaps both,” Xanthia murmured, her blank expression slowly twisting into a more confident one, filled with a calm glee. “Sensing what I could from it, and seeing the instinctive reaction that you had, my child, there is no longer any room for doubt in my mind. It matches the descriptions from our historical texts, at least as well as anything can match such vague bits and pieces gleaned one speck at a time from a far grander picture. That creature was Ereshkigal herself – the Goddess placed in charge of the land beyond. The Guardian of the Afterlife. A Fragment of Gaia - not an avatar, the real thing. And her pet, of course. A Shard, I believe - Hallahae, the Black Dog of **** herself.”

Bella’s blood ran cold. She dared not speak, for fear that her initial thoughts – all the ones that sprang to the surface as soon as she heard those words – would earn her a swift strike from her mistress, or worse. A Fragment meant a massive setback for their quest, and perhaps an end to it altogether. If they could not find a way to retrieve souls and wield their full necromantic might without attracting the ire of Ereshkigal, there was no hope of advancing their rituals further.

Xanthia was a powerful woman, but in all the history of the Abyss, no mage had ever slain a Fragment. If anyone stood a chance against one of them, it was surely one of the Deities, and for all her might, Xanthia could not hope to match one of them in combat. She might handle the Black Dog in a fair fight, but even that was questionable. There was no hope at all for them against a Fragment and a Shard together in open combat, not even with their entire army marshaled against the deities. If any of them had been dragged through the gateway, they would never have been seen again.

“I see your worries. Your fears. And they are not misplaced,” Xanthia cooed, reaching out and stroking Bella’s cheeks. Bella felt only one hand’s touch, but she smiled with both halves of her face as she gazed longingly into her mistress’ eyes. “But though this may delay our progress, it will never stop us. If we must delay and train a thousand years to become strong enough to claim that domain, we shall. For the good of all humanity.”

“For the good of all humanity,” Bella repeated softly.

“And it is not as though we have learned nothing from this. At the very least, for a Fragment to take matters into its own hands, and after hundreds of years of necromancy all leading slowly toward this moment? We must be close. We may well walk among the dead soon, rather than bringing them to walk among us,” Xanthia said, her voice nearly trembling with awe. “And there is a new possibility opened to us. One that will allow me to keep my vow.”

“Mistress?” Bella asked, tilting her head in uncertainty.

“Return to your duties. I must make preparations for this,” Xanthia said, her voice returning to its normal sternness, its harsh commands echoing through the chamber loudly. “Do not disturb me unless there is a true emergency. Take command of our forces. Use the silver-bladed assassin to deal with our little ghost, if you must – just keep the line held and tell the others to be ready for my signal. We will need all the power we can marshal for this.”

“My lady, may I ask what they should be ready for?” Bella asked. Although Xanthia’s tone was level, there was a glisten in her eyes, a plan Bella could only guess at.”

“My child, I already told you, did I not?” Xanthia gave a throaty chuckle, the sound reverberating around the room, caressing Bella from all sides. The tone was almost taunting, confident in a way that only her mistress could manage, a sound that sent shivers down Bella’s spine and lit a warmth in her core she thought long burned out. “The Fragment may be beyond our capabilities. But a Shard? That could be of use to us.”