#FLAMING ELMO. GEHRMEN THE FIRST HUNTER.

[furymint]

❗ for a frightened starter (and/or) 👫 for a reunion starter

starter prompts | header | tw: mild gore | wc: 1,403

Nolanel didn't know how much longer his legs would carry him. Filthy snow splattered under his step, and scorched metal sparked as his greaves struck their surface. There was nothing else left in the world. Even as the wind cut slices through the smoke, opening the greater landscape to him, nothing more lurked through its wreckage. If Garlemald was host to a single thing worth saving, it was its memory. Everything else of worth was dead.

Three bells ago, he would have regarded that belief as shortsighted. He had known what it was to love a land that despised him just for drawing breath in its glades and heights. Ruins could be as sacred as chapels, mongrel beasts so full of spirit, and buried trees as magnificent as the tallest belfry. The people of Coerthas were greater, stronger, and closer to the Fury than the patrician souls of the Holy City, and good gods Nolanel wanted to return to them instead of pretending the nearest Garlean with a blue collar could compare.

He wished he'd never met the damn woman. Perhaps it was penance that he'd meet the only decent cen who was—he knew it in his heart—certain to die. He'd spent the past moon with her silly laugh as a guide through asphalt and apocalypse. It was a good thing. When he nearly lost his footing and heard the monster hiss in sick anticipation, he knew he was spending his last thoughts on the wrong thing.

But he didn't want to be in this country, or to be among the soldiers who stared, or to have the frustration of seeing an enemy humanized. His drachen mail pressed into him with its familiar half-weight. In the only war that mattered, he'd never known the nauseating quiet of water as it boiled uninterrupted, free of comments made only to fill the time it took to truly think. It was a worthless nostalgia that she fulfilled. That was all she was. She wanted to kill him.

They had made a base in the processing center of a scorched and bloody post office. The bodies didn't bother him and he knew what to do with their open, bloated flesh, even as she stood in the doorway and whimpered her disgust. Once the ash at the base of a metal transport cart had been emptied, and the thing secured, packed, and fitted with steady fuel, he'd transformed it into a reliable furnace. Some of the corpses broke in his arms but all of them burned. The Garleans didn't have a god, she'd said, but they had pride, art, and industry.

A nation of thieves, he thought. Garlemald was full of punishments for every man still foolish enough to live in it—that did feel slightly like a god's hand. It made him believe that Hell was a larger place than he'd first imagined.

The thing chasing after him had seven arms. With each second, and each yalm that flew under him, it dragged its hulking mass forward through the snow. Cars snapped like twigs beneath the coarseness of its scales, and the heavy, oily stink of its saliva dribbled down its red front. There were horns on its head like the trunks of trees, a panting maw devoid of teeth, and a snake-like tail that beat the ground in its wake. Nolanel was thankful it didn't have a tongue to speak. The last thing she'd said was "sorry" before her pupils split into four.

He'd been strong enough for this sort of thing once. His legs didn't hurt back then—a year was long ago—and he feared nothing he could kill. Thinking was a manner of forgetting before this place. Now he thought nothing of that lake with the yellow pebble he'd found at its center, or the field where he'd pulled the lips of a ewe back for a bottle, or home. There was no name for that man his heart destroyed itself for.

If his ankles wanted to break, let them now. He crouched, prayed, and jumped. Aether screamed in his armor and burrowed in his bones. Every sky was Ishgard's sky, and this one was full of soot and snow and fire. Nolanel fit his body into the wind. A second passed, and he set his foot into the stand of Gae Bolg and plummeted.

The lance gored into the monster's skull. Ice scattered in knife-like shards. He channeled magic into the collision, pouring himself out like water, feeling the cold rise through his veins and empty into explosions of freezing force. It numbed and half blinded him, but before he launched away, the monster shuddered and paused as if it, too, was remembering something that could not matter.

Nolanel leapt onto the thing's writhing back and stabbed at its spine. The scales raised and cracked, but they did not part for his blade. He pounded ice into it as it garbled and foamed in a mania's thrall. Either it was dying or gathering strength, and Nolanel begged for a split or an end. The arms lifted from their scramble, open and cruel, and scored across its own back to mow Nolanel down. Long, ebony claws shred the scales into bleeding furrows.

With desperate accuracy, Nolanel pitched his lance into one of the wounds. Immediately ice crystals grew and burst, prying open the monster's body, tunneling through its meat to seize tendon and control. A spindly hand closed around Nolanel, lifted him, and hurled him into the road.

Metal shrieked loud enough to echo in his ears. He dispelled the shock quicker than the haze in his blurry eyes, and he panted amongst the gravel until he could lift himself. The balance was wrong in his armor—some of the prongs must have snapped—and there was nothing in his body that he could feel. 

The monster lurched toward him. Every arm quivered, overextended, hands open to grab, crush, and kill. The eyes bulged, thick with blood, and spread tears across its face. As if in echo of every groan, the fracture in its skull widened with the clamor of grinding ice. Its reason began to fail.

Nolanel let his strength drain into doubling its misery. The numbness in him gradually faded, letting him feel the cost of what he'd done to save his legs. It was as though his ribs had snapped from his sternum and curved inwards, crushing and stabbing every organ. He coughed and wretched, every breath too much and not enough, every color in the world pulsing with malice until he shut his eyes.

The monster slowed and whined. As it panted, its corpse-stench breath melted the snow. Stinging heat and hatred rushed over him but he did not stand. In his mind, he focused only on ice. Expand, pierce, stop it, halt the thing, freeze it, let it know what pain was before it dies. Nolanel squinted through the terror and cursed it.

One of its hands ripped Gae bolg free, sending chunks of ice showering to the ground. It flailed and sputtered, and its arm dipped low as vitality deserted it. With what seemed the last of its life, it flung Nolanel's weapon at the nearest building and shuddered into a twitching heap.

Nolanel tried to dismiss the ice. He squeezed his fists in the sign for finish, gasped and shouted for it to stop, while aether contorted wildy under his skin. Magic was not his place. The ice stayed in this world and it would make the same futility of his life as it did the one it already ended. He wondered if he should entreat fire or Halone—anything to close the siphon—but he already felt as though he were burning.

The great body of the monster settled to rest. The ruptured head sagged and spilled crimson viscera into the snow. Nolanel folded himself to the ground and tucked his arms against his chest.

Propeller blades thumped in the distance. He could not wait the agony out. No man could outrun a machine. His lance was a hundred yalms away and buried in muddy snow.

Despite every nerve reviling him, he stood. Old years were on his shoulders when he stretched them, obeying habit instead of his screaming brain. If he could not cast magic, he would walk, and when he could not walk, there would be a new question to answer.