Act 3, Chapter 105: The unrestricted tongues

Day in the story: 1st February (Sunday), past 3:00 a.m.—approximately 13 hours and 21 minutes remain until the record time is lost

Elle Erikson

“Guys, we need to take a break. Just sit down for an hour, two maybe even ten, and rest.” Patricia looked absolutely spent. Her armor was broken in a few places, covered in all kinds of dirt, soot, blood, and viscera she’d accumulated over the last few days of walking, running, and fighting. We all looked to be in a very similar state, with the exception of the Chuma siblings, whose insects did a remarkably good job of cleaning their bodies and keeping them in decent shape.

They just looked exhausted. Not dirty—just spirited away from the bodies.

“Are you kidding?” Piotr answered, suppressing a yawn. “We have what?” He scratched his head, then his back, before finally remembering to look up at the sky. He pulled away the red curtain and took a glance at the firmament illuminated by crimson, where bold red numbers measured his worth.

“Thirteen hours and twenty-one minutes, humans! No time for rest!” And Liora’s. This little rascal—ever since he understood there was glory to be earned if we finished under eighty-seven hours, a high had hit him. Proper full-on speed, hormones mixed with narcotics, adrenaline-laced and caffeinated speed. This made him Milo’s official mascot and battle partner by choice… of both of them. Contrary to Piotr, however, this dragon apparently did not need sleep at all and could go on forever, as long as he made short pauses and rested on my shoulder. The fragment of the soul core within my chest proved enough to sustain his need of Alexa’s soul presence.

“Screw this,” Liana dropped into a chair. We were already in Paris as remembered in this splinter. Just a rock’s throw from the tower, which loomed enormous here. We’d killed and disposed of about thirty Nazi monsters in this room alone over the last hour, but finally this restaurant they treated as a meeting place was under our control. “I have had enough of this stupid race. Ever since we came into that place, we’re either fighting or going through mud and blood, dirt roads and obstacle courses. That supposed shortcut led us straight through an underground tunnel into a fucking minefield!”

“That was fun,” Laurent exhaled. One of his photographic devices had been destroyed in there when a mechanized unit of infantry on stilts moved over the field to pepper us with bone bullets. They were wearing bone armor too. One of them hit a mine as it fell, and it threw Bastien a good ten meters away. Fortunately, his armor was strong enough to keep his body mostly intact.

“And that tiger?” Kito threw the glasses, platters, and fragments of Nazis off a bar counter onto the floor and climbed onto it, lying on his back. He yawned and only then continued. “Was fucking awesome. Wake me up in two hours.” He meant a tank that, apparently during the war, was called a Tiger—and it was enough to turn it into a mechanized feline prowling artillery unit. It stalked us over the fields, hiding out of sight and bombarding from afar. Fortunately, my minions finally found it, and we were able to get to it and destroy the thing.

“Pathetic.” Liora hissed, sitting in the air in the corner of the room. He was looking out onto the empty, half-destroyed streets and the tower in the background. It was overrun by a pink and red mass that now looked, up close, like hundreds of tongues. And at the very top—shaped like an enormous zeppelin crossed with a man-o’-war—was the source of all those licking appendages. Most likely our target, and the thing we’d seen gliding through the air on the very first day we set foot in here.

“Are you hearing this, Milo?” Lóng addressed the second engine of our group that pushed us beyond our limits. “Milo?” he asked again when Piotr did not respond.

“I will be on the lookout,” Lia said, watching Liora jump into the air, moving like a weasel that didn’t care about gravity, before stopping a breath away from Piotr’s face. Even the mighty Milo of the Czarnys had been defeated by sleep. The moment the tempo dropped, he slumped into a corner and snored like a hippopotamus.

“No!” Liora tried to wake him by clutching his wide face in both front paws. “This can’t be happening!”

“I can stay with you,” I replied to Liana, coming closer to her and pushing a sofa from the back of the room toward the windows to get a clear view outside. “I already have my minions outside, and I don’t feel that sleepy.” Alexandra had been resting for a very long time now—not just the usual half hour, but close to eight-hour overnight sleep like she used to when she was still human. She waited patiently for Sophie’s emergence and hoped proper sleep might help with the soul’s malady. It did ease my necessities, as apparently one body—either her original one or any of the Personas—could sleep for the benefit of all of us.

“You sure?” she asked, pushing a mutated Nazi soldier’s body out of the path she intended for the couch. I helped her move it.

“Yes,” I replied, taking a glance at the scene. Kito and Milo were already snoring, Pat was lying on a sofa farther into the room—not sleeping yet, but her eyes were open. It felt as if nobody was home already; she just stared absent-mindedly at the bloodstained floor. I gave her two minutes, no more, and she too would be out cold.

“Girls, two hours, okay? No more, or Milo will never forgive us,” Bastien said, walking away. He stepped carefully between the bodies and fragments that littered the floor.

“Sure,” Lia replied, just as Liora prowled toward us. He stopped with his maw placed delicately on my lap, while the rest of his body slowly wrapped around my shoulder and draped behind the sofa. There was something like resentment in the way Liana looked at the man. Oblivious to all of that—or too tired to care—he took a few steps away from where most of the carnage had happened and lay down in the corner, placing his head on a pillow he’d snatched along the way. His arms went under it.

I focused on myself, rubbing Liora’s skin behind his horns. It felt nice being part of a team that actually supported each other in times of need, and the reason behind my joining started weighing on me ever so slightly. Well, maybe not the reason itself, but the way I had basically forced myself into already established connections, relationships, and feelings, without caring in the slightest about what I'd trampled.

“You can take a nap too, Liana,” I said, watching her face partially reflected in the window that separated us from the street. “You must be tired, and I can handle it alone.”

“Does your Domain help with your energy levels somehow?” She let her head fall against the backrest. Ants emerged from beneath the piece of her suit that covered her breasts and started crawling all over her skin.

“Yes. I’m sure I can go without sleep for at least a full day, maybe more,” I lied. She didn’t need to know how long I could truly go.

“It helps me too,” she said, and suddenly every insect crawling over her lit up, surrounded by brief puffs of mist-like shadowlight. That fog gathered over her body for the briefest heartbeat before sinking back into her, as though seeping inside through every pore of her skin and the pocket-like crevices she kept for her swarms. Not a single ant survived whatever she had just done. They all disappeared.

This reproduction was taken without the author's permission. The official page used to publish the story carries the chapter.

“Your other soulmark. Nourishment, right?” I let my head fall against the backrest too, turned sideways, my normal eyes looking directly at her. Every time I let myself simply look at the way she carried herself, I was struck by how much it pleased me. Her slender neck, arms, and legs, her muscular abdomen, even her perky breasts—they were all incredibly attractive to me. I kept wondering what it would feel like to kiss her on the lips and slowly venture lower from there.

“Yes. It lets me consume my insects on a spiritual level to regenerate myself, but also to feel and understand them, as though it nourished my mind and thoughts.” She spoke, and her lips parted ever so slightly. “You?”

“I have a paper with my own image inside my Domain. I’m painted sleeping on it. It lets me fool the universe into believing I actually am. It catches up to me every now and then. Fortunately, not now.”

She turned her head toward me and studied me in return, her eyes lazily wandering over my body.

“My first instinct was to hate you,” she whispered, and I could feel her breath brush against my skin. Her voice made the hairs on my arms rise. “I don’t particularly enjoy meeting new people. Especially mages who somehow managed to wrap my former fiancé around her finger in just a few days.”

“I didn’t know. He never told me.”

“I know.” Her voice, so low, was borderline intimate, and it made me shiver. “I am angry at him, although I try to hide it. You are a good woman, Elle. I can see that.”

“I pretend to be good,” I admitted, my tongue working faster than any of my minds. “I try to fake it until I make it.” I had to remedy the problematic overshared truth.

“I like that. Honest.” She smiled. “It makes it more true too. He is good as well, I know that, and we hadn't been together for quite some time. And yet it hurt all the same. When we were apart, I thought he'd embrace me the moment he saw me and never let me go. That he'd show me he'd missed me so much his heart had been breaking apart every single day. And it didn't happen. Then you entered the picture.” She exhaled.

“Is that how you feel about him? Never letting go?”

“No... actually, no. That's what I thought I felt, but apparently, just like him, I grew apart from both the feeling and the reality of it. Neither the meeting, nor even his—don't feel offended, please—betrayal... none of it hurt me as much as I'd assumed it should.”

“Humans...” Liora hissed. One of his eyes opened for just a second before closing again. I kept scratching him while giggling.

“Will he... share this with others?”

“If he tries, I will unsummon him straight to hell, where he'll spend eternity eating nothing but rotten fish,” I said loudly enough for Liora to hear, but not loudly enough to wake the others. “He's pretending to be cold, aggressive, and distant, but in there, where his heart is, he's very warm, caring, and lovely little worm.” I scratched him even more.

“Distancing oneself is a good defense mechanism,” Lia said.

“Is that what you'll be doing with Bastien?”

“No. I try not to. I guess it comes out anyway, at least partially. It's difficult to be friends with someone you used to be more than that with. Do you know what I mean?”

“I understand the concept. It never happened to me,” I admitted. Maybe it was the tiredness, or the attraction I felt toward her. Whatever it was, it made speaking my mind around her so much easier. “I've never been in love. Not with anyone.”

“Bastien?” she asked.

“Oh, good Reality, Lia, no.” I closed my eyes for a second. “I like him and wanted to spend some time with him, but it would never have been anything more than that.”

“He isn't a particularly handsome man,” Liana whispered again.

“No. That's not the reason. Looks matter to me, but not that much. At least I think so. I had a friend who was a bit chubby, ginger, and not traditionally handsome, and I was attracted to him. Unfortunately, when he lost weight he became a hottie, so he can't really be much of an argument in favor of my claim.” I giggled again, and she did too. A warm feeling ran down my spine. “But then I realized that I'm attracted to women just as much as I am to men. At least some of them. But even then, I've never felt anything I could honestly call love.” I tried to give her a hint.

“I did love him once. Not anymore.” Her breath brushed my skin again in a warm exhalation that tingled enough to make me want nothing more than to feel it again. Without thinking, I leaned my head a little closer to hers and only stopped when I realized what I was doing. She didn't pull away.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, El,” she replied calmly. Her eyes were fully open now, the waterline catching the light. “I share... the sentiment.” She added, lightly biting her lower lip. “But we're all tired, no matter how much our magic helps us. If we... you know... we would regret it tomorrow. Maybe even right after.”

“I agree,” I replied, moving the head away and turning to look at the ceiling. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. We can't choose how we feel, only how we react to those feelings, right?”

“I honestly don't know if that's true for me,” I admitted faster than I could stop myself, again. “I'm almost one hundred percent sure that every time I let myself end up in a situation like ours, it was by my own choice. I know that if I really wanted to, I could quench that attraction until it disappeared completely.” She smiled widely upon hearing that, most likely thinking I could no longer see her.

“That's flattering.”

“I know, right?” I laughed. “I blame that scant suit of yours and your superb genetics. Once you discount all of that, you're insufferable.”

“Likewise, El. Exactly the same.” The smile never left her face. From that point on, it felt nice to simply wait and do nothing for a while. That silence between us lasted around ten minutes before Liana broke it, either unable to bear it anymore or simply bored of it. “I'd like to show you something.” Her voice was breathy again when she turned to me. “It's pleasurable, yet not entirely intimate, enough not to warrant precaution.”

“I'm up for it,” I replied eagerly.

Her eyes caught shadowlight somewhere in the whites of her sclera. They briefly turned green and gold, like leaves and honey. That same light illuminated the slits in her skin that allowed insects to crawl into her, and from those bodily hives emerged bees. Little balls of fur in yellow and black. Their tiny wings buzzed as they lifted from her body and flew en masse toward me. Part of the swarm never left her, and now both of us had our own bees crawling across our skin. The sensation alone—hundreds, perhaps thousands of tiny legs pressing gently against me; it was difficult to count them—was pleasant enough. A truly interracial massage on a miniature scale. When shadowlight gathered around the little creatures again, they responded with sound and vibration, buzzing in rhythm with their mistress's wishes. Shivers ran through my body one after another in response to the sensation.

Liana enjoyed the same treatment, equally satisfied by the motion of multitudes of tiny living engines. Liora hissed and, turning into shadowlight, slipped off me onto the floor, where he assumed physical form again and lay back down.

“It's un-bee-lievable,” I joked.

“Oh, honey,” she answered in kind.

“Thank you for not shutting me away. Truth be told,” I said, only half-focused on the words, “I'd been so excited by the prospect of venturing into a Nexus, or even Ideworld's version of Paris, that I didn't care much whether my actions hurt anyone. I just wanted so desperately to join in—”

“That you used Bastien for it?” she asked, her brows furrowing. I didn't answer. That was proof enough for her. “Makes perfect sense why you'd move away from him so quickly once you'd secured your spot.”

“It's not—”

“Not like that? El, don't insult me. That's why you said you fake it till you make it.” She snorted, and the buzzing stopped. Every bee flew back to her in one swift departure. They merged with the rest of her swarm and disappeared into her body again. “I'm such a fool. This must be so funny to you.”

“It is not. I grew to—” I tried to defend myself.

“Yeah, yeah. Saw it a thousand times in movies, read it in books. You grew to like us for who we are after you used us. Well played, Elle.” She turned away and sat straighter, watching the street with much greater intensity.

“What are you going to do?”

“Think. I'm going to think. And you won't disturb me again until they wake up.” She shut me out.

I turned away and, for the briefest of moments, closed every one of my eyes in the area, needing darkness to consume me. Then, when the sound of heartbeats became unbearable, I decided not to be attracted to her anymore.

Nothing good had ever come from indulging those feelings.