Chapter #3The fugitive by: Yote   Leaving immediately, while it satisfied some rebellious urge at the time, is proving to have been a foolish mistake. It had been your hope that they would take at least a day to notice you gone; alas, they knew almost the second you crossed the College threshold. No doubt you had triggered some old spell cast on either the grounds or the students to tracked their movements.
Now the whole city is out to get you. The penalty for desertion is death.
It's market day in the Shambles. Between the crooked buildings, the street is packed with with stalls. The local butchers have expanded out into the open air to peddle their wares for the day. Slabs of red meat and plucked poultry swing from hooks. The blood and offal which flows in a runnel down the center of the street will mask your scent. The milling crowds will hide you.
For a moment you pause, hunched against the side of a building, clutching a pain in your side.
An Obsidian Creature barrels through a butchers stall in a spray of blood, mechanical limbs trailing entrails as it leaps on top of you. It's serrated metal teeth sink into the forearm you fling up to shield yourself, stopping -just barely- at the bone. With a scream of pain, you hammer against its exposed skull with your fist. It begins to shake you around like a rag doll. In a moment, its vice-like jaws will sever cleanly through your arm. The aura emanating from its obsidian bones washes over you like a wave of freezing water, sapping your magic.
Wrapping your free hand around its throat, you life it bodily from the ground. Its rusted claws tear lines down your chest. Locked together, you launch yourself and it into one of the stalls. It doesn't even faze it - merely collapsing the structure around you. However, a large, sharp cleaver presents itself in the ruin. You grab it, swinging it down with all your remaining strength.
It strikes true, cleaving apart the Obsidian Creature's head and thudding deep into the mess of pink mush and clockwork that is its brain. The animal twitches violently and goes limp, releasing your mangled arm.
You stagger far enough away from the Creature to rekindle enough magic to fleshcraft shut the wounds in your arm. It's a rushed job - now your forearm looks like a lump of unmoulded clay - but all you care is that the bleeding has stopped. There can't be much left in you.
People are screaming and running. Witch-hunters will be alerted, assuming they're not here already. The situation is getting worse with each attack. With each spell cast, the stench of magic on you gets stronger, the trail gets easier to follow. The witch-hunters will be able to see it, a vivid rainbow of sorcerous magic that leads straight to you. Even if you could escape the city, they could track you on open ground, in dense woodland, even at night...
If you want to survive, you need to somehow remove or mask the magic energy that saturates your skin. You know of only three ways that it can be done.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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