Chapter Three Hundred And Fifty Five - 355The water thundered around them like a windless hurricane, a growl so immediate that it shook Felix's guts while the fall simultaneously sent them fleeing into his chest cavity. White waters surged all around them as the descended at an insane speed, the ice barge ill-suited to such exploits and smashing into every outcropping and fallen masonry that littered the spiraling river. A river that bore a clear resemblance to a expansive set of stairs.
Men and women screamed as the barge slammed and bucked down the sluiceway, a gauntlet of shattered stone and severed, upthrust statuary. Hands half the size of their ship rose before them, splitting the white, rushing water and Felix bellowed.
Adamant Discord!
The entire ship lurched to the left, slamming into a metal railing along the edge and missing the ramrod columns of stone by mere inches. Yet the lightning had barely faded when the barge hit a water-smoothed outcropping, lifting the left-most third of the ship into the air.
No!
People flew from the barge, armored bodies careening into one another like pinballs and Felix felt his stomach drop. His feet were still iced to the craft, so he plummeted with it as Legionnaires, Dawnguard, and several Risi were thrown free.
Shadow Whip!
"Bindings of the White Waste!"
"Pillars of the Domineering Sentinel!"
"Spear of Tribulation!"
Powers sped outward, chains of ice and pillars of force and spears of solidified air and metal. All of them snagged or dragged falling folk from the air or waters, hauling them back aboard while Vess' Spears formed a shifting wall to keep more from falling out. Even Pit flew up, snagging falling soldiers by their cloaks and armor. Felix's Shadow Whip itself snagged eight people in every direction, and a simple flex of his arm brought them all crashing back to the barge's icy deck.
"On your feet! I'm locking you all in!" Felix shouted as they navigated a swirl of stones. "Now!"
Rime Shaping!
As he had done to himself, Felix sent ice Mana surging up from beneath everyone's feet, locking them to the deck from their knees downward. He hoped it wouldn't hurt them too much, but Felix had no desire to pluck his company out of the water after every jostling wave...because there were plenty more to come.
Water and stone, foam and spray, the careening tide was chaos incarnate. The Frost Giants used their ice oars to shove them away from some of the rocks and statues, though more than a few oars splintered or shattered completely under the strain. Even the Dawnguard had their hooked polearms out, eager to prevent the barge's capsizing. Felix sent lightning skittering across the waters more than once, pushing and pulling at the forces around them in a desperate bid for control. The stone was too enchanted for him to shape, and the water too bountiful to freeze; anything he managed would have been flooded by the deluge coming from above. In fact, Felix caught several glimpses of glyphs deep beneath the water, though it was too fast and too hectic to tell their meaning. He tried to sunder them, but something about the array protected itself and they were moving too quickly for him to hit the same spot repeatedly.
All they could do was hold on.
"Hold low!" Harn shouted, followed by Darius' voice.
"Brace!"
They hit another statue, this one on its side and serving as a ramp that sent their craft sailing for thirty feet. Zara sang a dark melody, and Felix could almost hear the crash of cymbals above the roaring waters. A wave of aquamarine Mana surged up from below, catching their barge in its confines and lowering them back into the rapids. The Mana wrapped around the hull, tinging the purple-white ice Mana with its touch but cushioning every rock and wave that tried to flip or crush them to smithereens.
"Thanks," Felix said over the noise. Zara's ochre skin had paled to a startling degree, but her nod was loose and easy, as if she felt none of the strain holding their entire ship. He doubted that. "That can't be easy. You okay?"
"Fine, Felix," she nodded ahead, sharply. "But that will prove a problem."
They were nearly to the bottom now, but where the path had before been zig-zagged with fallen debris, now it was positively choked. It looked like an entire wall had been dropped onto this former stairwell, and only a few, relatively small cracks broke its bulk. Felix's eyes caught the flash of deep green scales as their Naga helpers slipped through the obstruction with ease. He growled, deep in his chest.
"That's gonna be a problem!" Evie shouted.
"We won't fit! We're too wide by half!" Atar's blonde curls were flat against his forehead, as waterlogged as his battlerobes. "We need to abandon ship!"
"No!" Felix shouted back at them. "I got this!"
With a flex of his Will and Mana, the ice around his legs vanished, and Felix leaped forward off the barge's railing, shattering it and sending the entire craft skidding backward a whole foot.
Adamant Discord!
Lightning cracked the air, and Felix pulled himself along a line toward those disappeared Nagafolk. The obstruction, of course, was in his way and he hit that instead, quickly slamming his fists straight through its surface. Felix had a brief, insane urge to try and smash their way through, but a better plan was to hand.
Chthonic Tribute!
The slab resisted for the briefest of moments, as if the Tier of stone was enough to anchor it, but it could not fight Felix's Willpower and Intent. With a hissing implosion, the entire contiguous surface of the obstruction turned to blackened smoke filled with dusty-brown glimmers of light. Still crackling with lightning, Felix hovered for a brief moment, buoyed by Adamant Discord but also the influx of Essence before he dropped
Right back into the barge as it sped beneath him.
Felix straightened to find dozens of eyes on him, nearly all of them some variation of awed, impressed, or relieved. All except one. Zara was an unreadable statue, Spirit and face both harder stone than the one he'd just eaten.
What's going on with you?
The barge cleared the final span of rushing water, now flowing in far greater quantities than before. The stone wall had acted as a dam of sorts, keeping the water within the staircase and circulating with those glyphs he'd spotted, but now all of it dumped out into the next chamber. They splashed down into a swirling pool at the base of the stair-rapids. The barge bobbed once, sloshing dark, foul water onto the deck, before righting itself into a lazy, sideways drift. A metal hand clanged into Felix's back, patting him firmly.
"Well done, kid," Harn grunted. He grinned. "Snakes'll be right confused about their little slide bein' ruined, though. Spoilin' for a fight about it, maybe."
Felix glanced back and snorted. The staircase had all but dried up, with only a few weak streams still pouring down the algae-slicked steps.
"Let's go find this Deepking," he said, his anger on a low simmer. "I'm in a bad mood. I could use a fight."
"Loquis, did you see that?" Pava said, nudging the Half-Orc man in the ribs. "Can your lightning do that?"
"I don't think that was the lightning, Pava," the Half-Orc said, somewhat sourly as he rubbed his ribs. The woman had notoriously sharp elbows. "That was something else."
Like everyone around him, Loquis watched as the FiendLord Autarch, he reminded himselftalked with members of his team. The others pretended not to, feigning interest in the ice barge the Lord and giants had made, or in the dark waters around them, but Loquis saw no need to hide it. He was fascinated by them all.
The fierce and beautiful Lady Dayne, whose spears had saved many of his friends' lives, just now on the rapids and previously in Haarwatch. The stoic Onslaught, whose reputation among the Guilders was enough for even the most grizzled veteran to give him nods of respect. The mages V'as and Knacht, scorching flame and shattering force, mighty and far more clever than Loquis could ever hope to claim. It was they, he was told, that enchanted the weapons they all bore and the powerful armors that was provided to them. The mysterious Lady Cyrene, a Master Tier and personal mentor to the Lord Autarch.
But what kept his eye was the beautiful and deadly Evie Aren. She was laughing at something Lady Dayne told her, showing perfect teeth in a wicked grin. A grin that reminded him of their fight a day ago, of the...respect in her eyes.
"She moved like quicksilver to catch us," Pava said, clearly following his gaze. "Well, me and Nell. Didn't Lord Knacht get you?"
Loquis' grimaced, thoughts flashing back to the crunching impact of a pillar of blue force arresting his fallbefore tossing him back onto the ice barge. "He did. Dented my battlerobes too."
"Tch. Just a side panel. You can have the Forgemaster there fix it, no?" Pava said with a shrug. The sword belted at her waist bobbed with the movement.
Loquis laughed, low and mirthlessly. "You suggest I go to Onslaught himself and asking him to repair my equipment?"
"Yeah. Isn't that, like, his thing now? Mervin says he's nice enough."
The Half-Orc stared at Pava, her skin so similar to his own for all that she was brown to his green. Skin and bone, just as me, but more different than I can imagine. "No. I'll not be doing that. The Autarch's team has better things to worry about than me."
Pava shrugged again, as if dismissing the matter entirely, and went back to inspecting her sword. The Blades made it a point to keep their weapons in perfect condition at all times, and sometimes it seemed to border on the edge of obsession. Surely a piece of metal was meaningless in the greater scheme of things. It wasn't like it was magic, after all.
Magic had been Loquis' ticket out of the Dust, just as it had for many others in the Arclight Legion. After the Battle of Haarwatch and the fall of the Eyrie, he'd lost almost everything. Then he saw it; lightning, coursing across the sky, shattering rank after rank of hideous monsters. And in the center of it, him.