tMFUtM - b1c12 - Murderous Skies (Patreon)

AN: Sorry I'm a bit late, got an unexpected call that might lead to some work in the future. We'll see what unfolds from that.

Rugrim was nursing something of a bad mood that night. That in and of itself wasn’t exactly uncommon, but for once in his loamy life he had no idea why he was even nursing a foul temperament! Everything was going well, for stone’s sake! His secret was out of the crate, but his party had accepted it with far more grace than he ever had. Origin was even working on some theories for how to help him keep his magic well-behaved—not that he expected much from the silt-minded demon.

Everything was completely okay, yet he was restless and ready to punch something. Or someone.

Since sleep was beyond his reach, Rugrim abandoned his tent and borrowed the spare tent from the ever-vigilant Tin. They were camped in the ruins of some long-abandoned estate on the edge of a tranquil lake, so he might as well bathe, surfacer-style.

It wasn’t like he had joined the others when they indulged in the water earlier. Oh, he had been invited, of course. Multiple times, even. But he politely declined the offers from both Origin and an unsurprisingly shameless Dawn.

The spare tent became a privacy screen readily enough. And only within its privacy did Rugrim remove his armor, one strap at a time. Each piece was carefully stacked on dry ground, with his underthings folded on top.

And then, with some measure of trepidation, he slipped into the water.

Surface water lacked the all-encompassing chill of the underground water sources he was used to. Of course, no dwarf worth a stone would think to dip any part of themselves in those directly—they were precious sources of water that everyone drank from and relied upon. And no one wanted some dwarf’s foot muck in their beer.

Yet there Rugrim was, waist-deep in tepid surface-water. As if that was somehow a rational thing to do. If not for the fact that his entire party—minus Tin, of course—had already done the same, he would have refused to do the same. A bucket of water and a cloth had served him well enough.

He grumbled and raised a calloused hand to the scars on his chest, tracing them. The older he got, the more he hated the unsightly things. They were nothing more than a constant reminder that he’d been born into a flawed body.

For years, he wondered if that defect had been why the S.T.A.F.F. and Tehmpp’s people judged him unworthy to become a miner, but he knew better than that.

After all, he had forced his way into their files and seen the truth with his own eyes, back during his younger and more rebellious years. The mucking exam was legitimately reviewed. He, like every other unhappy youth he had gathered, was exactly where ‘tradition’ demanded that they be. There was no greater conspiracy.

And exceedingly little sympathy for the folly of youth.

The bruises faded, but his scars never would. That somehow felt unfair—at least the bruises were his own muddy fault.

But there was a reason that Rugrim refused to bathe or steam himself or otherwise undress around other people, dwarf or otherwise. Even when they had the muddy decency not to ask questions, their eyes always lingered. There were some secrets a man preferred to keep, for the love of every last rock.

Bizarrely, bathing did not improve his mood.

<L2 Divide>

“I’m not liking the look of those clouds.” Origin just had to break the first bit of comfortable silence that they’d managed since breakfast.

“That would be why I had us take the higher road.” Tin’s tonal variance wasn’t quite as emotive as a normal person’s would be, but at least they had a properly scathing deadpan.

“We’ll be fiiiine, I’ve been through this area plenty of times! Thrice, even! And even when it rained, it never got too treacherous.” Dawn seemed to be operating under the highly mistaken impression that her limited experience was somehow either comprehensive or reassuring.

The skies had been clear when they broke camp, but ever since they resumed their journey north, clouds had gathered and aggressively bred—or however that worked—until the entire sky was covered in an ever-darkening orgy of greys. Thunder, because ‘oh, sometimes the sky roars’ was something that people just accepted, was becoming increasingly frequent and the flashes of light that preceded them seemed to be growing closer to their position.

“My master is insisting that adequate shelter needs to be procured. Immediately, if not sooner.” The spark-slinging nonsense on Steel’s robes translated the tiny being’s excitable chitters.

“I’m telling you, we’re fine, a little rain never hurt anyone!” Dawn was usually quick to please, but for whatever reason the fey woman chose obstinance.

And with those stubborn words, the first raindrops fell as the sky darkened precipitously—directly over their heads and nowhere else.

“MOVE!” Tin was the first to react, seizing Steel and Souna in their hands as they bodily hurled them aside.

Leaving Origin, Dawn, themself, and—oh yes, lest anyone forget—Rugrim directly beneath the thing that emerged from the clouds. Dawn drew her weapons, of course she did, but neither Origin nor Rugrim quite managed a coherent response in time.

Birds were one of the more interesting surface creatures that Rugrim had encountered. Instead of being armored in chitin, fur, or slime, like most sensible creatures, their so-called feathers gave them a sleek appearance that allowed them to take wing in the sky. They were unlike anything he had seen from the more familiar creatures that he knew, at least aside from their faces. Most beaks just looked like oddly formed mandibles, which was a common enough issue with subterranean creatures.

He hadn’t encountered a beak that was filled with serrated teeth until that moment, and he could have done without the experience in general.

A bird that was roughly the same size as their party’s golem slammed into the ground, directly where Origin had once stood, with enough force that even Rugrim was briefly staggered. The creature’s feathers, talons, and beak wore the deepest shades of black, which made its vibrant—seemingly luminous—yellow eyes all the more striking in contrast. Water and sparks scattered from its feathers as it spread its wings, unleashing a cacophonous caw that was half a roar.

And then Dawn leapt onto its back and tried to stab it with her little needly sword.

Things didn’t go wrong immediately—not any more than they already were, at least. In fact, the bird seemed to completely ignore her antics. Or at least it did, up until she tried cracking her whip against its left eye.

“Do not provoke it, it—!” Whatever warning Souna had for them, it came too late to stop the madness.

Rugrim’s world turned a vivid shade of purple, too bright to make any sense of anything. An instant later, the sound arrive—no longer a distant roar of the sky’s fury, but a kinetic impact that drove even him off of his feet, even as his body jerked and seized. There was an acrid smell too, similar to metal that had been clumsily overheated in a forge by a novice. But more than anything, the light seared and burned its way through both his eyes and flesh.

The next thing he knew, he was on the ground—drenched by the downpour—as he struggled to blink the spots out of his eyes. There were shapes and sounds, likely important ones, but he struggled to make sense of any of it!

Someone touched him and a gentle warmth suffused his body, just as that insufferable ringing was finally silenced. Honestly, how could any dwarf think with so much noise?!

His vision cleared to behold Tin—glowing with heat and steaming as rain fell upon them—grappling with a bird. But the truly absurd thing was that the bird seemed to be winning as it contested the ancient golem’s strength. Tin’s feet left deep trenches in the sodden ground as the oversized bird drove them back, flapping its wings in an effort to dislodge their arms from its shoulders (assuming birds have shoulders, Rugrim was no expert on bird facts).

There was no sign of Dawn or Origin. But Souna was at Rugrim’s side, and—

“No!” Rugrim refocused away from the ongoing conflict. Sure, the battle was important, but some things were a true emergency. Like the fact that his beloved beard had poofed up like a startled tunnel ferret!

The jagged black lines in his vision weren’t an aftereffect of the blinding light; they were stray strands of his ebony masterpiece pointing upward in defiance of stone and reason!

“Rugrim, if you’re alive get Dawn and find Origin! Hurry!” Tin’s voice dragged him—metaphorically kicking and screaming—back to the unfolding crisis.

He wanted to ignore the demand and focus on his own muddy problems for once, but for whatever sand-strewn reason, his heart was convinced there was an impossible note of fear in the golem’s words. He forced himself to his feet and started to run. Already, water poured over the ground, but his boots were sturdy and he was blessed with dwarven stability. The footing was nowhere near treacherous enough to cause him issues.

Dawn was on her side, almost a dozen meters away from where she once was. Like his beard, her multicolored hair was afflicted with a defiance of reason, but the downpour was steadily taming both sets of unruly hair. She was awake, but there was a jagged scorch across the breastplate of her armor.

“Can you walk?” Rugrim was already bending down, even before the wounded woman weakly shook her head.

Enfeebled or not, Dawn’s grip on her weapons was downright impressive. He was no slouch when it came to his own musculature—mining was no place for a weak arm—but he really struggled to pry her fingers off of the grips so he could shove the rapier into its sheath and spool the whip over her stomach.

“I thought… stormbirds were… extinct.” Dawn slowly wheezed out the words while he worked, not that he had any possible answer for them. It wasn’t like he knew anything about the surface’s nonsense!

Rugrim stood, lifting the larger woman in his arms, and tried to peer through the downpour to find where Origin could have gone. From his point of view, it truly looked like the bird had come down on top of him, but he refused to write the demon off—he had seen far too much to believe that any of his party could have perished so easily.

And for good reason.

Shadows seemed to erupt from the ground like a geyser, flowing over themselves as they formed a sight Rugrim had only seen once—Origin’s other form. The towering demon surged in size as all four of his clawed feet dug deep into the ground. A single limb lashed out, effortlessly overpowering the almighty avian. In mere moments, Origin had their adversary pinned in the mud, as he leaned in toward it. Water poured down his craggy carapace, directly onto the bird’s head, as Origin’s six malevolent eyes glared down at it.

“You thought you could crush me?!” Once again, Origin’s voice twisted into a booming and overtly feminine mockery of his usual soft-spoken nature.

And with that he leveled the claw-like digits of his other hand at the beast’s head as a pink light began to gather.

“Original, no! That is the juvenile!” Souna managed to project her voice—somehow—to cut through the howling winds that were building in ferocity by the moment.

…Ah. Stiffly, Rugrim raised his head and looked upward, just as Origin did.

And there two additional stormbirds hovered, beating their wings to keep themselves in place, heedless of the driving winds they created with every repetition.

“RUN!” Tin gave the order.

And no one hesitated to follow it.