Warsinger James Baldwin (read this if TXT) 📖

at a time, found their positions. They slid in like IVs, attaching to the backs of her hands, the inside of her elbows, the outer sides of her knees, and - most disturbingly - to her chest. I winced as it hooked in through the skin just under her collarbone. Suri flinched at that one, and the video feed abruptly cut.

Rin gasped. “Suri!?”

“What's happening?” Karalti rubbed against me anxiously, nuzzling her cheek against my shoulder.

“I don't know.” I looked up along Withering Rose's body, listening, scanning for movement, for signs of life.

The Warsinger did not move... but as we waited, keen to any change that would suggest Suri was still alive, the temperature of the room started to go up. I took another step back as a wave of heat washed over us, and frowned as heat haze began to gather around the sharp points of her feet. Embers crawled up along the dull metal spikes that formed her lower legs... more and more of them, in arcane designs that wove together until they suddenly turned red hot. Boiling wind blasted us from a hundred feet away, sending me skidding and Karalti tumbling over with a squeak of protest.

“Holy shit,” I whispered. “It fucking works.”

There was a deep squealing groan from deep inside Withering Rose's body, and the golden shards shuddered and began to float. As we watched, huddling back near the door, they lifted along fine snapping tendrils of mana and assembled into a corona that spun around into place behind Withering Rose's back, hovering in a vortex of heat.

“Suri?” I called to her with my voice, then via P.M. “Suri! Are you in there?”

Slowly, jerkily, Withering Rose's head turned to look back at us. The dust laid over the metal by centuries of rest was starting to burn away, leaving streaks of black soot. Fire licked out from the grille of her helmet. Karalti hissed and shrunk back. Beautiful as it was, there was something... wrong about it. Wrong about the way it stared at us without eyes, predatory and effortlessly arrogant. A helpless wave of fear washed through me, rooting me to the floor the way that the Rostori Brute had done to Suri until suddenly, the Warsinger dropped its face and looked down at one of its own hands.

“I'm here.” Suri's voice rang out from unseen speakers, seemingly from everywhere. “But I'm... I'm fighting something. Something evil. It’s like… it’s trying to crawl back into me.”

“The Drachan,” I said, swallowing. “It’s the Drachan spirit bound to the Warsinger. You have to fight it.”

“Its name...” Suri trailed off. “My gods... it's horrible...”

“Fight it!” I lunged forward against Karalti's grip.

Withering Rose curled her hand into a fist as embers began to crawl through her limbs and up along her spine.

“This is bizarre. I can feel everything.” The Warsinger shuddered, a sound that sent a rattling rumble through its massive frame. “The air on my skin, my hands... I can hear you speaking. But I can see all the way around. And this... thing... pushing me. These Drachan? They're awful, Hector. All it wants to do is destroy. You, Karalti, me, the world. Itself. Everything. It hates everything.”

“Don't let it get in your head!” Karalti called out, her telepathic voice ringing like a bell.

“You have to control it!” Rin added to the chorus.

“I can. I am.” Suri - not Withering Rose, but Suri - craned her head up toward the ceiling. “There’s some tutorials in here… and see those lines in the floor? This platform is an elevator. I can make it rise and we can get out of here. To tell you the truth, I don't want to be in this thing any longer than I have to be. It’s creeping me the hell out.”

“What's it capable of?” I held my arm up against the wind, heading toward it.

“At the moment? Not a hell of a lot. I'm getting alerts every minute telling me that it's only at four percent power and twenty percent integrity. But I got a Path change, and a tutorial. I've got to level up as a Warsinger Pilot. It's got its own Combat Ability tree: Physical attacks, energy attacks, sonic weapons, and a mass combat tree... I've only got four things I can do so far.”

Karalti and I crossed the lines, standing as close as we dared. I'd gotten used to riding and living with a creature larger than me, a creature capable of absently stepping on me and turning me into sandwich spread if she wasn't careful. But Withering Rose was a whole new level of huge. Suri wouldn't even have to try to crush either of us - or incinerate us. The heat gathering around her spiked feet was so intense that the stone directly underneath then was turning red.

“Alright. Here we go.” Haltingly, Suri laid the hand of Withering Rose down on the floor. “There should be just enough mana to get us out.”

We heard a series of clunks and thumps beneath us. There was a rumble over our heads, and I looked up on reflex as panels slid back, opening the ceiling from the center and letting a torrent of sand rush in. The rumbling was so intense it drove Karalti and I to our knees, and as the platform began to rise, we stayed that way, pinned by gravity, falling sand, and the intense vibrations. The elevator pitched from side to side under the artifact's weight, cranking its way up, and up. Suri shielded us from the worst of it, resting on hands and knees over Karalti and I as the platform vanished into a tan haze of desert sand... and then we burst through it, rising to the surface of the desert with a resounding BOOM that echoed over the empty wasteland.

“Joy. Every fucking sandworm in two hundred miles now knows we're here,” I said.

“Yeah. And… uhh…” Suri’s voice, transmitted through the grille of the Warsinger’s helmet, seemed to ring across the entire desert. “How the hell are we