Façades

[PepsiWhirda]

It seemed like years since she'd slept.

There was no fatigue. The pain in her back had settled to a dull ache as the contagion grew flesh and restitched muscle and sinew. She wasn't hungry, or thirsty, or so concerned for her safety that manning a watch felt like a necessity. In the wake of their battle against the tarrasque, it seemed everything in the moors had collectively gone into hiding, as if they understood the gravity of what lurked beyond the horizon. They hadn't so much as glimpsed movement across the vast plains during a day of walking. In the night, there was no sound.

Blues fell asleep soon after midnight, but still Whirda couldn't sleep. It could be chalked up to the adrenaline of victory. In the span of a day she had beheaded a colossal primordial beast, defeated dozens of drow, and taken up arms beside Blues, her tireless companion, to bring a handful of enemy Primes to their knees. To anyone else, that would justify her restlessness; to Whirda, it felt as though her very humanity was slipping through her fingers.

She cradled the reward for her hard-fought triumph in her arms, sitting on the cold ground with the trunk of a mottled aspen against her back. The buckler looked to have been crafted from one of the tarrasque's impossibly dense scales, the edges smoothed to a circle, with straps underneath to be worn on the forearm, allowing her to keep her hand free. The image had formed in her head the moment she placed her hands on the swirling orb of omnilium, as if simply by imagining the prize she wanted, it had sprung into being. The mysteries of the Omniverse never ceased to amaze her.

The moon scudded inexorably through the low clouds like a doomed man led to execution. Whirda listened to the low hum of Blues's armor as it repaired the damage wrought by tarrasque and Prime alike. They had set a course for Darkshire the day prior, at the preteen machine's insistence. Whirda wondered if the trek would prove as futile as last time, when the very town she crusaded for, whose children she had rescued from the shade, had turned her away like just another creature of darkness wandering the wastes. She wondered where else she could go. Who would accept the woman with the shade's contagion running through her veins?

When the sun climbed over the distant mountains and poked its rays through the dusty haze, Whirda nudged Blues with one foot. "Let's go," she said. Her voice sounded foreign after six hours of silence, hanging in the air for an awkward beat before dissipating.

Blues rose almost instantly, leading her to question if he had truly been sleeping at all. "Should make it to Darkshire by nightfall," he said, looking across the empty plain.

"And then?" Whirda asked, arcing one eyebrow.

"Back on the trail," Blues shrugged. "Like you said, Scylla's still out there."

Whirda nodded, but couldn't muster a reply. She knew it was her duty, but the idea of setting off on yet another bloody campaign across the moors turned her stomach. It felt more and more hopeless to slam her mortal frailty against the bulwark of the evils present in this world. She would be crushed to dust before it gave an inch.

"You okay?" Blues asked, frowning. The kid seemed immune to pessimism, always ready for the fight ahead. By Whirda's estimation, it was what made him mighty.

"Fine," she lied, turning her back on the preteen machine. She strapped her new buckler to her wrist, hefted Dobson's still-full pack of supplies over her shoulder, and started walking. "Let's just get this over with."