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TonyLB · Joined: 09 Jun 2008 Posts: 494

Dark, clutching trees rush past in a constant sussurus of wind and staccato pounding of hooves. April, dressed now in running gear and a light cloak, hunkers down over Krugault's neck as she and a small guard of Julian's rangers tear through the night at breakneck speed, bound for the edge of certainty and the beginning of malleable shadow.

April takes a deep breath, straining to catch a hint in the cold, crisp air of the delicate perfume from the dance. A smile crosses her face ... then she ducks under an oncoming branch, and turns her focus once again to the task at hand.

"Yer Ladyship!" the lieutenant assigned to this group ... Gault? Gaunt? ... shouts over the wind. "This pace is pressin' the horses something fierce."

April frowns in reply. "Will they hold up?" she asks, her tone well-nigh accusatory.

"Yes, yer Ladyship, they'll hold up to where we part with you, but gettin' 'em back is going to be ..."

"Oh good," April interrupts in a dismissive tone. "I only need the speed to my departure point. You're welcome to take your own sweet time getting back."

Gault ... Gaunt? ... bristles. "With all due respect, yer Ladyship," he says, "If you had time for dancing and finger-food this evening, why such a sudden haste tonight?"

April glares. "The King set the time of my departure," she says. "If you think it tardy you can bring that up with HIM. From that point on though, we go at my pace, lieutenant. Clear?"

"Crystal," Gaunt ... Gault? ... responds with a dour grimace.

In a very short time indeed, they half-canter, half-stagger up to a way-house at the forest's edge. A long, straight, even road of level flag-stones stretches away under the moonlight. While Gault confers inside, gathering April's few needed supplies, April pats Krugaults head with unpracticed awkwardness. "There's a boy," she says. Krugault blows foam at her scornfully. "Oh, what?" April replies, mopping her brow, "You asking if that's the best I've got? Yeah, yeah ... I'll be back in a while, tough guy. Get your rest."

Gaunt hands over a light leather pack, and April immediately swings it up onto her back, and cinches it tight.

"You sure you won't be wanting a bit more ... well ... weaponry, yer Ladyship?" Gault asks with obvious skepticism. "There's nasty stuff out there."

"I can't afford to be all that gentle on this mission, lieutenant," April replies. "Weapons would just weigh me down. If I need a bit of extra reach, I'm sure I'll be able to find something to hand on the battlefield."

She stands and briefly stretches her legs. "Thank you, gentlemen," she says with poor grace to the assembled rangers. "I will remember your dutiful service to the King." And then, without a further word, she turns and starts running down the road.

Footfalls blend quickly from individual events to a steady, throbbing rhythm. April falls into it, her breath like a long, punctuated sigh of relief. Running in Rebma was a whole different experience, a constant shifting challenge to find the currents of water, the patterned rippling changes of its density and motion. The instant yielding of the open air, barely imparting more than a gentle shove against her rising speed, feels like falling through a door left unexpectedly ajar. As the forest recedes, April lets out a whoop, and picks up the rhythm, feeling the weight of her limbs become not burden but tool, swinging forward one after the other to carry her on.

Almost reluctantly, she reaches out to take charge of more than her own body. The long gentle downhill is tempting, a blinding straight-away where she could revel in speed, but what she needs tonight is progress. She sets her mind upon her path, and each new rise presents itself a little steeper, a little more challenging, until she is heaving breath and flinging sweat off her with each violent whip of her head. She gains altitude with an unnatural rapidity, climbing the peaks that she conjures before her, and discreetly sliding a wedding cake of foothills under the road already passed.

At a high, snowy pass, April pauses to drink deep from a pool formed by the long, slow dripping of overhanging ice. She looks down through a blanket of scudding clouds far below, to see tiny postage-stamp valleys, lit with little filamented towns.

"Ah," April says sadly, "This is way too much like cheating. I'll have to climb these fair and square some day."

Away to her left, a long line of black peaks smolder and shoot smoke. Their snowpack burned away, the mountains march through the moonlit night like an invading army, or a scar upon the white-clothed range. April frowns. "Too early to deal with you, I think," she says and as she runs down the shoulder of the slope, she cuts into them as best she can, inserting steaming white plumes and glaciers dotted with snow-rimmed hot springs. The ground goes soft and spongey, and slightly orange, and April can feel that the effort of avoiding the Road for the moment has pushed her away from the pursuit of her goal.

"Persisitent little thing, aren't you?" she murmurs. As she pounds and slides her way up a fall of scree, April decides that around the next bend will be a small, obviously poor, cottage.

The man in the cottage refuses any payment for the food he offers, clinging to traditions of hospitality long-established in these parts. April smiles and swaps tales with him, strange old hermit that he is, and when she leaves it is very probable that the harsh winter will be broken by an early spring, and the old man's vegetable garden bear like never before. The sun is climbing the sky as she turns, refreshed and renewed, to the line of broken peaks and foul stench that bars her path.

"Might as well do it all at a go then," she says, with a grim smile. As she runs, canted forward into a half-falling sprint down the slope, she pulls the terrain around her and runs into wind. She summons up flatter terrain below, and forests to clothe it, and bends all things ahead toward her intuition of her eventual goal. As she nears the volcanos, she thinks that she starts to see the occasional broken husk of titanic old windmills in the valleys far below her ... earnest of her approach closer and closer to the might-have-been that is Windborne.

Before she gets any closer, however, she finds herself running on ash and pumice, stones breaking and shifting beneath her feet. Basalt stands out like the jagged, glassy broken bones of a world, and the air reeks of sulfur. April takes stock, of muscles loose with long exertion, lungs drawing great swallows of even this putrid air, and nerves jangling a bit from anticipation.

"Ready as I'll ever be," she says to the smoke-swirled sky, and runs toward the broad, deep swath of pitch black rock that spreads horizon to horizon across her path.

Nihilistic Mind · Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 4:13 am Post subject:

April aptly avoids any trappings the terrain has to offer, adapting the length of her stride and letting the descent grant her speed as she makes her way down, madly, freely.

The foul sulfur odor she almost got used to is nothing compared to the smell of rot and carrion that hails from the large section of black rock. When she gets close enough and crosses a steady stretch of rock, she notices bodies below. Every few feet. Blackened, ash-gray, rotten. All along the road, dotting the entire path here and there. The people wore dark green uniforms of some sort. Soldiers.
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TonyLB · Joined: 09 Jun 2008 Posts: 494

"Shit," she gasps, quietly, and presses her pace. Her nerves jangle as she comes into what was obviously (and may still be) a killing zone, and she keeps her eyes focussed ahead, working to avoid throwing off her stride by any pointless search for enemies before they arise.

Nihilistic Mind · Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 6:27 pm Post subject:

April arrives to about a hundred feet of the road, having crossed difficult terrain very successfully. The stench is something she has never quite experienced before. The bodies have been putrefying for several weeks, yet she can see that some soldiers are decaying differently than others. Some are oozing slowly, literally liquefying, while others are turning to dark gray ash and crumble like aging sandstone under the elements. A few of them are infested by thumb-sized, piss-yellow larvae.
The soldiers are all wearing the same equipment and no superior officers can be identified. The weapons lying around look like rifles with bayonets sticking out of the end, but some elements are different from what she's seen before.

Down here, the wind is weaker, more like a breeze.

Everything but April's power run is quiet. No animals, no sounds. Just April and death.
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TonyLB · Joined: 09 Jun 2008 Posts: 494

April feels her throat rebelling, swallows against rising bile. Her steps falter for a moment, and she spits a mouthful of vomit onto the edge of the road. She wipes the back of her hand savagely across her mouth.

"Crap," she says, looking ahead. She takes a deep breath, and breaks into a sprint, leaping over low boulders and broken terrain as she nears the road, and then pounding out onto it with long, frantic strides, her eyes and efforts focussed on the far side.

Nihilistic Mind · Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 8:03 pm Post subject:

With her first step onto the blackened rock, she feels the winds flare and the cold sweat on her body evaporates abruptly. The heat has been turned up to uncomfortable and dizzying heights.

The cold world around April is afire and the bodies begin to rise quickly in the red cloud of her sight, some bodies crumbling over their own weight while others begin to sprint after her.
Their faces! The horror of their faces causes her to falter but her instinct is not overwhelmed: she can push herself. The faces of fallen soldiers are people that she has met throughout her life. Some that she has met, some that she has known all too well. There is no emotion transpiring here. Simply the cold efficiency of objects, with a hint of maddened sadness.

Her mother, Ian, Eric, Jean, Llewella, Caine and countless others. They all follow her or block her way. Their eyes cold and dead, their mouths slightly open.

Just a hundred and fifty feet until she can cross the width of the Road! But there, they gather, trying to anticipate her course and keep her from reaching it.
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TonyLB · Joined: 09 Jun 2008 Posts: 494

April looks out over the fifty yards separating her and her goal. Her right arm curls for a moment, unconsciously, close to her body, before the absence of anything even vaguely like a football recalls her to herself.

She starts running long, shallow diagonals, aiming at weak points in the line, forcing defenders to choose directions to shift in. She gives them opportunities to foul each other's lines, to zig when they should zag.

"So many," she gasps, as she spins away from a lurching cadaverous doppelganger of the strict tutor who tried to drum languages into her head as a child. She gives up looking for an easy open space, and starts looking merely for somewhere that the press of bodies is less, somewhere that she can bull through on raw strength and momentum.

Nihilistic Mind · Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 11:45 pm Post subject:

April makes her way through, avoiding impacting any of the risen full on. Some of them claw at her, their expression impassive, their hands freed from their sockets and crumbling as they hit the ground.

Thirty feet.

She sees it behind a small group of Brands and Julians. The blitz line is all made of Ian's and Deirdre of varied size and shape, but all of them men, all of them rottern and half-deformed. She knows backtracking is a mistake at this point, with her goal so near, but it will likely take all of her strength to power through the horde of close family members.

Twenty feet.

Impact in ten.
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TonyLB · Joined: 09 Jun 2008 Posts: 494

Her pulse quickens, and her shoulders tense. April grits her teeth as she approaches.

"So NOW you've got a problem with me running away?" she shouts angrily. "What about when I wanted someone to come after me?"

She slams elbows-first into the corpses, driving the forefront down toward those behind them and crushing their bones underfoot. With rapid, savage steps she climbs the shifting slope of fetid, reaching flesh, and when she can climb no further, she jumps.

Nihilistic Mind · Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 11:30 pm Post subject:

Landing her jump poorly, April rolls right off the road where the weather is much cooler and a tad breezier on this side.

April is covered in goo and as she gets ready to sprint again she realizes that she is not being followed. In fact, the corpses are laying a few feet apart from each other, dotting the Black Road just as before. All of them the mundanely-visaged soldiers, faceless victims that they were before.

Additionally, looking down, she sees the gore and coagulated entrails are no longer soiling her person. Soon thereafter, she cannot feel it on her person at all.
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TonyLB · Joined: 09 Jun 2008 Posts: 494

April pants. "It wasn't ... they weren't... " She shakes herself, and brushes unconsciously at her clothes.

"Nasty," she says at long last. "Well, I don't know what you boys were after. I don't know whether your mission was noble or base ... but I do know that nobody deserves to go the way you did. I hope you've found peace on the other side of the great veil. I wish I could give you a proper burial, but ...."

She sighs, stands for a few moments in quiet with her hands clasped, then turns away and starts running down the slope again.

Nihilistic Mind · Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 5:22 am Post subject:

She is surprised by a crow, behind her, just a few feet away, cawing at her, the sounds echoing.

Several miles down the slope, behind cloudy vapors, it looks like the mountain grade begins to change. The angle is weird here, does it lead to flat land or a cliff, she does not know yet.
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TonyLB · Joined: 09 Jun 2008 Posts: 494

She reaches out to take hold of the scenery once again, casting about her for the landmark wind that she had achieved before the interference of the road, pushing to reach Windborne quickly, now that the obstacle is (she hopes) past.

Nihilistic Mind · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2008 8:10 am Post subject:

The wind is still there, not as intense so near to the black mark scarring the land. In the valley below, she can see, beyond cloudy mists, valleys and rocky hills, forests and a large city way down to her left with tall gray structures. The winds are strong and sway even the largest oaks down in the forests near the base of the mountain.

The crow continues cawing repeatedly behind her.
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TonyLB · Joined: 09 Jun 2008 Posts: 494

April pulls up and cocks her head, looking at the strangely insistent crow.

"What, girl?" she says, taking a few steps back. "You got something to tell me?"