Amber’s fist goes through the wall we’ve been hanging from, and she screams in a mix of pain and release. I can smell the blood, but she can fix herself up, and I can’t afford to fall, so as she lets go with her other hand and punches again I focus on my grip around her. Even focusing as I am, I almost slide when she kicks; maybe on the other side of almost, but I catch myself. She grabs me under one shoulder as she feels me start to slip, and I’m grateful for it despite probably having stabilized, because everything is moving fast and I’m starting to lose it.
I climb her like a metal-covered tree, shutting everything out of my mind, until my arms are around the back of her neck and my feet are on her legs with my back pressed against the wall, in the middle of that rectangle of weakness I’d arranged. The tears flow, maybe for a moment, maybe for a minute, maybe for longer; I lose track of time, I scream incoherently towards the formless void between dimensions below us, and I come back to myself eventually.
She’s shifted a little, but she’s still mostly in the same place, smiling at me with this calm, reassuring look on her face. “Better?”
“Yeah.” I wipe my eyes on the cuff of my jacket, thanking my ancestors for the fact that I don’t get all snot-drippy when I cry. I’ll have to cough up a glob of gunk eventually, and that’ll be disgusting and awful, but it only takes me a few moments to look like I’m somewhat less of a horror and more of a person, once I’m done crying. “Sorry about that.”
“Sorry for what reason?”
“Well, I mean, I did just spend however long being useless?” I sort of try to smile, and it probably comes out weird. She doesn’t say anything, just looks at me, face to face instead of having to tilt her head down for once, and smiles back at me. “Um. Thank you for saving us.”
“I am glad that you had a plan, in the end.”
“Yeah.”
We sit there for a moment, just sort of staring past each other, or at least I’m staring past her into the tenebrous stillness past her head. She says something, and I startle. “Adam?”
“Oh! Yeah, what?” It’s hard to focus my eyes on her, and I’m breathing a little hard for some reason. “Sorry, I was staring. Out. Maybe I shouldn’t.”
“Air into motion.” She’s breathing hard, too, and I’m not sure why.
“What?” I’m not paying enough attention, I think. Air into motion, she’s saying, but her lips are so kissable, and I lean forward to taste them, but she turns her head. I’m undeterred; her jawline is gorgeous too, and I nuzzle the few decimeters of it that are available until the helmet-bits start.
She’s still talking, and the words eventually sink in. “Your Motes, Adam. Please. Move the air.”
Her words don’t make any sense for a little bit. Move the air? I don’t… well, I do have an air glyph. My thoughts are sluggish, but if Amber wants something, that’s all the cognition that needs to be involved, really, and it’s not like it interferes with enjoying her. I can do these Motes, sure, and then I’ll take her helmet off, and kiss my way up her jawline and down her neck.
Air-aspected orb, motes of empowering and amplification, and the motive force glyph that seems vaguely appropriate. My vision is a little blurry, but I don’t need my sight for this; the orb has everything that’s left of… has everything that it needs.
The stillness shatters when the orb fires, and the cool, fresh taste of fresh air floods my senses. The wind catches at my clothes and my loose arms start to lose their grip, but Amber has me pressed between her armored body and the wall behind me, and the moment of danger passes as the wind settles into something steadier, something that less risks blowing us off. Well, blowing me off; Amber is anchored like she’s never going to leave, both arms and both feet dug deeply into the holes she punched through the wall, looking like she could casually hold us both up there forever.
“What was that?”
“Stillness,” Amber says softly.
“Stillness,” I repeat. My voice is betraying my bafflement. “Oh. Oh.” I look over to where the air orb is spinning, a wide plume of motion coming off of it. “Oh, that’s nasty. There was no breeze up top, was there? But here it’s a whole nother level.”
“Adam,” Amber says, and then she stops.
“What’s on your mind?” I look up at her face. I’m not shaking, not exactly, but the fact that we almost just suffocated in a bubble of our own CO2 exhaust is kind of horrifying. Talk about categories of disaster, that’s one that I trained on and even so I didn’t notice the effects on my mind until it was too late. “I could use a distraction, I think. That … just happened.”
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“I don’t wish,” she starts saying, and then stops again. “You don’t have to…”
“Please just ask your question.” I hug her as best I can. It’s not much of a hug, in part because I have no leverage and in part because I’m already being sandwiched between chainmail and unyielding wall. “Always, always please just ask your question.”
I might have put too much emotion into that one, because Amber’s face goes weird and soft, and then she nods. “What happened when you looked down? I see only darkness. You reacted… very strongly.”
“Um.” I take a breath, let it out. Almost like testing a broken bone, I poke the thought, expecting a bolt of panic and anguish that doesn’t happen. Maybe I got it all out of my system for now? Surfeited, temporarily. “Super short version, when I look down I see the Void Between; not even the negaspace, the nothing-space. We…” I stop myself. “Super short version, right. I was four weeks adrift with no anchor or tether in the Void Between by the time I charted a path out and wound up here.” It feels like nothing to say, there’s no emotional resonance between my brain and the words, so I think I’ve somehow managed to find myself in a place, biochemically, where all of my emotion is spent, if that’s even a thing. “For most of that time I knew, knew I was lost forever. No navigator’s ever come out the other end of an unanchored jump.”
“And so sad a story had I never heard in my day, I’m sure.”
“Zidanya!” My thought that maybe my emotions are spent or unavailable vanish like a fog under a searchlight. “You found us!!”
“Did I not tell you that I’d not so easily depart you?”
Tears prickle the corners of my eyes for a moment, and I feel a little choked up. “Yeah.” My tentative word is quiet, but then I take a breath and firm up a little. “Yeah. You did.” The grin feels like it’s threatening to split my face in two. “I just thought that… I do something absolutely, ridiculously stupid and wind up face to face with the Void, and Amber has to send us rocketing off into some random wall, and I don’t exactly expect to see you show up.”
“Hmph.” Zidanya’s voice is a little closer. I can’t see her, looking in the direction where she’s coming from, and a second later I laugh at myself. We’re being lit up by a glow that’s emanating out of Amber, so of course I can’t see Zidanya; there’s no ambient light any more than there’s ambient airflow, and I glance quickly at the orb that’s still chugging away to make sure that it’s still counteracting that. “Didst better than I’d expected with the airflow runes. You’ve a defter touch with the glyph-joins than I’d thought.”
“Thanks.” I smile at her, or at where she’s approaching from. “Coming from you, that means something.”
“Hmph. Defter than a babe is no room for complacency.” She says something else, but she’s moved into visibility, into the bubble of light, and I lose a few seconds looking at her.
It’s not for the usual reason, which boils down to her being a stunningly beautiful woman with a penchant for wielding both her curves and muscles to distract me. Mind you, the usual reason as a phrase is a little thing, since I’ve barely met her, but either way, this isn’t that; no, it’s more the spider-leg exosuit.
We’ve got a few kinds of arthropods that can walk up and across sheer walls. Mostly they do it by way of some really cool interactions with the laws of physics, different ones depending on the kind of arthropod and I think there might even be some tetrapods that do it, and I’m babbling because Zidanya is walking across a perfectly smooth vertical surface in a spider-leg exosuit and I want one.
The legs articulate smoothly, and she flows across the expanse of metal towards us. There’s eight of them doing the moving, with two shorter legs tapping at the wall, doing I’m not sure what, and all of the legs flow into a sort of exoskeletal suit that wraps around her torso and hips, and suddenly I realize that I’m staring and ignoring her, and flush with embarrassment.
“Sorry about that.” I gesture with one hand vaguely in her direction as she pulls up to us, inasmuch as I can, given my position. “Your suit is…”
“Do you find it off-putting, Magelord?” There’s a bit of growl in her voice.
“No?” I say it without thought, letting the confusion show. “Why would I find it off-putting? It’s amazing, is what it is. Is that something I can learn? Because really, that looks like an enormous amount of fun, and it has style to its, like, what are the little legs called?”
“Pedipalps.” The growl is gone. “It’s from a Skill of my own lineage, Mimic Nature. I think you would struggle to find a path to it, and I should not have been able to use it; a reckoning I’ll expect, when it fades.”
“Oh. Yeah.” I blink a few times, and then gesture towards the wall, leaving a mental note to talk to her about everything she’d just said. “So. Uh, not that there’s any rush, since Amber is apparently a titan capable of holding the world on her shoulders, but got any ideas for this?”
Zidanya smiles, slow and narrow. “I may, at that,” she says, and I feel some tension go out of my back and legs. “Aye, I think I may. We’ll be using your plan, harder.”