Chapter 16 #2
Then the ground heaved with a localized, focused violation.
The stone flagging in front of the chapel's heavy wooden doors bulged, cracked, and exploded as something massive and wrong clawed its way into the open air.
It was a vaguely humanoid shape, but made of shifting, fractured rock and screaming voids where a face should be.
It unraveled the earth with every step, leaving a trail of dust and structural failure behind it.
"Rupture!" Fly yelled, his voice sharp with alarm. "North, it's coming for you!"
North bellowed his defiance and stood his ground.
The air filled then with the beat of wings.
Flash burst into eagle form, a bolt of variegated red, white, and blue shot through with bronze, and climbed for the high winds.
Lechuza shimmered into the white owl, a silent, spectral shape that drank the light around her as she rose.
Easy, a low-slung predator of explosive grace in cougar form, melted into the cover of a crumbling wall.
Twister's white feathers were a stark, beautiful contrast to the gathering chaos as he took the swan.
Fly snapped open into the kite, a graceful, angular shape that rode the turbulent currents with instinctive ease, climbing fast for the height where he could read the whole fight at once.
Rupture ignored the birds and Easy. It lumbered toward North, its presence alone setting the dusty stones of the chapel groaning.
It raised a fist of shattered granite and slammed it down.
The shockwave hit North, a concentrated blast of anti-stability that tried to sever him from his footing.
He dug in, hooves gouging deep furrows, his weight and his stubborn will absorbing the assault.
The scream tore down from above and behind, out of a long, ragged shape that didn't belong to anything that had ever lived, a high, piercing note that sliced through the air.
Its wings were too wide, its joints bent wrong, a skeleton of a sky-hunter with a translucent membrane full of crawling light, and shifting, confusing symbols.
The sound penetrated inside his head, and North bore it as it poured over the clearing and stripped the birds from the air.
Flash faltered mid-climb, his keen vision suddenly betraying him.
The eagle's certain line broke into a stagger, his wings beating frantically at currents that had stopped making sense.
He loosed a furious screech, fighting the static.
Lechuza's silent glide turned into a desperate struggle just to stay level, her mastery of the unseen short-circuited, the air gone to false signals and dead ends as she veered wildly.
Twister tumbled, his inner song of healing a wavering counterpoint to the attack, and even he couldn't hold his course.
But it was Fly who suffered most. The kite, so dependent on reading the subtle shifts of the air, came completely undone.
The scream didn't just break his balance.
It erased his ability to interpret the world.
The thermals vanished, the wind became a meaningless roar, and his instinct for flight went out of him all at once.
His wings tangled. The kite lost its lift, and Fly dropped from the sky like a broken toy, a silent, falling shape against the vast, unforgiving blue.
North reached for him through the bond and found nothing there to hold. Where Fly's bright, restless pattern should have answered, there was only a dark, slack quiet. This monstrosity had been built for one target, and the focused attack had knocked him clean out.
"FLY!" North bellowed, a deep, guttural rumble that shook the chapel to its old foundations.
He couldn't go to him. Rupture was on him, stone fists raining down blows that would have shattered a lesser creature. North handled the impacts, his body taking the punishment, his hooves the only thing still rooted in a world coming apart.
The scream washed over North too. The clearing spun, the broken walls slid out of their places, the mountain itself seemed to roll over, and the sky and the earth traded sides.
He stood in the middle of the spinning world, and he knew exactly where he was.
It was the same way he'd always known, before the Veil, before any of it.
The horizon was gone, and his footing dissolved, but he knew where he was the way his grandfather had known, by what was real and what wasn't. The most real thing in that whole screaming clearing was Fly, falling, and his team, and the bond that ran between all of them like a road only North could still see.
Across the broken air, Flash's voice hit him through that bond, ragged and lost. North, where are we?
Right where we're supposed to be, North said, and he threw his will through his channel.
Flash caught it first and steadied, his line through the air going clean again.
Lechuza found her level a heartbeat later, the false signals burning off as North's certainty reached her.
Twister came back last, his tumble slowing, his own song finding its key again now that he had something solid to sing against. North pumped his truth into each of them.
"Fly's out," North forced through the bond, the words heavy and blunt. "Catch him."
Above them, Flash folded his wings and dove.
Lechuza dropped with him, the two of them cutting down through the broken air toward the falling shape, and where one of them faltered, the other held the line, the eagle and the owl matching each other stroke for stroke the way they'd been matching each other since the glade.
They reached Fly a body's length above the stone.
Flash got under him, and Lechuza checked the fall, and together they bore him down and laid him out on the cracked flagging, limp and pale, but breathing.
Easy exploded from cover, a blur of tawny fury at Rupture's flank, trying to draw its attention.
Twister’s surge of healing poured down the bond and into both Fly and North, sudden and fierce, wrapping the worst of Rupture's damage in cool light. Fly’s wings fluttered. The pain in North’s battered body dulled to something he could fight through.
North lowered his head. His brother was down and safe for the moment. The team was whole and standing, and the breaker of foundations was still between him and all of them. He set his hooves and started forward into it. Fly needed him, Llika’s warning filling his mind.
Rupture’s impact rumbled through his body as North drove forward with all three thousand pounds, horns sawing from side to side, shaving off rock and debris, slowing the blows down marginally.
The assassin caught him with a fist of fused granite that should have turned his skull.
He took it across the brow and kept coming, and the two of them slammed together in the broken courtyard with a sound like a quarry coming apart.
The fucking tumble of rock gave ground. Half a step.
Then it set its feet in earth it could unmake at will and started taking North apart.
The blows came faster than anything that size should move.
North weathered them the only way he knew, planted and low, taking what he couldn't avoid, and the cost mounted with every strike.
A fist caved the wind out of him, breaking ribs.
Another opened a gash above his eye that ran red and hot into his vision.
The ground under his hooves kept trying to leave, going soft and treacherous wherever he set his weight, so that holding his footing took strength he needed for the fight.
He was bleeding from a dozen places, and the assassin hadn't slowed at all.
From out of nowhere, Easy hit Rupture's flank in a blur of tawny muscle, claws raking down its side.
Massive claws dragged through the fractured rock, and the stone crumbled, sloughing away in a grinding cascade, the clean lines of it going ragged and wrong.
The thing screamed through its faceless voids and swung, but Easy was already gone, flowing back into cover before the blow stuck, leaving a ruined gouge down Rupture's side that wept dust.
It turned to follow him, and that was the opening.
Flash dropped out of the high air with purpose.
The eagle hit the assassin's raised arm with both deadly talons and the force of the dive, and the limb shattered, a whole section of granite forearm breaking loose and tumbling to the flagging.
Lechuza came in silently behind him, her talons finding the seam where the arm met the shoulder.
With her wings beating the air with powerful strokes, the joint tore loose.
The two of them worked it from the air in tandem, one drawing the strike, the other taking the piece the strike left open, and Rupture couldn't catch either of them.
Every time it built its stone back up, gathering the rubble of itself into a fist or a club, the eagle or the owl was there to break the shape before it finished, scattering the rock before it could become a weapon.
The assassin simply made more of itself.
It tore fresh stone out of the chapel's old foundations, out of the mountain under them, drawing rubble up into its body to replace what Easy gouged and Flash broke, and it never stopped hammering North while it did it.
For every piece they cost it, it stole two from the ground.
North stood in the center of it and took the blows meant to break him, so the others could keep cutting it down.
Twister's song reached him in waves. Each time North's legs threatened to buckle, the healing poured over and into him, cool and sure, knitting what Rupture tore, dulling the worst of the damage to something he could endure.
He felt the cost of it on the other end, Twister spending himself in steady, draining pulses to keep him on his feet.
He kept the assassin's attention fixed on the one target it couldn't seem to put down.