Chapter 16 #3
But he was tiring in a way that healing couldn't touch.
Twister could close the wounds. He couldn't pour strength back into a body that had been giving everything it had for too long.
North's great sides heaved. His head hung lower between his shoulders with each pass.
The blows that he'd shrugged off at the start now drove him back a hoof's length, then two, and the ground he gave up was ground the team couldn't afford.
Rupture pressed into the gap, relentless, rebuilding itself faster than they could break it down, and somewhere behind North on the cracked flagging lay Fly, still and pale and out of the fight, with nothing between him and the breaker of foundations but a buffalo running out of road.
He planted his hooves, but the stone was slick with pulverized dust, and they slid. Driving down harder, seeking purchase, he’d hold until there was nothing left of him to give, and then he'd give more.
Then the monstrosity screamed again.
The sound descended a second time, and North was slower to meet it.
The disorientation struck him and didn’t dissipate as fast as the first time.
His sense of balance slid loose for a terrifying breath before he hauled it back by sheer will.
He pulled himself level through stubbornness alone.
While his head was still ringing, Rupture's stone fist caught him square in the ribs.
Two threats, and he couldn't deal with both at the same time.
Flash. Lechuza. Take the flyer. Now. He threw the thought down the bond, hard and clear.
Flash broke off his assault on Rupture and climbed, the white owl a pale shadow at his wing, and the two of them went up after the screaming thing.
North felt their loss at once. Without the air working Rupture's flanks, the assassin came at him whole, unhindered, and he gave ground he didn't want to give.
He needed the flyer dead, and he needed it dead fast.
Easy. Go. Finish it.
The cougar broke cover and ran for the rise where Flash and Lechuza had driven it low.
North held Rupture alone while it happened.
Flash and Lechuza pinned the thing against the broken air, and Easy went up its body in a single tawny surge, taking its throat out.
The scream cut off mid-note. Something vast and wrong came apart in the sky and fell in pieces that were dust before they hit the ground.
One down. North had time to feel it land in his chest as something close to hope.
Then two shapes walked out of the chapel's broken doorway, and the hope went cold.
Severance and Null. The bond-breaker moved like a wound in the air, trailing the sense of every connection it had ever poisoned.
Null came forward as an absence, a place where meaning stopped, and North's mind slid off it the way a hand slides off wet glass.
They didn't look at him. They looked past him, at the cracked flagging where Fly lay struggling to his talons, his wings fluttering wildly.
Rupture pinned him in place, the air support was gone, Easy was a hundred yards up the slope, and between the soul-takers and Fly, there was nothing at all.
He let his massive, shaggy head drop, steam hissing from his wide nostrils in a heavy white plume.
He reached past his mind’s illusion that he’d given everything he had, past the raw, tearing heat in his immense lungs and the leaden failure of his hooves, delving deep into that sixty percent left waiting when the forty had been utterly expended.
The physical agony went cold, numbing out as his human consciousness detached from the flesh, surrendering entirely to the great beast he had become.
The fire he’d built in BUD/S surged here, the hardened mental armor of Hell Week colliding with the heavy, hollow ache of the man who had weathered Mei’s death. He burned his grief as fuel, feeling it expand inside a ribcage wide enough to hold the plains.
The chant rose deep from inside, more powerful in the silence. It was his grandfather's song, and his grandfather's grandfather's.
T?at?á?ka, the earth itself groaned.
?ha?tét’i?s. The word was a jolt of power inside him, the enduring Lakota command to have courage.
The rhythmic cadence inside his head narrowed his universe, shaving away the pain until there was only the next breath, the next vocal surge.
The individual boundaries of his mind dissolved completely into the Pte Oyáte, the Buffalo Nation.
He was part of a great collective belonging, a herd-mind that had no edges, no end, and no capacity for defeat.
Mitákuye Oyás’i?. We are all related. All things are connected.
The silent chant rolled out across the valley, a sovereign call that demanded an answer.
The frozen gravel beneath his front hooves danced, sending a subtle, tectonic tremor up his legs, the thunder of thousands of rhythmic, responding hooves.
The herd was coming. He had anchored his failing body to something primeval, immovable, and infinite.