A Legacy of Blades - An Epic Tower Fantasy

Anilith realized, upon further consideration, that she could probably have spent more time acclimating herself to the challenges in the plains surrounding the town, but she had always prided herself on taking the calculated risk. This time, however, she may have slightly underestimated the challenge before her.

She figured she had three main options: stick to the Plains, visit the Forest, or explore the Jungle. The Forest seemed like the, if not safe, realistic first major step in exploring the area around the town. Her conversation with Pashikh led her to believe that the lack of challenge offered by the Plains was a trap. While the location offered a safer place to adjust to her new circumstances, she knew from experience that growth was found in adversity, not by playing it safe. While this was an important lesson for any adventurer, one among many lessons, there was a second and equally important part: Failing to properly prepare for a challenge is a sure route to an early grave.

The Jungle felt a little too challenging, and, truth be told, Anilith didn't want to be bothered dealing with venomous creatures. Her people were no strangers to venoms and poisons of all varieties, but misfortune often fell on those who sought such means. The Forest had a nice ring to it, though; no trudging through muck or fighting through hordes of insects, against which there was very little defense. No, it seemed as good a place as any to start. No need to stop and check in at an Outpost on the way or even take any job notices. This was just a simple reconnaissance foray.

Overconfidence always seems like a good idea at the time.

Now, Anilith wouldn't call herself a fool, but she also knew when to admit her actions touched upon foolishness. She wasn't trying to be overconfident and had even taken her time crossing the flatlands, while marveling at the ease of travel compared to her marshy homeland. No, her mistake lay in failing to comprehend the scope and scale of challenges presented within the Tower, compared to the outside world, coupled with underestimating the difficulties introduced when navigating an unfamiliar environment.

While she could more easily account for the environmental factors, needless to say, warning signs in a forest differed greatly from the warning signs in wetlands. That would be obvious enough in hindsight, but she still found herself unprepared for the unnatural silence that had fallen around her.

Silence just wasn't something one experienced in the swamps. There, the drone of insects, amphibious croaks, and squelching sounds made by the mud were ubiquitous. There, she knew the most obvious sign of danger lay in the still moments preceding an attack.

Not so in this forest. Where she had initially found herself charmed by the birdsong and rustling of small game critters, she now found her surroundings utterly quiet. The lack of sound set off alarms in her mind as she could feel something out there lurking, watching. The silence seemed to her an amplification of that familiar dangerous stillness, as if someone had turned the silence up to eleven.

It seemed to her the difference between furtively hushed breaths and the pregnant pause of a breath withheld. The two felt similar in many ways, but each created a fundamentally disparate atmosphere.

How was it possible that she could be so much less observant than simple prey animals? They clearly all knew not to be here, but she, in her ignorant arrogance, had wandered smack dab into a not insignificant problem. That was when she learned the more important way she had underestimated the challenge of the Forest.

In the outside world, gifts had their place. Most people had some intrinsic affinity, some innate gift, her people said, but its use was limited in the wider world. Sometimes they manifested as an unusual resistance to an element, sometimes as an ability to mold or understand a particular element supernaturally, however small. Many weren't fully aware of their gift, if its signs even showed. Regardless, gifts rarely came with any ease.

She heard the creature before she saw it, its heavy footfalls conspicuous in the hush of the forest. A figure, clad in seamless stone and wielding a jagged battle-axe, slunk from the bushes before her, telling her in no uncertain terms that this was, evidently, untrue in the Tower.

"Maybe this is why Pashikh suggested starting out in the plains. I'm sure the beasts there are at least a little more natural than this ugly mug," she muttered to herself as she stared down her advancing adversary.

Juxtaposed with the silence of moments past, the creature's clamor was almost too conspicuous. That set her on edge in a way that his presence, alarming in its own right, didn't. She held no doubts that the creature wore armor blessed by the gods, a thing of Legend in her homeland. One such suit would be Heritage enough to form an elite line of warriors.

Instinct took over as her focus intensified, years of training taking over as she took extra care observing her surroundings. She didn't believe any intelligent creature, although time would tell if that might be too gracious an assessment, here, would so obviously announce their presence to an enemy. The armored nature of her foe only reinforced her sense of foreboding. Still, the unnatural silence around her remained unbroken, but for the slow, plodding, thunderous footfalls of the admittedly short biped before her.

Training can prepare a combatant for many situations, but countless more require firsthand experience. Sometimes, when faced with an apparent trap and insufficient information, the best recourse is to spring it with caution; see what series of events slight probing leads to.

Anilith slowly unsheathed her dual blades, the gentle whispers as they came free from her belt loops cut through the air in warning. Firming her grip while staring down her advancing adversary, she moved in with every iota of acceleration she could muster.

One.

Two.

Three steps taken in hardly a breath before Anilith vaulted backwards on a diagonal, narrowly dodging a salvo of attacks primed on her advancing position. A thin lance of flame passed her on the right, an arrow deflecting off her left vambrace, while a dangerous disturbance screamed invisibly through the air over her head.

Whatever launched that final attack had managed to track her better than its companions, but thankfully lacked the speed to maintain its accuracy. Still, that brief exchange was enough to tell her where some of the enemies were lurking. At least two flanked their distraction, while one was definitely hiding in the branches.

While noting all of this in an instant, she felt a slight vibration thrumming through the air around her. She simultaneously began to feel an uptick in the tempo of the walking distraction's gait. Faster now, its feet fell

Doom.

Doom.

Doom.

Guided by instinct, she felt herself begin to let loose as a familiar, cold confidence settled over her. Even without entering the true battle trance she felt when she briefly touched upon the gift of Blade Weaving, her awareness became more acute with each passing moment. Her Master had helped train her mind to process the rapid flow of combat and react almost without thought. Anilith's speed was a product of momentum building with every action, and utilizing her environment to its fullest. She marveled at the way the solidity of the Forest enhanced her honed skills, where the marshlands she had trained in had a way of draining the energy from her movements. It was as if she moved without weighted gear, an aspect of her Master's training she had always despised, for the first time.

For all its attempted haste, Distraction didn't have what it took to catch her at speed. Her Master had ingrained in her the importance of speed and precision over raw power. Power without precision was as much a risk to allies as enemies. Even alone, she knew she could not afford to be lax against unknown threats. The beast before her emanated the rigid solidity of a mountain, and she was sure her blades would find no purchase if she chose to clash against it directly.

Many warriors, trained in the Old Ways, which place pride in strength above all, would welcome the challenge presented by such an opponent, but not Anilith. She had never found herself attuned to the legendary barbaric fury of her brethren, but found herself endowed with gifts yet more uncommon.

She was speed incarnate. The world moved glacially around her as she broke to the right of the small titan of stone. She felt the unknown archer posed the most immediate threat, if he was of more than middling skill. A bowman who knows the battlefield can whittle even superior numbers until they find themselves at an advantage. Anilith couldn't afford to take that chance in unfamiliar territory and made haste. Cutting through the underbrush with her offhand, she found her estimate fell within an acceptable range of error, and found herself thankful for yet another aspect of her Master's wonderfully thorough training. His lessons in reading the arc of a projectile and following the wind's call to the source proved invaluable, and she saw the archer slightly to the right of where she'd placed her mental image.

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Wide eyes and a sickly grey pallor were all she had time to note before she passed the creature by. In the blur of her passing, the creature found itself cradling its dominant arm. A scream, unable to sound from the beast's cut-throat, came out as a gargle. She left the bowman's main hand in the dirt, bow falling from limp fingers. Mentally discarding the archer as a threat, she raced towards her next intended victim. Using the relatively slow doom-dooming footfalls to keep her orientation, she flitted through the underbrush at a breakneck pace.

"One down," she breathed, "no less than three to go. No Temperance to watch your back. Move, Ani, move!"

The invisible attack from moments ago was too much of an unknown, especially while under threat from multiple angles, but the lance of fire spoke for itself. Assuming her analysis was accurate, and while she couldn't imagine many scenarios where a projectile literally made of fire wouldn't qualify, that was a true combat gift she'd narrowly avoided; disabling the caster was next on her list of priority targets. Gifts, even the trifling variety she knew from her life before the Tower, were never to be underestimated. If not for the limitations inherent in combat gifts, the archer wouldn't have been her first target.

Fast as she was, enough time had passed in the intervening moments that she needed to reevaluate her enemies' locations. Kicking a fallen branch away from her, she shifted from speed to stealth, the momentum of her passage blowing forth as she changed direction with a whisper. Controlling her breaths, she listened to the silence around her for any inconsistencies, any gaps in the pattern that might give away her stalkers. Rock-stomper was steadily making his way towards where she had kicked the branch, while she soundlessly slipped away.

Reverting to her predatory training, an aspect of her Master's training she'd always excelled at, she strove to feel the breath of the wilds. The swamps sang a different song, but her Master always said all creatures behave according to that breath. She just needed to learn to listen to the song's differences. More primal beasts lived in tune with nature, hardly altering its breath. Intelligent creatures, relying less on natural-born instincts, left more evident signs.

"Gods, I hope these things are at least borderline intelligent."

While observing the natural motion of the branches in the wind, she began to see irregularities. Here, branches moved in synch as if connected, bouncing to the whims of the wind. There, she found less movement than expected, an unnatural resistance to the breeze. Deciding it was worth the risk, Anilith silently lowered her main blade to the ground and withdrew a carefully balanced throwing knife. After a few more moments, she threw the blade above where the branch seemed most weighed down. A tearing squelch, a growl, and the sound of a body hitting the detritus of forested earth followed.

The heat she felt building on her flank gave her pause, and she dropped to the ground, offering her latest victim, wherever it had fallen, a moment of unintended solidarity as they each lay prone. A brilliant bolt of fire passed over her as she looked up into the canopy, the section of tree she had been next to incinerated in an instant.

The familiar clomping plod homed in on the creaking wood, gaining momentum with each step. She jumped to her feet while scooping up her discarded blade, knowing each creak announced the doom of another failing strand of heartwood as the weight of healthy wood splintered its charred support, counting down the moments until the tree's support failed it. Throwing caution to the wind, Anilith sped dangerously close to where she anticipated the tree would land. Her stone-faced foe caught sight of her and made for a collision course. She dove into a nearby copse of densely grown trees seeking cover. Rolling to her feet, she put several trees between her and collapsing doom, just to be safe.

The collision Distraction sought came a touch more literally than likely intended, as he became more closely acquainted with the crushing weight of objects under the power of gravity. Both the tree and his armored body fell with an earth-shaking crunch. His limbs, the ones not smothered in a wooden embrace, didn't so much as twitch or show the barest hints of life.

"Master did say, 'Unconventional means are often required to bring about the downfall of an enemy one is ill equipped to face.' I'm sure he'd be glad to see how thoroughly that lesson sunk in." Anilith chuckled grimly as she turned to face her latest threat.

Hoping there were no more hidden enemies, she stepped away from her cover, seeking out the flame-wielding creature. The warrior remained on alert, ever on her toes and ready to dodge with every step. Thirty heart-pounding seconds later, she saw her foe step out from behind a line of trees. It stood shorter than an average man with a madness to its gait. Tattered, blackened armor covered vital spots, but an abundance of grey skin, charred in more places than it remained hale, showed visibly in the half-light. The creature turned and met her gaze, wisps of hair blowing through a blackened mask that was shaped into a grotesque visage, a gleeful glint in its eye. Flames danced in the beast's fingers, casting shadows across the grove.

Despite losing its compatriots to this invader, its expression suggested it still found joy in anticipation of their imminent combat. She would, if pressed, describe the feeling emanating from her opponent as mania. Too often, she had felt many future champions of her people give off this intensity, trained in the primal ways as they were, and it clashed against her cool nature. There was a reason she had never trained well with others, well, before Temperance came along. She'd gone through countless sparring partners before finding a suitable partner in him. The previous attempts had resulted in more…aggressive negotiations.

While the storm within, typically, was something Anilith strove to suppress, she embraced chaos, to what extent her training allowed, when faced with such a bestial target. She never let her control slip, but against beasts ruled by instinct, reason would never find purchase. It took instincts honed by a controlled awareness to find balance with those gripped in the lust of battle. All hesitation fled her mind, and her body reacted to her instincts to inspire its movement. Never had she been able to let go like this, always wary of crippling her tribesmen. The experience was, to no great surprise, liberating. The thrill she felt walking that balanced edge, now, that surprised Anilith.

"It's strange how unaware we are of the limitations we bind ourselves in before we cast them off." Her calculating gaze met the creature's manic glee, each emanating their presence.

Raging against the intense mania of the creature, the howling winds within her took shape as never before, and order sprang from the tumult. A cold, clean efficiency overrode the frantic rage she felt moments before, and the path forward was clear.

The beast launched itself forward, the glimmer of its eyes belying the impulse it felt to snuff out her existence. The person who stood before the creature was not like the others that it had ended in its thirst for blood; this person was a threat. Threats must always be dealt with before they reach their stride, just as they always had been before. Too many brothers had died, in the days before voices came, for underestimating a threat and not neutralizing it with prejudice. Gron…Gron…his name escaped him as always, mere kindling for his flames. He saw no issue with conquering any threat before it showed itself as such. There was nothing wrong with him taking some joy in the conquest. Frustratingly, he'd already failed to do so once…what came after once? More than that, already.

What followed was a moment Anilith would never really be able to describe, as her body moved without thought. Her mind hardly stirred as she saw herself, in hindsight, dodging attacks she hadn't identified. It was different, separate from the gift of Blade Weaving. This felt more innate, something born from within. The lessons she needed for this fight didn't come from her Master, or anyone else for that matter. The knowledge didn't even come from her mind; it was a part of her she'd simply never known. She was the well to quench this beast's rage; her winds, to borrow her Master's favorite analogy, would snuff out the fires and prove her instincts, her will, strongest.

Replaying the flurry of motion, she watched her body do something she'd never have done, even as her instincts screamed it had been the right choice. Planting her feet, feeling the gift the creature used take form, she mirrored the beast as it aimed to bisect her with its conjured slice of fire. Her blade met the flame and, rather than being burned, she sent it back through the creature's torso.

Without knowing how, she had sliced her opponent in twain, or had it sliced itself?

After confirming her surroundings were clear, Anilith made her way around the site of the skirmish, collecting what she might. One unexpected boon from the primer of language, which Pashikh should have called a primer of knowledge, in Anilith's opinion, gave her insight into what might be valuable to harvest from her conquests. The knowledge was, admittedly, full of holes and really only served to give her an idea of what might hold value. There was more guesswork involved than she would have liked, and she was certain she harvested parts that people wouldn't have many uses for. Still, it was better to be safe than sorry. In addition to the more macabre bits, she gathered an assortment of more ordinary loot. The flame wielder held little of value. It clearly valued its prowess with its gifts and carried little except badly spoiled rations and a charred sliver of wood. Even its armor amounted to little more than badly charred scrap metal, weakened from over-exposure to heat. She found herself grateful for that, though, as the threat from that one enemy had far outshone the others.

The climber may have posed more danger, but the beast's fall had proven more fatal than her dagger, which was, lamentably, lost somewhere in the underbrush. She found precious little near its body aside from a forged cylinder and hammer, more of the crafting variety than one for warfare, ball-peen, as Temperance had called the hammer's like once. She couldn't see how those instruments connected to the strange attacks it had utilized, but she also couldn't imagine this being the last time the Tower stumped her. Her ignorance would, doubtless, show itself again.

The archer, as it had turned out, had grazed her cheek with an arrow she never felt in the fervent rush of battle. At the very least, he may have posed more of an issue had she not taken him out, as his accuracy was adequate.

And then there was the stone flapjack. Due to no fault of his own, he fell victim to an age-old shortcoming: a poor matchup. The poor creature was never going to match her acceleration. Even if it had taken her time to find a weakness in his armor, especially considering its blessed nature. While she had a nigh impossible time breaching Flappy's armor, her fallen friend had no such failing.

Sadly, her unexpected ally, the Fell Tree, had been far too thorough in trouncing the laggard. There was no salvaging anything from that mess, save for the bits of his armor she slid from his exposed arms. Odd as it was, she felt for him, she really did. He'd done his best in his pursuits, and she would remember his efforts.

Still processing her brush with mortal peril and taking stock of her opponents' failures that granted her victory, Anilith took a moment to reflect on her own mistakes in falling victim to such a remarkably poorly executed trap.

She wouldn't soon forget the sense of security an idyllic forest could instill, nor the value of broadening her perspective. Prey reacts quickly to the presence of danger, for slow prey makes a quick lunch. Predators, especially those believing they stand at the apex, are far less attuned to the sensation of being hunted. The Forest had lessons to teach her, lessons she would have to work hard to embody if she hoped to continue surviving.