Tales of Destiny

The shouts of men, the clattering of bone against rusted metal, and the whistle of the wind past her ears combined into a cacophony of sound. The sound of thundering hooves combined with the hiss and snap of sparks and flames. Her heart thundered in her ears, and lightning sang in her veins.

Gu Xiulan’s cheeks ached from how fiercely she found herself grinning.

The road ahead was shrouded in dust, sand and ash, whipped by the wind and churned by battle. The flags and banners of the small detachment of men sent to inspect the cisterns here in these stony hills barely visible in the scrum. And what a scrum it was.

The ground churned and heaved like a thing alive, disgorging the dead in great numbers. Clattering skeletal bodies wrapped in charred and mummified flesh, garbed in the finery of the ancient Empire, of her ancestors the Lu. The unit of men who had sent up the distress signal were retreating in the best order that could be expected. A vanguard of their best at the rear in fighting withdrawal while the workers and formation engineers were pulled out ahead. But they were bogged down, increasingly surrounded. A thin shell of red and gold retracting step by step.

Gu Xiulan let out a sharp whistle, and raised her right hand in a sharp signal and the unit of cavalrymen behind her split smoothly, separating into two flanking wedges that fanned out and wheeled on either side of the road, preparing to run down the more scattered ashwalkers blocking the rear and reopen the road. Only Gu Xiulan herself remained on course, for the central mass of the walker swarm, where a ragged and defiled golden banner flew.

She adjusted her seating, squeezed her knees against her warhorse’s sides, and earned a toss of burning mane and a wild snort. Good enough. They picked up speed, and before they could crash upon the turning spearwall of the dead, her horse leapt into the sky with a thunderous crack, jets of flame erupting from his hooves, carrying them high above.

Gu Xiulan released the reigns, reaching out and above her hands grasping the searing desert heat and the rays of the sun itself, just as father had taught her. Twin spears of solar radiance erupted, twice as long as her body was tall, cores of blinding white light shrouded in corkscrewing auras of hissing lightning. She felt her own muscles try to seize from the power flowing through them, the plumes on her helm turning into blinding tails of a comet-like corona, her battlecry itself an eruption of searing blue flame.

She hurled her spears of sunfire at the climax of her steed's leap, just as they began to descend. Purifying light and electric wrath erupted in the enemy's center, slowed by defensive arts, siphoned by the cloying, sucking cold of the ashwalkers existence, they plunged to the ground regardless. Her family's Solar Lance art had been made for this.

The earth erupted in lashing lightning, reducing bone back to the ash and dust from whence it had came, and in its wake came the fires, turning sand unto glass, the whipping storm of churned up detritus in the air itself becoming an expanding cloud of white hot slag.

Her horse landed in the crater she had left with a thunderous boom and the sound of shattering glass. She immediately bent backwards, leaving her upper body nearly horizontal beneath the cut of a lance of black qi, burning with a corona of sickly green. Emerging from the storm of molten glass she saw the ashwalker lord, his tattered yellow banner upon his back.

Mounted himself, the dead man could no longer be separated from his horse, melted armor and twisted bone fused behind a headless equine neck, armaments still gilded with gold here and there, crusted with burnt and broken gems, the dead man was a twisted echo of the resplendence of her ancestors, though one could still see clearly the line of descent in the style of her own gear. Beneath a faceplate not too different than her own, empty sockets sparking with mindless hunger burned and mummified jaws clattered as ghostly green fire gathered again in its palms.

Pain seared up her arm, easily ignored. Xiulan flicked her wrist, and a lashing whip of flames erupted as a flex of her abdomen brought her upright again, snapping and hissing through the air to grasp the creatures wrist and drag the next fan of crackling deathly flames up to erupt harmlessly into the open air away from both herself and her men. She spared only a glance for the retreating regiment, enough to know they were following procedure, feet pounding on sand as they withdrew in good order, their vanguard elements moving to form up a line of defense on the ridge her cavalry had cleared for them.

Reinforcements were coming, they needed to hold and ensure the safety of the formation experts.

Her horse let out an angry whinny, darting forward as new hands of ash and bone erupted from the earth beneath, burning hooves crushing emerging skulls and dashing in crumbling rusted helms as he carried her away, in a circling gallop. She grimaced as she felt her whip tear and disperse, its component qi scattering. She met the next lance of black and green with burning gold and molten white, a rapid exchange, one, two, a half dozen more, making the qi in the air blaze and shriek like a damned howl as purifying fire met silent death shaped in mockery of flame.

She narrowed her eyes through the dust and grit, trusting her mount to guide them through the reforming ranks of clawing, jabbing ashwalker spearmen and shamblers, her whole focus on her opposite among their number.

She felt a familiar flex of qi, in time to move as pale green lashes erupted from the smoke of their clash, crossing her arms before her as they sought her limbs, to tangle and drag her down. But she was certainly not less able than this mad and broken shadow. She felt lightning crawl from her skin, erupt from her eyes as she let out a shout, cycling the beating heat of the desert sun in through her dantian and back out as an erupting sphere lightning that scattered the lashes and cleared the swirling storm.

Her eyes narrowed as she saw her foe stagger heavenly qi coursing through dead and dusty meridians, making bones clatter and shake unevenly. A thought, a squeeze of her thighs, and her mount whirled on blazing hooves, bringing them into a full charge at the stunned ashwalker.

Gu Xiulan could not contain her laughter as she extended her ruined arm, her blessed arm, and drew on the core of divine lightning sleeping in her marrow, tapping deliberately as she had once only dared to do in controlled cultivation. The eruption of heat and light was almost blindinging to her own eyes as they flashed past the staggering dead thing. Against her outstretched fingers, she felt the barest brush of solidity, before the monstrous heat she had drawn into the palm of her hand disintegrated stone, metal and ash borne bones alike.

Then they were past, and behind her the mounted ashwalker crumbled, less than a third of its torso remaining, the rest merely smoke and dust drifting from her palm.

It burned. It was a good burn. Gu Xiulan decided as she retook the reigns, a quick tug carrying them around dashing back for their lines. There was far more than one officer among the creatures for them to be formed up so, in the gathering darkness on the sand, but with the enemy vanguard shattered, they could reach the ridge and dig in.

“You really must tell me your proper name you know,” She said casually over the screaming wind. “We do make such a team.”

Her horse let out a withering snort, and carried her away from the ruin of glass and dust she had left behind.