The Endless Solvent

Step. Click. Step. Click.

Nilda’s eyes flew open when she heard it. The cursed sound rang in her ears as if it was right next to her, but as she fully awoke, she could gauge it was actually at a distance from within the mountain.

Step…Click…Step…Click…

Whoever that man was, the man who had different faces and walked with a strange clicking sound, was coming after them through the tunnel. Nilda roughly woke up the twins and Rask snapped to attention - he had been keeping watch.

“What is it?” he whispered.

"That man, the one who killed the Solaris and Taurin. He has a certain way of walking, I can hear it,” Nilda stomped over the remains of their fire and hastily drew together the children who were still blinking blearily. “We have to move.”

Her heart pounded at the sudden urgency. The sun was barely climbing the sky as they haphazardly slid down the side of the mountain. Rask had the little moon on his back as they ran the best they could, scaling rocks and dodging trees. For a long while, Nilda started to doubt herself as nobody seemed to come after them. But then Rask led them to a valley and a stretch of open, treeless space yawned out before them.

There were no nooks or trees or cliffs to hide behind. An open space like that would spell death for the four of them if they are spotted, but they couldn’t turn back. The layer of snow could clearly show their path.

“Keep going,” she hissed at Rask. “Keep running. Don’t look back.”

“What are you doing?” Rask demanded. The princess looked wide-eyed and scared over his shoulder.

“I’ll slow them down, then I’ll catch up to you,” Nilda said. “Please, remember what you promised me.”

Rask’s mouth stretched into a grim line, the way it does when she does something that doesn’t agree with him. But years working and living together had taught him it was useless to argue. Perhaps they should have gotten along more when they had the chance. Yet another thing to regret. Nilda pushed the thought from her mind. “You better come back to me,” Rask said roughly, then hoisted the princess further up his back in preparation. “You hear that, governess?”

Nilda smiled but then turned without answering. Rask ran with the children towards the cover of trees on the other side of the valley, doing it with difficulty with a layer of snow hindering them. Nilda concentrated and found a solid rock bed and drew up as many spikes as possible to make the ground impossible to walk over. She was only able to do thirty one at a time at the size she wanted to make them, but she did her best to cover the width of the valley. She drew handfuls of stone onto her body for protection.

She was out of breath when the enemy arrived to greet her. Trembling with exhaustion, she clenched her hands into fists and a wall of rock rose up to a modest height behind her.

Only three figures appeared. The man in the middle was the one that murdered Taurin and the Solaris. He still had the unrecognizable face whose change defied any explanation Nilda could think of. To his right was a woman dressed in traveling leathers holding a cruel looking sickle. To his left, a lean, tall man with platinum blond hair drew his sword.

None of them looked like soldiers. And yet, Nilda recognized the man’s step as that of a guard of the Lunaris. “Any reason why your face has been rearranged since last I saw you?” Nilda prodded.

The man in the middle grinned and pushed a hand through his long dark hair. That, if Nilda remembered correctly, seemed to be the same. “Why, yesterday was the first time we met, governess,” the assassin said in his fake standard-Gaian accent. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Maybe you can change your face, but you failed to do anything about your shit leg,” Nilda clenched her fingers open and shut. “You’re one of the Lunaris’s guards. Tell me, was she the one who changed your ugly mug? Was she the one who planned the coup?”

“She talks a lot for someone about to die,” the woman intoned, inspecting her sickle as if bored. She, too, sounded Kuvanian.

“You two go after that Captain and the two brats,” the man in the middle said. “I will continue… chatting with the governess.”

Nilda cursed as the two on the sides started moving. She tried to slow or stop them, but like the man in the middle, they seemed to have some sort of protection around them. She couldn’t get the stones to obey as they approached her wall.

There was a radius around the enemy in which her abilities were disabled. She just needed to find what that radius was. The man with the platinum blond hair and the sword started scaling up the wall. Nilda piled more stone, pushing it up to the top where the man was climbing and curled it over him. She raised a stone coated arm in time to block the sickle from taking her head off as the woman attacked her. She parried and flung sharp shivs at the woman, then willed the rock above the swordsman to weaken. A boulder broke off and crashed down.

The man screamed as he didn’t evade in time and it crushed his leg as the rock slammed into the ground. The woman with the sickle swore loudly, distracted by her comrade’s injury. Nilda swung her stone encrusted arm as hard as she could and caught the woman’s shoulder, throwing her to the side.

The woman recovered remarkably quickly and with a blink of an eye was right by Nilda, weapon rearing back for a fatal blow. Nilda blocked it again with her rock arms, then kicked the woman as hard as she could at her center of gravity and threw her back. Nilda then threw her entire body at her weaponed hand and forced the sickle out of her grasp, then positioned herself above the woman and reared back, ready to smash her face in with rocky fists.

“Enough.”

A body slammed into her, too quickly for her eyes to catch. When she got a hold of her bearings, the man with dark hair, Taurin’s murderer, was standing over her. A sword appeared in his hands. Nilda scrambled back, lifting her exhausted arms to try to find a way to defend herself.

Pain flashed over her body as her back was slashed - Nilda felt the runes that hand long scarred over burn. Suddenly the feeling and hold she had over stone and rock in the Great Solvent escaped her.

Gasping in pain, she rolled and dodged the next swing and scrambled to her feet, only to collapse again, this time from the weight of rock on her limbs. She no longer had the ability to superficially ‘lift’ the rock and continuously rearrange the material on her body to reserve energy. Exhaustion overwhelmed her, but she had to keep moving and stay alive. She could see the woman with the sickle move to scale the wall. Nilda needed to stop her and she desperately tried to reach out to stone again through the Solvent.

The small part of the wall crumbled and for a split second, Nilda thought she had regained her abilities, but panic filled her when the little moon appeared. Her small hands stretched behind the broken wall - the princess was evidently capable of crumbling rock.

“Princess.” She lurched forward and flung herself towards the child as a sword glinted in the morning sun. The blade sank into her shoulder and stopped at bone. Nilda collapsed over the little moon, gasping in pain.

“No!” the princess shouted, her little face pale with shock. “No!”

“Close… close your eyes, little moon,” Nilda rasped.

The princess watched on, gray eyes wide with horror. The blade left her shoulder, then a renewed thrust was made through her torso and through her heart. Blood splashed down on the princess’s face.

“NO!”

The scream filled Nilda’s ears, the terror, the sadness filling the Great Solvent. It swirled around her, even when her runes were cut and she was no longer special. The princess screwed her eyes shut and the Great Solvent roared around them. Nilda thought she heard shouts and then screams but wasn’t sure over the sound of the little moon’s scream.

With her last remaining strength, Nilda reached to the princess and pressed a bloodied hand to her face to cover the eyes - a silent plea for her to look away. But Nilda knew it was no use. The princess didn’t like to do what she was told, the stubborn thing. It was why everyone was so fond of the little moon.

The pain speared her torso and made her breathless, motionless. The last time it hurt that much the Being in Smoke was carving up her back, a long time ago, back when she was a child.

You were given a purpose, Nilda of the Heart. The words of the thing using the emissary as a proxy rang through to her. This is it. This is it…

Pain blackened her vision further, until she realized she was on the ground, staring at an ashen faced princess next to her. No assassin moved in to attack. Did the princess do something? Pain. Pain. Blood.

With titanic effort, Nilda opened her eyes again and thought she saw Rask’s face creased with worry and the little prince’s crying face framed with a halo of red hair. Rasks’s mouth moved to say something but she couldn’t figure out what he was saying. Was he saying all the things they left hanging in the air between them at every banquet? Did he speak the words he hoped a goblet of wine would say in his stead?

Nilda wanted to tell him how silly all was, and that she would be with him if he would have her. She wanted to be with him the day he looked for her in the alleyway and awkwardly asked for her hand in marriage. What would they have achieved if she took his hand that day? But the darkness closed in and she couldn’t form any words.

She wasn’t afraid. She closed her eyes and thought that she could feel Taurin waiting for her; she felt a familiar pat on the back of her hand. Long cool fingers took hers and held them until she no longer felt any pain.

Then the solute of Nilda of the Heart dissolved into the Great Solvent and was no more.