Dust & Rainbows

Nine’o’clock in the morning and it’s pitch black in the Mojave.

If that doesn’t describe just how fucked up the world can get when magic is in the wrong hands I don’t know what will.

Lightning Dust pushes open our hotel room door causing the tetragrammatic ward to crackle as its circuit is cut, and the magic flowing through it sieves out with a faint scent of air-freshener and ozone. I glance around through the dark, night-like desert, shivering a little at the unearthly cold.

The sky is shrouded by something that looks like late evening, but I know is really just the dying embers from Hell’s furnace.

Or something like Hell, anyway.

One of the first things you learn about conjurers is where they conjure from. Now some conjurers work with mostly benign powers, pulling things like formless energy into our world from beyond the Wall. You can get pretty much any kind of power doing that, from electrical energy, to kinetic force, to pure fire and ice.

Sometimes at the same time!

But the less benign ones? Oof, those are a doozy.

See, conjuring is a knack almost anyone can pick up and there’s a really good reason for that. There are always times when we’re desperate, there are always times when we’re alone and scared, and we just want someone, anyone, to be there for us.

So we cry out.

We cry into the darkness for help, and if a soul with enough magic in it does that?

Well… occasionally something in that darkness will answer.

“We’ve never fought this many at once, Rainbabe,” Lightning says, her voice wary. “Even in the middle of the Mojave morning, this is gonna be rough.”

“We got this, Dusty,” I crack my neck to one side, then the other, “just watch my back and I’ll watch yours.”

“So long as you don’t get distracted watching my butt,” she shoots back, and I smirk.

“No promises.”

We knock knuckles as the darkness starts to close in with a suffocating hostility. That’s the kind of thing that can really get under your skin if you’re not used to hellshades… the sense of being watched. The darkness out there is alive, after a fashion, and it’s watching me and Dusty, and it hates the fuck out of us because that is literally the only thing it’s capable of.

Hellshades aren’t complicated creatures, they’re just petty hate and violent impulses, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous.

Out of the darkness they begin to resolve, and I can’t help shuddering a little.

The only thing that really, seriously skeeves me out about Hellshades is their shape.

They’re like a walking silhouette of darkness cut from a cloth made of shadows, and when they manifest enough to really do damage they always look like something… not quite human.

I wonder if they’re like ghosts, but if they are then I’m definitely sure I don’t want to know what they’re ghosts of.

“Let’s snuff’em out,” I force a grin onto my face as I flex, and prismatic light crackles along my limbs.

“Shock and awesome,” Lightning says with a wry chuckle.

Her smile probably isn’t any more real than mine, but we put up the facade anyway. This isn’t a joke and we both know it… In the eight months since we started actively operating as members of the Hellions, we’d gone up against some real third-rate goombas and whoever this conjurer was?

He was not one of them.

“I count thirty-two, Rainbabe,” Lightning’s voice shook less than it might’ve.

“Sixteen for each of us then,” I crashed my knuckles together and arcs of power spat between them.

“No redlining, babe,” Lightning said more nervously. “You promised.”

“Right, yeah, I know.”

As we squared up, moving alongside one another, a voice shook the air and rattled the glass windows of the motel with shivering force. A sickly, tarry taste welled up in the back of my throat as it spoke, and I could tell Lightning wasn’t taking it any better than I was.

THE AMULET… the voice came from everywhere and nowhere all at once. LEAVE IT ON THE GROUND AND LEAVE WITH YOUR LIVES.

Lightning cusses sharply under her breath.

“He’s puppeting them all at once,” she says, and feel a chill run down my spine.

“That’s bad, right?” I ask weakly, and she just nods. “Right, thought so…” I turn back to the wall of shades and raise my voice.

“Hey, uh, neat trick with the surround sound but we’re gonna take a soft pass on that offer. Any chance you just let up? That way we,” I gesture between Lightning and I, “don’t have to knuckle down and fuck up your roadies, here.”

ONE FINAL CHANCE, the shades howled their master’s words in cacophonic shrieks. LEAVE THE AMULET.

“This amulet is our chance at bringing our friend back from darkness, douchelord,” Lightning snarls as she takes a step forward. “You can have it over our dead bodies.”

The world is a twisting murmur of shadows for a long moment, and I can feel every single one of the shades flowering down at us from the blackened skies. The tension lasts all the way up until the shades speak one last time, and they only say a single word.

ACCEPTABLE.

On that word, the wall collapses into a surge tide of darkness roaring towards us. I plant my feet, bracing the way I used to on track days, take a deep breath…

…and I run.

The air around me thunders as I barrel forward, a corona of prismatic electricity crackling around me as I ram into the solid wall of hellshades.

I feel as much as hear them shriek in agony as I burn past their initial charge, but it doesn’t last. Their claws are like gripping anchors into my body, my skin is only protected from their sharp talons thanks to the veil of energy I’m projecting around my body that blunts kinetic impact, but that’ll deplete quickly if I don’t get free.

Fortunately, I don’t have to bother.

Lightning Dust is a one-woman phalanx, limbs of caged voltage peel out of her body as she catches up to me, new sets of arms fold out of her shoulders and from beneath her real limbs making her look like a Hindu goddess.

Nothing can touch her.

Every shade that attacks is intercepted by a clone that peels out of her body, bearing the shadow creature to the ground in a flurry of fists. She seizes me by the color with four hands, wrenches me free of the morass of shadows, and pitches me behind her.

“Clear us a path!” Lightning shouts as she falls into a practiced martial stance.

I nod, ground myself for a moment, take a deep breath, then bolt outwards again towards where the wall of shades is thinner.

As soon as I move towards it, the hellshades try to compensate by swarming me.

Hilarious.

I’m too fast for these mooks to catch. Not quite fast enough to avoid a few knicks and cuts here and there, but nothing major and nothing I’ll even feel til the morning.

Of course, if I’d been going at full speed they wouldn’t have even been able to lay that much of a hand on me, but the weight of the enchanted chains I was wearing prevented that. Zee and Sunny had both warned me that the faster I accelerated the more magic I would consume, and the faster I ate up magic the closer I got to dipping into the permanently tainted portions of my wellspring that were sealed away by Harmony.

Lightning had the same issue of course but, unlike me, she had a hard throttle on her magic. Only so many clones could be controlled, and she generally managed with close-quarters combat using her clones to turn herself into a dervish of fists which was pretty energy efficient.

Me though?

There’s no throttle on the pain train.

The shades move like they’re caught in thick sludge as I careen around them. I spin and spiral, kicking off from the ground with every motion, almost flying as I rip through the air, my legs threshing through the shadows like blades.

I land on my hands, spinning and rolling in place, cutting through the shades as they throw themselves mindlessly into my light-shrouded legs before finally pulling back as their master reins them in, stopping them from shredding themselves on me.

Kipping up with a push, I handspring to my feet, land with a hard skid backward, brace, and push off again.

The shadows come at me like a scythe this time, their bodies folding together into a mass of dark magic and hate, but I drop to my knees, sliding beneath the attack and skidding forward before rolling in and lashing out with my legs again.

My legs have always been and will always be my best weapon, they’re pistons of magically enhanced skin and muscle, and my heels hammer into the center mass of the shadows, collapsing it like cheap metal siding as I blow through two more of the shades

I follow the force of the blow with a push, accelerating to throw myself forward into the air and spin like a bladed wheel.

From the air I see Lightning, fighting like an army is at her back because in a way there is one.

Hellshades are simple creatures, tactically speaking. They fight like jackals or coyotes, like starving, desperate wolves, circling their prey, snapping in only to draw back as they try to open a blind spot for a fellow to take the legs of their target out from under them and bear to the ground where the pack can finally bury them in tooth and claw.

Except Lightning doesn’t have a blind spot.

I watch as a shade dives at, right at the hollow of her back where anyone else would be vulnerable.

An arm made of lightning folds out of her real left arm, bending backward and lashing out to catch the hellshade by its throat. Two more arms follow, each one grabbing one of the shades clawed limbs, and with a mighty heave they wrench the thing apart, its airy shriek echoing as it’s banished back to its home.

Lightning never even had to look at the thing.

Her fists were barreling out, one-two-one-two, her knuckles cracking ephemeral jaws and shattering limbs. Each blow carried the force of three behind it as she layered her clones fists over hers.

One-two-three shots in a single punch, all within a heartbeat of one another.

Her feet are planted solidly on the ground as she bobs and weaves. Five clones, six bodies, all occupying the same space.

The Hellion who earned the title Kali of Boxing in the black-magic underworld rampaged through the conjured army, introducing shadowy flesh to Queensbury rules in the most visceral fashion possible while following my trail of light and destruction.

We trained night and day for months to get this good, and that’s literal.

During the day we sparred and fought, training with Adagio’s sister, Aria as she pounded the basics of multiple fighting styles into us.

During the night we Dreamed, practicing routine after routine in the space beyond the Walls of Sleep.

My feet barely touched the ground as I spun, kicked, rolled, and lashed out, my Capoeira turning the air around me into a meatgrinder for the shades. Complicated style or no, when you move ten times faster than anyone else and learn from a hyperkine, you don’t need much in the way of realtime to master a physical skill set.

And then I was out.

I spun and kicked, landing two heavy blows on a mass of shadow and striking it into the cold earth of the desert, and like a set of drapes being ripped from a window, suddenly sunlight is streaming in.

“Dusty, c’mon!” I shout as I turn, spinning and kicking at every approaching shade as they try to close the breach I’d opened up in their sorcerous darkness.

They were weaker here though, and the closer Lightning got to the opening the weaker the shades became until finally, we both managed to stumble out, panting and gasping from the dome of darkness that was covering a square kilometer of the Mojave around the motel we’d been sleeping.

“Crap, guess we’re hoofing it the rest of the way,” I spit on the ground and hold out an arm to Lightning as the dome of shadows starts to roil and shift, moving in a way that makes me think of an enormous, lumbering tortoise.

Lightning takes my hand and grips hard.

“Let’s get some distance, Rainbabe,” Lightning says as she steps closer, wraps her arms around my neck, and hugs me tight. “Now run!”

I don’t need her to tell me twice.

I turn my back on the shadows, take another deep breath, and bolt.

If that conjurer wants the amulet he’ll have to catch me first and, to this day, there’s only one person who’s ever really caught me, and she was resting in my arms.