Who: Xiaoli Fa & Divina Marcos What: revealing the glyph Where: Shieldwyrm Hall When: August 7th Rating: pg-13 Status:complete
Her hands hovered over the wound. Sweat beading on her brow, she imagined the tear mended, skin and tissue little more than fabric to which she could take needle and thread. Inhale, exhale. She cast. But her strongest spell had always been Drain, and what were Drain and Cure if not two sides of the same coin? The magick dug into her calf and pushed, ripping the wound even further open.
Divina screamed through gritted teeth. A smaller scratch on her shoulder came alight in green, then faded. In front of her, Li stood, shirt sodden with his blood. If it bothered him, he didn’t care to show it.
“Enough,” he said, lowering to his knees. His hands took the place of hers and undid the damage, although he would have to wait a while before he could cast Cure again. “You can use Drain on me, should the pain be unbearable.”
No, she wanted to argue. Again. But the words died in her throat as she slumped over, the air escaping and entering her lungs in needy gasps. “It is bearable,” she said. Even so, her eyes tracing the striations of exposed muscle, she wondered how she was to walk home.
Crossing his legs underneath him, Li sat down, a move indicating that they would stay here for now. “You are getting worse,” he remarked, but the steady tone sounded more like an offhand comment than bitter criticism.
Still, she flinched. “I…” Her vision was blurring. Divina closed her eyes, hands fisting in the grass, as if to will away the gnawing grit behind her eyes. “Something has happened.”
After a moment had passed and she’d yet to expound, he asked, “What?”
Eyes opened for a quick survey of their immediate surroundings. The pair always trained in secluded areas of the yards, but they were not exempt from the occasional audience, held in morbid thrall by the lure of the Dark.
There was nobody.
With rough efficiency, Divina set to the straps of her cuirass. When that was removed, the woolen under-armour, too, was pulled over her head. Underneath was a utilitarian camisole. Her long ponytail was swept impatiently over a shoulder.
“My back.”
He waited for Divina to move and show him, but remembering that her leg kept her immobile, he got up and shifted to take a look. Black ink splattered down her upper back. The image was completed when she tugged her camisole to reveal the rest of it, and Li leaned in close. Due to the nature of their training lately, he knew she didn’t have this marking before.
No redness or scabbing around the edges. It wasn’t a recent tattoo either. “What is this?”
“I do not know,” she said. The mark was visible in her mind’s eye: transecting waves and dangling chains, an ewer in central prominence. “I had hoped you might.” The Dark? hovered between them, unasked.
“I do not either.” He was reminded of Deathbringer, something steeped in Darkness. And likewise, it ebbed and flowed from the glyph like the rushing tide. Li pressed his fingers to a chain, but nothing happened. How strange.
Its overall shape was rectangular, and beckoned forth old, weary memories. He thought of the strips of paper that he often saw plastered over haunted places in his hometown. “It looks like a seal.”
“A seal?” echoed Divina, who had seen such paper talismans in travels but thought nothing of them.
“For exorcisms,” Li explained, removing his hand so they were no longer touching, “or wards.”
She let go of the camisole, the glyph setting like a terrible sun. “Against demons, then?” She breathed out.
“And spirits,” he added.
“But do not such things use characters, not…” A broad gesture of the hand was given to substitute for a proper term, if one existed for the glyph upon her back.
Paper tags were never used on people either, although he knew of a popular legend—one he heard it as a mere children’s story—of a hero who sealed an immortal, malevolent god within himself to subdue it, sacrificing himself for the sake of his people. As did each of his successors.
Did that seal look anything like this, he wondered. “No,” he agreed, and dismissed the notion, “it was only a thought.”
A pregnant silence reigned as Divina reached to don her under-armour. “So it has naught to do with our craft.” The cuirass was next, but trembling fingers could make no sense of the leather cords. Beneath her eyes, the gravel seemed to swell and throb.
“I cannot say.” Again, he relocated to sit beside Divina, and moved his hands over her calf once more. Magick traveled across the gap to her wound, and he cast several Cures in smooth succession. “But Ophion might.”
Divina nodded, though the onslaught of white magicks addled her thoughts. When Li finished, a hand weakly reached for his. I am afraid, said the hesitant contact, words that her pride would never allow her to utter.
The gash was now a stretch of tender scar tissue, and edging closer to intersect his line of vision, a hand called for his attention. A year ago, Li would have simply stared at it until she retracted herself entirely. He still did a bit of staring now, but closed the distance separating their hands and gently curled his fingers between hers.
A gesture that meant they would stay for now. Her leg was steady, and he would wait until the rest of Divina was too.