The battle was done when the beasts finally stopped coming, their advance halted against the palings and their motionless bodies now lying scattered in the melting snow. The Coeurls’ tendrils lay limp on the ground, the insectoid mantises were practically in piles, and Wolfe saw the remains of a few large winged, armoured things he couldn’t even identify.
He frowned, staring out at the massacre. The swathes of corpses bothered him; Emillion’s open plains had never seen creatures like this, clicking mantises creeping out of their underground caves into broad daylight, the aquatic Coeurls ranging afar from their water.
With the adrenaline gone, leaving only pain and blood and fractures behind, he suddenly felt tired. So very, very tired.
The task force had separated after the battle, and Wolfe went trudging back towards the wall, pausing only to sip at a potion whenever the pain hitched too hard in his lungs. He eventually spotted a familiar face, one who hadn’t fought by his side but looked even worse.
“Are you all right?” he asked, once his and Siri’s paths converged. It was a clear day, the bloodied field wide and open; they’d both seen each other approaching.
Often Siri was drawn to the same people (something) wolves, serpent and trees full of wisdom; they unraveled before her eyes, not people but symbols in her world. When she saw those types, she headed for a collision (metaphorical, not literal, she was not clumsy just tired). “Still have both eyes, see?” Which was a way of saying yes, fine but not fine fine.
There were deeper aches in her that would require closer seeing to, but for the moment she lingered, fascination present as she watched him. It was not always that you saw trees move. “All that is left behind, who will come for it?” Death did not linger, it had come and gone and left nothing behind. Nothing that mattered, only the shells of things that were no longer something.
Wounds stopped her from running among the remains in the field and screaming for Him to come take this, to not leave a mess behind. Probably for the best that she could not do that.
Wolfe’s own frown blossomed as he watched her, with a sidelong look and a furrow unfolding in his brow. Siri seemed more unstable than usual: thrown askew by the battle, rattled in her cage.
“No one,” he said. “They’re beasts—they came from the wild, so they’ll dissolve back into the wild.” A shrug of the broad shoulders, a gesture of helplessness (and acceptance) as they fell into line beside each other. “They belong out here. Or, well, not precisely here...” the geomancer was unnerved as any by the unexpected appearance of the monsters, “but you know what I mean. Out in nature.”