Forge of Destiny - Threads 69: Foreshock 6
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Threads 69: Foreshock 6

Threads 69: Foreshock 6

Chaos awaited her return.

In the flight south, she had seen the first signs. Great flocks of birds had been rising from the forest, raptors and songbirds flying side by side to escape the growing weight in the air. Beneath the canopy, beasts howled and yowled in fright as the earth shook and the wind gusted, and the pounding of a multitude of paws and hooves against the dirt added to the cacophony. As she flew further, she began to sense the disturbance in the trees themselves. Heavy branches swayed without wind and roots moved with ponderous but unstoppable strength as the tallest and most ancient trees seemed to gird themselves to endure the coming storm while their younger brethren shook and cowered.

It was nothing compared to the scene that awaited her at the village itself. She had left behind a peaceful farming village huddled on the shores of the river with beautiful green fields extending far upstream. What she found on return seemed more like an embattled fortress. The rolling fields had been trampled to ruin, homes, barns and other structures sagging where walls had been blown out in the rampage of some beast. Even now, spirits streamed through the trampled fields, fleeing in all directions.

At the center, things were even more dire. Ling Qi’s eyes watered at the fetid heat that radiated out from the battlefield she saw there, sickly and familiar. She remembered clearing out that nest of disease spirits just a few days ago, but it seemed there had been more pockets further south. Many more pockets. They churned from the southern forest like a moving river of chitin; centipedes, locusts, worms, and crawling and flying things that she could not name all flooded out from the southern hills, their buzzing and chittering seeming to shake the air.

At the top of the ridge that overlooked the river, a massive wall had sprung up. Formed of twisted bulging branches and boughs of vital green wood, it rose over ten meters high and stretched on for hundreds, a shield braced against the ground against the oncoming beasts. The Sect’s soldiers stood atop the twitching, living wall, four first realms to every second. The lesser cultivators rained crossbow bolts that left contrails of boiling steam down upon the advancing tide in a continuous rain, their hands blurring with the speed at which they reloaded the devices. Their captains swept the sky with fire, wind, water, and lightning while the wall itself crushed, impaled, and destroyed the things that crawled upon it with grasping branches and creepers.

She saw Xiulan standing at the center of it all, a burning brand under the darkened sky. Heat radiated from her form, distorting the very air and rendering her a miragelike appearance. Her gown seemed like a thing of liquid fire, and her hair rose, smoking on drafts of superheated air. Heavenly energies crackled near the surface of her skin, shining through the faded scars of her tribulation as if her friend were merely a damaged container for an ocean of living lightning.

Even as Ling Qi poured on further speed, blurring into a bolt of shadow in the sky, she saw Xiulan sweep her bandage-wrapped hand out, and a river of blue-white flame followed, a searing beam that carved through the advancing spirits, hundreds incinerated or boiled in their own exoskeletons until they exploded in a shower of miasma. Where the beam passed, it left a molten trench in the earth, liquid glass and stone snapping and hissing in the suddenly cooling air. With her other hand, Xiulan wielded a many tailed lash of red flames. It snapped and coiled through the air, snatching a locust the size of a large dog from the air and flung it away from the wall.

The tumbling bug was then snatched from the air by a pair of gigantic serpentine jaws, vanishing with a crunch down Zhen’s throat as Gui stomped through the tide, uncaring of the insects that swarmed up his legs, biting and gnashing futilely at his scales. With every rumbling step, roots speared out from the earth, impaling scores of spirits before withdrawing back into the churned earth. Yet Zhengui was not unharmed. Ling Qi’s eyes fell upon the patches of torn scales along Zhen’s body and the glowing crack that spiderwebbed across Gui’s shell.

The one that had inflicted the wounds was obvious. Hanging over the field like a macabre banner, she saw the body of a truly massive insect, a centipede over twenty meters long impaled upon three sharp wooden stakes the size of small trees, its grey-brown shell pitted and burned through by fires and its head a charred ruin. Its legs still twitched and writhed feebly, and fetid gore that stunk of sickness and rot dripped from its perforated body, leaving bubbling pools in the dirt below.

As Ling Qi swept over the village, Zhen opened his jaws, baring his fangs to the sky, and a little spark of fire perched like a crown atop his head flared brighter. A sheet of hissing, bubbling venom shot from his mouth over a far wider range than he was normally able, melting and burning the flying vermin trying to pass him.

However, despite all the firepower, the diseased things streaming from the southern forest were still numerous beyond counting. Ling Qi curved her flight to the side least supported and raised her flute to her lips. The dark Melody of the Forgotten Vale poured forth with a