Chapter 635: Don’t Open Now!
The creature simply ceased to be a cohesive thing in the moment of contact, the collision producing the kind of result that physics produced when a very hard object moving very fast met something that was neither hard nor prepared.
It became a spray.
In the direction of the second creature.
Which was the part Damien had noticed immediately after identifying the approach pattern, the specific geometry of gliding creatures maintaining their distance and angle producing a distribution in the airspace that meant one impact’s direction pointed naturally toward another target.
Luton ricocheted.
Not cleanly, not with any particular precision in the ricochet’s direction, but the cord was attached and the cord was his to manage and he pulled, hard, feeling the slime’s mass at the end of the cord resist the pull for a fraction of a second before the attachment held and Luton’s trajectory curved toward him.
The slime returned to his hand.
Still hardened. Still the dense, polished thing it had been when he threw it, Luton’s surface having maintained the hardness through the impact and the ricochet and the return. He felt the temperature of it briefly, the contact surface having registered the force of the impact as warmth.
Aquila banked.
Another creature was closing from the left, its glide carrying it into the space the griffin’s movement had created. Damien did not wait for it to close the distance further. He threw Luton at the angle the creature’s glide was taking it, leading the target rather than throwing at where it was.
The lead was correct.
Same result.
The creature the ricochet directed Luton toward was not in a position to respond to the redirection. Same result there too.
He pulled the cord. Luton returned.
Aquila kept moving, the griffin’s flight doing what he had asked it to do, the evasion not engaging the creatures directly but ensuring that the creature cloud never quite reached the equilibrium of all of them at optimum glide distance simultaneously. Every time a cluster of them approached close enough to be a concern, Aquila shifted, and the cluster’s glide trajectories carried them past rather than to.
The combination worked.
Aquila managed distance. Luton managed the creatures that got inside the distance. The cord managed Luton’s return.
He threw it again.
And again.
The creatures were not unintelligent. They adjusted. The ones that watched the first several throws adapted their approach angles, the glide shifting toward directions that the previous impacts had come from and which the gliders presumably calculated were less risky since the weapon had come from those directions and then left them.
They were wrong about the logic.
He threw from the directions they had decided were safer.
Same results.
The count dropped. Twelve, then ten, then eight, and the eight were adapting faster than the twelve had, the survivors having had more time to observe the pattern and respond to it.
He adapted faster.
𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞
Not by changing the fundamental approach. By changing the timing. The gliders had developed a sense for the moment the throw would come, the specific posture he adopted before releasing the cord. He changed the posture, made the release earlier than the posture suggested, made it later.
The adaptations did not help them in any decisive way.
Five remained.
These five had pulled back from the engagement zone, the glide carrying them to the edge of where maintaining altitude was comfortable, the creatures holding that edge in the way of things that had decided engagement was not currently in their interest and were waiting for the situation to change.
He watched them.
They watched him.
He was not going to chase gliders at the edge of their altitude maintenance range. The effort was not worth the outcome. He had eleven of them on the record, which had already cost him more time than the swamp route would have cost him, and the remaining five were making the correct decision from their own perspective.
He looked down at the plain.
At the rocks scattered across it. At the seventh altar’s resonance somewhere among them.
He looked at Luton in his palm.
"Soften," he said.
The slime returned to its natural surface quality, the hardness releasing with the ease of something that had adopted a configuration on instruction and released it the same way. Luton resettled into its usual form.
Damien looked at the cord still attached to his wrist.
Luton retracted it.
The slime climbed back to its position on his head with the ease of long practice, settling in the way it settled when the day’s demands had been addressed and it was returning to its preferred location.
Damien patted it once.
Aquila leveled its flight, the griffin reading the change in the situation through whatever combination of instinct and accumulated experience with its summoner communicated that the engagement was concluded.
They descended toward the plain.
The five remaining gliders held their position at altitude and did not follow, the calculation of approach-versus-outcome having apparently resolved in the direction of not approaching.
He did not look back at them.
The plain was below him now, the full expanse of it visible from the griffin’s current altitude, the strange rocks more numerous than the overview had suggested from the grass border’s edge. Some of them had a quality that was not entirely natural, the specific irregularity of stones that had been in the same place for long enough to accumulate the essence of the ground they sat on, the ambient field of the plain expressing itself through them in ways that were subtle but present.
He scanned for the altar.
Read its resonance against the plain’s ambient character.
There.
Toward the center of the plain, near a cluster of the larger rocks, the carved demonic script carrying its specific signature up through the ambient field and reaching him at altitude.
He directed Aquila toward it.
The griffin descended without requiring direction — it had read the shift in Damien’s attention the way it read most things, through the combination of his posture and the subtle changes in how he was holding himself that had become its navigation language over the months they had been working together.
They descended toward the seventh altar.
Below, the plain was quiet.
The rocks stood where they had stood for whatever period they had been standing, the grass border at the plain’s edge holding the five surviving gliders at its outer margin, the ambient essence of the Forest of Twin Disasters’ outermost section carrying the specific quality of a place that was very close to the forest’s edge and very far from its center.
The last altar was ahead.
After this, the seal.
After the seal, the center.
After the center, whatever the Thing of Ruin was and what its presence in the world was going to mean for the things Damien had decided about his future.
He descended toward the ground.
The five gliders had not followed.
He confirmed this with a glance behind him as Aquila descended — they were still at the altitude they had retreated to, the membrane of their webbing catching the air at the outer edge of their comfortable glide range, five shapes holding position with the collective patience of things that had decided this particular target was more expensive than available targets should be.
He looked forward again.
The plain opened beneath him as Aquila dropped below the elevation that had been giving him the overview. The full expanse of it becoming ground rather than geography, the features that had been legible as patterns from above resolving into individual things as he descended.
The rocks.
He had noted them from altitude as scattered, irregular, the strange rocks the record had mentioned without elaborating on. Up close, descending toward them, they were something different from what scattered and irregular implied.
They were large.
The ones at the plain’s periphery were substantial — taller than a standing person, wide in ways that made the height seem proportional rather than excessive, the weight of them evident in the depth of the impressions they had made in the plain’s soil over whatever period they had been sitting in it.
The ones deeper in the plain were larger.
The shapes were what was wrong.
Not wrong in the sense of obviously unnatural, not the clean edges and regular surfaces of something constructed. Wrong in the way of things that were natural in their origin but had been shaped by some process over long enough that the shaping had become inseparable from the original form.
Rounded in places that should have had edges. Projecting in places that did not follow any obvious geological logic. Each one distinct from the others but they all shared a few things in common.
Firstly, they were all made of rocks. That was the most obvious thing.
The second was that they were all irregular. The rocks were slightly different from each other and that made the third similarity weird.
This was due to the fact that the iirregularities were not random but we’re also not consistent either.