He fitted on the mask again, rubber seal covering his face, tank hissing as he readied to dive again into the liquid. The residents stood in silent witness as he moved towards the door, back into the green and purple haze.
Thread waved a hand in farewell. Ember nodded, understanding in his eyes. Even Veil watched, though her face was still suspicious, accusatory.
The dome light disappeared behind him as Bullet pushed himself out of the block. The liquid cooled, thickened, resisted his strokes. His muscles convulsed. The raider's wound seared with new fury.
Animals were scarce now, as though the block itself did not breathe. Pressure built against his temples, a beat in rhythm with his scar's pulse.
A slash ripped through the hard, smooth and intentional.
Then the blackout fell.
His scar throbbed white-hot. Vision blurred. Red eyes seared in his brain—like but not exactly like the desert's watchman, but close enough that ice slid through his blood.
He awakened gasping, the mask protesting in agony. The tug moaned inside him, despairing, savage.
And that's when he saw it.
---
The fluid shone with unnatural glitter, its surface twisting beneath the auroras' broken green and violet light filtering from far above. Something rose up out of the depths ahead.
The Dreadwraith.
It was huge—at least ten feet high, a human-shaped entity constructed out of the substance itself. Its shape was a distorted shine that warped the light around it, reflecting Bullet's own damaged face back in grotesque mockery. Where its eyes would be were emptiness—two black voids that seemed to draw in not just light, but hope too.
Its rotation was a bone-jolting bellow that diminished the threat of the spined beasts, that rendered the shudders of the dome gentle in comparison.
This was no simple creature. This was something else.
This was this world's cruelty personified. A killer-hunter that could transform with whatever it came into contact with—liquid to solid, fluid to rock, shifting, transforming, unstoppable.
Bullet's heart thudded within his chest. The need screamed within him to escape, but the material was jelly-like and held him fast, its weight crushing down on his limbs like a living thing that didn't intend to release him.
Each cramp was a fight. His muscles throbbed. His scar seared as if it had just been branded.
The Dreadwraith cut ahead, cutting through the block with ghastly ease, tearing the fluid apart like a knife through meat. Bullet dodged, his own body moving with that same unnatural speed he'd witnessed previously, sidestepping its push by inches.
His pipe was heavy in his grip, its serrated tip glinting in the aurora light. He swung, muscles tensing, the pipe slicing through the fluid form of the Dreadwraith.
The blow went through harmlessly.
The form of the thing quivered, reforming itself at once, its surface shuddering with what might have been a sneer. Its void-eyes locked onto Bullet's, burning with evil cunning.
The thing was doing exactly what it intended to do. It was acting on purpose.
The Dreadwraith attacked.
Its liquid arm stiffened in the middle of the swing, a fist of solid material that slammed into Bullet's chest. He folded back, mask skewed on his face, air bubbling from the gear in a mad spout of silver spheres.
Pain flashed through him. Ribs broke with a burning sound that he felt rather than heard. His scar burned like a hot iron pressed up against his heart.
The liquid intensified perception. The thrum of the Dreadwraith pressed against his head from inside. Spine beasts burst into the space, drawn by the turmoil, their thorny spines scraping against his legs, searing hot paths in his tissue.
Flames of scarlet blood poured from him in lashing tendrils, mingling with the purple glow.
Bullet smashed the pipe in either direction, sending the smaller animals flying. They collapsed on impact, spines shining like shattered glass when they landed on the ground.
Once more, the Dreadwraith dived, its whine a howling shriek, void-eyes implacable, ruthless.
An ache haunted with the agony, as cruel as the creatures' spines: *Why am I faster than Ember's people? Why can I slice through this barrier like I'm meant to be here?*
No time to master it, though. His lungs burned. Air in the device was spent, every breath a rub against the fogging glass of the mask.
The Dreadwraith vanished.
One moment it stood before him, solid and terrible. The next, it had dissolved once more into the depths of the liquid, its form disappearing as if it had never existed.
Bullet's heart pounded. Where—
It reappeared in a flash of crystalline facets.
It had brushed against a hidden entrance of stone and now its form had been changed to one of stone. It was not fluid and running anymore—now a glassy, sparkling statue, its edges sharp enough to strip flesh from bone.
It struck at him, and the crystal edge sliced through his breathing apparatus hose with a clean cut.
Air escaped in a foamy trickle, precious oxygen escaping into the liquid. Bullet's lungs hurt at the same time, every inhalation harder than before, the mask fogging with his desperate breaths.
A nearby rock formation gave way—or maybe the Dreadwraith made it give way, Bullet could not determine. Rock crashed down in a slow, catastrophic flow through the heavy liquid.
A jagged stone pinned his leg beneath a boulder. Bone against rock scraped across him. Blinding agony, burning white as flame, engulfed him. His scar paining to the beat of his hammering heart.
Red blood clouded the fluid, spreading in darkening wisps. The spined creatures drifted to it, drawn by the scent. Their barbs sliced new grooves across his arms, his chest, where they could get.
The vibration of the block was a ravenous incantation in his skull.
Bullet wriggled his leg free, ripping flesh as he did so. His head reeled. There was still air in his crushed gear.
But his mind was functioning, even as he suffered. The tug was a flame at the end of a lighthouse, guiding him along.
He had glimpsed something. A pattern.
The Dreadwraith slowed as it shifted. Its form slipped for a single moment as it transformed from state to state—liquid to crystal, crystal to stone. Exposed in the moment of changing,
That slowing was its weakness.
Bullet swam for the block's edge, responding to the pull's grasp of what he knew instinctively to be Province 837—Ember's stone lands. The vroom of the Dreadwraith, its vacant eyes pulsing in the dark, imploded behind him.
He ripped through the liquid's stretchy grip, his muscles burning with strain. His ribs throbbed with each stroke. The edge of the block was his goal, that membrane between air and water.
It opened wetly, gasping, and Bullet was tumbling onto hard ground—a flat rock under open sky. Cold wind cut into his lungs, each breath a harsh burn after the fluid's heaviness.
The burst hose gave a soft sigh. His blood trickled from his leg in beads to collect on the rock. His scar pulsed with every heartbeat.
The Dreadwraith came up behind him.
Liquid poured out as it emerged from the block, its form altering again. It kissed the rock, and its form altered instantly, changing into granite—a ten-foot figure that erupted out of the lip of water, its empty-eyes shining like twin canyons.
The ground shattered with every stride of it. Dust of stone swirled up in choking puffs. The ground trembled.
Bullet's hold on the pipe grew tighter. The weight of it was reassuring now, holding him against the pain splintering through his whole body.
He ran—or tried to. His hurt leg couldn't support much of his weight. He stumbled half-ran to a narrow crevice he noticed between the rocks ahead of him, its sides lined with loose boulders that seemed to lean over on either side.
This rock province was a labyrinth of stone, and currently, that was his sole asset.
The Dreadwraith trailed behind, its granite legs slow but unrelenting. Cracks spread from every step. Its whine insinuated itself into his ears, shutting out all else.
The crevice ripped his arms to shreds as he fought his way through, blood bubbling up from fresh wounds. His ribs screamed with pain. But the scar burned with that fire that would not let him fall, would not let him quit.
Bullet shoved the pipe into the base of a huge boulder, metal shrieking off rock, sparks streaming in the dim light. His muscles shrieked as he employed himself as a fulcrum with his own weight, prying, dirt ripping at his throat.
The Dreadwraith struck out at him, its stone fist tearing along his side. More ribs cracked. Pain was a white haze that nearly blinded him utterly.
But with one final, desperate heave, Bullet ripped the pipe free.
The boulder shifted.
Then it fell.
The others followed—a landslide of rock falling in a deafening boom that shook the whole crevice. Rock grated against rock, the sound ear-shattering. Dust burst in choking clouds that clouded the air with a thick, gray fog.
The avalanche engulfed the Dreadwraith mid-stride, burying its granite legs under tons of rock. The shock petrified it in that position—rigid, immobile, unable to become fluid when pinned.
And in that fleeting hesitation, that moment of vulnerability Bullet had been waiting for, the body of the creature pulsed with something new.
A core.
Shard-like, pulsating with yellowed light, radiating softly. Revealed in transformation, seen for one heartbeat under the surface of the granite.
Bullet didn't think. Couldn't.
He swung the pipe with everything he had left, his muscles screaming in pain.
Metal struck the core with second-to-last moment precision.
There was a snap, hard and final.
The splinter of the Dreadwraith's chest burst.
Red slime seeped from the cut, hard and sickening. The granite form began to break apart, cracks webbing across its surface like a spider's web. Shards shattered off, breaking into dust and debris.
The void-eyes blinked out, their glow fading and finally going dark.
The thrum—marrow-quaking, all-thrall thrum—ceased.
The air was thick, but still.
Bullet recoiled back, witnessing how the Dreadwraith dissolved into smithereens altogether, its enormous body crashing to the ground in a mound of dust and stone. Nothing was left but debris where the monster was standing mere seconds ago.
---
Bullet dropped to his knees, his chest struggling for every breath. Blood dripped relentlessly from his leg, from his side, from a dozen small cuts. The pipe slipped from his numb hand, clashing harshly on stone.
Air wheezed out of the ruptured breathing apparatus hose—a sound too sharp in the sudden quiet. His scar burned like a hot piece of coal pressed hard into his breast. His breaths were raw, agonizing things. His ribs throbbed with each breath. His vision contracted at the periphery, darkness creeping in.
The call summoned again to Province 837's rocky wasteland, summoning him yet in spite of the broken and bloodied condition of him.
The whittled sliver in his pocket was heavy, its circle and cut line still an unanswered question. Spark's shard lay cool beside him, a debt he could never repay fully.
Voices echoed through him, a litany of those he'd left behind: Cowboy's roar as the sand maw snapped shut. Rivet's blood seeping across Province 618's crimson sand. Ember's rock, worn smooth by lines of guilt and determination. Thread's blade, bestowed with undeserved compassion.
All of them echoed, a refrain of forsaken bonds, obligations unfulfilled, trusts shattered by the mere act of moving on.
Bullet struggled to get to his feet, stumbling. He picked up the pipe from the ground, its metal wet with the slime of the Dreadwraith and his own blood. He rubbed it on his cloak—Patch's cloak—beating it with splatters of crimson on the leather.
And then he walked.
The heartbeat of the water block faded behind him, that impossible water cube shrinking with every torturous step. The rocks in front of him stretched out in a new enigma, cold and inhospitable to the fading light of the auroras.
The tug a flame in his breast, drawing him along in spite of all. His scar thudding with each beat of his heart—a reminder that he lived, that he walked, that he had no choice but to continue.
A man without history. Without name save what the world gave him. Tormented by a hunger he could not explain, could not fight, could not understand.
Province 837 stretched out before him, the rock nations Ember had fled. New dangers. New faces. New bills he'd inevitably not pay.
But the pull didn't care about bills. It only cared about what lies forward.