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Friday, March 29, 2024

Dust and Sand – Chapter 32 – By Sean P. Wallace

Eleanor balled the knowledge together and uttered a spell to solidify and codify it. The world returned as the data became a small amber sphere. She rolled the ball across her palm, enjoying the feel of its smooth surface, then placed it in her travel pack.

The Bite, she concluded, had returned because its target was dead. She was about to dismiss it when she noticed more information on its tongue, a puddle compared to the main block of data but significant nonetheless. A questioning gaze got no response; it just waited for her to gather what it’d found.

Tentatively, she put a finger in the pool and a map appeared, the trail of a journey from the Wastrels’ stolen temple to Crucifix. At first she thought it was her own escape but the trail was too slow and halting; someone else had limped out of the temple and gone to Crucifix. Her heart stopped and her throat ran dry. She followed the path into the town and saw the statistics of a conflict, traded spells and a capture. The information stopped with a surge of magic, a hurried sprint and a gentle walk back to the chapel.

Eleanor had ordered the Bite to only gather information on Dust… this had to be about him. The Bite had returned to warn her that he had escaped. The gods-damned son of a fucking bitch had escaped the temple. That Which Sins’ Faustian had to be dead. She examined the map again; Dust had had three companions with him. Two of them would be Shadows Fade and her damn wolf.

The third was probably Penelope.

Calmly, she dismissed the Bite. It rubbed its soft fur against her arm and returned to Omnis’ realm. Then she jumped from her horse, thumped it three times on the rear to make it stay, and walked into the Badlands.

It had been too easy. That should have been her first warning; nothing worthwhile was easy. She and the plan had relied on the Wastrels and they had failed even with the Bond, one of Omnis’ most powerful artefacts! They’d had him completely disconnected from Resistance and he’d still slipped from their grasp to wreak a terrible vengeance; worse still, he’d probably saved Penelope in the process.

Eleanor growled. All of that planning, all of the careful movement and meetings and money spent to take the Wanted Man out and get a cult of That Which Sins to make a false Avatar, all of her time and effort… it had been wasted. She had failed. Eleanor was a failure.

It didn’t take her long to find something to take her anger out on; the Badlands were always crawling with foolish projects of That Which Sins or Melting Flesh. Omnis rarely worked here, preferring more… powerful grounds to experiment in, she could shoot the small herd of coyotes she set her sights on with impunity.

With a roar, she raised her rifle and fired into the pack. The pitiful things scattered when their leader exploded in a shower of gore. Eleanor did not relent. Her gun was akin to Noose in that it drew on a tainted artefact for power and she didn’t need to worry about bullets. So she poured shot after shot into their fleeing hides. When murder stopped satisfying her, she took wounding shots, knocking a creature’s paw off or gut-shooting it.

Their confused behaviour and lack of any will to fight told her the coyotes weren’t creatures of the Triangle. That made the destruction more enjoyable.

But this joy was short-lived. Her mind returned to the consequences of her failure; she hadn’t known her cult had an agent in Crucifix until she felt Omnis’ magic in him. He was also dead and they wouldn’t add evidence against Dust, a plan hatched quickly in a moment alone. That was a sidenote but it would count against her in the final tally, another black mark against her name.

Some creatures had noticed her rampage. They kept their distance for now, monsters of Melting Flesh if she were any judge. They waited to scavenge whatever she left behind. In her fury, Eleanor shot at them too but they were more careful, stronger, and avoided the bullets with magic or unnatural agility.

The red veil dropped then; she didn’t want something nastier to be drawn by the blood or her hatred. Eleanor lowered her rifle, checked her surroundings and jogged back to her ride. The mass of coyote corpses should keep the predators occupied enough for her to slip away.

And so it proved. She was not followed on her jog through the cold night.

Her horse stood where she’d left it, scared to resist its master. She clambered onto it and spurred it into a gallop in spite of her sore orifices.

The horse ran for twenty minutes before Eleanor slowed it to report her failure. She activated a series of tattoos around her body and sacrificed what she’d learned of this growing craze called ‘baseball’ to create another messaging spell. The knowledge was torn from her, a sensation not unlike having your fingernails pulled, but that was the price she had to pay when short of magic.

A swirling portal like a mirror at the bottom of a whirlpool appeared before her eyes. It showed only her reflection for a few seconds. Then another face, a familiar and handsome one with most of the same features, appeared.

“Eleanor, daughter of mine,” her father said. “To what do I owe the unalloyed pleasure of this early morning communiqué?”

She winced. This was always going to be a horrible conversation but his tone told her it would be worse than she’d imagined. She decided to cut to the chase, be clear. He’d appreciate that.

“Our plan has failed,” she said.

“You will have to repeat that, Eleanor, as I was certain you just said that the plan has failed.”

SeanPWallace
SeanPWallace
Sean is an editor, writer, and podcast host at Geek Pride, as well as a novelist. His self-published works can be found at all good eBook stores.

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