Sabriel, Round IV - "A hundred hundred heartbeats, no more—and I must win a battle against a terrible enemy."
The tombs of sand lay behind her, the hourglass in the office now toppled. Through fields of fire she had persevered to the point where only one remained; Sabriel, death's enduring herald. All had been flame and a straight and narrow path, but with a blink it was just as quickly vanished.
There had been familiarity in the tombs, a sense of innate understanding for their purpose and presence. That place was easily comprehended in its nature by her, as was that of the office and of the fiery field. All three arenas had contained some resemblance, a foundation of recognition that had put her at relative ease. The place she was now transported to, however, was entirely foreign in all its design.
The first thing she noticed were the screams.
Like rushing water they drowned her thoughts, so deafening was their presence. Anguish and desperation blanketed her conscience and consciousness, tearing her very memories - what few she had garnered - out from the folds of her mind. Her hands shot to her ears, but it did not dull the sound. The terror was within her, and naught could be done to cease it.
Sabriel had heard the whisper of the dead, but not their harrowing roar. No time could be recalled in which her mental faculties had been so thoroughly assaulted; it seemed the very walls of her skull would collapse and spill their contents. Mothers wept, children screeched, and men bellowed out their last. All manner of death knell echoed around her mind.
Taking a calming breath, she tried to parse out each voice separately. Things viewed as a whole often overwhelmed but when seen independently they could be dealt with. Focusing on each singular voice, she tried to find the common cause for their unrest, the reason for their expulsion from their earthly coils. One word ran repeated, one coarse reflection could be seen: bandits!
She whimpered, she could not help herself. Fearing for your own life was one thing, but having the loss of so many others come crashing down upon you was... no living creature could possibly know the weight of it. There were no words.
Slowly, with tears brimming, she heard another voice. It was one not belonging to the departed, and one she had previously encountered. Where had she heard it?
"-nly one of you will proceed. This promises to be a night to remember."
She saw the man, dining across from the dead woman, but it was not his face she counted recognizable. It was his voice. Where had she heard it? Deathly echoes clamored around her mind's ear, sending shivers down her spine.
Where have I heard it?!
And then she heard some band begin to play, its song wafting through the restaurant. The sound of it all, this mixing maelstrom of music and mania, did not help her one bit. She had not struggled so hard to keep her mind set since... when was it? With the goblin? That was when! Him and his arrows, his pointed stock which could not save him.
Think of father, think of him...
She tried to reach that calm serenity she had once held again yet the best she could find was relative normalcy. Her mind was burdened with the load. All was as pain and ending.
"Right you two, hop to it!"
That voice...
"Or float..."
Isn't that...
"Whichever.”
"You're the man from the hourglass!"
Sabriel had found her grounding; the deadened voices still remained but they were as cicadas in the summer to her now, not the torrent of an ocean storm they had been. Clinging to her remembrance of the man from the hourglass, she took in the surroundings quickly.
Nothing seemed familiar: not the weave of the carpets, not the curve of the drinking glasses, not the lights or the bottles or the tables. The sky outside the restaurant was a stranger. But that was not the sky, that was the heavens! Where had they been transported to?
Fighting off the disorientation which had so plagued her, Sabriel came to her own senses. Glancing down, she discovered another disturbance: her feet were not planted upon the floor! She was floating! Various objects hung in the air like light snow gripping at the wind or stringless baubles hanging from a winter tree. She realized her upset stomach was not related to the ache in her head the dead voices caused her. Noting her lack of hunger and tiredness, she turned to face the other man their captor and judge had addressed.
In a bout of relief, she realized he looked more similar to her than he did to the surroundings. Her fellow prisoner's hair was almost as black as hers, but his skin was darker. His eyes carried the sunken look of someone who had seen too much in life; the same one the Chronomancer had carried. It was likely, however, that this was something he had not encountered before. He too was presumably just as thrown off by the circumstances as she was.
Meanwhile their warden sat there dining, serene as could be. Her eyes flickered to her supposed opponent again. Back and forth, between the two men once more.
A great roiling of emotion built up within her. It was an anger seated at the right hand of righteousness. One thing was certain; here, unlike any where before, she had a chance.
"Come on then."
She turned away from the two of them and began to sprint. Only, her feet did not connect to the ground in the way she was used to. Lifting slightly higher and setting to collide with the ceiling, hands flung out to steady herself. It was like flying! How it was possible, she did not know and could not dwell upon. Once her hands were placed on the odd tiles, she attempted to stop herself, only to find that that majority of her body continued onwards.
It was like trying to quit a fall you were already caught in; no arm waving or movement of the torso could undo the momentum. Every twitch of every muscle was to no avail and she could do nothing to impede her body's own progress. She slipped through the space like hot butter on glass. Allowing her body to press against the ceiling, she tried to find a foothold. The toe of her right boot caught some sort of concave well, and she used what pressure that was there to launch herself away from the two men, heading towards a stairwell on the other side or the expensive looking room.
As Sabriel swam through the air, she did a quick pat down of her person to search for her belongings. The bells still clung to her belt, now joined by two new ones. More friends of hers. A brief grin flashed across her face before she looked to see if her sword was still in her scabbard. No skeletal cat, though; but she had expected that. It was just her, the dead, the presumed foe, and the Man with the Hourglass Voice.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she tried to stop herself, rather unsuccessfully. Looking back over her shoulder to see the raven-haired man still next to their captor, she called out to him, waving forward. "Well! Come on! We can't stay in this room! You need to come with me." She was trying to be vague; she didn't want the Hourglass Man to know just yet what she was plotting.
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