She sings Clode’s strangling tune before the beaded soldiers get a chance to speak a single word.
It’s not a gentle song. The Other does not leave room for mercy. There are no sips of breath for gasped begging. Instead, she minces their lungs in an instant, reveling in their horrified agony.
Blood erupts from the soldiers’ mouths, their bulging eyes leaking ruddy tears as they claw at their throats, some falling where they stand. Others try to escape, staggering into walls or off the bridge, dead long before they hit the ground.
The Other rips twin daggers free of her bandolier, spinning. Flicking them through the air. The blades slice toward the far side of the bridge, into the eyes of two soldiers just beyond the reach of her strangling tune before they have a chance to wield their own words.
They crumble where they stand.
Another soldier trips on the corpses, tumbling over the edge. The sound of his body breaking against a lower bridge thumps through the chaos.
A ruthless smile spreads across The Other’s face—no longer reminiscent of her fiercely beautiful host. Now sharp and savage.
Monstrous.
More blades whizz through the air, The Other’s deadly sky-borne blows finding home in flesh and bone, slotting into the frail slits between sturdy plates of armor.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Soldiers fall in a clatter of metal and meat while The Other sings the air into nothingness, stripping the oxygen and nulling the soldiers’ ability to sing. Making the atmosphere inhospitable for the flames her opponents need to see what she’s doing. Where her blades are being aimed.
They thought the darkness was their ally, but it was their ruin. As it so often is for many who underestimate the shroud of a sunless sky.
A storm of unforeseen reserve troops spill from the southern tunnel, screaming.
Charging.
One orders the bridge to split before The Other can pulverize his lungs, and cracks weave through the stone.
The bridge jerks.
She falters, hissing through bared teeth, catching her footing with a fist firmly planted on the rock. “Glei te ah no veirie nahh,” she screams, whipping up her head. “Glei te ah no veirie!”
Clode churns into a squealing dance of snipped breaths and collapsing airways, barging into soldiers’ chests in gusty shoves, tossing them off the crumbling bridge with a spray of stone.
Many try to retreat, though only a few make it back into the tunnel.
The Other laughs, pushing to a stand, hunting the clutch of deserters, her swift steps gaining ground until she’s close enough to sink iron daggers into the back of their necks with a flick of her wrist. She leaps, pouring upon another like a seething wave, ripping his head back and slashing his throat.
Blood sprays, coating her hands and face.
She charges the remaining two, salivating for the taste of their blood on her lips. She draws closer.
Closer.
The tunnel opens, and she passes into a small circular cavern lit by so many flaming sconces she’s forced to squint, her sooty eyes not attuned to the harsh glare.
The hairs on the back of her neck lift—
A loud clanking has her whipping around to see a door of metal bars now blocking the exit. Locking her in.
She hisses, spinning in a churn of black hair, blood, and spitting rage, appraising the many soldiers lining the cavern’s wall—arm to arm, red helmets hiding their faces and swords braced at their hips.
A trap.
A fight ring.
Some of them sing spitting, hissing tunes, flames whipping from elemental containment wealds and lit sconces.
Spearing straight for her.
With a lashing sneer, The Other sings Clode’s suffocating tune. “Glei te ah no veirie. Ata nei del te nahh. Mele, Clode. Mele!”
The ribboning flames sputter into oblivion, as with most of the lit sconces dotted around the walls, filling the cavern with a blissful gloom.
Many soldiers drop to their knees, clawing at their throats.
The Other descends on one of the two who beat her here, slashing a blade through the gap in his armor. His intestines bulge from the gory hack, and she’s on the next in an instant, wrapping her limbs around his head and lashing it to the side. His neck snaps with a satisfying crack, and he falls to the ground in a floppy heap at her feet.
Surveying her remaining opponents, she releases a deep, bellowing word that gouges a path up her throat. Like she just heaved a sharp stone from the pit of her gut.
“Vobanth!”
The cavern shakes with Bulder’s answer—a jagged cleft prying the ground apart, yawning like the crooked maw of some great beast.
Soldiers scream, hands whipping out to steady themselves against the rough-hewn wall, some falling into the grinding abyss, crushed by the shifting stone to the tune of breaking bones and popping skulls.