Her feet took several steps forward towards Echoh and the Rue. She stretched out her open hand and swirled it in front of her. Threads of air began to gather as she made the motion, and with one final gesture, Neomi released the tendril as a small burst of violent wind.
Neomi would feel the wind swirling around her, winding and spinning and weaving in separate threads like no normal wind should do. She could feel it in her lungs, breathing for her, tingling like peppermint; her throat and nasal passages opened and she could breathe clearer than she ever had before, her mind sharper and her oxygen-flooded body beginning to ease despite the desperate clamoring danger around her.
The strike of wind caught the little Rue in the face, and with a shriek it tumbled spinning and flapping with four furious wings through the air, smacked into the back of a chair and crumpled, struggling, to the floor of the aisle.
Outside the broken window, the pushing crowd of Rue gnashed and scrabbled long scratches into the side of the dead train. They pressed against the windows, further blocking the light of the cavern behind them, plunging the traincar into deeper darkness.
Echoh, meanwhile, danced with a whirr and clatter of mechanical legs before it reached inside its storage portal and pulled out a shining blue broadsword. The hilt was woven and golden; the blade was etched with indecipherable runes (at least, to Neomi's eyes) and emitted its own pale light. It seemed well-used, slightly notched and scraped, the pommel stained with old blood. The robot pushed the hilt into Neomi's hands while the window smashed again, and again.
CRASH!In front of Neomi, a shadowy snakelike thing slithered down through the window and increased in size as it landed in the aisle.
Behind her, the little four-winged Rue had recovered and clung to Echoh's leg, gnashing at the copper with four sets of teeth. Beyond that, past the closed door of the traincar, she might hear the frightened voices of the other Howls.
The snake-Rue slithered close, its many-eyed head as big as a crate. It did not appear to have a mouth or arms, but it watched Neomi with bright white eyes while it leaned silently closer to her face.
"Um..." She hesitated and took a shaky breath. Sadie wasn't good at talking with the Rue. It scared the hell out of her that she could hear them, but not see them. She tried again. "What-who do you want to leave? What do they have of yours?"
The revolver rose, pointed now at the shadow’s face, but she couldn’t fire, not with the newcomer standing where she was, in the line of fire. If it attacked, she would fire immediately and risk the miss, but not yet.
But the Rue didn’t attack; it just stood there silently in the eerie way that Rue always did, movements that should have produced some kind of sound producing none at all. A facet of their limited existence in this world, or just of Sasha’s limited ability to perceive them. The newcomer spoke but the words were confusing at first, they made no sense on their own. “Who are you… it is… speaking to you?”
Toni moved hastily to join Sasha. "We need to dress her wounds... uh... apply pressure to stop the blee--"
Toni cut herself off. The resurgent stimulation of the Rue within the train had ripped her from her thought. She turned to the back of the car. Someone else that Toni hadn't seen at the station stood, frozen still in the aisle; shadowy mist was amassed behind her. "It's here." Her senses told her that the presence she felt was emanating from where the newcomer was standing. Toni looked at her, fighting to stay composed. "The Rue is in here. I feel it. It's threatening you, isn't it? What does it want?"
Toni might feel another presence nearby, accompanied by the
crash of breaking glass in the next car. This one felt like a warm, clammy, almost slimy hand on her cheek, even as the first Rue's presence shivered down her back like frosted metal.
More Rue pressed against the windows, their big eyes staring in, their presence muffled by the runes painted on the side of the train, blocking the light of the Golden Cathedral so that the traincar was flooded with shadowy darkness. Sasha might see the halo of golden light that projected from the silken Rue with the gold-band head, with its sharp fingers at Sadie's throat. It leaned again to Sadie's ear:
The Tree of Arudoon, it echoed in Sadie's head.
It was stolen. The Cathedral is sacred.Behind Toni and Sasha, Yiya groaned and shifted on the floor between the seats. The gashes in her throat bled in long trickles of bright blood, and she pressed a palm against the wounds, gritting her teeth. She could not see nor hear the Rue.
"Echoh..." She clawed at the floor, scraping her fingers for her walking stick just out of reach.
Something
thunk, thunk, thunked against the window. A spidering crack appeared in the glass, and the Rue converged upon the spot. A little piece of glass fell out, and a tiny Rue slinked inside the traincar and skittered like a cockroach along the wall while its companions continued barraging the window.
The chill in Toni's back grew burning cold, threatening frostbite with its anger.
In Sadie's head, the voice boomed like a deafening drum while the Rue's fist clenched hard at her throat, leaving her only just enough room to breathe with difficulty:
TELL THEM.Thunk, thunk, thunk went the noise at the breaking window.
There were three, then six little skittering Rue infesting the traincar, their presence crawling along Toni's arms and moving in Sasha's peripheral.
Nani,
Mole,
ButtsnBalls,
MurderVictim,
Little Bird,
AlteredTundra,
Izurich,
Carlyle,
Kidd,
ruler of spades
