~~David~~
Acelina was carrying him. Part of him was surprised it wasn’t Caera, but the tiger lady was faster on all fours, and she couldn’t carry him in her arms unless she went on two. Another part of him was surprised Acelina had bothered to come back and grab him at all. But those thoughts danced away on the surface of the currents, and while he could look up and see them above his consciousness, some other part of him yelling down at him through the surface of the ocean, David was too deep. They were distant. The ocean was not.
The forest was open, trees ripped apart, and a path cleared for his demons to run through, and Acelina’s hooves sent up black dirt and broken, sharp twigs into the air with each step of her hooves. David looked down from over her shoulder, the huge demoness holding his legs and back in a hug, like he was a child held to her armored chest. Somewhere ahead of her, the others had taken the path and were out of sight. But behind, the flame wings of the rider tore up the ground that trapped him.
David held out one hand over Acelina’s shoulder, and told Hell to entomb the rider. Bury him. Stop him. Sink him deep into the tunnels, lava, and guts of Hell. And she listened. With an invisible dance, Hell trembled, and the ground quaked. The trees were sturdy but brittle, and they shattered in a circle around the rider for a hundred meters in every direction, as if a cinder block had crashed into a glass wall.
Acelina almost tripped, but she spread her massive wings and caught herself. All movement David only noticed at the edge of his awareness. All that existed was Hell, the black dirt, the blackstone mixed within it, the strange black trees that were closer to glass than tree, the ground and lava veins below, and the fire sky above. They were the ocean currents that pulled him. They were the wave the rider fought against.
David played harder, and the hellquake reached further. Trees exploded, sending sharp branches into the sky and above the fog as David’s song turned the ground into a churning machine, vibrating and twisting, coiling stone pulling on the rider’s position. Down. Sink down into the dirt and die.
The rider’s burning wings flapped harder, still piercing up through the dirt, but gaining no altitude. David played harder again, and Acelina let out a shriek as the surrounding trees exploded, burying them both in their shards. But it wasn’t enough. The song drowned the area for kilometers in all directions, and soon Acelina’s hooves sank, too. But it wasn’t enough.
“David!”
“Keep running.” He didn’t look her way, eyes locked on the distant fog and the burning wings disappearing behind the veil of gray. He summoned more vibration, until Hell herself groaned with the effort, and the ground sank into a crater, ripping it out from under Acelina. Only her wings kept her from falling, and soon she was running up a slope instead of flat ground.
Hissing and panting, Acelina flapped hard and jumped, launching the two of them into the air and back up onto the lip of the crater. She didn’t look back, breaking into a run the moment her hooves hit the dirt, and she squeezed him tight to her chest as she leaned forward for balance. The feel of her chest armor pushing into his chest hurt, and the jolt of pain pulled his eyes to her, and past her to the black forest beyond.
The forest of black, glass-like trees was gone. And in the distant flog and crater below, the fire wings disappeared into the churning depths. Got him.
The hellquake continued. David stopped playing the strings, but they continued to vibrate, the presence in the ocean with him plucking the strings regardless of him.
“David! Stop this! You’ll kill us!”
Stop this? It was the song. Why would he stop the song?
A scream in the distance cut across his spine like a whip, and he snapped his head up and looked back. Somewhere in the fog, somewhere on the path he’d created for his friends to escape, someone was screaming.
He grabbed the strings inside him, and silenced them. The vibration tore into the fingers in his depths, like rope burn, but he held on, and crushed the vibration. The currents came to a harsh stop, and cruel reality ripped him from the ocean, the rope tearing non-existent skin from his non-existent inner fingers. But the hellquake stopped.
He looked at his real hands and bit down the urge to scream.
Whether Acelina looked his way with her featureless face, he couldn’t tell, but as a thousand little thoughts restarted in his brain like a PC reboot, he forced his eyes away from his fingers. A part of him was still convinced they’d been burned off. He looked at her, past her, and sucked in a breath. The forest really was gone.
Thirty seconds later, she found the group, all of them in a circle and working to dig someone out of the dirt. The path he’d created was gone, every tree reduced to shards, and sections of ground were raised or sunk, churned, or broken open into small ditches or large trenches. And one of the girls had gotten trapped, half sunk below the ground. Lasca.
“Oh fuck, Lasca,” he said. Acelina set him down, and he got on his knees beside the little demon.
“David!” She reached out for him, and he got her hands in his. Caera and Dao were already digging her out, though, and Jes slapped David’s hands away and took Lasca’s hands instead. Stronger than him. It wasn’t long before the little lady was free.
She threw her arms around David and hugged him. If he hadn’t already been on his knees, he would have fallen over.
“What the fuck?” Jes said, flaring her wings. “Where’s my hug?”
Latia, Laria, and Laara all squealed, ran past Jes, and hugged David from all directions.
“So scary!”
“Rider scary!”
“Too scary!”
“David got him!”
“Killed him!”
“Big quake! David made the quake?”
“We saw him sink! Then we were too far, and–”
“Gone!”
Laara winced and held out her wing to David. It was torn and bleeding.