Tabitha Chirrick - Overshadowed

When you’re ten points behind in the last quarter of a magball game, unthinkable risks become the only options. Tayel saw little difference now with so little left to lose. She dropped her baton, leapt through the air, and tackled Ruxbane.

He swayed with the momentum of the attack he’d lost. She pulled all her weight against his arm, dragging him down with her. He tugged back. She caught his gloved hand before it could slip out of her grip, forced it steady, and slapped the prototype around his wrist. Her thumb just grazed the activation button as he swatted her away.

She hit the wall hard, but shook the daze away. Ruxbane clambered to a stand. The portal she’d nearly fallen through evaporated out of existence behind him, and Shy toppled to the floor. Tayel’s heart raced. Ruxbane drew back his fist. She held her breath as Shy shouted a warning, and he slashed through the air toward her.

Nothing happened.

No dark aether. Not even a breeze.

“What did you do?” Shy breathed.

Ruxbane’s expression twisted into a mixture of terrified, widened eyes and a confused scowl, and he raised his left hand, focused on the ticking gray band around it. He shrunk into himself, shoulders jutting up to his reddening ears. He scratched at the band as it refused to give. Tayel stood.

Guilt hit her harder than the wall had at the desperate way he looked at her. He took a step back, and her one forward. She didn’t have time to be indecisive. She literally had seconds, and when those seconds were up, guilt certainly wasn’t going to stop him. She picked up her mag baton.

He held up his hands. “Please. Wait. I didn’t want this.”

Neither did she. She attacked him, grimacing at the baton’s tremors as each hit met its mark. She didn’t want the raiders to invade her homeworld. She didn’t want her mom to die or for Jace — Alhyt, Jace — to be torn away from his family. She didn’t want to learn those invaders had been forced into servitude — literally brainwashed to slaughter people — or to see an entire civilization brought down by a world-shattering siege. She understood not wanting things to happen better than anybody. If Ruxbane felt the same, maybe he shouldn’t have started it all.

She swung again, and the impact sent him sprawling across the floor. The baton slipped from her numb fingers as his body shuddered. His skin evaporated away into wisps of darkness. They seeped upward into a black cloud, peeling away his body until it completely vanished. The center of the quivering mass that had formed lit up into a maze of spiraling, twisted, node-like patterns, and pulses of purple light rippled out from the center, almost like a heartbeat.

It didn’t move, didn’t attack. Just floated, silent and wavering.

Tayel draped over her knees. She held herself up against her thighs, swallowing gasps of air. Everything hurt. Her arms, legs, stomach, chest, neck, head. Even thinking hurt.

“Tayel,” Shy said.

Tayel huffed, pushing off her legs to stand tall and grimacing at the lance of pain through her side. She slogged toward Shy and offered a hand up.

Shy took it. “Is he dead?”

“I…”

“Just don’t touch it.”

“The cloud?”

Shy nodded.

“What is it?” Tayel asked.

“I don’t know; just don’t—” Shy sucked air through her teeth. She winced.

Tayel reached for her, hands hovering, ready to catch Shy if she fell. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I might have broken a rib. Or…” She stopped to squint over Tayel’s shoulder at the sharp whine of screeching metal rising from the rubble pile.

Tayel whipped around. Chunks of destroyed workstations rolled toward the floor as a force pushed upward against the debris. Blood drained from her face. Jace. She ran forward, willing her legs to pump faster, but every footfall was a plod. Her shins burned, her chest ached, her mind raced. A talon broke above the debris, and her breath came out as a cry. She jumped into the mountain of rubble, ignoring the scraping pains across her arms and legs as she scrambled upward.

The talon shoved another plate of warped metal away, and Jace pulled out of the debris, his glassy eyes widening at the sight of her. Her heart leapt. She reached him. She wrapped her arms around his boney frame, around the matted feathers and trembling beak, and pulled him close. He was safe. He was alive.

He shuddered. “I’m sorry!” he squawked.

“Jace—”

“I’m so sorry! I waited until the fighting stopped! I couldn’t — I wasn’t — I couldn’t!”

Tayel shifted slightly to let Shy up the path she’d blazed. “Jace, it’s okay.”

“I — no! I’m so sorry. I — I was so scared. I didn’t — I—” He pressed his beak into her shoulder and babbled incoherently, shivering as every other word became a choked cry.

“It’s okay.” She squeezed him tighter. “It’s okay, Jace; I’m here.”

Shy scooted past Tayel, next to the opening in the rubble Jace had dug out of. She picked up and tossed a bundle of wires from the narrow hole and reeled back after another look downward.

She slapped a hand over her chest. “ Alhyt .”

Fehn scrambled halfway out of the opening, teeth clenched and arms shaking as he steadied himself against the wobbling debris. Tayel sighed with relief, but the air caught in her throat as he climbed the rest of the way. Blood seeped through a tear in his coat, under his ribs. She caught the sheen of sweat across his brow in the full light of the room, and how pale his skin had turned.

“Did I scare you?” he grunted.

“You’re bleeding,” Shy said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Couldn’t protect everything with aether, turns out.” He laid his head down and panted.

Jace shifted in Tayel’s arms, looking to Fehn. “I’m so sorry.”

Fehn struggled to wave away the apology, his cyonic fingers shaking with the attempt. “Not your fault, Feathers.” He flinched as Shy pressed her balled up coat to his wound. “Did we win?”

“Barely,” Tayel breathed.

“How bad does it feel?” Shy asked.

“Bad,” he groaned. “Not dead yet, but…”

“Can you move?”

“You’re kidding. Balcruf should carry me, since he” — Fehn hissed — “had the mind to start this whole mess.”

“It would have happened anyway.”

“W-where is Balcruf?” Jace asked.

Tayel frowned at the memory of his scream. Half sunk in Ruxbane’s portal, she hadn’t seen what happened. She adjusted to scan the room. The cloud Ruxbane’s body had morphed into pulsed and wavered and expanded where she’d left it, and swirls of the darkness that comprised it slid to the floor.

“Shy!” she warned.

Everyone looked, and a horrified stillness settled over all of them. The cloud spiraled down the way it had peeled up, and in seconds the ragged, bloodied body that had vanished reappeared. Ruxbane reappeared. He pressed his palm to his forehead, back hunched and jaw set as tendrils of darkness evaporated from his skin — almost like shimmers of heat wavering in the distance. He looked up and stiffened at the sight of everyone.

He let loose an exasperated gasp and half-limped, half-sprinted to the stairs at the back of the room.

Shy jumped to a stand, ripping her compacted polestaff off her belt.

“Wait!” Tayel yelled. “What are you—?”

“We can’t let him get away,” Shy snapped, and she stumbled across the debris, swearing as she slipped downward.

Tayel snapped her head back and forth between Jace and her baton, laying on the ground across the room where she’d dropped it.

“I… I’ll stay with Fehn,” Jace said.

“But what if Ruxbane—?”