“He’s not getting up,” yelled Sari suddenly, the words cutting across Ezrihel’s focus.
“What?” the andromedan General snapped to be heard over the din, head whipping towards Sari, the blonde strands of his hair flung wildly around his aristocratic features, tangled with dust and smoke. His sword sliced through the air as he fended off an Unmade beast with far too many spear-like, grasping legs—scything off half of them in one fell swoop.
The pair ducked behind the toppled remains of a brick wall, wary of the twining heads of the three-headed golden behemoth and its shadowy counterpart high above them, creeping in sinuous coils amidst the debris, their sharp jaws gnashing and releasing bursts of lightning that tore everything in their path asunder.
“Arthur,” supplied the blue-haired assassin, his eyes flicking towards where the fiery cowpoke’s eight-story tall form had been cast into the war-torn wreckage of one of the city’s lower districts. “He’s not getting up. Do you think he might be dead, my General?"
"Hardly," Ezrihel scoffed at the suggestion, offended by the mere thought. “He’s tangled with an
Arbiter before, for Nithos's sake. I
highly doubt one little swat would be enough to topple him.”
Yet, the noblethem couldn't suppress the urge to steal a concerned glance back towards the silent, motionless heap of rubble and billowing black ash…
.
.
.
A dusting of snow shook down on him, sifting through the brittle air as a gentle powder descending upon his prone figure.
The biting cold tore at Arthur's cheeks, leaving his lips chapped and his grizzled beard raw and stinging, the skin beneath cracked into bleeding veins of scarlet and bruised blueish-black purple. Each flake that landed upon his weathered face felt like barbed wire being dragged across his flesh—the sharp crystals fleecy and spinning, as weightless as his thoughts were scattered, tangled up in a whirlwind where truth and shadows twined together in a confusing, hazy mess.
He couldn't remember how he got there. Couldn’t remember
why he lay there, sprawled across an endless expanse of white. A shivering husk of a man, of
nothing, the crust of frost beneath his crumpled frame bearing his imprint, his body’s thawing warmth, and little else.
But he could taste the sour, metallic tang of blood in his mouth, its coppery fingers clawing outward from his chest like a man might dig himself out of a grave. A brutal reminder that he was still among the living, even as his mind grew numb with delirium, his extremities deadened by the cold.
There was something… something he was meant to be
doing. Something that
needed doing.
With an effort that seemed to summon every ounce of strength he had left, Arthur forced himself to focus on his hands—those sun-kissed, scarred storytellers of a life lived hard and foolishly, though not particularly
long—and watched, like seeing some inexpert puppeteer at work, as his fingers hooked, scraped, and
dug with weakening fervor at the ground beneath him.
Fighting to stand. Fighting to
get up.
The snow yielded begrudgingly to his desperate scratching, revealing streaks of bitter ice that glinted scornfully under an absent sun. His fingers, chafed and burning red with exertion, met with opposition at every turn. He barely registered the cuts on his knuckles where the frigid crystals had lashed out too fiercely, the uneven granules leaving glistening, crimson droplets of blood to mix with the pristine white of the snow.
Shallow breaths tried to fill his lungs—crackling, laborious puffs that hung in the air, gusty and misting with flecks of black, diseased blood, before dissolving into the polar vastness. All other sounds were muffled, almost as if he were submerged under water; a great hum rolling and sloshing in his ears like the ocean’s eddying waves, everything beyond rendered as distant and fluid as a dream.
A dream, but not a particularly pleasant one.
Every so often, Arthur
thought he caught the cadence of a familiar voice or the distant, rumbling growl of thunder, but it slipped away from him just as quickly. An auditory mirage, he thought. Only the wind playing tricks on his mind.
With each futile effort to rise, the cold hard ground became his confessor, accepting the burden of his collapsing, crumbling body with stoic indifference. His muscles protested their leaden weariness, but it was as though his every fiber had been dredged through thick, gum-like mud—the snow painting him in its chilling, ivory-white livery until he was left there, sluggish and limp, staring up into a vault of endless white like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
As he lay there, slumped in the dirt like a beaten dog, Arthur became cognizant of… a secondary presence. The crackling of a campfire, the subtle sensation of heat against his skin. A mere suggestion of comfort against the bitter, blue-black cold that had consumed his eyelids, his ears, his nose, his mouth.
“Arthur Morgan,” came a voice, crisp and clear over the howling of the wind. “I do wonder… where you get the
nerve.”
Arthur blinked. Slowly, straining against the relentless flurries that sought to blanket him whole, his eyelids heavy with their weight… and looked up.
His mind sketched the figure before he saw him proper. A man, dark and looming against the searing canvas of white. A
strange man, at that—wearing a black suit and a black top hat, with a black, trim mustache and black, empty eyes.
The man’s figure was illuminated only dimly by the campfire’s hungry orange-gold flames, the murk of his clothing seeming to absorb its flickering light.
“Who… the hell… are you?” wheezed Arthur. He struggled to focus his bleary eyes, barely able to form words around the pain in his chest.
"I’m an old friend,” said the man, staring off at something across the frozen expanse. Arthur looked that direction, too, but all he could see was a plain of solid ice. That, and one monster of a storm brewing on the horizon, the dark clouds tinged with flashes of violet-black and gold. “Or perhaps simply an interested party. Either way, it doesn’t matter now. Does it?”
Arthur tried to respond, he did.
Instead, he coughed.
He
coughed, long and wet and
hacking, each choked, terminated breath like a strand of rusted saw blades
raking across his lungs, his throat, his—hell, the whole damned
trunk of his body, practically flaying him alive from root to tip.
Sweat trickled down his forehead in rivers by the time he was through, his face uncomfortably hot, head spinning as his eyes struggled to
line up.
“I thought so,” said the strange man, his shadowed eyes glinting, beetle-black, as he peered down his nose at Arthur. “You stand among gods, Arthur. Among angels and devils. And yet here you are, the most godless of them all, groveling in the mire like a lowly worm.”
Despite everything, a grin cracked across Arthur's face.
"Ain't… worth nothin' more than that, I reckon,” he croaked out, voice hoarse, the frozen-stiff corners of his mouth seeping thin trickles of crimson. “Just worm food."
The mysterious stranger chuckled, a low and soft sound like the gentle fastening of a coffin’s lid. Arthur felt the chill of that laugh creep across his skin, a prickling of gooseflesh lifting in its wake, rising like the hackles of an animal.
“Worm food?” the strange man echoed, tilting his head ever so slightly—his top hat casting improbable, unsettling shadows that seemed to falter in their attempts to cross his plain features. “You’re far from your final rest, Arthur. I’m afraid the worms will have to wait.”
Arthur didn’t imagine so. He felt worn. Beaten. Couldn’t the man see that? His body
ached, his muscles burning with a severity that rivaled the diabolic inferno he'd seen in the belly of the beast that’d struck him. Though it was more than the
physical ache that weighed upon his spirit, now; it was the crushing yoke of fate. The knowledge that even here, after every improbable, impossible thing he’d seen and done, he’d always be kicked back down to this one, solitary point.
The dirt.
“Can’t keep
doin’ this,” he groaned.
He didn’t know which part he was referring to. Damn near all of it, Arthur imagined.
But he didn’t have the luxury of languishing. There was something that
needed doing—something half-done that needed seen to.
Unfinished business. That’s what they called it, wasn’t it? When a man who was by all natural rights supposed to be
dead kept on
living.
With great effort, the cowpoke shoved against the icy crust of hoarfrost beneath his hands as he fought to rise, his arms quivering under him like sapling branches in gale-force winds. And all the while, the stranger observed him with an air of detached curiosity, as if watching a tortoise struggling to right itself upon its back.
“That creature,” said the man. “Is but a child’s bedtime story compared to what’s waiting for you.”
Panting hard, Arthur steadied himself as he rose up onto one knee. Chest heaving. Body hunched forward, his neck and spine tortuously bent, head bowed as if in supplication.
He squinted up at the stranger through swollen, cornflower blue eyes, utterly incredulous.
“Really?” he managed to spit out through bloodied, cracked teeth. Phlegmy red speckled the snow, bright as rubies. “What's there left after
this?”
All good things come in threes, growled the Wolf.
She stood to Arthur’s right, her hoary, mottled-grey coat bristling against the cold. Her yellow eyes fixed upon him, jaws agape in a canine pant, revealing rows of glistening fangs in a snarled muzzle.
And evils, snorted the Stag.
He stood to Arthur’s left, his broad chest and neck chiseled with sun-dappled brawn, his antlers sprawling outward like a crown of thorns. Long, graceful legs carried his form, his front hooves stamping against the icy ground with a blustery, ghosting
huff of steam.
And ahead of him, the strange man loomed ever closer, his shadow threatening to swallow Arthur up completely.
“This world is but a crucible,” said the man, hands folded neatly behind his back, tipping forward and back on his heels. “And you—like all those who came before you—are being tempered within it.”
“You keep carryin’ on like this,” Arthur grumbled irritably, in between gasps for air, glaring from beneath the brim of his hat. “Talkin’ in circles, riddles, and what have you... and I’m gonna get
mad.”
“Mad?” the man in the black top hat gave a mirthless chuckle, the sound mirrored by a
chuff from the Wolf, a snort from the Stag’s dewy snout. “Let me
tell you what you have to be mad about, Arthur Morgan.”
He turned, his footsteps crunching through the powdery snow as he paced slowly away from the stooped cowboy, one smooth, sleek accountant’s shoe after the other.
"You and I, we're cut from the same cloth. A lawless and moral breed, hailing from the untamed territories of the old world. The wild and free places that keep hell fat with sinners…”
The strange man drew to a halt, hands slipping inside his black suit jacket’s pockets.
“
Arbiter,” he stated, the title laced with a hissing, keen sort of distaste as it slithered off his tongue. “The very word signifies control. Power. The right to rule. They've yanked you away from your own world, from the fate you chose, my friend. They won't even let you
die. And now, they've allowed this governed realm to succumb to the dark. Worst of all… they expect you and your little friends to
rectify it.”
He pivoted on his heel and gazed down at Arthur with dark, scrutinizing eyes.
"I
wonder. What sentiment does that stir within you, Arthur Morgan?"
Arthur chewed on that thought, for a time.
“I reckon,” he began in a drawl, the words hoarse and weary, trailing along like the slow creaking of a wagon's wheels. "I
reckon I'm feelin’ mighty used up. It’s one thing when hell’s got hold of your coat tails… real different when it’s some devil I
don’t know, stringin’ me along.”
With a grunt, he heaved himself more or less upright and stumbled forward in the snow. His boots sank deep into the frozen ground with each unsteady, listing step—and the Wolf moved alongside him, the Stag and the Strange Man remaining behind, dissolving with the falling snow, failing, passing away.
“But I
also reckon,” said Arthur, a glint in his eye. “I ain't done yet. Got a few more good licks left in me.”
.
.
.
From out of the dark a blue whip of fire shot forward with a crack and shriek, its links ablaze, snapping in fury.
The three-headed abomination came to a sudden halt in its rampage, its shadowy form unfurling two colossal, cadaverous wings. Its serpentine heads reared high, the cursed sigils blazing upon their crested foreheads with an unnatural, blood-red gleam. From its loathsome nostrils billowed forth great strokes of violet flame, dark and pungent with the sulfurous stench of death.
Amidst the shattered wreckage of the Dwemer ruin, Arthur stood, his shoulders bent forward in a wolfish lean, an immense length of chain coiled in his skeletal grasp.
His shotgun hung limply in his other hand, wreathed in roaring blue flame.
“C’mere,” he said, the words crackling out from between the bared teeth of his naked, grinning skull.
“C’mere.”
He gripped the fiery blue chain and whirled it around his head, the singing whine of metal humming in the air with every turn.
Sch-ing. Sch-ing. Sch-ing.
The three-headed dragon rested in menacing stillness for a moment more, its tongues of fire and bilious thunderbolts wavering with uncertainty in its breast. Then, it approached slowly—the shadows around it seeming to deepen and expand, crushing homes and lofty towers beneath its bony, talon-tipped feet.
It uttered a baleful, snarling hiss, its dark words indecipherable to Arthur, mangled by the jaws of his mind. They were warped and corrupted, wrung from the very depths of whatever unholy nether it had crawled up from. Until finally, it reared upright, wings spanning wide, encompassing the cavern ceiling and casting an apocalyptic shadow over all that was ensconced within.
In the encroaching darkness, Arthur remained. He stood hunched, skull tipped at a crooked angle upon its stem of kerchief-covered vertebra, his skeletal form streaked with azure hellfire, his chain-whip swinging like a bolt of lightning striking against the black.
Sch-ing. Sch-ing. Sch-ing.
“C’MERE,” he said again, louder, this time accompanied by a high-pitched, whistling ember from between his gnashing teeth.
Out of the titanic creature's three maws came forth three beams of glaring violet light.
With a thunderous
BOOM and a searing lash of blue, the three-headed devil pitched backwards, emitting a shrill, furious cry—the lancing glare of its deadly breath forming a dazzling spectrum in the air, arcing wide of its intended target. Arthur staggered, his colossal boot-heels skidding in the rubble, before regaining his footing.
The chain in his bony hand continued its hypnotic, unending circuit, swinging in a rhythmic frenzy.
Sch-ing. Sch-ing. Sch-ing.
“C’MERE, YOU,” Arthur rasped again, and lurched forward, the length of chain crackling, hissing,
spitting in his grip.
Amidst the deafening thunderclap of its tattered, ripped-sail wings, the great three-headed abomination descended upon him, its spiny, club-like tails poised to strike and its cataclysmic jaws stretched wide.
A glimmer of gold flickered in Arthur’s periphery, coming from the creature’s flank, and that’s when he struck.
With a surge of rage, Arthur brandished the chain-whip with all his might, bottom jaw falling unhinged as he emitted a guttural, wicked cackle that ricocheted across the ravaged cityscape.
CRACK! The metallic links writhed and slithered in his bony grasp, singing in musical chorus as the chain spun. And at its tip, a blistering blue flame erupted, scorching the very air and leaving behind a deep black scar upon the rubble-strewn ground below.
But Arthur's chain continued its upward arc, soaring and seething with hate.
The chain-whip flashed and coiled around the long, serpentine neck of the three-headed dragon’s central head, yanking and pulling taut,
wrenching it forward. The beast's massive body pitched and spilled towards the skeletal cowpoke in a meteoric blaze, two of its heads retching out berserk streaks of brackish purple electricity, striking at him with all the ferocity of a pair of mated cobras.
Fortunately, Arthur didn’t have to worry about their interference for long.
One head’s neck was soundly clamped by all three jaws and both mighty talons of the three-headed golden dragon, the wind currents kicked up by its wings buffeting Arthur and stirring a hailstorm of dust into tumbling all around them. It thrashed and writhed, jerking its heads in an attempt to wrench the abomination’s skull free from its trunk, tendrils of white energy searing into the imposter’s grey-tinged meat.
With a ham-fisted scramble, Arthur mounted the back of the three-headed abomination, the barbs lining its spine scraping through cloth to grind against the bone of his flame-wreathed limbs, its grey-scaled frame rippling and bucking in protest. But the cowpoke held on with a firm hand, his skeletal fingers pulling tight on the chain around the center head's jaws, choking it, strangling the fire that sought to bleed from its infernal core.
”YOU AND I,” gritted Arthur, the burning sockets of his eyes flaring all the brighter.
“WE’RE GOIN’ FOR A RIDE.”
5,229/10,000 WORDS
Arthur is using 1 point of Focus to impose his will upon Shin Ghidorah using his Ghost Mount and Hellfire Lasso: Chains of Heaven abilities.