The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels plays catchup on SH and updates on RR.

Seth struck, cutlass questing in a chopping overhand that felt as slow as if he’d swung it in a nightmare—which had to be some trick of his agitated brain, because when it connected with the thin man’s sword, it out a hellacious clang and sent a vicious vibration up Seth’s arm.

The swords bound briefly, and then Seth’s slid forward and turned off the man’s crossguard. Clockwise went the cultist’s edge, wrenching Seth’s blade downward and flickering itself horizontal in a clattering counterthrust that Seth whirled into a side-lunging crouch to avoid. Practice cut through panic and halted the turn of his cutlass. His grip hardened; his blade shoved the riposte awry, past his ear. I’m in a swordfight, he realized, with the sickening shock of the victim to a practical joke. An antic, disbelieving huff of laughter passed his lips. No hiding-place to flee to or strike from, no Tiago to blow the guy’s brains out, no Annalise to run him through. I’m in a fucking one-on-one swordfight.

A pulse of furious spite seized him, and he sprung upward from the knee this mean bastard had forced him onto. He’d really expected this to last longer, to have a few flashing exchanges, so he was almost as surprised as the man he impaled when his sword shoved through his stomach to the hilt.

“What,” Freckles mumbled, with a queer, flat affect. Seth tugged the sword out from his belly with a sucking splorch and hacked him across the chest, and for a moment you could believe all he’d cut was cloth and then a bright angry red stripe bloomed onto the man’s shirt, and he went to his knees, and then onto his slackening face.

Footsteps and calling voices echoed off the slab walls. A shadow carved from the hallway mitelamp’s light rose through the corner as the first foe drew near.

Duck, Darling

Seth’s new hexentat. He hadn’t practiced it enough, fool that he was. But now it leapt to the forefront of his mind. The freckled man—what had he sounded like?

“He’s got a gun,” Seth cried, in a dead ringer for the deader man’s voice, and then—this will make you feel so stupid if it doesn’t work—he did his best imitation of a gun going off, entirely expecting to go “pshoo,” and perhaps stall his attackers with some kind of laughing fit.

What emerged from his mouth was a hellacious munition-mite BANG that roared its echo off the walls and put a horrendous ringing in his ears. He let out another—best they think it was a wheelgun—and the shadow thinned itself as the individual casting it flattened themself to a wall.

Hesitation. Seth took advantage. He bolted from the chamber down its perpendicular path, sprinting down twisting, silent halls. He lunged left, prayed this was some kind of circuit, that he’d loop round his pursuers, or that there was another exit, or, failing that, he prayed that the Turning Wheel was as gentle as the songs said, and death wouldn’t be such an awful thing as it appeared.

Another BANG behind him, this one not caused by any hexentat. A chunk of limestone burst, scattering him with dust and stinging shards.

“LISA,” he screamed, hoping a fool’s hope that she’d heard that, or heard him, through the Fox stone or through the sewer wall.

A door. A door, a door, thank every fucking Saint who’d ever swung a stick. An old sheet of rust with a wire window but it might have been the long-awaited Saint Portal opening to redeem the world, the way it surged Seth’s soul. He tried the knob and pulled it open and nearly laughed in panicky despair as it revealed a brick fucking wall.

Kick it.

He gave it a frenzied kick, mostly to register his displeasure at his evil fate, before he realized that one: the Fox had just spoken, and two: his kick had shoved a patch of bricks a few inches in.

BANG again. A bullet pinged off the swung-open door. Seth charged his shoulder into the bricks and they cascaded, a chest-sized opening of them, letting in a humid hosanna of rushing undercroft air.

And fucking Saints, she was there. Lisa al Ydris, his gorgeous, deadly, long-overdue miracle. Looking as shocked as he was, her blade bare and streaked with blood, and he’d never forget the look on her face, the expression of surprise and fear and gratitude and love.

Love.

He was sure of it. As surely as he loved her back.

A cried-out curse from behind him. Another bullet flew wide. Lisa threw her sword down. Her arms rocketed forward, hands linked, fingers spread.

Seth could see behind her now, where Tiago was stabbing an armed and coveralled man in the stomach as Ofelia bent his head back. Before he could process what was happening, Lisa said:

“Duck, darling.”

He ducked. Behind him, a warning was screamed too late.

Bright, scouring fire turned the night-haunted halls to day.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...ck-darling
UPDATE: https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2459590/