(2023-01-16) Overwatch

Details

Author:	inkie
Summary:	A falcon's eye view of the battle for the Sunwell.
Rating:	M for Mature 17+

“Sniper,” Sinthe hissed directly in his ear as one of Liadrin’s Blood Knights dropped in the yard below — as if Kas had not already drawn, was not already scanning the red-and-gold columns of the arcade across the way.

There was a flicker of movement, the brief, bright gleam of white-gold hair; Kas let out a slow breath and focused, closing out the chaos around him.

The sniper moved again, just edging from behind her pillar, all her focus on the Shattered Sun fighters below.

It was Amaril: Trust her to have clung to Sunstrider’s cape. Trust her to have been vain enough not to cover her hair.

Kas listened to the bowstring drawn taut by his ear and waited. There was always a moment after Amaril had chosen her target, when she'd tilt her head to be sure of her aim — there.

His string sang, and an instant later the falcon-feathered fletch of his arrow jutted from her eye. Her own arrow fluttered harmlessly to the grass below as she collapsed.

Sinthe elbowed him gleefully. He nodded once, still focused, still scanning.

Someone in the yard had noticed the falling arrow: a face uptilted, searching for him in the boughs. Sharp-eyed, to have seen the arrow among all else. Kas made a subtle, two-fingered gesture to Sinthe and she stilled at once. They were invisible within their perch, but her stupid movement of a moment ago had stirred leaves. It might have passed for the wind; it might not. The watchful soldier was one of theirs, but Kas wanted no one to give his position away.

The moment passed and they went unseen; the searching gaze slid past, the soldier lingering uncertainly, and then a commander in the yard shouted something and he turned away.

Kas considered him. Not a sin’dorei. Human. One of the hollow ones, like Sunstrike: There was a way they all moved, a kind of flow, not quite natural. Some were better at disguising it than others. Sunstrike was not. This one was.

He’d spotted Sunstrike herself once already, a grim grace in black saronite, no ghoul at her side: fighting like a warrior. He approved. And there she was again, in the thick of the fray, the sharp-eyed one now falling in beside her. In this context, Kas recognized him belatedly too. They fought well in concert.

He touched Sinthe’s arm and pointed upward. She nodded at him, and he faded back on the branch to skirt the tree’s trunk and swing back over the wall and onto the ramp. Sinthe was right behind him, and he cast her an irritated look. She shrugged and patted the toolkit on her hip.

Kas tipped his head at her, relenting, and turned away. She was correct; Captain Selana had been adamant that disarming the Sunblade Protectors was a priority, to keep the Shattered Sun forces moving through fast. And he could work with Sinthe, at least: She kept up and didn’t often insist on talking to him. It was hard to find distinct sounds within the battering storm of noise.

A pair of imps capered on the ramp ahead of them. Kas shifted sidewise into the low wall’s shadow and put arrows through the backs of their skulls before either one turned. Sinthe had slipped to his right, was crouched at his shoulder on the wall itself with her knives in hand. Kas beckoned with a another tilt of his head, and they moved on.

The whole place stank of the fel. He hated it.

He’d been smelling that stink for almost seven years now, bottled in his skull like the ghost of a migraine. He had wondered for a time in the first year or so whether it was some sliver of the felguard’s axe left in him, but he knew better now. He tried to avoid Silvermoon, where the reek of it was thicker, which was maddening: The city he’d fought and nearly died to defend, poisoned against him. Poisoning him.

The smell here was suffocating.

A warning black streak plummeted from the sky to his left, and Kas just had time to seize Sinthe’s wrist and jerk her from the wall the instant before a fiery volley battered it, shuddering the stones on which they stood. A section of the gilded parapet on the ramp’s opposite side caved away, crumbling into the waste of the Dead Scar below.

Shai circled once overhead to ensure his warning had been heeded in time, and then banked and beat his wings, gliding away again. Kas watched the black falcon recede to a speck among the chaos of circling dragonhawks as Sinthe clutched at his arm and tried to catch her breath beside him. She made a garbled noise among the roar of other noises, and he had to turn his head to focus on her.

“That was close,” she shouted again. He shook his head reproachfully and put fingers to his lips: Talk was a stupid distraction. She nodded once, ashen.

Another shadow swept overhead. This one was close and vast enough to raise a wind with its passage, and with it washed the sharp, ozone scent of the arcane. Kas breathed it in deeply, even as it opened a gnawing pit of hunger in him.

A blue dragon.

Sinthe made another noise beside him but Kas didn’t bother to sort it out this time; he rose to his feet and ran, half-crouched, across the ramp to watch the dragon circle the pit lord in the Scar. The pit lord bellowed and dragged itself ponderously, brandishing massive bladed fists. It was faced away from him and its voice was only a buzzing roar to Kas, an unpleasant vibration on the air.

Shattered Sun soldiers were spreading behind it, trying to flank it as the dragon roared a distraction, crackling with arcane lightning. At the Scar’s far end, small figures moved in a baffling formation: some sort of device — a palanquin? Borne by soldiers in white and gold and black, and carrying — a thing? And a red-haired elf. No, a human, but elf-slight. Ahead of this oddity stalked a sturdy blond fellow, shield and sword at the ready.

The redhead raised his arms and Kas tried to narrow in, tried to pluck one sound from among the sea of them. A thin wheedling on the wind. Music?

All at once Sinthe was gone — he felt, rather than saw — and Kas whipped around to drop low and put his back to the wall, drawing an arrow in the same motion.

A trio of sin’dorei were moving down the ramp toward him. They hadn’t seen him, locked in grim conversation with one another: there was a kind of shadowy pall lain over them, a distorted flicker around their edges. Kas sorted their voices from the storm and heard that buzzing again below the rise-and-fall sound of them, the same vicious vibration as the pit lord’s voice.

Kas breathed slow and even, watchful, and let himself sink deeper into stillness. He shut out the whirlwind of noise and watched them speak: liadrinspitifulrebels humansacrossapexpoint reinforcementstotheterrace.

A fourth shadow fell across the three they cast on the ground; a moment later Kas saw the telltale movement he awaited, a coalescence in the air. Sinthe’s dagger flashed across the throat of one of the elves, opening a startled, scarlet mouth, and Kas’s answering arrow punched at an upward angle through the skull of a second.

Sinthe grinned at him over the shoulder of the stunned and frozen third, and then her other blade jutted crimson from its chest. She tugged it free and the elf sank gaping to his knees, keeled heavily to one side to join his fellows.

They faded into the spreading pool of blood and were gone. A moment later, so was the blood.

Sinthe stared down at the stone where they’d lain, her daggers slack in her hands. whatthefuck Kas saw her say, and then the air to her left shimmered.

Kas put an arrow in the shimmer before it resolved and a fourth shadow-elf stumbled from the nowhere, sword upraised, and collapsed to the stones — but not before her blade bit into Sinthe’s side and hung there. Its wielder’s fall pulled it free with a clatter, and then swordswoman and sword both melted away like the rest.

Sinthe gave a soundless scream and dropped a dagger to press her hand to her side, folding on herself; Kas, already sprinting toward her, could smelled the bright bitterness of raw blood in the air.

He dropped to his knees before her and she raised pain-wet eyes to him, uncomprehending. “What the fuck?” she asked again, quite clearly.

Kas shook his head, took her by the shoulder and pushed her over onto her opposite side to get a better look at the wound. There was a rustle and faint scrape behind him, sounds he could pick unconsciously from anywhere now. It was Shai alighting watchfully on the wall.

Sinthe’s wound was jagged at the edges, open-lipped; it bit at an angle into muscle but no deeper. The sword had dragged sideways and down as the swordswoman fell.

“Tch,” said Kas, sternly. “Child. So — much fuss.”

That set Sinthe’s jaw and dried her eyes as she glared at him. He smiled faintly back at her, then glanced up to scan the ramp around them and the visible edge of the terrace above. No one moved; the air was still. Hold, he signaled, and rose silently to his feet. Shai remained to keep watch.

At the top of the ramp Kas paused, scanning. The terrace was vacant. There was no movement, no particular texture to the sound or scent of the place that told him any of it was close enough to beware. He slipped along the wall to a rank of silken tents and crouched to use his boot-knife to shear a long, broad strip from the drapery around the entrance to one.

When he returned to her, Sinthe was white-faced but alert, and in enough humor to sneer at the swathe of rose-colored silk he brought. “I’ll look — like a bloody Sunblade,” she gritted as Kas wadded one end of the silk in the wound and then wrapped the rest around her waist and around again snugly a second time, to bind it.

“Bloody Sunblade,” Kas agreed drily, and Sinthe snorted and then hissed.

“Don’t make me laugh, Duskwing,” she warned him, pressing a hand to her side.

“If not. Now. When?” he returned, and then fitted his arm beneath her shoulders to help her to her feet.

Once she was upright, she swatted away his aid. “Go,” she told him. “I’m a big girl. I know the way.”

Kas nodded. When she had limped stealthily around a corner and out of his sight, he signaled Shai with a twitch. The falcon took wing again and glided silently after her. Kas turned away and let his focus soften again, spread out, until he was once more aware of everything at once and nothing in particular; he moved along the parapet, scanning and waiting for something to snag him, to move too distinctly or dissonantly in the pandemonium.

#

There were two more snipers lying in wait in the path of the Shattered Sun’s advance, and Kas plucked both from their nests. He only knew one of them: Tenethias, a bright youth just setting foot on the Farstriders’ path when Kas had last seen him. A stupid waste.

The pit lord was down. Kas had felt the reverberation of its fall the moment before a ragged cheer had gone up from the Scar. The dragon had gone down too, though, the clean arcane crackle of it on the air smudged and lost beneath a cloud of fel and death.

Like everything else.

The Shattered Sun was racing now, pressing their advantage, and Kas shifted from shadow to shadow, vantage to vantage, moving just ahead of them. There were four other hidden archers now who had converged from elsewhere and were keeping rough pace with him; they took turns ranging out ahead and then perching, crisscrossing their fellows to keep the path open as best they could.

The Sun’s advance below was met by waves of those strange shadow-elves who seemed to vanish on death, and most of these groups were flanked by invisible assassins like the one who’d caught Sinthe. Kas knew what he was looking for now, though, and found his marks in the shimmering air. After the first few dead ones fell out of nowhere, a blonde human woman near the rear of the forward pack raised her hands and drew a spell; the next time the air moved where it shouldn’t have, one of the armored fighters at the head of the column turned his head and looked directly at it before running the hidden assassin through.

An invisibility-detection spell: They were quick studies down there. Kas approved.

He did not approve of the felhunter that bounded along at the blonde woman’s heel, and advised her distantly of this fact by pinning an arrow through it himself. A nearby paladin flung a shield around the warlock at once and a little band of fighters encircled her.

Kas waited.

She summoned the felhunter again, and again Kas shot it, patiently. Shields both metal and metaphysical bristled around the group as a half-dozen pairs of eyes searched the walls and balconies and did not find him.

After a few wary moments, one of the fighters in the group bent inward to address the others. The blonde woman nodded, and the cluster of them turned and moved on with the rest. The felhunter was not re-summoned.

Quick studies.

#

Two of his fellow archers had been lost: Presumably focused on the roil of battle below, they hadn’t felt threats closing from behind them until too late. Kas had seen one topple from her perch — a dwarf, he’d noted with faint surprise — to hit the yard below, narrowly missing a scatter of soldiers. The other he hadn’t seen die, but a second gap had opened in the smooth trade of movement between him and his fellows. He picked up his pace to fill it.

There were more demons than Sunblade in the clash now. Many of them flowed down the ramps behind or across from him. He picked off as many as he could to thin the tide, but couldn’t take the swarming beholders and massive felbeasts on his own, and so didn’t waste the arrows.

He was having to resort to scaling walls, the ramps and walkways no longer safe as they drove deeper toward the heart of the place. He could feel the fouled Sunwell ahead, a slow-pulsing power that seemed to align with his own heartbeat the closer he drew to it.

Shai had dropped from the cloud of dragonhawks to circle lower above the ground fight. Kas swung up onto a narrow ledge and crouched. The falcon banked to sweep past him and Kas signaled; Shai banked again to cut a steep turn and then dropped like a bolt from the sky to sink tearing talons into the face of a shivarra. Kas finished her, and the falcon took wing again.

A Kaldorei druid in robes the same hue as her deep-green hair stood as far back from the tumult as the courtyard allowed. Her hands wove patterns in the air, and vines of light entwined the fighters nearest her. A satyr loped toward her unnoticed. In the sliver of a second it took Kas to nock his arrow, a hammer of Light flashed in from the side and the demon crumpled harmlessly to the ground. A draenei vindicator, her black hair drawn back in two tails that echoed the shape of her downcurved horns, lowered her hand and turned away.

Kas sought another target.

Two human mages held a group of eredar at bay with frozen shackles. The blonde one, intent and expressionless, called down shards of ice; her brunette counterpart cast brilliant, streaking missiles of arcane energy at the trapped and battered demons.

Kas half-closed his eyes and tried to focus amid the wash of noise: there was the crackle of ice, and there — the peal of the bright spears of the arcane. He felt a prickle of longing. The indifferent torrent of sound and the throat-filling fel reek were crushing him between themselves. Sinthe had carried a stash of mana crystals; he should have gotten some from her before sending her back.

The pair of mages needed none of his aid, and he needed to spare his arrows now. He slung his bow and slipped from his ledge to catch a nearby balcony rail and pull himself over.

There was a terrace below and to the west where some of the Shattered Sun had established themselves, and Kas balanced at the corner of the balcony’s railing, shoulder propped against the wall, to overlook them. A pair of draenei shamans had thrown down a ring of totems at the center. One of them, her pale hair moving in a breeze that seemed to touch only her, knelt within the ring, tending a row of wounded; her counterpart, a spindly creature with an upright cloud of silver hair, darted from totem to totem, keeping them charged. A third draenei, a grim-looking woman with her blue hair drawn back beneath a headband, stalked the perimeter of the terrace warily, shield and blade at the ready. A patrol in the Sun’s black-and-gold were rejoining them now, and Kas’s search revealed no hidden threats lying in wait on the parapets around and above them.

Again, he moved on.

This time he dropped down to the plaza to take up a spot at the rear of the vanguard. A sin’dorei he didn’t know looked askance at him, startled, when Kas appeared at his shoulder, but Kas flashed a smile and kept moving; he wore the colors, and in the confusion who was to say he hadn’t been with them all along?

As much as it did amuse him to tag along briefly, the press of noise was too close and too much here and he had no vantage. At the next turn in the road, he melted aside into shadow. When he was sure there were no eyes on him, he scaled his way up the wall to the next level and dropped over the parapet to resume clearing the path.

#

Something powerful waited in the tower ahead. Its aura was a bitter and stifling fog, strangely twinned, layer over layer, and Kas hung back to wait for the vanguard. They weren’t far behind now; resistance had grown sparse, which Kas didn’t like. It meant Sunstrider’s sycophants were falling back to the Sunwell itself, and Kas could feel the darkness deepening implacably at that center.

The Shattered Sun was moving fast, but he didn’t know whether it was fast enough. He didn’t know whether they would break the final wall of resistance gathering grimly ahead in time.

They streamed up the spiral ramp now toward his position. Two of Voren’thal’s people and a massive draenei vindicator were at the fore in black and gold, but in the course of the assault the lines had muddied, and the soldiers behind them were a motley of races in a motley of colors, not all of which he knew.

A brawny, square-jawed human warrior, sweat drawing trails through the bloodspatter on one side of his face, stormed up the ramp like he had a grudge against the paving. He wore a blue tabard — white wings on a blue field — and that was one Kas knew immediately.

He’d told Geth and El that Cobalt Company would be here. Neither of them had liked it, but it hadn’t been enough to bring them here themselves.

Whatever El’s grudge was, this was a sin’dorei fight, and the Coterie should have been in it too.

He supposed he and Sunstrike were, at least.

The noise of the advance on the tower — the asynchronous tramp of boots and hooves, the bellowed commands and hoarse exhortations and rattle of weaponry — was a stunning wave, and Kas faded into his own head to wall it out, focused on watching instead. He glimpsed another blue tabard, ranks behind the first: this one was worn over clerical robes by a slim young human with a mop of red curls. He was flanked by the blonde ice mage Kas had seen below and, a little eerily, a blond paladin who was her taller double in male form, right down to the flat intensity of his expression.

Kas dropped from the roof’s edge on which he’d been crouched and joined the throng again, his eye on the blue tabards. They were very far from the most important thing here. But they were interesting. And they were a distraction from the column of darkness slowly rising at the heart of this place, the strange warp in the energies that felt like reality was beginning to bend upward as something mighty pushed against it from the other side.

There was the warrior ahead of him again; he was big enough to keep in sight through the shifting mob. Kas eased along the edge of the throng to get closer.

A second human warrior fell in beside the first. This one, too, was enormous: not as broad or solid a wall of muscle, but even taller and with shoulders like an ox. He wore the tabard of the Shattered Sun, but the Cobalt warrior turned his head and tipped him a casual half-nod that suggested easy familiarity: another of that mercenary company, then. This second one carried his helm under his arm, and when he turned his head to address his comrade, Kas knew his profile. He’d seen the man before.

But he hadn’t. He backtracked in memory, chasing every recent face. He didn’t know this one.

But he did?

They had reached the tower’s eastern entrance. One of Voren’thal’s people turned to bellow something — idetothenaaru, Kas read — and the Aldor captain peeled away with half the force behind him to circle around the tower. Cobalt went with him. Kas hesitated for barely half a heartbeat before following.

He felt the breach of the tower doors behind him as he and the rest of the draenei commander’s troop streamed along the rampart. A second world-rattling eruption followed a moment after the first, and a shadow boiled at their backs. Kas tasted blood and sulfur on the air. No one looked back.

They were approaching the last of the rampart towers. This one had been an airy crown on the wall, an open ring of arched windows and entries, sheer draperies floating in the wind. Those drapes hung lank and tattered now, hemmed with scorch-marks. The thing that waited behind them felt more like an absence than a presence, like a hole in the world.

There was a sharp brimstone smell and then a ripple of dismay from the rearguard. Kas elbowed out to the side and stepped onto the parapet to sight down the ramp.

Packs of imps wreathed in flame skipped headlong for the back of their column, and the first soldiers who’d stepped out to fend them off had learned to their final dismay that these demons had no intention of fighting: They simply detonated in shocks of fel fire when the attackers were in range. The rearguard was slipping into disarray, shoving into their fellows ahead in a panicked effort to avoid the blasts.

Kas picked off two of the imps. They exploded harmlessly where they went down, scorching only pavement. Someone below and beside him shouted something, and he saw from the corner of his eye another archer scramble onto the parapet across from him. He didn’t turn his head to see who, but knew from the way they fell into rhythm with him that it was one of his unseen fellows from before. Together they held the oncoming imps at bay until a radiant golden shield-wall sprang cleanly to life across the rearguard, and then the ground itself erupted with Light. The imps exploded impotently where they could no longer cross; their attack dwindled and then ceased.

When Kas turned he saw that his comrade across the ramp was a kaldorei: a white-haired, white-skinned woman with one ear only a ragged half, and a scar across her throat. She looked back at him, tipped her head, and then dropped back into the crowd.

A clutch of the paladins who’d dropped back to form the shield wended their way toward the fore again. Kas saw the blond twin to the ice mage — and then, to his surprise, the tall youth he’d half-recognized. He’d taken that one for a warrior, but as the man passed by he felt the distinct brush of an Aura, overlapping those of the rest.

The man glanced up at him and offered a curt, respectful nod, and for a moment Kas was rooted to the wall.

Ask Sparkwire something for me, he’d said to Geth. Hazan.

Kas didn’t know this man after all. But he knew he was Cobalt Company’s Hazan. The resemblance was nearly exact: The man was lighter-skinned and didn’t have the woman’s striking golden eyes, but he couldn’t be other than her blood.

How old would she be now? This would be her brother, then. Cobalt Company must be oddly full of twins and siblings. Or… he couldn’t remember how humans aged, exactly. Her son? Kas would be glad for her, if it was so: It would mean she had moved through the cloud of pain and fury she’d dwelt in at the time. And possibly out of the Shadow, if she had a son now of the Light.

The man was the son of Elohad Ference, he’d heard. Elohad Ference was not the girl’s father, so yes — a son, or perhaps a half-brother.

How strange to find himself twice standing with a Hazan at the end of the world. If there hadn’t been so many other world’s ends in between, he could almost imagine they were harbingers, like carrion birds.

Though he had been at most of them. Perhaps he was the harbinger.

Hazan was lost in the crowd now behind a screen of taller kaldorei and draenei. Ahead up the ramp, the blond paladin had taken his former place with his twin and the red-haired cleric; he appeared to be consoling the cleric, who seemed tense and agitated as they closed with whatever black emptiness lay in the chamber ahead.

Heads nearby turned, and Kas picked out a thread of sound that ran against the weft of general cacophony. It was the reedy redhead, the one who’d been borne on the litter in the Dead Scar, and he was singing again. His own blond paladin muscled the way ahead of him, one lens of his spectacles streaked with mud. Kas watched them pass, bemused.

Ahead, the Aldor commander barked something to the nearest rank of soldiers, and they drew back the tattered drapes across the arched entrance. One of them, another vindicator, opened her mouth, her face creasing expressively, and Kas picked out the thin wail of her despair. And then the column was flowing into the tower.

He dropped from the wall. He didn’t need to see what the tower held; he’d heard echoed in the draenei’s cry the distorted, dissonant chime of the tainted naaru. Kas turned his back on it and let the tide of the Shattered Sun’s assault wash past.

Behind him he felt the grasp of shadow, dark tendrils tearing; the roar of the soldiers was near-blinding. He clenched his jaw and closed himself to it, watching the ramp.

Even so, the shadow elves nearly took him off-guard. A handful of them materialized, too close to give him time to draw at them all; he brought down two and had braced himself to leap for the nearest window-opening when an arcane spear took the next in the chest. He hadn’t sensed the brunette mage dart back out of the chamber, but now she blinked forward into the remaining trio of shadow elves and unleashed a shattering explosion of arcane. The elves didn’t even fall, but simply dissipated where they stood. Kas drew a deep breath, letting the chill, clear residue of the spell fall across him. It quelled the storm in his skull and pushed back the brutal wall of noise.

The woman was looking up at him, bright-eyed as a bird. Kas turned away and leaped for the window.

The tower room was a screaming confusion. Sun soldiers fell back, strangled by warped strands of shadow; the shields of priests and paladins burst to bright life everywhere. The naaru’s crystalline form had fallen away, and an anguished shade of void writhed in its place. Smaller clots of darkness swarmed hungrily around it, and the first soldiers who closed with one were obliterated before the Light could touch them.

The young red-haired cleric pointed at one and cried something: spell, Kas thought. The youth raised his other hand and a shimmer took one of the smaller voids. It went out like the shadow of a candle. Across from him, the musical redhead was doing the same, and one by one the shadows were winking out. The greater void roared and stormed, spreading devouring stains of nothingness, but it was faltering beneath the onslaught.

Kas raised his bow and sent arrows into the darkness.

#

The naaru was dead. Not the naaru, but the thing that had consumed the naaru from inside out. Ben stepped back, breathless, his blood throbbing in his ears, and tugged his helmet off to cool his head. The draenei Prophet Velen had come in from somewhere and was kneeling in the shadows that were all that was left of M’uru. Aldor vindicators stood shield around him.

Ben looked away, searched out Mordecai or Cole in the crowd. He couldn’t spot either of them now. He was pretty sure he’d seen Vond Satterly in all that, too, but couldn’t find him now either. Mr Atley was leaning against the wall across the room, chugging water thirstily, and Ben realized he was parched himself, and they weren’t done yet by half. However bad this had been, however ugly, there was something a hell of a lot worse happening below them, a storm to beat all storms building underfoot.

He limped toward Mr Atley — or started to, anyhow, when a touch at his elbow brought him up.

It was the elf ranger, the quick one who’d held back the imps on the ramp until Ben and the rest had got there. He was a lean fellow with long, silver-streaky black hair in a topknot, an eyepatch over a mess of scars on the right side of his face, and he was looking at Ben with a sort of weird half-smile.

“Hha-zan,” he said, and Ben blinked at him.

“Yeah? Yeah. That’s me.”

The elf nodded, his smile widening to teeth. He had a kind of wolfish intensity that Ben wasn’t sure he liked aimed at him.

“Shattered Sun!” barked Vindicator Kaalan, and Ben glanced toward him. They were forming up now to head down.

He turned back to say something to the elf, but the elf was already gone.