User:8bit BlackMage/The Shelter of Obscurity

''Dust. Dust everywhere. This must be the most pedestrian patch of earth in this entire cesspool of a world.'' The magenta-haired girl crossed her arms and tapped her foot irritably, kicking up clouds of inoffensive grey haze. The monotone color stretched in every direction, and the horizon was little more than a pitiful wrinkle supporting a murky sky. Perhaps if I am lucky, he will just die in there. The thought was fleetingly comforting. But that would deny me the satisfaction...

There was no use for her particular talents in such an empty stretch of Sundry. She was absolutely sure that she and her accomplice had not been followed. The crystal traps she had peppered across the landscape languished, thirsting for fulfillment. Nearly an hour had passed since Sloth had entered the Shard, which was a long time even for him. She was therefore almost, almost pleased when Sloth's masked face reappeared in front of her, as if poking out from an invisible wall.

"Well?" she demanded. "What do you have to...!?" She grated to a stop as he immediately dissolved back behind the barrier. Only the grey desert stared back at her.

"Sloth...?"

A strange sense of loss bloomed through her chest. She wanted to crush it. Uncertainly, she reached for the threshold, and leaped back with a hiss when Sloth's face surfaced once more, inches from her fingers. The mask gave her an infuriating smirk, vanished once more, and then reappeared several paces away.

"What are you playing at, you despicable fool?" Her anxiety evaporated immediately, crystallizing into thoughts of a synthesized guillotine hanging over his neck.

"Just testing the waters, E-Enbii~" Sloth drawled, a shiver distorting the last word. Somehow he had found a way to make her hate that nickname even more. "Looks like you can go in and out of this S-shard pretty easily." He stepped out fully from the intangible division into the other world, shook again, and then looked himself over. The dark clothing covering nearly every surface of his frame was spotless, as if newly washed. "Huh. It all e-evaporated."

"Why are you trembling like an infant? What did you see in the Shard?"

"Bunch of snow. Oh, on a h-huge mountain. Looks like a v-village at the top, but.... ehhhhh, hard to climb." Sloth ruined the immaculate sheen of his garb by collapsing into the dust.

Envy pressed a hand to her face. Ostensibly the best equipped for recon, and yet so terrible at it... "Stop that pointless shivering. All the snow evaporated, and you're back in Sundry proper."

"I'm s-still cold, Enbii," he whined. "You go in. Try see for yourself." She rolled her eyes at the suggestion, briefly letting him out of her sight.

"If you're trying to elicit pity from me, you're stupider than I thought. Mother designed us all with an elemental aspect, and yours is ice. Get back in there and finish your assignment!"

"What does that even mean? I know like... one ice attack. And what's up with crystal b-bodies that can get cold? Design flaw on Mother's part, you know?"

Though she internally agreed, Envy did not give Sloth the benefit of empathy. "You are a design flaw. And yet Mother chose you to be the first contact for high potential sources of Aura." Which speaks as much about her as it does him...

"Well, shoots, she must s-see s-s-something in me." He reclined further back into the bed of ash. The look of eternal nonchalance written all over his face made Envy want to bury him, but what he said next quieted her.

"'Course, I don't know what that counts for... I mean, we're indebted to her and all for everything, but... I dunno, sometimes... what she wants us to do doesn't seem to have a point, you know?" He rolled over on his side and disappeared in a puff of sable smoke.

The childish trick had played on her a thousand times. ''Of course. A clone.'' Still, her crystal heart beat in a clockwork arrhythmia. ''So even Sloth is beginning to distrust that oleaginous crone. This goes far beyond baseline apathy. And here I thought he wouldn't raise a single word against her... how delicious. Perhaps we can... no. No. Perhaps he is playing me. Break him open and see how deep his doubt reaches, without revealing my own desires.''

"Come on Enbii, you could at least jump." As expected, he stood behind her, grousing in a bored tone. Coolly, replicating that supreme indifference she so detested and desired, Envy turned and fixed the man with a look of mild interest.

"Sometimes, what?" Her foot stamped a slow tempo in the dust, dramatically out of time with the pace of her heart. The noise forced her to reconsider Sloth's complaints about frostbite. What is the purpose of such a defect in a body supposedly engineered for perfection?

"Eh, nevermind," Sloth replied. He sauntered towards the Shard's threshold, rubbing the back of his neck. As the invisible partition swallowed him, he looked back at her with all those blank, false eyes. "I'll find the target. Gotta do what the boss says, yeah?"

He disappeared, leaving her with nothing but doubts and heartbeats.

A gale of frost greeted Sloth like a hammer as he stumbled back into the Shard. The threshold deposited him at the edge of a cliff, such that returning to Sundry would require a step of faith very close to a vertical drop. Clutching the tassel of his mask to stop it from snapping in the wind, he pressed forward across a ragged expanse of snow and stone, towards a barely visible collection of what looked like buildings in the distance.

Man, who the hell would want to live here? He searched around for footprints indicating his previous, fruitless attempt at reconnaissance, but found none. ''Huh? But I dispatched both clones...'' The shadowy familiars were a strange mix of solid and vapor, with a fragile tangibility. All Sloth knew was that they definitely left footprints - they had been his patrolling eyes around the circumference of the mountain while he took refuge in a nearby cave.

Eh, might as well try it again. He snapped his fingers, vanishing in a burst of shadow. Three Sloths stood in his place, two immediately shedding their colors into the snow. The blue of their tassels and silver jacket embellishments were wretched away in the blizzard as if stolen.

"I won't make you guys c-carry me again, but stay close and block the wind, y-yeah?" mumbled the remaining colored Sloth, pressing close to the other two as they ascended along the cliff's edge. Envy usually hurled abuse at him for talking to shadows that followed his every order, but Sloth liked the feeling. Telepathy just made him feel like he was telling himself what to do and not someone else. Plus, it was like being with the old gang again...

A fresh gust reminded him that the clones did not provide particularly good insulation. "Almost there. I c-could use a break." The skeletal frame of a huge, solitary evergreen loomed ahead, offering little protection against the weather. Like a signpost, the tree extended one thin-needled branch thrust away from the precipice and towards the mountain peak. The sight was bittersweet: Sloth knew that the relative comfort of the cave lay ahead, but so too did the remainder of the journey towards the village. It was not so much the exhaustion from the climb so far but the mental burden of the climb to come that weighed on him.

"Aight, you guys know what to do," Sloth panted as they reached the maw of the cave. His clones stood in the snow, making faces that he would have sported upon receiving the same command. "Come onnnnnn, don't wanna disappoint Enbii, right? And I bet that village is nicer to stay in than this cave. Trust me."

They gave silent sighs and plodded off in the direction of the peak. Sloth had already entered the welcome shelter of the cave as they were swallowed by the snow. Getting them to follow his orders wasn't that difficult, really. Just a minor exertion to transfer all of the heavy work away from himself.

The cavern was different. A pair of oil lamps dutifully illuminated its depths, where before there had been no light. ''Ah. This kine place. Should've known.'' They seemed to actually give off heat, however, so Sloth ventured further in, passing random objects scattered across the ground. Pickaxes, a cord of rope, an abandoned cane, wheelbarrows, all rusting and rotted as if abandoned for decades. The sight disquieted him.

So much garbage around, can't even find a place to sit... Another lit lantern beckoned him to a small pool, whispering occasionally as famished stalactites wept above it.

Sloth stared into the pool, contemplating his reflection and wondering why he was feeling so nostalgic. Maybe it's the Shard...? The hostile frigidity of the mountain was the polar opposite of the sun-drenched shores of his second of... four lives, now. Or was it more, considering each cycle of Sundry? The logistics of the place eluded him, and it seemed to be filled with people and places that immediately attempted to kill him.

On cue, the mountain shook with a sudden ferocity, dislodging a series of stalactites that pierced the water with a chorus of screams. Sloth fell backwards and tripped over a pickaxe, then hastily swapped positions with a random clone. He felt a tiny twinge of deprivation as the clone's senses dissipated underneath a tomb of rock, and waved it away upon realizing that he had swapped back into the freezing conditions. ...Probably not the Shard.

After a spat of grumbling and failure to find another shelter, Sloth decided to fish around and swap with the other copy. He arced his consciousness across the mountain, realizing too late that the clone was phasing its way through a stretch of unfrozen river.

The frigid, clammy shock of the current was a million times worse than the snow. It pulled him under immediately, filling his ears and eyes with people and places he had left behind.

I'm going to die, I’m going to die!

He flailed in desperation, failed to summon a shadow clone under the pressure, and spewed a stream of garbled curses. The water devoured them all.

Again!! The thought - the reality - of it terrified him, even after all the lives he had been through. That in itself was frightening.

Then he remembered he didn't have to breathe. The panic peeled away from his chest, painfully, thankfully.

When he accepted that he couldn't fight the river's flow, even if he wanted to, he let it carry him along for a while. ''Now I'm just wet. This is still pretty bad.'' A more measured questing for the clone revealed that it continued to march up the mountainside when he had left off, having paid no heed to his panic.

Sloth swapped places with it again, then mentally squashed it out of existence in spite. ''Damn mook could've killed me. Gotta do everything myself.''

He resigned himself to a solitary match up the mountainside, too exhausted to summon another shadow. The residual chill of the swim sent spasms through his body, and Envy’s verbal abuse echoed on the wind.

Through a screen of sleet, he could make out a collection of huts dotted across a peak in the near distance. ''At least the thing was heading in the right direction.’’

The tundra passed by wreathed in an unrelenting, unchanging storm of grey, shrouding his peripheral vision. He wasn't paying attention to it anyway. ''Once I'm finished with this mission, then I'll be in the clear. Should buy me some time. You got this. You got this. Go. Go. Go.''

He laughed aloud at the cadence of the last few words, stumbled over a hidden snag of rock, and fell face down in the snow.

It felt so inevitable to fall. He had been wanting to since escaping from the river. The bed of snow was somehow insular and comforting after the trauma of the river. ''It’s my element, yeah...? No such thing as freezing to death.'' Sloth rolled over, kaleidoscopes of melting crystals dancing in the holes of his mask. A thousand wooden gates loomed at all edges of his dimming vision.

"Close enough," he drawled to the iron sky as it buried him.

Enveloped by what felt like sheets of papery ice, he woke with a start. The gray roof above shed no snow, and the cushion below was replaced with the feeling of hard stone.

Whoa, what!? He reached for his face, clutching for the false cloth of the mask.

Still there.

What he had initially thought was suffocating him turned out to be a few ragged blankets. He pushed them aside and looked around with waning sense of unease at the wreckage of what once had been a home.

Snow drifted lazily through a door-sized hole in the wall. It covered mostly a bare floor, pooling around shreds of furniture and the raised platform he had been lying on. The nap might have been uncomfortable for anyone else, but Sloth felt strangely refreshed.

''Looks like someone gave me a lift. Huh.''

After establishing that the hut did not contain anything of value besides himself, Sloth rolled off the makeshift bed and slouched for the exit. The flux of wind that greeted him seemed almost gentle.

Made it! The sight of surrounding huts, though they appeared as abandoned as the first, as least confirmed he wouldn’t be punished for failing to reach the assigned destination. ''Now all I gotta do is find the target. Hmm, could find whatever generous soul carried me up here and ask them. Easyyyyyy.''

His eyes traced the steep earthen steps that disappeared in the mists farther up into the village, perpendicular to the row of huts that he had just exited. ''Go up, or stay in the hotel? I like option two. Eh?''

A trail of light, pointed tracks led from his position in a shallow layer of snow towards the stairs. He wouldn’t have noticed them but for the fact that they were evaporating in sequence, with those nearest the steps the last to disappear. No tracks were visible leading in any other direction, and his own imprints in the snow seemed to be solid enough.

''This again? But how did... whatever, not even going to bother to figure it out. Got my lead.''

For good measure, Sloth cloaked his feet in a veil of shadow, stepping into the snow without a sound. The prints faded just alongside him, phantom-like, as he began to ascend the steps proper.

Forced to keep his eyes on the ground due to the encroaching mist, he began to notice another irregularity. At times the footsteps were overlaid by a single sinewy gash, undulating in the snow before lifting and reappearing some paces ahead.

''What the? Looks like a jumping snake, but snakes don’t live in frozen hellholes like this. Nothing should live in frozen hellholes like this.''

As he pressed upwards, past deserts of empty structures drowning in snow, it dawned upon him that nothing did. Then what made these?

A faint, satisfying tattoo of blunt sound answered him, echoing from somewhere beyond the veil of haze. Man, I love how well I can hear now. He could tell the source was stationary given its gradual change in pitch as he drew closer. He could confidently label the noise as a sort of "thud".

The mists partially receded, causing him to feel strangely exposed. Around him stretched the same decrepit landscape, as if he had made no progress at all. Come on, I’ve been climbing for hours! He kicked a tuft of snow sidewards in annoyance, prematurely deleting a set of bisected tracks veering off the steps and leading towards...

Only after a few seconds of surveillance did crystalline gears somewhere behind the mask click languidly into place. Ah.

The phantom snake of a blue-grey tail, slashing patterns in the snow, occasionally obscured the back of the figure behind it. Without the contrasting background of gaunt trees, he might have missed it; against the sparse, sepia copse, the Drakenaer’s shape was unmistakable. The rhythmic lashing of the tail in time with each thud solved the mystery of sound: woodcutting.

Unnoticed, Sloth took the time to scan the rest of his surroundings. A gate identical to the ones he had seen multiplied before passing out stood on a small plateau among the trees. It was made of the same wood, yet commanded a space of emptiness all its own. It blended in, yet stood out.

There wasn’t much else to look at besides the gate and the woodcutter. Even the trees are dead here.

Still silent, he glided past a row of rocky slabs submerged in snow until he was right behind the Drakenaer. ''Lumberjack. Saves people lost in snowstorms. And he’s got a blazer on? Sweet. Probably a pretty nice guy, willing to tell me about any huge sources of Aura lying around... yeah?''

So Sloth strolled right up and caught the Drakenaer mid-swing. "Hey boss, are you-"

The cave-in was nothing compared to the avalanche of a roar he received in return. Out of pure instinct,, Sloth vanished in a backstep as a the tail sundered the shadow of the clone he had summoned in his place. As it exploded in smoke, he tripped - again - and fell in a numb terror. All around him, the icy crypt was boiling.

Another growl carried the Drakenaer through the remnants of the blackened effigy. Sloth could only hold up his hands feebly - why did they feel so heavy again? - to those outstretched, menacing claws. "Wait! Wait!"

The draconic features softened from a storm into weary recognition. “Why are you here?” he demanded. He did not lower his claws.

“Because you brought me here!? Sorry!” Sloth answered desperately.

With a sigh, the winds ceased to rage, and the snow settled until it was like a cradle again. Tremulously, he let his hands fall in time with the Drakenaer’s. “Sorry,” he repeated, regretting the cheek of his response.

Finally, the Drakenaer lumbered towards him and offered an arm. He took it with reverence. ''Auwe. Scary lumberjack.''

...