Vacation VI (The Fight Out of Chaos)

(( CHAPTER 15: THE FIGHT OUT OF CHAOS ))

The desert air struck her – colder than she'd have thought it, but parchingly dry. The sun indicated it was late afternoon, though that information really meant nothing – they could have been transported anywhere on earth, and she had no way of knowing the time difference.

She didn't have time to think about it, though. Jacob was standing a few feet in front of her, gun drawn, aimed at her. She didn't even have time to speak before he fired.

Reflexes took over. She'd been faster than anything she'd ever known, and every encounter with chaos had left her stronger than when she'd started, but now her reflexes failed her. Her mind was confused – which way should she duck? She'd never had this sort of confusion before.

Jacob was moving, firing again, and it was then that Alyssa realized she couldn't think of where to dodge because the first bullet hadn't been aimed at her to begin with. Neither had the second, for that matter.

Something struck her in the back, and she twisted away, all the adrenaline she'd put into the initial dodge going into her current action. Something scratched against her back, the bite of pain flaring up and then suddenly vanishing, numbness taking its place. She rolled to her feet to see their attacker.

His body was shadow, his eyes flame, his outlines angular and yet vague, and he carried a blade of shifting chaos.

“Fuck!” Jacob yelled, firing another shot. He almost never swore, but she supposed she could grant him some leeway, given current events.

Jacob's aim was as true as ever – she saw the bullet pierce the Soldier's body, but other than roiling up the already stormy interior it didn't seem to be having an effect. It wasn't paying attention to him, though. Jacob obviously was trying to distract it, to give Alyssa an opening the same way he had in their very first battle together against a Sightless, what felt like ages ago. It wasn't falling for it.

The blade of chaos came to her again, and her claws met it. The numbness that it had caused over her back was fading, and the pain was beginning to creep in, but she allowed neither the feeling nor its absence to distract her. Doubtless the blade induced the numbness. It was a blade of chaos, though, and she'd already proven she had mastery over it.

She concentrated, focusing on the blade in the Soldier's hand. There was a strange twisting noise, that of tortured steel, and the blade flung itself to the ground, embedding itself.

“You are no longer in Chaos, child.” the Soldier darted forward, ignoring its fallen blade, taking advantage of Alyssa's concentration elsewhere to wrap its cold hand around her neck. “Though soon all will become so.”

Her claws sprang up, her arm guiding it through the smoky membranes of the thing's arm. She felt resistance, and its grasp on her windpipe weakened. It did not let go, however, and her blades did not seem to part it.

“Let... me... go!” she gasped, striking again and again with her claws. She could feel them tearing, and she could tell each time she connected that the thing which held her was reacting, but it was too little. Its grasp would not release her, and its blazing eyes kept growing closer.

She grit her teeth, opened her mouth, and screamed. “THESE ARE ORDER!” she shouted, thrusting her blades forward, pouring every bit of her concentration into them. Order, dammit. If she could not use her mastery of chaos now that she was away, she would use her mastery of order.

The creature let go immediately, shrieking backwards. Alyssa's eyes widened as she saw her claws still in the midsection of the thing, glowing brighter as she watched.

“What on earth?” Jacob said, looking around wildly.

There was a soundless rush of air, and the Soldier dissipated as suddenly as it had appeared. Alyssa looked down to see the claws back on her hands, as if they'd never left. She hadn't even thought it possible.

Jacob struggled to her side. “For a second there, I couldn't hear it. Whatever you did to the Soldier, it blocked out even the Voice for a bit.” he shook his head. “What happened?”

“I don't know.” she whispered, truthfully. “I thought as hard as I could.... I escaped from the Chaos by forming order within it, here... well, my claws are symbols of order. They just weren't strong enough until I made them that way.”

“Mastery of order and chaos.” Jacob replied. “Savant was right on, there.”

“It will not be enough.” another voice spoke.

Alyssa turned, tensing. Another Soldier stood before them, so identical to the first that she found herself wondering if she had dispatched it after all. The second creature made no move to advance on them, but he stood directly between them and the shack which was apparently their destination.

“Your mastery is new and weak. You attempted to wield your skill against the blade of one of us, and failed to end it. Now look.” he gestured behind them, to where the previous fight had taken place. Alyssa moved to the side, keeping one eye on the Soldier, so that she could see where it was gesturing.

The sword had embedded itself in the ground when Alyssa had tried to will it out of nonexistence. Now it seemed less chaotic, in itself, but the swirl of nothingness and everything which made it up had seemingly seeped into the ground. The sands were fused into glass, which then ran as though melted. Only a circle a foot in diameter had seemingly been affected but the chaos was slowly spreading, leaking from the blade that had until recently contained it.

“Your skill is not to be trifled with, but it has no direction. You have defeated two Soldiers, one here and one within the very heart of our defenses. Were I to attempt to stand against you, I would be defeated.” Its voice was as smoky as the others, seemingly identical to theirs. Whatever they were, the Soldiers did not seem to have a great many individual features.

There was a sudden blurring of their vision. A twisting noise like the one she'd heard before when she'd attempted to destroy the blade echoed out, and the very world around her swam, seeming to briefly to become the twisting landscape she had been caught in when the storm took her.

Then, order reasserted itself. Her vision returned to crisp normalcy, and the silence of the desert returned in force. Next to the Soldier which had addressed them stood another, identical in every way. Even its stance mirrored the first.

“Could two stand against you?” they said, their voices echoing in unison, seemingly from all directions.

“No.” she said bitterly. “I can stand against whatever is set before me, and emerge victorious.” she didn't really have this sort of confidence – truth be told, the first battle had drained her and she wasn't even sure that she could fight against another single one. She would not let them see her weak.

“We our many.” they replied. “Ask your half-breed Sightless friend.”

Jacob's face had been slowly growing pale, starting from his sighting of the second adversary and progressing through the appearance of the third. His face was resolute, though. “You speak truly, at least for one of your kind. They cannot come here easily, though. Pushing chaos into our world is not done easily, especially when it is not called.”

“We cannot allow you to enter this place and learn. You are not yet ready for the consequences. Come with us, and you will learn in time.”

Alyssa stared at them incredulously. Their previous emissaries had tried to kill her! Their suggestion that they and their masters could be better teachers was insane on the face of it, and further inspection revealed it to be even worse than that. “No, thanks.” she managed.

“Very well.” they replied. “We shall pay the price for bringing the chaos here. Your half-breed underestimates our resolve. We do not underestimate yours.”

The twisting happened again, her sight blurring and that terrible sound echoing. The sound was louder this time, and her vision was nearly gone completely. Whatever they were bringing through, it was far larger a host than had been brought before. They would stop her, she realized. They would slaughter Jacob, who had no real defenses against them, and they would wear her down until she, too, fell in the battle.

Vertigo took over as she looked into the endless churning abyss of chaos, nothing and everything mixing together. She felt as though she was seeing from the edge of a pit, getting a glimpse of that which took her before, that which was now bringing forth an army of the Unknowable.

She took hold of it then, in her desperation. She'd been in the chaos once before, and she found she could direct and shape it. Though somewhere she knew her physical body was back in the world of order, her mind was already falling into nothingness, her identity under assault. The soldiers wouldn't even need to come forth, chaos would strip her of her defenses here.

It felt that way, at first – the chaos was seemingly prepared for her attempts to wrest control, and for a horrifying moment she thought she might fail, that the swirling ether would swallow her whole. She knew in this place thoughts could be potent, though, and so she squelched the specter of failing from her mind and concentrated.

A bath. How long had it been since she'd even got to do something as simple as bathe? Her thoughts were wandering, there was a reason she had thought of the bath.

Shower. Sink. Drain. Doorway, gutter, sluice, portal, archway. The thoughts came and went, her strained mind reaching to encompass them, to find the truth of them. There was a reason behind them.

The thought came, then, of her brief trip through the door of a nameless building in the city the storm which had almost claimed her had ravaged. There had been a dizzying moment of vertigo as she stepped through, and she knew now that was because she hadn't been entirely certain it would work. That moment of vertigo had been like this chaos, and the thought crossed her mind that her world of order was only a thin shell over an underpinning of constant change.

No, she must not allow thoughts like that. Remember the drains, remember the door.

She visualized it then, and it appeared. A door of wood, a door like that which had lead her to the lobby of the chamber in the past hung suspended in the whirling everything around her.

She concentrated. She visualized the desert, Jacob where he stood, the door through which they'd entered the first time. This door, though, would be where the shadows were, where the Soldiers had brought themselves through. She even envisioned them, as they were integral to the scene.

Then, she opened the door and stepped in.

She could feel the transition, standing on the wooden threshold of the door. Behind her was chaos, and she could feel it leaking through the door into the world of order, the world where Soldiers and Jacob stood suspended. She could sense more than see other Soldiers, hosts upon hosts at her back. She didn't know how long it would take them to pass through, and she didn't want to find out. She stepped through into the deformed world which was quickly becoming her own.

The suspension broke. Jacob seemed only then to notice she'd suddenly moved – she'd previously been at his side, and now she was next to the Soldiers. They were as surprised as she was. Before she dealt with them, though, she had one more thing to do.

She closed the door.

The twisting noise stopped, the blurring she'd initially attributed to her own sight vanished, and her world sprung into clarity again. There were no additional soldiers – she'd very literally closed the way to them.

The two which flanked her didn't speak, they simply raised their blades in unison to attack. They were simple to dodge, she saw now. Why shouldn't they be? Her more recent foray into chaos had even further attuned her senses. They were beings of chaos which could survive in order, and their shadowy appearances were appropriate – they were shadows of chaos, projected into the world. She could feel their presence, knew what movement they would take even as they decided to do so. They moved and she was already clear of them.

“No.” she said to them. They turned to face her in unison, making no move to chase her, as they were still between her and the shack which was her goal. She'd moved to be next to Jacob, so that they could not hold him hostage.

“Clever.” they said, voices calm and featureless. “You will not have to face a host now, but you will not always be at a place to stop our entry. You will still have to face us. Your trip could not have been easy.”

Strangely enough, it had been. She felt re-energized after her victory over the forces of primeval chaos as though, like them, she could draw energy from it.

“I will face you.” she said, and concentrated. The horrible thought which had occurred to her in the maelstrom was, in a sense, true. It was not a thin shell which divided the sea of chaos from order, but the same sort of bubble which had surrounded her during her first foray into the abyss. The world, her world, was afloat within the same sea, the bubble which contained it simply a great deal larger than the one which had sustained her.

Knowing this, she knew she still had the power over chaos, even without being there. She reached into it and found the core of the two Soldiers which stood before her. They were shadows of the real thing, the army of the Unknowable which lay within chaos. Shadows, though, that could not exist without their backing.

With a thought, she formed Order in their midst. The Soldiers vanished, utterly.

“You know, the idea behind me coming along was that, using this all-knowing but evil voice in my head, we could gain valuable insights.” Jacob finally spoke up.

Alyssa nodded, the stress and exhaustion of her situation catching up to her. “Yes?”

“Then why is it I don't know what the hell just happened here?”


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