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Saturday, 2:45 am in Storytime

Whee, crappy iRO fanfic time! Big apologies to Cayle for the bastardisation of her character, the lovely life-saving Zombie-Queen Linythe. Some dramatic licence may have been taken with the circumstances surrounding their meeting, and when I say ‘some’ I mean ‘a lot’…

Originally posted here. Yes, another place I can be stalked.

It had, in retrospect, seemed like such a good idea to come down here. The old churchyard at Glast Heim, place of ghost and ruin; easy pickings for a young Acolyte, the same divine grace that allowed them to heal the injured harmed the undead. Or so the Priests back at the church had said. Get inside and down the stairs, past the Nightmares and worse things, and you’d be sailing. There was a whole community down there, they said, and called it ‘The Cross’; two rickety gangplanks strung up perpendicular over some old graves, guarded and as secure as any place down there could get. A place to allow you to get your breath back between exorcisms. It had seemed like every young Acolyte’s dream.

It was only later she realised they’d forgotten to mention the Flies, and by that time it was too late.

---

“Get back! Damnit!”

When things went bad, Linythe thought, they really went bad. She’d been doing great, perfecting her hit-and-run on the slow-moving and frankly rather daft Ghouls and Zombies; ‘Healbombing’, they’d called it back at the church. It’d seemed too easy. The first time she’d seen a Hunter Fly it’d been chasing another Acolyte – there were lots down here – who’d run right past her, shooting her a look she’d only later recognise went something along the lines of ‘better you than me’. The Fly had stopped and turned its attention to her as he did so – they were stupid, she’d later learnt, in a particularly nasty and vicious kind of way – and she’d done what she’d always done;

“Heal!”

The next thing she’d know the thing had ripped a chunk out of her arm and was coming back for more.

She’d escaped, barely, to find the Acolyte who’d dumped the Fly on her sitting on the Cross later that day. He hadn’t been very happy by the time she was through with him. She’d felt only slightly better for it.

Since then, she’d learnt to run at the first hint of that Godawful white-noise buzzing sound. And it had worked. Every time except for this one. Things echoed in here, down amongst the moldy old catacombs. And sometimes…

There’d been three; she’d run straight from the first into the second two, the whole mob seeming more than happy to meet her with their demented, bulging eyes and bloody carapieces. They were mercliess, though she ducked and weaved as best she could; none of them gave her space to pray for Holy Light so she’d resorted to swinging her flail, but the things were fast and small, and realistically she had no chance of hitting them.

She was going to die, and she realised that with a kind of divine clarity. So she did what any Child of God would do in the circumstances; she lowered her flail and prayed for a miracle.

–

The world filled with blue light and rushing wind and when Linythe next opened her eyes it was to a swirling borwn-cream tornado and the screams of injured Hunter Flies.

She’d heard of the Monks of the St. Capitolina Abbey, of course, but had never before seen one. They were a secretive lot, secluded from the rest of the Church whom they – it was said – thought of as weak and corrupt for focusing too much of the Healing arts in neglect of the Body. Every now and again an Acolyte would choose their path and simply seem to vanish from the Church’s cloisters. It was a long and lonely road, they said.

They also said, however, that Monks were quiet and reserved. Dignified. Zen.

“Mother-f’cking little pieces of shit sit still so I can fucking kill you bastards…”

This one wasn’t. Every hit he landed – and there were lots, she had to admit – was accompanied by a long string of curses and unintelligible shouting. After sevral seconds watching the elaborate series of punches, kicks and seeminly unnecessary acrobatics, Linythe realised that the Monk really wasn’t landing as many blows as he looked like he was, but that even blows that should have missed still sent the Flies reeling. It was a dance, a show, a kung-fu spectacular, all lit in dramatic blue-shift by the five spinning balls above the Monk’s head.

A few seconds later, the first fly body hit the ground with an almost metallic thwap. It was followed soon after by two more, and Linythe found herself face-to-face with a single ice-blue eye. She took a step backwards and hit something.

She yelped and spun. A Bongun? What is a Bongun doing here…?

Except it didn’t matter, because a Bongun was undead, and undead were her forte.

“Hea—”

Her hand was stopped mid prayer by a grip like steel on her arm, and she found herself looking straight up into the baleful eye of the Monk.

“It’s okay. He’s with me.”

And that was, more or less, how Linythe met Yareth Shattenjager.

• Tags » drabble, fanfic, iro, ragnarok online, writing