WanderingBird

The air reeks.

It's a cloying, revolting smell, the worst parts of rotting, burning flesh, excrement and hot iron. It turns the stomache and leaves an awfull tension across the back.

The woman studdies the feeling of it intently for a while, as the wind carried the far away scent to her. Then she lets it go. Below her, spread out in the distance is the city, surrounded by packs of shambling corpses and less pleasant things around a titanic moutain-corpse used as a fortress.

So this, she thinks, is Thorns.

There is a thing, within it. A horrible enemy of life. One day, she will slay it, and bring golden fire to all this perversion of life, and send the unquiet souls to be clensed for their next lives.

The swords at her side want, neither patiently nor anxiously, for that time.

It will not be today. Today, she has only to cross this place of evil, and set what little of it she may without bringing the greatest monster down on her head.

The first lesson is to know ones own limits, Sensei said.

She is not ready to fight a Deathlord.

It is ten thousand steps to the trees beyond the city, and miles more to the land Lookshy's dragonlords hold against the lord of death. She has a long way to go.

One thousand steps down a hill, each one deft and soft. It is daylight, still: that much is good.

Night will fall, if she is fast, only after she crosses the second wall.

Five hundred steps to the wall, sixty feet high and stone. Too high to jump, to hard to shatter - for a mortal.

The Quiet Bird Song aids her jump, and her ballance, as she nearly flies up the wall in five steps.

It isn't completely shere anymore, for half the journey - and the flat edge of her sheathed sword makes more than enough leverage for the rest.

Two steps into the wall, and she meets the first guard, and her reaction is without thought.

The revanant's head departs it's body as part of a motion that begins and ends with a sheathed sword.

Five more stand before her and the lee side of the wall.

Fourty-five steps.

Arrows and crossbows clatter to the ground in her wake, as the not-so -shambling dead fall, two to blows from the Whispering Dawn Sword she carries, one to a kick that summersaults a body entirely into the air, and one more from an outright colision that sends one corpse hurtling into another, tangling on the wall.

Thirty feet to the ground, and a leap from the wall covers a hundred steps more as she ignores the stair for a nearby roof; Shingles burst under her feet at landing, but her roll is comphortable and light.

Ten steps to the gap between herself and the next roof, six to cross the alley between them.

A chimney to be vaulted over, putting her halfway across a roof in an instant, at least a dozen steps.

Five more rooftops before there is a street that runs half the breadth of town in the direction she wills.

One hundred and twenty two steps in jumps and runing to clear them all.

A swift leap to land on an armored sentinal, slamming it crashing to the ground on it's back while she runs on, seventeen steps.

The commotion behind her is faint, yet.

Soon things will be harder.

A thousand steps cleared down the street: Over a wagon, dodgeing to an awning to avoid a cluster of zombies, under a skelletal behemoth used to pull wagons, catching another armored warrior from behind and hurling him backwards from her to gain speed before a wall of guards can be errected before her.

She goes through the wall, and the soft voice of dawn clears the way for her. Five zombies are now reduced to half-zombies behind her.

Faster things give chase, and others hurl nets, but she blurs forward, out of range even of arrows.

Another thousand steps, a hundred from passing this wall, flying over beggars and fearfull citizens alike, not pauseing in the slightest as the Whisper of Dawn removes a 'tarrif collector's heart from the land of the functioning, and a gate is swung closed across the street ahead, no doubt of the old defenses of this place against seige.

The bars are only Iron. The Whisper of Dawn Sings, sending iron bars flying away as missles into the crowd gathered behind the bars to overbear. Their flinch gives her purchase to leap from head to head to back and catch the bottom of a balcony, and she is breifly upside down as she spins in a curled ball, lauched upward to land in the second story balcony of a shop.

Wards crackle and spit around her, but she does not stay to be victim to whatever curse the carry. That was only ten steps more.

An overhand blow of the sword gives her a leaping place to reach the next house's roof. It is five steps, and the Whisper of dawn never leaves her hand, sliding in and out of plaster walls like the fingers of a lover across flesh as she turns it's anchor into a cartwheel no mortal could possibly match.

The next gate - the last on this street - is two thousand steps away. It is being closed with thick portals of wood, nearly as wide as her sword itself.

She wasn't going to go that way anyhow. Rooftops pass by in a blur as a host of hopping zombines leap up in her path from below. Perhaps thirty. Perhaps more.

She smiles her favorite hunting bird smile and flies through them, decrepit crows to her great eagle, and the Whisper of Dawn reaps limbs as she passes; In four hundred steps she is through - and more than a hundred more dead hopping vultures line the rooftops beyond her.

In fifty steps she reaches the edge of a roof they wait just beyond, and then vanishes.

A great host of them explode at her passage, and she knows her caste can be seen now. It bearly matters, as she passes a hundred steps in an instant. Perhaps there are another ten fewer of the things in the city now. Perhaps it is thirty.

They are chaff. Not everything will be chaff.

Fifteen hundred steps to go before the next gate, and a wall, itself fourty feet tall and shere, unlike the delapidated, damaged outer wall.

The host of the hopping dead falls about her like a rain.

She is not where they land. A dead bird flies past her, to warn others.

She hits it with a thrown shingle and it explodes.

five more rooftops. two hundred and eighty steps: larger, more wealthy houses here.

A great gulf, which will swarm with zombies and hungry dead soon.

But not yet. She covers it in seven bounds, one hundred and five steps worth, and then flies again, from balcony to balcony up to another roof.

There is a grinning, death-eyed warrior there, waiting to bar her way.

She slashes the roof and leaps over him as he falls through where timbers no longer hold him up.

It is sixty steps to the roofs edge, and a leap that clears an entire buidling lands her in an ally, rolling past an ogre-thing that may or may not be dead. All told, another seventy steps, and a bruise.

Slightly more than a thousand steps to go.

She tears through the allyeway, leaping from side to side off of bricks, off of garbage carts, off of the leaf of a vine, an impossible travel that buys her three hundred steps before she nears a black brick wall.

There is no time to stop, but it is only a thin curtain of brick.

The Whisper of Dawn leaves glowing gold fire about the edges of the circle cut just as her leaping feet hit it's center.

Her impromptu vehicle carries her entirely through a shop, bursting out a shuttered window in a shower of bricks. She lands it in the street, surrounded by corpselike noblemen with blades, and uses the back of a horse and the roof of a carriage as her bridge, to a fence wall. It becomes her highway, and now three hundred steps is six hundred.

Four hundred steps to the wall.

Chaos is behind her, as if she has stired a cauldron of wasps.

She makes four hundred steps on the street, striking towards that closed gate, as faint shades and necromantic mountains of mismatched flesh gather before it to bar her way.

She uses one as a spring board to hurl herself into a back and forth jump between the gate guard towers to the top of the wall.

It was seventy steps.

The wall itself runs along her course now, branching often to block streets below.

There are guards, streaming out onto it, with whips and chains and nets.

Shambling out.

Fifteen hundred steps accross that, tossing bodies dead long before she touched them off the wall with a tap of her blade's blunt side. A Ghost manifests infront of her before the end of the wall, corpus all but invisible in the faltering sunlight.

She simply goes sideways off the wall, into a maze of shattered, burned out buildings.

Two thousand steps to the opposite wall. One more inner wall before that.

Skittering things errupt from the shadows of buildings, but she has no time for them, and takes to the ruins of wall tops and wreckage, though her perches often shatter at her passage.

A thousand steps that must be made perfectly in leaps of ten or twenty at a time fly by.

A storm of arrows greets her as she approaches the final wall, and she can only fly under them. One razor point slashes her shoulder, grazeing down her back as she leans low forward, and then there is the wall, sheere with no possible perchase up ward.

It is ten steps wide.

She cannot dodge, but her sword can help her direction change. The sheathed blade snaps into the ground, hurling her at the wall feet first, and she throws herself upward with all of her strength, like a missle.

The jump levels out at the top of the wall, but ten feet away from the slightest sold thing.

half a hundred arrows hang in the air approaching her,

She uses them as hooks to pull herself to the wall, and catches it's very edge by one hand.

More than enough.

What comes up on the wall with a snap of her wrist is a whirlwind of shearing edge, a circle of Orachalcum sharp enough to cut space and trailing golden fire. It kills twelve men and carries her along a path to the other side of the wall.

Fifty feet down feels like nothing after the impossibility of crawling through the air. Her arms burn from that effort and she uses the falling time to breathe, then flickers sideways as she lands, and twenty and more arrows strike into the space her back should have been.

Less than a thousand steps to the last wall.

Something stands in an empty street in front of her. An exalt: A deathknight.

She's met such creatures. She has no time to meet this one, so she meets it at a charge -and then dissappears, pushing herself to her limits of speed, disappearing from view, thrice, and now she begins to glow, and it is only five hundred steps to the wall.

An entire army of grasping corpses and manifesting shades fills the space between it and her.

And they break and scream as she hurls herself forward and lets her anima explode.

Wings of golden flame trail her as she flickes through the host, and bodies fall at seeming random as she approaches the last gate. Nets of chain have been rigged over this wall, she will not be able to jump over it, and the host will not remain broken.

She meets the gate with a greater light, and glows like a star as her greatest technique is turned - but not against the great armored gate.

The whisper of dawn rips into the street beneath it, shattering stone and driving a foot and a half deep crater beneath the portal.

Her breast catches uncomportably on the door as she slides under it, bearly slowing, but when her arms push stone, it is stone that gives, and she is through, knocking spears aside as she begins to run, dodgeing hither and yon through a host of dead horsmen.

One of the warriors at it's edge has a living horse.

She hammers him off his saddle when she leaps on it, and sets it at a gallop.

It is only a thousand steps to the forest, but untill then, her sword rattles as it counteres arrows, and flares brightly when she is forced to sunder a flung boulder.

The dead horses aren't as fast.

Then there are trees reaching for her, and she tumbles off the horse, hugging close to the ground and flowing around trees like water. Thrice she turns a dodge into a blow and lets great oaks crash down behind her, completely cut through, to slow pursuit.

The light of dusk deepens, except around the woman who carries the light of the dawn.