Chapter Text
You especially don’t expect to wake up to some eldritch creature carefully tending to the coffin-like pods in a suspiciously… fleshy room.
There’s a woman - an undead, you think - green skin, dark bruise-like marks on her face, no nose - thrashing about in one of the pods. The creature (it looks a little bit like one of the squids you’d seen in a book) holds something small and worm-like in its clawed hand. It methodically holds the thing up to the undead’s face and the worm feasts like her head is an apple.
You feel sick to your stomach - no, your bones.
This is hell. Must be. You’re in hell. Why? Stealing that knife from your Ma? Lying to Mom when you said you’d tend the chickens in the morning?
The creature turns to you and you see its eyes, dark like water tainted by rot. Some hellish glint glows through the muck, filled with malice. Another worm eagerly crawls along one of its long fingers.
Your pod opens. You heave for breath.
You do your best to resist, but try as you might, you can’t stop the creature from forcing your eye open.
From there, the world passes by between periods of nothingness: The room jolts, red dragons, the undead frees herself, you think.
She’s wearing strange armor - not like the knights in storybooks. It’s encrusted with rubies and actually quite beautiful.
The next time you come to, you’re still in the pod but the world is now on fire.
With strength you’d lacked last time you were lucid, you ram your elbow into the glass-like surface of your pod, chest tightening when it doesn’t budge. You throw yourself against it as best you can once again, glad for once that you’re so small and can wiggle around, even as cramped as the pod is.
Still no give.
You’ve got no weapons to use - but your bracers, reinforced with nails, eventually cause cracks to appear in the glass. You use your cloth-wrapped hands to push past the shards and crawl out of your prison, falling unceremoniously about five feet onto the ground.
Your elbows and knees take the brunt of the damage but you force yourself up to get your bearings.
The gaping hole in the wall shows an unfamiliar landscape - rocky, sulfur-smelling, dark - you ignore it to look for something that might be able to reasonably take down one of those tentacled-beasts.
You find the answer to your prayer - a mace - laying on the ground nearby. You take it but are surprised by its weight: it must be made of high-quality metal.
Nothing like the alloys made with scraps that your Ma works with.
You test its weight a few times, holding it with both your hands and swinging it around until you’re reasonably confident you won’t fall over when trying to use it.
Nice.
But a weapon’s just once piece to your survival - there are horrors yet undiscovered. At least one monster outside there.
As you traverse from room to fleshy room, you find the corpses of many different creatures strewn across the ground. Some humans, but some winged creatures that look like demons and small, squat goblin-like things.
You can only assume you’re in hell or your brain is hallucinating a nightmare as you slowly pass from dehydration.
You don’t know which is more preferable.
Still, you drag your aching body forward, forward, forward. Rot and ash and smoke are thick in the air as you pass from the safety of inside the structure to an outside ledge.
It’s as you’re facing down a sheer drop, the same hellish landscape greeting you through the gaping wound in the living ship you’re on, that you face your first foe: the undead woman from before.
She leaps over you from above, haloed by the red storm surrounding you, mirrored by a dragon that flies overhead at the same time. You don’t think you’ll ever quite get that sight out of your mind - not that you’d sooner forget the image of an undead wielding a weapon, let alone such a large sword.
Maybe anything can happen in hell.
Maybe your punishment is to get pummeled to death by all the undead who’d been sent here by your own hand.
You think you’d remember a face like hers, though - she was obviously pretty once. Maybe she still is, in an odd sort of way. You’d learned to stop seeing faces in the undead. Less nightmares that way.
“Abomination!” She growls, “this is your end!”
When your eyes meet hers, her face crumples… and then you see it. Red dragons. Sword fighting. And strangely enough… your own face, reflected right back at you. Bloody and grimy and tired.
When your vision returns you notice her ears are pointy. Like yours.
Not undead?
Perhaps… you have more in common than you thought.
“My head!” The woman gasps, “what is this… guh.”
You hold your head, also experiencing a painful rushing of blood. Did she see flashes of your life, as well? You wonder what parts. Hunting? Smithing? Those final moments before your world flipped upside down?
“Tsk’va,” she grunts in an unfamiliar accent, “you are no thrall. Vlaakith blesses me this day! Together we might survive.”
You only believe her when she sheaths her large sword.
“We’re not already dead?” You hear yourself asking.
The woman scoffs.
“Soon, we will be. We must head to the helm and escape this ship before it crashes. Then, I must find my kin and be purified. If you survive… you are welcome to join me.”
You very, very much want this not-undead woman with the large sword to take you away from here.
“Alright. Let’s do that,” you reply breathlessly, “I’m Ru, by the way.”
The woman regards you skeptically.
“I’m your only chance at survival. Now, we must clear the imps.” She gestures directly to your right, where there are some more of those winged creatures - demons - happily feasting away at corpses.
It’s not the first time you’ve seen such a sight, but the glowing eyes really don’t help to steel your nerves. Your new companion must notice, as her hand lightly yet firmly taps your back.
“Straighten your back. Tighten your core,” the woman advises sternly as she observes you, “grip your weapon and don’t miss.”
You nod once to her and then once to yourself.
…
You can do this.
You can do this.
One of the imps abandons its prey to fly towards you with its arms outstretched - you meet it with vigour, aiming your mace at its face. Its skull gives easily to the heavy metal, but there’s another one just a few feet away, holding a crossbow of all things that it’s pointing directly at you.
You curse while you free your mace from the first imp’s corpse, swinging it up and nearly losing your balance.
Behind you, you hear the woman curse in that strange accent. She leaps over your head, once again, in a stunning show of athleticism and slices the thing clean in half with her longsword. You can’t even thank her because there’s some feral hog from actual hell barrelling towards you.
You squeal and swing your mace at its head, managing to stun the thing for a second. The woman dashes past you to cut its head off, where it falls to the ground, jaw twitching.
Your own jaw drops open.
“Not bad for a whelp,” the woman says, “Perhaps we may make it out alive yet.”
Despite the harsh words, you get the feeling that it was supposed to be a compliment.
“Thanks,” you gasp-laugh, “you were pretty cool too.”
She appears to ignore your words and nods her head tightly to a mesh of wound up flesh. Your brows raise. She jogs over to it then begins to climb the gore. Your nose crinkles as she begins her ascent, but you’re soon after her. Her stride is steady and her gait is long despite her small stature.
You do your best to keep up while holding tight to your mace.
“Soo…” You sigh as the two of you march with purpose, “your kin, huh? Do they all have such… pointy ears?”
The woman grunts.
Okay. Noted. Not the time for conversation.
Still. You can’t help but wonder if the two of you are truly the same. If there’s some part of you that can be found inside her.
As the two of you push into the next room, your ears perk as you hear the unmistakable cry of someone screaming their desperation and the familiar sound of fists against glass. Your eyes scan the room to find the source - another woman, trapped, desperately trying to escape her pod.
“Don’t bother,” your unlikely ally warns, “we must get to the helm. We don’t have time for strays.”
Part of you is flattered she doesn’t think of you as a stray while the rest feels a sinking guilt when you turn away from the desperate woman to follow behind your savior.
You’re not sure what you would do if she left you behind.
Die?
And what could you even do - try and break the woman out of the pod by slamming the mace through the glass? What if you caved her head in along with the glass? Could the two of you even make it without your companion?
You nearly run into an armored back when your companion stops suddenly before another one of the sphincter-like doors.
“I hear the sound of a battle ahead,” she says lowly, “steel yourself.”
Your muscles harden as you hold your weapon in front of you.
“Got it,” you mutter back, “um, you’ll watch my back, right?”
Your companion spares a look at you with a half-smirk to her lips. You nearly drop your mace in shock after seeing her thin lips curled into that almost smile.
Is that even possible?
“I will carve out a path for the both of us. You will watch my back, whelp.”
Something in your chest slots into place hearing that. You feel… warm?
“Let’s go, then,” you tell her, feeling newly emboldened by her confidence.
True to her word, the woman dashes forward, stabbing and slicing and cleaving past demons. You swing your mace around a little - and even manage to take out a few baddies - keeping as close to your companion’s back as possible.
There’s a tentacled beast you don’t dare approach - especially when it’s engaged in a fight with a particularly big and muscular demon standing almost twice your height. Best to leave them to their own fight.
You’re still slamming your mace into heads and doing your best to pull it free afterwards when your companion does something with the alien contraption at the helm and suddenly the world outside is no longer screaming.
Instead, it’s you as your feet leave the ground and you barrel into the unknown.
You manage to briefly stop yourself from falling into abyss by holding tightly to the viscera composing your ship. You watch helplessly as your companion falls past you, her eyes meeting yours once last time before she’s gone.
Your mace, too, is a casualty of the crash. Lost to who knows where in the void.
And the beast.
Ghaik, you think your companion had called it. It clutches its side and stares you down, that same horrible look in its eyes. Your own loathing distracts you for only a moment - but it’s still enough for you to lose your feeble grip on the ship.
Down, down, down you tumble.
Maybe you’ve been falling this whole time. Maybe you’re still on that miserable roof. Maybe your body is being torn apart by hungry undead and that's why your heart had felt like it was being ripped out when you saw the woman who had protected you disappear.