Tag: Elissa
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Patina – Chapter 62
She walks through the forest, and the forest is dark. Pale trees sprout from the damp black ground, grow thick and strong, their branches spread like veins, throbbing with crimson sap. Up above a golden light seeps through everything like a kind of vicious bile. And she walks on naked feet on the sharp blades…
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Patina – Chapter 60
The Hunter lowered his head, trying to collect himself. The things he had seen… between Verna’s experiment, her lies about Lenora, about the scope and effect of the Sere Rite had pulled apart the shield of certainty and purpose he’d been building around himself for the past six years. There was no saving her, no…
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Patina – Chapter 59
The Hunter rubbed his face, trying to see how much of himself was still there. For a given value of there. “How can you be here?” He frowned. “And what’s happened to my body?” “Your body is perfectly busy dying,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Which is one of the reasons why we don’t have much time.…
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Patina – Chapter 58
Among all the ways mankind had found to hinder the ever-encroaching forest and halt its Tide, in places even push it back, there were water, steel, and blood. The division between these three approaches led to the Order of Vestals with their use of Sight and holy water, the Venators and their strange rituals of…
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Patina – Chapter 57
You could have done a better job, Elissa berated herself, plunging herself deeper into the hot water. The pool welcomed her, the numbing pressure enveloping her naked body all around in a soothing embrace. She pressed her hands over her blindfold, trying to massage the pain away from her orbits – an aftereffect of the…
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Patina – Chapter 56
If Sadja ever got out of this, she did not want to see a rope ever again, in her entire life. She bit and wriggled as her captors carried her away, with some success, as she managed to make them bleed and scream, but little else. One of the men pulled out a knife and…
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Patina – Chapter 53
Mastra Verna passed her hands through her hair. Something was wrong, and she couldn’t put her finger on where exactly. In her long career as an Augur, she learned to prioritize her gut feeling – sometimes her body knew something before her Sight even kicked into full gear. She sat inside the glider as it…
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Patina – Chapter 48
For the last few days, thresholds had been on Elissa’s mind. The threshold of the Temple in Belacqua reminded her a lot of the one in Venexia at her training monastery, where it clearly set an inside apart from an outside. She had believed staying in the pen drawn around her would be enough. Believed,…
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Patina – Chapter 36
Walking had never been as easy affair for Elissa, even less so since the… drastic measures she took in her childhood. Usually she had her palanquin bearers to carry her about, or at least a few guards would help her; but this was far from ordinary circumstances. To complicate matters, Augurs were not known for…
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Patina – Chapter 30
Verna’s body played with a remnant of an ancient motor, while her mind was split in three. On the present moment, she was sitting in her quarters in Venexia, looking out of the richly-decorated window onto the city, its red roofs and paved squares hidden by the swift clouds of steam and vaporized holy water.…
A. Montresor 