Snippet #2588874

Landing in the talons of a dragon felt much like crashing in a flaming airship. It took Sven a few moments to gather his senses when he dropped from Lohengrin's scaly grip. This time, he'd been able to keep his watery eyes open long enough to brace himself for the land. Less jarring to his aching limbs, and he managed to curl into a less-than-graceful roll. He made a quick count of the crew members, and moved to pull them back to their feet.

When the ground trembled again, he whipped back towards Lohengrin. Seeing such a large beast slump to the ground in a panting-heap felt as surreal as when he'd first laid eyes on the colossal mountain-creature. He glanced back to his bloody forearms, slicking down like raindrops. What could they do for him, in his state? He was no healer; and no beast-master besides. The wound, however, seemed as if it were located around his wings; that much he could tell.

He turned to find Kethyrian. To discuss what they might do—though, Percy might have been better to consult with given the fact that Lohengrin, too, bore Mutatio blood. If they were to patch him up, they would need him to revert to his human form, if that was at all possible. His eyes flickered past her and focused on the bundle of flapping fabric pooling around... another crew-member. A parachute? Sven's gaze swung towards the sky.

Where? His stomach swirled with bile, and all of his words crippled into silence. He rounded back onto the woman fumbling with her parachute, shrugging off the backpack. “Vhat happened?” His voice seemed far away. It might've been the rocky descent or the wind still seemingly whistling through his ears. “Vhere is ship?” She should have been rounding back towards them to pick them all up.

The woman was soon joined by a few others, though she was the only one down in time to hear Sven’s question. Poppy, as she’d been named, shook her head with wide eyes, and pointed silently to a spot on the horizon. There, if one was careful to observe, one could make out the silhouette of the Elysium, headed towards ground, trailing a plume of black smoke behind. “She…” It was impossible to finish the sentence. Sven's gaze swung up, and he froze; lips drawing back, eyes widening. There was nothing he could do. Nothing.

Theon stumbled away, in a daze, watching but not really believing anything he was seeing. The massive ruins of the colossus were still sagging into pieces, having yet to fully settle, and there was an extremely injured dragon that he knew to be Lohengrin, a creature that had just granted them a miraculous safe passage from the rock monster's back. By all logic, they should have died there.

The ship smoking away on the horizon was the most alarming to him, however, and the scryer continued to move away from where the dragon had let them down. There was nothing he could do for him, after all, unless he sought a bullet or an axe. He found a boulder to prop his back up against, and sank down to the earth, watching the Elysium go for a moment before he let his head fall into his hands, and closed his eyes. Leaving his body behind, he soared as quickly as he could to the ship's side, intent on following it all the way to the ground.

The ship was not much longer for the sky, and that much was unmistakable. For a while, it seemed like its landing might be hard but slow, though this lasted only until there was a large metallic shudder from the bowels of it, the engine at last giving out several minutes after having taken critical damage. From there, it no longer limped steadily downwards, but began to fall in earnest, turning slightly in what was plausibly an attempt to land on a hill rather than in one of the depressions between them. Not an illogical maneuver, when more time to fall would only mean more speed in the crash, but it was unlikely to make much difference, considering the swiftness with which the Elysium hurtled to the ground, her aerodynamics now a disservice to her.

The crash itself was loud, certainly enough so to be heard by Theon’s natural ears as well as his extended perception, and thus by the rest of those who had parachuted away from it as well. The sound of wood, glass and metal all breaking was cacophonous and grating, great grinding sounds uncomfortable in the same way chewing aluminum foil would have been, only amplified. It was hard to tell exactly where the initial impact hit hardest, but bits and pieces of the ship were left behind as it continued to skid forward, at last coming to a rest after sliding down the hill it had landed on. The wreckage was everywhere, the vessel more broken than whole, and as the smoke cleared around the crash site, all was still, the silence broken only by the occasional soft creak as the shattered fragments of the Elysium settled against one another, forming her inevitable boneyard.

The best guess for where the cockpit had ended up was given by the fact that the broken halves of the bank of controls were still close to one another. What had become of the pilot was not immediately evident, but many of the chunks of ship were more than large enough to cover a person of Gwen’s size—or crush one.

There was little that could hide her from the scryer, if she were still alive, and mere pieces of the ship weren't enough. Watching the ship crash and break apart wasn't easy, but it was difficult to look away, so mesmerizing was the destruction. And with his sight, he really couldn't avoid it. He saw everything.

Theon searched for life under the wreckage, reaching out to feel for it, and quickly locating a feeling of intense distress under a large piece of siding. She was wedged between a fairly ruined stump of a tree and the ground, and in a significant amount of pain, but very much alive. He forcefully pulled himself back into his own head, pushing hastily to his feet, almost falling over. He had forgotten how dazed he was still.

Dio was just landing nearby, separating herself from the crewman that had helped her make the jump as soon as she touched down, and running over to the group. "I saw the ship go down!" she cried, visibly distressed. "Do you think Gwen might have—"

"She's alive," Theon stated, already heading in that direction, "but I don't know for how long. She's trapped." He expected all of the others to jump up and run with him, but his eyes fell on the dragon, and then Kethyrian. "Can you do something for him quickly? We need to move."

She's alive. The only words he truly needed—the only ones he wanted to hear in that moment. Watching the Elysium plummet from the skies, and knowing that Gwendolyn would have stayed behind, felt like staring at an oncoming train; dazed and lost and anchored in place. The scuffle of belts unbuckling and parachutes being discarded sounded distant to him. Their voices sounded further away, because she was still alive. No further details mattered.

When Theon lurched back to his feet and into one particular direction, Sven did, too, though he did not stop when he had, but continued on. Heavy steps pounding against the dry earth. A promise. A promise he'd made. It would mean nothing if she perished in that wreckage, all alone. He would mean nothing. It did not occur to him that without Theon, he might not even be able to track her down in time.

A rattling of equipment nearby announced Artorias's action. He threw off the sword and rifle on his back, followed by the torn overcoat and stood, rushing headlong beside the rest of them toward the wreckage. All he needed was a word that she was still alive. It didn't matter what he couldn't do, but what he could and what he could was extract Gwen from the wreckage. As he ran, he turned and called out, "If you got a pair of working legs then follow us!" He demanded. A few of the crew perked up at the call and agreed, following him and Sven to what was left of the ship.

The smoke threatened to choke them out, but fortunately there was a lack of fire. Embers and tiny flames remained, but the Elysium was built to be resistant to incendiary weapons. Artorias ripped a sleeve off of his shirt and tied it around his mouth to help with the smoke and advised the others who would still listen. "Cover your mouth and keep low!" He said as he began to carefully pick his way through the wreckage toward what he figured what was left of the cockpit. He had no idea where to look, but that didn't matter-- he wasn't merely going to wait. She never did.

Taking advantage of Artorias's discarded overcoat, Vivi snatched it from the ground and scurried toward Lohengrin's form. She was no healer, the furthest thing from it in all actuality. But, she wouldn't just do nothing while the people who'd unfortunately earned her fancy were hurt. She vaulted onto the dragon's hind leg and scrabbled up his scales until she stood on his thigh, and a few more moment of climbing brought her to the worst of his wounds. Above his left wing was a massive rend where his shoulder was. She looked at the coat in her hands and the wound in front of her-- it was bigger than her by four times at least.

Not that it stopped her from at least trying, just paused her for a moment. She found the widest part of the wound she could conceivably cover and threw the jacket over it, trying to apply as much pressure as she could with her small frame using every bit of her body to aid. It wasn't enough, but she wasn't the type to do nothing. Looking up, she barked, "Do we have a fucking healer or what?!"

Unfortunately, the only healer in the proximity was currently following the others toward where the captain was. Kethyrian would not say it was out of any especially-great panic regarding the captain’s condition. It was hard to say if she had the capacity for that much concern for another person at all. But she did want to help, if she were able, but though she didn't say it, she didn't like her chances. She was running on next to nothing after taking down that barrier, something the others seemed quite quick to forget now that she was needed again. Wasn’t that just the damn way of it, though? She couldn’t even rightly blame them much. It was why she’d just left the dragon behind. Hating him had nothing to do with it—she just had a fair guess that his injuries were not fatal. She wasn’t in the business of healing twenty-foot gashes even on the best of days, besides.

Lohengrin’s breathing remained quite labored, Vivian’s efforts not doing much to staunch the bleeding in his shoulder, but it wasn’t that which seemed to be causing the issues. The fact of the matter was that he was exhausted—he hadn’t transformed in more than a century, longer than most people would live. It required a massive amount of magic, and the simple fact was, he didn’t have that much. What was more, he had to reverse it, else his wounds would kill him as his magic burned itself out sustaining this form. His eye cracked open, a large circle the color of a blood ruby, the slitted black pupil contracting with exposure to the light, and he lifted his head slowly, curving his massive neck back to peer at the tiny creature trying so futilely to aid him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

It must have been quite an effort to scale him to get there. Even on his side, he was considerably taller than most buildings. The colossus had been almost twice his size. He blinked at her quite slowly, a breath passing from his massive bellows of a pair of lungs, and he dredged up the effort to speak to her. Hold onto something. It was all the warning he gave before he closed his eye and dropped his head back down to the ground. This was going to take everything he had left, but if he didn’t do it, he would bleed out eventually, and no healer in the world could do anything about it. If, however, the wound was more reasonably-sized, then he might yet live.

Slowly, his body began to shrink, the reversal of the transformation process much more slow and laborious than the forward version had been. He had to remember what it was like to occupy a human’s body again, had to remember what one looked like and felt like. Any effort to do that was bound to be imperfect, but he might just be better at it than he was at being a dragon. Oh, shameful irony.

The entire process took a few minutes, but when it was done, Lohengrin was more or less himself again, and the wound in his shoulder was a much more manageable four inches long. Unfortunately, he was also out cold and completely unresponsive.

---

Pulling up the collar of her shirt to help cover her nose and mouth, Kethyrian tried to ignore her watering eyes. “I can’t help if I don’t know where she is,” she pointed out, directing her comment to Theon. Though there was a fair amount of frantic searching going on, it was obvious to her at least that the seer had the best chance of locating her. Mordecai stood slightly behind her and to the left, a furrow in his brow the only indication that he was absorbing this with some difficulty.

Theon's face by this point seemed to be made of stone, his movements direct and quick to the spot where he knew Gwen was trapped, even as the two large men of the group began randomly searching, seemingly forgetting the advantages his sight offered. He moved over to the piece of siding she was contained under, noting a lack of sound coming from beneath.

"Help me with this," he said simply, and waited the brief amount of time it took for a few people to join with him, even Dio trying to help push. With a groan of metal the piece came free, pushed up and moved safely enough to the side to be dropped to the ground. Theon looked to confirm that Gwen was indeed underneath, and when he saw that she was, and at least for the moment still alive, he turned and walked away, letting people who could better help her do the fretting.

The scryer walked slowly and aimlessly a ways into the wreckage, the acrid smell of burning filling his nostrils. He supposed he was in shock, not processing anything properly. He suspected that he just didn't want to process any of this. That the ship was gone, despite how much he despised being in the air. That Gwen might not make it. That he might be invested in something, finally, only for it to literally nosedive and explode moments later.

Theon sat down heavily in a surviving patch of grass, buried his head in his hands, and closed his eyes. His mind remained rooted where it was.

Alive she might be, but Gwen didn’t look like a person who had much longer for the world, to put it kindly. Both of her legs had broken, the right one near the ankle and the left midway up the thigh, the bone there having pierced her skin from beneath and speared outwards through the fabric of her trousers to expose itself to open air. Her metal arm was severely dented, and loose from its spot at her shoulder, though not detached completely, as though it had been used to weather a heavy impact of some description. Her other shoulder was dislocated, and her torso and what was visible of the rest of her bore numerous gashes and cuts, some of them still with wood splinters or pierces of metal embedded in them. It looked to be sheer miracle that she was still in one piece, though that much was, perhaps, a bit debatable, considering her condition. Her breaths were shallow, and bubbled with something, probably blood. She seemed to be conscious, but only barely.

Kethyrian let out a hissed breath at the damage. “I don’t have enough to heal that.” It was a blunt admission, but for all that her tone lacked its accustomed severity. Even she was not unmoved by the fact that she knew the captain was going to die. There wasn’t enough magic left in her system to handle so many injuries of this magnitude, not to mention all of the damage they couldn’t see.

Chewing her lip, she sorted through everything she knew of magic, wracking her brain for anything that might be helpful. She’d been educated in the nuances of her arts for years, but nothing she had learned seemed to be of any use to her now. Even the key, still hanging by a loop from her belt, didn’t have any stored energy left in it. She tapped it with a nail, trying to force herself to think of something, when a solution presented itself.

“The key…” pulling it from her belt, she looked over at Mordecai. “How much of my magic do you still have?” She was, after all, the one who charged him with the spiritual stuff, since the only other eligible mage on board was Theon, and he obviously didn’t.

To his credit, the automaton caught on quickly. “Not a great deal,” he warned, his tone cautioning in a way she had not expected.

“Doesn’t matter. Give me all you have.” She extended an arm, holding the key out to him. They’d tested it, and it ‘accepted’ magic of her subtype from any source, and anyone could pull it out again. Which meant… even if Mordecai couldn’t heal, he could help her do it. The golem grasped the other end, discharging the energy in the same way he did when entering a specialized mode of operation, only this time, he didn’t change at all—rather, the energy passed into the key, like charging a battery.

He was right—it wasn’t a lot. Almost certainly not enough. But it was a start. Kethyrian muscled her way in at Gwen’s side with surprising strength, holding the blue stone object in one hand and passing her hand a few inches over Gwen with the other, trying to get a read on where the worst injuries were. They might not be visible, after all. Indeed, the biggest problem currently seemed to be that a few of her ribs had perforated her lungs, which accounted for the wet sound of her breathing. Well. She could do something about that anyway.

What Mordecai had donated managed to help her seal the punctures and clear the majority of the blood out of Gwen’s lungs, through her mouth, actually, which Kethyrian wicked off to one side with a terse banishing gesture. She was far from safe yet, though, and the key was once more empty. “Get Theon over here,” she barked to whomever was nearest. “He can sulk later—I need his magic first.”

It was all that Artorias needed to hear. Turning his back on them, he ventured into the wreckage to find where Theon had gone. The smoke stung at his eyes while he trudged forward. He wasn't the scryer with his foresight, but it didn't take him long to find the man in a patch of grass with his head still in his hand. Artorias's lip twitched as he planted himself in front of the man, crouching down so that he was no longer looming over him.

"What are you doing?" He demanded coolly.

Theon glanced over at Artorias, not understanding why now of all times he would come to speak with him. "Waiting," he said, as though it were obvious. "Staying out of the way."

"She doesn't need you to wait, Gwen needs you now," Artorias said, putting a firm hand on his shoulder and giving him a single hard shake. "Kethyrian needs your magic. So please, get up and go save her dammit!" Artorias demanded, standing and pulling Theon to his feet as well. "Go!" Artorias boomed, shoving in their direction. He couldn't do anything himself, he didn't have the magic to do anything-- but he could fetch the scryer for them.

Theon didn't understand, but he didn't resist, allowing himself to be pulled to his feet. When shoved, he moved in that direction, back towards where Gwen and the others were, looking confused but certainly not defiant. Artorias seemed rather distraught, a rare display for him, and Theon was tempted to think that he had sought out the scryer simply because he was a mage, like he could somehow solve something Kethyrian couldn't. But where others had a level of mastery of their magic, Theon had always felt more like a slave to his.

There was a lot of blood to be found around where Gwen lay, but her breathing sounded better now. He supposed that was a good sign, though he still looked a bit pale. It wasn't like violence was unfamiliar to him, but caring about it was. He looked to Kethyrian, uncertainly. "What do you need me to do?"

Kethyrian glanced up, nodding slightly when she recognized him, and used her free hand to pick up the key, extending it upwards. “Hold this, then give it some magic. I’m fresh out, and she still needs work.” He did, and she felt the new charge enter the key, something she siphoned again as quickly as she could get hold of it. With the help, she was able to heal the worst of Gwen’s injuries, including the compound fracture in her thigh. The mechanical arm was beyond her assistance, but she did manage to get the other one back in the socket with a sharp motion.

Setting the key down on the ground, Kethyrian sat back on her legs, sighing heavily. She was exhausted; doubtless, they all were, but she could feel it pulling at her muscles and bones by this point. “Okay,” she breathed. “Okay, she’s going to be all right.” With the last little bit of magic she had, Kethyrian put Gwen to sleep, to give her a chance to recover from what had been extensive healing. She hadn’t quite managed to open her eyes, but the favisae knew that she had at least been somewhat conscious. Probably better that she slept the rest off—not all the injuries were fully healed, and she was willing to bet that the captain would still be very sore and tender when next she woke.

“We have to find… someplace to shelter.”