The Sketch Rift: The Seal of Demons

Red Petrichor

"The capacity of these talons to tarnish my birthplace..." Sulukrita respired with a visibly taxing exhalation, "is far greater than the maximum necessitated to mince your entire Plane. Something you should have done sooner to spare yourselves from the consequences of its practice!"

"Ignore Sulukrita!" Soal turned his back to the ascending mountain of disintegrating clay and mortar and slid toward the petrified militia before a piece of the chaos could snag him. "Just follow my lead! Hurry!" And only then did a pelt of coarse dirt thrust him over his faithful soldiers and into the very position he needed to effectively drag them in his trajectory.

Soal's elbows reared his hands' obsoletely metallic gloves -- whose handles had bent and torn since they fled their provenience -- to his sides for a negligible second, before they were coerced into an extempore sprinting animation. Only now did the "dragon" begin to hurl its many limbs to newfound terrain for them to vitiate, a single manic stride instantly sending Hendera's army of dozens to their ankles and leveling most of the so-far-lucky surviving structures in the city, while the ground beneath the claws sunk under the influence of so many virulent faces fused into one appalling admixture.

"Time your footsteps to Sulukrita's!" Soal hollered, the message struggling to carry over such a mundanely small distance. "That way the shockwaves won't stifle you!" But breathing itself was as much an errand for him and the others as it was for Sulukrita to swallow the massive intakes of smog-sprayed air for his survival. This command did not even register with himself because he was still sprawled on the scorching earth, and the dying drips of dead-sketch-glue encumbered him so him on the shadow's edge of the Darklighted Gauntlete-sized menace. But before it was a shadow too far ahead, Marsh's hand was there, and before Soal knew what had occurred or who had rescued him he was on his feet again, returning to the forefront of the militia -- one that was somehow building in number, despite several losses in the initial moments of the marathon. The rest of Hendera, similarly alarmed upon their tardy response to Sulukrita's early arrival, merged one by one into the swarm, which leaped unsteadily with every consecutive aftershock seemingly on the vague, serpentine passage towards the Great Waise Temple, which Soal recollected from his calamitous mission to vanquish the late Sulord.

"There is no grass here; thus, there can be no dew," Sulukrita monologued from above once more. "But a tactile sensation is no desideratum when my nasal passages ache so for the iron all of you are so attached to. Before long, there will be a preeminent rain than the one you want. It will be the one you are so attached to. Spell soon after a... red petrichor. Cherish it as it catches up with you, and then surely I may smell it!"

Everything that Sulukrita bellowed was a taunt; oft a barely forthright variation of a genocidal threat, always involving blood, and always centralizing it in a disturbingly quasi-subaqueous tone, which the thickening air and plot actively accentuated. But Soal was not paying much attention. Too much was on his mind for him to care about what the creature said. Only Irene, only Alice, only Isabel, only Hendera, but never himself.

"Lawrence?"

Not even now.

"SAMUEL LAWRENCE!"

Ignore Sulukrita. Soal's attempt to follow his own order excruciated him.

"SOAL... YOU OWE ME SOMETHING, YES?!"

"No."

"Enunciate!"

No.

"This is not a first-person novel. ANSWER ME!"

Soal's ears were bleeding, but for a less obvious reason than he had expected. Sulukrita's charge paused, granting Hendera another opportunity to quicken their pace, and Soal instinctively gave up his mental defenses while his neck found its way to lock eyes with Sulukrita's malignant equivalents, hundreds of all measurements away. "Then you may ask yourself," the Bane of the Armorillion snarled. "Allow me to introspect. What exactly are you running from this time?"

"Soal!" Emma's shouts now pierced Soal's senses, but clearly not enough. "Come on! Soal!" Soal hoped to redirect his gaze to his destination, but he could not, nor did he resist Emma's grip as she pulled him back to the rest of the city's populace in their race.

"And what are you running to!?" Soal shrieked in reply, amid a shot at comparing their resumes. Emma continued, others as desperate joining the effort. "Huh?! Ramble whatever about blood as you keep stomping around... it's not going to get you anywhere. If you think killing me is going to satisfy you... fine! If you think killing me is going to be easy... I wouldn't be here for you to kill at all!"

Sulukrita licked his half-skeletal chops with an extremely pointed tongue, lathered with more sketch-glue that fell and sizzled onto the blistering ground he passed earlier.

"Listen to me!" Emma gritted her teeth even harder than she had been for the rest of this ghastly experience. "Soal! SOAL!"

"THE DENIAL OF YOUR POSSESSION -- THE ONE MOST REQUIRED TO ANSWER YOUR OWN INQUIRY!" Sulukrita's most recent bout of frenzy -- enacting what could, put simply, be described as molding the remnants of the city into his personal trampoline -- finally snapped Soal out of his delusion. "YOU DENY IT... YOU DENY YOURSELF!"

Hendera was a crater, and Soal was a dawdling refugee in search of his temporary feather-storing home. However, distractions piled up on their side, most notably the caterwauling behind that would have assaulted Soal's ears, were they open to such. "You are certain, lizard? Or unsure of it?"

Soal did not recognize this voice, but knowledge of its owner was restricted to the Great Waise Catacombs. "Unsure it must be!" Berior barked derisively, and flitted about Sulukrita's aerial domain awaiting his brazen nails. Failing to receive them time after time, Berior resorted to squabbling with riddles. "If you wished you could flap your wings, would you?"

"You are the one without wings, Sulukridger."

"But I dart not unlike a pigeon... and you are but sluggish! Quite unlike a devil... devil," Berior likened the Bane of the Armorillion to multiple conflicting images, merely to be lugged further from altitude by the fingers of that so-referred devil, to the tune of a vexatious "whee" and a belated withdrawal from their clasp via wormhole.

"Hands, devil!" Berior sneezed and beckoned Sulukrita to his next lounge of the Rift's halitus. "What an insufficient decision for your adversaries' ends. Ineptitude has not neglected you, I do notice!" His vicarious pursuit bid Hendera moments, but not moments enough for them to bypass a semi-cliff face prior to the Bane of the Armorillion's burial of its vicinity in its own crust, preventing the escape of its once-soon-to-be passengers. The pressure felt to cripple Berior, but he still maintained the power necessary to draw individual portals to the other end of the rubble for every Henderian -- with one significant exception.

Soal on this occasion of supreme inconvenience lacked the surge of energy that would administer his climb. Disregarding the baffled yelps of his compeers, his feet shuffled slightly, compelling him to anti-negotiate again. The feet declined to perform the walking, though. Sulukrita's other arms substituted them and grabbed his back, the Ammeroap whisking him back through another Rift-gate into a familiar forest.