Contemptible Enemies - A Story of Pikka The Immaterial

Some time back, dear reader, I pointed out that hereabouts, we do happily host friends, family, and honorable enemies.

That said, we do have some experience of the less than honorable kind. Of enemy, I mean.

And, more to the point, so does Pikka the Immaterial. If you have followed Pikka's adventures, then you might recall the sorcerer named Yetimina Eb Zhedrin. And, remembering, you may well have wondered at her fate.

Like you, dear reader, I too have been curious over Yetimina's path through the world. In this week's story, I find that I may show you that Yetimina has become one example of those whom Pikka discovers to be...

Contemptible Enemies - A Story of Pikka the Immaterial by M. K. Dreysen

Pikka dangled between stones and a pit. Almost every drop of blood had been drawn from her body, through tiny incisions, to form the thorny fetters which bound her there.

She felt them, the bindings. They burned with the energies flowing from the pit. The wizard had been turned into a conduit.

The sorcerer who had bound her thus paced the stone circumference of the pit. "Yes," Yetimina Eb Zhedrin said to herself. And to her her prisoner. "Of course."

Pikka felt the energies; she heard nothing. She maintained her self within a void. And within that bleak opening into her mind, Pikka whispered a question. 'Pride?'

But no.

"This is much more satisfactory," Yetimina said. "Much more controlled."

And perhaps more entertaining. But Yetimina didn't go so far as to say that. She simply enjoyed the slow burning flow, and left the joys of lording her creation over her once-peers for later.

When the pit was safely closed. And the bridge she had formed to the netherworld burned to cinders.

'Accomplishment?'

"She is stronger than I would have dared hope," Yetimina said. "But then, perhaps one must be to make up for such poor beginnings."

'Wealth?' Pikka almost chuckled at that one. But she had room in her voidspace for only the questions. Humor must needs wait its turn.

Above, the barbed wires disappeared into the stones, to then appear within a small room above, where they continued upwards to the next level. And the next after, room, stone, room, stone, until at last the wires of blood found the roof. Here, they wound themselves into a rusted lightning rod.

In this moment, the lightning rod served as transmitter, rather than receiver. Lightning blasted from its tip into the dawn sky.

Blood-tinged. Fragrant of ozone and burning flesh. The forces called thus stroked across the dawn with the minimal subtlety of the search for power.

Below... below lay only darkness. Whatever the blood-drawn connected to left traces only in the lightning above.

And the terrible slow tearing of Pikka's flesh.

'Mastery?'

Pikka felt her questions fading. Did this mean that the time for questions had gone? Or that her strength to ask them had failed at last?

'Knowledge?'

Satisfied that her creation worked, and that the heart of it remained firmly bound, Yetimina hurried to the roof and the lightning rod. "Here, here," she muttered.

Here rose the purpose of her creation. All below was merely function. "Ah my dream."

She stood just within the door, unwilling to offer herself as a target and trusting in her wards. The forces she'd channeled and released ignored her.

Yetimina's purpose required exquisite timing, and luck. Luck for Pikka to survive long enough for the summoned forces to exhaust themselves.

For when they were exhausted, when, as Yetimina observed with some glee, they had poured themselves into the sky and found no connection only discharge... when they had allowed the idea of freedom to drain all that the eons of separation and frustration had generated... the scarlet lightning bolts shrank in length and breadth.

Until only a handful, a mad bouquet just about small enough to form a centerpiece at her table coalesced above the lightning rod's tip. Observing this with a smile that crept out of her iron control, Yetimina took a single step forward.

And then another.

'...'

Below, one more question rose unvoiced within Pikka's mind. Lifted itself.

And was answered. Not verbally, perhaps, not even as a feeling, other than maybe a combination of a last wavefront of energy from below, the last gash of the thorns tearing themselves free of her flesh.

And an opening. From the empty space where her mind had gone, to the last atom of her blood, the last molecule of iron within it.

And a blossom of energy.

Yetimina strode now across the rooftop, confidence lending her pace and distance. The bouquet, her target for this whole endeavor, had shrunk now to the size of her doubled fists.

Just a little larger than the quartz bottle she now brought from within her robes. "Ah, beauty, yes," Yetimina purred. "Just a..."

Just a breath, a moment. Long enough for Yetimina to tip the quartz lip into the flow of energy, for that flow to fill the bottle.

And, in the space below, for the husk of what had once been a human body to burst into a glitter of fragmented memories.

****

The quartz bottle, tinted pink and purple with what it contained, went onto a shelf in Yetimina's study. Between the journal of the last sorcerer-king of a forgotten kingdom and the notes of her first and only apprentice. There, for some weeks, Yetimina admired the beauty of her creation.

That's how long it took for Yetimina to realize that something was disturbing her sleep. Before, she had routinely slept through, accompanied or not.

After the quartz dream found its way to her shelf, though, Yetimina found that she rarely made it more than a couple of hours in deep sleep, before waking to stare at the ceiling.

After a few more weeks of troubled mornings and sniping at the servants, Yetimina found a... a whisper disturbing her rest.

She set aside any thought that the lack of sleep had unhinged her, and tracked down the whisper.

To the bottle on her shelf.

Yetimina passed a few days with this new knowledge before proceeding with the matter. She listened to the faint sibilance for those hours; it followed her at the faintest of levels wherever she went.

Only growing stronger when Yetimina actually sat, still, directly in front of the quartz.

For a few days. Days, then hours. Listening. Until Yetimina at last distinguished words. 'Pride. Knowledge. Accomplishment. ...'

And, where a sorcerer had settled herself to sit and listen to the quartz bottle that whispered and disturbed, and then closed her eyes to hear what that bottle had to say...

a wizard opened her eyes. Shuddered in release, and from the built up tension of a single word.

Slowly, her features and body shaped themselves to their new owner.

****

Some many months later, Pikka walked the rail of an ocean-going vessel beneath a blood red moon. Satisfied with the moment, or perhaps just that this moment was the first one she'd found where the decks were truly empty, Pikka the wizard cast a quartz bottle onto the placid ocean depths.

The ship continued, the sails giving it just enough velocity to pull ahead of the bottle and the current.

Some few hours after the vessel disappeared over the horizon, the bottle, dense with whatever it carried, sank beneath the waves.