Annie was awoken by the feeling of a heartbeat against her neck. She started to move and almost screamed from pain so intense it left starbursts of white dancing in her vision. So getting up was definitely a no-go.
”Fuck me.” she said to no one in particular. She'd have to worry about the heartbeat against her neck later, right now she needed to focus on not bleeding out.
She used her good(ish) arm to open her hip case, trying not to smear the blood still pouring from the wounds on her fingers all over herself in the process. She managed to undo the clasp after a few failed attempts so the case could fall open on its own, then fumbled at her last injector trying to get it out of the case by popping it free of its binding and letting it roll out on its own.
The problem was that it rolled right out of the case and kept on rolling until it was just out of Annie's reach.
"Fuck!" she shouted to the sky.
"Is that thing important?" A gruff voice came from somewhere behind her. Annie craned her neck and saw Lorena making her way towards her.
"Yeah." Annie croaked.
Annie heard Lorena set something down beside her and then bend down to scoop up the stray injector. She pressed it into Annie's intact hand as delicately as she could until Annie was able to wrap her fingers around it.
"Can you... Pull that little switch for me?" Annie flicked her thumb against the injector's switch. Lorena obliged and the needle sprang out. Annie tried to press the needle into her thigh, but she couldn't muster up enough strength to push it through the denim of her pants. Lorena's hand appeared above hers and carefully helped her push the needle through.
The injector's medical concoction did its work quickly, and Annie was flexing her fingers experimentally just a moment later. Giant scabs covered the wounds on her fingers and shoulder as well as sealed all the little scrapes and bruises she'd accrued over the past day. She sighed with relief.
"Thanks, Lorena." Annie said as she began to sit up. She felt Lorena's hand on her back easing her all the way to a sitting position and she glanced up at the mechanic, "I thought I told you to run. Why'd you come back?"
"You were fighting that clown-looking motherfucker, I thought you might need some help." She picked up a shotgun she must have set aside and gave it a little wiggle for emphasis.
"Oh ye of little faith." Annie wheezed and then broke into a coughing fit.
"Careful hon," Lorena warned, "You're lucky you're still in one piece, those wounds look downright nasty."
"I've had worse." A memory of touching her fingers to raw muscle and split veins drenched in blood, unable to speak as the her life poured from her throat and filled her lungs.
"Much worse." Annie said.
Lorena grunted in response and helped haul Annie to her feet, "Is Kenton okay?" she jerked her chin towards the unconscious Paladin.
"Not sure yet, but he physically he's fine." Annie wiped some of the blood off of her hands. She didn't want to think about what life was going to be like for him, now that she'd severed him from his Icon. With that much magic and power constantly at your fingertips, it was an agonizing thing to have it ripped away. She especially didn't want to think about how he would react to what Grinner had made him do...
She tore her eyes away from Connor and looked to Lorena, "Can you take him back to the motel? Tallis should be there. He's going to need someone with him as he wakes up."
"You're not going to take him?" Lorena asked.
Annie shook her head, "I have work to do."
Lorena nodded grimly. Together she and Annie lifted the semi-conscious Deputy to his feet and propped him up to lean on Lorena's shoulder.
"Take care of him," Annie's voice cracked, "And tell him I'm sorry." She lightly kissed his cheek before passing him to Lorena.
"You make it sound like you're not going to make it back." Lorena's casual gruffness carried a hint of concern.
"Don't worry, I'm not planning on dying anytime soon. Especially not to a damn Partee clown." Annie gave what she hoped was a comforting smile.
Lorena nodded, not entirely convinced but unwilling to argue. Annie watched her carry Connor away until they were out of sight, then let out a grunt of pain she'd been holding in. Everything hurt. Despite the medical elixir she had aches and pains in places she didn't know it was possible to have them, and there was a tightness in her chest that crept up her throat and made her feel close to tears.
She shook her head and shoved aside the pain, mentally walling it off in the corner of her mind to keep it at bay for the moment. There would be time for it later, but right now she couldn't afford to slow down, let alone have a mental breakdown.
The Icon's body was beginning to collapse, the threads that had sustained it slowly unravelling and liquifying. Annie patted her chest and pulled an empty vial from her bandolier. She knelt down and uncorked it to scoop up some of the ichor from the remains and felt that strange heartbeat sensation against her neck again.
She lifted her fingers to the heartbeat to investigate and found the shawl she had put around her neck after her nightmare. Annie had almost forgotten she was even wearing it. The heartbeat pulsed again and she felt the fabric twitch ever so slightly. She frowned and brought a piece of it up where she could see at it properly.
Its wavy patterns shone with a gentle white light and the fabric itself shimmered with an ethereal glow, as if the sunset woven into the shawl had come to life to cast its myriad of warm hues over Annie. She twisted the fabric around to inspected it from every angle and traced her fingers along the shawl's patterns, feeling the buzz of magic against her skin. Was her shawl enchanted? Annie tapped the rune on her glasses for a better look. It took her a moment of dumbfounded confusion before she actually understood what exactly she was seeing.
Threads of light were being pulled up to the shawl from what was left of the Icon's body. It soaked up the leftover magic as if it were a sponge. Every new thread it absorbed sent a small pulse of light throughout the fabric.
"Breyja... What in the world is this?" Annie murmured. She hadn't known that her shawl was enchanted. The buzz against her fingertips told her it was clearly storing the magic, and the shimmering light seemed to correspond with each time it absorbed a thread.
Breyja had surprised Annie with the shawl for her fifteenth birthday. At the time Annie hadn't thought Breyja even knew that she was a mage, let alone the Herald of the Empress. The retired Stranger had told her she based the design on Annie's tattoos, the ones Annie had designed to channel energy from the Veil through her body like she was a living needle. Annie had thought it just an artistic choice. A meaningful artistic choice, but ultimately a mundane one.
The shawl was precious to Annie, it was one of the few things she had been able to take with her when she'd escaped from Therult that awful night. But in all this time she had been too afraid to wear it, keeping it hidden away in her pack all these years, terrified that she might be recognized if she wore it. She had never seen it do.... whatever it was doing right now.
Had Breyja known she was a mage after all?
The enchantment on this shawl was delicate and complicated work, possibly among some of the best enchanting Annie had ever seen. If it was absorbing loose Veil threads from around it, that would mean it wasn't taking in any magic from the Veil or Annie herself. Then what was it doing with the magic?
A thought occurred to her. She touched her fingers to the pattern on the shawl and hesitantly attempted to draw on the tiniest sliver of magic she could muster.
A thread of light unspooled from the shawl, bearing its sunset hues instead of Annie's violet red. She pulled on it cautiously, slowly gathering more and more of the thread in her hand until she'd accrued a length of it as long as her arm. It separated from the fabric easily, as if she were plucking a loose strand from a sweater. The light rested in her hands, abuzz with the same energy as the shawl.
Annie realized her face was wet. She went to wipe the blood off her cheeks and instead found them damp with tears. She was crying. Annie couldn't believe it. It was magic, Annie was holding a thread again for the first time since she'd left home. She hugged the thread close to her chest and allowed herself a moment to sob. Breyja had given her magic, after all these years.
Annie wiped her eyes. She didn't have time to falter like this. Grinner was still out there, and he had a hell of a head start on her. She took the thread she'd pulled and began to weave it between her fingers, careful not to let it touch her blood.
It seemed like the shawl let her weave Veil threads that were stored within it, Annie wasn't about to risk letting her blood dissolve them or destroy the enchantment. She had no idea what the shawl's storage capacity might be, but Annie pretty confident that once she used up all the thread it had stored in it she wouldn't get any more until she figured out how to restock it.
But thread is thread, and right now Annie had more to work with than she'd had in a very long time.
She needed to consider her next move carefully. She was beat to hell and back, but her blood made medical magic an automatic no-go. Actually, her corrosive blood meant she couldn't perform any medical or physical reinforcement magic on herself at all. Even with her newfound supply of usable thread, she still couldn't reach beyond the Veil to channel the Blank to fuel an arcanum. If she even brushed against the Veil trying to get to the Blank, it would rip like it always did and she'd get a pile of demons on top of her for her troubles.
Annie's train of thought came to a screeching halt. She was adding far too many options and variables for what she needed to do right now. All she needed was to find Grinner and Jaigra. She'd handle everything else later.
She began to twist and shape the thread laced between her fingers, weaving an intricate pattern of light in the air before her.
The first thing to know about magic was that it is actually incredibly impressionable. A fundamental aspect of spell weaving was to have a crystal clear idea of what a mage needs the spell to do and what exactly the method of creating it would be. That process was broken down into three parts: the design for the weave, a verbal incantation, and the function of the spell. Threads responded to emotion and belief, if a mage has a clear image of how a spell works, it usually does.
No two spells ever needed to be the same, though there were many different styles of weaving taught to mages as guidelines for their spellwork. The Wings of the Empress offered one such form of guidance, teaching its Seraphs a rigid standard of combat magic for maximum effectiveness.
Annie had never quite fit that standard.
Her spell was nearly complete, it just needed one more component. She held the threads in one hand and pulled her pistol from its holster. Annie carefully draped the threads around it until the gun was encased in a glowing net of light. Then she whispered to it.
“Thread of fate and light divine, seek your past once lost to time.” The thread encasing the pistol shuddered and tightened around it, then unspooled itself and compressed into a small sphere of light connected to Annie’s index finger by a single thread. It floated in front of her briefly and then sped away, yanking at the thread on her finger like an eager bloodhound pulling at its lead.
Tears crept to the corners of her eyes again and she furiously wiped them away. There was no time for sentiment, Annie had work to do.
She had a pretty good mental map of Millpoint by now, she remembered where she'd been at the very least, and right now the tracking spell was pointing back towards Mitch's clinic. Right where Filch's secret mining tunnel entrance was hidden. Bingo.
Grinner had to be making his way through the mines up to the top of the ravine above town. It was that or he would try to get through the incredibly radioactive desert wasteland instead. Having gone through said incredibly radioactive desert wasteland herself, Annie would not recommend the trip. She hoped Grinner thought the same.
But she had a better idea than walking through the mines or the wasteland. A much better idea…
