Maja

Depiction of First Outerlander Attack

Maja’s personal diary—entry #167

[393 A.E. Temp d’Fig, 3rd]

I sprinted through the alley, oblivious to the two sapilens lying in wait. Spinning around, I reached for my belt, fingers finding the familiar satchel. Sand streamed forth, twirling in graceful arcs as my gloved hand conducted its movements. At my silent command, the orbiting grains split into three lines, two lashing out at my ambushers while the third coiled protectively around me.

One thousand six hundred and fifty degrees and cool down. The attacking streams hardened, turning into crystalline spears.

I watched as one glass spear skewered a sapilen, its blue scales offering no protection as it was thrust against a wooden door. The second spear missed, exploding into fragments against the wall. Heart racing, I faced the remaining sapilen's charge.

One hundred and seventy-one degrees. Atmospheric pressure. Trigonal crystal system. Alpha-quartz.  My dwindling sand hardened into a quartz plate, just in time to deflect its reaching arm.

The sapilen's layered hand shattered against my hastily formed shield. Its shriek of pain was my signal to act. Gripping the quartz plaque with my gloved hand, I charged. The creature, still reeling from its broken hand, had no defence. My push sent it stumbling, then crashing to the ground.

As I didn’t have the time nor the strength anymore to alter a plaque of quartz, I grasped another sand pouch from my belt and altered the sand into a sharp glass dagger. The fallen sapilen lay before me, neck exposed. I struck without hesitation, the dagger slicing through gill tissue. Thick blood oozed from the wound.

Once I was certain of the sapilen's death, I pressed on through the narrow alley. The city lay shrouded in a thick blanket of smoke, obscuring my vision and leaving me to rely on memory and instinct. But my feet knew these cobblestones and my skin remembered these walls. Trusting in that bone-deep familiarity, I continued.

I stumbled into what once was the public library, now just another building surrendering to the flames consuming our city. In the entrance, I found a corner, a small refuge from the smoke that sought to fill every space. There, I waited, surrounded by the ghosts of words and the dying dreams of a thousand authors.

The attack's suddenness left me doubting even the bruxa-mors had time to react, let alone evacuate. Had they fled? And what of the great families? Uncertainty gnawed at me, orders unclear in the chaos. Should I flee to the emergency dome beyond the city walls or stay to shepherd the helpless? In the end, duty won out—the sacred charge of every bruxa. Without waiting for orders that might never come, I headed to the palace, hoping to find it already emptied, with the royals gone to safety. Then I could turn back to those who had no one else to turn to.

The outerlanders came often to the open lands, to villages unprotected. But to breach a city-field, to infiltrate the very heart of our defences, that was a feat of an entirely different magnitude. It required more than mere savagery; it demanded a quality we'd long denied the outerlanders possessed: intelligence.

The palace's front gates roared with flame, a pyre to match the frenzied screams echoing from within. Dread coiled in my gut as I skirted the inferno, seeking a less obvious entrance. A side door yielded to my touch, and I plunged into a world of heat and darkness. The smog hung thick as wet wool, robbing me of sight. I walked by memory, by the knowledge of stone and turn. There was, of course, the ever-present fear that the ceiling above had finally surrendered to the flames, barring my path.

I dropped low, moving with the swift caution of a hunted thing. My fingers altered the sand into a round glass shield, willing it to part the choking smoke. For a moment, it did and carved a path of clarity through the haze. The glove's strength I trusted, though my hand sensed the heat's touch. Had I, in my haste, misjudged the ferocity of the blaze surrounding me?

The average house fire burns at five hundred and ninety-four degrees, Maja. Softening point at around eight hundred and twenty. Not enough to melt glass. You’re doing fine.

My "reasoning," as I'd come to call it, had an uncanny knack for perfect timing. A gift and a curse, really. It left my social graces in tatters, but who needed the fickle warmth of friendship when your mind was a constant companion? Then again, perhaps labelling it a "friend" was where I'd gone astray.

Certainty came, and with it, a dangerous ease. The self, too sure, grows careless. A turn taken, perhaps wrongly. And then, fire. Not distant, not separate, but all around. Engulfing. In the moment of greatest confidence, we often meet our greatest challenge. And I sure did.

(To be continued)