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The Pride demon staggers.
“ Close it, now !”
The bearer of his mark connects the Breach with a snap, swaying in place under the weight of an arcane magic the Kossith race is unable to hold. Solas moves to imbibe them with the power needed to momentarily stop the Breach from expanding. He moves to help them before it’s too late—
There is a crack.
His neck snaps, and he watches the Breach in a mix of awe and horror as a loud explosion shakes the air and something falls from the tear in reality.
Sharp eyes— sharper than those of any mortal in the remains of the Temple— catch a blur of pale gold, an earthen brown, lively green and then the object hits the ground in a cloud of dust as the bearer pulls the Breach close, killing the demon as he does so. Automatically, he moves to the bearer’s— Adaar’s— side, healing magic snapping to life, even as his eyes do not leave the cloud of dust hiding whatever fell from the sky.
It’s when he is kneeling next to the man with the fate of the world on his hands that the cloud settles. In its place is a human woman, wearing a long brown coat, with pale golden hair pulled back and tan freckled skin that hints at countless hours spent in the sun.
At first glance, the human does not look like anything unordinary, but then his eyes fall on the ground— no , on the being beneath her feet.
It’s—.
It’s nothing he has seen before. Not in the Fade, and not in Arlathan. It’s a dragon, but not. A reptile, surely, for it has scales thicker than the strongest metal and claws as sharp as the deadliest of spells. Wingless, but making for the deficiency by its sheer mass and by the number of heads it once possessed. Possessed , as in past tense.
Countless headless necks lay on the ground. Headless but for one head. Furious and aiming to bite at the woman on top of it, but failing on it’s every endeavor.
For every rear of its head, the woman brandishes a flaming torch and bats it away without looking, hacking away at its neck with a single mindless determination.
“Fucking— Hydras— and their fucking heads ,” she hisses as she hefts the axe one last time before dropping it with a victorious huff as it snaps the head from it’s neck cleanly. Green blood splatters her face, and her skin almost seems to glow against the color. As the head falls away, the woman drops the ax and lowers the torch to sear the skin of the beast’s—the Hydra’s?— neck. “There you go, motherfucker ,” she grunts gleefully, the blood on her face adding a certain mania to her expression.
Unluckily for the stranger, her fight with the creature had given the Seeker enough time to gather herself.
“Identify yourself!”
The woman pauses, and even from the distance Solas notices the sudden tension on her posture as she raises her head and looks around. Her head turns to the sky and the Breach, then down at the gathered soldiers, filing them away one by one until her eyes fall upon him.
There is nothing human in those eyes. Ancient and wild, flashing an unnerving green that reminds him of a type of vine known for tearing people apart and feeding on their remains. Those are not the eyes of a mortal, he knows.
Those are the eyes he sees every time he looks at his reflection.
“Where the fuck am I?”
It starts with an explosion, as most things in her life do.
Then it gets weird.
Well, weirder than usual. And that is saying something for Aster, but hey. Demigods usually don’t get yeeted into other dimensions, no matter what those bitches in Olympus tell you.
Demigods usually stay in their own dimensions, and yet, here she is, in a stranger’s land with the sky a shitty green color and the vague feeling that Dionysus is laughing at her bad luck.
As her gaze falls on a wolf in sheep’s clothing, she blinks and swears under her breath. The metaphorical laugh becomes metaphysical because her lover, the fucker , is using their mental link to mock her through time and space .
Asshole , she thinks fondly, as she looks at the woman in armor idly. She is not a threat, but the way she is puffing and huffing is pretty amusing. And she prefers not making the locals angry, it tends to bite her in the ass. Aster likes her ass well enough as it is, thank you very much.
“Aster. Demigod. Daughter of Demeter,” she says, knowing full well that she is breaking the rules of secrecy. “Currently on my Godhood Trials.”
“What on the Maker’s name are you talking about?”
Maker?
Oh shit, this might be one of those weird ass monotheistic worlds or something.
Fuck .
D’s laugh on her head gets stronger. Her beautiful shithead of a lover is now outright cackling at her unfortunate circumstances.
Which. Fuck him. She had been planning to smooch the everlasting daylights out of him when her trials were over, but now she is reconsidering it.
“I said what I said, ma’am.”