Chapter Text
He doesn’t recall hitting the ground after his fall. One moment he’s weightless, and the next he’s jolting awake with a particularly sharp rock digging into his back and a headache that will certainly last for days. He rolls his neck, wincing as his bones crack against each other, then takes a moment to look around.
He’s on a pile of rocks with water lapping against the edge; he’s certain that at high tide, he must’ve been laying in water—this is also supported by the fact that he is soaking wet. The sky is cloudy and it’s cold, wind whipping around him and chilling him to the bone. Shivering, he looks up, where a jutting cliff looms above him. He’d fallen from his place of prayer, where he had pleaded with Eurus for months to step in and stop the nonsense that kingdom officials spread about Prime. Eurus had done no such thing, but he had saved Phil from the death sentence of falling to the rocks below, so Phil pauses to send a quick prayer of thanks to the wind.
Phil stumbles to his feet and a particularly large wave of water rushes over the rock and slides around his feet. He wants to simply walk to the top of the cliff and return to his home, but, realistically, the Reverend would spot him and he’d likely be sentenced to death for witchcraft and treason.
He must be in shock, Phil decides, because he can’t quite feel his hands or feet and even though he just fell off a cliff he isn’t scared, and what else could it be? Eurus had obviously saved him, but shouldn’t Phil be at least a little bit scared? He’d just nearly died for his beliefs. That wasn’t normal.
Prime wouldn’t have saved him.
Phil takes a shaky step to the edge of the rock he had laid on, leaning over to grasp at the next flat-ish platform. He pulls himself onto it with weak arms, dragging his torso atop the surface, and rolls onto his back again. The sky was a blue-grey, despite no clouds being in the sky. His city had always been dreary, but the sky resembles the fog of dread that lays over his thoughts like a blanket that makes someone too hot but they don’t have the energy to remove it.
Phil lays there for a while before gathering the strength to move to another rock. Eventually, he musters up the energy to crawl to the edge and push himself to stand, only to immediately drag himself to another jutting platform and lay back down.
The process repeats. Lay there, stand up, force himself onto the next step, lay down. Rinse and repeat. When he comes across a wide gap he lays there longer, two pathways and he goes to the flattest one. It takes far too long to reach the top and the sky is darkening by the time he’s sprawled in crispy yellow grass patched with sand.
Phil would like to sleep, please. He lets his eyes slip close against the miserable sky and a weightlessness far too familiar to falling floods his body as his mind succumbs to sleep.
He’s falling again. He’s falling, his stomach in his throat and limbs flailing, the dark ground zooming closer and closer and closer, and then he wakes. He jolts forwards, sitting up with a gasp and heaving for breaths as consciousness slowly trickles past the terror. He lets himself fight for oxygen (he couldn’t stop if he tried) and his vision spins, black edging closer to the focal point of his vision until he can stutter out slower breaths and it begins to recede. He keeps breathing, shakily tapping a pattern into the grass with each change, and absently watches a crow that pecks at the sand. It tilts its head at Phil, one beady black eye meeting his and not shying away from his panic.
“Hey, birdy,” Phil wheezes, smiling. The bird tilts its head again, then flares its wings and takes off with a few strong beats. His smile falls.
Phil can’t completely feel the tips of his fingers where they grasp at the dried grass around him, but, as he stumbles to his feet again, he decides fingers aren’t necessary to getting out of this city.
It’s early morning, the sun barely breaching where the horizon meets a wash of pink and blues, the clear day promising good weather. Phil couldn’t be more thankful.
Most of the empire woke past the sunrise, theories of Prime’s curse on the night frequently shared throughout the city just before sunset, but as Phil lurches through the streets in the dark, people watch him from the shadows of alleys. He ignores them, facing forward adamantly, and the citizens in the corner of his eyes stay still and silent. A part of him wonders if they’re really there.
The gates of the city loom around him, tall and dark with their stone pillars and sharp peaks, but only two soldiers stand guard at the actual entrance. He halts at the sight, glancing around for any alternate way out, but he knows the only other option would be to climb the walls and although he was saved from his fall from the cliff, he doubts he’d survive the deadly spikes atop the wall.
With careful feet, Phil sidles up to the wall. Both guards face towards the entrance but one is leaning too heavily on the wall, a leg propped up with care. It’s dark, but after squinting at the leg, he can barely make out dark blood against pale white skin. The guard is injured.
He exhales heavily, the small of his back feeling strangely unprotected where it’s pressed up against the dark stone wall. A purple flag, boasting the Church of Prime’s protection, lays dormant against its wooden pole tucked just inside the town entrance. Phil glances up at it, making a vague note of how, despite the wind that whips around him, the flag does not even flutter; it is not graced by the wind.
He returns his attention to the guards. The injured one is leaning heavily on the wall while the other stands stationary at the left side of the entrance. Gears churn in his head, ideas filtering in and out with what could and couldn’t work. He could fight, but extra weight still drags at him from his plunge down the cliffside and he isn’t sure he’d win that fight, even with one bleeding and unstable.
He needs a distraction. The guards won’t move just by throwing something past them, but maybe if he could convince someone to start talking to the uninjured one-
Something touches his shoulder and he jumps, head jerking to the source, and a man with long pink hair jolts away from him.
“Who are you,” Phil hisses, patting desperately at his hip for his dagger. He can’t find it, his eyes shooting to the man’s hand where he holds his carefully engraved weapon with Eurus’ symbol, wind streaks burnt into the wood handle.
That fucker just stole his dagger.
“Unimportant,” the man drawls, “are you trying to get out?”
Phil eyes him. Long, pink hair is plaited where it’s thrown over each shoulder, the two braids neat where the strands intertwine with one another. Scars litter his face, one drawn tight over his mouth where it curls into a grimace.
“Why should I tell you?”
“Because I need to get out, and we can help each other.”
“Give me my dagger back.”
“Are you going to stab me with it?”
Phil squints.
The man squints back.
“No,” he sighs. “Name’s Phil.”
“Blade.”
“Yes, you have my dagger.”
“No,” the man cuts off with a sigh. “My name is Blade.”
Phil’s lips quirk up. Finally, his dagger is held back out to him and he snatches it from the man, thumb settling beside where Eurus’ name was carved with reverence.
“What’s the plan, then, Blade?”
The pink-haired man (where he got the dye, Phil doesn’t know—tulips, while considered a blessed flower by the Church of Prime, were not native to the region; to get it, he must have either stolen it from a church or picked it from some far away land) glances back to the guards. “Well, the one’s injured. One of us can go up and talk to the other guard while the other of us leave, and when the injured one alerts the uninjured one, we can offer to go for them so they’re not leaving the gates.”
Phil glances at the immobile soldier. “I doubt they’d leave a security issue to one of us.”
Blade shrugs. “Worth a try, is it not? Worst case scenario, run for it.”
Phil sighs. It’s better than any other plan he’d had. “I can’t be the one talking,” he says. Blade opens his mouth to rebuke this, but seems to think better of it and shuts it with a click.
“Alright,” he says, and without any further words—or planning—he struts up to the two guards.
Phil can hear muffled words from where he’s hidden by the shadow of the wall, but he can’t make out what, exactly, is being said. When Blade turns sharply to the town center, both guards follow his gaze, and Phil pushes off the wall quickly and silently.
The two are busy staring at Blade, who fake-searches (hopefully it’s fake, anyways, their shallow plan hadn’t included any third parties) one of the alleys, and Phil slips right in front of the injured one, steps hurried as he rushes out of the city. It’s anticlimactic—not that Phil had thought there’d be some massive battle, but he’d figured the guards would at least fuss at him. The injured one doesn’t bat an eye at Phil leaving, though, and the uninjured one doesn’t even notice, so he steps to the side once outside to wait for Blade. After all, the other man had been of the assumption that he, too, would be stopped.
When he doesn’t emerge, Phil suddenly remembers that the key part of getting Blade out was for the guards to be distracted by Phil’s exit. His thoughts flutter with possible distractions he could make, but in a split second he settles on potentially the worst one he thinks of.
“Prime is a fake! Prime is a government designed religion to doom you all! Spread the word!” he shouts, the wind carrying his voice to the inner city. Nearly immediately, a guard jerks around the city gate, eyes wide as they catch Phil’s. He laughs, mania tinging the sound, and Blade rushes out from behind the guard.
“Run!” Blade shouts and Phil obeys, breaking into a sprint. The two hurtle down the gravel path that leads to the city from the woods, rocks crunching under his feet as he flies over them. Blade is further ahead than Phil, already nearly to the woods edge, but Phil keeps chasing after him, guards at his heels.
Blade breaks the tree line first, but Phil isn’t long after him. The other man seems to know the forest better so Phil follows his footsteps, leaves crunching under his boots.
A tree branch hits his face where Blade, now slowed to a walk, pulls it back and releases it. Phil splutters but Blade just turns around and holds a finger to his lips, silencing him.
“There’s a town nearby that doesn’t house the Church,” Blade tells him. “I was trying to get there earlier, but your guards invited me in and I figured I could get some decent food before the walk.”
“Not a fan of Prime, then?”
“No,” Blade says.
“Me neither, mate.”
Blade rolls his eyes. “Really? I couldn’t tell from your ‘distraction.’”
Phil snorts and they fall into a companionable silence, Blade slightly ahead of him where he pushes branches away. The towns are close through the woods, and although traveling on the path that went around the woods (because, of course, forests were cursed by Prime) took nearly an entire day, it was only a few hours’ walk when cutting directly through the trees.
Wildlife skitters around their heavy footfalls, a few crows trailing them. Wind brushes Phil’s hair out of his face and he sends a quick prayer of thanks for escaping followed by a slightly lengthier wish for protection. He ends with a request for a safe settling at the supposedly anti-Prime city and, sure enough, the wind changes directions and pushes him to his left.
“Blade,” he hisses, turning to follow the wind.
“Where are you- Phil!”
He’s already pushing through bushes, digging his dagger out of its place at his hip to slash away the plants that won’t move. He breaks the tree line, pausing with Blade at his back.
The town gates are nowhere near as imposing as Phil’s city, but many more guards stand at the entrance. They proudly wear yellow, orange, and red as a part of their uniforms, as opposed to the red and black of Manburg or the purple of Prime. Their stone walls crumble at the edges, a tumble of rocks resting in the dead grass.
Only live once, he thinks and strides up to the guards.
“The Church has tried to stop me and my partner from reaching you, but we wish to take refuge in your secular town, away from the clutches of false gods.”
Two guards eye him warily, another checking Blade where he’s sighing behind Phil, but as Phil spews more anti-Prime thoughts, the guards grow weary and let them through.
“You are a security hazard in of itself,” Blade tells him, sighing heavily. He doesn’t leave Phil’s side, though, even as he beelines for the first tavern he sees—he could use a whiskey.