At first it was a light breeze, then a gust, before growing into a wind. But then it grew some more, and some more, like a tumour, the air spiralling around us faster and faster, pushing deeper and deeper into my skin like a gradually tightening vice, eventually picking up dust and becoming visible as a solid grey vortex of cold, powerful currents surrounding us, whirling louder and louder, before eventually picking up more than dust -
We were rising off the ground.
"HAHA! WHOO! ALWAYS WANTED TO TRY THIS!"
"YOU'VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE?"
"OF COURSE NOT! WHY WOULD I NEED TO CREATE AN ESCAPE TORNADO?"
At first it was just a few inches, then a foot, then we were metres off the ground. The tornado tilted forward, carrying us with it in its eye, as my grip on Luci's hand became clamped and rigid like stone. My feet dangled behind me, getting dangerously close to the winds - I was no expert, but I knew that touching dust travelling at hundred of miles an hour was really bad. But Luci took no notice, charging forward at impossible speeds, catapulted by the tornado, getting higher within until we were able to peek over the top. I could see the helicopter hovering beneath us, with a soldier hanging out of it with a megaphone staring at us in horror, his jaw dropped, before scrambling back inside. The helicopter began to turn back, fleeing to the city centre, but she curled one of her arms into a fist, creating a ball of impenetrable, fast winds around the helicopter, taking him as her prisoner.
"OH, NO YOU DON'T!" The mad woman screamed, raising an arm crackling with electricity. "I'M FRYING YOU UNTIL YOUR ENGINES FAIL AND YOU GET SHREDDED INTO PIECES BY THE WINDS!"
Wait.
I couldn't let her...
My fingers gripped her arm so tightly, the nails dug painfully into her flesh. "Ow," she muttered, lowering her crackling arm as she turned back to me, the winds still hurtling all around us. "Are we too high for you? You scared?"
"Do not kill that man."
She scoffed. "Yeah? Why shouldn't I?"
"Seriousl - "
But when I caught her eyes, I stopped, because I swore I could see a crimson, bloodthirsty glint in them, and I could feel the shifters in her blood vibrating ridiculously fast with boiling rage, threatening to slice through her veins. She was acting totally irrationally - there was no appealing to any reason, because she had completely forgotten it, turning into a savage animal. The only way I could stop her was through sheer force.
Oh, boy. This was gonna hurt.
I focused on her shifters, spiralling and shaking out of control, then on mine, trying to force them to move in that terrible stormy way that hers did - oh, bloody hell, that hurt like a bitch. I could've sworn I felt something warm trickling down my arm, definitely blood, but it was working - the air around me was beginning to spin too, faster and faster, but Luci began to realise what I was doing, and her eyes widened in hatred, the evil glint still in them.
"Oh, no you're not. I'm taking this - AH!"
I took drastic measures, biting deep into her arm, taking her by surprise. She tried to shake me off, elbow me into submission, but I didn't let go of her, my shifters kept spinning, and she was losing her focus, with the winds around the helicopter getting weaker, letting it slip out of the cold prison of wind unscathed, while my winds continued to grow, spiralling in the opposite direction of her tornado until their speeds matched. In a blink, Luci lost the demonic glint in her eyes, replaced by a new emotion: fear.
"Sam, stop, you're gonna make us - "
Fall.
It was a little sudden, but she was the one more taken off guard, since I knew it was coming. The winds around us disappeared, the vortex of grey clouds of dust having had collided with each other and dissipated harmlessly. There was nothing supporting us anymore. It was inevitable, but damn, it was a lot less exciting than I thought it would be.
To be fair, we were easily at a distance that was fatal for the average human being to fall from, at least a hundred or so metres. But we were both immortal - even a lost limb would quickly heal itself over days, and even if we did bleed out or something, we could always just generate a new body. Besides, below us was the thick canopy of a forest, so the leaves and shrubs would probably break our fall. There was no danger, apart from maybe colliding with a bird, and that was really just an unpleasant surprise. I thought that the wind whistling past me at high speeds would be terrifying, but I had just been in a tornado, so they seemed tame in comparison. I decided to look over to Luci as we fell, try and see how annoyed she was about the whole ordeal -
Huh? Why is she screaming?
I couldn't believe it, in all honesty. This woman, who had literally dangled my feet near winds that had formed possibly the most painful organ shredder known to mankind, was screaming in terror, one eye scrunched up, the other staring at the forest beneath us in horrified, morbid curiosity, her whole face contorted in fear. She busted out of prison in the eye of a vortex of high speed winds. How was she afraid of heights?
I hit the trees first, and I gasped in pain as the branches tearing cuts in my skin and clothes, battering and bruising me, the long, thin and prickly leaves providing me not comfort, until I finally hit the soft soil, lying there for a few seconds, followed shortly afterwards by a few seconds of yelping as Luci endured the same battering and landed on the forest floor on her back. She wasted no time in resting, however, immediately getting to her feet and stumbling over towards me. She looked in pretty bad shape, bruised by winds that she got too close too, cuts in her prisoner's uniform with more cuts in her skin, her hair a total mess, with some in her face that she didn't bother to push out.
"You utter IDIOT!" She shouted. "What kind of stunt was that?"
"You were about to kill that guy."
"Yeah! So?"
"That guy who did absolutely nothing to hurt you."
"He knew about us, Sam! He knew what they were doing to you and me, he must have! And did he at any point decide to help us? No! He sided with them! How could you let someone walk away after they so viciously ruined your pride, treated you like some kind of animal - "
I raised my voice, turning back to look at her. "Your reasoning is that of an untrained baboon, you oaf."
She took a step back, startled. "Huh?"
"Let me paint you a scene. A baboon gets captured from the wilds, put into a circus. The trainer puts him through horrible torture, poking and prodding at him, trying to make him break. But the baboon is cunning, and all the trainer did is make him hate humans. So he plays along, until his act comes up, at which point he's let out of the cage and immediately runs straight out of the circus onto a passing wagon, on the course to freedom. But on the wagon, he realised a human is driving it, and in his rage eats the human's face off, stranding the baboon in the middle of nowhere with no way to get back home."
She frowned. "Why, of all things, a baboon...?"
"Don't ask stupid questions. But this is your fault. Your bloodlust made you lash out at someone who did nothing wrong like some kind of animal. Do you want to become what they tried to make you?"
Her eyes widened. "Wha - I did not act like an animal!"
"No, you know what, you're right."
She smiled. "Yeah, you see, he had it coming - "
"Animals usually only kill for food. You're much worse."
A hand curled into a fist, as she squinted at me in anger. "Why, you little..." but then her fist collapsed back into an open palm, and she sighed. "I'm too tired to kill you. That tornado sucked everything out of me."
I rose to my feet. "Guess we're walking."
Her brow furrowed. "What? No, you spin winds too. You do it."
"I can't," I said, rolling up my sleeve to reveal the cut in my arm that the high speed shifters had formed. "That almost totally ruptured one of my veins, it was pretty much everything I had."
"But your tornado barely lasted over thirty seconds!"
"That's completely normal. Most folks can't shift tornadoes into existence, let alone as long as you did. Your shifters are ridiculously well suited to chaotic systems like storms, which is why you managed to last so long."
"Oh," she said, looking at the ground. "Is that why you were on edge when you met me?"
"Yes. Honestly, the way I described it was a massive understatement. Your shifters move so erratically one would think you would constantly be suffering from random heart palpitations."
"Huh." She turned around, kicking a rock as she did so. "Guess we should find some food then - oh, I think I found some."
She walked forward to a tree she fell on, pulled off one of its branches which was chipped and stained red with some of her blood, but out streamed multitudes of dark blood from the branch and tree, shifters weakly dancing in it. The sight of it made me sick. She put the broken end of the branch to her lips and drank the blood out of it. My eyes involuntarily widened in shock as I stumbled back.
She took the branch from her mouth, giving me a disapproving look. "What? Blood too fancy for your tastes? You know it's the best thing for reinvigorating your shifters. Shut up and drink it."
"Why," I said, my voice shaky, "does the tree have blood in it? Why are the shifters still intact?"
"Hm? Oh, this is a blood forest. I read about them in a library from when I was free. Apparently the trees have hearts in them and have blood with a few, low intensity shifters. Nothing to worry about, though, and the blood is totally safe. Here," she said, handing me the branch. "Take it. I'm done with it."
Oh, god. I'd rather eat my own face off than this... could I even trust Luci? She might just be trying to get back at me, after I foiled her plans of murder.
No. I have to pull myself together, shut up, and drink it, just as Luci said. If it works? Great. If it doesn't, and she was lying? Tough luck. Throw it up later, find some actual food instead.
"Bottom's up..." I said.
I put the hard, tough bark to my lips, pouring the blood slowly into my mouth, my eyes scrunched up hard, the metallic taste washing over my tongue - oh, god, it's warm. Why did it have to be warm? That makes it so much worse. What felt like an eternity passed before I couldn't pour any more blood into my mouth. I had to swallow, but my throat tried to gag the disgusting drink out of my body entirely. I overpowered it, however, and felt it slide down my gullet, into my stomach, until I felt a gross warmth spread across my body. It worked, surprisingly - I felt totally reinvigorated, at least in flesh, so Luci didn't lie. But in mind, I might as well have been dead. I felt like my soul had been shattered into thousands of pieces.
"Feeling better?" Luci asked, smiling. "Come on, then. I'll make a tornado to the nearest tow - "
Luci suddenly yelped as she fell on the floor all of a sudden, and as she tried to get up, she realised something was tugging at her foot, keeping her imprisoned - it was a tree root, which had curled around her foot, and snaked to the rest of her body, curling around her, creating a disgusting, creaking, groaning sound as it did so. I tried to help her, but I had been snagged by a root as well, which quickly imprisoned me, the warm feeling the blood had given me slowly disappearing as I felt a sharp sting - was it drinking my blood? Almost definitely. The world began to get more hazy, and I could hear a ringing in my ears. I tried to summon lightning, but it was no use. I didn't have nearly enough blood, nor shifters.
A voice spoke, dark and foreboding, yet mocking somehow. "You shouldn't have come here, immortals. Never walk into a forest of vampiric trees, and more importantly, never walk into a druid's territory. You'll never walk out again."