Free Mourning Cloak by Rabia Gale Page A

lounge and cloaks are pale patches against the ground, half-there and half-not.
    Sera strides to the front, drawing my gaze. She is strong, confident. It bubbles out of her every springing step, every swing of her arms. Well I know that feeling of limitless power.
    And of the fall that waits at the other end.
    Sera throws up her arm, and her army advances. Deliberately she steps upon a line cut in the earth and filled with dirty chalk, then kicks at a boulder. She wants the golems to know that she is here.
    They come.
    Up here, from the vantage point, they aren’t so terrible—clockwork toys that have seen better days, slow-moving compavanmoving red to the lupine bounding of the eerie men, the spreading mist of the mourning cloaks, the flashing movement of modified, earthbound wind swifts.
    I can see right away that there aren’t as many golems as there were that last time. So perhaps Flutter is right, that they had spent themselves repelling my army. Guilt gnaws at me anew. I should’ve stayed to finish them off. No matter what Flutter says about the gates, I should’ve hunted the golems down in their caves, destroyed whatever process they use to replicate themselves, so they could never march upon us again.
    The golems fall to the hybrids of Sera’s force, cut by the night walkers’ blades, electrocuted by the eerie men’s whips.
    Movement near the gates. No,
from
the gates and all along the walls. Protrusions that might have been taken as embellishments move, uncurl, and push away from the vertical surfaces. They fall, plummeting several feet before their wings snap open and catch the updraft. They glide, beasts of silver and obsidian, part-bird, part-lion, part-reptile.
    The Garguants are back.
    Pressure builds in my ears, behind my eyes. I
feel
them suck in the air, taking in so much that I am dizzy from the lack.
    And then they exhale.
    Even from up here, I cringe away from the droplets of acid brought in by a hot and dry wind, churned up by the Garguants’ flight.
    Down in the valley, Sera’s creatures bear the brunt. Their cries are tiny, but no less shrill and pained. Even the mourning cloaks cannot dissipate fast enough.
    And then the Garguants breathe again, and this time it’s the fire, setting aflame the acid, followed by a dose of toxic smoke.
    Sera’s armor hisses all over her, covering her hair and face, then snaps out into wings at shoulders, back and hips. She’s outlined in blue light and heat shimmer.
    She can fly.
    My armor—my old scrap-metal armor—can’t do that.
    Sera shoots up into the air like a Highwind firework. She turns into a speck I can barely follow. I strain against the bands, feel for my spiders.
    Come on, Flutter! Where are you?
    And then Sera’s back, this time above the Garguants. One of them turns and rolls onto its back. Its claws rake empty air. Sera’s inside its reach and she hits it like a catapult-flung stone. The tangle of Garguant and armored woman wheels across the sky. When they finally come apart, Sera zooms away and it’s the Garguant that crashes to the ground, squashing several eerie men. Its death throes take out again as many of them as died by its breath.
    Sera flies for another, but they’re warier now, grouped and working together to deny her an opening. She shoots a beam at them, but it skitters over their armor and scatters in a spray of light. Garguants are hard to kill, even with the transformation to aid her.
    And Sera is slower now, up in the air with nothing for her spiders—
my
spiders—to replenish her energy with. Bereft of the advantage of surprise, she barely misses a spray of acid. Would her super-alloy protect her if she were caught between all those Garguants? I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.
    A Garguant claw clips Sera’s wing. She tumbles in the air, nearly crashes to the ground. Her flight away is slow, zig-zagged.
    And the Garguants are upon her.
    She should’ve have practiced. She should’ve waited. She may