This was not the scenario they expected, but it was close to the one they'd hoped to create. There was space and time to gather everyone together and get ready to move out. Sophia spent the time concentrating on her task: finding the bone remnant. The others would harass the ruins apparitions and keep them away from her while she and Dav dealt with the brains behind them all.

Once that was done, it would probably be easy enough to pick them off in small numbers. They were dangerous in groups, but from what Volat knew, animal-based ruins apparitions tended to be easy to separate and pick off in small groups; it was large numbers of humanoid ruins apparitions, like what they encountered on the first floor, that could be dangerous because some of them would imitate mages. That didn't really happen with the animals.

Sophia hoped he was right.

It was almost by chance when she finally found the bone remnant. She'd started moving the light back and forth, swooping out farther and then back in to check on the ruins apparitions, when she suddenly noticed something that didn't look quite like one of the rams despite its horns and ran the light back to confirm what she saw. The bone remnant was hiding behind some of the skeletal sheep, moving around to stay away from the light, but was still fairly close as if it wanted to see what they were doing.

Sophia took the chance to get a good look at it. The first thing she noticed was, of course, the horns. They looked a lot like those of the rams that surrounded it, a pair of wide, thick horns with a slight curve. That was also the first difference; there were indentations in the horns, like they were made of individual bones stuck together almost like a spine, instead of proper horns. Each slice was stained green, while the plates between them were bone-yellow and the hollows revealed a red color.

The horns were set further back on the skull than they would have been on a real ram; in fact, the entire skull was deformed. It seemed to be made of bony plates, some of which looked more like spikes or perhaps miniature horns.The area where the horns should have been looked more like an extended forehead on a skull that looked like it was somewhere around the midpoint between a ram's skull and a human's, with the addition of two long tusks and a set of teeth emerging from the end of the skull that should have held the animal's nose.

The entire monster was like that, misshapen and somehow wrong. It stood upright, more or less, but had arms that still reached the floor in its hunched-over state and twisted hands with fingers tipped with talons that had far too many joints. It almost looked like it hadn't decided if it should be walking on all four limbs or not, which made the arms far longer than the legs.

There were too many bones in the ribcage and they didn't all look like rib bones, while the bones of the legs were actually bent and seemed to be jointed in the middle of what should have been the upper thigh instead of at the knee. The color scheme of the horns was echoed across the entire body, predominantly red with some places that were greenish or the color of old bone.

It was an abomination, and not just because it was a monster; it was also an abominable design. Sophia couldn't quite believe it could walk, but it definitely could. It looked awkward but its waddle was faster than she'd have expected such movement to be.

Sophia tried to keep the light on the bone remnant as she moved back towards the entrance. She couldn't afford to lose it, but that would be better than having it know where she was. Their plan, as much as they had one at the moment, was that Sophia would find it, and then Dav would distract it while Sophia snuck up on it, preferably from the other side so that if she failed, she could herd it towards everyone else.

Sophia had hoped there would be fewer skeletal sheep than she saw, but really this was as close to a perfect setup for the plan as she could really expect. Plume Shift should mean that she was nearly immune to the ruins abominations. More importantly, it let her and Ci'an work together in a way that hadn't occurred to either of them until they planned this attack.

"I'm here, above you," Ci'an projected. "This should be dark enough; you are Under My Wings."

It was a good thing, too; Sophia could hear her at all. Well, that was part of the Night Owl's power, after all; they were nearly impossible to notice at night, even more so than their silent flight should have achieved. Under My Wings let her share weaker versions of some of her Night Owl Abilities with an ally; in this case, she was using it to partially conceal Sophia in the darkness. She could only manage one Ability at a time at the moment, but even that was enough to make it worthwhile.

Sophia Spread her Plumes and immediately used Plume Shift. It was strange; she both was and wasn't one of the physical feathers that she'd used to trigger her Plumes. It was probably more accurate to say that she was the area her aura had covered, the area that was her Domain, but her physical form was still that of the feathers.

It took her a moment to gain enough control to group them together near the top of her aura. The feathers didn't really want to group up; it was more natural to spread out across her aura. That didn't make it impossible, but it did mean that she had to focus. By the time she pulled them together enough, they were saturated with her magic, rippling with color instead of the plain white they were when she bought them.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She was just not very covert. That wasn't a surprise; she might be an introvert, but that didn't mean she was sneaky or quiet. She never had been, and if anything her Abilities here in the Broken Lands were even flashier than what she'd had back home. She was going to be completely dependent on Ci'an to hide her.

In more than one way. She wasn't even certain the bone remnant could look up with its horrible horn placement. If it could, it certainly wasn't doing so. Not that Sophia could see it anymore; she was going to have to depend on Ci'an for her placement, as well.

The Night Owl grabbed the feathers that were Sophia in her talons. Her grip was surprisingly soft, firm but as gentle as she could manage when snatching feathers out of the air. Even so, it was a good thing that Sophia in feather form was a good bit more durable than actual feathers.

Ci'an flew up, nearly vertically, to near the ceiling. It was higher than the ceiling of the first floor, but that still meant that it was only somewhere between fifteen and twenty feet up, not nearly as high as Sophia would have preferred for this. Sophia couldn't make out what was happening; she could only "see" what was inside her aura, which meant that she could only see herself, the Night Owl, and the ceiling. Even so, Sophia knew what was supposed to be happening.

Somewhere below her, Dav was moving forward, Reflected. Both of him would be killing ruins apparitions, probably mostly sheep. Everyone else would be backing Dav up, capturing whatever he didn't kill by the most effective method from the first time: breaking legs. Taika was to ride Dav into battle this time and manage his shields from there; otherwise, he'd be too far away from Dav to help.

The bone remnant had probably moved out of Sophia's light, now that she could no longer control its direction to keep it on the monster. Well, she could still control the magelight, but she couldn't see the monster to know where to direct it, so the control wasn't very helpful. Ci'an was supposed to be -

"To your right, a little farther out," Taika's mind-voice interrupted Sophia's thoughts. He was projecting to both of them, even though Amy seemed to be talking only to Taika. "Yes, behind that ram. No, I'm not tracking you; I just always know where Sophia is. I'm following her. Yes, you should be right over it now."

Ci'an's talons released Sophia and she started to flutter slowly towards the ground. Sophia let her feathers drift apart; the air wanted to do that as she fell as well as the feathers themselves. It was convenient, because the more spread out she was, the more likely it was that she'd be able to get behind the bone remnant. She only had to be close enough to find it and have any one of her feathers behind it for this to work.

"Taika?" Sophia reached out to the colorful chinchilla. She wasn't quite certain how he was tracking either her or the monster, but a little direction would be helpful. "How's my aim?"

"Pretty good. It's closest to, uh, your green feather? The one with more green than the others. Between it and your golden feather."

Sophia tried to figure out which feather was which. Taika's description was less helpful than he thought it was, because as far as Sophia was concerned, her feathers were always changing color. If she had the bone remnant bracketed, though, all she really needed to do was make sure she landed behind him instead of off to the side.

That was tougher than it sounded, because she no longer had any idea which way was which. Ci'an was gone from her aura, or maybe just so well hidden she couldn't feel the Night Owl, and that meant she was completely disoriented. Sophia reached for the only real option she had. "Uh, if I move towards a feather can you tell me if it's the right one?"

"Of course." Taika sounded positively amused. "Do you always get lost?"

Sophia almost growled in frustration, even though she knew this would be hilarious later. That was later; right now, she had to deal with the problems. "When I turn into feathers, which can't see and drift sideways when I let them fall, sometimes even when I'm pushing them down if I forget to reorient them? Apparently."

Taika snickered, then added, "That's the wrong way, you're moving almost directly towards me. Move the other way and, uh, your blue feather - no, wait, you need directions, the second from the right then. That's the one that will be in the right place when you land."

Not long after that, Sophia was able to feel two presences in her aura. One was probably a ruins apparition, a ram given its height, while the other had a distinct feel of Death about it. She hadn't felt that about any of the ruins apparitions, so it was almost certainly the bone remnant. Sophia couldn't tell if it was animated by death or if she was simply feeling the resonance of the bones themselves, but either way it meant that she knew exactly where the bone remnant was.

As she dropped a little more, Sophia started to feel other ruins apparitions, shorter and slightly weaker than the first. Those would be the skeletal sheep, which told her everything she needed to know about where to land. Well, everything she hadn't gotten from Taika.

Sophia moved all of her feathers and in fact her entire plumed domain farther in the direction Taika had indicated, away from her allies. There were too many ruins apparitions near the bone remnant, but there was an open space a little farther into the room. It was almost like the bone remnant had cleared the area directly around the stairs by doubling up a small area around himself.

Actually, that was probably exactly what it had done, now that Sophia thought about it. It was smart enough to know that they had trouble with large numbers but not sma+rt enough to know that it would be better to hit them by surprise while they were still coming onto the floor; if it had isolated the first person out the door, they might have had problems.

Sophia was glad it wasn't actually all that smart.

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