It was a grueling job hauling wagon after wagon of corpses to the edge of the sea and items scavenged from the once living to the bar. They both helped, where possible, with a fair share of the hauling, but occasionally came across an Elysium abomination that was too interesting for Crow to not record details about. Jasper didn't complain. It seemed like a noble enough cause. One that could come in handy later.

Besides, corpse moving was a taxing job in every way; it would be wrong to fault anyone for taking a break. And a break to examine corpses didn't seem like much of a break anyway.

Jasper picked up another mutant with a blood dried neck and a moldy collar. Their breath was always foul, but this one had a weird arrangement of teeth to boot (probably his mutation, but maybe they had just been caved in). He stacked sideways on the wagon next to a man with four arms and a shark-toothed woman who was still clutching a spear in a forward position, ready to stab.

The wagon was overflowing with nearly forty men and women and three large abominations not worth description (for the sake of sanity). It may be worth mentioning the cluster of hairy spider legs dangling low enough to put tracks in the sand.

So Jasper wheeled it to the edge of the great gulf, far from the village and the sleeping wolf in the water. He reasoned that they would have to travel that coast soon to get to where Crow was going, so teasing the sea monsters out into shallow water didn't seem smart. Plus, it just felt right to release them to the ocean.

Dozens of sea creatures rose to the top to feast. They went to town on the bodies as they had since the first wagon, but giant serpents and fish alike parted way for the true predator of the gulf. At first, it seemed to be another group of serpents. Smooth skinned monsters the color of dripping tar, slithering up from the ocean. Miles of the creatures snaked their way past the other leviathans.

Their first prey was the second biggest thing in the water. A draconic serpent that had made too much noise chomping into the spider-like atrocity Jasper had just thrown in.

The inky serpents rose into the sky. The shadows stretched beyond the village and blotted out the sun. It was clear now that they were one creature. A sinular mass of tentacles with only a mouth for a body. The tentacles made short work of shoveling food back into the pit of teeth resting at the far end of the gulf, miles away. A shiver went through Jasper's body, and the chill stayed trapped in his armor. Monsters so insanely large that the only reason they didn't eat you was because you were insignificant, were a dime a dozen.

It may not have been the burial they deserved, or even the one he would have liked to give, but it made the streets a bit more peaceful for the living.

Another trip. Another load of bodies. Jasper's blade sank into the soft eye of a dead man, just to be sure. Then he picked the corpse up by an arm and a leg, lifting it over his shoulder and tossing it into the wagon.

Limbs of the dead clatter against the side of the wooden cart as the wheels rattle across loose shells and sand. In the distance, there was one shell as tall as Jasper's cart, with swirl patterns etched into its back by the wind and waves.

Tendrils and crab legs alike spawned from the depths of the shell and pulled the creature further up the beach, away from the tainted water.

"Every year, they travel further north, closer to the True Wastelands, but away from the water."

Jasper turned to the female voice, expecting to see Vanessa Crow. It seemed like something that would concern her after all. Instead, he saw another woman similarly afflicted by Elysium. Two lines of tattoo text hover over her chest like an X. Over her shoulder at the neck and back up under her armpits. She made no attempt to hide them like Crow did, but then most didn't. Also, unlike Crow, the effects were changing this woman already. Both of her arms were made of a glassy sandstone, nearly invisible against the sand of the beach.

"Are you alone out here," she looked around almost nervously, more like a manic turning of her head. Maybe it had something to do with the lopsided way she approached.

Jasper didn't feel inclined to answer that question, even if it was innocent, "Are you alright? You're limping pretty bad."

"So, where are the others? Survivors, I mean. There are survivors, right?" Her words exuded some panic and yet...

"I'm not sure. I've only just arrived."

She had a lushness to her sandy blonde hair, and her eyes were a perfect shade of jade. The way they bore into Jasper's own made him somewhat weak.

"It's very noble of you to feed the monsters of the sea," she pointed to the festering cart.

"Better them than let the parasite get to them."

Several things shifted in her eyes. Rage, yes, but something equally familiar to Jasper.

"You know, I never understood why everyone says the parasitic are undead. We are as alive as any creature. The Arch Druid understands this. Temnota says our time is now. The human populace needs to be thinned before it does more damage."

Jasper released his sword from its sheath as tiny grey bugs began to rain from her eyes like tears. Her hands raise to grip his arms with unnatural strength. Jasper's arms burst into pillars of flame that send his blade to the Earth.

A blast of sand lifted him from his feet and washed over him so that he could only sprawl for reprive. Then, the two lines of black text multiplied into a dozen rings of sandstone-colored Elysium language. They surrounded her with their angelic presence before firing through Jasper and constricting around his body.

He lay there stiff as a board. His hand was in reach of the gun at his hip, but the text spoke to him of paralysis. It burned the thought into his very soul. Crippling waves of depression willed him to lay still and accept his fate, and his fingers went limp in the sand.

She bent down and brushed his hair away from the side of his head, "Aside from a little radiation, you are a healthy specimen. Don't worry. You will still be able to feel your human senses once I take over."

Her eyes regained some humanity as an undulating sheet of gray matter began to phase out of her skull. It had the appearance of a hair net but solid and filled with hallow teeth on the inside. Teeth that would pirce the brain and drink its fluids.

The brain-welder parasite detaching from the inside of her skull looked like a crown of skin and tendrils. She leaned over so that the brain-welder could switch to its new host.

Then the woman screeched in pain, and the parasite shrank back into her skull as a barrage of enchanted bullets exploded into her body. Streaks of purple lingered in the air as Crow approached while preparing her next spell.

Sand pours from the mysterious woman's wounds, creating something between a waterfall and a landslide, as she rose into the air.

Massive lances of sand thrust from the infected's billowing landslide skirt. They shoot off every which way at first, but they right themselves and come streaming towards Crow. In response, she uncaps a vial of blue Elysium and pours a steaming line on the ground.

The line rises into a tidal wave of blue fire mixed with water. The opposing elements seem unbothered by each other as they washe away the lances into glass filled mud.

The Sandstone woman's cloak morphs into a fog that blots out the horizon and rolls towards the beach. A pained face emerges and submerges from the sand, its features shifting chaotically. But the wave continues unabated through the fog as if it were nothing and crashes into the original towering cloak of sand.

The flames melt the sand into jagged pieces of glass, while the water washes away parts into muck. The end result seems like a massive crystalline dress with the sandstone lady still sitting atop it battered and aflame herself, but far from dead.

With the resolve of the infected and the intellect that the brain welder let her keep, she rips and cuts her legs against the glass prison only to fall to freedom with streams of blood leaving two tracks down the front of the dress. Several lines of Elysium break out around the flopping torso of the woman, as her legs reform into sandstone prosthetics.

With the sand propelling her body, she backflips to her feet and forms an ornate ring weapon in each hand. The outside of the rings are razor sharp, but her stone fingers don't seem to mind as she slashes wildly.

Just in time, Crow pulls a very blunt and crudely shaped piece of curved metal from her back and uses it to block the incoming assault. Her movements are not as precise as Jasper's, earning her a few cuts here and there as she mis-blocked.

Her muscles are nowhere near as strong as Jasper's either, meaning that every time she blocked, she was put off balance from the crazed infected. This earned her even more devastating slashes, but eventually, Crow found a solid opening and brought her blunt instrument down on the lady's head. She stumbled back with both blades raised in defense and vanished into a cloud of sand.

Crow takes these precious seconds to run a vial of flaming orange Elysium down the piece of metal. It lit up like a scimitar of melting steel and endless inferno. The new blade has a mind of its own, and Crow finds herself spinning around to block a thrown ring-blade.

The blade slashes down, and the metals meet with a satisfying clang that vibrates in the air as the ring blade spins to the ground. What's more, crows flame blade lengthens into a 20-foot stream of Fire arcing down through the sky. The Sandstone lady backflips, and as if following the movement of her body, a pillar of sandstone erupts from the ground where she had once been. The sword paints a line of fire across the Earth and splashes violently against the stone defense.

Their dance continues until the red moon eclipses the sun by three quarters. stone pillars shoot from the ground every time Venessa slashes. It doesn't take long for the beach side to become covered in pillars and streaks of fire. Venessa Crow stands among them both, the trinkets on her belt making music in the wind, the Sandstone Woman hidden from view by the pillars as blade-rings are thrown at Crow from every angle.

They bounce off the pillars without slowing down, making deflecting them humanly impossible. Luckily, Crow was relying more on her blade to do the work for her. It was still physically taxing to try and keep up with the blade, but even more so, the magic was exhausting her spirit. She could feel the lines of Elysium text etching themselves onto her spirit, even as the beads of sweat ran down her body. The contrast between the branding of her aura and the cool sweat against her skin made her feverish.

Vanessa Crow has a trick, though, a method of using her magic that most didn't know. She was not wasteful like the Sandstone lady, Vanessa had used two vials of Elysium sure, whereas the Sandstone lady had not used any(a fact that befuddled Crow), but the single line of Elysium text that Crow had gained was proof that she had used her vials correctly. The way she supplemented materials instead of drawing upon her own self had given her a spiritual endurance that most mages could only dream of.

The sandstone pillars cracked one by one until they all collapsed into the sand to reveal the parasitic mage kneeling in the dirt and struggling to keep her limbs from dissolving into sand. She let out two screams that overlapped each other, one that was utterly shrill and parasitic, and another that was all too human. She brought her hands up to clutch her pain skull only to find that her hands had disintegrated into sand and were carried away to the ocean. The lines of text tattooed on her spirit had reached the maximum of ten, but a new magic took hold just as the parasite was leaving the woman's skull. She whispered out two words, "thank you."

The rings of text and circling the Sandstone lady imploded into her chest, and when they did, a sarcophagus of crystal formed around the limbless torso.

When the magic was through, Jasper and Venessa approached the makeshift grave. The mysterious woman could be seen smiling as a tear was frozen to her cheek for the rest of eternity.

Sealed into the side of her skull was a petrified parasite. Its worm-thin limbs reach out to the sky and push against the side of The Sandstone Woman's head, trying as best it could to escape the same endless paralysis that such creatures afflict by nature.

"She had a Brain Welder parasite." Crow was solenm when she spoke.

"And she was addicted to Elysium," Jasper's dark eye were hard to read from beneath the shadow of his wide hat, but the words spoke clear enough. Crow took a glance at her own arm.

"That's easy to say when you're built like a tank and trained by Wall-folk. Most of us Wastelanders have to learn how to survive on our own."

"I grew up this side, and that's not what I meant. You were doing what you had to, and I would be dead if not. I just... I need you to be careful. "

"Need me to?"

This time, she saw a definitive nearvousness in his eyes, but he was quick to change the topic, "was she casting without vials?"

"Yeah. She was drawing on her own spirit instead. I've only heard it could be done, but it's a poor substitute for Elysium, and... well, it doesn't last forever."

"She gave the last of her spirit to trap the parasite."

"Yeah."