Dark Armor: Escaped Prisoners

He triggered the countermeasure, and the stone around him cracked but didn't fall away. He triggered it again, and the stone shattered further, but being buried in gravel was little better than being buried in solid stone. He still couldn't move. He tried the left-hand gauntlet's missile, let it build, then loosed it...

I supposed that's marginally better. He could now rotate his wrist and wriggle his fingers. The armor's perceptions informed him that he'd drilled a passage to the open air, but it was only two fists wide and the gravel had already collapsed to fill it. Well, fine. He tried again, and then again, trying to remove as much stone as he could. He kept expecting it to close back around him, subject to the will of the Second, but it didn't. 

He still couldn't get himself loose. He couldn't turn his wrist far enough to free himself -- not and maintain the missile. If he could get the gauntlet off, he could escape as smoke; but the gauntlet would not come off by itself, and the rest of the armor was still pinned in place around him. That's a design flaw, he decided, not that he could do anything about it now. 

He triggered the countermeasure that was supposed to keep him being overwhelmed by a swarm of enemies, and it shoved enough of the shattered stone around him into the hole that he was able to return to using the gauntlet's missile to clear more of it out. He shoved more out, giving himself more room to move, and returned to blasting it away. The process was painfully slow, and probably doomed; all it would take was a moment of attention from the Second to undo all his work. 

Until that happened, he was determined to proceed. If he could remove enough stone to escape in the armor, he would. If he could make enough space to remove the armor, he would use his Smoke initiation to escape and leave it behind. 

He stopped, stiffening involuntarily. Something was approaching; the armor gave warning. It was a something the armor recognized, a being of darkness and fire...

The world went dark and Pallian felt himself moving, dragged through impenetrable shadows. Then he was loose, and he staggered at the sudden release. 

"Run," said the voice of flame and shadow. "The carriage is just ahead, but he is just behind. He must have felt me..."

"Later for that," Pallian ground out, before he remembered that he wasn't supposed to talk when he was wearing the armor. He caught his balance and found the carriage door, then flung himself inside. "Let's move." There was something soft on the floor, and he would have stumbled over it if the armor hadn't been watching for him. He slapped the wall, desperately hoping that his father had left a contingency in place... or that the carriage had one of its own. 

The thing appeared on the bench across from him in a burst of flame, and the carriage door slammed closed. The carriage itself began to move, gaining speed and rising into the air. The bundle on the floor stirred and groaned. 

"I took her too," said the nightmare lord. "She stabbed your enemy, so she must be your friend. I think she was hurt when the building collapsed on her." There was a momentary pause, and then it asked: "Was that the right thing to do?"

Pallian's head was still spinning, but the further the carriage went without anything assaulting it the better he felt. He looked down at the carriage floor. 

What he'd taken for an inconvenient bundle was, of course, a body: a woman, tightly clothed beneath a loose cloak and hood, armed with various short blades and a wide variety of enchantments. 

The nightmare lord had rescued the Shadow of Edrias.

The Shadow of Edrias was a woman.  

He considered that for a long moment, and then he swallowed. "Ashmiren?" he asked. "Is that you? Are you all right?"