I drop my head into my hands and wearily weep. Dawn never had a chance to survive. Never. Her fate was dropped into my useless lap. I’m dying, for the umpteenth time in my life, but this one seems more permanent. Most of them I could avert with time travel, or rest off because of being Can’Z’aasian critterkin adjacent. But not this time. Apparently I’m truly a changeling Fae, and apparently we shouldn’t mess with mana at all unless we use our natural inner gift in great quantities. But there’s stupid ol’ me, who tapped into an infinite wellspring of mana on Can’Z’aas, and went overboard with it, building up toxic mana residue within me. Stupid ol' me who never even knew I was truly a changeling, or that we had some sort of inner gift to take care of.
I can feel it. I can actually see it, since Alanea taught me about my inner self. Now that I know what to look for, I can gaze inwards at the desiccated husk that is the barely living inner me. Essentially it’s my second soul I guess. Teuila wants Alanea to be wrong, to believe that Tiago’s speculation about getting and absorbing more dragon hearts could be my cure. I can sense though that the dragonforce from Kozzurth’s heart is flickering and fading faster and faster. I’ve got maybe a month or so, if I don’t take any more grave injuries that require the dragonforce to save my life from, between now and then.
Why didn’t I think to try to rip out my inner self to send that dragonforce to Dawn? We were both dying anyway, but if Dawn could have had the curse’s connection to her soul severed by the weird barrier that Kozzurth’s heart energy provided, it would have been worth dying. She’d only have another month left to live, but at least she’d get to spend it, non-cursed, with Teuila. ‘Boss’ in her lingo. Huff. That’s making a lot of assumptions. Whether or not it was even possible, whether it would interact with the curse to block it at all, just, so many assumptions. Not knowing the would haves or could haves or should haves is vexing.
My affinity being nothing is vexing too though. Or maybe, maybe it’s something else. Jarrah said I have a remarkable affinity for absence. Cold magic has always been easier for me than most of my other forms of magic, because it’s the absence of heat. I could draw the heat out of things, and rather than completely waste it, convert that heat into more mana. One energy to another and all that. Was I missing an application of an affinity for absence that could have saved Dawn?
I can’t just turn things to nothing, though that’s what Dawn was hoping I could do for her in the end. I know I can make things denser, by creating an absence of space between molecules and various particles. It feels like this is all moot, because I could only do this stuff with my Can’Z’aasian magic. I don’t think I’ve ever natively, naturally done any of it. How can the Sister think I have any special magical natural affinity at all? Maybe her weird, gross, wriggly, blood jello divination was just wrong. I want to blast my face with another seven more fireballs from the staff just thinking about when she smeared that still-wriggling jelly on my forehead. Wait. It never costed me mana to use my flash freeze storm after I unlocked thermokinesis. Do I have the ability somewhere innately after all? Somehow, deep within me, can I draw heat out of an area, without having to conjure that cold rune, and knock myself unconscious by empowering it?
Huff. Whatever, Powers, time travel, magic, whatever, it’s all just stupid nonsense at this point. I’m going to die, and Teuila’s going to be stuck trying to stem the tide of torrential terror about to wash over Rayileklia. Dawn made me promise to seek out a cure for myself, to not give up. Yet all I can think to do is to scour the globe to find Lil, Luni, and Lucky, to at least see them one last time before I die. I don’t want to die not knowing whether or not Lil has ever forgiven me. Though maybe it would hurt less to die without knowing, than to know my best buddy, my dragon pal through most of my life, didn’t forgive me for wielding the timeline in the way that it turned out.
Luni, oh Lu. You fought so hard for all of us, for the timeline, and you fought my own brain to get me to notice how much you loved us, well, me in particular even. I’m going to die, and I don’t know if you’ll ever see your sister Teuila again, to ever even learn about my death. Our weird, soul energy egg project son, Lucky the cragbeast hunter hound is there with you. Does he remind you of my existence? Will he become a painful reminder if you ever learn of my demise?
My eyelids droop heavier and heavier. I can barely tolerate being conscious. I just want to sink into this despair and wallow in it. I’m ready to leave all these realities behind to fend for themselves. My ragged breaths wrack my chest with pain at the moment. I must be dehydrated from all the crying, and the accidentally not eating or drinking much over something like eleven days. Whatever I guess. Maybe I deserve the pain for failing so badly.
A voice startles me from just above my shoulder, “Do not despair hero. Your journey is not at its end. This was the likeliest route, though we wished upon all our stars for your success to avoid it. You may yet aid in the salvation of Rayileklia. Or at least the prevention of its destruction. To do that, you must survive. The price, the cost for such a task is great, monumental even. But pay it you shall. The Valkyrie won’t rest, perhaps ever, until her demise, if you fail to inform her. Speak to her of this chance, this opportunity, and its price.”
I boggle at the Sister. What chance? What price? I don’t even have to ask you. I now know you’re psychic. You can hear my thoughts. Also, is that an actual prophesized prediction for Teuila, or are you just waxing poetic about how much she cares for me?
The Sister smirks before explaining, “You’ve paid one, now you must pay five, and five, and six in order to remain, hm, mostly sane, and tethered to your mortal coil. That is to say, your friend, the saint, was wrong. You’ve quite a number of hearts of elder beasts left to claim.”
The Sister paces about the room, making a show of examining the pristine, empty stonework. She drags one of her ethereal, ephemeral hands along the wall beside her as she paces, before she adds, “Those must occur if you are to have any hope of vanquishing the parasitic force that dwells within and around you. Even then, you’ve a long, hard journey ahead of you if you manage to succeed in obtaining the hearts. There are further costs, further steps along the path of your journey you’ll need to take afterwards. Beyond that, you might not even understand, or know, who or what you shall become in the end.”
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The Sister strides closer to me to speak things that make almost no sense, “Our master has received that which was fated. A message of infinite import. We had hoped that perhaps portions of the fate could be avoided, that it may perhaps have been able to happen under different circumstances. It seems fate is a cruel mistress, or perhaps three. We’re sorry to have failed. We hope you still choose kindness.”
The Sister begins to drift out the doorway and back up the hallway away from the wing that they’ve dedicated as our suite. I scratch my head as I stare after her from beneath a furrowed brow. There’s that worry of theirs again. Why are the Sisters so worried that I might choose to treat them with unkindness? They’ve been nothing but great, or at least attempting to be great. I mean, I guess other than the elder Sister bonking me on the head twice with a stick. It’s not like I didn’t deserve those whacks anyway. The smacks were mostly playful attention grabbers rather than any sort of punishment or pain for the most part.
My genre senses still ring some semblance of intrigue, and possibly danger about this place. I know there’s more to this complex, and to the sisters, but I’m fairly certain that everything they’ve said to me was the truth as they believed it. They might have skeletons in their closets, but what sort of skeletons would warrant me giving in to my wrath? They’ve been supposedly guiding and helping Rayileklian heroes and downtrodden for decades, centuries, eons maybe. Even if that was to atone for some monumental travesty perpetrated at their hands in the long distant past, who am I to judge?
Or, heck, even if that travesty was recent, or even in the future, if they are so repentant, then, well, yeah. I’m not exactly sinless in any of my timelines. There are things future Reggie has done that made me, or make me sick to my stomach, that I’d like to atone for, or beg forgiveness for. Hell, a week or two ago I shattered five people after freezing them solid.
Gods, I can’t face my beloved Teuila right now, My Wings. What if she doesn’t remember Dawn? What if she does? I need to get out of here. I just. I failed them all so badly, especially my beloved Teuila. I break down and find myself sobbing my heart out. The woman who would reach out to clasp my hand, and drag me sprinting along to share each new discovery and each new wonder. She’ll either not know who I’m sad for having failed, or she’ll be devastated, utterly devastated.
I struggle to stand as I slump against the wall, yet I fall to my knees. I repeat my attempt, over, and over, and over. My body is just not cooperating. Between the three or four days of hyperextended sagacious meditative state, reading and levitating four written works, and my apparent week or so reading in the Sisters’ bubble room, I’m spent. Fine, I’ll crawl back to the bubble room. Maybe I can find the bubble with the diaries that I suspect to have been written by Taylynn’s great grandmother. Some source of distraction and mild sadness to wallow in. Or perhaps I’ll stumble across something that could have cured Dawn. I’d risk spending the lifeforce within the egg gifted to me by the roc and phoenix couple to send a message about that cure back in time.
Unless, unless the price would be too steep for Dawn to accept. She made no effort to indicate she was willing to seek out a heavily populated city for us to bodybind her soul by slaughtering all who dwell within its boundaries. I do worry that it may have been done before. Jeegoobotstan was razed sometime in the last decade or two, possibly very recently. If I survive and make it out that way some day, I’ll scour the city limits for traces of a massive runic circle. If the city was sacrificed to grant someone a body-bound soul, giving them partial immortality at that price, along with the eternal pain that comes with it, what should I do if I ever meet them?
Their body will be as resilient as the Aasimovian ancestors, possibly even more so, protected by the soul binding enchantment. They’d likely even survive beyond death in some ways, possibly able to have their soul retreat to a phylactery while their body reassembled or regenerated at some point, like a lich. What if they were truly repentent, and utterly regretted what they’d done? I hate moral quandaries. I draw a ragged breath and loose a slow, sad sigh as I continue crawling down the corridor, on my hands and knees.
My persistence is somehow like a train without a brake handle. I go on and on, with no way to slow down. No matter how breathless I feel. Despite wanting to wallow, I’m forcing myself to head somewhere where I might do something at least semi-useful. Never even any time to catch a breath for the locomotive that is Reggie Shellcracker. My locomotive breath. At that turn of phrase, my brain blue screens hard, and when I resume being able to perceive the world, I find myself on my side gasping for air.
Huff. What even are those episodes anyway? They’ll pop up at the most random times. Some are little fritzes, while others are downright like a personal computer’s BSOD from the nineties or the aughts on Fakeworld. Forced to reboot. Hm, that’s more specific than most of my memories of Earth have gotten so far on my journey. A long while back, I didn’t know the names or times or locations of anyone or anything on Fakeworld, I just had memories of how society was supposed to be in what, to my memories, was the most modern times.
More and more memories show up though, insistent about the way a world is supposed to work, and they’re never right. On Can’Z’aas, humans barely existed, and even they interacted with the fantastical nature of our world. Yet my Fakeworld, Earth memories insist humans don’t have or interact with magic at all, that none exists. Even here on Rayileklia, magic exists, though it’s weird to not have met almost any spellcasters, despite a wealth of spellbooks having been stolen by Milbert of Navica, the necromancer operating the soul-stealing light from his tower outside Victo.
Hell, Aces, that skulking assassin who’d spent many a night in Victo with Selunie Tavner, or Taylynn was a skeptic. Aces somehow didn’t believe in magic, despite being taught magic by someone in the Hidden Heart. Despite Taylynn having given them the magical dagger in the bone sheathe with alchemical symbols on it. I think the symbols were antimony, arsenic, and quicksilver, mercury that is. I guess it doesn’t matter what the symbols were. Hopefully Taylynn returns to Victo some day, and retrieves her dagger from where I’d left it with Selunie Tavner’s cousin. She’ll know that it means Aces has perished.
My eyelids are so heavy, and my limbs are so weak. Just keep pushing onward, let my trains of thought keep hopping the tracks, despite those locomotives’ lack of any way to slow down. Branching and congregating trains of thought sometimes leave me breathless as my brain hops from one series of thoughts to the next. Like when I accidentally trigger one of my panic attacks by thinking of a certain simple two word phrase. Right now, my panic attacks are in a weird fast forward state, thanks to Jarrah Bettergrove’s crazy chamber at the top of the Enochian Enclave. I don’t know how long that will last though.
This non-stop locomotive should steel itself for what’s to come. This little locomotive that is me, Reggie Shellcracker, should fight for their breath, and struggle onward, to seek the cure Dawn wanted me to find, the one the Sister hinted existed. What was it, five and five and six, sixteen more elder dragon hearts? Sheesh, it was bad enough when we were hoping it was three. Where am I going to find sixteen more ancient evil dragons? Huff. Plow through every obstacle around the world like a train off its tracks that has no way to slow down I suppose.