Interlude XII – Hark How the Bells

Johanna

Things were falling apart.

Now, that wasn’t an unusual state of affairs. Johanna had spent the past three hundred years living amongst humans, so she’d gotten used to the feeling.

Most humans these days don’t even remember the powerful Empire she did. Back then they ruled most of the continent, from Castellá to the Volkihe, over men and elves and dwarves alike. It’d be enough to make a grown woman cry, if she could bring herself to care that is.

Johanna had fought in the Fourth Sovereignty Clash, the First and Second Crusades, the Demon Wars, and even in the recent Pumilios War. She’d fought as a priestess, a crusader, a paladin, and then a landsknecht. In the service of four different emperors, one empress, and the Lady Pontiff herself.

And now here she was, in a bar, drowning her ghosts in shitty beer while waiting for her leader to show up and tell her she’s fired.

The familiarity of it all was almost comforting.

Someone slid into the seat beside her, and she raised an eyebrow at the sight of Lorenzo ordering another cup of coffee. That had to be his—what was that, his tenth cup? Had he even slept last night?

Also, who was paying for that? He’d better not have been throwing them on her tab again!

THUMP

Johanna leaned around the pretty boy, her other eyebrow joining the first as she took in the newbie. She looked like she’d barely been able to climb into her seat before she passed out on the table, small trails of smoke rising from her mouth.

“Palmira,” Lorenzo sighed, rubbing his forehead. “Are you okay? You know you could have stayed in the room, right?”

“…Mrgh…” the newbie barely managed to open a single bloodshot eye, glaring at nothing. “…The Horrors dig endless cities in the dark depths to hide from the eyes of hungry stars.”

Lorenzo gave her a long, exhausted look. “…What?”

“…Co…ffee…”

“…You know what? Sure. I’m not awake enough to begin to understand what you just said.”

Johanna watched them curiously, wondering what they got up to last night. The pretty boy may have looked less exhausted, but there was a reason she called him pretty boy. Bastard of a bard woke up in a field every morning looking nicer than she did with an hour’s effort.

Not that she bothered most days. Magic could be a bitch when it started warping your body, but a natural snow-white complexion was the kind of thing most mages her age killed for. Out of jealousy, mostly.

Where was she? Right, the kids. Staying up late, coming down together, pretty boy…

Leaning over, she elbowed Pretty Boy and gave him the kind of sleezy smile that always made the Fraud blow a gasket. “So~ How was she?”

Pretty Boy seemed to barely register her words, before slowly shrugging his shoulders, taking a mechanical sip of his coffee. Beside him, the newbie seemed to have completely passed out, having missed the arrival of her own cup. “She was better than I expected. Palmira is still new to everything, but she’s got some tricks up her sleeve that caught me by surprise.”

“Wow~ And she really kept you up all night?”

“That was mostly Chiara,” he grunted, missing how her smile grew even sleezier with every word. Damn, Pretty Boy got lucky~ “She’s been working the hardest, so after this I’ll be bringing her breakfast.”

Aftercare too? Ah, if only she were a few centuries younger.

Pretty Boy stopped talking after that, instead focusing on chugging his expensive, luxury drink in a single gulp. With that done he stacked a platter of cheeses and figs before heading back upstairs, snatching Palmira’s coffee along the way.

The girl herself hadn’t moved an inch the whole time, still passed out on the bar counter.

Ah, she was going to have some back pain later. It was enough for a twinge of sympathy to run through her, as memories of her own misspent youth racked phantom pains through her spine.

Not enough sympathy to wake her up, though. Newbie’s been getting too much special treatment from the guild, in her opinion. The girl wouldn’t get anywhere if the others in the guild kept coddling her.

Plus, she made Johanna pay the whole tab after their last bar fight, which was just rude. Everyone knew you split those fifty-fifty. It was just the polite thing to do.

“Psst! Hey!”

Johanna blinked in surprise, wondering who was knocking on the doors of her mind. Cautiously lowering her defenses just enough to open a dialogue—and only because she had an idea of who this might be—she replied, “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m Morte!” a sort of cackling amusement danced circles within her skull. “And I’m Palmira’s staff!”

Taking a moment to process that, Johanna turned to look at the newbie. More specifically, the creepy skull-headed staff she carried around everywhere that everyone politely pretended didn’t exist.

You know, back in the day, she’d been a holy woman. That part of her was telling her the thing was a crime against nature and needed to be purged.

Luckily, she’d drowned that part of her under enough alcohol to kill a dragon decades ago, so she just shrugged her shoulders. “Well, nice to properly meet you, Morte. What do you want?”

“Straight to the point, huh? Well, you see, I have some business I need to take care of in this city, and it’s not the type of thing I’d be taking a kid to go deal with. So, since you don’t seem to be doing anything, I was hoping you’d be willing to help a fella out.”

“Oh? And why can’t you just do this yourself?”

“Gee, I wonder,” he drawled, and she got the sense he was gesturing to himself. The immobile staff. Right. “And don’t worry, I’m not doing anything particularly evil—well, okay, there will be a bit of Necromancy involved, but it’s for a good cause, I swear! Pinkie promises and everything!”

Johanna hummed, considering the matter. On the one hand, this was an obviously cursed staff asking her to perform necromancy. On the other hand, did she really care?

More importantly, she eyed the staff for a different reason. She didn’t have a catalyst—she was an elf, after all, not a human, so she didn’t need a crutch to use magic—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t see the appeal. A catalyst was, at its core, a power amplifier. And that one looked particularly powerful.

She wondered how it ended up in the newbie’s hands. A hand-me-down, perhaps? She wasn’t competent to have made it herself or killed someone for it, after all.

“…Alright,” she said at last, having run the thought through her head enough times. She was even probably sober, which showed this was some good decision making! “But on one—two conditions. First, I want to take you for a spin after. I’ve never used a staff before; it sounds like fun.”

“It does indeed! It’s been a while since I’ve been with an elf! And what’s the other condition?”

“Huh? Oh, right. Uh, we don’t do anything that’ll get me arrested. I don’t want to have to flee the country again, y’know?”

“An easy enough compromise. It’s not like this is technically illegal anyways!”

“Technically legal’s the best kind of legal,” she nodded, slipping off her barstool to grab the staff. Unfortunately, something decided to interrupt.

‘Disagreement,’ the newbie’s mace shuddered, and oh, would you look at that, it had eyes. Gross. Also, why? ‘Our Lady would not agree to this.’

“Don’t worry, kid, she doesn’t have to know. We’ll be quick, in and out, twenty minutes at most!”

‘Derision. We do not believe you.’

“Ah, Palmira’s been rubbing off on you, huh? For shame, that the apprentices would team up against the master…”

“Hey,” Johanna butted in, lifting up the staff to look it in its creepy empty eye sockets. “What’s going on here? Is that thing gonna try and stop us?”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Oh, no, he can’t. After all, he doesn't have legs!”

“Then let’s get moving,” she shrugged, slipping the staff under arm and marching her way out of the inn. “I’ve got a long day of drinking planned and I don’t want to waste it listening to two crimes against nature argue.”

“But all I get to do these days is argue! Ah, whatever. Just follow my lead, we’ll get there in no time!”

With that they left Malocchio the mace alone at the bar, unable to do anything but watch as the elf stole his Lady’s staff.

‘Frustration. We wish We had limbs.’

--

‘No time’ was apparently an accurate assessment. As in, the staff had her stop immediately outside the inn, and then proceeded to point her in a direction that was making her reconsider this whole enterprise.

“The sewer?” she asked flatly.

“Of course! Where else did you expect us to go?” At her continued glare he relented, giving her the mental equivalent of a shrug. “Look, it’s either this or trying to convince one of the city guards to let you mess around under the city unsupervised. And trust me, you’re going to want to be unsupervised for this.”

Johanna took a moment to consider this. On the one hand, jumping into the sewers with a cursed staff was the kind of thing most people would call a bad idea. On the other hand, her whole life had been a string of bad ideas, and they hadn’t led to her death yet. So this was probably fine.

Hm. She was giving this too much thought. As her old mentor Leonardo once said, “Thinking is for idiots who can’t swing a sword.”

A couple minutes later, ankle deep in boiling sewage water and by this point quite deep underground, she considered that line of reasoning might be why her old mentor was dead.

“Okay, take a left here—no, wait, a right. That way’s a dead end. After that, you’ll want to go straight until you hear the ominous chanting—that’s how you know you’re going in the right direction.”

Johanna followed the staff’s words unthinkingly. This was because she couldn’t see, what with being so far underground. Not that this was too uncommon for her—her eyesight had been poor ever since her magic turned her eyeballs into snowballs. She could sort of still see, of course, but she relied more on her thermal senses these days to get around.

Ah, there’s the ominous chanting. So she was going the right way!

“Stop!” the staff commanded, and she stopped, glancing around the area curiously. There wasn’t anything different that she could see with her thermal senses. Most of the heat blobs that represented people were high above her, with only a few distant lights far, far below her. “We’re here. This is where the hole is.”

“The hole?”

“Can’t you tell? There’s a hole in the fabric of space-time here. Well, I say ‘hole’ because that’s what it looks like, but it’s really closer to a wound whose stitches have burst open.”

Johanna frowned, squinting. Now that she was looking, there seemed to be something very cold in front of her. It was odd—she wasn’t used to looking for cold things, as she’d not felt the bite of winter since she was a child. And while this thing in front of her didn’t look like it could accomplish that either…

Well. It could probably come closer than anything else.

The staff whistled, seeming impressed. “Damn~ This hole is old. Like, old old. And it’s shape… I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a remnant of the original attack that sliced this mountain in half! That’s incredible!”

“What, that it’s old?”

“No, you idiot! I mean that this a wound in the fabric of reality that’s been festering here for millennia! What’s incredible is the fact that it hasn’t collapsed into a singularity or something equally awful in the thousands of years it’s been sitting here. We’re looking at a bona fide miracle right here. And not the Divine kind, I mean the ‘oh god how has nobody noticed this was here for two thousand fucking years’ kind of miracle.”

“I dunno. Maybe it only recently ended up like this?”

“That’s arguably worse! If this has been sitting here for thousands of years, then it’s at least stable! If it’s only recently ended up like this, then this whole city could be sitting on a ticking time bomb and nobody would know!”

“Well, we know?”

“Goddess alive, you’re insufferable,” the staff sighed. “I miss my apprentice already. Just point me at the hole.”

Shrugging, Johanna did just that, pointing him towards the Cold.

“Good. Now, channel your magical energies into me, like you’re casting a spell, but don’t.”

She nodded, bringing up the essence of Winter which had clung to her since childhood. It came to her with the sounds of children laughing. The jingling of bells as reindeer knights rode past. The crisp smell of snow, chasing away all thoughts as she fell into a white world of her memories, a child who never grew up wishing the angels she crafted in her garden could one day take flight.

Johanna didn’t cast a spell, simply letting the feeling suffuse her soul. And then, with an almost gentle tugging, her magic was pulled through the staff.

The temperature of the sewer plummeted, the stone cracking from the sudden drop as the boiling sewage water froze in an instant. Snowflakes formed and began to dance as a miniature blizzard burst to life in front of her, the ice and mist consuming everything in an instant.

Had she been anyone else, she would have been blinded. But she wasn’t, and so the winter elf watched the wings of angels beat to life from snow and fog, and from their soft feathers countless hands grew with six fractal fingers. They reached out to the void that wasn’t a void and plucked at strings she couldn’t see, bringing about a chorus of singing children to join with the otherworldly chanting. And slowly, one by one, the Children subsumed the Others’ song, changing to something that was as alien as what it replaced.

Then, with what could be called a sigh of contentment, the song ended. The hole in front of her deflated, sealing itself shut. The blizzard fizzled out into slush and mist, and the frozen sewage at her feet cracked and melted.

And Johanna stood there, unmoving, tears freezing as they ran down her face and creating icicles under her chin.

“Ah, there we go, good as new! Now maybe the kid won’t have to deal with as many nightmares. Hm? Uh, hey ice lady, you doing okay?”

The ice lady blinked slowly, before taking a deep breath. And immediately regretted it, as the smell of sewage instantly assaulted her nose.

“That was beautiful,” she whispered softly, still staring at the empty space in front of her. “Can… can we do it again?”

“Well, we haven’t finished with your end of the bargain, so sure! Not that there’s anything to use it on, so it’ll just sit there looking pretty.”

Johanna took another breath, clutching the staff almost possessively. “What… what would it take for you to come with me instead of the newbie?”

“Nothing you could afford, ice lady.”

“Are you sure?” She turned to stare him in his empty eyes. “I’ll do anything.”

“Look, ice lady, Palmira’s my apprentice. The apple of my non-existent eye, you might even say. You, on the other hand, are more like a one-night stand.”

“Can we bump it up to a two-night stand?”

“Nah, you aren’t hot enough. Heh, hot enough, get it?”

As Johanna still looked determined, Morte sighed. “Whatever. Just start casting your spells so we can get back to the others. And if you’re thinking about pulling something sneaky on me, remember—you can’t use me without my permission. So don’t even think about it. Be nice to Palmira and maybe she’ll let you work with me some more later.”

With a slow, almost painful nod, Johanna sighed. There was a big part of her that just wanted to take the staff and damn the consequences, but he was right in that they could only cast those types of spells together. It was frustrating, but if it was choice between ‘maybe doing this again’ and ‘never doing this again,’ she knew what she’d pick every time.

And once she got back she was buying her own catalyst, because if this wasn’t limited to just Morte then she’d been missing out for centuries.

Squaring her shoulders, she brought the staff back up, and began to cast.

--

Palmira woke up to chaos. There was annoyed shouting of people she groggily recognized as the bartender and the owner, along with a bunch of other people she didn’t know, and the absolute worst odor she’d ever smelt. Also, her back hurt so much.

That’s what she got for falling asleep at the bar, she assumed.

“Good morning, sleeping beauty!” Morte laughed in her mind, helping her wake up. “Well, it’s afternoon by this point, but that’s just semantics.”

“What…” she grunted, wincing as she tried to wipe dried drool off her cheek. “Why’s everyone shouting?”

“Ah, it’s fine, it doesn’t involve you. So it’s not important!”

‘Correction. It is very important. The sewers are flooding, and it is Morte’s fault.’

“Morte,” she groaned. “What did you do? How did you even do it?”

“Wow, you really just believed him without hesitation huh. And for your information, I did nothing.”

“Then who—”

“You’re awake!” Palmira jumped in her seat as Johanna suddenly invaded her personal space, snow white complexion practically glowing with happiness. “Wunderbar! You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting! Ah, wait a moment!”

Under Palmira’s confused stare the elf slid over a platter stacked high with some of the most expensive foods she’d never eaten, along with a mug of coffee thrice as large as anything Lorenzo got her and filled to the brim with enough sugar to kill a goose-hydra.

“For you!” The woman’s radiant grin never left her face, even as she practically forced a fortune’s worth of food under her chin.

Now, while Palmira was very confused, she was also never one to turn down free food. So, taking a long draw of coffee to hide her expression, she glanced around the bar to see if there was anything that could explain what was going on.

There was nothing, beyond confirming that the bar was indeed flooding and that some other customers were arguing with the owners while they tried and failed to keep the boiling sewer water from pouring any further into the room. Because it was boiling, and everyone besides her and Johanna were practically on top of the tables trying to avoid it.

Hm. She should probably do something about that.

Grabbing Morte, she lowered the end of his staff until it just barely broke the surface of the water. Then, she pulled off one of her earliest experiments with magic, just on a much larger scale than what she was used to.

See, back when she was on the streets, she’d needed to boil their drinking water to clean it. But, she’d also need to cool it down so that her friends didn’t have to drink boiling water. That led her to a rather simple solution—if movement created heat, then it stood to reason that stopping movement did the opposite.

It wasn’t until she’d met Morte that he’d confirmed that for her, which filled her with a gratified sort of pride. And with that feeling of pride, she flexed her will throughout the water, pulling on the movement of the heat and stopping it dead.

The sudden lukewarmness of the water surprised the rest of the bar, but the owner swiftly jumped in, running to plug up everywhere the water was getting in while the bartender told her she’d be eating free there for the rest of her stay.

Hell yeah.

Johanna impatiently waited for her to finish, before swiftly recapturing her attention. “So, I was wondering,” she continued with that overly friendly voice that made a part of Palmira want to punch her. Again. “Would you mind if I borrowed your staff for a bit? Just for a couple hours… oh, or maybe days? Don’t worry, I promise you’ll get him back.”

Palmira blinked. Was she talking about Morte? What? Why?

“Say no!” said staff hissed to her, not helping her confusion. “For the love of all that is and isn’t holy, don’t let this crazy woman touch me!”

A spiteful part of her almost said yes right there and then, but she pushed that down. Instead, she glanced down at the fancy food in front of her, and recognized it for the bribe it was. And, well…

Free food was free food.

“Once we get back to the guild, maybe,” she compromised, ignoring Morte’s groan of defeat. What in the world did she miss? “We’re too busy right now for me to give up my staff, you know?”

Johanna’s face fell, but she nodded despondently, like a kid who’d just been told they’d have to wait to play with their new toys.

‘Concern. We agree with Morte. Do not let this Elf near Us.’

And you know what? Palmira agreed.

Free food or not, this woman was crazy.