Day 5, 11:40 PM

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”

— Aldous Huxley

Climbing a wall in near absolute darkness sounds harder than it is. On a sheer vertical surface, I have to touch blindly above me in search of handholds regardless of whether it’s day or night.

I close my eyes, and nothing really changes. My sense of touch doesn’t suddenly grow clearer like some stories might have you believe, but my hearing might have amplified a bit. I can hear Duchess climbing the wall a yard or two to my left.

Initially, she was faster than me, but I caught up, and now I’m in the lead.

It should be my stats.

The wall is twenty feet tall at the location she chose. It’s not the lowest point, she said the guards play closer attention to the shorter patches of the wall. Made sense to me, so we got as far as we could from those short locations, preferring fewer guards over five feet of vertical climb.

I scale the wall well before her and help her up.

“Thank you,” she whispers, and now comes the more troublesome part. How the hell do we climb down? Worse, there’s a moat right outside the walls, it’s at least five yards wide. I saw it, but it never crossed my mind to check how deep it is, and jumping twenty feet into what could be a knee-deep puddle seems suicidal.

However, our options are limited.

“How deep is the moat?” I ask.

“Ten feet, if they followed the standard. But do not jump. Other than making a splash and attracting the guards, there could be branches, rocks, or detritus in the water.”

I bite my lip and stare at the darkness ahead.

“They don’t have river dragons or man-eating fish in the water?” I whisper, and I can feel her confusion.

“Frogs, regular fish, and leeches. Maybe some snakes. That should be it. Don’t worry, winters here are too harsh for deer-eating iguanas,” she answers much more seriously than I expected, telling me they actually have something akin to river dragons.

Then again, an alien might argue crocs and gators are also river dragons.

We undress, bundle up our clothes, and toss our bundles across, then I toss my sack. I probably threw my stuff too far, but the coins click against something solid instead of making a splash, which is what we were hoping for.

Next comes the harder part.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to lower you?” I whisper, offering my help one last time. The worst-case scenario we discussed involved both of us falling off the top of the wall. If I lower her, she would drop some twelve, fifteen feet at worst.

“Thank you. I will try to climb down,” she refuses my help much more politely than Princess accepted it when she was alive. While I’m thinking she scampers down the wall and starts her descent.

I take a moment to look around. Most lights are out in the town. Only the mansion at the center has any significant light. In the distance, I can see moving torches, guards patrolling the streets and the walls.

None of them are close. I could jump. I dismiss the thought immediately. I might save myself the pain of scraping my naked self and my junior against the rough wall, but on the other hand, I might break my neck and send myself back to the dark forest. Worse, I might break my spine and survive.

That thought sends me carefully scaling down the wall. The climb is much more difficult, but I manage. Once more, I overtake Duchess, and my foot touches cold water relatively soon.

I resist the urge to jump, and instead lower myself slowly. The mud forms a steep, slippery slope against the wall and I slide down it without a splash.

“Do you need help?” I whisper much louder than I did atop the walls, but she whispers a no, and I swim for the other side.

I’m out of the water in three breast-strokes, my bald head dry. The first thing I do is run my hands all over myself, removing a leach, which somehow already found me. I squish the fucker, removing its perceptive ass from the evolutionary ladder for all our sakes, then I stumble blindly through the kneehigh grass.

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It’s kind of lucky the town keeps the trees away from the moat. Who knows where our stuff would’ve ended otherwise…

Even in the grass, finding our things proves difficult. I only find a single bundle before Duchess sloshes out of the water.

“Check yourself for leaches before they latch on,” I whisper and pause.

“And what’s your name? I’m Aang,” I clench my teeth before Blunt adds, ‘the guy who dicked you thrice in a row,’ and gets me killed.

“Thank you for the warning,” she says with a note of disgust.

I guess she found a worm stuck to her.

“My name is Manuella Eagleeye, pleasure to meet you, Aang.” The words come out weird.

I can tell she’s still holding the leach, maybe unsure what to do, or she could have found another? But giving your name with a revolted tone counts as a failed social interaction in my book.

I’m graceful enough not to mind, and even more so not to point it out. Instead, I focus on the problem at hand.

“I found one bundle. It’s not my bag, but clothes, and I can’t even tell whose they are.”

Well, they are all mine and very similar in the dark, but never mind.

Then it hits me and I check the knot. I touch blindly, and it doesn’t feel familiar.

“They are probably yours, but I think we should stay naked until we dry off.”

There’s a moment of silence, during which I have no idea what she’s thinking, but eventually she speaks.

“Thank you, I agree. I’ll help you search for your bundles.” Her tone is neutral now, hopefully that’s a good sign.

We take an eternity to find two lumps the size of a large watermelon. In reality, it probably took ten to fifteen minutes, but it felt like an eternity. On the plus side, we were mostly dry by the time we gathered our belongings, so we quickly got dressed, and we faced the first problem.

I left my original footwear with the cobbler. We’ve only got one pair of boots.

The solution is obvious. I take MY inferior boots. But, I wish to be a better person, and leave a good impression. My libido is mostly sated, and I can tell I was thinking with my dick at least a part of the time in these past few days. But that doesn’t mean I would mind banging Manuella again. And for that happy scenario to play out the way I want, she needs to have a positive enough opinion of me to let me have some.

Finally, there’s the democratic approach, which is we each get one shoe. I almost smirk at the thought. The practicality and usability of this solution matches my thoughts of democracy.

“Hey,” I whisper. “You should have the boots.”

“Why?”

That’s not what you say when I offer you inferior boots in our circumstances!

“Because you’re weaker and frailer. If I step on a mucky thorn, I pull it out. If you step on it with your soft skin, you get a fucking gangrene and die.”

Was that Blunt or me? Whoever it was, it was really uncalled for.

“How old are you?” she asks, and now I’m totally confused.

Thirty-nine, that’s the real answer, but I have no idea how old Aang Ree was before he croaked.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Because for a moment I had an impression someone much older was speaking to me like I was a stubborn child. And how can you not know how old you are?”

“Stop,” I interrupt the nonsense. “We can talk more about this once we’re away from here and after you put on my unsatisfactory boots.”

“I will not repay you with sex. Not even with my mouth. Do you understand?” The disgust is back in her voice, and maybe it wasn’t a coincidence when she introduced herself.

“I understand. Take the boots. I’m sorry I said fucking. I’ll try to mind my tongue from now on.”

“Thank you.” I’m not really sure what she thanked me for, but she took the boots, and we set off into the deeper darkness.

“This is far enough,” she says barely half a minute after we entered the bushes. “Stumbling through the dark won’t help us, and we need sleep. The guards will not search for us immediately. They might even take days before they decide we left Amplegord and form a search party.”

She pauses.

“Thank you. I have never had such a smooth start to my escape. We might even make it.”

There was a lot of sincerity in her voice, and not much confidence, but I’ll take what I can get.

“You’re welcome.” I speak calmly, because I know she might take anything else as offense. “We can huddle for warmth, but I’m guessing that’s out of the question for you. If you’re cold during the night, you may hug my back, I promise not to lay a finger on you. I could offer the same, and I promise my hands won’t do anything inappropriate, but I have less control of other parts, which may offend you.”

I take a deep breath, and she doesn’t scream, which is positive.

“If you are freezing, and I think you are dying, I can either leave you to die or save you. I would prefer to help you, but that may damage your dignity, pride, honor, and whatnot. Before we proceed, I need to know clearly would you prefer me to strip you when I have to warm you up and you’re unconscious or feverish. Is my erection pressing against your butt such an injury that you would prefer dying rather than me trying to warm you up with my body?”

The silence stretches uncomfortably, and the question hangs in the air for way longer than it should have. I wonder whether I should have said dick instead of erection, of all things, but luckily she speaks.

“You are not a child,” she says the utterly irrelevant remark slowly. “I will do anything to survive. My father ordered me to do anything to survive, and I have.”

I shudder. The steely resolve makes her raw voice, and her obvious despair sound more brutal, terrifying. I don’t want to know anything else, yet a morbid part of my mind is intrigued.

“Do you want us to part ways?” I ask, uncertain how much time had passed since she stopped talking.

“No,” she says without a smidgeon of doubt. “You have money, a weapon, some basic supplies, and physical strength. My chances of successfully escaping are higher if we stay together. As is your survival rate.”

I gulp. “And what do we do now?”

“Sleep.”

Following that single word, there is only darkness and silence. For some reason, my soul quivers. I am more terrified now than when I died.

What kind of woman did I involve myself with?