By noon, the Lieutenant's orders had trickled down, and every disparate part of the army moved like clockwork to execute her will.
Everyone had their part to play: Sara was in charge of communications, the foot-soldiers ran patrols, the overseers oversaw – usually while drinking coffee – and the medics medicked.
And, amidst all this lollygagging, who was responsible for doing all the hard work?
Why, the auxiliaries of course.
And who among the auxiliaries would be responsible for doing the most grueling of tasks?
The answer to that was 'who ever the foreman could get his hands on.' As it happened, today’s lucky winners had been Cas, the sole survivor Anne, Dacula, and Reg – the smoker who had questioned Cas last time.
“Watch it!”
The foreman, to his credit, was never willing to ask others to do what he himself wouldn’t and he always managed to put himself at the head of whatever bullshit was the central issue in his work camp.
“Hey, hey. I said watch it!” The foreman yelled through a strained voice, heaving a keg of explosive powder onto his thigh before hopping it up into a press. Cas leant over the twelve-foot high loading bay of the steel carriage, trying to keep a blasé expression as she and Anne caught the keg from either side, heaving it up onto the steel bed.
It was a simple job, and not too difficult with the help of another person. Doing it for six hours in a row was a bit much, however, and Cas could feel her arms turning to noodles as she and Anne dragged this latest load into the bed..
The Steel Carriage caught Cas's imagination from the first moment she saw it.
In Cas’s mind, the word Carriage had always evoked a sense of elegance and piano lacquer, and, you know, wood.
These steel monstrosities, on the other hand, had the frame of a covered wagon, and the sensibilities of a fast-food corporation. In that they were two sizes too large to be healthy.
The wheels alone were ten feet tall and constructed entirely out of a steel hoop with fence spikes sticking out of the rim. The bed of the carriage was two feet higher above that, and massive, metal springs could be seen supporting it in the clear space between. The carriage top itself rose several stories above all this. A high-arched convex of sheet metal covered over the wagon like a barrel vault. It was utilitiarian in design, and the inside was ten times the brutalist.
The interior of the carriage was a warehouse, with walls that rose twenty feet up into an arcing ceiling made out – surprise surprise – steel. The three story interior was separated into six separate floors, with stairs and pulley-elevators that wound up the front of the entire structure.
Cas and Anne – being the only ones small enough to move comfortably within the confines of the carriage floors – had spent the past four hours dragging powder-kegs across metal floors, winching them up pulley elevators, and stuffing them into the back corners of every level in this mobile warehouse.
Of course, the magic was in the details. The way they had ordered the loading so that the top floor of the carriage was filled first, the way they had decided to stack barrels in alternating configurations, so that vertical barrels could act as retaining walls for the more space efficient horizontal stacks, and of course, there was the tiny detail that they were doing all of this at noon.
Fun fact about metal left out in direct sunlight, it got hot, and the monstrosity of a carriage -- too large to fit under any of the surrounding trees, had been heating up for hours at this point.
Cas could see waves of heat swimming through the air, refracting the warm light of the magic glow-bulbs that floated by the corners. By the second hour, sweat was trickling down her chin like a loose faucet, hissing off the bare metal floor whenever it made contact.
Gripping the edge of the keg, she worked in tandem with Anne to walk it across the metal surface, sending a thunderous sound rumbling through the cart like foley work
Her aura kept the heat from being deadly, but it was still uncomfortable, and Cas worked to keep her contact with the bare metal to a minimum. The pulley-elevator, thankfully, had a rope made from fiber, rather than chains.
Small victories.
Another small victory was the harshness of the work itself. If hard, borderline murderous work was good for anything, it was building comradery, and Cas had found it easy to maintain a conversation with Anne. The nature of their drudgery somehow made it easy to move past the whole "I'm sorry your entire unit was murdered by a Regalia" phase.
At first their conversation consisted almost entirely of complaints and grousing, their conditions, that stupidly short third floor which forced them to crouch just to fit in it. Eventually, however, they ran out of complaints and new topics of conversation were opening up.
Cas told more lies about her origins. At first, she’d done so quite easily, but soon guilt stabbed at her heart when she noticed how earnestly Anne seemed to be accepting the information, with pure amazement and wonder on her face as she asked eager questions.
“So!” Anne said, forgetting her earlier gloom and starting a new topic in the usual way for her, with a ‘so!’ that sounded like it started with a z. “You said you were the third daughter? I know not how it goes in your land, but here most third daughters end up going to the military ya?”
“Really?” Cas said, surprised. “Mandatory service?”
Anne let out a chortle. “Far from it! Their parents would love for nothing more than for them to marry, but… being third daughters, they can hardly find the husband of their dreams. Usually, most parents prepare two dowries, so… you can see where this is going, ya?”
“The third daughter doesn't come with a land deal,” Cas answered.
“Ya!” Anne laughed again, gripping onto the next keg with Cas and heaving it up with hardly a strain. The girl was stronger than she looked, Cas noted, feeling how much weight her partner was bearing. Truth be told, she was probably doing seventy percent of the work, and she wasn’t even sweating. “Third daughters have no money, so usually the parents have to… settle. You know, find a man that has money but no women willing to take him. The kind with a bland personality or a bad one, ya?”
“That sounds terrible,” Cas admitted. “Back where I come from, people marry who they want.”
“Here too!” the woman answered. “Well, it’s really only the nobles that care so much, or families that have a lot of land,” she corrected. “But the High King made a law long ago. It said any person would be free if they joined the army. And people joined! Millions of them! This was when the demon queen was at the borders, so that tells how desperate people were for that freedom, ya?”
“Really?” Cas said, even more surprised now. “And all the lower kings allowed it? Wouldn’t it be a problem if some prince decided to marry into an enemy nation or something?”
“Well…” Anne’s face twisted into a curl. “Sometimes really powerful families can have a say, if it’s important enough. The Army doesn’t have to accept you, and some families can make sure it doesn’t. But..”
“But?”
“Well… if you’re really desperate, in that case, you can still becoming an adventurer. The high king’s declaration goes for anyone who can fight the demons, and adventuring guilds. There are so many of them all over, very few families can make them all say no.”
Cas was invested in this gossip now, and she craved for more details.
“And what happens if adventuring doesn’t work out?”
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Anne’s expression took on a pitiable expression. “Oh, then those poor girls get a wedding. Though, It’s not always girls. There are almost as many boys taking advantage of it, nowadays.”
“So they have no choice, then?” Cas said, sounding a bit saddened.
Anne thought, answering… “No. Even if adventuring doesn’t work out, well… I shouldn’t say. It doesn’t happen often.”
Again, they were at the edge of the cart, heaving up another keg. Though, the pain of anticipation made it seem light as a feather to Cas’s hands as she awaited the answer.
“What doesn’t happen often?”
“Well, some still find a way, if adventuring doesn’t work, but it’s scandalous. I’ve never heard of it happening,at least I’ve never met a woman that would admit to it.”
“Admit to what?” Cas said, ready to throttle the answer out of the girl.
“Being a mercenary, ya?” Anne answered easily, too lost in her own thoughts to notice the shocked expression on Cas’s face. “It’s not good work, to have no allegiances. Really, only the most selfish, black hearted people take it up. I wouldn’t dine with someone like that, even if I met them.”
Sara immediately came to mind, and Cas rose quick to defend her. “But.. not all of them, right? I mean, you just said they mainly do it to get away from their families.”
“Hmpf,” Anne snubbed her nose at the idea. “'Needing to’ doesn't excuse everything. There should be other ways. My friend in the Dalmatian unit had run away for the same reason. She wasn’t a noble, but her family owned a distillery, she…”
A blank look hazed out Anne’s eyes as the rest of the story came into full view.
‘But she died yesterday, because Sable had demanded it for reasons no one could understand.’ Cas knew that was how the story would end, and she worked quickly to dodge the subject.
“So…” she said, matching Anne’s usual preface to new topics, “about these carts. I hate to say it, but I haven’t noticed any draft animals in this army. I hope we won’t be expected to pull it ourselves.”
This got a laugh out of Anne. “Oh, nooo!” she denied. “That would be silly. They’re magical carts! They move themselves.”
Cas immediately dropped her end of the keg, setting it in place and letting loose a tinny, loud clang through the interior.
The load of kegs was stacked just ten feet from the end of the cart bed, now. Looking outside revealed five more crates left to load. Seeing that the foreman was taking a breather below, Cas and Ann decided to have a stand up conversation by the entrance slot, basking in the relatively chill of the outside air.
“Huh,” Cas poked her head out of the slot to look up at the rising back wall of the cart. “If they can make a cart that can move itself, why the hell can’t they make a cart that loads itself?”
“Wait…” the forman called from beneath them. “This cart can move itself?”
“Ya! Anne answered back. "It’s an old one from the spotted unit. I saw it moving when we were traveling a few days ago!”
“Why!” the forman was near hysterics. “Why didn’t you say so! Don’t you know moving carts can load themselves!?”
“What!?” Cas screamed, her voice harmonizing with the chorus of complaints from everyone on board and off.
----------------------------------------
As it turned out, the foreman was right. The cart could load itself, and it did so very neatly, reaching out with a magical grasp to levitate the remaining twelve barrels into the lower slot before a ten foot gate slammed up to close the thing.
None were in a mood to appreciate the marvel, stuck as they were pointing fingers.
The foreman, to his credit, looked abashed. “Why didn’t you tell me it was a moving cart?”
“How did you think it moved!?”
“The old fashioned way, of course. We’d pull it!”
“It’s a moving cart!”
“Then why does it have a pulling yoke at the front?”
“It’s an old model! The prince cast the spell on it before we deployed!”
“Then you should have told me!”
“I didn’t know moving carts could load themselves!” Anne said, refusing to take an ounce of blame for herself.
“Everyone!” Reg, the smoker – who throughout the entire process had been the most irritable of them all – displayed an almost serene sense of calm, now that he’d regained access to his pipe. “Frankly, I’d say it’s no use arguing about the issue. We can at least say we got some good exercise out of it… best to leave it at that, for the sake of all our sanities.”
“Agreed!” Dacula said, raising a hand which had lost most of its usual cheerfulness. Both of the men had removed their shirts for course of the work.
Dacula was the stockier of the two, with a solid stature that filled out his form, and seemed to drag him into an exhausted hunch.
Reg, the smoker, had a more wiry figure, with corded muscles that stretched over reaching limbs. And the ends of those limbs moved very dexterously as he repacked the end of his pipe, lighting the bowl before taking a few test puffs of his latest creation. “So, then, Anne. I’d hate to be so forward about it, but you have had more than your fair share of time with the local celebrity,” he said, gesturing to Cas. “I suspect the rest of the camp will be wanting her attention by dinner time.”
“What?” Dacula teased with a fox’s smile. “Are you jealous?”
“No,” Reg answered boredly, “I’m tired, and I’m hungry. And I suspect – if Cas is willing to play along – that we can use promises of a conversation with her to get us ahead in the dinner line. Supper starts in thirty minutes. From my experience with this unit, I expect the line will already be full by this hour.”
Cas had compunctions about using her status to get perks.
Past tense.
Cas had compunctions.
That was before she spent four hours toiling needlessly in a metal hot-box without the actual drugs.
“Absolutely,” Cas nodded wihout a moment of hesitation.
A sigh of relief came from everyone. “Thank goodness you’re not a goody goody girl,” Anne almost moaned with relief. "I’m too hungry to follow the line.”
“Honestly,” Dacula cheered, “It’s not even that bad. I mean, we have been working the hardest out of everyone. I say we deserve the pass.”
Cas noticed among this lively conversation that the foreman was quietly making his way out.
He had gained Cas’s respect for taking the hardest jobs in their list of thankless work. And it seemed he was quite used to receiving little appreciation, especially by those he had conscripted.
“Uh, foreman,” Cas called out, stopping everyone. “You’re invited too, by the way!”
The foreman looked at her confused and only laughed. “Oh, nooo,” he denied severely. “I have more work to do. Besides, I’m in a leadership rank. We’re not allowed to eat until the last foot soldier has received a meal.”
“Really?” Well, that was awfully progressive, Cas thought.
“Yes, really,” the foreman laughed with his scandinavian-ish santa claus jolly laugh that shook his bushy mustache. “It makes sure to make our soldiers eat. I end up having to chase down every stray that doesn’t make it to mealtime. Hahaha! The head doctor is the worst, always holed away in his tent working on something or other. He forgets to eat-”
Cas didn’t hear any of the rest of the man’s admonishments as the head doctor’s name rang out in her memory.
The head doctor… the same one she was supposed to take the prince’s brother to.
The prince’s brother! The one who was royalty! The one which had been shrunk down into a gem and given to Cas!
----------------------------------------
Cas made it to the medical tent in record time. The white hide tarp gleamed in the sun and the interior was almost clinically cool despite the flapping entrance.
Cas managed to get inside it, somehow. The details of everything had been lost amidst horrid memories of panicked ‘oh craps’ and ‘how could I forget’s’ as she ran over here.
In fact, the majority of her thoughts were still constructed out of that one sentence: ‘How could I forget’!?’ usually capped by a trio of ‘stupid!’s.
And, to tell by their expressions, everyone else seemed to be thinking the same thing as Cas meekly presented the red gem to the audience.
Sara, having maintained a communications channel with her since that morning, had beaten her there and managed to kick out all non-critical personnel in preparation for her arrival. As a result, by the time she’d arrived, only the head doctor, Sara, and Cas were present inside the medical tent.
Well, all of them and the prince’s brother, that was.
“Is he going to be ok?” Cas said, feeling an imaginary slipknot tie around her throat.
“He’ll be fine,” the doctor consoled. Reaching forward, he took the gem into both hands and placed it onto a pristine, white cloth, with invisible sigils patterned onto its surface, only visible by dint of the aura outlining them. He had the demeanor of a man who’d seen much worse things, and apparently un-shrinking royalty was all in a day’s work for him.
“It’s quite an advanced spell, but it’s designed to be quite breakable, I assure you. Just…” he raised a hand, aura flaming in the space between his fingertips as he focused on the sigil and the gem.
“Why didn’t you tell me!” Sara whisper-hissed at Cas.
“I thought you knew!” Cas whispered back. “Besides, I forgot!”
“How do you forget a prince is in your pocket?”
“I went through a lot yesterday.”
Frrruuum!
It was a… magical noise. It didn’t correspond to anything in the physical world.
But the noise was only a side-effect, for in the brief second that passed, a new entrant had appeared in the midst of their tent.
Cas leaned over. The doctor and Sara did the same on either side of her, as they crowded around the small pedestal which had once held a gem, and which now supported a tiny boy.
The boy looked much like the prince, except much younger. Midnight amber skin and dark, flowing hair which tufted over his round features. A soft breath raised his chest in a quiet snore, and Cas, making the effort to focus, managed to make out a dimly lit aura rising up around the figure of the boy.
And it was quite a strange one, too.
image [https://i.imgur.com/xGx28kL.png]
Banner Two Score?
Well, ‘score’ was just an archaic way of saying twenty. Doing the mental math, Cas figured the number fourty as the answer, and the character sheet updated accordingly.
image [https://i.imgur.com/8wJlAFE.png]
As with all things aura, the translation was remained mercurial.
Banner 40? What could that possibly mean?
Banner… where had she heard that term before.
Cas then remembered the other name for Trinket Ember.
Sara had called it the ‘First Banner’ of the Ember Regalia. The First Banner.
First implied a second, and that implied the Regalia had other banners, too.
It was all standard, just another small puzzle piece in the mystery of this world.
But the boy was a human, too, and Cas resolved to see him that way.
Still, it was hard not to notice the mystery inherent in everything, especially when the angel girl made her second appearance. She was standing over the boy, now, covering his closed eyes with her translucent hand.
Cas tried not to stare at what, apparently, only she could see.
The girl only smiled again, however, letting out a giggle that shook her shoulders but made no sound as she raised a silencing finger to her lips.