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[>>Now replaying: Log 1.5 - scout.git]
Date: Error
Location: Zephyro’s Domain
//Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.//
//ediate reinforcements! I repeat, requesting imm//
//Send the scouts. Find them. Bring th//
[>>DATA CORRUPTED]
E1 %The Music Box is close to getting choked.%
E2 %But they don’t sparking know that, do they?!%
Eventually, it will get better.
I didn’t say anything for the rest of our trip down the mountain, still trying to sort out the memory of Underbrook saving my life for the umpteenth time. It certainly hadn’t been the last. Even tomorrow, he’d be standing directly behind me as we negotiated, while Stax stayed back with the troops.
I caught myself worrying about the negotiations again, but there was nothing I could do other than walk a bit faster, so that’s what I did.
Zephyro easily matched my pace, and so it wasn’t too long before we reached the end of the stairs, framed by two massive pillars of stone, in the same color as the mountain itself. Standing smack dab in the middle of these two pillars was a young woman, perhaps 25 or 26 years old. She wore a lightweight leather outfit and had her hair loosely tied underneath something that suggested a headscarf, but really was more of a cowl. With her hands resting on her hips, and a cocksure smile on her lips, she cocked her head as we approached. The gesture revealed a massive crossbow—an arbalest—slung over her shoulder.
“There you are. I thought you’d gotten lost,” she said when we got close enough to hear her. Only then did she step forward to meet us halfway.
Zephyro tensed the second he spotted her, and I got the distinct impression he was suppressing a groan or a curse.
“What, exactly, are you doing here?” As we approached each other, he’d donned his fiercest scowl. “I told you to guard the gate.”
If the young woman was cowed in the least, she certainly didn’t let it show. Coming to a halt before us, she bowed with a smile both comforting and sincere.
“Ah, honored Vizier, I know you told me to defend the Gates, and that is exactly what I am doing.”
“You are defending the gates… at the foot of the holy mountain,” Zephyro said, raising an eyebrow.
“To the best of my ability, honored Vizier. It was you who made me a scout, so you should know how vital advanced reconnaissance is to any defensive effort,” the woman retorted without missing a beat. Her smile was nothing if not seraphic.
I decided I liked her, then and there.
Zephyro looked like a man trying hard not to show how uncomfortable he was with how things were going. “Sultana, this is—”
“Alkashafa. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sultana,” she said, offering me her hand and another bright smile.
I took it and returned the smile with my own.
“Like all the Alkashaf siblings,” Zephyro went on a little more forcefully than necessary, “she is adventurous and… Blunt.” He gave her the look. The one that fathers think is withering, but daughters find most reassuring.
“Actually, why are we calling the Sultana “Sultana”, and not Calipha?” Alkashafa interjected with a curious frown.
Zephyro, at a loss for words, stumbled a few syllables before I saved him.
“I don’t really mind. Actually, you can call me Sam. That’s much easier.”
“Sure, Sam,” Alkashafa said, beaming from ear to ear as Zephyro sputtered briefly. She was a tall woman, her warrior’s body thin and toned under her light leather armor. Still, her face had all the roundness of youth and I noticed the corners of her lips seemed to hold a sly curl at all times.
“So, should we get going?” Alkashafa asked.
“Yeah, let’s,” I said.
“Of course, Sultana,” Zephyro said, highlighting the last word. He frowned at the scout, who lifted her chin in a friendly challenge. I walked between them and waved them forward. As much as I liked the chat, I was still aware that the sooner we got to the center of the city, the better my chances were to get out of here in time. We could talk on the way, something I had learned to appreciate very early on during my time on Tobes.
It turned out that traveling in a medieval world for the better involved a lot of walking, a lot of sitting on uncomfortable carts, and even more boredom. So traveling between towns was better done in groups not just because of safety, but because everyone had a story to tell, and that staved off the monotony of traversing poorly maintained roads. Even if I had to make up most of my own biography at first, because I couldn’t well tell people that I came from another world, I learned to appreciate the sort of impromptu story circles. After a couple of months, I even stopped missing my cellphones.
An odd sensation assaulted me then, as if I was trying to remember something I wasn’t actively thinking about and that gave me just enough time to prepare myself.
Like a shark smelling chum, another memory erupted from my consciousness.
> A forest road. Trees thick on both sides. A fallen log. Oldest trick in the book, but effective. The bandits have surrounded the carriage, but when they see our group arriving, they flee.
> The carriage door opens, and a thin, young man steps out. I spot a woman inside, too.
> “Thank the Gods you arrived when you did,” the man says. He has a deep voice that puts me more at ease than it should, what with the edges of his words buzzing like static.
> He holds out his hand for me to shake. “I am Olre, and this—“ he gestures at the woman inside the carriage, “—is my sister, Patti.”
> “Sam,” I say, and smile as my hand meets his.
I stumbled a little, but I immediately caught myself. Maybe it was the brevity of the memory, or I was just getting better at handling them.
“Are you alright?” Alkashafa asked as she saw me miss a step.
I just waved it off. “Not used to walking in sandals, I’m afraid,” I said, exchanging a glance with Zephyro. “How long do you think it will be until we reach the city?” I asked.
“Maybe half an hour, Sultana,” Zephyro said at the same time as Alkashafa said, “Thirty minutes, give or take.”
“I truly wish you wouldn’t disrespect the Sultana so,” Zephyro ground out, more ashamed than angry, as far as I could tell. Alkashafa’s eyes fell on the Vizier like hounds on their prey.
“I don’t mind,” I interjected before they could escalate into an argument. “How about you two tell me about the history of this place while we walk?”
“Certainly, Sultana,” Zephyro continued with a sigh. “I will just let Alkashafa have the word. She likes history almost as much as she likes talking.”
The young woman laughed. “That I do indeed! But where should I start? With the miracle? With the Vizier? No, that’s far too long ago, and boring besides, but what about the Ferals? Perhaps I could talk about the places I have seen…”
“Wait, wait, slow down.” I couldn’t help but smirk at her enthusiasm.
“Call me Kasha,” she said, returning a wide grin that brightened even further when she saw the Vizier flinch.
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“I really must insist that you show some respect to the Sultana, Alkashafa…” he said, imploring me for a thousand pardons with a single glance. I just shrugged and smiled. Not that I wanted to annoy Zephyro in earnest, but it was fun to see the uptight Vizier squirm just a little. Despite his protests, though, it seemed that when it came to Kasha, he had long since accepted his lot in life. He would never win this little battle of theirs, and he knew it.
“Why don’t you tell the story, then, honored Vizier?” Kasha asked. “You could do the thing with your gauntlet!”
“Shafi, that is a trick to amuse children, not to entertain the Sultana,” Zephyro fretted.
“I certainly wouldn’t mind,” I shrugged, smiling. It was cute how different he acted around her.
“I mean, it’s not like we have much else to do, unless you two can speed this up somehow?”
Both Kasha and Zephyro shook their heads at that. I wondered if they knew they looked very much alike, and if she was his daughter. Then again, if this was some sort of alternate dimension where my Wish was made manifest in people (which still sent my brain for a spin) did they even have families in the traditional sense?
“As you command,” Zephyro sighed and held up his hand. Immediately, blue light streamed from the center of his hand. I thought I saw a small item glint there, a gemstone, or projector lens. I couldn’t be quite sure. The light reached forward until it seemed to hit an invisible wall, where it arranged itself into one picture after the other. As time passed, they picked up in speed, sharpness, and even color, until we were looking at a floating screen hovering a couple of meters in front of us.
That was impressive, even for me, and not for the first time did I wonder about the relationship between Zephyro, his people, my Wish, and technology.
The screen flickered once more. It showed the city as if viewed from the mountain we’d just come from, but it was far, far smaller. The palace existed already, but it, too, was barely more than a single large building with some decorative columns. The throne room, perhaps? Of the city itself, there was only a single small hut, leaning against the side of the palace.
“When I first took my post,” Zephyro began despite Kasha’s eye-rolling, “I came to without any orders, or message, and I couldn’t reach out to either you or the Maker. Still, I knew what I had to do. I fortified the palace as best I could, using the finest designs available to me, and then I sent out my people—your people—to work towards your protection. There,” he pointed towards the house nestled against the palace wall. “That is Emil-1 and his family. They were the first, and always among the bravest. He took the materials we found outside the palace and built more houses for his children, and soon, his children took their houses and made them their own workshops. They longed to take up their own trade, you see, each according to their Talent. Emil became a smith, Raoul our first watchman. Mudira coordinated between them and saw to their wellbeing, and so on. For a while, that was all we were, but we grew.
“When we could no longer find enough materials around the palace, it was not a big problem either. Alkashafa—the first of her line—always longed to see the world, and she set out to gather what we needed to raise more children, including all the Kashaf siblings, whom everyone adored, even though they always were rascals and up to mischief.”
Here Zephyro gave Kasha a sidelong glance, which she didn’t seem to mind at all. “Look, over there! Is that Minhat-Albina’s workshop?”
“Indeed,” Zephyro said with a smile, and some unspoken words passed between them.
When I raised an eyebrow inquisitively, Kasha grinned.
"One time, he sent us out to collect a thousand stones, but he didn’t specify which ones. We brought back nothing but tiny stones…”
“…and Mihnat-albina, he swore so loud…” Zephyro added with a grin. I'd never have thought he could even do more than crook the corners of his mouth, but the expression didn't seem out of place at all.
So I smiled as the two of them laughed, still bewildered by how different Zephyro acted around Alkashafa. While the honorable, untouchable, impeccable Vizier wasn’t gone, he was showing another side I hadn’t ever expected of him.
“Ah, but it does not matter for now, Sultana,” Zephyro said, still chuckling. “All that matters is that we are a proud people, alive by your Grace, and prospering under your ever-benevolent presence. Humbly, I might claim I led them well and—
Kasha nodded. “He does very good work, Sam. Best Vizier we ever had.”
“And we prospered,” Zephyro talked loudly over her, perhaps to hide the fact that he had been the only Vizier they ever had. “For a while, there seemed to be no limit to our growth,” he said as on the screen, the city grew in a time-lapse.
“How long did all of that take?” I asked with a tinge of worry.
“150 years, give or take,” was Kasha’s reply. “Domaintime makes measuring things a little strange, sometimes.”
I frowned. That timeline didn’t add up at all. If they said I had been the reason they even existed, which was still hard to believe, then there was no way they could have taken 150 years for this. I hadn’t even been alive 150 years ago, much less wielding the Wish.
At the mention that time moved differently in here, however, my eyes went wide. Perhaps… perhaps I’d gotten lucky for once. If this dimension had some sort of time dilation, and 10 years passed for everyone on Tobes, that meant I could easily take entire days in here and still be on time for the negotiations.
A quiet part of me grumbled that it couldn’t be that easy, but I shut it up. It was plausible, and I desperately needed a win. Besides, what was the alternative? I’d just wasted 150 years in transit? No, if I knew one thing about teleportation, it was that it happened in an instant. It warped space, not time.
With my heart beating faster, I looked up at the city closing on us in the distance. It already looked huge from up above, but up close it seemed even larger. As the screen began to show the skyscrapers being built around the palace, they quietly rose into view behind it, in the real world. It was quite a beautiful picture, especially with the gilded dome of the Palace nestled in there.
With my mood significantly improved, I got back to the topic. “Sounds like you are doing well, then. So what’s the problem?”
Perhaps that had been the wrong thing to ask, because suddenly, Zephyro and even Kasha grew more somber.
“As much as I thought my own reservoirs of your divine energy as boundless as yours, Sultana, my hubris will cost my people dearly, and soon,” Zephyro said, quietly. “I now know there are limits to the amount of Blessing I have been given, but even so, I kept creating more and more of us. There was always more to be done, more tasks than there were eager minds to accomplish them. People wanted children, and who was I to deny them that wish? You see, I did not consider what would happen once I reached the limits of the Blessing available to me. And far worse, I thought ourselves safe, forgotten by the world.”
“I still believe it was my mistake not to equip a standing army…” Zephyro said, lost in the recording.
“It’s alright, Vizier,” Kasha said, rubbing his arm in a gesture of support. “It’s not like you could see the future, or what would happen with the first Alkashafa.”
“What did happen to her?” I asked.
“Ah, the first Alkashafa, may Allah hold her dear to His heart, was one of our proudest scouts and fiercest warriors, imbued with a great amount of your Blessing. She went to gather more steel, I believe, but she never came back. When she fell far from home, a large sum of the Blessing fell with her, and worse, her Talents were lost to us forever. In many ways, losing her was the beginning of the end.”
“The Ferals started coming soon after,” Kasha said, uncharacteristically subdued. “Perhaps they caught her scent or something, but they began to harry our scouts and gatherers. We just couldn’t defend everyone.”
On the screen, time passed quickly. The sun sunk lower, towards the endless horizon. Everything looked normal at first, but then I realized more and more people left the city, and that several of them did not return.
“So, why didn’t you have an army?” I asked, watching as the city’s growth stalled.
“The Alkashaf siblings had weapons, of course, Sultana,” Zephyro tried to explain. “We did not want to send them out into the unknown unarmed, but we never had a need for guards or the like, connected as we were under your Blessing. But that peace, combined with my frivolity—”
“Generosity,” Kasha interjected, grabbing Zephyro by the arm again and pulling herself close.
“Either way, it brought us to where we are today. For a while, we managed to hold the beasts off.”
The screen showed a wild animal approaching the city. It was some sort of insect, barely larger than a cat. A soldier, or perhaps a scout, defeated it with quick jabs of his spear and as it died, blue sparks spread from its body and people shied away from it, waiting until they vanished before removing the Feral’s corpse. Another animal approached and died. Then another. And another.
Eventually, bigger animals arrived. Monsters, really. A pack of small wolves made of cables, a sort of buzzard thing that hovered on wings of sick electricity, even something that looked like a pony on fire. These were harder to defeat, and the monsters killed a soldier here, a soldier there. It added up. Sparks rose from the corpses of the citizens as well, but instead of vanishing, the beasts drew the energy into themselves, growing larger, stronger, more obscene.
That explained both what Zephyro had explained earlier, and why people avoided the blue stuff, which I suspected was a visual representation of my Wish. While I still believed that maybe I could control it—it was my Wish after all—just one look at the horrible mutations that the monsters went through made me quite sure I wasn’t going to risk it unless there was no other way.
In Zephyro’s projection, some of the creatures fled after they had eaten their fill. Other times they were killed, but none of the Blessing ever got absorbed back into the city or its people. As time passed, the amount of scouts dwindled, and there just weren’t enough to kill all the monsters anymore.
People started to hide whenever they saw a Feral approaching.
Zephyro watched the recording with the intense scrutiny of a man hoping for a better past. I had seen it in drug addicts looking at their stash, in CEOs going over their acquisitions agreement, and in parents quietly caressing a picture of their estranged kid. All those people were the same, reliving the past over and over again, convinced that if they just thought about it hard enough, they would find that one thing they could have said or done that would make everything better.
In the end, I knew from painful experience; it was futile. There was no way to undo what was done.
I stepped in front of the Vizier, and the light from his glove projected onto my stomach.
“Alright, enough of that,” I said. “I appreciate finally understanding what you need me to do, but this was supposed to be an entertaining little story until we reach the city.”
“…and not a nadb, Vizier.” Kasha added with a slight frown. Then, turning to me, she explained “That’s a funeral song.”
“Thank you. Finally, someone who explains what they’re talking about instead of wrapping everything in symbolism,” I said.
“Indeed!” Kasha said, rolling her eyes. “It’s always ‘Allah this’ and ‘divine providence’ that with him, right?”
“Indeed,” I said, and we giggled, while Zephyro managed to look both stoic and sheepish.
Man, I really liked this woman.
“Besides,” Kasha went on, “the Vizier tends to not pay attention when things turn for the better. He managed to summon you in time, didn’t he? And now that you’re here, we have nothing to worry about.”
I just smiled in return, even though I felt a pang of guilt for keeping her in the dark. Still, if Zephyro didn’t tell her I’d lost my Wish, or that I needed to leave this place again as soon as possible, I wouldn’t, either.