Solitaire POV: Day 10

Current Wealth: 2 silver 11 copper

Current Debt: 6 gold 44 silver 20 copper

One day I was going to get tired of being right, and a few hours of hauling a fucking tonne of feral asshole behind me was almost enough to make it that day.

It wasn’t, of course, my ego is an eldritch thing, more than a match for any weight the universe could possibly assemble, but holy shit did my back hurt after that particular exercise. It hurt an hour into it, it hurt two hours into it, and by the halfway mark to Jighral- ten thousand or so seconds if my counting was right- it hurt even more.

There were, I was learning, many more factors to hauling a fucking troll carcass than I had been made aware of. The first was grip.

Skin is hard to grab, particularly when you’re sweating. The skin of an eleven foot death blender made out of hatred was, apparently, harder still. The hairs growing along its fingers and hands were too short to grip, and just long enough to reduce traction. The thing’s arm was big enough that it had mass on its own, and just holding it over my shoulder was physically tiring.

Finally, there was the smell.

God, the smell. I’ve cleaned public toilets out, I’ve even made explosives out of my own shit, and the sheer reek of that creature still wakes me up in a cold sweat even years later. Presumably the Witchfinders had meant “giant, gaping arsehole in the ground” when they said it’d been cornered in a cave, because Jesus Christ this thing was trying to kill me from the nostrils out.

It was a nice distraction from the pain at least. But an inherently temporary one. Humans adjust, it’s just how we’re wired. A lottery winner and recent amputee will, obviously, be on opposite ends of the happiness spectrum, but overwhelmingly converge to roughly within the norm when interviewed again after a year. And I was apparently no different, because with every step my senses became less acute, and my mind less clouded. Smell and touch both faded into the backdrop, and everything became the walk, and the destination.

And something else. Something so minor I barely even caught it, and almost combat-rolled away from the fucking troll in a reflexive panic even when I did.

Hydrogen, Oxygen.

“Fucking fuck!”

The exclamation left me before sense could enter me, and by the time my synapses had stopped disembowelling each other I could already feel the adrenaline rush I’d spent three hours walking off rearing its ugly head up all over again. Brilliant, now I’d be knifing shadows for the rest of the day.

I had more pressing concerns than something as minor as long-term, untreated psychosis, though, because the moment I relaxed even a shade, I saw the words jump out at me again.

No, not out at me, not into me either. Just…There, exactly like picturing sentences even as I said them. Abstract and non-physical, some sort of representative entity existing only within my understanding of the concept it referred to.

Hydrogen, Oxygen.

Well, that was fucking useful, wasn’t it? Two words, two words with an obvious connection, I considered what they might mean.

I was an idiot, obviously, to need to consider it at all. I was standing surrounded by snow. The ground was snow, the sky was snow, and even the air immediately next to me was clotted with more bits of snow. Frozen water. Hydrogen 2, Oxygen 1. Moron.

The more interesting detail, though, was that I was being shown the water’s chemical components at all. Why was that, exactly? I thought back to what Xangô had told me of my sheet, and drew the obvious conclusion.

“What’s wrong?” He asked, then scowled when I gestured for him to shut up. I’d apologise later, there was thinking to be done at the moment.

The first of it came as I eyed Xangô himself, staring, glaring even with my concentration. He was always quick, it was what I liked most about him. I saw that quickness in how immediately Xangô’s face lit up with understanding.

“What are you looking for?” He asked, eager.

Detect Element.

I’d not given the name of my own power much thought, we’d been told outright by the Veiled Lady that it, and Beam’s, wouldn’t come into play as quickly as Xangô’s had, and we’d always been faced with more pressing issues. But now I saw a hint that it might just be the latest tool on our belt.

Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Carbon, Calcium, Phosphorus.

I almost jumped again, despite being half-ready this time, but I just about kept my shit packed together while I watched the words jumping out into my consciousness. They were half in my head, half in my gut, and I knew each one more instantaneously and cleanly than I could ever have hoped to understand a written word at all. It was like having thoughts emptied into the broth of my mind. Horrifying, on a principal level, but plenty useful for now at least. I compartmentalised my worries and piped up.

“Detect Element.” I breathed, still half in awe. “It lets me…Well, it meant actual elements, as we understood them.”

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Xangô’s gaze was intense, and immediate.

“By we, you mean-”

“Our homeland.” I nodded.

It was Beam’s turn to stare now, but his own reaction gave way to excitement far more quickly than Xangô’s.

“So what can you do with this?”

By the tone of his voice, I knew he was expecting something spectacular. My only answer was a shrug.

“Find chemicals in trace amounts, maybe?” I answered, unsure even myself.

Xangô’s body had, according to my ability, been made up of around six elements. But that was wrong. I probably didn’t know everything that was found in a person, but I knew for a fact our bodies had traces of potassium, magnesium, even copper if I remembered right. None of that had showed up.

Which made sense, because if everything that was in everything got displayed for me, my vision would perpetually be filled with long, winding lists of several dozen substances lurking in the quantities of nanograms within whatever I happened to be staring at. There was probably more than zero lead or even uranium in either of my friends, but if I picked up on something that scarce there’d be no point in picking up on anything else.

So could I not get any idea of how much of something there was in a sample? What was the minimum threshold to detect an element? Would it tell me about distribution? I would have to experiment with this.

The worst thing about answers, was that nothing in all the world is half as good at creating questions. And I didn’t have the means of experimenting myself into resolving them. Not in this world, and certainly not in this shitting woodland.

I looked up, seeing that both my friends were practically vibrating with impatience now, and sighed. Their disappointment was palpable, even halfway through the explanation, but the energy of having discovered a new power didn’t quite evaporate completely. If nothing else the minute of rest was appreciated when we got back to hauling the fucking troll behind us.

Beam did most of the work, as always, but that didn’t mean there was any time for resting on my or Xangô’s part. Combined, the two trolls were just barely too heavy for any pair of us to budge, and just light enough that we could all manage together. Maybe if we had a better source of food the issue would be simpler. Maybe.

Jhigral made itself known by looming far ahead, and I had to actively stop myself from crying in relief. For two reasons. The first was that my mother didn’t raise a bitch, but the more pressing one was that it had gotten colder since we set off, darkening sky turning to a sharper climate. I didn’t want to find out whether my tears would freeze against my fucking face.

I must say, it was bloody satisfying to see the looks on people’s faces as we dragged our haul through the town’s outskirts. We’d just barely gotten it between a pair of buildings, eager for the windbreak to give us a nice resting spot, when Xangô nudged me and spoke in a carefully lowered voice.

“We need to talk.”

I knew what it would be about, instantly. Of course I did. The gravity of his tone didn’t leave much room for doubt, and I, having a working memory at least slightly in advance of your average chimpanzee, could still vividly recall how upset he’d been when I turned that guy’s brains into an improvised layer of shoe dye.

Steeling myself, I nodded.

“Go ahead.”

Xangô didn’t pretend to hesitate, didn’t try to make me think he hadn’t planned everything he was going to say already. I appreciated that. He was smart enough to know better than insulting me with obvious bullshit, and he was smart enough that this wouldn’t take long. Hopefully.

“You killed someone who couldn’t fight back.” He said. I eyed him, waited to see if there’d be more. There wasn’t, so I replied.

“He killed others first.”

“You don’t know that.” Xangô answered, hotly.

“He was blockading an antiseptic in a pre-industrial continent.” I replied, forcing myself to keep calm, cursing how much better he’d always been at doing so. “Even if he never personally killed a single person, he murdered god knows how many by denying them vital medicine.”

Xangô was uncomfortable with the train of thought, I could tell. He’d never liked where I drew ethical lines in the past, or how little I cared about the fine moral gradations between action and inaction, deliberation and indirection. To me, a killing was a killing. If the dead cared about how many layers of separation there were between them and their murderers, they were in no state to tell us.

It had always been a philosophical disagreement, but as of a few days ago it’d become practical. We weren’t going to be able to just keep sitting on this or agreeing to disagree.

“Then I disagree with you just deciding to be judge, jury and executioner.” He was done thinking it through, and his voice was confident again. I sighed.

“We needed the-”

“I know we needed the teeth.” Xangô snapped. “I’m saying that if we need more, we…Discuss it first, at least, right?”

That surprised me, and I eyed him. He was unyielding as he stared back, brown eyes hardened, not softened, by the doubt I saw in them. This wasn’t just a matter of principle to Xangô, I realised, it was about trust. He needed to know he could rely on me.

And that was…Fair enough. I nodded.

“Deal.” I agreed, turning, now, to Beam.

“You hear all that?”

He hadn’t been hiding the fact that he’d stared, watching the whole thing unfold. Beam’s own nod wasn’t nearly as hesitant as either of ours.

“Far as I’m concerned, our first priority is living. Anything after that is a luxury.”

Xangô blanched at the declaration, and I just filed it away. It was surprising to hear Beam be so brutally practical, and more than a little bit reassuring. We might just survive yet. Xangô was speaking again before I could suggest we move on though.

“That Witchfinder died because of us.” He said, abruptly. I studied him sidelong.

“He died because of an unfortunate accident.” Was all I could say. What else was there? We had no way of knowing he was in the area, no way of knowing that killing more trolls would somehow threaten him, and no choice of doing anything else even if we had. We needed experience, power, and money. Now we had it.

Something tugged at my gut, but I put the feeling to one side and forced my face into a shape of certainty.

“We can have the luxury of ethics when we’re wealthy enough to live.” I pressed. “Until then, it’s us or them.”

Xangô agreed on that much, at least, and he nodded.

The three of us moved back to hauling our load from the alley just in time to see the men crowd its far end ahead.