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9
I Will See You In Your Next Life
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WHEN GENERAL VIKTOR returned home from the Gaian Expedition, he wasn’t rewarded with a medal. He already knew that something wasn’t right about how black the afternoon was that day. He was twenty-five and his hand was gone, Erin was holding the other. Port Quezon was burning in front of their eyes.
In a distance, the sea swallowed the sands as the sky swallowed the sun. The fire burns and burns making ashes out of wood, stones into smoke, bodies into corpses. Viktor watched everything he had built fall into rubble and ruin, reduced to heat and scorch.
For a moment, everything was silent.
Like a peaceful campfire beside a beach.
Erin, holding his hand. His hand, a phantom.
Already he forgot what she looked like. He couldn’t remember. She said sorry, and he couldn’t remember what he said. Only the sad, final voice of her offering warmth. Was her voice sweet? Was it sultry? Did her fingers tighten around his?
Did he tremble she when hugged him from behind? Sometimes her arms were light and lithe around his chest, her palms warm against his heart. Sometimes she rests her head on the back of his shoulder, sometimes she holds him softly, carefully, as if a single touch would break him.
Viktor looked at her face and he couldn’t remember it. Her features melted like liquid, falling into the hot sands of the burning Port Quezon, the wildfires eating through the black night and once again he was a goblin.
He looked at his hands and they were green, and the ash-colored trees stood tall around him like lanky pillars trying to stab the heavens.
“I am tired,” he murmured. Something was not right about what he was doing yet he was still doing it. Every day he retreats into these secluded parts, hiding from everyone, hating himself. He had done his time in The Land Beyond the Walls, he had done his time ruling, and he had done his time remembering.
You grow old enough and you’d find yourself doing nothing but trying to remember. Now he was having a worse time doing it than when he was human.
He could feel himself dissipating, slipping. Parts of his life were fading into black inside his head. He remembered being King but couldn’t remember being a child. Couldn’t remember his mother, or father, nothing but the soil where his new flesh was born.
What did Erin even look like? What did I even look like?
He grabbed the chisel from his belt and started carving. Eyes. Nose. Ears. Hair. Now the jaw, was it square? Was it sharp? He stabbed the carved head in the nose and threw it into the ground. He couldn’t even remember his face.
“It’s not right,” he whispered to the dozens of human sculptures in front of him, carved in wood, each as tall as their original height. They all stared at him blankly, with their dead eyes and unmoving mouth.
Each time he remembers someone, he’d take a walk into the woods and carve them into shape. If there was no one to remember, he’d sculpt what he remembers of his face, or of Erin. Or anything.
The newest one was the orc monk, and it was the only one who wasn’t looking at him. Its eyes were closed and peaceful, almost as if it was resting.
There was Friedrich, his right-hand man who became his enemy, one of the Five Kings. It was too late for Viktor to realize that his friend was right. It was the mass who should have the power, not kings.
There was Harris, the goblin tamer, poor bastard. The man came home as a Marcher and was sentenced to death for allying with beasts. Looking back, even Harris was right too.
There was Jason, the man before his death who asked him not to drink the poison. Maybe he was right. Maybe if Viktor was alive, he could’ve seen through their plans for a Republic. Erin would have—the image of her in armor flashed inside Viktor’s head, and he still couldn’t remember her face. Just a zoomed-in vision the sweat on her cheek. And her last words, whose sound Viktor could not hear anymore.
I will see you in your next life, she said, and Viktor imagined it written in text. Like the last line of a chronicler writing a romance novel that ended in tragedy. Viktor stabbed the newer face he carved and again threw it into the ground.
Look at him now, the little goblin, working with the wood. A table made of a stump in front of him, carefully, sinking the chisel into the material, one hammer on the other end, dozens of sculptures stood in front of him like judges in a theater.
The wind blows the leaves with it, as the goblin’s blade nibbled onto the wood for a face he would recognize, but couldn’t find it. Hundreds of malformed heads littered on the ground in circles within circles, all of them staring at the sky and the soil and the barks and the goblin.
Nothing dared to bother him, not even the birds nor the worms.
Not even The Five Kings and their wooden stares could scrutinize him, not the thirty versions of himself that he couldn’t even realize was his face. He stopped carving himself a long time ago. He stopped remembering.
“I’m tired,” he said to no one in particular, every day, for an entire year, while his army of fools had grinded their bones for a semblance of strength.
Viktor wasted away.
Port Quezon burned in front of his eyes as he carved Erin’s face. Her hand holding his hand, he hammered and chiseled. The wind blew against his goblin back and he could smell the sea in his hometown. He just wanted to remember.
He just wanted to see them again.
He just wanted to see her again.
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THE FIRST TIME CANYON SAW the woods with a hundred wooden faces, he had only known Viktor for four months. The new boss always disappeared in the afternoon, everyone just assumed he was either working out or chopping for logs.
There had been rumors that Viktor was practicing some secret technique, or doing witcraft. Nobody knew and nobody dared to ask; the young lad had always seemed elusive to them, secretive, mysterious and foreboding. Like being allies with lightning—you never really knew when or how it will strike—only that it will—only it will be strong.
Canyon himself had a lot of ideas as to what secret the goblin had been hiding, but when he followed him once into that thin part of the forest where no one went, he never expect the sculptures.
There were at least twenty of them, humans, and half of them were of the same man carved in different ages. The soil was buried beneath heaps of shaved wood, and pile after pile of wooden heads and hands that were either half-finished or destroyed in half.
“What is this?” Canyon said, even when he was supposed to be hiding. He left his armor to avoid the clanking sound, but he couldn’t stop himself.
The goblin didn’t even answer him. Viktor was staring intently at his work, hands focused on a singular task, even the bear on his cloak seemed like it was concentrating.
Canyon watched Viktor’s curly hair, made of little green stems that curled and twisted into shape, it was growing longer and longer too quickly. As if it was alive, crawling into his head and out, and then, they rot and die just as fast, starting the process all over again.
The wind was dead and vultures circled above him.
Canyon felt like he intruded into something he shouldn’t have seen, so he left.
Sometimes he came back and Viktor would notice him, but paid him no mind. Sometimes he just stayed and watch as the sculptures added in number, and soil claimed the dead wood.
“How far is Amanila?” Viktor asked him one time, stopping all at once from what he was doing. His voice wasn’t the usual deep voice, wasn’t in its usual sternness. It sounded like an old man whose lungs gave up on him.
“I’m not really sure, lad,” Canyon answered honestly. He watched Viktor walk into one of the tree stumps, and wrote something on it using a hammer and chisel. The goblin didn’t look like he was waiting for an answer. “Sometimes it takes two years, sometimes five. It is never without deat—”
Stolen story; please report.
“It will take at least two to three years to make a proper army out of these goblins,” Viktor muttered, talking to himself. His voice was low, trembling. “I can speed that up to one. And then we can march, but we might run out of supplies.”
The goblin didn’t talk to him for the rest of the night. The next morning, he was his usual self beating up the army, and when the afternoon comes he returned into these woods, doing nothing but carve.
Canyon looked at the sculptures looking at him. They seemed so lifelike and real that he never felt safe without his armor around them.
“Who are these people?”
“Friends,” Viktor said, writing on a stump. “Enemies? Me? I don’t know. Could be anyone.”
In one of the tree stumps, Canyon saw that Viktor had carved a map. On one edge was a large city beside the sea, its walls made it look like a maze. Outside of it was a layout of nearby lands, some desserts, trees with a drawing of fish on it, a mountain. Then there was a part of the land with a lot of… hands?
“Is this a map?”
“Of Amanila,” Viktor paused. “And some explored territory.”
“You made this?”
“Me? No no no, most of that are from the Marchers.”
There were times when Canyon stopped coming. Nothing Viktor said made sense to him. Nothing Viktor was doing made sense to him. Right now the goblin was drawing two things at once—a list of things in letters Canyon only partly recognized, and then a flowchart of some sort? Canyon was sure he’d seen flowcharts in Pureza before, but that was something used by those in trade. Viktor’s flowchart was messy, scribbly, filled with boxes and circles that were carved too deep or too dense, connected by lines that zigzagged or arcs that were sometimes crossed out.
“This is not gonna work. Do you think we can tame orcs?”
“Tame orcs?”
Viktor stabbed the tree stump, paused, then chiseled away his entire drawing on it. “Yeah, I think Harris did it.”
“Harris?”
“That guy,” Viktor pointed at one of the statues, his other hand detailing another plan. “Too sad he’s dead. I should’ve asked him about it.”
“How did you know him?”
“I don’t,” Viktor said. “I’m just the guy who cut his head.”
“When?”
“When I was king. I’m supposed to do it. I can’t let other people live by the guilt of my laws. I was a king. I pass the death sentence, I—”
“I’m sorry lad, are you going mad?” Canyon finally asked, pulling Viktor by the shoulders, his eyes focused on his. Ten months he’d been watching him doing it. Going in circles writing plans and then ruining them. Carving characters. Throwing things. Staring at the clouds or the soil. Making maps of some unknown place saying unknown names and unusual habits. And then come the next day, he was as normal as the day he was born.
“I think so,” Viktor almost stuttered. “I’m tired.”
Canyon didn’t question it. If this was any other boss of his he would have packed his bags and left. But Viktor never showed weakness to anyone, not a hint nor whiff of it outside this dreaded place.
So he let him do his thing. Nothing really changed beyond that place, Viktor spoke and acted like a proper boss.
Even as he went with Dos to attack the orcs, on the same night that Canyon and Scaramouche ransacked the human keep. And now, with his broken hand, was the same hammer, the same wood, the same chisel, the same rhythmic clank clank clank that buried the metal to frame a form.
But Scaramouche’s words spoke to him, so he went to Viktor and asked, “why do you want to go to Amanila?”
Viktor looked at him with a pair of tired, tired, eyes like someone who hadn’t had a wink of sleep. “I want to see Erin.”
“Erin?”
“Erin the Endless.”
“What?” Canyon wanted to punch Viktor in the face. “You’re going to lead us, all the way there, to see someone’s corpse?”
“Corpse?”
“She’s dead.” Canyon said. “She died, three hundred years ago. Your biomancer’s even reading her book.”
“Book?”
“He brought it earlier, didn’t you see?”
“See?”
Canyon punched Viktor in the face. “Are you sleepwalking, dimwit?”
“I don’t know,” the goblin responded, walking back to the stump, grabbing the hammer and chisel and another log. “I cannot process what you said.”
“Erin the Endless is dead,” Canyon said, putting a great weight on the last word. “What are you doing, Viktor? Who are you? Who are all these people? Why are you looking for that human? Where did you know the things you know? What is—”
Canyon stopped when he noticed how the goblin stopped. Every muscle on Viktor’s body went completely still, as if time itself had paused and now even the blood on his arms wouldn’t move inside his veins.
Viktor’s eyes stared dead at the log.
“Are you… are you okay?” Canyon wanted to touch him, but he was afraid that if he did Viktor would break.
“I will see you in your next life…” Viktor whispered. “I will see you in your next life...”
“Viktor?”
The goblin looked at him. “Canyon,” and Viktor’s deep, stern voice had returned into to his body. “Shoot me on the head.”
“What?”
He watched Viktor go into his knapsack and grabbed a bow. “Erin is an Inquisitor. Her power is luck. She said she will see me in my next life, and I am living in that next life.”
“Keep talking like a dimwit and I will actually shoot you.”
“I’m a king,” Viktor deadpanned. “A human king. Then I died and I became a goblin.”
“That doesn’t make—” Canyon’s brain juggled multi-threaded thoughts in a matter of milliseconds. There was Viktor’s pose, his knowledge, the way he moved like he wasn’t used to his body, how he knew how to completely move around Canyon’s Amanilan technique. How he spoke, how he cursed in Semos’ name, how he doesn’t call himself a goblin, and how he looked at most goblins with condescending disgust. He remembered that Amanilans weren’t as progressive as the people from Sunspine, and they thought humans were the superior race, so Viktor’s disgust made sense. Canyon recalled his debate with Scaramouche, and then it clicked. “—well call me a piss-drinker because that makes a lot of sense.”
“You absorbed that too fast.”
“How the hell are you in a goblin’s body then?”
“I don’t know, but I think it’s related to Erin.”
Canyon knew about Erin the Endless. The woman was a legend even in the Sunspine City, even the Biomancers has enough respect to curse and swear rusing her name. He didn’t know what she did, only that she was powerful and famous. “So why am I gonna shoot you in the face?”
“Because of luck,” Viktor said as if it made sense. “Erin’s witchcraft involves luck. Things happen to her the way she wants to.”
“And?”
“And the first day I became alive I managed to kill a sanguine beasts. When I needed supplies, on the fourth day I met Fog-eyes the biomancer, who happened to need a sanguine beast,” Viktor continued. The orc was back in their base now, Viktor had called him to tend to the wounded goblins. “And when I needed an army, on the fifth day…”
“You met me.”
“Yes.”
“So we’re pawns to her scheme, is that it?”
“No,” Viktor said. “Luck and misfortune go hand in hand, it is up to you which one you’ll claim. I would’ve died to that beast if I was any less smart about what I was doing.”
“And I would’ve made you a slave if you were as brittle as Dos.”
“And I need you to shoot me in the face to test it out,” Viktor handed him an arrow. “If I died, then my theory is wrong and she’s actually dead. But if I don’t, well, if she says we’re going to meet in this life, then we’re going to meet in this life.”
“We should leave this to Dos,” Canyon said. If Viktor died, Canyon would inherit his army, and there were a lot of good things Canyon could do with the army. If Viktor lived, then he was sure to have one hell of a life ahead of him. Nothing about it seemed disadvantageous to Canyon. Viktor dying would be concerning, of course, maybe even sad if Canyon was being honest with himself, but they’d get over it. “If I don’t hit you, we can attribute it to my lack of skill with the bow. But if Dos didn’t hit you…”
Viktor smiled. “Then we are golden.”
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Witchcraft
[Entry from The Archives of The Inquisition, Erin the Endless, courtesy of the Empire of Amanila]
The application of witchcraft is not as vague as it seems to be. Although, one should keep in mind The Seven Laws, for this is important. To be able to perform magick, one should simply hold a "conscious intention" of the thing desired. Say for this example, one wished for an apple to appear on the hand:
- First, hold out your hand and imagine an apple on it.
- Second, focus on its realness, as if the apple in your hand is already there, as an existing fact, as true thing.
- Third, is to think, speak, and act as if you already have it. The apple is here in your hand, as red and as sweet as it is.
- Fourth, take an inspired action as the way and means to make it a tangible reality and show up. Some Inquisitors says specific words like “Abra Kadabra, there is an apple in my hand” some simply snap their fingers, and some have ways that are more hidden and discrete.
- Fifth, Detach and allow the perfection and simplicity of the process to provide the "desired outcome.”
In retrospect, everyone human has the capability to be a witch; but less one destroys itself, only those in the Inquisition are allowed to practice magick, for all magick requires a sacrifice. Most Inquisitors use vows, sacrificing parts of their lives in exchange. However, bigger and larger magick needed precise rituals and many specific offerings. And when there is none, then it is the witch's body that suffers.
Maybe an apple will appear in your hand. Watch the skin on your arm rise up and crawl into your palm, watch the flesh on your hand form into the red shape of the apple.
And there, you will have an apple, as red and as sweet as you imagined it to be, but you won’t have a hand.
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