PART VII - CHESS AND CHAOS
“I shall tell them,” Xin said.
Before she could take two steps, though, Koda put his big paw on her shoulder. “No, Xin. She was his Healer. She needs to.” He looked down at the little Faun with comforting eyes.
“I do?” Ambria asked weakly, not wanting to deliver the news.
“You do,” Koda said simply. “Just the facts. His knee is repaired. There was a complication. We don’t know the extent yet and won’t for a while. Don’t embellish and don’t guess. You were his Healer until Tasi took over; this is your responsibility.” Gently, Koda pressed his paw against Ambria’s back, pushing her forward.
The Fae gulped, and then took a deep breath. The Bearkin was right. She could do this. She walked to the group of gathered recruits, noting that the Master Trainer, the Major and the Commandant had also stepped up to hear her report, along with another she recognized as the Ranger trainer.
“What happened? How is he?” Callie asked weakly, racing to the front of the crowd. Everyone must have come straight here. She was still covered in mud, as were all the other players here awaiting news.
“Kaisess suffered a badly dislocated knee, and the damage was quite extensive. We were able to repair it, but there was a complication.”
“A complication? What happened?” the Master Trainer asked sharply.
“With all the blood vessel damage, a blood clot went to his brain and he had a mild stroke. We alleviated it quickly, but we won’t know more for a few hours when he wakes up.”
“A stroke?” Callie said in a hushed whisper, remembering when her grandmother had had one in her final days. It was a terrifying word for her and her face echoed that horror. “How? He’s … He’s going to be okay, right? You can fix whatever damage it caused, right?”
“Master Healer Tasi feels any effects should be mild, but we just don’t know at this time.”
Callie put her hand to her mouth and staggered back, a stunned look on her face as she struggled to comprehend. It was just a Football game, or Bunkerball … Whateverball. It was supposed to be all in fun. Sure, a few people might get bumped around, but the Druids were flying patrol and other Healers were everywhere. Nobody was supposed to really get hurt. How could he have a stroke? How could all that come from … her play? Her … orders? Was this, in a way, her fault? Did she hurt her friend?
“Thank you for the update, Recruit,” the Commandant said curtly, interrupting the noisy swarm that had rushed the Faun, peppering her with questions. Addressing all present, Xera gestured at Ambria, “It appears there is little any of us can do now, so leave her be. All of you are dismissed. Go, get cleaned up and put on fresh uniforms. Relax this evening. You all have busy weeks starting tomorrow.”
“But …” Jesca began before trailing off. The sentence dying with little more than a look from Xera.
“Dismissed, recruit!” Xera once again said, not yet a direct order, but definitely a firm suggestion. They turned to Ambria. “You as well. Unless the Master Healer has need of you, go clean up and return to your own activities.”
Slowly, the crowd began to break up, Ambria following along, but retreating to the protection of Koda to avoid the unanswerable questions that still seemed to come at her. Xera was joined by Thorn, Celeste and Reynard as they watched the group go. Yet, in the tent sat Callie, unmoving, lost in her own head.
“What’s wrong with her?” Xera asked, gesturing towards the dirty Gnome. “What happened?”
“She stepped in as Marshal for the Recruit team,” Thorn said quietly.
“She did? You’re serious? And they actually listened to her?”
Thorn nodded his head.
“How did she do?” Xera asked, a curious tone now in their voice.
“Really well,” Celeste said. “They probably would have won if the game had continued. Shame about the injury. She’s taking it hard.”
Xera seemed to see Callie in a new light suddenly, and understood what she was feeling. They had noticed the look of horror on the little Gnome’s face when told of the Ranger’s complications. They noticed Callie stumbling backwards while the other players swarmed the Faun, peppering her with questions. Xera had seen that look before. Xera had worn that look before. This was Callie’s first command moment, even if it was a minor training one. It was the first time her decisions had caused an ally to become injured. Xera could feel it in Callie because they remembered the feeling when it had happened to them all those years ago, and what came next would decide so much of what came after.
The Major looked down at herself. “I’m a mess. Unless you need me, I’m going to clean up, too.”
“Go ahead, Major,” Xera said, dismissing Celeste while still carefully observing Callie.
“Thorn, fully brief the Commandant, if you would,” Reynard said quietly. He took a calming breath and sighed. “I’ll talk to her and then send her to get cleaned up, too.”
“Remember,” Thorn said, a warning in his voice, “Caring and empathy.”
Reynard’s only response was a low growl.
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Ranger Trainer Reynard ducked through the open doorway of the tent, Callie still sitting on the floor, her hand being held by the blue-haired Pixie that had been hidden from view behind her. “Recruits,” he said unemotionally, nodding to both.
Callie barely noticed him.
“How is she?” Reynard asked quietly.
“B-B-Beating herself up,” Pixyl responded, her eyes seeming slightly suspicious.
“I thought as much. Let me speak with her.”
Pixyl made no effort to move.
“Alone, Recruit,” Reynard added gruffly, before checking himself and adding a polite, “Please.”
Pixyl left Callie’s side, walking carefully in front of the Foxkin, a subtle glare in her eyes. She stopped though, and leapt into the air, hovering in his face, her wings humming. She glared even harder at Reynard, before jabbing a finger at him and hissing a quiet, “Be nice!”, before diving slightly and zipping out of the tent and into the sunlight.
Reynard chuffed a laugh at the crazy Pixie before he searched and found an unoccupied pillow. Thankfully, none of the mud-covered players had sat on it, so it was clean. With a slight groan, he sat, crossed his legs and looked across the tent at his young Ranger. “You have a very protective friend, Recruit. How are you doing?”
“I’m okay,” Callie mumbled.
“Are you?”
“Yeah. I’m just worried about Kaisess.”
“He’s under excellent care. Tasi is probably the best Healer I know. And from what I saw, your Faun friend did an admirable job rendering aid. More than admirable, in fact.”
Callie looked up from the ground and stared hard at the Foxkin. “But he had a stroke! From his knee getting hurt! How does that happen?”
“Well, blood clots …”
Callie narrowed her eyes and glared slightly, silencing Reynard’s response.
“Ah. Of course,” Reynard said with a polite cough.
They sat in silence for a while, Callie staring at the ground, still being introspective, and Reynard not wanting to push. Eventually, though, the silence got too thick and Reynard spoke. “You did a fine job as Field Marshal in the game earlier. That was quite the comeback in the fourth battle.”
“Field Marshal?”
“The … the one directing the team?”
“As the coach you mean? They just needed some organizing, that’s all,” Callie said, shrugging, not looking Reynard in the eye.
“Yes, but with your help they played magnificently in the fourth battle. I suspect you’d have pulled ahead in the fifth.”
Callie shrugged again. “Maybe. I had some ideas for the next one.”
Once again, the conversation seemed to peter out. This was proving a lot harder for Reynard than he expected. He gave it another minute, but finally had to ask … something. “Tell me, what are you thinking?” he asked. He immediately regretted it. It was a dumb question. He was about to try walking it back, but then Callie looked at him.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“You really want to know?” she asked with a sharp, almost angry, tone.
“I would,” Reynard said with a nod, surprised he even got a response.
“I feel awful, okay! I feel like it’s my fault. They were all following me; following my directions. It was my play that he got hurt on. Well, I stole it from the Major, but still. I told him what to do, and he had a stroke because of it. He got hurt because of me! He had a stroke … because of me!”
Callie was wrong, Reynard knew that, but he couldn’t simply say that or she’d just close down again. So, he did the only thing he could think of. “Callie, may I tell you a story?”
Callie shrugged, noncommittal. “I guess.”
Reynard cleared his throat. “Many years ago, when I was closer to your age, I was a professional Adventurer. We had a team. It was myself, my best friend, a Warrior Dwarf named Jorin who served as Guardian, and our Healer was my wife, Talania”
“You’re married?” Callie interrupted, her brain skipping a beat hearing that.
“It was long ago. That’s not important. Don’t interrupt.”
“Sorry.”
“We took a job. A local farmer had a giant centipede move into his barn where it started to nest, and he needed it removed. It had already eaten several of his Vone herd. Those that remained were soon to give birth and needed the barn’s shelter. So the three of us went to eradicate the beast.”
“They sound gross,” Callie said, making an exaggerated shuddering motion. “Spiders and bugs? No way! That many legs is creepy.”
Reynard huffed a laugh. “Well, they are at that. Anyways, we went and we had a plan. Jorin would draw the creature out, while Talania and I killed it from afar, with Talania healing if anyone were to get hurt, of course.”
“I take it things didn’t go well?” Callie said.
“Oh, things went very well. Jorin roused the centipede and led it out the door of the barn, just as planned. Talania hit it with a Wizard’s Arcane Bolt spell she’d learned on the side, and I dropped four arrows from Multishot into it. I was Bronze at the time. Headshot, and the creature fell, dead.”
“So what’s the point of the story?” Callie said, her voice irritated by the seemingly-pointless tale.
“It fell right on to Jorin,” Reynard said flatly. “Giant Centipedes stand about as tall as you are, maybe a little less, and are three times as long. Quite heavy with very large mouths and sharp mandibles.”
“Ouch!”
Reynard shook his head, a smirk on his face. “Even that wasn’t a problem. Jorin is a very stout Dwarf and found being stuck under the dead creature quite funny. It was quite funny, actually.“
Callie still wasn’t getting the point of this story. What was the lesson, besides don’t wind up underneath a giant centipede? She shrugged, not sure what else to do.
“A giant centipede carries a potent venom. It’s highly acidic, and will dissolve the target from the inside if it gets fangs into you. My arrows? The ones that killed it? One of them pierced the centipede's venom sac. Jorin, pinned under the thing and laughing about the situation suddenly started to scream. The dead centipede was dripping its acid onto his leg, which was eating its way through it. The acid burned through skin, meat, bone, all of it. By the time we wrestled the dead weight off, the leg had been severed, dissolved all the way through, right above Jorin’s knee.”
“That’s horrible,” was all Callie could come up with as she sat there, aghast. Tazrok the Giant Spider was one thing, because at least that was Tazrok. But giant acid-injecting centipedes as big as she was? Nope! Nuke that entire barn, Vone and all! “What happened next?”
Reynard shrugged. “Talania rendered aid, we got paid for removing the centipede, and we had to sell everything the three of us owned in order to get a treatment of Regrowth spells put on Jorin’s leg, along with the rehabilitation he needed. This included selling the enchanted bow my father had given me when I received my Ranger class. You can imagine how hard it was to part with it. The shop at least gave me a decent price.” Reynard sighed nostalgically, before adding, “Cavin’s Bows and Fletching is the name of the shop, if you should ever find yourself in the Capital. Highly recommended.”
Part of her curious about what she might find in an Archery shop here, Callie made a mental note of the name.
“On top of all that, because it was acid damage,” the Foxkin continued, “Jorin actually had to have his leg amputated even higher up to have a clean wound to regrow from. It was almost three months before his leg was back and he’d learned to use it well enough that we could return to our adventuring lives.” The Foxkin sighed wistfully and then laughed. “Those were the days.”
Callie smiled, but largely only because Reynard had. Soon her smile faded, though. She still couldn’t figure out what the moral of this story was. If you’re an Adventurer, have worker’s comp insurance, maybe? What did any of this have to do with Bunkerball or Kaisess getting hurt?
Reynar saw Callie’s expression. “You don’t see my point, do you?”
Hesitantly, Callie shook her head. “I don’t, I’m sorry. It’s a great story, though! Really.”
Reynard sighed, tinged with a bit of a frustrated growl. “My point is that we went into that engagement with a simple and fairly foolproof plan. Draw it out, kill it from afar. Nice and easy. Even if something had gone wrong, we had backup plans on what spells to cast or how Jorin could engage it. We thought of everything. Everything that is, except the arrow piercing the venom sac and the corpse landing on our friend. Who would have thought that might happen?”
“Huh. I suppose. Pretty long odds, right?”
“Exactly. You can make all the plans you want. You can have dozens of backups and contingencies. But it’s just as likely that something you couldn’t imagine happens, too.”
“Chess and Chaos,” Callie said quietly.
Reynard tilted his head, confused.
“Just a way I heard footb… I mean Bunkerball described. Anything can happen after the ball is snapped, even if your planned moves are perfect.”
Reynard nodded, pointing at Callie in emphasis. “Exactly! Anything can happen. And just as this is true in the game, it is also true in combat.”
“‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’,” Callie quoted from somewhere in the back of her head. She’d heard it said in a history class maybe? Or a movie? Or her grandfather? Somewhere.
“A wonderful way to put it,” Reynard said, pointing at Callie again. “This is why we all train together. This way, when that unexpected thing happens, you are prepared to at least fall back on your training. You will also know what your fellow soldiers will do when they fall back as well, and they know what you will do. Without that, no army would ever succeed.”
Logically, Callie could see that what Reynard was saying made perfect sense, both as it related to war and as it related to Whateverball. When she looked at it that way, it was just bad luck that Kaisess got hurt, worse luck that he had a stroke. Still, Callie felt bad. She was their coach. Or Marshal. Whatever. Didn’t some of the blame fall on her because of that? She felt like it should. She looked at Reynard. “How do you deal with feeling guilty? I still feel like I somehow contributed to what happened.”
Reynard shrugged. “There’s no perfect answer to that question. Talking it out with lovers or friends or colleagues or professional Listeners all can help when plagued by guilt. Sometimes all you just need is time. And yet still, sometimes things may haunt you forever. What happened to Jorin haunts me, even now years later, and even though he eventually had his leg regrown and fully recovered. It’s hard to hear a friend in pain, despite the fact we can laugh about it now.” Reynard tapped his head. “In here, though, I know that unexpected things just happen. I know what happened to Jorin, or what happened to Kaisess, are just a hundred fates coming together and meeting in a moment.”
“Shit happens, you’re saying,” Callie said with a wry half-smile.
“Your words are so very strange sometimes,” Reynard said, tilting his head, but smiling in return. “But yes. Plan for the best, be prepared for the worst, and ultimately know that … ‘shit happens’.”
Callie nodded, rolling Reynard’s words over in her head. She felt better, she had to admit. Not all the way better, but some … maybe even mostly. Or, maybe she really just needed to hear it wasn’t all her fault from someone outside her friend group. She liked this Reynard. His words were maybe a little patronizing, but they weren’t actually wrong, and he seemed sincere.
“Thank you,” Callie said after a quiet moment. “Really. This helped.”
“Take some time to think it through. If you still need to talk with someone, find me, and I’ll open a bottle of something. If you rather not me, I can find someone else you could talk to as well. Callie, you aren’t the first to feel this way, and you certainly won’t be the last. We can help you through it.”
“Thanks,” Callie replied quietly.
Reynard gestured towards the doorway with his chin. “You should go clean up and relax for the remainder of the day.”
“Okay,” Callie said quietly.
They both stood and Callie started for the tent door. Then she stopped. “Sir, can I ask you a personal question?”
Reynard raised one eyebrow. “Perhaps…”
“You’ve never mentioned your wife...” she began, letting the unasked question hang in the air.
The Foxkin frowned, his eyes growing sad for a moment, “She’s … passed. Twenty-one years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Callie quickly said, trying to apologize. “I didn’t know!”
“You’re fine,” Reynard said quietly, holding up a paw. “Life … continues on.” He coughed politely, shaking himself out of his thoughts. Gesturing with his paw, he tried to shoo Callie away. “Just as Training must continue on. Go! Clean yourself up. Enjoy your evening. Big things this week, including practice with all your new skills. Plus, your new bow arrives.”
Callie looked at Reynard. She could see the fake smile he had just put on, and hear the words he was using to cover up the moment of grief she had exposed. “I’m … I’m going to hug you now,” Callie finally said just before she rushed her trainer.
Reynard barely had time to prepare as the little Gnome slammed into his legs, hugging them tight. He didn’t know what to do, so he did the only thing he could think of and awkwardly patted Callie’s head a few times. They stood like that, weirdly showing affection for far too long, before Callie finally let go. She looked up at Reynard, smiled and simply said, “Have a good night, sir.”
“You Gnomes and your hugging,” Reynard laughed as he shook his head slowly. “You have a good evening as well, Recruit.”
And then she was gone, almost with a spring in her step it seemed, leaving Reynard alone in the tent. Alone with his thoughts and his memories of years long gone. He couldn't show it, but he was quite worried about Kaisess, and had a feeling his student would have to go elsewhere for better healing. There were no ritualists here in camp, after all. He’d need to talk to Tasi.
Before he could walk out himself, the doorway darkened. Master Trainer Thorn and the Commandant stepped through.
“I must say, Reynard,” Xera began, “that was brilliantly done.”
“Uh, thanks,” Reynard responded, his mind still a little muddled with his thoughts.
“I wasn’t sure you had it in you,” Thorn said, grabbing Reynard’s shoulder affectionately.
“You were right,” Reynard said with a sigh. “Caring and empathy was what she needed. But that was damn hard for me, and you’re an ass for making me do it that way.” Reynard wasn’t mad, though. He smiled and squeezed Thorn’s shoulder in return.
“Far more effective than if you had been direct.”
“It was. But now, I need a drink. Or maybe a bottle.”
Xera chuckled. “I have a bottle of wine from Imor proper I’ve been itching to open. After dealing with this recruit, I’m sure it would be welcome.”
“Sounds perfect,” Reynard said. He smiled, but there was still a tiny hint of sadness in that smile. Memories had come up. Memories of good times and bad times and lost times. It would take a bit, but in time he’d find the places where all those memories needed to be stored again.