Chapter 25:

The Wages of Survival

The landscape was a barren wasteland over the stretch of hours he walked, Azrom gradually heating up the world and Deros inevitably shedding his coat to adjust. He kept an eye out for the right sort of rocks for his sling, and picked up a few along the way, sticking them in a spare leather pouch that had once housed food. His habit of keeping everything he could hide away on his person had served him well once again.

As he trudged across the dead plain, he worked up the gall to try the farsense. He knew with absolute certainty that he could not do it while also conducting in his shunting trick, that by its nature it interfered with the usage of the lenseye. Lenseye. How quickly he’d come to think of it as that, how quickly he discarded the concept of daug’makar. But he couldn’t allow himself to do that. He needed that concept, whether it was still the truth or not.

I suppose I always knew it wasn’t. Hidden spiritual world... we’re just making it all up. A framework to make sense of things beyond our understanding. The Cajhorans have to be closer to the actual truth, by the evidence of their superiority.

He released the hold he’d taken, which was turning and diverting the oozing chaos energy, letting it free with some reluctance. Then he conceptualized in the old way, daug’makar, and the idea of ‘reaching out,’ touching with the flows of makar. Something immediately happened, a queer feeling of some resemblance to the jolt he knew, and the ensuing adrenaline rush and heightened awareness. But it was also like pulling out a knife too fast and fumbling it, juggling it, the conscious mind losing track and getting shocked with the alarm of lost control.

He stopped dead in his tracks. In one instant faster than reaction, he’d flared out makar in a swirling spherical vortex what had to be a kilometer in radius. The lenseye had contorted in some way to do it, along with the membrane around it, working together to focus through the thinnest of layers to create the feel of a viper poised to strike, a water serpent lurking just under the surface, nose touching but not yet breaking the surface. The information returned was a great, useless, confusing mass to him, with nothing of intensity to focus on.

I have to focus it… like makar’osa. I focus on an area and intensify it into greater reality. A chosen, discreet effect. But… what? His heart was thrumming in his chest as he considered what would happen if he just tried something. But anything he did would be passing through him — that much he understood. All things flowed from and back to the ‘hidden world,’ as he was taught. From and back to the lenseye. And he had no idea what the price exacted would be. He could turn himself into a drooling idiot from brain damage. He could blow his head clean off. What he was looking at was the bottom of a ravine from a high bridge. Sure, he could jump…

Let’s not. Swallowing hard, Deros slowly and carefully scaled the farsense back into a smaller radius. A hundred meters. It didn’t change much. He still felt that imminent unleashing, still feared it, but it felt more accessible. The landscape was more in focus… he felt the relatively flat shape, felt the wind flowing, felt a large rock sixty meters to his left, felt some dead roots almost under his feet, a few meters away.

He couldn’t help but laugh. It was so easy. It was like breathing, like stretching his arms out. The effort was minuscule for something that would’ve made him pass out to try before. A hundred-meter radius of the farsense, with less effort than he’d felt from three meters, before. Even the kilometer was next to nothing, however difficult to utilize.

But a dread soon settled over him. He wasn’t sure he could even risk attempting the makar’osa he knew before. It just didn’t feel the same without the constriction of the knot. It was like he’d grown needles into dull spears. Spears covered in barbs — ones to bleed the user as much as the target.

And I have to reach out, still. As if that is safer to try. Steeling himself, he cast his eyes in the direction of his destination, his target. The beacon. Somehow, he had to reach toward it.

Incrementally, Deros expanded the farsense, understanding the distances by referencing the increments more than feeling the exact points. Pushing the radius out and out, he felt it to have a working maximum of three kilometers, and entirely useless, smudged noise unless some garish thing was within it. He then abandoned the instinctual sphere spooling out and concentrated the farsense into more of an extended oval. It tended to warp the information, creating its own innate vibrational noise returning to him… but he could extend it perhaps ten kilometers in a thick rounded cylinder of sorts, a kilometer wide at the middle. All of it near useless in sensory information.

Damn it. Not far enough. Or the artifact needs to be operating. And I have no way of knowing. What else can I do? Try to push like I did while I was having a near-death experience, maybe blow myself into the void?

With some frustration, Deros loosened up the effect, temporarily giving up. He would have to give it time. Check it frequently, put out his ‘feelers’ every little segment of the journey. Perhaps fifteen minutes. If he covered that over a day or two, he’d either sense something or determine he couldn’t. The rest of the time, he could keep the chaos contained and diverted, hopefully training his brain to do it subconsciously.

The day wore on without signs, however. Any signs at all — water sources, food, or much of anything useful. Not even a good stick. Plenty of rocks as consolation. And certainly, there was no trace of the beacon on the horizon to his extended senses. Only his memory led him, and over time he wondered if he could even trust it.

Starving, he broke down and ate another couple of pieces of the meat, deciding it might be his last for a while, depending on conditions. Travel was more important than avoiding that particular suffering. Water was a different story. He drank a bit too little over the day, subconsciously trying to ration it though he knew better, and felt the signs of minor dehydration. Dry mouth, light-headedness. Dark urine. All dangerous. He drank a little more. But the waterskin was not the largest and the needs of the scorching desert day were large indeed… he’d have to find water again soon, as he’d be draining it the next day.

The priority was becoming more pronounced, so as Azrom was already descending, he began veering northeast or southeast, if there was even the slightest hint of some feature to the plain. The first thing he chanced upon was a small cluster of blue seedberry bushes in a rockier portion of land. The little berries were mostly picked clean by some kind of animal visitation, probably birds. But he picked off the few remainders then continued on his way, popping them in his mouth one by one. Sour and not particularly appetizing, with a dozen little hard seeds inside, but they held precious moisture. Sadly, there was no indication of water, but the bushes were deep rooters, so it was hardly a surprise.

Past Azrom’s setting, he continued searching, weary but looking for either water or a decent spot for sheltering overnight, despite the continual denial. In the twilight, he became aware of a slight scent. Something dead. After some further southeast travel, he started into terrain with heavy clay content, the topsoil dry and cracked. Sniffing the air continuously, he eventually went entirely south and came to a dip in the terrain. At the bottom was the gleam of water.

At his approach, a few birds launched off into the air, high and not stopping. The carcass of a small, hornless froul lay near the shore of the watering hole, nothing much more than picked-clean bones and bits of dried hide, but still enough to stink. Gobasa bugs crawled over it, and would likely be even thicker underneath.

The clay had well-preserved tracks headed westward, indicating a group. Probably a wild herd. There weren’t any other sort of tracks. It wasn’t a Hamaleen-frequented watering hole, which was unsurprising for the barren location.

Glancing at the area around the water, he didn’t see holes, but he strongly suspected it was a dartlurk kill. Uninterested in prey for a while with a fat belly, it would have covered its hole temporarily, as other scavengers and carcass-eaters had no doubt come along. Nonetheless, Deros went around to the other side of the pond and kept his farsense out to sense for movement, dodging around a few gobasa mounds and tough weeds.

The pond was nothing terribly impressive, but big enough that one couldn’t jump over it. No muck or slime covered it, which was good. It held some minimal insect activity, most of which simply scattered at his approach. It was clearly a natural feature, so it couldn’t be one of the wells Semõìn had mentioned… it was unlikely to contain enough water for an army, anyway. And he saw none of their tracks.

Deros soaked a cloth to take a squeezed sip first, and once he was certain the water was fine, began working on his existing waterskin, drinking his fill with relief, then drinking well past it. He filled the waterskin up after, though he would be able to revisit it in the morning. There wasn’t much point in going far from it.

He picked out a spot not immediate to the water, to hopefully avoid any visiting animals. Digging into the clay-heavy soil was more of an effort, but he at least tried to make a slight lip facing the wind, and diced up the earth as much as possible to make the soil looser and somewhat more heat-retaining. Ultimately he judged he was going to be colder than the night before, but it would be tolerable. Thinking about it, he opted to remove his sweat-soaked tunic and put it down to lie on. He could dry it and utilize it for more heat at the same time, he figured.

Settling down and bundling up as much as possible in the coat and scarves, he wrapped himself in the cloak and tried to rest, continually maintaining his ‘chaos drain’ and hoping his subconscious would keep it going while resting.

It wasn’t long before his exhaustion carried him right into sleep for some hours. He awoke in the dead of night feeling the bite of the cold, movement allowing a spike of the wind to hit him and cause a shiver. Then his skin prickled in alarm: the ‘drain’ was not operating in his head and the oozing-like leak continued, consequences unknown. But he had a throbbing headache and he felt queasy. Tiredness battled with anxiety in a bundle of frustration as he tried again. To shunt it away. Get rid of it, stop it. Please. No nightmares.

He awoke again in the cold, his dreams blessedly indefinite and mild. The bleeding out in his head had to be consciously stopped yet again. He could sense the resonance of the effect around him once more, though it was of significantly less intensity than the night before. A headache persisted, as did a feeling of sickness.

Standing up, he glanced at Keramus to see it still descending, the brighter center setting on the horizon. Four or five hours until Azrom’s rise. Deros decided to get the ‘day’ going. It was past time for him to begin traveling in the cold, as his keen vision would be adequate along the generally flat terrain, even in the dark. He retrieved his dried tunic and dusted the soil off of it thoroughly before re-donning it and bundling the rest over.

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Drinking as much water as he could again, he walked back to the pond. The gobasa mounds were too easy to pass up, so he found a decent stick among the dead vegetation about and proceeded to kick apart a mound — the furthest from the corpse he could find. The gobasa swarmed out of their hive, including their larger warriors. Deros used the stick to let them climb, then squished them between his fingers one by one before licking off the remains. The warriors were hardly appetizing but quite valuable for nutrition.

After eating as many as he could stand he decided to collect more from another mound, instead funneling them en masse into a pouch and squishing them inside. It sufficed to expedite the process somewhat, though he took some annoying bites for his trouble. One small mash of insects later, he finally ceased his slaughter and headed for the pond.

The top surface had frozen over, but it was no particular trouble breaking it with his tool to get to the water. He drank a bit more water, sat and waited, drank a bit more, then finally topped off his waterskin to make ready for travel.

He also took his ‘drinking scarf’ and stuffed it in his sturdiest pouch, then stuck ice over the top. Inevitably it would leak, but not immediately. Every little bit helped. If he had more time, perhaps he could’ve tried making some sort of receptacle out of the better clay deposits around, but he wasn’t certain his skills were up to the task and it would take time to even attempt. Time and energy better spent moving.

From the pond, he started off east again, chasing the beacon with Keramus naught but cloudy feathers of light angling south and west, running from the inevitable rise of Azrom that would quickly cause it to disappear. Deros soon extended his farsense out again, to check for that operation he hoped for and feared. Still nothing.

A brisk pace warmed him up a bit, and some of the sick feelings abated, but the headache did not. It persisted as a throbbing cadence to his steps that he tried to ignore. He ‘practiced’ the draining technique, trying to figure a way to make it persist when not thinking about it. The trick eluded him.

Light and heat arrived with Azrom and progressively warmed him in his nigh featureless journey. A few times he glanced back. Perhaps a slight elevation he was walking up, after all. He noticed his pouch leaking water, so he drank from his waterskin and then replaced it with squeezes from the icy rag. Every little bit helped.

He decided to track down what day it was in his head. It had been the thirty-first of Tortaeus when they began the journey from Miracle Springs… thirty-eighth when they were ambushed in Fallen Valley. Since then, seven days of captivity before the eight that he was free… past the 43rd of Tortaeus, first of Saermós, second… The third was when he freed himself and faced Raetmus. So it was the fifth of Saermós.

“Seventeen days since home,” he muttered aloud while he trudged through the wasteland. Winter was essentially over. The escapees of the ambush would’ve already arrived at Miracle Springs and delivered the news. He could see his mother crying from it… screaming…

I can’t think about it! He ruthlessly cast it out of his head, as if it were the same thing as the energy of wrongness he was mitigating.

His father would be stoic, surely. Deliberating on what they’d do as a community. Conferring with Vesânth as the combined pinnacle of reason. The alarm would be raised militarily, scouting conducted. They still had Bariaki, still had Ryza and Daexo, and Aerion. Still had Raleppo Flash of Eyes, the Blessed veteran who’d taught and led Deros to excellence. Many others. The Taldecca were still strong.

His father would contact other communities, forge an alliance. The Sylmex, or what remained of them, would doubtless be flying in all directions with the news. Maybe even Alnaseria would get involved, isolationists that they were. If they were as smart as reputed, they would. Perhaps they could figure out the gunpowder.

What do we do to our enemies… What do we do to our enemies…

“We destroy them, sis. I know. We destroy them…” Behind his goggles, he blinked back tears on the cusp of falling. How he wanted to. And he had the power: it was just waiting there. But it might cost him his life. Unless it was to save others, it wasn’t worth it. But oh how he’d love to deal them the damage they’d done to him, to his family, to Palamera, to Eursett, to Urchon. They deserved to taste a price they’d never forget, that would put ashes on their tongue when they so much as thought of Hamellion. Whether it was possible…

Once more, he shook off his cursed imaginations and chided himself for wasting energy on emotions. Into the void with the rest, like so much chaos. Begone. I am just two legs, two arms, a body, a brain. Surviving one day to the next. Nothing more.

Just before midday, he came upon a lonely dead tree in the middle of the sand. Feeling fatigued, he opted to begin his break slightly early. Utilizing his cloak, the tree, and spare cording, he rigged up a makeshift shade from Azrom, then sat down on his coat underneath it, to relax. He ate the rest of the bug mash and drank some water. He tried cutting at the length of thick cord extending from his waist for a while but only got through the first layer of the sealing material. The cord itself underneath was indeed resistant to cutting. Ultimately, it didn’t matter much, as the tie around his waist was like an extra belt. The excess was simply useful as rope.

Giving up on it to try another time, he laid down to try and sleep for Surrender. It wasn’t easy, as he’d been out of the habit for a while, but his exhaustion was powerful. He meditated to ease himself into it, feeling a relative calm despite everything, despite even the nagging headache. And the draining technique, shunting away the entropic force trying to spill forth, had truly become a continuous thing in the back of his mind. He’d almost forgotten about it.

As such, when he awoke after a brief nap, after a few moments of simply lying there, he burst out a laugh of triumph: he’d maintained the technique while sleeping, finally.

Mind over matter.

He managed another small nap, and otherwise just conserved his energy laying down through the hottest part of the day. In such a wasteland, even shade was hard to come by. Ideally, he’d have spent days scouting out from the watering hole, out and back, out and back, using the precious resources of water and food to plot out a survivable route. Instead, he was charging through with crap for supplies and hoping for the best.

He soon got restless and forced himself up from the malaise to get going. Packing everything up, he also broke off a branch and secured a decent club and walking stick. Somewhat too curved and not tall enough for a staff or spear, but it was something.

Camp was made in the night with a similarity to his first night, a dip carved next to a sorry cluster of rocks. He didn’t bother foraging for leaves, knowing it was an overall waste of energy. He did not eat, saving the last of the dried meat for another day. He could go without food, after all. All his energy needed to go toward finding water.

Despite resting through the night, he awoke still having maintained the shunting effect. It seemed even to cost no significant energy. Even his occasional extension of the farsense — increasingly infrequent — seemed to cost him more. The headache, however, did not go away. It only worsened. He knew it was from the lenseye… nothing else could ache from the center, like his whole brain was throbbing, which made the outer parts of the skull with nerves and such ache in answering echoes. It wasn’t good, but there was little he could do. One price in trade for another. The lesser evil.

The day increasingly proceeded to be panic-inducing, because he didn’t find another decent water source and he was running out. He searched almost into the cold to find something, and finally he at least found a sandy, wet dip again, with some sorry bits of vegetation as a sign clustered around it. He dug a large pit out to allow a pool to grow overnight, then hastily found a place to rest.

He awoke repeatedly to go and check the pit, finding water to collect, then digging more pits nearby, hoping he wasn’t wasting energy. His sleep was incredibly spotty, but he at least collected enough water to persist a bit further. Briefly, he considered heading back to the watering hole, but he discounted it. He had to take his chances going forward.

The next day saw him drain the last of his waterskin with a sense of dread, as he paused under the shade of a block of rock. Looking back, the day had seemed a blur of walking, worry, and pounding headaches. The landscape was barren, dead, and almost entirely flat. He realized it was a mistake to try it, to assume he’d randomly find water as he went. No. Not a mistake — a deliberate choice. Fatalistic, perhaps, tossing the dice because he refused to accept he couldn’t keep pace with the caravan. The gods-be-damned Ironbloods on their gods-be-damned rekasí, with plentiful supplies, dug wells, planned routes, speed. Damn them all.

He tried using the farsense to locate a sign of water, but he had absolutely no clue what that ‘felt’ like. His ‘prior life’ as he began to think of it, had been spent with a radius of the farsense too short and hard to focus to be used as such, so he had no practice. He felt he could feel surface water, at least, but continuously… it was dry. As dry as his feelers for the beacon had been.

In truth, that imprint in his mind of the beacon had faded. Somehow, his distance from the origin point had confused it all. He still knew the direction because he tracked it by its relation to Azrom, Keramus, and the constellations. And he still had a fragment of intuition for it. But he was not and had not been making a straight arrow toward it for some time, due to chasing after useful terrain in the distance, making this or that deviation, and general errors involved in trying to use moving celestial bodies as guides.

I am hopelessly outpaced… I’ll be lucky to even survive to see this skrófing volcano. This artifact. Damn it… why can’t I do what I did before… But he knew the answer. If Elserel had lived, she’d have asked herself the same, wouldn’t she? ‘Why can’t I make the earth shake anymore?’

She didn’t live, just as I wouldn’t have. I can’t have it again and survive. I changed it forever so that I had the chance I’m failing at now. I hoped otherwise, but that is the reality. I cannot reach and feel across hundreds of kilometers again. Perhaps I can sense it a little closer, still. Perhaps. I’m barely making progress…

Deros waited until the heat declined a bit, then pushed himself up to continue searching for water. Nothing. Azrom set and even the cold came, and he found nothing.

The next day was like a fever dream. His memory did not even imprint getting up and trudging back through the wastes, seeking a chance at survival with his head constantly thrumming with a rhythmic pressure he got used to. He wasn’t even cold, either. He remembered being rather warm. He avoided thinking about why…

The sun just beginning to ramp its heat up, Deros paused at something he chased down as an irregularity barely seen in the distance and that he initially had little hope about. But when he neared enough to accurately verify what it was, he fell to his knees and almost cried in relief.

Almost a dozen clusters of pricefruit were blossoming in the soft sand, huge red and yellow tangles of hard vines with nasty thorns sticking out, large bulbs completely covered and protected in the center. Not even a writher would try for them, the paralyzing poison in the barbs even too much for them. A Hamaleen could take only a couple of pricks before feeling numbness. Several could see them paralyzed after a few minutes. Falling into one was deadly.

Rising, Deros put gloves on and covered his face, then proceeded to work at the brambles of the nearest one carefully with his hacking tool and the club, completely tearing them away until he could begin hacking the fruit free, eventually rolling it through the sand away from the oozing, pungent vines.

Peeling the also-barbed outer skin off with a knife and the tool, he was careful to ensure no barbs fell into the juicy, fibrous pink of the edible fruit inside, almost big enough to need two hands to handle. Finally, he took his gloves off and lifted it to bite into the sweet and sour of the life-saving, semi-solid nectar. He devoured it all down to a central nut, scraping his teeth over the hard, slippery surface to get the last remainder of clinging fibers before tossing it away.

Tediously, Deros chopped through brambles to do the same to the others, massacring all but one, which was already bursting out with some type of larva that fed on them. Fortunately, it was the only one. It took him over an hour to harvest them all. He took one stinging barb for the trouble, enough to numb his hand and forearm for an hour. A price gladly paid. He saved one of the fruits as best he could in a pouch, and squeezed the first of the juice from over half of them into his waterskin.

He slept well that night, and woke with a little more energy, though he still felt off. He was doing something subconsciously again, something that kept him warm and gave him some kind of intangible, extra push. Perhaps kept him alive. He was changing, he was different somehow — he knew that. Some part of him worried, had pause before a great metaphoric fog, but he no longer had any quarter for it, could not spare such concerns. He faced death stretched out long and vicious in every direction, and to get through it, he would do whatever he had to. Become whatever he had to, as always.

He accepted it and gave some cautious part of himself up like a sacrifice to survive — to march onward through the unknown and defy its desolation.