There was a voice shouting inside of my head, screaming at me to stop, to talk this out, that there had to be some kind of misunderstanding. It doesn’t even make sense, it said. City guards don’t just go around killing people because they’re sick. They are mistaking you for someone else. Think about it, Miles. You don’t need to fight them.
I didn’t care.
I knew that I should speak up. I knew that I should raise my hands in the air and say “wait a minute, guys, she’s just sick! Look!” and then they’d understand and they’d apologize, maybe buy us a drink or something. It’s what Tom would have done.
Maybe that’s exactly why I didn’t want to do it. I was finally free from Tom. I had needed him, once, but I had proven that even a spark-less NPC like me could, through the sheer power of hatred, destruction, and billowing flames, make my will manifest in that world. The idea of listening to that voice in my head, before such a comfort to me, now grated at my psyche.
Tom was a tool I used, I thought. A tool to make up for my deficiencies. He was a skin I wore, a mask I molded out of my own flesh and blood.
But like all tools, they have alternate uses. One side of the hammer pounds in the nail, and the other side rips them loose. Copying - no, that isn’t the right word - Loving Tom helped keep me together.
And hating Tom helps me tear it all apart.
I raised my drows in one hand while liquid nail dripped from the other. I let it burn, a flaming waterfall flowing from my fingertips, hungry. Beside me stood Cadoc, and I’d never felt more like a brother to him than I did then. Our violence needed no justification. They attacked us first, so let us call it defending the honor of our friends. Any excuse to fight. Any excuse to prove ourselves different.
His stance was similar to my own, sword in one hand, the other ready to launch his magic. I could see his eyes searching for gaps in the enemy’s armor, places that a spear could pierce unsuspecting veins and organs.
Amaia was ready as well, her gilded sword glimmering in the retreating light - we had almost made it to Coernet by nightfall. Why did she fight? Novelty?
The guards weren’t ready. I couldn’t see their eyes behind their visors, but I could feel their fear. When my melted nails were pouring into those visors, when they ignited and melted the flesh, what would they think? Would they regret messing with me? Would they realize the mistake they had made? I couldn’t see their faces, but I felt certain one of them was this dimension’s version of Ryan, and that he deserved it.
And if that was true, wouldn’t I be making the world a better place?
We’d get away with it, too. No one in Coernet knew us. There would be no witnesses.
Naomi was yelling. I couldn’t hear her. Didn’t want to. I charged.
A bright light, then a flash. Something shot past within inches of my nose, and I felt the wind move my clothes as it went. I stopped dead in my tracks so that I wouldn’t run into it. It was like the concept of a cut made into a physical reality. It would have sliced straight through me. It was Naomi’s magic.
I turned to her, and decided then that she would be first. I’d ignite her, and the guards would be forced to watch as she burned, knowing intimately that they would be next.
She was holding Amaia’s arm, staff cradled in the crook of her shoulder. She had pulled back Amaia’s sleeve, revealing the inky blackness of the arm underneath. “Look!” she yelled. “She’s not turning! She was hit by a thladem!”
She was trying, once again, to take from me what was mine. I held out my hand, and I could vaguely hear the leader of the armored men shouting out some sort of apology. It didn’t stop me.
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Suddenly my arm was seized. I wheeled around, ready to strike down with my drows whoever dared touch me, crack their skull wide enough open that I could melt their brains with my nails. In the meantime, I let the nails keep flowing and burning down towards the criminal hand - let them know that touching me is like grabbing a burning coal, and that such actions have consequences. I turned, swinging my weapon.
It was Cadoc.
For a fraction of a second, I let the drows keep falling. In that second, I didn’t care. In that second, even Cadoc deserved what was coming to him. But I regained myself just in time. I veered it away from his head and let the strike die in the air.
“It is over, Miles,” Cadoc said. “There is no fight here, friend.”
It was like a light-switch being flipped off. Suddenly the hatred that fueled me was gone, and in its place was my oldest companion of all - Shame. Reality snapped back into place, but still I couldn’t hear what was said between the guard and the women, the apologies and the explanations. I only stared at the burnt hand grasping my forearm.
I dropped my drows and dammed up my fingertips. It really felt that like, as well. Like it was harder not to let them flow, to let them burn. As if it used up mana to contain it, rather than to use it. That wasn’t true, I knew, but the feeling was vivid.
I tried to get water from my pack, to pour it over Cadoc’s burns - I discovered much later that I had burned myself nearly as badly. But he waved it off with a smile. “I have had much worse, friend,” he said. “Think nothing of it. I will buy a potion in Coernet. I will be fine.”
I was blubbering at him all the while, and I can’t fully recall all that I said. But I do remember asking what I was, who I was, if I truly was a monster and whether the guards ought really to strike me down.
“You are a brave man,” Cadoc answered. “Perhaps even braver than I. Fearless.”
I knew he was wrong, and so the words didn’t help me at all.
The rest of the walk to Coernet passed like something unseen. We had to carry Naomi, but I could never recall which of us did the carrying.
The guards put us up in an inn for the night - the night which had fallen somewhere along the way. They said it was the least they could do, after having nearly murdered us. They probably used different words. The leader introduced himself as Zuan, and told us to seek him out when we needed him, what he still owed us and would do all he could to assist us. Cadoc asked him for directions, shook his hand, and then Zuan was gone.
Somehow I made it into a bed. Somehow I slept.
My dream had no duration. It existed only within the second in which I had let the drows keep falling.
-
When I awoke, I was surprised to find Naomi still with us. But then I realized that she probably hadn’t even woken up since using her staff, and so it wasn’t at all a sign of new-found loyalty.
We were all in one large room with four beds, though the men and women were at least separated to beds on opposite walls. I guess Zuan is broke. Couldn’t afford to repay us with two rooms.
Everyone else was still asleep - behind the curtains that covered the one window peeked out the faint twilight of early morning. I had been sleeping in my clothes, so it took no time at all for me to slip out of the inn - ignoring the snoozing innkeeper at the front desk.
Outside, I got my first conscious look at the town. The city.
The inn faced east, so my first sight was the sun cresting the distant horizon. It colored the river a deeper shade of red than usual, so that in the morning light it truly looked like fresh blood running north towards - towards whatever we would have found, if we had continued on Naomi’s false path.
The river was no narrower here than anywhere, wider than any river I’d ever seen on earth, and yet I could see from where I stood a bridge, large beyond description, spanning the monstrous width. It rose from wide and soaring pillars like skyscrapers, each carved into the figure of some man, and I could only assume they were some sort of famous heroes. Each held his hands high over his head, one seeming to support the weight of the road above, the other making some sort of symbol with three fingers held up. The road above was paved with brick, at least as far as I could tell from a distance. The scale of it rivaled anything I ever seen on earth, even buildings built with modern technology. I wondered if magic had been used in its construction.
Beneath it sailed ships, some larger than Earth mansions, which still passed between the supporting arms of the stone men with no fear of hitting their masts on the bottom of the bridge - no ship came close. Mixed among these were smaller fishing boats like I had seen Harfin.
The builders of the bridge had not taken the easy path. The Blood split into two rivers just downriver from the bridge - if they had built it even half a mile further down, they would have had a significantly easier job. Instead, they bridged the river at its widest point. Few ships sailed downstream in either direction, either north or the diverting path northeast. Nearly all of them sailed south against the flow, or else were heading towards one of the many moorings along the riverbank. I wondered again how they propelled themselves. I saw oars sticking out of some, but others seems to move with full sails even though the air felt dead and windless.
To my left was a wide gate, and from it ran a wide avenue, all made of brick. To my right the avenue continued into Coernet proper - we were barely inside the walls.
The walls ran along behind me, and I traced their path. They curved wide, encompassing the massive city of tall copper-colored buildings, then rose to climb first one hill west of town, then another to the south, before finally ending alongside the bridge’s far shoulder. The river was mostly left unwalled - whoever had built the walls didn’t fear an attack from the water.
Everything within the walls and the hills was filled, buildings the color of Zinthur’s blood, which, like the river, turned blood red under the rising sun. It was a massive city, and even so early in the morning there were signs of activity everywhere. Carts being pulled, laborers repairing some damaged bit of wall, merchants setting up stalls before morning crowds swarmed them.
Some dwellings seemed to have been built into the hills themselves - I say hills, but they were nearly mountains, and seemed only hills compared to the still-distant shadow of the looming Mantle. The hillside dwellings were only visible as the light glinted off of the windows.
And above all these, sitting atop the southern hill, was a building like a temple, square and vaguely pyramid shaped, shining with a white - and slightly yellow, at second look - marble, which made it look alien compared to the red and copper sitting below it. A mayan pyramid was the closest comparison I could make, if some paranoid Persian prince had moved to the Yucatan and turned the pyramid into a strange compound.
A presence behind me. Cadoc. I wasn’t sure when he had stepped outside.
“Zuan told me last night. That,” he said, pointing. “Is where the alchemists live.”