Arlette gripped the railing of the transport as it lurched wildly around a bend in the road. The robot’s long legs and high center of gravity meant it often swayed when rounding bends, but right now she was pushing the machine far beyond normal speeds. She would have pushed the “strider”—as her eccentric employer called it for some reason; sure, this one had much longer legs, but all his robots strode—even faster if she could, but to do so would have left her escort of smaller battle-ready skitters behind. They were already moving as fast as they could, their many shorter legs churning up the dirt beneath.
A trader ahead swerved off the road in a panic, a fearful look in his eyes as Arlette and her hoard charged forward. He wrestled desperately with the reins as Arlette’s metallic herd thundered past and continued on its way, the horde’s uncanny presence spooking the cart’s garoph into a wild frenzy. Normally, Arlette would have felt bad about this, but then again, normally she wouldn’t have been speeding down a dirt road with a small army of murder machines right behind her. This time, however, she was, because this time, she finally had a lead.
Cellvas was a municipality straddling the line between town and city. Maybe the largest metropolis outside of the five major cities of Otharia, it sat in a prime location within the triangle formed between Wroetin, Nont, and Eflok—close enough to all three that it was easier and safer to stop there when traveling between them. It would add a few extra days to the trip, but in a way, it was like traveling to one and a half cities. You could always buy and sell wares in Cellvas, too. In fact, its location was such that some of the country’s more prosperous businesses had built warehouses there to store goods. Then those goods could easily travel to any of the three cities with relative ease.
At least, that was how it worked and how it had been for centuries, but times were changing fast. In the near future...
The vast, vast majority of Otharians still refused to ride Lord Ferros’s tracked wagon transportation system for a whole host of reasons, none of which Arlette found very credible or justified. Lacking the prejudices of the natives, she used it whenever she needed to travel directly from Wroetin to another major city for her work. The wagons—or “trains” as Blake named them—traveled at an absolutely impossible velocity, one that made the already absurd speed of a “strider” look like a garoph trudging through mud. What’s more, they were far more comfortable than a wagon or the metal beast upon which she sat. Oh, and they were free to use. If one wished to travel from city to city, the “train system” was, hands down, the cheapest, fastest, and most comfortable method of transport, one which cut a ten-day journey down to a handful of hours.
It would take time, she knew, before the system would be in widespread use—years, maybe even decades. Garoph-headed stubbornness was as integral to an Otharian’s national character as duty was to Gustilian society—back when Gustil had still existed, at least. Still, she believed, the wondrous utility of her employer’s creation would eventually win out, and when it did, it would spell the death of this place and other towns like it.
None of the tracks in the system went anywhere near Cellvas. Running directly from city to city, they didn’t concern themselves with the towns and villages that had served for centuries as waypoints along the way, places to stop and rest and maybe enjoy a meal or stock up on supplies. The more people who used the “trains”, the fewer who would be on the road. Soon, these towns and villages would begin to wither as the flow of commerce dwindled to a trickle.
Hardest hit would be places like Cellvas. Once merchants realized they could transport goods from market to market in a few hours instead of days just by moving their storage to a major city, they’d have no more use for a place like this. Cellvas was a town living on borrowed time. The poison had already entered the system, rotting away at the inside. The only question was how long it would take for the symptoms to appear. As she neared the town wall, the “strider” finally and mercifully slowing to a more manageable speed, she wondered just how many people here realized any of what was to come.
Not that any of this mattered to Arlette in that moment. Her musings were only that, the idle thoughts of a woman trying to ease her anxiety by thinking about anything else other than the reason she had, suddenly and without warning, grabbed several subordinates and a dozen skitters and taken them on a frantic multi-hour journey. Now that they had finally arrived, however, she had no choice but to circle back to that reason.
They’d had a breakthrough with tracking the ink used to blind Blake’s robots during the attack that had happened during her and Tehlmar’s... “date”—even now she hesitated to call it that, but to her chagrin, no other term fit better. But that was getting off-topic; what mattered was that they’d had a breakthrough, leading them to this single warehouse owned by a nebulous business organization known as the “Pale Moons Mercantile Company”.
The Pale Moons Mercantile Company was a very minor entity, even just relative to the larger trader organizations in Otharia. Normally, Arlette would have had no real reason to even notice such small fry, but as she’d dug deeper and deeper into her ink investigation, the PMMC had popped up with abnormal frequency. For such a small company, the PMMC had been buying an awful lot of ink.
Once she and her people had turned their focus to the small organization, more and more suspicious details kept popping up. The company was new, having not even existed a year ago. Nobody seemed to have ever met the owners; any purchases were done through intermediaries and all goods were usually picked up by unmarked wagons directly from the seller. Nor could anybody say where the money they used to purchase things came from. Arlette’s team had labored for days, trying to track down any customers who’d purchased from the PMMC, but if they even sold anything at all, they did it through a different name. They were a ghost of a company. Just tracking down anything at all about them had proved to be a challenge. Until today, they hadn’t even known if the PMMC had owned any property for which to store the materials they purchased.
That morning, Arlette’s team had found something different, something worth looking into without delay. Through their tireless sleuthing, they’d acquired another record of purchase for a large quantity of ink made by the Pale Moon Mercantile Company. They’d already gotten their hands on plenty of these records from around the nation, but this one was different. This one hadn’t been picked up from the seller. No, this one had a delivery address, one that pointed to a supposedly unowned warehouse here in Cellvas.
“Where is the warehouse located? Do you remember?” she asked Fidsel Aigars, one of the three others accompanying her on this impromptu journey, as they approached Cellvas’s western gate. The small, nervous office worker was the odd man out, a pale ball of anxiety who had not weathered the harrowing trip well. An administrative assistant of sorts, the bookworm usually spent his workdays combing through and compiling reports from field agents, as well as coordinating with the Minister of Justice’s people. Unfortunately for him, he had also been the only native of Cellvas within her reach this morning, and as such, had been conscripted to be the local guide.
“Uh... I think it’s in that direction, closer to the north end,” he told her, pointing at an industrialized section off to their left. “I think I’ll be able to narrow it down if we get closer. It’s been a few years.”
“Alright,” she said, taking the transport’s controls into her hands and steering the ‘strider’ around the wall and towards the north gate. “You two know the plan?”
“Yes, Minister, you’ve gone over it with us three times since we left Wroetin,” Gvido Gailis responded. His tone was harsh, but Arlette didn’t mind much. Gvido was maybe the bluntest, least respectful Otharian she knew outside of the Minister of Agriculture, but she liked that he always said what he meant and didn’t hold anything back. It also helped that he was the best stone Observer she had. His job was simple in concept but harder in execution: to find any and all traps and hidden tunnels, passageways, or chambers lurking within the solid stone so often used in Scyrian construction. Though she had yet to see the warehouse for herself, she and the others had full confidence in assuming the building would be stone. Everything built by people of wealth was, for a variety of reasons.
“Gvido, show some respect to the Minister...” chided Ramune Berzina, the last of the people riding the transport. Unlike the Observer, Ramune insisted on at least some level of decorum at all times. With their clashing attitudes, the pair didn’t exactly get along too well, but their abilities paired too well for Arlette to only take one of them. Ramune was a rare type of Feeler sometimes referred to as a ‘sensory Feeler’, somebody who, instead of training to increase their strength or speed or stamina, chose to enhance their senses.
Ramune was the first of these specialized Feelers that Arlette had met in a long time—perhaps five years. She could see leagues into the distance or the finest details on a single hair, hear the slightest of sounds, detect even the slightest of lingering scents, and more. The woman had been a hunter in the past, using her superhuman senses to find and stalk the prey she needed to hunt to feed herself and her family. Now, Arlette used her to gather clues. If anybody in Otharia could find traces of evidence from where they were going, it would be her.
Everything started wonderfully. The guards at the northern gate had the good sense to promptly get out of her way when they saw Arlette and her robotic swarm coming, and Arlette guided the transport through the gate and into the city. Despite Fidsel having lived elsewhere for a while, he was able to successfully guide them to their general destination without much trouble and they’d narrowed it down from there swiftly. They came to a halt outside a small warehouse surrounded by other similar but larger warehouses. The building looked fairly inconspicuous, with bland tan walls, no visible windows, and a single double-door entrance in the front. No signs marked the place as anything whatsoever. In a way, its featureless nature made it a wonderful match for the organization that likely owned it.
Arlette had tried a stealthy approach in earlier raids, using Gvido to quietly open a hidden entrance in order to catch the perpetrators unawares. That tactic took a long time, however, and had never worked. They would step through their newly created opening, only to find their quarry long gone.
This time, she had decided to take a swifter approach, stealth be damned. Quickly, Arlette ordered most of her skitter forces to rush forward and surround the premises. She could not help but start to grin in triumph. Nothing inside this place was getting away now. She sent out another order and another skitter stepped up to the front doors, took a few steps back, and then launched itself forward with as much power as its motors could generate. With a bang, the weighty chunk of metal rammed into the center of the stone doors. A loud “CRACK!” echoed through the neighborhood and the door collapsed inward.
Arlette made a note to thank Lord Ferros for the new battering ram command he’d added at her request. It seemed to work wonderfully, meaning now she had a way to break down doors without putting herself or her subordinates in danger.
“Let’s go,” she proclaimed as the transport’s cabin lowered down closer to the ground, a thin ramp extruding from the side and the door above it opening automatically.
Arlette practically ran down the ramp, hustling towards the door and sliding up to the side of the door frame before peeking inside. It took her a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom, but when it did, she found...
“Huh?” she muttered.
“Seriously?” Gvido scoffed, just walking directly inside.
“It’s completely empty,” Ramune observed, following the Observer inside.
Arlette could only stare at the vacant interior, dumbfounded. The other times, though there had been no terrorists to catch, they had at least found the standard items one would expect to find in a warehouse or shop: crates, shelves, goods, etc--some sign that somebody, at some point, had used the place. The inside of this building, however, was literally empty. The entire structure was one single room composed of flat stone walls and a smooth, barren stone floor. Not a single ware occupied the warehouse.
Arlette felt her mind go blank as she entered the room, coming to a halt again just a few steps past the doorway. Of all the possibilities she’d had in mind, this had not been one of them. She didn’t know what to do, or even what to think.
What did this mean? Had she been following a false lead the whole time? It couldn’t be, could it? So many of the pieces had finally fit together! But then how could she explain this? Was she still just blindly groping in the dark? Or was something even more sinister going on? Had somebody tipped off her quarry that she was coming for them? Was there a traitor in her midst?
Arlette shook her head to clear it of the bad thoughts. No, this wasn’t like what had happened with Basilli. The Ivory Tears had been an eclectic band of misfits who’d come together for more through circumstance than planning. Her team now was different; she’d assembled it deliberately and carefully with security being a major focus. The loyalties of her subordinates were without question. They might not be fully loyal to an Elseling like her, but they all cared deeply about the safety of their homeland and multiple rounds of vetting had verified this many times over. Many of them had friends or family who had been affected by a Resistance attack.
But then, why? Why was the Resistance so hard to pin down? Why couldn’t she even track down a stupid black-market company like the Pale Moon Mercantile Company? Were the doubts that she constantly had to shove into the back of her mind actually correct? Was she not cut out for this kind of thing?
“We’re done, Minister,” Gvido announced as he returned to the door, Ramune right behind him.
Arlette started, her mind returning to the moment. How much time had passed while she’d been struggling deep within her thoughts?
“Any luck?” she asked, daring to hope against hope, even though the man’s dour face gave her all the answers she didn’t want.
“Solid all the way down, as far as I can tell,” he replied. “Nothing in the walls, either.”
“And you?” she asked Ramune.
The former scout shook her head. “Nothing but dust, Minister.”
“So we were still too slow,” Arlette sighed.
“No, I doubt being a bit faster would have changed anything. Indoors in a place like this, with no real ventilation, I should be able to smell the lingering scent of a person from maybe up to twelve days ago, but I don’t smell anybody. Judging by the dust accumulation, I’d say this place has been empty for days... probably tens of days.”
The woman’s statement stifled any more thoughts of double agents, at least, but it still didn’t make Arlette feel any better. Hours spent rushing over here, all to accomplish nothing but making herself look like a fool.
“So, you’re saying there’s nothing here. Nothing we can work with, at least.”
“Yes,” Ramune told her gravely. “This place is completely clean.”
“This is a bust,” Gvido added in. “Again.”
“Fuck,” Arlette spat out. She lashed out in frustration and anger at a nearby wall, driving her left fist into its solid stone side. Something crunched, and it wasn’t the stone. “FUCK!”
----------------------------------------
Thunk.
"Stupid warehouse."
Thunk.
"Stupid shitty company."
Thunk.
"Stupid, stupid, STUPID!"
Thwack!
The fourth of four knives pierced into the wooden target hung upon her living room wall, its point sinking almost the width of two fingers deep into the durable panel. Arlette growled out a curse as she marched across the room to the target. Of course she would lose her cool on the real one.
Four identical-looking throwing knives were embedded in the target; only one of them was real—the last one, the one she’d thrown with all of her anger and self-hatred, the one that would be a bitch to pull out with only one good hand. Still, as Peko instructed, she did her utmost to pretend there was no difference between the four except that the last one had been thrown harder. He was very insistent about that part.
Peko’s initial “training regimen”, the imaginary stone, had yielded no tangible progress—at least as far as Arlette could tell; if her friend had some secret purpose behind the exercise, he still refused to divulge it. Still, she suspected that she’d failed to achieve whatever that purpose was, as he’d changed her training to its current form—still without explaining anything. It drove Arlette to the edge of madness, but she continued to play along. Peko had been with her for as long as she could remember, and his advice had saved her life multiple times. Still, her patience was beginning to fray.
One by one, she pried the “knives” from the board, making sure to treat them like real, ordinary throwing knives. She made sure not to squeeze her fingers too close together, made sure to move her arm as she would have had to if she had to actually yank out a blade stuck in wood, and made sure to create the squeak of the wood as the metal was pried loose. She even made sure to maintain the illusion of the damage to the target as best she could.
To some degree, it was not difficult; she had two decades of practice with maintaining the myriad tiny details of an illusory disguise, all the way down to the individual folds of her false outfit. She had nearly that many years of experience with her throwing knives, a common design found all over the continent, and knew them like the backs of her hands. And yet, no matter how many times she went through the motions, Peko was never satisfied. Were her illusions not realistic enough? Was there something she was missing? All her friend would say was that he couldn’t tell her without ruining it. Somehow, that made it all the more annoying.
“Look, today might not have gone how you wanted-” Peko began as he lounged on her bed.
“Shut it.”
Proving once again the wiser of them, Peko did as he was told. He just watched as she took one knife at a time in her right hand and chucked them across the room into the target.
Fake.
Real.
Fake.
Fake.
Again.
Fake.
Fake.
Real.
Fake.
Again.
Real.
Fake.
Fake.
Fake.
“I’m done,” she finally declared, pulling the only real knife from the target and dismissing the rest. The board seemed to heal suddenly as most of the damage it had sustained throughout the exercise was revealed to be illusory all along. She rounded on Peko, her irritation threatening to boil over. “How many more times do I have to do this shit?”
“Until-”
“Peko, I swear to the stars above, if you’re about to say something like ‘until you figure it out’... I don’t care if you’re imaginary—the thing I’ll ‘figure out’ will be a way to bash your head in. Whatever this is, it isn’t working. If you can’t just tell me, then figure out another way, because I’m not spending the next twenty years throwing knives into a fucking board every night!”
Still fuming, Arlette marched into her bathroom and drew a hot bath. She felt a little bad for snapping at her imaginary companion; she was frustrated with his crap, but in reality, she was far more frustrated with herself. Perhaps a long soak would wash off the stink of failure, but she doubted it.
----------------------------------------
The next morning found Arlette in just as bad a mood as before. In fact, her temper might have been even worse for one simple fact: Tehlmar wouldn’t get out of her office, and she really wasn’t in the mood to deal with him.
“What happened to your hand?” the elf wondered, gazing with concern at the bandage-wrapped extremity.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Arlette grumbled.
“Did somebody attack you?”
“No! I said I don’t want to talk about it!” she growled. “Why are you even here?! I have work to do! Don’t you have work to do?!”
The former Drayhadan snorted. “Your boss doesn’t trust me enough to give me real work. The stuff he told me to do I already finished two days ago.”
“And you didn’t tell him?”
“Why, so he can assign me more pointless busywork? It’s like I always say, Letty: the number one rule of a mercenary is expectation management. Never do a better job than you’re being paid for, or when it’s time for your next contract, they’ll just expect that extra work at the same price.”
“Well, go be delinquent somewhere else,” Arlette told him in as dismissive a tone as she could manage. She scooped up a loose pile of reports and tapped their bottom edges against her desk, condensing them into a single, neat pile. “I have to get back to work.”
“But do you, though? Do you really?”
“Of course I do!” Arlette snapped. “We’re finally close to a real breakthrough!”
“Letty...” he sighed, placing his palms on the desk and leaning across it to better look her in the eyes. “You’ve been ‘close to a real breakthrough’ for half a season. You’ve been working your life away at this desk all day, every day, without a single day off for at least the last twenty days—either that or doing that training or whatever that you won’t let me see. I know you know as much as any leader what overwork does to people. You’re just as liable to make mistakes and miss important details in your condition as you are to accomplish anything worthwhile. You’re not going to make any progress as you are now. You need a break.”
“Nobody else has said-”
“Nobody else has said anything because they either don’t want to get on your bad side, or they’re too skittish because you’re their boss. That’s why it falls to me to say what needs to be said. Letty, you look terrible. You’re clearly worn down and it’s making me worry. So, I’m going to ask you again. Do you really need to work today?”
“I...”
Arlette glanced down at the thick pile of paperwork in front of her. In truth, she’d already read through all the new reports today, though she hadn’t yet done her customary reread, where she’d read the reports of the last few days with all the new knowledge in her mind to look for patterns and threads to follow.
If she were to be honest with herself, she was not actually on the cusp of a breakthrough. That had been yesterday, and it had turned out to be a colossal embarrassment for her. Was anything she was doing today going to really accomplish anything, or was she just pushing herself fruitlessly to try to make up for yesterday’s failure?
There were no substantive leads in the new reports. Deep down, she knew that rereading them wasn’t going to uncover anything, at least not today. And as much as she didn’t want to admit it, Tehlmar was right about the effect the grind was having on her. Her gaze went, unbidden, towards her bandaged hand. Try as she might, she still couldn’t find a justification for her childish tantrum. She’s just snapped—and then snapped bones in her hand. Would she have done the same without having worked herself to the bone for days on end?
Maybe.
But maybe not.
“I’ll tell Lord Ferros I’m taking the rest of the day off,” she conceded.
“Tomorrow as well,” Tehlmar prodded.
Arlette sighed. “Fine, tomorrow as well.”
“Excellent!” He clapped his hands together and rubbed his palms vigorously with excitement. “I’ll go get some booze and meet you by the west fortress gate. Bring one of those creepy transport things.”
“What, have you been planning this from the start?”
“Oh, of course! What sort of committed partner would I be if I wasn’t always planning another date, hm?”
“Yes, because our last one went so well,” she snorted. “Sofie is still mad at you over what happened last time, you know. She blames you for that other elf’s death.”
“Yes, that is exactly why she hates me.”
“Now, get out of here before I change my mind. I’ll meet you in a bit.”
Arlette locked up her office and made her way from her department to the floor’s main hallway. From there, she stepped into an open elevator and headed up two floors.
This was the floor that Blake had moved both his living and working quarters to after Pari had detonated within them the nastiest-smelling stinkcandle Arlette had ever had the displeasure of experiencing—she’d barely caught a whiff and immediately lost her lunch onto the metal floor beneath her feet. Though her employer had flushed out the air and replaced the metal making up the rooms with fresh metal untainted by the beastgirl’s actions—just as Arlette would have done, had she the ability—he’d then relocated all of his quarters anyway, claiming, even after all his efforts, that he could still smell it. Arlette couldn’t detect even a whiff of that putrid odor anymore and believed that whatever Blake was sensing resided entirely within his head, but she had the wisdom to keep that to herself.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Though Arlette had not been around for the early days of Lord Ferros’s rule, she’d heard the stories; once her subordinates had warmed up to her, they’d shared their stories of those chaotic times. Between Samanta’s stories and theirs, she felt it safe to say that the Lord Ferros of those times would have overreacted to Pari’s deed with fire and fury. The Lord Ferros of the more recent past—the one she’d first met and the one to hire her—had been more tired and worn down, his fury still present but weighed down by bitterness and cynicism. Still, she didn’t believe he would have reacted too well, either; exiling the girl from the fortress would have been the least punishment she could envision.
The Lord Ferros of today, however, was... different—more mellow, more relaxed, more willing to forgive and forget. It was like he had a completely new outlook on life. The change had been so significant that Arlette had wondered if the Lord Ferros of now was a literally different person, a doppelganger created by the god with whom he’d gone to parley.
The ultimate expression of her employer’s attitude shift could be found in the difference between his new rooms and his old ones. His old rooms had been like a fortress within a fortress, with their own absurd security mechanisms that had, to be frank, made it a giant pain in the ass to speak with him. His new rooms were just rooms. With normal doors. That was it. The strict security of the fortress itself remained unchanged, and only certain approved people could enter this floor on their own, but he clearly no longer felt the need to keep himself entirely locked away. Arlette welcomed the change
There was one other difference, however, that she found much less appealing.
Ringing the doorbell, Arlette stood outside Blake’s office and began to count. When she reached twenty, she rang it again, pressing the button twice this time.
The door slid open just a crack, not enough for her to see inside the room but enough for her to be able to hear his voice.
“Hm? Yeah? What?”
“Lord Ferros, I wanted to inform you that I’m taking the rest of the day and tomorrow off.”
Blake did not respond. Once more, Arlette began to count. When she hit thirty, she spoke again. “Lord Ferros?”
“What? Oh, yeah, yeah, sure,” came the absentminded reply. “Go. Do what you need to do. It’s fine.”
Arlette wasn’t quite sure that he’d heard a single word she’d said, but she decided not to press the issue. With a shrug, she turned and left.
Something was on her employer’s mind and had been since he’d returned. His thoughts would wander off in the middle of meetings and even direct conversations. Whenever anybody asked what was wrong, he would deny that there was any problem and change the subject.
Arlette didn’t know what was on Lord Ferros’s mind. If she were being honest, she didn’t know if she really cared outside of idle curiosity; it certainly wasn’t her business, anyway. She had more important things to think about right now.
----------------------------------------
“In what world will the two of us need that much booze?” Arlette wondered as the elf struggled up the ramp and into the transport cabin with a large casket over one shoulder and an unmarked wooden case under the other arm.
“Given how weak the local brew is,” Tehlmar grunted, “I might be wise to get another.”
“Where did you even get your hands on one of those?”
“I have my ways,” he replied with a wry smile.
“You stole it, didn’t you.”
He let out an overly dramatic gasp. “You wound me, fair maiden! To think you would think me a lowly thief!”
“Calling you a lowly thief would be a compliment compared to other things I’ve called you not too long ago.”
“But now that we’re together, you call me ‘sexy’ and ‘honeyplum’,” he smirked.
Arlette couldn’t help but roll her eyes and let out an exasperated groan. “‘Honeyplum’? I have never, and will never, call you ‘honeyplum’. I would rather die.”
“So you will call me ‘sexy’?” he chuckled, wiggling his eyebrows.
“I hate you so much,” she sighed, prompting another round of chuckling. “You’re in a very good mood today.”
“Why wouldn’t I be? I get to spend time with the woman I love. I’ve been looking forward to this. Wanted to take you to this place for days.”
“‘This place’ had better not be a gaming hall.”
“How rude!” he protested in mock outrage. “To think that you think of me that way.”
“Uh-huh,” she snorted. “You’re the one who lost most of his pay in some gross gambling den every time we stopped at a town.”
“That wasn’t me, that was Jaquet the Quick!”
“Who you said was basically the same person as you ‘for authenticity’,” she reminded him. “And, let’s not pretend you haven’t been in either of the two underground casinos here in Wroetin.”
“Well, I have to do something to liven up my days, you know? It’s boring here.”
She snorted again. “What’s in the box?”
He smiled knowingly. “You’ll see when we get there.”
“And ‘there’ is?” she prompted again.
“Trust me. You’ll like it.” He pointed off into the distance. “Head west.”
----------------------------------------
“Should be just over that hill, if I remember...”
“How did you even find this place?” Arlette asked. They’d been traveling for a good three hours at normal transport speed—far slower than ‘Arlette rushing to Cellvas transport speed’ but still far faster than any other form of travel outside of the rail wagons—and she hadn’t seen a sign of an Otharian village in over half an hour.
“Yes, here we are!” Tehlmar announced.
Arlette looked around as the multi-legged transport slowed to a halt. Like much of Otharia, the land around them was more rock than dirt, with a variety of hearty bushes and grasses eking out a living as best they could. One area ahead had a far denser volume of plant life, which probably had something to do with the sound of running water in her ears.
“Could you carry that for me, please?” the elf asked, pointing at the metal box as he bent down to hoist the cask of ale upon his shoulders.
Arlette acquiesced, grabbing the handle on the lid with her good hand and following him down the ramp and off the transport. Grunting all the way, he led her towards the sound of running water until they came upon a small, shallow stream about three paces wide and less than half a pace deep. From there, he turned right and headed upstream, taking a thin path that led along the side of the water. The stream and the path twisted and wound, refusing to stay straight for more than twenty paces as they worked their way higher. Several times, they found themselves on a thin, one-pace-wide strip of rock with the stream to their left and solid stone to their right.
Just before Arlette got annoyed enough to demand an explanation, they passed through a naturally formed stone arch and the view before her finally opened up once more. She couldn’t help but stop in her tracks and stare for a little; it was like she’d stepped into a different world.
The first thing she noticed was the colors. Rainbow hues of flora bombarded her eyes from every angle, a sudden and dramatic shift from the dull stone they’d hiked past for the last half hour. Gorgeous blossoms in a hundred different shapes and colors covered the ground, mixed in with knee-high grass. Flowering shrubs ringed the edge of the space, adding their own brilliant hues. Three large trees towered over the area, providing much-needed shade over the wide pond.
Right, there was a pond, too, a large one in the center of the space. Oval in shape, it filled the middle half of the glen, its water overflowing by her feet and forming the stream they’d followed to arrive here. Aquatic plants and other aquatic life covered much of the surface of the pond, adding more color to the scene. The only areas that remained a drab and dreary tan and grey were clearly man-made—smooth, flat stone walkways circled the circumference of the pond; a stone pavilion stood off to the right, its large, slanted roof propped up by thick, solid columns; and last, but definitely not least, an ornate stone walking bridge, complete with railings, that crossed over the very center of the pond.
Arlette had to blink for several moments before her eyes and brain could adjust to the sudden change in environment. She stared dumbly all around, taking in everything from the flora to the pond to how the area was bounded by large, smooth, and flat rock walls, almost as if this place had been cut directly out of the middle of a rock shelf. Perhaps, she considered, that was exactly what had happened.
“What is this place?” she finally found the voice to ask. She resumed her steps, following the stone path around the pond and toward the pavilion, where Tehlmar stood with a cheeky grin on his face.
“So, the boss man decided to give me busywork a bit ago,” he began. “As I said, he doesn’t trust me too much, I think. Not like you. Anyway, he had me go out to Keqont to go through some bunch of paperwork left over in the regional church palace or whatever they call them here. I guess he never got around to going through them or something, not that it mattered; there wasn’t really anything important there. I think he just wanted to keep me busy.
“So anyway, one thing I did stumble upon, however, was this. I found mentions of a secret hideaway that the regional governor—or priest, or Apostle, or whatever they were called—had set up decades ago. Basically, he had this place made to be his little secret getaway where he could go to unwind. Obviously, it’s gotten a bit overgrown-”
“A bit?!” Arlette snorted.
“-but hey, it’s still pretty great, huh? The far end of the pond is actually a spring. The pond is even stocked with fish!”
“How long have you known about this place?” Arlette inquired.
“Eh, about fifteen days, now,” Tehlmar answered as he opened up the metal box she’d carried up here.
“Does anybody else know?”
“Nope! It’s our little secret!”
He pulled out two metal rods, each the width of a finger. With a tug, the rods lengthened, forming long poles about six paces in length.
“You didn’t even tell Lord Ferros?”
“Are you serious?” he scoffed, pulling out some string and tying it to the end of each pole. “I can if you really want me to, but why can’t this just be our little secret place, just for the two of us? He doesn’t need this one. He’s got more than enough power to make ten places just like this any time he wants to.”
“I guess that’s true,” she conceded. “By the way, what is with the poles?”
“Aren’t you hungry?” he replied, pulling out two small metal hooks and a small sack that smelled like offal. “Let’s catch dinner.”
“Catch?”
----------------------------------------
“I still can’t believe you’ve never fished before,” Tehlmar said as they sat in the center of the cross-pond bridge, their legs dangling off the side. If Arlette stretched her toes, she could just barely touch the surface of the pond with the tip of her big toe. Tehlmar, being a midget, stood no chance.
The two of them lounged lazily on the bridge’s edge, each of them resting their back against one of the posts that formed the railing on that side, a pole propped up between their legs and a tankard of beer in hand. Arlette kept her eyes pointed downward, watching the string for movement. Besides, with the reflection in the water, she didn’t need to look up to see Tehlmar while they talked. It was rather convenient.
“Why not? There weren’t any ponds near my home with fish in them, so I never tried it. We’d catch other animals around them though, newts and whatnot, but not fish.”
“What about after you left?”
“Well, princesses don’t fish, for one. That’s something only an undignified peasant would stoop to. Then, after I ended up on this side of the Divide, I guess I was just too busy. My second parents and I lived in the city and I was always in school or training or something else. After that...” She shrugged and took a drink. “Just never thought about it, you know?”
“I guess it was different in Drayhadal,” he shrugged. “The Casm have been the ruling clan for many decades, and whatever fashion and activities the ruling clan has tend to become popular among the elites of Drayhadan society.”
“And the Casm live in a city by a lake.”
“Not by a lake, on a lake. Literally anybody could just open their window and drop down a hook and grab a fish any time they wanted. Of course, so much fishing meant that they nearly caught and ate all the fish, so the Casm declared a new law limiting how much fishing the general populace was allowed to do. The nobles, of course, could fish all they wanted. That only made it a more exclusive, special activity in the eyes of the other nobles, so by the time I was a child, it was something we all did from time to time.”
“Well, it’s not bad. Rather relaxing, I guess.”
The two of them lapsed into silence for a while. Arlette, for her part, just soaked in the ambiance of this secret garden in the middle of nowhere, trying to allow herself to unwind for the first time in what felt like ages. She took in the sounds of the birds and the insects, the smell of the pond and the plants, and the sound of the burbling brook leading from the edge of the pond. She found it pleasant. She could feel the anger and frustration that had built up on her psyche slowly beginning to melt away. It felt... nice.
“Letty, are you happy here?” Tehlmar asked eventually, finally breaking the quiet.
“...I don’t know,” Arlette admitted after giving it some thought. “In some ways, this is the best situation I’ve been in in a long while. I don’t have to pay for an inn; my rooms are the nicest they’ve ever been, maybe even better than when I was a princess; I don’t have to worry about security; I don’t even have to pay for food if I don’t want to; I’m close to friends; I’m close to you; I am getting paid far more than I’ve ever been paid before; I have the pride that comes with an important job; my employer isn’t some nitwit noble who is constantly making idiotic demands... There’s a lot to like.
“On the other hand...” She sighed. “I don’t think I’m very good at my job. I have more resources, more personnel, more time than I ever had as a mercenary. And yet, I struggle to produce results anywhere near what I used to manage with just a handful of people. Every time those bastards attack somewhere and kill people, it feels like failure—no, it is failure. I haven’t made the least bit of progress in stopping them, and it has been seasons now. And then, on top of all the guilt and the frustration, I have to worry that Lord Ferros will decide—rightly—that I’m not suited for this job and I’ll lose all the good stuff I mentioned.”
“Do you think he’ll really relieve you of your position?”
“I don’t know. Everything he’d told me says that he won’t, but I can’t help but think that, if I were in his position, I’d toss me out without a second thought.”
“But he isn’t you. He doesn’t seem to have your capacity for self-loathing, for one.”
“Can’t deny that, I guess,” she conceded. “I told him, one time, that I didn’t think I was competent enough to do what he was asking me to do. Do you know what he said?”
“What?”
“He said ‘Stop it’,” she quoted, putting on her best Blake voice and making sure it was as nasally as possible. “‘Anybody who can keep Sofie Ramaut alive for a year is more than competent enough to handle this. More than that, anybody who can keep her alive that long deserves a fucking medal.’”
Tehlmar threw his head back and guffawed, drops of beer falling from his tankard into the water below. It was a very Jaquet-esque mannerism, one she’d seen countless times over the years, and Arlette couldn’t help but smile slightly at the sight. Even though the two of them looked nothing alike—especially with the huge size difference—for a moment, it was like Jaquet was sitting next to her again. It felt... warm.
“That man is so strange,” Tehlmar giggled once his laughter had mostly died down. “Was he always like that?”
“Until recently, he’s been the same self-important, sarcastic asshole as he was the day I met him. Did I ever tell you the first thing he said to me?”
“No, I don’t think you have.”
“I walk into his quarters, and he’s sitting there, all dressed up in his armor and mask, trying to look all intimidating in a chair, and he looks up at me for a moment, and he says, ‘I thought you’d be taller.’”
The guffaws returned, harder than before. “It’s so hard to take the man seriously. I mean, what sort of person is so cowardly that they won’t even show you their face?”
That was right, she realized: Tehlmar had yet to see Blake’s face. Very few people that she knew had ever seen it—Sofie, Gabriela, Samanta, Leo, and herself... and maybe Pari. That, as far as she was aware, was the entire group.
“I don’t know if it’s some tactic of his, or what. Maybe he thinks it will make him more feared, but I don’t see the point. He’s the only person I know to actually fight with the Monster and survive. That’s more than enough to earn my respect.”
Tehlmar spat into the pond. “That woman pisses me off.”
“Who, the Monster?”
“Yeah. Sometimes I want to give her a piece of my mind. Same to the rest of them.”
“Well, you’re going to have to wait. She left a while ago and nobody knows when she’s coming back,” Arlette informed him. “But seriously,” she continued with a roll of her eyes, “why do you bring this up every time we’re together? You were blabbering on about it on the first date, too.”
“Well, I was right then, and I’m right now! You and the rest of us Scyrians put people like her up on a pedestal, like they’re untouchable, and for what? What have they done to deserve that respect?” he argued. “Remember when Jaquet the Quick was regarded as a terror on the battlefield? One of the strongest fighters in Nocend, too fast and too strong and too skilled for all but the best of the best to handle? It really grinds my axles to think that I put all that work into being, uh, the other me, and this girl just shows up and she’s stronger and faster than I could ever dream of, and she can’t die to boot! Do you think I was as strong as I was from the start? No! I had to work hard for years to get to where I was, and she just pops into the picture one day, stronger than I could ever be. Makes it all feel pointless, sometimes. Like nothing I did ever even mattered.”
“Like we’re just side characters in their story,” Arlette agreed. She tipped her cup back and drank it down until there was nothing left, then got to her feet to get a refill. She paused to find her balance as the world swayed slightly. How many steins had she consumed now, four? Six? The answer was ‘not enough’. “I feel it every day. I’m surrounded by people who can lift mountains or make machines that fly through the sky or fucking control peoples’ minds, and I’m supposed to act like that isn’t crazy. They don’t even seem to appreciate the work that everybody else has to put in just to get to a tiny fraction of their power. They don’t get it. But I do. I know what it takes to get true power... and what it costs.”
Arlette sat back down with her cup newly refilled and set it aside. Reaching into a pocket, she drew out a small vial, entirely empty save for a single drop of pitch black liquid resting at the bottom. “See this?”
“A small crystal vial? What about it?”
“This is not just any small glass vial,” Arlette corrected. “I got this vial in Crirada. Picked it up from near the half-melted corpse of General Khilran, a fairly powerful Eterian water Observer. Well, powerful for a Scyrian, at least. See this drop of black liquid at the bottom?” She held it out and at an angle, so he could see the last bit of liquid collected against the bottom edge. “This nasty stuff once filled the whole container, and just by drinking it, Khilran gained enough power to go toe to toe with an Earthling... or perhaps even outclass them. It was like she controlled the ocean itself.”
“Are you serious?! There’s something that can do that!?”
“And then,” she pressed on, “she popped. Her body ruptured like a berry squeezed between your fingers. It had barely been a few moments. Just a few moments, and all it cost her was everything.”
“Wait, I think I remember something about this. This is that Otharian drug, isn’t it? Chimirin?”
She nodded.
“Stars above, to think that it’s actually real! I’d always thought it was a rumor. The Battalion had records of it from centuries past, but it didn’t seem possible that something like this could actually exist.”
She held the vial up to her face and watched the light filter through the clear glass-like material.
“At the time, I picked this thing up on a whim. I’d thought that maybe it would somehow prove useful in the future. It didn’t, but I still keep this around as a reminder of everything that happened back there. Of all the people lost, all the sacrifices made. So desperate for power that people burned their entire futures for just a few moments, just long enough to turn the tide...”
Arlette shook her head, banishing those bad memories for the moment.
“Oblivion. That is what this is. That is what it takes to come close to the level of power that people like Sofie and the Monster achieve just by breathing. But... what can we even do about it?”
“I had a trainer back in the Battalion who used to say that life is like climbing the world’s tallest cliff side. It’s not a bad idea to look up once in a while at those far above you. It gives you a goal, something to strive for. But if you spend too much time looking up at others and not at the handholds right in front of you, you’ll never make progress, and eventually, those people will be too far above you for you to see them anymore.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Arlette snorted. “Have any other words of wisdom I’ve already heard from all four of my parents, oh wise sage?”
“Sure. ‘All you can do is your best.’”
She laughed, but slowly her merry chortles fades, being replaced by forlorn, halfhearted chuckles. “I am doing my best. I really am. I’m trying so hard, but nothing’s working anymore. I think I have to admit to myself that I’ve hit the limit of what I’m capable of. I’m not like them; I’m just a Scyrian, and there’s only so much you can do with illusions, anyway. I’ve been trying new avenues, trying to find ways to expand my abilities, but... nothing works. None of it. All I want is the power to have control over my own life, but the only path to that power leads to...” She held up the vial again, staring at the last remaining drop held within. “...annihilation.”
“Don’t give up, Letty,” Tehlmar said, scooting closer and putting a concerned hand on her shoulder. “Progress is never smooth and easy, and sometimes you can beat your fists against a rock for five years without feeling like you’ve gained a thing, but it only ever becomes pointless when you give up. You can do it, Letty. You have it in you to be even better than you are—I don’t know how, but it’s true—and I’ll be by your side every step of the way. We’ll do it together. We’ll find a way.”
As Arlette stared into the elf’s eyes, she came to a realization. Tehlmar’s past actions—the lies, the abandonment... none of that mattered to her anymore. She’d forgiven him fully, completely, and without reservation. At what point she had done so, she couldn’t quite say. Maybe it had been back on that first night together, back at the inn when he’d laid out his love for her in embarrassing detail. Maybe it had been sometime later, or even now, at just this moment. In a sense, it didn’t really make a difference. What mattered was how it felt when she thought about a life with the former Drayhadan prince, the man that, in one form or another, had already been by her side longer than anyone else. It felt... good—no, more than good. It felt... right.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Of course! You know you can always count... oh.” He pointed at the pond—more specifically, at the end of Arlette’s string. The line twitched repeatedly as something struggled beneath the surface. “It seems you have caught us our dinner.”
Arlette yanked the rod upward, pulling a large fish out of the water and sending it arcing overhead to land with a wet slap in the center of the bridge. Ignoring the creature as it flopped desperately about, she set the pole down and grabbed the sides of Tehlmar’s head in her hands, ignoring the twinge of pain from her left. “Dinner can wait,” she said as she pulled his lips towards hers. “I’m hungry for something else right now.”
----------------------------------------
Late that night, Arlette stumbled into her living quarters to find an annoyed Peko waiting for her.
“About time,” he said. “Let’s get to training.”
All Arlette managed to get out was a confused “...wha?” and a moderately loud belch.
“You wanted a push, right? That’s what you told me last night. It’s time.”
“But... I’m too hammered,” she slurred.
“Exactly,” he said, pushing her down into a nearby chair and turning it towards the target across the room. Reaching down to her thigh, he pulled a throwing knife from its strap and placed it in her left palm. “Get to it.”
She groaned. “Do I have to?”
“Yes.”
Another burp forced its way out, mixing with a sigh of resignation. Three more phantom knives appeared in her hand beside the real one as Peko retreated to sit on the bed and watch. Looking away, she shuffled them around, then picked one at random.
She knew it was a fake knife from the start; though it looked the same, and she tried her best to pretend it was real, it lacked the presence that came with being an actual physical object. This was why this whole rigmarole made no sense and was such a waste of time. Deep down, despite her best efforts, it just wasn’t possible for her to fool herself, so whatever Peko had in mind would forever be an impossible task.
Though the board was hard to make out and sometimes, just for a moment, it looked like there were two boards, she wound up and threw with confidence. This wasn’t the first time she’d thrown a knife while soused—drunken violence was practically a mercenary rite of passage. Her aim was... well, it hit the wood, at least. That was all that mattered, right?
She reached for another randomly selected blade and immediately knew it to be real. The way it pulled ever so slightly against her fingertips told her everything. She pulled her arm back and let it fly, then repeated the pantomime twice more.
“I got it,” Peko said as she began to struggle to her feet. She gratefully sank back into the chair as he walked over to the target board and began to pry them out, one by one.
“Did you ever think about Severed, Arlette?” he asked with his back still turned to her as he pulled the final blade from the wood.
“Huh?” Arlette eloquently responded, thrown off by the sudden change in topic.
“As far as anybody knows, Severed people, before they become Severed, are not special,” Peko continued, crossing the chamber and handing Arlette the four blades before returning to the bed. “They are not supremely powerful Observers. So, why can they do what they do?”
Arlette chucked a knife. It was a fake.
“...dunno.” In her drunken fog, she was having enough trouble keeping track of the knives. She couldn’t spare much of her impaired mind to try to make sense of whatever it was Peko was rambling on about.
Next one... fake.
Knife three... fake.
Even her alcohol-addled mind knew that this meant the last one had to be the real one. Yes, there it was, that heft that the others lacked. She hurled it towards the target, then yawned and rubbed her eyes. Today had really taken a lot out of her.
“I think it’s important to underscore the magnitude of what a Severed actually achieves,” Peko carried on as he fetched the knives for Arlette a second time. “Whether it’s the scores of tentacles that they’re so known for or other more bewildering creations, they are able to create things—real, corporeal objects—that are far more complex than any Observer.”
Arlette threw a knife... fake.
Another... fake.
A third... fake.
That meant... yes, a subtle squeeze of the fingers told her everything she needed. Her eyelids starting to droop, she tossed it.
“Fire, water, stone... the thing about Observer creations is that they’re all so homogeneous. There’s no difference between creating a drop of water and a ball of it the size of your fist; it’s all the same material, you’re just making more of it and adjusting the collected material into your desired shape. But Severed are different. Their creations are levels above: more complex, more varied, more detailed.”
Throw. Fake.
Throw. Fake.
Throw. Fake.
Once again, the real knife came last. She waggled the weapon slightly, feeling the inertia as it changed direction. She threw it while she still could. Everything about her felt spent. The alcohol was really taking its toll, now.
“And yet, how? What is that they have that all the rest of us lack?”
He got up and cleared the board a fourth time, but this time, he went back to the bed without handing her back her knives.
“They’re insane,” Arlette answered. Unlike the rest of Peko’s long-winded sermon, this was an easy question to answer, even while smashed, as it didn’t require any thought. Everybody knew that Severed people were crazy.
“Close, but no. Their insanity is the source of the key to their power, but it is not the key itself. The key is something far more rudimentary, something you and I and everybody else has to some degree.”
“What?”
“Belief. Do you remember what the Severed you came across in Crirada was acting like? He was seeing something, something only he could see, and he believed that what he saw was real. It was a belief so strong that it became his truth. He didn’t just believe that the world he saw was real, he knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt. It is that belief, a belief so wholehearted that even reality accepts it as truth, that is the secret to a Severed’s power.
“All this time, everybody has thought that the key to power was understanding. To improve as a water Observer, you must study the water, learn to understand it—what it is, how it acts, all the finest details and minutia of it. And for others, maybe that is the only way... but not for you.
“You don’t make water, you make an illusion of water. It’s the opposite of how traditional Observers function. What it is, how it acts, all the details and minutia—you decide all of that, not the material. Understanding does not matter. What you need is not greater understanding, it’s greater belief—belief strong enough to make your creations real.”
“That’s... impossible,” she slurred. All this thinking was making her head hurt.
“Is it?” Flashing a smug grin, Peko held up a hand, four knives held between his fingers. Releasing the blades, he let them tumble from his grip. One by one, they fell towards her bed. Two of them pierced the soft cushioned top of her mattress just beside her pillow, while the others bounced haphazardly, clanking off each other before coming to a rest.
Arlette’s exhausted, muddled mind abruptly crashed to a halt. Every instinct she had told her that the knives on and in her bed were real, but that only made her more confused. Lurching out of her chair, she stumbled over to her bed and collapsed beside the assembled blades. One touch was all it took to confirm that they were, indeed, entirely real. They had mass and weight, and the cuts in her mattress were, dismayingly, no illusion. Where had he acquired these?
“From you, of course,” Peko told her. “Every time I fetched them from the board, I took the real knife and hid it.”
His words made her brain hurt. There had only been one real knife, not four. Where had the other three come from? It didn’t make any sense!
“Of course it does. Each time I hid a knife, I gave you back the three illusions—but you expected four, so you would subconsciously create a fourth fake knife. Did you not find it strange that the last knife you threw was always the real one? That wasn't a coincidence, Arlette. Each time you got down to that final knife, you took that illusory blade and you made it corporeal because you knew, without a doubt, that one of them was true. You believed, without a shadow of a doubt, that if the others were fake, then the last one had to be the real one... and so it was.”
Arlette struggled to keep her mind afloat as Peko’s words battered her like storm waves battered a ship, threatening to capsize her. Sometimes she had trouble keeping up with Peko while sober; now, she found herself being swept under. That didn’t stop him, however. His triumphant grin grew wider as he pressed on.
“Don’t you see? This is the true power of belief, Arlette—the way forward that you’ve been looking for. Think about it. Not only could you make fire, or water, or stone, or ice faster and better than any Observer, you could make all manner of other things as well, from the simplest blade to creations more intricate than the machines Lord Ferros builds! Why, who knows, perhaps you could even create life itself! The possibilities for you are nearly limitless, Arlette. As long as you have the power and the will, you can make... well, you can make just about anything.” She felt him root around in her clothes for a moment before he withdrew his hands and placed something in her right hand—something small that felt cold, smooth, and hard against her palm—and closed her fingers around it. “Anything at all.”
Arlette felt the last of her energy evaporate, and she fell into a deep slumber.
----------------------------------------
Arlette Faredin let out a soft groan as she slowly regained consciousness and her hangover first made its presence known. It had been a long time since she’d had so much alcohol in one day, and while it had felt wonderful to just let it all go for a little while, the bill always arrived not soon after. She thought back to the day before and the wonderful time she’d had: traveling, drinking, relaxing, drinking, fishing for the first time, drinking, making love, drinking, eating, and more drinking. The two of them had been so sloshed by the end that it was a miracle they’d made it back to the fortress at all.
She couldn’t remember much of the trip back, and the gaps in her memory grew larger as the evening went on until all she could remember of the end of the night were small blips surrounded by mental fog. She could remember Peko, and... knives? And... there was something else, something confounding but important that eluded her no matter how hard she tried to recall it.
Oh well, it couldn’t have been that important, she decided. It would come to her eventually, most likely. For now, though, she needed to get up and do something about this blasted hangover before it made her regret having fun.
Rolling over, Arlette went to push herself up, only for her hand to come into contact with something unexpectedly cold and hard where her bedding should be. Four throwing knives lay on her bed, though she had no idea why. They looked like her throwing knives, but why had she left them beside her pillow, instead of putting them away like she normally did? Had she really been that drunk?
Sitting up, she went to rub her face with her hands but stopped just before. Her left hand, still injured and wrapped in fresh bandages—by Tehlmar, most likely; how sweet it was of him to care about her health so much—wasn’t the best choice for any assertive face massaging just yet. It would be another day or two before her bones were fully healed again.
That left her right hand, but that hand was, for some unknown reason, clenched into a fist. It had been like that since she’d awoken, she realized, and judging by how her hand felt, probably the entire time she’d slept as well. However, she couldn’t recall even the slightest hint of what she held so tightly. It felt smooth and dry, but that alone didn’t tell her much.
Slowly and carefully, Arlette loosened her grip, unfurling her fingers until she could finally see what she’d held in her grasp the whole night. She gazed at the small object with puzzlement. The longer she looked, the more her confusion grew.
She held in her hand her small glass vial, the same one she’d shown Tehlmar the day before. Except now, instead of the expected glint of light shining through a container with a single drop of black inside, she found nothing but darkness. A tenebrous liquid filled the space within the crystal, an ooze that seemed to suck the light out of the world around it as it beckoned with promises of untold power. Somehow, someway, she now held in her hands a vial filled to the stopper with chimirin.