Once there was a country filled with happy people. They lived happily in their lands, where life was peaceful and food was plentiful. But the gods became jealous of their happiness and laid a curse upon the people and their lands. They stole away the sun, covering the sky in gray, and sent the lands into a harsh winter. Crops would not grow and snows covered the ground land.
The people despaired. They begged the gods for their forgiveness, but the selfish gods wanted the sun for themselves and themselves only. Then one day, the spirits of the world took pity on the people, and they sent great storms to wash away the gray. The people rejoiced, dancing between the raindrops, each drop having absorbed the gray that shrouded the sky and become a milky white, like ivory tears falling from the-
“HOLD ON A GODDAMNED MINUTE! THAT’S NOT THE STORY YOU TOLD ME!”
Sofie grabbed Pari away from Basilli and Jaquet as the two mercenaries broke into peals of laughter. She pulled the confused catgirl into a protective embrace and glared daggers at the men as they hooted in amusement. Basilli was even laughing so hard that he’d fallen off his chair, the asshole. “Come on,” Sofie told the child, leading her out of the Delons’ living room, “let’s go talk to people who appreciate us.”
Together they headed down the hallway towards the bedroom where they and Arlette slept. Lucas and Liela’s house was not the biggest, but it was well-laid-out, making good use of the space it had. It was a tight squeeze, but with the help of some cots they’d been able to fit the five unexpected visitors into two small spare rooms. They found Arlette in their “bedroom” sitting against a wall with a large metal needle, slowly patching holes in her clothing. To say that her ensemble had taken a beating over the last season was putting it lightly. The cloth was riddled with puncture holes and long slashes from the dozens of fights she’d been in since leaving Poniren, but the chance to fix any of it had not presented itself until now.
“What’s gotten into you?” Arlette inquired as Sofie stormed in with Pari in tow.
“Your friends think we’re nothing but a free source of guffaws,” Sofie huffed. “Pari just wanted to know why you’re called the Ivory Tears, but they decided to lie to her about it for fun.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of a thing they do. It’s a game for them.”
“Why not just tell us the truth? Why do they have to be so mean about it?”
“They don’t know the truth.”
“They don’t?”
“I’ve never told anybody the reasons behind the name.”
“Tell Pari!” urged Pari.
“No.” Arlette refocused on the tunic on her lap.
“Come onnnnnn,” whined Sofie.
“Nope.”
Pari and Sofie pouted, but no amount of pleading or puppy dog eyes would sway the mercenary’s hardened heart.
“Oh yeah!” Sofie said, straightening up as a thought came to her. She stuck her head out into the hallway and peered down towards the living room area. She could hear Jaquet and Basilli chatting about something, so they were still where Sofie had left them. Good. She shut the door to their room quietly. “There’s something we wanted to tell you about Basilli. We ended up following him by accident, you see, and-”
“Stop right there,” Arlette said, her tone harsh and commanding. “I don’t want to hear another word.”
“Wha... why not?” Sofie asked incredulously.
“One of the cardinal rules of being a mercenary is that you never pry into others’ pasts. Period.”
“Really?”
“Being a mercenary is a brutal, dangerous job. Most people don’t become mercenaries because they think it’s a good life. They do it because they’re running from their pasts and have no better options. So we don’t ask questions about each other. It’s one of the most important principles of being a soldier for hire.”
“Are you running from your past too?”
Arlette gave her a glare.
“Sorry...”
An awkward silence filled the room. Pari drifted away and started messing with her candlemaking apparatus.
“No,” Arlette said after a while.
“No what?”
“I’m not running from my past.”
“Then why? I’ve always wondered why somebody as young as you would choose to be a mercenary. You’re smart, you’re strong, there must have been plenty of other paths to take.”
“Control,” Arlette replied, before continuing upon seeing Sofie’s perplexed face. “The one thing about being a mercenary that is different than other jobs is that you have control over your own life. If you’re a farmer and your country’s rulers decide that they need extra soldiers and that includes you, you either serve or get executed for disobedience. Same deal if you’re a tailor, a blacksmith, whatever. Your life is yours only until those in power decide your fate for you. But being a mercenary is different. You work for whoever you want to work for. You abide by the terms that you decide upon with your employer. Other than that, you’re free. Countries can’t touch you, they can’t conscript you, they can’t force you to do anything.”
“Why not?”
"You mess with one mercenary band, you mess with every mercenary band. It's part of the mercenary code. Every band will walk, and nobody will hire on with you. The bigger ones like the Scions of the Black Dawn are basically their own private armies. If a country tries to strong-arm a mercenary band, they might suddenly find that a third of their fighting strength has suddenly left and joined their rivals."
Sofie smirked at the idea of an unofficial mercenary union going on strike. “And that outweighs all the downsides, huh?”
Arlette scowled down at the needle as she brought it up and through the cloth. “I refuse to be a tool ever again,” she stated with a finality that told Sofie the conversation was over. “Never.”
Just then, Sofie heard footsteps outside and turned towards the window just in time to watch through the small opening between the two shutters as a foreboding silhouette passed by. As the footsteps receded, she pulled the shutters open and stuck her head out to find a figure bending over and picking up several pieces of trash from the street. A large cloak covered the figure's entire body, its loose folds concealing the person's gender and overall build. The only distinctive things she could see from the back was the sack on the ground to their side and the large broom strapped to their back. The figure paused at the sound of Sofie's actions and swiveled their head to look directly at her. Sofie's head instinctively reared back as she found herself staring not at a face but a mask. The mask, an unsettling depiction of a lizard with tusks sticking out of its mouth, completely covered the person's entire head. Combined with the cloak and a pair of leather gloves, the ensemble covered the person's body from head to toe, obscuring any hint of skin from her view. For a moment, Sofie lost herself in the mask's inhuman eyes. Then the moment passed, and the person turned away and resumed filling their sack. Sofie's skin crawled as she watched the figure slink away through the darkness of the alley. It wasn't until the figure was completely out of sight that Sofie pulled herself back into the room and shut the shutters.
“Arlette, there’s a creepy guy in a lizard mask outside,” she said.
"Stay away from it. Sweepers are unclean, you'll get sick."
"What do you mean?"
"They remove the filth and trash of the cities here in Eterium. I heard that they have to fill their masks with herbs to be able to breath without vomiting from the smell of all the foulness that surrounds them."
"So they're like garbage men mixed with janitors? That doesn't mean you'll get sick just by being around one. You just have to make sure you wash properly. Also, don't call them 'it'!" She put her hands on her hips in frustration.
"Sofie, I'm telling you. They're barely people. If you stay around one of them too long, you'll be cursed. Everybody knows this."
"Okay, okay, I get it," Sofie gave in. It was a shame, but even seemingly rational, level-headed people like Arlette had their prejudices in this world.
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Sofie leaned against the side of their covered wagon and chewed on a chunk of pickled meat, watching the wind ripple through the tall grasses of the Eterian plains. The meat had a strong vinegar flavor and was as salty as the ocean, but she'd take it over a lizard any day of the week. That was assuming this meat wasn't from some giant lizard... Sofie stuffed that thought in a box and threw it into a mental closet, never to be opened again. This was garoph jerky, she told herself. Yeah. Definitely garoph meat.
The caravan had stopped for the day. They’d left Begale eight days ago, making their way southwest towards the Stragman border. Two days ago, the desert sands had begun to transition into a multicolored grassland, and now all Sofie could see was a rainbow of grass and the occasional tree from horizon to horizon. One thing Sofie had never quite gotten over was the plant colors in this world. Looking at a small rise to the south, she could see purple grass, red grass, yellow grass, and even some black blades of grass, all mixed in with the normal green she was used to. Weren’t plants green because of chlorophyll? How did the other grasses live?
Off in the distance, a small flock of birds took off for the skies, their territory disturbed by a particularly hyper catgirl with an abundance of energy to burn after a day of sitting still in a wagon. Keeping the child from going stir-crazy every day was primarily Sofie’s task, and it consumed a great deal of her attention. She had to pull out every trick in the book to keep Pari from going out of control, from every game she could remember, to stories pulled from her childhood or just straight made up, and anything else she could think of, but she was scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point. It took a lot to keep a child from going crazy during a month-long journey. Yesterday she’d been so desperate that she’d even tried to teach the girl how to juggle, which, given that they were in a wagon at the time, had gone about as well as one might imagine.
A few more birds took flight closer to the convoy, and then several moments later Pari popped out of the tall grass, a variety of plants in her grasp. Every evening, once the convoy had stopped for the day, Pari would run off to explore the local area and return later with a collection of anything she found that she considered new or interesting. Today was no exception. The girl raced past Sofie and climbed into their wagon. After a series of clanks and clangs she emerged again, this time laden with her sack of candlemaking equipment, tottered over to Sofie, and sat down.
Sofie found what came next fascinating every time she watched it. The girl whipped out a series of equipment and set it up with practiced precision. Sofie recognized some of the ensemble, like the stone mortar and pestle that Pari was currently using to grind up some orange flowers, but some of the rest, like one series of metal tubes that seemed to twist around each other, were completely mystifying.
If somebody were to ask the girl what her favorite thing to do was, there was no doubt she would say “making candles”. But what she actually did was something far different, some form of mad chemistry that used the inert properties of the wax to seal in various ingredients until released by the flame. This extreme candlemaking put her much closer to being an alchemist than a candlemaker, though Sofie wasn’t sure that Pari understood just how different her version of candlemaking was.
The girl was on a constant search for new recipes for her candles, always experimenting with new ingredients she’d find on their travels. Today that was the orange flowers, a few purple stems, and some sort of root she’d dug up. Pari ground the flower petals into a paste before putting it in some sort of sieve and squeezing out the juices from the pulp.
Pari smelled the liquid collected in a small bone cup, her ears twitching as she sniffed it repeatedly. Sofie was convinced that the girl did most of her experimenting based off of smell, using her powerful nose to analyze the chemical contents of her materials and predict how best to combine them. Done sniffing, the girl poured the liquid into a hollow candle and mixed in several other ingredients from her sack. Sofie found it interesting how she used wax to store her ingredients as well, ripping open a small gap in the wax with her nails or a knife, pouring out however much she wanted, and then resealing the wax with her hands. Within a few minutes, the candle had been filled with this strange concoction, a wick had been inserted, and a wax cover had been placed on top, the warm wax melting just enough to seal the inside from the outside air.
“Pari, why did your grandfather teach you to make candles like this?” Sofie asked after a while.
“Grandfather says Pari’s soul is the weakest,” the child replied with a depressed frown, her ears flat against her head. She snapped her fingers and a small flame, no bigger than a candle flame, appeared where the two fingers had pressed together. “Grandfather taught Pari candlemaking to protect Pari because Pari can only do this.” The girl looked at the weak, pathetic flame with shame in her eyes, like she viewed herself as a disappointment.
“Awww, it’s okay, sweetie,” Sofie said, giving the sad girl a warm hug. “I can’t even do that.”
“Really? Sofie-sis is weaker than Pari?”
“I can’t even make a flame like you, and I’ve been trying for weeks now. Maybe you could teach me later?”
“Okay! Pari will teach Sofie-sis to be strong like Pari!” the girl declared. That said, she picked up the container housing her newest experiment and shook the still-cooling candle from its container.
Sofie wondered where Pari’s wax had come from as the child snapped her fingers, lighting the wick, and tossed the candle onto the ground a few feet away. A few second later, clouds of brown, noxious smoke suddenly spewed out from the candle, engulfing the two, their wagon, and some of the campsite beyond. Sofie coughed as a foul smell worse than anything she had ever experienced filled her nostrils. The world blurred as her eyes filled with tears. All this from some orange flower petals? Cries and coughs could be heard from elsewhere in the smoke as it spread through the camp.
“Smelly!” gagged Pari. “Yuck!”
Sofie coughed again as she rubbed her face with her hands, feeling an oily residue on both. Oh lord, they were going to smell like this for hours.
“Pari! Sofie! Get over here!” came Arlette’s angry, hacking shout from the other side of the wagon.
“Having indigestion again, Jaquet?” coughed Basilli. A loud thud followed. "Ow! That hurt!"
After what became known as the “stinkcandle incident”, new rules were put in place. From that point forward, Pari had to do all her testing away from the campsite and downwind. Always downwind. Always.
----------------------------------------
Consciousness returned to Sofie slowly. She groaned. Her body hurt all over, her head most of all. Why did everything hurt? Her eyes snapped open as previous events came rushing back. Her hands shot to her face, searching for that horrible bug, but finding nothing. A breath of relief escaped her lips.
Picking herself up off the ground and looking about, Sofie found little to see except mist and a cliff face. It seemed like she’d tumbled onto a ledge about five meters long sticking out from the wall. She shuddered to think of what could have happened if she’d been anywhere else along that path.
“Hello?” she called upwards into the mist. The haze was too thick to see where she’d fallen from, but the others would surely still be able to hear her. She waited for a response but none came. “Arlette? Pari? Anybody?” Still nothing.
How long had she been out? I was still daytime, but she couldn’t say more than that. She called out again, as loud as her lungs could manage, but once again only the birds and insects replied.
No, there was no way Arlette would just abandon her now. The mercenary tried to put up a hard front, but Sofie knew that there was a caring soul hiding beneath all that armor. Arlette was probably down in the valley below, combing the area for her at this very moment. Looking down, Sofie searched for a way to descend without breaking something. Luckily this was Stragma, and trees grew everywhere. Even the cliff side had small trees growing out of it that she could use to slowly make her way down. Cautiously she tested one, seeing if it could support her weight. The trunk bent under her, but held. Finally! A situation in this world where it paid to be thin!
As she ever-so-slowly made her way down to the forest floor, Sofie couldn’t help but ponder if the others would come back for her. Were they working their way through the valley, on their way to find her, or had they just written her off and moved on? They were coming back, she decided after just a moment’s consideration.
Basilli never seemed to care one way or the other and that hadn’t changed, but detachment was pretty much his style with everything. He threw in a joke or a prank here and there to convince people that there were connections between him and others, but really he seemed to not care one way or the other what happened to people that weren’t him. Still, he wouldn’t rock the boat if the others wanted to come look for her.
Jaquet probably still wanted her gone, but he hadn't been saying it out loud for a while now. Were it his call, Sofie would probably never see any of them again. But it wasn't his call, and it seemed that he'd finally recognized that fact and started keeping his opinions to himself.
Arlette’s decision was really all that mattered, and it was why Sofie was so certain that she’d be seeing them all again quite soon. She’d pondered many-a-time why the mercenary had put herself out on a limb for her so often, and had never been able to come up with a concrete reason. At first she’d thought that, as much as the woman tried to hide it behind a gruff exterior, Arlette just cared too much to not help her. She still believed that was a large part of it, but as she’d come to understand her savior better she’d realized it was more complicated than that.
First of all, Arlette had given Sofie a promise that she’d help Sofie get home in exchange for Sofie’s help back in Poniren. At the time, Sofie hadn’t understood just how seriously Arlette took her promises. The woman seemed to place a large amount of her self-worth on her ability to follow through on her commitments, no matter how large or small. Sofie admired that in her.
There was another thought, however, that had been creeping up on Sofie recently, one she couldn’t dismiss out of hand — that Arlette kept her around because she was lonely. It was incredible just how little Sofie actually knew about the woman that was Arlette Demirt. As far as she could tell, nobody knew much about the woman, not even Jaquet. Such was the mercenary way, Sofie figured. Don’t ask questions.
Still, for a person who’d claimed she wasn’t running from her past, she sure did go out of her way to avoid talking about it. But putting up all those walls around herself had just served to make her feel more isolated. Sofie’d seen it several times now, when the woman had thought nobody was looking — that empty, forlorn gaze into the middle distance of somebody who felt like she was alone even amongst friends.
The valley’s floor looked little different than much of the rest of the forest. Trees, ferns, ivy, and all sorts of other plants filled her view. Her eyes caught a strange shape lying on the ground not far from the cliff. Oh, it was the waterproof bag she’d been given by the Stragmans back at the start of her journey. She’d been holding it at the time of her... misstep... and it must have fallen off the ledge when she’d landed.
She picked the item up, lifting it easily because it was empty. She’d never had anything to put inside the bag, but had kept it around just in case it proved useful in the future. In comparison, Pari’s bag was nearly overflowing with a random assortment of items she’d collected as they made their way deeper into the forest.
Getting down without plummeting to her death had taken longer than she’d planned. The light was fading. Now what? After a moment of contemplation, she decided that she needed to find a place to stay for the night before all the light was gone. Slowly, Sofie made her way deeper into the valley in search of a place to stay, and with luck, her friends.
----------------------------------------
The massive wall of metal loomed over her, but Sofie was far too excited to be intimidated by the foreboding ruin. It had been so long since she’d spent those few days alone in that bunker inside a mountain in Kutrad that she’d basically forgotten that there was more to this world than its barbaric medieval cultures. Here stood an undeniable reminder that civilization had existed here once, long ago. Not the pathetic attempts she’d been dragged through so far, but real, true civilization.
Walking along the building, Sofie ran her hand along the worn metal in appreciation and awe. To make structures like this and that bunker which could survive the ravages of time was a monumentally impressive feat. She stiffened in shock as a door suddenly slid to the side, its gears squealing in protest against the passage of time, but it was what she saw inside that nearly blew her mind.
As she walked down the empty, lifeless halls, she could not get over just how much the inside of this building reminded her of a fancy office back on her world. Beneath the dust she found polished stone floors coated with some sort of epoxy. Glowing panels lit the rooms and hallways almost like rows of fluorescent lights back home. Many rooms had large, solid metal tables in their centers and long counters along the walls. Each room held strange contraptions, each different than the last. Some were on the middle table, others on the outside counters, and some large ones were even built into the walls of the rooms themselves. Many of the machines featured switches next to small diodes that shined an eerie blue light. Sofie was smart enough to keep her hands away from those.
A laboratory; that’s what this was, she realized. This was a place of science. What kind, she could not say, but she couldn’t help but feel warm in this place. Everything here, even those things that she could not recognize, felt so much more real to her than the crude wagons and stone walls of the world outside.
Sofie paused for a moment as she passed by an open door. This room was different, smaller than most of the others, with only a single large desk and a chair covered with what she believed had once been padding. On the desk sat a box very much like ones she'd seen in most of the other rooms. Some sort of computer, perhaps? Shutting the door behind her more out of habit than anything else, she bent over the desk and inspected the box on the desk closely.
The box was perhaps half a meter long and wide, with a rectangular crystal panel sticking out from the top at an angle. Looking around it, she spotted a switch with a blue diode on the back and toggled it. The diode shifted color to orange and the crystal panel at the top began to glow, but no matter how long she waited, nothing appeared. What a tease.
Looking around some more, another blue diode caught her eye down by her feet. Embedded into the side of the desk was some kind of panel with knobs and buttons on it, all next to a large lever. On a whim, she grabbed the lever and gave it a tug. To her surprise, it rotated and the entire panel swung out, revealing a cavity behind it. A safe!
Sofie peeked inside, not expecting to find anything, but instead found something boxy was sitting in the shadows in the back. Pulling it out, her jaw dropped to the floor. It was a large book! The first book she'd seen since that fateful day in the library!
All other thoughts forgotten, Sofie reverently placed the book on the desk. Most likely thanks to being inside the tightly sealed safe all these years, none of the pages had decomposed. It was as if the book had been printed just a few years ago.
Large, circular patterns decorated the cover. Carefully opening the book, Sofie realized that the patterns weren’t decorations at all. Long complicated lines looped and twisted from the top of the page down to the bottom in vertical rows, sometimes throwing in the occasional sharp angle or two on their way down. The lines, once started at the top, rarely stopped until it reached the bottom, instead forming complex patterns that flow downward in one single unbroken trail of ink. The language of an ancient culture, long dead. Even though she couldn’t make heads nor tails of it, Sofie found the scrawl-covered page to be the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
Hours vanished as she turned the pages, her mind consumed by the book. Many pages were covered with the squirrelly writing, though she started to notice some patterns that popped up with frequency in the same spot in the upper left. Numbers? Dates perhaps? The rest of the book was filled with detailed drawings of various things covered in notes, including a map. The final third of the book was entirely writing and drawing of a plant, with many notes squeezed into the margins between the images, before the author simply stopped and left the final thirty or so pages blank. Strange.
She’d turned back to the first few pages for a second look when she thought she heard a soft, muffled crash somewhere in the building. Was somebody out there? Another crash.
Quietly she closed the book, placed it inside her waterproof bag, and opened the office door. Immediately she picked up the sound of metal pounding against metal echoing down the halls. Keeping a lookout for anybody as she went, she moved cautiously towards the banging, until it suddenly stopped. As she crept closer, she could hear voices. Familiar voices. She ran the final few meters to towards the next doorway and peered inside.
“Oh, there you are!” she said in relief after rounding the corner and finding her two would-be rescuers. After all that time Sofie had begun to worry that she’d been abandoned for real.
Her heart soared when she saw a Pari’s dazzling smile. Putting out her arms, she caught her adopted sister as she jumped and swung her about in joy. How could she stay mad at that cute face? “You little rascal!” she play scolded, pulling the child into a hug. “What have I told you about shoving bugs in my face?”
“Pari sorry.”
“I’ll forgive you this once, but don’t do it ever again, okay?”
“Okay!” The little munchkin nuzzled up against Sofie’s shoulder and began to purr, making Sofie want to never let her go.
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“Are you hurt?” asked Arlette. Right. She’d been there too this whole time. Whoops.
“I’m mostly alright,” Sofie replied. “I got really lucky. Part of the cliff side juts out from the rest just beneath the mist. I hit my head and got knocked out and when I came to, you were all gone! I tried to climb back up but I couldn’t make it so I had to climb down. It was really scary!”
“Well I’m glad you’re safe. Now let’s get out of here.”
“Awwww, do we have to?”
Arlette stared at Sofie’s disappointed face in disbelief. “Don’t tell me you actually like it here...”
“Are you kidding?” Sofie gushed. “This place is the best place I’ve seen since I came to this world! It’s so nice and quiet! I feel so safe in here!” Come on, who wouldn’t like this place? Sure it was dusty, but it was clean, and safe, with working lights and who knew what else!
“Of all the boneheaded, ignorant, crazy things that I have heard come out of your mouth since we first met, nothing even comes close to what you just said. This place is a waking nightmare. Now let’s leave it while we still can.”
Sofie sighed. There were times when she thought she understood the mercenary, but the rest of the time, she felt like they were looking at two entirely different worlds. She had been about to tell Arlette about the book, but now decided not to. With that attitude, Arlette would probably say something about "stealing from the spirits" and make her put it back where she'd found it. She set Pari down and watched as she scurried over to her bag, purposely skirting a trashed machine lying on the floor.
“Oh?” she said. “What happened here?”
“A big mean thing attacked Pari, but Arly-sis beat it up! Arly-sis was so cool! Arly-sis was like wham! Bam! Bang! Arly-sis is the best!”
“‘Arly-sis?’ Uh-ohhhhhh,” chuckled Sofie. She hadn’t expected Pari to change her tune towards the other woman so quickly. She had to admit, she’d felt a ping of jealousy mixed in with the happiness at the child’s words. “Looks like somebody got promoted. Welcome to the family, ‘Arly’.”
“Don’t you dare start calling me that.”
“Would never even think of doing such a thing, Madame Demirt.” Sofie was sooooo totally going to call her that. She stepped over to the crumpled metal contraption to get a closer look. A long hose protruded from one side, with a strange attachment on the end. She looked closer. Was that a brushroll? No. It couldn’t be. She took a glance at the floor and noticed a single lane dust free, from where the machine lay going all the way back to the room’s entrance. Right in front of the machine were a series of dirty footprints the size of a child’s feet. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure this one out. A snort fought its way out of her mouth against her will, followed by a giggle.
“Is... is this the big meanie that attacked you?” she asked Pari while doing her best to keep a straight face.
“Yes!”
"Was it trying to... snrk... suck you up the whole time so it could eat you?"
"Yes!"
Sofie couldn’t hold it in any longer as she began to cackle uproariously, releasing all the worries and frustrations of the day in the form of breathless guffaws. With all the other differences between Scyria and Earth, it felt good to know that no matter where you were, cats were still afraid of vacuum cleaners.
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“So, I don’t really understand why they move so much,” Sofie said as she relaxed inside their borrowed house in Pholis. “I get that they needed to leave Krose to avoid those giant, ugly, acid-spitting lizards, but why not just stay here? It’s nice here.”
Basilli and Jaquet paused their drunken revelry for a moment at her question. “Ya ever heard o’ a komori?” Jaquet asked.
“No...” Sofie replied. The man’s sadistic, knowing smile worried her.
“Wha’ abou’ a frog?”
“Sure...” she said warily.
“Ever seen a leech?”
"I know what they are," she replied with a slight shiver. She didn’t like where this was headed.
“Imagine a leech tha’ could jump like a frog.”
Sofie’s face paled.
“Now imagine millions o’ ‘em migratin’ through ‘ere,” the man continued, leaning in for effect, “dozens o’ ‘em jumpin’ on ya, latchin’ onto your skin with their sticky fee’, and suckin’ ou’ every. las’. drop.”
Nope nope nope nope nope nope. There was no way that was true. That had to be made up. Had to be. Such nightmares could never be real.
Sofie didn’t even have to say a word. Her look of abject horror was enough to send the two drunken mercenaries into fits of hilarity. “You think that’s bad?” Basilli teased. “Do you know why they move to Krose from Kukego in the first place?”
“No, and I don’t want to know, thank you.”
“Insects, long and thin like ropes, with hundreds of legs.”
“No! Shut up!” Not centipedes! Sofie hated centipedes more than almost anything.
“A swarm leagues wide moves through Kukego every spring. Hundreds of millions of them, some the size of your arm, some bigger than this house, devouring every single living thing, plant or animal-”
“Shutupshutupshutup!”
“-They say that you can’t even see the ground, the trees, or any other surface. All you can see is a writhing black mass, wriggling its way towards you-”
Sofie shrieked as the image of a mass of centipedes descending upon her, crawling all over her with their horrid little legs, and biting into her flesh with their terrible pincers played through her mind on loop.
The two men laughed twice as hard, the jerks.
“Look ou’, they’re gonna ge’ ya!”
“Leave me alone you-”
Nobody heard her next words over the explosion, not even her. A massive tremor rocked the house and the entire structure swayed dangerously, as if it were thinking about falling in. Basilli and Jaquet raced outside, Jaquet brandishing his huge halberd, ready for a fight. Sofie followed, afraid the house was going to collapse, to find a giggling catgirl.
“Hehehehehehe boom! Heehehehehe.”
Strange, Sofie thought. Hadn't there been another platform before?
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Sofie rummaged through crates and sacks, pulling out bandages, leaves, and berries as per her instructions. Once her arms were full, she hurried over to a group of people tending to fires lit under large pots nearly half her height and deposited the materials nearby.
“Thank you, dearie,” said the gaunt middle-aged woman leading the group. “That should be enough for now.”
The general leading this expedition had been kind enough to allow Sofie and Pari to tag along with the army’s support staff, which was good, because there was no way in hell that Sofie was going to let herself get separated from Arlette after all she’d been through to stay by the mercenary’s side. Deep down inside her was this irrepressible certainty that if they split up, even for just a few days, she’d never see Arlette again. So Sofie was coming along, no matter what. Even if it meant heading back out into that horrid jungle.
Sofie hadn’t realized that an army of this size needed a lot of people who didn’t actually fight to tag along. Right now, she, Pari, and the other non-combatants were camped out on a small hill, watching the rest of the army do battle off in the distance. The army was several kilometers away, but the sound of combat was so loud that they could all hear the carnage going down with disturbing clarity.
Other than a small group of soldiers tasked with guarding the support staff, everybody here was a Hollow. Much like the first trip through Stragma, Sofie had been able to feel the contempt that the soldiers had for the ones they called “Shells”. Judging by the conversations she’d had with some of those in the group, the life of a Hollow seemed a harsh one. You got the worst food, the pay was so low that it was almost an insult, and worst of all you had to obey non-Hollows and their orders no matter what. You had no control over your own life. If you were told that you had to put your life on pause and carry supplies from the northern border to Krose, for example, that was your new job and you couldn’t refuse without severe consequences. Physical abuse of Hollows was generally outlawed, but there was an exception in place for cases of disobedience.
Arlette had downplayed it before, but Sofie didn’t see too much of a difference between this and the slavery in Kutrad. Sure it wasn’t a life of non-stop suffering, but you still had no real say in your own future. It was just a matter of degrees. Did a country with a good, wholesome society exist in this world? Eterium had seemed okay, but there was probably some terrible thing about it lurking below the surface, knowing her luck. Maybe Gustil?
Currently her task was to supply ingredients for a group of Hollows who were making some sort of paste and putting it on bandages to create a dressing that they said helped to “keep evil spirits out”. In other words, these plants had anti-bacterial properties, and by mashing them up, boiling them, and putting them on the bandages, they could help prevent infection. Sofie was completely against the idea of this war, or any war, for that matter, but it did feel good to be able to help save lives. She could already spot some Stragman soldiers, too injured to fight but still able to walk, making their way towards her.
“Having fun, Pari?” she asked the girl. Pari was sitting near the others, mashing some leaves and berries into a paste between two stones.
“Bored,” came the reply.
“I know it’s not very exciting, but you’re helping people,” Sofie said as she sat down next to the child. “I’m sure it will be over soon.”
“Pari wants to make candles.”
“I know...” She ruffled the child’s head just as several loud booms rumbled across the plain. She grimaced as she watched Drayhadan soldiers tumbling from their hurriedly constructed fortifications as the stone disintegrated under the powerful blasts of three boomcandles. “Pari, look at me... We have to talk about something.”
“Nya?” said Pari as Sofie took her hands in her own.
“I worry that you sometimes don’t seem to understand just how dangerous the candles you make can be. A bangcandle can really hurt somebody, and if it went off in the right position it could even kill somebody. And your new boomcandles are way worse. They’re very deadly weapons, and you need to be very careful about how you make them and what they end up being used for.”
“But grandfather said that it’s okay,” countered the confused catgirl. “Grandfather said that if people die it’s because people were too weak. Grandfather said that weak people deserve death.”
What the fuck? Sofie wished she could find this mystery person and give him a good slap or two. Who the hell would teach a child such a savage philosophy?
“I’m sorry, but your grandfather is wrong. Life is very precious. Once it’s gone, you can’t get it back.”
“Grandfather isn’t wrong!” Pari protested. “Grandfather is super smart!”
“Pari, listen to me. Aren’t I super weak?”
“Yes!”
Sofie couldn’t help but sigh at how quickly and readily Pari had agreed with that question.
“If I died, would you be sad? Or would you say it’s okay that you’d never see me again because I’m weak?”
“B-but Pari doesn’t want Sofie-sis to die,” the girl whimpered, her lip trembling at the thought. Sofie instinctively pulled the child into an embrace.
“That’s why you have to protect life. I need to make sure that you understand that killing is bad. I’m going to say this very clearly because it’s very important. Don’t kill people. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Do you promise to be careful with your candles from now on? To make sure that they’re not used for bad things?
“Pari promise.”
“Thank you, Pari. You’ve made me a very happy sister. Now how about I go find a rock and we mash these up together, huh?”
“Okay!”
Sofie rose to her feet and wandered away, looking around for a rock of suitable size and heft to brandish. The land around her possessed an open beauty to it that really appealed to her after weeks of nothing but leaves, leaves, and more leaves. It was refreshing to see the sky again. A shame that everything was ruined by the butchery going on behind her. The cries of pain and bloodlust still filled the air as the Stragman army hounded the retreating Drayhadan troops. Then, without warning, everything fell silent.
Like the rest of those around her, Sofie turned back towards the battle, disturbed by the sudden hush. Something was wrong; tens of thousands of people weren’t supposed to all go quiet simultaneously like that. What she saw upset her. Off in the distance, men and women on both sides had stopped moving, as if in a trance. The entirety of both armies stood motionless, still as pond water on a windless morning.
What was going on? Hushed, fearful discussions rose around her, urgency growing in the voices of the participants. Then everybody off in the distance fell over, as if they were all puppets with their strings cut, and those discussions turned into panic. Suddenly only a small group of guards was there to protect them in the middle of their greatest enemy’s lands!
Almost as if on cue, rows of elven soldiers came into view, coming around the side of the hill. Sofie took off in the opposite direction like the rest, only to find more elves coming around the other side, their faces adorned with wicked grins and mocking eyes.
Where had these troops come from? The Stragman soldiers, outnumbered ten to one, were easily overwhelmed and within minutes the entire group had been surrounded. Sofie quailed when she saw the manacles the elves carried, but there was nothing she could do. Like the others, she and Pari surrendered with fear in their hearts.
“Filthy, tree-hugging savages,” spat one of the elven soldiers to another as they stood guard over the captured Hollows. Only several remained nearby, the rest having moved on to the unconscious Stragman Second Army. “How dare they invade our lands?”
“Heh,” chuckled the other soldier, “the entire battle went as Madam Esmae predicted. Nobody can withstand the Mother of Nightmares. They never stood a chance.”
Sofie was stunned. Looking back at the soldiers off in the distance, this time she spied carts filled with shackles. Lots of shackles. Enough to cuff an entire army. This had all been a trap.
----------------------------------------
As the Drayhadans marched the entire Second Army deeper into Esmae territory over the next several days, Sofie had nothing to do but ponder many questions. Who was this “Mother of Nightmares”? Could one single person really be strong enough to take down an entire army on her own? How had this “Madam Esmae”, whoever she was, known that they were coming far enough in advance to acquire the restraints needed to capture tens of thousands of people? Where were they going? Were Arlette and the others okay? Most importantly, what was going to happen to them? Those questions and more floated through her mind as she trudged along the plains, Pari thankfully by her side, but answers were much harder to come by.
At least just a little while later she got the answer to one question, as the prisoner of war procession came to a merciful halt at a large fortress. There she was herded into one of many large metal cages, along with dozens of others, and left for hours to bake in the hot summer sun. Her body felt weak from hunger, as the Drayhadans had only fed them all once a day, and very little food at that. Instead of giving in to despair, she put every last ounce of focus into soothing her adopted sister, holding her and petting her as best she could with bound hands.
The Drayhadans laughed at and mocked the miserable Stragman soldiers crammed into the pens, purposely eating food within their view and then throwing scraps into the cages when they were finished. Sofie couldn’t understand why the two sides hated each other so much, but the enmity was plain as day to see.
The next day several soldiers came by, inspecting the cages, and stopped at the one with Sofie and Pari inside.
“That’s her,” said one, pointing at Pari. Sofie immediately latched onto the child protectively. “And there’s the other one.”
“You two,” a more important-looking guard said, pointing at them both, “follow me.” He unlocked the door to the cage and several other guards stepped in, waving swords around menacingly to keep anybody from getting thoughts about rushing the door.
Confused and frightened, the sisters obeyed, emerging from the cage into the courtyard and following the guard to a different area. There on the ground sat a large palanquin, big enough to hold perhaps ten people comfortably inside, and tall enough to stand in. The guard pulled out a large key chain and went through each until he found the one he was looking for, and then unlocked both their shackles. Another guard opened the palanquin’s door.
“Please enter, miss,” the important-looking guard respectfully said, beckoning for them to do as he requested. Confused and frightened by these sudden developments, they did. To her shock, the three mercenaries were inside.
"You're alright!" Sofie cried happily, giving Arlette an enthusiastic hug. "I was so worried when everyone just stopped and fell over like that! And then we got captured and I wasn't sure I would ever see you again! What the hell happened, anyway?"
Arlette grunted in response, returning her hug with a lukewarm pat on the back, but didn’t answer her question. Neither did the other two mercenaries.
“What’s wrong?” Sofie asked, confused, as the door shut behind them. The palanquin rocked as it lifted off the ground, forcing her to take a seat.
“They’re letting us go,” Arlette said. “Taking us to the Eterian border.”
“What? But why? How? Why us?”
“We don’ know,” replied Jaquet.
“Somebody must have pulled some strings to help us out,” chimed in Basilli, “but none of us know who or why.”
“Still, shouldn’t we be happy about this? It’s gotta be better than being back there. They stuck us in a cage!”
“This is too suspicious,” Jaquet replied. “Tha only reason we’re bein’ le’ go is because somebody’ll ge’ somethin’ from lettin’ us go. Tha’ doesn’ mean they ‘ave our bes’ interests a’ ‘eart.”
“We’re being used,” spat Arlette, arms crossed, a dour scowl on her face.
"Plus, what are we supposed to do once we're in Eterium?" Basilli pointed out. "There's still that bounty on us. If we make a break for Stragma again, the Stragmans won’t trust us. Why would they believe that the Drayhadans just let us go, when the rest of the Second Army is still kept prisoner? They'll probably treat us like spies or traitors."
Sofie’s hopes fell. She hadn’t thought about that. Basilli was correct — as suspicious as these developments looked to them, they would be even more suspicious in the eyes of the Stragmans.
No! She have herself a mental smack, straightening up in her seat. She refused to fall into despair. “Well, we’re still better off here than there,” she said, trying to rally the others’ spirits. “We have our freedom again. You have your weapons. We can still fight!”
Despite her efforts, for some reason her words could not reach them. Instead they just sighed and stared off into the middle distance, their minds preoccupied with something.
Sofie gave up for the moment, choosing instead to push aside the nearby curtain and watch the scenery pass by. The ride north to Eterium took far less time than a normal journey in this world. Four Feelers, probably trained for this very function, smoothly carried the palanquin as they ran for hours without stopping, their long powerful strides eating up kilometer after kilometer far faster than any garoph could.
“Are we close to the border yet?” Sofie asked hours later as the sun dipped below the horizon.
“The border is just on the other side of this small mountain range,” Arlette responded gloomily as she glanced outside to gauge their progress.
Sofie sighed as she watched Arlette glumly continue to stare out the window.
“Tell me about the flying things,” the mercenary suddenly said after minutes of silence. “The ones you told Pari about.”
“Wha? Now?”
“Please.”
“Well... uh... we have this thing called an airplane,” Sofie began. “Basically, um, it’s a machine that moves through the air really fast. The air moving over the wings keeps it in the sky so it doesn’t crash. People ride in them to go from one place to another really quickly. Uh... what else...”
“Are they just used to carry people?”
"I guess? I mean, they’re used for shipping and war and stuff, but I-."
“What do they sound like? Like a swarm of giant rota beetles flapping their wings all at once?”
“No, they’re more like a roaring sound. Well, I guess the old propeller planes would have sounded like that. They’re not very common anymore... Look, why are you asking me this all of a sudden?”
Arlette’s eyes shifted away and she didn’t say anything.
“Because she saw something, I believe” Basilli said. “And I’d bet money it’s the same thing I saw.”
Jaquet grunted and nodded.
"What do you mean?"
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” Arlette began. “I had just made it to the general’s palanquin. I reached for the handle, to yank open the door, and suddenly I was... somewhere else. But it didn’t feel like that at the time, like I had been taken some place. It was like I had always been there. Like being there was normal, and right...”
Slowly, haltingly, the three began to tell their story. Arlette took the lead, while the other mercenaries chimed in from time to time, all three of them seeming to have experienced the same thing. Sofie listed with puzzlement, unsure about what was going on at first, but the more they talked, the more a creeping realization began to form in the back of her mind. Her heart began to beat faster, her breaths becoming labored as their tale continued. It couldn’t be... All this time, she’d never even considered the possibility...
“I watched my friends and companions burn to death. I watched an entire city get destroyed by a creature far greater and scarier than anything I’ve ever seen. But somehow this was many times worse than anything I’ve ever experienced. The terror and helplessness I felt when I heard that terrible droning sound return... I still feel it now. It won’t leave me. Maybe it will never-”
“T-the flag...” Sofie interrupted, her whole body shaking. “Did you see it? D-did you see what was on it?”
“It was a... a red circle, with red lines coming out. I’m not sure-”
“A sun,” Jaquet said with absolute certainty. “Tha flag was a red sun.”
Sofie couldn’t breathe. Her heart pounded in her chest, ready to explode. Her whole body trembled as she connected the final dots in her mind. The giant metal birds, the eggs that spread fire everywhere they fell, and most of all that flag. They’d somehow experienced a bombing raid in Japan during World War II. There was no other explanation that fit.
Somebody knew about World War II. About Japan. About things she'd read about in books, but only understood in general terms. All three of them had experienced the same events in the exact same way, like watching a movie. Like experiencing a memory. The memory of somebody who'd lived it. Somebody else. Somebody here.
She wasn’t alone.
“Sofie-sis, don’t cry,” Pari said, rubbing her head against Sofie’s shoulder. She was crying? She touched her face and found it tear-soaked.
“We have to go back,” she said, the words barely making it out of her dry, constricted throat. “Tell them to turn around!”
“They won’ take orders from us,” replied Jaquet with a shake of his head. “They won’ le’ us back in to Drayhadal after this, anyway.”
“But we need to go back! There’s somebody else! Somebody like me! Somebody from my world!”
"I'm sorry, Sofie," Arlette said, "but we aren’t elves. The Drayhadans are very strict about who they let in their country, and they aren't going to allow us back in, probably ever."
“No! I have to go back! I-”
A several screams of pain cut off Sofie’s pending tirade and the palanquin tumbled to the side and dropped, the windows on the left side shattering as they slammed into the ground. Sofie and the others were thrown into the broken glass. Sofie cried out as one large shard embedded itself into her left shoulder and several others cut into her side.
More screams came from outside, and the door to the vehicle, now opening towards the sky, was ripped off its hinges. Two people, a man and a woman, stood over the newly created hole, each holding a large bladder with a tube sticking out under their arm. Sofie had just enough time to note how much they reminded her of bagpipes before they each squeezed their bag and a yellow powder shot from the tube, filling the cabin. Sofie and the others coughed, and the world went dark.
----------------------------------------
Head throbbing and body sluggish, Sofie regained awareness in the gloom of a dungeon. Cold, hard, rough stone pressed against her back, her arms and neck chained to thick metal rings embedded into the wall. Around her she could make out the four others as they stirred as well. Arlette was across from her on the other side of the cell. To Sofie’s left sat Basilli, and to the left of Arlette was Pari. Past those two stood a metal door, the only way in or out of the cell. To Arlette and Sofie’s right, chained facing the door, was Jaquet. Unlike the others, who were bound by several shackles, Jaquet was practically mummified in thick metal restraints to the point where it looked like he couldn’t even move.
“Everybody okay?” Sofie asked. A chorus of mumbles came back.
“What happened?” asked Pari. “Pari’s head hurts.”
“It looks like the other shoe dropped,” Sofie said. “You guys were right.”
Arlette just grunted in reply.
“Anybody know where we-”
“Shhhh!” Arlette hissed, cutting Sofie off as the sound of a door opening reached their ears. The clacking of boots walking down stairs slowly grew in volume. Sofie wasn’t sure but she believed that she could make out at least three people on their way down. The footsteps grew closer and closer, until they stopped just outside the door to their cell.
A panel on the door swung oven, revealing the shoulders and head of somebody looking in. The lighting was too dark to see more than a silhouette, but she guessed it was a man from the height and broad shoulders.
"It’s been a long time, Miss Faredin." Miss Faredin? What? There was no "Faredin" here. But just as she was thinking that, Arlette's head whipped up to look towards the door.
“No!” she cried when she heard the man’s words, horror in her voice. She scrambled away from the door as much as the chains would allow. “You can’t be here! Why are you here?!”
“Come now, is that how you greet an old friend?” the man replied menacingly. “You remember your etiquette lessons, don’t you princess?”