I thought Mag was going to be devastated, but she wasn’t. Although her reunion with her brother had been depressingly brief, she said she felt like a massive weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Now that she knew Archie was okay and didn’t blame her for his death, the guilt she had been carrying all this time had vanished.
She was also glad that she now had a way to honor Archie’s memory by aiding the Butterfly Guild in its fight against Vulgra.
“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m not fighting Vulgra. We’re just going home. I don’t see where the honor is in that.”
Mag grinned. “You’ll come around. You’re a better person than you give yourself credit for, and I know you’ll do the right thing.”
“Mag’s right,” my dad said, “You have to fight Vulgra. I know what I did on Earth was horrible, but this is bigger than you and me. You can’t let what I did make you turn your back on the world. I know it will take time, but can’t you at least be open to the possibility that you might forgive me one day?”
“No!” I snapped. “You’re a slimy, disgusting worm, and you don’t deserve forgiveness. You deserve eternal pain.” Each venomous word stung my dad, but I didn’t care. He had hurt me, and I had every right to hurt him back.
“I take back every nice thing I ever said to you or about you. Every time I ever told you I loved you was a lie. I never loved you. I only loved who I thought you were. I loved the man who was always there for me and who swore to protect me. But you’re not that man. You’re not a man at all. You’re nothing but a useless, heartless, selfish asshole.”
“Emerson!” Mag said, stepping between my dad and me. “Stop it. You’re not being fair. Your dad was possessed by Vulgra. He’s innocent. Like, I’m not even mad at him anymore. I’m mad at Vulgra, and you should be, too.
“I don’t care what I should be feeling. He abandoned me, and I’ll never forgive him for it.”
“But Archie said—”
“I know what Archie said. And I believe everything he said. I know my dad is resisting Vulgra and suffering because he loves me. I know all that. But there’s a difference between knowing someone loves you and feeling loved. A huge difference. And I don’t feel like he ever loved me. At least not enough to stop Vulgra from infecting him.”
“I still think you’re being unfair,” Mag said. “You forgave me right away for wanting to kill you in the pyramid. Why are you being so hard on your dad?”
“You need to stop calling him that. He’s not my dad. He’s Sir. And even that name’s too good for him. His name should be Scunge the Abandoner.”
“That doesn’t answer my question. Like, at all. Why can’t you forgive him like you forgave me?”
“Because it’s different. He brought me into this world with a woman who he knew was abusive, and he had a responsibility to protect me from her. He knew who my mom was and how she would treat me if he was gone, and he still bailed on me. Unlike you, he had a duty to keep me safe. So what he did feels less like a mistake and more like a betrayal.”
We continued north, my dad trailing by the prescribed hundred feet. In Mag’s mind, we would eventually turn northeast toward the Kingdom of Egola. In my mind, we would continue north to Zolptoria.
We walked for several hours. Every fifteen minutes, Mag asked me if I had decided to fight Vulgra yet. I kept saying no.
Suddenly, from behind us, my dad went, “AAUGH!!” But not like Charlie Brown when he misses the football. No, this was much more disturbing. He was on the ground, his arms wrapped around his head. I thought his head was going to explode, given his shrill, soul-splitting shrieks and the way he was writhing on the ground. Part of me felt bad for him, but a larger part of me said, “Serves him right.”
Mag went to him despite my efforts to convince her to leave him and keep going. When we reached him, his writhing and shrieking had stopped, and he sat up.
He explained that Vulgra was regaining its control over him, and it didn’t like that he had told me to fight it. “And when Vulgra doesn’t like something I do, it hurts me real bad. It knows everything I know. Therefore, it knows we’ve spoken with Archie and have a plan to destroy it. And now it’s angry.”
These words were followed by another short but equally intense bout of shrieking. Apparently, Vulgra didn’t like us knowing that it knew what we knew.
My dad tried to continue. “Emerson, I have to tell you while I still can... Vulgra... It…” He coughed fiercely but choked down the vomit. “It wants to…” He struggled so fiercely to speak that his eyes bulged from their sockets. He grunted several times before finally saying, “Whatever happens... don’t...” But that was all he could get out before he fell into the worst coughing fit I’d ever heard in my life.
“Don’t what?” I asked. “Don’t what?”
But he could say no more. He groaned slowly and loudly for thirty seconds as the black gunk he had been holding down now gushed from his mouth. Then he lay back down and held his stomach in agony.
I looked to Mag. “Don’t what?”
She shrugged her shoulders with a ‘how the hell should I know?’ look on her face.
“Don’t fight Vulgra?” I asked. “Or don’t go home?”
“I don’t know,” Mag said impatiently. “I know as much as you do.”
My dad then slowly lifted his head and looked at me. “Don’t let Vulgra infect you… It wants to use you to—” But he was cut off again. He choked until his face turned purple, and then he fainted.
Whatever he was about to say, Vulgra was desperate to keep it from us. But I had heard enough. Vulgra intended to infect me, which meant it would consume my soul and send me to the Abyss. More than anything, I was frightened by the words “it wants to use you.” I didn’t even want to imagine what Vulgra might want to use me for. Whatever it was, I wasn’t safe in this dimension.
“That settles it,” I said. “If Vulgra plans to infect me and use me, there’s no way I’m changing my mind. We’re going to Zolptoria. End of discussion.”
I walked away. I didn’t care that my dad was unconscious and could no longer protect me. I didn’t even care if Mag followed me. I wanted to get home and play Nintendo and forget everything I knew of butterflies and evil smoke.
“Are you seriously going to ditch your dad?” Mag asked as she caught up to me. “You’re just going to let Vulgra harvest his soul?”
I ignored her.
“Come on, Emerson! You have to fight Vulgra. Maybe it made your dad say that just to scare you.”
“I can’t take that chance. Also, what if it wants to turn you evil, too, and have a soul smorgasbord? Did you ever stop to think of that?”
“Not in those exact words, but yes. And I think it’s worth the risk. But I can’t fight Vulgra on my own. Like Archie said, you have to be the one to destroy it.”
“Well I’m not going to. My mind’s made up. We’re going home.”
“And you don’t think you’ll regret giving up a chance to save the world?”
“Meh. The world’s overrated. Besides, I wouldn’t even be saving the world. There’s lots of other Vulgras in lots of other dimensions. I’d only be fighting one of them. How much of a difference could that make?”
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“I don’t know, but Archie made it sound like a pretty huge deal. And maybe we won’t live long enough to see it, but beating Vulgra now could have a knock-on effect. Maybe it gives the butterflies a boost of power, and then they’re able to help more people resist Vulgra, so then people are friendlier and more loving to each other, and so the butterflies get even more power.
“Plus, I don’t buy it when you say you won’t regret your decision. Can you honestly say you can be happy back on Earth knowing that people will suffer because you wouldn’t fight Vulgra?”
“You know what? I think I can do just that.”
Mag frowned. “How can you say that? After everything Archie told us, how can you still be so cynical?”
“Because it’s not like anyone else gives a crap about the world. Certainly not to the extent that they would fight Vulgra if they were in my shoes. I don’t know what power Vulgra has or what it’ll do to me if I challenge it. What if I end up in eternal pain, coughing up black stuff all over the place?
“Or my fate could be even worse than that. Apparently, Vulgra wants to use me for some purpose, and who knows what the penalty will be for that? I could end up with literally the worst fate ever. I’m not going to risk that for a slight chance to maybe make the world a tiny bit better.”
Mag sighed. “Look, I totally get what you’re saying about the world being a sucky place. And, yeah, a lot of people are pieces of shit and make me want to put my fist through a wall. But that’s no reason to give up on everybody; that’s reason to try to make things better, even if it is only a tiny bit.”
“Just drop it, okay? It’s not gonna happen. We’re going home.”
We had now reached the point where the path diverged. We could either continue straight toward Zolptoria or veer northeast toward the Kingdom of Egola.
I stopped. I looked down the path leading to Egola and felt something sharp in my gut. It was guilt. Guilt from knowing that I was abandoning everyone by not fighting Vulgra. In a way, I was doing to everyone what my dad had done to me.
No, this is different, I told myself. I’m not their father. I have no responsibility to make sure they’re safe. It would be ridiculous to feel guilty for letting down people that I’ve never even met. But no matter how I tried to rationalize it, this feeling of guilt was harder to shake than previous ones.
I recalled how I had manipulated that sapling in the forest, how I had been willing to sacrifice Mag in the Mother Araknor’s Lair, how I hadn’t noticed she was sad as we crossed the Avarian Desert, and how I had bashed her in the head with my staff. All of those things still stung. Perhaps I hadn’t resolved the guilt of those events as effectively as I thought. Instead, I had merely buried the guilt inside me, and it was now piled too high to ignore.
However, I knew I could withstand my guilt, but I did not think I could withstand Vulgra. If it wanted to infect me, it would do so easily. Living with my guilt would be better than suffering in the Abyss. So, I reminded myself that people were evil and didn’t deserve to be saved, and I took the path leading to Zolptoria.
“Emerson, wait. Please,” Mag said. I ignored her. She grabbed my arm and spun me around, forcing me to look at her. “I know you’re a good person, and I know you’ll regret this.”
“Oh, but I won’t,” I said. “The world’s an ugly, broken mess, and you can’t just tape it back together and shine it up and pretend everything’s okay. The world’s broken beyond repair. That’s exactly why the butterflies can’t fight Vulgra on their own anymore. And now they want me to risk my soul attempting something they know damn well I can’t do.”
Mag shook her head in disappointment. “You know what I think? I think you’re doing that thing you said in the pyramid. That thing where you reflect the bad parts of yourself onto everyone else, and you’re using that as an excuse for your own shitty behavior. You say you don’t want to fight Vulgra because other people suck and nobody would fight it if they were in your shoes. But that’s just a wall you’ve put up. I think you do want to fight Vulgra, but you’re scared. You’re scared because you think you’re a hopeless, ugly, broken mess that’s beyond repair. You’re scared because you don’t think you’re a good enough person to resist Vulgra.”
“Of course I can’t resist Vulgra!” I said, agitated. “l admit it: This isn’t just about other people being jerks. It’s also about me being scared of the pain I’ll suffer when I lose. Part of me feels like crap for being so selfish, and that part of me does want to fight. But I can’t.”
I gave out a long sigh and gazed down at my feet. “I’m no good, Mag… I’m no damn good. I’m weak, and I’m a coward, and I can’t save anyone. Is that what you want to hear?”
“No, it’s not. It breaks my heart that you see yourself that way. I wish you believed in yourself like I do. You’re not a shitty person, Emerson, and I know you could beat Vulgra if you tried.”
“You’re just saying that because you want me to fight it. Because that’s what Archie wants. Nothing I’ve ever done suggests I would stand a chance against Vulgra.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Mag said. “There’s something I never told you about the first day we met. Before Archie told us everything, I didn’t know it had anything to do with Vulgra. But you saved me from it.”
“What? How?”
“Well, obviously, I was in the worst pain ever after Archie died, and I thought it would never go away. I thought I was going to hurt like hell every day for the rest of my life. And you’ve seen firsthand how I turn my pain into anger and take it out on other people. But I was hurting people literally all the time, and the other person usually didn’t deserve it. Like, one time, I beat this kid up because he budged in the cafeteria line. I beat him up bad. There was blood, and he had to miss some school.
“Things got even worse when my moms decided to move to a new town. I begged them not to move. It made it feel so official that our family was never going to be the same and that Archie was never coming back. I’d never get to go into his room ever again. I’d never see the residue on the kitchen window where he had used a marker to write the lyrics to the song from the softball episode of The Simpsons. I know that’s a stupid, random thing, but things like that were all that was left of him, and my moms were taking them away from me.
“I hated them so much for making me move. I didn’t beat them up or anything, but I did shut them out. I stopped talking to them, except to tell them I was hungry or that I hated them. And the worst part is I wasn’t just saying it to hurt them. I meant it. I hated their guts. It must have hurt them so much to lose one child and have the other one hate them. They didn’t deserve that, but I had this ball of sadness and hate inside me that I couldn’t control.
“And then last year, when school started, I got bullied by these two girls. And by then, I was so sad about life that I couldn’t even stand up for myself, and I just took their shit. And one day after school, they told me I should kill myself, and I felt like they were right. It was the only way to make the sadness end and to maybe see Archie again.
“I went into the bathroom and cried for half an hour, desperately wishing that I could go back in time. Not just to undo my mistake on the night Archie died. But I wanted to be, like, six again. Even just for a day. For an hour, even. Just to remind myself that the world didn’t always hurt so much to be in. To remember what innocence felt like.
“But since I couldn’t do that, the next best thing was to take myself out of the world. Before I left that bathroom, I decided I was going to slash my wrists when I got home.
“And it wasn’t just to end the pain of being alive. I also really wanted to hurt my moms. While I was walking home, I was planning my suicide note in my head. I was going to tell them it was their fault I killed myself and not to adopt any more children because they couldn’t even love their children enough to keep them alive—that was the big line. I was hoping that one would stick with them forever. And as I was walking, I kept thinking of more and more hurtful things I could say...”
“And then I met you. And for the first time since Archie died, I actually felt not completely horrible. The fact that you look so much like Archie was definitely part of it, but it wasn’t just that. As dark as you think your heart is, you really are just a big sweetheart who’s lost his way. You have an irresistible innocence to you, and even though we had just met, you made me see that I could be okay even though Archie was gone. Because there are other innocent people in the world who I can defend.
“When Archie was saying how Vulgra uses people’s hatred, hopelessness, and sorrow to infect them and make them commit terrible acts, it reminded me of that day. Vulgra had infected me and was going to make me kill myself, which would have caused my moms the worst pain imaginable. And then it would have gotten them, too.
“But you stopped it. And you didn’t even have to try. You just had to be you. I’ll never forget the first thing you ever said to me. You were on the ground, beaten and bruised, but you asked me if I was okay. It was such a stupid, silly, Archie thing to say. But that was all it took. Three words—are you okay—and you repelled Vulgra from me.
“And because of you, instead of being dead when my moms got home from work, I hugged them and told them I loved them for the first time in a year. That’s how I know you can beat Vulgra.”
I had been wrong before: I was definitely more heroic than a ping-pong ball. Hell, I felt more heroic than five ping-pong balls. And, for the first time since my dad died, I felt I was worth something, that my life was more than something I had to get through or escape from.
“Vulgra was really going to make you kill yourself?” I asked. “You didn’t make all that up to convince me to fight, did you?”
“I swear on Archie’s grave that every word is true.”
That was it. Vulgra had gone too far. It had tried to take Mag away from me before we even met. Was that the kind of crap Vulgra was pulling on everyone? Maybe it was like Archie said. Maybe everyone was good, and Vulgra was messing us up.
“That does it,” I said. “I’m still not sure if I care about anyone else, and I certainly don’t care if Sir suffers for all eternity, but no one tries to hurt my family and gets away with it.”
Mag’s eyes lit up. “You mean you’re going to fight Vulgra?”
I paused and dared to gaze at Misery Peak. It filled me with the same depression and hopelessness as before, but this time these emotions didn’t scare me. Knowing what Vulgra was doing, knowing that it was trying to make everyone feel this way, only solidified my newfound determination.
I narrowed my eyes. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I’m gonna fuck it up.”
I turned back to Mag. The look on her face was almost worth the eternal pain I would suffer if I lost.