Scars tell more than words.
- Orcish Proverb
Miles prodded at the bandage on his broken nose for the ten thousandth time. It hurt just as much as it had every other time, but he knew he would do it again before long. It was like that every time he got hurt. He couldn’t help it. He always picked at his scabs. When he had a cut in his mouth, he would keep running his tongue over it even though he knew it would heal faster if he didn’t.
He couldn’t stop himself from going back over it again and again, thinking of all the things he could have done differently. If he would just have been more careful, he wouldn’t have fallen and cut his elbow. If he hadn’t tried to climb that tree, he wouldn’t have slipped and bitten himself when he landed. If he’d just done something other than go to the library, Lucas wouldn’t have found him. Then nobody would be hurt, and he wouldn’t be thinking about Raziel and Lucas’ fight. He wouldn’t be blaming himself for Lucas getting hurt or for Raziel and Hoeru still being stuck in the hospital.
He sat in a tucked away corner of Dominic’s chilly library. He liked it here; he always had. The books were a great comfort to him. They were so unlike the rest of the world. With a book, if you could read it, there was no mystery. Everything you needed to understand it was in its pages. It wasn’t like people. He could control books. They never got offended if he put them away without finishing what they had to say. He could read and reread a line or a page as many times as needed to fully understand what it was saying. Books were safe.
He supposed that was also a part of why he’d befriended Raziel. Raziel always wore his heart on his sleeve. He never pretended to be happy when he was sad or angry. He never sat around for hours indecisively going over every aspect of a decision. He just acted, and when there were consequences to his actions he accepted them. Miles desperately wished he could be like that. But he couldn’t change himself. The closest he could come was to continue to try to avoid conflict where he could and accept the consequences of his weakness when he couldn’t.
He prodded at his nose again in a different spot and winced. He tried to go back to the book he’d picked up, but it just couldn’t hold his attention. He’d turn the page and realize that he hadn’t actually been reading for the past several paragraphs. His eyes had just traveled over the words while his mind continued to go over the fight again and again.
The worst part had been talking to Duriel. Raziel’s grandfather had cornered him and made him go over every single detail of what had happened. His tone had been like an icicle: cold and sharp, ready to pierce through Miles at any misstep. Miles had been as thorough as he could. He wasn’t sure if he was lucky or not that Duriel hadn’t asked anything about their time in the hospital. He’d made Miles go through the entire story three times before he’d been satisfied, and when he was done he hadn’t said anything. He’d just gotten up and walked out the door.
Miles gave up and set the book down. He wanted to rub at his eyes, but he couldn’t do it without making his nose ache even worse. The weight of his glasses was bad enough, especially since he hadn't been able to bend them back into their proper shape and one side poked harder against his nose than the other. He walked back to the shelves and put the book back in its space. Without thinking about it, he put his hand in his pocket and found the little crystal there. He pulled it out, considering. He wasn’t really in the mental state to do anything with it, but maybe working on it would keep his mind off of things for a little while. He moved out of the stacks thinking to go to the stairs and find a desk where he could work on the calculations he needed to make the crystal work.
“Miles, there you are.”
He nearly jumped out of his skin at the sudden sound. He took a couple steps back as he turned around before he realized that it was Keira coming towards him. The look in her eyes made him wish he’d just run.
“Uh, yeah. Here I am. What’s—” he started to say, but she put a finger to her lips and motioned for him to follow her.
He considered saying no, but the look on her face made him think he would probably regret that. Besides, his feet knew that he didn’t have the guts to run before his head did as he found himself following behind her.
She headed for the stairs. From the second floor, they had a much better view of the library. She first walked around making sure no one was hiding in a corner or behind a chair. You never knew when you were going to find Cassie and/or Ward’s new hidden make-out spot. You only knew that you would find it, and it would be awkward for everyone involved. Still, Miles thought she was being overly cautious as she searched over the entire floor, then positioned herself where she could see the only door to the library.
“I need your help,” she said finally. It was about the last thing he expected her to say.
“With what? Do you have a test coming up?”
“No, shut up,” she said through gritted teeth. It was only then that he noticed the effort she was making to keep her voice down. “I need your help to break Raziel and Hoeru out of the hospital and then to get back to that fort out in the woods.”
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. The idea was too ridiculous. It was a short-lived laugh though as the look Keira gave him probably took a full year off his life.
“You’re serious?” he asked, incredulous.
“Absolutely.”
Miles’ skepticism quickly changed as she told him a story about seeing the masked person from the forest meeting with Alban. Mask’s reappearance and the look on her face were too serious for a prank.
“I don’t get it.”
“What’s not to get? He needs help. Mask and Alban need to be stopped.”
“Why not tell Dominic and Duriel?” Miles started, ticking objections off on his fingers as he went. “How are the two of us going to break them out? Why break them out in the first place? Why would we go into the incredibly dangerous forest and try to help this spirit thing instead of getting knights to do it? Again, how do we do that? Why fight Mask at all when we can just stay here where it’s safe and let the people whose job it is do that? Most importantly, why me? What am I going to do to help?”
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“Miles….” Keira said, and the look on her face changed then.
From the first time they’d met, Miles had always admired Keira. He’d known she was stronger than he was just from meeting her eyes. Like with so many other people, he wished he could be more like her. But here and now, the ferocity she always projected dimmed a bit. He saw how much it was costing her to admit she needed help. This was probably as vulnerable as she knew how to be.
“We need you. It won’t just be you and me. I’m going to get someone else to help. But no one I know can do what you can, Miles. You’re the smartest person I know. You noticed that trap that would probably have killed Raz back at the tower. I’m going to go, even if I have to go alone. But you can come. You can help. I’ll be back in an hour. Have your answer by then.”
With that she turned and headed toward the stairs. He realized he was shaking and had to reach out to grab the railing to steady himself.
“This is too much,” he said as she walked out, knowing she couldn’t hear him.
He moved shakily to a nearby chair and sank gratefully into it. Thoughts burned across his mind. One moment he was trying to figure out how to word it when he told Keira no. Another he was considering where would be the best place to hide so that he wouldn’t have to say anything at all. The next he was mentally mapping the hospital, deciding where Raz and Hoeru were likely to be and the best way to get around the guards’ patrol patterns. The next he was remembering his home before coming to Peritura and what had happened when the corrupted had come there.
It wasn’t one of the masked servants of Lies that came to Dawning. People had started disappearing, one or two at a time. Most of the disappearances were children. When the first two children went missing, people thought they might have gotten trapped somewhere in the mine. That was preferable to thinking they’d gotten lost in the forest.
But as people continued to disappear, it became clear that someone was taking them. The town wizard had people only travel about the town in groups and instituted a strict curfew. She said she would find the person responsible.
She was the next to go.
There was about twelve hours of full panic between when the wizard disappeared and when someone came for them. During those twelve hours a house burned down, two people were killed in a fight, and one entire family decided to take their chances and head into the forest.
Help came on an airship. The ship had brought another wizard, a dwarf. This wizard was older and more experienced than the one who had gone missing, but it was Captain Basil who stuck out in Miles’ mind. Basil had gone everywhere with the wizard, looming like a storm cloud.
Once the worst of the injuries had been seen to, the wizard had commanded everyone in the town to come to the square. Miles remembered that it had seemed like such a small number once they were all together. It only emphasized what they had lost.
One family at a time, the wizard had called people forward to be examined. He had put a hand on each of their foreheads, checking each for signs of corruption. When he cleared a family, they were sent to board the airship.
With each family that was cleared, those remaining became more and more restless. Miles could still remember the mounting tension, the nervous whispers he heard all around him. Every time a man or woman was being examined, the tension would rise as people wondered what would happen when the wizard found something. Some people wanted to know what would happen if no one was found. That didn’t end up being a problem.
About the only time that anyone was anything like relaxed was when children were being examined. All except for Basil. He had the same frozen stare for everyone.
Miles didn’t see what happened next. He glanced up at his mom at just the wrong moment. The wizard was reaching out to a small child one second, the next Miles looked up and saw his mother’s smile for the last time. He wanted that memory to be a safe one, one that he could treasure, but he couldn’t think of it without hearing that first scream and feeling an echo of the panic that came with it.
The next few minutes were chaos. His mother grabbed him and pulled him into her arms and ran. Unfortunately this gave Miles an unobstructed view.
The hand the dwarf had been using to examine people was gone, replaced by a ragged stump that spurted blood. He fell to his knees as a clawed hand covered in dark red fur came up and ripped the skin off his face in a second shower of red.
The creature was like a dog the size of a horse, but the proportions were all wrong. It was far too wide in the shoulders and its back legs were much shorter than its nightmarishly long arms. The dog thing fell back on its haunches and let out a horrible screaming howl. Miles still saw it sometimes in his nightmares. It was somewhere between a dog’s face and a human’s with jaws that unhinged as they fell open to reveal row upon row of flashing, hooked teeth.
There was a thunderclap and the creature flinched. Miles saw the captain holding pointing a pistol at the creature, but he only saw it for a moment. The monster charged Miles and his mother. Miles screamed and there was another thunderclap. The creature jerked again, but that didn’t stop its wicked claws. His mother fell, landing on top of him. The monster stood over them breathing hot, wet air into Miles’ face while his mother tried to shield him with her body. A third thunderclap drove the monster away.
His mother never seemed to notice. She kept feebly trying to cover him. It wasn’t long before he felt something warm and sticky. It wasn’t long before she stopped moving altogether. It was a very long time until anyone saw that he was still alive. Basil was the one that noticed him, and that was the only time Miles saw anything like compassion in his eyes.
In the end, the monster killed nine more people before the captain was able to finish it. Miles found out later that it had been the child the dwarf was examining right before all the chaos started. No one ever found out how, or technically even if, the child had been corrupted or exactly why he had done what he had, though it was believed by many that his father was a drunk who beat the boy and his mother. But the father was one of those who lived through the ordeal. He was examined and no corruption was found in him or anyone else in the town.
Miles’ father had died two years before in a mining accident, and he had no other family. Basil had taken him, along with the rest of the survivors, back to the capital. There he’d gone through a long season of therapy at the House of Healing, a center for those who had encountered the corrupted and other dangerous magics. That was where he’d met Roland. He never asked what had happened to Miles, and Miles gratefully returned the favor. Eventually they were deemed ready to rejoin society at large, and to his surprise Basil had been the captain of the ship that had taken him to Peritura. It seemed impossible that it would be a coincidence for the same captain to be the one to carry him to his new home, but he never said more than a few words to Miles.
He’d learned a lot since then. He’d learned how to move forward and how to deal with his pain at the capital. In Peritura he’d learned about magic, history, mathematics, biology, and more from a dozen subjects from the hundreds of books he devoured in the library. But none of that had been as important as what he learned in his hometown: No one could really control anything. Plenty of people thought they could. But the simple fact that Miles had seen proven over and over again through history and his own experience was that only chaos ruled. Things were never as solid as they seemed, and the world could always be just a week, a day, a minute away from pain and horror.
He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the chair. He felt cold and tired. His nose ached.