We didn’t send everyone into the town immediately at the same time, of course. That just felt like a good way to freak these people out even more than they were probably already going to be. We had no idea how they were going to react, what kind of knowledge of other planets they even had, or any of it. So we had to take this slowly and not run in there with the entire small army we had.
Speaking of small army, the people who had come with Avalon and Dad on the ship were Wyatt, Athena, Sariel, Hisao, Deveron, Larissa, and, surprisingly, Jophiel and Elisabet. Those last two had seemed to take just enough time to ensure that Tabbris and I were okay before moving aside and staying silent. Aside, that was, from the quiet voice I’d heard projected into my head from one of them, informing me that when I had a few minutes, we needed to talk.
Whatever they wanted, it would have to wait for later. For now, we had to go meet the people of this planet. Or at least one city-worth of them to start out. To that end, we settled on my mother, Nevada, Avalon, Shiori, and me going in first. My dad wanted to go, but we convinced him to stay with the others. And Tabbris was going to spend time with her mother, who had been worried about her, to put it mildly. So she would simply be keeping in contact through our connection.
The five of us didn’t teleport into the middle of the village or anything dramatic like that. Instead, we simply walked there, and took our time in the process. We just walked slowly, giving the people in the town time to notice us. Which also gave us time to talk a bit more with Avalon about everything that had happened, while also discussing what we were going to do and say once we got there and started introducing ourselves.
One new thing I did find out, alongside Avalon, was that Denuvus hadn’t exactly agreed to go into that portable storage thing without some form of assurance that she would be safe. Apparently while I had been busy, back when I noticed Mom, Nevada, and her talking together, they had been coming to an arrangement. With Erin watching intently through her video connection to Nevada, Mom had allowed Denuvus to use her power strictly to ensure she would be taken safely back to Earth and let out in a private area she could leave from without issue. Erin had been ready to jettison the entire treasure cargo if Denuvus tried adding any extra orders, but she had apparently stuck to her agreement. Even then, the idea that Mom had been controlled that way, despite agreeing to it, still made me feel queasy.
We approached the first gate, making our way down an old, cracked stone road. We could see two men up on the wall, staring at us with what looked like some form of binoculars. We didn’t hurry our pace or anything, though we did wave at them, trying to appear as friendly as possible.
The gate creaked loudly open as we drew closer, revealing a man in what looked like priest or monk-type clothing, holding a gnarled walking stick. He had long graying hair, and was flanked by several more men, all of them younger and quite strapping. They held an assortment of makeshift weapons. Spears that looked like they had only just been cobbled together recently, or hammers that were clearly originally intended as tools. One person held a scythe.
“Strangers!” the old man called once we were close enough, “we’ve not seen your style of clothing before! What settlement have you come from?!”
“We can understand them?” I managed, blinking a bit in surprise.
“With this,” Nevada noted, holding up a small silver ball in one hand. It was giving off a soft hum. “You’re hearing them in English, and they’ll hear us in their language.”
As soon as they saw the orb in her hand, the armed men shouted something about stopping as they put themselves in front of their elder. Mom held a hand out for the rest of us to wait, then walked a few steps closer. As she did, the old man poked his head out from behind the ones protecting him, and his eyes widened. Immediately, he pushed the big guy in front of him aside with surprising strength considering his apparent age, and came forward as quickly as he could while leaning heavily on his walking stick. The man dropped to his knees in front of Mom and started to lean down to kiss her feet. But she dropped to her knees as well, putting both hands on his shoulders to stop him. “Perricks, no. You don’t need to do that. You know better. You know he’s gone.”
The old man looked up, tears staining his wrinkled cheeks. “You are mistaken, my lady. I greet you as such not in fear of his return, but in joy that he shall not. And in the knowledge that you played some part in that. I thought you dead in the attempt. That you are not is… joyous news indeed. You being here, it means it was you after all. You killed the beast, just as you threatened him you would do all those times.”
“Not me,” Mom corrected, both of them still kneeling in front of each other while the armed men lingering by the gate murmured amongst themselves. She turned, gesturing for me to approach. “I helped. But in the end, it was my daughter who ended him.”
Oh boy, now everyone was looking at me. Forcing down the nerves that were threatening to overwhelm me, I took a breath before walking forward. “All I did was get the last hit,” I managed. “Mom did most of the work. She’s the one who deserves the credit. I was just… in the right place at the right time.”
Despite me saying that, the old man rose to his feet, catching my hands with both of his before squeezing them. He was still crying, barely able to get the words out. “You have given us the greatest gift anyone ever could.” His hands were still squeezing mine tightly as he met my gaze. “Thank you. Thank you both. Thank… all of you.” He was looking past me, his eyes on the others. “He was too strong for only two to defeat. We saw how many of our people he was taking for that battle. It must have taken all of you.”
“All of us and many more besides,” Mom confirmed, her voice breaking slightly as she continued. “But we’re sorry about the people you lost while we were trying to kill him. We should have found a way to cut him off from this world sooner.”
That time, it was one of the younger men who spoke up, taking a few steps forward while shaking his head. “No. We all would gladly have died if it would mean the end of him.” He held his heavy blacksmith-like hammer in one hand, raising it to point our way. “So long as a few of our children could survive, our world would go on without his taint. That would have been worth every other loss.” His words were met with agreement not only from the old man and the others behind him, but from the men up on the wall as well, who were still watching.
The old man shook his head as though to clear it. “What was I thinking? Introductions are in order, but I believe everyone will wish to meet you. Come, come.” He turned and went back past my mother toward the gate while speaking loudly. “We’ll gather the rest of the town in front of the temple. It… will be nice to use the stage for something wonderful. And better for everyone’s questions to be answered at once.”
The rest of us exchanged looks before following after him. He was right, it was better to only have to tell the story once. Or once per town. I still wasn’t sure how we were going to deal with all that. One step at a time.
We walked through the first gate, and the younger men who had to come out to see what we were doing fell in behind us. Together, Mom, Avalon, Shiori, Nevada, and I looked around. There was about thirty feet between one wall and the second, but it stretched all the way around the city. And from here, I could see that the few guys who had been with the one apparently called Perricks had been far from alone. There were at least a hundred more men of similar age, all holding makeshift weapons, standing in the space between the walls. They had been ready and waiting to come charging out if we ended up being a threat after all. Honestly, I was seriously impressed that they were that prepared to fight after having suffered under Fossor for so long. It said a lot about the sort of people they were, and made me even more livid about what that piece of shit had done to them for so long.
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Avalon apparently practically read my mind, because she spoke in a low voice as we approached the second gate. “The only sad part about that monster being dead already is that it’s impossible to kill him again, this time in front of all these people so they can spit on his corpse.”
Her voice was tight with obvious emotion, and I took her hand to squeeze it. “Yeah,” I murmured, “I don’t think they’d be the only ones spitting. But we don’t have to worry about that. He’s dead, that’s what matters. It’s time to let all these people move on. That’s what we’re here for.”
Passing through the second gate, we found ourselves in the renaissance-era city. The road split into three paths here, two leading out and around the outside edge with buildings on either side, while the third went straight up the middle. That last one was about three times as wide as the others, with several large fountains with broken statues lining the middle of it every hundred feet or so. After a moment, I realized that the statues had once been of Fossor himself. The people here had taken hammers or whatever else they could to them, shattering the once-grand sculptures into tiny pieces that left only bits of the stand, legs, and sometimes arms behind. Given enough time, I was pretty sure they would break the rest of them.
Then there were all the people. They were filling every available bit of space they could down in this area, staring at us. I saw men, women, little kids poking their heads out from behind their parents or sitting on their shoulders, even teenagers sitting on rooftops so they could see better. Hundreds of them. No, thousands. They didn’t fill the entire city, of course. Their population wasn’t quite that large. But they had all crowded down into this one area so they could watch us arrive. A few waved, most of them were crying, one or two called out questions until Perricks held his fist up, silencing all of them. His voice was just loud enough to be heard by even those on the roofs, now that they had become quiet. “We will go to the temple. They will answer your questions there. Let the words speaking the truth of his death mark the last spoken on the grounds of his sanctuary before that ground is wiped clean and birthed anew.”
Wow, this guy knew how to say the right thing. Everyone cleared a path, and we all walked through the city, flanked by its people on all sides on our way to what turned out to be a very broken and burned temple. They had clearly done a number on the place, which was even more evident up close. At one time, this had obviously been a massive, seriously imposing tower. Now very little of it was left and I could smell the burnt remains from the fire that had destroyed most of it. But the courtyard was still intact, and that was where we all went. Perricks led us up to the center, where a couple more priests were waiting, along with a thin girl with light brown hair cut short. She looked like she might blow away in a stiff breeze, and couldn’t have been older than fourteen or fifteen. Why she was up there with the priests, I had no idea. At the moment, her gaze was locked on me. Not quite distrusting or anything, but I could definitely sense some hesitation and uncertainty. Which was fair, considering everything. I was a little surprised the rest of these people weren’t more suspicious, honestly. But then, they apparently knew my mother. And she had a way of making an impression, to say the least.
“Joselyn, daughter, and friends,” Perricks started, nodding to the others on the stage at the center of this courtyard, “These are our surviving elders: Tuuenfa, Larifke, Norshi, and Dars.”
The largest of those four, the one called Tuuenfa, raised a hand to indicate the slender girl standing a bit to the side. “It is our warmest pleasure to meet you all. And this is Beilela, the One Who Said No.” He made that announcement with pride, his tone making it clear that the words were a title of some sort.
Beilela, for her part, visibly blushed while shaking her head. “Stop, I didn’t do anything. You know I didn’t do anything, especially now.” She looked at us again. “The others have been saying it was these people. They stopped him.” There was clear curiosity in her voice. But also that same very subtle undercurrent of suspicion. Belatedly, I realized why. She was grateful that we had killed Fossor, but now that we were here, there was a part of her that worried about us trying to pick up where he had left off. Of course she saw that as a possibility, after living under Fossor forever. Not only did her entire life amount to being subjugated by that piece of shit, but so did literally everyone else’s on this planet, going back thousands of years.
“Why do you call her that?” Nevada asked curiously, stepping over next to Shiori. “Oh, sorry, we should introduce ourselves before we get into all that.”
Perricks gave a quick nod, gesturing out to where the rest of the city’s population had gathered throughout the courtyard. “Please, for everyone. We would all like to know the full story. We have… no contact with the worlds beyond. We had thought generations would pass before we fully understood the truth. But you are here now. Please, anything you can tell us about his death would aid the stories we spread.”
Mom took the lead, thankfully. She moved to the front of the stage and magnified her voice to be heard by everyone. Then she introduced herself and the rest of us. Not that she really needed to do the former, because as soon as they got a good look at her, I heard some of the people murmuring her name back and forth. They definitely remembered her. And I was certain they were going to remember the rest of us as well. Mom went through our names, gesturing to each of us in turn while saying that we had all been there at Fossor’s last stand. Yeah, that definitely got their attention.
What also got their attention was when Mom took me by the hand and had me move in front of her. She spoke as clearly as possible. “I told you that this is my daughter, Felicity. She came from myself and a man I love quite deeply. It was she who destroyed the monster in the end. Her blade killed him. He is gone forever because she ended him.”
Oh, boy did that ever get their attention. Now everyone was staring right at me. No one was saying anything, no one was even moving. They were just staring for several long, incredibly quiet moments. I had no idea what they were thinking. It made me squirm a little bit uncertainly with my mother’s hands on my shoulders. “Um, is everything okay?” I finally managed.
“They want to remember you,” the large priest, Tuuenfa, announced quietly. “We never want to forget the face of the one who delivered us from the darkness. They–we… owe you more than we can ever repay.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I insisted. “You don’t owe any of us anything. They— he’s gone and you’re finally free. Don’t put yourself in debt like that to anyone else. Never again.”
Before I knew what was happening, those last two words, ‘never again’ were repeated by first one, then several, then all of the people in the crowd. They repeated ‘never again’ several times, each stronger and more forceful than the next. It was enough to make me shiver a little from emotions, and I found myself whispering it along with them by the end. As did the others behind me. We all felt it, that rush of emotional power that made the words mean more than they had before.
It was the girl, Beilela, who spoke up once everyone had gone silent once more. “How did you stop him from sacrificing all of us to save his own life? He wouldn’t have stopped on his own. The bells were calling for us, but then they stopped. They went silent. How… how did you save us from his power?”
“Oh, that wasn’t me,” I quickly put in, reaching down into my pocket. With everyone staring, I came out with my familiar rock. “It was Herbie!” With that dramatic announcement, I held my little buddy up so they could all see his handsome self, with his googly eyes, hat, and incredible sword. “I’d like all of you to meet the true hero!”
With that, I went on to explain what had happened, about how I had managed to use Fossor’s curse to cut him off from this world by getting him to stomp down on Herbie, a rock from Earth.
The people took that in, all of them, staring at the handsome hero in my palm. They were looking at him with even more reference and awe. Gradually, several of them started to say his name. Then more. Soon, the entire crowd was chanting, “Herbie! Herbie! Herbie!” It got louder, filling the streets beyond the temple as it echoed back through the rest of the town. “Herbie! Herbie!”
“Aww, see that, buddy?” I murmured with a smile while holding him aloft so they could all get a good look.
“You’re finally getting the recognition you deserve.”