Chapter Thirty-Seven
Two More
Soon Michael was wandering back through the hallways of the keep, looking quietly for Flinn. He saw the reception doors and wondered if Amekot was hiding somewhere behind them. Michael turned down the Paladin corridor and made his way to Defanin, opening them softly.
Flinn was sitting on his top-bunk, with his legs hanging beneath him. He turned as Michael came in and gave him a tired smile. In his left hand was an empty glass, and in his right was a bottle of something which Michael could smell from across the room.
Michael sat on his own bed and realised he had no idea what to say. After a long moment of sharing the silence, he decided that there was nothing to say about Ilo. Part of him wished his curiosity was dulled, but it wasn’t.
“Mind if I ask you a question? You’re more than welcome to tell me to get fu-”
“Go ahead.” Flinn’s voice was raspy and hollow and he began pouring another glass.
Michael folded his hands in his lap and recalled the flashes of the creature he’d seen. “How did one monster manage to do all that?” Michael gestured vaguely to the door, and to the world of horror it had left behind.
Flinn sipped his drink and seethed through his teeth from the taste of it. He rubbed his eyes and shrugged. “Two answers to that. First, it didn’t really break in. It manifested here. Probably in the courtyard somewhere. That’s what the vibration in the ground was. And second, well, not many monsters can force a Legacy to run. But a Reaper is one of them.”
Michael frowned, trying to take his answer one piece at a time. “Manifested?”
“Aye. Monsters can be destroyed, but they always come back eventually.”
Michael leaned back against his headboard. “Like Nikereus’ Soiltorn? Could they form here?”
Flinn sipped his drink again and shook his head. “No. That’s a bit different. The Soiltorn revive instantly- which is bizarre -usually when a Shanii is killed, they disperse-”
Michael made a face of realization. “-turn to sand or essence, right?-”
Flinn tapped his nose, adding, “-that’s it. The essence returns to the Dark Lands, or so we think. And it takes time for their soul and essence to bind back together. But when it does, they can manifests anywhere that there is a great enough concentration of darkness and Arcancy.”
Michael felt his skin crawl. “Why darkness?”
Flinn touched the glass to his forehead. His eyes were closed as he thought, “I was told it has something to do with Khasm. They were All-Maker. The Void, itself. Shadow.”
Flinn scoffed at his own word choice and shrugged, deciding he didn’t care.
Michael nodded, slowly understanding, when another thought occurred to him. “So, why don’t monsters manifest here more often?”
Flinn finished his drink. “Fort Guardian has enchantments which prevent it, but if a creature is strong enough, they can break through. It almost never happens. But when it does...”
Michael didn’t think he’d need another reason to be afraid of the dark but there it was. He also wondered what those early Legacies must’ve felt when they figured it out for the first time. He knew one thing; there was certainly a time before that bunker was built.
“Why couldn’t we fight it? I was convinced Jack would try...”
Flinn put down his glass and bottle on his wall-mounted nightstand and lay back on his bed, staring up at the ceiling.
Michael almost apologized, wondering if he’d gone too far as Flinn tiredly rubbed his face. But then he spoke.
“Simply said, there’s no point. Those things are… not sure what the word is- unkillable, maybe? They mostly get called ‘Reapers’ but there’s actually another name for them. Ancient Shepherds. Legend says that they were forged by the Gargan as messengers. One for each race of creature, created to be a kind of link between Creator and Creation. To help the Gargan understand the troubles of each society they’d created. I assume the Creators used to rejuvenate them every couple hundred cycles, because their bodies still age, as I’m sure you noticed from their mummified flesh.”
It haunted Michael to remember but he nodded.
“Anyway, one of their jobs was to make sure that no population grew too out of hand, otherwise they’d eventually be a strain on the resources of the world. Unfortunately for us, the Gargan fuckin’ died, and their immortal servants lived on, and apparently, immortality and invincibility without oversight just leads to this kind of thing. Which is my way of saying that they still try to enforce those ancient orders around population control, however, for the most part, Draendicans are the only creature they understand to be out of control. And since Reapers are cursed with immortality in very mortal bodies, they’re blind and senseless and insane and driven to fulfil those orders.”
Michael began to feel sick in his stomach. “If they’re blind, how do they find us?”
Flinn sat up and restlessly jostled his hair. He picked up the bottle and drank straight from the neck. “They can sense Arcancy, like any Gargan creation.”
Michael sat for a moment and then realisation struck him. He looked out the window of their cabin to the darkening hills beyond Fort Guardian. “Which is why they only hunt Legacies. Draendicans can’t produce Arcancy, so Reapers aren’t drawn to them.”
The older Paladin nodded. “And since Draendicans keep spreading, they keep hunting Legacies.”
“Why did it stop after killing-” Michael realised what he was about to say and let his words fall to pieces. “I’m so sorry.”
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Flinn looked down at his hands. “We- we chalk it up to their confusion. They kill a Legacy and realise there are very few of us, but still an enormous amount of non-Legacy Draendicans. They kill one of us then get conflicted and then err on the side of caution. Besides, the bunker is impenetrable. They lose interest and end up searching for the next nearest source of Arcancy.”
Michael nodded and found his curiosity fairly well quenched, though his heart was weighed down for it. He stood quietly and walked over to Flinn’s bed.
Flinn looked down and him and the two boys didn’t say anything for some time. Eventually, Flinn sighed and said, “Sorry to tell you that this life isn’t always a faerie-tale.”
Michael shrugged, thinking of what Oliver has said at the party. It felt strange, having memories so different in the same span of days. He wanted to tell Flinn everything would be okay, that it would get better and that all things eventually healed. But he couldn’t. He wasn’t even sure if it was true. He opened his mouth to speak and couldn’t think of anything.
Flinn smiled weakly and reached down, squeezing his shoulder.
Michael touched his hand and squeezed it back.
With that, Flinn laid back down on his bed and closed his eyes. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Paladin. I’m going to try rest, I think.”
Michael left his bedside, knowing he’d done all he couldn’t, even if it wasn’t much. He twisted the doorknob and walked out the room to find Aroha, Nichole, Oliver, Sarah, Carter and James all sitting on the floor of the corridor, making easy conversation.
Michael smiled with soft confusion. “What are you guys doing out here?”
Oliver shrugged and said, “We didn’t know if you were going to call it an early night or not so we decided to wait for you, in case you wanted company.”
Michael’s frowned to try and stem the flush of emotion that sat behind his eyes. He smiled unevenly and he nodded, trying to maintain his sarcastic tone of voice. “I should’ve known you were all as bloody stubborn as these two,” he said, nodding to Carter and James.
James smiled quietly and said, “I think you attract it, Sparky.”
Michael sniffled away the last of his heavy heart and nodded. “Hold on for one second.”
The Legacies watched as he stepped back into his room and a moment later re-emerged with a fistful of blankets he’d stripped from him bed. He handed them out and said, “Buddy-up, I’ve only got a few.”
Aroha and Nichole grabbed Sarah and pulled her laughingly into their huddle as they gathered beneath a blanket and Michael hooked his arm around Oliver’s shoulders as Carter and James pushed in beside them, all swaddled in bedspreads and sheets.
The group of young Legacies sat on the floor of the corridor for a long time that evening. People came and went, giving them bizarre looks but they didn’t care. They exchanged stories and did their best to make one-another laugh. Carter, at one point, scampered away and came back with a large bundle of food and drinks which he’d gathered from the dining table. He and James told Michael a handful of their stories about their time at Fort Guardian and about the different days they’d itched to tell him about it. In response, Michael described his week to them, and told them all about Sarah and Oliver, Aroha and Nichole in embarrassingly complimentary detail while the others denied and objected to most of it.
It wasn’t all as happy as could be, but they tried to make it so. Michael finally talked about his mother and realised there’d been a weight lingering on his chest over the matter. It wasn’t completely gone, and maybe it never would be, but for certain it was lessened.
Halfway through one of the stories Michael remembered something his mother had once said. He thought about it often. “How could you ever hope to heal when you’re ignoring everything that hurts. Pretending you’re not wounded doesn’t stop the bleeding.”
Carter and James were both shaken by the news. Nala, Carter’s mother, was as much a mother to Michael and James as Connie had been to the two of them.
Michael wanted to ask about their Arcancy but the question felt like a strange one. There wasn’t anything under the sun he wasn’t comfortable talking about with his friends, yet it felt foreign to him, and the strangeness of it made him hesitant. Instead he listened as Oliver talked about his upbringing all across Leverest. He didn’t say words like “orphanage” or “boys’ home” but the way he talked around them made it clear that his family either wasn’t around anymore or had chosen not to be. They didn’t press him about it. When the conversation lulled, Nichole talked about her life in the Northern Ringlands in much the same way. While Oliver was hopping between homes in Southern Talisatia, Nichole was apparently biding her time, enduring the endlessly irritating Riinin teachings of the Redhill Orphanage on the other side of the world. She subtly skipped over some parts and told them of how she eventually made her way to the empire and met Aroha.
Everybody asked questions which they felt were appropriate but they all understood the language being spoken. It wasn’t one of honesty, as much as they’d all have liked it to be. It was one of gentle hesitation, not driven by fear or worry of what the others might have thought, rather by the mere reluctance to relive certain things.
By the end of their long talk, the group was huddled in one great mess and they sat in gentle quiet. Oliver had fallen asleep on Sarah’s shoulder and Nichole played idly with her girlfriend’s hair. James was dozing in Carter’s lap as he looked idly over the group assembled before him, and though plagued by the tragic events of the day, he knew there would be more, and that allowing them to taint the beautiful things was not how Legacies lived.
Carter looked at Michael, leaning softly against the wall of the corridor.
Michael caught his eye and raised his brow in question.
“I heard about this Nikereus. Apparently, they’re bad news,” Carter said quietly.
Michael’s smile faded and he nodded. “They’re coming back around on the Eighteenth within ten-thousand friends. After something called a Location Tablet, and despite...” Michael stopped for a half-moment, “... despite Ilo putting an exploding javelin through twenty soldiers, they all managed to get up again. So even if they didn’t overwhelming outnumber us we’d be in trouble.”
Carter nodded and asked, “What’s Amekot’s plan?”
“Don’t think he has one.”
Carter smiled. “You’re catching on. How about Jack?”
“Seems like he’s waiting on Amekot but doesn’t want to be.”
Carter snorted and said, “Sounds about right. So, what’s your plan?”
Michael thought about the gist of his “plan” and the ludicrous nature of it made him smile. He shrugged helplessly and said, “I’d wager you saw the big hole they walked out of? Well, we’re going to train. Then we’re going in there to see what nonsense Nikereus is up to. And then…” Michael gestured Carter close and Carter leant in. Michael whispered. “…I have no fuckin’ idea.”
Aroha and Nichole chuckled and Sarah had to choke her laughter not to wake Oliver.
Carter nodded, smiling, and looked down to James, dozing quietly. “I’d walk blindfolded into a burning building if you told me to, my love.” Carter’s eyes were as serious as a funeral.
Michael took his hand and squeezed it.
*****
One the other side of the door to the Defanin cabin, slowly everyone had filed back in passed as the Legacies outside and made their way to bed. Only three beds remained empty, belonging to Michael, Ilo and now Flinn himself.
Night had well and truly fallen.
While everyone slept, Flinn sat up against the door of the cabin, listening to the sound of their voices outside. Flinn listened to the music in their gentle laughter and the softness they held for one-another. Hearing it simply eased his heart and the ache in his soul. It made him cry softly.
When Michael finally came back inside, he found Flinn asleep by the door, dozing softly with dried tears on his face. Without prompt or hesitation, Michael sat down beside Flinn and pulled his bedspread across himself and Flinn. Finally, Michael fell asleep, resting on Flinn’s head.
Sometimes sleeping isn’t about being tired. It’s about having the hope that you’ll perhaps be kind to yourself. Kinder than the world is, anyway.