Chapter Sixty-Seven
Family Ties
Carter stepped toward Michael, his hands out in front of him, already trying to calm him down. “Okay listen to me-”
Michael stepped back. “You know what. Don’t.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and then blinked as he looked to James. He didn’t say anything at all, which said perhaps far too much.
Michael smiled darkly as a laugh came to his lips. A hysterical laugh. A tired, incredulous laugh, edging his eyes with tears as his fatigue finally settled on his heart. He pulled his hands out of his pockets, bent and picked up his bow. He ran his fingers along the shaft, trying to distract himself, and clicked in the small hidden plate, springing the two long blades out of either end with a good dribble of sea water.
Carter watched him go through his motions as he picked up his quiver. Thanks to Archie’s runes, the arrows had stay in place. He had only five left, passing two each to Aroha and Nichole.
The rangers took them in silence, daring not to speak.
Michael left himself only one arrow, which he nocked to his bowstring in silence.
Carter looked at his friend and softly said, “Look, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” Michael snapped.
The company jumped at his bark, even Magnus glancing slightly.
Michael clenched his teeth hard as he glared at James and Carter, the two people he’d trusted long before he’d even learned what the word trust meant. “Sorry for keeping an entire world from me? Sorry for making up lies every cresk of my life? Sorry for keeping shit from me that couldn’t have possibly-” his voice broke as he shouted, “-couldn’t have possibly led to me finding out! What? Were you so used to lying to me that it just became your default position?”
Carter looked helplessly at James but the boy stared numbly at his feet.
Carter combed his hair back, trying to speak calmly. “Michael, I didn’t know a way to tell you about Sarah without spilling my guts on-” he gestured to the world around them, the pillars of trees, the weapons on their backs, the bruises on their face.
Michael looked him coldly in the eye and felt himself begin to shake with sick, exhausted laughter. His head fell as he nodded as the others looked on in concerned. When Michael lifted his head again, angry tears began to run down his face. His breathing was tight and venomous and finally he spat, “The Holorhi-Nahni knew me for about two hours. Two hours. She either died back there or is in prison for helping us. Me. She trusted me with her name before she went, you know?” Michael laughed venomously as he spoke, his throat closing with anger and his racing heart. “Two hours. Two hours and she trusted me with a secret which in her culture had the same weight of vulnerability as stripping naked in front of another person. Two. How many hours you known me, Carter?” Michael demanded.
“Michael, its not the same! It’s not about trust-”
Michael shouted, “You know full-well that if the roles were reversed, I would have found a way to tell you everything I could so long as it kept you safe!”
“I’m not you, Michael!” Carter shouted back, his eyes alive with anger and frustration all kindled by his ferocious love. “I don’t have your silver tongue, I don’t have your mind-
“-oh please-”
“-I spent cycles, day after fucking day trying! We spent our spells at Fort Guardian getting yelled at by Amekot because we spent so much time trying to figure something out that we were actually becoming worse fighters!”
Michael was so filled with anger but all the emotion was so brittle inside him. He stood there, watching Carter tear his hair, unable to say a thing.
“Because the fact is, Michael, you don’t understand what you are. You don’t! You don’t let things go! You don’t accept being unsure or ill-answered! You hunt down truth like if you stopped it’d kill you! If I had told you about Sarah, even though she lived half an empire away, you would’ve chipped away at my secrecy! You would’ve broken me down, piece by piece and do you know how I know that! Huh?”
Michael stood staring at his old friend and breathed, “How?”
Carter opened his mouth to keep screaming but the soft tone of his friend gave him pause. Carter’s lip shook and he hung his head for a moment.
In the distance, their yelling echoed as he breathed.
After what felt like an eternity, Carter sighed and shook his head, his heart wounded. “Because I wanted to tell you so bad. If I had said one thing about this part of our lives, I’d have given you everything. Because you’re right. I knew exactly how much it would all mean to you. I knew that.”
Michael glared at him as tears rolled off his unblinking face. “You clearly didn’t-”
Carter barked, “I have known you since you were five, Michael! I know everything you’re afraid of. Everything you’d die for. Everything you’ve survived, beaten, overcome- all of it! I know your dreams! I know where your mother keeps the chocolate in your house and which books you read when you’re scared!” Carter pulled at his hair and finally screamed, “I knew how much it meant to you! I did.” Carter let his voice sink and after what felt like an eternity, he mumbled, “And I knew what you didn’t know. I knew the price of it. The price of your wildest dream. All of this.”
Michael wiped his face of tears but they kept coming.
Carter raised a hand began counting on his fingers. “Monsters. Dead creators. Ancient Shepherds. Shredding. Ilo. Nikereus. The Holorhi-Nahni. Waking nightmares. War... and that all happened in a single cresk. Thirty days. It’s not a faerie-tale. They leave these parts out of stories. And the moment you knew anything- I mean even slightly suspected –the very instant I let anything slip, they’d hunt you. Arcancy has its aura, but so does knowledge. The truth of our world- its scent -would lead them to you Michael. And I would be dead in the ground before I was the reason they would come for you.”
Michael understood. He truly did. But his heart was tired. “They came for me anyway, Carter. In my own house. In the room with those books that made me feel less scared. Because my friends, my mother, everyone who knew… thought it would keep me safe. Because they thought keeping me in the dark would be better. Even though, they knew my entire life how afraid of the dark I was… Two strangers had to save my life. And I nearly didn’t let them, because I thought, ‘I couldn’t possibly leave my friends’, when those friends had already left me. The only two people in the world I wanted there. But you weren’t. I was alone, because you two thought the lies would keep me safe. They didn’t. You didn’t.”
The group stood in haunted silence as his words sat heavy upon them all, but no one more than Carter’s, whose face was a twisted mess of a teary, thousand-yard stare.
“You all get so worked up so easily,” Magnus muttered.
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Michael’s eyes were not his own. They were cold and grey as the storms which killed sailors before they had a chance to scream out that they were drowning. “For about two seconds in this whole trip I thought I might be wrong about you,” Michael breathed.
The red-eyed Paladin saw his bow-hand twitch, and he whispered as earnest as a lover, “Do it.”
Michael had had enough. “Okay.” He ripped his arrow back and launched it at Magnus’ head. The scythe-wielder narrowly ducked. The crowd of Legacies exploded in panic.
Magnus came roaring toward him, glancing strikes so near to Michael as he evaded and leapt backwards that the bowman felt the fabric of his shirt cleave open.
A wild swing caught Michael’s bow and sent it sharply into the ground before Magnus planted a kick on Michael’s stomach he was knocked flat on his back.
Magnus raised his scythe high and his eyes were no longer the colour of rubies, but blazing live volcanic lava, when Rose and Aroha slammed into his back, tackling him the forest floor.
Michael swiped up his bow and ejected the hidden blades when Sarah and Carter grabbed him by the arms and waist, restraining the boy as he yelled curses at Magnus. Carter managed to twist his weapon out of his grip.
On the ground, Magnus smiled at the way Michael screamed and immediately stopped struggling, much to Aroha and Rose’s surprise.
“Michael, enough!” Nichole shouted, her eyes glistening with tears as she ran and helped Sarah and Carter hold him.
Michael let out one final, pained roar before he went still, breathing out his rage. He felt his companions loosen their grip and all his energy fell away.
He started walking, moving passed all his pleading companions without a word into the depths of the forest, unconcerned with which direction he was going in.
James stood there with his face in his hands. Carter had closed his eyes and tried to breathe slow breaths. They both looked to Magnus, shouldering his way out of Aroha and Rose’s grip as he stalked over to his scythe, polishing the dirt off of its blade.
Oliver took off into the forest. “Michael, come back!”
The others all lingered awkwardly.
Nichole looked sorrowfully to Rose and Aroha before wearily she nocked an arrow of her own. “We should go comb the forest for anything that’s already set up camp, kill it, and then take guard-posts on the borders. Hopefully we’ll be able to spot anything approaching the woods.”
Rose watched Oliver catch up to the young archer. She said softly to Sarah, “Can we go scout together?”
Sarah looked wretched, puffy eyed and numb as she nodded. She glanced to the boys in the distance and then to Carter and James. “I feel like this is all my fault.”
James face was tight with his frown as he shook his head “No. We should’ve handled this the moment he arrived.”
Carter nodded, looking a million leagues away. “Nicky, you two go East. I’ll go West. Rose, you and Sarah go South. Meet back here half an hour before sundown.” He faintly touched Sarah’s arm and then turned and ambled away from the clearing, vainly hoping James would let him go alone.
*****
“Why don’t Creations attack non-Legacies?” Michael asked quietly, after walking in silence with Oliver for the better part twenty minutes. “I know we attract them and everything but... do they just not care about “regular” people?”
Oliver could hear the desperation in his voice. The kind that begged for a distraction. He thought on the question for a moment and said, “A fort-friend of mine, an old Legacy named Karmine, once told me to imagine myself in wasteland of gravel. To picture myself walking endlessly through it until I stumbled upon an apple. Eventually, I’d get hungry enough and I’d eat it. But no matter how hungry I became, I’d never eat a handful of gravel. Mortals are the gravel. Legacies are apples. And now replace the word “hungry”, with “cursed”, and you get monsters.”
Michael nodded, tucking his hands into his pockets to feel the hard, smooth face of his Kosadi. He pulled it out and quickly scanned the forest floor until he found a pointed rock, aware that their friend had been waiting on a reply for days now. Michael scraped away the top layer and wrote as neatly as he could.
Safe. Whereabouts unknown. How are the defences coming?
As the archer finished his message, he glanced back at Oliver with a question on his brow. “So, it’s just in their nature?”
Oliver was halfway through nodding when he frowned and said, “No. Not really. It’s a little less simple than that.”
Michael looked to the empty forest before them and gestured at the lack of anything interesting. “I think we have time.”
Oliver watched as a small red leaf drifted softly down toward him and he let it touch glance his palm as they walked. He looked to the sun, still a good few hours from the horizon. “Well, long ago, when Khasm still lingered in the aether and their children were still creating things down here on Draendica, supposedly, there was an age of utter peace and content among Creators and Creations. And- well, you know the story, the Gargan fumbled the process in making one of their Citizen races and unleashed an entire species of tormented creatures onto the world.”
Michael nodded slowly, shrugging his shoulders. “And then that mysterious race attacked their creators, and Khasm was forced to wipe out all life on Draendica. What’s this got to do with what I asked?”
Oliver was aware that his friend was a touch frayed emotionally, so he smiled softly and said, “Shut up and I’ll tell you.”
Michael bit his tongue, irritated by the prospect of Oliver being able to make him feel better by insulting him. “Fine.”
Oliver took his arm and walked in lockstep with the young man. “What matters is how the mis-made monsters- let’s call them the Broken Ones -how the Broken Ones managed to wage such an effective war against the gods of their world. Two words-”
“-Big sticks-”
“Heart Stones,” Oliver swatted his arm. “Every Gargan Creator, quite like us, had organs- Hearts, Brains, Livers, and things, but because they were extremely powerful and their veins flowed with pure Creation Magic, their organs were closer to mystic artefacts than squishy bits of muscle and flesh. The most important one of all, however, was the Heart Stone.”
Michael’s levity fell to the wayside as his attention was drawn in, and he was hardly even searching the treeline any longer.
“Heart Stones, if you believe the myths and age-old documents, could be used to control the minds of entire races. Supposedly, it’s how the Gargan convinced stubborn Creations to move around Draendica when continents needed to be reshaped, or how they stopped conflicts and plagues and all other manner of mass-effect catastrophes. Now, this only matters because the Gargan were unable to use this magic if the intention was based in ill-will. So, they couldn’t just force entire races to chain themselves in prison cells or walk off cliffs.”
Michael frowned as he ran his hand along a growing pale tree trunk, wondering how on Draendica Oliver had learned it all. “Why not?”
Something flickered above him. Michael frowned, but said nothing, assuming it as a leaf as several others flittered down in front of him.
Oliver pointed lazily to the sky with looking up. “Khasm decided it was unjust. They said that they’d become just as corrupt as the Broken Ones if they committed to that kind of malevolence. And so, using their almighty power, Khasm’s will became law, and their children couldn’t use the Heart Stones in malice. But...”
“But?”
“Khasm’s magical law didn’t apply to the Broken Ones. And since every Creation was forged Immortal, they kept on resurrecting. The way a tide eats a cliff, eventually the Broken Ones managed to kill a Gargan named Verganus, and ripped his Heart Stone from his chest.”
Michael blinked in disbelief. “How’d they kill a god?” Another leaf fluttered before his eyes as he swatted it away.
“They picked the right one,” Oliver said darkly. “Verganus was the Gargan Creator of Trust. He was conjured to ensure the Broken Ones would work in harmony with everyone. The Broken Ones then invited them to a ten-thousand-person feast... they poisoned his food... and all ten thousand of them tore him to pieces.”
Michael looked at Oliver in horror as they walked into a darker patch of forest. “Sweet Rii, Gror, Yue and Arh.”
Oliver frowned as the darkened canopy above them seemed to shift. And then, unbound by Khasm’s law of decency, they used the stolen Heart Stone and turned it against the other species on Draendica. The Broken Ones puppetted almost every species on Draendica, and forced them against the Gargan. And so, the real Creation War began.”
Michael peered up to the high leaves. The red star-shaped ones still fell unendingly to the forest floor, but much bigger, darker foliage seemed to reside in the tops of the trees.
Oliver continued mumbling, “And if you believe what they say, then that’s the reason Creations hunt Legacies, but not people. Part of them is still ensnared by the Heart Stone that the Broken One’s corrupted. Part of them still searches for a way to destroy their Creators... but the only thing left of the Gargan is their Creation Magic, and the only ones who bare any remnant of that, is us.”
“Oliver.”
The swordsman glanced at Michael to see him staring straight up into the canopy. He followed Michael’s eye-line and felt his breath slip through his teeth. High in the branches of the magical trees, the dark leaves all shifted at once, and dozens of pairs of bone-white eyes glared down at them.