With Anise’s orb and ability potion sorted out, the group continued traveling. Sallia’s father seemed a bit upset over the ‘loss’ of the ability potion, but he seemed to be willing to put it behind him and keep moving forward. Soon, our journey returned to an endless set of footsteps as we marched through the cold of the mountains.
After several hours of travel, we hadn’t come across any other anomalies, and Old Mo quickly found a spot for us to camp for the night.
After almost everyone settled down for the night, Old Mo volunteered to maintain the campfire for the first hour or two after everyone else went to bed. As he did so, he also eyed from the side. I felt a strange mixture of anxiety and eagerness in my stomach - I realized that Old Mo wanted to talk to me.
That was for the best. I also wanted to talk to Old Mo.
I waited a few minutes, as everyone settled down for the night and I dumped some healing mana into my mother’s comatose form. Then, I got up, and made my way back out of the tent and towards the campfire. There, I saw Old Mo, sitting on a tree stump as he tended to the campfire.
I walked over to him and sat down. Old Mo poked and prodded at the campfire a few times as I scooted closer to him..
Old Mo seemed lost in his thoughts as he stared at the campfire, and I didn’t interrupt him. Finally, he turned towards me, before he instead looked up at the stars.
I opened my mouth to speak, and then hesitated again. Old Mo might already know something was ‘off’ about the four of us.
Did he know that we were from the Market?
Probably not, unless he already knew about the greater multiverse. That seemed unlikely, since we hadn’t found any evidence of the natives of this dimension knowing about the greater multiverse. But he still probably knew something was wrong. And I felt bad lying to him when he had done so much to take care of me.
But before I could say anything, Old Mo sighed.
“Did I ever tell you why I got out of the assassination business?” asked Old Mo.
I blinked in surprise, and then mutely shook my head.
I had wondered a lot of things about Old Mo’s past, especially after a group of soldiers had chased after us and mentioned Old Mo’s past as an assassin. But I had never asked about any of it. I had felt that Old Mo would tell me when he was comfortable telling me about his past - and if he didn’t tell me, that was also his right.
“I started out as a rich kid. I must have been… what, eighteen? When my family was murdered by Ennalians during a war.” Old Mo sighed. “It’s blurrier than I wish it were. You’d think that I would never remember the loss of my family. That the date would be etched into my mind like a brand that I could never forget. The day isn’t what I remember. It’s the feeling I had when I learned what had happened and saw their corpses. Everything else in my memory surrounding that day seems as blurry as snow in a fog bank, but I remember the moment I learned they were dead as clearly as cut crystal.” Old Mo stopped for a moment, before he turned away from the stars and towards me again. “Do you remember when I told you that the continent goes to war again every decade or two?”
I nodded.
“Well, that’s where things started. Ennalia and Verne started yet another foolish war when I was fifteen. My family was an important supplier of brass prosthetics at the time - we had a lot of connections with the Vernese military, since we supplied most soldier hand and leg replacements and upgrades. Factories were just starting to make a big impact on the world and production, but my family was one of the first merchant families to jump headlong into the new age. We managed to rig together a factory that produced prosthetics at a rate no normal alchemy workshop could match up with. The technology wasn’t complex enough to put absolutely everything together - but we were able to put together a lot of pieces in a factory, and then get an alchemist to do the last bits of welding.” Old Mo laughed bitterly.
“The Ennalians didn’t appreciate my family’s contribution to the war effort. The front lines of the war that year kept moving back and forth. Verne mostly had a decisive military advantage at the time, because Verne was the birthplace of the industrial revolution and Ennalia hadn’t really started investing in factories yet. So Verne kept pushing the Ennalians back - but the front lines overextended due to how easy victories on the battlefield came for Verne. The generals of Verne were probably used to deadlocked war fronts with Ennalia, and so when they the new rifles and mass-produced artillery and grapeshot cannons punched through Ennalian lines, they overcommitted the troops. The supply lines couldn’t keep up, and for a month or two, the front lines didn’t have enough food or ammunition. During that month, Ennalia managed to push Verne back quite a bit, and even gained some ground. Including the that my family lived in and where all of our factories were located. The Ennalian military executed all of my family members for supporting the war efforts of Verne, along with a lot of other economic producers.” Old Mo snorted, a mixture of anger and bitterness creeping into his tone. “I bet they were trying to intimidate other factory owners in Verne - not that it really accomplished much. I wasn’t in the city at the time, thankfully - I was in the capital. But when I learned that the city fell, I feared the worst. When Verne took the city back, I found my family’s graves. I lost everything during that war. My mother and father, my big brother, all of my family’s property…” Old Mo sighed. “I was so angry. I joined the military, and I did very well. I was recommended for the sharpshooter squad less than a year into my service - which is quite rare. Usually it takes three years of service to get recommended as a sharpshooter. By the time the next war started, I had been determined to have a lot of useful talents, and so I was offered a position as an Assassin of Verne. I gladly took it. I wanted the Ennalians to pay. And for a while, that went well. I got rid of a lot of Ennalian smaller leaders - I even managed to track down the commander who ordered my family’s execution. I killed him.”
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Old Mo sighed. “Things changed when I met a girl. I was in my late twenties at the time, and I was getting a bit old for a marriage. Most people get married around 20, maybe even in their late teens. So I had thought love just wasn’t for me. She was Ennalian. I met her while I was infiltrating a city. As I got to know her better, I was quite smitten.” Old Mo sighed again, and this sigh carried the weight of a lifetime of regret.
“I was too afraid to say anything about what I really was. I was Vernese, and she was Ennalian. Our countries have been at war again and again for centuries now. There’s enough bad blood between the two sides to drown a continent. But maybe we could have worked through it.” Old Mo grimaced. “Instead, I was a coward. I didn’t say anything. I was content to talk with her whenever she would have me around. I was happy spending time with her. She was happy spending time with me. She hinted once or twice that she wouldn’t mind something happening between us, but I was always afraid to push our relationship into more serious territory. I wanted to find the perfect way to tell her about my past, but I could never find the words. Or the courage.” Old Mo reached for his belt, and for a moment, I blinked in confusion as I saw his hand snatch at empty air.
He seemed surprised, and then chuckled. “No alcohol anymore. I quit a long time ago.” He shook his head. “She got killed by one of the other Vernese assassins in the city after we had been courting for half a year. She wasn’t even a target - she was just a bystander. The Vernese assassin in question stuck a bomb to a carriage, and it blew up, killing the target and a few bystanders. Mary was just… unlucky. She was on the same street, and a few pieces of shrapnel embedded themselves in her skull. Probably killed her instantly. At least she didn’t suffer.” Old Mo’s face was the color of stagnant water at the bottom of the ocean, inky black and stained with the weight of fallen remnants of the past, laying like rotting carcasses in a void that would never hold light. “That was the day I stopped working as an assassin. I’ve never, for a single day, not regretted that I didn’t take her up on her hints before that day. Every single day, I think about what I could have done differently. How many chances I had to change the outcome of that day. How things might have turned out differently. Maybe if I had taken her up on her offer, we could have moved to another country, or even another continent. I don’t know. It’s too late to think about it now.” Old Mo laughed bitterly.
“She looked a lot like you, you know. Your eyes are the same blue as hers. Your hair is almost the same shade of gold as hers was. Sometimes, when I see, I can’t help but think that if she and I had a daughter, she would have looked a lot like you.”
I could see little glimmers of wetness at the edges of Old Mo’s eyes, and I opted not to say anything.
Instead, I gave Old Mo a small hug. Hugs may not fix everything, but they could always make things better.
Old Mo patted my back a few times, before he sighed again. Then, his eyes hardened. “I know that there’s something off about the four of you. You don’t have to tell me what it is, but things just don’t add up. I see a lot of Mary in you sometimes, but I want to know, Miria. What’s with the four of you?”
I hesitated for only a moment, before I patted Old Mo’s back again.
I only got a few moments of silence, before Felix responded.
said Anise, sounding a bit hesitant.
With the approval of my friends, I felt a little bit of the pressure on my heart lighten. I took a deep breath, and prepared to tell someone about the Market for the second time in my existence.