I was never taking the night coach again. It turned out there were two coaches. One left town in the morning and travelled most of the day and the other left in the evening and travelled all night. If you think the red-eye flight from LAX to anywhere was bad, a coach ride through the night was a nightmare, no offense to the delightful not-horses. Yes, that thing in the stable had looked more like a horse than any other animal I’d seen in this world, but it didn’t move like one.
The coachman said he liked the rocking motion and that we’d sleep like a baby. I slept like a baby. I slept like a teething six-month old with chronic colic. I woke up like I was in my fifty-year-old body back on Earth. The coach was like riding a little kid roller coaster. Almost fun for the few minutes of a ride at the carnival, but if you ever stayed on the tilt-a-whirl all night, you’d have some idea of what a coach ride felt like. My stomach was so sick after the first four hours that I must have passed out for a whole hour of what I am generously calling sleep.
Kat practiced the Spark spell I taught her most of the night, but even she fell asleep sometime after midnight. Terra was curled up on her shoulder and had been the only one of us to sleep most of the way. I only noticed dawn curling over the horizon because I had my head out the window throwing up again. I cast a clean on the carriage for the dozen-th time and squinted my eyes up at the driver.
“It’ll only be another few minutes, ma’am,” he said, sympathy and mirth warring for time on his facial expressions. “Siff is just up ahead.”
I woke Kat and Terra, the latter of which hopped more nimbly than my tired mind could process onto the roof of the coach. Kat leaned out one window and I leaned out the other. At least we’d been lucky enough to be riding alone, so my humiliation was mostly private. The coach’s rocking slowed to a gut-churning sway of a back yard teeter totter as the not-horses slowed to a walk to stop outside the gates.
Siff was bigger than I expected. It was surrounded by two walls. One outer wall was only three feet high, but nothing existed between it and the other. The coach stopped at an inn outside the walls. The inner wall was intimidating at over fifteen feet high, and it stretched as far as I could see to the west and then right up against a river to the east. It was topped with guards and punctuated with towers. I’ll admit I goggled at the majesty of it, as I stumbled out of the coach.
The ground felt blessedly solid, and I barely resisted sinking to my knees right there in the street. Kat wearily dragged me into the inn, got me to pay for a single room with a double bed, and nearly had to carry me up the stairs. I didn’t remember anything else until well after noon when Kat woke me with a bowl of something that wasn’t my cooking.
“We have troubles,” she told me softly, brushing the sleep from me like the pail of water Mabel had flung at me the first day.
“Okay,” I scrubbed my face with my hands and took the proffered bowl of oatmeal. My stomach demanded that I eat it even as my nose wanted to turn up at it. Mabel’s porridge had smelled better. “What’s up?”
“My compass is spinning,” Kat whispered to me, holding it out so I could see the spinning needle.
“It means her nemesis is here,” Terra nudged my hand into moving, so I took the bite I’d been bringing to my mouth.
“How close?” I asked them both, meeting Kat’s tone. Three days. It should have taken three days.
“Close,” Kat and Terra said at once even though Kat couldn’t hear Terra.
“I’m a hypocrite,” I groaned, my mind clicking information into place. “Beau got to me in three days when it should have taken him nine. He didn’t have any money so the quest engine calculated the distance by how long it would take to walk.”
“That’s good, right?” Kat whispered. “Whoever it is won’t be as ready as they might have been.”
“I called Beau a cheater for it,” I ground out around another bite of lousy porridge.
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“Stop it! Just stop it. I can’t do it. Make it stop!”
The quill stopped scribbling, its spines drooping slightly.
“I can’t write today,” I protested, my voice cracking with a sorrow I hadn’t dealt with yet. “This is stupid anyway.”
The quill set itself flat on the teakwood desk with a click.
“We lost five followers,” I ranted at the passive quill as if it was all its fault. “It’s not like I can keep them interested. My life isn’t interesting, or they don’t believe it or whatever other excuse they use to move on. It’s all the same. I can’t do this.”
Terra padded into the little office and scratched her way up her cat tree. She gave me a stare.
“Don’t look at me that way,” I pushed away from the desk. “I won’t write it.”
The fireplace dimmed as if my anger had scared it. I wanted to feel a little guilty for the way the furniture flinched, but it wasn’t my fault they were all skittish.
I heard a scratching behind me. “I said stop it,” I growled out, my fists clenched so tight that I thought I had to hit something. The quill stopped again.
“It’s just a bad day,” Terra reasoned, her tone serious.
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Five followers. I could feel my mana pool shrinking. At least you hadn’t left me. I don’t feel quite as alone with you there. It seems like such a small thing, and I should be able to get over it. It’s the life of a writer to have highs and lows. It isn’t their fault. They don’t understand what’s coming. I think something in you understands though. Just stay and maybe I can get through it.
Every time I hear the quill scratching across the paper, I know it gets one step closer to Kat…How do I write it? I know. The quill just scribbled out my thoughts and you think that must be easy but… I apologize for the disjointed nature of this chapter. I begged the quill to delete most of this. I just don’t think it’s necessary to plaster my grief all over a bunch of digital pages. Don’t.
It doesn’t listen to me. It’s ruthless. I’ve tried plucking every spine out of the thing, setting it on fire, and… well lots of stuff. I’m surprised that it’s still writing this.
Honestly, I thought I could write about it and feel better. I thought it could get me through the grief. But it’s too raw. I just want to crawl back in bed and pretend it didn’t happen.
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“Excuse me,” Terra interrupted my heartache.
I didn’t want to talk about it, not even with her. I could hear that quill and it set my teeth on edge. Everything I thought was being put on a page to then be uploaded. I hated him more than ever.
“I said, excuse me,” Terra broke into my thoughts again.
“What?!” I raged, and she flinched back from me. I was too mad with grief to care that I’d scared her. “I can’t write about how Kat died. I can’t do it. I don’t even want to think about it!”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Terra half-hid behind the trunk of her carpet-covered tree.
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I’m a horrible person. Terra loved me and I was striking out at her because of the pain in my chest that wouldn’t go away. Some days I can hardly breathe from it. It had been my fault. Me and my sanctimonious ideals of fairness. I’d made her wait. We could have gone in there and obliterated that pansy-assed little snot-nosed kid, but I hadn’t wanted to cheat. I hadn’t wanted to be like Beau, so I’d let that punk get just strong enough to kill my baby. I’d underestimated that boy’s ability to lie.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Even you’ll want to leave me soon. It’s for the best. I’ll just get you killed too. But… don’t go. Not you too.
Yeah, I know it isn’t the followers that got to me. I know that but I can’t admit that I just don’t want to talk about Kat anymore. I don’t want to think about the look on his face when he drove the dagger into her back.
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“You killed my family,” Joey ground out through his clenched jaw, his face a twisted mask. At first my mind didn’t process what had happened. I cast my heal, but it didn’t seem to do anything. It just looked like when the two of them used to hug. He was behind her with his chin on her shoulder, one arm around her waist. Except instead of smiling, Joey had a crazed look on his face.
“What are you talking about?” I gasped out, still unaware that my daughter wasn’t breathing. Caught in the middle of it, I hadn’t figured out yet that my world had stopped turning.
“Don’t act like you don’t know,” he let her go and she sank to the ground.
There was the knife, covered in her blood. I knew the look in Joey’s eyes. They weren’t rational. I’d seen that look before. I’d stopped it before, but it hadn’t been my daughter in a pool of blood at the feet of the man with that look on his face.
“She killed them all, just because we broke up,” he whimpered at the look in my eyes that mirrored his. I stumbled to understand him, but things were breaking in me and I only half heard his words. “The blood was everywhere. My mom was still warm, but I couldn’t wake her up.”
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“I said STOP!” I screamed at that stupid quill. I cast every spell I knew at the quill as if it could stop her lifeless body from falling to the ground. Just like I’d cast every spell I had at Joey.
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“Go ahead and kill me,” he uttered his last breath, still cursing me, her and our family. “My whole family is dead anyway. She killed them all.”
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I pieced it together later. On the night that the Nemesis Engine had pulled Joey into this world as Kat’s nemesis, he had walked into his house to find bodies. It couldn’t have been Kat. She’d been in another world. My soul knew my husband had gone off the rails. Without me there to stop him, my husband had gone to find our daughter. When Kat wasn’t there, he took their daughter. Then he’d taken them.
Now Kat was dead too. First love. So passionate and bittersweet. I’d hated Romeo and Juliet, finding the whole thing so trite and banal.
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I beg of you to understand. There is a… There’s no excuse. I’m sorry.
How are you still reading? Did you see what that stupid quill recorded? Go ahead and turn away. I know you want to. Hell, I want to.
No matter what I do, that stupid quill keeps writing it all down. If I read what it’s writing, I’m not sure I can live with myself. I don’t care about this stupid Nemesis Engine anymore. I don’t care about anything. Just leave me here.
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“I said, excuse me,” Terra insisted yet again.
I wanted so badly to ignore her but how does one ignore something that’s booming inside your own head?
“What?!?!” I choked out, my tears in waves, my grief still raw even after so much time had passed.
“I don’t want to interrupt your perfectly natural response to grief,” Terra sounded far too reasonable for my state of mind. “I feel my own too, so I know… BUT, we are strong enough to get back up from this.”
“I don’t feel strong,” I told her angrily. “I don’t want to BE strong anymore. I’m just so tired. I just want it all to stop.”
“I don’t want to intrude,” came Sammi’s voice, and I turned to cast any spell I could at them.
Sammi’s tutu caught fire, but they remained stoically standing there, much to my despair. I felt so powerless. They didn’t even try to put out the flames. Sammi just gave a sigh and let me punch and pound on a leather jacket that reminded me of her. How dare Sammi show their patient face?
“I can’t talk to her when she gets like this,” Sammi told Terra, and I hated every ion in Sammi’s body.
“Please,” Terra pleaded into the haze in my mind.
Every once in a while, in the process of grief, you think you can handle things again. You get up and get on with life. You move through things like the world doesn’t have a hole in the middle of it. You do what needs to be done and you cry a little every night and you think, now it could be getting better. Then something happens. Something stupid or smart, small or large, nothing or something. And once that something happens, you fall straight back into the worst of the grief.
Knowing the fact that this process is normal and natural does not help. You see that break in the writing? I spent days in a haze of reliving the worst grief a parent can experience. If the stupid quill would let me, I’d spare you the hideous scene, but it just keeps scribbling across pages. I’m going to move forward here, not because I got the stupid quill to stop, but because I’m in the next little eye of the storm of that grief and I can write the next bit.
“That’s what I was trying to say,” Terra broke into the writing.
“What do you mean?” I said, empty of feeling, wrung out.
“I’m just saying that maybe we can change things,” she suggested, her little ears perky and too… just too.
“It’s written,” I said. “I can’t change it once it’s on the page. I tried to get that stupid quill to stop, but it just wouldn’t back up. Kat’s dead and there’s nothing I can do about it. Even the author can’t change it once it’s published.”
“Maybe,” Terra hedged. “But maybe not.”
“Spit it out, cat,” I shuddered with the effort to hold back another outburst.
“That’s why she called me,” Sammi popped in. I was glad Sammi was behind me. If I couldn’t see the genie, I could pretend they weren’t there.
“It’s written,” I moaned out. “I tried to stall with chapters of her and Terra, but the slower it went, the more followers we lost.”
“To be fair, you glossed over the fight between you and Kat about her accepting a Nemesis Quest,” Sammi said.
“You goaded her into accepting that quest,” I ground out, my fists either ready to fly at Sammi again or hold back my temper.
“I did,” Sammi admitted, “but you couldn’t have stopped her.”
“She was young and didn’t understand her own mortality,” I growled at Sammi, slowly losing my control of that temper. I wasn’t rational enough to know how badly I needed to blame Sammi so that I could lessen the shame I felt for myself.
“That isn’t the point,” Terra insisted, turning us to her. “Tell her what you told me!”
“I did some reading,” Sammi said, their voice carefully neutral, “on the forums.”
“Some research,” Terra put in, her tone hopeful. I didn’t want to hear it, but I knew they wouldn’t leave me be.
“Have you heard of a genre called the time loop?” Sammi asked.
“Like Groundhog Day,” Terra piped up.
“It’s more of a sub-genre,” Sammi admitted.
“You like Groundhog Day!” Terra perked her ears forward and I wanted to pet her and feel better. Feeling better often seems so wrong when you hurt this badly.
“Stop pussyfooting around it and tell me,” I grunted, wanting them to get it over with so I could go back to my grief. Let them all leave me, I thought. I didn’t care. Let that stupid quill write us all into oblivion.
“Think,” Sammi hedged, and all I wanted to do was smack them.
“You have to come up with it,” Terra pressed me.
“God, I’m so sick of all these rules,” I groaned aloud. “Didn’t I become the author to be able to make my own rules?”
“And you do, mostly,” Terra dared to come close to me, her whiskers forward and her ears alert. “But we have to have more mana for that.”
“And I have to have followers to get that mana,” I tried so hard not to yell, wanting Terra to stay near. I’d made her timid and fearful with all my big emotions. “I know all that but, in case you weren’t paying attention, this story isn’t going to get them!”
“Not if you keep whitewashing it,” Sammi said too bluntly. “What about that hour that you raged at each other over taking the quest and another couple of fights in the coach about how she wouldn’t learn your magic. Or the…”
“Shut your mouth,” I swung around to punch Sammi in their foul mouth, but they stood back far enough for me to miss. “I can’t have a little respect for the dead?” I muttered, fury exciting the very air between us. I didn’t want to think about the arguments. I blocked them out just as surely as I’d blocked out Terra’s timidness.
“Nobody wants to read about your perfect daughter and your perfect pet,” Sammi closed the space between us and got up in my face.
“She was perfect, and you killed her,” I raged, my palms burning. “You and Fizzbarren and this stupid Nemesis Engine!”
“It doesn’t have to happen that way,” Terra squeaked into my mind even as she hid behind the overstuffed chair. Normally she was afraid of the fireplace behind us, but she braved the fireplace over my temper. It was more courage than I’d ever seen in her. What mattered so much to her?
“What are you talking about?” I called out to the ceiling, despair my only friend.
“You’ll have to calm down enough to read and do some research,” Sammi yelled into my face. “And I don’t think you have it in you!”
I pushed Sammi out of my face with my flaming hands. The leather of Sammi’s jacket smoldered in the shape of my splayed fingers. It would never again look just like her jacket, and I was glad.
“And you’ll need all the mana you can scrounge up!” Sammi continued to yell, taking a step toward me.
Sammi pushed me back. Sammi never got violent, so I was surprised enough to backpedal.
“The genre exists,” Terra prodded me, and I let Sammi push me back again until I felt armchair bump against my backside.
“I don’t have it, so what difference does it make?” I argued weakly, my emotional outburst having drained me of mana and fury.
“I brought you some books,” Sammi offered me a stack.
“Why?” My mind still spun stupidly.
Sammi shoved the stack of books at my chest, and I stumbled back over the arm of the chair. Books tumbled around me like an avalanche.
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It doesn’t do much good to continue on a loop that no longer exists. If I went back, I’d never have to write this part of the loop. I shoved the grief back and popped open books with a new desperate thirst. I did love Groundhog Day. I loved how almost every long-running series had their version of it in at least one episode.