Lenya dropped hard onto the soil to sulk and ruminate, and undid and repaired her long, thick auburn plaits while we waited in silence. I slapped Raik on the shoulder to stir him just long enough that he groaned to his feet, toppled a few paces, and dropped heavily onto some seaweed and bracken, then retreated his head a few inches into his shell and settled again into drunken slumber.
Watching him with her upper lip raised, Lenya said, “What colourful company you keep; a drunken tortoise and a FOUL blond beast.”
“They’re your company too, for now,” I barked, and sat down nearby. I tore a piece of seaflour loaf off and stretched out a hand, but she turned up her nose and scoffed.
“Your loss.”
I greedily ate the last of the rations that I’d bought in Zhai-Khul.
A few minutes of silence passed, then a noise rose like grumbling, or the shifting of large boulders, from deep within the trees. She flinched and her bright grey eyes darted around.
“What was that?”
“Not sure,” I shrugged. “If it’s anything dangerous, however, you’ll be very glad for this boorish little group.”
I laid back on the sand. The suns were dipping, the red took on a deeper colour and the white began to fade into the seagirt horizon. The steaming waves burst with geyser-pillars far from the shore and glistened like blood through the dimming light. A quartz Rib, the one that I’d met Lenya beside, towered overhead, its smooth surface shimmering in the light.
Lenya seemed to be torn at all times between distaste and worry. At one point a strange mollusc, a little like a razor clam, popped up from the wet sand near her feet and, with a few slapping motions, fell and rose on its foot-point, edging towards her. She shrieked, batted it away with her staff, and moved further towards the trees while I laughed.
Picking up the clam, I saw before it retreated into its shell little sharp puckers that were likely just as good at sucking blood as eating whatever detritus it usually feasted on. I turned and tossed it far into the sea, where it rested on the salty water for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to move back towards us, before sinking beneath the surface.
When she had calmed, she cleared her throat again.
“So, Talbot . . . Why did you choose this place?”
I chewed my lip, deciding how much to divulge, before realising it really did not matter.
“At first it was because I was stuck in a rut on Earth — my home World — my girlfriend dumped me, I’d just lost a job that I hated, and probably would have had to get another one that I hated even more. I’d been spinning my wheels for four years, just eking out the days watching awful shows and . . . spiralling. I decided that another life — any life, even one of very real danger — couldn’t possibly be worse, so I picked the World Gate that sounded coolest on some forum, and here we are. Phew, that feels good to say! Weird, and a bit pathetic, maybe, but sort of cathartic.”
I was sure she was going to launch into a disapproving or straight-up insulting tirade, but she simply let the pause linger for a while. Lenya probably didn’t understand half of it, but as I didn’t ask anything myself, she pushed a follow-up:
“You said at first, you mean you’ve gained some perspective here and have another reason?”
“H’m? Oh, yeah, so while I was arriving, SYS approached me in this misty in-between world, introduced Herself, and announced that I was a Warrior of the Gods, and a Guardian of the New Worlds. What that means really was that She’d enlisted me to be some kind of soldier in an inter-planar war against a dark purple fog-monster.”
She gave a sharp intake of breath. No humour. Looking over to her, I saw her eyes had widened and her mouth was ajar.
“Do you know the fog monster?” I asked.
At length, she nodded painfully, reached for her staff and cradled it close to her. Despite her incredibly off-putting attitude, she looked like she needed a hug, but as I shuffled towards her, she quickly shook her head.
“It sounds familiar, yes. . . . So I haven’t escaped it, after all. . . . My m— . . . the sacrifice was for nothing.” She raised her head and a single bead welled in her eye. She brushed it away and made an attempt to resume her air of superiority. “We do not speak its name in the common tongue. We only call it the Albowesti.”
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“Oh, that means World-Eater?” I blurted out without thinking.
She gasped and dramatically threw her head back, almost toppling over.
“By Jove, sorry!”
“No, no, it’s okay, I . . . So you are tasked with . . . what? Stopping it?”
“Destroying it, I think is the idea. SYS brought over Alator as well, but that seems to be the end of Her ability — it’s kinda up to us, now.”
A glimmer of hope disappeared quickly from her eyes and she became utterly cold once more.
“Ridiculous. There’s not a prince or princess who could stand against that evil.”
“Well, I’m not a —”
“I know. Even more ridiculous.”
The conversation faded to silence. After a half-hour or so, Alator returned and took a quick sip of water from a skin in the ship. His fists and chest were splattered red and black with blood not his own.
“Only unthinking beasts out there,” he spat. “We’ll head out at dawn. Between us, we can row the boat even if Raik isn’t up for it,” he said.
“I’m going to get some exercise before nightfall, then.” I took to my feet and brushed off caked golden soil from my blue tunic, suddenly very aware again of just how short it was on my thighs. Then I looked back at the others, “Play nicely, eh?”
Both Lenya and Alator shot me an eerily similar grimace. I chuckled and set off at a jog at first.
Within a few minutes I was racing along the shoreline, tearing into the trees for a short while, jumping broad streams with [Vigour] and keeping [Vigour : Endurance] popping to keep my breathing steady. A few times I stopped to train with my new spear, feeling the slight weight difference compared to my old one — the pole was slightly thicker and the head was longer.
Perhaps it has to be to carry the enchantment, I thought.
While I trained, the suns fully set and a chill crept over the Ribs. While moving, I could barely feel it, possibly due to my Constitution and near-constant Skill use, but when I stopped it clawed at my skin and numbed my fingers.
Once or twice I totally stilled my body, focused on the cold, and tried to find some middle-ground between my bodily senses and the stream of my inner power. I attempted to force my awareness out into the forest, as Alator did, to find something — anything — to fight, but nothing happened. Or, if it had any effect at all, there were no fiends around.
At length, still thoroughly buzzing, my shoulders, legs and upper back aching, I made again to the shoreline and started the long walk back north towards the group. As they came into distant view, still utterly in silence, I saw Alator was trying to — or pretending to — sleep, and Lenya was set up in a straight-backed seated position, gripping her staff tightly across her lap, staring wistfully out into the sea.
When she heard me approach, she quickly brushed a silk-robed arm over her face and brought herself up to her feet.
“Is there . . . anything out there?”
“Couldn’t find anything,” I mumbled, reaching for the waterskin.
“You sound disappointed,” she exclaimed, exasperated.
I shrugged. Finishing the contents, I decided to delve a little further into the forest by the quite bright starlight to fill it up at a river. With gentle waving white lines of reflection moving over my body and the trees, I inspected the wounds of the past week. The snake bites in my shoulder were tiny off-pink pin pricks, and rolling my arm around in the ball joint didn’t hurt any more.
The light burns from the Cinderback Armadrax (what a cool name) still covered my arms and itched something fierce, but didn’t affect any movement.
Perhaps my constant use of [Vigour : Endurance] has been helping as well, I thought, as I hadn’t felt them while rowing — though I wasn’t sure if that was just because the effort and precision took all my concentration. The [Berserk] Special had almost completely healed everything else. I wondered if there was a way I could learn to trigger that at will, preferably while maintaining my sanity. . . . I breathed a sigh of thanks to whatever power for Alator’s complete lack of a grudge at the sudden violence.
The very faint scars criss-crossing my skin were pale next to the dark tan that had been forming over the past few days. Couldn’t remember the last time I had a tan. Most days, with the MegaCorp buildings being so tall, we only really experienced sunlight for a couple of hours, and during that time we were either slathered up with sticky, itchy sunscreen or huddled away in some cafeteria eating those god-awful calo-pouches.
Absent-mindedly, I then smelt my armpit and WOOF . . . I took a little time to strip down and scrub myself with my hands in the river, rubbing off blackened dead skin, then — fairly certain I still reeked — returned and found rest with the others, beside Alator. A few minutes of staring at the stars passed, and I just couldn’t help myself. I crawled ever-so-silently a few feet over to him and sniffed. Smelt faintly like olive oil and ferns.
Bastard. . . .
At some point in the night, I awoke to the sound of sharp intakes of breath. Rolling over, I found Alator fully awake, squatting beside me, his eyes glinting almost black.
“Bloody hell!”
He put a finger to his lips and whispered through gritted teeth:
“She’s been crying for almost an hour.”
Quietly as I could, I turned to the side to see her usually straight and proud body curled up into a ball, again cradling her staff to her chest, turned away from me. Her breath was wracked with movement and a pained, uncontrollable sadness.
There’s no way she’d allow me to comfort her. She’d probably be insulted if I tried, I thought. I turned over again and tried to give Alator a look of sympathy. He clicked his teeth, stood silently, and resumed his watch.