I yawned, stretching mightily, still sprawled between the roughspun woolen sheets of my bed. The coarse fabric scratched my skin, coloring it light pink in swathes and patches.
Groaning softly, I clutched my head.
It was pounding. The pressure within my skull felt on the brink of overloading, bursting, forcing grey matter strenuously out of my ears and nose. I hadn’t slept well at all, plagued by nightmares–
NO.
No, that was wrong. I hadn’t been plagued by nightmares, not once, not since that last one I’d suffered back in Talos, between the silken sheets of the Dappled Mare. And just now, despite waking up in what appeared to be the ramshackle bed of my childhood home, I knew I hadn’t slept at all.
The last thing I remembered was being ripped from the dying confines of my soul, clutched tight within my primary Blessing’s insectoid grasp.
Now, somehow, I was here.
Immediately and instinctually, I attempted to call upon my Blessings, to cast my gaze into my inner sea, and thereby gauge the damage within.
“Impossible,” I whispered, sitting up ramrod straight.
I saw nothing.
There…was nothing. Nothing inside me. Not a drop of Entropy, nor soul, nor sea. The song was silent. Absent. All I felt was soft flesh, fragile bones, and a gently beating heart.
Somehow, I was mundane.
“Impossible,” I repeated, my hand scrabbling tremulously across flimsy, unenhanced skin. “Is…is this not reality?”
A foolish question, perhaps. Whatever my current circumstances, I had reason enough to believe that this was ADMINISTRATION’s doing. If it could grant me Blessings, then it stood to reason it could just as easily take them away.
But to remove my soul, entirely?
I shivered, glancing anxiously about the room. Nothing appeared out of place. No eldritch artifacts writ with maddening script graced the corners of my vision. I could no longer feel my Noble Shard’s gaze, but that did not mean it wasn’t watching. I’d no idea where the limits to its power lay.
Shoving aside woolen sheets, I slid off the coarse bed, landing on the hard cottage floor with a thump, and looked around.
Thankfully, unlike in the nightmare I’d suffered before, I’d not been returned to childhood. This time around, my body appeared unchanged. Better than before, in fact. Though lacking the fiery strength bestowed upon me by Draconic Blood, a quick shake of the arms and hop from toe to toe revealed my limbs limber, and my senses sharp.
The sudden absence of grueling pain and paralyzing weakness should have made me euphoric, but instead, all I felt was a creeping, gnawing unease.
My newfound vigor was ADMINISTRATION’s doing, not my own. Had it repaired my fractured soul, merely to then snatch it away? Was it capable of undoing such horrific damage? Just how powerful was it?
Could it have healed me this entire time?
Again, I’d no way to know. I’d always thought my relationship with the mighty Shard to be tenuous, at best, but a lack of communication had led me to badly misjudge just how estranged the two of us truly were. Just how different we were from one another.
Its written words were so much more than that, indescribably more. They allowed me to not just hear its horrifying voice, but to feel its alien emotions in their entirety, our minds merged in some perverse immaterium. And what I’d felt from it, then…the pure magnitude of wroth, the intensity of contempt…
It was inhuman.
Still shivering from the memory, I strode cautiously over to my makeshift closet. My health might have been restored, but my clothes remained absent, so I threw on a surprisingly comfortable woolen tunic and breeches before turning towards the door that led from my small bedroom to the cabin proper.
My palm froze for a brief moment, just above the handle.
I swallowed, took a deep breath, and eased it open.
Nothing.
No one stood right beside the stove, gently stirring a pot of dark, sugary liquid. No one prepared for me a delectable meal of cookies and candy, in preparation for a day of back-breaking labour. No one laughed at my comments, or lovingly tousled my hair.
The gas stove was dark. The table, and the sink, were empty. The room was tidy and squared away; I was its sole occupant. No one had eaten here for a long, long time.
For the best, most likely. It would do me no good to dwell upon the past.
Ignoring the deep pang of sadness that welled up from within my chest, shoving it down and away, I threw open the front door and emerged onto the misshapen dirt streets of the town that had once been all I’d known.
Burrick was abandoned.
In a way that disconcertingly echoed the empty interior of my own home, there was absolutely no one here.
As I wandered the meandering earthen paths of my once-village, strewn about with little pebbles and bits of hay, I noticed not a single hint of life. From the other cabins emanated not a trace of smoldering hearths, nor clinking pots and pans. The forest surrounding the hamlet, normally animated by the calls of myriad fowl, now sat still and silent, not even the subtle whisper of a soft breeze to rustle its leaves.
As I made my way cautiously towards the village center, the only thing I heard was the quiet scrunching of my own leather boots against the gravelly ground.
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CLANG!
All of a sudden, a noise graced my ears from afar, and my head snapped towards its source.
CLANG-CLANG!
It was a rough, violent thing, the sound of steel striking steel, and it rang out again, and again, and again, coming from the direction of the smithy. My eyes widened slightly as an impossible notion graced my mind.
Ewan.
My body, mundane though it was, leapt into action.
Wood walls and thatch huts blurred on my either side as I raced towards where I knew it to be. Two months had done nothing to dull my memories of the place I’d known all my life, and I navigated Burrick’s winding streets like the back of my hand.
As I drew nearer and nearer to my destination, I realized that the noise was, in fact, not emanating from the smithy itself, but the makeshift arena located just behind. One I knew even better than the hamlet surrounding it.
Ewan!
Pounding past the smithy’s walls of mossy stone, and hopping lightly over the shoddy fence that separated the village’s poor attempt at training grounds from the rest of it, I saw him.
A wooden dummy had been planted in the earth at the very center of the roughly circular, dirty, dusty, arena, and clad in rusted, dented iron plate. Twirling and pivoting gracefully about it in a whirlwind of methodical strikes was a lean man with grey eyes, and short-cropped hair.
My eyes widened further.
“Ewan,” I whispered.
My dead master somehow heard me, acknowledging my sudden presence with barely a grunt, halting his most recent attack to turn around.
“Ho,” he grunted again, “the mighty hero arrives at last, late for his own examination.”
I offered no reply to his words, merely staring at the phantom as he spoke. This was a perfect recreation. A flawless simulacrum. I could barely believe my eyes. Ewan was just as I remembered him, down to even the most obscure mannerisms, the subtlest twitches of mouth and palm.
How was this possible? Had ADMINISTRATION reconstructed him from memory, alone?
Ignorant to my disbelief, the man himself barely spared me a look before rolling his shoulders and glancing down, examining his blade for nicks and cuts, glaring imperfections left by vigorous practice.
“Damnable thing,” he cursed, as he found them in plentiful supply. “Not five minutes, and already useless.”
My mouth worked, but no sound emerged.
“Protect the village, Ewan. Train the villagers, Ewan.” he groused, stomping over to a weapons rack, beneath which a pile of similarly-abused arms lay.
“Never mind that you’re not a Blacksmith. Never mind that you’ve never led men. Never mind that they’re fucking geriatrics. I’ll take care of everything else. Everything you need.”
“What I need,” my master snarled, “is steel with fewer holes in it than a Nycta brothel.”
He glared down at the chipped, battered rows of blades, even the forged steel seeming to wilt under his withering gaze. Then he sighed, and a great weariness flashed across his face for a moment.
“Even in the Bastards, we got better fare. Even back in Syn…,” he trailed off, muttering, his voice barely above a whisper.
“Well, I can’t work with this.” He shook his head, turning around to face me. “I can’t. I’ll have to speak with Aldwyn, again, and he’ll whinge at me, again. I ask you, my disciple, just what is it about halfway decent steel that’s so damned difficult to find? Priest above, it’s not as if I’m asking for anything enchanted, ju–OOF!”
Ewan’s tirade was interrupted by my impromptu assault. I barged into him at the waist, knocking the air from his lungs and wrapping the surprisingly short man up in a desperately tight hug.
Tears stung the corners of my eyes.
“I’m so sorry, Master,” I choked, my voice trembling. “So, so sorry.”
Ewan’s frame was firm. Wiry, strong, dependable. Safe. Everything that I now lacked. The last vestige of a life lost to me forever. My limbs shook as I clung to him. I didn’t want to let go.
Ewan was far from warm to me, but he was the only father I’d ever known. Dead, because I wasn’t fast enough to save him.
“I failed you,” I croaked.
For what must have been the first time in history, my master was stunned silent.
I’d never hugged him before. Our relationship wasn’t like that. I’d come to him vengeful, furious at an unfair world, and he’d given me an outlet. That was all. I expected a snappy rejoinder, or perhaps a scathing rebuke, but my late master said nothing of the sort. I couldn’t see his expression, but felt his callused hands awkwardly pat my back.
“…Why…why, you’re only a mite bit late, Taiven, you need not apologize…” he murmured.
With a softness that seemed uncannily out of place on him, Ewan gently grasped my shoulders and pulled me off. “And besides, I must have told you a hundred times by now, I’m no master, never ha–”
Ewan’s eyes met mine, and he stopped cold.
“Priest alive, boy,” he muttered, brow furrowing as he glanced me up and down. “What’s the matter with you? Is this about the exam? No, you’re pale as a ghost, what on earth is…what on earth is…what on earth…”
Ewan trailed off, words becoming whispers as his expert eyes narrowed and probed across my face, and form, and posture, lighting up and focusing in on little details unknown to me. Wits sharpened over decades of fighting for survival against unwinnable odds whirled into action, and Ewan’s demeanor shifted from gentle concern to apprehension, to suspicion, to rage…
And then, all of a sudden, that rage gave way to something else entirely.
My master staggered back from me, his visage contorted in the one emotion I’d never, ever seen him display.
Fear.
“Who…what…what…” Ewan’s head snapped every which way, looking all about the abandoned village, again fixating on minutia invisible to me, but apparently horrifying, each one increasing his building terror and draining further color from his face. Then, they locked back on me.
Shaking violently, he took a step towards me.
His blade was raised high. His knuckles were porcelain-white.
I backpedaled, raised my arms forestallingly, my panic mirroring his own. Had he lost his mind? Was the memory breaking down? What was going on?
“Ewan, it’s–,”
“A Stranger…” Ewan hissed at me, face distorted into a mixture of rage and fear. “How dare you wear my disciple’s skin?”
“I don’t care if this is all an illusion,” he continued, nearly upon me now. “I’ve killed Blessed before. If you’ve harmed a single hair on his head, I swear I’ll–”
Time froze, and we froze alongside it.
Space warped and flickered, tearing at the seams. The scene before me, previously indistinguishable from reality, turned monochromatic, blurry black dots filling its corners like a spreading stain until I could see nothing but darkness.
Still paralyzed, a growing buzzing in the back of my ears slowly grew louder, and louder, and LOUDER–
CLANG!
I jumped at the sudden noise, stumbled, and startled at what I saw.
A wooden dummy had been planted in the earth at the very center of the roughly circular, dirty, dusty, arena, and clad in rusted, dented iron plate.
The monochrome hellscape was gone, and reality had returned.
CLANG-CLANG!
Twirling and pivoting gracefully about his inanimate opponent in a whirlwind of methodical strikes, danced a lean man with grey, short-cropped hair. My mouth dropped open as I stepped forward and beheld my master remade anew.
“Ho, disciple,” Ewan greeted me with a grunt, just as sane as he’d ever been, quitting his assault and turning around to frown at me.
“The mighty hero arrives at last, late for his own examination.”
I stared at him.
Ewan glanced down at his now battered blade and grimaced, tossing it to the side, letting it clatter near the pile of similarly-bruised blades near the weapons rack. He clasped his arms behind his back.
“So, shall we begin?”