60 – Threats looming

Melina kept watch over the caravan, sitting at a small fire while Lisette slept inside the tent. The air was chilly and moist, the smell of rain carried by the cold wind that had picked up half an hour ago. In the distance she sometimes saw the brief flashes of a thunderstorm, and the muffled and low rumble of thunder reverberated across the fields and the hills until it reached her sensitive ears, carried by the wind that was her friend. She had felt her connection to the natural element of the world strengthen as of late, another sign that the stalemate in her power was a thing of the past.

She surveyed the caravan, looking around and in the distance. Fields and lone trees all around, and silence reigned. She closed her eyes for a moment and rested her back against the bark of the great oak she was sitting under, letting the warmth of the campfire and the pleasant sound of distant thunder relax her body and mind.

“Hey.”

She almost jumped to her feet, readying her magic to defend herself from an assault she somehow didn’t hear or feel coming, but fortunately her brain recognized the voice and stopped the chain of actions she was about to perform.

“Ishrin!” she yelled but in a hushed way as not to wake everyone up. “You startled me!”

“Sorry!” Ishrin said tiredly as he slumped down against a tree, and Melina saw that he was massaging his temples like he was nursing the worst headache ever. A thing she had seen him do from time to time, and every time it had been due to an overuse of some onerous magic on his part and, strangely, never because he had run out of mana. He never seemed to run out of mana.

Power radiated from him in waves, like he was struggling to contain it, but each wave was slightly less erratic than the previous, and she tried not to worry about it too much. She would fail at that, of course, but she could at least conceal it.

“How did it go?” She asked, looking around and noticing with relief that everyone was still asleep and that the air was quiet. Thunder rumbled far away.

“I did it. Lucius is dead, the whole city is gone. Up in flames. Everything destroyed.” He said.

She could see in his eyes that he was deeply unsettled by what he had done. Recently Ishrin had begun to open up to her about his past, never mentioning the god or his wife beyond little comments made in passing or when they were necessary, instead focusing on the grander things he had done in his life. Eventually all the tales ended with what he had done after his wife left him, what at the time had looked like a revenge kill perpetrated by cultivator of a powerful rival sect.

Never had he mentioned the darker things directly, only alluding to them by means of their collateral damage. The Ishrin of today was at core a fundamentally different person, no longer the broken man who had given up his humanity in pursuit of revenge and to get his wife back. Yet, for a moment, beyond the grief she could see in his eyes, she saw a glimpse into that man. Into the man she feared he was becoming once again, which she had talked herself had only been a figment of her imagination. Here there was again, that look she did not quite hate but fear viscerally, like a barely contained monster that could set ablaze the whole continent just because he could not control a fit of rage.

But there was more in his eyes. Grief and guilt. Even though they had not talked about what he was going to do in the city, she knew well what he was planning to do. Lisette knew as well, and the woman had confided with Melina that if it had been up to her, she would have done even worse and more horrible things to the city and its corrupt denizens. Melina might not have agreed with the widespread violence, knowing that it would inevitably touch the innocent as well as the guilty, however many innocents could be found in Obscuria. But she had not stopped Ishrin either.

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“Don’t overthink it.” She said in the end, surprising even herself. She, of all three, was the chief overthinker.

“I’ll try.” He said.

Then Melina watched as Ishrin opened the doorway to his inventory right above his head, looking up as several droplets of a clear, dense liquid fell into his mouth. A sickly-sweet smell assaulted her nostrils, carried by the wind. Before she could ask him about it, he was fast asleep.

She wondered, for a moment, just how strong such a concoction had to be to make her feel dizzy after having just inhaled some of its fumes from a distance, and how resistant Ishrin had to be in order to have to take several drops of it just to sleep. She shook her head, suppressing a frown, and spread her makeshift blanket so that it would cover him at the cost of exposing her side.

It was no use. Rather the feeling delighted, being at his side and holding his head as he slept, Melina felt restless and worried. She got up and relieved Lisette of her watch, taking her place at the top of the central cart. A cart, she realized, carrying the very same pixie dust that had been the sole reason for Obscuria’s downfall, all at the hands of a single man.

The next day passed without incident. There were no monsters, and they travelled light. They barely talked to each other beyond Lisette expressing interest in Ishrin’s newest power-up, but as the day turned to evening, the silence felt less oppressive as each member of the party processed their emotions in silence. Melina had been worried that Ishrin might do something with the pixie dust, or punish Taiival for being a knowing pawn in his former—although he didn’t know about it yet—boss’s underground network.

That night, they all gathered around the fire. It was late, but they each had their demons keeping them from sleeping. Lisette was peppering Ishrin with questions about dimensional theory and strange math, keeping herself and their party leader busy. But even such questions could only stall the impending conversation for so long, and after a brief heavy silence, Ishrin spoke.

“I owe you all an apology. It’s just been eating at me from the inside for a while now, you know? I need to get this out of my system. It’s about what happened to us when we jumped out of the mountain pocket realm, and our subsequent near-deaths and the death of Liù.”

“She isn’t—” Melina tried to say.

“She is dead.” Lisette cut her off. “And you are at fault.” The venom in her voice felt spent, stale and well beyond any efficacy. Indeed, she was just keeping it up out of rote habit, but there was no fire in her voice.

Melina knew.

“Knock it off,” regardless of her true feelings, Ishrin glared at her with sharp, dark eyes. “Enough of this. This is precisely why I wanted to speak about it now. We need to move on from this baggage we are carrying. Obscuria was just the drop that broke the camel’s back. Don’t ask what a camel is, not the point.”

There was a faint outline of a smile.

“What I mean is that we need a good, simple and clean adventure to get our minds a chance to relax and unwind. I think that looking for the bracers might be that, if we avoid unnecessary problems. What do you think?”

“It certainly didn’t start on the right foot, though.” Lisette said.

Was that a joke coming from her? Or a jokey, snide remark, at the very least.

“That it didn’t. Let’s see if we can salvage the situation. We already are in deep shit with the whole Syrma-Dynasty situation, no need to be at each other’s throats as well. Semiluminal might just be a good enough place to unwind for a bit.”

There were nods, and a few more words that were lighter and more carefree. Things might not be okay just yet, but Melina felt that they were going in the right direction. When they broke apart, however, Melina noticed that Ishrin pulled something strange out of his inventory. Pretending to go in her tent to sleep, since it was his turn to keep watch, she instead circled around to spy on him. The contraption was a beautiful thing, made of discs of translucent material floating along a central axis made of ethereal light, and they all looked lighter than air, as if made of condensed magic itself. There was a periscope, a small octagonal opening of blackness surrounded by bolted bright brass.

Ishrin looked into it as he pointed the thing at the sky, and released a long, heavy sigh. She tried to turn her gaze to the heavens to see what he was seeing, but only saw the bright light of the firmament. Amidst the many stars, too faint for even her sight to see, a small dot moved. A spaceship, carrying a ruthless captain and its empath second-in-command. On their way to the world of Prima Luce. They, unlike she and Ishrin and Lisette, moved with no hurry. Confident in their abilities, knowing that their superiors at the guild would never send then to fix something that they couldn’t deal with.

A thing that made the captain of said spaceship restless enough to seek fights even where he should have kept his calm. He was the right arm of the Guild after all. One of countless, but one nonetheless.