Somewhere
In the vast and infinite space
That place between worlds
Of dark and light
Where uncountable stars whorl in the blackness
Like a million arrows piercing a black veil
Calbreia came
Herald of Justice
The Winged God
The Blade of Recompense
Wielding a sword of Will and Light
And there was Varcovith
The Grey God
His own sword drawn
With a cape that whirled and trained behind him
A black flag that sook to smother the stars
— From the Song of Calbreia, by a member of the Cult of Blind Seers
*****
Harlowe arrived in a small, dusty, southern town as the day turned to dusk. As the coach pulled down the main drag, she was curled against the back of her seat, the folds of her duster wrapped around herself and her brimmed hat pulled down so as to partially obscure her face. From this position, she peered out through the passenger window. A lit, swaying lantern bobbed and dangled from the coach, disturbing the greyish blue twilight which had settled over the buildings and street. To the west, the faint orange glow of the sun dwindled at the angled crest of some overlapping hills.
She was glad to be awake. This place, dark and quiet and cold, was the antithesis of what she had seen in her dreaming. That place of fire. Hot, and painfully bright. Impossible to look away.
If only the memories would stay where they belonged.
But Harlowe didn't want to think about that. She would move on. Distract herself.
She peered out through the glass window of the carriage and watched the dim shadows of buildings.
The surroundings which scrolled past the window were that of a quaint, practical settlement. A waystop between busier, more populated areas.
The carriage passed a stable. A general store. A—
Fog smothered the window-glass.
Harlowe sighed, expelling another cloud of breath which fogged the window further. Using one arm to keep her jacket held closed and tight, bracing against that imminent chill the daylight sun could no longer hold back, she leaned forward and used a sleeve to rub a circle on the glass.
There was little activity in the streets. Candlelight throbbed inside windows and under the lips of doors.
Giggles, laughter, and lively conversation echoed from within the saloon. Shadows meandered in front of the windows.
The coach began to slow, pulling to a stop in front of what appeared to be the town’s hotel. Grey smoke roiled out from a brick chimney which jutted from the peak of the slanted roof.
The coach bounced a little as the driver hopped down and opened the passenger door.
As soon as the door was open, cold air reached into the compartment, grasping for her.
She took a deep breath, pulling her jacket close, before stepping out and dropping, both boots hitting dirt at the same time.
The driver closed the door behind her and stood there, waiting. Each breath he took became a fleeting, ghost-like wisp in the dusklight.
Harlowe removed one of her tan leather gloves and held it in her teeth. She reached her glove-less hand inside the folds of her duster, brushing past one of the two revolvers holstered at either hip, and opened the money pouch attached to her belt. She pulled out a wad of Alveranderan dollars and began flipping through them, counting up the second half of the payment for the ride.
During her first few years after leaving the Federation, she’d traveled alone, and always by horse, expecting that it would be easier to disappear that way, leave things behind. In reality, interested parties could always find what they were looking for if their pockets were deep enough. In fact, she sometimes had an easier time losing people in a packed city than when she was away from everything, out in the western wild.
Besides, the open range hadn’t suited her quite like she’d expected it would. She’d become accustomed to the occasional warm bath, as well as ending the day with a hot meal, a good drink, and some company to share stories with.
In the end, she’d sold her horse. There were alternative means of travel these days. It was just as easy to get around without one, if not easier.
She separated the bills, put the bulk of them back in her pouch, and pressed the remaining folded bills into the driver’s palm.
He tipped his hat, hopped back up onto the coach, and slapped the reins. One of the two horses made a chuckling whinny, and together they began to march forward. The wheels rotated as the coach pulled out and away. Perhaps the driver was on his way to stable the horses. After that, maybe to the bar, for a nice drink.
Harlowe envied him. There would be no drinking tonight. At least not for a while yet.
She slipped her glove back on, adjusted her hat, and approached the front door of the hotel.
The door creaked and had a slight wobble to it as she opened it. She was immediately hit by the warmth of a lit fireplace, emanating from the far end of the room, basking the entire landing in flickering light. The smell of burning pine was cozy and inviting. It reminded her of the winter months in her own home as a child.
As she turned to close the door, one of the hinges was loose, and she had to lift it a little by the knob in order to close and latch it properly.
She removed her hat. It was a custom based in the sentiment of not scattering dust when you enter someone’s home or establishment. She’d been traveling either by train or coach all day and her clothes were all relatively clean. But it always paid to be polite. When you wandered from place to place, and no one knew who you were, first impressions were the only social currency you had.
On the other end of the landing, not far from the lit fire itself, was a desk. Behind the desk sat a skinny, spectacled man. Firelight glinted and flashed on his bald pate. Bald except for a few thin, lonely strands of dark hair that had been greased and combed over the top of his head.
He had a story magazine laid flat on the desk, but at some point he had looked up from it and was now regarding Harlowe with some interest.
It was more than just the look of a clerk assessing a potential patron. There was something about her that seemed to fascinate him.
Which, honestly, shouldn’t have surprised her. She was a single woman, alone on the road. She had a slim, fit figure, sculpted by years of war and military training, still with some curves. Unlike some women she knew, her complexion was still mostly free of any scars or marks. At least, not ones that would currently be visible. She also kept her blonde hair long, despite it’s thickness and unruly curls. Though, right now, she had her hair wound together into two different buns behind her head.
In other words, she was used to getting looks. That part wasn’t strange.
Still, she sensed there was something more to it, though she doubted it was important.
“It’s getting cold out there,” she said. Seemed as good a way as any to break the silence.
“That it is, ma’am,” the clerk said. He slid the magazine off to one side, revealing a bound ledger which was also laid flat on the desk. “I take it you’re looking for a room?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He slid open a drawer and withdrew a pencil. “Your first name? And family name?”
“I don’t have a family name,” Harlowe said, then hesitated for only a couple of seconds before saying, “Harlowe.”
The clerk’s eyes went wide. “Truly?”
“It’s my name,” Harlowe said.
Excited, the clerk slid the magazine back over on top of the ledger. ”This Harlowe?” he said, pointing at one of the stories.
“Couldn’t tell you,” Harlowe said, only giving the page a brief glance. Given the lighting it was hard to make out just what it said from where she was standing anyway.
“I knew it,” the clerk said, unashamedly looking her over. “I knew something was familiar about you. You’re a Deadeye. No…the Deadeye.”
“Used to be,” Harlowe said. It wasn’t often that people recognized her or cared who she was. She wasn’t sure she much cared for it. “I’m not with the Federation anymore. I do freelance work. Now and then.”
A glint of wonder shone in his eyes. His lips were partly open, slack. Then he seemed to come back to himself. “Can you still...” He imitated putting a Shattercryst capsule in his mouth and biting down on it.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Of course. That never went away. As long as she was who she was, people would always come looking for her. And she would always need Shattercryst to defend herself. Never went anywhere without it. Couldn’t.
“Do you have a room, or not?” Harlowe said.
“Would you be willing to sign one of my tarn novels?” He said, standing up. “It features you, in the showdown at Carmine Ridge. It’s quite incredible!”
Carmine Ridge. Those two words were like an incantation, conjuring memories and bringing them to the forefront of her mind unbidden.
Suddenly, the crackling hearth, and the firelight flashing on the walls, seemed the furthest thing from inviting. Suddenly, Harlowe was back on that ridge, irises engulfed with the licking flames. She saw the coal-like glowing of burning debris. Body parts strewn among the wreckage. A tiny little hand poking up amid a fallen pile of bricks. So close, as if the child had been reaching up to grasp Harlowe's leg—
But then the clerk spoke again, dragging her thoughts, mercifully, back into the present.
“It’ll just take a moment,” he said. He wound his way around the desk and began to head toward a doorway halfway down the wall.
“They still sell books for a tarn?” Harlowe said.
But by that point the man was already through the doorway and gone. His footsteps sounded distantly in some hallway, growing quiet.
He had seen right through Harlowe. The real her, anyway. To him, she was more myth than person. He had yet even to properly introduce himself. He seemed to know so much about Harlowe, and she didn’t even know his name.
The room grew silent, save for the occasional crackle and spatter from the fire.
As a child, whenever Harlowe had said that a tarn was only a tarn, her mother had reminded her that a tarn wasn’t just a tarn, even if it took ten to make an Alveranderan dollar. It all added up. At the time, she’d rarely ever seen more than three dollars put together.
Now, more than twenty years later, it seemed like the Alveranderan dollar could take a person fewer and fewer miles every year. And yet, somehow, the presses still sold their stories for a tarn. Harlowe didn’t understand it.
She’d never read one herself. Those books with the exciting, illustrated covers, usually of a gunslinger in some kind of shootout, the tips of their guns flaring red and smoking. Her parents had been poor, unable to afford such things. It was why she had joined the Federation to begin with.
Since then, she had become one of the gunslingers on those illustrated covers. Both literally and figuratively. And now she couldn’t bear to pick one of them up. The magic of those stories was gone for her now. The fiction of it. She was too familiar with the reality.
Just when the clerk had been gone for about a half minute, Harlowe found that she was glancing absentmindedly about the landing, and had started rapping her gloved fingers on the wooden desktop.
The loud creak of the hotel’s front door tore through the quiet.
For the way that Harlowe swiveled around, hands reaching into the folds for her jacket for her guns, it might as well have been a gunshot.
She drew her Wulthers. Hefty revolvers with larger than normal barrels, and dials on the cylinder slots for adjusting the directions of crystal afterburners.
She snapped back the hammers.
The door of the hotel door had cracked open. The gap was as wide as Harlowe’s waist. Cool blue light from the full moon wafted in, clashing against the flickering firelight which ebbed on the walls, with only a thin gap of undulating half-shadow in between.
A hollow coldness crept into the room. Hairs stood at attention on the back of Harlowe’s neck. Goosebumps began to materialize on her forearms, abrased by the fabric of her jacketsleeves, despite the fact that she was standing closer to the fireplace than the door.
The wind had picked up in the moments since Harlowe had entered the hotel. The door creaked and whined from the force of it. There was an eeriness to the hushed sound of the persistent breeze which traveled past the open doorway, echoing in, like the exhalation of a corpse.
Harlowe could not rationally explain how she knew it, but she did. Her intuition was like an outstretched hand, gripping the collar of her jacket, urging her not to make any moves. Not to approach that open door. Because she knew that they were here. And somehow, she also knew that it would be different this time. One way or another, the encounter would not end as it had before.
She was no coward. She had her battlemarks to show it. She was accustomed to running toward danger rather than away from it. But there was something about the ones tailing her, her Shadows, that she did not understand. In a strange way, the fear of certain death was always dwarfed by the fear of the unknown. (Or perhaps the two were one and the same?) Over time, Harlow had begun to sense that there was something unknown about the Shadows that she would be right to fear.
And now, here she was, staring at a cracked door, both her guns drawn, aiming at nothing. The night. The void. At what she couldn’t yet rightly see or understand, though something told her it was there. Something, in herself, as unknown and illusive as the portent it warned her against. Something she both trusted and distrusted at the same time.
But none of these feelings were completely new to her. Combat was a game of the mind as well as the body. One voice telling you to turn tail and run. One voice urging you forward, to glory, reckless or otherwise. And sometimes there was another voice, still and quiet. A gut feeling. A whisper in the ear.
Harlowe’s heart, elevated after the sudden and inexplicable cracking of the door, had begun to ease back into a more comfortable pace. She took a couple deep breaths. She rode forward the hammers on her Wulthers and holstered them both. She marched toward the gaped front door. She reached into the inner front breast pocket of her coat and procured a Shattercryst capsule. It was half dark-orange Citrine and half Obsidian, fused together. She placed it in her mouth, using her tongue to pack it between her gums and cheek. When the time came, she would bite down on it. But not yet.
She yanked the door the rest of the way open. It bonked against the wall and wheezed as it began slide closed again. But Harlowe had already put on her hat and ducked through the door.
The cold night embraced her, touching her face and ears with icy fingers. Bitter gusts fluffed the tails of her jacket and probed for weaknesses in the fabric of her clothing. The sun had set completely. Lamplight still flashed in golden gleams behind the windows of buildings. Despite this, visibility was low when looking down the main street, thanks to thick clouds that choked the moon’s light as soon as Harlow stepped outside. But she could still see them. The Shadows.
There were four of them. They stood in the middle of the road, spaced a couple paces apart from each other, facing Harlowe. As if they’d been expecting her.
She could only make out their outlines. Looming shadows in the violet dark. They wore brimmed hats and long coats and one of them had a long-barreled lever action rifle.
They didn’t move. The folds of their coats swayed and flapped in the breeze.
“Who are you?” Harlowe said, but as she spoke the wind swelled and howled, and she was fairly certain they hadn’t heard. She leaned into the northern wind, holding tight to her hat to keep it from being torn away. The Shadows were dark statues, seemingly unaffected but for the rippling fabric of their clothing.
“Who are you!?” She was yelling, now, screaming into the wind, one hand on her hat and other on the grip of one of her Wulthers.
The air currents waned, relaxing at a soft, steady breeze again.
“What do you people want?” Harlowe said. Soft, this time. But she knew they could hear. “Why are you doing this?”
One of them spoke. She couldn’t tell which one. Just that it was a man, with a voice both deep and raspy at the same time. She wasn’t sure if he was so much speaking as growling the words.
“We want you to remember.”
At the words, the wind suddenly died, the hushed tones of its whispers cutting off in mid-sentence.
Harlowe held her breath. Apprehension seized her, though she couldn’t say why. She pushed through the resistance, spoke again. “Remember what?”
There was no answer.
It was so quiet then that the gravelly crunch as one of the Shadows adjusted their footing was a shock, like thunder without the lightning that normally forewarned it.
It was the one holding the rifle. They were in mid-pivot, raising the rifle so it would be leveled at Harlowe.
One of the other Shadows was leaning toward the one with the rifle, gesturing palm-down with his hand, even reaching to try and grab the barrel. Too late.
Things had been set into motion. Actions that would be met by reactions. The intertwining dance of fate.
Harlowe bit down on the Shattercryst capsule. It burst between her teeth, with a sound like shattered glass rattling in her head. Tiny crystal particles scattered, rapidly absorbed by her gums and tongue and lungs, taken in by her body. She quickly felt the reinforcing effects of the Obsidian, working it’s way throughout her flesh, muscle, and bones. It would give her inhuman speed, the ability to react quickly.
At the same time, the Citrine began to do its work. She knew the crystal had reached her eyes because of the pinpricks of pain there, and in her head. If she had been able to see herself, she would have seen bright, Citrine-colored irises. Which was why for a brief second, she angled her head down, using the brim of her hat to hide her eyes. She could still see the Shadows’ torsos, and their hands. And the long barrel of the rifle being raised in her direction. But time--or at least Harlowe’s perception of it--had begun to slow. A blurry foreimage stretched out from the rifle barrel, showing what the angle of its motion would be over the next couple seconds. And in that ghostly future image, a spark ignited at the bore. So he intended to shoot.
Contrary to what some would believe, the ability to draw on someone who already had a bead on you, shooting them before they’re able to pull the trigger, is not an inhuman feat. It’s simply a matter of speed, focus, and training. But the effects of Shattercryst can certainly help. Especially when facing four separate assailants.
Harlowe drew, shooting two of the Shadows simultaneously, including the one with the rifle. The Citrine helped her to aim quickly, providing a foreimage of where the shots would land.
The one with the rifle she hit dead in the chest. The rifle went off, bullet hitting the road and sending up a sprawl of dirt and dust. He careened backward, feet actually leaving the ground.
The other was a gut shot. Blood arced out from the lower back and the Shadow stumbled, dropping their pistol, and tripping backward.
The other two drew their revolvers. Including the rifle-reacher. Whatever their intentions had been earlier, it was now a matter of self-defense. Events were in motion that could not be undone. For them or Harlowe.
Harlowe clicked back the hammers, cylinders rotating. She pulled the triggers.
Both shots hit home. One of them in the chest, again, causing them to slip backward onto the ground. With the other, the one who had tried to grab the rifle, she took a risk, aiming for the hand in which he held his revolver. It paid off. Metal pinged against metal, a flashing spark in the night. The revolver flew out of their grip, and they fell on the road, clutching broken fingers.
When he yelled out in pain, Harlowe recognized the voice. He was the one who had spoken earlier. The one who told her to...remember.
She clicked back the hammer on her right Wulther again, aiming at the downed Shadow with the wounded hand as she strolled toward him.
She stepped over one of the downed Shadows. Her shot would have shattered the spine. She wasn’t concerned they would suddenly reach out to grab her, or pull a hidden gun like in the tarn novels. Somehow, she didn’t think any of the ones she’d hit directly would be getting up any time soon.
The one with the broken hand was using one elbow to scooch backward across the dirt. He was a grey outline of a form, shrouded in dark. Harlowe couldn’t see his face. She couldn’t tell if he had a weapon hidden somewhere on him still. Which was why she hadn’t put her Wulthers away.
She came to a stop, so close that their boots were almost touching. The Shadow froze. His hat had fallen off, at some point.
“You don’t recognize my voice,” he said.
“Should I?” Harlowe said.
No answer.
The moon came out, washing the road in damp cobalt light, like a lakebed on a clear day.
The man on the ground in front of Harlowe was looking up at her with hope. And awe. And something else. Did he fear for his life? Or for something else? Harlowe couldn’t decipher it.
He had a square, angular jaw. A wrinkled brow. A slanted incline of a nose. His hair was cut short, clean and nice. His eyes...were blue. Bright and clear. Like the coral reefs out at the edge of the Riven Continent. The edge of the world.
And suddenly, Harlowe remembered. Fragments of memory flooded in, making her gasp, like cold water flushing through her veins. Things more than forgotten. Things she had never wanted to remember. Things that changed everything.
Was this the real reason she’d been running all these years?
The Shadow pulled himself up, sitting upright in the road. He must have seen it on her face. The knowledge. The recognition. It was fuel for his kindled hope, burgeoning into a blaze. He reached up with his unbroken hand.
A hand that Harlowe batted aside with her Wulther barrel. Her teeth clicked together as she bit down. She nicked part of her tongue, causing blood to well in her mouth.
In that moment, the Shadow’s expression contorted. Replaced by something else.
“Wait,” he said, as Harlowe pressed the bore of the Wulther against his cheek. “Waitwaitwait--”
She pulled the trigger.