CHAPTER 10: GATHERING FATE

The morning light infiltrated the makeshift clearing unabated. A swarth of muggy heat drenched a young boy in sweat.

“Kreee?”

Dan swiped his face, and a fuzzy creature disappeared into the underbrush. Blinking wearily, he languidly turned his gaze to his surrounds. After an agonizing couple of minutes gathering his bearings, he released a hefty sigh and closed his eyes.

He was drained in a myriad of ways. His body ached from overexertion, his meridians wrinkled with disobedience after the previous night’s punishment, and his head pounded as images continued to flutter to mind.

The Valyon family was in murdered shambles. Their bodies had littered the compound, their homes and any wealth within ablaze. He presumably lost sisters and brothers, and worst of all, he still didn’t know the fate of his father.

It was that very point of contention that pulled Dan to his feet. Only then did he discover that his sandals weren’t to be more than a woven strap around the midst of the soles of his feet. The rest of it must have been a casualty of his flight the night prior.

The biting sting of a wound in his back made him wince. Sneering, Dan shook his head and turned to follow the trail of broken forestry he had left in his wake.

For a short time there, he had thought about staying, resting, and even running away; never to return home again. But he was Dan Valyon, not merely Dan. The very idea of it left a bitter taste in his mouth. He already knew he would regret it forever.

If his father was alive and hale, then all was fine. If he wasn’t, and the killer was still around – Dan could very well be walking toward his death. If he couldn’t find either of them, then he would take his father’s chest and live low profile for a while. If even that was burned down in the incessant fiery mayhem? Then Dan didn’t know what he would do.

It took an hour for Dan to make it back to the Valyon Compound. Or at least, to what had once served as home to over a hundred people. As an aside, the carriage was long gone. He hoped the driver was still okay, but the man’s odds weren’t great.

The spotty vegetation was dark and ashen. The family hall, despite its stone construction, was somehow toppled. Dan couldn’t even imagine how that had happened. Homes were only half-standing, their integrity questionable, as blackened wooden bearings and walls were either barely holding or outright missing.

Any remaining fires were burnt out, and the bodies that had littered the family compound the night prior were missing. A hope blossomed in Dan’s chest, a sorely-missed feeling that had been absent when he’d woken.

He tread lightly on the messily strewn-about path that led to his home. The fire damage petered out long before he reached the stout, well-decorated building that he’d lived in all his life.

Nobody came out to greet him when he walked by the wards guarding their home, a precaution his father had incessantly prattled on about with a prideful smile. The runes were drawn deep beneath the earth on stone plates, and scattered around in a wide, elongated circle. Dan naturally couldn’t see them, but he could feel the alien sensation of strange energy brushing past his skin as he crossed them.

A moment later the feeling was gone, and he hurriedly burst through the front door.

Still nothing. Nobody.

The home was undisturbed, and unsettling in its silence. As if it merely wasn’t party to the destruction that wrought the rest of the family compound to ruins. As if he could still expect his father to be home. The back of his eyes tickled, and his nose wrinkled. Dan fought back the depressing swell of emotion and darted to the study.

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It was as he and his father had left it, the same as it was two days ago. The table was still spotless, and nothing at all lay on his father’s desk; he had always preferred it that way.

The chest was exactly where they had left it. Dan dutifully pulled it out of its hole in the wall, placed it on the convenient table, and pulled a series of inconspicuous journals from amongst others in the bookshelf. Within said literature, naturally, were the keys.

Ker-chunk.

The locks fell one by one, and after releasing the final latch, Dan held his breath and pulled it open.

It wasn’t the first time he’d seen inside of this chest, but he’d never been allowed to go through the things inside.

For a time, he was distracted from the uncertainty of his new reality.

Dan carefully removed the inkwell and quill, the same way his father had done. He slowly, with wide eyes, plucked and arranged the literature.

The leather casings were well worn, and he had to open a book to find its title.

Special Physiques. Magical Beasts. Runecrafting.

A small surge of disappointment bore to the forefront of his mind. It all seemed worthy enough to be his father’s treasure, especially the ink that he recognized as a ‘special kind’ for runecrafting, but at the same time… it didn’t feel like his father’s treasure.

Something tickled the back of Dan’s mind, and it wasn’t loss or desperation. It was the uneasy feeling that he was missing something important.

But nothing revealed itself. He searched the bookshelves, then pushed his head into the chest’s hidey-hole and even searched the drawers of his father’s desk. Not a thing jumped out at him.

Dan knew he was running out of time. There were bigger dogs than the Valyon family in Bluecorn Hamlet, and there was equally no doubt that they had watched his family burn to the ground. Under the guise of burying the dead, it was likely that the family compound had already been searched.

Maybe his father wasn’t among the fallen, and maybe the runes had stopped others from passing into the well-known runemaster’s direct home. But that would only last until another runemaster made the trip. Likely, the only reason Dan was unaccosted was due to a natural fear of the runes that his father might have, and truly had arranged.

Clenched fists scratched at thin palms. Feeling like he had missed something valuable, and upset because of it, Dan slammed Special Physiques a tad too hard into the chest. He cringed at the sound, but then his face rapidly changed. Without thinking too hard, he tapped the floor of the chest.

Tak. Tak-tak.

Dan frowned and tapped the table.

Tunk. Tunk-tunk.

He slapped the table with a bright smile and shook his head.

“Of course, it’s hollow!”

On inspection, it was obvious that the floor of the chest was a tad higher than it needed to be. Now that he knew what he was looking for, it didn’t take long before Dan extricated a thin sheet of wood from the chest. In the end it was as simple as pushing one edge down, pulling lightly at the raised edge opposite, and sliding the wooden square from the box. It was clearly made to fit after the fact, small indents roughly carved into three of the four walls to pinch the wood in place.

Another book greeted his eyes. Unlike the others, however; the cover was perfectly legible, if ordinary.

“Fate Cultivation.”

The title puzzled Dan for all of two seconds before he impatiently opened it.

Until the fateful moment he laid eyes on the book’s introduction, Dan had felt that he had sufficient cultivation knowledge and at least some idea about the typical and whimsy interpretation of fate.

He discovered very quickly that, apparently, he knew nothing at all. Esoteric statements and interest-piquing queries fluttered beneath his eyes as he flicked through pages. As an aside, the material was thinner and heavier than he was used to. Once the light filtering through the curtains curtailed beneath the overwhelming weariness of night, Dan blearily marked the page and closed the fount of knowledge.

It was his father’s true treasure. The real reason he’d expounded so heavily on Dan taking it with him if something ever happened.

…and yet, despite reading until day receded, his father hadn’t showed up. Whether his father was dead or not, Dan would do as he promised to.

With moist eyes and a heavy heart, Dan packed the goods back into the chest and slid it into a rucksack. It was heavy and a little bit awkward, but he wasn’t a mortal anymore either.

He changed out of his ruined robes, cleaned the wound on his back that – now that he saw it – wasn’t so bad, and then packed his things. There wasn’t much. Some clothes, the few rations they had on hand, and – with a dreary what-am-I-doing countenance, Dan tossed the stone rooster into the sack.

He thanked his father’s reputation for being unaccosted through the day, as unreasonable as it might be with the place burned down around him, and left through the night.