Quiet days passed, and Jack noticed an increasing tension in the members of the caravan: the anticipation of a delayed destination finally drawing near. They made a habit of delaying their encampment until true dusk, eating cold dinners, in order to pull every scrap of distance they could from the amblers. For this reason, it came as a surprise when one morning they rose, only to find the peaks of the Flowstone Mountains had crept over the horizon in the night. Another day of travel and the rises of the Meal foothills began to appear as well, and with them the Flux Forest.
With their destination in sight, the remaining distance passed quickly, and soon they were taking their first steps away from the plains. The complex topography of the forested foothills created a multitude of hidden groves, secret valleys, and isolated nooks. The region had never been fully mapped, and the draw of hidden treasures had drawn in expeditions for centuries.
At the edges of the forest the trees were small and sparsely clustered and the natural gaps between trunks were no barrier to the caravan.
Jack had taken to riding with Jam in the days of their final approach, but it was only after they were deeply into the forest that he happened to look back the way they came to find that at some point the route had been filled with densely packed trees, far too narrow for the carts to have slipped through. His confusion was met with a cheeky grin from the caravan master, who silently offered Jack the reins of the amblers. He bemusedly accepted only for the trees in front of them, which had appeared sparse enough to allow the cart through with ease, to become impassibly dense. The amblers snorted their discontent to have their route suddenly disappear and Jack hurriedly passed the reins back to Jam; the open path returned. Even watching closely the delineation was too sudden, like a mere twist of perception had occurred instead of a fundamental warping of space.
That was when Jack began to give the transformation of their environment its due attention. The wind of the plains—a sound so continuous it could only be forgotten—had diminished until all that remained was verdant quiet. The texture of a forest eats sound but even as one sense is starved the others receive a feast.
Wet loam and the musk of growth, a thousand aromas with unknowable purpose and intention. The shade of the trees left little light to dapple the forest floor, and so the understory grew dark and stubborn—jealous of the gaps where the sun still visited.
Jack had never been to a forest before and found his attention overdrawn by the complexity of it. The plains had demanded days of focused attention and the explanations of others before he had begun to understand elements of its nature. In comparison, the richness of the forest seemed insurmountable.
It seemed like every other step the herbalists of the caravan darted away, exclaiming in delight over foliage indistinguishable to Jack from any others. They could read the flow of the landscape, knowing where to look through an intuition that drew them to entirely hidden blooms or fungi settled into the hollows of fallen logs.
When an ancient deadfall was spotted, the herbalists insisted on stopping and hitching the amblers to it, working all in unison to turn the log over. The frenzy of collection that followed was intimidating, small curved knives darting out in eerie unison, hands returning to stuff already bulging satchels. A dozen other identical seeming logs had been passed with comment; when Jack ventured to inquire why the others had no pull the reply was dismissively quick: the others had been far too young, only four or five decades fallen.
They continued on until Grant made a casual visit to Jam. The two engaged in what seemed to be a ramble of pleasantries until Jack pulled together the subtext. Grant was politely suggesting that going much further would stretch the nobles to protect the caravan; Jam was open to the idea, but tentatively raised the issue of what being effectively barred from the mountains would do to the caravan profits on an already delayed journey. The conclusion was lost to Jack in the muddle of exchanges that followed, and Grant made his exit after a series of escalating complaints about the burden of travel on old men such as them. Some arrangement had been made however, as soon enough Jam called a halt and the caravan settled deep into the woods, a fair distance still from the slopes of the mountains.
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“Walk with me,” Calre said, not an hour after the camp had settled, already turning away without waiting for an answer.
Jack followed, bemused by Calre's aristocratic obliviousness.
As they approached the camp's edge, Jack saw Vasala start to rise, only for Grant to raise a hand and shake his head. Whatever he said was out of earshot, but the last Jack saw of Vasala's expression was a fraying impassivity.
Calre led them a fair distance before he began to talk, eyeing trees as he walked with a considering look.
"I dare to think you've had time to consider my offer."
'He isn't really one for subtlety, is he? No, that's wrong. I've seen him subtle, he just doesn't use it when it doesn't suit his purposes. He uses the tools before him.' The thought was oddly comforting to Jack, a feeling that he interrogated only to find the discomfiting answer was that it reminded him of Liosa—his mother. Jack's stride hitched just a moment before he smoothly recovered, 'shan't share that.'
"I think you've rather a lot more to explain. I can't exactly agree in good faith to something I don't know the details to," Jack finally replied.
"Information, Jack, is power,” Calre paused then, letting the words linger in the air, aging in the silence until the heady vintage of his meaning was clear.
Jack remembered a similar occasion, with his role reversed. Him and Stroph, standing in an open field, he had thought to play a game of subtext but Stroph had barrelled straight through. That had been the real beginning of their friendship, when his defences had been disarmed by an act direct and honest.
"Mmm, no."
It was then Calre's turn to stumble.
"What?" Calre struggled to regain his footing in the conversation, "You do not agree with the premise?"
"No, that's not it. I agree with the premise. Information is the ability to act with purpose and exclusion from it is a form of power. But that power is stagnant, vulnerable. It relies on the assumption that those who you withhold from are enemies. But if there is a common purpose, if you are my ally, my knowledge can only further your goals. Empowering me is empowering yourself, when we work together."
"Ah but Jack, you assume a common purpose."
"I do. That's what friends are for."
Calre didn't reply and Jack knew that his words had landed. This was an overstep, an acknowledgement of what had gone unsaid until now. All the games Calre played, the layers of noble intrigue, Jack understood them now. Calre was afraid. Jack had seen enough sides of him to know how much pretense existed with Vasala, how Grant was trusted, loved even, but could not be a father or a brother. Jack was offering something Calre didn't know how desperately he needed.
"There's things I can't tell you," the noble's voice was thick, he could not look at Jack.
"That's alright."
Calre nodded and stood straighter. Jack realized the weight that must have lifted, when Calre learned he was already forgiven.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“I see your point. But for many in my circles, your view of things is not the norm. I once had a difficult lesson that some questions are dangerous, perhaps you can be taught it for a lower cost. I will answer your questions, what I can, and the cost will be what it will be.”
Jack considered his questions carefully, settling on what he felt was most important.
"You're trying to do good?"
Calre laughed at first, but Jack's silence stole over him and the noble grew somber.
"What is good? We live in a broken world. The cycle of civilization has made this a weary place. There are more monsters than people in the world, the weapons and dangers of countless lost ages. It stifles us. Do you think the era of expansion ended because we lost the will to continue? No, we saw what lay beyond the edges of the map, and tore the paper there! Telling you this alone would be enough to see me punished, and you dead. Am I trying to do good? In a world like this... yes, damn you, it's an ugly good but I believe in it, if it keeps humanity alive."
Jack held his reactions under control. Calre was doing more than answering the letter of Jack's questions, he was baring something, revealing the truths that to him were fundamental. Jack felt that he couldn't interrupt, that to make an expression or to ask for clarification would sully the purity of Calre's exposure.
"Did you come here to card?"
"...In part," in lieu of an explanation Calre shifted his stance, taking on a haughty imperious air, but with a spark of humour, "Be well," he said. Then he shifted again, turning his back to Jack to hunch over the ground and call over his shoulder, "Sterilize them," he gestured towards nothing, and then after a beat continued tersely, "your hands. There's soap. Use the waterskin, and cleanse your hands. I may yet save them both if you don't dawdle like a fool."
Jack remembered then, he had heard this before, exactly those words.
"Do you recall?" Calre asked, standing, "I've said it before."
"The ambler corpse... and then the victims of the umbrar, that was exactly how you sounded, those were the words you used."
"Catalogue, my central card. Everything I experience is captured, in perfect fidelity. Captured in my mind for later perusal, details I'm not even conscious of, there, waiting to be examined. I told you of my library, well it exists twice over. One of them I carry with me, the wisdom of ten thousand tomes only a card play away."
He smiled at Jack then, but there was little joy in it.
"The card is flawed. The information is too much, there is no way to navigate it. I could tell you the first words I spoke to Grant after carding if I had an hour to find them, or if he stood there to cue my card. I was very interested to learn of your broken cards, how they altered at your pressing need. But it became clear that your challenge was not the same as mine. I hope to find an answer in my next carding."
The card could only be a few years old, but already it had become unwieldy. Another decade and it would be a day’s effort to find useful information with the card, and that was without other cards watering down his deck as well. An attrition of quality that would be unacceptable in noble circles.
There was one final question that burned in Jack, something that had lingered long in him, and was a true transgression of the rules of their society.
“Why are noble’s cards stronger?”
“Hmm? They’re not really.”
Jack’s expression of consternated confusion had an unsettling effect on Calre, who struggled to maintain his own calm in proximity to such a face.
“Well obviously there’s the stories, but really, truthfully, nobility are not significantly stronger. Assuming nutrition and general health are equivalent, there's only a few factors that have any affect at all, and they are hardly secret. The folk notion of exposure to hazardous conditions has some foundations, but it's more complex than that—everyone knows that carding to save your own life tends towards power, but really it's less the danger and more the principle of solitary effort towards a essential goal—being in an unpopulated region seems to play a small role as well, one of the reasons for country estates. Beyond that, the natural variability of personal card strength is about proportional between populations. Of course, if you’ve already carded well, that tends to correlate with later strong cards; so you have nothing to worry about.”
Jack stood silently. This was not at all what he was expecting. That night on the rooftop with Neavie, they had puzzled through that something was off about the claims of noble card strength. Jack had been driven to leave Calamut because he thought that the secret lay somewhere in the wilds, and here Calre was blithely dismissing even the premise! He would think Calre was hiding something, but the noble seemed genuinely unbothered.
Baffled, Jack attempted to explain the logic that even drove him to ask the question, Calre nodding along seriously until Jack finished lamely, awaiting some explanation that would reconcile it all.
“Very astute of you Jack, you’ve passed my test. There is something in the wilds that explains why noble cards are seen stronger,” Calre began to whisper, leaning in conspiratorially “Do you want to know?”
Jack nodded numbly, stunned by the sudden turn.
“Nobles that come to the wilds to card will occasionally develop weak cards, but once that happens they simply... die!” Calre leaned back and laughed.
Jack froze, understanding coming through far too late, ‘I’m an idiot,’ he thought, and repeated it aloud for good measure.
But Calre remained in unlistening hysterics, “you came all this way! Danger and death abounding! Because you forgot survivors’ bias!” Calre was letting out each sentence between guffaws, tears streaming down his face.
Jack finally cracked, and a rueful chuckle broke from him.
“Isn’t that just the way of things?”
Calre was slowing his breathing with care. Purposefully avoiding Jack’s gaze.
“Of course,” he finally managed to muster, “in fairness there’s elements you couldn’t have known. We do go through quite the effort to maintain the vision of invincibility. ”
“How can you support that attrition rate?” Jack asked, “If nobles are really just the surviving upper end, that would mean...”
Calre demurred for a moment, peering sharply at his companion, “You do have a knack for getting to the heart of secrets don’t you? I’ll give you a hint, are you ready? My closest living brother is more than double my age.”
Jack let that settle in his mind, rolling it through a process of careful consideration before finding the most innocuous question he could.
“Half-brother?”
Calre’s grin said everything.
“Then how old—”
“—Are our parents? Not the ancients you’re presuming. Not more than three centuries, not less than two. But we shouldn’t delve too far into that, some things I can’t share.”
The wall of disclosure rankled, but Jack nodded, accepting that Calre broaching the subjects at all was a tremendous gesture of trust. He returned to an earlier point, one he couldn’t leave standing.
“Is it truly as bad as you said? A broken world?”
“Perhaps not as much as I implied,” Calre sighed, “we’re stable. We have records of civilizations that fell through attrition, others by meteoric rises that couldn’t be sustained. We don’t resemble them. Our approach is slow, careful, mindful of these failings. Perhaps in a thousand years we’ll have worn away at some of the threats and the world will be safer.”
“But not safe?”
Calre stopped to look at the trees around them before giving a seeming non-sequitur, “Do you know why the flux forest doesn’t burn?”
By now Jack had learned to go along with Calre’s asides, trusting a point was in the making, “the sap suppresses flame, which—”
“Wrong! Not ‘how’, but why. Why doesn’t the forest burn? The answer, it doesn’t burn because of the Flowstone Mountains. Because the mountains are riddled with the Animus of elementals, and open flame is a sure way to awaken them. When awoken, an elemental moves to destroy everything touched by humanity before they run down, as that is what they were made to do by someone dead so long we don’t even know who to curse.”
Jack understood, “And growing a forest that doesn’t burn... Means that one that does can’t grow in its place. The forest seals the mountains.”
“Correct. Their gift to the future. Can you imagine their triumph? To overcome the destroying force of a thousand years of history by creating something that would stand far after they themselves were distant memories. They did not attempt to destroy the elementals, that had been tried and led to self-destruction far too many times; they only sealed them. Not much else can be done with a billion tonnes of living rock,” Calre paused for effect, “and Jack? That’s the safe neighbour.”