Grant looked again at the point of his sword. The blood had dried quickly, it was already flaking off. He wondered if it would continue until it was clean, residue falling off the enhanced steel until it was like it had never been dirtied at all. He'd never left a blade untended before—to do so was a failure of duty, an erosion of the perfect capacity he was expected to show at any moment.
Calre still hadn't spoken. After Jack... after Jack had fallen the noble had knelt by the boy's side, just an instant where his hand almost reached out and then they had left. Grant knew he was in pain, but couldn't bring himself to act, to offer comfort to the man who commanded him to kill a boy they had both begun to... to have a beginning with.
When he had been called to act... there had been a moment... a forever... that he had been still. He'd known what Calre meant, he'd known the necessity of it, and yet only the pain in Calre's voice had driven him on—the ultimatum that anted up the part of Calre he didn't dare lose. He had tried to keep Calre's hands clean, to preserve the part of him that threatened to break in that moment.
"I failed," Grant said before he could check himself.
Calre's steps came to a halt, but the noble did not turn back.
"You swore an oath. You did as I bid. It was upheld."
"Damn the oath! That is not why—that is not why I..."
"Then why did you, bondsman? Why?" Calre turned, his face as cold and imperious as Grant had ever seen.
"You were the most human of them Cal, I saw something different in you—a better way. And you've proven it! You alone rose among your generation! Because you had principles, purpose! What they've done here," what we've done, " it goes against everything—"
"—I stand by my principles, bondsman, and I uphold them. But you, you do not have principles. I am your principle. My will is your principle."
Grant didn’t feel the sword fall from his hand, didn’t hear the clatter on the stone.
“...Yes, my lord.”
Calre turned away, and for an instant he was framed by the harsh lines of the mountains as his back blended into their indomitable greys.
“Come, we must oversee the final hours. There have been overzealous moves. The release of the hivers, the umbrar, whatever other monsters they set out to shield this work from prying eyes—they have gone against me. I would not see the same impulse lead to greater destruction than is necessary. You know the intemperance of my kin.”
“Yes, my lord,” Grant had little else to say. A wedge had been driven, a wound that would take time to heal.
“It is the least we owe him,” Calre said, so quietly that Grant wondered if he had been meant to hear.
He left the sword where it lay.
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For a body, there's only one traditional past-time. The fecundity of a wood is ideal for that pursuit, and will take a corpse to its ultimate end without delay. It takes a place barren of life; desert, tundra, pitch-bog; to preserve the remains. That is to say, the denizens of the understory, those many legged and legless both, were readying themselves to make quick work when their object broke from expectations and sat up.
Dried blood had caked his mouth closed, a seal broken only with his hands after multiple attempts to produce saliva failed. His body wasn’t working right. Pain radiated from the wound in his chest, but through the cloud of agony he could detect a significant absence. He still required air, a small experiment in restraint showed that clearly, but something unnatural had occurred.
He should be dead; he wasn’t. A small trickle of blood tickled his skin as his upright torso created new opportunities for pioneering crimson rivers to trace down his front. He was still bleeding but there was no rush of lifeblood, not like there should be.
Slowly, fearful of disturbing some status quo he couldn’t understand, Jack coaxed the silvery water of the ancients from his spare waterskin. The glistening mass had gone somewhat neglected since he’d taken it, as other demands had taken his time.
The water pooled in his hands, seemingly sluggish, only growing active as Jack raised it to his chest. A small tendril of liquid immediately extended into his body, a shiver went down his spine as the cool liquid penetrated into the wound. After a moment his pain faded to a dull ache.
The liquid he still held began to swirl, pigment suddenly arising from the transparency, coalescing into the image of a heart. His heart.
The wound Grant had given him was there, the blade had pierced through his heart and into his lung, and the parting of the flesh was shown in clear detail. It was a live representation, Jack could see the flex and motion of his lungs as he drew breath, but there was a notable absence. His heart did not beat.
“It’s less of an inconvenience than I thought, you know, not having a heartbeat. Everyone seems to think it’s necessary, well there goes that theory,” Jack babbled.
The water flashed red.
“Oh you disagree?” He was growing manic, reactive to every stimulus as the—
The water flashed green.
Jack paused. That had been too timely. The deep chamber had shown signs of intelligence, but he never expected a piece of it to have any similar capacity—it was just a tool.
“Can you understand me?”
Another flash of green.
‘The weird-water is smart. That would be...worthy of interrogation in any other circumstance but right now there is a somewhat more pressing matter.’
“Are you doing this, keeping me alive?”
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A flash of red, and then nothing.
“A card effect then.” He felt a small swell of hope—perhaps the betrayal hadn’t been as complete as he thought. “Grant did something. He didn’t want to hurt me, I-I could tell he didn’t.”
Red, and Jack’s short-lived feeling died. The water rippled again, producing a shift in perspective as the image of the heart faded and a full representation of his body materialized in miniature. An intricate network of lines were overlaid on it, congregating at his chest.
‘My circulatory system, it showed me this before—but why show it again now?’
“The effect that’s active now... was active then.”
Green, and the image changed again to show his heart once more, but now a visualization of the blood moving through the frozen chambers, an unceasing current unheeding of the absence of a mobilizing pump.
“It’s flowing... my blood.” Jack shivered as the realization swept over him.
Vital Flow was still active. He had never imagined it had an effect that extended beyond protection against the effects of acceleration, but now it seemed so obvious. The card ensured that his tissues and blood functioned as normal, resisting external forces that would impede their function. Of course, his heart couldn’t actually provide sufficient force to keep his blood flowing normally when he was dashing, a different mechanism was present. With Vital Flow, the blood flowed on its own. It was a profound discovery of the mechanism of the card, but a deeper investigation would have to wait. There was more he needed to know.
“I’m dying, aren’t I?”
Green. He wasn’t surprised. For the entirety of his investigations the wound had continued to bleed at a steady rate. He felt weak, unfocused, a haze covering every action and choice.
“At the current rate of loss, longer than a day?”
Red.
“Twelve hours?”
Red.
“S-six hours?”
Green.
Jack sighed, he’d been afraid the same pattern would hold. Red. Red. Red, until his life was measured in minutes. He didn’t have much more time than that, but it was enough to do... he couldn’t imagine what it was enough to do. If he was well, perhaps he could have challenged the impossible odds, but even now his vision drifted out of focus. What could he do like this? What could anyone do against a conspiracy of the nobility? He was going to die, not at the time of their choosing, but nonetheless it approached with the same inevitability.
So much of Calre had been clarified. For all that he seemed different from the rest of nobility, for all of his willingness to forgo the rigid structures of class, he still lived by their essential doctrine: the powerful did as they willed. For him it was a greater good, perhaps regretful in method, but sound in purpose. No wonder Calre had worked to pull Jack into his own orbit, some part of it might have been guilt, the knowledge that there would be no home Jack could go back to.
Even so, the moment Jack had fundamentally threatened their plans, he had been disposed of. Only a quirk of his cards had kept him alive, allowed him to even have these thoughts for a short time before the inevitable. He was like an afterimage of a person—intangible, soon to fade into nothing.
‘But I’ll do what I can anyway, won’t I?’
Jack stood, and looked back to the mountains. The peaks were framed in the sun’s fading light, a glory of colour around the black stone and white snow. There was a final question he had for the ancient water.
“The chamber where you’re from... it could heal me, couldn’t it?”
He didn’t need to look to know the answer, just as it wouldn’t change his path. The hiver city was four hours away at his stop speed—enough time to save himself, but not enough to return before the flowstone elementals were unleashed.
A step towards the mountains, then another. By the third stride he was whistling—unburdened by doubt.
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Jack sky-leapt up the slope, leapfrogging over craggy terrain that would take hours to traverse, in mere seconds. The sun was beginning to dip below the horizon, and he knew that by now he would be missed by the caravan. The summer still held enough sway that even the residue of light was enough to see by, but Jack hoped it would still serve to veil him. The air grew colder, biting at his lungs with every breath even as it thinned. He had begun to shiver mildly on his approach, but it became violent. When he couldn't will himself still he knew there was more than the cold at play.
But through it all he ascended, circumventing the mountain until he could see the faint lights of the crevasse far below.
The slope was made up of scree and the few hardy plants eking out a stubborn existence. Another hundred meters down a cliff-face presented the major opportunity of his plan. If enough rock was disturbed and fell from the cliff it could build on itself, producing a rolling wave of stone that would sweep over the crevasse and bury their efforts in a massive landslide. He simply needed to tip over the first domino.
Trembling hands tore strips of cloth from his shirt, tying them end by end as tightly as he could manage. He found a stone that was at the barest edge of liftable, but when he braced himself under its weight a fresh wave of blood poured from his chest.
'That was surplus blood. What, you've never heard of surplus blood? Everybody has it. Every drop until I fall dead to the ground is surplus. It's meant to be spent.'
Loop after loop of improvised cord secured the stone. He only had a couple of meters of slack, but it would be enough. His efforts shouldn't have worked, the cloth was too fragile, the stone too massive. But Pivot's power didn't care about such trivialities as the tensile strength of abused fabric.
Jack readied a sky-leap, and then, momentum preserved, reshouldered the boulder with a wince.
'You can die after. Do you understand? You can die after.'
The leap was weaker than it should have been, energy stolen by the added weight of the stone he carried. But he rose nonetheless, the weight suddenly trivial as the card effect took over where his muscle strained.
He reached his apex, and then dashed downward. Falling, he released the stone, but before it could leave the effect and rip from his hands, Jack triggered Pivot and his shoddy ties became irrelevant as the whole unit was suddenly treated as an extension of himself.
He'd chosen his target carefully, a large boulder positioned high on the slope, stubbornly embedded for centuries. Jack wondered if it would enjoy this, meeting the horizon it had looked out upon for so long.
Pivot whipped him in tight cycles of motion, and he could see blood spraying out from him, staining the air and himself in a fine mist of red. His aim was true, and his Pivot driven hammer struck with a peal like thunder.
Stone shrapnel peppered Jack, new cuts opening all over his body as shatter enveloped him. The struck boulder lifted off the ground, rising in ungainly flight before crashing back down tens of meters down the slope. It rolled on, bouncing gaily towards the cliff until—a sudden pause in the crash of stone—it dipped out of sight.
Jack listened, heart in his throat, until the second crash came and was followed by the growing cracks of a thousand stones and then ten-thousand more disturbed in turn. The sound of rain magnified beyond comprehension—for the briefest moment he felt a surge of hope.
But there, in the distance, light bloomed in a stretch through the forest as fire—long held in check—was suddenly released. A gout of flame hundreds of meters long suddenly appeared down the mountain and, a moment later, the shockwave struck him back down like an insect.
The world began to tremble.