The farm had been stripped, and the trap door busted open. All my fields were dead, bereft of torches, and nothing was left of the home I had built for myself and Esmelda apart from empty rooms. They had even taken the bed. Furnaces remained, lonely stone monoliths in the basement. Too big to move, and of no use to anyone but a Survivor.
Bojack hadn’t bothered telling people to keep their hands off this place, if he had even known where it was. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but the square moon of Plana was beginning its descent to the horizon.
As I came back up, a phantom dive-bombed me, the air screaming through the ventricles in its wings, and I cut it in half. Between Caliburn and my upgraded armor, I felt invincible, but it wasn’t satisfying.
Mobs didn’t matter. Packs full of cabochons and medallions; they were just extra weight. All garbage, if I couldn’t get Esmelda back. If the child I had never met was not okay.
A winged shape stood out against the stars, far larger than the phantoms, and a second followed close behind. Wyverns. The monsters could get bigger, but they would die just the same.
I’d crafted myself a bow to test out the arrows, and this seemed like a good opportunity. Starting with one with red fletching, I aimed for the first wyvern and noticed the rider.
He looked oversized even on the back of an oversized monster, and the shape of his head was wrong. I lowered the bow as the wyverns circled to descend. They weren’t being aggressive. This was Bojack.
“How did you find me?” I demanded as soon as the horse-man swung his leg over the back of the winged lizard and slid down. The creature rasped, flexing its neck and stretching as if grateful to be rid of its burden.
“You are bound to me,” Bojack said, “I sensed you as soon as you returned to the world.”
Caliburn was in my hand, less than ten paces separated me from the demon. Did I really need him to deal with Kevin?
“Where’s the oathknife?” I asked. “Is that what tells you where I am?”
“Hidden,” Bojack’s gaze was empty, “if you kill me, the curse will strip you of your blessings, and eventually, crush your soul until it is too mangled and weak to be reborn.”
That answered the question I hadn’t asked. The sword slipped into its corresponding hoop on my waist. It wasn’t exactly a sheathe, but it wasn’t like I needed to worry about cutting myself.
“Where’s Esmelda?”
“Living a peaceful life with her child.” He raised his hand to stave off my follow-ups. “No. I will not bring you to her. Not until the throne is yours. You would be too difficult to manage if I did.”
“How can I trust you if you won’t give me any proof.”
The demon shrugged. He was still a giant, but I no longer found him intimidating. There were much bigger monsters out there. “Simple reasoning should lead you to conclude that she is well. I had nothing to gain from handing her to the Dark Lord, your wife and child were insurance against your return, and that did not change when you did not come back immediately. I see that you were successful at long last.” His ears twitched. “What happened?”
“Got stuck in a time sink,” I said, “the goddess got me out.”
“Intriguing.”
“That’s it? Intriguing? That’s all you have to say after sending me into that trap?”
Bojack’s long face moved from side to side. He was still wearing a toga and sandals, demonic casual. I wondered if it was actually the same outfit, or if he had a closet full somewhere.
“It was always a possibility that you would fall prey to the perils of Bedlam,” he said. “What is intriguing to me is that the goddess still supports you to that extent. Effecting such change so far from the center of her authority will have been costly, and could even have exposed her to attack from the deep entities, if not the One Who Knocks himself.”
“You said it was almost impossible to get out of one of those time sinks. You were wrong.”
“The direct intervention from an entity of that scale qualifies as an exception.”
“That’s not what I mean. There was a squid in there with me, a kulu. And it had tentacles on both sides. It was in and out of it at the same time. How is that possible?”
“More intriguing still.” The demons said. “It must have been an exceptional being.”
“It was a giant squid. Not even smart. Its tentacles did most of the work, and it just sat at the bottom of the lake, stuffing its face with zombies.”
Bojack’s heavy lips raised in something like a smile. “Intelligence is not a requisite for power. There are several possible explanations. Chaos is chaos, and the distortion may have had weak points which the creature learned to exploit through long familiarity. Otherwise, it may have grown in potency to the point where it could create small tears in the boundary, enough to slip through a limb, but lacked the power to free itself entirely. However it managed the trick, there was always a chance that something would trap you on the other side, and I will consider your absence excused.”
Was killing him now really not an option? “Did you actually expect me to come back,” I said, “after all this time?”
“I am immortal, and monitoring your family costs me nothing. Your return indeed grew less and less likely as the years went on, but no other candidate has presented themselves, and the Dark Lord’s usurpation is more necessary than ever.”
That didn’t sound good. A lot could happen in a decade. High King Godwod, for example. What a joke.
“What did I miss?”
“Ride with me,” Bojack said, gesturing to the wyverns. Both beasts were watching me with black, beady eyes as if deciding whether or not they could pry me out of my armor and eat me like a prawn.
“Right now?”
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“The night wanes. When we pause for the day, I will tell you all there is to tell. I take it you have recovered all there was to recover from the ruins?”
“Yeah, everything but the enchanted books. They were missing. And my enchanting table. Though I can still use the room in the base.”
“Ah, that is simple enough. Gent has your books, and the table as well, unless he sold it. Do you need them? I can’t imagine you have the skill to improve the armor.”
“The sword is new,” I said, “and if Gent has any of my stuff, I want it back.”
“Very well.” The demon chuckled. “We will stop at Westmine before setting out to Dargoth.” He grabbed the back of his wyvern’s head and forced it down, causing the beast to lower itself into a position that would allow him to mount. He got on, and I had no reason to linger at the farm. It wasn’t my home anymore.
It was a quick flight back to the mine. Williamsburg, now Westmine, had grown significantly in my absence. There were two palisades now, an outer and an inner ring, and Gent had settled his family in a large house near its center.
There were still signs of what had been, the longhouse was left standing, but most of the lillit homes had been torn down and replaced. It was still well before morning, so there were no locals out and about to react when we landed in the street.
A horn sounded when we passed over the palisade, more a greeting than an alarm. This region belonged to Godwod, and Godwod belonged to Dargoth. I doubted they saw many mobs, as there was no storm to protect monsters from being banished by the sun, but when you allied yourself with a Dark Lord, monsters were a part of the deal.
We didn’t stop for tea. A tall, older woman with long white hair answered the door. Mirella, Gent’s wife. She squeaked at the sight of a demon and a heavily armored stranger on her stoop, before sputtering out welcomes and apologies.
Bojack had to bend nearly double to get under the lintel. The baron was hiding in his bedroom, and Mirella said something about a surgeon treating his wounds. There was no need to ask for his permission, and I didn’t care if the zombie bite killed him or not.
My books were in the library, as well as Kevin’s enchanting table. I converted them all into medallions, and Mirella very helpfully provided me with yet another purse to carry.
A young woman in a night dress spied on us as I worked. Thin face, and a dark mop of wavy hair. She looked vaguely familiar, and it wasn’t until we left that I realized who she was.
Elara, Gent’s daughter. She had grown up. Somehow that, more than anything else, brought home the reality of the time I had lost.
When I had gotten myself locked up in a previous life, my little brothers had been kids in Middle School. There had been periods when visits were scarce, for a variety of reasons, and I had seen them become adults in skips and spurts. At some point, they both got taller than me.
Not having a child of my own was something that I’d been grateful for. So many men didn’t see their kids, communicating through letters or phone calls, if at all. In some cases, the kids were better off without them, some people truly do need to be quarantined from society. But that in no way applied to everyone who happened to be incarcerated.
I’d always thought I would have children someday, but being childless had been a blessing then. Now, in another world, circumstances had conspired to bring about a similar situation. For me, the experience of that time was either erased from my memory or lost to dilation. But my son was somewhere in the world, and he had never had a father.
“Let’s go,” I said to Bojack, tying shut the last purse. “We’re wasting time.”
“My thoughts exactly.” The demon stood in a corner of the library, his mane brushing against the ceiling. A heavy, dark presence that I could feel even when my back was turned.
Soon we were flying again. The experience brought me no joy. I gripped the wyvern’s harness and watched the gray world flow beneath me. The wind didn’t touch me, though I heard it rushing across the metal encasing my body. My new helm may have been imbued with Aqua Affinity, or something similar, because the air tasted of nothing, as if it were being filtered.
The wyverns were swift, covering in a few hours a distance that would have been more than a day of travel on horseback. We reached the mountains that separated the wastes from Drom, or what had been Drom, and landed in a steep ravine.
Bojack directed me to mine a shelter for the wyverns, and I complied. If they got us to our destinations faster, their survival was important to me.
“Exactly how long has it been since I left,” I said as blocks vanished under my pick. His answer came immediately.
“Ten years, three hundred and twenty-two days.”
I paused. “That’s…precise.” Leto was ten years old. Two digits. What did he look like? Aside from height, there weren’t obvious physical differences between lillits and humans. How much of him was his mother, and how much was me?
“I keep a journal,” Bojack said. A trio of phantoms shrieked down into the ravine, and I tensed, but they were under his control. They hovered around the demon, and he made a slight “go-on” gesture to the wyverns.
Like a pair of well-trained dogs, they took the signal from their master and lunged for the phantoms snapping up the manta-like mobs and swallowing them whole. His mount, the larger of the pair, took the third for itself. The phantoms didn’t even try to get away.
As disturbing as the scene was, it couldn’t distract me from the fact that Bojack kept a journal. There were saddlebags as a part of his wyvern’s harness, but if I’d had ten guesses as to their contents, demonic diaries would not have been on the list.
Whatever.
“My son,” I said. “Can you tell me about him?”
Bojack’s ears pricked forward. “How did you know you had a son?”
“A dream. Please, tell me about him.”
“There is not much for me to tell,” the demon looked like he was chewing. “A boy. Healthy. We have never spoken.”
“What does he look like?”
Bojack shrugged. “Thin, with dark hair. Humans all look very similar to me. There is nothing to remark upon.”
“But how is he? What kind of place are you keeping them in? Are they isolated?” Is it a prison, I didn’t ask.
“Any details I give you could make you believe you could find them. They are not in a cage, and I have never raised a hand against them, nor have any who serve me. That is as much as I will say.”
It was something, though his statement did beg the question of how he could have captured them and kept them in one place for all this time without resorting to violence. I let it lie. If I knew too much about what he had done, I really might kill him, curse or no curse.
“What’s been going on with Dargoth and the Free Kingdoms? How is Godwod the High King of anything?”
Bojack snorted, amused. “It is a self-proclaimed title. Godwod rules in Henterfell and has a tenuous control over the surrounding regions. Every spring, the king of Drom sends a force to oust him, and he has remained in place only due to our aid. But the Dark Lord has not chosen to expand the storm or his empire, satisfied to occupy himself with his hobbies in defiance of Bael’s counsel.”
“Hobbies?”
“He is fond of his train.”
I had more questions, a lot more. Bojack and I talked well into the morning after the wyverns were secured from the sun. Kevin was stubbornly refusing to do what the demons wanted, and he had grown too powerful for them to force the issue without risking what they had already gained. Most of them were content to wait it out. Demons were immortal, but many were unhappy with the status quo.
Bojack had allies who would support a change in leadership in exchange for new positions in a political structure that sounded as convoluted as complicated as any human government. Bojack was cagey about why having a Survivor on their side was so important. With the rest of the heroes gone, why didn’t the demons conquer Plana themselves?
There had to be a reason, but the demon wasn’t sharing it with me. He’d said before that my power set was useful to them, but useful wasn’t the same as necessary. Without an answer forthcoming, I spent most of the day trying and failing to sleep. With evening approaching, I gave up on proper rest and dropped the enchantment table. It was time to gamble.