Chapter 10: The Requiem

Jace “Quickshot” Leál

The abject silence after the battle was unnatural. Missing were the moans, the calls for medics, distant gunfire, and the rustling of people crawling along the ground, refusing to believe they’re already dead.

“Shiiit. Jace, your elf is some kind of demon.” Marcus had said when he reached the ledge where Ayla slew the darkling. “It’s kinda hot.”

I didn’t feel like letting the mood lighten. Instead, I glared at him and made my way with Ayla down the slope.

The moment their true leader died, the black magic keeping the band of Reavers unnaturally alive disappeared, and the remaining enemies collapsed like puppets with cut strings.

The revelation that the Reaver chief was a darkling had been a surprise. I wondered if it was the same with all Reaver tribes. As far as anyone knew, Reaver chieftains were merely a more powerful Reaver. Except, now that I’d seen it with my own eyes, there was no doubt in my mind that any dealings westerners had with chiefs were done using stand-ins. Why, then, had this darkling fixated on us? A petty sense of revenge? Was it only coincidence that he’d targeted Ayla and challenged her to a duel? Unlikely.

Ayla…

The sight of her howling, bloody form played in my mind. I knew that rage, the height of adrenaline that immediately follows after a difficult kill. And I also knew the frustration that even after vengeance has been wrought, it means nothing to the dead.

Afterward, she was deathly silent. If she heard the praise that rained upon her from the others, she didn’t show any sign. Down the valley she went, and one by one she checked every corpse for any remains of her people, starting with the severed head I later learned belonged to her sister.

So I joined her in the somber task, picking ears and bones from corpses like plucking morbid flowers.

The others also looted, but didn’t touch the trophies.

We put the remains in a sack—not the ideal choice, but the only one we had. Ayla sat quietly in the back of the wagon clutching it, and waited for us to put the stinking valley behind us.

There was no reason to stop before nightfall.

Only then did we let ourselves celebrate victory. A good soldier knows not to declare victory and lower their guard immediately after a fight is done. Doing so too soon is as good as inviting fate to prove you wrong.

Where we camped, there was ample dry, dead wood—as well as many petrified trees. We were entering scrubland, the transition area between the end of the Waste and the beginning of forested lands. Tempest was only two sleeps and a wake-up away.

We piled the wood high for our campfire, while Ayla made her own around two hundred meters away from us. She would need it to cremate the remains she carried, and I guessed she would rather do that without humans breathing down her neck.

Even counting the accelerated pace we kept over the past few days, two barrels of water remained in reserve, which we were unlikely to need over the next three days.

The men would each take several liters of extra water rations from one barrel to wash off the grime of battle. Ayla got the second barrel whole. Something Marcus said she’d earned for taking care of the darkling for us. I was glad to see there were no objections.

In an impressive show of strength, Lars bear-hugged the barrel and lifted it on his own. Then walked it behind a nearby thicket of petrified trees so she could get some privacy.

Ayla still hadn’t said much since we left the valley. Wordlessly, she took her tunic and towel, then went behind the thicket to wash.

Around our towering campfire, we each took a bottle of mead or wine from the crate Marcus passed around—how Marcus had managed to keep so many glass bottles from breaking during our harsh travel, was still a mystery to me.

Then someone set a pot to boil water, and we all started to clean our weapons while we drank—something I could only accomplish awkwardly by gingerly using my still-healing left arm. It was oddly nostalgic and horrifying at the same time. I felt as if I’d fallen back in time.

“I wish I coulda seen that fight with the darkling.” Callum shook his head then sighed. “I bet it was epic. Aren’t elves all like blade masters or something?”

“Some are.” Marcus said, snacking on a bag of trail mix—the same food that Ayla had been living off since the waystation. “It depends on how old they are and whether they were raised in an enclave with a sword master to teach them. During the war, every goddam long-ear was.”

Marcus got into his story the more questions Callum asked. “Pixie’s tits… You couldn’t let one get anywhere close to five meters. You were fucked if they did. Suddenly it’s swords drawn and it feels like you can’t hit ‘em no matter how many bullets you pop off. Then it’s off with your head or getting elf steel in your gut. I swear I watched one cut a bullet straight out of the air before I caught him in my thrall.”

“Hell of a story.” Bolton said, sounding more sarcastic than sincere. Marcus ignored him.

“How about you, Jace?” Callum asked, all eager-eyed and guileless. “You ever fight against a sword master?”

“Callum.” Sapp stepped in, his gravelly voice carrying weight. Haven’t you realized by now Jace don’t like talking about his time in the military?”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

I gave Sapp a grateful nod. He tipped his hat in reply.

“What—really?” Callum asked.

Sapp rolled his eyes. “Haven’t you noticed how tense he gets even when you start all the war talk with Marcus. Even when you get into it with the boring shit Lars says since he’s so fucking awful at telling stories and shit.”

Lars looks up from inspecting his freshly oiled and reassembled repeater. “Hey! That’s not nice.” He put the weapon down and stomped to the nearby water barrel with a pail so he could start washing himself. “You’re a jerk, Sapp.”

“And proud.” He said, taking the compliment.

Bolton snorted in amusement.

“Shut up, all of you.” Marcus waves his hands dramatically. He took a swig, finishing the bottle, then grabbed a fresh one from the crate. “Kid, I can answer on Jace’s behalf.”

Marcus looked in my direction, less checking for permission, more assessing the risk of resistance. Given the context, I wouldn’t interfere, but that didn’t mean I had any intention of contributing to the conversation.

When Marcus was satisfied it was safe to go on, he grinned at Callum, raising two fingers. “Twice. You know how I know? Because both times I was the one there to save his ass from getting skewered.”

It was true. I remembered them clearly. Marcus’s power to enthrall and control people with just his voice was terrifying.

It was also incredibly useful, though it had three harsh restrictions. First, there was a limit to how many people he could enthrall at once. Second, if the target was already enthralled, he needed to win a mental tug of war—as had happened during the fight with the darkling chieftain. But the third was the harshest of them all. He could only enthrall someone once. Ever.

Once he surrendered or lost control over his target, he could never take over their mind again.

I sat there watching Marcus as he became increasingly sauced and wild with his mix of truths and fabrications that made him out to be the hero who single handedly won every battle. Left to it, he might even claim to have won the war on his own.

Except that no one won the war.

Suddenly the stories bothered me less than Callum’s giddiness.

“The problem…” My voice came out more like an animal’s growl than words. Despite making no effort to raise my voice, it cut through Marcus's grand gesture mid-sentence, freezing him in place. Callum looked at me with an expression half excited at the prospect of my having anything to say about war, and half apprehensive under the intensity of my glare. I took a deep breath and tried to relax. Then started again.

“The problem with romanticizing war is that you ignore the fundamental truth of it. War only happens when someone with power or money—usually both—determines there’s something to profit from it. No matter what you’ve been told, there are no victors in war. Only survivors and profiteers.”

I wanted to tell him how the Dominion lied to us. Gave us fake news and altered facts to sway our national pride as we marched into lush elven lands and claimed them for our country only to raze the forest and their homes to build factories, hot springs, condominiums. The Dominion then taught—a euphemism for indoctrination—children that they were pacifying and civilizing the savage elves for their own good; that their resistance was ungrateful and evil.

I wanted to tell him how the pressure that the Dominion put on the elves made their leader snap and bring increasingly dangerous magics to bear against human lands. Which only made Emperor Macht push the technomancers to create more powerful means to counter them. Then the elves responded in kind. The threat of mutually assured destruction mattered little in the end. Who pushed the button first that blew up the world didn’t matter. The world was Shattered.

The fire crackled and popped. Then the logs rearranged themselves as the ones beneath crumbled.

In the end, I didn’t say anything. What good would it do to make humans out to be evil? There were plenty of people who tried to push back against the government, to make them see the path we were on was folly. Just like there were elves who’d done horrible things to innocent people in the pursuit of vengeance. What happened happened. Maybe everyone tells their own story in the end and the truth is just the kind of thing that rots in a grave.

“Fuck, man.” Marcus chucked a bottle into the fire where it shattered, and the dregs of alcohol flared briefly. “Way to kill the mood.” Then he picked up his third bottle and chugged quietly.

I sighed and let my head fall back. The stars were brilliant and beautiful, the colorful, glaring eye of the rift just as judgmental as ever.

Bolton added dried meat, vegetables, and barley to the boiling water to make soup while we all sat in relative silence for a while—I really had ruined the mood. But then we all had something else to rally our attention behind.

From the darkness, a flower of light bloomed then rose like a miniature blazing whirlwind. I smelled the faint scent of magic, but I wasn’t alarmed. Ayla had lit the funeral pyre. Silhouetted by the light of its fire, she began a dance for the dead.

Her movements were slow and deliberate, her arms moving through the fluid motions like a martial artist performing their kata.

The flames seemed to bend and twist along with her, bowing to her sinewy form. Then Ayla began to sing.

I couldn’t make out the words clearly, except to know they were in elvish. But the meaning was clear. It was a song of lament. Sorrowful, mournful. At once the most beautiful and terrible sound I’d ever heard in all my life.

It was a dirge as much for herself as the dead she burned in that pyre. She seemed to have known one of them personally, and, by the severed head’s hair color, I guessed it had been a close relative. My heart went out to her, inexorably drawn in by the requiem.

Ayla’s song felt like regret. Like longing for another, better time. It was the sorrow of an entire nation. It was the loneliness of a single woman.

The fire continued to sway with the melody and dance, growing taller and taller until it was like a coiling serpent, ready to spring into the sky.

Then the light and the song faded into smoke as the melody came to a close. In afterimages, I thought I saw wispy spirits rising upward, and I wondered if they too would join the wraiths haunting the night sky.

“That elf of yours is hot as hell man.” Marcus wrapped an arm around my shoulder. His breath was heavy with the stink of alcohol. “How’d you get her anyways? There’s got to be a wicked story there. How is she in the sack? That kinda tale won’t piss you off in the telling will it?”

I grimaced. There were some mutters of encouragement and approval from the others, then I realized that not just Marcus, but all the men had got up and stood in a line next to me to watch Ayla’s mournful ritual. I didn’t even remember getting up, so enchanted had I been by the song.

“I’d rather not, Marcus.” I shrugged off his arm. “You should rinse your mouth. Your breath reeks.”

“Bro, when did you get so boring?”

I clutched my hand to my chest. My heart was so heavy. I wished I could sear the sight and sound of Ayla singing that song into my memory. It had pulled from the black place in my mind all the dark things I didn’t want to remember and gave them a voice. A sweet, melancholy voice that stirred my soul in a way I hadn’t felt since…

“I’ve got to walk.” Without listening to whatever Marcus or the others said, I sauntered off into the darkness beyond the firelight. Maybe there, away from distractions, I could parse my feelings. In the darkness, maybe I could hold on to the memory of her song just a little longer.