The pain didn’t matter.
Manifested swords orbitted Marroo as he sat at the top of a tower and wept, not the razors that normally manifested when his icon pressed itself into his spirit, but fully detailed swords. The air rippled where their edges cut lazily through the wind while airtraffic and familiars buzzed around him through the city’s streets and the shadow of the New Year bore down upon them across the horizon.
His father’s sword sat unsheathed across his lap, unhappy memories bubbling up from the pit of misery that was his father’s spirit as though in sympathy to his own experience.
He saw his mother, himself as a boy, saw the stone placed into his son’s hand.
The pain didn’t matter.
He kept waiting for his father’s wraith to appear, but it never did, and the swords given spiritual reality by the sword continued their slow orbit around the crying boy.
In the memories, he watched himself battle with a cultivator his father paid to try and kill him. He was a halfbreed with skin like Dhret’s, the color of smoke.
“I don’t know why I kept you.” He said. He looked down at the sword. He’d snatched it on his way out of the apartment, had practically destroyed the wall where he’d hidden it in doing so. Breath ran inside the blade like water, and Marroo found bodies scattered around an old man somewhere in the depths, and the boy standing above them. He felt the pride of knowing that his son was well on his way to the power that brought him alive out of the tunnels.
Marroo closed his eyes.
“All you’ve ever given me is pain.”
He felt the stone himself, in his father’s hands for the first time as his father used it to wrestle with his own meridians, a pain echoed in his last moments as he poured his spirit into the sword meant for his son.
Marroo looked away, watched the armory of spiritual weapons spin past while the wind drove banks of clouds by overhead. He felt the auras of the other adepts beyond the swords, like stormclouds on the horizon.
“You never protected me.” He said. “Not even with this sword.” A short sword spun by in its orbit, plain and brutal in its design, but meticulous in the detail granted to it by the Icon that defined all swords. “You were never there for me. Never, when it counted.”
Blood welled up from the sword, not in fact, but in memory, and Marroo abruptly pulled his breath from the blade to cut them off. He closed his eyes as the sword blades around him faded then disappeared, and the wind touched his cheeks.
“Some pain does matter.” He whispered to the wind. “Some pain matters more than anything else.”
He stood.
From his place at the top of one of the highest towers in the city Marroo could see the midnight plains on approach. The smaller normal constructs moved far below the arch of the new year’s night. They stood in staggered ranks across the horizon as they sank through the haze at the terminator line of visibility across the bottom. Oceans sparkled where the bottom curved upward to go around the core, oceans so distant that they looked like no more than small lakes despite their vastness, pooled next to mountains that looked like no more than pin pricks against the unending curve of the horizon. He watched the light wink out of one of those oceans as a Midnight Plain passed over it, the same Plain that would cast its shadow over the Dregs in a couple of hours before the much larger shadow of the New Year’s Night drew itself over them like a blanket of darkness.
Time was running out.
The aura of corruption that rose from Dhruv’s house made it easy to find. Marroo had been there before, as a courier, but it looked different surrounded by guards and filled with a presence like all the poisons of the worlds. Marroo landed on the street well behind the circle of Red Squad guards he could see around Athesh and the other executives. They wore body armor and smoked heavily while the wind sucked the cigarette smoke away from them and made the coals burn cherry bright.
Athesh smiled grimly past his cigar when he saw Marroo walking toward them across the pavement. “Dhruv said you would change your mind, when the time came.” He boomed. “Welcome back to the family.” He didn’t extend his hand or any other formal greeting, and Marroo stopped a good dozen yards from him.
Marroo looked at the mansion behind its wrought iron fence. The place was huge and lavish. Wide lawns of cultivated grass, footpaths, and small gardens separated the walls of the house from the property’s fence. Marroo could see Dhret, in his mind’s eye, moving between the potted flowers in the formal dress of a sect leader’s daughter, and he tried to imagine what it must have been like to move from this, from wealth, and luxury, and servants, to a cramped one room apartment cluttered with books and occupied by a boy who didn’t even care to own more than two pairs of pants, or cut his hair more often than it was necessary to keep it out of his eyes.
The aura of corruption inside shifted, breaking Marroo’s reverie, and he studied it for a moment before he turned to the executives in front of him.
“I’m not your family.” He told the big man wreathed in cigar smoke. Athesh just crossed his arms over his chest. Marroo stared at him for a long moment. Eventually he turned back to the house. “Is Dhruv still alive?” He asked. He could feel several spiritual impressions of non-cultivator’s in the house, some of them hiding from the corruption in distant corners, and others that must have been very close to the center of that aura, but he couldn’t identify them.
“Yes.” Athesh rumbled. “The adept hasn’t come out to kill all of us yet.” He glanced at the other executives bunched up beside him. “I see no reason for him to have killed Dhruv.” He turned back to Marroo. “Yet.”
The voices of the soldiers arrayed around the mansion came to Marroo in a murmur and he looked around the line he could see at men who looked hard and dangerous behind their armor and their weapons, as dangerous as any of the thousands his father had lain waste to without a second thought. He turned back to Athesh and looked up at him.
“After this, we’re through.” Marroo told him. “I’m here because Dhret –“ He had to stop. He ground his teeth and wiped angrily at one eye. “I’m here for Dhret.” He finally went on. “But afterwards, we’re through.” He looked up at Athesh and thought of the girl still in the apartment he’d left far behind. “We’ll never see one another again.” He looked away, then turned to glare at the executive in front of him. “I never want to hear from you again.” He said. “Do I make myself clear?”
Athesh sucked in smoke from his cigar and blew it out in a streamer pulled towards the mansion by the wind. “Of course.” He replied.
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Marroo glared at him for a moment, then turned away. He thought of saying more, but glared at Athesh one more time before he shook his head and marched towards the perimeter formed by the red squad guards.
“Marroo!” Athesh called before Marroo reached the fence. Marroo stopped and turned, and Athesh unclipped something from his belt. He tossed it to Marroo and Marroo snatched it out of the air to look at it. It was a tube just a little longer than the width of his palm. He flicked a tab at the top like the tab on his familiar’s clip and a half a dozen familiars swarmed out to take up positions around him, orbiting him the way the midnight plains orbited the core. He spun the magazine he’d been tossed looking for some marking, but he recognized the spiritual weight of the icon pressed into the little constructs of light.
“Where’d you get these?”
“Spoils of war.” Athesh replied. “Some mercenaries your father killed. No idea where they really come from, but they hit like a grenade when you use them. Just flick,” he made a motion to show how it was done, “and they’ll hit whatever you’re looking at.”
Marroo watched the orbiting familiars change, as they synched with the familiar in the clip at his shoulder, from golden abstract spheres into the tiny red woman he’d always used for his familiar’s mobile form. They spun serenely as they orbited, like dancers waiting for their partner to arrive.
“Good luck.”
Marroo nodded, then flicked one of the little familiars at the fence.
A weight slammed into the fence as the familiar zipped into it. Breath burst from the tiny figure as it dissipated and blew chunks of the wrought iron fencing flying across the lawn.
Marroo marched through the gap towards the glowering sun of corruption waiting for him on the other side.
Raised flower beds lined the paths leading towards the front door, each of them filled with flowers Marroo found he recognized from the pots Dhret kept in her rooftop garden. Small red and yellow blooms, purple buds looking ready to burst, vines that trailed small white flowers along the ground. They smelled of her, reminded him of her, as they bobbed at him in farewell as he passed.
The mansion might have seemed undisturbed if it weren’t for the door. A glimpse inside as he passed a bank of windows showed Marroo a room empty of anything but plush furniture and expensive works of art. The property was quiet without the usual air-traffic moving above the mansion as he climbed the few stairs leading to the grand double doors, might even have been peaceful if not for the soldiers stationed around the property’s edge, if not for the marks left in the door by the adept who’d broken them in.
Black handprints marred their surface, twinned impacts, one on either door, at the center of a circle of shattered wood to either side. The wood beyond the handprints was warped and blackened by streaks of decay, the hinges twisted and speckled with rust while two fancy knockers sneered down at Marroo from faces contorted by their own corrosion. Marroo slipped past and found himself in a gilded hall of marble floors and ensconced light fixtures.
Where the exterior of the mansion had been quiet, the interior was smothered in silence. His footsteps echoed on the marble tiling, and the whisper of his own breathing came back to him from polished surfaces along every wall.
Marroo felt the adept deeper in the house with his third eye, but even without it he’d have had no trouble finding him. Black footprints led deeper into the house down a trench of corruption. Floor tiles crumbled to dust, wall paneling blackened or stained with rust that pooled around hidden nails. The glass fixtures along the walls were half melted wherever the adept passed and familiars set as lights along the ceiling sputtered fitfully above the adept’s footprints.
Fumes still rose from the trench of corruption as Marroo skirted it to follow the adept deeper into the house. He kept his hand on his sword and felt the breath inside stir as it touched the corrupted breath the drifted from the other adept’s marks on the world. Memories flickered in Marroo’s mind, scenes of violence, methods of killing, a hundred ways to cut picking at his mind as though offered by the sword as options for dispatching the source of the venom it recognized from his father’s memories.
He ignored the sword and crept on.
He found the bodies of A red squad sent to liberate the mansion tumbled across the staircase leading up to the second floor, or what was left of them.
There wasn’t much.
Ash dusted the carpet around the blackened patches left by the adept’s footsteps and what was left of the squad’s bones peeked from the rags and bits of body armor and weaponry scattered across the stairs, blackened and crumbling from their exposure to the corrosive icon that still lingered in the fuming breath embedded in the staris.
Marroo could see it with his spiritual sense. The adept’s breath clung to the bones, rose in wisps around them, like fumes from overheated cement, or like the scent of rot from garbage. With his veil up and at this proximity, the fumes from the corpses was almost thick enough to occlude the adept beyond the top of the stairs. Almost.
The trap covered the stairs. There were holes in the carpet where the adept’s feet had passed, but there was more breath packed into them than into any other part of the house Marroo had passed thus far. It filled the stairway, blocked it, as he expected it would block other parts of the house as he went on.
He leapt them, threw himself up the steps while the sword rebelled at the first touch of poison and Marroo felt his meridians burn as the breath seeped into his spirit feathered his external meridians.
He stumbled as he landed at the top of the stairs and fell to his knees as the poison entered his channels and he gasped at the pain.
His father’s memories spilled into him from the sword and he saw another house like this one, filled by the fuming spirit of corruption as his father blew through it like the wind, cutting down the men stationed there to defend it before climbing the stairs through the poison to confront the man he could feel waiting for him at the top. He felt the surprise, when the bullet bit into him, the brief chase that followed before the burning agony and the madness before the poison planted the seed in his flesh that finally killed him.
Remembered pain was nothing in comparison to the pain experienced in the present.
The pain was excruciating. Marroo’s limbs shook as the poison he’d touched only briefly flowed through his meridians. His breath fought against the veil he’d forced it behind and the venom moved through his aura into his other meridians, mentalis, sensorium, externalis, core. His mind went blank with pain while his vision blurred where it touched his eyes. His guts churned and his chest heaved.
He curled, slowly, around the pain while he shivered and fought against both his own breath and the bit of poison roiling inside of him.
Marroo felt the pain of the venom moving through him echoed in his father’s memories, memories in which he paced his suite in the rose tower coughing up blood as the venom corrupted his flesh with each passage through his channels. It infused him with each pass, so that even when Darro resorted to the desperate measures of amputating his own meridians with the sort of spiritual blade only he and Marroo knew how to touch, it still rose from within him, flowed in his veins as well as his spirit, slowly turning his entire body into a carrier for the poison that would eventually take his life.
As he remembered it, Marroo felt it happening to him, or the moment it would have begun, if it was going to begin.
The venom touched one of his Core Meridians, ran through it in less time than it took for his heart to beat and wrung out Marroo’s guts like a rag before it encapsulated his heart and ran out with the blood to the channels of his Extremis Meridians. The breath Marroo had hidden within his flesh shook as the venom passed and it left agony its wake, but it left none of the corruption that had turned his father’s blood to poison. None of the death. Only pain while his own breath shook behind its veil and his Icon roared to see the venom cut from the world.
Marroo knelt for what felt like an age as he traced the poison’s passage through his spirit. The agony made each heartbeat feel like a century, but the pain was only pain. For all of its intensity it felt like an old friend, his father’s last gift before being taken by this same pain. By the time Marroo pushed himself to his feet in the hallway at the top of the stairs only a few seconds had passed and he was in control again.
He let out a long breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and released a bit of his breath from its veil. Strength traveled with it, making the pain easier to bear while what he kept inside his flesh continued to shake as it fought of the venom that tried to take its place. His spirit quaked within his veil wherever the breath passed, but against this little bit of breath, it would be enough.
When he opened his eyes, he found a familiar face staring down at him from a portrait on the wall, younger than the girl he knew, her name stenciled on the door to its left. For a moment he was tempted to look inside, but in the end, he turned and followed the corruption deeper into the mansion.
He’d already said goodbye.