Choosing Destruction (Part 4)

A bearded man Idris knew to be a baker, peeled himself off of the wall of the Inn. He gestured at the fallen Hive Soldier, a creature that should not be away from the Hive let alone inside the walls of the node, and called out, “What… the fuck!?”

“Well said,” Conrad remarked, wiping the insect blood from his sword.

One of the other adventurers shouted, “That thing shouldn’t be able to get in here!”

“Well? It did,” Karno said, chuckling wryly.

“But it can’t be!” cried a woman.

“Well?” Karno replied again, “It is.”

The room erupted in a panicked flurry of voices and motion as the realization sank into the crowd.

The node was no longer safe.

“Keep calm!” Conrad shouted above the din, “And arm yourselves,” he pointed down at the unfortunate remains of the headless man, “Let’s not have any more like him.”

“I’d like to see it,” Kaladrian said, moving forward. Throughout the previous engagement he had shown little reaction beyond mild surprise.

The Seekers stood aside from the corpse, but Kaladrian moved right past them and exited the Inn. Idris followed.

Outside Kaladrian stood and scanned the sky. It was exactly how Idris remembered it from the night the imps had followed him through the barrier of the irondale node.

But the scale of it!

If that night had been a ripple, like a pebble breaking the surface of a still lake, this was like a hailstorm. The entirety of the node was a convoluted mess of overlapping blurred curves and jagged lines of blue-white energy like lightning reflecting off the roiling surface.

“That doesn’t look good,” Idris said, unsure what else to say to convey the rising uncertainty and fear he felt threatening to overtake his senses.

“Oh, Idris,” Kaladrian replied, voice strange, almost reverent, “This thing won’t be, can’t be constrained by our mere human conceptions of good and bad.”

It was the first thing Idris saw in the man that felt off. Idris didn’t put too much weight on the words he used, but the look on his face, the tone of his voice. Whatever this calamity was for Idris and the town of Irondale, to Kaladrian, it was something else entirely.

The spectacle of it could have captivated Idris for hours were it not for what he began to notice around him. From out of the darkness he could hear screams. They came in ones and twos. Some yelling back and forth. Some calling out for help.

But in and around it all was the clicking of the bug men. Some of them were deeper, louder. Most quiet like a branch breaking in the distance, too far to pinpoint. The sound of it was growing, though, and where at first Idris could distinguish the individual clicks, gradually it was resolving into a continuous sound that baffled all attempts to distinguish one click from another.

None of this distracted Kaladrian, however. The look of reverence and awe he had worn only moments before was replaced by intense concentration as his eyes traced something invisible to Idris through the roiling storm of the failing node.

Conrad, Troy, and Karno had moved just outside the door and stood talking just within Idris’s earshot.

“...the bug men are here, then they’re all dead,” Troy was saying.

“How many went out?” Conrad asked, “Breakthrough and who else?”

“Black Hats, Wolves, a few solos,” Troy counted off on his fingers, “At least five other bands were out there already.”

“Some others could have made it out. Maybe still fighting,” Karno said.

“No, not if the girl is back. We’d have seen them. They’d be here,” Troy countered.

Conrad stood silent, eyes glazed as he examined something on his interface. “With that many deaths so soon, all that XP, the dungeon could easily have leveled twice. Even three times once it takes them all in,” he said.

“What’s the play then?” Troy asked.

Jibs suddenly dropped down from the second floor of the Inn, landing lightly beside the two men. Idris looked up at the angled roof and realized that Jibs had climbed it, the tallest point in the squat town, to get a better view of the area.

“It’s bad,” Jibs said, “It’s not just to the north toward the Hive. They’re spreading around the perimeter of the node. Wherever there’s a gap, they stream in. And the gap gets bigger.”

“How many?” Conrad asked.

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Jibs shook his head before answering, “Too many.”

“The bridge?”

“It’s going to be a fight. But if we go now, maybe,” Jibs said.

“We’re leaving,” Conrad said. He made eye contact with Kaladrian who shook his head slightly.

Without another word the Seekers began heading in the direction of the adventurer’s camp and the bridge across the river toward Confluence.

Idris held out a hand, “Conrad we can’t-”

Conrad pushed it aside and kept walking, “Rule number four, Light Bringer.”

The band of armed and armored men moved past him and picked up the pace. Conrad looked back once, saw that Idris hadn’t taken a single step, turned away and broke into a jog, joined by his three other companions.

Idris watched them go. He wanted to follow, wanted to hate Conrad for leaving, wanted to feel betrayed but in his heart he could only feel like he was the betrayer.

“If you’re not leaving,” a voice said, startling Idris out of his thoughts, “We have work yet to do.”

Kaladrian was still there. He was doing something with his armor. There were small pockets, really just slits with ties or rivets at the opening wherever leather was not covered with steel. Idris hadn’t thought anything of them, seeing them only as ornamentation. But the man was showing they were clearly much more than that.

Manifesting into Kaladrian’s hands out of his inventory was gemstone after gemstone. Some had the deep purple of charoite, but Idris saw colors, shapes and sizes of gemstones he never even knew existed. Kaladrian placed each of them in different places across his armor, and as each slotted in a brief light of energy would course through lines in the armor that formed symbols of some kind. But before Idris could make any sense of what he was seeing the light would go out and the… Scholar? Would move on to the next one.

“What class are you anyway?” Idris asked as he watched Kaladrian casually slot in a gemstone that could buy his entire town.

“I suppose it’s reasonable to assume,” Kaladrian said, slotting a final gemstone, “That it involves magic.”

He turned and saw Graham taking a few careful steps out of the Inn, eyes looking in every direction for possible danger.

“Where’s that lot off to,” Graham asked.

“Leaving,” Idris said.

Graham hesitated a moment before asking, “Aren’t you going with them?”

Idris looked longingly into the darkness where the Seekers had run, but before he could answer Kaladrian cut in, “You’ve misjudged your son. You see him as a man desperate to get away, but that was his chance there, his ticket out. And he let it go. Do you know why?”

“You’re a bit new here to be telling me about my own son,” Graham said defensively.

Kaladrian waved a hand in Graham’s direction and a flash of magic radiated across his armor, briefly illuminating several of the symbols embedded in the armor. “That’ll do, Graham.”

Idris’s father’s face furrowed a moment before returning to neutral, “I suppose you’re right, Kal, point taken,” he said.

Realizing Kaladrian was talking to him but momentarily stunned at his father’s response, Idris stammered out a reply, feeling suddenly that he needed to be right about himself, that his answer needed to match whatever it was Kaladrian expected of him, “Because of Eana. It’s for my sister.”

Kaladrian gave him a pitying smile, “No, no it isn’t because of her. She is the target, the focal point at this moment for what you are, Idris, but she isn’t the reason.”

“What do you mean?” Idris asked.

“Was it for your sister that you fought your father to begin with? Was it for her you became a Warrior? Was it really for her that you entered the dungeon, brought her out of it, and are even now preparing to face down death in events swirling around her?”

Kaladrian’s unmatched eyes seemed to bore into Idris’s soul as a strange shimmer ran over his armor.

If anybody else had asked the question Idris would not have hesitated - of course all of that had been for his sister. Well, maybe not all of it but he had gone in to rescue her from the Shimmering Rocks because… it struck him then.

Because she was a Healer. Without her he would be stuck again, unable to move forward. But was she really only a tool for him to use for his own growth?

“You’re nearly there,” Kaladrian said, “I can see it in your face. It isn’t easy to accept what we are, Idris, but here it is in plain language, though you won’t understand the full breadth of it until a long time from now.

“You despise the Path of Order, Idris. You love the power, the control, the exploration and progression, but you despise how Order places you on a path and it is your lot in life to follow it. You seek every opportunity to stray from the path, to prove your uniqueness, to fight against anything that would force you in a direction not of your own choosing.

“Order is limitation, Light Bringer. And if we wish to transcend those limits, we must be willing to face danger and even the prospect of death if it means furthering that goal.”

It was to Idris as if Kaladrian was putting words to something he had only ever felt in the past. The Light Mage class, seemingly a boon but actually a hindrance with no means to move forward. His father attempting to further his own dreams and ambitions through his son, stunting any ambition to explore. This small town itself with its lack of vision and isolation like it was just an extension of the tunnels he spent his days toiling in.

But his sister? Was she just one more obstacle placed to keep him on a determined path, a path he wasn’t allowed to travel outside?

No. That wasn’t it at all. Eana was a fellow traveler who desperately wanted to be placed on a path - any safe path, any friendly path - but Order always rejected her and sent her off on her own.

She wasn’t an obstacle. Just the opposite. She was the key.

She seemed, for better or for worse, cosmically unable to travel a careful, average path of normalcy. And everybody who got caught up with her found themselves being spun about and moved anywhere but where Order might have placed them.

It was as if everything in his life had been set in front of him to keep him here, to keep him small.

Everything except for her.

He felt a certainty spring up inside him, down to his very bones. Neither Idris nor Eana were meant to be held to a particular path or destiny - and together they could, had to travel beyond the carefully laid Path of Order.

“What do I need to do?” Idris asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Kaladrian asked, “We find Eana.”