Anomaly

Eana felt herself being carried. Reflexively she struggled in a spasmodic attempt to defend herself from hive monsters dragging her off to be absorbed by the dungeon.

The gentleness of the arms that held her gave her pause, and she looked up to see Kaladrian.

She struggled anyway, and he set her down on her feet. Kaladrian put both hands up in a placating gesture, giving her space to come to her senses.

“You’re safe,” he said.

“We got out?” Eana asked.

“We got out.”

“Where is Idris? Where are the others?”

Kaladrian looked down a moment before saying, “We’re it.”

She couldn’t have heard that correctly. She clarified, “What?”

The man took a deep breath and said it again, “We’re it. It’s just us.”

“Just us?” Eana asked, incredulous, unbelieving, “That’s crazy. It’s impossible. We have to go back!”

Idris was back there. She had been healing him. It might have been enough, he could still be there, still waiting for her to come back and finish the job. She was already mapping out what to do in her head. It was a deep wound and would need some serious work before -

Kaladrian motioned for Eana to follow.

“Where are you going?! The last thing I remember was we were fighting, the adventurers were fighting, my brother was hurt. If we got out they had to!”

But he had said they were it. He couldn’t have meant it the way it sounded.

“We have to go back,” she said, insistent, “We can’t just leave them!”

“Eana,” Kaladrian said, “There is nobody to go back for.”

“How could you possibly know? How can you be so sure?” she said, getting angry, “I don’t have to listen to you! I don’t have to follow! I make my own path now!”

She had felt hopeful, ready to change his mind, ready to return triumphant to find her brother and the rest either camping and sharing stories of the night before or still holding the bridge.

But in his eyes she saw no guile, no lie. Just a tired man, spent and with no energy left to fight her. If she ran, would he even follow her? Or would he just wait here for her to return and confirm what he told her?

They were on a dirt road, barely a road. More of a path made by default from consistent if not frequent wagon and foot travel. On both sides the woods of the Chaos Lands grew thick.

She looked back, trying to find the mountain and orient herself. When she did she was startled to realize she was far outside the node of Irondale, farther away than she had ever been.

Just how long could it have been since she lost consciousness? In the last moments she remembered it had been full dark. And raining. But around her the woodlands were quiet and the air clear and light, the sun low in the sky of early morning.

Numb, confused, and not seeing any other options, she did as he asked. She followed.

After a few moments of silent, walking tension, Kaladrian began to speak, “When you healed your brother, everything went to Chaos. They came at us so hard I wasn’t even sure I could get us out anymore. The whole plan was coming apart. Then your brother did something. You cast Epigenesis on him didn’t you?”

Eana thought back to the fight. She had cast everything she could on Idris, anything she thought could give him an edge. Light Heal, Recover, and yes, Epigenesis. She examined the spell in her interface.

Spell

Name: Epigenesis

Classification: Active, Child of Chaos

Description: Are you strong because you were born that way, or because circumstance demanded strength? Are your tastes and preferences an accident of birth, or have they emerged as a result of a lifetime of smaller decisions and moments? This spell permits the target to discover skills that are available only to them, and are available only due to their unique and defining experiences. Can be used only once per target. There are no further levels of proficiency.

At the time it had seemed like it could be worthwhile. Minor Heal and Recover were still working and she had felt the need to do more. But why hadn’t she continued healing him? Had it been enough?

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“It helped then? Is Idris… ” Eana said.

Kaladrian shook his head, “The Hive monsters closed in before any of us could do anything about it. You were knocked unconscious and I was left carrying you. But your brother, he must have learned something truly special from you.

“He healed himself, got up, and fought like a demon. With that hammer of his and his light flashing around him as he moved, he pressed forward and gave us the seconds we needed to escape. He saved us, Eana.”

Eana listened, but her heart sank at the last words. What hope she had held began to slip away as the meaning of the story began to coalesce, but she pushed against it, resisted the temptation to let him get away with relegating her brother’s survival to an implication.

She asked, voice strangely unsteady, “And you saw him… you saw him..”

Chaos take her, she wouldn’t be the one to say it, she wouldn’t! Because he wasn’t. Not Idris. Kaladrian could have seen him do a hundred things, a thousand, and she would believe it of her brother. But she would refuse that one thing.

Kaladrian stopped a moment and looked off into the distance before answering, “Yes.”

“Yes what,” Eana said. The tension inside her began to peak, ready to burst between them like a magical explosion. He wouldn’t say it. She willed him not to say it. If he said it it would become real and it could not be real.

“He’s dead, Eana.”

“No!” she shouted suddenly, attempting desperately to hang onto her defiance, her anger, anything to keep from giving way to the truth.

“Eana, he was a hero who-”

“NO!” she shouted, “I was there! I’m the best Healer in Irondale and I was there and the spells I used on him worked and they don’t work on the dead! You saw him! You saw him get up and keep fighting! You saw him and he isn’t dead! He isn’t!”

“Eana…” Kaladrian tried, he really did, but she was beyond mundane consolation.

Screaming now, she continued, “I told you it could take you! I said Chaos could take anybody! I said-” her voice caught on a sob, quickly stifled, “I said I wouldn’t let it…!”

She stood there, fists balled, holding onto the rage of what had to be a lie. But behind the rage she felt the sorrow, the despair, the weight of loss threatening to crush her. And it was winning.

Kaladrian walked up to her then and held something out. She looked up at it, vision blurry. She wasn’t crying! Crying meant he was dead, crying meant she thought it was over, but it couldn’t be, he couldn’t be!

She wiped her eyes clear of the water - not tears! - and saw what Kaladrian was presenting to her.

“You didn’t let it,” Kaladrian said.

In two hands, held with the reverence of offering a solemn and sacred artifact, he held out her fighting staff. It was still crusted with the grime of fighting the night before. She had killed dozens of the creatures herself. She had fought with everything she had, alongside the rest of them, alongside her brother.

With effort, she unclenched her fists and reached for the weapon, letting the insane strength of her grief and her rage hold tight to it instead. It wasn’t just a weapon now. It was the symbol of how the world worked.

No matter how often she declared that things would be different, no matter how much she yelled, defiant, that never again would she be made to run, to fail, to give up and be subject to the pain the world seemed determined to throw her into - Chaos was still determined to take everything from her.

But that didn’t mean she had to let it.

She cried then, clutching the staff like it was her brother, like she should have held him before it happened. And through it Kaladrian stood over her, silent as a sentinel, patiently waiting for her to be ready.

After some time, she wiped her eyes and looked up at him, “You couldn’t help him?” she asked.

“I used nearly all of my mana in that failed attempt to clear the bridge. The waste of it!” Kaladrian balled his fist, mouth clenched tight a moment before continuing, “I didn’t expect the Drones to have that kind of intelligence. That attack drained me and did almost nothing to them, and I’m ashamed to say that at the end the only thing I was good for was carrying you.”

Eana stared into the distance. Mind blank.

Kaladrian knelt in front of her, “Your brother did not survive, but he succeeded. They all did. And you, alive, is the most important thing they could have achieved in the entire stretch of their lives.”

Eana frowned, unconsoled by the praise. But she remembered something he had said the night before, “You said you had been looking for me before. Why? What’s so special about me?”

Kaladrian’s voice was grave, severe in a way it had not even managed in telling her that her entire world, everything she had once known, was gone.

“You’ve felt your whole life that something was wrong with you,” Kaladrian said, “Men and women have rejected you out of course, any achievements you gained were quickly forgotten and each failure was etched into the permanent consciousness of even those who never met you.

“You’ve been hated. Despised. And all you’ve ever offered in return is value. You heal the sick and they hate you. You bring men back from the edge of death and they ridicule you. You’ve done everything you possibly can to be loved, to fit in, and your reward has been stress, hardship, and fear of a knife in the back. Is this not true?”

It was uncanny. Everything, all of it, was true.

“How could you know any of this? I only just met you.”

Kaladrian looked back at her, one eye of blue and one of green, “Because your story is my story. Order is for Children of Order. And Order does not suffer the existence of Chaos. Our story could not be anything other than what it has been. Do you see why?”

She glanced at her class interface, the greatest gift of Order to its children, and saw in clear text the contradiction of her existence.

Child of Chaos.

“How do I… is nobody like me? Like us, I mean?”

“Whenever we appear, Order works to expunge us. To have us culled,” Kaladrian replied.

Unsure what else to say Eana asked, “What are we?”

“We are,” Kaladrian said gravely, “what should not be. Accidents. Anomalies.”

She thought it through. She was a human, a girl, she was everything the other people around her were and yet every moment of it was tainted somehow. It had been wrong, unfair, the scales had always been weighted against her. Always. In her inventory she played with Tomme’s knife. She wished he was here so she could kill him again.

Suddenly angry she said, “I hate it! It’s not fair!”

Kaladrian nodded, “I couldn’t agree more. A story like that, in a world governed by a deity we call Order? The irony is almost funny. I promised myself at a very young age that I would find others like me. That I would do something about it when I did. And now that I have - you and me, Eana? We’re going to change the rules.”

Something about how he spoke, his conviction, his ironclad certainty was building in Eana. His passion could be her passion. They could change things. She could change things.

“What rules? Whose rules? How?”

Kaladrian laughed and lay one hand on her shoulder as he gestured into the distance, “The rules that govern everything. Eana, together we’re going to change the fabric of existence and Order itself.”