Chapter 29 - An Epiphany of Loss

After Adam’s revelation, Oliver opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something reassuring. Adam could almost see how the realization of what he’d said hit Oliver when the friendly smile turned into a bewildered stare. Emily’s eyes grew wide. She looked away from Adam, folding her arms over each other.

“Emily, I’m sorry for before, I honestly didn’t remember,” Adam said and took a breath. “You were right.”

Pain and confusion lay behind Emily’s orange eyes when she looked at his face, probably trying to find traces of a lie. Adam swallowed. See that I’m speaking the truth.

Oliver looked back and forth between the two with an irritated frown, as if he was left out. “What’s going on? What are you sorry for?”

Emily kept looking at Adam and spoke slowly. “Now that I think of it, it kinda makes sense, you being Tainted. I am… sorry for you. Do you feel different since it happened?”

Adam looked away and thought for a moment. “Hard to say… how can I know if I feel different when I’m not sure which memories I can trust? And I don’t know when—” He frowned. “Back at Caine’s house! He Tainted Eric and probably Catherine as well! Maybe he did the same to me when we fought?”

“Why would Caine Taint you like this then?” Emily asked. “I mean, he hasn’t made you worship him, right?”

Oliver fiddled with his lips and studied Adam’s face. “Perhaps Adam knew too much. You said you don’t remember anything about your secret research or this strange third type of sorcery, correct?”

Adam squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember. All he got back were vague images of his office in Ziecherhein’s university. “Now that Agatha mentioned it, I think I vaguely recall I did some research, but that’s about it.”

Oliver snapped his fingers. “That must be it! We just witnessed Caine and Agatha with these… plans of his. What he wanted to do if he had the Prophet’s sorcery. I bet the Penduli are filled to the brim with his plots! And Agatha thought the research you performed concerned the very same kind of sorcery as the Prophet uses.”

Adam thought for a moment. “Plausible. Caine can supposedly Taint people. If he uses this forgotten sorcery, what I used to know could be a threat to him.”

Oliver and Emily kept talking, maybe to each other, maybe to Adam. However, Adam didn’t catch any of it since he zoned out again, wondering what Caine had done to him, taken from him. A hollow, cold feeling of dread grew in his stomach as he anxiously rubbed the scars on his wrist. With a lump in his throat, Adam grabbed the sides of his head, running his shivering fingers through clumps of hair. I tried so hard to turn everything back to normal. But is there even a ‘normal’ anymore? What can I be sure of, now that I can’t trust my own mind? Adam thought of the long tunnels, Schultora and Osaehin, the waterfall and the Roots. A bizarre, corrupted place he’d finally thought he’d made a bit sense of. Until he stepped into the spiral and ended up in the past.

Adam widened his eyes. Wait, she must be here as well. Adam scanned the Eulenschloss’s northern wall and there, amidst the savage combat against the Pure, was Catherine. Tall, young, and beautiful. Her face a blank mask of concentration, she ducked underneath an Armistherium’s claws and sank her glaive into one of the beast’s lower paws. Immune to pain, the monstrous foe kept swiping its claws as it fell on its back. With her long blonde curls flowing in the wind, Catherine jumped up for the finishing blow.

Adam clenched his eyes shut and suppressed a soft whimper. To see her, even a version of her before they were together, made his heart ache with loss and the desperate desire to hold her again. To be in their warm, trusted cabin in the mountains. To be safe from all the madness going on.

But is all of this happening at all? Am I imagining this through the Taint?

With a shiver, he thought of the Tainted that Oliver and he had seen in Gotterburg. Like the lad who had whispered ‘I’m sorry, dad’ over and over again. Or the old man who had screamed incoherently, too far gone to notice the woman who had been trying to comfort him. Adam knew that, apart from an altered memory, many Tainted developed severe mental issues. Examples included immense confusion, entire changes of personality, or even turning into a vegetative state over time. Some die, while nothing is physically wrong with them.

Can the Taint… kill me out of the blue? Or does that happen when I die here? Adam vaguely heard Oliver and Emily say something about him needing some time to process.

Adam looked down below, where the younger version of himself fought like the Ancestor. He kicked one of the Pure’s ladders off the wall. The Pure who climbed it fell to their death, smiling all the while. I used to be so much stronger, more agile, more… everything back then. Adam’s shoulders slumped. His arm, which once made him known as ‘the Fist of Gotterburg,’ wasn’t nearly as muscular as before. Although he’d lost some weight since he’d ended up in the strange tunnels, his stomach wasn’t chiselled as it used to be.

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He closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the wall behind him. I’m probably some old, broken madman who climbed a tower to spy on a couple of lovers. Who claims to come from the future when the guards kick him out. I deserve nothing less, I guess. Would anyone even miss me if I…

Adam’s grooved and chafed fingers clenched. No, I refuse to give up. He’d made up his mind before his left heart whispered its familiar phrase. Frowning with grim determination, he took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, calming the rapid beating of his left heart. He looked at his hands and saw how the thick tendons moved at his command. I can still choose my actions, even though I can’t trust my memories. Even if I can’t trust this ‘world’ around me, I can still think and reason, which means I must still exist in some form.

Adam breathed in the cold, fresh air through his nose and gently let it go again. It wasn’t much, but knowing he had some form of control gave him a basis again, a foundation amidst the bog of uncertainty and dread. I could sit here and grovel in my old misery, denying and burying all that happened, as I did since the War of the Prophet. Or… All the events of the past days flashed through his mind. I can get up and make a change. I can discern the truth from the lies.

Adam opened his eyes and saw that Emily and Oliver sat beside him, giving him the space and time he needed. They looked up at him with warm, patient smiles. There were still people who cared for him, despite everything. A lump grew in Adam’s throat. It was more difficult to smile back than he liked to admit.

“Thank you,” Adam said with a raspy edge in his voice. “For standing by me, for being here with me.”

“What did you expect? Of course we are!” Oliver said heartily and squeezed Adam’s shoulder. “You don’t deserve all of this shit! But we are with you to the end, buddy. We’ll help you get your true memories back whatever way we can!”

“We were tasked to investigate the Taint as a group, remember?” Emily asked softly. “I think we’ve just found an excellent test subject.” The left corner of her mouth curled upwards again in her mischievous smile. It was a while ago since Adam had seen that happen, relief washed over him along with a tingly feeling in his stomach.

Adam laughed. “Oh, yes, experiment away. But, honestly, if it was just me experiencing all this weird shit around here, without being able to trust my own memories, I’d really start thinking I was imagining things.”

“ ‘Weird shit?’ What do you mean?” Oliver peered around with wide eyes, glancing at the intense battlefield of the past below them as if he was looking for something. “You mean the dish we just ordered? Yeah, the shepherd’s pie was terrible. Adam, you might want to finish your desert though, before the innkeeper gets cranky.” He pointed at an imaginary plate in front of Adam.

Emily laughed. “Oh, Oliver, come on, give him a break.”

Adam didn’t mind the least, grinning as well. Whatever mess he was in, Oliver, and later Emily, had been with him and experiencing the same things the whole time. Assuming I’m not imagining them, of course. But I refuse to believe that.

Oliver made a startled gasp. “Down there! We have a visitor!”

On one of the fortress’ roofs, down below, stood the mysterious warrior who had attacked them in the pyramid. Her one arm held up her blood-red sword, with the tip pointing down. Although the battle raged ever more fiercely, and the younger version of herself was still fighting together with Adam in the distance, she ignored it all. Filled with an icy hatred, her eyes were fixed on the old Adam up above. Unlike her younger self, she looked like she had barely survived a gruesome fight, just like the last time they had seen her. Her armour, caked with mud and blood, was blackened on one side. A charred stump hung from her shoulders.

However, the strange leaf-vein-like chains that had been wrapped around her torso were gone now.

Her low voice echoed in Adam’s head. ‘You won’t escape me, Adam!’ she had screamed between heavy coughs. ‘I’ll find you no matter where you go!’

“Damn that wench!” Emily muttered, glaring down at the warrior. “How did she follow us?”

Oliver looked baffled, his eyes almost perfectly round as he looked at the warrior down below. “What? How can she be both at the wall and down below?!”

“Probably the same way I am,” Adam said. “I do wonder what happened to her in the time between this battle and now.”

“Bizarre, how could she be...” Oliver rubbed his lip, deep in thought. “She’s the same warrior you told me about?”

Adam nodded slowly. “And trust me, she fights like the damn Ancestor.”

A rumbling sound akin to an avalanche erupted in the distance. The gate on the western wall had fallen and Pure cavalry rode their armoured rhinos into the fortress. The defenders near the gate tried to flee but were mowed down or trampled with ruthless efficiency. Adam stepped back and stared wide-eyed with raised eyebrows. What? No! This never happened, the Pure never breached the walls of Eulenschloss. I was fighting right there on the wall beside it!

“For Dorenland!” the defending soldiers behind the gate screamed, running straight at the charging cavalry of the Prophet.

And soon, the two forces clashed on the streets. Pure Rhinos stormed straight through units of swordsmen, using their horns to send soldiers flying like ragdolls. Tridentiers screamed their war-cry as they charged the knights of the Pure from the side, stabbing at the thin joints in their opponent’s armour. One of the knights of the Pure broke through the tridentiers and led his rhino through a unit of defending archers, impaling two of them with his lance. A Novaseer jumped up from behind him, conjured a greatsword of Marrow and beheaded the knight. Having lost its rider, the armoured rhino ran amok through the massed forces. Being immune to pain, the rhino ignored the tridents and arrows that stuck out of its leathery hide and continued its rampage.

Despite the ruthless melee in the streets below, the warrior’s eyes didn’t leave Adam’s. Effortlessly, she planted the tip of her blood-red sword in the stone roof and raised an outstretched hand in front of her chest: the challenge of a warrior.