A light rain greeted me. Nowhere near as violent as the earlier storm, it was closer to the occasional drop filtering down through a rooftop of leaves. More rain pattered against the remnants of the aforementioned ceiling, shattered and torn.
The damage left by the titan had devastated the forest, its wide paths still coated in layers of debris. Frequent branches had fallen, some the size of streets. Mud still coated everything at ground level, and a feather larger than my body – quill dented with the impact of a plummeting elevator – lay at my feet.
I picked it up, wincing at the burns in my palms. It was light and bluish-grey, untouched by the mud, and felt like magic. Water dripped from its shaft and kept dripping, and the smallest movement of its feathers created powerful targeted winds. A few experimental swishes sent all but the heaviest debris near me flying. I flicked it gently with the back of my hand, and the impact was muted. Cute.
Carrying it posed a problem, so I poked it through the back of my sash and put up with the relative minor discomfort as it dripped water down my leg and blew gusts out behind me.
Then I surveyed the damage. Multiple fingers on one of my hands were broken or fractured, along with the opposite wrist. I suspected the same of a rib. The wrist arm was pained all the way up to the shoulder, and the leg that had tangled wasn’t much better. My gait had an unavoidable limp.
I might have fared better had I let myself drop from the beginning. It was hard to say. But the pain took a backseat to the fact that I’d done it – actually used Near Miss for its intended purpose on demand without it getting in the way.
I tried not to dwell on how I was most likely the obstacle being removed. Or that I'd been injured again. This was a win; I was allowed to enjoy it.
With the torrential storm in the past, distinctive odours of cooking and smoke made their way through the forest nearby. My stomach growled. I hadn’t realised our earlier fight had been so close to a settlement, though in hindsight the elevator shafts should have clued me in. If Alusept hadn’t Found them, I wondered if one would have been so near.
The clearing I limped my way into was small but well-established with capacity for only a few hundred people. A handful of large thatched buildings decorated the ground in various states of recent storm damage. One was the source of the cooking. The rest hung off the trees, built into and around the massive trunks with rope bridges strung in concentric spirals between. Some dangled brokenly from damaged supports, and others looked not far behind.
A whistle sounded from above, and I looked up to find an arrow pointed at me. It appeared to be attached to an archer aiming a bow from a platform on one of the tree trunks. She didn’t seem friendly.
In seconds, I found myself surrounded by a handful of other villagers. Most were blonde with their clothes layered in rain-proof folds. Even if I hadn’t been currently less than my best, my appearance still would have screamed ‘outsider’. Another point in favour of approaching as a vehicle. Too bad elevators weren’t good at that.
More faces displayed fear and disgust than I liked, and no one seemed willing to be the first to speak. That meant it had to be me.
“I mean no harm,” I opened with, slowly raising my hands. “I just want to ask a few questions, and I’ll be on my way. Have you seen –”
“What are you?” the archer on lookout interrupted, making me sigh inwardly. It was rarely a good sign when that wording appeared.
I didn’t know enough about the local culture to try something clever, so fell back to a classic favourite. “Disfigured. A condition from birth making me frail. You have nothing to fear.”
“Then you should not be travelling,” said the archer. She didn’t move the bow. “Ask your questions.”
I nodded. “I’m looking for a man by the name of Jash. Young and pale-skinned with dark hair. I heard he was nearby during the storm.”
Judging by the immediate reaction and shared uneasy glances, the villagers were indeed familiar with the Rein.
“Why do you want to know?” the archer asked.
“Because he’s missing and I want to find him.”
“Are you here to battle?”
“Me? No. I’m a friend.”
The mood in the group subtly shifted to one closer to relief.
“You’re talking about Great Shaman,” a second villager offered, though he still maintained his distance. “Jash is the protector of this village. Prospective rivals from all over the country travel here to challenge him. But as you say, he isn’t here.”
“He didn’t come back after the storm,” added the archer. She finally lowered the tip of the bow, though not by much. “That’s all anyone knows, so anything else is wasting your time.”
“Did he summon the elemental in the sky?” I pressed, remembering how Jadal Cai had fixated on it at the time. I was regretting posting its feather through my belt; its drip hadn’t slowed down and had drenched the trousers that would otherwise be damp.
A number of villagers shook their heads. “If you mean the legendary summon,” the second villager stated, “no. It was wild. The Great Shaman is strong, but even he couldn’t tame such a beast.”
“Is that why you’re really here?” a third villager piped up beside him, suspicion in her tone. “It’s long gone. If you want to find it, follow the storm damage.”
“Unless Jash is with it, I’m not interested,” I said upfront, although it had been spectacular. Not many universes hosted megafauna of that scale, and most of the ones I’d run across had been contained in oceans where they were barely visible. That, or butchered within an inch of their lives to form organic habitable structures.
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The memory made me shudder. “If Jash didn’t invoke it, could it have been done by someone fighting him?”
The villagers shared glances among each other. “You’re awfully familiar with the Great Shaman,” the second villager said in a tone one used for taboo-breakers. “To be invoked, a summons must first be captured in the wild. And to do that, for this…” he shook his head, “…would take the calibre of the Eminent Three.”
“Who are they?”
The villagers all looked at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses.
Right. Household names. This part of versal travel was always hard.
“The greatest shamans in the land,” the third villager answered.
Lack of data notwithstanding, a trend was beginning to form in my head of the kinds of worlds post-death Reins tended to be assigned to. Lots of hierarchies, titles and limited job postings; perfect for solving problems with violence.
“So the Eminent Three were here to challenge the Great Shaman?” I followed up in an attempt at recovery. It would explain a lot, such as why Jadal Cai hadn’t engaged. A difficult fight too early in their growth could easily spell death for a Rein, like it almost had on Stabula. The mechanisms of Fate were meant to protect them. But lately, they may as well have been failing.
Fate being wrong was a terrifying thought.
“Oh, no. He would love to challenge them,” said the archer. She raised the tip of the bow and placed it to rest on the edge of the platform handrail. It was a casual movement, but also served to steady its aim. “But he has not earned the right. When or if he does, he will make the pilgrimage.”
“To overthrow leadership of the country?”
“To earn a position in the Eminent Three,” the second villager said, looking at me as if my outward injuries extended inwards.
I was missing something here regarding local politics. Maybe this was a different faction to the one the Rein was destined to overthrow, or maybe he hadn’t realised his purpose yet. Second-tiers could sometimes get a little too into the divine roleplaying aspect of Rein interviews; depending on who’d delivered it, the situation might not have been fully explained.
It didn’t matter. “So you think the summons is wild. Is this a common sight?”
It was the archer’s turn to give me an incredulous stare. I could see the shift in her features as she finished writing off my intelligence.
“Your friend isn’t here,” she stated, ignoring the question. There was a sceptical note on the ‘friend’. “Leave us to rebuild our town.”
That hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped. I looked at her, looked at the village, weighed up my chances and slowly drew out the summons’ feather, much to the perplexity of my audience. There was a open door only about thirty metres away.
I propped the feather, quill forward, onto my shoulder and gave it a small swish from side-to-side. A small gust surged out behind me.
Then I bolted, ducking through a gap in the crowd. My leg screamed at me, torn muscles popping, but I grit my teeth and pushed through. The purpose of pain was to warn against damage, and it didn’t matter if I did myself extra. Myrd’s healing had also done its job, and even after the fall, I was closer to sprinting fitness.
I waggled the feather over my shoulder as I ran, sending out disruptive flurries of air. It would never hold up as a serious weapon, but I didn’t need it to. Arrows clattered harmlessly to the ground as I took the straightest path to the door. Hands grabbed at me, but I had just enough of a head start.
One day, I thought as I made my Interstitial escape, I was going to purchase an augment of door creation. I wouldn’t have been the first, and manifesting a door inside a human body also doubled as an effective way to kill it. Two objectives in one.
All I’d learnt from that conversation was that I didn’t know anything. My suspicion was that the elemental summons had been there not for the local Rein, but for Jadal Cai. That somehow it knew the multiversal traveller wasn’t supposed to be there and was bad news. But if so, why hadn’t it overtly attacked?
Unless it had been there for Jash, but too early. This was the second time now. It was like the late-stage villains of some universes were waking up, recognising the burgeoning threat against them, and deploying pre-emptive strikes. It was happening out of order; Fate was supposed to prevent this.
The pattern never changed: a Rein would die, be transported to a new world, and exploit its resources to grow in strength, fighting corruption the whole way. These were universes headed down roads of terminal ruin; dimensions in need of a Rein’s unrivalled power. Like Stabula, some were too hostile for the average person to even survive.
Irwol’s version had titanic forces of destructive nature. And probably a lot of corrupt politics to go with it, judging by that conversation, outside of the peaceful circle of the Rein’s village. I hadn’t seen enough of it to do much other than speculate.
But I didn’t know if Jash had died. It was the most likely option, but – I didn’t know.
I didn’t know anything. Which was fine when things went to plan.
But now, when it mattered, I still knew nothing. How many Chapel agents wandered the multiverse following orders we didn’t understand? Why didn’t it trust us?
I immediately stamped on the thought. Of course I didn’t know. I was a first-tier, a loyal assassin. My duty was to Fate, the infallible force existing everywhere, but especially in the Chapel.
If anything in the multiverse could be called a god, Fate would be it. But it was more akin to a principle of nature like gravity, capable of being manipulated. If something could be manipulated, it could be abused. And the actors who could manipulate Fate were… us.
We needed to be looking internally.
I dropped off the feather at my house, leaving it dripping endlessly into a bathroom drain. Its strands shimmered magically in Creed’s overcast light. The world's usual light rain was picking up due to approaching storm clouds.
“I guess I report this,” I muttered aloud to myself and Near Miss, peeling my tattered clothes off with more than a few winces of pain. Glimpses of my body reflected back in the wall-length mirrors and I turned my back, consigning them to peripheral vision. “Let them know a new post-death is missing.”
The paranoid thought still haunted me that Jadal Cai might have come back from the dead to finish the job. I shivered in the balmy room temperature.
Cranking the skylight open on its brass-trimmed frame, I stood in the shower as the storm broke above, summoned by Fate as needed. One more reason to live on a Chapel world. Everything there that you asked for, within reason. But they suffered the same problem as most advanced worlds: ‘everything’ lost its allure fast. Ultimately, we craved adventure and the climb.
Right now, soaping my injuries clean, I didn’t feel formidable or glamorous. Just dirty, sore and lost, with all the certainty stripped away.
The one thing I was sure about was Near Miss, as though the world had turned inside-out.
“I don’t know what to think,” I told it, breaking into a sudden hiss as the soap touched an open wound. “Where do I fit into all this? Am I supposed to root out a traitor, is that it? Or are you trying to make me turn coat? Even if you could fool the Chapel, my friends are here. I have nowhere else I want to go. The only other option I have is you, and you’re – I don’t know what you are.”
Arches fell into the category of being so rare people barely bothered to talk about them. I knew of one. There’d been one not long before my time, allowing its user to manipulate whole universes. I didn’t think it had been a core.
Then they’d advanced and vanished into the multiverse like everyone else. Bright, flashy and world-shatteringly powerful. But ultimately, operations went on as normal.
Mine didn’t feel like that. I was only beginning to learn how to work with it, and suspected it was on track to leave more of an impact. I wanted to end up having a say in how. But it wasn't going to be easy.
Decisions and power were easy. Much harder was giving in.