A minute or two passed as we stood on the rooftop in silence. No matter if it came from the genuine article or not, the content of the creator’s announcement was chilling. I couldn’t imagine being a resident here when all this was really happening.
“What do you think is the best way to get down there?” Cira asked, looking at the aftermath of a one-sided slaughter at the harbor.
“You’re asking me?”
She shrugged, “It may be tricky to jump down and not get hurt. I would like to keep some mana afterwards.” we were at least five stories up, and jumping off the edge didn’t look very appealing to me.
“You were the one going on about how easy flying is. Can you conjure a rope?” I asked as a joke.
“Now there’s an idea…” Cira held out her crystal ball, “This is how I descended the Last Step.”
The crystal was dyed green as a verdant beam split in two and hit the roof’s edge. She held out her other palm and water gently flowed to each spot, giving rise to little saplings that rapidly grew and fell over the side.
“Seriously…?”
“We must be quick, though. Before they wither!” Cira wasted no time to rappel down, leaving me in the dust, baffled and alone on a rooftop.
I tossed my crimson blade off in a panic and scrambled over the edge with very little grace. I wasn’t scared of heights, per se, but actually seeing the ground from a high place made me imagine smashing against it. Usually, it’s just clouds and easy to ignore.
So, I looked up, adjusted my grip on the vines, and slid down. I almost slipped at the bottom as a severed arm slid out from under my foot and the vine crumbled apart in my hands at the same time. The harbor seemed no better than the meeting room from before—actually much worse—but all the carnage melded together here. It was impossible to tell where one body ended and another began when they were all in pieces, many of which were missing. Evidently heads were also on the menu.
I grabbed my aether flame sword from the dock and Cira was still able to use her undine powers to douse the surrounding embers. Her waters were noticeably frail, however.
We couldn’t see as much from down here either because the many ships blocked most of the docks, but none of the ships appeared to have been manned.
“So, how do we find the right boat?” Maybe it was a stupid question, but I had to ask.
“We would run out of time if we checked each one…” She pondered, “Perhaps I could craft an instrument to point us in the right direction.”
“Could you perhaps do that…?” I guess sorcerers really have an answer for everything. How envious. “How do you look for something when you don’t even know what it is?”
“How indeed.” She agreed, but held out her crystal ball nonetheless. Nails pulled themselves out of the boardwalk and melted together before forming a thin metal frame like a small box. “I’m still trying to narrow in on that feeling I grasped when fighting the necromancer, but I have been workshopping an idea lately.”
I felt an unsettling tremor in my soul as she held the object up and a flash of colorful light seared my eyes. She crafted a lantern, evidently, with a flame that couldn’t seem to settle on a color. It was small and weak, but brilliant all the same. I had to stop looking at it, turning my gaze to Cira in confusion.
A perfectly cylindrical dowel rose up from the wooden dock below and Cira formed a small chain to attach the lantern to it. She held the lantern now on the haft and rotated slowly until we were facing back towards the city.
“Damn… I guess we’re in the wrong place after all.”
I was baffled as she turned her back on the harbor and walked down an alley. I took a double take at all the ships and bounded behind her, “Are you going to tell me what this is about?”
“Were I to affect fate within a conjured memory, we would likely be thrown out of it, or it would otherwise fall apart. There is a set course of events meant to occur here—I suspect the same thing would have happened if I somehow managed to stop those weird monsters from entering the room before.” Cira held her glimmering lantern on display again, “But that just means fate flows in a single direction here, or more accurately, all toward a single point. I’m still working on a catchy name for this fire,” She ran her fingers through the flame’s tip, and it shifted through a hundred colors, “but they yearn to consume. I’m confident they’re pointing towards the most important moment in this time and place—so let’s try and get there first.”
She did not wait for my reply before turning forward again and speeding up her gait.
“Hang on!” I whisper-shouted, “Aren’t there more of those things all over?”
In fact, I was pretty sure I could hear the sound of flesh being chewed around the corner.
“You’re right. You go first.” She shimmied behind me and gave an assured nod before gesturing her head toward my crimson sword. “But move quickly.”
Shit… Why did I say that?
I let out a deep sigh and resumed walking. The sound had gotten closer and I poked my head around the corner. There was of course, very much blood, and an otherwise unblemished man getting his leg gnawed on by one of those monsters.
Ash silenced my footsteps, and I cut it from right shoulder to left hip, then a couple through the head, and separated each limb.
The only way to deal with these monsters, it seemed, was to incapacitate them and move on with one’s life as soon as possible.
“Hey… this guy’s breathing!” I was almost excited to see a little bit of good fortune in this tremendous disaster, but then Cira opened her mouth.
“How many times do I have to tell you we’re in a memory? Unless there’s another tag team of unlikely heroines right behind us, the guy still died—over a thousand years ago.”
Another sigh, and we continued through the streets at Cira’s direction as more colors than I knew existed reflected off the countless trails of blood. Many of the buildings seemed to have been burnt quickly with magic and left as charcoaled frames, but there were more than a few active fires we had to circumvent. I couldn’t help but wonder if Cira wanted to traverse the streets or if going back to the rooftops hadn’t even occurred to her.
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“Hey, if you can conjure some stupid flame to point exactly where we want, why didn’t you do it earlier?” This was such an obvious question I couldn’t believe I just thought of it.
“I hadn’t thought of it—left here.”
The impression I got was that returning to the roofs had not occurred to her.
We were no longer anywhere near the harbor, which felt like wasted effort and time, but I guess it didn’t really matter. Despite being in front, I was just along for the ride, really. This was all just one big learning experience. All I had to worry about was what’s in front of me.
Strangely, I only had to cut down a couple more of those things. I was glad there weren’t any groups to fight, but it made me more uneasy than anything. There was no end to the half-chewed corpses while rivers of blood ran through the gutters, and I couldn’t help but wonder where all the monsters that killed them went. There had to be a lot of them to cause this much carnage in such a short time. The announcement of condemnation honestly came too late, but I guess it worked all the same.
“Any idea how close we are?” The silver lining I clung onto in my head was that we weren’t going the same direction of the coalition building we woke up in. We actually moved opposite from it, further up the coast, but gradually inland.
Cira’s feet slowed and I turned around to see her waving the flame around. Almost like she was reorienting the solar compass for accuracy. I pushed through the mental discomfort staring at it gave me and noticed the flame’s tip turned rather quickly now, whereas I couldn’t see a change earlier.
As it turned, it continued pointing in a single direction. So, Cira kicked open a wrought-iron gate and took a step inside the ominous estate. When her foot touched the ground, I felt something like a spatial quake. Suddenly, I couldn’t move a muscle, nor feel any of them. The world turned white as if a dense fog began to fall in the blink of an eye.
While the last dredges of lingering warmth in my consciousness tried to fade away, I felt something grab my hand.
It was Cira. All of a sudden, the fog was gone and I stood in a cobbled courtyard with square hedges to form a road up to a large manor. My eyes blinked and I felt a shiver. Feeling returned to my muscles, and I could finally take a breath. Desperately. When I followed the hand clutching mine upward, I met bright viridian eyes betraying at least some concern.
“Phew, almost lost you.” She pulled me further and I noticed the world around me looked more vague the closer I looked. “We need to hurry—”
“No—wait. What the hell… Just happened?” I was still in shock and played the role of an anchor in her escape. “Why can’t you let me know before you do these things? And what happened to Madam Granola or whatever?”
Cira did have a rare sense of urgency on her face, so I at least let us continue walking toward the front door.
“Sorry, I didn’t expect this. We’re no longer within a conjured memory—I suppose its bearer knows nothing of this place.” Cira waved her arm around and it left afterimages. Worse yet, I could see right through it to the colorful flowers along the fence. “Just don’t let go of my hand. We are currently unbound spirits adrift in an ancient aethereal imprint until we return to our bodies.”
“And… how do we do that?” While the world was vague, that was not to say it was blurred or muddled in lack of detail. There were many vibrant colors within the courtyard, and everything looked incredibly well-defined—real even, but something was just off about it. Like each thrum of my own heart threatened to repel me from this place.
It wasn’t like the fog was returning, but like my vision was cutting out in intermittent places. It was more accurate to say that which needn’t be observed didn’t bother appearing, but if I observed something too closely, there wasn’t enough of it left to see.
I started to worry holding onto Cira wasn’t enough to remain, then I noticed the myriad flame in her lantern.
Every color and more, many I couldn’t tell you the name of if I tried, and the world around us seemed to flicker along with it. As if the flames were breathing life into this place. Were they forcing the aether to bring us here?
“I suspect the Paradise Mage,” Is she serious…? “is actively working to pull us out. He is likely struggling because my consciousness and yours have left his area of authority. Still, we’re probably just laying on the floor of some hut, mind and soul intact, so it’s not like we’re completely adrift.”
“Well… that’s good. We just need to wait and he’ll pull us out.” Relief welled up in my chest, and Cira took it as a sign to tug me along faster.
“Exactly why we need to hurry. There’s a juicy secret inside this manor, I just know it.”
Cira held up her hand, conjuring a new, shinier crystal orb, and snickered to herself, “But my aura is no longer that of a pitiful dead woman.” I realized my haphazard domain was long gone—I guess it died with Madam belliyon. Cira gathered more air in a second than I could in a day, and the courtyard’s existence seemed to suffer under the pressure.
Right when I thought she was going to tear what remained of this world apart, the wind crackled like thunder. Glass shattered as all the windows disappeared and the front door exploded to splinters. Choice few bricks slid out from their place, and I was sure for a moment the entire building would fall.
The last of Cira’s wind cleared the resulting dust and she pulled me up the stairs and straight through the front door. Once we were inside, the blood drained from my face. A small group stood around a magic circle, painting it in blood. Behind them were masses of intwined corpses. Not exactly human, but close enough. Just like the abominations that destroyed so many.
“Fascinating.” Cira crossed her arms and looked over the glyphs, “As far as spatial enchantments go, those are all beginner runes, but arranged in such a complex array that it appears they’re attempting long-range teleportation via rudimentary means. I guess it makes sense they escaped that way.”
“Wh-what do you mean? Is that possible? What are all the bodies for? Those monsters—” I was in shock at her words but grew petrified when I realized I wasn’t the only one. Needless to say, Cira continued.
“Those wretched ghouls slaughtered the townsfolk for all their mana, and were reduced to a catalyst to power this array for their escape… I’m all for convenient repurposing, but this just feels so wrong… Why slaughter everyone in the first place? Was the old geezer taking blame just a matter of convenience as well, or was his defamation the goal?”
“Who…” The woman on the ground spoke, “Who are you?”
She had gone pale at the rambling interloper, and Cira did the same when she heard the woman speak, locking very alert eyes.
“Oh… oh no.” Cira looked at me, “We have a serious problem.”
“And… that problem is—”
“I said who ARE YOU?!” The woman jumped to her feet and shot a flaming spear at us, which fizzled away very quickly.
Cira, still looking at me, “They can see us.” As she said, all eyes were on us. Mana flared up but was snuffed out upon inception.
“But… they could always see us. They even spoke to us in the—”
“No. I told you we’re no longer in a memory. These people in the past…” She wore that look on her face like she was trying to avoid admitting a great mistake, “they can see us.”
“In a memory…?” The woman had intently listened to Cira’s words. Her eyes narrowed, “Whose memory?”
Mana burst and we were assailed with a hundred flaming needles. They were worthless, luckily.
“Your memory.” Cira laughed, “You grow into a very old woman, I’ll have you know.”
Cira was undoubtedly stronger than this woman, but I felt another force of mana gather in the room. A sudden gust brushed over us. Power manifested in the hue of a fine rose wine. I didn’t recognize it as an element, but it formed smoke that drifted in on the breeze and converged into the shape of a person.
“I would love to hear more about that,” He looked young, but his eyes were smug—flushed with the arrogance of age. Dark hair combed up like the nobles above almost hid a pair of short horns on his head. He reached out a hand and Cira recoiled, “To what do I owe the pleasure of a visit from such beautiful creatures—”
Shattering crystal drew my attention, and I watched Cira crush her crystal orb in her hand. As shimmering shards fell to the ground, the makeshift staff was replaced by dark wood. My arms’ form trembled in its wake.
“You will forget this.” Petulant gray smoke flowed from the wooden staff and into the mysterious horned man, then she turned her gaze to the woman, “And I will see you in fifteen hundred years.”
More smoke enveloped the baffled mages on the ground as the room around us faded to white. I watched her rainbow torch wisp wildly as if a storm was intent on blowing it out. Another prominent force of mana bore down on us like the sky had fallen, and the world only faded further.
It felt like I spent hours in a blizzard, but my chest suddenly heaved, and I felt warm air with a faint scent of salt and ale.
I heard another violent inhale beside me and golden hair danced as Cira flew to her feet. The island trembled, but it was not her doing.
“WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, LITTLE SORCERER, TO MEDDLE WITH MY MEMORIES?” That familiar thunderous voice echoed through our minds.
“Those are my memories, you oaf.” Cira replied, “You should be grateful.”