(Back to Isa POV)
It hurts so fucking bad... I have no idea how I kept going in that fight. I just felt... compelled to keep going, not by honor, anger, or loyalty... it somehow felt... good.
When I stood up after getting basically tazed by Karl everything felt strange. The world seemed to move slowly and my entire body felt numb. When some of those enemy knights charged me it was as if their movements were slow and I could almost see where their swings were going. I sidestepped or ducked every attack easily and then I attacked back. As soon as I dropped one a surge of electricity seemingly flowed through my body and it felt good, way too good. A rush of dopamine that shouldn't have happened, but it drove me forward, easily slaughtering those knights between me, that armored bitch, and Karl. I didn't even notice when I lost my sword in the fighting I just wanted more blood, more gore, and more death. I had been consumed by some form of bloodlust I couldn't describe.
Then was the fight against the armored woman. I knew she was stronger than me and I managed one last act of lucidity over the feeling that had overcome me. I managed to remove the strength limiters on the runes of my armor. I had enough mental capability to do that, but not enough to realize how badly the enhanced strength would hurt me. Even the slight healing bullshit the runes offer wasn't enough to keep me from destroying my body, but the feeling every time I caused her pain was indescribable... and it scares me.
Never before have I felt good about taking life, even Lady Beller didn't bring me joy like this. Killing was the means to an end or a way to protect myself or those around me. Before this, if I had my way I would never kill anyone if I didn't have to. I guess I'll have to do some introspection to make sure I haven't finally lost my mind. I hope it was just a product of taking a nasty shock mixed with the feeling of betrayal. I also have to make a mental note to ask Karl about his reasoning, I kinda wish he had gotten to me first so that we could talk things through. Hell, maybe he actually had a good reason that I would agree with.
As for that big teleportation ritual I fucked up I can't remember exactly what I changed it to. I simply changed some of the sigils to ones I remember. At the very least I changed the teleportation destination, but aside from that I can't wrap my mind around where I sent us or what I did... everything hurts so damn much to think about that. I still feel a little pride at my spiteful final act during that fight. At the bare minimum, I'll be with Godiva and can deny them whatever they want with her, hell if it's nefarious enough I'll kill her to protect her, death is sometimes preferable.
I also feel as if this teleportation is taking too long. I am still in the blackness that engulfed me after the initial flash the ritual caused. I am simply in a formless void in lots of pain due to nearly all of my bones being broken, smelling my own vomit, and I think I'm bleeding out. Not the best situation but hey, it could be worse.
Somewhere in the distance, I hear muffled yelling getting closer, or in actuality, more clear. It's a familiar-sounding language but one I do not understand. Whoever is speaking has a deep authoritative voice and is really chewing someone the fuck out. My vision begins to clear as light fills my eyes. I have to squint as the brilliant white light blinds me. Suddenly my pain feels distant and dull, rather than sharp and overpowering. My vision clears to show me a strange sight.
Before me, two strange-looking figures lie prostrated in front of something impossible. I somehow recognize the two figures as Silus and the green dragon. They don't look like anything I've ever seen but I know it is them. They are currently being shouted at by the impossible... thing. A continuously folding and unfolding shape glowing with light. The geometry of the shapes is impossible and are of materials and colors that do not exist, at all. It really tears into the two of them for a while before suddenly I feel as if the thing has all eyes on me. A wave of calm washes over me as the thing speaks to me in a million voices, in all languages at once, all languages that exist, ones of the worlds I am from and those unknown. I don't know how I know this, but I do. It speaks,
"Oh... you aren't supposed to be conscious here. I am sorry you had to see this little discipline session. My kin here... well really only one of them has broken some rules, and I apologize for that.
For this trouble, may you be healed..."
Suddenly I feel all the pain disappear. All the vomit and blood covering me is suddenly gone, even the sword lodged inside me is now at my side and is completely clean. All my bones feel correct now and looking down at my arms, at the runes enscribed there they fade and the leather and steel are back to how it was before I ever added the runes, clean and polished, but still badly damaged from the fight. The thing then speaks,
"We will meet again. I pray it is no time soon. Your role is important here.
Remember, even in your darkest of days when you feel alone,
Legion is with you...."
I am thrust back into darkness and I feel gentle hands place me onto a cobblestone surface. A cool and dry wind blows through my armor as I feel dust kicked up. I can hear the sounds of songbirds and the rolling of a stream. I can smell some flowers in bloom... all the sounds and smells remind me of somewhere. I open my eyes and take a look...
[Perspective change from Isa to 3rd person narration] (Last one for a while I swear!!!!)
Godiva blinks rapidly as her eyes adjust to the sudden change in light. She finds herself sitting on a weed-filled cobblestone road. Her arm is throbbing from injuries sustained against the foreign hero, but she is mostly okay. She is curious about where the ritual had taken her and looking around she finds herself in a strange place.
Buildings made of expertly cut stone, a mix of gray and tan stone. Domes made of stone bricks cap some of the larger and more important-looking buildings. Looking up she can see the entire city is carved and built into the side of a towering and white-capped mountain. Down the mountain, she can see the white sands of a seemingly endless desert, only contrasted by a beautiful clear river flowing and carving through the sands, the banks filled with vegetation, lush-looking grass, and endless amounts of multi-colored flowers.
Godiva sits there in awe at the beautiful city, the expert craftsmanship required to create such a city of stone impossible in her home kingdom. The cool mountain air carries the smell of the flowers to her nose and she feels at peace in this place and for a moment takes in the view, soon she then notices the truth of this place.
The planter boxes, filled with wonderful bouquets of flowers, watered through small aqueducts and channels are overgrown and flow out of their planter. Ivy from these planters climbs the stone walls, following cracks made in the stone by time and weather. Faded wooded signs hang by rusty and breaking chains or dry-rotted rope. Doors are shattered or are knocked off of their hinges. The lovingly carved portals were left to fall apart and bleach in the desert sun. Great waves of blackened stone cover the city, a sign of a terrible fire having consumed much of the city. Then there is the silence aside from the sounds of nature. This city is a ghost town.
She looks to her side only to see a terrible sight, a pile of bones, picked clean by scavengers. Rusty weapons and armor sit next to it and lodged in the ribcage is a sword belonging to one of the neighboring kingdoms she recognizes. The more she looks the more bones she can see. They are covered in moss, weeds, and blown sand. All bleached to a stark white, some damaged badly, and some with char on them showing the firey death the person had faced.
Godiva goes to shout in shock when she sees Isa sitting in front of her. Immediately she is overjoyed to see her friend and protector. She begins to speak when she notices something is odd with him. He is looking around, his shoulders slouched instead of holding strong in their normal broadness. He remains on his knees seemingly not breathing, holding his breath as he takes in his surroundings. Then he leaps to his feet and begins sprinting.
Over the mountains rain clouds are able to break over the barrier, a rare happening, a once in every five years occurrence for this region when a storm is strong enough to push clouds over the white-capped mountains. Godiva climbs to her feet as the sun is covered by the light-gray clouds. She hurries after Isa who expertly sprints through the streets, catching himself as he trips on the uneven and neglected cobble.
Godiva worries about him, as he runs as if he were possessed by something. Eventually, she follows him into a large square where he falls to his knees in front of an odd sight.
A well-crafted set of leather and steel armor, similar to Isa's but more rudimentary hangs lifelessly on two spears which have their back ends planted into the ground. The white bones of the skeleton inside peek through the armor, a few of the bones sit below the armor, where scavengers have removed them to pick morsels of flesh from them, back when there was flesh.
There is a low rumble of thunder as rain begins to drizzle on the dead city. Isa removes his damaged helmet and throws it to the side. The clanging metal echoes in the now-quiet city as the songbirds hide inside the empty buildings. He sits on his knees for a while staring at the remains before him. He crawls forward saying something in his mother's tongue. He gingerly removes the remains from the spears and respectfully piles the bones and armor. He takes the helmet and holds it close to his chest, resting his head against it.
Godiva carefully steps closer to the sad display. Through the rain she can see the sadness in his eyes, the raindrops making it impossible to tell what is rain and what are tears. Isa speaks quietly to the empty helmet as his body shudders slightly. As Godiva gets close he speaks to her in the Alrius language,
"Welcome... to my home...Yotesden..."
Godiva's eyes go wide for a moment and she asks quietly,
"Do you know them?"
Isa nods slowly and says in a choking voice,
"This.... this is my dad..."
Godiva feels her heart sink into her stomach, unable to imagine what her friend feels at this moment. She had almost forgotten for a moment, that Isa Hasslerouge, was no Hasslerouge. He was not raised in nobility, his first steps were not on golden embroidered rugs, and he did not run for comfort into the Duke's arms when scared. This pile of bones and armor in front of him is his father. The man who raised him from birth, the man who beamed with pride at his son's achievements, and the man who died most likely thinking of his son...
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Godiva feels tears well up in her eyes for her friend who must be hurting so badly right now. She crouches beside him and wraps her good arm around his shoulders before pulling him in close. He holds onto the helmet but leans into the princess next to him. Quiet and contemplative of something. He then says to her quietly,
"I am recognized as the son of the Hasslerouge family...it means nothing to me...no amount of gold, fame, or anything they can offer can buy me what I want most...I want my mom... I want my dad... I want to go home..."
In silence he stands, breaking Godiva's grip as he collects the bones and armor. He grabs an old piece of canvas, which is barely holding together, and wraps the remains inside. He holds the bag of remains in his arms as he solemnly walks through the wet streets. His eyes locked forward, staring somewhere distant.
Godiva follows his march as he walks through the streets he grew up in. He pauses at certain buildings for a moment, clearly remembering something from his childhood which was less than three years ago, but feels like decades. His gait slowly loses momentum until he is shuffling across the wet stone and then he stops in front of a seemingly random house.
The door is slightly charred but the sturdy wood held against the blaze. In the darkened wood there is a small mural carved with care. It looks to be a family of three, the father standing tall with a spear in hand depicted in a way Godiva somewhat recognizes. What is assumed to be the mother stands behind the smaller child-like figure. They appear to stand together lovingly. There were once more carvings on the doors, but the blaze had removed or badly damaged them to unrecognizable blobs.
Isa opens the door with care and enters the small home. He takes the sack of remains through the dusty home and enters a back room. He exits with a shovel and leaves through a backdoor entrance. This door leads to a garden with rich brown dirt taken from the other side of the mountains filling the small lot. A small pipe from the aqueduct flows through the yard allowing water to gently trickle through the earth, allowing for grass to form. Isa drops the sack and begins digging a hole.
Godiva leaves him to this task in the rain as she sits down in one of the still intact dining chairs. While she is mostly an offensive magic user her father made sure she understood healing magic to some degree no matter how minor. As the rain patters against the roof above she works on her broken arm, which for some reason is the same one every time. She considers the luck needed to break the same arm seemingly in the same place every time. It takes a while but eventually, her arm no longer hurts and she can move it. With that done she goes back outside to check on Isa.
She finds him on his knees over the hole. He has broken the shovel and tied it into a strange shape using scraps from his clothing. The handle of the shovel is broken into two pieces and the head is discarded, they are tied perpendicular to one another creating a cross. Godiva has no clue about the meaning of this object but understands it to be some manner of headstone. He had organized the bones and armor of his father back into the shape of a normal human. The bones were placed inside the armor carefully. Isa is saying something under his breath, speaking to the bones in the language of the Coyote.
He ignores the rain as it soaks him to the bone, Godiva looks for something to cover him but finds nothing to do the job well enough. She goes back inside and sits at the dining table sad, but determined to figure out a way to get home. She tries to think about the location of this place. She only has a fundamental understanding of the more civilized world, always assuming the Frontiersmen lived like tribals. Most maps didn't go far enough west to see the homes of the Frontiersmen so they could be close to home or over a continent away. The backdoor opens pulling Godiva from her thoughts and revealing a dirty and pale Isa. His eyes stare at the ground ahead and he says quietly,
"I'm...I'm going to bed..."
He trudges through the house removing his armor and throwing it onto the ground with wet thuds. Down to his undergarments, he enters a side room revealing a dusty, but completely intact bedroom. He opens a trunk filled with some surprisingly preserved clothing. He pulls on some still-fitting clothing and flops onto the bed kicking up a plume of dust. Slowly he pulls himself under the covers and faces the stone wall. Godiva enters the main room and using some of the wood piled next to the hearth starts a fire and begins drying herself and her clothing. Her heart weighs heavy but she has no idea what her friend is going through, and this isn't the first time she has felt helpless.
While nobility lower than the royal family do have problems within their families and sometimes outside they are never beyond what could be best described as petty squabbles and lovers quarrels. Of course, the royal family's worst issue so far was the death of Godiva's grandfather, the old king, but she was too young to really remember the man. Some of the free servants left the royal household for various reasons but overall Godiva has never felt true loss, and she knows it and feels like she is lacking something as a friend because she has no idea how she can even begin to help Isa.
Once dry she enters Isa's room where he hasn't moved, and with only a short glance she can see his eyes are wide open, staring at the wall in front of him. She lowers herself onto the edge of his bed sitting there for a while thinking about what to do. He doesn't move or even seem to notice her arrival. She then leans over and forces an arm underneath his body and pulls him into an embrace. His body tenses for a moment but one of his hands comes up and gently cups her hands where they are clasped around him. The tension in his back and shoulders disappears with a long sigh.
The afternoon falls into the evening and then into the night. The two remaining people in Yotesden among the ghosts lie there hanging onto one another for comfort. One for a loss, and one out of fear of being in a distant place with no clear path home. The rare and gentle rainstorm pours for a while, making everything droop for a while under the weight of water, but it breathes new life into the arid place and it goes as gently as it comes and soon the sun peaks over the mountains bringing golden light over the empty, but now florishing city.
(Back to Isa POV)
I wake up from my restless sleep a pit in my stomach but I'm better now. I go to sit up but feel a weight on me. It takes me a few seconds to remember Godiva had held me in a caring embrace the entire night. I don't move feeling the warmth of her body until I feel her stir as light comes into my bedroom. She lets me go as she sits up to stretch. I sit up at this point popping a joint seemingly back into place. I look over at Godiva, give her a light smile, and say to her,
"Thank you for dealing with me... I didn't know how to act... I thought I had all my tears shed by now."
She shakes her head and then responds,
"No, I'm sorry, I can't give any words of comfort and I don't know what you are going through."
I give a light laugh and tell her,
"No, you did exactly what was needed. You are here... even if I may have more or less brought you here. Any words may have been close to insincere."
She nods and then asks me confused,
"You seem better today... I don't know much about grief but normally people are stuck on it for a while."
I frown understanding what she is asking but not really having the right words to say. I find something close to right and tell her,
"I'm not, but I'm handling it better after a night of grieving.
I was so bad last night because I never got to officially bury my father. I watched him die back then and it hurt and I raged, cried, and shut down, but I never just had the time to sit there and grieve his passing and especially never got to bury him. I really thought that during those late nights, in a barn or locked in a cage like an animal I had cried all my feelings out for my lost parents, but seeing the dry remains of dad... that hurt.
Though I can pull myself together. That's what he would want me to do. To be sad about his passing because I love him and he loves me, but because of that love I have to keep going. I have work and responsibilities to do. I probably won't ever get over it, but I can learn to manage it better.
Right now I have to figure out a way to get us back to the Kingdom of Alrius. To get you home and to go and shove a molten iron rod up Karl's ass, that's my goal right now."
She smiles seemingly happy with my explanation and I stand up and enter the main room. I pick up my destroyed armor and put it inside the empty equipment chest by the door. The contents were emptied a while ago, but I won't let it go empty again as it will be the final resting place of this armor that has served me well. With that done I begin explaining to Godiva,
"Well... I had time to think about it. I hope the people back home are smart enough to figure out what the big teleportation spell is and what it does. If I remember right my sudden changes made it send us to the place of the target's greatest shame. My last moment spit made me the target so here we are.
Based on my understanding of the airspeed of an airship and the intelligence of our peers I'd say we have at least a week here in Yotesden before people come for us. "
She nods and asks,
"So what do we do until then?"
I reply,
"Well, I recommend first we secure some food through whatever means necessary. Then we can take a trip down memory lane and I'll show you around my hometown. Anything else is to keep boredom away."
She nods and follows me outside into the suddenly far more green Yotesden. The flowers bloom on every vine and plant and everything seems more lively in the morning sun. A lovely sight overall, and nostalgic to an almost damaging degree. With that, we begin searching through the abandoned city looking for entertainment and supplies.
Over the next few days, we managed to not only make do but thrive. Due to the rushed state of the depopulation of the town all stores of preserved food remain intact. Jarred fruits which are mostly edible remain in cellars. A few of the pubs have stores of dark brown beer and alcohol in their basements giving us something aside from water to drink, and a way to unwind at the end of the day. I avoid looting any homes out of respect for my neighbors. When I can I take some time to bury the remains of those who died in defense of their home. While I can't remember or tell who is who sometimes I give them respect where I can.
Slowly the city feels less depressed as I clean up the human remains and sometimes tidy up areas I remember frequenting when I was younger. The city feels empty as expected, but it no longer feels haunted and sad. It now seems like a relic from a better time. A way to remember something that was once grand and has fallen, but the hard work of those who came before still remains.
Toward the end of the week, we enter the Voivodes palace. Godiva takes in all the craftsmanship of the building, almost disbelieving it could be done without the usage of magic. The high dome in the center with a still-intact mural depicting a great battle on it. Statues and paintings of all previous and current Voivodes line the halls, the most recent one defaced beyond recognition. The statue smashed and the painting burned. While she explores the palace I work on unlocking the Voivodes treasury.
With a specific placement of weights on some pedestals the old waterwheel has water flow over it bringing to life fountains all through the palace, in my opinion making it all the more grand and beautiful. With the mechanical energy granted by the flowing water what appears to be a solid wall groans violently before shuddering and the old gears crank it open on massive hinges revealing a hidden room.
Godiva follows me inside and I ask her to light the braisers as we go since she can use magic and all that. With small candles of flame, she lights them all lighting up the room in a warm glow. This reveals the treasures of the Stella Coyote.
The vault is filled not with gold coins like many others would, but instead is filled with trophies gained through combat and other trials. This mostly is the heirloom weapons from vanquished foes, important artifacts from other Frontiersman cultures won through various trials, and then the equipment from the previous Voivodes.
I smile upon seeing something that shouldn't exist but at my request, the Voivode at the time preserved it for me. A massive skull with human-shaped teeth and a massive pelt of shaggy brown fur, the hide underneath having been tanned and cured forming a sort of leather under the brown fur. I say out loud,
"Hey, there Silus. How's it going?"
Godiva approaches the dragon's skull and asks,
"I-Is this the dragon you slew?"
I nod and her eyes widen in wonderment as she inspects the remains as I start going through the piles of preserved gear. On a pedestal before me is the helmet of the last Voivode. A leather and chain helmet with a faceplate looking like the vague outline of a coyote's head, a circlet of spikes line the head like a crown, one fit for the Voivode. I nod at it in respect, as if the old man can see me and I continue looking through the gear deciding on what to take with me.
After a while, I get what I am looking for and begin thinking about what runes I wish to add to all these pieces of armor and weapons. I leave the treasury after taking Silus's hide, I have plans for it. I close the vault once more and we leave the palace, continuing a small routine to gather food and clean up the city.
Two weeks since our teleportation we finally see an airship on the horizon and its masts fly the Alrius colors. It's time to return to the Kingdom and I have great plans ahead.
Never again will our enemies come to our gates...