Solipsism: Chapter 6 (Patreon)

I hated hiking. Never done much of it in my life, mind, and having that proud history changed was entirely against my will in this world. It took me maybe an hour to realise that I’d never be doing it for fun, and not much longer to swear an oath to myself that I’d do all in my power to avoid it at any cost. 

The sheer distance alone would have been one thing, but it was the terrain that got me. Aethiq was, apparently, a perfectly flat and level land for the most part. Not here. Around the village of Guran, its landscape was almost entirely consumed by a mix of forest land, at best, and outright jungle at worst. 

“Stop whining.” 

Aexilica, I was quickly learning, was not the most empathetic of women. As a matter of fact, she could have been dropped into an all-female boothe in some Roman coliseum’s spectator’s zone and still not cracked the top ten. And even after our brief accord yesterday, she really didn’t like me. I normally had to spend a fair sum on Only Fans to get women to talk to me the way she did, but this one seemed content to hurl her abuse free of charge. It wasn’t nearly as enjoyable from her, either. 

Still, I walked. Barely mustering the breath to reply.

“I’m not.”

“You keep glaring at me.”

“Because you’re making me walk through a fucking jungle.” I snapped, between desperate breaths. My lungs felt like they were melting.

“I suppose you didn’t get out much back in your world, just sat in your palace doing as you pleased?” She said it with more envy than jealousy, but either way it stung. She wasn’t wrong, not in the broadstrokes at least. 

“I’ve been practicing my powers while we went.” I muttered, eager to change the subject. It was true of course, I’d never been the hardest worker back home but there was something uniquely motivating about literal magic that seemed to overcome that. 

She didn’t say anything, which bothered me. I’d wanted her to ask, it sounded much cooler to give information you were asked for. Especially when you played coy and said it all mysteriously, flicking a bit of hair out of your eyes at the same time. This one seemed intent to ruin everything. 

“I can heat things up.” I explained. “As well as just propel them, but I need to be touching whatever my target is. Also, that target has a big impact on what can be done. If I throw a rock with everything I’ve got- magically I mean- then I can leave a tree looking worse for wear, but if I use that same amount of power on a branch then I’ll just end up blowing it to bits mid-flight and be lucky to even scratch the bark with a few haphazard splinters.”

She didn’t seem that impressed, which, once more, didn’t fail to bug me. 

“That’s something at least.” The woman shrugged, not looking back as we continued. We’d been walking for easily half a day, and by my reckoning we must’ve cleared at least twenty miles despite the hostility of our terrain. She didn’t relent though. It got me thinking.

“Do you actually have an idea of where you’re taking us?” I prodded. “I don’t want to march for miles just because.”

Her eyes turned sharp.

“We’re not marching for no reason,” She replied, “We’re-”

“-Drawing the Irethani away, yes, I know, but where?”

And, more importantly, how long would it take them to find us? That seemed like the sort of question that would only lock her up again though. 

“There’s a set of mountains north of here, big ones. They’re difficult to pass, impossible to hold, and so the people who live there have been permitted to do so relatively in peace. It’s one of the few areas of Aethiq that might be beyond the Irethani’s reach.”

I thought about that.

“Wouldn’t that defeat the point of luring them away? Surely they’d just take revenge on the villagers then.”

“Not if they’re all long gone before they realise we’re beyond them.”

Put like that, the long walk made a lot more sense. I was a bit quieter afterwards, right up until we finally made camp for the night. 

I felt the air cooling by the hour, but while we’d been walking my own exertion had kept me warm. Now that fatigue was winning and forcing me still, and we were sitting down to rest, the heat started leaving me scarily fast. Aexilica was quick in giving me orders of course, disappearing into the foliage almost instantly and coming back with a respectable amount of twigs and one or two logs bundled into her arms. She dropped them in a pile.

“You said you can heat things up now?”

The implication was obvious, and I got to work on getting us a fire started. 

It wasn’t as easy heating things as launching them, possibly due to my lack of practice. Or perhaps my just being better at the former- I’d find out as I got chance to test my limits in both areas. Still, even while torturing myself with the march I’d gotten a fair amount of time to work on the deed. It didn’t take more than two tries to light up a few leaves, the only obstacle was when they simply fizzled out instead of setting fire to the log. 

I frowned, but before I could do anything Aexilica was kneeling down to calmly arrange the wood for me. 

“You’ve never built a fire before?” She asked, hands working as fast as a surgeon’s. I watched her, studying how she went about setting the components down. Larger logs put to one side, with medium twigs piled beside the dry leaves and a few shavings of wood she herself removed with a knife. I understood the logic of it early enough of course, smaller objects caught fire easier. I needed to use one flame to make a bigger one, then turn that to creating a bigger one still. 

It wasn’t ego that got me to take over, of course. I just wanted to let her know that I wasn’t as helpless as I seemed.

“Eager to learn.” I grunted, finishing her work then trying again. I got the flame started on my first try this time, and soon enough we had something of a fire going. The heat, next to the frigid breath of outside air, was almost magical itself.

I caught her eying me at that.

“What?” I snapped, temper suddenly short. Wasn’t every day I got shown up in survivalist skills by a woman. 

“Nothing.” Aexilica snapped back, instantly annoyed again. “I was just watching you use your powers.”

Right, Worldsingers- whatever we were exactly- had some special place in her people’s legends. I’d asked a bit more about that, and hadn’t been entirely surprised to learn our abilities were considered unnatural and evil, even demonic. 

No surprise there, if I were a god I’d try and monopolise the supernatural at my earliest chance, too. Ignoring that this was all nothing more than my brain shitting itself to death of course. I had to say, as far as hallucinations went, I’d have to give it top marks for realism.

So why not enjoy it like an actual life?

Cortana’s question hit my brain like an icicle digging into the stem, and I found myself suddenly angry again, suddenly less interested in the whys and hows of my situation, suddenly a whole lot less philosophical. 

“What was it like, living under the Irethani?” I asked abruptly. Aexilica seemed surprised by the question, and I might have been too. Truth be told I was only even asking it to give myself something to think about besides…Besides the thing I decided that instant not to think about at all. 

“What are you asking about exactly?” Aexilica frowned. I only realised then what a laughably broad question I’d asked. What’s it like living under the United Kingdom, Gordon? Not my sharpest inquiry. 

“How do they treat their subjects?” I asked. She shrugged.

“For the most part we never interact with them directly, or even with their actual Priests. In the cities, you’ll find true temples and organised worship, but this far from the centres of Aethiq they barely even remember we exist. I imagine it’s actually the Priests themselves who’ll be sending for us after this.” Her lips thinned at that, face growing bitter. “Old Uzthcpitoill probably won’t even find out about us until we’re already-” She paused, froze, then spoke again just a bit too quickly. “Long gone.”

So she didn’t expect us to survive this. My blood ran cold, then hot. Lying bitch. 

“And what about the sacrifice?” I asked. “How was that? Or, uh, how was it done more specifically, I guess.”

No point in letting her know I’d noticed her little slip, I figured. And if I made myself look clumsy and oafish while asking a distracting question at the same time, so much the better. People were all too quick to assume clumsy oafs had let them get away with something. Aexilica continued that proud trend by jumping on my question, probably thinking it was a lucky out. 

I had to stop myself from grinning. This was like some tabletop RPG, all lateral thought and sneaky solutions. Better- it had all the freedom and more, while letting me use each one of my senses. I could get used to this.

“They’d do it annually.” Aexilica muttered, voice quieter now, limbs withdrawing as she stared into the fire. “Some places have more frequent sacrifices, mostly slaves taken from other nations in war. But citizens are offered up too, no matter where you live. For a village of our size that would only be one person each year, but… With a village of our size, practically everyone would know who that person was.”

I swallowed, finding my fun suddenly blunted. It was hard not to feel some way about this. I’d read somewhere that playing a TTRPG and making decisions in-game activated the neurons that govern our own behaviour, while watching something on T.V or some other medium turned on the mirror neurons which respond to other people’s. If that was the case, I could only imagine my dying brain was thoroughly convinced everything here was very real, no matter how much I knew otherwise.

So why not enjoy it like an actual life?

It wasn’t a fucking actual life, no matter what that bitch insisted, and I wasn’t going to treat it that way. I couldn’t. My mind suddenly felt…Heavy, like it was being dragged down, thoughts restrained by something tough and unyielding. Cognition itself was worsening my exhaustion.

“We should eat.” I said at last. Aexilica nodded, and fished out some travel rations from her pack. They seemed like some sort of long-lasting biscuit, and tasted like air, but they filled me up a shade. I still ended up going to sleep hungry.

In my dreams, though, I saw things, and heard things. In my dreams I was whispered to by something with a lot of very interesting things to say.