An Epic Hero Story: Book 2 Chapter 43 (Patreon)

Gandai was quickly proving my conviction in the fact that there wasn’t a single normal Thaumaturge in all of Anglyn, maybe in all of the world. He led us through his house, revealing a scale to it I’d not suspected from the outside as he hurried down into a previously unseen basement, and started hastily sifting his way through scrolls.

Except he didn’t just look at them, like a regular person, but rather sniffed or, at times, licked the exteriors, pulling foul faces as he tossed apparently unhelpful articles aside before he finally settled upon one that he seemed to approve of.

He unfurled it quickly, and though I could see from a glance over his shoulder that it contained no language I was able to read, he began speaking in a monotone that betrayed his words as coming from the parchment.

“And so the earth’s skin shall break and a necromantic ichor will bubble forth. Those who disturb the sanctity of the underworld shall bring about ruin. Ruin of themselves. Ruin of their world.” 

I shivered, Vara blanched, Devyne looked like he was about to shit himself and both the Arvharest trainees appeared on the brink of fleeing. Cedwin actually did try to flee, halted by a particularly pointy glare from Morlo. 

Only Gruin and Il’vanja appeared indifferent, the former from distraction and the latter because she was simply apathetic to all things in the world. Morlo was the first of us to reply.

“That’s not…terribly useful,” he pointed out, “there’s no…instructions?”

“Why is nobody asking about the important thing!?” Vara cut in. All eyes turned to her, and if anything she grew more angry, not less, beneath the weight of such scrutiny. “Kyvaine lost consciousness! He had some sort of fit, and he hasn’t even mentioned it since.”

At this last part, she shot a look at me that left me blinking and frowning in confusion. I realised only then how odd it was that I hadn’t brought up the experience. It was, after all, my own brain that’d decided to take an impromptu break. 

“I…suppose it didn’t seem important?” I frowned even as I said it, the explanation rang wrong to me. That sort of episode, seeing visions, was pretty damned important. 

Then something else clicked, and I turned to Morlo.

“You didn’t even ask me what I saw. You asked about the last ones, not this. You know what’s going on, don’t you?”

Morlo got quickly ratty at that, clearing his throat.

“I have hypotheses,” he said at last, “and, presently, no way to test them. We’ll find out eventually, but if we do we need to find out more about what’s causing these undead to emerge first. Any data on that will, by association, tell us more about your…condition.”

“Not good enough,” I snapped. Now that Vara had made me realise, put my thoughts onto it, it seemed impossible to think about anything other than my fits. “You said you had hypotheses. Share one.”

Morlo eyed me for a second, then sighed and looked around.

“Pick up that desk,” he nodded to a heavy oaken thing strewn in one corner of the room. 

“What?”

“Just do it, pick it up.”

“It’s got to be a thousand pounds.”

“If you don’t want to find out anything new, then feel free to ignore my instructions.”

I muttered a few very brave and defiant things about him, all under my breath of course, and gave lifting the desk a go. To my surprise, the dead weight obeyed my musculature and let itself be hoisted off the ground. I was lifting it awkwardly and my back twinged in warning, but all the same…I shouldn’t have been able to do that. I let it fall the few inches down to where I’d lifted it from, wincing at the sound of floorboards groaning under stress.

Everyone stared at me, and I stared back. 

“So I’m stronger,” I managed at last, “that’s what that carving did?”

“More or less,” Morlo told me, “you said you’ve found a few others?”

“Yes. A few.”

He nodded, apparently more to himself. “That explains a lot then. Find a few more and we won’t need the Grynkori anymore.”

Gruin suggested a few anatomically improbable courses of action for him, but Morlo didn’t seem to notice. He was still distracted. 

“What sites do you know of that have relevance to this prophecy of yours?” Morlo asked Gandai, who bristled fast and took on a rather indignant air.

“It’s not a prophecy,” he snapped, “it’s a warning written by the scholars of its time.”

“Most prophecies were written by scholars, too,” Morlo pointed out, “two thousand years ago madmen were called philosophers, and everybody sought them out for wisdom.”

“Seems like madmen are still being sought out in scholarly circles,” I muttered, but neither of the Thaumaturgically trained lunatics seemed to hear me as they continued their bickering. I just sat around and tried to listen, but found my attention slipping fast. Things quickly moved onto the esoteric matters that I hadn’t the education or attention to make real sense of. 

Vara did. Or at least, she’d paid more attention to what education both of us had shared, and spent more time experiencing it. I could practically see the clockwork of her mind moving around as she soaked up what was being said and filed it all away into that vast library of her memory. 

++”I have no idea where he’s getting this impression from. I was so confused listening to them talk that I actually worried I’d been poisoned at one point, having heard what sounded like ten unbroken sentences without a single individual word I recognised.”++

Eventually some sort of agreement seemed to be arrived at by the Thaumaturges, if only to leave their debate for later. The skies had darkened outside, and without my noticing the lights that shone within the building had slowly become our only source of sight. It was cold, and the thought of shelter quickly came to mind. 

“You can’t stay here,” Gandai told us all, “especially not the Grynkori.”

“If you have a problem with my kind, you can say it to my face!” Gruin roared.

Gandai eyed him with the fearlessness innate to all who’ve made a serious study of Thaumaturgy. 

“You are unpredictably aggressive, loud and wrathful creatures prone to destroying human possessions through the exertion of a strength more suited to works of stone than wood or ceramic,” he told him.

Gruin paused. “Aye, fair enough,” he grumbled, surprisingly. 

We ended up finding lodgings in several inns. The paranoid part of me didn’t much like this, and rebelled especially hard when Morlo gave Cedwin a room in a building shared by none other among us. I soon realised what his logic was, of course. He wanted the gunner to leave. Now that we were in a settlement again, we had no great need for every fighting hand here. 

I, for one, was much pleased by the decision. I’d gotten somewhat used to sleeping with the fear of Cedwin slicing my throat open in the night, but that by no means meant it was pleasant. With him gone, all I’d have to worry about was that fucking Demon still hounding my heels. And the fear of my undeserved reputation burning up into a smoke of humiliation.

Or Morlo getting me killed, possibly just for a laugh.

Going over it all again left me thoroughly miserable, and it was fortunately timed with my heading to my own inn to sleep. I had nothing to do, then, except dwell upon my various miseries and let them erode whatever scarce shadow of a good mood remained in me. 

Well, except eat hot food and lie in a hot bath and put my head down on a soft pillow. The memory of being spoiled by Arvharest’s nobility was now a distant enough one that I was thinking more of earthen mattresses than feathered ones. It made the modestly high-quality straw of my current accommodations feel like heaven.

Full, warm and with something that provided more give than a slab of granite to sleep on, even I couldn’t help but have my mood lift. I kept my armour close, just in case something—or several hundred somethings—tried to kill me in my sleep, and kept my sword right beside the bed. Other than that, I was so exhausted that sleep took me fast.

But not long.

The creaking floorboard woke me up, a sure sign of how deeply my roadside paranoia had yet sunk. It also kept my life from ending that day. A shaft of moonlight drifted in through a window I’d been sure to leave shut, and I saw it glint off something metal held out ahead of the silhouette in my room’s corner. 

A gun barrel. I froze, and must’ve somehow given away that I was awake and aware because the figure with the weapon moved deeper into the light. Cedwin. He was staring at me with unmasked hatred, face and body trembling but pistol-hand terribly, surgically still. He wouldn’t miss. 

“Surprised?” he sneered.

I swallowed, bit back my instinctive, panicked response, and did a lot of thinking very fast. Cedwin was here to kill me, I could tell. He had that look. So he was the sort of man to kill people over grudges, even when it did nothing to materially benefit him and everything to endanger his life. That told me he was petty and vicious, going on sadistic. It told me how to work him. 

Either it told me that, or I was dead.

“Not really,” I shrugged fractionally, “I was waiting for you. Bad luck that I dozed off before you came, but I got to thinking you’d never work up your nerve.”

That threw him off instantly, as I’d hoped. Cedwin had come here for fear and begging, for humiliation. I wasn’t giving it to him. And for as long as he didn’t get what he wanted, he needed me alive to try and extract it.

Granted, I didn’t have much of a plan beyond playing to try and get as many more sweet, precious moments of life as I could, but it was working so far.

“You can cut the brave act,” the gunner snarled, “I’ve been watching you long enough to see through it.” Well there was a nasty surprise. Of course something as simple as having my pathological deceptions exposed was no reason to stop them. 

“Are you going to shoot me?” I asked him, projecting as convincing an air of boredom and disinterest as I could, “if you do, I’d like you to aim for the heart if possible. Headshots can leave a man still living, and I’d rather just cleanly die than spend the rest of my life like you.”

Utter fury washed across his features. Fast and intense enough that I spent a long moment worrying if I’d made a mistake, wondering if I was about to see the flash of burning powder and feel the touch of death. Cedwin just kept glaring instead.

“You think you’re so fucking charming,” he spat, “so much better than the rest of us.”

That I did, in fact, believe that, seemed suddenly tangential to my situation. 

I didn’t have time for thaumaturgy, Cedwin had seen me work it often enough that he’d twitch his finger and kill me before I could get halfway to conjuring any magic of use. That limited my options immensely. The more I considered things, the more I depressingly realised that I was fundamentally hoping for him to miss.

Not likely. Cedwin was as great a shot as any human I’d ever seen with any weapon.