An Epic Hero Story: Book 2 Chapter 48 (Patreon)

Morlo’s look of abject horror lasted for all of a half-second before being smoothed over into nothing. “That’s a weird thing to say,” he grunted. 

My father stepped up next. “Ignoring what my idiot son is saying, what makes you think I’ll let you whisk him away now that I’ve just barely gotten him back?”

It felt oddly characteristic of him to stare down the most powerful Thaumaturge I’d ever seen without even the slightest hint of fear, but Morlo wasn’t as impressed as me. 

“I think a better question is, what do you expect you can do to stop me?”

The air was chilled in an instant, and I heard half a dozen sets of lungs take in a sharp breath all together. Morlo sent his eyes rolling across the group, tilting his head, smiling. The smile didn’t reach even halfway up his face. 

“I’ve been nice,” he told us all. “I’ve been pleasant. I’ve let all of you think that you have a choice in any of this, but apparently I can’t trust you enough to do even that much. The world is in danger and I need Kyvaine to help stop it, so he’s going to stop it whether he wants to or not. If any of you tries to interfere with me, I’ll kill you so thoroughly that a fucking alchemist couldn’t figure out what’s left of you used to be human.”

Nobody said anything. We all just stood there, staring, trembling. Save for Gruin, too belligerent for any emotion save rage, and Il’vanja, too frosty of thought for any emotion at all, we were all a gaggle of traumatised rats. 

I was among the rats, of course. I’d seen Morlo lose, seen clear limits to his power. I knew, intellectually, that his Thaumaturgy was no greater a force than was a well-managed cannon battery.

And…so what? A dozen dickheads with heavy arquebuses were enough of a threat for me to take seriously, the thought of crossing Morlo was…madness. A hundred men-at-arms leading two hundred billmen could’ve marched through the gate right then with the offer to kill anyone I wanted, and I’d still not have been willing to take the risk of aiming them at Morlo. 

Especially knowing what I did then. 

I lowered my gaze like everyone else, and what happened next proceeded without much fanfare. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to my father properly, just caught his eye and was whisked away before either of us could think what we wanted to say. He, at least, managed to order Jeeves to follow along and protect me. 

That I hadn’t seen my mother at all stung even more.

The journey began. A group, a fellowship, heading out across the Anglysh countryside to finish our epic quest, kill evil monsters, and save the world. Except I’d never felt very heroic, on any of my journeys, and that had never been more true than it was at that moment. I looked around and saw fear upon the faces surrounding me. 

Vara’s stung the most. Hers was tinged with pity. Even back then, I wasn’t so shameless as to meet that without flinching. After turning away from her I spent most of the journey in silence.

But then, nobody else was too chatty either. I’m sure you’ll understand why, given the bloody circumstances.

We were heading east. That was about all Morlo was willing to tell us, except he didn’t seem irritable or annoyed at being asked this time. Almost satisfied. Like he’d finally taken a weight off his shoulders. The weight of secrecy? More like the weight of pretense, at last he could simply keep from humouring us with comfort and concessions. We would go where he instructed unconditionally, because we feared death. 

By now I was well used to making the most out of a journey like this, however. Il’vanja and Gruin had been my sparring partners for the most part, with frequent bouts against one of the trainees to keep myself from growing overly specialised in fighting non-humans.

Jeeves was even better for that. Slower than Il’vanja and weaker than Gruin, he was nonetheless among the most fearsome opponents I’d ever sparred against, and even with my newfound physical advantage over him I could feel the disparity in our skill. It certainly made things challenging. I needed that challenge. Not just to get better in a fight, but because the weight of my own thoughts might have crushed me without a distraction like that.

But then night fell, the sparring was over, and Morlo made his way over to me. 

“A lesson,” he said. “In private. Come this way.”

“Are you going to kill me?” I asked him. 

I could barely see Morlo’s face in the dark, but I could practically smell his contempt. 

“Don’t be stupid,” he spat. “Now come with me.”

That didn’t reassure me, but I also didn’t exactly have any options, so I just tucked my tail between my legs and did as I was told. Fortunately, we didn’t stop beyond the visual range of the fire everyone else was seated around. That was at least a decent indicator that I wasn’t about to be turned inside-out. 

“You’re Glyca,” I told Morlo, before he could take me farther from sight. 

He turned around and affixed a lazy look my way. 

“You keep saying that. Are you just trying to make me think you’ve gone insane? Joke’s on you, I don’t care if you start foaming at the mouth, I’ll still throw you at whatever I need until I can go back to my tower and spend the next year wanking in an actually comfortable bed.”

Unfortunately for Morlo, I was just shy of smart enough, and somehow just shy of cowardly enough, not to press this issue for a third time. 

“You’ve referenced things from…ridiculously long ago in the past. You know about Heroes, about demons, you know Thaumaturgy…And you were my father, or rather disguised as him, the day you tricked me into leaving. And I’ll bet you were Jeeves yesterday, too, when he turned me away from the old man’s accommodation. Stop lying, Glyca.”

Morlo looked terribly bored for a moment, then irritated, then he sighed, waved his hand, and all around us dirt fountained up into a cloud of dust too thick for even the slightest glimpse of what lay beyond it. I saw it suspended in the air, rather than falling. A perfect smokescreen.

But I wasn’t looking at that, I was looking at Morlo. Or rather, I was looking at the way his features had started to suddenly soften, then fold inwards. Melting and running like wax by a fire, moving so suddenly that I half-expected to see white bone peeking out beneath it. 

There was no skull, though, only more flesh. Smoother, younger-looking skin that was taut with life and flushed with health, narrow eyes of the same grey colouration and piercing age as Morlo’s, a new nose, narrower and nicer-shaped. Lips, thick and…full. The jaw, the chin, the cheeks, the brows…

…The breasts.

I don’t think there’s any way to actually describe how fucking weird it was to go from Morlo, Morlo, to…the very attractive young woman standing in front of me, whose robes were rather clearly too tight around the chest and hips. 

And if you’re noticing how weird a thing that is for me to have been focusing on at the time, congratulations on being a functioning human. 

Glyca noticed, too, of course, and she just sighed. 

“You know, now that you’re finally talking to my real face…I really am remembering why I started running around as an old man in the first place. What is it with you? A pair of tits within sight and all the blood rushes down to the wrong end, is that it?”

“Uh…What?” I said, intelligently. 

Morlo sighed. Glyca, she was Glyca now. She sighed, and she looked at me in a way that reminded me terribly much of my mother. That probably shouldn’t have been as arousing as it was. 

++”What the fuck, Kyvaine.”++

“Why did you lie about your identity?” I asked, finally managing to say something useful. 

Useful, but not exactly intelligent. Travelling with Vara as much as I had, and seeing what I’d seen of the Thaumaturges, should have made the answer obvious. 

“Do you know how you get taken seriously as an attractive, young-looking woman in this world, Kyvaine?” Glyca asked me.

“No,” I replied.

“You don’t,” she sighed. “The best way to make stupid people listen to you is by wearing the face of an old man. The second best way is to be a scary, unstable old man, so…well.”

I can’t tell you how paranoid I’ve become, over the years, at the thought of meeting aged Thaumaturges who were secretly women in disguise. Though realistically I shouldn’t have been, as far as I can tell Glyca’s facechanging is a power near-unique to herself, among humans at least, and frankly the average Thaumaturge would have his shit a lot more together if he were someone else in disguise.

“What does this mean, then?” I asked Glyca at last. She scowled at me.

“Nothing, there’s a reason I kept it to myself. It doesn’t matter, and going around without the disguise will do nothing except cause irritating problems from all the idiot men in charge. So you’re going to keep it to yourself, just as I have.”

It didn’t escape me, of course, that she hadn’t phrased that like a request. 

“That’s not what I was asking about,” I growled. “Glyca the Facechanger. I’ve heard stories about—”

—”You’ll hear nothing of my past from me. I’m the worst source, in any case, and I won’t be digging up those old wounds on account of some little shit less than a hundredth of my age.”

A hundredth. Not a tenth, ridiculous enough for a man close to twenty, but a hundredth. Here was a creature more ancient than anything else I’d ever encountered. All the people I’d met, all the towns and even cities I’d set foot in, none of them came even close to Glyca’s span of years. 

She really did swear a lot, for something so old. 

“This is how you knew all that about Heroes,” I managed at last. I’d known already, used it as part of my reasoning to identify her even. Somehow it was only just now making its way from my lips. Lots of information was, my brain working slowly to untangle the big knot of suspicions it had spent so long being choked by. 

“It’s how I know a lot of things. You need to be incredibly stupid to live two millennia and not become an expert on at least a dozen topics. Some manage it, but people with minds as feeble as that tend not to last so long in the first place. Even Heroic blood can only protect against so much idiocy.”

That didn’t bode very well for me, of course. 

“That bode well for you, of course,” she continued casually. “A rare combination, Heroic blood and an actually functioning brain. Most of our kind just chase after whatever catches their fancy like rutting dogs, but you…well, actually you’re not so different, except you have an understanding of consequences and deferred gratification that I suspect will see you go far.”

I remained silent for a second, thinking things over. “I’ll shut up about this,” I told Glyca after a moment. 

She didn’t seem to relax, but then she’d become a lot less expressive all of a sudden. Expecting to read the emotions of someone her age would’ve been pure vanity on my part.

It really was lucky, then, that I’d finally started to get a handle on mine. This was the point in my life where vanity might have actually killed me.