An Epic Hero Story: Book 2 Chapter 49 (Patreon)

Glyca was Morlo again when we returned to the group, and she—he?—looked more pissed off than ever. 

Despite that, though, I was actually a good deal less scared of her than usual, because…well, she was a ‘her’. In later years, I would wisen up and learn to be properly terrified of the world’s especially mean women, but at the time I’d not yet overcome that singular weakness that’s so very common among truly stupid men.

Not unsurprisingly, it was Vara who approached me first.

“What did he want?” she asked, eying me like she was expecting to find some trace of a curse. For that matter, it occurred to me that I may well have suffered one. Glyca was a Hero, and the stories all told of them accessing magic beyond the sterile science of Thaumaturgy. There was really no telling what she’d done to me. 

Which made it easy for me to just shrug and not worry about it. If I had no way of knowing then there was no use in worrying.

“Just a few words about…things,” I told Vara. 

She looked about as satisfied with that response as I might have expected, but there was really nothing for it. 

“Did he…hurt you?”

“No,” I said a bit too quickly. I only realised after the reflexive lie escaped me that it actually was a lie. “He didn’t,” I continued. “Actually it was quite…illuminating. But he probably will hurt me if I illuminate you as well.”

Vara was glaring now. “So you won’t tell me.”

“Oh come on,” I grinned. “You know how it is, eh? Besides, aren’t there other things you’d like to be doing more than discussing some dusty old pervert?” I reached out to slide an arm around her waist as I said it. 

The seduction attempt, as clumsy as it clearly was, went precisely how you’re probably picturing. Honestly, I’m wondering these days why she ever slept with me at all.

++”There are depths to Kyvaine that everyone not named Kyvaine learns to appreciate fast. I was also young and his shoulders were like a draft horse’s.”++

Sleeping that night was not pleasant for me. Mainly because I couldn’t really do it, finding myself staying awake, tossing and turning, mulling over the events of the previous day. Things were happening so fast, in my life, of late. Always these big, dramatic revelations and realisations, always the world throwing everything at me all at once. I’d never been one for real excitement, only ever cultivating the air to the contrary because it was expected that a young man be filled with piss and vinegar.

If I’d ever had a scrap of either, it was long drained away by then.

The state I ended up falling into is less accurately described as sleep, and more like ‘unconsciousness’. I didn’t know this at the time, but Heroes don’t need as much sleep as other people. Whatever magic keeps us healing quicker and cleaner, aging slower, also works to help our minds rest. 

So I didn’t wake up groggy and stiff, but I sure as shit wasn’t happy either. We were moving first thing in the morning, crossing the landscape in swift bounds. As usual, Vara began to fall behind due to lacking any of the advantages—my general superhumanity, Il’vanja’s stride or Gruin’s seemingly infinite stamina—that made long-distance walks so effortless. The trainees, fit men as they were, fared scarcely better. 

Morlo did, as he always had. But then the reason for that was hardly mysterious to me any longer, his own body was just made of the same magical, ancient stuff as mine, beneath that disguise.

The funny thing is, though I’d objectively learned only things that ought to have ruined my mood of late, I was actually feeling pretty good that morning. Now that facts settled into my mind, I knew the danger ahead of me was far greater than even my cowardly brain had been fearing. It was, in fact, a danger great enough to demand the attention of Glyca the Facechanger.

And no fucking wonder there was a demon out for us, she’d probably pissed off a thousand demons before I was old enough to walk. 

No, by any sane measure my life had just become a good deal harder and, in all likelihood, shorter. And yet I couldn’t quite convince myself to be as scared as before.

Because Glyca had surely encountered challenges worse than this one, right? She was almost two thousand years old, she’d walked the earth back when human civilization consisted of illiterate cave-dwellers smashing rocks against each other’s heads. She’d been alive when Emperor Norus himself burned half of Catun. 

She’d been the one responsible when her own powers burned all of Durundhai. 

The trouble with walking around alongside a living legend is that you never really stop coming up with new questions to ask them. Maybe that’s not such a big issue usually, but in my case I’d been explicitly forbidden from asking any of those questions openly, and implicitly discouraged from asking privately. And the person who had done that forbiding and discouraging was…well, responsible for blowing up a whole fucking city.

Sparring kept my mind off things, as did Thaumaturgical study. I was getting better at both, though compared to the growth I enjoyed with magic I found my martial skills improving agonisingly slowly. My latest magical exercises had started branching past just force and heat, though I’d far from mastered either of those, and onto an entirely new order of power. 

Lightning.

Or, as Morlo called it, ‘electrical energy’. Vara was far better at it than me. I struggled with the finer elements of Thaumaturgical control, still, and they all seemed to come to her as naturally as breathing. In the historic scale of magic-wielders, I’m probably in the top five. If I’m nice to myself, top three. Top ten if I’m less nice.

There is no sane reckoning by which Vara fails to hit first place, however. Or at least not in terms of talent and potential alone.

Neither of us exactly knew this hierarchy at the time, and Morlo wisely chose to lie about it. I, apparently, was a one-in-ten-thousand talent, while Vara was perhaps one in a hundred thousand. That conveniently left both of us with a few to a few dozen competitors in Anglyn at that very moment, while also bolstering our egos in that way that’s so useful for honing magic.

Of course I hadn’t really needed the lie as much as she did, Vara was so clearly above me in aptitude that it was self-evident on a session by session basis. Naturally, she rubbed my nose in it at every opportunity, too. 

Morlo encouraged this a lot. In his words, it was healthy competition. I think he just enjoyed it when Vara won our challenges of ‘build up an electrical current by rubbing your hands together before the other one can’ and punished me for my sluggishness with a nasty jolt.

“Neither of you will be killing anyone with electricity for a while,” Morlo told us.

“Why?” I growled. “Fucking hurts enough.” I was being petulant, but stumbling onto a real point as well. With my physical resilience being what it was, a painful jolt for me would’ve been at least injuring for a normal man. 

“It’s just not an efficient way of killing,” Morlo shrugged. “The benefits of electricity don’t rear their heads outside of particular circumstances.”

“Then why the fuck am I learning it?” I snapped. Vara’s question was somewhat more practical.

“What circumstances?”

Morlo looked at us both, and didn’t answer. We both got it fast. 

“Lightning,” we said in unison. He grinned. 

“Believe me, there is nothing in this world that puts shit in the enemy’s trousers like bolts of lightning hitting them. Channel and conduct them right and they’re the deadliest thing you can unleash. Normally the energy is all wasted, flows through them. Have you ever seen a corpse that’s absorbed all of a lightning bolt by itself?”

We shook our heads.

“Neither have I,” Morlo continued. “Nobody has. Because corpses that do that just stop existing on the spot, turn into clouds of hot vapour and blow away on the wind. If you ever have to fight a demon yourselves, do it in a thunderstorm.”

Good advice. In retrospect, of course, this is where all the trouble began. You see, I’m lazy by nature. Lazy and cowardly, so when I’m handed an ability that can supposedly let me avoid even getting into those big, epic struggles I was constantly having inflicted upon me by whatever enemy champion was nearest at the time…Well, ‘Kyvaine the Lightning Snatcher’ has a nice enough ring to it that I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised so many idiots parroted it after the handful of times I was lucky enough to manage that. 

‘So many idiots parroted it after the handful of times I was lucky enough to manage.’ Funny, that’s essentially the story of my life. Well you can put the book down now, dear readers, I’ve just gone and spoiled it all, haven’t I?

Our latest journey was perhaps halfway done when the first of the complications arose, and as you might have expected, it was the blackmists. No coincidence, that they’d coiled around the town right as we planned on leaving. 

Something out there, I was now rather confident, was thoroughly pissed off with Morlo. Others among our party started having their suspicions, too. 

“It’s that demon, isn’t it?” Dubin growled, staring accusatorily at Morlo with all the unhidden hostility of someone who’d forgotten who he was talking to.

“Maybe,” Morlo grunted back. Which I thought was a bit rich. There wasn’t any doubt in my mind that it was the demon responsible, and Morlo didn’t seem the sort to indulge in wishful thinking. 

“Can it swarm in and attack us?” Vonti hissed, on the brink of panic. He and Dubin had learned my cowardly ways well, it seemed. 

“No,” Morlo snapped. “Not here. Demons can manifest only in very particular locations.”

That was reassuring, somewhat. 

Somewhat. 

“But it can conjure the blackmists?” I pressed. “How often?”

“I’m not sure,” Morlo admitted after a moment. It seemed to physically pain him to even do that much. “It varies between one demon and another.” 

“You’ve encountered multiple demons before?” Vara asked. 

“Why the fuck did you do that?” Dubin added.

Morlo became a lot less accommodating to the remainder of our questions. This bothered everyone except, as usual, Gruin and Il’vanja.

“All I need to know is it’s a demon,” the Grynkori shrugged. He hefted his hammer, at that, toying with it in his hands. It appeared to me that he was intending on swinging the fucking thing into the demon when next we encountered it. 

Il’vanja was at the very least less delusional in her own reaction.

“I am unsurprised the Thaumaturge has had past dealings with them, he has…seen things.” 

That was about when I figured out that she already knew Morlo’s real identity, and had done so from the start. After that, I became very interested in managing some alone-time with the aelf so that I might pick her brain about it. This wasn’t hard, probably because she worked out what I was doing halfway through and deliberately made it easier for me. 

“You know that…uh…” My stunning display of articulation was punctuated by a few hesitant glances in Morlo’s direction, which, fortunately, seemed to be enough.

“That the Thaumaturge is actually Glyca the Facechanger, that she, and you and the girl, are actually Heroes, that there is more to this journey than she is letting on, and that I am likely to be in a great deal more danger than has been deliberately implied. Yes.”

There really wasn’t much else to discuss, after that.