Trust in Oneself, Draft 1, CH 18 (Patreon)

With a yelp that sounded too scared to come from his best friend, Thomas vanished. The cheetah looked where the rat had been.

“That answers one of you.” He looked at the seal. “Ma’am, I’d appreciate it if you let me in.”

“Don’t,” Grant said, as Wassa stepped out of the way.

The cheetah entered, immediately followed by a bear, a wolf, and a raccoon wearing gray and black body armor. There was a methodicalness to how they surveyed the room and those in it.

“I told you to stay outside,” the cheetah said.

“Sorry, sir. Mister Marrows was quite descriptive in what he’d do to us if we let you go into this alone.”

“Fine. You stay,” he told the bear. “You two, out. We don’t need to scare them any more than they already are.”

Paul looked at the others. Like him, they looked more worried than scared. Except for Wassa, who was watching the cheetah with curiosity.

When neither the raccoon nor wolf moved, the cheetah eyed them. “Do you really want me to remove you myself? Akram is here; I’m not alone. Tom’s over-protectiveness is dealt with. Out.”

They reluctantly left, and the bear closed the door.

“Now,” the cheetah said. “My name is Denton Brislow. While I don’t know you individually, I’ve gathered enough to know you are part of the magical community. Except for you, Ma’am. I know you are part of the community, since He’s shown me some things you did before arriving here, but I was unable to discover more.”

“That might be because Wassa was on ice for a lot of years,” Paul offered.

“Centuries,” Grant added reluctantly.

“Alright, thank you. That does answer it. It leaves the question of why He’s seen fit to pester my nights with you.”

“I may be able to enlighten you,” Wassa said.

The cheetah looked around. “Thank you, I would appreciate it. Do you mind if I make space for us to sit?”

“Shit,” Donal muttered. “Sorry. I never considered having people over.” He headed for the couch, but the containers of materials raised on their own. The squirrel first looked at Grant, who was staring at the cheetah, then at Wassa.

“My way will be faster,” the cheetah said, and more chairs were cleared. The boxes and bags were deposited around the living room. “You,” he told the bear, “are staying by the door. The price for not doing what your boss tells you.”

“It sounded like his boss is this Mister Marrows,” Paul said, taking a seat.

“No, he’s just the guy who doesn’t think I can survive five minutes without him watching my ass. And since he’s out of the country at the moment, he’s making my life hell by proxy.” He let out a breath as he dropped into a love seat. “Wassa, if you’d be so kind.”

The seal sat at one end of the couch, and Grant took the other.

“I must go back in time to explain properly. But first, do you know of the Practitioners and the Chamber?”

“I have heard the names. I’ve had people give me a rundown of who they are, but I’ve yet to encounter anyone from that faction.”

“We’re not—” Grant started, then closed his mouth.

The cheetah waited, then nodded to Wassa.

“This story begins before there was the Practitioner or the Chamber. It was only those of us who channeled the creativity of the world. We made magic by making items and imbuing them with meaning. Grant tells me those are now called talismans.” She tapped the phone at her neck. “This is such. A talisman around the idea of communicating. Then, it was discovered that some of us had made a talisman so strong that it and its power remained once the crafter died. More so, that talisman would draw someone with a similar aptitude to itself. Those are what became known at our staves.”

Donal stopped reaching for a pocket when the cheetah glanced in his direction. Then resumed the motion and pulled out his staff.

“Out of fear of what the uninitiated might do with such powerful item, it was decided caretakers should be assigned to look after them and educate whoever the staff drew to itself. In time, they would come to be called the Chamber.”

Grant had stopped looking at the cheetah and was also paying complete attention to Wassa.

“There were ups and downs. Arguments and alliances. We are like everyone else, prone to our opinion and the desire to see them adopted by others. One such opinion was that the gods who bestowed magic on those who followed them did so by stealing from the creativity of the world.”

The cheetah tilted an ear but kept his opinion to himself.

“Then, it was decided by the Chamber that this blasphemy could not be allowed to continue. That this theft needed to be put to an end. They devised a plan by with they would use the strength of all staves, assembled and still in use, to create a ceremony that would destroy all those thieves and return that creativity where it belonged.”

The cheetah chuckled. “Sorry, but really? Have some magic to kill all the gods? Return their power to your god?”

“That isn’t isn’t how it works for us,” Grant said with heavy exasperation, then raised a hand to forestall the protest. “I get it. You follow a god, so do the people in the other factions. Do you really think absolutely everyone out there has to operate under that one principle?”

That seemed to give the cheetah pause. “Alright. I’ll grant you that I don’t happen to know everything about everything, so I’m not in a position to claim you’re wrong. But that the power of all the gods comes from…” he gestures around them.

“The universe,” Grant finished. “No, we don’t believe that.” When Wassa didn’t immediately agree with him, he stared at her.

“I do not believe,” She said cautiously, “that my belief as to where the gods get their powers from is relevant to this story. I will say that by the time I became involved, the purpose of the ceremony was no longer to simply return that power to the world, the universe, as you say. After all, without a mind guiding, protecting, that power, what would stop other to steal from it again and make themselves gods? It was decided by the Chamber that one of them would become the mind and hold all that power.”

“Make themselves a god,” the cheetah said flatly.

“It sounded as arrogant to many of us as it does to you,” Wassa said. “And when the Chamber was no longer content with convincing us their goals were good, or at least for the greater good, they began taking our staves by force.”

He fell silent, and Paul realized it was possible her dress wasn’t her staff. Grant didn’t have a staff. He’d sacrificed it to save Thomas and his friends. Maybe she had lost hers in a less noble way.

“They won. How could they not? By then, for each of us with a staff, there were dozens of them charged with looking after the staves of the fallen. Once they had all of them. They attempted their ceremony.”

“It failed,” Paul said, “Obviously.”

“Catastrophically,” she added. “The volcano by which they did it erupted, sending dark clouds across the sky that would not dissipate.”

“That was in Iceland?” Grant asked thoughtfully.

“It was. For months, the skies were black. Anywhere I went, the weather was cold. People started.”

“You’re talking about the dark age,” the cheetah said.

“The time was dark, yes.”

“Almost two years of ash in the sky,” Grant said. “There might have been up to four volcano eruptions that caused it, but they are sure of two. Kalta, in Iceland and El Chichon in Mexico. Can what the Chamber did also cause El Chichon to erupt?”

“I do not know,” she said, aghast. “They were attempting to destroy gods. The ideas needed to do such a thing should be unthinkable.”

“The concept of destruction on that level could have blown the world apart,” Donal said with a shudder. “If all we got were two volcanoes, even four, we can count ourselves lucky.”

“Or the gods stepped in,” the cheetah said thoughtfully.

“They don’t get involved,” Grant said dismissively, and the cheetah chuckled. “You imply that you traveled, Wassa. I thought that what the Chamber did resulted in you being trapped where we found you.”

She shook her head. “I…survived… I was changed. I do not understand how it happened. When my staff was rendered in the ceremony…. Most died. The destruction of their staves ripping something from them, but a few of us…” she shook herself. “The dark age was still ongoing that the surviving Chamber analyzed what happened, why it went wrong. They decided the mistake had been to attempt it without the proper number of staves. I do not know how many they believe they need, but it was enough that they decided they could not afford to wait until staves came about naturally. They created the Practitioners for the only purpose of creating more staves and then having them die, and so freeing the staff.”

“For them to use,” Grant said darkly, which surprised Wassa. Paul realized no staff had been used when they were captured. The Vole had one, but he had entered after, and the way Thomas talked about it. It had happened fast enough once Wassa woke up that she might not have noticed it. (all this can be altered, I’m going from the fact that nowhere in the outline is it mentioned that in Wassa’s time the Chamber uses the staves. So I’m thinking it could be something they discovered in the centuries after the ceremony)

“You said you aren’t the only one who survived,” the cheetah said. “What happened to the others?”

“I do now know. The few who, like me, sought to keep the chamber from attempting this again went their own way after our last failure at keeping them from harvesting practitioners. They may have tried again. I no longer had the energy, so I sought a different method. I scried the future for what to do.”

“You can do precognition?” the cheetah asked, surprised.

“Knowledge is an idea, a concept, that does not limit itself to what had happened in the past. It led me to retrieve the tool required to ensure the Chamber be stopped, and then where to slumber, so the one to stop them would find me so I could hand him the tool so he could ready it for the coming battle.”

She cleared the coffee table by shoving the items on it to the ground, then covered it with the sleeve of her rope. When she raised her arm, there was something on the table.

“Holy fuck!” Grant was standing and backing away.

Paul looked at the broken sword. The pieces were arranged as they should be, but there were close to a dozen of them. The hilt was intact while the blade was shattered.

The cheetah stood and took a slow step back. “What is that?”

“Tell me that isn’t what I think it is,” Grant demanded of Wassa and her reaction was one of confusion.

“What is it?” Donal asked.

“That,” Grant pointed, “is fucking Excalibur.”