Chapter 77 - Dublin (Patreon)

“We’re in Arcadia.” Walker said.

Felix looked around. The boggy marsh they were trudging through looked exactly the same. There was no great difference in magic, no flashing lights, no obvious sign that they’d shifted over. 

“How can you tell?” He asked, barely managing to muster up the curiosity after eight long, grueling hours stomping through the wilderness. Sure, only seven had been walking, with the rest being a break, but there wasn’t even a trail through the woods between Avalon and Dublin.

Walker pulled out a device that looked a little like a pocketwatch, but didn’t tell time.

“The artifact told me so.” He deadpanned, before pocketing it.

“Wooo! DUBLIN! I’m BACK!” Sora yelled out, sprinting through the marsh.

“How the heck does she still have energy? I thought I was fit.” Felix mumbled at the unfairness of it all.

“The marvels of modern magic.” Walker said, sadly shaking his head in mock-disapproval.

“If she gets eaten by a monster between here and the gates, have we failed?” Jones wondered out loud.

Walker shrugged.

“We made it all the way through. A girl that’s lived here her entire life should know the local hazards enough to make it the final stretch.” He said.

“That’s not what I asked.” Jones replied.

Felix ignored the bickering Praetorians. No matter how light-hearted their conversation, their wands never lowered, their shields stayed up, and the two argent anima spirits continued to circle around them, on guard against any last second threats that might leap out of the swampy waters.

There was nothing though, and the three of them soon caught glimpses of city walls through the trees, before eventually emerging from them. The road to the gates wasn’t well-traveled, but Sora was already sprinting back to them.

“Come on!” She shouted, not even bothering to stop as she came up to them. “Let’s go, slowpokes! Dublin awaits! Go go go!” 

She sprinted back to the gates, and Felix picked up his feet in the wake of the two Praetorians.

“Whatever job she takes when she grows up, it’s not going to be behind a desk.” Jones observed.

Felix nodded. He could see that.

The three of them had to wait while Sora went through a rigorous ego check at the gates. Then the conduits came out, and the four of them were extensively scanned from head to toe. Walker and Jones had to take off several dozen artifacts - rings, glasses, amulets, and more - before the scans came up clean. 

Once they were in, they were in, and the two Praetorians waved the kids off.

“See you at the start of term!” Jones cheerfully told them. 

“We better not see you at the start of term.” Walker told the pair with a glare. 

Sora laughed the threat off and grabbed Felix’s hand.

“We won’t! We will! Or, er, other way round! Thanks, bye!”

She pulled the unresisting wix along, into the depths of Dublin, their luggage floating along behind them.

“Great! We’re here! I know every street, every alley! What do we want to see first? Oh! I know! Let’s go look at The Rimebreaker! It’s Bjorn’s ship! It’s practically a historic relic and shit, but, you know, actually used! It’s so cool! Oh, and…”

Felix let himself get dragged along, not needing to contribute a single word to be an excellent conversationalist as far as Sora was concerned.

The place felt significantly less magical than Corwin. No floating buildings, significantly fewer people on the streets, and fewer open displays of beautiful magic. However, while the people were ‘plainer’ in a clothing sense, they were also far more interesting. Pointed ears and webbed hands, third eyes and hunched backs, the residents of Dublin were clearly magical in a way that most of the students Felix had seen weren’t. Some buildings were straight out falling over, and Felix had to ask about them.

“What’s with that building?” He asked, pointing to an old stone building that looked like the roof collapsed years ago and nobody cared.

“Eh, it’s Dublin, you know?” Sora said with an unconcerned shrug.

“I really don’t.” Felix said. 

“But you’ve got top marks in history!” Sora said, snapping her head around like Felix had somehow offended her. “How do I not have a perfect grade!?”

“We… didn’t cover this?” Felix said. Sora’s mouth dropped open.

“You didn’t cover the Sundering of the World first?” She asked in raw disbelief, then shook her head. “Wait, no, that’s not right, I remember you asking questions about that for an essay. What?”

Felix crossed his arms and stared at the girl with blue undertones to her black hair.

“Could you try to explain?” He asked.

“Okay… good explain, good explain…” Sora muttered to herself. Felix got a thousand-yard stare, unsure if Sora’s atrocious grammar was deliberate or not. He was about to be subjected to one of Sora’s ‘Explanations’ without Erik or anyone else around to translate.

“Lots of people. Big city. SUNDERING GO BOOM! Big city. Almost no people. Zombies go brainssss. Fewer people. War. War. Light people bail, ungrateful pricks. War. Plague. War. Plague. Tada! Big city still, fewer people, empty buildings.”

Sora nodded proudly to herself. Felix looked at her incredulously.

“Using smaller words and shorter sentences doesn’t make an explanation good.” He said, briefly trying to piece together what Sora said with what he knew of history and The Sundering.

“Basically… the city was pretty populated right before The Sundering, because it was built for both noonie and wixen populations. The Sundering occurred, only Wixen were moved over, even though it was built for a lot more people. Population levels never recovered to pre-Sundering levels, hence all the empty buildings?” Felix asked.

“Yeah! Exactly!” Sora fist pumped. “See? I was able to explain it! Ha!” She held up her hand for a high-five, which Felix reluctantly returned.

“Great, now that we’ve got that done, let’s GO!” 

Without checking if Felix was ready, Sora blitzed ahead, dragging him along. The Rimebreaker was the first thing they saw. The two of them climbed up the walls, and Sora pointed out the ruins of Malahide Castle. There were busy markets and streets, filled with life and people. Felix would never guess that old churches were left in utter ruins just four blocks over. 

Green was the favored color, and the sun was starting to set by the time Sora finally got around to Dublin Castle.

“How… how do you still have energy?” Felix panted. Early morning wake up, seven hours of hiking, and Sora still had the energy to run around all day. She grinned.

“These five hour energy things are GREAT!”

Felix facepalmed while Jones pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Don’t tell me… you drank them all at the start of the trip, thinking they added onto each other.”

“I mean, yeah, that’s what they do, right? Five plus five is ten, ten plus ten is twenty, that seemed like a reasonable amount of time to be awake. It’s nice, yeah? Alright, let’s go find Erik so he can call me a broombrain then we can go open a vein.”

Felix shook his head and followed in Sora’s wake. The two of them entered Dublin Castle proper after a lengthy ego check with the guards, and Sora promptly jumped on one of the other kids.

“Caleb! How’ve you been? I missed you!” She shouted, jumped on the boy, wrapped her legs around him, locked one arm around his neck, then proceeded to furiously rub her knuckles into his hair.

The boy in question went purple and tilted over at Sora’s furious ministrations. She jumped off him in a well-practiced move before they could crash down, leaving the boy to end up in a tangled pile of robes.

“Sora… my spine did not miss you.” The boy groaned from the floor. Sora held her hand out, and helped him to his feet. She batted her eyelashes at him.

“But what about your arms? Legs? Thick skull? Actually, hang on, get back here, I gotta check all of those…”

Sora half-leered as she approached Caleb, her hands extended in claws. Caleb roared a laugh, and grabbed Sora in a back-pounding hug.

“Missed you too, idiot.” He said.

“Oi!” Sora squawked. “It’s broombrain, thank you very much.”

Caleb snorted.

“I’m going to call a wand a wand, and use the proper word, idiot.”

Sora’s eyes narrowed, and then it was like a dog seeing a squirrel.

“Oh! Wait! Hold up, where’s Erik? Gotta say hi to him. Oh yeah! This here’s Felix. He’s from the mundane world, can you believe it? America! Or, specifically, as he’d say it, Sacramento! Can you believe it? Have you ever even heard of Sacramento before now? We went there last week! It was amazing! The place is gigantic. The buildings are HUGE! I didn’t know you could make buildings that big. All without magic! And they’ve got cars and airplanes and power lines and street lights and their money is all paper! When it’s not plastic that works forever. Can you imagine? Getting a piece of plastic and having unlimited money? How cool is that! And-”

Felix laughed at Sora’s wild misinterpretation of a credit card. 

“Do you think she’s going to breathe before passing out?” Felix asked the other boy.

“Maybe?” He shrugged. “I’ve seen her do it once. Anyway, Erik’s up in his room.” His eyes sparkled with mirth. “He’s got a girl up there.”

“ALEX!” Sora yelled. Ditching the conversation in the middle, she sprinted through the hallways, dodging around the other people bustling around.

“I better follow her bye!” Felix called over his shoulder. Forcing his burning legs to move, he hurried after Sora. Up and up they went. Felix almost lost the girl, but found the room she burst into. 

“Erik! How are you?! We missed you!” Sora shouted, half-tackling the boy. Erik braced himself and was able to absorb the hit. “Whatcha doing? Oh, hi Alex.”

“Sora, Felix! Great to see you! I was just finishing up this treatise on efficient infanticide.” Erik said. 

Felix did a double take, and almost a triple as nobody else blinked.

“Um. This is one of those things where I’ma start inching towards the door until it gets explained.” Felix said, slowly scooting his way back out. They had explained human sacrifice to him in a way that made him feel alright about it, and he was willing to give them the brief benefit of the doubt, enough to hear them out, but efficient infanticide?

Alex rolled her eyes.

“I swear, you decided to channel Sora there and figure out the worst explanation possible.” The ginger-haired witch whispered. 

Erik flashed a happy grin.

“Well, they’ve been stuck together for a week, I figured I’d gently reintroduce him back to normal life and society with a Sora-tier explanation.”

“Actually, she’s been going for short words and shorter sentences.” Felix said. “It… actually worked?”

“Me good talker.” Sora deadpanned, and the four friends burst into laughter. Felix was the first to recover.

“Okay, for real… the infanticide? Please?”

“The treatise is on a very specific type of protection. A magical mother dying to protect their child out of love confers long-term protection against the killer.” Erik explained. “Interestingly, probably due to groove theory, it doesn’t work when a father dies. Anyway, if you kill a protective mother inside her own home as she’s defending her children, you cannot hurt her biological or magical children. If, for whatever reason, you’re utterly determined to wipe everyone out, you either need a second killer for the children, or to deal with the children first, then the mother.”

Felix was looking more than a little green, swaying slightly in place.

“And knowing this is… good?” He asked.

“It means, if I’m ever in that spot, I know I need to kill all but one of the attackers, and my children will be safe.” Alexandria whispered. “Or it gives me the framework to start considering other protections, with that as the lynchpin.”

Felix stumbled his way over to a chair and sat down heavily. He was a little suspicious of Alex’s remarks on a theoretical protection for her theoretical future children - it didn’t match what he knew of the girl at all - but wasn’t going to dig too deeply.

“Is that, er, a serious concern?” He asked, more than a little light-headed. 

“Probably not.” Erik said at the same time Alexandria whispered “Maybe.”

The two of them looked at each other, and Alex gestured to her melted and scarred face.

“Maybe.” Erik promptly self-corrected.

“Nevermind that though, it’s a long way away.” Alexandria whispered. “More urgently, what are we going to do about the coven ritual? The solstice is only a few days away, and we don’t have Vivian. Her parents didn’t let her come.”

“There’s only four of us.” Erik said. “Either we need to add another person, or drop one more.” Unsaid was the obvious solution - substitute in Hazel for Vivian. All five of them were here.

“Or…” Felix said, seeing the obvious answer but unsure if there was a reason why they couldn’t. “We could just go get her?”