TVisTV Book 3: Chapter 49 (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 49 - Gall’s Chasm

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The party rode at a fair clip until twilight swallowed the sky. Gall’s Chasm waited before them like a gaping wound carved into the world, with the river Aran flowing fast far below. The only way across was a single rope bridge—a smuggler’s crossing, or a brigand’s—weathered and worn half to death. From the looks of it, more than a few wooden slats were missing in places, and the whole thing looked eager to gift the careless to the roiling black water beneath.

Seraphina swung lightly from her exhausted horse, looking as fresh and composed as if she had just started her day. A surreptitious cast of the Heal had seen to that.

“Well, then, let’s start the crossing,” she commanded simply.

“Lady Seraphina, it is not my place, but a crossing at such a late hour might not be the wisest of choices,” Sir Gravens said, finding within himself somehow the temerity to speak. “The light…”

“The boy has a point, milady. You’d need your wits about you to cross that by day, let alone at night,” Frest added practically, lending his support, though there was the smallest of quavers in his voice.

The blonde crossed her arms in annoyance. “That sounds awfully like excuses. I do rather hate excuses. They have a habit of making me most antsy. You can make torches, can you not? Also, I might add, is there not nearly a full moon in the sky?”

As if the mention itself had called it closer, Desdemona gritted her teeth. The Change was beginning to press against her soul. The violence of recent events had left its mark, and the moon’s pull was getting harder to resist. The wild was calling. It was a miracle she could hold it off at all after all the violence in the capital. But then again, she was Desdemona.

“Oh, stop being such an overbearing dolt, Sera,” the fiery girl snapped. “I, for one, am not crossing that until I’ve had a good night’s sleep, dark or no dark. This is simply common sense.”

The blonde girl looked positively nonplussed. Open rebellion from Desdemona de Savant was not something she had expected. She was tempted to lash out, but held herself in check. It would do her no good to abuse her limited human assets.

“Cornelia,” she said to her familiar, the white-scaled serpent. She was not truly asking anything. She only wanted the comfort of a whisper.

But only silence answered her. Cornelia was sunk in torpor. It seemed even the lazy hydra wanted its rest. Or perhaps it was something more. Who knew?

“Very well. It seems some of us are made of less stern stuff,” the blond girl replied with a huff. “Gravens, Frest, Ibn, see to the camp. I want a fire. This may be the wilderness, and we may be fugitives—” She paused, the word itself seeming to leach some of the dignity from her. “But I will have that basic comfort, if nothing else.”

“The smoke and light will be seen for miles,” Gravens countered, his voice shaky with pent-up exhaustion. He had faced the Hero and lived, not a feat that many could claim.

It seemed that as soon as Seraphina’s position weakened, everyone had suddenly discovered that they had a backbone.

She was on the verge of throwing a fit when Frest stepped in with what might, by the standards of the moment, have qualified as bravery.

“I believe I may have just the trick for such an occasion…” he ventured.

Seraphina kept her arms crossed, shifting her weight slightly, but nodded for him to proceed.

Nervously aware that his mistress’s eyes were on him, Frest crouched beside a shallow rise where the soil looked dry enough, and the wind would not blow straight into the fire. “An old bandit’s trick. Two holes,” he said, more to steady his own nerves than because anyone had asked. “One for the flame, one for the air. Keep it low, keep it hungry, and the ground hides most of the light.”

He took a camp spade and dug the first hole deep and narrow, a cramped little chamber in the earth instead of an open pit. The soil came up in dark, damp clumps. A short arm’s length away and slightly upwind, he began the second hole—smaller, slanting down toward the first.

Seraphina quickly lost interest in the process itself, caring only for the result. Gravens, however, had gone silent, watching with fixed—almost rapt—attention.

Frest tested the draft with his palm, then gave a small nod to himself. “The wind feeds it from below,” he said, glancing up with a flicker of borrowed confidence. “Less smoke. Less light. Burns hotter too, if the wood is dry.”

He broke kindling into the larger pit, arranging it with the fussy care of a man laying out tinder for judgment rather than comfort, then fed twists of dead grass and shaved bark into the lower chamber. When the spark finally caught, it did not leap up in any cheerful blaze. It only smoldered, then glowed.

What little light it gave was smothered by the walls of the pit, no more than a muted copper pulse over the faces nearest it. No merry flame. No bright campfire crown. Just clean, contained heat.

Frest sat back on his heels and rolled his shoulders, the metal and leather of his armor creaking. “There, milady,” he muttered.

Seraphina, who had been fully prepared to lash out at the next failure, simply stared down at the sunken glow and felt the edge of her irritation dull. At least they would be warm tonight. A small comfort, perhaps, but enough to keep that ugly little word—fugitive—at bay for a few hours.

She was about to command Miriam to do something, but her trusty maid was not there. Instead, Desdemona began the business of pulling what they needed from the saddlebags to make tea, while the men set out pans and pots for a humble evening meal. Beans, of course. It was always beans and something untrustworthy when one was on the trail.

Well, at least they would not be hungry or cold tonight.

Seraphina shuddered at the thought of being grateful for comforts so meager. Those were poor people’s thoughts.

While the others busied themselves with the miserable little minutiae and the one hundred and one small details of their little hidden camp, the young noblewoman let her mind drift. Recent events had been far too much. Too many things had broken at once. Too many of her plans and ambitions had gone up in smoke. She had counted through the ashes often enough already, and still found new losses each time.

Complicated, she could manage. Complicated was tolerable. Complicated could be mastered. What she loathed was messy. And the situation had become very messy indeed. To make matters worse, she had made a mistake in choosing Oracle as one of her classes or Callings.

When it rained, it truly poured.

Gathered around the buried fire, the others ate. Frest passed her a plate of beans, lightly salted, with strips of meat too anonymous to inspire questions from her. Seraphina ate mechanically, barely noticing the taste, which was probably a mercy in and of itself.

“So, you were stuck in the book for a lot longer than us… what was it like, Ibn?” Gravens asked, looking at the boy who was now, by all appearances, a man.

Ibn’s eyes were hollow. He had the look of a veteran who had seen far too much, far too young. His gaze fixed somewhere in the middle distance, caught on memories no one else could see.

“There was a lot of fighting… a war. There were occupiers from the Empire. The year was in the reign of Barus the Bold…” he began slowly, then turned to Seraphina. “The people in the book—they were real, weren’t they… Lady Seraphina?” he asked asked desperately, his voice trailing slightly toward the end.

It was an interesting question. A philosophical one that bordered on the metaphysical. The people in the Book of the Four Gods were real in the sense that they were echoes of real people, though in truth they were magical constructs. Or so the game’s lore claimed. A dungeon—or Trial, as this world insisted on calling it—with the book as the gate to its depths. The echoes would be conceptually destroyed once the Trial was complete.

And then there was the other piece of lore, the uglier one. That yes, the people and things inside Trials were quite real indeed; that each one was a shard of time trapped in endless repetition, forced to live and die again whenever new challengers entered. A living hell, turned into a test.

So she decided the truth would be too bitter a thing for Ibn to swallow. Ignorance, as the adage went, was bliss.

“I have heard that, as legends go, it is a vision of the past, or something of that sort,” she said, deliberately vague and noncommittal. “What is important is whether it was real for you. What you learned, what you felt, that was real. It is not what you do that is important, it is what it does to you.”

It was warm and meaningless slop, but it served its purpose. Comfort without substance. So Seraphina let Ibn speak of his time in the Book of the Four Gods, that strange place that was not truly a world at all. At its core, it was a test, a true trial, nothing more and nothing less. He spoke of comrades and battles, of work with the resistance as he gathered survivors to fight the Empire, and of his clashes with General Ma. By any reasonable measure, he had cleared the dungeon in the normal way.

The price of power for Ibn had been time.

In Seraphina’s mind, that was a cost he could afford. He had been but a boy when entered, and returned as a man. And, he was still young. And in return he had won Ardent Moon, the long curved sword at his side, along with the hard experience that had hammered him into the warrior now sitting at her fire. There was a saying that youth was wasted on the young after all, this was in her eyes, just simply more efficient. A fair trade, in her estimation and it had at least made him vaguely useful.

Seraphina had, in effect, power-levelled one of her companions.

But it was the sword Ardent moon that drew the eye. The weapon itself was a masterwork. It resembled a Japanese nodachi, save that the tip tapered to a sharper point. Wavy lines ran the length of the watered metal blade. The guard was small, offering only modest protection to the hands, clearly built to allow the wielder to use fast-draw techniques.

And how did one draw such a long two-handed blade quickly?

The answer was in the scabbard. Along the edge side, it was left open, and a mechanism near the guard locked the blade in place. The design allowed Ibn to use fast-draw techniques despite the weapon’s almost absurd length.

And Ibn, from the sound of him, had suffered for it. He had struggled. He had bled for it. But he had passed, and passed just in time. The boy had become well-rounded.

De Sariens nodded when she needed to, repeated the last words of his statements now and then to give the appearance of listening, and otherwise let him speak. But Seraphina was Seraphina, and her thoughts remained chained to her own problems and to whatever trials tomorrow’s dawn would no doubt bring.

And so, slowly but surely, like pus pressed from a lanced boil, Ibn emptied out his pains and sorrows. At last it was time to settle in.

A good thing, Seraphina thought, because she did not know whether her patience would have held for another second. Over the years she had learned that while her reserves of patience were deep, they were not, regrettably, bottomless.

A burr clung to her hydra-scale armor, and she brushed the small seed away with distaste. That was the problem with nature: it insisted on being natural, and it had no manners whatsoever. It got everywhere without asking for permission if you let it.

Paranoia had set its hooks in deep. Though the men had arranged a watch, Seraphina chose to sleep in full armor, with her weapons close at hand. Her entourage, save for Desdemona, all decided to follow her wise example.

Leaning back against a crooked, uncomfortable tree that made sleeping in armor just a little more miserable, Seraphina finally managed some poor semblance of rest.

Gratefully, dreams of ash and the failure of her ruin did not come for her that night. In fact, she dreamed of strawberry icecream, her mind turning to the problem of its creation in this world.