BT - Book 1 - Chapter 36 (Patreon)

Jo’s laughter filled the night as she ran out of the bar, a crumpled hat in her hand.  Micah pursued her, trying to keep a smile from his face.  Behind the two of them, three burly men and a sunburnt woman sprinted down the dark street, livid expressions on their faces.

A pair of daggers coated in flame soared past Micah, lighting up the moonless night as they guttered out on the cobblestones of Basil’s Cove.  Jo spun around in a graceful pirouette, bowing and placing the crumpled hat on her head in one smooth motion before she resumed her flight.

“All of this over a cap?” Micah puffed as he barely kept up with Jo.  He’d used the free points from the Thaumaturge class to fortify his Body and Agility attribute, but at the end of the day Jo had a speed oriented physical class and pacing her was a challenge.

“You can’t wear a hat that ugly around me and get away with it,” Jo cackled.  “It’s a sin against the senses of both god and man.  I’m doing him a favor.  Without my intervention, a god would likely strike him down for inflicting that fashion travesty on the masses.”

“Then why in the name of the Sixteen are you wearing it?” Micah asked as he cast wind shield just in time to deflect an arrow.  He frowned slightly.  How in the hells did someone manage to shoot an arrow at him while running?  One of their pursuers must have a blessing that let them fire a bow one handed. It was the only explanation he could think of.

Jo’s only response was another peal of laughter as she slid to a stop in front of a nondescript house and sprinted off into an alley.  Micah rolled his eyes as he followed her, barely arresting his momentum in time to avoid slamming into the next building over.

Behind them, their pursuers shouted something indistinct.  Micah frantically mouthed the words to updraft as he sprinted and squirmed past the refuse littering the narrow path between the houses.  Just as the spell was triggering, he grabbed Jo’s arm and jumped, carrying both of them onto the roof of a nearby home before the spell guttered out under their combined weight.

Micah flopped on his back, breathing heavily and staring up at the stars as he began to come down from the adrenaline of the chase.  Next to him Jo whipped off the hat and put her hand in her mouth, biting down to muffle the laughter that rocked her body.  He glanced over at her and smiled.

Even without the moon, Jo was beautiful in the starlight.  The past two months had been magical.  He raided a dungeon with the Lancers once a week, handled the Cavern of Rust on his own, but the rest of his time was devoted to these stolen moments with Jo.

“Did you see the look on his face when I grabbed his hat?” Jo hissed, her teeth faintly visible as she smiled at the stars above.  “I couldn’t believe how big the oaf was.  By the Sixteen, I swear that he was half Durgh and half Muskox.”

“You know he’s down in the alley right now?” Micah whispered back, shaking his head slightly.  “If we make enough noise, they’ll figure out we’re hiding up here.”

“If you aren’t going to let me talk,” she smirked slightly in the night air before crawling over to Micah, “I’m sure I can find something else we can do.”

“Jo,” Micah’s eyes went wide, “there are five drunk people down there looking to skin us alive, if we’re-”

His hushed words were stolen, as her lips pressed against his.  Micah briefly tried to struggle, but her hands were on his shoulder and his hair, the warm weight of her body pressing him into the shingles of the roof. 

Hours later, Micah stared at the stars once more.  Jo had fallen asleep almost immediately.  Rest hadn’t come so easily to Micah.

He chuckled quietly, trying not to wake Jo, while remembering his first sixteenth birthday.  Nerves almost kept him awake the entire night.  No matter how much he wanted to sleep, he couldn’t force it.  The anxious energy filled his mind with concerns and worries that paralyzed him for most of the night.

Jo on the other hand managed to fall asleep while angry drunken adventurers tore up the dock quarter looking for her.  It was something that he envied about her.  She lived her life hard and without regrets.  He might worry about whether he was taking the right course of action, but Jo would just do it and worry about the consequences later.

Tonight was a great example.  He honestly didn’t know whether he was still awake because he was nervous about the angry adventurers, or because he was still trying to find a way to talk to her about his future.  

Of course, it might be the series of rituals he’d used to restrict his need to sleep.  Even after he’d stopped casting the rituals, energy flooded his body from the portal humming in his chest.  Every night he slept less and less, and although he tried to avoid thinking about it, Micah couldn’t help but worry that his humanity was slipping through his fingers.

It’s true that he was becoming something greater.  A mere human couldn’t gain levels or control the number of daemons like he did, but at the same time he didn’t know exactly where his path ended.  Hells, he didn’t know if it actually ended at all.

He closed his eyes.  Immediately the darkness was lit up by the threads of fire extending from his chest toward the grove in the distance.  Fifteen of them now.  He ran his finger over the tethers.  It wasn’t quite as red as them yet, but it was noticeably darker than in the Cavern of Rust.

Next to him, Jo glowed with the same quiet blue and green light as Telivern.  Much dimmer than the deer, but given that no other human he knew glowed, something worth noting.

He sighed and opened his eyes.  Jo had her secrets.  Everyone did.  In three lifetimes he’d seen nothing but consistency from her.  There was no need to pry just because of his new senses.  Plus, they’d have plenty to talk about come morning anyway.

He closed his eyes again, following the chains of flame binding him to his daemons once more.  Micah had hours to kill before sunrise and he might as well spend it on something useful like trying to probe the nature of the tethers and the portal.  Right now all he knew was that they connected to Elsewhere and that they were changing him.  An uncertain and worrying prospect.

The hours flew by as he focused on each inch of the fiery bindings.  Before too long, he found himself able to dimly sense the thrum of otherworldly energy passing through them.  After drawing his attention deeper, Micah began to see the shapes of the daemons minds.  He couldn’t touch on much more than their rawest and most primal of emotions, but even that experience gave him a blinding headache as he tried to make sense of their alien minds and desires.

A slim hand grabbed his shoulder and shook gently.  Micah blinked awake to Jo smiling contentedly down at him  in the early dawn light.  She’d propped herself up, hand holding the side of her head as her elbow rested on the cheap shingles of the roof.

“Good morning sleepyhead,” her voice was soft, barely audible over the sound of Basil’s Cove waking itself.

“I wasn’t asleep,” Micah replied, sitting up and shifting himself so his back pressed up against the house’s chimney.  “You know I barely sleep.”

“Well thank you for protecting me all night then,” she laughed, a quick peal of chimes before she continued.  “What were you worrying about this time?  As great as you are, that’s your one problem.  You’re always worried about what troubles tomorrow might bring.  You never fully relax and enjoy the moment.”

“What if I know exactly what problems tomorrow might bring?” Micah asked, a half smile on his face.  “If I knew what was coming, it wouldn’t exactly be irrational of me to worry about it?”

“Nice try Silver,” she blew a lock of her hair off of her face.  “Even if you know what plan the gods have in store for us, worrying about it won’t change anything.  We’re grains of sand on a beach afraid of the tide coming in.  At the end of the day, we’re tiny, insignificant, and the forces that move around us are capable of shaking the cosmos themselves.”

“Did I ever tell you about Sarah and my childhood?” She asked, cocking her head, a slightly wistful look on her face.  When Micah shook his head, she continued.  “Our Mother was an elf.  I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread that around.  Elves aren’t the same kind of social pariahs that the Durgh are, but that doesn’t mean that the Church of Luxos makes it easy for us.”

“Anyway,” her voice lowered slightly, “Mother was a kind soul.  Too kind.  After our Father died of pneumonia, she took pity on a trapper that lost his way in a blizzard and got lost in the deep forest.  He fell ill and she nursed him back to health.  We spent almost four months with him while he recovered, but come spring he was well enough to return to his community.”

“He came back though,” briefly, Jo looked like she’d bitten into something sour.  “While we’d been caring for him, he’d noticed the moonstone jewelry that all of us wore.  That summer he returned with a large party of adventurers.  They killed most of our warriors, robbed our tribe and drove us off of our land.  For years after that we were nothing more than refugees, preyed upon in every human kingdom we came across.”

“Sometimes,” she looked away from Micah for a second before resuming her story.  “Sometimes I wish that I’d killed that trapper.  It would have been as simple as crushing up some bloodroot and silver ivy leaves and putting them in his tea.  He’d have gone to sleep and never woken up.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” her eyes came back to Micah, laden with sadness.  “I carried that anger around with me for years before I learned that humans had slowly been encroaching further and further into the deep forest.  The trapper might have hastened the attack on our tribe by months or even a couple years, but the raid was inevitable.”

“Sarah’s sort of like you,” Jo crawled over to Micah and laid her head on his shoulder, watching the Sun rise with him.  “She’s convinced that if she becomes powerful enough she’ll be able to stop something like that from happening to us again.  That’s why she tries to play all of these games.  I mean, she’s even flirting with that porkball Will.  He’s ugly, clumsy, and acts like a child, but with his blessing he’s meant for greatness.  For Sarah?  That’s enough.”

“What about you?” Micah asked, running his fingers through her hair.  “How do you make sense of all the awfulness in the world.”

“I don’t,” she shifted slightly against him.  “What will be, will be.  I’ll fight what I think is wrong, but I’m not planning on getting myself killed fighting some impossible fate.  We’re all doomed to die anyway.  Some of us are just more efficient about that process than others.  My goal is just to make the best out of the meantime.”

For almost a minute they sat in silence as the Sun crested the horizon and began to cast its warm rays down on Basil’s Cove.  Finally, Micah interrupted the sounds of the City stirring.

“I can’t say how,” his fingers stopped flowing through her hair, cradling her gently against his shoulder.  “But I know what’s coming Jo.  You’re going to die.  Trevor’s going to die. My parents and my kid sister.  Basil’s Cover is going to be destroyed.  Unless I can stop it, the best case scenario is that everyone we know and love will survive as refugees, and even that is a stretch.”

“For the sake of argument,” her voice was contemplative.  “Let’s say I believe you.  How in the name of the Sixteen would you be able to stop it?  You’re incredibly powerful for your age, don’t get me wrong, but anything capable of sacking Basil’s Cove is beyond any one person.”

“You’ve only seen the weakest of my daemons,” Micah pursed his lips.  “I have more, and a way of summoning even more after that.  I’ve finally raised my level high enough that I can cast a ritual that I’ve been struggling with.”

“This is it Jo,” he shifted cupping her face with his hand so that their eyes met.  “I finally have a real chance at saving us.  At saving everyone.”

“How?” She asked, confusion lacing the word.  “What are we supposed to do to stop whatever it is you’ve seen?”

“I have to summon daemons,” Micah smiled but there wasn’t much mirth in his eyes.  “I have to summon a lot of daemons.  Then, I have to bring them to the Great Depths and fight an army of Durgh amassing to attack Westmarch and Basil’s Cove.  I don’t even really have to win, just do enough damage to make them think twice about attacking the surface.”

“You’re serious aren’t you?” She asked, a hint of a smile teasing the corners of her mouth upward.  “By the Sixteen, whatever this vision was, you believe it enough to risk the Depths.”

Micah just nodded.

“Well,” She smiled back, her eyes flashing like gems in the early morning sunlight.  “Just tell me when we’re heading down.  That’s not an adventure I’m going to miss.”

“Jo,” Micah frowned.  “I don’t know exact levels, but the average Durgh are around level twenty.  The daemons can fight them, but you’ll get torn apart.  I’ve literally already seen you die once.  I’m not willing to do it again.”

“Micah,” she replied, her voice snippy as she crossed her arms.  “We’re more than just friends.  If you think that I’m going to just let you run off into danger to ‘save’ me from the unknown, you have another thing coming.”

“Jo,” Micah frowned.

“I’m not some sort of damsel in distress Micah,” her tone rose as her eyes flared.  “I’ve been taking care of myself for years before I met you.  I can handle fighting and hardship just as well as you.”

“Jo,” he implored her.  “If I go, I might die.  If you go, you will die.  I can’t take that again.”

She frowned.  Opening her mouth to respond before closing it again.  Finally she turned her back to Micah and stood up. Tiptoeing to the edge of the roof, she glanced backwards briefly from the precipice.

“Fine,”  her voice was a melange of bitterness and sadness.  “Have fun on your adventure.  I’m glad I could at least send you off in style.”

She jumped off the edge, catching a windowsill on her way down to slow her fall.  Micah walked to the edge where she disappeared.  He glanced up and down the alley, but she was already gone.

He sighed, running his hand through his hair.  No matter how many lifetimes he spent with Jo, he felt that he’d never actually understand her.

Micah pulled up his status as he began cast updraft to slow his own descent.  Frowning, he stopped the spell.  Where in the hells had that skill point in arcana come from?