BT II - Chapter 21 (Patreon)

“Leeka,” Micah called out, turning away from the glittering river.  The orange skinned woman jumped, a guilty look on her face and her cheeks puffed out as she stuffed a piece of fruit into her mouth.

“Wuh ss it?” She tried to respond through a wad of juicy pulp.  A second later her throat bobbed as she swallowed the food. “What do you need?”

“How do you feel about a little swim?”  Micah asked, nodding toward the water.  “We’re running a bit behind, but so long as you don’t mind getting a little wet, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”

Leeka squinted at Jakint in the distance.  It loomed above the water, its fortifications dominating the landscape.  She glanced back at Micah and raised a single eyebrow.

“We’re at least an hour or two from port,” she commented.  “How in the name of the Sixteen do you plan on turning swimming into a shortcut this far out.”

“Wait,” Leeka interjected before Micah could answer.  “Are we smuggling something into the city?  Maybe it’s a forbidden artifact of one of those daemons you told me about.  Is that why we’re trying to avoid the City Guard?”

“No,” Micah answered dryly.  “Although half the enchanted items I’m carrying would probably raise eyebrows if the guard actually inspected them, none of them are explicitly banned.  In reality, I have some spells that will let me see the near future.  Suffice it to say that my family is in danger, and by the time this ship docks it might already be too late.”

“Are you sure?”  She asked.  “I haven’t seen you cast anything.  You’ve just been staring off into the sunrise for almost an hour.  Then you just jumped up and turned around to talk to me about this out of nowhere.”

“Just trust me on this, please?” He implored, reaching up to rub both his temples with his index finger and thumb.  “You know I have my secrets Leeka, please consider this one of them and follow my lead.”

“Fine.”  She stood up on her tiptoes, peering over Micah’s head.  Leeka bit her lower lip, squinting as she tried to discern some secret hidden in the glare reflecting off the river.

“What in the name of the Sixteen are you doing?”  Micah questioned, not removing his hand from his face.  “You were just agreeing to jump into the water with me, and-”

“The last time someone told me to jump in the water,” Leeka replied, not making eye contact with Micah as she raised a hand to shield her eyes.  “It was because they’d angered a feral ursine fine.  I was just making sure that you hadn’t enraged some sort of primal power before we did something so drastic as to get wet.”

Micah rolled his eyes, planting both of his hands on the tall woman’s side and pushing her over the waist high wooden safety wall that ringed the barge.  Leeka’s squawk of surprise was accompanied by a stream of angry chattering from Jakaw

“Grab onto my back,” he shouted over the splash of Leeka hitting the water while lashing his spear to his side.  “I doubt you’ll be able to keep up otherwise.”

Then he dove off of the ship’s deck, joining her in the surprisingly chilly water a second later.  Leeka sputtered to the surface, Jakaw clinging unhappily to the braid of her hair. She bobbed unevenly, struggling to stay above the water by flailing her limbs in an untrained fashion as she glared at Micah.

He paddled over to her, letting the larger woman drape her arms around his neck and lock her hands before he began swimming toward Jakint.  The second he kicked off, using the entirety of his body attribute to send them rocketing upriver, Leeka started sputtering above him.  Evidently, Micah was moving fast enough that the spray of river water from his passage was being directed right into her face.

Mentally, Micah made a note to use healing magic on Leeka once they arrived at Jakint.  He had no idea what sort of diseases or parasites there might be in the swift-flowing water of the river, but they had enough to do without Leeka spending an hour or so throwing her guts up when they arrived.

He didn’t know if he could trust Pokkan’s dying words.  The man might have been lying, taunting Micah to make him feel helpless.  Still, it wasn’t like he had any other leads.  Trevor had been in the abandoned bar’s basement, and now he was gone.  All Micah could do was hope to arrive before his friends and family were moved.

Barely ten minutes later, Micah’s hands hit the silty bottom of the river as he neared shore just outside Jakint.  He stood up, letting Leeka fall off of his back with a splash.  A quartet of guards around the massive stone city gates eyed the two of them with a combination of confusion and suspicion as he waded to shore.

Micah waved cheerfully to them, doing his best to ignore Leeka dry-heaving next to him before casting panacea on his struggling companion.  The spell washed over her, and the orange woman glared up at Micah balefully.

Rather than respond, Micah walked toward Jakint.  A road made of stone bricks and mortar ran parallel to the river, eventually splitting off into branches that traveled up and down the coast as well as one that followed the river toward the Grass Sea.  The road itself was wide enough for two carriages to run in either direction, clearly designed to serve the heavy mercantile traffic of a major trading city.  On either side of the highway were ruts from wagon wheels where carriages had strayed into the mud.  Already they were showing signs of fading as repeated rains began to wash the damage away.

The pathway was empty.  In the distance, Micah thought he saw some carriages pulled by oxen traveling north up the coast, but it was clear that the merchants were avoiding the city.  Other than Leeka and the handful of suspicious guards, there was no one within shouting distance, a worrying sign for a city like Jakint that relied upon trade to keep itself supplied.

“Hello!” Micah called out, waving a hand over his head.  “I just finished an energizing morning swim, and now I’m seeking entrance into your fair city!  What do I need to do to gain entry to Jakint?”

“You want to get IN to the city?” A female guard asked, leaning against her pike before shouting over her shoulder at someone standing atop the city’s stone walls.  “Oi!  Reggie, what do we do with someone that wants into the Jakint.  I’ve only got orders about attackers and keeping people from getting out?”

“Do you mean that if I entered the city, then I wouldn’t be able to get out?”  Micah questioned, raising an eyebrow.

“Well yeah,” she responded before perking up.  “Say, that doesn’t make you not want to enter does it?  If you say you don’t want to go into Jakint, then we don’t have to look up what the orders are regarding ingress.”

“I have business inside,” he answered with an apologetic shrug.  “Say, do you mind letting me know why the ruling council doesn’t want people getting out of the city?  That doesn’t seem like an ordinary edict to me.”

“Probably to keep people from spreading the news that we aren’t letting folks leave?”  The guard mused.  “Might be about how rough the supply lines are getting.  If another city-state found out we’d probably lose all of our resource colonies within the next month or so.”

“Jessica!”  The male guard on the battlements shouted down.  “Quit your jawwing and let ‘em in.  The rules are in place to prevent information leaks.  They don’t do much good if you just stand there leaking all of Jakint’s secrets to every stranger that wanders by.”

The woman stepped to the side, her exasperated partner joining her.  As Micah and Leeka walked past her, Jessica shot both of them a smile before continuing their conversation.

“There you have it.  Once you’re inside, you’re inside.  Can’t have anyone other than me gossiping and blabbing all of our secrets.”

Then they were inside the city.  A cordon of guards, their pikes locked together and keeping a crowd of citizens at bay, surrounded the gateway.

Almost immediately, Micah had to dodge to the side as a glob of excrement was thrown over the wall of soldiers, splattering onto the paving stones of the main entrance.  His nose twitched as the smell of the feces combined with the general scent of unwashed bodies, woodsmoke, and desperation that filled the city.

The mob surged, finally noticing that the gate had been cracked open.  Metal clanked along the left wing of the guard formation as the defenders snapped into position.  Moments later, the thrum of the crowd was replaced by screams as their charge was dashed upon the well-trained steel curtain of spears.

“That isn’t…” Leeka began, only to trail off.  A frown on her face as she watched a man in a ragged cloak drag another man with a chest wound back into the mass of rioters.

“Don’t look at it,” Micah said quietly, putting a hand on her wrist as he began to cast flight.  “When people get desperate, this is what happens.  It’s almost impossible to stop from the outside.  All we can do is get out of here and hope that they manage to tire themselves out before something awful happens.”

“But,” she croaked, her voice barely audible over the swelling anger of the crowd.  “Someone might die Micah.  If we leave things like this, those guards are going to kill some of the civilians.  Look at them, most of that crowd is forgotten.  They can’t even defend themselves.”

“Don’t worry,” Micah replied, casting flight on himself.  “The forgotten of Jakint can defend themselves.  A bit too well actually.  If this comes to blows, I’m not sure that my attunement is on the guards, and if that were to happen, things wouldn’t be safe for any blessed.”

Leeka swiveled her head to squint at Micah, her face struggling as she tried to process the scene outside the gates.

“Come on,” he chided her, tapping the side of Leeka’s face to grab her attention.  “I’ve cast flight on you.  In a second we’re going to take off.  I know where a Chorus safe house is, follow me and we’ll be in and out before they even know what’s happening.”

“What in the name of the Sixteen is,” she began, only to be interrupted by Micah launching himself into the air and zipping over the tumultuous crowd.  “Hey, WAIT!”

Micah wove in between Jakint’s many rooftops, keeping his pace just slow enough that Leeka could catch up.  Under him, the roofs zipped by, transitioning from fired clay to thatch as they traveled away from the city’s richer quarters and toward the rundown forgotten district.  No matter where Micah went, the only constant was a lack of activity.  Chimneys produced no smoke, and the handful of people occupying the streets walked quickly and with their heads down, trying to avoid any untoward attention.

Leeka pulled even with him, wind whipping at her hair and sending the terrified Jakaw jerking back and forth as it clung to her braid.  She scowled at him, shouting to be heard over the tumult of their passage.

“Don’t you think that we could have found a less flashy way to travel?  Given how the guards were acting, this seems like the sort of stunt that will get us put on posters.  You know, the kind with rewards listed below our pictures.”

“No time,” Micah yelled back.  “Plus, it’s not like the city guard will want to be friends with us once we break out of Jakint.  Maybe we can soften the blow by cleaning up the Dread Chorus den where everyone is being held, but-”

“What in the name of the sun, the moon, and the night is the Dread godsdamned Chorus?” She screamed in frustration.

Micah stopped, the roaring of the wind in his ears suddenly halting as he hovered over the forgotten distinct.  He squinted slightly as he looked down on the muddy streets and poorly repaired roofs.  Here, gaggles of people were moving about normally, entirely unconcerned with the chaos that had engulfed the rest of the city.

The real problem for Micah was that everything looked different from above.  It didn’t help that his only encounter with the tavern was at night, moments before a major fight.  He chewed on his lip as indecision plagued him.  Down below, a couple of forgotten stopped in the middle of the street, pointing up at Micah.  One of them ran off, shouting something indecipherable.

“Seriously Micah,” Leeka called out as she soared back to him.  “You’ve barely explained anything, just rushed me from one place to another.  Before we do anything else, I really need to know what’s happening.”

Micah sighed, eyeing up the rooftops.  Finally, he settled on one that was big enough to be the tavern, surrounded by roughly the same landmarks.  The only problem was that the word ‘landmark’ was a bit of a stretch.  Almost every building in the forgotten quarter was some brand of poorly designed and run down.  There were hardly any amenities to draw the eye, leaving Micah to little more than guesswork and luck as he tried to pinpoint the specific building.

“Someone found a way to give the forgotten something that resembles blessings,” he replied, floating toward the larger building.  A gentle thrum of energy coming off of it caused his Arcana skill to tingle.  “They grabbed my family, and they’re trying to smuggle them out of town.  Unless we act quickly, they’ll be able to ship them off to gods know where.”

“Blessings to forgotten,” Leeka whispered, her eyes widening.  “That’s amazing.  What kind of person would have that sort of power?  It seems like the sort of thing reserved for the gods themselves.”

“I never said that my opponent was a person,” Micah replied with a chuckle as he lowered himself onto the bar’s roof.  “In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the Third Prince is closer to a god than a person.  That said, I want to be clear.  What it’s giving the forgotten aren’t blessings.  They’re wounds in their souls, powered by the energy leaking out of them.  It might give the forgotten the power to fight on par with a blessed, but I doubt that any of them will survive more than five years, and after that it’s not just death.  Their souls are gone entirely, devoured back into the mists of Elsewhere.”

“That doesn’t-” she began only to catch herself.  “I don’t understand half of what you said, but it sounds bad.  Like, really really bad.”

“A fair assessment,” he agreed with a distracted nod.  “Now get ready, we’re going in through the roof.”

Leeka opened her mouth to reply, cutting herself off when she noticed Micah’s lips moving wordlessly as he cast a spell.  A second later, wind blade tore a massive hole in the cheap, rotting thatching of the bar’s roof.

Voices began to shout on street level, but Micah simply ignored them as he floated down through hole opened by his spell.  More screams accompanied his descent, but Micah tuned them out.  As soon as his feet touched down on the top floor of a bedroom in the tavern, he began casting wind blade a second time and stomped on the floor, relying on his absurd attributes to blow a hole clean through the poorly fitted wooden planks.

Micah let himself fall into the tavern’s common area.  Unsurprisingly, the tables and chairs were in the exact spots he remembered them.  The bartender, on the other hand, was washing what looked to be the same glass using the same dirty rag as when he’d first stormed the building.  If anyone was actually entering the bar to drink, he’d be concerned about their health, but that was the furthest thing from his mind as Micah unleashed the wind blade at the frowning tavern-keeper.

Rather than the wall of green fire that he expected, the high tier wind spell cut the forgotten in half, painting the back wall of the bar a deep cherry red.  Micah reached out with his Arcana skill toward the bisected corpse only to recoil.

It was like touching the soul of a rabbit or a squirrel.  A bar wisp of nothingness with no force or vital energy behind it.  Evidently, the damage done to the bartender’s soul in the previous timeline was permanent.  Whatever those green flames were, they burned reality on a level that time magic couldn’t hope to match.

The doors burst open as Leeka followed Micah through the hole in the ceiling and into the main room.  The two thugs that had accosted them in the previous timeline rushed into the room only for Leeka’s arrows to sprout from their chests, leaving them to die with looks of surprise on their faces as their defensive ‘blessings’ failed to activate.

She cast Micah an uneasy look as he began casting vacuum.  Evidently the massacre of ‘defenseless’ forgotten didn’t sit well with her.  Micah didn’t really blame Leeka.  Apparently the time shift had caught the guards by surprise, and they made no effort to defend themselves as they charged headlong into the attacks.

Micah’s spell finished, cracking a hole in the tavern floor just above where he remembered the chorus.  He jumped through the gap, landing in a crouch amidst the macabre orchestra.

This time he was rewarded with a rush of green flame.  It came too quickly for Micah to dodge, almost as if the person firing it was waiting for his arrival.

The attack splashed off of his Maarikava armor, the force of the blow rocking every enchantment in the equipment.  Micah gritted his teeth against the explosion of icy cold energy that erupted from the ball of flame.  His armor protected him from the worst of it, he could feel the runes inscribed in it straining against the otherworldly energy of the spell, but the small amount of eldritch power that leaked through gnawed at his very core, utterly ignoring his physique and hit points.

He threw his spear, launching the weapon through the flash of green flame that encircled the man who had attacked him, and ultimately pinning his victim to the far wall of the basement.  A trio of air knives battered the forgotten standing next to him, activating her defensive flames and knocking her off balance.

The low tier spells didn’t do much more than distract the guard.  The spell that glanced off of her cheek might have left a bruise, but Micah’s magic was blunted and slowed by burning armor to the point that they barely represented a threat.

Still, they did their work, leaving the forgotten reeling just long enough for Micah to dash past her and wrench his spear from her burning companion.  An arrow zipped through the air as Leeka joined the fight, disappearing into a wall of flame.  A second later she was on the floor of the basement, bow drawn back as she looked for another target.

Past the two guards were a gaggle of bound and hooded bodies watched over by a tall blonde woman wearing a white robe emblazoned with an emerald torch.  Leeka fired another arrow at the woman as Micah stabbed the remaining guard, thrusting his spear through the protective flames and impaling the forgotten’s head.

The robed woman summoned a whip of green fire and lashed out at Leeka, forcing Micah’s companion to jump back behind the bone harp.  As soon as the flames touched the instrument, it exploded, peppering both Leeka and Micah with shards of bone.

The Maarikava armor protected Micah from the worst of it, but the shrapnel still managed to open up shallow cuts on his face and hands.  Leeka had it worse.  Her thin leather armor wasn’t enchanted, and she had been much closer to the harp when it detonated

Leeka fell to the ground, blood streaming from a dozen wounds as Micah surges past her, spear leading the way toward the whip wielding forgotten.  The whip cracked again, forcing Micah to arrest his charge and pull up short.

The icy cold rope of energy snapped in front of him before winking out.  Micah blinked once in surprise, his vision struggling to process the sudden dimness of the basement.  The woman grinned.

“Micah Silver.  The master will be happy to know that you’ve arrived.  He’s been waiting so long to meet you again.”

Then she crushed something in her right hand, activating the teleportation formation that she was standing in and leaving Micah in the dark room with nothing but the chills running down his spine.