[The Twining] 5. Better Off (Patreon)

[ the last of the chapter dump. from now on i'll only post a chapter when i write one :) but i'm writing quite fast ]

Isen woke up in sticky darkness and retched at the smell of sickly sweet blood.

He was still inside the bear.

Every part of him hurt. Gritting his teeth, he crawled his way out of the bear’s torn throat, the knife still held in his right hand. He shivered from the cooling blood.

How long was I out? he wondered, alarmed. If the scaled beast had lived, wouldn’t it have rescued him from the bear’s corpse?

He fell limply from the throat, landing on his side in a pool of coagulating blood. He winced and staggered to his feet.

His heart fell.

No, he thought, rushing over to the unmoving body of the scaled guardian. We killed it. Please.

As he drew closer, he realized that the mist was undulating faintly around the monster, entering its mouth. It wasn’t properly cycling—it was subconsciously drawing on the ambient energy. But that meant it was alive.

His relief was overwhelming. He leaned against the beast’s spine, his hands trembling.

Was it worth it? he asked himself.

He clenched his fists, and suddenly he was somewhere else, his mind playing back old memories like everything was happening again in the present.

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

They’d all wanted to get out of Goldbounty. Becoming the apprentices of a lonely older woman had seemed like a good idea... to no one. It hadn’t made any sense. Why would someone like Lady Jin find pity in the pit of her wealthy heart to rescue a pack of strays? There had to be some ulterior motive.

Isen had told them it was worth the risk. That this opportunity was truly as good as it sounded, even if it seemed inexplicable. He’d told them, and they had listened, because Isen always knew best.

He squeezed his eyes shut as though that would be enough to clear the haze of the past.

Better off, he thought, experiencing the regret, would have been better off... listening to their own common sense.

He needed to drown it out, so for the first time since the fateful day he witnessed tribulation lightning tearing the Twining apart, Isen laughed. He roared with delirious laughter, his head thrown back.

He thrust his head into the scaled beast and a sharp pain spiked between his eyes. His breathing was ragged as he collected himself.

Everything… it was just ridiculous. The floor was coated in blood and he was absolutely drenched, his hair a sticky mess, his wounds all liberally coated. He was so thirsty.

He dropped the knife; it fell with a clang. His shaking hands pulled up his slick waterskin from the ruin of his pack. He uncapped it and poured the water over his face and hands before sending some into his mouth. The sweet taste of the bear’s blood refused to wash away.

Isen knew he lived in a cold world, one inhospitable to those poor in wealth, looks, intelligence, standing, and magical talent—and most of the children he’d known were all of the above. But he’d also always recognized that the world was a large, boundless place. He’d look out over Goldbounty’s rooftops at the sprawling plains. He’d hear the stories of beyond from the caravans.

He’d known that the world had plenty of room for people, and had wondered why they were all stuck in a place so overcrowded and hopeless.

Everyone always blamed the Twining. It was dangerous. It spawned monsters.

But having spent time within the shadowed depths beneath it, he realized those for the poor excuses they were.

He wondered, dejectedly, if he had a chance to approach them now, and tell them that they could just leave, walk right out into the plains with only themselves to rely on... he wondered if they’d trust him.

It was a moot point when he’d never see any of them again.

The mist had filled the room completely over the course of the battle. Isen realized he could see the full size of the room at a glance. His left eye had gotten stronger.

Seeing more of the chamber didn’t give him much to work with. It was a circular room with a ceiling too tall for him to see—the mist didn’t go high enough. The walls still seemed plain and featureless. The door’s mechanism couldn’t be seen through the mist, he remembered, his eyes narrowing in thought. Following a hunch, he walked toward the closest wall. He held out his hands and felt the wall’s surface.

It felt like—books.

He recoiled in shock, then walked swiftly around the perimeter, his hands dancing across the wall’s surface. It was a distraction from worrying over the scaled beast. Endless books, at least endless by his standards, filled shelves. Maybe they even reached the ceiling—he couldn’t tell.

But they were useless to him. He pulled one from the shelf, but he couldn’t read the pages. What good would a place like this be to anyone if the books were illegible in the dark? He considered the possibility that this place served merely as storage but discarded it. If someone wanted to store books, there were far better ways than hiding them within the depths of the Twining’s tears. There had to be another reason.

His mind raced with possibilities. Maybe an outlaw mage had escaped into the depths and created a secret lab. Maybe a prince from a long-lost kingdom had been trapped here with only books for company. Maybe this place had been a mage’s tower in Eboncall before being sucked into a tear when the two dimensions collided—

Suddenly, his hand fell upon a break in the shelves. It was a panel of smooth wood. He was close to the entrance, only a few feet away. He drew his hands over the panel, searching for something familiar.

Found it. The imprint of a hand, like on the door.

Chest buzzing with anticipation, Isen placed his hand in the impression.

Suddenly, the world was awash in light. Far above, a chandelier glowed a pale gold, like warm candlelight. He shut his eyes on reflex, blinded by the sudden radiance after days of darkness. He blinked them open, his eyes wide in wonder as he took in the full scope of the room. He could clearly see the shelves of books. There was even a ladder he’d missed, propped up against the wall on the opposite side of the chamber, its base soaking in the bear’s golden-white blood.

Isen sucked in a breath. The bear’s skin was pale white, and its dead, worm-like tendrils were colorless, like ice. He stared at it, transfixed by the monstrous corpse. Then he turned to behold the scaled beast who had brought him to this place.

He’d seen glimpses of its true form in the luminance of the golden water, but nothing prepared him for the vision of its full form. He’d known it was white, but under the chandelier, its scales were pearly and iridescent. The largest ones that covered its back and legs scintillated in all colors of the rainbow.

It was beautiful.

But the beast was heavily wounded. It was easier to see in the light just how terrible the damage was. The beast’s ribs were caved in, its spine bent the wrong way, one hind leg half torn off and twisted. Unlike the bear’s pale, gold-tinged blood, the guardian beast’s blood was a pure white, like milk.

Shaking, Isen looked down at his arms and ruined clothes. He’d expected to see himself drenched in red, but sure enough, he was covered in pale gold. His hands were coated in gruesome scabs, but his injuries had closed, even the bone of his wrist covered by a thin layer of new skin.

The bear’s blood had healed him. Maybe it could heal the guardian beast.

The allure of the mystical sanctum temporarily forgotten, Isen raced over to the scaled beast. He couldn’t see its head—the beast had tucked itself into a ball—so he carefully climbed onto its back and slid between its ears onto its forehead.

“Hey!” he shouted, trying to wake it up. He slapped the beast as hard as he could across its cheek. He pulled on its ear.

He screamed louder, jostling the unmoving face with his feet, kicking at its mouth to reveal its gums. Several of its mighty fangs were broken and its gums—pale white, rather than the pink he’d always assumed—wept milky fluid.

But he could see it—the mist. With the light above, the mist no longer looked gray. It shone in a multitude of colors, not unlike the rainbow iridescence of the vulpine beast’s scales. It entered the mouth in a steady ebb and flow.

Trusting his gut, he gathered up mist in his own mouth and cycled. He considered how he forced the mist to enter his stomach. He made an emptiness that the mist was called to fill. But why was he limited to drawing the mist into his body? Why couldn’t he create an emptiness somewhere else?

He cupped his hands and imagined that they were like his stomach. He cycled the ambient energy, and at first it only entered his stomach like before, but after an unknown period of time, small eddies began to whirl around his hands, filling the space between them.

Brows furrowed in concentration, he maneuvered himself onto the beast’s maw, bracing himself with his thighs while he dangled off to one side, his abdominal muscles protesting.

Hands filled with energy, he forced them between a broken section of teeth, then opened them, willing the energy to enter the beast’s throat just as he normally willed it to circulate through his body.

He withdrew his hands—newly scraped from the jagged edges of the beast’s broken fangs—and tried to repeat the same process again.

After what felt like the hundredth attempt, the beast stirred. Isen fell onto its arm and winced as he hit his hip. The pain was immediately forgotten as one large, golden eye opened and stared down at him.

In the overhead light, the eye looked different. It glowed, but Isen could see a slitted pupil at the eye’s center and the contours of the beast’s eyelashes, almost like little feathers. Its scaled eyebrows were expressive as it peered down at him.

It looked at once defeated and relieved.

“You look a mess,” it wheezed, coughing up a mouthful of white blood tinged with gold—traces of the bear’s blood. “Foolish human—are you crying because of me?”

Isen immediately wanted to protest the accusation but couldn’t. He hadn’t realized it, but he was crying. Now that it had been pointed out, he found that he couldn’t stop. Great sobs shook his body and he curled up into the crook of the beast’s arm.

“Stop,” the beast said. “There’s no time to waste. I’ll be dead soon—you need to prepare.”

Isen froze, then leapt up, meeting the beast’s eye. “But you defeated the other monster.”

“I can’t walk. My wounds are too grievous to heal passively with the ambient energy.”

Isen bit his lip. “But… you can’t.”

The beast’s face softened. “Boy—how old are you?”

“Thirteen,” he said quickly. “Well, maybe. Or twelve. Why does that matter?”

The beast closed its eye for a moment and pulled deeply from the mist. “It doesn’t.”

“What if… what if you ate the bear?” Isen suggested. “I got some of its blood into my wounds. They’re healing quickly.”

“Healing?” The vulpine beast’s brows drew together. “What color is its blood? I cannot see.”

“Gold,” Isen said, then amended, “golden white.”

The beast jolted. “I cannot go to the corpse, and you lack the strength to drag it to me.”

“I have a knife,” he said. “I’m weak, but I can cut through the beast’s flesh if I’m patient enough and have good leverage.”

“Don’t use your knife,” the scaled beast said. “Cut free one of its claws. It will serve as a far better implement.”

As Isen jogged over to the gold-tinged corpse, he wiped at his cheeks. He knew why he cared about the monster. It had saved him and guided him in this inhospitable place. It wasn’t exactly friendly, often ignoring him. He couldn’t even say it was honest. But he couldn’t deny that he owed it his life.

This was his way of paying the debt.

You don’t believe that, he told himself as he positioned his knife over the bear’s mighty paw. The scaled beast never would have come here without you. Never would have fought that thing if you hadn’t said there was opportunity here.

It’s your fault.

The knife swung down like a cleaver. It left only the shallowest mark on the bear’s tendriled fur. He snarled and brought the knife up again. He let out a sharp yell as he swung.

Your…

The knife came down again. Each time he hit a slightly different spot, inflicting negligible damage. The tears still wouldn’t stop.

…  fault.

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