Hungry Heart - Book 5 - Ch. 10 (Patreon)

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Chapter Ten – Your True Power Is Here

A pair of slanted eyes rested on their faces, but there appeared to be no recollection of having seen them before in the boat pilot’s gaze. Was it possible that they had the wrong person? Hand on heart, Duril couldn’t say that the boat rider standing tall in front of them was the same as the one who had taken Toru and Mako to an unknown destination.

“We are looking for our friends,” Claw began. A silent agreement between them had established that the bearshifter should be the one to talk for both of them. His impressive stature could very well be more convincing than Duril’s usually less threatening demeanor. Throughout their travels, Duril had noticed that a second look from people was usually all it took for strangers to see that he was no one to be afraid of despite the tusks that pointed at the origins of his sire.

“They aren’t here,” the boat rider said, as if it were question for which he had the answer ready for a long time.

“Where are they?” Claw asked sharply.

The boat rider didn’t change his stance or expression at the change in tone. His features remained as unmoving as ever. “Am I the keeper of your friends?” he asked. There was no challenge in his voice, no sign that he intended to get into a confrontation with these strangers pestering him with questions.

“You or one of your mates must be since they left on a boat and haven’t yet returned,” Claw continued.

“If they haven’t returned, it means that their journey is not over.”

Silence followed, as Claw and the boat pilot faced each other. Of their group, only Claw could stare one of these boat riders in the face and even dwarf him with his presence. However, if intimidation was the weapon the bearshifter hoped to use, it was less than a blunt knife in his opponent’s eyes.

“Are you here for a ride?” the boat pilot asked, his garments floating by his sides like the waves of the Aureate Sea.

“No. We need to find our friends.”

“If it isn’t a ride you want, I cannot help you.”

“Wait,” Claw said before the boat rider could move away from them, “were you the one who took our friends to their destination?”

“We all are,” the boat pilot replied in the same even tone.

Duril pondered briefly over the strangeness of that statement.

“Your friends’ journey is not over,” the boat rider continued.

“Do you mean to say that one of your mates is still with them? Out there?” Claw pointed at the fog shrouding the distance. It was hard to see it in the moon’s glow, but Duril didn’t doubt that his bearshifter friend was able to perceive his surroundings as if it were daylight. The fog was unmoving and unyielding, filling Duril with a sudden and inexplicable sense of longing the more he stared at it.

“I mean all that I say.” The boat rider turned away from them, seemingly ready to ignore them.

Claw made a move to follow, but Duril caught his arm. His eyes were fixed on a dim glint in the evening sky that appeared to grow larger the more he stared. “Claw, what do you think that is?”

The words died on his lips, as the innocuous glint from earlier appeared to transform before his very eyes into a ball of fire. The shouts from the boat riders nearby weren’t enough to make him tear his eyes away from the horrifying blast moving through the sky, ready to smash into the sea of sand below.

“Duril, come!” Claw shouted and took his hand, pulling him along.

The boat pilots were boarding their vessels, waving their arms hurriedly, an unusual thing for the likes of them, always so stern and collected. The ball of fire only grew, and it seemed to send a blast of wind before it to prepare its welcome because the Aureate Sea parted as if scattered and split in half by the invisible hand of a deity. The swish of sand through the air was soon followed by grains so small that not even squeezing his eyes shut saved Duril from feeling them smack against his eyelids and then find their way into his eyes themselves.

“We need to get on one of those boats,” Claw said urgently, Duril tagging along blindly.

“You must pay for the ride,” he heard a boat rider’s voice, and he searched for his purse.

But the thing was snatched from his hand by an entity he couldn’t see. It had to be too strong to be the sudden wind raised by the ball of fire, right?

“Damn you,” Claw cursed, and Duril felt his hand slipping from his friend’s.

The next thing he knew, Claw’s large arms were wrapped around him and he felt the force of the blast made less powerful by the sheer size of the bearshifter. They stayed like that for what felt like hours, as everything around them howled like a tormented creature.

And then, silence. Absolute silence. Claw removed his arms slowly, and they both looked around, dumbfounded to discover that the wind was gone, along with the maddened dance of the grains of sand.

It would all have looked the same as before, only that a good distance from the shore of the Aureate Sea or what had been called that only earlier, lay what looked like a huge rock with burn marks all over it. And on top of it—

“Toru!” Duril shouted, rubbing his eyes with both hands to get rid of the pesky sand that still remained stubbornly glued in them.

Claw was faster than him. He reached the damaged rock first and gathered Toru’s unmoving body up in his arms. Duril noticed, not far from the young tiger, a bundle made from a cloak. He rushed there, afraid of what he might find.

“Mako,” he whispered as he untied the knots that held the thing together. The young man was there, and although still unconscious, he was breathing. “Claw, what’s with Toru?”

The bearshifter had lifted Toru’s body from the ground as if the young tiger weighed nothing at all.

A movement from Mako pulled Duril’s attention momentarily from his lover’s unmoving shape.

“Duril,” the young man whispered, “what’s going on?”

It took Duril two heartbeats to realize why he was so startled by the young man speaking to him like that. “How do you know who I am?”

***

The guards flanked him on both sides as well as from behind.

“Where are you taking me?” he asked, although he wasn’t truly expecting an answer.

None came. Varg carefully took in his surroundings. Coinvale was unusually silent compared to the noisy city that had welcomed them barely days ago. Even at night, Coinvale had appeared to be a place that never slept, and now, to see it as a picture of long shadows cast by the street lights, still burning with the same intensity as ever, seemed an exception to the rule.

Was it their doing? Had it happened because they had arrived there, disturbing the balance? If their peace relied on the use of an evil shard and absurd rules, maybe their harmony was not to be envied, and their balance was crooked.

He looked around, trying to gauge whether hidden eyes were following him being paraded through the city in that manner, as if he were a criminal. In their eyes, he might very well be, he pondered, as he remembered what words he had exchanged with these guards dressed in armor that concealed their faces, even their eyes.

The guards forced him to make a left turn, and Varg realized that they were soon to be engulfed by a maze of streets that lay behind the orderly buildings fronting the well-lit main road. But no, that wasn’t their intention. One of the guards stepped in front of him and opened a metal door Varg hadn’t noticed. The door opened into a long flight of stairs descending into deep darkness. Varg blinked. His weary eyes would be of no use in the complete absence of light, and he would be required to rely on other senses.

“Where are we going? I have a right to know,” he said, still playing the role of the flabbergasted traveler, caught in a situation he didn’t understand.

“The only right you have now is to understand your mistakes and pay for them,” the guard replied.

Was it the same one who had talked at the inn in the name of all three of them? So it seemed, but Varg could swear that they must have switched places among themselves on their way to wherever ‘here’ was.

“The path you now choose is yours,” the guard added in an ominous voice and then pushed Varg down the dark stairs.

He hadn’t quite expected this turn of events, but he had been in worse situations before. Varg caught himself just before he ended tumbling down the stairs. Was this the judgment they passed in Coinvale? Was there a pile of corpses and the skeletons of so-called wrongdoers waiting for him at the foot of the stairs?

The guards had been quick to close the metal door after pushing him to his most likely demise, so they couldn’t have seen his refusal to act like a bag of potatoes. Varg shifted into his wolf and began sniffing the air. A strong scent of mildew and decay hit his nostrils. He was beginning to understand Claw’s dislike of merchants and their cities with their underground labyrinths. If forced to live under such conditions for centuries, not many would be able to keep their heads on their shoulders.

First things first, Varg walked back up the stairs to check the metal door. Step after step, he had to be getting closer, and he expected to end up smacking his nose against it any moment now.

Any moment now.

The moments passed, and his nose met no door. He stopped and then took another step. His wolf paws registered the cold surface beneath them and nothing else. He took another step and listened. Yes, he wasn’t wrong; there was a certain sound whirring right below him. He hunched down and listened while moving one paw in front of him and pressing against the step. The soft whirring sound occurred only when he moved. What could be the meaning of it?

Now that he paid attention, he realized something else. Each step, when he put one paw on it, sagged very slightly, like a button being pressed. He moved faster, and the humming under his feet sped up into a continuous rhythm. It reminded him of something, and it took him a moment to understand where the familiarity came from. The mechanism helping the Heart of Tradeweaving on its slow ride around the long spire had made a similar sound.

So, he was stuck on a mechanism that made the steps he took toward the metal door above absolutely useless. To check one thing that crossed his mind, Varg took a few steps down, and noticed how there was no whirring to be heard.

That meant that the mechanism only worked when he tried to climb, and not when he tried to descend. He was expected to either expend himself trying to reach a goal he couldn’t achieve or go down these stairs and discover what waited for him at the bottom.

For all he knew, this strange mechanism could be powered by another fragment of Hekastfet’s shard. Too bad he didn’t have Toru’s ability to sense it and remove it. The one time he had tried, things hadn’t worked out very well.

Pushing away that thought, he proceeded to descend. Whatever those guards wanted him to find here, he would reach it. As for their talk about paying for his mistakes, he would see to everything in due time.

The way down was long but it didn’t give him the sense of a futile endeavor his climb up had. The smell of rot grew stronger, making him believe that he could very well be heading into the city’s sewer system. What did the guards expect him to find in the middle of heaps of refuse coming down from the inhabitants above?

Unless they expected him to end his life there, the lesson they seemed to hope to make so-called criminals understand made no sense.

He came to level ground and turned into his human, only to see if he could stand as tall as he was. He swung his arms left and right and it appeared that there was plenty of room for him to move around.

“Left or right?” he wondered out loud, only so he could hear his own voice and pay attention to the echo.

At his right, after a few steps, a solid wall greeted the unwary visitor. After a short check for any sort of door or handle, Varg gave up in favor of going left. No wall was there to stop him, so he continued to walk into the darkness.

A soft light appeared before him like a figment of his imagination. But no, it was there, so Varg hurried toward it. Where there was light, there was knowledge. And maybe he would find someone who could tell him what sort of prison this was.

***

Mako’s eyes grew wide at the sight of Toru’s unmoving body. Duril followed the young man’s every move, too startled to conceive that it could be true.

Claw was the one to break the silence. “Toru?” he asked tentatively.

“That’s me,” Mako pointed at the young shifter. “That’s me, but I’m also here!”

Fear wasn’t an emotion Duril had ever read in Toru’s eyes. And there was none of it when he looked into Mako’s, either. What he saw there was anger.

“What? How?” he started in confusion. “Toru… do you mean… you’re here?”

The young man stepped back, his face all a frown. “This is all that horrible hermit’s fault!” He stared at the body now lying on the ground and hurried toward it. “I must be in here!” he demanded in a booming voice that seemed so unlikely to come out of a body like his.

“Claw, do you understand anything that’s going on?” Duril asked. Maybe Toru wasn’t frightened about being trapped in another person’s body, but he was spooked by such a possibility.

“What I understand is that some damn magic is at play,” Claw replied. “Because,” he said, pointing at Mako, “that’s our kitty, right there.”

“Then who is here?” he asked, kneeling by the side of Toru’s unconscious body. He took an inert hand in his and shuddered at how lifeless it seemed to be.

“For all we know, either no one, or the young lad,” Claw said, shaking his head. “I hate cities where merchants are in power,” he grunted under his breath. “There is always some scheming that hurts others and tortures their souls.”

“Of course, I’m tortured!” Mako… no Toru – Duril corrected himself – shouted. “How am I supposed to find all the shard fragments in this puny body?”

“Show us your hand,” Duril demanded hurriedly.

He took the bony hand and turned it over. The fragment they had seen before glowed darkly. Claw came to stand close by and examined the same thing Duril was looking at.

“It seems to me like it’s possible this fellow here wants to be reunited with all the fragments we haven’t found so far,” the bearshifter commented.

“But what about those that were in my shoulder?” Toru asked. He touched his shoulder and seemed so surprised to touch a body that wasn’t his that under other circumstances Duril would have smiled.

This wasn’t the time to be amused. On the contrary, such a strange development made Duril question what sort of evil and dark magic they had to confront this time.

“When I find that hermit, I’ll strangle him with his own beard,” Toru promised.

“Does he have a beard?” Claw interjected.

“I don’t know, but I’ll find a way to punish him,” Toru said, clenching his small fists.

Duril couldn’t help feeling a jab of tenderness at all that display. Even if he was inside a different body, Toru was Toru. And now his frustration only served to prove that something must have happened on his journey that was supposed to have been about saving Mako.

“Why are you talking about the hermit? How do you know he did this?” Duril asked gently.

“He lured me there,” Toru said and crossed his arms. “I don’t know if he was in cahoots with those boat riders, but it sure feels like it. As soon as I got there, Te’cla did something to prevent me from moving and then told me that he gave me the ability to see all the shard fragments. What good is that when I’m not even myself?”

“You are very much yourself,” Duril assured him. “It does seem like a new challenge has been thrown your way… but let’s figure it out together.” He took the smaller hand in his, still dumbfounded by such a reversal of roles. It was usually Toru who had the bigger hands.

“And my body? My real body?” Toru asked.

“We must find a place to keep that part of you safe,” Claw agreed. “I am the sort who believes things happen for a reason, so my guess is this. In the body of this young lad, Toru, you might be able to sneak through the city to all the places where the fragments are kept to claim them for yourself.”

“But I have no power,” Toru complained. “I’m sure I no longer have my tiger.” He squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced. “No, I don’t have him anymore.”

Duril squeezed his shoulder. “I want to add something to what Claw has said. I believe that this is only temporary, and you will be able to reclaim your body once your quest is over.”

“Do you really mean that, Duril? I’m not going to be stuck as a puny human being forever?”

“I don’t see how that could happen. Now, we must find a place where we can keep your body safe from any harm while you follow the trail of hidden fragments. With our help, of course.”

Duril tensed when he noticed that they were surrounded by the boat pilots. They must have returned from their short flight, and now they had made a circle around the rock that had fallen from the sky.

“You,” Toru said accusingly. “You left me and the young lad and went on your merry way.”

“That was your quest, and you survived it,” one of the boat riders replied calmly.

Duril felt just as angered as Toru at that answer. “He survived it? Wasn’t he supposed to? What sort of people are you?”

He leaned back in surprise as all the boat riders knelt at the same time in one sweeping motion. With their heads bent, they spoke at the same time. “We are the messengers, and our lives are sworn to help defeat the evil lurking in this world.”

Messengers. Like the old man who had given Toru the first shard. A lot of things made sense, but not all.

“Wait,” he intervened, before Toru could give them another piece of his mind, “but you are the boat riders of the Aureate Sea. How can you be messengers?”

With his head still bowed, one of the boat pilots spoke again. “Messengers all have their places in the world of Eawirith. When we are called upon to complete our mission, we will always help.”

“Great help you were,” Toru growled. “Why am I in this body? Did you make this happen?”

The boat pilot who had spoken before rose to his full height. Although he towered over Toru, it looked like any battle of wills that might ensue would not result with him as the winner. “No, it was your wish.”

“My wish?” Toru sputtered. “How can it be my wish to be stuck into a puny body like this?”

“You wished for the young lad that was with you to be spared, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I went to that strange island to save him--”

“I’m not talking about that moment,” the boat rider interrupted him. “As you fell, didn’t you wish it?”

Toru remained silent for a moment. “Yes,” he admitted. “Wait, does that mean that my body… is dead?” He turned toward where what was supposed to be the real him lay and this time, Duril felt his heart in his throat, as he realized that there was a smidge of fear in the young tiger, even if he would never admit to it.

“No,” the messenger said. “You can leave it in our care. No harm will come to it.”

“I don’t trust you,” Toru hissed. “And can’t you give it back to me?”

“You still wish to save your young friend, don’t you?”

“Yes, but--”

“Then you will do what needs to be done.”

Duril moved his eyes from the boat rider to Toru and back again. Claw moved closer. “What happened here?” he asked in a tone that brooked no contradiction. “You must at least provide some answers.”

“We just did,” the messenger replied, unperturbed by Claw, just as before. “You cannot take the tiger’s body with you through the city while you are looking for the shard fragments. Isn’t that true? And Toru needs all your help, now that he is, as he says, trapped in such a puny body.”

“How about you get trapped in a puny body for a change to see how it feels?” Toru shouted.

“Our hero is young and quick to anger,” the boat rider commented. “Take his body,” he ordered and his mates hurried to obey his command.

“Wait,” Toru begged, “where are you taking me?”

“We’re not taking you anywhere, young hero,” the boat rider said. His voice appeared unusually tender. He pressed a hand against Toru’s chest. “You are you, no matter where you are. That,” he added, pointing at Toru’s large body being carried away by the other boat riders, “is only a vessel. Your true power is here.”

TBC

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