Chapter 127 - Reunion (Patreon)

Zeke paced back and forth on his balcony, which was a new addition suite of rooms, probably prompted by his persistent complaints that his porch had disappeared when it had evolved from a cottage and into the tower it had become. The pair of rocking chairs Abby had bought back in Beacon sat unused and gathering dust, while his book of runes lay open and ignored on the railing. He’d discarded his armor, and it, along with his mace and shield, was safely stowed away in his spatial storage.

“You know that’s not going to help, right?” Tucker said, leaning against the white stone wall. The veins of red had grown more prominent, and from a distance, they appeared almost entirely crimson. Soon, the red would probably overtake the white, and the tower would begin to live up to its name. “You’d be better off trying to distract yourself than dwelling on it.”

Zeke stopped and glared at the alchemist, who’d, of late, taken it upon himself to become Zeke’s right-hand man. It was as if Tucker didn’t trust him to be alone, which, if Zeke was honest, was probably a valid notion. Without his companions holding him back and convincing him otherwise, he’d have already gone straight to the gnoll village, as opposed to remaining in the meadow they’d agreed upon before Abby parted ways with the group. For all his positive attributes, patience was not a characteristic Zeke possessed in abundance, especially when the woman he’d slowly begun to accept that he loved was in mortal danger.

He considered Abby a strong, capable woman, and if it came down to it, he believed she could find a way to be successful in any endeavor. However, that belief was slowly losing a battle of attrition with the certainty that he couldn’t bear to lose her. Until she’d split off from the group, Zeke hadn’t even realized how much he’d leaned on her, both emotionally and from a more practical standpoint. Their nightly talks were invaluable, and not only because they helped Zeke to break down the seemingly impossible tasks before them into smaller, far more manageable chunks. That was certainly the case, but there was also something comforting in letting his walls down and revealing a small portion of his inner self, of his insecurities and fears. With Abby, he could do that. And in turn, she could do the same with him. Neither really offered solutions to the other, but the mere act of telling was incredibly valuable.

“I shouldn’t have let her go alone,” Zeke muttered. It had been three days since they’d cleared out the myconid cave, and a part of him had expected that, when they returned to the predesignated rendezvous point, Abby would be waiting for them. It was silly. She’d had the more difficult task. But the entire trek from the myconid nest to the meadow they had decided upon, the idea had haunted his every thought. So, when they arrived and Abby wasn’t there, it had sent Zeke into a tailspin of increasingly fatalistic thoughts.

“As if you could have stopped her,” Tucker said. Zeke gave him a pointed look, which made Tucker amend his statement with, “Not without losing her. You don’t tell a woman like that she can’t do something, kid. If you do, she’ll leave. If you did manage to stop her, she’d have never forgiven you.”

“I know,” Zeke muttered, putting his hands on the balcony and hanging his head. Below, Talia and Pudge were “sparring,” which, to Zeke, seemed more like playing tag with one another. “I just wish…”

“She needs this, you know,” Tucker stated. “I know you don’t want to think about it like this, but, as she is, she’s too weak. Sure, she can make up for it with plans and such, but when it comes right down to it, we’re going to be going up against some real monsters when we get to the desert. It’s not like anywhere else.”

“That’s what everyone says about everywhere,” Zeke stated. “When we left Beacon, everyone kept telling me how dangerous the north was. We did okay up here, though. And we’ll do okay in the Red Wastes.”

“Okay? Y’all almost died a hundred times,” Tucker pointed out. “The undead almost got you. The Caprids. The Jotuns. Even the goddamn myconids were almost too much. You’ve been living on the edge of oblivion for months now, and I’ll tell you right now – it’s going to get worse in the desert. The rest of this, it’s been a vacation compared to the dangers of the Red Wastes.”

“Is it really that bad?” Zeke asked.

“It’s not just the monsters,” Tucker explained. “Though they’re bad enough on their own. I’m talking giant sand crabs, desert basilisks, and rock spirits that’ll pummel you under five tons of stone. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

“We can handle monsters just fine,” Zeke stated with confidence.

“Maybe,” Tucker conceded, idly toying with one of his braids. “If I didn’t think you could, I wouldn’t be here. But like I said, the real issue isn’t the monsters. It’s the people. Do you know anything about Jariq? Or the gangs that run the Red Wastes?”

“No,” Zeke admitted.

“It’s a complicated system, and unless you live there, you probably won’t ever completely understand it,” Tucker explained. “But basically, there are five gangs based in the city, and each one has their own territory.”

“And let me guess? They all fight one another,” Zeke sighed.

“No,” Tucker said. “There are skirmishes here and there, but they mostly keep to their own territories. If they stray too far out of line, then the council steps in. And when they do, the spiders follow.”

Zeke ground his teeth. It kept coming back to the Crystal Spiders, didn’t it? He knew they were based in the Red Wastes, but he hadn’t expected an assassins’ guild to be so legitimate as Tucker seemed to make them out to be.

“And when the spiders start dropping bodies, the gangs back off real quick,” Tucker continued. “But outside of Jariq, it’s an anything goes sort of situation. So long as word doesn’t get back to the council, I mean. If it does…well, they’re there to keep the peace, and no matter what else happens, that’s what they’re going to do.”

“Okay? How does this affect us? There were factions in Beacon, too,” Zeke said.

“There was only one faction that really mattered there,” Tucker countered. “The Temple was the only one with any real authority. But in Jariq? You’re at the mercy of whomever owns the territory you happen to be in. You follow their rules, which are almost always different from their rivals. It’s difficult to keep it all straight.”

“You seem to know a lot about it, though,” Zeke reasoned. “You can make sure we don’t screw it up too badly, right?”

“Maybe,” Tucker said. “But you’ve already gotten on the bad side of the spiders, from what I understand. Might be difficult for you to fly under the radar. And even if you can, I’ve known you long enough now to know that you probably won’t. I don’t think you’ll be happy unless you leave that city in ruins. Especially after you see some of the things that go on there.”

“Sounds ominous.”

“It should,” Tucker stated. “It’s a city of rules, not morality. So long as you remember that, you might survive.”

“I won’t look the other way if people are being hurt,” Zeke said.

“And that’s why I wish I could talk you out of going in the first place,” Tucker said.

“I’ve told you already, we have to go,” Zeke said. “We have the quest, and we know the wyrm is in the desert. Chances are, we’ll find something along the way that’ll point us in the direction of a warlock or a flame warden.”

“I know,” Tucker said. “I just wish there was another way. We could go around, come at the desert from the south.”

“And risk drawing Constance’s attention?” Zeke asked. “Or did you forget about her? She’s probably already heard about what happened with Talia, you know. Do you really think she’ll let that slide? She was willing to sacrifice her own daughter to get her husband back, and we just yanked that away from her. She’s insane, and she probably blames us. Going anywhere near Beacon is a bad idea.”

“There’s also the issue of the undead army to worry about,” Tucker said.

“What? We could just circle around it,” Zeke reasoned.

“No, no – it’s probably on the move,” Tucker explained. “I think I’ve alluded to it before, but if you think Constance is crazy – and she is, by the way – Micayne is worse. The way he probably sees it is that Constance sent you and Abby up there to foil his plans. Maybe to reneg on their agreement. I don’t know what’s going to be going on in his head, but he’s not going to be happy. He was already a hair’s breadth from going to war with the rest of the island; this probably just pushed him over the edge.”

“You’re saying that he’s going to attack Beacon?” Zeke asked.

“Probably just surround it, at first,” Tucker said. “That aura is extremely powerful, and it’ll affect his undead pretty badly. By the time they reached Beacon itself, they’d be easy pickings for almost anyone in the city. On top of that, the Church of Purity’s there to cleanse the disease. No – they’ll siege the place. Blockade it. And while they do so, Micayne will probably be sending agents into Beacond with the intention of undermining Constance’s rule as well as the aura itself.”

“Is it possible that they’d bring it down?” Zeke asked, a little horrified. After all, he and Abby had been almost directly responsible for what had happened on Micayne’s estate. Certainly, they’d only been trying to do the right thing, but it seemed that they’d inadvertently started a war. Did that mean that every death that followed was on their heads? Zeke didn’t want to feel responsible, but there was an itch in the back of his mind that told him otherwise.

“Probably not,” Tucker said. “But they can weaken it. And if Micayne gets his hands on the runes that control it, there’s a possibility that he can subvert it to his ends. Kind of like what he did with Hvitgard. If that happens, the Radiant Isles will fall.”

“Damn,” Zeke said. “Is that…I mean…should we try to stop it?”

“Maybe? I don’t know,” Tucker said. “But rest assured, if it comes to that, Beacon won’t be defenseless. There are a couple of hundred true elites in the city at any given time. Half that many in Salvation. Micayne and his undead horde are powerful, especially with all those giants on his side now, but they can be stopped.”

“But if we run into them on our way, they’ll overwhelm us,” Zeke said. “And I doubt we’ll have an entire tribe of caprids to save us.”

“Right.”

“I have been wondering something lately, though,” Zeke mused. “Why did they send us up there? I mean, it makes almost no sense, right? All we could do was mess things up.”

Tucker rubbed his chin, then said, “It depends on who actually sent you, really. If it was Constance’s decision, it was probably part of her deal with Micayne. Find people who are powerful, but not so powerful that they could be called true elites, send them up there to become part of his undead army. In return, Micayne continued his work to try to revive her husband.”

“It was Silas,” Zeke said. “Or I think it was.”

“That makes a difference, then,” Tucker said. “If I had to guess, he might’ve hoped you could save the girl. He’s a tricky one, by all accounts, and he doesn’t often ask for permission before he does what he wants to do. I don’t know him personally, but I’ve heard enough rumors to think that he probably sent you up there to ease his own conscience.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it, Zeke – if he really wanted to save Talia, he’d have gone after her himself,” Tucker explained. “Instead, he sent a pair of level fifteens. He did something, but not enough to draw Constance’s ire, because there wasn’t much of a chance you’d succeed. But it eased his conscience because there was still a chance, slim though it was. He was kind of playing both sides.”

Zeke wanted to contradict the alchemist, but the fact of the matter was that he barely knew Silas at all. Sure, they’d trained together for a few days, and Zeke had taken a liking to the man, but that wasn’t much of an endorsement. Even going back to his baseball years, Zeke had always latched onto any coach that seemed to know what he was doing. It wasn’t quite hero worship, but it wasn’t all that far off, either. Competence, to Zeke, was an admirable trait, and there were few people he’d met since being reborn that exemplified that characteristic more than Master Silas.

“Either way, the point stands,” Zeke stated. “We can’t go that way. We don’t have much choice but to head to the desert and hope we don’t draw too much attention.”

“If you say so,” Tucker muttered.

Zeke was about to reply, but he was cut off by Pudge’s excited thought, Abby’s back!

Just then, Zeke looked in the direction indicated by the bear’s thoughts and saw a bedraggled and exhausted looking Abby trudging toward the tower. It was telling that she didn’t gape at the structure; when she’d left, it was a cottage, but now, it was a full-fledged tower. Perhaps she was even more tired than her plodding steps might indicate. However, Zeke was grateful to see that, at least to his eyes, she didn’t appear injured.

In seconds, he’d leapt from the balcony to land on the hard-packed turf that abutted the tower, and soon after, he’d begun sprinting in her direction. As soon as he reached Abby, he very nearly tackled her in his enthusiasm. And he felt tears of relief rolling down his cheeks as he said, “I was so worried about you.”

“I was worried, too,” she admitted. “But can you let me go? I’d really like to breathe.”

Sheepishly, Zeke unwrapped his arms and held her at arm’s length. After a brief use of his inspection skill, he said, “You leveled. So, I take it that the trip was successful? Did you get what you wanted?”

“I…did,” she said. “Kind of. I don’t know. It’s really complicated. But yeah, I completed the quest and got a skill. I’m still not sure it was worth it, though.”

Zeke studied her for a long moment until he recognized what he saw in her eyes. She’d had to make some tough choices, which was something with which Zeke was intimately familiar. He didn’t know what those choices entailed, but he knew that she’d struggled with doing what had to be done.

“It’s okay,” he said, hugging her again. “It’ll all be okay.”

“I hope so,” she said, though Zeke could tell that her heart wasn’t really in it.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

“No. Not right now,” she answered. “I just want a shower and some rest. Maybe after, though…”

“I…I understand,” Zeke said. Then, he escorted her into the tower, where she pointedly didn’t even seem to notice the changed décor. Abby had clearly gotten the life-changing experience she’d sought; he just couldn’t help but wonder if it came with a heap of regret.