9 - Star Road

Hub

The shack that Kary was letting us stay in wasn’t fancy - it was set on stilts two or three feet up like the rest of the buildings here, the walls were made from wood, with no insulation to speak of, and the roof was made from corrugated metal repurposed from the field. It was only one room, with bunks for eight people and scarcely any space for personal effects. When I first saw it, part of me wondered if Kary wasn’t better off sleeping where she had been, in the guild storeroom in town.

I sat in the doorway, watching the storm to the east. Multicolored light flashed in the depths of the clouds, while hope and fear warred in my mind. If I can get there and meet the other Celestial, maybe I could finally get some answers? …Or, at least, maybe I could finally have someone that I can talk to honestly.

Raaf’s approach roused me from my thoughts. He seemed to on his way back from town. “Are you doing all right?”

“Fine, I suppose… I don’t know what I was thinking, I guess the air underground got to me.”

“Maybe, mind if I join you?”

“Please.”

We sat in silence for a while, watching the clouds swirl.

“Would it be strange if I wanted to go?”

“Go… where?”

“Go to the eye of the storm, try and take part in the hunt.”

“Considering it’d be suicide if you actually found them? Maybe.”

“I’ve just been thinking about… I had a family on the inside, and I keep imagining how I would try to save them, but even with what I can do now, I can’t imagine it ending anywhere but the gallows.”

“And you think if you had the Celestial’s full power, it’d be different?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t doubt that. But it’s more likely you’ll die trying to get it.”

“…Maybe.”

Raaf put a hand on my shoulder and looked at me with a sad smile. “Then I guess I hope you come back empty-handed.”

I lay my hand on his, but didn’t meet his gaze. “Thanks.”

Brask tripped over the step into the shack when I told him where I wanted to go. “Are you insane? No! Obviously not!”

I stood up from my bunk and met his eyes. “I understand it’s going to be dangerous-”

Brask began to pace. “It’s not just going to be dangerous. Healthy people don’t go on the hunt for a reason, no one just runs into a Celestial and wins.”

“Maybe normal people don’t, but we’re not normal. We might have a chance!”

Brask winced. “Lily, I don’t think you understand just how powerful Celestials are. Have you heard the story of the Demon War?”

“No, this is the first I’ve heard of it.”

Brask sat on his bunk and began to recant. “The Demon War was the start of our war with Earth. At the time, we still had the Gods’ favor, so there were heroes that carried the blessings of each of the Gods in turn. All the Heroics are named after the heroes that carried them in those days. My Heroic is named after the hero called Lincoln. Do you have any idea how this valley was formed, where all the wreckage we’ve been collecting came from?”

“No, what does that have to do with..?”

Brask avoided eye contact. “He punched it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Brask gestured around us. “There used to be a mountain here, it was the capital of the Dwarvish Cooperative before the Demon Lord took it over. He was out of options, so Lincoln hit the Demon Lord as hard as he could. He won, but the exertion killed him. They say he’s still at the bottom of the lake.”

I sat back down on my bed, stunned silent.

“That’s why we can’t join the hunt. My Heroic’s diluted through fourteen generations, yours probably isn’t much different. People think the guild’s just being bureaucratic when they hound you for details on where you’re hunting, but it’s no accident. It’s so they can keep track of where people don’t come back from. Once they know that, they know where to send the only people with any chance of winning - the heads of the highest Imperial noble families that still carry relatively pure Heroics.”

“If… If it’s completely hopeless, why did you say you were on the way to the hunt when we first met? What changed?”

“That’s… personal. Sorry.” Brask stood to leave, but he paused midstep in the doorway. “No… You, out of anyone, ought to know.” He took a moment to collect himself before returning to his seat. “Before I was an adventurer, I worked under my father, as a blacksmith. Some rich aunt or uncle of mine died, and by some bureaucratic slip I still don’t understand, I ended up inheriting one of their… assets.”

“By ‘assets’, you mean..?”

“Yeah. Her name was Alys, she was hardly six years old. I didn’t know how to live with myself, owning a person. I filled out the papers to emancipate her as soon as I figured out how, but… She didn’t really have anywhere else to go, so I ended up taking care of her. I watched her grow up… I was the closest thing she had to a father for eight years.” Brask’s voice began to break, and his eyes grew misty. “But, uh… One afternoon, I was getting an anvil from the upstairs storeroom while she was manning the floor, and… My hand slipped. It fell through the floor and landed on some noble who was looking down his nose at our work.”

“That’s how you got your Heroic?”

Brask nodded. “I went to prison, and I barely escaped being hanged for murder. Before I skipped town, I went home to try and bring Alys with me, but she wasn’t there. From what I heard, her papers were seized as evidence, and without anyone to vouch for her, they… turned her over to the victim’s family as recompense, and they sold her off somewhere. That’s why Arin and Kavek stopped travelling with me, they thought I should have done a better job protecting her. It… dug things up for me, after all those years.”

“You… You weren’t trying to..?”

“When I heard you calling for help, I was just trying to do one last good deed in case I died on the hunt, but… You look just like she did. When I saw your face, for a second… A part of me almost believed we were together again. Despite everything, I’ve still found myself falling into old habits.” Brask let out a sigh. “What I mean to say is, I know the way I’ve been acting is unacceptable, and I’m sorry… But I hope you understand why I can’t bear to see you throw your life away.”

“That… That makes sense.” We sat in silence for a while before I stood and approached him. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think your behavior has been half bad, now that I know the circumstances… And, uh…” I averted my eyes. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that Alys loved you very much.”

Brask fully broke down, wailing as he sprung up from his bed and pulled me into a hug.

I yelped in surprise at being pulled off my feet so suddenly, but I softened and hugged Brask back as he blubbered a stream of incoherent apologies to someone who wasn’t there to hear them.

While Brask was calming down, I went on a walk along the beach, and while I was there, I had an idea. I felt a little bad about how it was contrived to serve my ulterior motive, but at the same time, I thought it genuinely had a chance of working out for him.

I stepped up into the doorway of the shack. “Hey, Brask?”

Brask sat up in his bunk, his eyes still a little red. “Yeah?”

“I’m wondering if it might still be a good idea to go.”

Brask tensed up. “No, I just told you­-”

“Let me finish! I don’t mean to actually participate in the hunt.”

Brask looked at me quizzically.

“There’ll be adventurers from all over the country there, right? Maybe there’ll be someone there who knows something about Alys or Paisley?” No one would have information about Paisley, of course, but if I don’t have skin in the game, Brask might try to go on his own.

“…Huh. It’s a long shot, but… I guess that could work.”

It took us two days to make it to the site of the hunt, but when we arrived, the unruly mess of tents almost blocked the road and stretched nearly a mile long; there had to be at least a thousand adventurers here.

Brask stood next to the cart, about to climb aboard, before he turned back towards Raaf and I. “Okay, I just want to make sure everyone understands perfectly. First, no one is to go anywhere alone, for any length of time. Second, do not bother anyone. We are in a crowd of a thousand extremely irritable people who are armed to the teeth.” Brask looked pointedly at me. “Third. Please do not use your magic unless there’s a life-or-death situation, Lily. There’s almost certainly at least a few people here who know about Heroics and the related Imperial laws. Is that understood?”

Raaf and I agreed, eager to get out of the rain and get some rest before what was undoubtedly going to be a long day.

Brask elected to sleep in the cart to save space and keep an eye out for danger, while Raaf and I shared a tent just outside. I hoped to make some small talk before calling it a night, but I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow.

I was intact, curled up somewhere soft and warm. The ground was rocking back and forth beneath me. I could hear the muffled booming of thunder and pattering of rain, and someone was gently patting my head. I wasn’t scared at all - when I opened my eyes to take stock of my surroundings, I found myself in a place that had become familiar over the past month: I was aboard Brask’s wagon, the walls and ceiling made from canvas wrapped around a frame of bent wood. Across from me sat Raaf, and beside me was Brask, resting his hand on my head.

Outside the cart’s front opening, I could see brightly colored flashes of light, silhouetting a forest against the cloudy sky and casting long shadows in the dim light of the cart. Brask and Raaf were speaking about something unimportant when the smell of fresh bread wafted across my nose. I rose, stopped the cart, and followed the scent into the forest, where I saw the kindness with a forgotten face just as she slipped behind a tree.

I gave chase through the muck and the sheets of pouring rain as quickly as I could manage, calling out to her in every way I knew how, but every time I got close enough to reach her, she laughed like raindrops on glass beads and danced once more out of sight.

I reached a clearing, and finally, the glow slowed to a stop, her arms spread out awaiting my embrace. We intertwined, my joy at the feeling of her warmth tinged with sadness at the knowledge that it would soon be gone. She sang again of the beauty I brought to the universe, and when at last she pulled away from my arms, she continued into a new verse - a farewell song, a promise that I would be okay, with or without her - and gestured toward the center of the clearing where I saw the cottage that meant home. I followed her as she walked away with desperate tears in my eyes, pleading for her to stay, but she just waved with a sad smile and continued into the trees.

In the blink of an eye, she was gone, and the world began its assault all at once. The rain pounded harder, the cold ate into my extremities, the muck seeped into my shoes, and the thunder roared all the more terribly… But when I turned back toward the clearing, the cottage that meant home was gone, and in its place was a cabin made of living trees.

(Author’s note: Hello again! Things have been going very well for me lately. I’ve established a habit of writing every day before bed, and I even started work on my dream game since I last posted. My goal is to make an RPG with time-management and life-simulation mechanics like Persona, roguelike dungeon progression like Slay the Spire, and a battle system loosely inspired by Deltarune. I could probably write a whole chapter’s worth just about my ideas for its gameplay and story, but I’m getting pretty close to having the tools I need to make a dungeon and fill it with enemies. Once I have a little more to show, I might release a tech demo if there’s interest.)