by Simon Archer
I put that proud thought aside to move faster. Time passed differently while I was in the Record, for the mind moved much swifter than the physical form, but still, I did not wish to dawdle. Every moment without my knowledge and advice was a moment in which William could be improperly treated. My mind hurtled forward with lightning speed, whirling through the Philosophy section, past Anthropology, and into the section on Medicine and Herbalism. With a deep breath, I spread my wings as I opened up my brain, and all that raw knowledge poured in.
The Treatise Anatomica by Sitoma, the Great Forest Treasures by Belisarius, Surgery with Will, Sinew, and Spell by Lady Amara the Merciful, all the great works on healing and treatment from Etria’s greatest thinkers filled my magically enhanced mind. The knowledge wouldn’t stay, well, not for too long… I only had so much space in my head, too little for all this, but it would last for long enough.
With that, I closed the conduit to the Records as I snapped my wings shut, and the physical world rushed back in, filling my senses with the sights, the smells, the sounds of our impromptu battlefield. It was always a bit disorienting to return to myself after a trip to the Khalarti Records, so instead of trying to process the current situation and all that sensory input, I simply delved straight into giving my comrades the counsel they certainly needed.
“I have consulted the Records,” I announced as I tried not to look like I was still half-blind and deaf from my psychic trip, “and the proper way to begin treating William is with--”
“Thank you, Shikun, for cleaning the wounds so well,” Petra’s husky voice interrupted, her warmth for the draconian girl mingling with her worry. “Where did you learn to do that?”
Confusion filled me as I finally got control of my senses. True to the dryad’s words, Shikun was swiftly and efficiently cleansing the claw wounds with chozu, a kind of strong alcohol brewed from Kaulda’s famous challah grains, and while her technique was not impeccable, it was much as was described in Lady Amara’s tome. Even Sir Reginald nodded approvingly as he observed, an unrolled kit of healer’s tools next to him.
“Indeed, well done,” he mused. “You have a doctor’s touch, my dear.”
Though her shoulders trembled slightly with nerves, Shikun didn’t let her focus fall as she finished her work. “You honor me, sir knight. I… I often had to tend to my old master’s abuses, both to me and others under my command. Never thought his viciousness would lead to something positive.”
“Your knowledge is impressive, Shikun, especially for your harsh upbringing.” I forced down the faint pang of embarrassment at being so judgmental about what Shikun didn’t know and raised my forepaw, one finger raised. “Now, Petra, I’m sure you are not familiar with bileroot, as it only grows in the highlands far to the north of Solanna, but--”
Again, I should not have been so quick to assume anything about those William had brought into our tribe, for in the short time I prattled on, the dryad had spread out a hand over the moss bed to her left. At her command, the sickly yellow stalks of the bileroot plant sprang up through it, and she expertly plucked the weeds up in her long fingers.
“Thank you, Amalthea,” she said softly, never looking up from the work at hand, “but this is an old remedy amongst my seed.” Then, almost as if she had read Bellisarirus’ seminal work as I had, she neatly rolled the weeds in her hand, turning the bileroot into a mushy paste.
I knew I was red-faced as I coughed. “I, yes. Indeed. I see that you have this under control. Perhaps once you have applied the proper poultice and stopped the bleeding, I could properly set the bone and apply a splint?”
Though I was confident now that my harem sisters could do this, especially with Sir Reginald’s supervision, I wanted to do something to help William. Though my time with him had been short, I was fond of his generous nature and thoughtful treatment of us all, and I wished to give back now that he was in need.
But the moment I spoke, I realized that what I asked to do was foolish even before William’s mentor looked over at me apologetically.
“Lady Amalthea, while I know Master William would be moved by your desire to help,” Sir Reginald said diplomatically before he gestured to my raised paw, “you are not precisely equipped for this kind of gentle work on such a small scale.”
I held in the massive sigh that built in my chest as I twiddled the fingers of my paw. While we sphinxes fortunately had a thumb, unlike most felines, I would do more damage than good trying to apply the knowledge I had been given. As Petra used a combination of moss and the bileroot paste to pack William’s wounds, Shikun pushed up to her feet and came over to where I still loomed over the whole affair, putting a tentative hand on my shoulder.
“It may not be my place, sister, but…” The draconian’s voice trailed off as she stroked my tawny fur.
My eyes didn’t leave where the dryad worked while Sir Reginald fashioned splints of wood into what would be more of a frame for William’s shoulder, but the combination of anxiety and embarrassment I felt started to fade under the fiery girl’s touch. I finally managed to tear my gaze away to look over at Shikun, her height making it less of a stoop than the others. That gesture seemed to give her the courage to continue.
“I know more than most how it is to feel useless in a moment,” she said softly, so low that the others couldn’t hear. “But if you let us do this, I think there’s something almost as important you can do for William and our mission while we tend to him.”
And she was absolutely right. How could I have not realized this sooner? No, I was being unwise, and far from the first time.
I had to do better. Be better.
“From the mouths of babes,” I purred softly as I gave Shikun a gentle pat with a paw, and together, we turned to look at the shivering, frightened innocents still huddled together against the cliff wall. “Thank you, Shikun. Please, help the others with William. I shall speak with our new friends.”
With that, I held my head high, the glint of my golden halo in the shape of Libritas’ symbol restoring my confidence as I padded up to the two huddling creatures.
“Please,” I began softly, staying at first with Solais, the tongue of Solanna before trying any of the thirty-seven other languages I knew, “we mean you no harm. We did not save your lives to do worse to you, I assure you.”
To help assuage their near-panic, I kept my tone low and level, adding a bit of a purr in the back of my throat, something non-feline folk often found calming. It was no different for these two poor souls. Though they remained stooped, their shivers slowed, and the male of the pair rose up, though he remained strangely hunched. I still wasn’t sure what species they were, but they were small of stature, no more than four feet tall. There was a distinct animal musk beyond the stale smell of their poorly tanned furs, which only narrowed the possibilities down to twelve.
“Toda,” he grunted, more beast than thinking folk, as he thumped his chest. He then pointed at the woman that huddled behind him. “Mate Kai.” I could see now that his hands were scaley, with short claws as he gestured emphatically across the Marches. “Valley bad, valley cursed, full of beasts! Guard all ways out, keep tribes in valley. When Toda see path open, take mate, flee.”
It was strange, because Toda was indeed speaking Solais, and his words themselves were not spoken poorly despite his grunts and poor grammar. No, it was more as if he simply could not construct the sentences he meant to say.
“That is when the owlbear found you, I imagine,” I finished for him as I lowered myself forward and folded my wings back. With every action I took to minimize my size, the calmer the two became.
Toda grunted an affirmative and raised his bone mask up to spit to one side. Though uncouth by polite standards, it was a common curse used by the poorer folk in this part of Etria. More than that, I got a good look at his face, and that let me know that these were kobolds. Lesser cousins of the draconians and far, far lesser descendants of the true dragons, they looked more like scaly skinned half-men than a
nything as grand as Shikun. He slipped the mask back down as he continued.
“Your tribe save Toda. Save Kai.” Even though he acted half-savage, he put a certain solemness in his grunting, growling speech. “We help back. Headman hurt, but Stalker Tribe has healer.”
That’s when Kai spoke for the first time, her voice still shaking as if she feared the owlbear would climb back up the path any moment to eat her. “Healer not kobold, but very wise. We take to tribe, your headman be strong again.”
I glanced behind me a moment. While William’s wounds were packed and bound and the bleeding stopped, he was still unconscious as Sir Reginald and Shikun worked together to splint and support his crushed shoulder. Despite all his courage and strength, William was merely an Uplander at heart, and by all the ancient texts, they healed far slower than most of the folk of Etria. Without a healer’s magic, he could remain injured for months, perhaps even permanently.
Still, these two poor souls had risked their lives to escape whatever horrors lay in the ravaged city below. To ask them to go back would be horrible, unless…
I turned back to the pair and smiled. “You are brave to offer this, friends. To go back to where you fled, you honor my tribe with this.” The two kobolds seemed to puff up at my praise, but their eyes widened in awe as I continued. “I would offer you this in return: Once my headman is healed, I will fly the both of you to safety, beyond the edge of the Marches.”
Kai literally prostrated herself before me while Toda thumped his chest in the familiar salute of the land. “Great thanks to sphinx. Honor your tribe, Stalker Tribe.”
“Much kinder than great beast lady,” Kai uttered as she sat back on her haunches.
That piqued my curiosity. “Great beast lady?” I asked.
Toda spat to one side again. “Chimarra. Headsman of the land beasts, pack made from many creatures.” He shivered again. “Branded.”
A shiver ran down my spine and through my wings and tail. That one word confirmed my worst fears.
The Marches of Solanna were no longer free. The Black Runes had come, and that meant that not only were those free people left here were in danger, but that the Brand of Civilization itself was in jeopardy.
5
It struck me just how peaceful and beautiful the meadows outside of Kaulda Village was. The rolling hills with their multi-colored grasses, adorned with glowing Sola crystals, the curving bronzewood walls that Reggie and Petra had helped erect, the breeze rolling off the distant Whitesword mountains to the north, it was absolutely perfect. The only weird thing was that I was alone. The tables were still laid out laden with food and drink for the victory celebration after defeating the Weaver, but there was nothing but silence.
I picked myself up off the ground, my left shoulder throbbing for some reason, still under the tree that Petra had summoned, where I had been telling the tale of our adventure to her, Reggie, Suli, and Una, but they too were nowhere to be found. Strangely, that didn’t worry me as much as it should have, but one thing was certain. I was craving a cup of zym, the Etrian equivalent of coffee.
So, I walked over to the food-laden tables to look for one, and that’s when I realized I suddenly wasn’t alone. Someone was sitting in front of a steaming pot of zym, pouring out a mug of it. Both this mysterious woman and the pot hadn’t been there the moment before, had they?
But that worry slipped away like a dream as I took her in. As with everyone I met in Etria, she wasn’t human, and like most of the women here, she was alluringly exotic. Though at first glance, she seemed to be merely a perfectly proportioned woman, as if that was something you could be ‘mere’ about, the shining surface of her naked form looked to be made of highly polished steel. It was as if someone had gone back in time, created a mold from the intact Venus de Milo, then poured living metal into it to form this breathtaking sight before me.
What’s more, from her elbows down, spirals of gold had been blended into the steel, eventually culminating into hands and wrists of the purest gold, and as she stood to smile at me with the mug in hand, I could see that her legs were the same. Her hair too seemed to be made of spun gold, and where the famous statue’s hair was tied into a bun, this woman’s extended into a braid of some kind.
Except it wasn’t a braid. It was a chain. A broken one to be precise, and that’s when I realized that she did have adornments of a sort. Manacle cuffs with short, broken chains hung off her wrists and her ankles, all of black, rusted iron. Across her taut stomach was a spiraling symbol that I instantly recognized. I knew then who this was even before she opened her mouth, and a familiar voice rang in my ears, her piercing golden eyes seeing right through to my heart and soul.
“Here, William,” Libritas said as she held the mug out. “Drink this, and you will feel much better.”
My hands moved almost automatically to take the proffered zym, but my mind was whirling. My relief at not being alone was greater than I thought, but more and more, everything else felt wrong. Wasn’t the celebration over? I remembered… Yes, I had left it, gone to find Shikun. We kissed, and then there was the meeting with Sullah Sona, the headman, and the orc leader, Aroch Steeltusk, and…
And that’s when a jagged pulse of pain rocked through my left shoulder just as I took hold of the steaming mug. The spasm that rocked through me sent the scalding hot drink splattering across both Libritas and the meadow, but she didn’t even flinch.
“I’m sorry,” I said through gritted teeth as I clutched my tortured shoulder. The pain wasn’t relenting, and my jaw clenched as my bones seemed to grind in my body. “I--”
She shushed me as she wrapped her arms around me, the broken chains clinking ever so lightly. I expected Libritas’ embrace to be as hard and cold as steel, but instead, it was warm and comforting, with a surprising amount of give in all the right places. As I sank into her hug, Lib’s touch seemed to deaden the pain and calm the tremors.
“What the hell is going on?” I got out as my jaw unclenched.
By way of an answer, she maneuvered me around back to the table, now suddenly clear, and pressed me up against it. “You must relax, William. I know it’s in your spirit to act, to fight, to push forward, but you must learn when to do nothing and let others act in your stead.”
What was she talking about? Not that she was wrong entirely, I never felt right telling others what to do without being out there myself, and as I was the leader of our party, well, I was on the front lines. But why did that matter? There was no one here, no danger I could see, and yet, something was wrong, wasn’t it?
My cloudy memories started catching up to me. The push through the forest, the wolverpines… I remembered looking out over the Marches of Solanna… and then it all came back to me. The hooting owlbear, its impenetrable feathers, the crunch of the kick that broke my shoulder. Even though I knew it was dead, my instincts to protect my friends, my women, roared up in me, and I began to pull away from Libritas.
“I don’t know where I am not, but I’ve got to go,” I said hurriedly. “We might have killed that monster, but the Marches are full of them.” However, as I pushed, Libritas’ form took on the feel I had expected, that softness turning into solid steel.
“No, William,” Lib said into my ear, her voice low and husky, her breath hot against my skin. My errant thought as to why a figure of living steel needed to breathe was pushed away as I tried to calm myself and listen. “Let go. You need to let it go.”
I won’t lie. It was hard for me, and not just because I had to be dreaming or having a fever dream or some other kind of hallucination right now. I mean, I had to be delirious to imagine a branding iron, even a sweet, sentient one, as a gorgeous woman, right? All my current state made me think was that Petra, Shikun, Amalthea, Reggie, even Lib, everyone had to be in danger.
But I forced myself to drive those impulses down the best I could, and as I relaxed in Lib’s arms, the hardness of her metallic form relaxed as well.
“Okay,” I said softly as I let out a
pent-up breath, and now, I noticed how slurred and distant my voice sounded. Instead of pushing away, I put my arms around her waist, hands sliding down the perfect smoothness of her curves. “I’m yours, Lib.”
There was a trill at the back of her throat as she pulled me up and onto the sturdy wooden table. “And I am yours, William Tyler,” she said, her golden eyes going half-lidded as she straddled atop me. “Now and forever.”
As those words slipped out of her, my heart thumped hard in my chest, and my breath hitched for just a moment. That’s when I realized, as much of a dream or hallucination or whatever the hell this was, that these words that passed between us were real, and there was something deeper in how Libritas felt about me beyond whatever our tangled destiny was, whatever her relationship was with my family line.
Without a moment more to think about it, Libritas bent down over me, her smooth breasts pressing against my chest as she kissed me on the lips. And with that, the world around me shattered as I kissed her back, fire in my veins, and a shudder down my spine before I descended into utter blackness.
6
Oh, Jesus, my head. Did someone get the license plate on that owlbear?
I tried to open my eyes, which eventually peeled open despite the layer of eye crust that had built up. I could hear a humming above me, but it wasn’t a voice I recognized. All I could see were blurry shapes in dull colors. I rose to a sitting position, my shoulder pinging me to lay back down. It was a blunt pain, so I easily ignored it.
As I looked around, nothing coming quite into focus yet, I saw lots of browns, and a chill rode up my spine. I tried to feel around my surroundings when I noticed that I was gripping onto Libritas so hard I thought I might bleed. Or maybe, it was more like she was gripping onto me. Hard to tell when her body is technically an inanimate object, but who’s to say?