by Arthur Stone
The terrace floor was ablaze. The floor planks had been crafted in quite an original fashion, to the point where you couldn’t even call them planks. Logs, maybe? I couldn’t be sure of the correct term given my ignorance of carpentry.
Or of the world as a whole.
The lumber had been split using wooden wedges that Camai would hammer into them with his bare hands, thereby killing two birds with one stone: taking care of a chore that needed doing while getting a workout in for his palms. The resulting halves were then hewed until their surface was smooth, and ingeniously stacked flat-side up.
The upshot was that the floor of the terrace comprised of large components that took a long time to ignite, but even longer to burn through. That was why the flames from the blazing house were taking a while to reach me.
I didn’t know why the fire had started, but I had an inkling that the cause had been the power released from the vessel, having been violated by my amulet. The apparent fallout suggested that I had been the epicenter of a serious explosion. The blast had scattered chairs and other furnishings in all directions, ripped off the terrace guardrails, caved in the nearest wall, and demolished the roof. The ground in front of the homestead’s main structure was littered with many of the things that had been blown away from here.
Being at the epicenter, I was supposed to have died, but apparently didn’t. I didn’t feel too good, sure, but that could be expected.
I never felt good in this place.
The troops in black were no longer standing over me with weapons raised. The killers lay on the ground right where the wave of the released power had reached them, the dark mounds forming a neat second row behind their victims in white night garments.
Our servants’ corpses had changed as well, their skin now a charred black. Strangely, their clothing hadn’t been damaged or even discolored by the blast, which had seemed to impact only organic matter.
Truthfully, I didn’t care to ponder the mysteries of what happened. I wasn’t even worried that I couldn’t see the main killer anywhere, nor Camai. He could even be hiding behind me now, readying himself to slit my throat. I didn’t care.
Just as long as I managed to do one thing before that happened.
The fact that I managed to stand up was a miracle. And the step forward that I took afterward—a miracle twice over.
As were all the subsequent steps.
I had a goal to which I would happily crawl on my hands and feet. But I wasn’t crawling, I was walking. Walking in the correct direction.
And that felt wonderful.
The skin on mother’s face and arms was unchanged, meaning it hadn’t blackened as with the others. Treya wasn’t moving, but that didn’t fool me.
She was still alive. Life hanging by a thread, but still breathing. I could feel it. I didn’t know how, but I could. After all, my bond to this woman was built on more than just hatred. Too much had accumulated between me and the person who had cut short one of my lives before selflessly defending the other. Somehow that gave me certainty that I would have enough time to tell her some parting words.
I stopped before her body, then proceeded to crouch—slowly, taking every care not to lose balance and topple over. But mother was true to form even now, blocking my attempt to take initiative.
Treya’s eyes snapped open, and her hand shot out in front of her, trembling. Not to help me, but to grip the amulet around my neck. She relaxed after a few seconds, then said in a barely audible whisper.
“Gedar... the coffer... Your bag... Give me...”
Why did she want those things now? I couldn’t begin to guess. Nor did I care for the whims of the dying. This wasn’t why I had walked over to her. And yet, so great was the woman’s authority over me that I could no longer remember what I was doing here.
So I took out the coffer and proffered it to her, as requested.
“Open... Give me...” Treya whispered.
I opened the nephrite lid and took out the contents. An ornamented silk pouch that held several familiar items.
Mother gripped the pouch in her hand, wheezing.
“Higher powers... last words... prayer of the dying... Essential. Essential to my boy. Give me... more.”
Another fine tremor passed over her body before she relaxed, then added peacefully.
“Your neck. Put it around your neck. With the amulet. And don’t take it off.”
As I followed Treya’s instructions, I suddenly realized what a buffoon I was being. Instead of telling her all that was on my mind, I was behaving like a mama’s boy.
The bitch was about to croak, leaving me with nothing.
I hurried to remedy the situation.
“I’m not Gedar.”
“Gedar... my dear boy...” the woman stammered out, her eyelids growing heavy.
“Wait! Don’t you dare die on me! Don’t you dare! I’m not Gedar! Do you hear me?! I’m not Gedar! This is not your son, but merely the shell of your degenerate spawn! Not an empty shell, either! It’s occupied! You remember me, don’t you? You must remember! It was you who had ripped out my heart! You and Traco Darce! You remem...”
A brutal seizure gripped every muscle in my body, and I collapsed forward onto mother, squeezing the air from her chest as her last word filtered into my ear.
“Ge... Gedar...”
And that was that. The dying woman would never know the snake she had cherished in her bosom, fighting to the end to protect an empty shell that had long been misappropriated by a stranger.
How unsatisfying. I had been desperate to explain to her what a degenerate her child truly was. Every last bit of him. He was as empty as a blank page—whereas I was the text that she, in her blind mother’s love, had recorded where the consciousness of a true Crow should have been.
Treya died with the full confidence that she had used her last strength to protect Gedar, and not an enemy who had hijacked his empty shell.
Meaning, she died with a clean conscience. And that was terrible. So terrible that not even the pain from the seizure ravaging my body fully distracted me from ruining the missed opportunity.
I should have accomplished my wish. To explain to the shrew the full depth of her error. She should have met her death in the throes of despair, gritting her teeth with helpless fury.
The seizure receded, but the pain remained. Something was happening to me. Something I’d never before experienced. The wave of chi that had passed through my body hadn’t vanished fully. Some kind of trace had remained.
And that something was torturing me from the inside with the cruelty of a professional executioner.
Were this happening to a typical denizen of this deviant world, they would probably proceed to take their own life just to put an end to the pain. Instead, it was happening to me—the weakest creature imaginable. And one that had been suffering for years. Suffering nonstop. Suffering from the moment the incandescent blade of the sacrificial knife had burned into the skin on my chest.
That is all to say, I was no stranger to suffering.
The seizures were but a bonus ingredient to a cocktail of pains plaguing my daily existence. For me, debility was a state dreams were made of. Without the amulet, I was a vegetable barely capable of breath, let alone movement. Managing to walk a few dozen paces with the gait of a blink drunk sailor was a feat to be celebrated. In normal times, I might have gone weeks taking fewer steps than that.
Yet, I was still walking.
Walking away. Didn’t matter where, but simply forward. As far from the burgeoning blaze as I could get.
The killers that had come to the homestead were dead, though one of them might have escaped their fate. Using some sort of local magic, perhaps, like Camai. I should have seen their bodies otherwise, blackened like the rest from the release of power accumulated by the Crow over many centuries. Yet, their remains were nowhere in sight, and they hadn’t had enough time to get away from the blast in time.
The emission of energy that nourished this w
hole world had spared only mother.
Mother and me.
The shell of the last of the Crow, occupied by an outlander.
And this outlander’s mind kept working even under these difficult circumstances. I remembered that it wasn’t just our homestead that was burning, but also the windmill. That could have been the handiwork of the killers’ accomplices, some of whom may have escaped their common fate and, upon getting to the scene, would discover the demise of their comrades. Worse yet, the one who had slain Treya could come back.
I had bittersweet feelings about that one. Sweet about her dying; bitter about it being done by his hand, and not mine.
The further from here I would get, the higher my chances of surviving.
Then again, with this life, why did I even care if I lived or died?
Chapter 6
A Look Within
Degrees of Enlightenment: Unknown
Attributes: none
Skills: none
States: none
I woke up from a nightmare of all nightmares. I was burning alive in the homestead because my amulet had been taken by Camai, and without it I couldn’t hope to get out of bed, much less walk. Pence was at my bedside, breaking bone by bone with his bare hands, and mother was standing nearby, applauding every crunch and snap. Teshimi, having risen from his grave, was telling me about the peculiarities of feeding behavior among a variety of worms, and what happens to a decomposing corpse when being devoured by the little monsters.
Oh, and my heart kept getting extracted from my rib cage. At least a dozen times. Sometimes using a red-hot knife, other times an ice-cold one, and once without any tools at all, but bare human hands.
Child’s play for those of Pence’s and Camai’s ilk.
The worst part about it was that I couldn’t get myself to wake up. I tried and tried, but kept failing time and again. I was even starting to suspect it was all real. That I had made it to hell at last, rightfully earned for my wicked wish to brutally murder mother and Traco Darce. Perhaps the higher powers of this realm considered even thoughts of such deeds to be a deadly sin.
Until, after countless attempts, I reemerged into reality at last.
An unusual kind of reality. I vaguely remembered losing my strength and collapsing somewhere. I hoped that a few minutes of rest would help me recover, but the fit of seizures that swiftly followed was too painful even for me.
I passed out.
I expected to come to on the ground. Instead, I found myself lying on dry hay, or rather in dry hay—almost fully buried in it. My bed shook and jolted in irregular intervals as something creaked monotonously underneath. My ears registered unintelligible mutterings of human voices, and my nostrils were assaulted by a pungent smell of dung.
The clues were overwhelming. I was lying not on the ground but in a moving wagon. My immediate neighbors were sacks, barrels and crates, having been dutifully separated to make space for a prone passenger precisely my size. How very thoughtful of them.
And reassuring for me. Still, true to my mistrustful self, I was in no hurry to reveal that I had regained consciousness.
Instead, I thought to analyze my current state. Mainly, I wanted to focus on figuring out certain things about the dream from which I had just barely escaped. Things that had felt too real and too specific to this world to fit the mold of a regular nightmare.
I squeezed my left hand. Then my right one. No issues there. I might even be able to grip something with decent force. Or hold a bowl full of soup while I ate, which would be quite an achievement for me.
Careful not to give myself away with sudden movements, I tested the other parts of my body. Everything seemed to be in order, though I could only experiment so far while in a lying position.
All in all, the tests of my muscles and joints were a success.
Next came my senses, which were at once simpler and more difficult to test. Taste would have to wait, but every other sense appeared to be working just fine.
In fact, they were more than fine. Nothing had ever sounded so clear to me. Every individual sound felt almost three-dimensional and unique, easily traceable to its source. And the same went for my vision. I was seeing dozens of different shades in my bed of common hay, which was totally unprecedented. My fingers felt so agile, I felt confident enough to become a card shark, and my nose was picking up incredibly nuance in the stench of dung. Not only was I certain that it came from several horses, I could wager that one of them was dealing with a problem affecting its digestive tract.
“Shoot, Jigsaw is bloated again,” said one of the coachmen, confirming my veterinary diagnosis.
There were several coachmen, one or two per wagon. That part was suggested by my ears—as my brain revved up to keep up with the unexpectedly bountiful flow of information from all of my senses.
The child whose body I had inhabited had been thoroughly handicapped. Barely able to see or hear, and incapable of recognizing the smell of dung short of getting his face shoved into a freshly made mound of it. His taste buds were sufficient to distinguish between honey and salt, and, with a little luck, his fingers might be able to tell a person’s face from their ass.
My body had definitely undergone some substantial changes. Whereas before I felt like a grown man’s foot wedged into a child’s shoe, now, everything felt different. All of a sudden, it fit me like a glove.
This wasn’t Gedar’s body any longer. It was fully mine.
It was an unusual feeling. I had to relearn all the things that felt normal to a regular person.
The seizures were gone, but the pain was still there, nesting in all my joints. Still, it was perfectly tolerable, even somewhat enjoyable. Not in the sense of enjoying getting your balls stomped on by latex-wearing dames with daddy issues, but more like the pleasure your muscles feel the morning after a hard workout—sore yet satisfied in the knowledge that the body will be better off for it.
I didn’t know what exactly was happening, but whatever it was, I found it hard to complain about this development, considering I had never felt this good before.
It made sense to continue studying my new state. To delve into a phenomenon that clearly had no analogues in my old world.
The problem was that I had only the vaguest of ideas how to do it. From time to time mother would try and get me to understand the fundamentals of working with Order, and had even engaged some outside specialists. And I had tried my very best, hoping that it would help make me whole. Unfortunately, none of those attempts had gone anywhere.
But something had changed within me, possibly unlocking doors that had been previously closed. Certain elements of the nightmare I had escaped hinted at this as well.
Of course, a dream wasn’t the same as reality. Learning the truth of the matter would require putting my theories to the test.
Only that was a problem, since neither mother nor the instructors she had contracted had been successful in explaining to me how it was done. Such a task was akin to trying to teach meditation to someone who not only was uninterested in spiritual practices, but derided and dismissed them as quackery.
Or, perhaps, describing the color spectrum of the rainbow to the blind. Quite a challenge, indeed.
But I was trying. Trying my very best. Straining my memory to the limit to try and fish out every detail I had ever heard on the subject. Supposedly, I would first need to enter into something resembling a trance. The exact words used by the locals would translate the term as “a look within.” So I tried my damnedest to rotate my eyeballs every which way.
Again, this wasn’t my first attempt at this thing. Mother had spent a ton of her own time, as well as the clan’s money on numerous instructors. The outcome had not justified the investment in the slightest, as despite me having sat through many mind-numbing lectures, nobody had succeeded in guiding me into the required state, leaving the impression that it was simply impossible. That either something in my mind blocked the ability, or it was absent altogether.
> Probably the latter. Why allow an empty shell to peer into his own emptiness?
But here I was again, back at work to do the impossible. Spinning my bulging eyeballs to somehow make them “look inside.” Snapping them shut, then back open.
All in vain.
What else can you expect from a degenerate...
In this world, it was better to be born deaf and blind than empty. I lacked the single most important instrument with which to interact with reality. My case was beyond treatment, beyond even an explanation as to why treatment was hopeless. I was a unique case. It wasn’t that people deprived of Order didn’t exist at all, but in virtually all cases the poor bastards either died at childbirth or shortly thereafter.
I wasn’t supposed to have survived. And yet, I had. Thanks almost exclusively to Treya’s efforts, despite her meager means ever dwindling. In short, the fact that this empty body had reached twelve years of age was nothing short of a miracle.