Spectres & Skin: Exodus

by RJ Creed

  “Mm,” he said finally, and to my immense relief there seemed to be no venom in his tone, only curiosity. “So you would have me lower my rates for one farm, two farms, or for all of the farmlands around Dawnspire?” he asked.

  I swallowed. I didn’t like the calm way he was asking for my opinion. “I … would have you do nothing,” I said, completely losing my nerve. “Our quest was to bring the discussion to you, and return to them with your answer.”

  Xanthe glanced at me sideways as if she had lost a little respect for me, but she was immortal, and I wasn’t.

  Moro took that second to step to my heel and sit down, gazing up at the faceless cultist with her burning golden eyes. He stared down at her. Rae stared at me. Xanthe stared at the Father. It was a veritable spiderweb of tense ogling.

  Then the Father raised his ‘gaze’ back to me, I think, and gently stroked his own fingers one by one as he regarded me. I felt a chill ripple up and down my spine, as if someone was inspecting me, but more intensely.

  “What do you earn from your quest?”

  “I earn the right to my Initiation, Father,” Xanthe responded with a charming smile.

  “A hundred experience points,” I said slowly, unsure.

  “Anything else?”

  I would have to check. “Excuse me.” I turned away and brought up the quest. I turned back to him. No point in hiding anything. “Reputation with the lower classes.”

  The Father looked back at the wolf and then back at me. He glanced sideways at Rae, just for a moment, and then looked back at me. All of the silence was making my mouth dry. “The Collective can charge them all 4 gold less each week, but that really is the minimum. Unless they do not meet their quota for food, in which case the old rate is applied, with an extra 15% charge until the quota is met. I will sign to this if you are agreeable, and you may bring it back to the farmers.”

  I had such an overwhelming urge to cry ‘What? Why??’ but I didn’t succumb to it. A feeling of dread crept up from my toes at his easy willingness to help, but I realised that … actually I hadn’t ever seen the Father do anything truly cruel. Caspian had slain an Acolyte, presumably under his orders, but then he was only doing what he thought his goddess wanted.

  Could it be that he was actually a good person, underneath those thick brown robes?

  He handed over the signed and sealed terms and I took it gratefully, but he kept his hold firm and tugged a little, so that I was forced to step forward. I could almost feel the heat radiating from his elderly body now. He leaned in, his breath sour.

  “But … if you return here with another request, spectre be damned, I will have you thrown in the dungeons,” he said. “Are you sure you want your one and only favour, as the chosen of the Collective, to be lower rent for the farmlands nearby?”

  “I didn’t realise I had one favour,” I said thickly, stepping back with the sealed piece of paper. I stared at it for a while.

  What else could the Father have given me? Visions of gold, armour, blades … spells for the wolf, skills, experience … they all danced quickly through my head. But no. I had chosen lower rent for the nearby farmers.

  Good. Great.

  Fine.

  I slowly slid it into my pocket with a weird smile forced onto my face.

  “This will be good. For you to have a reputation boost with the lower classes,” the Father said coolly, intertwining his fingers together again in his lap. He was so calm and collected. It could have had something to do with the immense power that radiated from his nearby spectre. “This will help our image in the city. It’s been a little … less than optimal lately.”

  “Right,” I said, eager to get out of there. Xanthe’s big blue eyes were on me, a little alarmed and clearly unwilling to say or do anything until I did.

  “You’ve noticed?” he asked, his hands parting and resting on the arms of his chair.

  “I … have noticed a certain look I get when people notice my faction alignment,” I said, diplomatically.

  “Precisely,” he said. “We would be wise to do what we can to keep our relationships as positive as we can with the citizens of Dawnspire. Especially now that our Ivy Lady is back. There is much to be done.”

  There was another silence. I had no idea what to do or say, and so Xanthe and I simply turned to leave.

  “Boy, I am hoping that you understand the significance of what has happened to you,” he called out after me. I turned again to face him, and he was now standing up straight and a solid two paces closer to me from where he had been sitting — which almost resulted in an instant heart attack from me.

  “Your time of ultimate sacrifice will come sooner than you expect, and when it does, you will wish you spent more time studying the scripture and aiding the Collective, so that you may truly know the meaning of your forthcoming hardships.” I was frozen solid at his words. “If you are truly the Champion, you will know without a doubt. Your time is coming. It is not a burden to be taken lightly,” he finished in a stern whisper.

  Thoroughly scared, I gave him a short nod and essentially scuttled out of the room with a protective arm around Xanthe’s shoulders. Moro followed us slowly, tail calmly swishing, clearly not understanding why we were freaked out.

  The quest had gone well. All we had to do was return the sealed paper to the farmers proving that he had lowered their rent as long as their crops continued to grow, right? I didn’t know anything about economics, or about the world at all, honestly, but I was pretty sure that this was fair enough. Even a small decrease in pay would help. I recalled the look on the girl’s face when I had handed her just a few gold coins. I was certain that what we had done would help an awful lot.

  But … a lurking demon that lived inside my selfish mortal head spoke up once that paper was in my hand. From what he had said to me, I could assume that I could double back right now, hand the document back, and ask for something else in return. Something that could keep me alive for longer. Something powerful beyond my level.

  I’m not sure at all what I would have done if I had been alone, but Xanthe’s smiling face as she held the door to the outside world certainly helped me to leave the spire when my feet weren’t sure if they wanted to cooperate.

  The lives of so many … versus the life of me.

  Though internally my mind and stomach were churning at the thought of throwing away something so huge as a favour from such a powerful man, my feet kept moving me forward and I made no move to stop them.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked her, hoping for some insight. “We could ask for something else from him — you heard what he said. You could ask about Hendrix.”

  Xanthe turned around and regarded me with surprise. “Would you have been able to blurt out a question like that? That character has always freaked me out, even when I was just reading about Dawnspire. As for requesting something different...” She paused and looked thoughtful, resting her hands on her hips. “Well what would be best for our character progression?” The setting sun was behind her head, dousing her fair hair in an orange glow, and I watched her think. “But maybe I should have just sucked it up and asked him where Anderson is.”

  “Why did he do it?” I asked her. She looked up at me again, her eyes large and questioning.

  “Are you serious?” she asked, her voice flat. I was starting to notice an interesting disconnect between her sweet, lovely features and her unimpressed, perhaps slightly superior demeanour. Every time she gave me that condescending, annoyed look I found myself less attracted to her. “You know about Project X3, right?”

  “The planet thing, yeah.”

  “The ‘planet thing’? Yes. The thing where humans need to leave Earth before it turns into a blackened smoker’s lung. The thing that has been on the news all day every day, pretty much, for your entire life. The life or death of the human race thing, and my ex-employer’s biggest task to deal with.” She flicked her eyes up briefly.

  “I know,” I said, but I could h
ear the hesitation in my own voice. I didn’t want her to think I was an idiot. I knew what Planet X3 was. I had a degree and everything. I just didn’t like to try to sound smart, I guess.

  A little of that was that Luke had always been the smarter one of the two of us. I was the chill one, maybe the funnier one, but why try to come off like the smart one? Anyway, the way she was talking down to me was rubbing me the wrong way and making me feel self-conscious.

  “Good,” she replied. “Well, Anderson was tasked with figuring out a way to get the project underway. He figured that putting people into the game would severely cut down on the amount of food, water and oxygen they needed to survive, which is true. But then, without telling any of us, he erased all of those poor people from existence completely. One hundred million fewer lives; fewer mouths to feed. Fewer people to shuttle to initially colonise the new world. I know he thought he was doing the right thing, but…” She shook her head hard, suddenly, and her lip trembled.

  I was about to ask her what was wrong, to allow her to tell me herself, but I knew what it was and I didn’t want any more comments about my intelligence, so I said, “Your brother was in the game?”

  She nodded silently. “My baby brother. I didn’t want him to go into the game in the first place, I said I would miss him way too much. I really, really didn’t want him to go.” She sucked in a breath and let it out. “It’s my fault he went in. I spent a huge amount of time researching the culture that cropped up throughout Ilyria for Anderson, and personally extensively beta testing the game. I told Joe about it and I guess it really just got his blood flowing. He went in because of me, and now he’s dead.”

  I reached out to rest my fingertips on her elbow as she regained her composure, and she did nothing to remove me. “He might be fine,” I told her. “I have someone in here that I want to find too.”

  “Yeah?” she asked, looking up. Her eyes were dry but sparkling. Around us townspeople wandered through the darkening streets, making their way home at the end of another Dawnspire day.

  “Yeah, I guess he’s like a brother to me. My friend Luke. We grew up together. We’ve always done everything together. We got separated, obviously, by the quiz and I don’t know where he is.”

  Xanthe drew up to her full height, still maybe a foot shorter than me, and resolve sharpened her briefly softer features again. “Let’s go,” she said. “We both need to get stronger and find them. Life here will be easier in a group. I learned that the hard way.” Her eyes flicked over to find mine as she began to walk again and I followed. With a small smirk, she added, “I died a lot in the beta stages.”

  “You didn’t get to keep your levels and your gear?” I asked.

  “No, I went in a backdoor during the beta and my character spent a lot of time over in the southeast where all the bandits live. This time I had to go in through the front door, do the quiz, and I guess the system didn’t acknowledge my tester account. It was incredibly annoying at first, but I suppose being immortal I don’t really have much right to complain.”

  “It’s a shame,” I said as we left the city gates. “It’d be a lot easier if you were stronger. We could do some more intense grinding.”

  She didn’t make eye contact with me, just swept her hands through the air as if dismissing some text. “If I still had all those levels, Matt, I wouldn’t have teamed up with you. Obviously.”

  There was that superiority again. It really did rub me the wrong way.

  “No offense,” she said as if reading my mind. “It’s just that you’d probably slow me down quite a bit, especially being mortal and all.”

  “What’s your plan when you find this guy?” I interrupted. “You going to challenge him to a duel or what?”

  “There are Player versus Player areas in the game,” she said. “You can kill other players in the Badlands arena to the east and also in No Man’s Land to the north.”

  It occurred to me then just how useful it would be to have someone who had spent not only significant time within the game world already, but significant time with the game’s programmers, presumably, as well. Keeping her around for a bit would benefit me as well as her.

  “Alright, so you’re going to … drag him kicking and screaming to one of those places and kill him before he can kill you and escape again?”

  “You’ve pretty much got it,” she said. “Is it this one or a couple of farms over?” She gestured to the correct farmhouse and I nodded.

  “Yep, that one.”

  I had barely finished before she stomped her way up to their front door and rapped her knuckles against the wood. An exhausted-looking older man answered, glanced at her clothing and pendant, then behind her at Moro and I, and a very obvious sneer spread across his lips.

  “What do you want? Haven’t we given you enough? Leave my family in peace, won’t you?”

  Xanthe smiled brightly. “I have great news, actually,” she said. “My associate and I managed to get an audience with the Father and convinced him to make the following changes. We have it in writing. Matthew?”

  I moved to stand by her side and presented the sealed paper to the farmer. He flicked the seal open and, still glancing suspiciously at us, read the handwritten letter. His eyebrows rose higher and higher the further he got, until he reached the end and they were practically in his hairline.

  I realised that I didn’t actually know what the letter contained. The Father could have been lying to me. Instinctively my hand brushed by my dagger’s hilt but I made an effort to move it away until I heard what the farmer had to say.

  “You … did this?” he asked quietly. It could have been a deep reverence or it could have been a barely contained murderous rage; I had no way of knowing yet. A single tear left his eye and tracked down his cheek before landing on his shirt. I still had no idea what emotion the man was experiencing.

  “Are you ... happy?” I blurted out like some kind of movie robot.

  “You’ve saved my life, and the lives of my family,” he said softly. “Why would you have done that for us? What do you want?”

  I stared at him for a while. Could I just fling my arms in the air, cry ‘EXP’ and then stroll happily away? It seemed like he was going through something so I should have tried to be a little more respectful, or something. I just looked at him blankly for a moment, and then shrugged. “I guess it seemed like the right thing to do,” I said. Which was the truth, but I wouldn’t tell him how much I had struggled with the decision.

  “Thank you,” he said, voice thick. “Thank you so much.” He disappeared from the doorway for a moment and then came back with a pair of expensive-looking shoes. “Here,” he said. “I found these in my farm when we moved in. I was hoping to sell them but now I don’t have to. I don’t have anything else. Please, take them.”

  He thrust them at me so I grabbed them, and he gave a small, watery nod and then gently shut the door. It was getting late, and I guess he had celebrating to do.

  Quest Completed!

  A Farmer’s Plea

  You have received Boots of Stamina

  Your reputation with Dawnspire’s Lower Classes has increased by 200!

  You have gained 100 EXP!

  Xanthe sucked in a breath as the tingling of level up washed over her, and a couple of visible sparkles twinkled from her skin. “Congrats,” I said. “Here, take these.” I pressed the shoes into her hands. “I already have some,” I said, “and you need to start thinking about getting out of that sackcloth.”

  Her eyes instantly narrowed and I backpedalled. “Because it has no armour bonuses. Jeez.” I turned and started down the path back towards the city gates again. She was dragging her feet following me, hesitating before pulling off her thin pointless foot wraps and sliding on the fine black material instead.

  “+10% to Stamina,” she noted, eyeing them up and down. “And 2 to defence. That’s pretty good. Are you sure you don’t want them?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. The shoes were definitely bett
er than mine, a +10% to Stamina would allowed me to do some more interesting things … but I had already been kind and given them to her, I couldn’t then ask her to give them back to me.

  I had to consider starting to be more selfish if I wanted to live, though. I had let two opportunities pass me by in the last hour to strengthen myself; I couldn’t keep doing that and risk my own death.

  “What do you want to do now?” she asked me. “A good few hours of grinding are left before we have to go get some sleep, right? Shall we make headway on that other quest you shared with me?”

  Freehill. We had to talk a merchant, somehow, into including the brand new underground settlement into their trade routes in exchange for … I had no idea what anyone would do that kind of thing for. If they were discovered, after all, they might be banished by the Father. Hopefully Lucius and Alina had chosen a good area for creating the town, somewhere near enough to another town so that the merchant wouldn’t have to go far out of his way, but also far away enough from anything else that they wouldn’t easily be discovered as rebels.

  “I’m not really sure where to start, to be perfectly honest,” I said. “Where would you go to find a travelling merchant?”

  Xanthe pointed in the direction of a small cart pulled by a dappled grey horse, a single portly man sitting up at the front, looking exhausted and making his way to a nearby farmhouse.

  “Why not start with one of these people we’ve just helped out?” she suggested, and then a wicked grin spread across her face. “The Father may have just given us a perfect in for beginning to take down the Collective, and he doesn’t even know it.”

  I nodded and started to walk, but then did a double take and turned back to her. “Taking down the what?” I repeated. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “The details of the quest, genius,” she said with a small laugh. “‘Help Matthew Blake take down the Collective by starting a new rebel settlement,’ etc. etc.”

  I blinked a couple of times. I really hadn’t been thinking when I had shared that quest with her — that could have been completely detrimental to my continued existence if I had shared it with the wrong person...