by Steven Drake
When morning came, they converted their tent to a small litter and headed back to the city with the stranger in tow. The trip back took over twice as long as the journey out with their added burden, but still they arrived around midday. They put the strange man in one of the spare rooms at the lodge, where Miri started into her routine as a healer.
She had worked on many patients since coming to Exire, hunters wounded by encounters with razorboar or snowsabre, refugees suffering from disease, townsfolk injured farming the difficult terrain, some nearly as bad off as this fellow. Miri first dressed him in new clothes, an unexpectedly difficult task. She cut herself several times on the several dozen small knives hidden in every pocket and crevice of the man’s armor. When she finally managed to get the man undressed, she reacted with shock as she found not a few, but dozens of scars, some old and barely visible, others more recent, some even on top of one another. They had healed well, a testament to the man’s endurance, but to have been injured so many times. He had to carry the memory of so much pain.
She redressed the wound with new bandages, checked for fever, and examined his broken bones to be sure none had separated on the journey down. Once satisfied with this, she held his head and gave him water and warm broth. It wasn’t much, but it would keep him alive until he woke.
Caring for this man, however, felt different than any of her other patients. The power that seemed to well up from within this man distracted her, sometimes flaring far stronger, and other times diminishing again to almost nothing. After some considerable observation, she noticed the spikes in his energy accompanied what she guessed were intense nightmares. He struggled in his sleep, jerking violently, fighting imaginary foes, sometimes almost weeping, sometimes sweating until his sheets were soaked and had to be changed. It moved her heart to pity as she watched him clearly suffering, yet there was nothing she could do for this. She could not imagine what awful scenes he might be imagining, but she did notice he often spoke, sometimes calling for his mother, and other times for the same names over and over, Rana, Jerris, Nia, Kirin, and one other, someone he seemed to fear immensely, who he called Master. She looked forward to being able to speak with him, just to find out what those names meant.
Day in and day out, the wound continued to fight her. She used her power to dispel the darkness each day, sometimes twice a day. It continued to exhaust her, and left her with little energy for anything else. Zitane tried to get her to stop focusing so much, but Miri would have none of it. Something told her that this person who had fallen on her mountain was important. She felt that the energy within him was like her own, and that when he woke, he would be able to answer the questions she had held inside for all her life.
Chapter 3: After a Long Sleep
Darien the Executioner had been defeated, not by Alistair, or by the Demon King, but by his own failure. He had not seen the treachery of Traiz Tiberius until the knife was in his back. Then, the Inquisitor had done the unthinkable, and summoned a demon into the world. It had taken more than Darien’s own strength to defeat that enemy. In one terrible moment of rage, he had finally resorted to using the power of the Demon’s Blade. He would have done anything to stop that beast defiling the corpse of his friend just a few feet away. Such a thing could not be allowed to exist in this world. To banish that monster, it had been worth the risk, worth his own life, worth his very soul.
He had not expected to survive. He had prepared himself for that moment. Perhaps more than anyone else, Darien was ready for death, ready to be reunited with his mother in eternity. Fate however, had once again denied him rest. He had survived, barely, and walked in the realm of dreams between life and death.
How long he slept, he did not know, nor did he know where he was, his mind far too fractured to think clearly. He woke a few minutes at a time, in a strange place, a primitive dwelling of dark, almost black, wooden logs and simple mortar. He struggled to stay awake, but each time, the memory of what happened came flooding back into him, like a poison of the soul. Rana had been killed, and Darien had no one to blame but himself. His very existence had cursed her life from beginning to end, and the knowledge that she had paid for so many of his failings came crushing down on him. It was that, as much as any lingering effects of his injuries, which drove him, time and again, back into blissful unconsciousness.
He did not count how many times he woke for a few seconds only to fall back into the pit of despair that opened beneath him. Time dulls all pain however, and by slow degrees, he grew stronger, his pain gradually overtaken by the concerns for those who still lived. He remembered Jerris, and his sister of whom he had only recently discovered. He remembered the Star Sword, the purpose for which so much had been sacrificed.
One day he woke, and instead of relaxing back into the arms of emptiness, he fought back. He fought to move, to figure out where he was, what had happened. He wanted nothing more than to make his way back to Jerris, but first he had to know where he was, and where they were. Most of all, he had to know Jerris and Nia were both safe. He knew only one way to get that information, distasteful though it was. Though he loathed the idea, he would have to summon the Faerie Queen. Before he left Kadanar, she had mentioned that he might want to speak with her, and now he did, even if only to scream his resentment. Had she known what would happen even then? The thought that the faeries had again guided Rana into a terrible fate to serve their own purpose filled him with fresh rage, and he used that rage to will himself out of bed.
The effort proved equally painful and exhausting. His legs felt like weights of heavy stone, and every joint was stiff as cured leather. Just sitting up took what he guessed was about half an hour, though it seemed like ages. Finally up, he waited as a momentary wave of nausea passed over him, then swung his legs out over the edge of the bed and took stock of the situation. He found himself dressed in new clothes, a simple light brown shirt and pants, made of something soft and warm, a kind of wool perhaps. He looked around to see his ruined leather armor piled in a corner. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the Demon Sword lying beside it.
Darien slowly, gingerly, pushed off the bed to stand. His legs felt weak. How long have I been lying there, he wondered? He called for his magic, and to his considerable relief, it flowed easily. Whatever Traiz had poisoned him with, it seemed to have run its course. With augmentation magic running through his legs, he pushed himself to walk. It was slow at first, like wading through a muddy slough, but he gained strength. He staggered over to the corner, and picked up the Demon Sword. In a sudden fit of rage, he remembered the homing stone he had placed in the sheath, the thing that Traiz had used to track his movements. He rummaged around his armor and found a knife, then cut the stone from the sheath, and held it in his hand. With a surge of rage and a blast of magic, the stone burst into a cloud of dust, the magical cords that held the stone together burst as their maker undid them, and in an instant the stone was gone. Darien slung the sword over his back before heading out the door.
Once outside, he found himself in a candlelit hallway. The entire structure of this building appeared to be made of large wooden logs. He tried to guess where he might be, but his mind was hazy. He again thought of Jerris, and Niarie, and it filled him with determination to get back to them.
He looked up and down the hall, and picked the direction he guessed led outside, but he didn’t get far. A young woman emerged from one of the rooms in the hallway. Her skin was pale but bright, almost as if it radiated with some inner light. Her platinum hair drifted around her face, catching the candlelight and reflecting in iridescent shimmers. Long straight strands drifted across her face like filaments of starlight as she entered the hall. The lithe and wispy young woman moved gracefully as a spring breeze, but her eyes were kind and deep as an ancient sea, pale grey with a touch of violet, like thin clouds at sunset. She was an elf, at least partly. He wondered at finding one here, wherever here was. Most striking however, was the magic. Darien had never felt an aura quite as acutely. It s
eemed different, not so much raw energy as Niarie or Jerris, but something else, some difference, some inexplicable inexpressible dissonance that defied classification.
When she met his eyes, her mouth fell open. He moved forward, already intent on getting past this obstacle. He had no desire to hurt this woman, but he needed to return to his friends. He had already lost what he guessed to be several days at least to his convalescence, perhaps more. He started toward her, intending to simply push his way past.
“Hey… stop,” she said, stepping boldly into his path. “You’re not fully recovered yet. You need to rest. I can’t believe you’re up. How long have you been awake?”
Darien ignored the questions, and tried to push her aside, but she wouldn’t budge. “Please, I don’t want to hurt you, but I need to leave. I’m fine, if you’ll just let me go.”
“Oh no you’re not fine,” she huffed. “You’re badly injured. It’s a miracle you’re alive. As your healer, I can’t allow you to leave yet.”
“Just get out of my way.” His anger was already getting the better of him. He pushed hard, but she quickly adjusted and twisted his arm behind his back. Such a simple move should barely have phased him, but in his current situation, it felt for a moment that she’d broken his arm in two. He jerked away, sending another sharp wave of pain pulsing through him. The pain was excruciating, and seemed to resonate with the knife wound where Traiz had stabbed him, setting the wound aflame again. Perhaps the poison wasn’t gone, after all.
He managed to get a few steps, but then the girl was standing in front of him again, with her hands braced against the walls. “Please, just let me go.” Darien pleaded this time, but by the time the words left his throat, his legs had turned to jelly underneath him. He began to shake uncontrollably, and his vision faded in and out. He took a final step, and collapsed.
Darien’s next conscious perception was the same view of the same log ceiling he had seen many times before. He found himself lying in the bed once again. He cursed his weakness, and started to get up, but this time, he felt a gentle pressure against his bare chest. A pair of soft hands pushed him back down onto the bed, firmly but gently.
“Just stay down,” a woman’s voice said. “It’s all right. You’re safe here.” Her voice was light and airy, with a high pitch like a songbird. As much as he wanted to push himself to get up, and begin the process of planning his return to Jerris and Nia, the woman’s wholehearted concern and his earlier collapse convinced him to wait.
“Where am I?” Darien said.
“This is Exire,” the woman answered. “I guess you would call it a free city. Everyone is welcome here.”
Darien searched his memory, but he could not recall ever having heard of any city with that name. He had flown far to the west in pursuit of the demon, and since he had not expected to survive, he had paid no attention whatsoever to where he was going. He had completely believed he was about to die, and that the faerie’s prophecy had come true, but here he was, alive once again when he had no right to be.
“And who are you?” he asked quietly, reluctantly realizing that he would have to remain here for a while longer at least.
“I am Mirisa, but most people just call me Miri.”
“She is Lady Mirisa, Princess of Catarina, and you will address her with respect.” A deep thundering voice resonated from across the room, like a boulder tumbling down a mountainside. Darien suddenly realized that someone else was in the room.
He found the source of the thundering bass, an ogre, of average size by ogre standards, slightly smaller than what Darien had become used to. Many of the Demon King’s ogre legions were magically enhanced from birth to grow larger, and most topped ten feet easily. This one, however, had the look of a wild ogre, perhaps eight feet tall, with thick apelike arms long enough to drag the ground and thick round tree stump legs. He was sitting, yet his head still nearly reached the ceiling. How had he even gotten through the door? The ogre watched out of large cobalt blue eyes set below a tuft of messy blue gray hair only a shade darker than his dusty blue skin. The ogre wore fur pants that covered just the tops of its legs, and a leather hauberk with studded straps that crossed the chest, and left the sides bare.
“And you are?” Darien asked.
“I am Garok,” the ogre rumbled. “I am Princess Mirisa’s personal guardian. By Prince Zitane’s order, I am to ensure her safety. Should you lay hands on the Princess again, you will answer to me.”
Darien wondered for a moment what the ogre was talking about, then he realized that the ogre could only mean their encounter in the hallway, which had hardly been violent, and he had taken the worse of it anyway. All the same, in his current state, he didn’t want to fight an ogre.
“My apologies. When I wakened, I did not know where I was, and acted without thought.” The ogre rumbled out what might have been a growl or a sigh, but either way, it sounded like the peel of distant thunder. Garok crossed his arms and eyed Darien suspiciously. This ogre was likely a bodyguard hired to defend this princess’s life, but Darien had never heard of any kingdom of Catarina.
“Honestly Garok,” Mirisa said. “I have told you a dozen times. I am not a princess here. I put that life behind me and I’m not going back. I’m just Mirisa now.” Behind the determination in her voice, Darien could hear a pang of lingering sadness, or perhaps fear, but it was none of his business.
“Well, Lady Mirisa,” Darien said respectfully. “I am Darien, and I left my family name behind a long time ago.” Darien pushed himself into a more upright position with his head resting against the wall behind the bed. His neck ached. Actually, everything ached, though nothing felt worse than his right side, around the wound he had received. “How long have I been sleeping?”
“We found you almost a month ago now. What happened to you?”
Darien shook his head weakly. A month, so long? Damn, he cursed his own weakness, but shrugged it off a moment later. He could do nothing more about that now.
Darien took a long few moments to consider how to answer her question. He had no good reason to tell her the truth, assuming she’d even believe it. The less she knew, the better off she would be.
“I can’t remember,” he lied as he looked up at the woman.
The corners of her mouth turned down, and her eyes seemed to grow darker. “Fine, don’t tell me. It’s not like I saved your life or anything.”
The woman huffed as she crossed her arms and glared down at him. As she did, Darien felt a shivering current of energy in the air, and became acutely aware of the woman’s magic once again.
Such a disconcerting aura. What is she? Her magic is strong, but also strange and alien, like it’s somehow unnatural, or altered in some way. The feeling vaguely reminded him of the Black Council, whose magic had been enhanced by the Demon King, as it felt slightly out of sync with other magics he had felt, but where the Black Council’s auras felt chaotic and corrupted, this felt purer, more harmonious, and it made his own aura feel discordant. Darien shook his head to rid himself of the stray thoughts and drag his mind back to the present.
“Forgive my rudeness,” Darien said. “I have not thanked you properly for your assistance, Lady Mirisa, but my situation is… complicated. It is best that I not involve others with my problems.”
“Well, it sounds like you’re in the right place, then.” The woman let her arms hang to the side and sighed. “A lot of people here have things in their past they would like to forget. Nobody comes here by choice. Exire is where you end up when you don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Well, thank you for your hospitality, but I should go as soon as possible.”
She frowned again. “Well, you can try, but I don’t think you’ll get very far. That wound of yours is completely different from any I’ve ever seen. We thought it was poison at first, but it kept coming back. A poison should have cleared, but this hasn’t. It’s more like a disease that keeps coming back.”
The chain of events ran back throu
gh Darien’s mind. The knife that Traiz had stabbed him with had dropped him almost instantly, something even the worst poisons he knew should not be able to accomplish. More than that, it had restricted his magic, and no poison he knew could do that to anyone. Restricting magic required powerful enchanted shackles, most of which could be overpowered by an experienced mage of his strength. This had to be something else, something meant for him especially. He wanted very much to examine it thoroughly, but that would mean retrieving Traiz’s body, clearly an impossibility at this point.
Darien reached down to pull the covers away, just to see how bad it was, but before he could, Mirisa’s small hand grabbed his and pulled it back. Darien resisted the urge to slap the hand away, remembering Garok’s threat.
“It’s really bad,” she said anxiously. “You might not want to… er…”
“I’ve been wounded many times before.” He waited, and finally she sighed and relented.
Darien had indeed seen many wounds, and bore the scars to prove it, but what he saw when he removed the covers shocked even him. A roughly circular area several inches across had turned a shade of foul purple. Tendrils of deep violet radiated out of the center like creeping vines that tapered to spider web thin threads that lightened in hue as they spread across his stomach and up onto his chest. He actually had to catch himself so that he didn’t gasp.
“I told you it was bad,” Mirisa said. “When I started, it covered almost your entire right side, and was almost black. I’ve been fighting it for weeks.”
What does she mean she’s fighting it, Darien wondered? A strange choice of words. “By all rights I should be dead. I did not expect I would survive.” How did I survive, Darien asked himself? Did the sword somehow keep me alive, or did this healer manage to counteract whatever Traiz did? “How did you manage to counteract the poison, if indeed poison it was?”