by Logan Jacobs
We all laughed, and while Elrin and Elissa chatted about the night before, I found myself thinking about the terms Lucian laid out. Elissa had made it abundantly clear that she had no interest in marrying the duke’s son, and I wasn’t about to give my woman to another man, so I imagined there was about to be another epic battle just outside the town walls.
“I’m gonna get some air,” I said as I patted Elissa’s thigh through her dress. “I have to come up with a strategy if I’m going to protect the town.”
“Would you like me to call the men for another meeting?” Elrin offered. “I’m sure many of them would volunteer to assist you in the fight.”
“Naw.” I shook my head. “For now, I just need to weigh all of the options. I don’t want to put anyone in any more danger than they’ll already be in.”
I bade the two of them goodbye and headed out of the house. Lucian was long gone by that point, but I could have sworn I could hear the chattering of his men just outside the walls. The word ‘army’ had been thrown around today, but I had no idea what kind of numbers I was looking at. It had to be a decent amount, since the mine had been crawling with goblins. I couldn’t see ten men clearing out the mine and coming out unscathed, otherwise Elrin would have done it himself ages ago.
I headed straight for the main entrance of the town where I had fought the kobolds. Elrin made it clear that the duke’s castle laid to the south of Addington, so I had to assume that was where the army would camp out in this waiting game. There weren’t any other towns nearby that we could go running to for help, so it wasn’t like the army needed to surround the town to keep us from leaving. Two days wasn’t enough time to get reinforcements.
Too bad I didn’t actually have that fire-breathing dragon Lucian claimed I had rode in on.
“Holy shit,” I breathed as I saw what laid beyond the main gate.
Canvas tents stood like islands in the sea of tall grass. They were spread out in a chaotic manner, and I knew that the only way to count them all would be to get some height and hope the number of tents was equal to the number of soldiers. The men swarmed the place like a bunch of ants, and every single one wore fine plate armor that made my own set look like it was made of aluminum foil. Swords and spears gleamed in the sunshine, and the sound of metal clashing told me there were at least two men practicing their skills with one another.
I tried to take a headcount, but none of the men stood still long enough to get any kind of accuracy. I thought about what made an army back home, but even that didn’t provide any answers. All I knew for certain was that there were less than two hundred men waiting outside the town, but there were definitely more than twenty waiting to destroy everything in sight.
“Disappointed, Great One?” a man asked, and as he came up behind me he clapped a hand on my shoulder. “They’ll be like a cloud of annoying flies for you to swat around.”
The two men with him laughed and agreed, and I did my best to pretend like I wasn’t worried. I mean, I wasn’t really. I could respawn as many times as I needed, so it wasn’t like I was going to lose in the end, but when I thought about how long it had taken me to defeat the kobolds and the goblins, my hands started to sweat. I had gotten really good at drawing on my ability before I could actually experience the pain of death, but there were always surprise moments that slipped through the cracks.
The men out there were likely to be highly skilled in the art of war, and they would be able to slip through my defenses easily in the beginning. I really wasn’t looking forward to being turned into a voodoo doll.
“You seem troubled, Great One.” Mahini’s melodic voice cut through my thoughts. Her presence calmed some of the turmoil building up in my head, and when I turned around, her eyes were filled with trust. “I have seen you battle a horde of kobolds and a slew of goblins. If these men cause any issues, you will handle them without a problem.”
“When they cause problems,” I corrected her, and I quickly filled her in on Lucian’s demands. “He won’t leave without Elissa, and she won’t leave with him, so I’m going to have to kill every man out there.”
The desert warrior’s blue eyes filled with cold fire. “I am sworn to fight at your side, so do not forget to include me in your plans for slaughter, Great One.”
I recalled that some asshole had made threats to her family and I understood her anger. “Do you think it’s wrong to kill all of these men? Lucian I get; he’s a dick; but these guys are only following orders...”
Killing the kobolds and the goblins had been as easy as breathing. Neither creature looked enough like a human for me to even consider their sentience. Even after I learned the goblin language, it had been easy to just think of the little green dudes as monsters that needed to be exterminated.
It was different with humans. The sorcerer’s men had been trying to kill me, so killing them was simply a matter of self-defense. And, yeah, if the duke’s soldiers started swinging their shiny swords at me, I wouldn’t have a problem with defending myself to the death.
But what if there was a way to convince them not to fight?
“If they choose to cross swords with you, then they choose to die,” Mahini said as if she followed my train of thought. “But these men swore an oath to their lord, and if they were to stand down at your word, they would lose their honor.”
“There aren’t many people as amazing as you, Mahini,” I praised her with a smile. “Most humans will choose their lives over their honor when it comes down to it.”
“Would you?” she asked, and she turned her piercing blue eyes to me. It was like she was looking deep into my soul.
“I wouldn’t run away from a fight,” I said. “And I wouldn’t put my life above anyone else’s. But if you or Elissa were in danger, I would sacrifice myself to save you.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought,” the black-haired goddess said with a nod. “You have the highest sense of honor. That is just one of the many reasons why we are bonded.”
“Well, I’m glad you think so highly of me,” I laughed. “I’m happy to have your respect.”
“You have more than my respect, Great One,” she said as she gave me another piercing stare. “I have already spoken of my love for you. But now I need to speak with Jax about upgrades to my armor if I am to stand at your side for this battle. May I depart your company for a bit?”
“Yeah, I’ll meet you there later,” I said, and she was gone before I had even finished the sentence. “That was weird.”
I stood staring after her for several long minutes. What did she mean when she said I had more than her respect? Was she talking about loyalty and trust? Or something else entirely?
“She really is a desert mirage,” I said to myself.
But that just made me want to know even more about her.
I wandered through the town with no real destination in mind. The townspeople must have already figured out that Lucian had given Elissa an ultimatum because the town was as busy as rush-hour traffic. The men were hauling materials to the outskirts of town to get the wall built. A few stopped to talk to me about my home repairs, but I assured them that the town’s safety was more important than my flooring.
“The room you and Liss need is in pretty good shape, huh?” one of the men teased as the rest roared with laughter.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “And what’s a few more days in the long run? I’ll be able to work harder if I know that pest isn’t out there sulking.”
The men went back to their work roaring with laughter and making all kinds of jokes at the expense of their liege lord’s son.
I probably shouldn’t have been stoking the fire of their hostility toward the man, but if I had my way, this town would look to me as their sovereign. The villagers clearly preferred me over the Duke of Bullard who sat in his castle hundreds of miles away, and although I didn’t exactly know the politics of this world, the guy must not be doing a very good job if the first god that comes walking into their midst can just take over as
the ruler.
“Wipe that silly grin off your face, Great One.” The sharp voice behind me made me jump and whirl around, and Dora the Healer was standing there with a smug expression. “You have to survive the battle before you can start patting yourself on the back.”
“I don’t suppose you have some knowledge that will help me survive?” I asked with as big a grin as I could manage. Dora reminded me of a feisty Italian mother that used her sharp tongue to protect her loved ones from their own blunders, so her jabs just made me chuckle.
“Unless you plan to poison the whole bunch, my herbs won’t do you much good until after the dust clears.” The scrawny woman let out a barking laugh and jerked her head for me to follow her.
Her words brought back the acid goblin from the mines, and while I thought it might be cool to do something like that, I doubted there was a plant in her care that had the same kind of strength as something obviously magical.
The dark-skinned healer brought me to a small building just around the corner from Jax’s forge. It stood out among all the other buildings in the town because it was built entirely of stone except for the shingled roof. A wide chimney was spitting out thin white smoke into the air, and there was a small fenced-in plot of land attached to the left side. Plants of all kinds were growing there, and the fragrant and pungent smell of herbs hit me as soon as I came within five feet of the front door.
When Dora entered the stone hut, I created a new save point. If I was about to learn a new skill, I wanted to make sure I had it mastered on the first go around. I crossed the threshold and had to pause for a minute for my eyes to adjust.
It was much darker inside, and the only light came from the happily crackling fire in the grate. A single window sat in the middle of the far wall, and when I spotted the bed beneath it, I realized that the healer’s hut had only one room. It served as her kitchen, entryway, bedroom, and sitting room, but it was larger than most studio apartments back in my world, and with how organized everything was, the space was perfectly utilized.
The kitchen consisted of a single flat surface and a large basin that served as the sink. The sitting room had two large comfortable-looking chairs sitting close to the fire. The bedroom was just the bed and a small end table, and the entryway had enough space for several pairs of boots and coats to go on pegs on the wall.
Dora was busy at a large table right by the entryway, and the walls around the table were covered in shelves that held all kinds of jars and baskets of various herbs. Each container was labeled, and I quickly realized that the herbs were sorted in alphabetical order. A large book laid open on the table to a page that detailed the uses of a poultice, and I wondered if it was the poultice she had applied to my arm.
“You’d be better off learning magic than sticking your nose into that book,” Dora said when she caught me reading over her shoulder. “Won’t do you much good in the battle. Those men won’t sit and twiddle their thumbs while you mix herbs together and plaster your injuries.”
“You mentioned magic before,” I said as I looked at the different jars on the shelves. “Is there someone in the duke’s land that could teach me how to heal wounds? It would definitely be nice to mend my injuries as I go.”
The healer was quiet for so long that I wondered if she had even heard me. It was several long minutes before she finally turned around, and she did so with the same slowness of a main villain being revealed.
“I never said there was healing magic in this world, Sebastian.” Her voice was not angry, but there was a certain edge to it that caused my heart to pound in my chest. “The true God of Time would have known that.”
It felt like I had been dunked into an ice bath as the woman’s hazel eyes pierced right through me.
She knew, fuck, she knew.
Chime.
Why was she testing me? Did she not think I was the real God of Time? Nobody else in town had any doubts about who I was, and even though I couldn’t actually show them my powers, how could anyone who wasn’t the God of Time be able to defeat his enemies as easily as I could?
If Theodora was an enemy, I had to figure out how much she knew.
“Magic will serve you better than my herbs in the end,” Dora said after I followed her inside.
“If you’re talking about healing magic, it doesn’t exist,” I replied. “All I can do is mix up a poultice to aid in the natural healing of my body; you said so yourself the day we met.”
The healer didn’t immediately turn around, and I braced myself for whatever harsh villain words were about to come my way. I didn’t have to wait as long as last time, and when she finally turned, her hazel eyes were sparkling with delight.
“Of course, you knew,” she said, more to herself than to me, I think. “Forgive me, Sebastian. I shouldn’t have tested you like that, but I needed to be sure you truly are the God of Time.”
“Who else would I be?” I grumbled. I was a little stung by her doubt, but at least I knew now that she wasn’t actually against me.
“You are very young, Sebastian,” she observed, “yet you are so wise. You must have lived many times over to get to this point.”
It almost sounded like she was talking about my ability to respawn. Why else would she say that I had “lived many times?” Was that why she had tested me before? Not just because she wanted to be sure of who I am, but because she knew something about what I could actually do?
I had immediately connected with Dora when we first met, and I thought that maybe it was just because she was blunt and didn’t put me on a pedestal like everyone else had, but maybe this was why. Maybe she was the person I could talk to about my powers.
Maybe she was supposed to be my mentor in all of this.
Maybe I should just tell her, and if things didn’t work out, I could just Chime and start again.
“I actually have lived many times,” I admitted, and her hazel eyes flash with interest, so I started from the beginning. “I’m actually not from this world...”
I told her absolutely everything, starting from taking my nap in the office. It all just came pouring out of me like water bursting from a dam. The fight with Raijin and the confusing maze of the catacombs, the trek down the mountain and the discovery of the kobolds, and all of the many times that I had died to reach the town only to find out that I also had to clear the mine of the goblins.
“And I know I can defeat Lucian’s army,” I concluded as I looked down at my hands, “but I also know that I’m going to die a bunch of times. That’s why I was hoping for some healing magic so that I could maybe live a little bit longer each time I respawned.”
A huge weight seemed to have lifted from my shoulders, and I could hardly believe how badly I had been wanting to talk about what I could really do. It was nice to get all of the praise and admiration for all of my amazing skills, but it was nice to finally admit that there was a shit ton of hard work behind my badassery.
I smiled at the relief I felt and then lifted my gaze to meet Dora’s only to find her looking at me like I was ten kinds of crazy.
“I simply meant that you must have been reincarnated dozens of times, and perhaps you could recall some of those lives,” she said in a tone that suggested I had overburdened her with my story. “I didn’t even realize reliving your previous moments was even possible!”
“So I guess you’re not my mentor, then, huh?” I asked as I drew on my power.
Chime.
Some of the weight returned to my shoulders as I realized that I couldn’t even talk to Dora about what I could really do. It was easy enough to forget about it in my new routine of killing all the bad guys, but it would have been nice to have someone I could really open up to about my abilities. I still didn’t know everything there was to know about what I was capable of. Sure, I could respawn back in time, but what if there was more to it than that?
“A tutorial would be really nice right about now,” I growled to the ceiling.
“Tutorial?” Dora questioned.
“What do you mean?”
“Doh,” I chuckled. “This one doesn’t even count.”
Chime.
The scrawny healer gave me the test about magic again, and I passed it with flying colors. She asked for my forgiveness, and I gave it, since I knew that her heart really was in the right place. Despite having seen me take on a horde of kobolds, the healer was willing to go toe to toe with me if I turned out to be nothing but a fake.
Gotta admire her bravery.
“You seem really interested in me, Dora,” I said to her as I picked up a jar labeled ‘Tincture of Feverfew’. “Is that why you moved here? Because of the Great Catacombs of Legend?”
Once again, the healer was silent for so long I was worried I had stepped over a line, so I turned my eyes from the feverfew jar and found her staring at me with her jaw hanging open.
Oh, shit, I must have really surprised her with that one.
She recovered quickly and let out a throaty laugh. “Nothing ever gets past you, does it, Great One?” The question was obviously rhetorical, and I waited for her to continue. “I suppose now’s as good a time as any to tell you my story.”
The scrawny healer crossed the room and plopped into the high-backed brown chair on the left, so I took the little blue one on the right. She hummed quietly to herself as she stoked the fire a bit, and when she finally sat back again, she stared at me for so long I wondered if there was something on my face.
“I am descended from witches,” she stated as simply as if she were commenting on the weather.
The first image to pop into my head was the Wicked Witch of the West, but I thought Dora looked more like the White Witch from The Chronicles of Narnia, only with very dark skin instead of icy pale.
“The sort that liked to brew potions in big cauldrons, or the kind that use wands?” I asked.
“Uhhh… both?” Dora tilted her head to the side with confusion. “That is an odd que--”
“I’m sorry,” I chuckled. “Just keep going. I’m guessing you are going to tell me about your grandmother that first had the magic?”