The Crossroads, Chapter 12: Calls to Disadventure

Thock, thock, thock.

“I’ll give ya a gold piece for the lot, plus your time,” Marko muttered, massaging his temple.  He seemed to wince each time the sound of the apprentice’s hammer rang through his office.

“A gold piece for the armor of a legendary hero?” Ty asked.  “That’s it?”  Marko growled and reached for a steaming, herbal-smelling cup on his desk.

“Yeah,” he spat.  He took a gulp.  “Ya got a buyer who’s paying more?”

“No–”

“Ya feel like breaking our contract, then?”

“Our contract was that you’d pay fair value!”

“What, that ain’t fair?” Marko snorted.  “Does it do anything special?”

“I don’t know,” Ty said, “but coming from the Hunter of Beasts–”

“Well there you have it,” Marko replied, clutching his head.  “You don’t know what it does, might be nothin’, I’m payin’ less ‘cause I’m the one that gets to find out.  It’s called speculation.”

Thock, thock, thock.

Bleeding Wolf rolled his eyes as the “argument” went on, vaguely wondering if this routine had worked on any of Ty’s previous dealers.  The Khettite knew what he was doing–no way he’d been in this line of work for more than a job and hadn’t figured out what Marko was telling him–but a gold piece was fair, Marko knew it, Ty knew it, and Bleeding Wolf was growing impatient.

“Ey, Marko!” he called out, interrupting Ty’s fourth or fifth objection, to another visible wince from the dealer.  He gestured at the splintered entryway: “The fuck happened here?”

“Disruptive customer,” Marko grunted, taking another gulp of his brew.

“They dead?”

“No.”

Bleeding Wolf chewed on that, noting the bandage around Marko’s arm.

Thock, thock, thock.

“You…lookin’ to do something about that?” he asked.  Marko glared at him.

“Not yet, Dog Boy,” he scowled.  “Keep in touch.”  He glanced back to Ty.  “We done here?  I’ve got unconsciousness callin’ my name.”  Ty sighed:

“Fine.  One gold piece.”

“Ah, sorry,” Bleeding Wolf cut back in.  “There was one more thing.”  He rummaged in his belt pouch as Ty took a step back, eyebrow raised.  After a moment, he withdrew the fiber Lan had cut from the Hunter’s corpse.  Despite the full night’s travel, its vibrant green had not faded, and in the shadows of Marko’s office, the faint glow it gave off was clearly visible.

Marko considered clipping, raising the cup steadily to his lips.  Perhaps too steadily, Bleeding Wolf thought.  The dealer’s eyes had widened, his posture ever so slightly stiffened, and if Bleeding Wolf was not mistaken, the man’s pulse had picked up just enough to hear.  At last, Marko spoke:

“Ten gold pieces.”

“Twenty,” Bleeding Wolf countered.

“Done.”

Bleeding Wolf flinched, to Ty’s visible concern.

“Dammit,” he muttered, climbing up to Marko’s stage to make the exchange.

“Best not beat yourself up,” the dealer said, counting gleaming coins into a pouch.  He slid it to the end of his desk.  “I wasn’t speculatin’ on that one.”

“Got a buyer already?” Bleeding Wolf asked through a forced smile.

“Ain’t your business,” Marko replied coolly, watching Bleeding Wolf exchange the fiber for the pouch.  Bleeding Wolf raised an eyebrow but offered no further reply.

***

“You see, the reason Ka’s eastern flank was unassailable at that point was because Le Marquains had an established alliance with Ali’Khazan of the Barabadoon, probably the most influential warlord in Hazan at the time…”

The man’s–was his name Naples?–voice droned on at the other end of the makeshift infirmary in the apothecary’s shop, no doubt fueled in enthusiasm by Lan’s intermittent, excited outbursts, but Orphelia didn’t follow, let alone care.  Her attention was on Devlin, curled, shuddering, unconscious on the cot before her.  He looked even sicker than when she’d left him the previous morning, his face gaunt, his wrists and elbows bony and protrusive, dried mucus and blood caked over his cracked lips.  Despite the sweltering temperature in the room, he still shivered, and his forehead was cool and slimy.

“You must be his sister.”  The voice came from behind her.  She turned, hunched, to see the apothecary, the wizened person Lan had referred to as Brill, approaching from the swaying curtain that marked the divide between the infirmary and the rest of the shop.

Orphelia nodded but kept her mouth clamped shut.  For a brief moment after their return to town, Mr. Ruffles had broken his silence to issue a warning: The Crossroads would become interested in them, in the Bad Stuff, and she mustn’t let them know.  She didn’t know what Brill knew already, what it was okay to say, whether it was okay to say anything at all.

“Have you heard then?” they asked.  “He saved the whole town.”

“What?  How?!” she blurted, surprise momentarily overtaking her trepidation.

“A monster tried to break into Marko’s stock last night.  Your brother helped fend it off.”

“Is that why he’s not waking up?” Brill frowned.

“I do not believe so,” they said.  Orphelia found it strange that she could not tell whether the apothecary was a man or a woman, but she found their voice calming nonetheless.  It wasn’t parental–perhaps she was thankful for that?–rather it felt like a sort of pragmatic compassion, and it put her at ease in spite of Mr. Ruffles’ warning.  “Actually,” Brill added, “I was hoping you might shed some light on the source of his illness.  Do you know when this all started?”

There it was.  Orphelia consciously shut her mouth, her eyes, shook her head for a moment, thinking before she spoke:

“No…a few weeks ago, maybe.”  The tears welled in her eyes, one rolling down her cheek.  “We were with a caravan when he got sick.”  It was an acceptable performance, Mr. Ruffles assured her.  They would tire of questioning soon.

“Do you perhaps know whose caravan it was?”

Orphelia sobbed again and shook her head.  Brill considered this and opened their mouth to press further, but it was at this moment that Orphelia’s deliverance arrived, and Bleeding Wolf stepped through the infirmary curtain.

“Ah, al’Ver, there you are,” he said.  “Got coin for you.  And Brill, a word.”

“A pleasant surprise as always, Bleeding Wolf,” Brill replied sardonically.

“Yeah, yeah,” the beastman muttered.  “Sorry.  Yesterday was a rush.  Still need to talk to ya.”

“Very well.”  Brill glanced apologetically down at Orphelia, but before they stepped away, an angry look flashed across their face.  They turned on Naples.  “You!” they shouted across the infirmary.  “I do not recall giving you invitation to recline here.  Your talk is–I would surmise–of little help to my other patient.  Please recuperate from your questionable decisions elsewhere!”

Naples shrugged aggressively and glanced among the infirmary’s other occupants in search of defense, but finding none, he adjusted the bandage on his head and, dejected, left the room.  Brill sighed and followed Bleeding Wolf beyond the curtain into the main shop, and Lan, easing himself from the empty cot where he’d playacted Naples’ attentive audience, sauntered to Orphelia’s side.  His demeanor seemed carefree, but as he reached her, his expression grew suddenly forlorn.  He knelt by Devlin and took the boy’s hand.

“Please, Sister,” he whispered, slipping a dirty, iron ring from the boy’s finger.  He placed it on the table beside the cot.  “Let the child rest.”  Orphelia threw her head back in mock affront, objecting:

“Mr. al’Ver!  I am not your sister!  How informal!”  Lan turned to her, his face overtaken by a mischievous grin.

“My apologies, Miss Orphelia, I forget myself.  But quick, we must away!  An encounter is close at hand, and I am ill-inclined to leave it to chance!  He swept out of the room, and Orphelia, bewildered but heartened, made to follow him, taking one more glance at Devlin before she did.  Mercifully, his breathing had calmed and his shivering ceased, and for the first time in weeks, she felt truly reassured.

***

“What’s this business about an attack last night?”

“You’ve heard already, then,” Brill sniffed.

“Just the bare bones.  Marko was tight on details.”

“I wonder, then…”

“Wonder what?” Bleeding Wolf asked.

“The…thing that attacked.  It was clearly one of the False Gods’ abominations, but not any handiwork I recognized.  It was an eight-foot-long centipede, anatomical liberties notwithstanding, wearing a cloak, walking upright, pretending to be human.  Except…”

“Hmm?”

“Except there wasn’t a bit of flesh on the thing.  It was entirely steel, a machine.”  They paused.  “This familiar to you?”

“The witch of the Ironwood,” Bleeding Wolf muttered.  “I’d never seen substance for any of the talk, but there’s scattered rumor down south of a mage-monster who lives in a metal forest near the Junction.  They call her the Ben Gan Shui.”

“She makes metal monsters?”

“Guess?  The rumors say she can turn a man to steel, make ‘im immortal.  Metal bug monster seems within the realm of possibility.  But then…fuck.”

“What?”

“We brought back a trinket, likely similar to the Hunter’s flower, and Marko bought it off us.  Said he’d already found a buyer.”

“I don’t follow, Bleeding Wolf.”

“I was kind of hoping the witch was his buyer.  It was too little and esoteric for anyone small-time, and my list of False God tinkers isn’t long.”

“The Sculptor, then?”

“No.  It’s a plant that strengthens flesh.  He would need stone to fit in somewhere.”

“Then…oh no.”

“Yeah.”

Abruptly, both turned to the door as an eruption of shouts poured in from the street.

“What the fuck?” Bleeding Wolf growled.

***

“You are looking for a Khettite?” Naples repeated to the hunched, hooded figure.  “Well I’m sorry to say you may be at a historical disadvantage.  The kingdom of Khet fell centuries ago when the Blood God of Kol took power, and–”

“They ssay you arrived on the ssame boat.”  The figure’s voice was guttural and whistling, and Naples had to conclude he didn’t care for its tone.  No, he wasn’t going to be helpful here, he decided.  He continued his pedantry:

“I certainly didn’t arrive with anyone from a place that doesn’t exist.  And I’m afraid I did not interrogate my traveling acquaintances regarding their heritage.  In my opinion, we’ve come together here in the Revián, and in this way we are all Riverlanders in this place.”

The creature expressed a noise between a grunt and a hiss, and beneath its threadbare cloak, Naples caught sight of a bandaged fist, clenched in frustration.  He considered whether it might be prudent to cut this conversation short–before that fist were to be propelled at his already tender skull–but the apothecary’s door opened behind him before he could make a decision.

“Ah,” he said, noting the emergency of Captain al’Ver and the urchin girl.  “If you are so interested in the circumstances of my arrival, then I should introduce the gentleman who conducted me.  Captain–”

The figure had already turned to al’Ver, shambling rapidly, unevenly past Naples.

“Boatman,” it growled.  “Tell me where I might find–”

“Yes, yes, the Khettite, Ty Ehsam,” al’Ver said, drawing a rapier from the handle of his umbrella, to a look of perhaps-feigned shock from the girl.  “Tell me: What manner of cowardly creature art thou to threaten innocents in the street for these questions?  In broad daylight, no less!”

“That iss none of your concern.”

The figure had barely finished speaking when al’Ver lunged, catching the hood of its cloak on his blade.  The escalation caught Naples by surprise.  He was no stranger to scuffles, of course, but Captain al’Ver had not seemed the type to strike first.  But then the hood, sliced at the crown, fell to either side of the stranger’s head, and Naples caught up to the Captain’s intent.

The creature’s face was a bizarre, careless distortion of human anatomy.  Its skin was blackened unevenly by burn scars, the top of its cranium squished low and smoothed, marked by irregular–presumably decorative–bone spurs jutting through its flesh in the shape of horns, and its jaw had been pulled forward and fashioned in the shape of a snout, suggesting an overall reptilian appearance.  It was an abomination–in the technical sense, of course, clearly a product of magical experimentation by an unhinged mind.  But in this case, if Naples was not mistaken, he had had a pretty good idea of which unhinged mind that was: This individual was a dragonling of the Blaze.

Snarling, the creases in its scarred flesh alighting like embers, the dragonling leapt at al’Ver, who rebuffed it with the explosive unfolding of his umbrella.  As it reeled backward, the Captain calmly swiped a nick across the creature’s snout, sending flecks of black blood across the street.  Naples noted expectantly that the blood burst into flames where it landed.

“WHERE ISS HE?!?” the creature shrieked.  “WHERE ISS THE THIEF?!”  Wild-eyed, it turned to the girl and leapt again, arms outstretched, the boney claws adorning its fingertips now fully visible.  Al’Ver stepped between them, sword raised, shield braced, and before Naples could call out what he realized might be a…relevant warning, the dragonling had fallen on al’Ver, impaling itself on his blade.

The girl screamed.  The Captain grit his teeth.  The creature belched liquid fire onto him, its burning blood pouring for good measure down the hilt of his sword, onto his arm.  And Naples took a deep breath.  Perhaps he would be helpful here after all.

He reached out, felt for the hungering violence of the flame, surrounded it, drank of it.  All of it.  Too much, too hot, but it must be gone in the end.  And then it was in his gut, in his heart, rising, fighting to burst from his mouth, boiling the nerves behind his eyes.  It had to go.  He exhaled, channeling the death the only way he knew how.  He started with a campfire.

The Crossroads, Chapter 11: Security Considerations

Been dealing with other aspects of life for some time, but hopefully getting back into the swing of semi-regular updates.

“Do you know what it was after?”

“Nah,” Marko spat, wincing as Brill pulled a stitch closed on his shoulder.  From the other side of the table, John Bergen, mayor of the Crossroads, stared half-lidded, annoyed and unimpressed.

“What would it have found in your office had you not stopped it?” he ventured.

“None of your business.”  The mayor sighed and glanced between the others in the room, probing for reactions–Gene, arms crossed, leaning against the wall; Michel and Anita, the peacekeepers, standing at attention by the door; Brill, focused on his stitches, but not so focused that he forgot to turn his head, avoiding the mayor’s withering scrutiny.

“Brill, you have a key to the back room, don’t you?” Brill looked up, nearly dropping his needle.  It was confirmation enough.  “Would you kindly provide it?”  Brill gulped as Marko interrupted, slamming the table with his uninjured arm:

“I said it’s none of your business!”

“He’s right, boy,” Gene grumbled.  “You’re oversteppin’.”  The old man didn’t mean it unkindly, but the mayor bristled anyway.  It was endlessly frustrating to him that the elders refused to lead but still insisted on ramming their fingers through the spokes of his solutions.

“I do not intend to seize any property,” he clarified, staring Brill down.  But since your patient has decided not to help in the effort, I would like Michel to take a look and help me estimate what portion of our town has just narrowly escaped ruin.

“John…” Gene cautioned.  The mayor placed a hand flat on the table and turned to the blacksmith as slowly as his anger would permit.

“I’m not so young that I don’t remember what happened fourteen years ago, Gene.”

“What?”

“The last time Marko’s stockpile was attacked,” he intoned.  He turned on Marko.  “Hazani scavengers found the cave up north where you were storing your acquisitions.”

“What of it?” Marko shot back.  “It wasn’t even a setback in the long run.”

“Yes, but the short run was a year long.  A year you didn’t have the funds to purchase inventory.  A year your credibility was damaged by the exchanges your ‘non-setback’ made impossible.  A year our three largest trading companies plotted routes bypassing the Crossroads, directly to Holme–do you recall, Marko?”

“I do,” Marko growled.

“Do you recall that during the food shortages we experienced that year, one in five of us died or left?”  Marko practically snarled but did not reply.  The rest of the room had fallen silent.  “The key, Brill,” John said.

Before the apothecary could react, Marko stood, sending his chair skidding backward and tearing the needle from Brill’s fingers.

“Oh, fuck you, kid,” he rasped, moving to rip the thread from his shoulder just as Brill intervened, cutting it free with a hastily produced pair of scissors.  “I took precautions after that, I gottem now, I’ll add some more fuckin’ precautions right fuckin’ now if it’ll help you sleep at night.”  He paused, turning angrily back as he reached the door.  “Long as you keep your damn nose to yourself.  Gene, send your apprentice by me tomorrow.  Door needs fixin’.”  And with that, he stormed out.

A quiet moment passed before Brill, prompted by a pointed look from the mayor, begrudgingly rummaged the key from his pocket.

“You probably don’t have much time to use this,” they said, placing it on the table.  “He’ll be booby-trapping the place as soon as he gets back, no doubt.”

“I can head over now, sir,” Michel offered.  John shook his head.

“No need.  Marko answered the question well enough.  Tonight was indeed a closer call than we can afford.”  He reached over and picked up the key, noting its ornate design and filigree handle.  “This isn’t your work, right Gene?”  The old man leaned over the table, squinting.

“No,” he confirmed.  “It ain’t.”

“An artifact, then,” John said.  “He won’t be able to change the locks very easily if that’s the case.  I’ve no doubt we’ll find a use for it soon.”

“Whaddya mean, ‘we’, John?” Gene asked.  “I don’t like this one bit.  It’s bad precedent.”

“Marko isn’t like the rest of us anymore, Gene.  He’s too important.  You and Brill, you’re the backbone of this town, and I will always be grateful for what you’ve done for us.  But dead things have backbones too.  Marko’s trade is our lifeblood, and we can’t pin our livelihood on the dubious solace of his paranoia.”

Gene considered the argument for a moment before gritting his teeth and flicking the table in frustration.

“Do you disagree,” John asked.  Gene huffed:

“No.  I agree.  Still don’t like it.”  The mayor turned.

“Brill?”  The apothecary sighed.

“I sympathize with  your position, John,” they said.  “I understand what you are trying to protect, and I’ve given you that key to use as you see fit.  But I would have you understand that when we are finished talking here, I will be visiting Marko to advise him of what transpired and how he might protect his interests in spite of it.  I am his friend, or the closest he has to it.  I think that has its own importance in your web of incentives.”

The mayor grit his teeth but said nothing, regarding Brill silently until the apothecary, ascertaining that their point had been made, turned timidly to leave.

“Brill,” John muttered, grasping at the last thread he could think of.  “Do you know where you stand in the end?”

“With the Crossroads, of course,” they replied, before making their exit.  The mayor thought about it for a moment, nodding to himself as the others waited for a reaction.  Gene pushed away from the table, snapping him back to reality.

“Gene, before you go.  The boy.  What was his role in all of this?”

“Ain’t sure, but I don’t like it either,” the old man grunted.  “Barely coherent, sicker’n anyone I’ve seen since the war, but he shambles into the square and hits the thing with some kinda spell.  Stunned it just long enough for Marko to pin it down.”

“Do we know where he came from?”

“Nah.  Showed up with a caravan two weeks back.  Think he goes by ‘Devlin’, but that’s all I’ve got.”

“I’ll look into it.  Goodnight, Gene.”

Constellations

Getting back out of my house once more.

“You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again.  Only no sky can blind you now.  Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations.”

-Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

The problem is that you think a constellation is a picture.  You see in the Night Sky’s plumage an unknowable design–but merely a design, to be studied for meaning, for intent.  But would you study it for its use?

A pair of points makes a line, and each line is a connection, yes, but also a barrier, a demarcation separating one side from another, a within from a without.  And in the Night Sky, millions of lines, millions of walls become a vast, shining labyrinth, home and prison to Existence’s greatest shame and most inexorable inevitability.

When the Night Sky first dreamed the world into being, he had yet to look upon it.  As he did, the multiplicity of his subconscious vision greeted him: the earth, the forests and fields and seas, the creatures, the first gods and their Magics, and yes, of course, mankind.  But beneath it all, a second greeting, singular, arose from the darkness.  It was Hunger.  It was Lack.  It was Cold.  It was Freedom.  It was Song and Promise and Desire, All That Was Not, All That Should Have Been, All That Might Yet Be.  The humans gave it many names–the Minotaur, the Wendigo, the Voice that whispered and sang in the night–for it hunted and devoured them with a cold and unfathomable tenderness.

To spare the rest of his dream, the Night Sky sealed the darkness in the space between the stars.  Its whispers would not be silenced, and its hunger–the hunger of all creation–would not be sated, but for a time, none could heed its call.  They would look skyward and be saved, struck senseless by the vast array of beauty and light.

The Maze in the Mists

Slight change of pace. This is the introduction for a new setting I’m working on for the Rale universe. Credit to Kelsyn for the original concept.

You have been walking this road for some time now.  It is an unremarkable road, unpaved, trodden uniformly by an infinity of unrecognizable footsteps.  All around you is mist, itself unremarkable for its familiarity–you’ve been living in it for longer than you’ve been walking the road, after all.  It is everywhere in this place: blanketing the fields, suffusing the woods, wrapping the scattered towns between in its damp embrace.  You suppose you can still remember that there was a time without the mist, but the specifics elude you.  All you remember is this:

You were a soldier once.  You and your companions.  You no longer know who you fought, what you fought for, or where, but by the time you stopped you had nightmares.  Bad ones.  The kind that woke you not screaming but frozen, paralyzed by the notion that whatever you had been running from in your sleep had crossed into the waking world.  It was there with you, standing over you, behind and to your left, just out of your peripheral vision, breathing heavy, deafening.  You could feel the rancid condensation of that breath on your forehead as that nameless creature reached down and caressed your hair with dirty fingers and whispered:

“Why would you do that?”

Whether you could answer the query is moot–you can’t anymore.  You never told anyone about the nightmares, save your companions, and you all agreed it wasn’t the sort of story anyone would want to hear.  The war stories, though?  The ones that preceded the nightmares?  Those you traded away gladly for the means to sleep soundly again.

That was the thing.  This place in the mists operated by different rules.  The people here had different wants, a different economy.  When it came time to pay for your meal, your provisions or board, they did not ask for coin.  They asked for a story.  And when you told it to them, it was gone.  It was no longer yours.

Not all of your stories were horrible.  The good memories you traded for fine food, company, and wine.  The solemn ones you traded for fresh clothes or flint.  The everyday occurrences, the uninteresting daily nothings weren’t worth much, but in a pinch you found they bought you attention, an ear to listen as you vented your increasingly formless rage.

You learned ways to make your stories last.  You could tell only a single side of a complex tale, embellish banalities, omit details that you could cling to for a while longer.  Sometimes it worked.  Most often they would see through you, not that they minded.  You were still offering a story of sorts, and it was still payment.  A falsehood was just worth less than a truth, and what you bartered for was measured accordingly.

As time passed, as you walked the road, you grew poorer and poorer, and you remembered less and less.  Sometimes you were able to trade your labor for someone else’s story.  Sometimes your travels and choices and happenstance allowed you to forge your own anew, but too often you found yourself giving away more than you got, and now…well, now you have been walking the road for some time.  You don’t remember the last time you saw anything but the dirt and the mist and the imprints of travelers before you.  But, of course, that could be for a number of reasons.

The Crossroads, Chapter 10: Nom de Guerre

Lan was troubled.  It was not a matter of the Holmites and scouts or stragglers–no, he was quite certain there would be no more of them, though they provided a convenient enough excuse for egress.  He was troubled, yes, but he had no need to show it to his companions.  What depths of despair might overcome them should they witness the great Lan al’Ver fretting like a house-husband?  Better to save them such unnecessary crises of conscience.

Their mental fortitude notwithstanding, Lan was troubled because the whole scene had been…troubling.  Preternaturally troubling.  The sort of troubling that had one counting and sorting their troubles like inventory, attempting to spot the error in the arithmetic, to trace back the entry missing from the ledger.  Or perhaps to cross out one made in error.

It wasn’t Bilgames.  No, the old boy had long since retired, given up his crusade against whatever beastie he’d pulled that silly cult together for.  He’d been sitting on the shelf awhile now, and it was about time his sins caught up with him.  It wasn’t the Holmites either.  Mud rats could scurry as they please in the dark and dry–it was no concern to a riverman.  If Lan was being frank, Holme itself had worn out its welcome.  The Riverlands had little tolerance for dogma these days, and the Sculptor wouldn’t have the mettle to survive in spite of it.  The place would be torched within the decade, he predicted, but an eddy in the stream when all was done.

Lan arrested his thoughts as he reached the forest’s eastern edge.  Why the exposition, he wondered.  His intuitions were winding.  Following them precisely was often difficult, but troubles, troubles: Something told him the stakes were higher now.

Back to the grave.  The whole thing had felt familiar.  Like family.  Like Brother and Sister.  Like home.  Like old comforts and old threats, which was odd, because the forest was no home to Lan al’Ver.  An exotic locale, certainly, a fleeting call to far-flung adventure.  But it ought to have felt more…foreign.  And why did the Holmite–the rude one, the one with the gall to raise an axe to a legend like him–keep butting into his thoughts?  The man would live–he had time left–and besides, the scoundrel had nothing to do with Lan’s family one way or the other.

“I was wonderin’ if I’d have the pleasure t’meet you here, Captain al’Ver.”

Lan stopped cold.  He was not frightened.  He was not even very surprised–the forest was dark, and a body eluding his notice was the most plausible thing in the world.  But no one ever did, and he was somewhat surprised, and that was cause for consideration.  

He turned to the source of the voice to see a flint spark bloom into torchlight.  The torch’s carrier was a woman, leaning at ease against an ash tree, clad like the Holmites in patchwork plates and leather.  Instead of a white cloak, a red cowl hung loose about her shoulders, and a rusted spear and greatshield balanced against the tree beside her

“I suppose I shall grant you that pleasure,” Lan said.  “Though I think it only fair I know who accepts that gift.”  The woman’s smile was barely visible in the firelight as she pushed away from the tree and approached.

“But of course,” she replied, extending a hand.  “I’m called Atra ‘round these parts.  And you, I’ve admired for some time.”  Lan shook her hand, for it was only polite, though he had to admit he found the lady peculiar.

For one, he could not for the life of him tell her age, and he was normally quite good with those sorts of things.  He could tell quite easily, for instance, that Bleeding Wolf had sixty-eight years in spite of his youthful frame, or that young Miss Orphelia was sixteen, no matter how forcefully she projected the notion of an innocent eight-year old upon her victims.  His intuition told him nothing of Atra, however, and he was left with only the confusing visual cues on her skin: fit, unwrinkled, unlined, but covered in an array of scars that suggested either extensive torture or an…improbable amount of time on battlefields.  Then, of course, there was the matter of recognition:

“Are you, indeed?” he remarked.  “And here I’d thought myself quite familiar with these parts.”  Atra laughed uncomfortably.

“Ah, you’ve caught me–I’m a new arrival.  Just a week ago, in from the ‘Stones.  I told no lies, though.  ‘Tis indeed m’name, and ‘tis what my employers in Holme know t’call me.  Enough, though.  I’m sure you grow bored of this starstruck girl’s prattle.”

“Never, my dear,” Lan replied.  She was clever, he admitted.  She knew that flattery would get her everywhere.

“Even so,” she continued.  “I take it we’re here on the same business, then?  And I take it you found my men wanting?”

“Desperately, I’m afraid.”  Atra sighed and spat on the ground beside her.

“Bloody useless.  Should have known.”  She put a hand on her hip and glanced up at the sky beyond the canopy, then back to Lan.  “Any survivors?”

“Two,” Lan replied.  “I expect they’ll be conscious before long.  Would you like me to bring you to them?”  She shook her head.

“Thank you, Captain, but there’ll be no need.  Just send ‘em east, and that’ll suffice.  You can let ‘em know I’ve got camp set up just beyond the treeline if it please you.”

“It can be arranged,” Lan said, welcoming the easy solution.  He was still distracted, though.  There was something about the woman that he ought to have been able to place, but he couldn’t quite focus on it.  “My professional apologies that you should return empty-handed, but I am quite unable to offer assistance on that count.”  Atra laughed again, this time at ease.

“You’re every bit the gentleman the stories built you up to be!  But no, you’re right.  The pieces’ve fallen, and it’ll be my lot t’get those two back home once they’ve made it t’me.”  She walked back to her weapons, picked up the spear and slung the shield over her shoulder.  “I bid you good evening, Captain,” she called back.  “Perhaps we’ll meet again on more pleasant terms!”

“I shall await the hour!” Lan replied to her departing silhouette before he too turned away.  That solved the Holmite problem, he supposed.  Best to head back with the good news.  Though the darkness and tangled undergrowth may have proven an impediment to a lesser man, Lan cared little for the frivolity of logistical struggle, and by force of his disdain, he arrived at the Hunter’s informal grave some minutes later.

It appeared he had not kept his companions waiting overlong.  Ty had lit a torch and was fussing over a bundle of what appeared to be the Hunter’s armor as Orphelia, her demeanor evidently much improved, offered a bound and freshly conscious Holmite a severed finger, calling the gift a “lozenge”.  Bleeding Wolf, meanwhile, seemed the opposite of his normal, capable self.  The man was slumped at the base of a tree, oblivious to Orphelia’s nonsense, clearly preoccupied with some existential concern or another.  Lan shook his head, disgusted.  Was no one going to take advantage of this teaching moment?

“Miss Orphelia!” he called out.  “Don’t you know it is impolite to hoard snacks between you and your friends?”  Orphelia looked up at him, an unmistakable twinkle of disturbed mischief in her eye.

“Oh, Mister Lan!  Would you like one too?”

“Captain, my dear,” Lan corrected, plucking the severed appendage from her hand.  “And do tell: Did this lozenge come from one of these cadavers, or have you been keeping yourself a stash?”  Orphelia’s face fell, and the mercenary, suddenly recognizing the object for what it was, began to sob violently, struggling against the ropes holding her to the tree.

“But…” Oprhelia muttered.  “But you’re not supposed to–”

“Don’t think you can pull the sack over my eyes so easily, young lady!”

“What in the bloody, bottom-feeding hell is wrong with you?” Ty interrupted.  “Both of you!”

“A bold question from one who allowed such behavior to proceed with impunity,” Lan replied, dismissive.  Ty exhaled angrily, turning his glare on Orphelia, but otherwise swallowed his response.

“Did you find anything, then?” he asked instead.

“Indeed, I did,” Lan said.  I spoke with these ruffians’ leader.  She awaits their return at a campsite to the east.  Best let them run along.”  Ty nodded, approaching the tree and pulling Orphelia–perhaps more forcefully than necessary–away from the prisoners.  The girl blew a raspberry at his back but otherwise acceded.  Some minutes passed as they gathered their effects.  Ty helped the mercenary to lift her still-injured comrade, but before they all could depart, Bleeding Wolf gave out a low whistle.

“That,” he growled, pointing to the Hunter’s corpse, “concerns me.”  Lan pursed his lips and approached.

Concerning indeed.  From the floor of the clearing, still sprouting rapidly, a web of green, luminescent tendrils was beginning to envelop the body.  They had the vague shape of vines, though Lan suspected they were not plants.  Not truly.  Not completely.

“Looks like something’s got an interest in the dead stuff,” Bleeding Wolf added with a glance back at the three Holmite corpses they had dragged to the edge of the clearing.  They were being swallowed similarly, and Lan had to admit the beastman had a point.  The two surviving Holmites did not wait for the situation to develop.  They took off into the undergrowth, hobbling as fast as their injuries allowed.  Lan, however, paused to consider the strange growth, and his companions, out of respect or simple confusion, followed his lead.

He drew his rapier and gingerly cut one of the tendrils, lifting it with the flat of his blade.  He plucked it off and held it between two fingers.  It was…inert.  But strangely, it still held life, far more than such a small strand ought.  He did not like what he felt of that life.  It was cold and vast and hungry.  And familiar, like the gravesite and the lark that watched over it.  Familiar, though no longer familial.  He tossed the strand to Bleeding Wolf, who caught it deftly if not readily.

“We should be along,” he said, doing his best to make light of the deep unease that had overtaken him.  “I do not think it is safe here.”

The Crossroads, Chapter 9: Confluence

The altercation could have gone better, Bleeding Wolf supposed, surveying the bodies at his feet.  If he and his companions had arrived sooner, had been better prepared, they might have been able to surround the mercenaries, force a surrender, stop the violence before it began.  But to the extent that he prioritized the job and his own party’s safety, it had gone perfectly.

There had been five that marched into the clearing.  They had worn white, Holmite capes and carried a characteristically motley assortment of mismatched armor and armaments of varying quality.  They were likely Holmite citizens then, but not Holmite agents, which was just as well: Bleeding Wolf had little appetite for the political implications that would entail.  Of the five, he had personally dismembered two.  They…would not be standing back up.  Lan had beat the shit out of another who had unwisely attempted to dispatch him with an axe, and Ty had kicked another in the head hard enough to knock her unconscious.  Those two were still alive, though Lan’s victim was in bad shape.  The girl’s was another story.  Bleeding Wolf hadn’t witnessed the whole interaction himself, but he did see the end, as Ty wrestled her to the ground and the last mercenary hacked frantically at his own chest, trying ostensibly to remove his heart.  Leaving the girl contorted in a fetal position, Ty had cut the man’s throat before he could finish the job.

“Well, that was splendid,” Lan said dryly, wiping his rapier clean and re-slotting it into his umbrella-shield.  “I think I shall be off to a walkabout.  See if these louts left any stragglers still on their way.  Mind the poor dear, would you?”

“She’s the poor one, is she?” Ty muttered as the merchant walked off.  He glanced down at Orphelia.  She seemed to have calmed somewhat, but she was still horizontal, breathing slowly and clutching her teddy bear to her chest.  Ty was keeping his distance from the girl, and Bleeding Wolf was of a similar mind.  He felt no need to intervene in her coping process, and there were other pressing matters besides.

“See if he’s got any rope in there,” he said, gesturing to the bag Lan had left in the clearing.  He unbuckled a pouch at his waist and withdrew a handful of herbs.  “I’ll see if I can patch this one up.”

They worked efficiently, applying rudimentary bandages to the mercenaries’ wounds and tying them both to a tree.  By the time they finished, Orphelia had mostly collected herself, and the three of them met up again beside their original quarry: the corpse of Bilgames, Hunter of Beasts.

“This the guy, then?” Ty asked.  Bleeding Wolf nodded, suppressing the swell of emotions as the certainty of it resolved.  It was…him.  The enormous, musclebound frame, the long beard, the etched armor.  It was just like the stories, just like the glimpses he caught decades ago through a crowd.  But though the corpse was still in remarkably good shape for what had almost certainly been days of exposure to the elements, the job was still just as it had been advertised: The corpse was just a corpse, throat cut, unmoving, and they were there to loot it.

To that end, Bleeding Wolf noted that his earlier conjecture–that the tipster had already taken his cut–had been vindicated.  In life, the Hunter of Beasts had worn an enormous lotus flower upon his chest, but where the flower ought to have been, there was only an indentation, an irregular cavity amidst the corpse’s musculature, framed by hundreds of tiny pinpricks, perhaps where the roots had entered his flesh.  The stories were true, then.  The flower was an artifact.

“Looks like the best has already been taken,” Bleeding Wolf remarked, gesturing to the indentation.  “I think we’ll earn our fee if we can bring Marko the armor, though.”

“Is it magic?” Ty asked.

“Hell if I know, but it’s all he’s got left.  Marko didn’t ask for anything in particular, right?”  Ty shook his head.  “Help me get these off, then.  The bugger can figure for himself what his merchandise is worth.”

It took them little time to remove the heavy belt and vambraces, but as they set about the task, a deep uneasiness fell over Bleeding Wolf.  At first he thought little of it.  They were in the Bloodwood, it was getting dark, there may yet have been more mercenaries about, and they were looting the grave of his childhood hero.  There was plenty to be uneasy about.  But then he heard a rustle beyond the clearing, and the unease became material.  He looked up, saw a flash of white, and the rustling receded rapidly.  Dammit, he thought.  Missed one.

“Keep an eye out.  Run if more show up,” he growled to Ty.  “I’ll be right back.”

He tore into the woods.  He’d try to be less lethal this time, he thought to himself, but either way, they needed this one caught.  If their group had spread out, if the party had only intercepted a portion of them, this scout could be bringing friends back.  And given the state the first group was now in, they would be out for blood.

Except this scout seemed to be very fast, and–Bleeding Wolf noticed it quickly yet still too late–something wasn’t right.  The trail he’d been following for lack of visual contact, the scuffs in the dirt, the trampled moss, the broken twigs and branches–it was not a trail made by a human, no matter what kind of hurry they were in.  These footprints could not have been made by boots.  The spread of shattered branches was much too large for a human frame.  The deep lacerations into the bark of the trees–what could a Holmite scout have been carrying to have made those accidentally?  All of these thoughts coalesced, collated in his mind just in time for the trail to abruptly end.

He slowed to a halt, listening, sniffing the air, straining his senses to detect any sign of…whatever it was he was chasing in the rapidly dimming undergrowth.  At first there was nothing.  The shadows were still, the air smelled of the forest’s pungent floor and little else.  Then he heard breathing, massive, deafening, not ten feet away, and the unwelcome feeling that he had been outwitted, that he had been led here, began to settle in.  Slowly, he turned to face the source of the breathing, and he froze, fear and awe mixing, cold in his chest, as he recognized the mask.

He fell to his knees.  It was him.  The Wolf of the Green, for whom Bleeding Wolf had taken his own name all those years ago.  The Masked Wolf.  The Masked Alpha.

In his peripheral vision, he could finally resolve the Alpha’s colossal frame amongst the shadows as the creature began to pace, its steps suddenly graceful, silent in spite of its incredible size.

“You followed in our footsteps, then,” came the rumbling words, seemingly from every direction, as the earth and trees resonated with the primal force of the creature’s presence.  “You were eager.  Do you understand where it has led you?”

Bleeding Wolf looked up to see the Alpha paused mid-pace, neck elongated and bent down to regard him.  It was not poised to strike.  It was…skeptical?  He bowed again.

“I am not sure that I do, Great One.  Please help me understand.”  The Alpha remained motionless for what might have been minutes before the reply finally came:

“Two circles converge.  One, a careful orchestration, pieces placed carefully, falling outward until all is in ruin.  Our congregation was the instrument of its genesis, and the first among us has now fallen to it.  The second is a gyre of passion and rage and lies.  It draws all within, for it is of the Deep, and the Deep is of all.  It is human, and for that I despise it, for it has long since consumed me.

“Your eagerness has brought you to a crossroads of ruin, too late to turn back, only chaos and ravening before you.  But…”  Again, the Alpha paused, and the forest paused with him, as if the insects, the birds, even the creaking branches were captive to its words.

“But perhaps you may prove yourself a successor.  Perhaps your devotion might stem the rot and resentment and the Story-That-Hungers.  If you think yourself worthy, then listen carefully: Trust not the girl, but help her to find her redemption.  Beware the Second, but help her to find peace.  And when His whispers drown out all else, do not be afraid, for Harmony compels naught without discord.”

With that, the Alpha fell silent, and slowly, tepidly, the subtle din of the forest began to seep back in.  Crickets and cicadas resumed their sawing chorus, and a breeze blew through the canopy, and as the quaking leaves drowned out the Alpha’s rumbling breaths, Bleeding Wolf looked up.  Around him was nothing but roots and leaves and dusk.

The Crossroads, Chapter 8: Devlin

Devlin woke with a heaving cough, dust and feathers issuing from his mouth.  His brain was foggy.  He could barely think.  He could barely breathe with all these birds, black birds, brown birds, birds the color of dirt and shadows and dried blood, fluttering about his shoulders and face, shedding filthy down in his throat, cawing and chirping in his ears.  In his daze, he could barely hear it, but it was all he could hear.  Where was Orphelia, he wondered.  Why couldn’t she chase them off?  Why were they still here?

He wiped the crust from his eyes and looked about the alley.  It was getting dark, and she wasn’t here.  That wasn’t right.  She went about during the day, of course.  She brought food and water and the blanket she’d used to erect the makeshift awning over his head, but she always came back before it got dark.  He roused what little strength he had and crawled to the mouth of the alley.

The street was nearly empty, and Orphelia was nowhere to be seen, but a sudden flicker of movement in the shadows prompted Devlin to recoil.  He scrambled backward as a figure appeared, pausing at the mouth of the alley.  It was the old blacksmith from across the street–the one Orphelia had warned him not to speak to.  He lingered for only a moment, meeting Devlin’s gaze with a reassured nod before hurrying away.  He had a large object–a spear, or perhaps a halberd–balanced on his shoulder, and somewhere amidst the confluence of details, it occurred to Devlin: Something was wrong.

The flock took off in surprise, instinctively squawking, pecking at his hands as he clambered upright.  He began to stagger after the old man.  The haze and the birds pulled at him, the fog gathered at the edge of his vision, but he willed his legs to keep moving.  Orphelia should have been back by now.  People were hurrying through the streets with weapons at twilight.  She could be in trouble.

He kept hobbling after the man’s shadow for what felt like hours.  Was the town really so large? How many houses had he passed?  On his periphery, he kept trying to count, to note signs and features of the doorways on either side, but the birds kept fluttering about his shoulders, blocking his view, breaking his train of thought.  It was only with a semblance of cognition that he realized he had followed the blacksmith into the square at the north end of town, and then almost immediately he was knocked to the ground, senses assaulted by a blast from the old theater on the other side of the square.

Bleary, he righted himself in a half-crouch to see, through the storm of screeches and feathers, a tall, black-clad figure climb to its feet amongst the debris from the explosion, only to be engulfed again by a torrent of fire jetting from the theater entryway.  In the sudden abundance of light, Devlin could see the figure all the more clearly, that it did not seem to heed the flame licking at its voluminous cloak, that its movements were too smooth, too precise, as if it were unfolding rather than simply standing.  The birds seemed to see it too: As the flames around the creature died down, leaving it apparently untouched, the screeching chorus faded with them, and for the first time in weeks, Devlin could see clearly.

Standing in what remained of the theater’s doorway was the greasy man Devlin knew to be Marko, the artifact dealer, brandishing a stone sculpture of a face in his left hand, his right covered in blue fire, surging from a glowing bracelet on his wrist.  On the other side of the square, as yet unnoticed by either, the blacksmith waited next to a stack of crates, halberd ready, attempting–like Devlin–to take stock of the situation.

“You can get lost if y’ain’t got nothin’ to say!” Marko called out.  “We do business here.  You can take your threats and leave!”

The figure did not respond, but it did glide forward a pace, prompting Marko to raise the stone face.  Instantly, the ground in front of the figure compacted with a loud thud, as if struck by something massive, sending dust into the air and leaving a crater in the dirt.  As a warning shot, it would have terrified Devlin, but the creature seemed unfazed, and in the moment of aftermath, as Marko attempted to judge the efficacy of his intimidation, it charged, closing the distance in an instant.  It batted the stone face from Marko’s hand and, ignoring the plumes of fire he reflexively raised, tackled him, impaling him through his shoulder on a spike jutting from its cloak where a hand should have been.

The blacksmith was already in motion, running toward them, halberd braced for a wide swing, but Devlin found himself approaching as well. In the uncanny silence of the birds’ absence, he found himself beset by a bizarre, intrusive desire. He wanted to touch the creature. He wanted to see what was beneath its skin, to stab his beak into whatever served as its eyes and savor the strange taste of flesh. There was a part of him confused, that recoiled halfheartedly at the wet fervor that had overcome him, but it was tired, far too tired to resist.

The blacksmith arrived first, his wild cleave catching the creature at the base of its neck, pulling it from atop Marko and sending it reeling toward Devlin’s position in the middle of the square.k  But though he seemed to have struck a solid blow with the sharpened edge of his weapon, the creature righted itself swiftly with a clicking undulation, barely inconvenienced, much less decapitated.  It issued a jarring sound, somewhere between a hiss and an otherworldly hum, and poised itself for another charge.  Then Devlin reached it.

With a confidence he had never known in himself, he reached out and grasped the limb the creature was passing for an arm, and with a terrifying, practiced familiarity, he projected a presence into the creature, found its whirring voice, and took hold of it.

As expected, it fought back.  The hum and the harmonies swelled, intensifying, weaving into vicious complexities as they writhed in his gnarled grip, and then they burrowed into him.  Devlin imagined a clicking, modular eye, studying him, unblinking, segments dialing and focusing, but the image remained for only a second before his mind was recalled to reality.

The creature was shuddering, resonating violently, and the force of the vibration was all but wrenching Devlin’s arm from its socket.  His confidence was gone.  He panicked and let go.  Still twitching erratically, the creature whirled on him, but before it could continue the motion, it lurched sideways into the ground with a metallic crunch, and the twitching stopped.

Looking past the fallen creature, Devlin noticed Marko, clutching his shoulder with one hand, the stone face raised tepidly in the other.  Behind him stood the blacksmith, undisguised concern written on his brow, attention divided between Devlin and the motionless heap of cloth and spines at his feet.

“What…” Devlin croaked, the query only half in mind before the screeches and feathers returned to drown it out.  Then the haze returned.  And the fatigue.  Then his legs buckled, and everything went black and mercifully quiet.

Alternative Alternative History

The Sounds Of New York City, Circa 1920 : The Two-Way : NPR

An intro story intended as a direct reference to Robert Chambers’ The Repairer of Reputations. I do recommend the original, provided you can overlook one or two references to attitudes that are justifiably no longer acceptable. Beyond that, though, in the niche of literature that Lovecraft and Derleth came to dominate decades later, The Repairer of Reputations stands out as a particularly subtle example among weird fiction’s supremely un-subtle enclave, with its portrait of a shining, futuristic 1920s New York (from the perspective of its 1895 publication date!), seen through the eyes of Hildred Castaigne, a megalomaniacal but only understatedly unreliable narrator. It also has suicide booths.

The original leaves the open question of how much Hildred’s insanity has affected his perception. There are clear, “onscreen” arguments over whether Hildred’s combination safe is, in fact, a breadbox, or whether the crown he keeps inside it is simply a piece of trash, but those allude to the arguments no one has: How much of the ordered, tranquil, pomp-and-circumstance New York of the future can be real if we are seeing it only through his distorted gaze. It’s an elegant ambiguity, one I ignore entirely in the below. My story is not elegant, and where Chambers’ work was meant to stand alone, mine is intended to introduce an aesthetically similar but larger and (by modern standards) much more conventional interweaving of characters. My version of Chambers’ setting is meant to be unambiguously real (because I like it), but I hope it will pique your interest anyway. The tags/categories are relevant, of course.

Toward the beginning of the year 1920 the government of the United States (and, newly, of Britannia) had practically completed the program adopted during the last months of President Winthrop’s administration.  The country had every appearance of tranquility.  The Great War, despite its ravagings upon Europe, had left no such scars upon the republic, having cemented its mutually agreed-upon annexation of the British Isles and Canada and emboldened its navy, granting it control over a profitable majority of both the Atlantic and Pacific.  The last vestiges of the white separatist movement in Texas had been quelled and its leaders apprehended with the aid of the Venus of the Sinaloa, and with the exception of the Army’s ongoing, troubled campaigns in the Shandong jungle, the country was in a superb state of defense.

Moreover the nation was prosperous.  Chicago, for a moment paralyzed after a second great fire, had risen from its ruins, argent and stately and even more beautiful than the white city which had been built for its people in 1893.  Everywhere good architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York a sudden craving for decency had swept away a great portion of the dingiest existing edifices.  Streets had been widened, properly paved, and lighted; trees had been planted, squares laid out, elevated structures demolished, and underground roads built to replace them.  The new government buildings and barracks were fine bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely surrounded the island had been turned into parks, which proved a godsend to the population.

The colossal Congress of Religions had convened only a year ago, but already itseemed clear to most that a new understanding prevailed between men and their cultures and creeds, that bigotry and intolerance were to be laid in their graves, that kindness and charity had finally triumphed over that ugly, sectarian will to conflict.  Many thought the millennium had arrived, at least in the new world, which, after all, was a world unto itself.

Many thought as much, yes, but Beau Pierre wasn’t so sure.  He looked down, bleary, from the window of his tenement–one of the few of its hideous kind remaining in the city–upon the newly reconstructed Pell Street, its wide, neat sidewalks, flowering cherry trees, alabaster storefronts opening to the carefully managed calm of a seaside park two blocks down.  People were supposed to like these things, to draw from them the same outward order and organization within their own souls, but Beau found them curiously soulless.  Something was wrong with him, he admitted.

After the war, he had enrolled at Columbia.  Prospects had been bleak at the time for a return to Paris, and he had been eager to resume his studies.  But it didn’t take.  It wasn’t that the faculty weren’t supportive or that they were hostile to expatriates or really any subversion of his expectations for the place.  Beau had changed.  It might have been the war–the Romantics had oft described the change that might occur in man upon his immersion in hardship and violence–but something told Beau that the particulars of the Western Front weren’t what the Romantics had in mind.  Besides, the war failed acutely to provide an explanation for the other changes he’d noticed in his life.

Beau turned to look at the door at the opposite end of his dusty studio and focused, flexing a muscle in his mind which had gradually made itself apparent over the past three years.  Clouds of possibility converged about the door, forming lines and threads stretching into dimensions he could intuit but not consciously fathom, along which the door began to shift.  The vast majority of them–ninety five percent, Beau estimated–were closely grouped, and the majority of what remained did not stray far.  It was a near certainty, then, that the door would open between seven and eight minutes from now.  He checked his pocket watch.  Ten minutes late.  Perhaps it was a power play?

Since his departure from the university, Beau had drifted through a few different arrangements of employment, less for the needs of his lifestyle–he lived cheaply and had been able to extricate an appreciable nest egg from his family’s holdings in France before his crossing–than for an idle fascination with Americana and its trappings.  A store clerk, a carriage driver–a profession swiftly yielding to the automobile traffic coming to dominate transportation about the city–a librarian, a shop assistant to a record seller–it was through this last, oddly, that he finally encountered the grasping fingers of New York’s peculiar underworld.  Out of curiosity, he had accepted an invitation to a secret society dedicated to the King in Yellow, who seemed to Beau to be a sort of cross between myth and metaphor, though he still had little idea what any of the society’s gibberish actually meant.  It was through that bizarre enterprise, however, that he had been recruited by Felix Wilde.

He’d never seen the man–only received messages from the other members of the society.  The employment they offered–periodic requests to deliver cryptic messages and nonsensical objects to individuals across the spectrum of social standing–paid poorly, which was notably orders of magnitude better than it ought to have paid.  It was terribly interesting, Beau felt, made all the more so by the enigma of Mr. Wilde himself.  The man, purportedly a microcephalic gremlin, was the chief accountant at Hawberk Armoury and Defense, the largest arms dealer in the country, but it seemed he had his malformed digits in some great share of New York’s illegal operations as well.  Some small portion–liquor smuggling, forgery–seemed profitable.  Most, like Beau’s errands, did not, but it was clear that Mr. Wilde held a sort of ineffable sway over the city’s miscreants.  Beau dearly wanted to understand why, but salient evidence had thus far eluded him, which was why the development of three weeks ago was so exciting.

Between Wilde’s sporadic requests and his own counter-research, Beau had taken to spending his afternoons at Belmont Park, testing his newfound predictive talents upon more measurable stakes.  Almost to his surprise, they proved quite reliable, and he found himself able to collect margins on small bets placed within ten minutes of a race’s start.  When he attempted to replicate his success with a more substantial sum, his predictions did not fail him, but unfortunately, his lack of guile did.  The track administrators had apparently noticed their novice patron’s perfect betting record and, upon the unfurling of circumstances that might otherwise have garnered the attention of their other clientele, decided to intervene.  Beau’s winnings were confiscated, and he was tossed unceremoniously to the street.

It was a costly error, to be sure: Though he was not currently relying on the extra pocket money, he had entertained hopes that it might provide some assurance of his financial independence in years to come.  A ban from every track in the state of New York complicated things.  Ultimately, though, Beau found it worthwhile, for the very next morning, an envelope arrived at his door, marked in the usual way with the initials “F.W.”  It was a task, of a sort, but unlike previous instances of terse, unadorned instruction, this note took the form of a ledger entry:

Incident recorded for one B. Pierre, student, migrant, amateur gambler.  Incident occurred April 3rd.  Reputation damaged on the racetrack.  Known to track proprietors as a race fixer.  Reputation to be repaired April 23rd aboard the Prince’s Emblazoned.  Retainer to be paid by client’s assistance to Mr. Hawberk on said date.  Entry papers and details to be provided to client by H. Castaigne at 8:30 AM, April 23rd, prior to departure.

-Mr. Felix Wilde

Accountant, Hawberk Armoury & Defense Co.

The mystery had coagulated deliciously.  Martin Hawberk was a pillar of society, and the Prince’s Emblazoned, his ocean liner, was the decade’s crowning achievement in modern nautical engineering–such was the agreement among every sailor Beau could find relaxing outside the cafes which bordered the harbor.  That idle engagement with Mr. Wilde’s nonsense had propelled him into such stations was a thrill in itself.  That it might finally shed light on Wilde’s intentions–or “repair” Beau’s damaged public character–was a veritable culmination of his atrophied ambitions.

He cut these ruminations short, rising in anticipation of a knock at the door, which arrived precisely on schedule.  Adjusting his sleeves, he breathed deep and opened it to a dandily-dressed young man who sauntered in with barely a glance of acknowledgment.

“Mr. Castaigne, I presume?” Beau asked.  The man delayed his response, surveying Beau’s ascetic lodgings with an almost exaggerated curl of his lip before laying his cane against the windowsill and producing a folio, which he set upon the table.

“Indeed,” he replied, begrudgingly making eye contact.  He did not sit, instead choosing to lean dramatically upon the backrest of Beau’s chair.  “You understand what is at stake here, yes?”  Beau clasped his hands and shook his head humbly, for now content to play along with Castaigne’s overstated theatrics.

“I am afraid Mr. Wilde provided me with precious little context.  What service is it I am to be providing?”

“You are to be controlling damage,” Castaigne said, almost with a snarl.  “Hawberk has decided that he shall jeopardize our finances with his frivolity, and Mr. Wilde finds this unacceptable.  We are to understand your capabilities make you an effective card player?”

“I’ve not made a habit of card playing.”  Castaigne scowled and looked out the window, perhaps to hide his sudden turn of rage.

“My blood boils at the thought that you were chosen, with wits this dim!” he spat, turning back.  “Your role is to ensure that either Hawberk or yourself wins this useless game, so that our work is not imperiled.  Do not fail, or the King in Yellow will surely enlighten you as to the meaning of fear.”

Beau considered the manic threat for a moment but ultimately found himself unable to resist:

“What have I to fear from the King in Yellow?”

Castaigne regarded him for a moment, taut-lipped, knuckles clenching around the top of the chair.  Then, in a low voice, he intoned:

“Mr. Wilde the other day relayed to me the most curious rumor of a certain Benoit Foyer, a French entrepreneur most perturbed by the theft of his family’s fortune by his estranged half-brother, mere hours after their father’s death on the Front.  I understand he is attempting to ascertain the miscreant’s whereabouts.  What do you make of it?”

Despite his efforts, Beau felt his brow raise incrementally.  Mr. Wilde’s attention was more careful than he’d realized.

“I would venture,” he replied slowly, “that Mr. Foyer may overstate his claim.  There exists no record of his parentage prior to his adoption into the Foyer family, making his accusation baseless.”

“Mr. Wilde is quite gifted at finding records, Mr. Pierre.  Hawberk’s former competitors can attest to it.  But let us agree that, in this case, he is surely mistaken in his assumption that such a record might be provided to Mr. Foyer.  And let us agree that his faith in you is not misplaced.”

With that, Castaigne deliberately relinquished his grip upon the chair and fetched his cane.

“Everything else you need should be in it,” he said, gesturing carelessly to the folio on the table.  He paused.  “Except you had best find yourself a tailor.  Even Mr. Hawberk would not suffer your presence on his ship looking like that.”

He strode out, leaving the door open behind him–and Beau to wonder whether his curiosity had been worth it after all.

The Crossroads, Chapter 7: A Visitor

It was growing late, Brill noted, sleepily watching the technicolor projections the setting sun, filtering from their window through the incongruous mass of bottles, phials, potions, pots, and tinctures arrayed before it on their sill-made-shelf, had cast upon the study wall.  They continued grinding away with their pestle.  The market had been…demanding today.  Many orders.  Little time to fulfill them.  It would be another late night.

Business was booming, it seemed, and though they regretted the impingement upon their reading time, Brill knew to be grateful for the surplus.  They had seen the alternative.  They peered down at the parchment on their desk, absentmindedly emptying the mortar into a mixing dish.

“Gar slime…” they muttered, creaking to their feet, rummaging through the pots and bottles on the shelf.  Locating the requisite container–a bulbous, ceramic tub, sealed with a large cork for the…aroma of its contents–Brill lifted it gingerly, pausing mid-turn as a knock on their door echoed through the shop.  “We’re closed!” they called back.

“Aint’ a customer!” came the response.  Gene.  Brill lifted an eyebrow, set the tub of slime on their desk, and proceeded to the door.

“What do you need?” they asked, opening the door to a restless Gene, hands on his hips, mid-pace.

“Need a favor,” the old man muttered.  He was uncomfortable.  The way he got before doing something impulsive, Brill noted.

“I’m always at your service, Gene,” they replied softly.  “Though I am running short on time this evening, so–”

“Sorry,” Gene muttered.  “Y’know those two kids been skulking ‘round the past few weeks?”  Brill nodded.  “Right.  Younger one–the sister–jumped town with Dog Boy today to run some errand for Marko.”

“Bleeding Wolf is back?”

“Was.  Maybe back soon, but that ain’t the point.  Point is the girl left her sick brother in the alley by my shop, and he’s been layin’ there all day coughin’ his guts out.  Was wonderin’ if you could do something for him.”

“That will depend on the reason for his cough,” Brill said.  “I will need to examine him–can you bring him here?”  Gene glanced over his shoulder.

“Weren’t sure if it was okay to move him.  He don’t seem particularly conscious neither.”  Brill sighed.  The alternative it was, then.  He grabbed a small oil lamp off a shelf near the door and lit it with the candle from his desk.

“Take me to him,” they said, their tone urgent partly for concern and partly–they hated to admit–for annoyance at having to leave the shop at such a late hour.  Gene nodded, taking whatever implication he needed, and turned to lead, only to freeze at the rapid approach of a stranger on the dusky street.

The figure was tall, draped head-to-toe in a thin black cloak, though Brill wondered–at the swaying of the garment in the breeze, at the complete lack of visible ambulation beneath it–whether toes were something this creature even had.  It stopped before the two of them, looming, silent, its face obscured by the twilight and the cloak’s drooping cowl.  Then it spoke:

“Where might I find the one called Marko?”

The words were jarring, brassy, spoken not in tones but in harmonies, and they reverberated, as if through a long, metal hallway.  Gene turned slowly to Brill, then back to the creature.  He nudged his head in the direction of Marko’s.

“Big house.  End of town.”

The creature declined its head in acknowledgment and proceeded down the street as quickly and eerily as it had arrived.  Gene looked back to Brill.

“Think we need to handle that first,” he said.  Brill agreed.

“Go make sure it’s under control at Marko’s,” they replied.  “I’ll get the Mayor.”

With that they parted ways, Gene to his workshop to fetch his polearm, no doubt; Brill to Mayor Bergen’s residence at the town square.  The boy would have to wait.  Unfortunate though it was, a False God’s arrival in town put more lives in danger than his own.

Coming Back: Remaining Alive in Dimly-Lit Rooms

Eternal Return: Black Survival on Steam
A non-fiction interlude, reviewing Eternal Return: Black Survival    

***

“The title…it doesn’t make a lot of sense…”

“What do you mean?  It’s Nietzsche.  The kids’ll love it!”

***

Taking a brief break here from Crossroads (brief=while writing this), since game design and culture are on my mind.  To blow off steam lately, some friends and I have been playing Eternal Return: Black Survival, which, design-wise, is a fascinating and bizarre evolution, and it’s filled my head with many thoughts.  They are not terribly organized so do please pardon the rambling, and for those of you who don’t care for video games, don’t worry: This is about much at least a little more than the mouthfeel of my digital pastimes.

***

The “what” comes first: Eternal Return is a Battle Royale (e.g. Fortnite) formatted as an isometric MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, e.g. DotA, League of Legends).  The latter term refers to a team-based game where players fight each other in an arena populated by tactically relevant (and usually at least slightly hostile) environmental features, growing and specializing their characters as the action escalates.  The game ends, generally, when one team achieves some goal with respect to the environment, unrelated, really, to the fighting with the other players (except insofar as they can’t stop you while they’re dead).

A Battle Royale is less complicated: A large number of players/teams get dropped onto a large map, and the last one standing wins.  To escalate the action (and to make safety a meaningful and fun tradeoff), weapons, armor, and other useful things are scattered around the map to give the strategically-minded survivors an edge in the showdowns that become inevitable as the map shrinks.

Amusingly (from an industry perspective), the two now-mega-genres have similar origin stories.  Some sloppy history: By most accounts, the first MOBA (in the sense they exist today) was a StarCraft mod called Aeon of Strife.  This inspired the Warcraft mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA), which became DotA: Allstars, which schismed out of Blizzard’s umbrella of control into League of Legends and DotA 2.  Similarly, Battle Royale started with the ARMA 2 mod DayZ, which passed design talent along to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), which prompted Epic Games to whipturn development on Fortnite in order to compete with it.

Generally, the creative direction of the games industry can be modeled as a linear combination of the interests of its best game designers and those of guys in suits who like the word “monetize”, and it is very easy to see the explosion of genres like these as dominated by the latter.  I’ll admit: It’s damned hard not to notice that within five months of the Auto Chess mod for DotA 2, both Valve and Riot had released their own proprietary versions, with Blizzard’s arriving only six months after that.  But the spectacle of the fat cat feeding frenzy distracts from the fact that these mod-to-blockbuster stories captured the artists’ attention too, with pseudo-legendary designers like Tim Schafer describing DayZ as the future of narrative in games (nosic).

***

For those of you whose eyes glazed over at all of that, this is where things return to the normal subject matter of this blog.  The lingo may get a little blurry, but the key to Schafer’s argument is this: Battle Royale games don’t have a story in any conventional sense.  There is little setting, no cutscenes or writing, no characters but you and the other players, no narrative but the one you make for yourself.

Frankly, I feel vindicated.  Back when I was in school, I dropped this same argument in one of my writing classes.  The MFA student opposite me, unimpressed, inquired: “Isn’t that just everything in life, though?”  It was very Robert Frost of her, but last I checked, no one is arguing that free verse isn’t poetry anymore.  The boundaries where art begins and ends are not important.  They were never important.  What’s important is that art can be crafted from agency.  It can be framed and sculpted, and like just about everything else within our powers, it can be improved upon.

The baseline for multiplayer games is essentially what you see with mainstream sports.  You have a simple task with a simple goal, and the game is doing it better than the other guys until one of you wins.  Maneuver the sportsball through the hoopgoal.  Go fast.  Hit hard and shoot accurately.  That these imperatives apply equally well to football/soccer, Street Fighter, Mario Kart, and Halo shouldn’t be controversial, but make no mistake: There’s a narrative there.  It’s just a very short narrative, leaving comparatively few opportunities for interesting variation.  I’m not knocking the excitement of the neck-and-neck rival showdown, won at the last second by a half-court buzzer beater, but I will point out that when they make movies about sports, it is always about the context, an athlete or team’s struggle and growth over months or years–their rise to greatness–and not the one awesome match they fought out in the preseason when stakes were low.

This then begs the question: How do we take that framework of engagement and structure it in such a way that a single game tells a story worth hearing?  The MOBA and the Battle Royale are two answers to that question.

The standard narrative of a MOBA match is this: The beginning, instead of a team v. team slugfest, opens with smaller scale matchups (generally 1v1 or 2v2) in “lanes”, with each side competing to most efficiently extract resources from the “minions” the enemy base sends down each lane.  You can fight your opponent directly here, and you might even succeed if you outmaneuver them severely, but you’re weak.  The minions aren’t strong, but they are a significant defensive advantage should your opponent catch you in the middle of them.  And, of course, attacking your opponent beneath the defensive structures at the end of their lane is certain death, so barring extreme outcomes, it is advantageous for both of you to sit there and farm, competing to grow faster, prodding and skirmishing to prevent each other from feeling too comfortable.

Soon you grow stronger.  Within the first third of the game, you’ll have unlocked all of your abilities and have improved your stats.  With some smart planning, you can now work around or through your opponents environmental defenses and score a player kill (for much higher rewards) or simply leave your lane to coordinate with your teammates (and overwhelm another lane), all with the goal of securing more resources, growing stronger, and conquering objectives to aid in the final assault on your opponents’ inner stronghold.

Nuts-and-bolts-wise, this is basically a whole bunch of subgames glued together, though organically and analogous enough to common concepts (e.g. war) to not feel like an abomination.  The variation in skillsets the game demands is wild, with different tactical mindsets needed for “laning”, “jungling”, “sieging”, “teamfighting”, and skirmishing around objectives.  There is, of course, some overlap with the basics of controlling your character, but even that is subject to do’s and don’ts that don’t travel well between concepts.

Seems like a cost, but the holistic result is profound.  In 20-40 minutes, you’ve now gone through the better part of the Hero’s Journey, from humble beginnings (level 1 laning) to confluence with your companions (meeting up as the laning phase ends), proving yourself as a Dragon Slayer (literally an objective in League of Legends), and ultimate, hard-fought victory over the enemy.  The goal was to establish a complex narrative in a multiplayer game, and, uh, mission accomplished.

Ish.  There are cons, many of them logistical.  For example, these are team games, and the precisely-combined nature of their subgames means they don’t have IRL sports’ luxury of freeform adjustment to deviant behavior.  So if Timmy gets disgruntled and walks off the virtual field by way of an unplugged router, that ruins the game for everyone.  There are no substitutes, there’s no rearranging the teams to account for the new imbalance (both for technical reasons and for the fact that doing so would invalidate all of the narrative built up to that point).  All the players can really do is remain halfheartedly engaged as the game grinds on for another fifteen minutes to its predictable, cheapened conclusion.

This is, of course, inextricably entangled with the other big MOBA downside: These games are long.  In the abstract, 25-45 minutes might not seem like a long time, but it’s time when you cannot be interrupted, when a moment of inattention could have deleterious consequences for the following half-hour.  If that doesn’t sound at least mildly stressful, you probably ought to check in with your significant other more often than you do.  All this to say, the MOBA is a significant development for narrative in (multiplayer) games, but it’s not the only one in town.  Meanwhile, the Battle Royale tackles things differently, avoiding these issues and falling upon different ones.

The narrative of a Battle Royale, specifically, is less about growth and more about movement.  It’s less a journey of empowerment, a campaign to win the war, and more a daring trek through the desert or a harrowing escape from prison.  Growth is, of course, there, but it’s incidental, an excuse for the movement, a reason to scatter everyone across a giant map instead of just dumping them all into the usual FPS deathtrap and having them shoot it out.  The resulting, absolutely enormous sandbox serves to frame the goal nicely: This isn’t a daunting foe that’ll require skill and coordination to bring low–it’s a huge and hostile gauntlet, and you want to get to the end by any means necessary.  Of note, the former is a team goal, the latter, a solitary one.  Obvious point: Most Battle Royales allow you to play solo at no disadvantage, and even when you do play with a team, you will often lose your friends on the way to the end, leaving you to soldier on alone.

None of this is to diminish the narrative value of the journey–it’s just a different type of journey, one where you have the choice to fight or flee, making it to the end through bloodthirst, boofing every chad who shows his face in headshot range, or instead playing the clever scavenger, forgoing combat with the guy who is just gonna get killed by the next player he meets anyway, biding your time, picking the circumstances of your final showdown.

This addresses the MOBA’s weaknesses pretty well.  Players are numerous and eliminated rapidly, allaying any risk that someone might unilaterally kick the experience off its rails.  And it’s fairly short, with the map shrinking down to its highly constrained showdown point in twenty minutes (or less, depending on the specific game).

Predictably, this introduces its own problems.  The first is that you aren’t going to win a lot.  Games of Fortnite have 100 players.  Apex Legends does 60.  Assuming you are all evenly matched (you aren’t), this means you are likely to win fewer than one in 60 games, which maybe doesn’t sound so bad, but I will emphasize that the real parameters of that calculation definitely skew the output toward “fewer”.  This wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem if placing anything but first meant something, but it’s not clear that it does.  It is, in fact, trivially easy to not be the first one dead in a Battle Royale, because not being the first one dead only means you avoided the first clash over loot (and, of course, that you didn’t get any).  It’s not even particularly difficult to hide out and keep a low profile to the end, but doing so slams you right into the second big problem: 1v1 games are hard.

This is simultaneously big-dumb-obvious in theory and still shocking in practice, but virtually any mano-a-mano contest worth contesting is going to feature a high skill ceiling, and while multiplayer games tend to obfuscate it behind the chaos of a hundred shooting scavengers, team coordination, and (for asymmetrical games) matchup differentials, the final moments of a Battle Royale lead fairly reliably to a contest of skill between a small number of players on mostly even ground.  Then you factor in the likelihood that you are the most skillful player in the 100, and, uh, it seems like you’re pretty boned.  Again, victory isn’t everything, but when your narrative is worth so little when it doesn’t end in victory, it starts to look less worthwhile to keep pulling the lever on the slot machine.

Cutting off the salt stream, where does that leave us?  Our leading narrative structures have encountered four key pitfalls:

  1. Vulnerability to unilateral disruption
  2. Burdensome commitment of time and energy
  3. Minimal likelihood of victory (or, more importantly, having a worthwhile narrative at the end)
  4. Exposure to the vicissitudes of symmetrical balance

Is it possible, then, to design a structure that addresses all four?

***

As with all questions of aesthetics, any answer is going to be a matter of interpretation, but I would argue Eternal Return is at least a respectable attempt.  Refresher/dissection of my previous description: It’s a Battle Royale with the interface/control scheme of a MOBA (isometric, QWER abilities that you rank up, equipment slots you fill up to improve your stats).  By this logic, its resolution of #1-#3 is actually pretty boring.  By simply being a Battle Royale, it becomes resilient to #1 and #2, and taking the edge off #3 is simpler than I’ve made it sound: Just reduce the number of players (Eternal Return has 18)!  Duh.  Where the MOBA elements really shine (and where this analysis gets its crunch) is in how they address #4.

It’s worth mentioning here that while certain game structures confer a sort of immunity to certain pitfalls (e.g. Battle Royale and unilateral disruption), MOBAs have no such immunity to #4.  It would certainly be possible to design a perfectly symmetrical MOBA with on-rails development to guarantee “perfect balance”–it would just be stupid, and no one would play it.  The salient observation here is not that MOBA designs inherently overcome the risk of directly exposing players to their own lack of skill but rather that they have tools to mitigate that risk to a greater or lesser degree.

The one to focus on is growth (matchmaking improvements with fewer players/teams as well as Eternal Return’s asymmetry–that each of its characters plays differently, with varying capabilities at different stages of the game–are relevant too, but they are less novel here).  

Most MOBAs structure character growth along two axes: “Experience”, a slow trickle of small stat improvements and ability access/augmentations awarded for productive activity (ie, killing stuff, in most MOBAs) and “resources”, often as a currency used to purchase items which provide larger, spikier stat boosts in a much more variable stream (the two are invariably correlated, but while the experience dispensed to all characters tends toward a tight bell curve, it is common to see a subset of players get “fed”, acquiring a great deal more currency than other players in the same match at the same time).  Eternal Return adopts this system, eschewing the Battle Royale standard of awarding random embiggening to those who stumble upon loot boxes.  This serves to both smooth and complicate the growth curve, reducing the power differential between the character who opened one more box and the one who showed up just behind him.  More importantly, it makes growth a focus, something to pay attention to, as doing it well or poorly can influence or even overwhelm in-the-moment mechanical contests down the road.

Another way to argue for the same design element is that it emphasizes multiple skillsets, deprioritizing absolute dominance in any one of them.  As with the earlier metaphor of military campaigns, you can excel either as a general, planning your map movement to most efficiently secure resources and control strategic positions and opportune times; or as a tactician, winning even unfavorable battles through superior execution and a dearth of mistakes.  Conventional Battle Royales heavily favor the latter; Eternal Return puts both on much more even footing.

***

The result is a game with lots of cool narrative moments, not dissimilar to either genre it draws from, but notable for the way it fuses them and, more importantly, the way it minimizes the costs of each.

Back to hedge-world, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be everyone’s cup of tea.  If you dig neither MOBAs nor Battle Royales, you may be underwhelmed here, not even for dislikeability but for a lack of things you care for.  You might be put off by the anime aesthetics or the half-hearted translations, or you might just hate isometric, click-to-move control schemes.

But even beyond the obvious target demographic of [not the above], I’ll throw a cautious recommendation to that narrow, eclectic group who has no idea what the fuck I’m talking about but remains curious about this notion of narrative in agency.  Check it out.  It’s the future, man.  The future is now, of course, but it’s gonna keep coming back, if this budget localization is to be believed.