Echoes

by Nathan Ravenwood

  “Which way?” Vann asked as the horse slowed to a trot.

  “Keep heading north,” Rorzan instructed. “We're headed to the mountains.” He looked at the horse. “Though we may want to find this girl something to drink. She looks thirsty.”

  “I feel bad,” Vann said, patting the horse on the neck. “We've been giving her a hard time today.”

  “Hey, you've got two legs. You want to turn her loose and huff it, be my guest.” Rorzan made a face. “Wouldn't recommend it, though. Branna's sure to have set some of his dogs after you.”

  Vann frowned. “We didn't keep dogs at the palace.”

  “I meant his guards.”

  “Oh, right.” Please don't let it be Ansel. He patted the horse. “How you feeling, girl? Ready to keep going?”

  The horse snorted, stopped short, then promptly bucked him off. Vann swore as he tumbled off the mare, landing hard on the packed dirt road and having the wind knocked out of him. Rorzan bust a gut laughing as the horse took off down the road, stopping short and whinnying loudly.

  Vann rolled over and picked himself up with a groan. “Glad you find this funny,” he snapped at Rorzan.

  “Buddy, I've been a ghost for three centuries!” Rorzan said, getting himself back under control. “I need something to make me laugh!”

  The horse was already gone, galloping off into the distance. Now that he was off the horse, the reality of Vann's situation was starting to crash down on him like a blacksmith's hammer. He was alone in the woods in the company of a ghost, with soldiers who that morning he'd been friends with likely already on his tail. He looked around, as if seeking the answers to his problems in the trees. “What am I doing?” he wondered aloud.

  Rorzan got himself under control, though he still looked like he was about to crack up at any moment. “Hoo boy... what do you mean?”

  “I'm an idiot,” Vann said, smacking himself in the head. “I'm actually a moron.” He turned around and started walking south along the road, back the way we came.

  “Uh, what are you doing?” Rorzan said. He zipped around Vann's side and hovered in front of him, spreading his arms wide. “We're going the other way.”

  “Not me.” Vann walked right through Rorzan. “I'm going back to do what I should've done in the first place and plead my case to Branna.”

  “Great! Have fun dying!” When Vann didn't stop, Rorzan chased him down again. “Vann, I meant what I said. You go back, they'll kill you!”

  Vann scoffed. “You're more than a little biased. You're Rorzan Jetta Diavolo, as you're so fond of reminding me! You're the Metal Lord, the Deathsinger, the Great Enemy, the Iron Lord, the Leather Rebel, the-”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Rorzan said. “What was that last one again?”

  “Leather Rebel?”

  “That one's new, never heard it before. I like it, sounds like a good song title.” Rorzan shook his head, refocusing. “I'm being serious here!”

  “You know, my life wasn't great,” Vann said, whirling around and jabbing a finger at Rorzan that dipped into his ghostly chest. “But it was fine enough! And I just had to go into that chamber and touch this thing!”

  “Deep down you know that it wasn’t 'fine enough',” Rorzan snapped. “You wanted more, you crave more than a meaningless life serving the whims of the royals.”

  “You don't know anything about me!”

  “I can make a fair guess!”

  Vann folded his arms. “Then guess away.”

  Rorzan glared at him for a moment, then started ticking off on his fingers. “You have a muscular physique, which tells me that you've spent most of your life doing manual labor, more than any of the pampered blue bloods ever have. You don't look sickly, which means you eat well enough, benefits of life in the palace. You being in the palace is the tricky bit, especially given that face and voice of yours. They don't just bring in servants that look like you do, it would offend the delicate sensibilities of those in the palace. So your presence can be explained by one of two things – one, either you're the most successful brownnoser in the world, or two, you had a connection inside the palace before you lost your voice and your good looks. Given your age and the type of connection required, that only leads me to one logical conclusion, which is the Lord to-be Yilon Branna. You handle the guitar well enough, which means that you probably have experience, likely in efforts to help said Lord-to-be.” Rorzan went to tick off another finger, then realized all his fingers were up. He looked at Vann. “Did I get it mostly right?”

  Vann was dumbfounded. “Yeah, mostly. How?”

  Rorzan let out a breath and sagged, sinking towards the ground a bit. Though Vann could see through his eyes to the trees beyond, there was a distance in them that was both scary and profoundly sad. “Because if you change a few details around that's basically my story too.”

  “But I thought you-”

  The ghost raised a hand. “Ever hear the phrase 'history is written by the victors', Vann?” Vann shook his head. “After the Rebellion and my defeat, the Lords were free to make me into a villain. But the real truth is far more complicated.” He gestured to the guitar strapped to Vann's back. “I can't make you do anything. You're free to toss the guitar into the woods and throw yourself on Branna's mercy if you want. But if you keep walking, I'll tell you everything. Your choice.”

  Vann looked back south along the road. The trees bowed in around the road, forming a tunnel of wood and leaves. He could faintly in the distance see the plains they'd ridden past.

  He sighed. “Not going to catch the horse standing here,” he muttered, hiking the guitar strap further up his shoulder.

  Rorzan nodded, smiling a bit. “That's the spirit, kiddo.”

  The mare snorted and trotted away from him as he kept walking north, it's tail flicking as if to say “come and get me.” Vann was in no hurry. “So... start at the beginning, I guess,” he said to Rorzan.

  The ghost laughed once. “There's a whole bunch of those.”

  “The very beginning.”

  Rorzan nodded. “Much like you, I go back with a Branna. Fala and I met when we were learning how to be Weavers. I was the son of a couple farmers lucky enough to have a Voice and a fair amount of magic. We got along well enough, became friends.” He smiled, his eyes growing distant. “We were going to conquer the world, him and I.” He blinked. “How'd you lose your Voice, Vann?”

  Vann felt the scars on his throat and face tingle, as if they were responding to their mention. “Lesson gone wrong. We were practicing shaping glass. I put a little too much power behind it and well...” He made an explosion noise with his mouth. “Boom. I was lucky I wasn't killed.”

  “Huh.” Rorzan floated around, studying his scars. “Well, shit, that makes mine so less dramatic.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “I got sick. One day I just felt a little scratch in my throat, the next day I woke up unable to so much as get out of bed. I spent the waking hours of the next three weeks coughing every day from dawn until dusk. By the time it was over I sounded like a dying goat choking on a dying frog.”

  Vann made a face. “Lovely image.”

  “But Fala and I were still good friends, and he took pity on me. When he went to Papreon to gradually take over the duties of the house from his father, he took me with him. I hadn't given up on myself. I turned my attentions and my smarts to studying instruments, experimenting and tinkering.” His expression darkened. “After his father died Fala became a much more reserved person. He just didn't talk to me any more, only really when he had a request and needed something built.”

  Vann shivered. The temperature in the shade of the trees was much colder than it was out in the open. At first he'd welcomed it, but now he realized he was in for a long, dark night. “Then what?” he asked.

  “It was business as usual for a while. Then Fala came to me one day with some news – a coterie of elves were going to come stay with us for a couple months while he, a few other human Lords, a
nd the elf Lords hammered out new trade deals. I'd been experimenting with a device that could glimpse other worlds. He asked me to find something new.” He smiled wistfully. “It was during that time I met her.”

  Vann had been raised on the stories. “Arielle.”

  Rorzan nodded, his smile growing wider. “I fell in love with her at first sight. Silver hair, silver eyes, legs to die for, perfect tits...” He trailed off, then coughed. “Yeah. She was there with her husband Aramis, a stuck-up, pompous windbag of an elf with a bigger stick up his ass than Fala. When she caught wind of what I was doing, she immediately jammed her way into the whole affair. At first I thought she was being nosy, but then after I while I realized she just wanted to get away from her husband. I was with her when we found it.”

  “It?”

  Rorzan flitted around behind him and passed his hands through the guitar, fingering chords his ghostly hands couldn't play. “Heavy metal. When we piped it through the device every light in the room lit up like the midday sun. I could feel it's power, Vann. It's music that has this power to it even when you don't put any magic behind it. That night, Arielle took a lute and shaped it into this very guitar. I'd carry it with me for the rest of my life.”

  Vann reached around and yanked the instrument off his back as he walked, feeling it's weight and shape. “Looks good for how old it is,” he said, his eyes following the sheen of the lacquer on the instrument.

  “Of course, you probably know how the story goes from there,” Rorzan said. “Arielle and I played a heavy metal song for the assembled Lords. They fucking hated it. Branna ordered me to destroy the guitar, and I almost did, but Arielle stopped me. The two of us fucked, an unabashed giving of ourselves to one another, and afterwards, lying there, we made a pact – to leave the realm of the Lords and forge our own path together, exploring this new kind of music that we'd discovered together.” He stared off into the distance. “Gods, I miss her.”

  The trees opened up into a small clearing, where the mare had found a stream and was having a drink of water. Vann carefully moved upstream from the beast and got some water for himself, cupping it between his hands and sipping. “Then what happened?”

  Rorzan lowered himself into the water until only his head was visible. He looked down at himself and cackled. “Hells, that's funny. Arielle and I went south, to where I think Ibanz is now. Back then it was called Uada. The Lord at the time had heard of what we'd done, so we-”

  “Wait,” Vann interrupted. “What did you do?”

  “Oh, right. I blew up a statue of Branna as we left Papreon. He was not happy about that.”

  “Gee, I wonder why.”

  “Same. Anyway, Lord Uada had beef with Fala and took every opportunity to piss him off. When we arrived in the south he welcomed us with open arms. But it wasn't just him. The whole of his country was a lot less... anal about pretty much everything. Comes from being a port. They traded with all the peoples of the Western Continents - the orcs, the centaurs, and the satyrs. In Uada, Arielle and I were able to further explore metal – what it could do, who could use it, and how powerful it was. And we found no shortage of people who were willing to help us figure it out. We started a movement.”

  “The Metal Revolution.”

  “Bingo.” Rorzan rose up out of the water, eyeballing the mare. “Think we can get back on and ride her some more?”

  “You made that sound way more creepy than it should have,” Vann muttered, lowering himself and stealing closer to the mare. The horse stilled, and gave him a look that said, “don't even try it.” Vann sighed and stood up, and the mare moved down the stream. “I don't think she's going to let me get anywhere near her.”

  “Yeah, doesn't seem like it,” Rorzan grumbled. “Oh well. Let's keep moving.”

  They left the mare by the stream, following the path away from the stream and back into the cover of the trees. “So the Revolution began, and you went on the offensive?” Vann asked.

  “Not even close,” Rorzan answered. “Most people mark the beginning of the Revolution as when I became Lord of Uada, which was a decade after I first arrived. The old Lord, the one who took Arielle and I in, never married or had any heirs, and when it came time, he named me his successor. It was witnessed, given the blessing of majority of the city's guilds, the whole shebang. Of course, that didn't stop conspiracy nuts from coming up with a million theories as to how I 'stole' the lordship from Uada. But in any event, I was a Lord, on equal footing with Branna. When I went to my first conclave, it was the first time I'd seen Branna in a long while.” His lip curled. “It was also the first time he tried to kill me. I arrived the first day with full intention of asking him to sit down and put the past behind us. That same night I killed one of his assassins with my bare hands. If there was any moment where the Metal Revolution began, that was it.”

  “Why would he do that?” Vann asked. “It makes no sense.”

  “Oh, it totally does. Branna ate the brunt of the elves' ire for Arielle running off with me. They screwed him over on trade deals, almost bankrupted him. He blamed it all on me, instead of bothering to wonder whether or not the elves were just pricks.” Rorzan made a rude gesture. “To make a long story short, the road to war was inevitable at that point. It was just a matter of when.”

  “It took a year, right?”

  Rorzan shook his head. “The first skirmishes didn't happen until three years later. I'd gathered a few more allies then, the rest of the Metal Lords. The whole continent went to war.” He held up a finger. “And I know we would've won in the long run if it wasn't for the fucking elves. They decided to stay neutral and let the puny humans kill each other until we started getting close to their borders. Then they jumped in, pushed us all the way back to Uada. By that time I was getting old, and couldn't hack it as well as I used to. Arielle never left my side.” He grinned. “Or my bed. Those were some fun times.”

  Vann flinched, the talk of sex striking a nerve. “But you lost that last battle. That's not a lie.”

  Rorzan gestured to himself. “Obviously.”

  “What happened?”

  “Sheer number, plus, I repeat, the fucking elves. They let the elves in on the Canto and flattened the walls of my city in hours. From there it was simple mop-up for them. I ordered everyone else to retreat, and headed off Branna and the High Lords myself. It was me they wanted.” His jaw clenched. “And, well... the rest is uncomfortable. I don't like talking about it.”

  Vann nodded. “So how are you here?” he asked, changing the subject. “How did you... seal yourself in the guitar?”

  Rorzan perked up, looking eager to talk about something other than his death, for which Vann didn't blame him. “Well, in my studies, I found it's actually possible to fragment your soul.”

  He said it with such banality that Vann did a double take. “Say what?”

  “Look, it's...” Rorzan flailed his hands through the air. “Difficult to explain. But you can do a lot of impossible things with magic when heavy metal is the vehicle. The sheer amount of power it can generate, especially with a band, is mind-boggling. Basically what I figured out was that you can leave an... echo of yourself in something. But not just anything, it has to be something precious to you. The song was an old elf one that Arielle and I messed around with, and I chose the guitar.” He floated around behind Vann and closed his ghostly hands around the guitar. “This thing is damn near indestructible, I saw to that. Branna tried to destroy it in the aftermath, but Arielle layered so many runes into the interior of this thing that you could drop it in a volcano and it would just float atop the magma like a giant middle finger. So he decided to keep it locked beneath his palace.”

  He flew through Vann, and he felt a chill as Rorzan's ghostly torso occupied the same space as his own for a moment. “Time passed weird. Sometimes I was aware of things, other times I wasn't. Decades would go by in minutes sometimes, othertimes I’d be aware of it all. I was definitely aware of it when each Branna came down with his heir e
very fifty years or so.”

  “Did they know you were there?”

  Rorzan smirked. “Nope. Remember, the only people who can see me are the ones that I want to. I amused myself by mocking and taunting them because they had zero clue I could see them. It gave me something to do, and then I'd be bored until the next time they turned up.” He folded his arms. “And then, well, today happened and you showed up.”

  Vann sighed. That morning already felt like a lifetime away. Reality was starting to set in. He couldn't go back to Papreon, he'd be in irons before you could say 'minor fifth.' But what was there to go back to, really? His life as a servant? His one singular friend in Yilon? Fucking the Lady behind her husband's back? Well, that was probably out in the open now, and was probably enough to see him stuck in a cell for the rest of his life on it's own.

  But he could do magic again. The guitar against his back no longer felt heavy as it had when he'd first been running. Now it fit against his back like it belonged there, the strap comfortable against his shoulder. “So what happens now?”

  “Well, that's on you,” Rorzan said, turning to face him. “Still thinking about running?”

  Vann shook his head. “No. Now you've told me all this, how could I?”

  Rorzan poked him in the chest, his finger vanishing into Vann's shirt. “Right here, right now Vann, I'm going to make you a promise. Stick with me, trust in me, and I'll make sure that nobody ever uses you like they did again.” He held out one ghostly hand. “Deal?”

  Vann looked at him, then down at his hand. “But how can I shake your hand? You're a ghost.”

  The old Lord gave him a bemused look. “Just give me your best effort.”

  It took a few moments, but Vann eventually managed to line up his hand with Rorzan's and give the ghost the best approximation of a handshake that he could. “Deal.”

  “Excellent!” Rorzan pumped his arms enthusiastically. “You're not going to regret this, Vann!”

  “So where to first?”