“For fifty years?”
“Yes.”
“Even though Rhodes’ people had to have told you where I was?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“Because you are the traitor-prince, and we knew you were not dead.”
“But you knew where I was!” I shouted, because I had completely had it with this shit. “You could have just rang the freaking doorbell and asked if I was in! They would have let you kill me at least once or twice!”
“No,” the monster snarled. “They would not let us touch you. You were... ‘re-search.’” The lupine mouth struggled with that word. I didn’t know why. “...they said. We could only have part of your corpse when you died.”
“You knew I was going to die,” I clarified.
“Yes!” he hissed flatly.
“And you still tore across the Expanse for me.”
“Yes!” the creature shouted. Spittle started to drip from his fleshy maw. “Because you were not dead, and you needed to be dead! So we demanded from all the worlds, give us the traitor-prince! Give us the traitor-prince or we will hurt and shame you! We would spread ruin, until someone chose to come forward and give us the traitor-prince! And we did not care who!”
“Because you hated me that much.”
“Yes! Yes!” The creature tossed his head back and howled. “Traitor-prince! Traitor-prince! Catch and kill the traitor-prince! Reclaim the blood, un-wrong our hearts, and kill the traitor-prince!”
The monsters in the woods behind the beast took up the howl as well.
“Traitor-prince! Traitor-prince! Catch and kill the traitor-prince!”
“Right then,” I said, pulling my spear out of the ground. “Parley’s over. Take your best shot.”
The creature stopped his chant and looked at me.
“You said it yourself,” I continued. “And I hereby quote: ‘kill the traitor-prince.’ You’ve said that phrase often enough to get it on all kinds of merchandise if you wanted. Well, I’m right here. Your fifty-year hunt is over. Time for a gut-check. Do you really want to kill the traitor-prince? Because you won’t get a better opportunity than right now.”
I leveled my spear and stared the monster down. Yes, he was over a head taller than me. Yes, he was terrifying, and creepy, and insane.
But so was Cavus.
I waited longer. Eyes still locked. Spear still braced. The monster did not move.
“Trick,” he finally said. “This is a trick.”
“Of course it is,” I replied. “It’s a big, nasty trick, and you saw right through it. I’m not planning to let you kill me at all. I’m going to fight back, with weapons and magic. Just like I did with all the other Horde that tried to kill me. Go ahead and ask them. They’ll tell you the same thing.”
He didn’t seem to like that question. Probably because those Horde were all dead.
The creature darted back half a step and growled at me. I could see the hair on the back of his neck start to rise.
“That’s right,” I said. “It’s just you. None of your pack-mates are in range. If you fight me, you will be on your own. So will I, of course. Unless Weylin feels like firing his bow into our melee.”
“No, that’s alright,” the elf called out helpfully. “You two go ahead and have fun.”
“See?” I said. “There you go. Just you and me, and our two groups of cheerleaders. And yours even have the longer legs.” The howler seemed baffled by that comment. “Now decide right now. Do you really want to kill the traitor-prince? Because this is your best, and riskiest, shot.”
The giant wolfman looked back again, as if seeking approval from his packmates. A moment later, I realized that was exactly what he was doing, and he was getting a mixed response.
“Kill him! Kill the traitor-prince!” one of the giant dogs called.
“No! Don’t get go anywhere alone with him!” another barked. “Come back!”
“Kill him and he can never pervert us again!” a third argued.
“Lose and he may pervert us further!” the second retorted.
“Will he not do the same if we let him go?” a fourth argued.
“What if he’s doing so right now?” the first wolf whispered.
That seemed to settle it.
The cries of “kill the traitor-prince” rang out again, and the howler facing me closed his mouth, swallowed, and then bared his teeth at me. The monster paced carefully to my right. My spear slowly tracked him. Then he paced to the left, and my spear tracked him again. He darted briefly back to the right, and my spear didn’t follow. The creature snarled in frustration as I saw through his feint.
Far behind him, I saw several other monsters carefully step forward and sniff at the ward-markers. So I let go of the spear with one hand and pointed straight at the monster, just as I had done with Fried Tom.
The howler yelped in surprise and scurried out of the way. He ran full tilt towards the safety of the enemy treeline. I let it go, because I didn’t want his pack-mates to find out exactly how much damage my improved lightning magic could do to them, not at the same time I did. I’d test it on them later, when I was more confident about not leaving any survivors.
When Mr. Scruffy made it back to his friends they all took up their howling and chanting to an even more frenzied degree. I listened to it for three entirely-too-tiresome seconds before I decided I just wasn’t having it.
“Avalon,” I asked. “You had a timeframe for reactivating the shelter’s wards. Are more functions available now?”
“Affirmative,” the mists boomed.
“Good,” I replied. “Because I want all these damn dogs off my lawn. Drive them away.”
“Command confirmed.”
There was a bright flash of light at the opposing edge of the clearing. The howlers all yelped, and I heard a flurry of cracked branches and rustled leaves as they all fled from the boundary marker.
I walked pass Weylin, who still had his bow drawn and nocked. I got the feeling he actually would have fired into the melee if the howler had chosen to fight me. And I also got the feeling that he wouldn’t have missed his target either.
“Well,” he said calmly. “Learn anything?”
“Yeah,” I said grimly. “When it comes to absolute evil, tell your desire for diplomacy to go fornicate with a rusty hacksaw.”
“Noted,” the elf replied calmly. “I could have told you that myself, though. What else?”
“Best as I could tell,” I said with a sigh. “A long time ago someone made a prophecy about me leading an army of evil and making it even more evil, but forgot that they never got me to sign on to the idea. So now they’re all miffed and butt-hurt over the fact that I got in the way of their dreams.”
“Butt-hurt? I haven’t heard that expression,” Weylin asked with a raised eyebrow. “Do you think they’ll try and recruit you over to their cause? I’ve heard of a few Challengers that have had to deal with that.”
“Yeah, we have a couple stories back home with that theme too,” I nodded. “But no. Now they’re afraid that I’ll make them less evil if they start listening to me, and that terrifies them. So now they all want to kill me and drink my blood. I think. I’m not really clear on why they’re so obsessed with my blood. But they clearly don’t want me to keep having any of it.”
“Huh,” the elf replied, and I couldn’t blame for being at a loss for words at that. “What about their potential?” he finally added. “Did you get a better feel for their strength?”
I nodded.
“My mind-screen informed me that they are probably on Spawn-level, whatever that is.”
“That’s bad,” Weylin replied. “Spawns are at least as strong as a person who has undergone six Rises. Some Spawns are a match for champions or monarchs.”
“That sounds like a very wide range,” I noted carefully. “Because my understanding is that a lot of people have undergone six Rises.”
Weylin shook his head. “The most the
average human ever undergoes is one or two Rises in their entire lifetime. Some people don’t even Rise until their elder years. A person who reaches their sixth Rise is considered to be very skilled in their profession. At 12 Rises a person reaches another mile-stone, then again at 25. The true elites of the races start appearing at this stage.”
“Can those things be at that level?” I asked worriedly. Weylin shook his head.
“Very unlikely. They would have rushed you and disregarded the wards if they were that powerful. But there might be a champion here at that range.”
“Great,” I said. “Then we all need to get stronger then, don’t we?”
Weylin chuckled.
“It would be nice if Rising were that easy. But accumulating that much power, experience and personal growth takes ages. All four of us are already outliers for being at our strength at our young ages. And we are all in our mid-twenties at least, by human years.”
“Really?” I asked. “I thought you guys were only a few years older than me?”
“I thought we were too,” Weylin replied with a suspicious edge to his voice. “How old are you?”
“Still around eighteen, counting the time I was conscious,” I answered.
“Right. I forgot you were a Challenger,” Weylin said with a groan.
“The point is,” I pressed on. “We need to get rid of all the monsters on our doorstep. And since they’re too strong for us now, we need to either get stronger, or cheat. So let’s do both. Come with me.”
Chapter 6: Old Haunt
As we walked back to the ruined buildings, I saw Breena flash past me in a little pink ball of light. A large pack of children giggled as they chased after her. I thought I saw the four girls from Earth run by as part of the pack as well. I should have called out, but the truth was I still wasn’t ready to face Val, Kayla, and Sam yet. And I didn’t think they were ready to talk to me, either. I swallowed a mouthful of shame and kept walking.
“So,” Weylin asked. “What’s the plan? Why did you pull me off of patrol?”
“Because the Horde can’t get through right now, and because Avalon already has sufficient power to inform us whenever they try. And because I think I need your help.”
“What do you mean?” the elf asked, curious.
“I mean that counting Breena, the five of us are the only ones who can fight. And I don’t know if we even have the weapons to arm all the women and children we have with us.”
“We don’t,” Weylin nodded. “And we wouldn’t have the time or ability to train them right now even if we did.”
“Right. So the five of us need to see what we can find here.”
“You are Avalon’s lord, yes?” Weylin asked. “Shouldn’t it tell you what’s in here?”
“I’m not sure it knows,” I answered. “If it comes up with more information, great, but until then we’ll have to do our own exploring. It’s a bad idea to hole up in a place we haven’t finished securing anyway.”
“Fair enough.” The elf nodded.
“So the plan is to get one last report on the refugees, then we figure out what all is in the deeper part of the ruins. Maybe there will be something we can use to help us.”
“Quite possibly,” Weylin replied with another nod. “Avalon is the most ancient of all the nations. It was shrouded in mystery even when the people of the Lightborn Lands were raising their first castles and anointing their first kings. If there are treasures hidden on any land, it would be here.”
I chose not to point out that if there really were hidden treasures here, Stell would have already armed me with them. We both knew we were grasping at straws here, and that we didn’t have any other choice. So I cleared my throat and changed the subject.
“You three called yourselves something called the Testifiers. Can you explain more of that? Are you guys some kind of magic historians or something?”
The ranger and musician chuckled at that comment.
“That’s a close guess, though don’t let anyone else hear you call us that. And the three of us are just a small part of the order. The Testifiers strive to both record events and to discover lost records. We use magic to that end.”
“So the whole script, song, and stone recital…”
“Is our commitment to preserve knowledge using the sacred arts of our order,” Weylin confirmed. “Karim ensures that the events are written so that they can be read. I ensure that they are preserved by the oral and lyrical traditions. Eadric sculpts large and small monuments so that memories of the same events can also withstand the passage of language and time. Therefore, history is protected threefold. If stone is destroyed, we still have script and song to remember. If books are burned, song and statues will testify on their behalf. If songs are no longer understood, then script and stone can be studied to recover what was lost.”
“That’s… really neat,” I said, something at a loss for words. This order fascinated me, because I loved history. It was one of my favorite subjects. “But why did you come here, though, if you all are historians?”
“Because we are not simply historians,” Weylin replied, with a slight sniff. “We are artists, explorers, and warriors. To preserve history, we must travel so that we can discover it, then we must record it, then we must fight to protect it. So when the Malus Members and Horde sought to destroy the records and art of all of our worlds, our order commanded us to take up arms.”
“Who is your order exactly?” I asked. “Because it sounds like it’s composed of much more than just you three.”
“Indeed,” Weylin nodded again. “We are but junior members. Senior enough to go on missions of our own, but junior enough to be under the authority of another for the process.”
“What was your mission exactly?” I asked. “And why were you chosen to come here?”
“Long ago, our order was one of the few groups permitted to travel across worlds,” the musician explained. “Our charter made us an interglobal organization, with members and races from every world. When the Order of Malus seized control of the portal network, it scattered us. Stranded our people away from our many colleges. The local Council decided that travel must be restored or our order would perish, so we were sent to investigate Avalon itself, and try to ascertain the downfall of Avalon’s portal systems.”
“How could you do that when you couldn’t use portals anymore? And isn’t Avalon normally inaccessible, even when the old portals worked?”
“It was,” Weylin replied uneasily. “We were instructed to follow a group of Malus Members and seize control of their portal, then use it to further investigate what had gone wrong.”
“With just the three of you?” I asked, incredulous. “That sounds incredibly dangerous.”
“Yes,” the singer said carefully. “The mission was probably more of a… political strategy, than anything else. Though in their defense, the Council did not have many good decisions to choose from. We were originally more than three, but all of our senior observers deemed it necessary to stay behind, in order to better report on the success or failure of our mission.”
“You mean they were cowards,” I said harshly.
“No comment,” the bard said diplomatically.
Looks like people on other worlds aren’t perfect either, I thought quietly to myself.
At any rate, the conversation was over, because Weylin clearly didn’t feel like castigating his former teachers. I found Emalee and waved to her. She ran over as fast as her ragged dress would allow.
“My Lord Challenger,” she said with a deep curtsy. “You honor me with your presence. How may I be of service?”
Huh. That was different.
“I just wanted to check on everyone,” I said uncomfortably, glancing over at Weylin, who just shrugged. “How is everyone? Is anyone still wounded? Did everyone get enough food and blankets? How long do you think the food will last?”
The woman shifted uncomfortably at my last question.
“My Lord Challenger hono
rs us with his concern. Everyone has been treated by the Holy Fairy—”
“Breena?” I asked, then turned to Weylin. “She’s talking about Breena, right?”
“Your bonded sprite is known by a number of titles,” Weylin supplied. “Which one depends on the nation and world.”
“Fantastic,” I said, reminding myself that Breena has literally had her job for centuries. “Sorry about that, Emalee. Please continue.”
The woman shot me another troubled look.
“As my Lord Challenger wishes. Everyone has been treated, and is recovering. Some of the old are still weak, but all are on the mend at least, and no longer in any danger from their wounds or illnesses. My Lord Challenger has graciously supplied us all with adequate bedding. As for the food…” The woman shifted uncomfortably. “We ate at our Lord’s command last night, but others have been talking, and we are unclear on our proper rations.”
“Unclear how?” I asked, getting weirded out by her words. “Do we not have a count on how much is left? Are you wondering how much is edible?”
“My Lord Challenger did not specify on how much we are allowed to eat.”
“Okay, time the heck out,” I insisted. “You keep calling me that mouthful of a name every single time you speak to me. Yesterday I was just ‘you,’ or ‘Challenger.’ My actual full name is Wesley Malcolm, and the shortened version is Wes. Virtually everyone I know calls me Wes. Although come to think of it—” I turned and looked at my elven companion—“you haven’t called me by my name either, have you?”
“I haven’t had the opportunity,” Weylin replied. “But since you’re both a Challenger, and the Lord of Avalon, acknowledged by the very world itself, it’s somewhat inappropriate to casually refer to you by your first name. Especially for her.” He turned to look at the poor woman trembling in front of us. “The Challenger is unaware that you came from a feudal society, and he himself comes from a land without lords. He took no offense to your informal behavior last night.”
The woman shuddered visibly as she relaxed.
“May I address him by his name and rank?”
“His name and title will be fine,” the elf nodded. The he turned to look at me. “She won’t be able to handle just calling you by your first name. Let these people call you a lord, and they will feel far more secure.”
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