Chapter 28 – Pride of the Lake

The Warlock moved into the final battle, throwing everything he had left into the fight, and that was no small amount.

His remaining arm swung the mace in wide, devastating arcs. Crimson runes flickered along the weapon, no longer glowing steadily, but stuttering like a light bulb about to burn out, but with each flash, a shockwave was released that shattered furniture and knocked Shaeravyn soldiers and sorceresses off their feet. Even Shaelith had to pick herself up again.

The Warlock did not try to escape over the balcony, he did not negotiate, and he did not beg for mercy.

He wants to die.

Benderast didn’t seem to notice, or he didn’t care. He had reached a state of almost meditative focus, in which even all his stupid gaming terminology fell away from him and all that remained was a man with a sword who was damn good at using it.

And he was the only one who managed to stay within the Warlock’s striking distance.

The mace crashed against Benderast’s blade, sending sparks flying. Benderast parried the blow, staggered back, caught himself, and thrust forward again. The Warlock parried, countered, and his mace struck Benderast’s side with a crunch that did not bode well for the condition of his ribs. Benderast took a step back, buckled, gasped, raised his blade.

Get up, Ben, come on!

Shaelith continued to hammer kinesis pulses at the Warlock, not strong enough to penetrate the armor, but enough to hopefully disrupt him, perhaps sabotage his timing, tip his balance enough to be of aid to Benderast. The other sorceresses did the same, a dozen invisible hands tugging at the man in crimson armor.

The Warlock staggered toward the stumbling Benderast and swung a powerful overhead blow that relied on raw force. The mace came down like a meteorite, and Benderast raised his sword just in time to block it.

The runic steel of the mace struck Benderast’s magical sword, causing the impact to vibrate throughout the room. Benderast buckled even further, and for a moment it looked as if the mace would simply push him to the ground.

But then, as if guided by magic, Benderast’s sword slid to the side, finding an angle past the mace that made no physical sense, and glided through the crimson armor as if it weren’t even there.

Shielding Riposte. Shaelith remembered the skill from the last fight.

The Warlock froze. The mace slipped from his hand and hit the stone floor with a dull thud.

He looked down at himself. At the blade protruding from his chest. Then he raised his head and looked at Benderast.

His face was hidden behind his helmet. But his voice was soft, almost gentle, as he spoke.

“Finally.”

The crimson glow of the armor faded and the Warlock staggered backward, sliding off the blade, stumbling a few more steps backward and falling. He hit the stone floor with a terribly ordinary sound.

The Warlock was dead.

“Level up!” said Benderast.

I fucking hope so.

“Okay, wow, that’s the highest XP drop I’ve ever-“

Then his voice trailed off as the air above the Warlock’s body began to change.

A shimmer, like heat over hot asphalt. The air folded in on itself, tore open, and where there had been nothing a moment before, something opened up.

It wasn’t a portal in the classic sense. More like a window, a membrane between there and elsewhere, growing thinner and thinner until it was transparent.

Behind it lay a lake.

Gray-blue water under a cloudy sky. Trees stood on the shore, but not the kind Shaelith had ever seen in this world, but Eastern Cottonwoods.

And on the lake, perhaps five hundred feet from the shore, lay a white excursion boat. The paint was peeling, the railing rusty, and on the side were letters that Shaelith could easily read even from twenty years away.

Pride of the Lake.

The air in her lungs turned to concrete.

Everything came back as an avalanche. The cold water. The weight of her soaked clothes. Ben’s arms wrapped around her, no, around him. The burning in her lungs. The darkness. The drowning.

And then, right behind it, like a second film projected over the first, the moment when a toddler crawled over a balcony railing and her adult consciousness stopped just in time. Twenty years of Mushroom Metropolis, no, twenty years of Myzelemaerlazin, her home, hair messages, poison, and assassins in the nursery. Her sorceress exam. Vyriz’s laughter. War. Ryzinre. The cage. And the moment on the balcony on her eighteenth birthday as Shaelith, when she poured a glass of moss wine into the night and said goodbye to Jacob Williams.

Two lives stacked on top of each other. Thirty-eight years compressed into a fraction of a second.

And in that second, Shaelith knew with absolute certainty that she would not walk through that portal.

Not one step would she take, not one inch would she move. That was the place where she had died. This was the place where she lived. Vyriz was bleeding three feet away from her. Her glyphs burned on her skin. Her mother was waiting in Myzelemaerlazin.

I have already made my decision. I have made it two years ago, on a balcony, with a carafe of moss wine.

So she didn’t move, didn’t even flinch, didn’t even shift her weight.

Not like Benderast.

A raw, uncontrolled sound, half gasp, half sob, burst from him.

“That’s…” His voice broke. “The lake…”

Yup.

He dropped his sword to the ground with a clang and ran off.

He ran past Grimbart and Thaelon, who stared at him with their mouths open, looking through a window into a strange world and having no idea what they were seeing.

The portal was already shrinking. It contracted like a pupil adjusting to bright light, and the edges folded inward, swallowing piece by piece the cloudy sky, the trees, the gray water.

Benderast sprinted, stretched out his arms, spread his fingers, as if he could prevent the window from closing if he could just grab it in time.

He was so close.

Then it simply ceased to exist.

Benderast came to a sliding halt, arms outstretched, fingers grasping at empty air. Where another world had been waiting for him just a moment ago, there was now nothing. Nothing but the dusty, blood-stained stone floor of the throne room.

He fell to his knees. His hands groped across the floor, over the spot where the portal had been, as if it might be hidden beneath the stone. He shook the Warlock’s corpse, as if he could shake the window to Earth out of him if he only shook hard enough.

Shaelith could imagine what he was feeling because she had felt the faint echo of it in the fraction of a second when the lake and the sky and the old ship had been real enough to touch her. She had said goodbye two years ago, after almost two decades here. Ben was nowhere near ready for that.

For a moment, just a brief moment, she didn’t see Benderast Stonefist, the insufferable hero with his quest log and his harem protagonist syndrome, but Ben Blomquist, the overweight geek who had been thrown off a boat to die like a dog. The boy who had drowned because a few jocks thought it was funny, and who now just wanted so desperately to go home.

Shaelith stepped up to him and put her hand on his shoulder.

She said nothing. There was nothing to say.

He didn’t react immediately. He knelt there, his hands flat on the ground, his whole body shaking as he sobbed silently. Then he calmed down.

The room slowly returned to the present. Sounds of fighting still rose from below. The battle was not quite over yet.

“The tower is secure.” It was Grimbart who broke the silence with a few practical considerations. He was still pressing one hand against his ribs, and his chronosteel arm was vibrating quietly, but he was standing upright. “We should try to link up with the command structure.”

“The dungeons,” said Mirrsoss, who had joined them together with Mirilenre. “There are prisoners down there. I saw them, I know where they are. We have to free them. I need soldiers… can I have a few soldiers?”

Mirilenre nodded curtly and ordered two squads to follow Mirrsoss. Shaelith watched the Umilari girl hurry down the stairs, walking though, with her wings folded tightly against her body so the soldiers could follow her more easily.

Benderast slowly stood up. His face had closed, walled up. He walked over to his sword, picked it up, wiped the blade on his tattered pant leg, and sheathed it.

He still said nothing.

Shaelith turned to Vyriz.

He was leaning against the wall, right where they had both been chained, clutching an iron wall ring and trembling. His emaciated face was ashen, his eyes feverish but open.

Shaelith went to him and silently slipped under his arm. She put her arm around his waist and pulled him close, feeling his ribs under his dirty clothes and how little he weighed, and nestled her head against his chest. His heartbeat was faint and fast, but it was there.

“How dare you desert the army and give me such a fright?” She scowled up at him.

“Giving you a fright… I don’t believe it! Listen, I got word that you were dead or captured, and-“

“And what? I had everything under control.”

“I thought if there was even the slightest chance… then I should try to save you.”

“I’m beginning to understand why Mother always tells you to leave the thinking to the grasshoppers because they have bigger heads.”

Vyriz just smiled, buried his nose in her hair, and took a deep breath.

He was alive. Nothing else mattered right now.

~

The balcony was narrow, but they squeezed out anyway, Shaelith and Vyriz leaning against each other, while below them the fortress fell.

The goblin army was in a state of complete disarray. Goblins were running in all directions at once, and the allied army was systematically dismantling them.

Tulvian knights swept across the battlefield in brilliant formations, chasing goblins, their proud sentient battle standards fluttering wildly behind them. The Shaeravyn grasshopper cavalry drove the fleeing goblins into a pocket. And the Sylvin Rangers had ventured out of the woods to assist the dwarven siege engineers in clearing debris from the largely destroyed main gate archway.

It was the coalition that she had helped build over the past two years through much diplomatic work. Two years of nerve-wracking negotiations, translations, attempts at cultural understanding, and painful compromises between factions that often distrusted each other. And here were four peoples fighting together as if they had always done so.

That’s better than any reward any UI could give me. Or a Story Engine. Whatever that is supposed to be exactly.

Behind her, scattered on tables, walls, and the floor, lay the Warlock’s documents. Maps, several journals filled with neat, careful handwriting, sketches, and all sorts of other things. Obviously the research of decades.

Some of the pages that had fallen to the floor in the heat of battle showed diagrams she didn’t understand and words she didn’t recognize in any language she spoke.

She hadn’t touched any of it, at least not yet. The Shaeravyn troops were securing the room, and the documents weren’t going anywhere. But she would secure them herself before anyone else could claim them.

Benderast now also stepped onto the balcony, at the other end, as far away from Shaelith and Vyriz as the narrow ledge allowed.

His gaze briefly fell on Shaelith and Vyriz, standing there leaning against each other, and something flashed across his face. Not really jealousy, or at least not only that. More like the discomfort of someone observing an intimacy he envied.

Then he looked down again.

I will not leave this world, but I will read these documents. And maybe I can help Ben to go home.