RE: Monarch

Over the next few nights, sleep came poorly. The first night, Thoth saw me place my dagger beneath my bedroll's pillow. While she made no direct comment, she certainly made a show of sitting just within her tent-flap, cross-legged, a long, wicked-looking short blade resting across her lap, all but daring me to try.
As far as I could tell, she never truly relaxed.
It was difficult to tell whether she was a light sleeper or simply never slept at all. A single rustling leaf outside the circle of our fire and that snake's eye would flicker open, scanning the surroundings before sliding closed once more. Any movement from me incurred the same reaction, even when I was completely silent. It occurred to me that she couldn't actually be sleeping. Not really. Rest was sullied by vigilance, and even if she dozed in increments between disturbances, the deeper cycles of unconsciousness that bring true rest must have been entirely lost to her.
Beyond the initial tensions, there was practically no conversation, which made gathering information difficult.
She didn't seem to know how to deal with me outside our usual context, and now seemed crestfallen, or at the very least, overly introspective. Several days of foot-travel and cataloguing the chasms went by. They still pointed north, almost uniformly, though the origin point and winding of the ley lines themselves vaguely resembled forking lightning, branching almost infinitely down the page.
It was on the fourth day of haunting my footsteps that Thoth finally broke the pattern.
I'd just finished connecting the rough line of charcoal that signified one rupture point in the ley line to another, when I saw her balancing atop a cracking log, walking its length with her arms outstretched.
"What are you doing?" I asked harshly.
"Traveling from one point to another with very little else in mind, being exceptionally
" Thoth eyed the road wistfully.
Her expression grew irritated.
Magic had limits. That was the rule, and it was truer now than ever. My vision was still gray at the fringes from heavy mana use over two days ago. It wasn't static—there was a sense that it had accumulated a small amount since then, likely drawn from ambient mana still lingering in the air—but it was regenerating exponentially more slowly than before. Between the simulacrum and whatever mana-heavy method she was using to fly, Thoth's usage had been far heavier than mine. In theory, her mana pool could be massive, maybe the combined size of twenty mortals. But she couldn't use it forever, and if she was already rationing, there was a good chance she was running low.
The log cracked, and Thoth hopped down from it, panning both me and the dark fissure with equal disdain. "There are more interesting places to go, and far more interesting things to see."
"This isn't an expedition of
" I rolled my eyes. "
am following the ley lines to whatever caused them to fail. You are the blight on my mind who refuses to help, constantly complains, and seems to have forgotten she's more than capable of making a departure whenever she wishes."
It was strange. Even with little mana to draw from, she was significantly more mobile than I was. She could have left at any time, returning periodically to keep tabs on me, if that really was her concern. Nevertheless, I was learning to tolerate her presence, even if my thoughts grew progressively more murderous the longer she was around.
"Have you considered the obvious?" Thoth asked, her voice provocative.
"The obvious being what?"
"That the signs all point almost perfectly north. And there's only one shithole to the north of note."
I paused, absorbing that. "Whitefall. Do you know what caused this?"
Thoth rolled her eyes. "That's where it's leading. Obvious, to those who aren't preoccupied staring into the abyss of their own navel."
"It isn't obvious." I shook my head, not rising to the provocation. "There's considerable distance between the two points, and plenty of note in between, though perhaps not enough to impress one with staggeringly high standards. It's not as if Whitefall is a particularly magical city. The closest thing to an arcane institution we have is the Crimson Brand's headquarters outside the city's walls, and there are no ley lines beneath it."
I caught it. The slightest flash of superiority, along with an immediate effort to squelch the response.
"Then you
be right, and you should spend even more time gallivanting around in this oversized fire pit." She agreed easily.
On one hand, it felt a little obvious. A simple reverse ploy, intended to drag me away from what had the potential to be a productive venture for the sole purpose of manipulating me into wandering through the ruins of my former home. Such an undertaking would be painful, and her pettiness knew no bounds.
But it was also subtle enough that it could have been hubris, the immortal arch-mage looking down her nose at the middling perceptions of mortals beneath her.
There shouldn't have been a ley line beneath the capital. The absence was why so few humans who lived their lives there ever awakened. In an ordinary human city or village, anywhere between 1 in 500 to 1 in a thousand would eventually awaken to some degree of magical talent. It was an order of magnitude rarer in Whitefall, at least partially because of the reduction of ambient mana. This was generally taken as a point of pride by the residents, who tended to dismiss magic and matters relating to magic as signs of Demi-human influence or mixed heritage.
It could have been a ploy.
But there wasn't much downside to checking it out anyway. If the ruptures lessened on the way there, the lie would become obvious. And as much as I hated to agree, she was right that this was taking too long. Some of the jerky I'd found in my pack was simply too tough to chew. I could make it and the rest of the pilfered fare last another week, the water a little longer than that, but at this rate—if whatever happened did start in Whitefall—I'd be out of resources long before I reached it.
"Fine."
"Fine?" Thoth raised an eyebrow.
"It's not as if I have a desire to linger here, spreading the ashes of a dead world. We'll seek sleep and depart early tomorrow morning for the city."
"You're being suspiciously agreeable."
"Imagine being capable of seeing reason."
A deadly glare silenced me. She waited to speak until I'd looked away. "As I've tired of the sad little pit of embers you struggle with every night, I will make the fire."
"Careful. Someone might mistake your practicality for kindness."
I felt holes burning into the back of my head from the hatred in her gaze. After several long moments the sensation faded, and when I turned to look, the arch-mage was nowhere to be seen.
Again, her presence made everything feel off balance, and having her around was nauseating. But the odd ringing that plagued my ears every time she was nearby until recently was gone. Potentially part of her defenses. A woven aura, maybe even a glamour she could simply switch on or off. There were a few overturned wagons further down the road. I took some time to search their contents and dismantle them, fiddling with the smallest with hopes of repurposing it into something appropriate for a single person to tow cargo with, before eventually giving up and eyeing the intact canopy. I pushed a minuscule amount of mana through the inscriptions in my legs, just enough for the force necessary to pick the thing up by its vacant hitch and yank it off the road, down a small slope and beside nearby tree cover.
Typically, I never would have dared to camp this close to any road. Tired eyes wandered from the path, and an undefended traveler fallen prey to exhaustion would serve as a strong temptation to many who had even a drop of brigand in their blood.
But now, I couldn't really see the point. The scariest thing on the continent was already making camp with me. And to some extent, I wanted to be spotted.
It was increasingly hard to believe we were the only two alive. A huge portion of the populace had been wiped out, to be certain. I'd only lived because my companion possessed a legendary artifact and the unbelievable mettle required to fully exploit it. Thoth had lived because that was who she was. But there were plenty of gifted practitioners among the elves, some ancient in both craft and power.
Pulling together a group that comprised more than the singular avatar of my pure and unfettered hatred struck me as something that could only be helpful.
So I started the long and arduous process of building a fire. It was decidedly harder than it had been less than a week ago, but traversing a highly wooded area meant there were a great deal of options to choose from. While the green canopies and any semblance of fruit were both long gone, many of the thick, rounded tree trunks were only heavily decayed on one side. Felling one no longer resulted in the same bounty of firewood, but a single medium-sized tree easily provided enough for a fire. I wasn't satisfied with that though. There were still clouds of smoke lingering everywhere, and a small flame would not be visible above the tree-line.
Halfway through putting the bonfire together, I realized something I'd never picked up on before. The carbonized bark of the wood, when pressed against a similar surface, sort of locked together, as if the dry, porous textures interlinked. A small discovery, but one that made vertical stacking infinitely easier. Like a builder who'd finally seen his imagined blueprint begin to take shape, I started adding more and more, stabilizing the bottom while tacking on as much height as possible.
Ideally, it would show for wingspans in every direction. But it wouldn't matter if I couldn't get it started.
I interspersed tinder throughout the larger chunks of wood, bits of clean twig and intact leaves, then worked the flint against a sparking stone, muttering a prayer beneath my breath.
It would be simple just to use a spark. Along with providing plenty of warmth, the fire it put off burned vegetation with a thick dark smoke that was perfect for sending a signal. But that would mean manipulating the fire, which would cost me mana. Not to mention, the violet flame had a long history of drawing the wrong sort of attention. A survivor might see it from a distance and steer clear simply due to its strangeness, while a monster who found it intimidating might stalk the camp from a distance, waiting for the fire to burn itself out before it struck.
No. Ordinary fire it was.
A spray of orange sparks caught, tiny plumes of smoke going up from cherrying embers that spread, winding their way toward and eventually through the wood, glowing impetus proliferating into an open, hungry flame that licked up toward the top of the pile, blackening it immediately, leaving a long, obvious spiral of black smoke.
I looked down from the sky, still elated at my accomplishment, only to feel the pride diminish somewhat as I spotted Thoth at the edge of the clearing. Her sudden appearance still invoked the same inner lurch of fear it always had, though I did my best not to show it.
"Big enough?"
Thoth approached the fire, orange flame reflected in her golden eye, something dangerous etched in her stoic expression. She cradled a bundle of greenery in her arms, voluminous and netlike, similar to creeper vine. "No matter how many cycles pass, I am always astonished by what a fool you are."
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The smug smile died on my lips. "What—you complained the fire was too small—"
"I
to let me build it." Thoth growled. Then her head snapped around, searching the growing shadows of the forest.
I heard it a second later. A long sustained howl, low and guttural. The voice cracked, and the howl cut off halfway, sputtering into a wet, foul cackle. Several more howls followed, growing in volume and frequency, bursts of hideous laughter echoing off the dirt and burned-out trunks.
Thoth turned her back on me. I lingered on her neck, how easy it would be to slide my knife into her throat if I could get in range. She'd been so guarded up till now—it was the first real opportunity.
Eventually, doubt stayed my hand.
I was already living the results of trying to kill Thoth and failing. If I struck and missed, it would destabilize the odd balance we'd attained and likely lead to a reset. That reality was never far from my mind. Where it really got murky was if I tried and succeeded. The Black Beast told me, once, that my objective—the purpose for which I'd been given my power—wasn't to stop Ragnarok at all. It was to remove the Usurper from the cycle. There was still too much I didn't know about that, including whether killing her would suffice as removal. If it didn't, then I ran a genuine risk of the same type of magic that powered my resets coming back to bite me in some way. And if it did, I certainly didn't want to do it now, potentially locking in the results. The beast had also implied there was a 'correct' way to do things, which was the only reason this situation hadn't set me on a race to introduce the sharpest object I could find to a vital artery, but he'd seemed fatigued and well-worn, the sort of long-suffering existence that would at least consider accepting an imperfect result, if it meant his watch had ended.
No. Patience. Those who had died or suffered at Thoth's hands deserved vengeance.
But I would do this right.
Not like the fools in stories that let their bloodlust control them.
Whatever we faced, this was the perfect opportunity to build some small semblance of trust. We didn't need to be friends. All I needed was for there to be enough rapport that my words wouldn't immediately be treated with suspicion and discarded.
"Almost." Thoth murmured, watching me out of the corner of her eye.
I tore my eyes away from her neck, forcing my gaze to the ring of darkness that surrounded the camp. With practiced ease, I drew my sword, trying to relax my gaze, letting my mind fill in the blanks of their movement. "What are they?"
"Hungry." Thoth said, scanning the perimeter. She seemed to be more wary of the trees than the ground, so I adjusted where I was watching accordingly, keeping my back to hers.
"Helpful."
"When mortals die, they shit and piss themselves. Biological processes make a mess when they shut down. But there's more to a person than their blood and organs. It takes a small amount of mana to eject the soul from the body. Not much. A fraction of what it takes for an earth mage to move a pebble. If that infinitesimal amount isn't there, because the fools excessively drained themselves, or cast something that continued drawing from them long after they fell unconscious from over-exertion—"
It dawned on me. "—Or if they have the misfortune of living through the mana-poor apocalypse—"
Thoth nodded grimly. "The souls remain trapped."
The logic followed, though the conclusions were disquieting. "What happens if the soul is trapped in a dead vessel?"
"Nothing good." Thoth's brow furrowed, and I saw her head pan to one side and stay there. "Don't let them touch—"
She cut off mid-sentence, twisting at the torso. I felt something stomp against the back of my leg, sending me painfully to one knee, before I belatedly realized it was her.
My immediate outrage died as I felt something displace the air above my head. Something big.
Thoth moved. In a blur of motion that was difficult to parse, she plucked the spindly silhouette of a person from the air with catlike ease. The elegant movement turned brutal as she pivoted, slamming the pale, barely clothed form into the dirt head first, slitting its throat before its feet had hit the ground.
The creature's pale jaw unhinged, gray flat teeth snapping wildly as hands lashed upward to catch Thoth's arm, still holding its forehead in place.
Thoth swore, reeling backward, catching the creature in a devastating series of stabs that put out its eyes and left a gaping gouge where its nose once was. Only then did I get a proper look at it. It was a human—maybe even an elf—but its limbs looked too long, neck, arms, and legs gangly and twisted. Blood dripped from its too-wide mouth onto white teeth.
It reared back and screamed in her face, voice echoing with pain and rage.
Thoth stuck her gloved hand in its open mouth and grabbed a fistful of cheek, then wrenched the monster's head back until there was a sickening snap.
Two more emerged from the shadows, rushing me on either side.
Despite their anemic forms and distant stares, their movements gave them away as competitive hunters. There were many like them in the sanctum, opportunists that worked together for the sake of felling larger prey, all the while knowing the alliance would be as short-lived as whatever they intended to hunt.
They closed recklessly, heads and cloudy eyes low to the ground as they clambered forward on all four limbs.
I sliced off an arm that swiped toward me easily.
The second blow came almost immediately after, seemingly too fast until I realized what had happened. The second creature had used the first's seemingly hasty lunge as a smokescreen. Its nails grazed my cheek, and I hopped back, barely avoiding a dervish of nails and grasping fingers.
Something clamped onto my thigh. The first creature again, minus an arm and back for more. The feeling of damp frost traveled up my leg from its fingers, the gray around my vision growing more severe with every second that went by. It was too close for my sword, and drawing the dagger would take too long. I slammed my left fist into its jaw, mistakenly believing that would be enough to dislodge its hold.
Its jaw snapped back. It whimpered and tightened its one-handed hold on my leg. For a moment it was almost pitiable.
Then the mana drain truly took hold.
Any vestige of sympathy vanished, and I stomped at it wherever my boot could find purchase, desperate for distance, what was once a cautious exchange quickly devolving into a graceless struggle. I finally found purchase, the toe of my boot breaking a rib and becoming half-lodged in the surrounding bones. I slammed it painfully into the ground.
My heel found the back of its head with a wet squelch, and it finally stopped moving.
The remaining creature paced before me, its movements simultaneously jerky and languid, pressing forward. Waiting for a sign of weakness. I retreated a few steps, buying time to catch my breath. The gray around my vision was significantly more prominent than before. If it caught me in the same way the first had, I might lose consciousness.
If that happened, there was a good chance it would be the end.
It was sobering.
A reminder of how fragile I was without magic.
And I wasn't the only one.
In addition to a couple she'd already felled, four of them were pressing in on Thoth. My mind processed the scene, cold arithmetic working through the numbers. She was right to warn me of their touch. That was all they needed to leech mana, direct contact, and they were willing to act against to their own survival if it meant scoring a single touch. One grabbed Thoth by the back of the neck. Her face twisted in stifled pain, then there was a blur. The creature's partially severed arm flapped precariously as it struggled to maintain its balance, and it staggered onto a bleeding hole where its kneecap had once been.
Another creature, standing behind its wounded brethren, brutally shoved it forward. The tumbling creature landed on her, and she skidded backward, wincing from the brief contact.
The apathy toward their own survival made them devilishly tricky to fight.
I wavered. It was my first instinct to protect the person fighting alongside me. It was just what you did. The natural order of things. But she was also Thoth. If I delayed a little, just long enough for her wounds to grow more severe, she'd be more dependent on me in the immediate future.
It was my sister's counsel. Words she'd never said, but the same sort of advice she absolutely would have given if asked.
I frowned. Because all of it meant doing something I'd prefer not to. Helping someone I could barely stand to look at.
One of the stricken lurched around aggressively while she was fighting another, getting a powerful grip on both her shoulders before she could react. Simultaneously, my one remaining attacker lurched forward.
I remembered the exchange at the beginning. By forcing me to the ground, she'd saved me from the surprise attack. Direct cause and effect. She'd seen it coming, and moved me out of the way instead of letting it hit me outright.
I crouched just in time to intercept my not entirely human attacker, avoiding his touch, grabbing him by bunches of his shirt and belt. He moved with more momentum than force, and was easy to redirect, sending him flying toward the group that stormed Thoth.
The off-balance stricken hit with enough impact that it knocked the one that grappled her free, pulling one other to the ground, leaving the other two nearby in a critical moment of indecision that left them in fighting range. Again, Thoth blurred. It wasn't a magical technique. I was fairly sure neither of us were in shape to cast anything even before the encounter. Either way, it looked like magic. Her knife hand barely moved, then all four monsters were on the ground, stunned and bleeding, in various forms of dismemberment.
A sheet of blood covered her visage and leathers. She peered at me, interest refocusing now that our attackers were in the active stage of dying. "My. How decent of you. Almost as decent as if you had simply listened in the first place."
"I did listen. All that reached my ears was a trumpeting of ego. There was no warning not to start it, earlier or any other time you saw me lighting one."
"Shut up. We need to leave." With that announcement, she shoved the bundle of herbs into my arms. "That is Riverwort."
I examined it with renewed interest. I'd heard of the plant but never seen it before, despite looking at several points, eventually settling for an alternative. Typically, it was just too difficult to find. "Good for stopping internal bleeds and refreshing the liver. Layer it evenly atop a fire and staunch the smoke. This will be useful."
"Yes, you're very clever." Thoth sneered, stomping off to her tent, which she tore down and packed up at a blistering pace.
I followed suit, gathering what little I had into my satchel and snatching my bedroll, pausing just long enough to stamp the still sputtering fire out.
After about half an hour we'd relocated, this time to the mouth of a shallow cave. A new fire was set, deep enough in from the cave’s entrance that its glow wouldn’t radiate much, somewhere between the bonfire and sad embers of before. Thoth stood at the cave’s mouth, gazing into the darkness. She looked moody, mercurial even. As if she had no real idea what to do or where to go, yet felt equally uncomfortable being at rest. There was a visible deep scratch around her collarbone from the earlier attack.
"So." I said from my place by the fire. "Our guests from earlier this evening. What are they called?"
"Many things. Most of which are spoken in languages you cannot hope to properly hear, let alone comprehend." Came the aloof answer.
I rolled my eyes, briefly considered cutting my own throat again, and returned to the business of pushing ashes around the fire.
"The one you'd be most familiar with is 'ghoul.'"
It took a moment to absorb that, nostalgia and the vaguest familiarity swirling together until I finally put a description to the name. "The silly, mind-blighted creatures from stories performing menial tasks in a wizard's tower?
ghouls?"
"Yes, and you say that every time." Thoth rolled her eyes. "When was the last time something from a storybook matched up with your experiences?"
Her point was obvious enough. I didn't bother addressing the rhetorical with a response. Still, I found it rather odd. The human historians and researchers seemed to take a great deal of pride in getting whatever there was to misinterpret as wrong as possible. "Ghouls only appear after Ragnarok?"
"With any consistency? Yes. Though there are always edge cases." Thoth continued scanning the dark surroundings, barely attentive. "Most eventually fall to corruption."
"The creatures I witnessed in the Sanctum."
Thoth nodded.
"But 'I say that every time.'" I pointed toward her. "Meaning we've had this conversation before, and you've given the answers enough times to be tired of them."
"And?" Thoth tilted her head back toward me and raised an eyebrow.
I stood, deciding to press my luck. "I just find it interesting. We've seen the end of the world together at least once before, and I'd wager the real number is a lot more than that. And—" I was drawn to the mess of red below her neck, where one of the ghouls' razor sharp nails had done a number on her chest. The skin surrounding the wound was red and angry, on the cusp of infection if not already festering. "—you should really get that treated."
"It is fine." Thoth hissed, her eyes narrowing.
"Whatever power you have, I'm guessing you can't heal yourself—" I thought back to the Riverwort she'd gathered, the way it was bound. "—Unless you know your way around herbs or apothecary."
"Apothecary?" Thoth leered. "What am I, some backwater simpleton?"
It sounded like the sort of talk I'd heard before. The haughty noble alchemist, looking down his spectacles at the accomplishments of those who did not have the same capacity for mana. Of course she'd be an alchemist. And of
she'd hold the same overly generalized opinions about apothecaries.
My voice grew frigid. "I was taught 'the salve that heals the world burns cold upon the hand that bears it,' but you're clearly too ancient and experienced to be endangered by that mundane pitfall." I discarded any intention of seeing to her wound and unrolled my sleeping bag, flattening it out in annoyance.
Her golden eye beheld me, glimmering with frigid cruelty.
"You were so talkative before. What happened? Was it something I said?" She lingered on the last sentence, relishing it.
My fingers brushed the hilt of my sword. Thoth wasn't stupid. And she knew me better than most men knew their lovers. She'd guessed at least part of why my hackles were raised, if not the whole. It was everything I could do to suppress my instinct to leap across the fire and throttle her as it was. If she dared—If she so much as
, I wasn't sure I could hold it together.
"Did you find out the little bitch is dead yet?" Thoth asked.