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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 144, An Interlude on the Island at the Edge of the World
🕑 Added 2022-11-02 16:25:51 +0000 UTC~~~~
Harmon had always liked the Barrier Storms. They weren’t visible from Dondrian, not even on a very clear day, but there were a set of islands an hour’s flight to the north, and those had a view of the endless roiling storms. He’d spent a week at a hostel there when he was young, and had marveled at them from afar, miles-tall black clouds that flashed with lightning at all hours of the day. The people of the islands got used to it, apparently, maybe because it was far enough away that the thunder was only faintly audible in very good conditions.
The Barrier Storms were, by some accounting, one of the last great unknowns. Beyond them, magic failed, which made crossing them difficult and returning even harder. There were only a few semi-successful forays into the Barrier Storms themselves, and no recorded returns from them. Chrononauts had ventured into the Storms, but the power seemed to fail there in the same way that entads and wizards failed.
Assuming that Cate was telling the truth, she had dumped a relatively small group of people on an island near the Barrier Storms. They had no concrete information on where the island was, or even how close to the Barrier Storms it was, which meant that it could be almost any one of them. In total, there were nineteen thousand islands within suitable range of the Barrier Storms, but only seven hundred of them were large enough to hold a self-sustaining village of perhaps fifty people, and only one hundred and twenty-two of those were non-national.
Harmon had pulled in all kinds of favors, some of them in undone days, trying to find some evidence of a similar spate of disappearances somewhere in the distant past some three to five generations prior. He’d come up with nothing though, which might simply have been because it had passed out of living memory. It was also possible that the means of abduction had been different the last time, assuming that Cate hadn’t been lying. Still, there was nothing for it but to do things the hard way, which meant visiting every single one of the one hundred and twenty-two islands.
“With a team of six, it won’t take that long,” Harmon told his children. “That’s only twenty each.” The search would need to be expanded if they didn’t find anything, of course. The distance from the Storms had been selected somewhat at random — close enough that they’d be visible, which was what Harmon thought of us ‘close’. It was entirely possible that Cate’s definition was more liberal. Still, part of the reason for choosing an island close to the Storms was that ships wouldn’t go near them, not just because of the occasional inclement weather, but because there was hardly ever a reason to.
“I can’t say I love this,” said Beryl. He was fitting a bracelet around his wrist, one of the better travel entads, this one creating portals rather than granting speed, flight, or teleportation.
“What are we even looking for?” asked Kyrie. “Dragon prints?” She was the youngest, and had been flirting with the idea of joining the church, though the fact that she hadn’t picked which church was a sign that it wasn’t likely to be serious.
“Molten rock would be a good first sign,” said Harmon. “Other than that, you’ll be looking for a settlement where there shouldn’t be one, or signs of a settlement having once been there. You might just be looking for foundations. If you find something suspicious, report it, then we’ll get some of our past-watching and diagnosis up and running.”
“Is it exactly a hundred years?” asked Mo. “Or is that just tossed off?”
“Tossed off,” said Harmon. “Your mother didn’t bring much diagnostics in with her, so it’s only a guess. We think that it’s close enough.” Harmon had given himself three days to play with, which meant room to adjust the parameters.
“I really don’t think she should be in there,” said Mo. He was the eldest of them, his own man now, and their relationship had changed over the last two years. Mo wanted to be equals.
“No, I don’t want it either,” said Harmon. “But she is in there, and she needs our support on the outside.”
“This is an undone day, why is she not out here helping?” asked Faith, the eldest of his daughters. She was surly by nature, which thankfully hadn’t gotten in the way of her being a high achiever — it was possible that she was surly with her parents and gregarious around her friends and teachers.
“She’ll be out here for a few iterations,” said Harmon. “I spoke with her on a different day. There are certain things she wants to attempt on my undone day, and we’ve coordinated as best we can.”
“She’s going to be fighting the dragon,” said Faith.
“She’s going to be testing to see whether it even is a dragon,” said Harmon. “But yes, the mechanism for testing will be brute force.”
Faith rolled her eyes.
“Be diligent out there,” said Harmon. “It’s important that we hit every island on the list. If we miss something on one of them, we might have to burn another day on this. We want to grind this out while not making mistakes or getting sloppy. And if there’s a problem, report in immediately, don’t wait for confirmation or for it to go sour. There’s a chance that this is a trap of some kind.”
“Let’s just get it done,” said Mo. There was a way he spoke that made him seem like second in command, which had been there since he was very young. Now, as an adult, Harmon thought his son’s ‘bossy’ voice would probably need to be retired, at least with the other children, but that was a conversation for another day — a day that Mo would have memory of.
They departed, going their separate ways, some blinking out, others zooming away, and in Faith’s case, turning into water and splashing down into the ocean.
For Harmon’s part, he flew. He had a profound love of flight, though with entads, flight came in many forms. The entad he was using wasn’t the most enjoyable one he had, but it was the fastest, so fast that he needed protection from the sheer speed it was capable of. He made a trip of three hundred miles in just minutes, leaving a booming echo behind him. Sound, apparently, had a speed, and for reasons that were still unclear to him, if you went too fast, it would make a terrible racket.
There was a second reason that Harmon had chosen this entad for himself: if anyone was going to announce their presence, he wanted it to be him, rather than the children.
The first island was actually a chain of islands, meaning that Harmon was crossing five off his list all at once. Even the smallest of the five was large enough to have held a village, though they’d have been hard-pressed to keep themselves fed even if there was good fishing.
The idea of dumping people onto an island so they could survive there on their own was shockingly cruel. Most people in Inter took it for granted that they’d have food, water, clothing, and shelter, but even in her own accounting of things, Cate had cast them out of her paradise with almost nothing. It wasn’t quite tantamount to execution, but it was highly unethical, and a good sign that Ria was on to something.
Harmon went down among the vegetation, looking for signs of a settlement, and found only animals that seemed disinterested that he was there. There was a good possibility that he was one of only a handful of people to have ever set foot on this island, and that he’d be the only person that these creatures would ever see.
It took an hour for all five islands, because he was attempting to be thorough, but if he had wanted to dump people off on an island, these weren’t the ones he’d have picked. They were too mountainous, and while the trees and plants could be cleared away to make room for houses, farming seemed like it would be a challenge, and the waters didn’t have quite enough fish. Of course, if Cate had been intent on a slow and painful way of letting people die, she might not have cared.
The next island was another two hundred miles away, all on its lonesome, and within half a mile of the Barrier Storms, which made them look massive. That close to the miles-high clouds, the wind was strong enough to put some fear into a person, and because the exact border wasn’t static, Harmon worried that the island might be engulfed by it. The maps had placed the island in the safe zone, but the maps were old things, and the entad maps they’d used to supplement didn’t make a record of the Storms at all.
He landed on the rocky island, not expecting much. There was almost no soil, but some plants that grew in spite of that, spreading vines and roots.
He came to a stop when he saw the house. It was made of pieces of stone from the island, mortared together in a way that seemed like it had taken deliberate craftsmanship, with timbers that seemed like they might have come from the native plants. It raised questions though, like how such a thing could be made without access to metal tools, though he supposed that Cate might have dropped them off with everything they needed, even though that would make the tools irreplaceable.
Still, the house looked in good repair, and there was only one house, which didn’t suggest an entire village. It was more than he’d thought he would find out here, but —
“Can I help you?” asked a man with a sword who’d come from inside the house. The sword was held over the shoulder, resting there casually, but the man, who had sandy blonde hair and a fair bit of muscle, looked ready to bring it down.
“Just a bit lost,” said Harmon. “Can you tell me when this island was settled?”
“Can?” asked the man, spitting to the side. “Sure. Will? Not a chance. Who are you with?”
“Private citizen,” said Harmon. “Tell me, have you seen a dragon?”
“You’ve got about five seconds to get off this island,” said the man. He grinned. “No laws out here but what we make by the sword.”
“Just you in this house then?” asked Harmon.
“And that’s time,” said the man. He strode forward, lowering the sword, and went at a run for the last few steps, angling the sword in at Harmon’s midsection.
The sword bounced off, so hard that the man lost his grip. Harmon was quietly pleased by that, since he’d worried that the man’s sword might have some hidden magical effect that would defeat his layers of defense.
“I’ve got a lot of islands to check today,” said Harmon. “So are you going to answer some questions now? I just need to make sure —”
The man ran away, back toward the house, and Harmon bounded forward, cutting off his path. It was just under the speed that would make a cracking sound that would have deafened the man.
“What do you want?” the man asked.
“I want to know whether this place was ever frequented by a dragon,” said Harmon. “Or whether there’s any evidence that a village of castaways lived here.”
“Oh,” said the man. He narrowed his eyes. “No.”
“That was all,” shrugged Harmon.
There was something that made him cast a glance back at the house though. Someone who would choose to live on an island so close to the Barrier Storms, cut off from everyone else, someone whose first thought when a stranger landed was to grab a sword … it did raise his hackles. The island wasn’t under the auspices of any country. There was no law here. And it might very well be that there would be something objectionable inside that house. In fact, with the right travel entads, this house might be essentially adjacent to civilization, and a place like this might be a hideout. If that was the case, stolen goods might be the best case scenario, and the worst case scenario …
Harmon took to the air and flew away before his desire to insert himself in the situation grew any larger. This was exactly the instinct that Ria had so much trouble with, and the entire reason they were dealing with a dragon in the first place. You could not, in Harmon’s opinion, waltz into someone’s house just because you had a bad feeling about them and no respect for their privacy or personal property. This was true even if they were the sort of person to threaten someone with a sword before making sure they knew who they were dealing with.
It was tempting, of course, especially because this was an undone day, but this was the sort of thing that chrononauts weren’t supposed to do. It was bad for their public image to go snooping around where they weren’t wanted, even if the subject in question was undoubtedly guilty of something.
They will come for you at the witching hour. It was a family refrain, not to be forgotten, and it was easy to forget when you knew that you held enormous power in your hands.
The next island had a large number of skeletons, and Harmon examined them closely before deciding that they didn’t fit, the bones too thick, the skulls too misshapen. It was hard to say what had happened there, but it wasn’t a group of villagers being dropped off and forgotten.
Three more islands came and went as Harmon covered enormous distances. Most of them were too small, or had nothing at all on them, and there were no telltale signs of humans, let alone dragons.
The island after that had people.
He had seen their huts from a distance, and made a show of getting their attention before landing, just so there would be no question of where he’d come from and whether or not he meant them ill. They were conversing rapidly with each other, thankfully speaking a dialect of Inter, and a tall man came to stand in front of the others.
“Are you with her?” asked the man.
“No,” said Harmon. “No, I’m not.” He gave them his best practiced smile. “And I come bearing gifts.”
Harmon was a seasoned dungeoneer, and had plenty of extradimensional storage. A brass ring on his finger had entads inside it, and with those, he was able to produce a table, then on top of that, things he thought they might want or need, starting with food. They were hesitant as he did this, uncertain, until a small girl raced forward, away from her mother’s clutches, to grab a pastry. Once that was done, the rest followed. It was a small community, less than fifty people, but fifty people could feel like a crowd when they were all around you, and Harmon stepped back once they started taking things from the table.
The man who’d greeted him stayed back, regarding the scene.
They were, overall, malnourished, people made small by a lack of food. They were dirty, in a way that came from not having much clean water. Harmon had expected, if they found anyone at all, that there would be some level of poverty, but this was such obvious poverty that he still felt slightly shocked by it. Their clothes were sparse, made from palm fibers, if he had to guess, or some kind of rugged seaweed, with browns and blacks, and adornments of shells.
Harmon made his way over to the man.
“My name is Harmon Overguard,” he said. “I should tell you upfront that I’m a chrononaut, and this day will be undone.”
The man was silent for a moment, then nodded. “I don’t know those words. There’s some magic that will remove the food?”
“No,” said Harmon. This wasn’t something that he was entirely prepared for. “It means … there is some magic that will cause us to have the same conversation twice. You will remember only one of those times. I’m still here to help, but I need to know about the woman who stranded you here.”
“Woman?” the man asked.
“You asked, when I came here, whether I was with her,” said Harmon. He still didn’t have the man’s name, and realized only belatedly that if this man was in his thirties, he would have been born on this island. That would mean that he had never introduced himself to anyone, and never learned any of the social rules of Inter or the wider world — only whatever rules existed in this place.
“She’s not a woman,” said the man. “She’s a beast. A spirit.”
“Do you have a name?” asked Harmon.
The man hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”
“Can I have it?” asked Harmon.
The man looked away for a moment, then back. “Fern,” he said. Harmon immediately felt that the name was probably a false one, but let that slide by.
“Fern, does the woman come here often?” asked Harmon.
“Not since before I was born,” said Fern. “There are stories of her though, and we were told that she would return.”
“Did she come here in living memory?” asked Harmon. “Please, this is important. I can get you anything you’d like, food, clothing, shelter, tools. I can help you move to somewhere else, with —”
The man, ‘Fern’, spat to the side. “We don’t accept your deal.”
Harmon took a step back. “It sounds too much like a deal your ancestors were offered,” he said. “I understand that. The gifts are offered freely. I have — can you read?”
Fern shook his head.
“Then there will be other people, those more equipped to handle this,” said Harmon. “People from Inter, which is a large nation to the south. South-west, actually. But like I said, we’ll have this conversation twice, and you’ll only remember the second time.”
“You can erase memories,” said Fern, eyes narrowed.
“No,” said Harmon. “I mean … not really. It’s different in important ways.” He tried to reorient himself. “I want to know about her, and how your people came to be on this island. I’m willing to do anything in my power to speak with you or someone else, especially someone who knew her, or can give some details about where you originally came from.”
“She last came eighty years ago,” said Fern. “Everyone who has seen her is now dead.”
Harmon winced. That was bad news, but not entirely unexpected. “How many years has it been since your people were dropped here?” he asked.
“One hundred and thirteen years,” said Fern. “And one hundred and thirty-six since the world before that.”
This gave Harmon pause. “The other world, the demiplane, the ancestors of this group were there for twenty-three years?”
Fern nodded slowly, and it occurred to Harmon that the man’s math might be weak.
“Tell me about her,” said Harmon. “What you know about how she worked, how she came here, what she wanted and how it ended.” He was so tempted to say that things would be better, that he would give them everything they needed, that they would be relocated — but for someone who had heard the stories that this man must have heard, those assurances would raise too many alarms rather than provide comfort and security.
Fern looked at the table of food, which had run empty, and Harmon moved over to it to fill it back up. He was trying for familiar foods, but wasn’t entirely sure what these people routinely ate. He guessed fish, but had no idea what the fish of the region were, let alone which of them could be caught by people on this island.
They ate, and talked, and Harmon felt sad that this was probably the best day anyone had had for possibly their entire lives. There were some wounds on some of them, limps and scars that a cleric could easily heal, and the more he watched, the more he felt a burning rage.
“She came with sweetness,” said Fern, who had moved to stand next to Harmon. He’d taken none of the food, Harmon noted. “She promised a new world, a better world, free of the old sufferings. For a time, she held to her word. The deterioration was slow, with minor disputes and broken promises. There were things she could not or would not deliver. People grew homesick. She provided, but couldn’t offer everything they wanted, because some of what they wanted involved other people. People were cooped up. Tensions ran high. Eventually, she opened her mouth and burned down the home of a detractor with flame so hot that the air itself crackled.”
“She killed someone?” asked Harmon.
“No,” said Fern. “Not at first.”
“Later, then?” asked Harmon.
“There were attempts to kill her,” said Fern. “Rebellion. Strife.” He bit his lip. “Those parts of what I was told were always difficult to understand.”
“Civil war,” said Harmon.
“I don’t know what that is,” replied Fern.
“Fighting amongst yourself,” said Harmon.
Fern nodded. “There was more of that, when we were forced to the third world.”
“The third world being this one?” asked Harmon.
Fern nodded. “The first year was good. The second year had a bad harvest.” He looked out over the people, who were now smiling and working on second or third helpings of the fish, vegetables, and everything else Harmon had produced. “She returned to us after half our number were dead, in the third year. She treated it like a punishment for bad behavior. She offered some of us a return. Some accepted, and were never seen again.”
“And others were left here,” said Harmon.
“They were given food, tools, other things,” said Fern. “She returned, from time to time. Sometimes she gave things. Other times she stood in the air and watched.” He turned and gestured at the Barrier Storms, which were an immense wall that took up a third of the horizon. “The Wall pushed out one year, and she returned to shield us. The island has been protected since then.”
Harmon had more questions, but thought it best to wait. He’d conduct interviews with the others, maybe someone who wasn’t the nominal leader of the small group, and then they would move in with the past-watching, as little good as he suspected that would do.
He put out word to his children that the search was over not more than six hours since it had started, and they came to the island in their various ways with portals, bubbles, racing across the water, or in Faith’s case, rising up from the ocean like a goddess of the sea. There was awe from the group of survivors at each of these arrivals, and the children helped to take interviews.
“It’s awful,” said Faith an hour later.
“We’ll fix it,” said Harmon. “Inter is no stranger to refugees.”
“To live like this,” said Faith. “No clerics, no magic, no ectads for heat, water, lighting …”
“They have water ectads,” said Harmon. “More than they need, actually. And they’re tropical, no need for heat, only for shelter from the sun. No winters here. People used to live like this. The tragedy here is that they have no culture of it, no body of knowledge to draw on, and they have no ability to make a choice for themselves.”
“I can’t imagine wanting to live on an island like this,” said Faith. She shook her head.
“You should talk to Alfric when he gets back,” said Harmon. “I think it would appeal to him, at least for a few years. Living by the sweat of his labor, battling against the elements, needing to fight and struggle to survive, even if that meant making nets from palm fibers or however they do it here.”
“We’re saving these people, right?” asked Faith.
“We are,” said Harmon. He had already said that, she just needed to hear it again.
“I see why mom cares so much,” said Faith. “I don’t think I got it before.”
Harmon nodded, but he wasn’t entirely sure that it was true. Ria cared for the people, saw rule-by-dragon as tyranny, and wanted the demiplane to at least have some level of oversight by a democratic society like Inter.
She was also spoiling for a fight, and unfortunately, it was a fight that Harmon wasn’t sure she’d be able to win.
~~~~
“Your father found them,” said Ria. “The lost village. Several undone days later, and we’ve pieced together as much history as possible. They’ll be rescued from there, returned to Inter where they’re ancestors came from. They were malnourished, living in conditions that we wouldn’t wish on our enemies, without the tools or knowledge to thrive.” She looked at the rest of the party. “Harmon said that they were within spitting distance of the Barrier Storms.”
“I don’t think any of that helps us,” said Alfric.
“It’s proof of wrongdoing,” said Verity. She let out a breath. “I’m extremely impressed that you were able to find anything with so little to work on.”
“Chrononauts are good at that sort of thing,” said Ria. “We can organize a search party and then iterate through that way. Usually we do it with more people, but in this case it was thought better to keep it in the family. Harmon also did well to narrow down the search. At any rate, there was something like a civil war, if you can call it a war when one side has all the power. Tyranny, in short, of exactly the sort you’d expect from someone who’s installed herself as queen.”
“It’s possible she’s changed though, ay?” asked Hannah. “Not to defend her, but she’s not here to defend herself, and I do think people can change.”
“Can dragons?” asked Isra.
“Well, we don’t know enough about them, ay?” asked Hannah.
“I don’t know what I’m going to say to her today,” said Verity. “She said that I should think about what she’d told me, and now I know things that I shouldn’t know. That’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Talk to her then,” said Ria. “See how it goes. I’ll undo the day if you’re not back here safe and sound with a report on how it went.”
