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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 124, Bulrushes
🕑 Added 2022-08-01 15:45:02 +0000 UTC~~~~
Kell moved swiftly through the bulrushes, naked from the waist up. His clothes had been set in a neat pile, away from the murky water, all but his briefs, which he had decided he would allow to get wet. There was, after all, a risk that someone could come across him, and it was worth the cost of wet underthings to not be totally exposed. He thought he’d have a hard time explaining himself no matter what, but it would be made more difficult if he was nude. The only other thing on his person was his long staff, almost six feet long, and the magic that surrounded it. The sun was still setting, and had in fact disappeared over the horizon, but light was still smeared across the sky, giving the swamp an unearthly feeling.
He and the other children had loved the boggy areas of the swamp when he was a child, and visited them often. There was a surfeit of dead trees standing like withered statues in the peat and loam, and the children told stories among themselves about the ghosts that lived there, and the bog’s silent victims that had been sucked down into the muck and mire. There was a smell to the bogs, that of perpetual decay, and one time Kell had found a skeleton with damp orange fur still hanging to it, almost certainly a fox, though in his imagination, something more. It was a place of moss and ferns, slime and mushrooms, a wonderful playground. He could imagine it as nature’s solemn tomb.
It was surprising how hard the memories hit him. They had a weight and inertia that couldn’t be denied, and he could feel them threatening to suck him under. Half-buried thoughts bubbled up when he looked at small red mushrooms, as though his mind were a bog of its own, spitting up things that had been buried in fetid muck.
The memories weren’t why Kell was there, pushing his way past the plants, sinking down to half-calf in dank water. He was following will-o-wisps.
The staff was made of a special wood, from a tree that grew with exaggerated slowness in the alpine provinces of Inter. It had, at one point, been a sapling that had taken thirty years to grow: youngerwood. Magic glommed to it easily, and it was virtually indestructible, as few weapons could cut it and fire wouldn’t touch it. They said that by the time a youngerwood had grown for a hundred years, it was still small enough that two hands wrapped around it would meet at the fingertips, and it would be virtually impossible to destroy. That might be the ultimate fate of the world some day: covered by indestructible trees. It had been a parting gift when he’d left Kiromo, and despite the fact that it was nearly impossible to harm, it had taken him a week to feel like this valuable thing could really be carried around.
He had modified his constructs only a little for will-o-wisp hunting, since he had a dungeon the next day and would need to undo what he’d done. There was a chamber to hold the wisp, made from cold mana, and if he was successful, it would sit on top of the staff for as long as it took to bring it to Mizuki.
She had talked about chasing the wisps more than once. Kell could picture it in his head, and it had a sort of mystical quality that he enjoyed thinking about, especially since it was done at this time of day, when the light was fading away like a fire that had been left unattended.
Some wizards wore enchanted spectacles to help them see magic, or a monocle, or a looking glass, but Kell had anchored the construct directly to his skull. The bulk of the magic floated in front of his eyes, changing how he saw the world without the uncomfortability of glass held in front of his face. It helped him to more clearly see the wisps, which left distinctive trails, rendered in green by the magic he’d cooked up. He surged on after them. All he wanted was to capture one, which was the first thing that had gone through his head when he’d caught sight of them.
The wisps moved faster as he drew closer. They were sedate little things, colored orbs moving as though floating on the wind, but they had a sense of him, and spread out away as he approached. Their laziness left them once he was in full pursuit, and eventually they scattered so that he was forced to follow only one. They were a dungeon escape, he thought, or had been once, before they spread across the land.
The lone one he’d been tracking was doing its best to avoid him, but he was dogged in his pursuit. Unfortunately, it seemed to be faster than him, and it was growing dark. What he was worried about most was that it might go dim or dark, or disappear into a hollow. You didn’t see the will-o-wisps during the day, he didn’t think, and they must go somewhere. The wisp grew faster the nearer he got, avoiding him as though his motion were giving it fuel.
Eventually he trapped it by using a fair amount of his magic, putting up fires in front of it, driving it toward him. He was sure that Josen would have chided him, but when Kell set his mind to something, it was hard to dissuade him.
He was quite wet when he got back to his clothes, not just because he’d splashed through the water, but because it was a soggy sort of day, and the bulrushes had wiped their water against him. His clothes were safe and dry beneath a tree, but he was wet enough that putting them on would mean he’d be damp the rest of the way to Mizuki’s.
Instead, he held his staff in front of him with both hands and called upon a spell of elemental repulsion, parameterized carefully so he could use it on himself. The water blasted off of him, leaving a brief ghost of vapor in the air behind him, and Kell pushed the staff into the soft ground so he could get dressed, quite pleased with himself.
Being cool was, in Kell’s opinion, supremely underrated. For whatever reason, people just didn’t take the time to look amazing when they were doing things. It was a part of what he appreciated most about Mizuki — she would drop from the sky after one of her flights and strike a pose as she drove into the ground. It took some time and effort to pull that kind of thing off, and Mizuki put in the time and effort, in the same way that Kell did. It didn’t matter to Kell that no one had actually seen him blow the water off of himself in such a dramatic way, it was the principle of the thing, the flourish and flair that people seemed content not to have in their lives.
As Kell walked back to the path and then toward Mizuki’s house, he looked at the captured will-o-wisp. It was stuck to the end of the staff, more or less pinned there, and he altered the construct a bit so it could bobble around within the field he’d made for it. The confinement was a drain on his magic, and would be for as long as he maintained it, but he would have plenty of reserves left by the time he released it back into the world.
When he got to the house, he heard a clanking from the backyard, where lights had been set up. He maneuvered his way around the house, rather than knocking on the door, and found Mizuki back there throwing rocks at Alfric.
Alfric was in his plate armor, a piece of kit he’d gotten a week and a half before, from Dondrian, and this was Kell’s first time actually seeing it. It looked goofy, which Kell hadn’t expected, and that was in part because it didn’t conform to the body very well. Instead, Alfric looked a bit like a pinecone, with the individual plates overlapping each other. It seemed like it would be impossible to move in, but magic seemed to be handling most of the difficulties, shifting the plates around in order to allow him to pivot and lurch.
Mizuki wound up and then pitched a rock directly at Alfric. One of the plates detached from his chest and came up to stop the rock. That was the clanking sound that Kell had heard. Once the rock was diverted, the plate settled back in place, floating down like a petal.
“Testing?” asked Kell.
“No,” said Alfric. The plates around his head parted to show his face. “Practicing.”
“Kell!” said Mizuki, turning to look at him. “Wanna help chuck rocks at Alfric?”
“I’m getting tired,” said Alfric.
“You told me that’s when the best training happens,” said Mizuki.
“We can do a round,” said Alfric. “Let me pick up the rocks, let’s say five each? It’ll be good to try against two targets at once. Usually a dungeon doesn’t give you a single projectile you know is coming.”
Kell set his staff to one side and helped to gather rocks, then stood beside Mizuki. He was having those moments less often, but it still struck him every now and then how short she was. He remembered when they’d been little, and she’d seemed like a giant.
Kell turned his attention to Alfric. He didn’t know Alfric all that well, and knew him better through the accounts that other people had given of him, namely Mizuki and Vertex. To hear Vertex tell it, he was a nerd, obsessed with dungeons and with them as core to his identity, an object of endless study and stoic enthusiasm, from which no conversation could be diverted. They had very little idea how it was possible he was getting along with the four girls. To hear Mizuki tell it, he was genuinely funny, caring, considerate, and smelled nice. She seemed to find him endlessly interesting in the way that he found dungeons interesting, and there was always something new to talk about.
Alfric had never been anything but polite to Kell, and it was hard not to feel like that was a personal slight. Their only interactions were ones of politeness, perfunctory questions about how life was going, a goodbye, a request to pass some food at dinner, things like that. They’d never shared a joke, or an interesting conversation, let alone something personal. Even in group settings, they seemed like they didn’t interact. Kell had been invited over for dinner a few times now, and he never ended up talking with Alfric.
Their one extended conversation had been when Alfric had advised Kell not to join Vertex, and Kell had gone to join Vertex anyhow, which had more or less worked out. There wasn’t anything like tension between the two of them. There was just … nothing.
Mizuki threw her stone and Kell threw his right after. He’d been trying to time it right so that his throw was faster and they’d reach at the same moment, making them harder to block, but Alfric threw out seven plates at once, arranged like a flower with a single plate in the center, and the rocks plunked off.
“Cheater!” Mizuki called.
“I just wanted to make sure it worked,” said Alfric. “That’s the first and better defense against multiple attacks.”
“Still smells like cheating,” said Mizuki. She sniffed. “It smells desperate.”
“I’m pretty sure two isn’t a problem,” said Alfric. “Are you ready to throw for real?”
Mizuki threw a rock at him overhand, not well-prepared at all, and if she’d been hoping to catch him off-guard, she was disappointed. A plate came forward and slapped the rock down into the dirt.
“You’re controlling that?” asked Kell. “Deliberately?”
“Yes,” said Alfric. “I don’t need line of sight to the plate, but I need to be able to see what’s coming. If I can’t react, the only defense is as normal armor.”
That was the kind of conversation they had together, direct and to the point.
Kell palmed a second rock, so he had two in his fist. He looked over at Mizuki. “Ready?”
Mizuki threw first, and Kell threw second, both rocks at once. He wasn’t sure whether he’d been hoping that he’d hit Alfric, but there was no such luck, since three plates came up to block the rocks, plunk plunk plunk. It was hard to know how much of that was the armor and how much was Alfric, but by reputation, he expected that it was Alfric. Even to people who didn’t particularly like him, like Josen, Alfric was known as someone who would put his nose to the grindstone and make himself competent at things. It was hard to say how much training he’d done on this so far, but Kell could easily imagine him putting in two weeks on it.
“Alright,” said Mizuki as she gathered up the remaining stones. “Here comes the barrage!”
She threw them as fast as she could, one after the other, and Alfric seemed almost bored as he knocked them down. The last of the stones, though, was knocked up into the air, then caught by Alfric as it came down. The plates dropped away from him and he was left there, hand out-stretched, holding the stone, as the plates organized themselves in a pile. It did, in fact, look cool. It was hard for Kell to appreciate it though. There was something in the futility of throwing rocks at someone who would always deflect them that rankled.
“Alright, looks like you’ve acquired stone immunity,” said Mizuki. “You’ll protect me, right?”
“So long as you pull your weight,” said Alfric with a smile. He seemed to often have a smile for her.
“If I had another stone, you’d be in trouble,” said Mizuki. She gave him a faux pout, then looked at Kell. “You would not believe how mean this guy is to me, especially when I’m helping him train.”
“You asked me if you could throw rocks at me,” said Alfric.
“He said bad things about my cooking,” Mizuki explained.
“I said I didn’t like raisins with chicken,” said Alfric. “After being directly asked.”
“It’s part of the dish!” said Mizuki, turning back to him. “A Tarbin classic! A little sweetness to go with the savory, what’s not to love?”
“We didn’t really eat that food when we were growing up,” said Alfric. “Where’d you get the recipe from?”
“A book,” said Mizuki. She folded her arms and looked at Kell. “Anyway, what’s up? Our rock throwing is done, do you want to hang out? Or some leftover chicken? I can pick the raisins out.”
“I already ate,” said Kell. “I didn’t want to intrude on your dinner.” This was only partly true. He’d held off on coming for other reasons.
“Nonsense,” said Mizuki. “I always make more than we need, you know that.”
“I’ll be going in,” said Alfric. He gathered up the plates and was carrying them under a single arm. “Shutter the lights before you come in.”
“Fine, fine,” said Mizuki. She spent some time watching him go though, and only when he was out of sight did she turn back to Kell. “So, what’s new?”
“I captured a will-o-wisp,” said Kell, holding up his staff. He was surprised that she hadn’t noticed. She moved in close, peering at it, then looking at the magic around his staff.
“They don’t do well in captivity,” said Mizuki. “You should probably let it go?”
“I will,” said Kell. “I just wanted to show you.”
“Yeah,” said Mizuki. Her face was quite close to the creature. “I’ve never seen one up close. Usually I’m on their trail, soaking up their magic as best I can.”
“I’ll let it go now,” said Kell. He undid the magic, and they watched the will-o-wisp speed away. It got only ten feet before it slowed and began its characteristic drifting instead, seemingly unperturbed by its temporary capture.
Mizuki shivered.
“Cold?” Kell asked. He didn’t have a pack with him, or anything to offer. Her shoulders were bare, and with the sun down, it was starting to get chilly.
“That wasn’t a cold shiver, it was an — I don’t know, a shiver you get when you see something wonderful and fleeting. You know, I went to the zoo in Dondrian, and they let you feed this huge, long-necked creature, and as it was happening I knew that I would never forget it. It had this black tongue and pulled the lettuce from my hand with so much force I was actually afraid. I was just feeling some of that, that sense of having a Moment.” She shivered again. “That one was because I was cold. Inside now, let’s get these lights closed and warm up.”
Once the lights were closed, they moved inside, as though chased by the chill breeze of nightfall. Kell had his staff, and wasn’t sure how he was getting home, since the slingshot was a pain to use in the dark. With Verity living in the woods, there was a chance that he would be able to ask for her bed for the night, but he knew that might be awkward, not just because he’d taken Verity’s place, but because he’d be sleeping in the same room as Isra.
“Alright,” said Mizuki as she went into the dining room. She pointed at a contraption sitting on the table there. “Check this out.”
Kell looked at it. “Okay?” he asked.
“I don’t actually think it’s got a name yet,” said Mizuki. “But we’ve been calling it a screamy machine.”
“I … see,” said Kell.
“It screams,” Mizuki explained. “Here, listen.” She pressed a lever on the side of it, and trumpets immediately started up, quick enough and loud enough to make Kell jump.
He listened to the song the whole way through, not making a noise, and Mizuki looked at him expectantly the entire time. It was a good song, and he tried his best to enjoy it, but standing there while someone watched him listen was unnerving and made it hard to concentrate.
“So … what is this?” asked Kell, looking at the machine. There were a number of parts within it, and it seemed as if some kind of fine-grained modulation was going on within the machine to produce the sound. The disc inside it was elemetal though, and from the faint magic on it, Kell thought it was forcestone.
“Oh, I’ve got no idea,” said Mizuki. “There’s the disc, which screams, and I guess it contains the song somehow? Which wasn’t how I thought they were supposed to work, but whatever. And apparently the machine can be used with other discs, though we don’t have any, can’t make any, and would need to talk to Verity’s dad about them.”
“And it’s not an entad?” asked Kell. “Wow.”
“I’m not sure it’s such a big deal,” said Mizuki.
“It’s like a book,” said Kell. “But for music.” He was feeling that same shiver she’d talked about, as though he was seeing something unique and magical, something profound.
“I mean, I guess,” said Mizuki. She looked at the machine. “It’s bigger than a bread box and plays exactly one song. This doesn’t seem revolutionary to me.”
“You can’t imagine not paying a band to play for a party?” asked Kell.
“When have I ever hired a band?” asked Mizuki. “When have you ever hired a band?”
“Tavern music then,” said Kell.
“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I don’t think people would sit and listen to songs without bardic effect. Besides, you’d still need someone changing out discs.”
“So you wanted to show me something that you didn’t think was very impressive?” asked Kell.
“Yup!” said Mizuki. “Also, I probably shouldn’t have played it just now. Everyone is getting sick of the song, since we’ve all heard it about a dozen times already, and that’s a bit much.” She looked him over. “It’s not like you to come over so late. What’s up?”
“Nothing,” said Kell with a shrug. “Just restless.” Being with Mizuki wasn’t making him less restless though. It was why he had decided not to come. But the house he shared with Vertex had been particularly boring, and carousing with Grig hadn’t felt like it would suit him.
“Well there’s not a lot going on here,” said Mizuki. “The herb dragons have been let out for the night, Emperor hasn’t made his grand return, and Verity is still off in the woods, not that she’s what you come over for. Glass of wine and a bit of chatter, now that I can offer you.”
“Sure,” said Kell. “That’s more than I’d be doing if I was on my own.”
They made their way down into the basement, where the wine cellar was. Only a quarter of the slots were filled, and it was Kell’s understanding that the house was going through wine at such a fast rate that they were very quickly going to run into supply issues. Mizuki kept hoping for an entad, but so far, there’d been nothing. They’d gotten a perfumer’s bottle from one of the dungeons, which could fill itself with a new liquid depending on what scent you thought of, but it was limited in activations, didn’t clean itself properly, and was rather difficult to use, since sometimes you got a liquid that only smelled like wine.
Mizuki selected a bottle without any real care, came up to the kitchen and prepared a plate of cheese, meats, and crackers, then settled down in the living room before groaning.
“I wanted a fire,” she said, looking forlorn, as though the fireplace was a million miles away and she was homesick for it.
“And now you’re all comfy,” nodded Kell. “On it.”
“You’re so nice,” said Mizuki. She poured a glass of wine for herself, then a glass for him. “It’s that time in Kiromo that made you nice, I imagine?”
“No,” said Kell as he got logs from the stack next to the fireplace and began building up the fire. “Kiromo’s not a nice place.”
“I thought you liked it?” asked Mizuki.
“That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it,” said Kell. He stepped back from the fireplace and conjured forth a ball of fire, which he made float down into the nest of wood he’d made for it. When he released the flame, there was a flash of light, and the fire was going all at once.
“Show off,” said Mizuki, but she seemed pleased by the display.
“Kiromo is a hard place,” said Kell. “It’s rigid in a way that Pucklechurch — Inter — isn’t. Here, you just do whatever you want, but there, everyone goes along with the rules, which there are so many of that they feel like they might suffocate you. It’s worse as a foreigner, because you don’t grow up knowing anything, and they cut you some slack, but they resent you for it.”
“I thought you liked Kiromo,” said Mizuki. “Wasn’t that the upshot, the last time we talked?”
“I’m just trying to get across how it is,” said Kell. “I’m probably doing a bad job.”
In Kiromo, so long as you followed the rules, there wasn’t much trouble. It could be good, actually, to get along like that. Everyone had their place. When Kell had been a wizard there, he had learned all the wizard things, and once he got over how the rules could chafe, it was sort of like a dance, where you could flow along because you knew how it was supposed to go. Kiromo was a place of hierarchies that weren’t found in much of Inter society. And no, it wasn’t a nice place, but some of the rules were nice, and that was different, but it somehow ended up the same. In Pucklechurch, Mizuki offered food and wine because she cared, but in Kiromo, it was part of the ritual of a visit, and there were certain foods and drinks kept on hand just for when a guest came over. There was something nice about the certainty of it, but it never felt like a host was being nice, only like they were doing something that was expected of them. The nets of obligation and expectation were tight in Kiromo.
It was hard to explain though, so Kell didn’t.
“If we could ever actually finish a dungeon, we could start rolling the dice and hoping to get a travel entad,” said Mizuki. “Something to cross continents.” She shook her head.
“How’s Alfric doing?” asked Kell. He was asking mostly because it was the last thing that Mizuki had talked about. He did care about Alfric, in the abstract, but Alfric was, at best, an acquaintance.
“How in the world would I know?” asked Mizuki. She got up a bit from her seat, wine glass in hand, and looked around the room, then toward the hallways. “He’s probably in bed, which means probably out of earshot, but I don’t just have to worry about how sound travels in the house, but also whether there are birds listening to me.” She looked over at one of the chairs, where the cat was curled up. “Or the cat. Tabbins! Get!”
The housecat flicked an ear.
“Well, I guess I’ll just live with it,” said Mizuki. “I can’t spend every single moment second-guessing animals.”
“Isra never said she spied on you, right?” asked Kell.
“I dunno,” said Mizuki. “No. But there’s spying and then there’s spying, and she definitely did do the first one.”
“Which is … ?” asked Kell.
“Looking at me when I was in a ‘public setting’,” said Mizuki. She swallowed down more wine. “Like if I’m at the market and negotiating a good price —”
“Which you’re terrible at,” said Kell. He took some wine of his own. He’d drank a lot while in the Kiromon military, but more or less stopped when he’d returned to Pucklechurch. He was afraid he was becoming a lightweight.
“Hush,” said Mizuki. “But, true. If I’m at the market talking to someone, I don’t feel like that conversation is a private one, really, at least not unless I’m leaning in and keeping my voice low, but it would be different if I had someone standing over my shoulder, because then I would know that I was speaking to two people. And it might have been like that, with birds.”
“I suppose,” said Kell. “It depends.”
Mizuki drank some more wine. “I had a boy spy on me while I was getting changed,” she said. “Maybe it just feels like that.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard this story,” said Kell. “Recently?”
“Eh, it’s not a good story, and no, not at all recent,” said Mizuki. “I was up in my room, getting changed, bare-chested,” she placed her hands on her chest and lifted them up, as though Kell needed a demonstration, “and then I looked out the window and saw this boy looking up at me. We were kind of dating, but not so much that it was okay. I opened the window and lobbed some magic at him, and that was just about the end of that.”
“Was this Karl?” asked Kell. “That’s not at all how he tells it.”
“Welp, I guess I’m going to have to track him down then, and help him remember properly,” said Mizuki. “I’m sure he says that it’s an accident?”
“He says that he never saw anything,” said Kell. “Just that he was outside your house, trying to find a way up to the second floor without waking up your parents, and you yelled at him and then almost blew his head off.”
Mizuki snorted. “You can see how flat the aether is here, barely enough to singe someone. But no, it was the feeling of being alone and then suddenly having someone intrude on that — to have someone intrude without me knowing about it, not until well after it had happened. I don’t actually know how long he was watching, only that he was watching. And the funny thing is, I might not have minded, if I had seen him there before I got undressed. It might have been something I’d have done for him.” She took a drink of her wine, a gulp more than a sip. “Probably too flirty, I guess.”
Kell had found that Mizuki talked about old boyfriends, or flirtations, or flings, with some regularity. It seemed to him that she had stories in endless supply of boys who she’d had a few dates with, or sometimes kissed, and a few where she’d felt her heart thumping and thought it was serious before it all fell apart in short order.
The way that Mizuki talked about all these boys — what must have been a substantial fraction of boys her age in Pucklechurch, including a few years up and down — didn’t do much to dampen Kell’s own ardor. That was a problem, because she’d made it as clear as she could without saying it outright that she had no romantic interest in him. He’d never said that he was interested in her either, in part because the wordless advances had been so thoroughly rebuffed. He had let his hand fall on hers and seen her pull away, sat down close to her and watched her get up within half a minute, had drawn close only to have her move away. She talked about Alfric in ways that made his stomach do flips.
Kell had decided, weeks ago, since joining Vertex, that they would be friends and nothing more. For whatever reason, she had no interest in him, and he didn’t think there was anything that could kindle that interest. When he’d returned to Pucklechurch, it had been a non-event for her. She barely remembered him, for as much as she had dominated his memories of childhood.
He could recognize that there were ways in which the friendship wasn’t good for him. He had tried to make peace with the idea that she had no interest in him, that she didn’t feel the same spark that he felt. There was a part of him that wanted to ask, that wanted to make a move that was unambiguous — but it was clear that she was already negotiating around his affection, turning aside the incidental touches that might be construed as flirtatious, changing the subject away from affairs of the heart, moving as though she were an expert swordswoman who could parry his advances with practiced ease. The only question for Kell was how much of that was deliberate on her part. He thought that she was ignorant that it was happening, moving without much calculation.
Calculation was decidedly not Mizuki’s strong suit, which was one of the things he liked most about her. And she was, by her own admission and the testimony of a number of people who knew her well, a flirt. Why she should feel no compulsion to flirt with him, why he was somehow unmemorable and unsuitable, was a painful question that seemed to have no good answer.
He had written off the possibility, and told himself that he wanted to be a friend and nothing more, but he saw the way her lips parted when she was about to smile, and watched the way she dropped out of the sky when she was flying, and a part of him refused to believe that it was friendship and nothing else.
There was something about it that twisted his stomach. It was like what Mizuki had said about being watched from the window. The same act could be different, depending on whether it was desired, invited. Somehow the fact that Mizuki didn’t want him in that way made every look he gave her turn, by strange alchemy, into something twisted and gross. Kept personal, it was no problem, but it was something he knew he’d have to keep from her, and that rankled too. It was why he had told himself he wasn’t going to visit.
“Alright,” said Mizuki after a few glasses of wine were warming both their bellies and the fire had filled the living room with a bit of warm heat. “Tell me about Kiromo girls.”
“Girls?” asked Kell.
“Girls,” said Mizuki. “I was talking to Verity and she was saying that before Isra she’d never had a real partner, and for me — well, you know for me — and it feels like for Alfric it was the same, just the great and terrible Lola. And you talk about Kiromo like it’s a foreign place, so I was wondering how it was there. With the girls.”
She was tipsy, not drunk, but loosened enough that her words were coming fast. Kell wasn’t feeling it as much, only a light vibration that seemed to go through his brain. Wine always felt like it made him fluid and chilled, but he knew enough from watching other people to know that this was an illusion the wine cast, a false confidence and verve. The wine wouldn’t keep you from stumbling over your words, it would make it so you didn’t notice the stumble when it happened.
“Two girlfriends for me,” he said, holding up his fingers. “Both serious.” He shrugged. “It’s the same as anything else in Kiromo, more structure to it, more rules. Spring and autumn are for girls to confess, summer and winter are for boys. People talk if you do it out of season.” He set his glass down. “You do your confession, and if that goes well, then a date, which always includes a meal, then you settle into — they’ve got a word for it, asebo, which means a sort of early partnering, less serious, where you’re getting to know each other, and a later partnering, kinguo, where it’s more serious. More phases, overall, a kind of mapped out lifecycle of a relationship leading up to marriage. You’re expected to live together for a bit, to make sure that you’re a proper match.”
“Bah,” said Mizuki. “I want to know about the girls, not the other stuff. If I wanted to read a book, I’d read a book.”
Kell picked his glass back up. “Kimizi was the first one,” said Kell. “She confessed to me on the final day of spring. That’s a traditional thing there, your last chance before the change of the season. There are lots of confessions. And she was traditional in a lot of ways — I know you don’t want the world atlas treatment, but it’s important stuff if you want to know what ‘Kiromo girls’ are like.”
“Mmm,” said Mizuki. “My sisters are Kiromo girls now.”
“Yeah,” said Kell. “Probably not traditional though, unless they’re taking pains to fit it.”
“So this girl, Kimi,” said Mizuki. “First love? Or nah.”
“Uh, no,” said Kell. “There were three girls before her, at the mage college. Three serious ones, anyway.”
Mizuki squinted at him. “All this time and I’m just now learning this? I thought you were some kind of Kesbinite.”
“No,” said Kell. “No, not at all.”
“Huh,” said Mizuki. “And none of them went the distance?”
“Er, how do you mean?” asked Kell. He was wondering, briefly, whether she was asking whether he was a virgin, which seemed too casually intimate a question for her to pose to him. It was an important thing in Kiromo, less so in Inter, and he tried to calibrate properly.
“Just, you know,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “You’re obviously not married.”
“Oh,” said Kell. “Well, no, nothing that ended in marriage, no, obviously.”
“Right, but the why, that’s the interesting thing, at least to me,” said Mizuki. “Why did it fall apart, how weren’t you a match, other question words.”
“With Kimi, it was that she seemed more invested in doing the right thing at the right time,” said Kell. “I don’t know how to word it. It was like she had a plan for how it would go for me, and when I didn’t like that plan, she’d get cross, and I was always having to figure out what I’d done, or worse, what she expected.”
“Thousands of things to know, and you didn’t know them,” Mizuki nodded.
“Not thousands,” said Kell. “But dozens, maybe. The thing was, it wasn’t horrible. I liked her. She was really good at conversation, which you might not expect from how I’m talking about her, but she was. It was just all the other stuff.”
“Why’d she want a foreigner?” asked Mizuki. “Seems dumb.”
“I don’t know,” said Kell. “Maybe she didn’t decide to like me, she just did. I don’t think we ever really talked about it.” He had learned, by that point, that asking someone what they liked about you could easily come off as vaguely desperate.
“And the second?” asked Mizuki.
“Kind of the opposite,” said Kell. “Kind of. Suki was, ah, rebellious. Hated her parents, hated Kiromo, got with me because, I guess, she saw something in it.” He paused. “I liked her, I think it just wasn’t what she wanted. That’s kind of been the story, with girls, being not really what they wanted. We get together because I’m close enough, then it turns out that close enough isn’t enough.”
“Wait, no,” said Mizuki. She blinked at him with slow, wine-heavy eyelids. “But what about what you want?”
Kell laughed. “I’ve got no idea. I think after mage college, I wanted a partner, someone to go through life with. That was always how it was talked about, and finding that has been — I don’t know. Hard. I came back to Pucklechurch and more than half of the people in my age range were partnered up. No girls — or guys, for that matter.” There was one obvious exception sitting in the room with him.
“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “Sucks.” She drank more wine. “But dungeoneering is good for meeting people, especially people who haven’t settled down yet. Most of them don’t want to be dungeoneering while they’ve got a family, they move around enough that it’s hard to keep attachments, that kind of thing, so partners aren’t as easy to keep. Dungeoneers marry late in life, usually, unless they can make it work some other way. So you’ve got time, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’ve got time, and I’m older than you. But … are you lonely? Is this something that’s actually a thing for you?”
“I don’t know,” said Kell. He didn’t, really. He was surrounded by people, most of the time. He’d had lots of friends at the mage college, lots of accolades when in the Kiromon military, plenty of fast friends. There was less of that in Pucklechurch. “I feel like five years could pass in the blink of an eye and I would still be where I am now.”
“Except you’d have five years of dungeon profits,” said Mizuki. “And more than that, five years of dungeon entads. Enough that you wouldn’t have to work much, probably. I mean I’ve heard people go crazy without work, so you wouldn’t want to go crazy, but maybe a hobby that becomes a side job or something.”
“Yeah,” said Kell. His mind had rooted itself though, and the aching sense of isolation was taking over. It wasn’t loneliness, he would never have called it that, it was a feeling that he was apart from everyone else in the world, a mote floating in a sunbeam. He had his party, though they were slow friends, and he had Mizuki, but there was little else. He had left Pucklechurch, then left the college, then left Kiromo, and now was a creature of nowhere. He was climbing the side of a cliff and could quickly become untethered. He had come untethered, for a bit, when he’d done the solo dungeons.
“I think I’m going to go,” said Kell. He stood suddenly and his head swam. He’d had too much wine, and the conversation had been too deep. He almost forgot to pick up his staff.
“You can stay the night here, on the couch,” said Mizuki. “It’s dark out.”
“I’m a wizard,” said Kell. He tapped his staff on the ground and altered the magical mechanisms that clung to the staff, causing light to spill from the tip. “And I’m off.”
“I’m serious,” said Mizuki. She seemed slightly more alert. “The couch is yours.”
“Nah,” he said. “I’ll get some night air, clear my head.”
“Hope I helped,” said Mizuki. There was something soft and perfect and hopeful about her voice and the way she looked at him. Kell cast the warp before he could say something he’d regret.
The trip back to Liberfell was going to be a pain, he knew. He was still using the slingshot and amulet, which he strongly felt were due for a replacement. He looked up at the stars, aligned himself toward Liberfell, then fired the amulet off before resting up against a pillar of the warp point’s enclosure.
His mind was on Mizuki again. Maybe it was the wine that had done it. He tried to move his mind to his staff, to undo the alterations he’d made to catch the will-o-wisp, but he was too unfocused for that. It was a stupid thing to do while drunk, though he wasn’t quite drunk, only in a particular mood that drink often brought on. There were some people that grew gregarious with alcohol, but Kell had a tendency toward longing and melancholy. He should have refused the wine when it was offered.
Kell had sought clerical advice, in Liberfell rather than Pucklechurch so that nothing would be said or insinuated to people he cared about. Going to see the clerics was, sometimes, cause for gossip, even if the clerics themselves were good about keeping confidence. If a couple went to see Xuphin together, people might whisper that they were trying for a child and wanted a blessing, while a young man or woman seeking the counsel of Garos would have the usual whispers. Kell had gone first to Xuphin, then to Kesbin, then finally to Bixzotl, mostly for a change of pace. Their advice had been conflicting, and Kell was left to pick and choose.
He was certain that Mizuki had not a trace of romantic interest in him, and also certain that he felt her pull like he’d felt it from no one else.
The cleric of Kesbin had said that it was probably better to stop spending time with Mizuki — that these feelings would fade, given the time and allowance to fade. But if Kell kept going back to her, he was giving the cup a chance to refill, and while he did that, the water would sit heavy on his mind. But Kell had almost no one else, and making friends when everyone was so ensconced in their lives was difficult. He went to temple days and hoped that he would find something for him there, but it had been all of nothing. The groups of friends were too difficult to crack into, there was no one who shared his line of work, and his time in both Plenarch and Kiromo had marked him.
He teleported to the amulet and found himself in ankle-deep water. It had managed to land right in the river that ran along Liberfell, though thankfully not in the rapids or the deeper part where he’d have been over his head. He scooped up the amulet and did the warp again, this time to the center of the Liberfell hex, and blasted the water away from him once he was clear of the building. It was less cool the second time.
Vertex had a house in Liberfell now, serving as their base of operations. The place was run by a young widower, Lena, not all that much older than they were, and she made them meals when they weren’t doing dungeons, as well as taking care of all the housework. For that, they paid her a somewhat handsome sum, and there had been talk of her becoming a part of a potential counterparty. She had been widowed two years prior and seemed to itch to get out of the house — she listened intently to what they said about dungeons. They’d been with her only briefly, two weeks, but already it felt like she was a part of the team.
Kell had thought about courting her, but every time he thought of Lena, it was in comparison to Mizuki, and he had enough experience with women to know that wasn’t healthy and would doom any possible romance from the start. Still, he was drunk enough that it was seeming like a good idea, as though her hair and limbs could wrap around him and give him comfort, somehow.
He stopped before the house. There was a figure there. That raised Kell’s hackles, and for a moment he was thinking of summoning his armor to him, his dancing sword, and a handful of other entads that he could call to him in a flash.
But when she stepped forward, it was a tall woman in a long cloak that was drawn around her, obscuring her figure. She was a face above an expanse of cloth, nothing more.
“Kell?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I don’t think that I’ve had the pleasure.”
“My name is Cate Peregrin,” she replied. “I’m the Seeker of Secrets for the Greater Plenarch province, among other things.”
Kell nodded. “And you wanted to see me outside normal business hours?”
“I wanted to see you,” she said. “And I had heard that this was your home.”
“I see,” said Kell. He shifted. “It’s been a long day.”
“I have an opportunity that I’d like to discuss with you,” said Cate. She slipped a hand out from her cloak. In it was a black orb, which seemed to have bits of gray swimming beneath its surface. “First though, if you’re willing, I would like your discretion assured.”
Kell hesitated. The black orb was an entad, he could tell by the magic around it. There was also something untrustworthy in this woman who’d appeared outside his door so late at night, just as he was getting back. But it was something new and interesting, and she had a flair for the dramatic that he couldn’t help but appreciate. And after all, what did he have to lose?
Kell reached forward and touched the orb.
The next day, he wouldn’t remember any of it, not the orb, not the introduction, and not what had been said between them once his fingers had touched the black surface. There would only be, somewhere inside him, a sense of contentment and resolve.
Comments
Ross Owen Qualls
Well, that was a nicely ominous ending
