00
One morning when I wake up
I want to be myself.
01
“You’re standing on the wrong side of the street!” said Tora Halfcour angrily. “Did you get your orders backwards? How come I’ve asked master Barfaur for two of his best Riders and ended up getting… you two?”
Riders in question exchanged somewhat confused glances, then one of them spoke up:
“No, lady Tora, our orders were clear and well written: come to this place at ten in the morning and wait for you on the right side…”
“And is that why you’re standing on the left? Riders! What are your names?”
“Lady Tora, we were at your classes…”
“All of you lot were! Do you seriously expect me…”
“Royal Rider Cai, at your command!” tall athletic young man straightened himself and saluted. He was about ten inches taller than sorceress.
“At ease, Rider!” Tora saluted back.
“Mylene, R.R.” second Rider was a sturdy built young woman with a large hazel eyes on a smiling round face framed by the dark burgundy hair. She was shorter than Cai but still a bit taller than the sorceress.
“Oh, stop this measuring contest, would you?” Tora asked the skies. Riders exchanged glances again. “Look, I might be shorter, but I’m still in charge, understood? Good! So, why are you standing on the wrong side?”
“It’s all Cai’s fault!” Mylene poked him with her finger.
“How so?” rider was startled. “Don’t go blaming me for no reason!”
“It’s because of you we walked here from the airship dock…”
“What’s wrong with that? I like watching airships fly in and out…”
“It’s because of that we come here from the wrong side…”
“Wrong side?”
“So our ‘right’ was lady Tora’s ‘left’.”
“Oh…” Cai hanged his head. “I see…”
“Good,” little sorceress nodded. “Now only if I could do something to not be called ‘little sorceress’ every other line… Anyway, I see you are not as hopeless as I thought! Chins up, riders!”
“But why do you need us here, lady Tora?” asked Mylene, smiling.
“To welcome a new model citizen into our glorious kingdom, of course.”
“Dressed like this? With these long black capes we’re more suited to welcome an infamous rogue or something…”
“We kind of are, actually…”
“I don’t understand, lady Tora…”
“Oh, you riders…” sorceress sighed. “I understand that we don’t get a lot of welcoming parties like this these days, but I clearly remember that this is taught in Royal Riders Academy by the finest teachers this island has to offer…”
“Lady Tora, excuse us!” Cai’s voice was more than a bit disingenuous. “But you must understand: we left the Academy about five years ago and most of this time I spent stationed at the southern garrison. That duty doesn’t lend itself well to an academic growth.”
“And I was doing patrols!” added Mylene with the same intonation. “That’s even worse!”
“If you two are the best Master Rider could find, I wonder who’s left at Riders’ Hall…” Tora shook her head despairingly. “Well then… Do you at least remember where the bulk of current inhabitants of our island came from?”
“Criminals, exiled from the Mainland, thought to be dead crossing the Mare Procellarum, also known as the Sea of Storms! But our ancestors survived because of mages in their midst who guided the ships through magic storms.”
“Spot-on, Mylene! Everything was exactly like that… at least, as far as we, the characters, are concerned… Forget I said that.”
Riders just quietly nodded.
“Good. So mages guided the ships through the storms, but why were they on those ships in the first place? Because magic on the Mainland for a long time was considered crime. It still is, by the way, but there are preciously few mages left… and they are mostly spread around in the families with the social status high enough to not care about the laws.
With the number of mages dwindling and a change in public sensibilities some century ago, sending ships into the Sea of Storms was deemed ‘inhumane’.”
“So now they sentence people to a time in some Guild’s mine…” Cai chuckled. “As if that was somehow more humane.”
“But not mages,” Tora raised a finger at the Riders. “There’s still an odd mage here and there, and they need to be dealt with in accordance with the law… Don’t look like that, you’re the Royal Riders, you do the same, essentially… But you can’t just put a mage into the mine and expect it to go well. That’ll be a recipe for disaster – as fifty completely carbonized bodies in Transylvania had proven.
What they… No, what we do instead – we give those mages a chance to escape. One way or another, mage in question gets in contact with the secret organization that offers them a passage to the Island, where magic is legal. They receive a ticket to the airship of their choice, pass couple of thrilling but inevitably successful checks, and, in the end, step on the ground here, in the Capital. That’s where we come in to meet, greet and escort them to safety.”
“Isn’t it a bit wasteful, to create a fake secret organization just to get rid of couple mages in a decade?”
“That’d be wasteful, yes,” Tora nodded. “But every state has lots of secret organizations anyway, so giving one of them some additional duties isn’t that big of a deal.”
“I see…”
“Good, good,” sorceress hotched nervously. “Really, I just hate talking so much…”
“And yet you’re a teacher at the Academy…”
“But I’m a magic theory teacher, not a historian!”
02
Exile they were waiting for, arrived with the next airship. At least, he should’ve arrived on it. There was a small question...
“But who are we waiting for?” asked Mylene. “Lady Tora, do you know their face?”
“No.”
“Then how?”
“Easy enough, Mylene. Look for scared out of his pants guy on the other side of the street… Well, I guess he should be on the other side – he was told to meet us on the left, as far as I know.”
“That’s why…”
“Exactly. Orders matter, kids” Tora pointed her finger at the Riders. “And should be executed properly.”
“...Is that him?” Cai nodded at small hunched figure of a man in front of them. “He looks scared enough… even if still has the pants on.”
“Don’t be too literal…” Tora watched as the man looked around, carefully examining the street, the wall he stood close to and adjacent buildings all the way to the roofs. He clearly was seeing it all for the first time.
“Must be him” said she and crossed the street, stopping next to the frightened man, expertly trying to avoid making an eye contact with him.
“Thirteen, twenty-one, zero,” recited she, as if speaking to the thin air. Man was startled for a moment but soon recited back to her:
“Sixteen, seven, ten,” he had a gravelly quality to his voice that could be more noticeable if said voice wasn’t so quiet and lifeless.
“Welcome to the island of Ynys,” said Tora finally looking at him and gesturing at the Riders to join. “I hope your journey here weren’t too perilous. We’re here to take you out of the city, Mister…”
“Gregor,” said the man, looking at Cai. “My name is Gregor.”
“That’s Cai, and that one is Mylene,” Tora introduced the Riders. And before they had a chance to ask why she didn’t introduced herself, she continued. “Nice to meet you, Gregor. But now we probably should be moving. Manhole leading to the sewers isn’t far away, so let’s go. Cai…”
“Follow me, please.”
03
Cai went into the sewer tunnel first, lighting up the lantern and gesturing for others to follow.
“Come on, Gregor, let’s get moving,” said he. “I apologize for the smell on behalf of our city.”
“Smell?” Gregor smiled subtly, walking into the sewers. “I’m from Ruhr, meister Cai, I’ve lost all sense of smell long ago…”
“How long until the tide rises?” asked Mylene, who walked in last, with another of the lamps lighted.
“Two, maybe three hours. Plenty enough time for us to get through and out before the sea will move in.”
“Even then, if we’ll stick to the upper tunnels, it’s going to be passable,” said Tora.
“Passable, yes. Pleasant, no. I have no desire to walk up to my knees in sewage.”
“We aren’t on a pleasant trip here, Mylene.”
“It’s pleasant enough for me…” Gregor suddenly got into the conversation. “Say, meister Cai, I’ve heard ‘upper tunnels’ mentioned… So there are lower ones too?”
“Yes, sewers are multi-levelled… It’s an old city – and its population kept getting bigger and bigger, and bigger population means more refuse and more refuse means overflown sewers and overflown sewers means…”
“Stinking streets!” Mylene finished his sentence. Gregor seemed to ignore her.
“So, there’s more tunnels beneath this one?” asked he.
“A lot more,” answered Cai. “This one’s stem shaft, so there’s very few as big as it is, but smaller ones – they are a-plenty… Some still passable by human, either crouching or crawling. Some are just wide enough to let the waste through.”
“So, if something falls here, it wouldn’t be found for a long time…”
“Something? Like what?”
“Like a dead body.”
“Well… I guess so...”
“And does anyone live here?”
“Live? Why would anyone…?”
“Oh, you know…” Gregor talked like a parent explaining something very obvious to a little child. “If there’s not enough place to live above ground. Or if you need to hide, if for any reason you really need to hide. Or if you’ve been punished and aren’t welcomed in the world above anymore. Or if you have been disfigured so badly, those living above ground would rather kill you than tolerate your presence… There’s a lot of reasons, why one may choose to live in the shafts, meister Cai, there’s a whole lot of reasons…”
“Hm…” Cai stopped before a tunnel junction. “No, I don’t think we have any of those here, Gregor… Nobody lives here. Toshers scour the place, flushers come down to do their job, occasional charlie… I mean, police patrol may pass through… Other than that – there’s no people, just rats and…”
“And a herd of giant pigs!” again, Mylene had finished Cai’s sentence. This time Gregor was interested.
“Giant pigs you say, young lady?” asked he.
“Young lady?” Mylene chuckled. “Nobody called me that for a while now…”
“I’m… I’m sorry…” Gregor seemed genuinely embarrassed. In the dim lamplight was hard to tell if he was blushing, but Mylene decided that he did. “I’m not… not used to talk to women… women of your status that is.”
“Oh…” Mylene gasped, but quickly got her calm back. “Nevermind. Giant pigs. I haven’t seen them myself, but people tell stories…”
“Tall tales,” said Cai over his shoulder.
“Maybe, but you don’t know it for sure! Could a pig or two ran from the city into sewers? It could! Could they littered here? They could! Why do you think it’s just a tale?”
“A moment… please” Gregor was in equal parts confused and astonished. “You mean a pig, well, any edible creature could ran into this tunnels and survive long enough to have an offspring?”
“Well… yes…”
“Pardon me, but this is just so strange, so… unthinkable… Back there, in Gildenstaat, it would be either immediately eaten, or would poison itself by drinking underground water or walking into a shaft with gas layer near the bottom…”
“But you should have similar stories back there on the Mainland... Not about pigs necessarily, but about something,” said Tora.
“Hm...” Gregor took a moment to think. “A bit like that, yes. Sometimes it’s rock spirits, guarding the coal, sometimes – ghosts of the dead miners... But usually it’s all just gas pockets and haphazardly placed supports.”
“But it’s only normal,” continued sorceress. “Show a man a sufficiently narrow and dark enough passage and he’ll immediately will think of what might be on the other end of it. On the other, unseen, end. And more often than not, there’ll be monsters. Beasts, magical or natural, ghosts or goblins – anything and everything that man from the beginning of this paragraph could think of. Anything and everything he could possibly fear.
That what uncertainty, that is darkness, brings. Unsettled mind begins to think of possibilities… of every possibility, no matter how impossible – and puts it there, were it can’t be seen. Because first thing mind wants – to be better prepared, to be better equipped to protect the body it’s stuck in.”
“I don’t know, lady…” said Gregor slowly. “But I grew to like the darkness and the tunnels… They both are very good for hiding, you know? If you’d learn your way around the mines, of course.”
“Indeed the are, Gregor, indeed they are…” sorceress’ voice god a bit deeper than usual. Possibly, that was just an echo of the shaft they were in. “But then you have to ask yourself: aren’t you afraid of monsters, living in the darkness, because you know there’s none, or because you know exactly what they are?”
Gregor didn’t answer the question. At this moment he was completely absorbed in the complicated task of stepping on the slimy floor of the tunnel in such a way so his feet won’t slip.
“You know a lot about mines…” asked Cai just to break up sudden silence. “Were you a miner, Gregor?”
“Oh, no, not really… My family were accountants – my grandfather, my father and me too. Not a bad job, really, keeps you above ground, keeps you fed well enough, even gives you enough clean water to bathe… sometimes… It was a good job, yes.”
“Was? You mean, before you got here?”
“Sadly… Quite a time before that. One of my immediate higher-ups was caught embezzling the money from the Guild… But of course, guilt was passed down the line – as it usually does, like that poison gas in the mines. So I ran. Ran underground, stuck with a company of former miners. Things were not so bad for a while, before one time the Gildwehr decided to raid that section of the mines we were living in…”
“So you escaped?”
“I didn’t… Now when I look back on it I think I should’ve jumped into a sinkhole and died. Well, if I’d did that I won’t be here, but still… They took me to the Institute.”
“Institute?” asked Mylene. “Well, I didn’t like the lessons at Academy either… I’m sorry, lady Tora, but it’s the truth. But even I won’t say I’d prefer death…”
“And what were you learning there, Gregor?”
“Oh, meister Cai…” Gregor blinked: one, two, three times. In his eyes, close to the bridge of the nose, dark swivels begun to form. No one noticed them of course. “I wasn’t a student there… I was far from student… very, very far behind the bars…”
“Not student, but…” Cai paused. “Studied?”
“You’re right, meister Cai. I was a test subject… favourite test subject, as meister Schlieffen told me…
But as much as they tested me and tested their machinery on me, just as much in turn I did learn from them… Things I shouldn’t now, plans they’d never told me, thoughts they hid even from themselves… They shared it all with me anyway. Who’s envious of whom, who wants what, and who just wants out of the Ruhr… I wanted out too!”
“You are out of there, Gregor,” Cai put his hand on Gregor’s shoulder to reassure him, but man just shook it off.
“I am! I finally am!” he stood there for a moment, looking at the slimy foul floor behind his feet. “But am I?”
Cai put his lantern down.
“What’s wrong, Cai?” asked Mylene. “Do you not know, where to go next? Confusing left and right again, do you?”
Cai haven’t said a word. He stretched right hand to the side and made a gesture, like he was holding the hilt of an invisible sword. At the same moment, air around his hand condensed into dimly glowing white threads, slithering and shifting, coiling around his fingers, forming a semi-transparent guard, like a basket, covering his fingers. And out of that guard sprung forward white-glowing straight blade, his Shining backsword – a weapon of unimaginable sharpness. A weapon capable of slicing through both matter and magic, blessing and curse alike. An impossible weapon of a Royal Rider, specifically trained to combat mages.
It took mere moments – and immediately after that he made a jump and a flip over the Gregor’s head, landing firmly on his legs and swinging his weapon at Tora. His motions were slightly awkward, distorted, like a puppet, controlled with an uneven hand of an inexperienced puppeteer.
It was…
Impossible.
Mylene in the back wavered.
Tora, whose life was in immediate danger, didn’t.
Little sorceress darted left, away from the Shining blade, and forward, faster then Cai could turn to follow her. She jumped, grabbed something invisible, something that was stretching from Gregor to Cai, with both hands and, with an expression of great disgust, plunged her teeth in that something, she was now holding.
Cai shuddered, his knees bent and with an audible sigh he fell face-first on the muck-covered floor. Shining blade blinked and disappeared.
Tora let go of the thing she was holding and turned to face Gregor, who didn’t move an inch. He stood there, jaws clenched so hard blood was dripping from the corner of the mouth.
“It’s not too late yet, Gregor,” said Tora calmly. “Even now, it’s not too late to stop.”
“Stop?” said he finally, smearing the blood on the chin with the fist. “You won’t have me, Riders. I swear, you won’t! I ran away from one prison, I won’t be put into another. We know what you do to mages here, we know it all… I’ve seen that shining blade of his and I don’t want to be a fuel for whatever makes Shining weapons possible! I’ve escaped Gildwehr, I won’t be stopped by the Royal Rides either! I won’t be!”
“Gregor, you are mistaken…”
“Am I? Do you think I didn’t recognize you, traitor sorceress? Working with the Queen? Teaching the Riders how best to kill your own kind?”
“Finally, someone recognized me…”
“I did! I did from the very moment I’ve met you! I wonder what you did to people who were supposed to wait for me… Did you kill them and threw their bodies into the sewers for rats to eat? For the pigs to eat? I’ve noticed you! I’ve seen your face before! I’ve looked into their mind and I’ve seen you face! You’re… monster! Monster! And since the moment I saw you on the street I was just waiting for the opportunity… Now!”
Mylene followed this exchange closely, but she couldn’t see what’s happened after those words. There was motion in the air, like something passed by with a great speed, followed by a very brief moment of pause – both Gregor and Tora stood perfectly still, giving each other steel looks.
And then the small thin figure of the sorceress exploded...
...outwards, in every which way possible: sharp thorns, long metallic needles, tangled vines of razorwire, a bizarre iron tree: its root was fear, its trunk was agony, its branches were throes and leaves were pain – and they were many.
Gregor let out a high-pitched screeching scream of anguish.
“Amulet, Mylene!” Tora’s voice wasn’t coming from somewhere inside that thorny needle-laden mess. It was coming from every bit of metal at once. “You need to see!”
Mylene grasped the rider’s amulet on her neck, squeezing it in her hand until it began heating up, spilling glowing green dust through the fingers. She opened her palm and the whorl of green twirled outside, coiling around the man still crying in pain and the heap of sharpened metal still causing him that pain. Floating sprinkles of green dust were filtering reality, absorbing anything that wasn’t truly real, eating up any disguise, glamour or guise, like activated charcoal filters the water. In mere moment everything in the vicinity was covered in a dim green glow, revealing the truth of what was going on in front of Mylene.
Where there was Gregor, a frightened escapee from the Mainland, now flailed its tentacles and hissed in rage a horrible monstrous creature – a chimera, a combination of parts impossible in nature. Insect legs, squid tentacles, cat-like eyes and snake tongue. Skin of its tumescent body varied in color and texture, patched, stitched together with dozens of staples… .
And in front of it, where a moment ago was nothing but needles and razors and pain, sat a child, a girl no more than two to three years old. She looked at the creature in front of her with an earnest curiosity, biting her lower lip.
One more moment passed.
Tentacles stopped flailing around pointlessly.
Creature had collected its thoughts.
Little girl picked up something from the floor, threw it up in the air and laughed.
Mylene moved forward, shielding the child, taking her Shining rapier out of the air as she went.
Creature attacked from different sides, but this time its blows were met by a Shining blade, threatening to cut off any and all of its meaty appendages. It tried again and again, but the Rider’s guard was firm and strong and none of the monstrosity’s blows could reach their target.
The moment creature gave her a pause, Mylene feigned a strike from the right but lounged forward instead, thrusting her rapier hilt-deep into the creature’s body and pushing the blade down, cutting the swollen flesh like a butter.
Tentacles flailed once more.
Then fell on the floor, limp and lifeless.
Mylene breathed in and out once, – twice, thrice, – and when she was sure creature wasn’t moving anymore, she released the blade into the air and turned to the sorceress, now very little.
“Here, here,” said she, picking the girl up from the floor. “Don’t be afraid, aunty Mylene won’t left you here with all this nasty stuff lying around…”
“Royal rider Mylene, do you understand how your amulet works?” answered Tora, rolling her eyes. “What you see now is just a reconstruction of objects’ and creatures’ truest nature, based on how they affect and distort general magic field. A temporary effect that shall pass in… Why are you giggling!? Stop giggling and put me down! Go better check on how Cai’s doing, you, disgrace of a Royal rider!”
04
Queen was furious.
“You were supposed to help him with accomodation! Not drag him into the sewers and murder! Do you even understand how such incidents influence our image on the political arena? I’m absolutely serious here, rider Mylene, hide that smile of yours!”
“I apologize, Your Majesty…”
“Apologizing won’t be enough! Not even close! What shall I say to the Federation’s ambassador when he asks about the internment of the most recent exile? Do I say that I apologize, but he was cut in half by one of the Riders while my royal sorceress was watching and didn’t do anything to prevent it? Or maybe even encouraged it?”
“Well, at the time she couldn’t even…”
“Mylene!”
“I apologize, lady Tora…”
“In all fairness, Your Majesty,” said the sorceress. “I don’t think we had a choice…”
“I could believe that, but could you at least do it in a way to not get yourself injured? Cai will be out of commission for a while, you were completely exhausted…”
“We had to see what that man really was. Had to make him show us his true nature. That’s why I decided to took him away from the streets and into the sewers, where, if it’d came to worst, he couldn’t pose a risk of injuring innocent civilians.”
“Wait, lady Tora,” Mylene widened her eyes. “So you… you knew!?”
“Do I have to say it again?” Tora posed a question to a ceiling.
“She knows all, Mylene,” said the Queen. “Just not all the time, sadly.”
“Thank you!” Tora was still talking to the ceiling.
“Royal sorceress! I am here!”
“Now I apologize, Your Majesty…” sorceress finally lowered her gaze. “That man… when exiles came here before, they were usually full of hope, they were looking forward to a new beginning, new life. This one was different.”
“Different how?”
“Scared. Looking for a fight. Expecting someone to attack him. In part it’s because he’s from that place… Gildenstaat will make anyone jumpy. But that’s not all. Someone imbued him with a belief that here, on our Island, he’s still in danger, that his persecution haven’t stopped when he crossed the Sea of Storms.”
“Someone…” said Mylene. “He mentioned… that guy from the Institute. That Schaff… no… Schlaff... no... Schliffen, yes. That Schliffen guy.”
“How convenient,” Queen looked at Tora. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“Exactly the kind of convenient I feared…” sorceress shook her head. “Or should I say ‘expected’?”
“Oh… What is this with you mages…”
“‘You mages’, Your Majesty?” Tora raised an eyebrow.
“Doesn’t matter,” Queen cut her words and straightened her skirt. This time just out of habit. “So, Tora, what else did you learn from our unfortunate guest?”
“He was… irregular. Strange. There was something to his magic… something that felt… artificial. Then again, it could’ve just been an imprint of the place he lived in – biggest industrial stinkhole on all of the Mainland. But still… it’s like he was a monster, but haven’t been born to be one, haven’t grown into being one either… like he was manufactured instead.”
“If that’s true… if even half of that is true… it needs to be thoroughly investigated. I still may have some favors to call – not everyone of the Mainland’s old aristocracy likes the Federation’s recent rise to prominence. This Institute is rather intriguing little place…”
“Indeed it is, Your Majesty, indeed it is…”
