“Adheim Village was founded about two centuries ago, but the history of the island goes back much further,” Mad said as they sat on a boulder beneath the copse of trees. He had stopped to let Zenos catch his breath. “Before the Bastilhasians, there were the Archurians, then the people of Olm—old and new—and I’m sure there were others that came and went without ruins to show their passing. There’s a history of at least two millennia that we know of, and much more we’ll never know.”
Zenos’ cheeks were red. He breathed hard through his nose and took long draughts from his canteen. He glanced over at Mad and saw the adventurer damp with sweat and weary in his own way, but nonetheless smiling as he talked about this and that.
“Adheim is far from the coast,” Mad said, “but what made it valuable across so many cultures, apart from its lumber and its gold, was its mithril. There are a handful of mines in the world and they are carefully guarded. If Adheim’s mine still produced ore, the Atilonians would have sent the Sixth Fleet and reduced Adheim to rubble. No dungeon break needed.”
Mithril. Zenos was familiar with the supreme metal. It was second only to Adamantine in sheer strength, but it was lighter than copper and just as easy to refine. In the demon emperor’s world, the dwarfs controlled the mithril mines. After the elves were subdued, the raw superiority of mithril made conquest of the dwarfs his next priority. That was how the Demon Empire clashed with the dwarf kingdom, Golud Baradash, and how he met its prince, Balagrim Dazka.
“Am I boring you?” Mad asked. “You’re just… staring.”
Zenos blinked. “No,” he said and shook his head. “I was just thinking about the dwarfs.”
“Dwarfs?”
Zenos gestured beside his knee. “Short, bearded,” he said. “Quiet, irritable, angry, but glad-hearted. Dwarfs.”
“Short and bearded,” Mad said.
Zenos nodded and stared out from the copse, over the meadow of green grass that ran before him. They met on a similar field, a battlefield, where beautiful grass had turned to mud, and corpses of the Demon Army piled at the shields of dwarf shieldbreakers.
Heavily armored, strapped in axes and knives, Balagrim led his troop of elite shieldbreakers through the center of the demon emperor’s line. Not arrows or magic could stop them, for Balagrim had the Eyes of the Warrior and they deflected all harm. Zenos had pushed back the main dwarfen host, but the shieldbreakers soldiered on. Even when they were bogged in demon warriors, they locked their shields together, and held their ground while Balagrim cut a swath toward the demon emperor.
Balagrim’s orange, double-braided beard was soaked in blood. His eyes were red and they burned with hateful magic. Presently, Zenos’ hand fell to his side and gripped the air where a sword had once hung from his hip. For centuries that encounter remained his closest brush with death.
“Well enough to move on?” Mad asked. “The sun is low and we need to make it to the first campsite.”
Zenos capped his canteen. “How far off is it?” he asked, placed the canteen in his bag.
Mad smiled.
The pair continued through the meadow and back into the forest. When it became too dark to see the trail, Mad stopped Zenos with his hand and set down his backpack. He retrieved a knife and pulled forward his long ponytail of black hair.
“Cutting your hair?” Zenos asked.
“You said you wanted to be an adventurer?” Mad asked back, his grin faint in the night. “I’ll give you a lesson now. Magic is everything and an adventurer is nothing without it.”
Mad severed a strand of hair with the blade. “Anima, Level 1.”
White light, bright and cold like the dawn, shined from the hanging strand. Its end lifted up and Mad released it, so that it would float on its own volition. “We’re a bit east of the campsite,” Mad said to the strand. “Do you mind helping us find it?”
The strand made no sound, but it glided onward by graceful undulations, as comfortable as an eel in water. Mad flashed a thumbs-up to Zenos, stowed his knife, and pulled up his backpack. He carried on a few steps down the trail, then turned back. Zenos hadn’t moved at all.
“You’re a necromancer,” he said.
Mad smiled and continued on the trail. Zenos followed shortly after.
Later they arrived at a dirt clearing surrounded by thick conifers. The ground had been packed many times over by hikers, and appeared recently used; there were coals in a pit of round stones. The strand of hair, whose light they followed to find the site, tied itself in a bow in the branches overhead. Mad set down his backpack and got to setting up in the eerie glow.
Zenos removed his bag and picked out a spot by the fire pit. He unlatched the bedroll from the bottom of the bag and spread it on the ground. Mad started the fire and the pair sat across from one another. They watched its flickering flame.
Zenos realized he hadn’t spoken to Mad since he’d cast anima; since he called Mad a necromancer. It wasn’t out of loathing. Magic was rare before the seal was broken, he thought. What is it like now? Could it be so commonplace, where it powers boats, and enchants hair? In all the world, I was the only sorcerer to manipulate the dead, and by the Reaping, just a fraction. Anima… it’s a spell that was in my tomes, but I couldn’t cast it.
“I’m sorry for not telling you,” Mad said. “About my class. I figured you knew, but that was foolish of me. Now that I think about it, I don’t know why I thought that way.”
“Knew what?” Zenos asked.
“I’m not Bastilhasian,” Mad said with a thin smile. He didn’t raise his head to look at Zenos, but watched the fire with glassy eyes.
Zenos watched him. “Then, what are you?”
“Echokhet.”
Orange light fluctuated in Zenos’ eyes. By his sight, he knew Mad hadn’t told the whole truth.
“Would you tell me now where you came from?” Mad asked, looked up from the fire. “You look like you’re from Bastilhas, but apart from your eyes, it’s your cluelessness that makes me wonder if you’re from Adohas at all. At first, I thought you were just shy, but I think you’re serious. You say strange things, you know?”
“Strange things?”
“You haven’t been to the dungeon,” Mad said. “But you already know what’s inside.”
“Dwarfs.” Zenos’ face hardened.
“The guild calls them golems, but when you said that word, it felt true to me.”
The pair returned to looking at the fire.
“I won’t keep any secrets from you, Zenos,” Mad said after a time. “We’ll be camping together for a month, and then, maybe fighting together. I respect the choice you made by not leaving, but I still don’t understand why.
“Why follow me?”
I could tell him everything now and there’s much to say, Zenos thought. I could tell him about the Demon Empire, my world, and my conquest. I could tell him about the gods that were sealed, and the battle I fought. How I died. I could tell him about the Arkitects. I could say that I’m a Player, that his world is a game like my own, and that he is certainly an NPC. Non-Player Character.
Ghost had done the same to him. It was liberating, but it left a wound that couldn’t heal. It would be better if the NPCs of Mad’s world, Adohas, didn’t struggle with questions that had no answer.
“I’m from another world,” Zenos said. “It was in my world that I first died, before I woke up in yours; in a bedroom of the guildhall. I thought I could help you.”
I’ll trade one half-truth for another.
“Weird how that’s the only thing that makes sense,” Mad said.
“I’m sorry for not telling you earlier,” Zenos said, “but I wasn’t sure what to make of you.”
Mad smiled a little more. “I’m used to it.”
“Because you’re Echokhet?”
He nodded. “The Echokhet are… the children of Chotokhet and Rukhet. Two-thousand years ago, Achlesial killed Chotokhet, or so the story goes. We appeared sometime after with strange magic.”
“I don’t understand,” Zenos said with rounded eyes.
Mad pointed at the strand that glowed overhead. “Necromancy,” he said. “The common myth is that my ancestors drank Chotokhet’s blood. That is why our connection to mana is perverse. Among the Echokhet, there are many kinds of spellcasters, but they are all necromancers one way or another. We have a connection to the dead that’s difficult to explain.”
“So, they fear you.”
Mad made that somber smile. He folded his arms over his knees and settled his chin on them. “They fear what they believe,” he said. “The dead can be a powerful ally. They can kill, they can heal, and they can spy. Rumors start, lines are drawn, one thing leads to another and the Olmenites round us up. There were wars, camps, and prejudice, but it’s worse than that.” Mad pulled at his cheek. “Not every brown man is an Echokhet, but every Echokhet has brown skin. Many have been killed on that evidence alone.”
“Shouldn’t you be angry?” Zenos asked. Mad looked him in the eyes. “Whenever I look at you, you’re smiling. Even when you’re sad.”
Mad looked at the glowing strand. Its light had faded, but it still glimmered in the branches above. “It’s been nearly a year since I decided to smile. I didn’t want to live with more regrets,” he said and looked at Zenos again. There were tears pricked in his eyes. “I’m sorry, I’d continue, but I don’t want to cry.”
Zenos nodded. The conversation ended there, but they sat a while longer. They said their goodnights, the fire was snuffed, and they turned into their bedrolls. Zenos looked up at the branches, where stars peaked through the dense conifer canopy. The anima strand was depleted.
It’s a strange world without dwarfs, where gods kill each other, and rare magic prevails in the blood of so many men. Was this the change you wanted, Ghost? Another cycle with as much violence as the last. If we had beaten Achlesial then, could we have stopped it all?
Zenos raised his hand toward the darkness.
Why, Ghost, are these worlds created?
Why do I still exist?
