Curselock

Chapter 187: Crush

Sitting in Floe and Gelo’s cave, everyone ate a still-steaming hot meal from Diana’s inventory ring. Steak, steak, and more steak… a few vegetables. When was the meal actually cooked? Not even Diana knew. It had been years since she restocked her ring, the magical enchantment making it so the food stayed fresh and hot rather than molded and cold.

“This ring is the most important piece of equipment I have ever purchased!” she said with a laugh, her mug brimming with foamy mead.

Roy squinted at the ring and his increasingly drunk wife. “Isn’t that the ring we got from that dungeon with the sand spiders?”

She thought for a moment. “Huh. Then where is…” She patted herself all over, feeling for hidden pockets that she didn’t actually have. “Was I pickpocketed? I could have sworn I bought another ring.”

To the side, Jude laughed. “It’s okay, mom. I’ve been pickpocketed as well!”

“Oh?” his father asked. “And how much wealth was stolen from you?”

“Well,” Jude leaned in, the crackling fire casting long shadows across his face. His parents leaned in as well. “There was like twenty silver and my beloved enchanted harmonica.”

Diana’s eyes went wide as her mouth formed an “O.” She made an oohhh sound.

“What kind of enchantment?” Roy asked. “Some of those can get pricey real fast.”

Roy gave his son a “look.” His wife laughed.

Sitting beside Jude, Gelo perked up. “Do you remember that song you were playing when we first met?”

A mischievous look sprouted on Jude’s face. He pulled a harmonica out of his pocket. “Do you mean this song?”

He began to play. And Gelo began to sing.

Sitting off alone, Glenny and his father spoke in hushed voices. “I saw you echo a stab.”

“Yeah, I’ve been practicing.”

Carmon coughed, his upper body flailing in response. “What was your breakthrough?”

Glenny took a moment to answer. “See you fight Ashford.”

“…So you know?”

“Who Ashford is, yeah.”

“Who told you?”

“Spencer and Roy.”

Carmon went quiet. “Your mom and him used to date, you know? Back before we were together.”

Glenny’s eyebrows creaked slowly all the way up his forehead. “Gross.”

His father laughed, sending more pain shooting down his spine. “She actually left him for me, so. I have victory in that matter.”

“I was so scared,” Glenny muttered. “Seeing you almost die.”

“He wouldn’t kill me. Contrary to the battle and me almost dying. I actually like the man.” A dark look rose across Carmon’s face. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ll kill him the next time I see him. But back when he was in the Umbra, he was a good man. He worked well with the Inquisitor administration. Got his people on track for good rather than not.”

“He killed a lot of people, dad.”

“That he did. I don’t know what changed in him, but one day he simply vanished. Your mom and I looked for him for a while, but ultimately we gave up. Sometimes people just wish to start over, and we respected that at the time.”

Glenny took a bite of steak. “His Lord probably called for him. Or, at least, that's how I understand Harbingers from Leland.”

Carmon nibbled his own food. “How do you mean?”

“Leland says that he doesn’t believe all Harbingers are evil even if their Lord is. He suspects that more than just him have been handed a Legacy without knowing who the giving Lord actually is. Leland didn’t know his Lord was a ‘Vile” Lord until some difficult questions were raised.”

“I can see that, yeah.” In a way, that made total sense to Carmon.

But then again, Lords don’t usually offer their Legacy to any random person. They hunt for people that would work well with their powerset and theology. So, in his mind, he saw Harbingers as being evil people with only Leland being the exception. He didn’t say that to his son, however.

“Anyway,” Glenny continued. “So when a Vile Lord calls upon their Legacies, their Harbingers have to come running.”

Carmon glanced at Leland across the room. “So what happens when his Lord comes knocking?”

“She won’t do that,” he answered instantly. “Leland says she wouldn’t do that. He trusts her, and I trust him.”

“I see.” Carmon leaned back and rested his eyes. “Your friend is rather good with that thing.”

Glenny found himself swaying with the music. “Yeah.”

Isobel sat next to the great mother bear, Floe. She had slowly slinked over, slipping in and out of conversation as she went. Say a few words here, agree with a few statements there. As it turned out, everyone wanted to talk with her. She had watched the boys fight the most out of everyone here, so the parents asked for her honest opinions about each individual child. She, of course, didn’t mince words.

Jude needed to find his niche and stop fighting like a dullard. There were likely to be far less battles he could win by simply charging head strong at the enemy.

Glenny needed to confidently attack and stop falling back to forging weapons until he mastered all of them. Soon enemies would pick apart his fighting style, attacking at weak points and capitalizing on his mistakes.

Leland. Well. She didn’t have much to say that she hadn’t already said to him. He knew his faults and where to improve in combat.

Eventually she did want some peace and quiet. And Floe just happened to be sitting semi-isolated. Isobel figured that if she sat on the other side of the mother bear, then she would be hidden in her shadow and the others would stop talking to her.

And it worked… until Floe started talking to her.

“You destroyed the poacher ring, correct?” She was referring to the group of murderers hiding out in the local mountains.

“I did,” Isobel replied, remembering infiltrating their camp and slaughtering them all. All except one, that was. The one that ordered Leland’s death. “And you killed their leader when he came in here, right?”

Floe nodded her giant head. “I did.” She paused for a moment. “I got my revenge. He killed my husband, Gelo’s father.”

Isobel’s eyes didn’t widen, but they did twinkle a bit. A false smile invaded her lips. “I’m glad. When my family was killed, I got my revenge as well.”

Face crinkling, Floe asked, “Does it get easier?”

“No, no it does not.”

Leland and his parents sat alone, their plates full of meat and their cups full of drink. Leland was telling the tale of Sapphire and the unique Archon runes he worked with.

“It was a box, of sorts. Its surface area was completely filled with etchings, but none of the usual scripts It was completely unique, as far as I could tell.”

He drew a rune with a stick into the dirt. “Like this one was for externally adding mana to the device. Weird, huh?”

Spencer rubbed his chin. “It reminds me of Hydlish.”

Lucia rolled her eyes. “It all comes circling back to Hydlish.”

“It’s the runic language of the future, honey!”

“It is not.”

Spencer deflated.

“What’s Hydlish?” Leland asked.

His mom waved her hand. “Nothing but a start-up runic language made by a few students of The Yearn Towers. Your father happened to be walking past the classroom where the study group was. As it turned out, the group had a member that was always late. And while waiting, the other students made a new language.”

“And dad helped them?”

“No. Your father was interested in helping, yes, but not even he could create new runes for their language. Especially when one of the runes was officially named ‘Left Hook Squiggle.’”

“Ah.”

Spencer shook his head slowly. “They were revolutionary ideas at the time. In fact, one of those students went on to write a thesis about runic numbering and its correlation to the phases of the moon and oceanic tides. She is now the lead researcher at the Yearn Research Institute.”

Leland made a face. “So this Hydlish is actually Archon—”

“No,” Lucia said like she was stomping out an ember. “Your father just likes to bring up Hydlish to mock me since I didn’t want to help the study group.”

Quietly, Spencer muttered, “Maybe if you were there we could have finished the alphabet before the semester was over and everyone lost interest.”

Blinking a few times, Leland continued on with the tale. “Now Sapphire’s runes didn’t make any sense to me. So she… gave? Me the knowledge. I’m not sure how the process actually worked, but she created a small little sparkle of mana and told me to swallow it.”

Lucia and Spencer shared a look.

“Knowledge by consuming?”

Leland shrugged. “It made me loopy for a few hours. But some of that was in a life or death battle, so maybe I was just trying to cope with what was happening around me. Shock, you know?” His eyes flicked away then back.

Suddenly a very concerned Lucia leaned in and stared at her son in the eyes. “Are you okay?” What she saw in Leland’s eyes, she didn’t even know. But whether because she was his mother or an innate empath, she knew something was wrong.

Leland glanced at his father, finding only resolved firmness. He sighed. “I don’t know.”

It was a different answer from a few hours ago when his dad asked and honestly he didn’t know why. Maybe it was that he was back with his loved ones. Maybe it was his mind trying to ignore the problem of Sybil possibly missing. Regardless, a pit was open in his stomach. He felt as though it could close at any moment, but he also knew it wouldn’t close on its own easily.

What that meant, he didn’t know. So he asked, and received two very different looks.

Spencer was more subdued, although there was a hint of a smile. Lucia, however, her cheeks were pushed as high as they would go. Smug. They both looked quite smug.

Then Isobel’s mocking words from earlier came back to him, and Leland suddenly found himself sitting before his parents as a child again.

“You’re in love!”

“Am not!”

“You are!”

Leland went to respond but his father held out his hand, silencing both. He slowly took in a breath, then reached out and put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “There comes a day in every young man’s life when—”

“She’s dying!” Leland yelped, jumping to his feet, causing both his parents to snap away with their mouth’s agape. “I am not ‘okay’ because I have a crush! I am not ‘okay’ because I don’t know if she’s alive! And your patronizing tones are less than helpful!”

Silence echoed through the cave.

Leland looked around, seeing all eyes on him. He made a guttural sound, turned, and walked off.

“Honey!” Lucia said, forcing her bruised body to stand. “Come back—”

Spencer reached out, stopping her. “Give him a few minutes alone.”

“But—”

“You heard it yourself, he’s not okay. And right now you being his ‘mother’ is going to make it worse.”

Lucia pulled her arm away. “And if I’m not supposed to be his ‘mother,’ then who am I supposed to be?”

A cold light gleaned in Spencer’s eyes. “His war council.”

Like a bull running at full speed into a wall, Lucia fell into her seat. For a long moment she was silent, dead silent. Then she nodded to her husband and continued to think. Slowly the conversations picked back up, although Jude didn’t start playing again.

Slowly Lucia realized something, however. “What did he mean by ‘dying?’” she asked Isobel, who was slumped in Floe’s shadow.

Isobel took a moment to answer. “She’s not. At least not by conventional terms. ‘Changing’ is how it was described to us, the kind of change that kills all semblance of a person and makes them anew.”

“Is that such a bad thing?”

She sighed. “When a pseudo-dead Lord is the one doing the changing, yes. Very much so.”

Lucia recoiled a little, just like all the others listening in. “What does that mean?”

Isobel slowly shook her head. “I don’t know. Neither does Leland. But he’s seen a Lord change a mortal first hand before. And that Lordly image obliterated that man’s body. So I think he has reason to believe that any change to Sybil in this regard will be for the worse.”

The cave was silent for another moment before Isobel spoke again, “And when this ‘war council’ officially meets, make sure to send me an invitation.”

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