“Next pipe.” Char held out her hand. She was precariously balanced on another pipe forty feet above the desert, her other hand supporting the half-finished base for the next level of their tower. The opposite corner was being held to a tree root that poked out of the cliffside with a connection rune to give it a little more stability, and she needed to get this corner finished and supported before the rune ran out of mana.
This level was the last one, and it would get them within six feet of the top of the cliff. She’d never assembled scaffolding before, and could only assume it was a job meant for multiple people. Or someone with six arms. Or she was doing it wrong. Whatever. They’d gotten this far, and that was what mattered.
Declan passed up the next length of pipe, and she got it slotted into place to support the corner she was holding. She fished a bracket out of her pocket. This was a tough bit: trying to hold the bracket in place, fish a bolt and wing nut out of her pocket, and get them threaded without the bracket slipping loose. There were several bolts lost somewhere on the desert floor where she’d fumbled and dropped them. She’d learned her lesson about lunging to catch them after the first time when she’d nearly gone over the edge.
She wished they had some tension cables to keep everything squared up. The brackets and cable ties cut down the worst of the sway, but it still shifted under her like a living thing. Getting thirty people down this was going to be an adventure.
They had greatly underestimated the number of boards they would need for planking, so some of the levels and ramps had only a couple of two-by-fours for flooring, and she had to climb out on bare pipes to get things assembled. Still, the tower would not only let Lulu get to the top, but it would provide a route to get everyone else down. If they were careful.
One more precarious corner, two more pipes, and the last of their boards for the platform, and they were done. Char tightened down the last bolt on the last clamp and let out a long breath. She used lengths of scavenged cabling to tie the supports to exposed roots for a little extra stability. They’d only been able to do that for the last few levels. Below the exposed soil, the cliff was solid stone, and there was nothing they could use to anchor the tower. When they brought the others back this way, she’d go first and apply a few Connection runes to make it a little sturdier.
They’d saved enough boards for the top to make sure the whole platform was covered. It was already a small target for people climbing down from above; the least they could do was make sure there was something resembling a floor to land on.
Ramps zig-zagged down from landing to landing with no railings to hold onto. The whole thing looked like a death trap, and OSHA would have a heart attack if they saw it. They’d built it wider at the bottom to make it more stable, but it still swayed alarmingly in the wind. She hoped it would still be standing when they came back this way.
She coaxed a nervous Lulu up the last ramp. The boards bowed under her weight, and she was practically belly-crawling up the ramp, whimpering the whole way. The large dog could have easily made the jump up the last six feet to the top of the cliff, but Char was worried about what that jump might do to the tower. Instead, she crouched down and helped to boost Lulu up the last little way. Char could feel the dog trembling when she touched her. Lulu was more than happy to get off the swaying tower by whatever means she could.
Once Lulu was safely on solid ground, she paced, waiting for the rest of her pack to join her. Char used a tree root as a foothold and easily pulled herself to the top, and Declan scrambled up after her. To make sure they could find the scaffold again on the way back, Char took a minute to tie a bright yellow cargo strap around a tree to mark the location.
Declan sprawled out on the ground, his arms and legs flung wide. “Did I mention that heights make me nervous? After that, I think I may be developing a full-fledged phobia.”
“Keep leveling up, and eventually you’ll be sturdy enough to survive the fall.”
He snorted. “Life goals: get strong enough to laugh off terminal velocity. On my bucket list, for sure.”
Char held out a hand, and he grasped it, letting her help him back to his feet. The woods were shrouded with thick fog, and the day was almost gone. They needed to find some place to hole up for the night. She hoped to find the same cottage they’d stayed in when they first came this way, but thought they might be too far east to run across it again.
What they found, after walking for nearly an hour as the light failed, was a small Japanese-style home with a raised wooden floor covered by tatami mats. The doors and windows had actual rice paper screens. The damp weather and wind had been unkind to the paper, and it was ripped and sagging, but the interior was dry enough.
Declan surprised her when he stopped in the foyer and slipped his shoes off. He shrugged at her questioning look. “I know it doesn’t make any sense, no one lives here anymore, but it just feels disrespectful to walk in with my shoes on.”
Char started to walk past him, but stopped at the threshold to the living space. The home was neat and had been well cared for. A table against the far wall had a bowl for incense surrounded by family photos. She looked at the faces in those photos for a moment, then went back and sat on the little bench by the door to take her boots off. The people who lived here might be gone, but the least she could do for them was not track mud all over their home.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The fragile wooden slats and rice paper seemed like a thin barrier between them and the dangers outside, but it kept out the fog and gave them a little bubble of comfort for the night.
Char boiled some water, and they both had packets of instant ramen for dinner. They borrowed bowls and chopsticks from the little kitchen. It felt appropriate for their surroundings, and Declan told her about how he’d always wanted to visit Japan.
“Tokyo first,” he said around a mouthful of noodles. “Not the touristy crap, either. I wanted to find one of those tiny ramen shops tucked under the train tracks. The kind with five seats and some guy who’s been perfecting broth longer than I’ve been alive.”
Char smirked. “You know you’re eating noodles that came out of a plastic brick, right?”
He held up his bowl like it was sacred. “I’m practicing. Gotta respect the form before you get to the real thing. It’s ramen cosplay.”
She shook her head, but couldn’t stop the little smile tugging at her lips. “Pretty sure no one in Tokyo would mistake this for respect.”
Declan slurped his noodles loudly and leaned back. “Maybe not. But I figure you show up, you make the effort, people get that. Same way I didn’t keep my shoes on when we came in. Not like anyone’s around to care, but still…” His voice trailed off, and he stirred the broth with his chopsticks. “Feels like the least we can do, y’know? To not wreck what’s left of the world.”
Char glanced at the family photos still on the table. “Yeah. I get that.”
For a while, the only sound was the rain against the roof and the soft clink of chopsticks. It felt weirdly normal, like the kind of quiet night she might’ve had before everything went sideways.
Declan broke it by saying, “Godzilla marathon. That was another bucket list thing. Whole series, back to back. Including the terrible American one.”
She raised a brow. “You mean the really terrible one.”
“Exactly.” He pointed at her with his chopsticks. “Suffering together builds character.”
She snorted. “You’ve got a messed-up idea of bonding.”
“True. But…” His expression softened, shadows flickering across his face in the lantern light. “These days, I’ll take whatever kind of bonding I can get. Beats being alone.”
Char didn’t answer right away. She wasn’t great at comfort, not when words were expected. But she nudged her empty bowl closer to him. “Next time, you’re cooking. We’ll see if you can make noodles without dishonoring Japan.”
Declan grinned. “Challenge accepted.”
Declan took the first watch, and Char tried to sleep, but her mind kept circling around the confrontation they were walking toward. Guilt and worry gnawed at her. Dread over possibly having to kill more people churned her stomach. If she’d stayed… ‘If you’d stayed, you wouldn’t have found the Sanctuary. This is pointless,’ she told herself, rolling out of her bedroll.
The soft patter of rain drummed on the roof, and after a quiet reassurance to Declan, Char stepped out onto the garden-facing veranda. The house was ‘L’ shaped, and the space in the crook of the ‘L’ was a well-tended garden. She took a seat on the floor of the veranda, pulling her legs in lotus style, and just looked out at the rain and the garden for a while.
She remembered sitting cross-legged like this next to her father. He’d been learning to meditate as a way to help with his PTSD, and she’d wanted to learn with him. She could hear his voice as he told her to acknowledge her thoughts and feelings as they came. Recognize what they were, then let them go.
There was guilt for leaving the group at the mercado, knowing that Voss and his cronies weren’t good people. She hadn’t seen them do anything awful, so it had been easy to ignore the possible problem. She acknowledged the guilt, reminded herself that hindsight was 20/20; she could learn from it and let it go.
She acknowledged the anger. Voss wasn’t going to go without a fight, but if he was really mind-controlling and killing people, she couldn’t let that stand. The world had enough problems without people being shitty to one another. And then there was the dread that came with that resolution. She didn’t want to kill other humans. Killing monsters was one thing; it was even fun sometimes, but other people… she acknowledged the feeling and let it blow away like a leaf in the storm wind.
Fear was next. Not fear of monsters or aliens, but fear that she would fuck things up. She was gathering people together, and they would look to her for leadership, but she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. She wasn’t good with people. That fear was a hard little knot in her stomach, and she recognized it, named it, and let it go.
The storm winds tore it away as her grip on it loosened. The pounding rain beat down on her as the surf crashed. The memory of her father’s voice was drowned out by the roll of thunder above her. The storm had reached the shore. The sand under her was wet and stuck to her as she stood.
She turned in a slow circle. The palms and thick jungle foliage whipped in the wind, sometimes showing glimpses of an ancient stepped pyramid deeper in the green tangle; a place she needed to explore but had been too afraid.
The fairy mound was gone, but the World Tree still loomed large in the distance, impossibly huge and hazy. The Tuatha side of her wasn’t gone, though. It ran all through this place, where earth and sea and sky met. Where had she learned that? She remembered reading something like that in those wizard detective books set in Chicago. Fiction, sure, but the words had stuck with her. And here, in this storm, they didn’t feel like fiction at all. She could feel the truth of it all around her: sacred nature and the meeting of the elements. The place where boundaries blurred.
There was a charge in the air; a buzz that raised the hairs on her arms, building to a crescendo; teetering on a precipice. This place, this storm, it was her at her most fundamental. She was the one teetering on the edge of choice and change. But what did she want to be?
The thunder crashed and boomed like a war in the heavens. She turned her face upward and let the rain wash over it. Lightning flashed in the clouds, and for a moment she thought she saw the shape of a great bird, limned in actinic white fire. For a moment, the thunder sounded like words. “You are not small. You are not weak. You are the child of sky and thunder.” Lightning split the sky. “Stop pretending.”
She wasn’t a mouse to run and hide until the storm had passed. She was the storm. She was a predator. She was a being of magic and nature, of runes and wisdom. The civilized world had been washed away in a tide of magic, and it was time she stopped clinging to it.
She opened her eyes to the real world, much more settled in herself. She could gather people together, but she didn’t have to lead them. She wouldn’t become a monster; she would plant herself between the people and the monsters. It didn’t matter if the monsters were beasts, people like Voss, or powers like the Aldevari.
It was one thing to make that resolution, but living up to it wouldn’t be as easy as saying it. The first test would come tomorrow.
Her mind no longer whirling, she rose and made her way back to her bedroll. Lulu snuggled up against her, and this time, she found sleep.
