With good-nights said, my friends and I retired early into the house. All things considered, we pulled the curtains along the gss wall. Zanshe rummaged in her bag and pulled out her folded cot to set up on the open part of the floor.
“I know everyone’s tired,” I said. “But can we talk?”
Serru nodded. “You’ve been talking to him quite a lot. That is not a compint, since he may have answers we do not, and it’s quite clear that there’s a mismatch between what we thought we knew and what is. I’ve been waiting to hear where that’s leading.”
We gathered in the living room, with me in my human form on the couch with Serru and Terenei, Heket and Aryennos in the chairs, Zanshe on a cushion on the floor.
I took a deep breath. “I think maybe tomorrow morning I should leave you here and use my dragon form to fly to the Axis. I haven’t given up on a way back to my family, but he’s been persistent about that being a pce I can get answers and that I’m not getting home. I don’t know. Part of me desperately does not want to leave you in danger, and no matter what you say, the Moss Queen is angry and it’s extremely pusible she’ll take that out on you so it is not the level of danger you were in before. I don’t know how to minimize the damage that I’ve done to your lives just by being here.”
“Stop there,” Terenei said. “You are not the only person in this room making choices. I very much doubt I’m the only person in this room who has no regrets about anything.”
“It would be foolish not to take the danger seriously,” Serru said. “But, as Terenei says, that does not equal having regrets. I am still gd I stumbled across you. For your sake, I hope the Axis offers you a way home. I know that it’s hurting you to be away from them and for them to not know where you are. I’m going to miss you terribly, but that’s not the important part.”
“That’s important too,” I said, with a sigh. “Part of me wants this to not work, so that I stay here but know that I tried my best and I didn’t just abandon them. I really love this world and I feel like I’ve hardly seen any of it yet, there’s just so much of it that I want to actually experience instead of hearing little bits and pieces. I don’t want to lose you, any of you. I’m really scared that I’m going to find a way home and then spend the rest of my life regretting that and wishing I could find a way back here to you and... and everything. But I’m scared that if I don’t go to the Axis, I’m going to spend the rest of my life feeling guilty that I didn’t try to get home.”
“There is currently more to it than that,” Zanshe said thoughtfully. “Did our new friend not tell you that, in his estimation, going to the Axis is in fact your best chance for a future? I’m very good at listening to my clients and knowing whether they are telling me everything and being truthful with themselves and me. I don’t think he’s lying to you. Whether his assessment is accurate is another matter entirely, but he believes it enough that he’s willing to associate with us, which is clearly causing him some conflicted emotions, and go against the Moss Queen to help you do that. I’m not sure the question at this point is whether the Axis will take you home. I think it might be, will going to the Axis be the best route to keeping yourself and possibly your friends safe from the anger of the Moss Queen, by a method we currently cannot determine because we ck enough information?”
“All the threads of this story lead in that direction,” Heket said. “Life is not a story but sometimes the broad shapes are the same. We’ve had, several times, an influence that as far as I know there is no card for. Someone we cannot understand has given you gifts, has changed the roll of the dice and possibly the shape of the world in small ways, and has generally been behind you. Our new friend appears to know who that is and have great respect for them.”
“Which probably,” Aryennos said, looking down at his journal, “brings us back around to the idea of the creator of this world or at least assistants. I saw the caretaker working under the moons and they knew my name. I can’t think who else would be able to or inclined to do those things. Although they don’t seem to be pushing you in any direction in particur, just leaving you to make your own decisions.”
“Logan said I was being maniputed,” I said. “I don’t think it’s manipution if someone just gives me stuff that I’m actually happy to have and lets me figure out what I want to do with it. It should be fairly easy to figure out that a paramedic is going to put healing skills to use to help people, and that if there’s a treatment avaible for a bigger problem, I’m going to do everything I can to get ahold of it and promote its use.”
“That does not seem maniputive,” Zanshe said. “It does sound like someone understanding you, and perhaps taking advantage of an opening. Does the creator of the world have limitations on what they can simply do within it? What an odd idea.”
“Or they’ve been looking for a way to weave a new thread into the story in a way that isn’t obvious,” Heket said.
“Or that.”
“I don’t see what else you can do,” Terenei said quietly. “If you walk away from the Axis, you’ll never know whether you could have gone home, and from what our new friend has said, there are other things you can only learn that way—things you are probably not going to be able to share with us, one way or another. Those are likely to be things that make sense of this whole situation. You will spend the rest of your life here, wondering, and while I’m sure at least our families would be delighted to consider you our own and you’d be very much appreciated for your skills much more than seems to be the case in your world, I don’t think you’d be happy with permanent loose ends.”
“I won’t be happy if I get home with loose ends, either,” I said.
Terenei reached to the bag at his feet and pulled out a potion bottle. “I suppose the only thing preventing us from testing this, at least on zombies, is someone being dead, and I don’t expect anyone to volunteer for that.”
Everyone in the room stared at the bottle cupped in his offered hands, practically hypnotized.
The bottle wasn’t a shape I’d seen before. It was bulbous, nearly spherical, with a neck that narrowed where it connected with the body, but ripples spiralled around the bulb. The contents had the colour and sheen of liquid copper, with visible flecks of pink and yellow-green and sky blue; it had a very faint glow deep inside that brightened the flecks.
“Wardens have generally agreed that it looks like the neck would break off very easily on any impact. There’s no cork, so presumably that’s how it works. Throw it and when it breaks the contents will come into contact with a mossling or zombie and set them free.”
Myu hopped up on my p so she could look at it, then batted it gently with a paw.
“It’ll keep you safer, too, little one,” I told her, and stroked a hand down her spine. “Has anyone ever invented a potion that did nothing?”
Terenei shook his head. “Sometimes results are unexpected, but if a formu creates a potion, it does something. And this... it has bits of the colours of Cleanse and Panacea and Antidote in it, but it’s a new colour and shape. My grandfather assures me he followed your instructions exactly, which means this is the potion described as Purification. The odds that it will not work are... infinitesimal. This,” he nodded towards the bottle, “is the biggest loose end you’ve been worried about here. There are currently only a few but that won’t be the case for long. The gatherer team found the aleksite where Serru said the cave was, and in other caves in that stretch of coast. Miners and gatherers together are finding more caves with morning star crystals. The other components are... mostly uncommon but not really rare, and gatherers are collecting them while farmers reassess whether any of them can be cultivated to increase the avaibility. And advanced alchemists are practically twitching to get their hands on the instructions and components.” He switched the bottle to one hand, caught hold of one of Serru’s, and pced the bottle in it. “Don’t do anything stupid with it.”
She looked down at it, nodded speechlessly, and tucked it safely into her satchel.
I got the odd feeling that my friends only then remembered to breathe.
“I think,” Heket said, “you can trust that things here are in the process of changing for the better and safer, no matter how angry the Queen is.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s going to take time, but I think you guys have got it all under control. I don’t think I really needed to be part of this except maybe as a convenient way to pass it on.” I sighed. “So. Do I switch to dragon in the morning and fly to the Axis, and you can stay here? You’re safer inside a settlement, even with the Zombie King actually present. There’s no way I’d leave you just camping. But if anyone’s uncomfortable, I’ll stay and wait. I’m not the hero or the main character and you are neither NPCs nor my harem. We’re in this together.”
