V2Ch94-Between Dreams and Disaster
That night, after sharing some affection with Vidalia and another dream - this time, they visited Samara again rather than trying to tamper with the future - Tybalt lay for a long time, drifting between sleep and wakefulness.
He had woken up after the dream encounter. He didn’t know why.
Now something kept him from falling back into deep sleep and joining Vidalia in whatever other pleasant dream scenarios she might have constructed for them that night.
As he tried to sink back under the layers of unconsciousness, visions began presenting themselves to his mind. Images he didn’t understand at first, and then sensory experiences that disturbed him.
He lay on his back in a darkened room. He was waking, raising stiff hands to his eyes - hands that were unrecognizable as his own, sun-browned and callused in different places than Tybalt’s, not from holding a spear but some other, steadier occupation.
There was a sound of crying from nearby. An infant.
What is this? the necromancer wondered.
As he thought that, the vessel he inhabited rose from the bed, and a low growl rumbled from his chest.
***
Some hours later, the sun lighting up the horizon, as his companions filed into the dining room for breakfast, Tybalt still thought about what he had seen.
Mariella is avoiding eye contact, he thought as the fire mage passed him. But she was also barely containing a smile, so it couldn’t be anything bad.
Victoria could barely look at Tybalt as well, though in her case, the reason was more obvious. She’d had the room next to Tybalt and Vidalia the previous night, and the walls weren’t particularly thick. She was slightly pink, probably thinking about what she had heard before Tybalt and Vidalia settled down to sleep.
Vidalia, for her part, gave Tybalt a sultry wink when she entered the room, fresh from a bath.
Dero had a knowing look as she passed in front of the necromancer.
Kistana took her usual place silently by his side, eating the same meal as Tybalt when the servant came to bring their food.
No one said much of anything beyond “Good morning” to their neighbors at first. It wasn’t until all of the plates had been placed that Dero spoke up.
“We have a big fucking announcement,” the dark elf said, pounding one fist on the table. She held up Mariella’s hand, and the fire mage blushed bright crimson. “That is, not just an announcement that’s big, but one that’s also actually related to fucking!”
Tybalt smiled and shook his head. He understood immediately, with the context of what he’d seen of Mariella already that morning. But his heart wasn’t in this moment as much as it should have been. His mind still couldn’t shake off what he’d seen in bed the previous night.
“Are you sure, Mariella?” he asked.
“You should probably ask Dero if she’s sure,” the fire mage said softly. “But yes, I think I’m pregnant.” She placed a hand over her stomach, looked at Tybalt, and smiled at the look on his face.
“Gods, really?” Victoria asked. She and Vidalia sprang up at almost the same time, and both women hugged Mariella, pulling Dero in too, somewhat against her will, until she managed to slip out of the embrace.
Kistana stepped forward from her position behind Tybalt.
“Congratulations!” she said quietly, eyes darting back and forth between Tybalt and Mariella. The fire mage couldn’t react to it, since she was crushed between the two foxgirls, but Tybalt gave the catgirl a quick hug.
“Thank you,” he said.
But his eyes immediately darted back over to Dero.
What did Ella mean, we should ask Dero? The dark elf caught Tybalt’s questioning gaze lingering on her, and she began to explain.
“So, after you and foxy went to bed last night, Mariella and I stayed up so I could give her that womb tattoo that I mentioned yesterday. She had wanted to wait until you approved of it, and you seemed pleased about it yesterday. Since it was Vidalia’s night with you, it seemed like a good time. Anyway, she has a fresh tattoo now. As soon as I finished it, the ink started glowing through the bandages. A glowing womb tattoo means that the womb has an occupant. It also means the magic runes in the tattoo are working. So, congratulations, like Kistana said! I guess you and Mariella are both fertile.”
“Congratulations!” echoed Victoria and Vidalia as they pulled away.
Mariella was still bright red, and now there were tears on her cheeks.
“Thank you both!” she said. “I’m glad - I wouldn’t want this to be- ”
“Oh, it’s a competition,” Vidalia replied with a small smile. “I want to be top wife and have the most kids with Tybalt, and I’ll compete with you on some things like that… but that doesn’t mean I won’t be happy for you at a time like this. We’re family. Now more than ever.” She bent down and kissed Mariella softly on the lips. The fire mage softly laughed as they parted.
“Fine, competition it is, then,” Mariella said in a low voice.
“This is amazing,” Tybalt said. He walked over and put his arms around the fire mage, and he kissed her on the mouth, where the foxgirl had just been.
But his mind was still on what he’d seen in bed the previous night. Maybe his heart wasn’t quite in the kiss or the words, or his attention wasn’t on the present moment.
The fire mage, who always seemed to know his moods at least as well as anyone else, picked up on it instantly.
“Are you all right, my love?” Mariella asked. “You don’t seem quite as happy as I was expecting.”
“I… I’m sorry to spoil the mood,” he said quietly.
She shook her head. “Don’t be. Just tell me about it. Whatever it is.”
Her tone got the attention of the others, and Tybalt felt that he almost had no choice, with all the eyes of these women who cared about him watching, than to share what he was thinking about.
“I had a nightmare last night, after my… pleasant dream with Vidalia.”
“I thought Vidalia kept you from having bad dreams,” Victoria said, raising an eyebrow.
“Well, maybe it wasn’t exactly a dream,” the necromancer replied.
Vidalia said nothing, just looked at him with a furrowed brow.
“You seem nervous, Tybalt,” Mariella said softly, taking his hand. “And it’s unlike you to be nervous without a good reason. Just tell us. What’s wrong?”
“I think I was using my necromancy powers in my sleep. Half-sleep. Whatever. I can see through the eyes of the undead I control. One of them woke while I was sleeping, and I connected with it. A father who turned into a zombie. Because I was sort of half-awake and inhabiting it, my standing order for new undead to stay still didn’t seem to work. He almost sank his teeth into his baby before I got a grasp over the situation.”
“But you stopped it,” Victoria said firmly.
“You’re very good at controlling yourself,” Mariella said. “And others.”
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” Dero asked. “You wouldn’t be this shaken by almost hurting a child.”
Tybalt nodded slowly. “I could feel what the zombie felt, see what he saw, hear what he heard… Outside of the dwelling, I could smell salt water. I could hear ocean waves.”
“A fucking port!” Dero exclaimed. “I warned you. Damn it, I warned you!”
“And we took precautions,” Tybalt replied defensively.
“For those of us who weren’t there for this conversation, a quick explanation, please,” Victoria said.
“Dero and I were both aware, when we kept visiting more towns to spread my pestilence, that it could spread further than we meant it to. So we avoided the Salt Waste’s only port town, Whadesgart.”
“Yet somehow, here we fucking are,” the dark elf muttered darkly.
“Yes,” Tybalt said.
“And that’s where Carlos and the caravan will be right about now!” Dero exclaimed.
“I warned Heimar as soon as I was fully awake,” Tybalt replied. “They have enough supplies to bypass the port and just keep traveling out of the Salt Waste until they get somewhere the pestilence won’t have spread.”
“The plague, you mean, at this point,” Dero said. But she sounded somewhat mollified.
“So, what happened?” Victoria asked. “What went wrong?”
“Someone sick must have gotten from one of the towns we infected to Whadesgart,” Tybalt said. “That’s the only explanation.”
“Or one of your fucking magic plague-infested rats did,” Dero said.
“No! Whadesgart is too far away for them to travel that distance without food or water. The nearest town we attacked was Sant, ten miles away.”
“Yet life finds a way, and so we end up here,” the dark elf said.
“All right, so the disease hitched a ride on something,” Victoria said, waving a hand to cut off Tybalt and Dero’s low grade bickering. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a sick human or an infected rat. Darling, can’t you, um, stop the disease? Wasn’t that what you did for this town yesterday?”
“I don’t think so,” Tybalt said. “What I did yesterday was go around town, person to person, absorbing the mana from the disease particles in each person’s body to kill the virus. I’m pretty sure that I could kill any of my undead the same way, just pull my power back into myself and unravel them. It refills my mana, too, so that might be useful someday. But I had to be in person. I couldn’t even sense the presence of the virus yesterday until I was within a few miles of it. I didn’t realize how many people were actually infected until we walked in and saw the town had basically fallen to me already.”
“Yep, so we’ve become the originators of a plague,” Dero said. “Oops.”
Mariella gave the elf a pointed look. “I don’t think that’s helpful, Dero.” She turned back to Tybalt. This whole time, she had been holding his hand and caressing the back of it gently. “I’m sure you thought of some ideas for how to contain it. If not, we’ll work together and come up with something.”
You always know how to make me feel better, Tybalt thought.
“For now, I’ve ordered all undead connected to me to act dead unless they’re already assigned a task. Not just sick. Dead. So they’ll hopefully get buried. If they’re not wandering around, and ideally not being treated like sick patients, that should prevent the infection from spreading further.”
“Do you want me to teleport you to the zombie you dreamed about? The one in Whadesgart?”
“No, you’d have to teleport me next to the town, then we’d have to get inside, sneak around, and find the zombie, and we’d have to repeat that every time a new one wakes up. It’s probably a waste of time anyway.”
“What if they get on board a ship?” Victoria asked. “I know you don’t want to attack humanity broadly. Just the Kingdom.”
“I’ve never seen any future where we start a pandemic accidentally,” Vidalia said. “It’s always possible, but if it was a likely future, I probably would have dreamed about it. I’d say it’s a low risk, if not no risk at all.”
“I’ve actually issued a special order for any undead that feel the motion of the ocean beneath them,” Tybalt said grimly. “They’re instructed to leave wherever they’re being kept, slaughter the crew, and sink the ship. Playing dead isn’t enough there. I don’t want to take any chances. I definitely don’t want any of my undead winding up in random foreign countries. Some doctor there could open up the ‘sick’ patient and get infected, and before you know it…”
“Yeah,” Dero said. “Before you know it, a plague. Suddenly there’s just a plague. Happens every millennium or so, but I’ve never heard of one being created and spread on purpose. Embarrassing as well as tragic to do it by accident.” Everyone gave her a look at that, and she let out a little sigh before looking at each of the women around her in turn. “Look, I hate to rain on the parade, but I think I have to keep presenting the worst case here. The rest of you have too much faith in Lord Tybalt here. I know he was a good fighter when your village got attacked, and he has religious significance to you, and you’re carrying his baby, and I guess two out of the the four of you are really in love with his dick- ”
“We have faith in Tybalt, because he’s a good leader,” Victoria said, interrupting. “I’m not in love with his dick. Tybalt’s been patient about that with me, and it’s disgusting that you try to pretend like we’re being led around through sex. And I don’t follow him because of religion either. If anything, I wasn’t nearly as observant before I met Tybalt, and he brought me closer to Lord Mudo. There were lots of people in the fox tribe’s village when it got attacked, and Tybalt wasn’t the only one who fought for it, so it’s not that either. It’s because he’s a good and responsible man who we can trust to take care of us.
“I tried very hard to think about that objectively before I agreed to an engagement with him, and he was basically a stranger to me at the time. I don’t have too much faith in him. I have the faith that he’s earned. He’s admitting that he can’t stop the pestilence from spreading for certain. He’s also assessing the risk to our people, the risk to our family, of going and devoting a bunch of time to dealing with the disease in person. And he’s weighing those risks against the risk to the human race. These aren’t easy choices, but Tybalt is the person we trust to make them. That’s why we agreed to marry him - or to follow him, in Kistana’s case.”
Kistana, Mariella, and Vidalia silently nodded in agreement with Victoria. Dero threw up her hands in defeat.
I’m not a good or responsible person, the necromancer thought. I’ve never seen myself that way. But the women gathered around me certainly make me want to be like that.
“I just don’t think we can afford to distract ourselves from the war we’re waging to go and squash every possible trace of my virus,” Tybalt said slowly. “Hunting down every possible infected person could take weeks, assuming no new infections - which isn’t a safe assumption. It’s even possible there might be people who are not harmed by my virus - just lucky, I guess - who are still carriers of the disease and can infect other people. If there’s someone like that, we could be looking for them for years, even if they never leave the Salt Waste. We have another five towns to take before we’ll get to Whadesgart. It would be quicker just to follow our existing plan, capture all those towns, destroy them, and then occupy Whadesgart. I was planning to take and hold it anyway, because it is the desert’s only port. It has ships and trade. It’s useful. Once we capture it, we can investigate what happened there at our leisure.”
“I agree,” said Mariella. “It sounds like Tybalt has done everything reasonable that he can to try and keep his pestilence under control. Maybe there’s a lesson for the future in all this, but we can’t spend all our time managing the possibility that the worst case scenario comes to pass.”
“Even Tybalt doesn’t look entirely confident about that,” Dero pointed out.
“Yeah. My brain says that we’re doing everything reasonable. I still have a bad feeling, though. Mostly just a feeling, without reasons behind it. Some small thing didn’t go the way I expected, and a plague zombie wound up in Whadesgart. What else isn’t going to go as planned?” He looked the dark elf in the eyes. “I admit I am a little nervous. There are lots of humans I’d rather not kill. I don’t want to unleash a plague on the continent. So, instead of you and I going together and trying to find and hunt down every zombie and every infected person, which I’m not confident I could actually do - pinpointing who’s infected is beyond my capabilities unless I’m very close - maybe you could go on your own and just make sure that nothing wildly outside of our expectations is happening?
“Unlike me, you can basically turn yourself invisible, right? So after you teleport to the exterior, you can just sneak through the gates. If there’s a big outbreak of disease, people will be talking about it on the streets. Even if the authorities are trying to hush it up, there will at least be some area of town where people aren’t supposed to go. In that case, you come back here, and then we’ll go back with my strongest undead. We might not be able to take the town on our own, but we can crack the walls open, destroy the port, and sink all the ships before we retreat. No more outbreak.”
“That’s… actually not a bad idea.”
Why do you always sound surprised when you say something like that?!
Dero had a way of making even her compliments sound somehow insulting sometimes. The infuriating thing was that she was often right.