(47) Hubris Is Fatal
Tara descended the stairs, fidgeting with the thick fur coat slung over her shoulder. Whatever creature it came from, its dander tickled the inside of her nose, making her feel constantly on the edge of sneezing.
“Well, if it ain’t, Tara! Off to train? Don’t let Nef give ya a rough time!” called Melvin, a regular patron of the inn’s eatery.
Tara waved at him with a small smile as she passed through the dining room.
“Aye, hit ‘er a couple times for me!” shouted another man, Rick, from the back of the room.
Tara smiled and nodded to him as well, making her way toward the front door.
“Ah, there you are. Take care, dear. I’ll have Willem save you something for dinner tonight,” Halla said with a wave.
She sat behind the counter, writing in her ledger, as always. Tara was unsure what about running an inn involved so much writing, but when she was not collecting dishes or helping guests, Halla was always behind the desk.
“Thanks,” Tara said with a wave, exiting the inn.
She was supposed to meet Nephthys outside the inn for her first day of training with this mysterious master, though Nephthys had not given further instructions beyond handing her this heavy coat. Where exactly did she want to meet…
“You are ready?” Nephthys asked.
Tara spun around on the balls of her feet, crouching into a defensive stance. When she saw Nephthys before her, wearing a small smile, her cheeks began to color. The days she had spent sparring with the woman had clearly taken a toll on her mental state.
“Yes,” she said, straightening and attempting to hide her blush by brushing her pants off, though they had obviously picked up no dirt on the walk from her bedroom to the front door.
“Good. Follow,” Nephthys instructed, turning and striding into the darkness of a nearby alley.
Tara did as instructed, still futzing with the coat on her shoulder.
“A demigod lives…in a back alley?” she asked after a few minutes of following silently. The sun had just crested the horizon, and long morning shadows pooled about the edges of the walkway.
“No. He lives atop the highest peak on the northernmost tip of Ashreach,” Nephthys replied casually.
“Northernmost…north of the Crater?” Tara asked, dubious.
“North of the Crater and Blackwater, yes,” Nephthys said, still walking along, not turning around.
Tara was stunned. No one made it through the Crater alive—no one she knew, anyway. To find that there was even anything beyond its north rim was shocking, though she supposed she should have known it intellectually. There were several regions south of the rim, so it stood to reason there would be north as well.
“Wait, how exactly are you planning to get us all the way, what must be thousands of miles, to the northernmost point and back in a day?” Tara asked, suddenly realizing that the thick coat was probably because the top of a mountain would be freezing cold.
“I am going to make a gate. I have come to understand that this is not common magic, though, so I will make it in an area that will not…cause a stir,” Nephthys said, glancing over her shoulder.
Oh, she was just going to make a gate, obviously. Tara rolled her eyes. Most people did not think of moving thousands of miles instantaneously as rote as walking to the store.
They entered a rundown shack that seemed might to fall apart with a small gust of wind, and Nephthys closed the door behind them. The wood sparkled with some sort of magic, but Tara could not identify what it was, just that it was there. Some sort of ward, probably.
“This is where I will make the gate, and this is where Aka will wait for your return. I recognize that leading you through dark back alleys is not the safest idea, so she will both ensure that this cabin is not claimed while you are gone and accompany you back to the inn, should I be unavailable,” Nephthys explained.
Tara glanced down, noticing Aka leave her side for the first time in what felt like forever. A pang in her chest made her throat constrict, her breathing become labored. She choked the feelings down quickly, firming herself.
It’s just while I’m training.
“Come,” Nephthys said, giving Tara no time to collect her thoughts.
A golden line appeared, as if space had been sliced with a knife. It split open into an archway only large enough for a single person to enter at a time, and the golden edges solidified into what seemed a metal frame.
The tear itself was a swirling vortex of purple and blue light that cast an eerie glow into the ‘cabin’, which Tara thought was a generous description of the shack.
Nephthys passed through, and Tara, glancing at Aka one last time and waving, followed behind.
She emerged into a whiteout storm of snow and ice. A tightness gripped her chest, vastly different from what she had felt mere moments ago. It felt like the cold was pulling the breath from her lungs.
She donned the coat as quickly as she could, and suddenly the cold, previously poised to bite her nose off, receded as if it had never been.
She pulled the hood up, and the snow and ice somehow stopped hitting her face, though it was still exposed. It was as if the coat cast some sort of magic shield over her, independent of where it actually covered her body.
Nephthys had given her the coat without explanation, but now Tara wondered what sort of artifact she had draped about herself. Was she unknowingly wearing some sort of national treasure?
Still, all she could see was white flurries as large as her fingers. All she could hear was the howling wind, nearly deafening as it clawed at her ears.
“Follow closely,” Nephthys’ suddenly said.
Tara could hear her voice just as easily as she had in the shack, somehow, though it appeared directionless. She panicked for a brief moment—how was she meant to follow when she could not find Nephthys—but a great burst of magic washed across her body, instantly demanding her attention.
A bubble spread out, blocking the ice and snow for what must have been hundreds of feet around them. Nephthys appeared, standing next to Tara, and began walking through the feet-high snow toward a cliffside that Tara had not seen in the blizzard. The snow seemed to melt around her, as if afraid to even touch her.
Tara followed, using the trail Nephthys made through the tall snow to ease her passage. When they arrived before the cliff face, Nephthys unexpectedly stopped. She surveyed the sheer wall, as if looking for something, and, nodding to herself, she rapped the back of her hand against it.
Did she just…knock on the cliff?
Tara blinked in surprise, yet in that split second, the cliff vanished, replaced instead by what appeared to be a natural cavern. Stalactites hung from the ceiling, dripping onto stalagmites spearing up from the floor, yet there was an obvious path through, as if carved.
“This is where I must leave you. You must enter and find the master. This path will take you to the top of the mountain,” Nephthys explained cryptically.
“You’re…not coming?” Tara asked, stunned.
“I cannot. Indeed, the master will already be disappointed that I deprived you of the challenge of reaching the mountain itself. He will not allow you to skip what comes next,” Nephthys said, again choosing her words strangely carefully.
“The rest of what?” Tara replied, not in the mood for games.
“I cannot say. However, let me inform you that the path back is always open to you. You are always free to come back here, to abandon the path. The master is simply the top of my list to train you. He is not the only option,” Nephthys lectured.
Now, Tara was beginning to sweat, despite the cold. Nephthys had never offered her an out so directly before. What exactly was waiting for her in this cave?
“The choice is yours. I will not judge you either way. It makes little difference to me who trains you so long as you learn to defend yourself,” Nephthys said, motioning toward the cave, which now appeared the maw of a giant beast, the path through the stalactites and mites a tongue, poised to devour Tara whole.
She slowed her breathing forcefully, exhaling through her mouth and inhaling through her nose. Thinking about it logically, this path must be some sort of test. That was the only thing that made sense. The master would use whatever was in there to test whether a student was worthy of his instruction.
Tara began to chuckle. The more she thought about it, the more ridiculous it was. She had been, since a small child, abandoned, betrayed, enslaved, and embroiled in battles she did not choose. A test? Please.
A test had rules, goals, and limits. None of the suffering she had endured in her life had any of those things, and yet she had endured nonetheless.
A test was nothing.
She strode forward confidently, not even glancing at Nephthys as she walked past and into the mouth of the beast.
“Take heed: confidence is good. Hubris is fatal,” Nephthys called from behind, yet Tara did not look back.
The howling wind died the moment she crossed the threshold as if the mountain had closed its mouth, swallowing both it and her.