25: There Are Always Impossibilities
Liam took in a deep breath and tried to make sense of any world where he could possibly be the cause of this much destruction. The problem being that he had trouble conceiving of a lot of things that’d happened over the past night, so all the destruction was just one more thing to add to the pile of weird things that’d been happening to him.
He looked at the remains of the tower all around them. The claw marks in the wall that, oddly enough, were proof that it was the same tower they'd been in before.
He couldn't conceive of a reason why Ana and Alistair would move him to a different tower that had been destroyed at some point in the razing of Isai. But he also couldn't put it past them.
Who knew why demons did anything they did? They were inscrutable. They did things that were confusing to humans.
"I did this?” he said.
"You did," she said.
"What exactly did I do?" he said, grabbing at his head and trying to remember.
He was pretty sure he had a good handle on everything that had happened. Running into the garzeth out in the forest after taking on the scourgeling nest. Ana causing him trouble every step of the way. Running away from the creature that had lumbered after them slowly and inexorably. Like there was nothing that would stop it from ripping them to shreds and eating all the juicy morsels they had in their body.
Which was understandably something Liam had wanted to avoid.
He even remembered everything with Albert the cat. He looked around quickly, figuring if there was any part of the story that had been made up by his mind, it would be the bit where he was given a feline familiar who was the reincarnation of the infamous sorcerer who'd caused all of the destruction all around them in the first place.
For all that he’d just had a conversation with the cat. Right. His mind was still a little foggy after waking up from whatever had happened. Though he could give his mind a break for still having trouble believing his familiar was the reincarnated spirit of an infamous sorcerer stuffed into a cute and cuddly little kitty.
The cute and cuddly kitty of doom was right there, sitting and staring at him with a satisfied expression. His tail twitched this way and that as he stared.
“It was because I went after you falling off the tower, wasn't it?" he said.
"It was," Ana said.
"I told you, High Princess," Alistair said. “You were very rude in trying to feel at his essence. That's not the kind of thing you do. It's overly familiar."
The massive ball of fur and fangs and claws sounded like he was actually scandalized that Ana had done something like that, for all that Liam didn't know what in the hells she'd done that was considered such a faux pas.
"We've been over this, Alistair," she said, rolling her eyes at the garzeth.
"And I feel like we need to go over it at least one more time," he said with a sniff. "You got what you deserved."
She raised a hand and something sparkled at the tips of her fingers. The garzeth merely looked at the spot where her fingers were sparkling, thoroughly unimpressed with whatever it was she was threatening him with.
"I am a high princess," she said with a sniff, though she sounded almost petulant as she said it. Like she wanted him to acknowledge her as a high princess.
Liam looked at her fingers. He thought he could almost see the faint outline of a diagram floating in front of her, and that brought back memories of the diagram Albert had tried to get him to draw with his mind while he was falling from the tower and everything had slowed down all around him.
"I got something wrong with magic, didn't I?" he asked, rubbing at his head.
He felt like he should have one hells of a headache, but surprisingly, he felt pretty good.
"That's an understatement," Albert said, sashaying up to him and rubbing against his leg.
Liam stared down at the cat. Albert turned and stared back up at him, still rubbing against his leg and letting out a purr that was so loud it almost rumbled his body.
"What?" Albert finally said after a long moment where they stared back and forth at one another.
"You're sending me mixed messages by saying I did something stupid, but rubbing against me and purring like that," Liam said. "I'm not sure what to make of it."
"Well, I thought I would reassure you. I'm trying to be friendly as I tell you that you did everything wrong. You catch more flies with honey and all that.”
“You’re terrible at it,” Liam said.
Albert batted at his leg, but his claws weren’t out. “Well maybe we can do a bit of the paws the next time you screw up, if that’s how you prefer to learn.”
"But I screwed up because you distracted me," Liam said. "I was trying to catch Ana so she wouldn't be hurt by the fall."
"There's no world where I would've been harmed by a fall from the top of a tower like that," Ana muttered, sounding insulted that he’d even think that was a possibility.
Liam turned and hit her with a sharp look. She looked back at him, her chin jutting up in an obvious show of pride. They maintained that look for a moment, and then finally she blushed and turned away from him.
"Thank you for trying to save me anyway," she said. “Even if it wasn't necessary."
"You're welcome," he said.
She glared at him all over again. As though the very act of him thanking her was an insult piled on top of an insult.
"Me distracting you is not an excuse," Albert said, totally ignoring the interaction with Ana. "If you're going to use magic like a proper mage, then you need to be able to draw a spell diagram under any distraction. Do you think I wasn't distracted when I was drawing my spell diagrams on the killing fields as demon hordes poured across the line between worlds I created?"
"Oh, I'm sure that catastrophe you created for both our worlds was very distracting, cat," Ana said, and then she frowned. "Wait, you're still talking like you're actually Sorcerer Albert.”
Liam quickly tried to step in. "I told you he's just suffering from a little bit of a brain fog or something.”
"A brain fog?" Ana said.
"It is not a brain fog," Albert said. "I'm..."
Again, he let out a yowl because Liam had reached out and grabbed his tail and gave it a yank. Which had the cat turning around and hitting his hand and arm with all his claws and teeth at the same time, but it still wasn't enough to break his skin, considering he was now at least Third Ascension when it came to infernal magic and Second Ascension when it came to arcane magic.
He didn't know exactly what all of that meant, other than the vague things he'd read in books and heard from people telling stories about the Demon Wars over the years. It felt powerful, though, and a cat wasn't going to be enough to harm him.
It was almost enough to make him want to go after Old Tom, a fat, orange bruiser in the barn who thought the whole barn was his domain and that humans were interlopers interrupting his busy schedule of napping and chasing after the rodents from time to time.
More often than not, he was fighting other cats and stealing the rats they'd killed fair and square. When he wasn’t going after the lady cats to make a horde of little orange terrors.
"Are you quite done?" Liam asked, staring down at the cat as he gnawed on Liam's arm.
The cat continued trying to gnaw at him for another moment, and then finally he pulled away.
"I just wanted to make sure you had time to contemplate the error of your ways. And clearly you prefer the stick to the kind word.”
"Oh, I've contemplated it plenty," Liam said, and he reached down and gave the cat's tail a yank again. He figured that yanking on the cat's tail was only getting his attention, and the darn cat wasn’t the only one who could use the stick. Not that it was doing any damage to the cat any more than the cat trying to gnaw on Liam was doing any sort of serious damage.
The cat puffed up again and then ran over to one of the walls that was still in place. He stayed up there, hissing and spitting at Liam and looking ridiculous.
"Anyway, enough of that," Liam said. "I got some bad advice from my familiar, and I guess it blew everything up."
"What were you trying to cast anyway?" Ana asked.
Liam racked his brain for a moment trying to remember exactly what he'd been trying to cast when he went flying, and then it hit him. Mostly because it was pretty easy to remember exactly what he was trying to cast considering what he’d been doing as he tried to cast.
"Would you believe it was a Slow Fall spell?" he said.
"A Slow Fall spell?" Ana said.
"Well, yeah," he said.
"You just know a Slow Fall spell. Just like that."
"I do?" he said, though it came out more as a question than a definitive statement.
"You just reached your First Ascension tonight and you know a Slow Fall spell."
Liam decided to keep quiet about exactly what Ascension he'd reached so far. He might have a strange liking for this demoness in front of him, for all that she seemed combative a lot of the time, but he didn't want to get into exactly what had happened while time was frozen and he was trapped inside that magical vortex.
That seemed like the kind of thing that would only create more questions than answers for everybody involved, but mostly for him.
"Yes?” he said, and again it came out more as a question than a statement.
"And it created an explosion that was powerful enough to destroy one of the guard towers," she said.
"Yes," he said, and this time it was more a statement than a question. Though he could still feel a lingering question there as he said it.
"One of the towers that was able to withstand the burning of Isai, and the creation of the scar twenty years ago.”
He looked up and around. He thought about the situation they found themselves in, and he shrugged.
“Well, they obviously haven’t been maintained in the years since. I figure there was probably some rot and structural damage that was helping me out just a little.”
"Just a little," she said, her voice flat.
"Well, yes?” he said.
She stared at him for the space of another breath, and then the explosion came. An explosion that seemed every bit as dangerous as the explosion he'd created because of the botched spell drawing he'd done earlier.
"Do you have any idea how impossible any of that is?" she said, throwing her hands up. He noted there were claws at the tips of her fingers, and he wondered if she’d even realized she was doing that.
"I don't care how impossible any of it is," he said, rubbing at his head again and wondering that he didn't have a massive headache. Maybe all that ascending had also done something for his ability to take a lot of frustration and not get an annoying pounding headache from it. "So do you want to tell me why it's still night? Was I not out for that long?"
Alistair and Ana exchanged a glance as he tried to change the subject, and suddenly he wished he hadn't tried to change the subject as he stared in between the two of them. A prickling started in between his shoulder blades and moved up to his scalp.
"What?" he said, figuring he wasn't going to like the answer.
"You've been out for a whole day now," she said, poking at the fire, and very pointedly not looking at him. "This is the second night since you went under. I was starting to wonder if you were ever going to wake up."