13-6. The Quiet Tragedy of Hope
Elijah awoke to a cascade of pain.
But a quick inspection told him that he wasn’t dead. Nor had his body been corrupted. In fact, he’d managed to maintain his Mantle of Authority, even without his direct input. However, because it spread out entirely uncontrolled, he felt even worse than when he’d passed out.
With an effort of willpower, he retracted the mantle, reducing its area of effect from a little more than a hundred feet down to the size of the tent.
“You’re awake.”
Elijah glanced at Benedict, who sat nearby. He was just as pale as ever, with deep shadows beneath his eyes. In the flickering light of the a candle, the combination made him look almost skeletal.
“What did I miss?”
“Nothing,” came Benedict’s reply. He closed the dog-eared romance paperback he’d been reading and added, “I thought you were going to die.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” Elijah remarked, retrieving a meal from his Arcane Loop. He’d been rationing his supplies, but even so, they’d begun to truly dwindle. Upon further thought, he grabbed another and handed it to his companion. Benedict took it, muttering only a single word of gratitude.
For the next few minutes, silence reigned between them as they ate their meals. Elijah’s consisted of boar tenderloin smothered in peppers over a bed of wild rice, and it was just as tasty as if it was fresh. Such was the nature of his Arcane Loop, which kept its contents in something akin to stasis. That made it great for storing food.
However, the second he completed his meal, the sense of hopelessness returned. He knew he would keep going. That was just his nature. And he’d drag Benedict along with him. But he couldn’t deny one simple fact – they needed some sort of win. Any victory, no matter how small or inconsequential, would go a long way toward making the journey more palatable.
The problem was that Elijah had no idea how to engineer such a victory.
The situation hadn’t changed. They still didn’t know where they were going or how to achieve their goals. And despite learning that he could maintain his Mantle of Authority even while unconscious, Elijah felt no real relief. Because he’d also found that doing so would rapidly degrade the structure of his soul.
If he rested too often, it would fail altogether.
“Consequences,” he muttered to himself.
“What was that?” asked Benedict, picking at his own meal. He tended to eat much more slowly than Elijah. Not because he savored it, but rather because he could scarcely muster the mental energy to eat.
“Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”
Benedict gave a subtle snort, but he made no effort to continue the conversation.
That left Elijah to his own thoughts, many of which spiraled into despair. He took great pains to yank them back, but there was a part of him that wondered why he did so. What was the point, after all? There was no hope. No goal. Just rote survival, and without any sense of accomplishment that came from solving problems or completing tasks.
He shoved those thoughts aside, quarantining them in their own leaf so they couldn’t taint more constructive ideas. That led him back to his Arcane Loop, mostly so he could catalogue his remaining supplies. Water remained in a good place, though it was obvious that that would not always be the case. Food was dwindling by the day, and even though he didn’t expect it, he found no great key to success among the rest of his items.
He did latch onto the coffee, though.
Over the next few minutes, he boiled some water on a hot plate Benedict had brought along, then used his French press to brew some coffee. The smell alone was enough to bring joy to Elijah’s heart, and when he took the first sip, he very nearly collapsed in relief.
Even Benedict asked for a cup, which surprised Elijah. Until then, he’d had the man pegged as more of a tea drinker. But like most good Americans, he claimed to prefer coffee.
“I knew I liked you for a reason,” Elijah said, handing over a clay mug full of the honey-sweetened coffee.
“I was under the impression that you didn’t like me at all.”
“What gave you that idea?”
“I’m…me. Most people don’t like me.”
“I’m sure they just don’t understand you,” Elijah said, though he could definitely see how Benedict might be a bit of an acquired taste. The man was unabashedly odd, from his fashion sense to his demeanor. And on top of that, he’d made no secret of killing people he deemed bullies.
It was obvious that Benedict had had a hard life, even before the world’s transformation. But against all odds, Elijah did enjoy the man’s company. In the back of his mind, he had to acknowledge that it wasn’t so different from saving a wounded animal and nursing it back to health.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
He wanted to help Benedict. Maybe because he saw something deep inside of him that might offer value to the world. Or it could’ve just been pity. Regardless of the reason, the desire to pull the man into stability was there all the same. And it had been there since the first time they’d met in the temporary clinic during the Trial of Primacy.
A lot had happened since then, but Elijah’s need to rescue Benedict remained just as potent as back then.
As Elijah was enjoying his coffee, he found himself idly toying with the items in his Arcane Loop. He went from one to the other, even taking the time to recount some of his thoughts in his oft-ignored journal. Even as the wind howled outside, he retrieved his collection of potions from the storage space.
Most of them were useless for his current situation. Physically, he was fine, so the restorative potions wouldn’t help. He even had plenty of ethera at his disposal, largely because the atmospheric density was even higher than in his grove. Sure, it all had to be filtered through his Mantle of Authority, and it ended up feeling sterile. But abundance was not an issue.
Then, he settled on the Riftseed potion.
According to Biggle, it would serve to upgrade a growth item. The only problem was that he only had one of those. And growing his Arcane Loop didn’t really seem all that useful at the moment.
But what if he built a dolmen?
Those were all growth items, weren’t they? He could build one, then use the Riftseed potion to upgrade it, couldn’t he? Maybe that would connect it to his grove.
The idea stuck in his mind, and manically, he sprang to his feet.
“What’s going on?” asked a concerned Benedict. “Are we being attacked?”
“No. Better. I think I might’ve just figured out how to get us home.”
When Elijah stepped outside the tent, he was assaulted by hurricane-force winds that swept across the plain, wearing it smooth. Above, violet streaks slithered through the black sky, briefly obscured by shadows that he knew to be the flying creatures who hunted in the upper atmosphere.
He’d yet to take to the skies, mostly because his every instinct told him that those monsters would rip him to pieces the second he rose above a hundred feet.
But it was as he looked around at those windswept plains that Elijah realized that his plan had a couple of holes in it. First, there was no rock from which he could build the trilithons that characterized his dolmens. That was an easily solved problem. Worst case scenario, he could simply return to the mountains, where he would find plenty of building materials.
However, the second issue was far more troubling.
If an excised world was cut off from the World Tree, and ley lines were just a name for the World Tree’s extended branches, then did such conduits of power exist after excisement?
So far, Elijah hadn’t felt anything that might lead to a ley line. But given the world’s ethereal density, he assumed that they must exist.
Finding them had to be the first task, and it wasn’t one he could accomplish sticking to the ground. With that in mind, he informed Benedict of his plan. The Warlock was cautiously excited, but his resigned state kept it from becoming true optimism.
But that was fine.
Elijah was optimistic enough for both of them.
Buoyed by the notion of taking a concrete step towards rescuing themselves, Elijah gathered the tent, stowed it away, and shifted into the Shape of the Sky. After Benedict had strapped himself to Elijah’s back, he took off.
The wind made flight a difficult proposition, but after a few minutes, Elijah had mastered navigating the sky. The only issue was that those winds seemed determined to push him higher and higher, which he was certain would draw the attention of the powerful but mostly unseen creatures far above.
Because of that, it was a constant struggle to keep himself close to the ground.
Complicating that was the need to maintain the Mantle of Authority, though by that point, doing so had become almost instinctive. Still, he kept it close in an effort to preserve his energy.
And like that, he flew across the plains.
More than once, he saw craters much like the one they’d previously encountered. Some were larger. Others, smaller. But they had all wrought havoc on the surrounding landscape, pockmarking the terrain and sending a spiderweb of deep ravines arcing out from what looked like an asteroid’s point of impact.
Most of them played host to terrible monsters, and from above, Elijah could see writhing tentacles and misshapen bodies he couldn’t even begin to identify.
It was an ecosystem predicated on predation. There was no harmony. No peaceful coexistence. It was just all-out war, all the time. That anything managed to survive was a mystery Elijah didn’t really want to solve. All that mattered was that there were plenty of monsters out there, and most of them wanted nothing more than to destroy Elijah and the companion on his back.
In the Shape of the Sky, Elijah managed to cover hundreds of miles in the time it would have taken him to travel even one on foot. But despite that speed, he still failed to sense anything he might consider a ley line.
He did see more ruins, though – proof that the world had once been settled – though the structures were so worn that he struggled to identify any defining characteristics of their preferred architecture. Not that he had much mental bandwidth to devote to that sort of ultimately meaningless detail. The only thing that seemed somewhat important was that he confirmed the circular nature of the walls.
For the next week, Elijah searched for some sign that ley lines still existed. But he found nothing, which led him to a gambit that he told himself would work. Despite that, he didn’t have high hopes.
Over the following couple of weeks, Elijah took great pains to gather building materials and meticulously carve trilithons that would become his dolmen, all the while suffusing it with the essence of his power. But when he finally cast Roots of the World Tree, nothing happened.
He tried it three separate times, but it was useless.
In a fit of rage, Elijah destroyed the product of his hard work. He tossed the twenty-ton stones as far as he could manage, then, with Benedict riding on his back, he descended amongst the closest nest of monsters where he vented his frustrations. When he was surrounded by bits and pieces that had once been be-tentacled wolf-like monsters, he felt no better than after the failure that had prompted his rage.
Through it all, Benedict remained mostly silent. He pitched in when he could, which was increasingly more frequently due to his ongoing recovery. But he offered no words of support. No ideas, either. He was just along for the ride.
Or maybe he’d already accepted what, in the back of his mind, Elijah knew to be true.
There was no escape.
No magic solution.
They were stranded, and they were eventually going to die on that excised world. And there wasn’t anything either of them could do about it.