Chapter 50: Chapter 50 – Rewards

I’ve never seen more than one pylon in one place before; with eight of them, their glow is perceptible, pulsing slowly from blue to purple. It makes for a very strange tableau, grown as they are out of the green runic floor, and there’s a sort of awed silence as everyone else just sort of takes it in.

I’m apparently broken in some way, because I’m just annoyed. I wander over to the nearest pylon, vaguely seething for no adequate reason about how things ended, and glare at it as though it can bring me someone I dislike enough to punch and possibly also a solid meal. That’s probably why I’m the first person to notice the bags hanging off the frame that the pylon is sort of socketed into, and the markings on those bags.

“Hey, Stella.” My voice sounds disgruntled even to me. “This one’s yours.”

There’s a bit of a pause, and her voice is slow, almost muzzy. “Why?”

“Because the bags have crossbows drawn on them. Nobody else here uses a crossbow.” I ignore her response and start trudging around the ring. “Wand, that’d be Tim. Shield, obviously Amber. Knife, take a guess.” I keep walking in a slow circle. “It’s actually almost obnoxious that we spend all of that time working out an equitable lootshare and then the Temple just flips us the top-wing. Rune, this one must be mine. Sara, what’s yours?”

“A tome.”

“Heh.” I stick my hands into the pylon’s sockets, ignoring the single, tiny bag hanging around the crystal. “Alright, let’s get this over with.”

“Magelord, might we—”

I realize too late that Sara’s talking to me, and I’ve already activated the pylon. There’s a rush of imagery and information surging through the crystal, and I’m lost in it for a moment, Omniglot drawing me into a mesmerizing haze of profanity and awfulness; if I had at any point forgotten that a malign spirit still dwells in the metaphysical space between me and the structured magics of this world, I’d have gotten a startling reminder. I lose substantially more time than I care to admit staring at the imprecations, pointed reminders of my flaws, and plays on my insecurities, until a hand on my shoulder pulls me out of my daze.

“Adam.” Amber’s voice is soft, insistent. “Adam, what is it? Talk to me?”

I open my mouth to talk, but nothing comes out. I’ve broken my staring contest with the pylon’s crystal surface, at least, and I sit down heavily, pulling Amber down behind me. She makes a surprised sound, but settles herself obediently - and stars in the deep, do I hate that that’s the word that comes to mind - behind me. I want to say so many things and nothing at all; I want to push her away, show her just how much she’d be better off without me, her and Zidanya both, and at the same time I want to say whatever it takes to make sure they never leave.

“I killed a ghost a little while back,” I say instead, almost dreamily. I’m not particularly conscious of the mechanical details involved; it’s a stranger’s voice, a stranger’s body, but at least I’m still in control of the words. “Beat it in a contest of riddles, but it wouldn’t admit defeat; said that my riddle was nonsense, even though it couldn’t muster a real objection to the answer. So I kill it, because what am I going to do, let it cheat?” I let my head loll left and right, stretching out the kink in my neck that had somehow developed, and that serves to bring me back at least a little bit to an awareness of my body. “Anyway, so I kill this piece of shit dybbuck. And then? It curses me.

“Now it’s living service-obligation-free somewhere in the spiritual, metaphysical space adjoining my head, I guess. So I look at a pylon, and instead of the opportunity to tier up from my Outsider class, it’s just… it, ranting at me about how awful I am and how awful my existence is to everyone around me. And it’s pretty good at getting under my skin, gotta say.”

“Sacrilege,” Amber mutters, and that sets me off giggling for no reason that I can concretely identify. There’s a hysterical edge to the giggling, driven by the euphoric crash of stress flooding out of my system as much as by what I read in that crystal, and she does exactly the right thing; she holds me, laughing quietly with me, until I settle down.

About a minute after I go quiet, there’s a quiet voice to the side, the same one I’d accidentally ignored earlier. “Magelord.”

“Sara.” I turn to face her. I can’t see much of her face, between the scarfs and the hood, and her body language is entirely shrouded by her voluminous robes, but that’s fine. It’s not like I’d be able to understand much of her body language anyway; just not my specialty. “I apologize for not waiting to hear whatever it was you had to say. You have my attention.”

She’s silent for a bit, brows furrowed. I hear murmurs in the background, the others talking amongst themselves, but nobody’s interrupting, and I give Sara the time she seems to need. “What are your plans?” The words come out in a rush, like a dam breaching, and I blink at her in confusion. “In the medium and long term. Presumably your short-term goals are your survival and departure in good order from this sinister fane.”

“I… um.” I physically force myself to stop blinking in surprise. “If by sinister fane you mean this ill-mannered Temple, yeah, us all getting out of here alive is absolutely the objective for now. After that? What is my…” My mouth closes, and I take a deep breath in, letting it out slowly. “What is my medium-term goal? That's a good question.”

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“His lordship,” Amber says with a tone that would dessicate a reservoir, “may not have had the opportunity to develop such a plan.”

“Very well.” Sara sits down, surprising me. She’s a bare few centimeters away from me, and I can see the clenching and unclenching of her hands. “Do so now, please, and inform me.”

My eyebrows go up high enough to make my eyes ache, but as far as I can tell she’s serious, and I shift gears to follow. “You’re a lot more talkative now than you were a few moments ago.”

“I choose my words, and my time to speak. You are not the first I’ve had the need to explain this to, but be assured, I prefer silence, solitude, and study to any ribaldry or conversation.” I see her eyes shift to the side. “The Druid is an acceptable conversational partner, as was my fellow thrall, when the Lord Mayor and his entourage were not present to engage in mockery.”

“What? Ye can’t be—”

Rei’s voice cuts off, and I glance over to see Knives with a hand on the Lord Mayor’s shoulder. Their fingers flicker back and forth in some sort of structured sign language that Omniglot won’t translate, which causes me a moment of frustration before I realize how petty I’m being.

“Magelord.” Zidanya squats next to me, hand on my shoulder. “In truth, she is not wrong in the asking, and I share… curiosity, and more, at the answer.”

I rub my face. “I honestly think that the medium term goal is probably going to look something like settle down and relax for at least, oh, three to six months.” I grimace, leaning my body back into Amber. “I want to learn to cook for a small group. I want to learn runes, and how they came to be, and why the System exists. I want to find a way to reform wherever I wind up settling so that slavery doesn’t just not exist, it couldn’t possibly exist; I want to find whoever is maintaining the Hytherian caste system and work with them to find a better way to structure their society.

“I come from another world. Sara, Zidanya, Amber, I don’t think any of you really understand how strange everything here is to me. I want to taste every herb and spice grown in all of Cador, I am absolutely certain I’m going to revolutionize your concept of mathematics, and somewhere in the midsts of that I want to make space for my companions to build lives either with me, adjacent to me, or away from me as they so choose, and sever the ties that enforce their bonds to me.

“But before I do any of that, I’m going to want to spend at least three, maybe six months without having to even think about violence or conflict, because I am glutted beyond my capacity and we’re not even through with the Temple.” I blink a few times, and realize that I’m leaning forward, hands squeezing my thighs as though for emphasis. “I guess,” I say slowly, relaxing backwards, “some of those are medium term goals, and some of them are short term goals.”

Sara nods slowly, and we sit in the quiet for a while. I’m not in any hurry, and she’s still sitting there looking at me, so I wait for her, eyes closed. “What,” she says eventually, drawing me out of my Amber’s-hands-in-my-hair daze, “was the riddle which the wraith took such offense to?”

“Oh, that.” I fight down a laugh, feeling like I should be more surprised than I am. “So, there are some details that make it less clear, but I’ll leave them off, since they’re just the flavoring on the base. It’s pretty simple: you’ve got a choice of three boxes. Behind one of them is victory, behind the other two defeat; they’re set before you make any choice. You pick a box, and a different box is revealed to have contained defeat all along. Do you switch to the third box?”

There’s a pause. “Indisputably.” Sara’s voice is firm. “Your probability of victory rises as a result.”

“Goatshit!” Rei has drifted over; actually, they’ve all drifted over. “Of course you don’t.”

I start laughing, mostly at the look of profound offense on Sara’s face. “This is why it’s such a—”

“This,” she interrupts with an absolute, calm firmness, “is why I’m leaving your party for the Magelord’s. I am informed that the appropriate phrase is ‘It has been a pleasure, Lord Mayor’.”

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