Chapter 116: Chapter One Hundred and Thirteen: Motivating the Hero’s Journey Aftermath

The being inhabiting her childhood friend’s body gave her an anguished look.

 

“I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I am your friend,” he said. “I want to help you.”

 

“No, you’re not my friend,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re not the boy I grew up with.”

 

All the times he had seemed so alien to her. When he hadn’t understood anything about how the world worked. The total shift in personality when he’d been Chosen. How had she missed it?

 

No, really, how had she missed the fact that her best friend had been replaced with a totally different person? It was like whenever she’d gone up against the Golden Prophecy’s wishes, and it had pulled her back into line. It had taken the discovery that he’d lied about the fate of her village for her to even be able to question his true nature.

 

“Oh,” the creature said, “that. Yeah.”

 

“The reason I can’t remember his name,” she asked softly, “is because you erased it, isn't it? What are you? Are you a Dev?”

 

“No,” the entity said sadly. “I’m… something different. I don’t have their abilities. But I am from the same place as them.”

 

He wasn’t her friend. This entire time, she’d been doing everything she could to be the very best childhood friend so she could guide him in fulfilling the Golden Prophecy, only for her friend to be replaced the second his destiny was manifested.

 

Unless that was his destiny. No. They wouldn’t do that. The Devs, and the people from their world, were strange, and alien, but they weren’t Evil.

 

“My friend,” she said, “give him back.”

 

“I can’t,” was the reply.

 

“What do you mean you can’t! You’re possessing him, like the Devs do, so just, I don’t know, unpossess him! Ruth and Warwick are dead, take their bodies!”

 

The instant the words left her mouth she felt sick. Ruth and Warwick were dead. People she had grown up with were in that field of death before her, and she was arguing with a thing capable of puppeting their corpses around.

 

“That won’t do any good,” the thing said. He sounded close to tears. “Look, I’m sorry, but the three of them… this was what was supposed to happen to whichever one was selected. I don’t know what duplicating them would do, but I can guarantee it will destablise everything. And there’s no way any of the Devs would agree to add such an insane wild card at this point. It could crash everything.”

 

She couldn’t think. She couldn’t form any theories, or try to solve this cruel puzzle. Instead she was just locked up, staring straight ahead at the charred remains of everything she had ever known and loved.

 

“What was his name?” was all she could manage.

 

“Felix,” he said quietly. “He was called Felix.”

 

She didn’t know how to feel. The name meant nothing to her. She’d thought she would have some kind of connection to it, but instead it was just another name. Even that had been taken from her.

 

“So I suppose I can keep calling you the Chosen One,” she said, struggling to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Given Felix wasn’t ever actually Chosen.”

 

“I’m sorry,” the Chosen One said, making a hopeless little gesture with his hands. And, although he wasn’t her friend, her heart still ached. “But, even though it might not mean anything, I do consider you a friend. I care about you, and the others, and I really do want you all to be happy. You, especially.”

 

“Happy,” Qube said, like she’d never heard the word before. She could feel her heart thrumming in her ears. “I’ll be happy when my loved ones are revived.” She stopped, an idea striking her.

 

As if in a dream she stood, and started walking into the wreckage of her hometown. The smell was terrible, but she pushed it to the back of her mind. She was a Healer. It was time for her to fix things.

 

“What are you doing?” the Chosen One, alarmed, sprang to his feet and followed her. “Hey, be careful!” 

 

Letting a lifetime of muscle memory guide her, she wandered to the front of Alderman’s house. It looked like it had taken a direct blast from the Evil Emperor, or one of his shadow troops, but she could see what looked like some blackened bones peeking out from the debris.

 

“You want me to be happy?” she whispered to the Chosen One. “Help me put them back together.” Making her meaning clear, she started moving debris, trying to get to Alderman’s body. Given the state of it, she wasn’t even sure it was Alderman, but that didn’t matter.

 

“Hey,” the Chosen One said, grabbing her arm. “No, trust me, you don’t want this.”

 

Something inside of Qube snapped.

 

“You don’t know what I want!” Qube turned and yanked her arm free, nearly screaming in the Chosen One’s face. “You don’t know me! You want me to trust you? You, who puppet my best friend’s corpse? You want me to trust you? Help me [Revive] each and every one of my loved ones because I want my village back.”

 

She was panting, trying to fight back tears that threatened to choke her. She had to keep it together. She wasn’t about to let this-this traitor see her cry.

 

“Look,” the Chosen One said with such gentleness that she wanted to claw his eyes out. “That Evil Emperor guy said that you can’t revive people without having all their… bits, right?”

 

Qube narrowed her eyes at him, making her vision swim. Whom had the Evil Emperor been talking about when he’d made that remark? Had he been talking about the villagers, but in such a way that Qube didn’t understand? Her memories of that time were fuzzy.

 

“Does it really look like anyone here has all their … bits… remaining?” the Chosen One asked her.

 

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“I have to try,” Qube said stubbornly, refusing to acknowledge the truth of his statement. She couldn’t think about the tableau around her. If she did, she would break. “They’re my people.”

 

“They won’t come back as your people,” the Chosen One said softly, his hand still on her arm. She shook it off angrily.

 

“I can help them. I can bring them back,” she said, trembling. “I’m the village Healer. I’ve become more powerful. This is what I do.”

 

The Chosen One stepped closer to her.

 

“Please,” he said. “Don’t do this. I don’t know how, exactly, they’ll come back, but I know that they won’t come back right. Best case scenario: just the bits we can see start walking around and talking, making some kind of skeleton village, worst case… I don’t even know what it would be. They come back and they can feel the pain and then everything crashes. And you’ll have to see them like that.” 

 

“That sounds like something you’d enjoy,” she said with as much venom as she could. Her voice wobbled slightly. “You like breaking things.”

 

The Chosen One gave a small smile.

 

“To be honest, if it weren’t for the connection to you, yeah, that would be interesting to see. And probably horrifyingly hilarious.”

 

How could she ever have thought that such a monster was her sweet, slightly stupid, perfectly dull childhood friend?

 

But then he wasn’t a monster, was he? He was the personification of Good. He was the Saviour of All Human and Human-Adjacent Beings. But he also wasn’t human, himself. He was from a higher level of existence, where the very creators of this world dwelt, and to them lives such as hers must seem cheap, and small.

“But I know it would hurt you. And there’s the potential that you would remember it, even if I … used a Save Point. And I don’t want you to be hurt like that.”

 

She turned his words over in her mind.

 

The Chosen One was doing something extremely dangerous. He was making sense. Healing magic could fix what was there, but even it had limits. It was well known that if you removed core parts of a person, it couldn’t be [Heal]ed back. After all, that’s why you couldn’t [Heal] someone who’d been chopped into lots of little bits, even if they were technically still alive. It had to have a base structure to cling to.

 

Same with [Revive]. If you took away the head of a corpse, or destroyed all their flesh, it was more than normal magic could repair. In some of the stories told to Qube growing up there had been an old mentor character who had access to a spell powerful enough to bring someone back just from a memory (and even they tended to die in the casting of such a spell), but even in the context of fiction it had seemed far-fetched.

 

Qube looked around the village, scanning the wreckage.

 

“There might be one person who isn’t too badly damaged,” she said, without any faith in her own words. The destruction had been too thorough. The Evil Emperor, and the Dark Devs acting through him, had been too determined to send the other side a message.

 

“I promise you, I will make the Devs fix this,” the Chosen One said, reaching a hand out to touch her shoulder. She flinched away. He dropped his hand. “I can’t do it yet. But I will. I swear to you.”

 

Strangely enough, she believed him. He may have concealed the truth about who he was, and the fate of her hometown, but she had still learned how to read his face. He meant it.

 

“I can’t think,” she said, swallowing hard. “I’m sorry, I just can’t think.”

 

She was Qube, the Childhood Companion to a man who no longer existed, from a village that had been wiped off the map. The Golden Prophecy that had dictated her entire life had been made by the people who had placed a being from another world in the body of her friend, and concealed it.

 

She was a guiding light and she was utterly, utterly lost.

 

But she looked into a face, at once so familiar and foreign, and saw genuine pain reflected there. She had spent months travelling with this man, and, even though he wasn’t who she had thought, he was still there. And he cared. And she was so very, very lonely, scared and lost. Suddenly, tears welled up, and she started uncontrollably sobbing. The Chosen One wrapped her up in his arms, and held her as she wept.

 

“Don’t apologise,” he said, his voice rough. “You have nothing to apologise for.”

 

She wanted to scream. She wanted to punch him, destroy all this rubble around her, and burn down the Evil Emperor’s castle. She wanted to storm into the Dev’s world, and force them to kneel before her and apologise. She wanted to make everything right, and bring everyone back, and keep everyone safe. Instead, she could only cry.

 

She was unable to help those most important to her when they needed her most. And that hurt more than anything else.

 

Finally, though, the storm of tears tapered off, and she was left, wrung out, supported only by the Chosen One. Her feelings were still in a tangled mess, and she didn’t know what this meant, or where they stood, but she knew they had to move forward.

 

They had a world to save.

 

“This doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you,” she said weakly. “Or that I’m going to trust you again immediately.”

 

“I know,” he said into her hair.

 

“We’re going to save the kingdom,” she said, only standing because he was holding her upright. “And then we’re going to go to the Devs and make them make this right.”

 

“Of course,” he agreed, with the ghost of a laugh.

 

“And you’re going to tell the others the truth. And let us be in charge of the next Temple.”

 

“Wait, what?”

 

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