Chapter 3: Chapter 3 – Civilization, Ever In The Distance

I started itching between the second and third steps.

It wasn’t much of an itch, but I’d been rather enjoying the total lack of pain and discomfort. It was a distinct contrast to my standard aches and pains, what with joints that could only be described as problematic and both tendons and ligaments that were weaker and less tightly coupled than they were supposed to be. Still, startling as it was to get kicked in the metaphorical teeth the moment I stepped out of the trees’ shade, I’d probably have noticed it regardless. Maybe not quite as quickly, but by the tenth slow step, I’d taken five breaths, and I was starting to feel the tiniest bit of itching up in my nose.

It was… alarming. I had been noticeably allergic to my parents’ house, something that my father had used as a way to needle me for the brief period in my adult life when that was a capability I permitted him. The itch was different from what I would have expected if I’d walked into their—carpeted, astonishingly—kitchen, but it wasn’t completely different.

If it held true to form, in about fifteen minutes, I was going to feel like my eyes were itching on the inside and I was going to have a definite headache. And given the undercurrent of burning that I was feeling under the itch, true to form was going to be wildly optimistic.

I took a deep breath—no reason not to, it wasn’t like shallower breaths were going to save me—and sighed, looking out into the endless-seeming fields of grass. On the horizon ahead of me, there was a vague blur rising out of the fields; the town, probably, and if it had any kind of wall, that would explain the sort of uniformity of appearance it has from this distance.

From this distance? Well. I couldn’t exactly assume that the planet I was on had the same curvature as the Earth, but if I assumed both that and that I was looking at a palisade that was in the vicinity of ten feet, I was about three miles away. Not a particularly comfortable distance to traverse feeling like I was, much less how I would be feeling shortly, but far from impossible.

Besides, I had been bid by a god, the god who’d dropped me somewhere with my joints all fixed up. No sense in getting all paranoid about whether I should take the obvious route at that point.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had wildly underestimated how bad things were going to get, or how rapidly they’d get worse.

I knew, intellectually, that three miles was less than an hour’s easy walk, but before long I had lost all sense of time. To distract myself from the burning itch that was spreading and intensifying across every inch of my skin, with the miraculous exception of my feet, I wiped my eyes clear of rheum over and over again, casting my eye around the grasslands. I saw some astonishingly brilliantly-colored birds gliding on thermals above me, which was nice enough to keep me distracted for minutes, trying to figure out what was so different about the shape of their wings and whether I could tell anything else about them.

Mostly, I pushed myself as hard as I could to keep my walk from turning into a trudge, to occasionally even stride for a few moments before everything hurt too much.

Around the time when I was starting to lose that fight, when my trudge was starting to slow into more of a lurch, I heard—or maybe felt—a skirling, harmonized piping sound, something high and playful over a drone. It was like someone had combined a pan flute and a bagpipe, and something about it sunk into my brain and let my limbs move more freely. The pain dimmed, and my eyes and sinuses cleared, and I looked in grateful interest over towards where it felt like the music was coming from.

A goatherd, or possibly a shepherd. They waved at me, sitting, of all things, sidesaddle on what looked like a particularly shaggy-fronted pony, pan pipes in their hands. There was, yes, a pouch of some sort on the near side of the pipes, so it was apparently literally a combination of bagpipes and pan pipes, which meant that the kid—definitely kid, looking like maybe nine or ten years old—hadn’t been playing until we got close to each other.

I waved back, because I’ve never been the type to be rude or anything, even if the wind on my hand and arm when I gestured felt like knives.

The animals moved at a slow amble, grazing their way through. I caught glimpses of a few dogs, or what I thought were probably dogs, chivvying stragglers along; they were nigh-invisible in the grass, calling out in barks and showing themselves in jumps. One of them was particularly hard to spot, given that the dog in question didn’t seem to be physical so much as a sometimes-coalesced, sometimes-disparate cloud of angles and lines; it said something about how desperate I was to get to my destination and hopefully get the itching taken care of that I just didn’t care.

Even after I lost sight of the kid on the other side of a small hill, I could still hear the pipes. Their music sank into my muscles and tendons, into my joints and ligaments, into my skin and mucous membranes and eyes. It was like I had a shield, a tenuous and porous shield but a shield nonetheless, against the depredations of whatever was attacking me, and it lets me pick the pace back up to something more reasonable. Three, maybe four miles per hour; the pace I’d intended to keep up, and had fallen off of disappointingly quickly.

One foot in front of the other, maintaining as much momentum as I could, I made it to the gates.

It wasn’t anything like a commotion. There had been a commotion; I’d heard shouting and people calling out to me in what sounded like two different languages, one full of sibilants and front-of-the-mouth vowels and another in gutturals and clicks, neither of which I recognized in the slightest. But by the time I got to the village, body back to being on fire despite whatever ameliorative effect the music was having, everything was orderly and quiet, with someone who was clearly a guard beckoning for me to follow.

Score one for, if not the universality of some gestures, then some degree of parallel evolution. Probably.

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I tried to pay attention to the guard and to where I was going, but my attention wound up just cycling between all of the different pains I was being swamped by, especially since the music was gone. I was three rooms and one full cycle of pain-introspection in, despondently noting to myself that my feet had now finally joined the pyre-party, when my eyes belatedly registered that the guard had stopped.

There was a circle of blue squiggly rune-like things on the ground, with a tall cylinder of that same shade of blue projected up from the stone, and at a gesture, I stepped into it.

I grunted inelegantly in relief, with a sound more suitable to being punched than anything else. It wasn’t exactly freedom from pain, but the pain diminished, and my ability to think through and around it increased at the same time.

“[Lesser Communication].”

The words cut off my train of thought before my brain had so much as worked through the relief of not being in quite as much pain. It was a woman saying it, but the words had weight, weight like I had heard when Artemis commanded me to approach her a lifetime ago, or alternatively, some hours ago. She sagged into a chair—okay, there’s a chair there—and the man whose wrist her hand was on straightened, facing me across the light-blue haze of the magic cylinder. He had a sheaf of papers in his hands, and he glanced down at them one last time in the kind of practiced gesture that I recognized from being about to give a canned but inadequately practiced spiel.

“Please be aware that the Skill being used to communicate,” he began, startling me by speaking in perfect English, “permits precisely one sentence, and that sentence is being used to provide you with medical and integrative information, in the former case so that you may be informed before we act and in the latter so that you may be informed and either grant or not grant consent, and the information is as follows: we will be momentarily casting a spell of biological adaptation, without which you will be dead due, among other things—” I felt my lungs burning sympathetically, but he somehow showed no sign of being out of breath. “—to incompatibilities between your home and this world, and which requires your awareness rather than your consent; and you have the option of a spell of integration, which will supplant your known extra-planar languages as well as providing you with access to the empowerment of the Stolen Flame, which you may signal the acceptance of by ringing the bell on my desk before leaving the room and which I personally strongly recommend. [Biological Adaptation].”

It took me a long, timeless moment to realize what had just happened, that he’d done another one of those spells that echoed in that same command voice. It might have taken minutes; I spent them vomiting my guts out into a suspiciously convenient bucket, a bucket that slowly glowed brighter and brighter blue as I filled it, until there was nothing coming up anymore.

A wash of frigidity swept through me and the stink, the copious former contents of my stomach, and what felt like a few layers of skin up through my throat and mouth disappeared, along with the urge to, or so it felt, voluminously piss my intestines out my ass.

I quite literally collapsed with relief.

The bucket was a dull steel-gray when I managed to get up again, and the light blue cylinder around me was gone. So was the itching and the burning, and after an equally-suspicious convenient cloth was applied to my eyes and nose—in that order, always in that order—I felt at least a quarter human again.

The room was simple, and I could actually look around and pay attention to it now, study it for what it implied. Hardwood floor, not shiny but not overly scratched up; wood-and-plaster walls, with corkboards overflowing with paper covered in a dense, flowing script. There were a couple of armor stands with what looked like multiple layers of a bunch of stuff and a weapon stand with a couple of maces, some strips of cloth, a couple of satchels, and some shields; they probably would have told me a lot about how they fought, if I knew anything about pre-modern warfare. Or warfare at all, really, other than what I’d picked up from video games.

Which wasn’t much, given that Celeste was about as historical as Fallout: New Vegas.

I didn’t have to think about my decision all that much; I wouldn’t have been sent here if I weren’t supposed to take the offer. I walked over to the desk, noting that where the man was sitting was the little desk in front, not the big desk back in the corner where the woman was, barking my shin on the bucket and wincing as I passed it.

He had the bell out, obviously having shifted some paperwork to make space for it while he worked on something with intent focus, pencil—unmistakably a pencil—scratching away. He paused in his writing to grab a knife, whittling off a few shavings, and then noticed me standing at the desk.

He cocked an eyebrow, and, smiling, I hit the little lever on the side of the bell. It chimed, and he nodded in obvious contentment, smiling back at me. He called something out to the woman in back in yet another language, neither the sibilant one nor the guttural one but rather one that sounded like he had a mouth full of potatoes, and she looked up from her own writing and beamed at me.

“[System Integration: Kingdom of Shem, Duchy of Aluf, Dungeon Village of Kibosh],” she intoned without any preamble, and my world went black.

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