Chapter 82: 82 – History and Fables

“Pretty sure it’s a holdover from the first pattern, when these used to have full knuckle dusters,” Zef explained with audible uncertainty, making more of an educated guess than anything else. “Good for keeping hold of it while reloading, not much else. Feels heavier than I remember.”

After a short delay, Strolvath couldn’t help himself but begrudgingly add his own knowledge, “There was to be a fancy new rifle that used metal cartridges which would also make use of the ring as an additional locking point, but Blackwall happened and it got shelved.”

Zefaris let out a bitter chuckle, “Makes you wonder if we could’ve won, were it not for Blackwall.”

“Win the war? No way, not without allies. Lose on more favorable terms? Possibly.”

Zelsys didn’t get it - she had no context. The more time went on, the more her cover of having been off in the tropics during the war seemed like a good choice. 

“What’s with the wall anyway?” she asked offhandedly. 

“The Sage’s last act of defiance,” Strolvath said with a chuckle just as bitter as Zef’s. “Encircles the whole country, can’t be flown over, can’t be dug under, you can’t even sail the Sea of Fog to get through it. Only way to get through is to find a dedicated transit point, let the Fog Gate read you, and hope it opens.”

A raised eyebrow and a befuddled question, “Does it just arbitrarily decide who can pass?” 

“Oh, I’m certain there are specific things that make the gates open, but nobody’s figured out what those are,” he responded. The singer reached for his instrument and began idly plucking away at the strings as he spoke.

“It was thought it’d only open for Ikesians, but it wouldn’t let an all-Ikesian band of criminals go through. It opened for our dear Provisional Governor, even for his snot-nosed brat of a son, but wouldn’t let any of the Grekurian brass through. Maybe he figured out how the Dungeons were built and it’s some arcane construct controlling the whole thing.”

“Maybe the Wall itself is a gigantic Dungeon,” Zefaris said, jokingly. 

“Gods, that’s almost as uplifting of a possibility as it is terrifying,” Strol laughed in response. “Y’know the Dungeons were originally built as an elaborate plan to topple the old feudal rulers, right? It worked, though the heroic families that replaced ‘em weren’t much better - good riddance to the fuckers.”

“How old are they? I thought they were ancient,” Zelsys lied.

“By some standards, they are. This one is…” he trailed off, raising a hand as he counted out years in his head. “I believe three-hundred and sixty-something? Hard to tell from public knowledge, and the only surviving records of how Dungeons operate are stuck in vaults locked to the soul signatures of people who died in the war, or even before it.”

 “You know more than I would expect from a soldier,” Zel admitted. He reminded her of Sigmund.

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“I was an intelligence officer,” Strolvath said with pride. “It was my job to know things like this.”

“You mean a spy,” Zefaris chimed in.

“My assignment was actually counter-propaganda, and let me tell you, convincing scared civvies that exposure to gunpowder won’t make them explode really starts to grate on you after a while.”

The conversation naturally trailed off and went silent soon after, as each of the three’s attention was drawn by the environment rather than one another. They each had things to say, questions to ask, that much was true, but the desolation surrounding them far overwhelmed any drive to speak.

This place was calmer than any grave, its silence juxtaposed in time with the carnage whose aftershocks were still carved into the very earth, whose victims still littered the fields. The further across the field they went, the less industrial it became - from the trenches, the artillery, the razorwire of the Ikesian side, the battlefield transformed into craters and the remains of tents.

Craters upon craters upon craters.

The landscape was like the ground had been turned to liquid, stirred to a roiling maelstrom, and then turned solid.

Myriad shells still littered the ground, some unexploded, the only safe path the narrow plank walkway that they trod. Once more into the treeline, once more out of the battlefield, yet it clung to them even as the three continued their journey through the forest. 

The only noise to accompany them was the melancholic ring of Strolvath’s instrument. He began to hum the melody, and soon enough, humming turned to the same buzzing throat-singing he had used to manifest his bizarre sonic attack before. A slow, steady rhythm, the sound of their feet, the percussion. 

Somehow, by some strange technique, Strolvath proceeded to maintain his buzzing tone whilst singing the words to the song in a soft vocal style, as if he had two sets of vocal cords to sing with. Zefaris joined in humming the tune, clearly familiar with it.

“Blood and war, when the world is no more, she's been watching us for centuries with hatred, and with scorn,” he sang, telling of a tale that Zelsys instinctively knew was ancient, older than anyone alive, older than the glimmers of Ikesia or the Sage of Fog. “If you know the slayer’s coming, then you hide or keep on running 'cause she's slain the gods before...”

Strolvath continued to sing his tale of a mythical god-slayer, smoothly transitioning to a song that lamented the deaths of the gods, then to a fire-hearted declaration of man’s independence from guiding deities. A single song stretched into a dozen, a few minutes stretched to more than an hour, and in the span of this single hour, Zelsys gleaned the true reason for why she’d heard people invoke the dead gods, even why the ruler of Pateiria was referred to as the Divine Emperor.

Zelsys couldn’t know how much of what Strolvath’s music said was true, how much was embellishment, and how much was simple falsity, but she felt that the conclusions she arrived at were reasonable enough.

Strolvath’s ongoing performance trailed off into jaunty tunes that largely consisted of creative slurs deriding Pateirians as cat-eaters and locusts in human skin, at which point she allowed herself to mentally check out of the trek until the sun began to set and they reached their next stopping point.

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