Chapter 13: 11 – Kanbu

A wholly unpleasant grimace spread across Henry’s face as he stared down the barrel of the gun. It was an expression of… Pain. Pain and consideration. He raised the glass to his lips, downed its contents, quietly put it back down on the counter, got up from his seat, and stumbled out without so much as another word. Just that horrible grin gripping his face all along.

The door clicked shut behind him and Kanbu let out a heavy sigh, lowering his gun and putting it back under the counter. 

“Terribly sorry about that...” grumbled the chef as he returned to his work, lifting a pot lid with one hand while he fished up pierogi with a pair of tongs. He thoroughly dunked them in some sort of breading, then arranged them in cones of wax paper. Handing them over, the old man looked the two women over. His old eyes drifted to Zel’s stump, to her face, then to Zef and to her gun. 

Zef went to fish around in her pocket with the intention to pay using the very coins she’d used in the dungeon, but Zel had already pulled her Tablet and willed it to pull a silver and a copper gelt out of Fog Storage. Kanbu picked up the silver coin and, ambling over to the register, replied to a sentence that had yet to be said, “Keep the change, just come back someday. Least I could do after that nuisance.”

There issued mechanical click-clacking, the jingling of coins, then a small chime. The old chef looked over to them again just as they were getting up to leave with their food. 

“...You two the monster-killer sort?” asked the old man curiously. There was no uncertainty in his voice, just a desire to confirm his assumption.

A simple nod of affirmation from Zel as she took the first bite. The old man smiled, his eyes drifting to one of the pictures on the wall. The breading was sweet and caramelized, a thin crust that gave way to soft dough, which in turn was followed by the creamy sweetness of the custard. To say it was delicious after days of rations and elixirs would be an understatement.

“Good, good,” he said. “We need as many like you as we can get these days. What a mess this new age is…”

He looked back to them and said, “Tell you what, I’ll give you a discount whenever you come around. Enjoy the pierogi.”

There was no need to ask why, as he read their questioning looks and answered the question he thought they wanted to ask.

“That was me right there, some thirty years back,” nodded the old man towards the picture he’d looked at before. “Just think of it as me paying it forward to the next generation.”

It was a charcoal rendering that depicted a masculine figure in elaborately-decorated plate armor, draped with the fur of some bizarre beast, posing with an equally elaborate halberd. They had to look closer, but it was there - a far younger version of Kanbu’s face could be seen behind the lifted-up visor. Strangely, everything around him was rubbed out. 

“Things were different back then, y’know. None of that azo-whatever stuff,” the old man kept reminiscing. “We’d just lift boulders and run all day in full plate until we could keep up with the biggest bastard in the guild and then go hunting for wyverns. Some folks hauled swords as heavy as themselves and just let the weapon’s weight do the work.”

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Zef furrowed her brow in confusion and swallowed a bite, blurting out, “...Wyverns have been extinct for over a century, though.” 

“Is that so? Maybe we mistook some other monsters for them, then,” chuckled the cook with a knowing glint in his eye. “Run along now, I’ll be closing for lunch break soon.”

And so they did, briefly lingering on that strange old man before they had to refocus on the here and now. 

---

Kanbu was old. This new technology, this volatile political landscape, all this mess surrounding completely pointless things. It would all come to pass, and he would still be here - it had been so before, and it would be thus again. At least, he hoped as such.

Kanbu was old. He’d shed his arms a lifetime ago, accepting his place as the relic of a bygone era just as his peers had done. 

Unlike them, he couldn’t let go entirely. All the others just… Let go and happily settled into their mundane lives, hiding away evidence of who they once were. He couldn’t. Instead, he made partial copies of old quartz slip pict-captures and put them up in full view of his customers.

This time, though - this was the first time he’d explicitly pointed it out to someone. Three doors separated his establishment from his personal living quarters. 

Only one of these doors was visible to the naked eye, and only two could be passed through by anyone other than Kanbu himself. 

The third was walked the old way, the way which the new world didn’t remember, even if Kanbu didn’t like crossing the threshold himself. 

“I tire of this flesh…” he murmured an invocation, briefly drifting from this world and into the next. It grew easier to go there and harder to return the more he allowed his mortal coil to decay. 

The Sea of Fog had grown turbulent and unpleasant to traverse in recent weeks. He soon reached his destination - marked by a faint circle on the endless ocean’s surface that only he could see - and invoked once more to return to the material realm, “...yet I reject eternity.”

In this isolated chamber without doors or windows he had peace. It didn’t even have physical vents - he’d instead gone through the years-long effort of creating a permanent Aer conduit from here to a remote mountaintop. The walls were plastered with memories layered over innumerable protective seals that warded against all forms of scrying, and were themselves layered over the rune-carved bedrock that made up the chamber's walls. Indeed, this void had been created with a spatial transposition ritual - Kanbu still remembered the precise location of the boulder whose size and shape matched that of this place. The furniture was older than most of the buildings in Willowdale.

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