I woke up covered from head to toe in piles upon piles of ash. By the gods, if my lungs hadn't ceased to work by then, I would have woken up coughing. The fact that I didn't was the second thing I noticed. The first was the numbness.
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Right. A sai'mul is supposed to have absolutely no functioning nerves. We can't feel pain, we can't feel heat or cold and we can't feel the touch of another person. When I sat up, I saw a sword laying on the ground with a gold-plated scabbard. It didn't belong to me, so I figured that it might have been lost by the templars during the purge. When I picked it up, I couldn't feel it in my hands. All I felt was a strong sense of relief and euphoria, as if I had been liberated from something. Everything I had ever known in life was gone and so was my attachment to it all.
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That's a misconception that the living love to perpetuate. Sai'mul are not emotionless beings. Our brains may not produce any of the chemicals that are associated with emotions, but we also don't need food to stay on our feet. Our bodies don't make sense to anyone because no one has bothered to study us until recently. The only reason most of us appear to be so stoic is the fact that our existence is so depressing. When your entire life is a consciousness without half of what's actually good about being alive and you are surrounded by well-meaning mortals who only want you to sail off to a desolate island in the middle of the world so they don't have to think about you, you're left with more than a chip on your shoulder.
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That's why they love Salica so much in Midania. Everyone who lives there has had to take so much shit before they even ship off to that lousy place that a lot of us feel more than any mortal ever could. Our emotions are literally the only feeling we have.
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As soon as I started walking around again, everyone I passed by was quick to notice the change. When they did, they were always quick to talk to me with the assumption that I'd be leaving. They'd give me directions to Karatal so I could find a ship, ask if I needed money to help secure passage, or offer words of encouragement for my new life across the sea. They didn't ask me what I wanted, they just seemed to assume that was my fate. It got old quickly. It was beyond frustrating to have my plans made for me by strangers.
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I told them I had no intention of going anywhere. When that didn't work, I began telling them to fuck off. When they began to mistake my frustration for violent hostility, I learned that it was best to simply avoid people altogether. What else was there to do? For the first few months, I kept to myself and stayed on the move. I went everywhere but back to Shaville.
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I ran around for over a year until I met a woman named Saayuko Dreadkiller outside of Ridge. She came from Heron, where she was known for slaying some bandit they used to call the Dread Arrow.
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So, your people have heard of him too? You'd be the first person that I know of that has, to be honest. However much of a threat he was to people, I can only assume he knew better than to trespass on the Desmond clan's territory.
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I'm sorry to hear that. But I didn't mean to imply he wasn't dangerous. Saayuko told me that he was, and as I've come to know her, I know she can be believed. She is a strong woman who had a lot to teach me. Both of us were cast away from society, so we each had some useful tips for each other. For both of us, daily life was a struggle to maintain our freedom from the expectations of society. And we just happened to walk into each others' lives when we needed each other the most.
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Absolutely not. What I had with Sophia was nothing I even cared to replace. Our entire relationship was like a prison I didn't even notice until the bars were torn away. What I had with Saayuko was a friendship founded on respect for each others' strength. I can see why you would think that, though. I can see the page you're looking at in my file. You want to know about what happened in the capitol that year.
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Well, I can't tell you much about what was happening with the Champion of Geos. It didn't take me long to figure out she had won. But I wasn't there to stand for or against the other gods. I was far from caring about which god the mortals prayed to. None of them can hear my voice anyway.
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What drew me to the Gilded Keep happened at around the same time, but was completely unrelated. Saayuko had run to the capitol with some retrieval expert named Mordecai and she had found a way to get a message about him to me. She was sure he was an evil brute and was looking for proof that the man had killed the wife of one of his clients while he was supposed to be rescuing their son from some gang in Karatal. Apparently he was more interested in bedding the mother than doing his job and she told him off for slacking with a fury that could have set his ears ablaze. That was apparently the last mistake she ever made.
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Yes, he was quite the piece of work. He was smarter than he looked as well. Saayuko had worked with him for eight months without finding any hint of what he was up to when his contracts went abandoned. She hit a wall, though, so she pulled me in for some convoluted plan of hers to make him confess. Complex strategies were always her strength.
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I posed as a potential client who was looking to find my family so I could reach out to them before I ship out to Midania. Saayuko kept the other details of the plan to herself, but it seemed to work. I suspect that she had me meet with him because she had him spooked and she needed me to draw him out of hiding so she could tail him in secret. The good news is that the plan worked. Saayuko learned what she was hired to learn at the point of a knife.
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The bad news? Well, Mordecai was eager to give everything up because he had no intention of letting her off. The bastard captured her and was ready to kill her. If I hadn't decided to track her, he would have. As it was, though, he seemed to have pulled it off when I arrived. I didn't know until later that she was still alive. At the time, though. I lost it. I was tired of having everything taken from me. My home. My family. My very breath. It was all gone when I found my new friend and I was furious to have been left with nothing yet again. So, I killed the bastard. I picked up a shield and smashed every bone I could.
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No, I never looked for her body. We tore his house apart in the fight and I needed to get out before it collapsed. By the time I had calmed down, it became clear that I should not be around when the new regime's Royal Army soldiers came to look for me. So, I retreated to the opposite end of the city and waited for news of Saayuko's fate. But it never came.
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