FIFTY-ONE: Take Me Somewhere Better

“Kibby, I’m so sorry,” Alden said, staring down into her wide brown eyes. “I told you it might not work. Don’t worry. I have a lot of other plans.”

She was frozen in place, waiting for a magic Alden apparently couldn’t produce.

“Kibby—”

“Your Artonan is vastly improved.”

It was Alden’s turn to freeze.

It definitely wasn’t Kibby. She was still sitting on the floor by his chair, unblinking. And that high, strange speech with the undertone of breaking glass…

He slowly turned in the direction the voice had come from and saw a familiar gray alien with black eyes staring right at him.

“Gorgon,” he breathed.

And then, a moment later, he was out of his chair and—

“We’re hugging? That’s new.”

“Gorgon!” shouted Alden. “Are you here?! Are you real?”

“I am real,” he said, squirming away from Alden, who had to force himself to let go. “But I am only here, if by here you mean ‘projected across dimensions into Alden’s mind through an uncontrollable urge to provide guidance to my spiritual progeny.’ Hello. I am shocked you are still alive.”

“I am so happy to see you,” Alden gasped. “Even if it’s just in my head. I—”

Gorgon held up a hand. “Wait. Time is extremely limited. This feature of myself isn’t one I am accustomed to. It’s supposed to be triggered in my death cave shortly after you have feasted on my corpse. ”

“What?”

The alien was leaning around Alden to examine the kitchen with interest. “I was never a fan of the life sacrifice tradition, so I skipped it. I’m much older and more powerful than I should be. I thought I could probably get away with transferring some of the benefits of my inheritance to you without the bother of dying and being eaten. Clearly, I was…more successful than I intended.”

He was staring at Kibby.

“You can talk without restrictions,” Alden said. He was still so busy processing his shock at the fact that he was speaking to Gorgon at all, he was surprised he’d even realized.

Gorgon smiled at his wrists. “Yes. No bindings in the mind space. It’s been decades. I’d like to spend the next few minutes relishing in even this false freedom, but wasting the entirety of your first Rite for that seems too blasphemous. Even for me…even if you’ve chosen to perform it for an Artonan.”

“This is Kibby,” Alden said in a rush. “I want to protect her.”

“I can tell. Things like that are very obvious in this place if you know what you’re doing. Come here quickly.”

He walked over to Kibby and crouched down. Alden followed and knelt beside him. After staring into the little girl’s eyes for a moment, Gorgon said, “This is going to be a disappointing first experience for you. I’m not what you think. And this doesn’t work at all like you’re hoping it will.”

“I wanted to share whatever you did to me with her. It made me…I think it made my authority less susceptible to corruption?”

“It did. But you can’t pass it on,” Gorgon said in a matter of fact voice. “You’re too young. Too weak. Too alive. You don’t initiate that process in this way. Drinking the successor’s blood is the second to last step in the inheritance, not the first. And you’re carrying an altered version of the gift anyway. You’re incomplete.”

He looked back at Kibby. “She’s exhausted,” he noted, running a gray finger idly over the demon-damaged sleeve of the lab coat. “It’s due to a chaos storm?”

“We’re trapped on Moon Thegund.”

“More like a gentle chaos breeze then. But I’m surprised you somehow ended up in one. Though I am loath to admit it, most wizards wouldn’t throw inexperienced humans, B-ranks, or Rabbits into such an environment. It’s too wasteful. You have bad luck.”

He examined Alden’s face and then made an annoyed click with his forked tongue. “Never mind. You volunteered.”

“I didn’t know exactly what—”

“You’re frustrating. Be quiet and learn an ancient duty that has no place in today’s universe.”

As soon as he said that, Alden became focused in a completely unfamiliar way. The room around them blurred into random colors so that he couldn’t make out any of the details save for himself, Kibby, and Gorgon.

“My people practiced magic, though not in a form you would be familiar with,” said Gorgon, pacing around Kibby and tilting his head from side to side as if he were trying to examine her from different angles. “Humanity would see us as primitive in almost every way. But I think our understanding of life was so different that it’s difficult to make a real comparison. For us, power was a thing that came only through sacrifice.”

He stopped walking and stared at Alden.

“A few among us were chosen to measure and spend souls in order to aid them in the fulfillment of their true will,” he said. “That is how my teacher described it to me. And I feel like I should describe it to you in that way first. It was a position of great meaning to my kind, and it was one that I always looked down on. And now that I am alone, I wish I had at least pretended not to.”

Alden didn’t know what the respectful thing to say was, so he just nodded.

“Anyway, in more technical terms the Rite you just triggered by drinking the girl’s blood allows us to intermediate between a person and their own magical potential. Most of my people could not control the power they held, so those like me enabled them to use it. They came to us, we read their needs and desires, and gave them what they wanted if it was possible and fell within our very strict notions of what constituted a proper miracle. Basically, I was the village wishing well.”

That was not at all what Alden had been expecting. “So…you granted wishes. Just like that?”

“Not that simple. It required a lot of training. Come look into the girl’s eyes and see. If you can see. I’m not entirely sure what I transferred to you. Or how it’s been modified by the fact that you’re not the right species.”

“You don’t know what you did to me?” Alden said, surprised.

“I know what I meant to do. But you wouldn’t even have noticed I’d enhanced you if it had gone exactly as I intended.”

Alden had more questions, but Kibby came first. “I just have to stare into her eyes?”

He leaned forward and peered into them.

“Nothing’s happening.”

“Here,” said Gorgon. “Let me give you a push.”

All of the sudden, Alden was immersed in a sea of deep emotions and desperate wants that didn’t belong to him.

He was so scared. He missed them. The chaos kept trying to take him away from himself. He was tired. He didn’t want to die. He missed them so much, and it was his fault that they were gone. The guilt was crushing. He wanted them back. He’d give anything to have them back. Anything.

Anything.

“That kind of desire is common,” Gorgon’s voice said from a long way away. “Nobody has enough strength to raise the long-dead, though. Focus on the feeling for a moment. It will help you both to move past it.”

Alden couldn’t quit focusing on it.

Gorgon’s voice had helped him to separate himself enough from the yearning to finally realize that no part of it was his; it was entirely Kibby’s longing to have her father and sister back. But he was still drawn to the overwhelming power of the emotion.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

He examined it. Closer. Closer.

As if he’d finally given it permission to do what it had always wanted, the gremlin in Alden’s brain took over.

Something was weighed just beyond the limits of his understanding. Some part of him looked even deeper.

No, it said firmly. Not that.

There was not enough of Kibby to pay for that. She would end. It was fine for her to end, but it was unacceptable for the end to buy her nothing in return. Spending her in this way would create a perpetual unevenness. It was not allowed.