Chapter 752: Worth Saving

Messengers rarely touched the ground. It was the reason Marek Nior Vargas had stood out to Jali; he often stood on the ground, walking instead of floating. It had drawn a lot of negative attention, leaving many wondering, as she had, if he was as loyal a messenger as he proclaimed.

Jali had decided to follow his example, the sensation of having her feet settled grounding her both literally and figuratively. It was unusual feeling the weight of her body holding itself up instead of floating with her aura. She suddenly realised why so many messengers lost their composure when grounded in a fight, the sensation being slightly unsettling. In the middle of a combat that was already more difficult than anticipated, it would be enough to throw them off further.

Rather than shrink away from that uneasiness, Jali embraced it as she moved through the gardens. As the gardens changed, so did the textures under her feet, from neat tiles to dirt tracks. Sometimes the change in the gardens came as she walked from one to the next. Other times, the gardens changed themselves, the world shifting with a lurching sensation. Open lawns and topiaries became small huts and bridges winding through bright flowers. A shift later, she was on a narrow dirt path twisting through dense green foliage. The thick canopy left her in false twilight, surrounded by shadows. She quickly discovered that the shadowy foliage was full of sharp, hidden thorns that, at a taste of her blood, started rapidly growing. Forced to hasten her step to leave them behind, she was happy when the world lurched again, leaving her somewhere else.

One garden was a complex network of water channels with drifting waterlilies carrying brightly flowering orchids and lotuses. She thought she glimpsed one in which a rabbit in a top hat was painting a watercolour, but the gardens changed just as she spotted it. It was gone so fast she couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t just her imagination.

She passed red flowers that smelled of blood yet were somehow sweet and enticing, despite the coppery tang. The dissonance seemed to bypass her nose and take place in her mind, as disorienting as everything else. Another garden was set out in strict right angles, the flower beds holding black and white flowers in regimented rows and columns. The flowers had no smell, but Jali had a very strong sense that straying from the path would be extremely bad.

Jali was staring at her reflection in a still pond when the world lurched again. She found herself underground, beside a river streaming past, reflecting the room’s rainbow light. That light came from phosphorescent fungus crowded across the walls and ceiling, glowing with brilliant light that shifted through kaleidoscopic hues.

The ground was too flat for a natural cave, despite it otherwise seeming that way, and a blanket of soft cool moss cushioned her feet. It meant that she didn’t need to watch her step and could instead look around at the cavern’s beauty, lit by the fungal luminescence. She spotted a tunnel leading downstream, and another leading up. An angry voice growled out from the downstream tunnel.

“Bloody gods, Jason, will you ever stop changing things about?”

Jali’s first instinct was to go in the other direction, but on a whim, she moved towards the voice. She entered the tunnel as clanking sounds of metal being tossed around echoed out. Heat radiated from whatever destination awaited her, soon becoming strong enough that even a silver-rank messenger felt uncomfortable. The fungal lights gave way to stones embedded in the walls, also shedding light. She recognised them as nodes of lava-watch granite, a stone that absorbed heat and converted it into light. She had seen them used for illumination in volcano foundries.

As she continued down the tunnel, the clanking grew louder, accompanied by a growled muttering only intelligible in short snatches.

“Where did you put my damn anvil you skinny, ridiculous… oh, you have got to be kidding.”

The tunnel changed from a mostly natural cave to a roughly hewn passage, the floor going from flat and padded with moss to polished smooth. It was hot on Jali’s bare feet but she didn’t float up to relieve herself. She saw an opening ahead, lit by the orange forge light of a smithy. She reached the chamber that, like the tunnel, had rough-cut walls but a polish-smooth floor.

The large room with a smithy, centred around a massive forge fire in the middle that radiated the room’s light and searing heat. There was enough infrastructure for a half-dozen smiths to work at once, from more forges, currently cold, to bellows, tool racks and benches. They were all scattered, and tipped over, with loose tools, ingots and chunks of scrap metal scattered at random. The major absence was an anvil, but the room’s solitary occupant revealed where it had gone.

A leonid in a heavy leather apron was leaned back, hands on hips as he glared at the roof. He seemed unaffected by the heat, despite his thick fur. Jali followed his gaze to spot an anvil affixed to the ceiling. The leonid moved his gaze from the ceiling to her, saying nothing. He just stared, his expression unreadable.

Jali got no read from the leonid’s aura beyond his silver rank. Asano’s kingdom seemed to restrict aura senses to whatever Asano wanted them to see, one of the many things that made the place feel alien. Even to a cosmic traveller like Jali, it was strange and she wondered if all astral kingdoms were like this. This was the only one she’d been in.

The leonid kept staring, saying nothing. Jali looked back, uncertain of what to do. Everything she’d been told her entire life said that when faced with a non-messenger, the only options were to kill or dominate. She didn’t know what she wanted, only that it wasn’t to do either of those.

“You’re the new one,” the leonid said, his voice coming in an unfriendly rumble.

“The new one?” Jali ask.

The leonid turned away and went back to cleaning up the room, picking up scraps of metal and tossing them in a corner.

“Jason’s started collecting messengers,” the leonid said, not bothering to look at her as he worked.

“Collecting?”

“He thinks that maybe you’re worth saving.”

“You disagree,” she said, an observation and not a question.

“Plenty of folks need saving,” he told her. “None of them deserved it less than you and your kind.”

“You know me well enough to be certain that no one in the world is less deserving?”

The leonid stopped what he was doing and turned to look at her.

“Were you part of the attack on the city?” he asked.

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Then that’s all I need to know. I fought in that battle too, and faced more than a few of your people. Every single one of them started out the same. So proud, so confident. No more purpose than to kill us to prove they could, sowing fear and spreading terror. And they liked it. Thought it was sport. Innocent people, slaughtered in the street. Homes brought down on the heads of the families living in them. It takes a special kind of evil to look at a street littered with dead children and laugh.”

He growled, the echo of it filling the chamber with his presence. She was suddenly very aware that while her height was larger than his, her teeth were not.

“Your kind,” he continued, almost spitting the words. “They float above it all, beautiful and untouchable. But then you show them that they can be touched. You can see it in their eyes, the moment they realise what’s about to happen, that they aren’t as invincible as they thought. When they realise that they’re about to die, filthy and broken, after thinking they’d live forever. That the superiority they believed in was nothing. It’s not so hard to drag your kind down to the ground.”

He glanced down, seeing her feet on the floor instead of floating over it. His eyes panned back up to her face, staring again. She wasn’t sure how to respond, so she said nothing.

“Are you just going to stand there?” he asked finally, “or are you going to help clean this mess up?”

“I… you’ll have to tell me what to do.”

His eyes narrowed in an assessing gaze.

“Jason’s soul realm decided to move my smithy,” he said. “Tossed everything around, dumped my material stores on the floor while warping half of them into useless scrap. Just grab any twisted chunks of metal and chuck them in that corner for now.”

He pointed to a corner where he’d been doing just that, a small pile of scrap metal heaped in there already. She looked around and saw there was no shortage of metal to add to it. She was about to reach out with her aura to move the closest chunk but stopped herself. Instead, she walked over, picked it up and threw it. The leonid glanced at her briefly before resuming the cleanup.

“I’m Gary,” he told her, his tone still hostile, although not quite as angry.

“Jali Corrik Fen.”

“Well I’m going to call you Jali,” he grumbled. “That thing where you use people’s full name all the time is bloody annoying.”

***

Jason watched, unnoticed, as Gary stalked off to try and find his way back to the surface. Jali moved to follow until she felt a prick of aura directed her way and turned to spot Jason. She glanced at Gary but Jason shook his head and she remained silent, letting him walk away. Moments later, his voice came rumbling down the tunnel.

“A bloody beverage station? I want a forge that works and a way out, not a drink. I mean, yeah, I’ll take a drink, but I don’t want to be wandering around these tunnels all day.”

Jason chuckled and wandered in the opposite direction, towards a wall that became an upward-sloping tunnel as he reached it.

“Isn’t he your friend?” Jali asked, hustling in an un-messenger-like fashion to catch up. The tunnel was dark, although that impeded neither of them.

“He is my friend,” Jason said. “He’s also gotten about a mountain’s worth of rare and expensive materials conjured up for his metallurgy experiments. The price of that is getting messed with from time to time.”

“So, you wrecked his forge?”

“No, that was my soul realm going wobbly, the way I warned you it would. I just didn’t want to waste the opportunity for a little fun.”

“I think he might have killed me, if not for you.”

“Probably. I’m having trouble getting people to leave the people you’ve enslaved alive, let alone you lot. If I don’t keep the actual messengers in here, you’ll be tortured for information, then tortured for visceral satisfaction, and then eventually killed. I’m glad he didn’t kill you, though. He’s a joyful man by nature, and a symptomatic carrier; his joy is infectious. I don’t want him to lose that again.”

“Again?”

“The people of this world have seen a lot in the last few years. You and yours are just the latest thing. One more group who don’t care about who or what you destroy in your greed for whatever it is you came for.”

He sighed.

“I don’t want to talk about all that. I know you didn’t make those choices and I think you’re a long way from ready to engage with that discussion. In some ways, you messengers are like children raised in a cult; all you know is the indoctrination. It’s hard to have a conversation about a world you only see through a single, myopic lens. I’m guessing that you’re feeling very lost right now, away from everything you know.”

She nodded. Further up the tunnel, she spotted daylight promising release from the darkness.

“I said you should take some time to let your thoughts settle,” Jason told her. “The reality is, you’re dealing with so much that doing so isn’t really possible. In which case we might as well begin. Do you still want me to go into your soul and cut off the leash?”

“How… what does that entail?”

“Basically, I knock on the door of your soul and you open it, or not. If you let me in, I erase the brand the astral king has on your soul.”

“You said something about replacing it with my own brand, and not yours. I don’t have one. I’m not an astral king.”

“Not with that attitude. The brand isn’t a big deal, more of a fingerprint of the soul. We just have to figure out what yours is and use it. Then we take off the limiter that’s holding your rank down. You were never inherently limited to silver. Your astral king has been feeding on your potential. All the power that should have gone to you ranking up has been going to Vesta Carmis Zell instead.”

“So, all the messengers who can’t go past silver…”

“Absolutely can. No messengers are locked to silver or gold. That’s all just astral kings feeding on them. It lets them set up useful hierarchies and drain large amounts of power. The messengers aren’t just slaves without knowing it. They’re also food.”

Jali bowed her head, her walk becoming a trudge as she considered Jason’s words. She seemed oddly small, even as she towered over him.

“The good news is,” Jason told her, “I can take you out of that cycle. I’m even getting pretty good at it. It’s a whole different thing now compared to when I bumbled through cutting Tera Jun Casta off from your astral king. I worry that my fumbling might be responsible for her instability, at least in part. But she’s got more than enough things causing that, so I don’t think I’ll ever know.”

Jali looked down at Jason.

“Why go to such effort to be compassionate to her? She tried to kill you. The messengers have done so much. Your friend Gary pointed out that there are so many that need help, and we are the least deserving.”

“Mercy and compassion aren’t about deserving. Or they shouldn’t be, not if you genuinely want to make things better. Compassion can be hard to give, and so easy to give up on. I did that for longer than I’d like to admit. Mercy and compassion are so often regarded as pointless, weakness or all cost and no payoff. I once showed mercy to a man who tried to murder me, and that choice saved my soul. When I was alone and in the hands of my enemies, that man whose life I spared turned out to be working for those enemies. He betrayed them to run for help, for me. They realised he was gone and what he was doing and turned on each other. Their inattention gave me the chance to fight off the star seed they implanted in me before the Builder could force me to open up my soul. And my friends came and got me after he led them to me.”

“You fought off a star seed?”

Jason nodded.

“That was the beginning of my soul becoming what it is now.”

They emerged from the tunnel into a garden that was wild and untamed, like a jungle with an incongruously neat garden path running through it.

“Even now,” Jason said, “with all my soul has become, I’m not sure it was worth what I went through. What the Builder did to my soul. And I did the same thing to Tera Jun Casta, only worse because she didn’t escape me. I kept going until she broke. Knowing what that is like, I’m not sure I can ever make up for that.”

He smiled sadly.

“Compassion isn’t always easy and you don’t always get it right. But imagine if we could break the hold the astral kings have over the rest of the messengers. If, instead of an army of indoctrinated slaves, you were just ordinary citizens of the cosmos, like the rest of us.”

“I don’t know what that would be like,” Jali said. “I’ve never known anything but my people as they are. My tasks. A life of obedience. Just a few hours ago, the very idea of wondering about any of this was dangerous.”

“As demonstrated by the nasty lady trying to tear you apart from the inside out,” Jason said and stopped walking. “Are you ready to do something about that?”

They were in a grove with a stream trickling by, the path forming a little bridge passing over it. He turned to face her and she nodded firmly.

“I think I’ve been ready for a long, long time. How do we—”

Jason vanished and she fell unconscious on her feet, toppling into a bush.

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