I survived. We all survived. Including Daisy, though it was closer than I would like to admit.
When I last wrote to you we were inside the hut and the sky had swallowed us. What I didn’t know then was that there was something inside the sky. A puppeteer. No face. Controlling the puppet man, who was controlling the clones, who were all chanting and hammering on the dome. I saw it when the sky tore open and the hut was ripped off the ground. The ground came with it. The earth just fell away beneath our feet and we were lifted up, and from inside the mouth I could see clearly for the first time into the thing controlling everything.
The puppet man mouthed something at me. Just two words. Say his name.
Bawbaggins had been talking to one of the remaining clones while all this was happening. Trying to get anything out of it. The clone kept saying the same thing, over and over, no one will hurt you. And then Bawbaggins asked it directly: is your name No One?
The puppeteer in the sky went very still. The puppet man looked delighted.
The mouth couldn’t close on us after that. Naming it had done something. Gloom misty stepped up forty feet into the sky, teleporting himself directly to the puppeteer, and cut him in half. First stroke severed the tethers, second stroke cut him clean through. All the clones vanished at once. The sky went with them. Just gone, like something leaving a room. The puppet fell down next to us in the dirt and lay there, lifelike but empty.
And Daisy was still on the ground.
I put my hand on his forehead and poured what healing I had left into him. He opened his eyes and said something snarky that I have already forgotten because I was too relieved to take it in.
We didn’t use the hut after that. You’ll understand why.
We found an overhang a good way off the main road and made a proper camp. No magic. Nothing that glows or can be seen from a distance. Just rocks and earth. Gloom took a watch shift and heard a voice calling hello in the dark, but didn’t engage. I sat my shift without incident, which I am choosing to interpret as progress.
The road to the Spire the next day was quiet, mostly. A little man leaned out of a bush near the treeline and told us that if we stepped off the path he might hurt us, that he wasn’t promising he wouldn’t. He had a knife he was trying to hide. Gloom showed him the axe and he shuffled back into the forest. I thought that was rather efficient.
Then the river.
Mum, the path we needed to follow to reach the Spire runs across a river. It used to cross a river, I should say. Something powerful has changed it. Burst the bank, flooded the path, made the water move too fast and run too wrong for anything to touch it. I spent a good while trying to work out how to undo it and had to conclude that whatever made it is too strong for me to unmake. I can see things, I know things, but I cannot always fix things.
Downstream there was a boat. And in the boat, an old man in a cloak with a skeletal hand, who turned out to be a ferryman. He charged a toll in truths.
Bawbaggins gave him the truth that he had been microdosing on shrooms that afternoon. I have questions about this but they are questions for another time. Gloom gave him the truth that he once lied to someone he now calls a friend, told him he had eaten his horse of his own free will when in reality he had been made to eat it. The ferryman called this a very nice truth and seemed genuinely pleased. Gloom also told a lie to the ferryman in the same breath, which I suspect will catch up with him eventually.
I told the ferryman I was not comfortable giving him a truth. He said that was itself a truth. I said I was concerned about what he would do with our truths. He said that was similar to the one I had already given him. I thought about it for a while and then I told him I do not know if I am a good person.
He wrote it down on the contract. Runtar does not know if he is a good person. Just sign here.
So I signed it. Because it is the truth.
He ferried us across. The water stayed still on either side of the boat and rough everywhere else. When he said the truths would take effect once we reached the other side, I did ask what that meant. He said not to worry about it.
I am, of course, worrying about it.
The Spire is visible from the other side of the river. Closer now than it has ever been. Still impossibly tall. Still full of planes of existence stacked on top of each other. Still somewhere inside it, Famine, inside a god called Dandelo, waiting for us to come and do whatever it is we are supposed to do.
I do not know if I am a good person, Mum. But I am going to the Spire. I suppose that is the same thing, from some standpoints.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.