Edge Cases - 147 - Book 3: Chapter 12: Interlude - Xothok - Inward Spiral

Mercy was something that could only be afforded by the powerful.

That was the lesson Xothok had taken away from the fight between his team and the four adventurers that had utterly overwhelmed them. Derivan, Vex, Misa, Sev — the names were practically burned into his head. They could have killed all of them, and as far as Xothok was concerned, they would have been justified in doing so.

They hadn’t. But they could afford not to; they were never in any danger. His team had never had that option. He’d thought that they’d moved beyond that, with all the progress they’d made, but…

It was clear that it wasn’t enough. The same logic he’d once used on the caravans they preyed upon — overwhelming force, because they couldn’t guarantee that they would win if they showed one iota of mercy — now reflected back on him in the death of his oldest friend.

He wondered when Byrrhon had changed so much, and he wondered when he’d made himself stop looking.

“We should hold a funeral,” he said absently. It felt cold, the way he said it, like there was no real emotion behind his words; the truth was that Xothok didn’t really know how he felt. His other self stared at him with something like sympathy in his eyes, and didn’t say a word.

Xothok normally hated it when Kothos spoke, but now he found he missed having his input.

“Fer that scumbag?” Morkar snarled. “No offense, boss, but he was tryin’ to kill you. Almost did, too.”

“Not just for him,” Xothok said. He didn’t finish the thought. Instead, he walked over to the pile of wood still lying in the field. Byrrhon’s body could wait; they had a catapult to build.

Though he did send a quick message off to the Guildmaster first, just so she knew what had happened.

His men followed his lead, though they gave each other strange looks. The quests and working with the Guild they were fine with; though many of them bore a grudge against the Guild for rejecting them in the first place, they were starting to understand that those were the actions of rogue members, rather than a general principle of the Guild in the first place. In their time here, a few of them had managed to make friends, both with other adventuring teams and with the staff at the Guild.

They were, in other words, starting to fit in.

But this other project Xothok had? None of them could make heads nor tails of it. They knew, intellectually, that Xothok had explained what he was trying to do a number of times. They’d all seen the piece of paper onto which he’d drawn a picture of the night sky, and they all felt the same strange sense of odd familiarity.

That more than anything, perhaps, was the reason they all followed him despite not knowing exactly what all of this was for.

The work took hours, even with the help of a skill; in that time the Guildmaster had responded and sent someone to collect Byrrhon’s body, so Xothok didn’t have to look at it. Didn’t have to think about it. He kept himself focused on the work instead, until the final nail had been hammered into place, and he stared at what they had constructed.

It was a piece of shit. It was clear everyone else felt that way, too, considering the dubious looks they were all giving the thing. But it didn’t need to be good. So long as it had a bare minimum of functionality…

“You will need to remember how to navigate,” Kothos murmured, standing beside him. “Targeting is not enough. Space is complex, and reaching a star safely even moreso, even when the star is dead. Perhaps especially then.”

“The fuck is complex supposed to mean?” Xothok asked. “It’s space. The whole thing’s empty.”

“You’d think that.” Kothos chuckled. “The planeshifted thought that. Turns out space here is a little different. You’ll find out when you get there.”

“Or you could fuckin’ tell me.”

“Now where would the fun in that be?” Kothos smiled.

Infuriating ass. It was made all the worse by the reminder that Kothos was just another iteration of him, and he could absolutely picture himself acting that way in another life.

“You know what to do?” Xothok turned to Two. He was the only one that Xothok actually trusted to aim and fire the thing. He’d been surprisingly amenable to changing his class, too.

Two nodded, but stayed silent, as he always did. Morkar folded his arms, staring skeptically at the catapult.

“Hate to say it, but this feels like a stupid idea, boss,” the orc told him. “Ain’t gonna stop ya, but I am gonna say I told you so.”

“Trust me, I know how stupid this looks,” Xothok muttered, staring at the catapult. “But I don’t really have any other ideas.”

Before he actually tried launching, though, he needed to reply to a message. He’d been putting it off for a few days — he didn’t know how he felt about being sent a message by the very same adventurers that had captured them, and he couldn’t even phrase his response correctly if Kothos wasn’t around to remind him of what he had forgotten — but now that he was about to embark on whatever this was…

Well, he needed a backup plan, and as far as he was concerned, those adventurers owed him one.

The plan was predicated on a lot of things they weren’t sure about, really.

One of them was whether or not the launch would even work. The system had been far from stable of late, especially with the new failure of growth spells in Elyra; there was every chance that launching Xothok out of a catapult would result in an impact that erased most of his health and did little else.

The second was whether or not the stars were dead, or gone entirely. The sky was dark, certainly; they had, at the very least, gone out. If his understanding of what Kothos had told him was correct, then their corpses should still be there in the sky, open to being explored… but maybe that was wrong, and even their corpses had been erased. If that were the case, then this would be a non-starter entirely.

The third was whether or not he could get back.

Fortunately, the last one was the one Xothok was most certain about; he’d enlisted the Guildmaster’s help for this one, asking for one of their mages to mark him with a [Return] rune. Short of something absurd like magic not functioning properly in space — which Kothos had reassured him was not the case — he was set to be able to return safely, just in front of the catapult. Two would be there to greet him, and Morkar would be leading the rest into other missions in the meantime. He didn’t exactly know how long this trip was supposed to take, after all.

All of this left him sitting in the catapult. Kothos was balanced on the edge beside him, defying the concepts of the laws of physics; Xothok had never really thought about it, but he supposed as a mental construct, his other self didn’t really need to be concerned about things like balance and weight and comfort.

“This is nostalgic,” Kothos commented. “Same setup as one of our first launches… We got better after that, of course. At our prime we had a full observatory, with these metal structures within them that would launch our ships into the stars.”

“I’m just wondering what idiot discovered this,” Xothok grumbled. Kothos gave him a surprisingly sad smile.

“That’s a story for another time.”

“Are you ready, sir?” Two asked him. His voice was soft-spoken and quiet, and almost didn’t carry all the way up to Xothok’s perch.

Xothok sighed.

“Yeah, go for it,” he said.

He felt [Improved Target Selection] activating; there was a thrum that raced across his scales, and he shivered involuntarily. He didn’t see Two reach for the rope, or the dagger that cut across it — but he imagined those things happening. Kothos just watched him, amused.

There was a beat. A pause.

Then he felt the protective cloak of a Skill wrapping around him more firmly, and a tremendous force as his seat launched him into the air at an angle that did not at all match where they had aimed the catapult. He felt himself accelerating, which shouldn’t have been possible. He saw the ground receding away in the blink of an eye.

And then he was in space.

Kothos hadn’t followed him, and with the loss of his other self, his memories of what he was supposed to do or that there was an other self to summon at all were rapidly fading; he couldn’t reach for the ink drawing in his pocket that he knew would remind him, either, because at the speeds he was traveling at the paper would simply be ripped away from him.

He was protected to some degree. [Improved Target Selection] selected a target and guaranteed its arrival without the projectile being harmed, and in this case harm included things like ‘death from not breathing’ and the like. But protection meant nothing if he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do.

To stave off panic, Xothok closed his eyes. It wasn’t like there was anything ahead of him to see, anyway. There was just an infinite dark expanse that felt cold and wrong, and he didn’t want to look at it for longer than necessary.

The moment he did, a brilliant array lit up in his mind. Xothok opened his eyes again, startled, and it vanished just as quickly; once again in front of him was that endless void.

He frowned. He closed his eyes again—

—Once more, a small field of brilliant points of light appeared behind his eyelids, in his mind’s eye.

“Oh,” he said, though the word was lost quickly to the wind.

But it was strange, wasn’t it, that there was wind at all?

That realization made the wind around him die down. He’d already arrived, he realized; the idea that he was still traveling was just another layered illusion, built by the expectations of his mind.

He recalled the response Misa had sent him, startlingly fast. [Be careful,] she had said. [You’re going to go out of range of the anchors that way. We’re not sure exactly what’s there, but it’s probably not going to be what you expect. If we’re right about where you are, then you might be in a liminal space — don’t ask me what that means, Vex used the term, not me — where direction of thought influences direction of movement. That might not make sense until you’re there.]

He had, of course, replied with [I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.] and left it at that.

Now, though, the meaning of her words were a little more clear. Whenever he focused on one of those points of light, he found himself drifting closer toward it—

[Are you okay?]

The message pinged, unexpected, from Two. Xothok blinked at it, surprised, then answered [For now.]

It was the first time any of his men had checked up on him, even Two. How strange.

Xothok dismissed it for now and reached for the drawing he kept in his pocket, and let the image mentally drag him in; allowed the aching familiarity to suffuse his being. It served as a reminder that he’d once been someone else—

“They’re waypoints,” Kothos said, appearing as a strangely well-lit phenomenon in the void. He sounded wistful. “Not stars. Just markers we left for each other, exploring… whatever this place is. Every one of them should be near a star.”

And yet it all looked so empty. Kothos hadn’t needed to say the words; Xothok could see — could feel it for himself, how achingly empty the space felt, even filled with light like this.

“Might as well give it a try,” he muttered, mostly to himself; Kothos nodded beside him, but he ignored him. He had his own storm of emotions to deal with without having to deal with the infuriatingly calm other version of himself. Something like fear, anger, some guilt he was certain he wouldn’t have felt if it wasn’t for the damn Guild—

He was moving, he realized. One of the waypoints was darker than the others, and unlike most of the others, there was something next to it. Not a star — nothing like a star should have been.

The corpse of a star, perhaps. Except even that descriptor was insufficient. He saw burnt and desiccated ruins made of crimson flesh, and as he directed his mind towards the thought of it, he felt himself drift closer.

“I don’t think you should go there,” his other self told him. Kothos sounded, for once, nervous.

“Fuck you,” Xothok answered.

Part of him knew it wasn’t the best response. Kothos had a point. There was something about this place that repulsed him. But he couldn’t have pulled himself away if he wanted to. Even when he tried to cast his mind to other waypoints that seemed like they might have something next to them, Byrrhon’s hate-filled expression jumped back into his mind. The way he’d stared at him as he died stuck in his mind.

And those thoughts, too, drew him ever closer to those ruins.

“Navigators need clarity of mind,” Kothos said. “You can’t dwell on your emotions—”

“—I said fuck you,” Xothok repeated. He wasn’t explaining shit to his copy. What right did he have to say anything? Kothos had experienced none of the hardship he had; he’d lived a cushy life as a fucking noble.

Some small part of Xothok recognized the spiral his mind was in, maybe.

But not enough to break out of it.