Orphan At The Edge Of The World - 238 The Fool 43

For Orison, it had been little more stressful than a leisurely week outing but in truth, there had been quite a few dangers. Jarvis was just so experienced and good at what he did that the young mage hadn’t even noticed until evidence started piling up. The adventurer’s pack started bulging, showing signs of a new fur or leather roll poking out. An extra bag was filling with expertly preserved and scentless collections of ‘tags’ such as ears, fangs and other bounty turn-ins.

That evening at the fire, Orison asked, “When are you doing this? Pleasant days spent walking and riding, peaceful nights. When are you collecting this stuff?”

Jarvis shrugged. “I’m a light sleeper and I do rounds.”

“So am I but I’ve never heard more than you shuffling around or an occasional rustle,” the young mage said.

“My rounds are wide… Didn’t see any need to bother you,” the adventurer said, indulging in a little pride with a faint smile of self appreciation.

Not knowing what to say to that, Orison added a request for herb collecting, explaining the identified ones he could use. Since they had started edging around an older part of the woods, the young mage had caught signs of a few useful ones but didn’t want to slow them down. If the adventurer was doing some nocturnal slaying, there wasn’t any burden to take a few extra glances for them.

Frowning, the man opened his pack and pulled out some bundles, hesitantly handing them over. The young mage looked at them numbly as he grabbed them. Things started clicking for him.

“You know alchemy and medicine making?” Orison asked.

The man nodded and showed off some of the ones he had mixed. They were rough and there were a few that the young mage didn’t recognize but spirit sight and personal knowledge labeled them effective. Instead of turning in early, he initiated an exchange of recipes and some ingredients. Jarvis’ knowledge was specialized and a little too focused on being field practical but it was deep. By the time Orison called it, they had both benefited tremendously from the exchange.

The next morning, Jarvis was still in the process of skinning his fifth dire wolf, looking tired. “I’ll finish this up. Get some rest. You might think you’re alright but you’re starting to look like sh*t.”

Though he’d never say it out loud, Orison admitted that the man was impressive. There wasn’t a part of Jarvis that hadn’t been honed to the lethal limit of its potential. It was no wonder that he was still capable of doing risky business at an age twice the profession’s prime. And at the moment, the man was still on the plus side of that but not by a whole lot.

A pair of amber eyes fixed on the young mage. Getting caught in the act of admiring, even if it was on a purely aesthetic level, Orison was deeply embarrassed. Turning away, he busied himself with fixing the leathers that one of the wolves had gotten a decent swipe on. A brief internal rage flared up at the borderline arrogant chuckle he heard behind him but it died just as quickly.

Orison did as he said he would. There was a stack of neatly prepared furs waiting for Jarvis when the man stirred back to wakefulness in the late morning hours. That wasn’t all.

Handing the adventurer a bottle and three medicinal pellets, the young mage said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing with everything I’ve got. I’d normally suggest spacing those out over three or four days but you process things so quickly, it would be better for you to take them all at once. It’s the last of what I’ve got to extend life or restore wholeness that would do anything for you.

“I kind of know but don’t completely understand why you’ve been wearing yourself so thin just to make things easy for me but… there you go. Don’t make a thing out of it. I’m already self conscious enough.”

Jarvis looked at the medicine, faintly surprised. “Is this going to give me the runs or something?”

Orison said, “I’d have to examine you to see how many toxins are still left in you. There’s-”

The adventurer took the young mage’s hand and put it at his heart point.

Inwardly, he thought, “Alright! No need to be so pushy about it.”

Focusing on spirit sight, Orison dove in slowly. There was some buildup of toxins deeply buried into the marrow of the man’s bones. Vestiges of unwholesome medicines lingered in hidden recesses. There was a strangeness to the man’s soul as well but Orison didn’t want to rouse suspicion by getting anymore curious.

Withdrawing intent, as he tried to take his hand back, the young mage said, “Yeah. And it’s going to be the gross kind that’s going to come out everywhere but it won’t take long. Uh, you can let go now?”

Jarvis released Orison’s hand and took the medicine.

After the unpleasantness was over and the young mage had cleaned him back up, the adventurer said, “It’s like the last sixty or seventy years never happened.”

“Freakishly efficient life essence usage. The people responsible for the method must have been incredibly smart and just as immoral. I can’t imagine what they did to figure that out,” Orison mused.

Jarvis sighed. “No one alive remembers how it’s done. The last who knew, died in an explosion nearly forty years ago. The few of us puttering around could probably figure it out if we got together and worked on it but…”

The young mage stared out to the horizon. “The end of an era. A few more generations and I don’t think magic’s going to exist much outside of the kind that never really disappears. Everything runs in cycles though.”

Later that afternoon, they were back on roads and out of the wilds. A small group of people approaching from the opposite direction made both of them tense up and be on guard. The sudden trill of wariness turned out to be for nothing but the reappearing space between them illustrated that they had become far too comfortable with each other. More specifically, Orison realized that he had taken his form changing ability too lightly.

The longer he lingered in a form, he realized, the more he’d grow to thrive in it. Originally, he hadn’t minded a little experimentation with it for the sake of understanding things a bit better but everything down to chemistry worked as it was designed to. Jarvis was a pragmatic person with years of emotional pain induced avoidance issues. That meant Orison got to fill in the blanks on the ‘nature’ part of the form. The same couldn’t be said about Cray.

Cray was a simple and straightforward kind of person for the most part. Loyalty and sentimentality were a definite part of that and it held that he’d want the same thing in return. The archer’s drunken whimsy had real effects on Orison and the young mage had learned just how dangerous it was to have been unaware.

He only had ‘nurture’ to fight nature and a soul’s relatively passive influence. The young mage was ready to finish what he thought was good and right before returning to the form he wanted and never mess with it again if he could help it. The brief time he’d spent as a woman in the dark gray world he found himself in had been a moderately traumatizing experience.

The seasoned adventurer tried to subtly pull Orison back into his chest, where the young mage had been resting earlier while in trance. The effort was resisted. He was surprised when the young mage dismounted instead.

“I’m assuming that you weren’t pressed on the time limit I gave you because you know you’ll have a taker in that chateau I see in the distance there?” Orison said.

Jarvis got off the horse and looked at the young mage with a complicated gaze and said, “Yes. Teshara would if she could. Could she? If not-”

The young mage replied, “Yes. With what I’m about to do, as long as there’s a full set of lady parts and they’re attached to someone that’s healthy enough to provide what a growing little guy needs, you’re gold.”

A phantom key surrounded in honey colored essence appeared before a small ball of dense, honey colored light with a blue dot in the center flew into Jarvis’ sacral chakra. “Aim steady and shoot for the bull’s eye. The rest will take care of itself. You’ve got three days, now that I was inspired to do this a different way. Don’t misfire in the mean time or you’ll blow it. Pun kind of intended.”

As Jarvis tried to work out what to say amid jumbled thoughts and emotions, Orison held a dim yellow light in his hand while the honey sheath around the key rapidly boiled away. A twist of the key later, a man who was a stranger to them both looked towards them in confusion for a split second before trying to cast a spell. He went up like a gas soaked bonfire as the dim yellow light in Orison’s hand was roasted by a potent casting of Ignite. The young mage quickly put the key away with a thin layer of honey colored light flickering on it weakly.

“Would choosing to stay with me be so terrible a thing?” Jarvis said with laser focus, as if people spontaneously combusted around him all the time.

The young mage smiled weakly. “No. All I’d have to give up is my personal identity and struggle to reconcile what I remember wanting with what my current form does. In a few weeks, I probably would consider myself the luckiest ‘girl’ on this planet as long as you treated me right.

“But you know what? It wouldn’t be what I chose. It would be what someone else chose for me. Despite that, setting aside my path of mistakes and pain to bet on you would probably end up being the absolute opposite of terrible for however long it lasted. The thing is, I’d rather walk the path of misery I made than a path of paradise that was paved for me. That’s the kind of nonsensical sh*t I am.”

The adventurer smiled and said, “I think I understand that too well. Besides, it’s not like I could make any promises anyway. You were slowly coming around and I thought, why not?… I wouldn’t have played with you. I would have taken it serious.

“If it isn’t prying too much, how did you do all this anyway? Whatever you can share is fine. It’s an unsettling thought that a sorcerer could yank up someone and set them on fire or have so much power over the foundations of life itself.”

Orison looked at the pile of ashes and said, “What I did to this trash was a waste of precious resources but I wouldn’t have been able to move forward with peace of mind otherwise. I took what he tried to do to me and used it as a link to him. Having him suffer the same fate. Don’t worry too much about the morality of it. What I used was a soulless collection of cells. There’s more life in a sneeze.

“What you have is different. It’s alive and has a soul waiting to experience that life. A powerful essence surrounds and safeguards that life to give it every chance of properly existing outside of giving it a form itself.”

Orison began walking away as Jarvis said, “How much will the mother be… the mother?”

Not turning around, the young mage said, “Enough to make it work. Outside of that, I don’t know. In every way that matters is how I would explain it.”

Slightly speaking louder, Jarvis said, “You know, you don’t have to be the mother of my child or even my woman to receive my aid. Before all of this, you sought to be my friend first. I can say that you’ve done enough that I can claim you as one without reservation. We could complete the last few miles of this journey and get you properly settled in with someone headed to where you wished to go next.”

Orison sighed and turned around. “I saw the map in the Red Brick Inn. We’re ahead of the caravan by half a day. I’m going to find a nice safe place to become myself as you remember first seeing me and travel with them. Besides, after all that’s happened… It might sound petty. But the last thing I need, is to keep hanging around a man who’s going to make me feel like less of one even after I AM one.”

Jarvis stood silently for a moment before laughing heartily. “I’ll take that as the compliment it is, whether you intended it as one or not… Very well. Safe travels Orison and thank you… for everything.”

While they spoke, a stiff breeze wafted around them. Orison’s spirit sight picked up a spirit essence signature from the greatly reduced pile of ashes from the roasted male sorcerer’s remains. Walking back, he sifted through them while Jarvis had paused to watch with curiosity. Sifting through, the young mage picked out a condensed eternium fragment the size of a pea. No sooner had Orison’s aura envelope encased it, as with any object held for more than a second or so, it disappeared.

“When sorcerers and certain monsters perish, they leave behind those things. Without the proper equipment, it’s impossible to store and keep them. They break apart fairly quickly after forming. I’ve heard tell that they carry-” Jarvis explained but the young mage didn’t hear it all.

His spiritual seat was bombarded with a jumble of memories. The vast majority was shunted out but a fraction of knowledge remained. The rest was taken down into the depth of the first layer of his space.

The young mage stood up and looked at the world around him as if it had become a terrifying and alien place. “Jarvis, I need to confirm something. I know I’m asking for a lot of trust but I need to look at your soul… It’s important.”

The man froze up. Enough time passed for it to become awkward and Orison was about to tell him to forget it. There would be other opportunities to fact check the horrifying idea that had taken root in the young mage’s mind.

With a faint smile to cover his reticence, Jarvis said, “Well, you’ve seen everything else. Is it the same method that you used to examine me?”

Orison replied, “Yes but it’ll be stronger and you could technically hurt me. I’m not going to risk hurting you by putting up defenses.”

They moved off the road and found a relatively hidden spot. The young mage understood the risks but the matter was so dire that he reasoned it was worth it. The faster the truth was uncovered, the quicker Orison could do something about it.

After a quick breakdown, Jarvis found himself sitting down and leaning back into the young mage’s arms. “You’re not going to turn back into a man while you’re doing this are you? There were a lot of things I could overlook when I thought you’d given yourself up to what you had become but… I’ve managed to nearly survive a century without finding myself in a… compromising position. Doppelgangers don’t count.”

Orison said. “No. Don’t follow me down in, by the way. Keep your senses keen on our surroundings… please. I’m worried about unpleasant surprises.”

Uncomfortably aware of the strong back pressed against soft chest, Orison thought, “I’ve made some big mistakes along the way but taking the pattern of a physical form lightly was huge. I assumed that I’d be me no matter what I ‘wore’ but that was soooo wrong. I’m NEVER voluntarily taking the form of a woman again!”

Clearing thoughts from distraction, the young mage delved past Jervis’ aura as gently as he could and drove intent to the spiritual seat. It didn’t take long for Orison to figure out that the outer strength of the adventurer’s soul had actually been supplied by the young mage. The booze and medicine had bolstered what was meant to fade, not strengthen.

Leveraging against that, Orison delved deeper with nearly no resistance to find that the center of Jarvis’ soul was hollow and slowly siphoning off spirit essence and strength of existence elsewhere. It was a bit dangerous but the young mage followed the siphon line and found himself having to quickly reduce what he was seeing because it was overwhelming. Countless lines ran from one branching sequence of potential world events to another.

He didn’t spend too much time exploring. After discovering that weakening alternate branch points ended in ‘cold’, both literally and metaphysically, he’d seen everything he needed to. Making his way back up, he stopped, sensing spiritual ties to himself.

The world was already subtly drawing Orison into the branching of events as well. It was weak but there was a force attempting to siphon away essence to brighter lines. By coincidence, the world was successful in fully establishing one but it went off to a connected plane of existence sandwiched between two separate realities in a tug of war to claim it.

Briefly peering through, he found that it was his original body that Stefen had been shoved in but restored to ‘real Orison’. Concerned, the young mage checked to find that Stefen was ‘feeling’ alright but that only added to the mystery. This other body was being preserved as if waiting for Orison to need it and the world will was accidentally helping to establish a strong connection.