Adamant Blood

The sky was dark and filled with clouds, while the red lights of hovercars patrolled out beyond the walls of Citadel.

Mark walked along the running road near the wall, just to get away from it all, to walk in the dark and clear his head. The air was cool and Summer was nearing an end, so it was going to get colder. Florida never got snow, but they’d get snow here at Citadel. Mark wanted to see snow.

He wasn’t sure if he wanted to participate in any more situations like he had back there at the party.

The party had been decent… ish. Really good, all things considered. He accomplished his goal of meeting high society, but breaking that wine glass had been a… a bad moment.

… Anyway! Mark had definitely not eaten that well in a long time, and he had even made a new maybe-friend. Eliot seemed like a great guy. Great scout, for sure. It was nice to see Isoko in a new environment, too. Isoko was probably someone to keep in touch with.

… Mark needed to call Sally again.

Was she near a phone right now?

… Mark ignored that tangent and focused on the party.

There seemed to be at least 3 major factions trying to get Mark to go their way.

The first faction were the Cybersongs. They wanted Mark to be a paladin of Freyala. This was a complicated thing, because Mark had been 100% sure, before tonight, that Freyala wanted Mark to just move on into the world, and look back on his time here at Citadel fondly, and maybe as a fall-back option. Not the main option.

The second, weirdest faction, was the Villain Program of Crystal Tower. A freaking supervillain was trying to recruit Mark, for gods’ sakes. Wandering Sage seemed like a decent person, outside of her over-the-top villain persona she played on the screen. She raised good points. You don’t risk your world-saving heroes on fighting real battles all the time; every battle carried risk, and any one could die to any number of weird monster magics, at any time. And at the same time, heroes still needed villains in order to know how to fight when it came time to fight, and villains needed to be honorable but willing to play the heel. The whole movie-and-television-show-business aspect of it all was just the vehicle to keep the participants battle ready.

And Wandering Sage wanted to kill Addashield’s Dragon.

The third faction was Mark and his Parents.

Mark didn’t want to live his life in revenge against a monster that was cooperating with the world, and especially if the whole world wanted to keep the monster around. Mark had other plans, and none of them involved being consumed by a dead-end revenge.

Walking in the dark, thinking about everything, Mark let his mind wander for a while.

And then he took out his phone and called up Sally. She was probably on Daihoon right now, so if this call connected it was going to be a miracle. Mark would just leave her a voicemail—

“Mark!” Sally blurted out, “Oh my gods are you okay?! I was worried sick!” People were talking in the background. Sally yelled at them, “Oh fuck off! I’m talking here!” She said, “Hold on, Mark. I need to get somewhere— Hmm— Mark? You there?!”

Sally was somewhere quieter now.

And Mark had stopped in his tracks. His voice cracked, “Y— yeah. Hey, Sally.”

Sally’s voice cracked. “Y— You okay, Mark?”

“No, not really, but I will be.”

Sally sniffled. Then she strongly said, “Good.” And then she said, “I heard you got fucking tall, dude!”

Mark chuckled once. “Six foot three inches.”

“Holy fuck! You might actually come up to my chin.”

Mark scoffed— He paused. “… Wait. To your chin?”

Sally chuckled and said, “Sooooo… there’s this Brawny power called Giant’s Streeeength—”

“Holy fuck! Congrats! I’ve sparred with them and I can’t even punch them anymore, and I’m tier 1 Body already. Giant’s Strength is one of the really, really good ones! Did you get the Rank B or A version?”

Proudly, Sally declared, “I am a rank A Giant’s Strength! Times 12-point-4! It might even go up higher someday!”

Mark felt a profound sense of joy. He smiled, and he softly said, “That’s really, really good, Sally. Congrats.”

“Fuck yeah it… is…” She went quiet. And then she said, “I don’t know how to say this right. I’m just gonna say it. I’m sorry about your parents and I hope you’re not thinking of revenge, or getting anywhere near that dragon. I lost you once and I don’t want to lose you again. You need to come out here to Daihoon and forget all of that shit back home.”

Mark felt his heart ache, black veins pulsing out from his astral body into the night, almost invisible. He said, “I think that’s what I’m going to do, but I’ve gotten some supervillains asking me to be a villain for Crystal Tower, and I have to at least consider it.”

Sally was quiet, but Mark might have heard a scoff; he wasn’t sure. And then Sally asked, “You’re not seriously going to be a cartoon villain, are you? Get endorsement deals from soft drink companies? Get beat up on the weekends?”

Mark laughed. “Apparently it's this whole system…”

Mark ended up talking to Sally for a good hour about everything and anything.

Somehow they ended up on monsters, and how Sally was regularly fighting them now.

“The worst shits are the goblins,” Sally said. “Almost all monsters are just mindless horrors, but goblins are smart and the older ones can talk, but literally all they want to do is infect everyone with their corruptive goblin magic and turn them into more goblins. At first, they made me doubt the human/monster divide because they can talk and reason, but they used those words and reason to try and kill you, to get around you to kill the people you’re protecting.” Sally exclaimed, “This one time it was a talker —that’s what we call them when they’re like that— and he was talking about trade routes and staying in goblin territory and we were pretending to be interested, to listen, but our scout was watching 4 goblins walk through the underbrush to try and surround us. They tried to spring a trap but they got sprung instead. It was easier to let them come to us to die instead of chasing them down.”

Mark said, “That sounds like the stories I read about them. I encountered a baby goblin at the end of his time in the Tutorial. It had a mace and it talked at me. Addashield was there, though, and he said how it was just trying to confuse me with not-words, and that confusion worked for half a minute as it slowly walked toward me. But I saw it was coming in for a kill and killed it back,” Mark said, “Addashield said something about mountain goblin folk, or something like that. Not sure. Only that I would kill a lot of them during my life.”

“He was probably talking about the Endless Mountains. You know Daihoon is kinda like a candy-wrapped Earth, yeah? And the candy wrapper goes off the north and south poles?”

“Yeah. I learned that, like, weeks ago, or something.”

“Mm-hmm! The mountains and valleys form in the candy-wrapper part at the poles. They’re full of impossible heights and depths. Full of monsters, too. You can follow the rivers up the valleys, though, and you either pop out on Earth, if you know the way, or you walk up into Endless Daihoon! All up in the motherfucking magnetosphere, Mark. There are so many mysteries about Endless Daihoon. People think that Heaven is located somewhere up there, and also the Elves and other fantasy races that might actually be not-monsters. You could theoretically walk to the moon if you wanted, but ain’t no one does that… Some dragons have, though.”

They were on to the dragon now, eh?

Mark said, “I’m hearing, over here, that a lot of people don’t hate the idea of Addashield’s Dragon. They like him. They want him as a new god. I hear there’s a history of that in Daihoon?”

Sally sounded like she might be shaking her head. “If any of the big settlements spots a dragon that dragon is getting shot out of the sky. But there’s an undercurrent, you know. Ancient history. Ancient magics. Ancient dragons who are still known ‘allies of humanity’, as ridiculous as that sounds. I don’t know what to make of it at all, either, but it’s definitely a thing that is happening… And he’s calling you ‘his brother’.”

Mark breathed. “Yeah. I have tried not to think about that too much.”

“… Anyway! Yeah. There’s a history of dragons being in charge over here, and a lot of people want them back in charge. It’s a whole thing.”

Mark scowled at the night, at that thought.

He stopped in his tracks.

… He kept walking. “They really do, huh?”

“History is more complicated than how we were taught in school, under the Curtain.”

Mark heard the distant rage in Sally’s voice when she said ‘Curtain’. It mirrored Mark’s own feelings. He said, “When I found out we were raised fundamentalist— Well. Short story: I’m taking an ‘Understanding Curtain Protocol’ class here at Citadel Freyala, and— Oh.” Mark looked at his phone. “We’ve been talking for two hours. Want me to talk about what I heard in class, or later?”

Sally sighed a little, and it might have been a yawn. “I do, Mark, but… I’m mostly over my own rage, and I lucked out with this version of Brawny. It’s hard to be mad when you won the Talent lottery.”

Mark grinned. “Have you learned tactile telekinesis yet?”

Sally chuckled. “I’m working on it! This is actually really good practice to hold my phone and not have it break, even when I’m kinda… really tired.”

Mark smiled softly. “I miss you, Sally. I’ll see you later— Or you could come here! But then you’d get involved in politics, I think. I’m here for another 6-ish months; I don’t know. 7? I talked to people about it today and schedules are all sorts of malleable.”

Sally yawned on the other end of the phone, then she said, “I have duties to Drakarok and I don’t want to go back to Earth for a while. The family all relocated to Memphi, though. I think a lot of people did. So I might see you there, if you go there, but I hope to see you here, Mark, on Daihoon. We could really use a big-time healer.” She sighed dramatically, then added, “And your other Talents too, I guess.”

Mark chuckled.

Sally easily said, “I love you, Mark. Don’t die on me.”

Mark felt his heart beat hard. “I… I love you too, Sally. Don’t die on m—”

Sally’s voice turned high pitched, “As a friend! As a friend! I like girls and you don’t like anyone! I’m too tired! Good night!”

She hung up.

Mark smiled brightly.

He was going to hold that over her head for the rest of her life.

… But in a loving sort of way.

Obviously.

- - - -

Sunday was lazy, and Mark needed that.

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