Heart of Dorkness

I slump on the shore and sit there, water dripping off of me and onto the drier rocks around me.

Felix is no better; she’s staying close to me, very close. If things were different, I might call it uncomfortable, but, well, no.

Today hasn’t been the best day.

“The caravan will have moved on,” I say.

“Oh,” Felix replies.

The angel targeted the monsters, not the people. It... it has to be an angel of Elestmorte. I remember reading some books that mention gods and goddesses that aren’t part of the current pantheon, and when I asked Mom about them, she said they were dead.

I know Mom is responsible for some of those.

Elestmorte the Vile Singer, a goddess of singing remorse. Her domain rubbed against Mom’s and that caused the two to fight. Mom won, in a very decisive way. That doesn’t mean all traces of the goddess are gone. The angel being a rather big remnant.

Why didn’t it kill me?

I’m me, a monster who looks like a girl.

Maybe... magic? Monsters tend to radiate Disgust, and I don’t think I was feeling any of that when it hovered over us. There was just Fear.

I shiver, then stand up and pull my cloak off. “We can’t just stay here,” I say.

“It’s dangerous?” Felix asks.

“Well, no... maybe. I... I have my little friends, but I think a lot of the monsters will be dead or scattered. I mean, we need to... I don’t know.”

Felix shuffles closer, then hesitates a bit. I’m not sure what she intends to do, at least until she leans to the side and hugs me. “It’s okay?”

I laugh, just a bark, but it does help. “Thanks,” I say. “We need to gather some things; it’s not even afternoon yet.”

“Are we going to walk back?”

“To Santafaria? I don’t think so. We can find some helpful monsters, maybe a black tar pit. Once we have some help to act as an escort, we just need to follow the road all the way over to the capital. I think we’re past the halfway mark.”

Felix nods. “If you say so.”

I press my hands down the front of my blouse, squeezing some water out of it. There are things washing up to the shore, some of our bags and the stuff within, which probably broke open on hitting the water.

We were lucky.

I don’t want to rely on that again, not if I can avoid it.

“I’m going to grab what I can,” I say. I remove my shoes and my stockings. No point in getting those even wetter, and I’ll have a better grip on the wet rock in my bare feet anyway.

I don’t find much, but I do grab a bag with a little of our food in it. It’ll be soggy, and I think we might have to throw some of it away, but some food is better than no food. I also pick up a blanket that floats to the surface. The rest is so torn up or wrecked by the water it’s not worth grabbing.

On returning to the shore, I give the blanket to Felix and ask her to do her best to wring it out while I move off to the side and inspect myself. I have a lot of little cuts and nicks I haven’t been paying attention to. Nothing serious, I don’t think, but nothing good either.

I don’t need to catch something while so far from home. There’s no Mom here to give me soup and read aloud while I try to sleep.

So I rely on my magic. Finding a kernel of disgust isn’t hard. It’s aimed at me. At being so weak, so unknowledgeable I almost died to something that should have been so preventable.

I was a bit stupid, and I regret it.

The magic fills my core in starts and fits. Once I have enough, I channel it into a spell, Dark magic rushing through me like tar melting over my skin and coursing through my veins. Dark magic is great at preventing things; in this case, I hope it’ll work for infections and the like.

I shiver once the spell has run its course. It feels... yucky. Like choking down a thick syrupy medicine, but from all over at once.

Better than catching a cold.

I can’t do much to help Felix. I don’t have spells that are designed to help others, and I don’t exactly have my Mom’s collection of grimoires on hand. Even if I did, they’d probably be wet and soggy.

Designing a spell on the spot and experimenting on a friend sounds like a terrible idea.

“How are you feeling?” I ask Felix.

She smiles my way. “A little better,” she says. “I’m getting drier.”

The sky is still cloudy, but the air is warm, or at least warmer than the water. I think we’ll be entirely dry within an hour or two. “Not much for us to do out here,” I say. “We should start walking. If we go that way, we’ll eventually intersect the road.”

“We might run into the caravan.”

“Hmm, maybe, but I kind of doubt it. Unless they stopped entirely, by the time we reach the road, they’ll be long gone. They’re not moving too fast, but they should be moving consistently, which makes up for a lot.” Mom is big on consistent but small improvements; she says that it’s one of the true paths to power.

Felix and I fold up our last blanket, and I put on the bag with what’s left of our food. We’ll need to figure that out later, maybe once we take a break.

I start off into the forest, only to slow down when I notice that Felix is tripping over branches and into bushes. She’s smiling, but I imagine it’s hard for her to see in her own particular way.

“Here, take my hand,” I say, and she reaches out and grabs it with no hesitation.

“I can’t sense some of the branches; they’re too small,” she says.

“Huh. How does your vision work, exactly? I mean, mechanically.”

“I don’t think it uses a machine?”

“No, mechanically means that, ah, well, things that work with a system, something that’s been done over and over again, can be said to be mechanical. So when someone asks what the mechanics of something are, they want to know what the steps are to make that thing work.”

“Oh, I think I get it. My wind... when I’m happy, I can make the wind move.” I nod. That’s basic Joy magic right there. “And I can sense where it’s moving to. So if I push the wind out around me, it will bump into stuff, and I can tell where it bumped into things.”

Her nose twitches, and I feel a bit of air moving away from her, then back in. It’s not super noticeable, but I do see some leaves flutter on the ground and on the lower branches around us. “That’s really impressive control,” I say. “Well, maybe less the control and the sort of... sense that you’ve developed for it.”

“Is it?”

I nod. Talking like this is more fun than worrying about food and long walks and possibly getting sick. And maybe Felix knowing more would make her that much stronger. “Oh, definitely. I can sense where my Dark magic is, but it’s... amorphous. And vague too. Just a sense of how much of it I’m moving and more or less where it is. I could probably make it take a shape if I wanted to, but I wouldn't be able to guess at the shape from feel alone.”

“I think that makes sense,” Felix says. “Like a smell?”

“I... yeah, sure, like a smell. I can smell that I have Dark magic, and where it is, but I can’t tell much more than that.”

“Well, my wind magic’s not that strong. I can make a big gust, but then I feel... wrong? Sad?”

“You spend it all in one go,” I surmise. “But can you keep your vision up all day?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“Then you've probably trained your core to reabsorb your own essence, or you can just produce a decent amount, but your reserves aren’t big.”

“I don’t get it,” Felix says.

I hum as I bring us around a particularly rough patch of the forest. There are plenty of bushes and viny things in the way here. “Think of it like... food. Imagine someone has a whole pantry full of bread, and someone else has a... tube leading from a bakery. The one with the big pantry can eat a lot in one sitting, because they have a lot of food available. The one with the tube can only eat so much because there’s only one loaf coming in every minute, but at the end of the day, the one with the tube is getting more bread because it’s always coming in.”

“I... think I get it.”

“Awesome! Now, if you want to be even stronger, I think I know a couple of exercises, and some very basic spells we could test you with...”

***