The Ruler of Ruin

The world beyond looked a lot like it did behind the Wall. I knew from Dad’s stories this would be the case, but part of me expected there to be some grandeur. We were past the barrier wall, in the wilds, in the mists! The actual mist started nearly two hundred yards past the wall. The bank of fog abruptly thickened and rose to be taller than even Blaise. The ground between the fog and the gates consisted of sparse, trampled grasses, and uneven difficult terrain. The plain had been the site of countless battles since the construction of the Castle of Havenstone, but the hewn earth alone bore the scars. All weapons, corpses, and monster parts were reclaimed after every skirmish, and magic burnt dirt didn’t tell me much in the way of tales.

Halfway between the banks of mist and the gate Blaise held up a hand to stop the group, and the Dustwalkers formed a circle to listen to their leader.

“Listen up, you worthless bastards,” Claire spoke first, not Blaise. Claire might have gained an inch on me in the years since her graduation from the Academy and stood at I’d guess 5’10”. She wore a set of tan and green leathers with a cloak to match. On each hip she had a vicious-looking short sword and an arrow-filled quiver on her back. She already had her longbow in her hand, which she strung as she waited for the group to pay attention to her.

Claire’s strawberry blonde hair had been tied back into two braids, which accentuated the sharp, well-defined features of her face, and drew attention to her piercing hazel eyes. The boys in my class rated her beauty slightly lower than Celestine’s, but she was just Claire to me. Until the revelation of my magical anti-aptitude, I had tried to be Claire’s rival at the Academy. She was faster than me, stronger than me, and better at everything than me, but I tried to beat her until she graduated. The few and far-between victories I’d eked out against her had let me live in denial that maybe, somehow, I could be a hero and make a Castle as a blank.

I missed those challenges, but our friendship ended abruptly after graduation. Claire moved onto becoming an adventurer with the Dustwalkers. I don’t want to say she abandoned me, but that’s how it felt. I guess we just weren’t the good friends I had thought we were, and she’d probably been glad to be rid of me. She’d certainly embraced being a scout, and a social firebrand at the Guild.

“We’re heading out to hunt the Libraescale Kobolds. The Alchemist’s Guild has offered us a massive bonus if we can acquire over fifty pounds of scales. We’re headed to the Pyrite Hills, nowhere else has enough of the critters. Glint, image it up. Fix it in your mind. Rolling rocky hills, gold scaled kobolds, thatch huts.” Claire spoke about the dominating traits of the illusion the mage Glint had conjured.

Glint was a somewhat nondescript man in his thirties. Brown hair, average build, average face, same height as me. He faded into the background the moment you quit focusing on him. I recognized him from social gatherings, he made fireworks for kid’s birthdays for a pittance when he wasn’t working. At birthday parties Glint didn’t conjure smells to accompany his illusions, or at least, not smells like the kobolds refuse heaps. I wasn’t the only one who nearly gagged.

“Memorize it. That’s where we’re going, the Pyrite Hills, to kill Libraescale Kobolds. Keep focused, keep it in your mind, don’t make me have to expend extra energy fighting your stray thoughts. I’m tired of seeing your naked wife in the mists, Alec, focus on the job, or I’ll steal Mildred from you. You’ve got five minutes to memorize our destination.”

Claire’s whole spiel ended abruptly, and the whole group stared at the illusion before them. The Chimera Slayers had already vanished into the mists, but two other parties huddled on the plain sorting out logistics like the Dustwalkers did.

I studied the illusion, drank in the details, the colors, the smells. I fixed them in my mind as if one of the Professor’s at the Academy were going to question me about it or ask me to paint it with words. The wilds were a place of chaos, one where you navigated by imagining your destination. Stray thoughts could lead an entire group to their doom. It happened regularly; entire adventuring parties would vanish. Sometimes a survivor would make it to Havenstone, sometimes their corpses would be found by other adventurers, but most often no remains were ever recovered. I very quietly whispered a prayer under my breath to Mithras, for the safe return of myself and the Dustwalkers. I added a small prayer to awaken a power I could use in the mists, maybe Mithras would be benevolent and take pity on my worthless self.

A light cough pulled my eyes from the illusion. Claire had moved next to me, and even though I’d grown in the three years since we’d last seen each other, she’d grown more. Her eyes still had a fire to them, a force of personality that intimidated me, and her build looked stronger and leaner even than when I’d failed to ever compete with her. I had no doubt she could crush me in every and any physical contest, like an adult against a toddler.

“You don’t have to worry too much, Em. I’m the best Mistwalker in Havenstone. I don’t know if you heard, but after I left the Academy, well, word got around about how good I am, and old Wandering Gulliver gave up fishing for a whole year and a half to personally train me. Even if these morons all imagined the gaseous swamps of Blacktree I’d get us to the Libraescale Kobolds at the Pyrite Hills. Memorize it, imagine it, but don’t be anxious or nervous. Those are the real dangers. The mists love to spawn fears, you know.” Claire’s eyes were hazel, with the green more nuanced than I remembered.

“Right,” I nodded. “What’s Blacktree?”

“Marius never told you about Blacktree? Well, maybe when we get back I could tell you about it over a celebratory dinn—”

““Claire!”” Remy and Dad glared hard at Claire. Both materialized from nowhere on either side of me, as if I were about to be devoured by a dragon. Sure, Claire had a bit of a reputation of carousing with younger men, but she wasn’t interested in me that way. The stories of emotionally scarred fresh Academy graduates becoming obsessed with Claire were strangely common, though. I assumed people were making things up or exaggerating though. Why would you chase fire, then be mad it burned you? Claire was a Mistwalker. Nothing and no one could tie Mistwalkers down, even when/if they wanted to be, or so many claimed. If the chaos of the wilds couldn’t bind her, what chance did any man or woman have? At least, that’s what the last boy she’d crushed, Aedem, had said about her.

“It’s great to know you’ll keep us all safe, Claire. It’d be fun to hang out like we used at the Academy, but I start my apprenticeship with the Quartermaster as soon as we get back. I don’t know if I’ll get free days right away, but I’ll let you know?” I thanked Claire sincerely, and even managed to hide my lingering resentment for her abandoning me like a piece of trash. I think. I already knew I’d have a free day once a week, but she didn’t know that.

“Errr. Yeah. You got it, Em.” Claire looked at my Dad and Uncle, her expression slowly changing to a flush of red cheeks and ended with a glare at the older men. I didn’t get it, why was she mad at them? Claire stalked to the front of the group with Blaise.

“She’s always overcompensating. We all know she’s tough as nails, but she doesn’t seem to ever realize we don’t need her to act like that for our sakes. Youth is wasted on the young.” Uncle Remy set his hand on my head and ruffled my hair into a mess, which left me trying to get it into a semblance of order.

“Let’s go!” Blaise snapped curtly at the Dustwalkers, and without waiting to see if he would be obeyed, walked at pace with Claire.

I gave up trying to fix my hair.

This was it.

I looked back to see the immense walls of Havenstone. I’d dreamed about this for so long now, and here I was. On the wilds side of the Wall. I didn’t have magic spells, my equipment barely qualified as serviceable by adventurer standards, but I made it this far. The mist seemed to tickle my feet through the boots as we walked into them. They didn’t leave any moisture behind on the waterproof of my boots, though, unlike the mists that formed at night by the river.

When Claire stepped into the bank of fog it seemed to reach out as if to embrace her. For the rest of us it enveloped us without any kind of grace or nicety, although the more it pressed in on me, the more it felt like it might choke the life and warmth out of me. I stumbled along between Dad and Remy, each of whom reached out a steadying hand to keep me going. Apparently, the first step into the mists was always a doozy, and I appreciated the support they gave me, but they could have warned me. The fog rose with each step, until I could only see the slight outlines of the nearest Dustwalkers.

“First Veil,” Claire’s voice carried lightly backwards to the group. Each step we took felt weird. It was as if we crossed miles instead of feet, and the air had the resistance of moving through molasses. I’d never experienced the confining, pressing power of the mists before, but after twenty long paces the mists descended below our heads, and then down past our ankles, to the.. stone bridge we walked on.

Beyond either side of the half-missing railing lay a spectacle I’d never seen the likes of. Stretched out to the horizon in every direction, the dusty ground had a strange orange-brown-red color, and even the stones had a vivid orange hue to them. The wind carried flecks of dirt that stung the eyes, and the bridge we were on crossed an immense gorge with the tiniest trickle of water in its mist obscured bottom. Rising from the depths of the gorge were statues with the faces of birds, but the bodies of humans. Ages of wind had eroded most of the details, but the scale of the statues was boggling. They had to be at least three hundred feet tall.

“This is a new one,” Marius grunted quietly, eyes narrowed as he searched the gorge, skies, and shadows of the statues for threats.

“Something is interfering. I’ll over-power it this time, I’m sure.” Claire explained to the crew while they walked across the bridge. “Here we go! Veil tw-!”

“Decaylings! Make a box.” Blaise’s voice boomed mightily, cutting Claire’s voice off. Around me all twelve of the Dustwalkers shifted their formation to three-by-three-person box. This put me, Remy, Claire, Glint, and Michael, the party’s cleric, inside the box. It would have been a ridiculously tight fit if the linemen didn’t control their spacing. Each person on the front was next to someone they complimented, and the four in the center sniped enemies that were at risk of pushing through.

Decaylings looked like someone mixed a porcupine and a racoon then dumped the damn thing in tar. They seeped a black ooze that smelled horrific, had the consistency of thick gelatin, and the bits of it they left behind or that dripped off them made the stone of the bridge smoke. They were small, but they came in a swarm.

The smell alone, a rank odor of rotten flesh and melting stone, assaulted my nose as if one of those long quills had been jabbed straight up my nose to make my sinuses burn. A deep nausea overwhelmed me, my stomach churned, and a headache like I’d never, ever felt before, made me woozy. With each breath of the air it felt like my sinuses were being burned from the inside out.

I missed the fight, but apparently it wasn’t really much of a fight at all. The Dustwalker’s killed over fifty of the Decaylings in the ten minutes I had passed out. Michael had been forced heal me, repeatedly. Normally only people with at least one awakened affinity would be out here. The Knight’s called them devotions, and the most powerful could hold four devotions at once, with each devotion providing powerful physical resistance.

The overpowering stench and noxious fumes of the Decaylings had completely overwhelmed me.

“Hey, now we know the smell is an attack!” Uncle Remy said while patting me on the back.

“You know me, it’s always been my biggest dream to contribute to knowledge of the Sages of Mythozoology,” I wanted to deliver that deadpan, but the slap on the back left me coughing and the concerned looks Dad and Claire were shooting me left my delivery puttering out lamely. Michael insisted I drink a ration of water and eat some bread before he gave them the okay for the party to resume travel.

I’d never drank a bottle of water and ate a few slices of bread so fast as I had with twelve people all staring at me. Realistically, only like, six were staring at me, most were watching for another ambush or signs of valuables amongst the statues.

“Alright everyone, let’s get it right this time. Veil two!” Claire called out when we finally got moving again.

I wanted to ask why the adventurers called them Veils. As a blank I hadn’t been qualified for the mist courses. I couldn’t see any reason at all to use the name Veil, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Not after I’d already been knocked out by the fumes (that no one previously even knew were dangerous) of a creature they jokingly called Trashquills.

The mists condensed around us and surged up around Claire first, and then around the rest of us. I caught a silhouette of darkness, someone tall and terrifying, on one of the bird heads overlooking the bridge. Before I could glimpse any details the mists obscured them, and then I had to focus on walking and breathing. Why did the mists feel like they were trying to choke me, or drown me? The drab blue mist felt heavy, but it had no mass. I guess it felt like being strangled by a pillow would -- fluffy, soft, and terrifying.

“Another miss,” Uncle Remy grumbled when dozens of steps later the mists descended to reveal a lush environment unlike any I’d ever seen. Thick vines and moss covered everything, while the canopy above us blocked out so much light it was as dark as dusk on the ground.

“I hate rain forests,” Marius groaned. “Full of poison, disease, and damp. Fire never works well, or it works too well. Watch where you walk, buddy, places like this are rife with dangers, even the insects can kill people.”

I sighed. If a bit of noxious Trashquill fumes could almost kill me, I didn’t want to even think about what the bite from a wilds mosquito could do to me.

Blaise and Claire bickered about something while the rest of the Dustwalkers looked on at the forest in apprehension. No one seemed keen on exploring, I guess. With so many plants something here had to have value, but they were focused on the Kobold job, and I guess didn’t see the risk vs the reward in an environment full of unknown threats. At the end of the day, the Dustwalkers weren’t explorers, and the wilds were lethal.

“Third Veil. Focus on the Pyrite Hills, alright?” Claire’s voice wasn’t as upbeat as it had been outside of Havenstone. Common knowledge among adventurers said that three to four tries to reach a destination was good, but maybe Claire was used to doing it in one and was mad she couldn’t show off to the party? It wasn’t like we’d entered the territory of nine Veils. The sing-song children's rhyme went six veils are fine, seven veils require wine, after nine, you’ll vanish, lost for all time.

Many groups had made it past nine over the years, so it wasn’t a hard rule, but adventurers gave the saying a lot more credence than the Professors at the Academy did. I could almost hear the sing-song chorus of neighborhood kids chanting it, and one adult voice that savored the words with glee.

When I saw the haunted look on the faces of the Dustwalker’s, I realized I was hearing it for real. We all heard it, and no one could figure out where it came from.

“Misty, Misty, don’t you stray, Follow the path, don’t lose your way.

Misty, misty, hide and seek, Stay on the trail, or the outlook’s bleak.”