When Heroes Die

“What do you mean when you say, ‘a demon as a Gatekeeper is going too far’? According to heroes, the most important step of any journey is always the first one.”

– Dread Emperor Sinister

Ten days passed in the blink of an eye. Finally having somewhere safe to stop and think had been nice at first. After cleaning myself and some goodwill from Morgaine, I now felt like a person again. I didn’t like having to rely on the charity of others. After she’d made it clear I would have the opportunity to pay it back, I had finally caved in.

Those were the positives of my situation. The “apprenticeship” itself was another matter entirely.

I had seen enough around the tower so far for my thoughts of these being parahumans to have been completely dismissed. Parahuman powers were not teachable. They were not standardized. They didn’t require arcane symbolism to affect the world.

As absurd as it was, I had had to concede to the idea that magic was real. Magic was real and the people living here could learn it. I could learn it.

It was a novel and exciting idea at first. Then everything else had hit home. The front face in the town for this halfway house for orphaned wizards was a shop that operated for profit. They needed me to produce magical goods for me to be worth keeping.

In theory, that was not a problem. In practice, I had one arm.

That made no real difference in learning to read, write, or speak the local language. It made no difference for active magic either, other than slowing it down a little. I had been told that many of the rituals or magics that were reliant on me casting them myself were all things that could be done with only one hand. I hadn’t had the opportunity to really learn any of them yet, but it was something I could do.

There would still be some degree of a disadvantage compared to someone with two hands. But it wasn’t the kind of disadvantage I couldn’t overcome.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the kind of magic Olivier and Roland wanted me to learn.

Artificing turned a profit and is what this place cared to teach. What I had learned so far about artificing made the realities of my situation clear. Unlike throwing fireballs and lightning bolts, this type of tinkering almost certainly required the use of two arms.

Most of the others suffered through my attempts to spend an hour or so attempting to learn from them each day in good humour. It went even worse than expected. Not only was I physically at a disadvantage compared to others, but it seemed like something I was just incapable of learning. No matter how hard I tried, I achieved no results.

“Not everyone has the talent to be an artificer,” they commiserated.

Not everyone was talented at all kinds of magic. They suspected I would be good at offensive magic, but also weren’t willing to teach me it.

They had also commented about the uncanny speed I was learning to speak the language. It made me uncomfortable, because it wasn’t something I could afford to pretend to do worse at.

Then I was sent out with Maxime to gather herbs. He was like me in that he wasn’t a good artificer and was instead relegated to drudge work. They had him fetch herbs and then turn them into potions. So I was out with Maxime, where I could actually be useful to them. It stung. It was worse than that, though. From the way the others averted their eyes when talking to me, or they frowned when they thought I couldn’t see, I could tell that I wasn’t really wanted around. I didn’t even know what it was I had done to earn it.

With time to reflect in the evenings now that I was somewhere safe, I grew more and more morose. I was alone in an alien world that seemed to follow completely different rules from the one I lived in before. Whilst there were other people living in the same place as me, I was tolerated, not liked.

This likely wasn’t another version of Earth but instead something else. Something completely different.

I didn’t really have any idea of how I got here.

Magic was real. At least, a force existed here that operated on rules which on Earth Bet would probably be termed magic.

And most crushingly, I would almost certainly never see any of the people I cared about again.

My evenings were not any better. Sleep was restless, troubled with dreams of hexagonal gates opening across a myriad of worlds and the golden glare of the wrath of an infant god. I woke intermittently, crying out whenever I did. The looks of pity the others gave me come morning did nothing to improve my mood.

Frustrated, late one afternoon while out in the mountains with Maxime, I finally caved in.

“Can you teach me war magic?” I asked angrily as I pulled out another herb and deposited it in my pack.

I didn’t like the man. He was still crass in how he talked and provoked people for no good reason. He didn’t pity or shun me, though, and instead seemed to treat me like a comrade in arms. Someone who had been through the same crucible and came out with similar scars. That made him more tolerable than talking to anyone else.

Also, I was tired of feeling like I was making no progress at all.

“Girlie finally got tired of picking flowers and wants to put her hands on a real tool, eh?” He asked, leering suggestively.

I stared at him flatly.

“You’re less fun than my last commander,” he muttered under his breath. “Fine, let’s head deeper into the mountains, so we won’t give the people around here a scare.”

I was surprised at how quickly he agreed.

With the onset of Winter, frost was creeping down into the valley. As we hiked, our breath trailed behind us in the bitter Autumn air, and the path forward became more and more precarious. Eventually, he called to a stop.

“The fancy academics will argue for days about the benefits of one system of standardized magic or another. They will go on forever, discussing the merits of Jaquinite compared to Ligurian or Trismegistan Sorcery. Don’t let any of that claptrap fool you, though. When you are on a battlefield facing down a cavalry charge, it doesn’t matter what school of magic you were taught in. So long as you can rip the earth up under their horses' hooves, pelt them with blocks of ice, or drown them in hellfire, your skinny ass might have a chance to survive.”

He came alive as he began to talk. Almost as if he was another person.

“Roland told me that attempting to learn a second school of sorcery will drive the practitioner mad, is that true?” I asked.

I wasn’t sure how learning more than one methodology could cause an onset of insanity, but it was worth finding out before I made a terrible mistake.

“That’s true,” he agreed.

“What will you be teaching me then?”

“Jaquinite war magic. It was what I was taught, so it’s not like I can really teach you anything else. If you want to go balls deep into Trismegistan sorcery like those evil fucks up in the tower to the east, you’d need to find someone else.” He spat at his foot as he spoke, then took a swig from the flask at his side.

“What will we be starting with, then?”

“The fireball. It’s one of the simplest workings someone can do. Even an idiot can pick it up.” He started tracing symbols in the air, demonstrating what to do.

I tried mimicking what he was doing. Over and over, I repeated the gestures. Whenever I messed up enough he would interrupt me, warning me that the outcome would be dire and told me to start again. As I worked, failures continued to mount. Frustrated, eventually I visualized the fireballs that Othala used to grant people back in Brockton Bay. I felt resistance again, much like I had on that night on the road. I pushed.

Finally.

A syrupy ball of liquid napalm languidly flew out of my hand, colliding with the mountainside. The grass it struck caught the light and, hastily, Maxime extinguished the flame. The two of us both looked on in surprise.

“Well girlie, that wasn’t what I was expecting when I taught you that spell,” he mused, scratching at his ass as he spoke. His grey eyes narrowed on me searchingly.

“Why not?” I asked. Was he expecting me to fail even more?

“Well, because I taught you a standardized spell construct, see. The ball should have looked like this.”

He proceeded to demonstrate, going through the hand movements rapidly as he worked. A ball shot out, colliding with a rock. He repeated the gesture and a similar ball appeared. Moments later, he had extinguished both. I understood what he was trying to show me. The ball I had created had looked nothing like either of the two that he made.

“Maybe I did something wrong then, but not wrong enough to mess up the spell?” I asked.

He shook his head. “If you had made a mistake like that, I would have stepped in. Try repeating what you did again and see if you get the same result.”

I did as he asked. I went through the hand motions, visualized the same image, felt the resistance again, and pushed. Another ball of flame tumbled through the air, landing on the slopes further down.

“Well, I’ll be, maybe girls like you just handle balls differently,” he said absently. The usual bite wasn’t in it, though, he seemed distracted by what he had seen.

He had me practice for another half hour. As I did so, he kept putting out the flames. He watched what I did avidly, as if trying to solve a puzzle. It was unnerving, but not in a bad way. The process was cathartic. Despite the oddities that apparently existed, it felt like I had found something I could do.

The fact that what I was doing was clearly not what was intended, was something I needed to worry about. Nobody liked Maxime though and if I was only practising around him, even if he did raise a fuss about what I was doing, I doubted anyone would believe him. The others apparently knew nothing about war magic anyhow.

We started the journey back, arriving just as the bell in the centre of town tolled out the hour. We started the trek to the tower next. I asked to be invited in as we arrived, and then we deposited the ingredients we had collected. Usually, this was where we split off. He headed towards the local tavern in town and I stayed around the tower. As I was about to leave, I felt his hand on my shoulder.

“You should come drinking with me, girlie, it would do you some good.”

I felt my eyebrows raise involuntarily at the assertion.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“I can see you wallowing in misery about whatever it was that happened. None of the people here get what it’s like, really. They’re all soft. So pull the stick out of your ass and come down drinking with me, talking it over will do you some good.”

He let go of me then and turned around, leaving.

I didn’t say anything or take him up on his offer then but chewed it over in my mind.

A month later, and Winter had properly dug in. Snow covered the pass into the valley, cutting off all but the most adventurous of travellers from making the journey here. It dusted the roofs of buildings and clogged down the roads, turning them into a slurry of mush.

With some of the spare coin I had, I had purchased an empty journal and taken to recording everything I could about Earth Bet. Without having a ballpoint pen, it was challenging, but I persevered. Who I was, what I lived through, and the people I knew. The food, the culture, the technology. I had been struck by the fear that it would, with time, all fade from my memory. That I would forget where I had come from.

I had been writing it in English, since I doubted anyone here would be able to speak it. There were likely some skilled sorcerers who could translate it with magic. If any of them took a passing interest in my journal, though, I had far greater concerns.

The process would take long, and I expected it would be months before I finished. Better to take the time now, though, then leave it and have my life fade from memory later on.

Olivier had reconciled with Alisanne. Come Spring, the two of them would be leaving to get together somewhere else. He was moving on. The more time I spent at the tower, the more I realized I didn’t want to keep staying here. The moment I felt that leaving wouldn’t land me in trouble, I would probably depart as well.

The other people in the town shunned me. This was unsurprising, as they turned away from everyone else who could work magic as well. I would be able to live with that if I felt some sense of friendship with the other sorcerers. Unfortunately, I had drawn apart from most of them too. The only exception was Maxime. As obscene, obnoxious, and odious as he was, time spent with him had become the highlight of my day.

Throwing fireballs, lightning bolts, and chunks of rock far out in the countryside had become my only escape. The explanations for how to achieve higher order effects were becoming increasingly arcane. Unfortunately, I was reaching the limits of what he could teach. That meant I was reaching the limits of what I could safely pretend to learn. He wasn’t capable of what he called High Arcana, which was apparently the more advanced part of sorcery. Without a teacher, I would need to learn more on my own.

He still hadn’t taught me how to heal. It was supposed to be much more complicated than anything else I had covered so far.

With the change of seasons, my trips out with Maxime had become shorter and more of the time was spent digging up plants. That left both of us in a foul mood. The others avoided us as a result whenever we returned to the tower.

It was early evening, and I was digging through some books on sorcery that Roland had made available. It had taken me some time before I was able to even partially read them, considering the language barrier. Whilst it was still a struggle to decode the text in front of me, I understood enough to be able to piece together the words I didn’t know.

I was trying to work out how I had arrived here.

While it was possible that I had been brought here by Contessa, I had doubted that for a while. I strongly suspected this universe was not one of the ones typically accessible to people from Earth Bet at all. It seemed likely that if there had been people capable of magic available during the fight with Scion, I would have mastered them at the time.

Given my state of mind during the fight, I would have considered it the reasonable thing to do.

The fact that I hadn’t, suggested that however I arrived here had come from this universe and not the reverse.

I was fighting my way through a treatise on the nature of Creation written by a Proceran priest. It was mostly filled with theological ramblings. I was about to give up and look at another text when a passage stood out to me.

Devils and the Fae are not creatures born of Creation. Manifesting here takes effort for them, as they fundamentally do not belong here. Bringing them into Creation almost always involves a ritual of some kind, although the Gods Above caution that it is unwise to do so. If the practitioner finds themselves in a position where they are forced to deal with the aforementioned beings, however, do note that they can be contained by use of an appropriately structured threshold.

The text went on, providing more detail. That was not what concerned me, though. The sense of foreboding I felt whenever I approached a building, I finally understood the source.

It was because I was approaching a threshold.

On a hunch, I tried creating a flame. I didn’t bother going through the required motions, instead just focusing on the result. It appeared, dancing on my fingers. I dismissed it.

Unable to help myself, I laughed. It was a bitter, ugly, laugh. Thresholds. The world itself was telling me that I didn’t belong.

The effect was not supposed to be as strong as it was for me. For me, a building didn’t even need to be warded at all. So long as it could be considered lived within, I couldn’t enter without an invitation. Maybe it was because I came from a place even further removed from Creation than the beings that the text described.

No wonder I felt so alone.

It didn’t explain everything. How I arrived here, for one. Someone probably summoned me, but I didn’t know who, how or why. I did know that I wasn’t performing sorcery as the others here understood it, though. This was likely why none of their lessons helped. It surprised me that none of them had realized that.

Maybe they had and just thought it wiser not to inform me.

I discarded the idea. Almost all the stories I had heard locals tell about how to deal with extradimensional entities involved either running away or killing them as fast as possible. Containing them was seen as the worst possible option. Letting them roam free was dismissed entirely.

Whatever it was, the other practitioners hadn’t caught on to the fact that I didn’t belong. They had ways to check for the gift and seemed to believe I had it. Without a much better foundation, I couldn’t be sure why. It was even a possibility that I did have the gift, but I couldn’t figure out how to use it. I didn’t consider that likely.

Feeling down, I closed the book and put it away. I had read enough.

Where to go from here? I felt so very lost. What I wouldn’t give to talk to Lisa again, or say goodbye to my dad. Tears ran down my cheeks and I didn’t bother to wipe them away.

Then, a recent memory struck me.

“I can see you wallowing in misery about whatever it was that happened. None of the people here get what it’s like, really. They’re all soft. So pull the stick out of your ass and come down drinking with me, talking it over will do you some good.”

Talking about my life from before wasn’t an option. Not without being extremely creative with the truth. The offer of company made in good faith, however, called to me like a moth of a flame.

If it drove off the loneliness, I could deal with everything else.

Heading out, I was struck by the cold the moment my foot slid past the door. I looked around, there was nobody else in sight. Not in the mood for being even more miserable, I pictured an aura of gentle warmth exuding out from me. Moments later, I shoved the idea down Creation’s throat and wondered out onto the street.

The walk to the tavern only a few minutes. People eyed me distrustfully as I went, but I was used to that by now.

You can’t escape those looks, even a world away.

Knocking on the tavern door, I asked if I could be let in. They agreed, but seemed confused, as if the idea of even asking was odd. I didn’t care. I spotted Maxime by a table nestled in the corner on the far left. He was alone, nursing a drink. There was a wide gap between him and anyone else.

That suited me just fine.

I grabbed one of the bar stools and pulled it up, taking a seat opposite him.

“Finally got the stick out your ass, eh?” Maxime slurred.

I didn’t bother to reply.

“Louis, get the girl a beer.” He bellowed. Then, his eyes narrowed, eying me critically. “Actually, make that two.”

I was about to protest that I didn’t want to drink. The memories of what people had been like at the Merchant’s parties were still fixed in my mind, and they weren’t nice ones. Then, mouth half opened, I paused.

Why not at least give it a try?

I closed it, letting the order go through. What the hell, the world I knew had ended. My dad wasn’t around to shout at me for drinking, and I had stopped listening to him years ago anyhow. On the list of things I’d done to disappoint him, this wouldn’t even make the top ten.