Chapter XXVIII: Understanding

There was no fading back into consciousness; it wasn’t like waking up from a deep sleep. My consciousness went on like a light switch in the middle of the night, hurling me headlong into awareness of my surroundings. My arms, now that they were working again, shot instantly to my throat as I gasped for breath. There was no injury, not even a scar or a seam, where the reikverratr had decapitated me. 

I was lying on my back, looking up at the sky. Some time had passed; the sky was grey and cloudy, and the sun was partway through setting over the mountains. As I sat up, I noticed two related facts. The first was that I was feeling intensely lightheaded; the second was that I was still wearing the same shirt, which creaked and moaned with the sheer quantity of dried blood encrusted onto it. Over time I would learn to gauge how much blood I’d lost by how lightheaded I was feeling, as well as a few other signs. I’d lost about a quarter of mine: bad but survivable. 

As I sat up, I quickly found myself watched by three pairs of eyes. Standing a few feet away was Sarnai, still in her uniform, with a musket in a sling around her chest. Crouched by my head was Sir Margaret Halflance. And, no matter how much it didn’t seem possible, off to my right with her back to me, was Miss Rook, sewing together some of the gashes in the skin on her arm as best as she could. Sarnai and Sir Margaret had expressions like, well, like they’d just seen a girl rise from the dead. Which I suppose they sort of had. But I was too busy looking at the other apparent resurrection. 

“Rook?” I said. My voice still sounded weird, and not just because my throat was bone-dry. “I thought… I thought you were dead! The reikverratr broke your neck, how did you make it out of there?”

Rook slowly looked over her shoulder at me, while Sir Margaret and Sarnai looked at each other in mute confusion. Then Rook spoke to me. At least, I assume she was speaking to me, because it sounded like complete gibberish. 

“Rook? What’s going on?” I said. “Are you okay?”

Sir Margaret reached out a hand at me, gently resting it on my shoulder, and started speaking… identical gibberish. It was still her voice, and it had the cadence of normal speech, but none of the words made any sense. Sarnai started speaking as well, just as incomprehensible. 

In a panic, I pulled away from Sir Margaret’s touch and started backing away from the others as well. It felt like a nightmare, but scratching the back of my hand with my fingernails didn’t make me wake up. Suddenly the headache, that same inexplicable headache that had plagued me during the fight against the reikverratr, returned. 

That familiar pain was enough to get my mind working. This was real, not a nightmare, and on top of that, there was something familiar about it. I took a long, slow breath, into my core, calming myself down, and then started really paying attention to the sounds everyone was making. It took a few seconds of close listening to realize that they weren’t speaking gibberish: they were speaking a different language. It sounded a bit Germanic, maybe Dutch or similar.

And all during the fight with the reikverratr, there had been the oddest feeling that what she, and I, and Rook had been saying was a strange mix of the incomprehensible and the comprehensible, like they were speaking a foreign language, but one I could still understand. A feeling which had started as soon as the reikverratr had started speaking, and one which began at the exact same time as the exact same headache I was feeling now. Something strange was going on, and had been going on. In fact, as I stood there in the cold, looking at the others while they looked at me, it hit me that something was different about me.

For the first time in months, I was thinking in English. And why in the hell would anyone speak English on Selene?

Suddenly, the switch clicked, and with a spontaneous pulse of agony everything opened up to me. I balled my right hand into a fist, sorting through the massive flood of information, the multiple tracks along which my brain could now run.

“One,” I said, in English, extending my thumb. Then “Two,” in Rochathan, the official language of the Empire, extending my index finger. “Three,” I said, in Blueroser, an offshoot of Common Cassandran, extending my middle finger. “Four,” I said, in Rélonsine, a Miranian dialect, extending my ring finger. “Five,” in High Creandasian, extending my pinkie. “Six,” in Old Mahasha, a language I knew nothing about except for how to speak it fluently, sticking out the thumb on my other hand. 

“Uh. Sorry about that,” I said in Blueroser. “I just remembered that I’m multilingual now.”

“Well, that was worrying,” Sir Margaret said with an anxious grin. “For a second there I thought you’d gotten your brain damaged for real from the lack of oxygen.”

There was a subtle but key difference: before, speaking in Blueroser had been like speaking in my only language, a way of speaking so natural that I didn’t even notice it was new to me. Now I understood that Sir Margaret was speaking Blueroser, my second language, even if I could understand her perfectly. And I could understand that I was speaking Blueroser, with no accent and perfect understanding despite my only having known it for a couple of months, and had been speaking English just a few seconds earlier. 

“How exactly does one not remember that they’re multilingual?” said Rook. She was speaking with a slight Creandasian accent, which I suddenly could compare with the sound of High Creandasian as a language, thus giving me a fairly good understanding of why she might have that accent in the first place. The information was a bit overwhelming. 

“You know, I’m not entirely sure myself,” I said. “Honestly I’m trying really hard not to think about the implications of it. But something… activated in me, when I was fighting the reikverratr.”

“You were talking in Rochathan the entire time,” said Rook. After a moment of introspection, I realized she was right.

“But so were you, for some of it.”

She shrugged. “I picked up a bit of the language over the years. It helps.”

“So yeah, that was English you heard me speaking for a bit. My native language, kind of. It’s where words like man and elephant come from. I guess I’ve been using loanwords for a while without realizing it.”

“That’s certainly fascinating,” said Sir Margaret. “You mean to say that you lost the use of your native language, but still unconsciously used loanwords from it to express concepts which do not have words in our language?”

I shrugged, sitting back down on the blanket I’d woken up on. “We can talk semantics later. Right now I have a more pressing question, which is I saw you die, Rook! How are you alive? For that matter, how am I alive? And also where the hell are we?”

Now that I was no longer concerned by whatever jackhammer had been taken to my Wernicke’s area, I had a moment to properly take in my surroundings. The four of us were out in the middle of the plateau, surrounded on all sides by a vast expanse of rolling hills and fields. It was only after several seconds of searching that I could find the outline of Zrimash; it was miles and miles away, and barely on the visible side of the horizon. The blanket I was lying on was one of a few, scattered around a small campfire that burned only dimly. There were also three backpacks set in a pile, a small distance away, as well as a large and disorganized pile of furs and knives and other implements on the far side of the campfire. 

“We’re about ten miles from the treaty grounds,” said Sarnai. “We… lost. Horribly.”

“The ghouls were simply too many in number, and those Cassandran weapons totally outmatch anything we could muster. All of the soldiers who couldn’t escape into the wilderness are dead, and all of the civilians and such are effectively under Cassandran occupation. Sarnai and I were able to fight our way out of it and steal a few supplies.”

“And as we were escaping,” Sarnai continued, “we found the aftermath of your fight with the reikverratr.”

A slight shiver passed down my spine. Everything I’d fought for, all those people I’d saved from the pyramid, it was all for nothing. Fuck. “Okay, that explains the ‘where,’ but what about the ‘how’?” Specifically how did Rook survive getting her freaking head rotated around 180 degrees!”

“Steel is easier to repair than flesh,” said Rook.

“And it just so happens that I have something of an interest in mechanical engineering, with a special eye on repairing things which are broken. I also happen to know her mechanisms better than just about anyone.”

Sarnai flared her nostrils visibly at the word “mechanisms.” I got the feeling that she was just as new to the idea of Rook as… part-machine as I was, and probably an order of magnitude more unsettled by it. That made sense. I’d grown up on comic books and had already had my world thrown upside-down, whereas she… hadn’t.

“Sir Margaret knew to, er…” Rook placed her hands around her head, a few inches away, and made a rather brutal twisting motion, “which got me moving, at least. I’ve been doing what self-repairs I can ever since we got out here.”

“And what about me?”

The others all froze, giving each other awkward looks, occasionally glancing at me or down at their own feet. I’d stepped into something uncomfortable.

“Well that’s concerning. Is there something bad I need to know about?”

“Well, Emma…” Sir Margaret pressed her lips together, trying to assemble her words. “When we found you, the toll the battle had taken on you was obvious, even with the benefit of your advanced regenerative ability.”

“She means that your head was not attached to your body,” said Sarnai.

Sir Margaret nodded. “Also you weren’t breathing and you had no pulse. We all assumed that you’d finally hit the limits of your ability and died. So we took your body with us and were deciding whether it was better to bury you or burn you.”

Rook grimaced. “We meant it only in the most respectful way, trust me. Would have been a bit of a horror novel, considering what’s happened.”

“Miss Rook informed me of an observation, based on an event during one of your fights with the ghouls, that while you cannot regrow severed limbs, you can reattach them. Thus, I struck upon the idea of, erm, putting your head back on your shoulders. It honestly went quicker than I expected; the two stumps had sealed together in about fifteen seconds, at which point your heart and lungs restarted almost instantly. You were awake about a minute after that, albeit speaking a different language from the previous one. But now we’ve resolved that, and now we’re sitting here talking about it.”

I felt a little queasy, which, after everything else that had gone on, I didn’t think was possible. For a few seconds my mouth just opened and closed, and my brain struggled to encompass the words. “So if I get my head cut off, I die. But if you put my head back on, I come to life again?”

“Yes,” said Sir Margaret. 

“Cool.”

Dead silence, while Rook gave me a mildly disappointed expression. I got off of the blanket and picked it up, sitting down closer to the fire and putting the blankets up and over my legs. The sun was going down, and it was getting cold. There were two things I could think about: the metaphysical and physiological implications of my decapitation, or everything that had gone down in the treaty grounds. I chose the latter. 

“What the hell are we going to do?” I said. “We can’t fight the ghoul army, let alone the reikverratr. Anna and Unity and all the others are still back there, assuming they didn’t die, and who knows what the Cassandrans and Dinara are planning.”

“There were… others, who escaped,” said Sarnai. “Lady Halflance, and some of Kurzurnah’s commanders. In the short time before the ghouls were upon us, I heard whispers of a meeting in Yazthaan. That’s a town, similar in size to Zrimash, some distance to the east of here.”

“Alright, sure,” I said. I was doubtful on a whole bunch of levels, but I also didn’t have an alternative. “How far away is that?”

“Not sure,” Sarnai said. “This isn’t my home territory.”

“I vaguely remember grabbing a map at some point while I was packing, let me see if I can find it in all of this,” said Sir Margaret, going over to the large pile.

The pile, which had a few swords visible on top of it, reminded me of something.“Did you grab my sword while you were carrying off my body, by any chance?”

Rook shook her head. “It was broken into half a dozen pieces,” she said. “I imagine that was the reikverratr’s doing.”

“Fuck. Guess I’ll need a new sword, then.”

“Sir Margaret packed a few,” said Rook. “And I won’t be needing one, trust me.”

“Are you going to be okay?” I said, looking at the exposed segments of metal plating along her shoulders and back, several of which had been visibly dented by bullets or impacts. “You took a beating like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“I’ll manage,” she said, pulling tight one last suture. “I’ll need serious attention and some fresh parts when we get back to civilization, but I can move. Won’t be at full strength until then, though.”

“How did you… What are you? Are you a machine? Were you always a machine?”

“‘Been asking myself questions like that for a very long time. Haven’t found a satisfying answer yet.” Having finished repairing her skin, Rook moved on to her steam vents, sticking fingers into the gaps and feeling along the edges of each one. 

“That’s not really what I’m asking, though. I mean, how did you… there’s nothing else like this on Selene, I would know, I’ve studied it. What’s that glowing green thing in the middle of your chest?”

“That’s none of your—”

“I knew I’d picked up a map!” Sir Margaret said. “Everyone gather around and look at this.”

Rook and I gave each other measured glares of the kind that said “We’ll settle this later,” then did as we were asked to, forming a huddle on one of the blankets around the map Sir Margaret had found. It was fairly substantial as maps go, about the size of three letter sheets side by side, but also very boring. Which made sense; it was depicting a large area of open plain and grassland. Most of the interesting features were artificial; major trails for the nomadic Durkahns, river valleys and towns where the settled populations lived. The one notable feature was right in the middle, where the huge expanses of rolling hills and flat plateau were split by a row of small mountains. Of course, small was relative when you were already sitting at an altitude of six thousand feet.

“Alright, now, if you’ve been paying attention you probably notice that Zrimash is right over here,” Margaret said, “which would put us just barely to the right of it, about here. Yazthaan is… over here, by the mountain rim. That isn’t very good, I think.”

“It wouldn’t have a scale, would it? I like knowing how many days I’m going to spend going through hell before I do it,” said Sarnai.

Sir Margaret pulled out a compass (the geometry kind, not the magnetic kind) and started taking measurements without another word. Because of course she just had one of those sitting around. After a few awkward moments of taking widths and angles and comparing against the legend, she muttered, “a hundred miles.”

“A hundred miles?” I said. I was not used to the concept of a hundred miles.

“Give or take ten, yes, depending on how much the trail winds back and forth, which will hopefully not be much over flat terrain.”

“A journey of about five days, no?” said Rook. “An army would take a week, but with only four…”

Sir Margaret nodded. “Five days if we push ourselves. But I think I don’t need to ask when I say that we’re all used to pushing ourselves.”

“I’m not,” I said.

“Yes, well, you may not be a soldier, but you are also somewhat immortal, and you fought a reikverratr damned close to a standstill, so I think you can tough it out.”

I made a vaguely whiny noise under my breath, but couldn’t exactly contest her. About ten minutes earlier I’d been a decapitated corpse, and yet I couldn’t feel a hint of injury or fatigue. It was almost unsettling how little of an impact my temporary death had had. And for all my whining, I had survived the initial trek up to the Urcos plateau mostly unharmed as well. A five-day journey on mostly level ground was well within my capabilities.

“Five days starting tomorrow,” said Sarnai. “I need rest.”

“Very much agreed,” Sir Margaret said with a groan. “Grab your blankets, everyone. The sun’s going down, and saints know how cold it’ll be in a couple of hours.”

I wasn’t all that exhausted compared to the others, at least judging by how sluggish the normally hyperactive Margaret was being. She’d been fighting nearly all day, as had Sarnai, and without the benefit of regeneration or steel skin like me and Rook. But I was weary; both from how that day seemed to have stretched out into a whole week, and from just how much I’d seen. The rest was more important for my mind than for my body, and I took it gladly. 

Grabbing a few blankets, I found a soft spot away from where I’d resurrected, out on the darkening edge of the camp, and curled into a fetal position. My clothes were still crusty and rough with dried blood, and the echoes of the headache still reverberated through my skull, not to mention all the questions that had been raised by my sudden multilingualism, but they all faded fast as soon as I had the soft wool blankets around me. I was tired in a way I’d never been tired before, and drifted off to sleep in the blink of an eye. 

Of course, I couldn’t sleep for very long. The nightmares found me too quickly. These ones, mercifully, weren’t the trauma-drenched flashbacks brought by the Musician. These were pure reaction to the day, a replay of every gore-drenched moment. I felt my bones break as if it was happening all over, I saw ghouls and Bluerosers fall dying before my blade by the hundreds, by the thousands. Even my own body rebelled against me, the regenerative powers of the “Alraune'' twisting it into a bloody tendrilled thing that constantly assembled and reassembled until I was a living maelstrom of flesh and teeth. And there was always an undercurrent, the idea of something nagging at me no matter what I did. I dreamed that I’d finally learned something that made it all fit together, that the secret to it all was finally in my hands, that through the blood and turmoil I’d finally found my place… if only I could remember what that was when I woke up.

And I did wake up. Not when I was supposed to, of course; I woke up drenched in sweat, despite the pitch black and bitter cold of night biting at my face. I grabbed at my chest, expecting to find something deformed. Nothing was. It took me a few seconds to remember that I had breasts. That was probably what was wrong. 

Breasts or not, I wasn’t going to be able to sleep again for a bit, assuming I slept at all, considering I actually felt very well rested. So I threw the blankets aside and went over to stare meditatively into the fire. To my surprise, I wasn’t alone in that. 

“So what’s keeping you two up?” I said, folding my knees to my chest. 

“I don’t need sleep,” said Rook. “That’s a weakness for you animals.”

“Can’t sleep,” said Margaret. “I’m worried that I’m going to get to Yazthaan and find out that Sarah didn’t make it, or worse… Can’t stop myself from thinking, which always seems to be my problem.”

“Nightmares,” I said. “What about Sarnai, is she…”

I was interrupted by a very loud snore coming from a huge pile of blankets a few feet from the fireplace. You could only tell there was anyone under it from the huge pair of antlers emerging from one end.

“Lucky bastard,” Sir Margaret muttered.

We sat around the fire, Rook still doing her best to repair her extensive injuries from the fighting earlier. Her skin had so many sewn-up holes that it looked like a maze of stitches, and at some point she’d moved on to working on her metallic internals. I didn’t feel like asking what her deal was, not just yet. Instead my thoughts turned inward, trying to remember my nightmares at the same time that I desperately needed to forget them. And from the blood-splattered memory, my thoughts leapt gingerly over to the reikverratr. 

“Do you know anything about something called an… Alraune?”

“It’s a type of plant,” said Margaret. “A toxic hallucinogen, last I heard. Why?”

“The reikverratr… she called me an Alraune, when we were fighting. Talked about it as if it were a… type of being, or something like that.”

“We have myths of all sorts about the alraune,” Rook said. She glanced over her shoulder at Sarnai then added, “the Creandasians, that is. Suppose there’s no point in being cagey about that anymore.”

That made me curious. I leaned forward, looking up at Rook. “What kind of myths?”

“That the first humans were made from the alraune. That under certain circumstances, alraune can… emerge from human stock, so to speak. It’s the reason why we have two methods of execution in Creandas. Some women get hanged, some get the chopping block, depending on—well, it doesn’t really matter.”

That got me to raise an eyebrow, but I decided not to press the matter. “So it’s like… a religious thing?”

Rook shook her head. “Folklore. Though you get the occasional mad doctor trying to use alraune as part of some scheme to create life.”

“That doesn’t really explain why the reikverratr seemed to think that I am an Alraune. Last time I checked, I’m not a plant.”

Rook shrugged. “Do you have any guesses, Sir?”

“The Cassandran Empire is a big place, and I wouldn’t even know where to begin if I wanted to categorize all the myths that have arisen in that place. Maybe she was just insulting you for your height, or casting imprecations about your mental stability. Soldiers tend to do things like that in the heat of battle. Makes us feel better.”

I didn’t believe that for a second. Then again, I didn’t feel like giving her a Powerpoint presentation of all the weird shit that the reikverratr had said before and during absolutely wrecking my ass. Instead, I let my chin lean down on my knees and stared into the flames. Where was Lady Halflance? Where was Dr. Charcharias? Were Anna and Unity even still alive, let alone in good condition? I had no way of answering any of those questions, let alone all the other ones floating through my subconscious, but I worked myself into exhaustion trying to piece it together from a total lack of evidence. Shame about that.

The next thing I knew I was back in the blankets again, waking up to the dim red-tinted light of mid-dawn. I can’t say that as I extricated myself from all of the bedding that I felt rested, but I didn’t feel tired either. My clothes were still covered in blood. 

Of course, I was the last person to wake up, which meant that as soon as I was out of bed it was time for packing. It took a solid half-hour of negotiating and finagling to divide up which things would go with which person, who could carry the heaviest load, and so on. It would take a page to write down all the boring details, so I won’t.

I took a new sword. We had a few, and as the only one without a sword I got first pick. The one I found was, apparently, an infantry sword, straighter in the blade and more sturdily built than my old weapon. It wasn’t perfect for someone my size, but it was balanced, and I felt that I could handle the weight. There weren’t any spare clothes that would remotely fit me, though; the best I could manage was to find a stream and take a soak, but even that didn’t get rid of the blood entirely. 

And with all that done, it was time to leave the treaty grounds behind. You could hear the sounds of gunfire in the distance, as ghoul patrols caught up with fleeing groups of Bluerosers, and we didn’t want to be one of those groups. We had been walking for maybe an hour when I looked back and realized that Zrimash had completely vanished over the horizon.

SaffronDragon

Seeing everyone in the comments for the last chapter getting sad over Rook being dead was super weird because I knew what was going to happen this chapter, so I was cringing and also laughing so much for like a week. Anyway, yeah, never consider the cyborg to be down for the count until you're really, really sure about it. Also, my Patreon has been stagnant for a while, and it's my only source of income, so if you've been following along and enjoying this story so far, why not click the link and support me for as little as $3 a month, join my Discord, and all that. You have no idea how much it makes my day to see the notification for a new patron. If you can't afford it, that's fine; I'll see you in two weeks for Chapter XXIX: A Confrontation.