Chapter 4: Falling For Her

While Yume was still cleaning out the Chosen One's wound Selene and I busied ourselves skinning and butchering the manticore. We kept the paws and the stinger whole but skinned the entire rest of the body, minus the head. I mean come on. It had the head of an old man except three times as big as it should have been. There's macabre trophies and then there's literally dragging a human-looking face around with you.

I'd never had manticore meat before so I didn't know what to expect but we decided to try it anyway. Well, after I used a minor magic item to test if the meat itself was poisonous. It wasn't. But we did find the manticore's multiple venom glands and made sure to preserve them as best we could. The next alchemist we found would probably pay a small fortune for those.

Once we were done with the manticore and Alisha had healed the Chosen One back up we kept walking until it started to get dark, at which point we built a campfire to cook some of the manticore meat for dinner.

I was half tempted to make the bastard find his own dinner, for several reasons but most recently because he'd done nothing to help with making dinner, neither helping with cooking even after he'd been healed, nor helping with butchering the meat, but Alisha told me to let it rest.

The meat ended up pretty tough. Alisha had done her best, working with high heat and wine to soften up the meat and it had worked up to a point, but with only a few hours to cook there had only been so much she could do. But while the meat was pretty tough, it was also pretty tasty. Like beef but with a strong gamey flavor. It had gone particularly well with the stew of wild mushrooms and red wine that she'd cooked it in.

I also noticed that Yume seemed a lot more comfortable eating with a spoon than any of the silverware she'd been struggling with before. I was determined to find out what that was all about.

My next reason for wanting to punch the Chosen One came when we were speaking of watch shifts, where he informed us that since we were his paid-for mercenaries that keeping a lookout was meant to be our job and then he vanished into his tent. Yume, however, stayed outside and decided to take the first shift. I had no idea why he allowed her that freedom, but she seemed relieved.

Sadly, the nature of sleeping in shifts meant that we didn't actually have time to talk to her. Yume took the first two hours, then Selene took two, then me and finally Alisha. Alisha always took the final shift if she could help it as it let her get breakfast going early. Even when we weren't on quests, Alisha was almost always up early to make breakfast so the final shift barely felt like an inconvenience to her. I also noticed that two hour watch shifts were a lot less awful to go through than our usual three hour shifts.

My own shift began rather uneventfully, Selene waking me with a gentle kiss and me making my way to the tree stump that Yume had sat down on during her shift.

But as soon as I'd sat down, I felt a phantom weight press against my back. Back when she'd first started doing that it'd freaked me out but now I'd come to expect it.

“Hey Syr”, I said to the black-haired woman in the long white dress leaning her back against mine.

“Hey yourself”, she replied, then asked: “What did I miss?”

“Ah, I'd been wondering where you were”, I said. “What's the last thing you've experienced with me?”

Syr was a prisoner in her own body, taken over by a possessive entity, and her mind had taken refuge in mine, sharing my experiences and being able to speak to me. Except when she was able to covertly listen in on what her body was up to, which of course she did whenever possible in the hopes of finding a clue on how to get her body back.

“Well, I left halfway through your little... adventure with Alisha. Gods that felt incredible”, she said and I felt my cheeks heat up at the memory. One of the weirdest things, from Syr's point of view, was that sharing my experiences meant she got a really good idea of what having a penis was like.

“Alright”, I said, trying to get us back on track, “that means you didn't miss much.” I then filled her in on what had happened since then.

“That rat bastard”, she growled once I'd shared the way the Chosen One treated Yume. “I agree with Alisha. Do whatever needs to be done to take him down.”

“Sheesh, you too?”, I asked, then said very quietly: “I'm already planning for it. I'd rather beat the Dark Lord first, but if he keeps acting like this...”

“You'll need to do something about him sooner”, Syr finished.

I nodded, then asked: “So, what have you been up to?”

She shrugged. “I heard something interesting. Remember when you told me about skinwalkers?”

I winced. I did. I'd thought she was a skinwalker stalking me back when she first found her way into my mind and hadn't wanted to upset me by telling me, so she'd observed me from the shadows. “Yeah”, I said.

“So of course when I heard my body mention skinwalkers I got curious”, she said.

“What did she say?”, I asked, curious myself now.

“That's the thing”, she said. “What she said doesn't make any sense to me. I was hoping you could tell me what she meant.”

“Go on”, I urged.

“So she was talking to a bunch of cultists”, she said. “Someone asked her whether skinwalkers could be trusted and she replied 'skinwalkers and wendigos are to the Dark Young what ghouls are to the undead'.”

I felt myself go cold at those words.

“That means something to you, doesn't it?”, she asked. “I can tell by your reaction.”

“Yeah, it makes an 'oh fuck' kind of sense. So you know what ghouls are?”, I asked.

“Weird cannibalistic humanoids, right?”, she replied.

“Sort of”, I said. “There are two different kinds of ghouls. One are cannibals as you said. We call them feral ghouls. The other kind aren't as insane. They live in the wild and hunt wild animals, kinda like orcs but with less infighting. Both have the same origins, though. You know how just about everyone is willing to put their differences aside when it comes to killing Necromancers?”, I asked.

“Yeah”, she said.

“Ghouls are one of the reasons for that. A fledgling Necromancer is dangerous but sort of predictable. They all start off reveling in their powers. And the powers they start with are substantial. They can create those weird cancerous growths the Black Goat is using, they can use the Crawling Chaos' Darklight and they can create undead minions thanks to the King in Yellow's powers”, I explained before she stopped me.

“Hold on, I know two of those, but what is Darklight?”

“Ah, right. I guess it would be more appropriate to call it anti-light. It's not just darkness, it glows like a source of light but instead of illuminating things it sucks the light out of the environment. It can also burn through things like the concentrated beams that light mages can use but it's cold. It also has a lot of other weird properties. You don't want to face anything that can use Darklight, put simply”, I said.

“Alright, I got that, so what about ghouls?”, she asked.

“Right. So ghouls happened when some piece of shit Necromancer tried to use his reanimation powers on living humans. Some claim he did it to keep starving people from dying, others think he was just doing it for fun. Not that anyone can say for sure. And that's why people kill Necromancers on sight. Because once they get down from their power high they start getting creative. And one of these creative endeavors was to engineer a race of super hardy carnivores half of whom refuse to eat anything but sentient humanoids”, I said.

“Sheesh”, Syr commented.

“So, about that claim she made”, I said, getting back on track. “Ghouls were created with the same magic that created undead creatures, but with a living human as the basis. So what I think she is saying is that skinwalkers and wendigos are creatures of Shub-Niggurath, but instead of being born directly of her they are the result of her magic being used on living humans.”

“So, what you're saying is that they're Human-Outsider hybrids?”, she asked.

I nodded. “If I understood that correctly, yes. It sure would explain why these things give me the creeps. Well, aside from the cannibalism thing.”

She shuddered. “Charming company she keeps, then.”

I couldn't disagree. “So, what else has she been up to?”, I asked.

Syr winced before she told me: “Let's just say that once I get my body back I'll have to spend three days in a bathhouse just because of that last excursion.”

I didn't press her. A bit later I asked: “What do you think of Yume so far?”

While Syr hadn't been there she did have access to my memories. “She's adorable, but there is something there... she is powerful, older and wiser than she first appears.”

“You noticed it too then?”, I asked.

“Yeah. It's her eyes. They're so weary. She's seen so much.”

**

When we finally got up Alisha had already prepared a pot of oatmeal for breakfast. Funny to think that I used to hate the stuff until Alisha converted me. She also got her own back at the Chosen One by handing him some nuts, jerky and dried berries for breakfast since “you don't take a watch shift, you don't get a proper breakfast”. He then tried to command Yume to give him some of her portion but she'd already licked her bowl clean by the time he'd woken up.

During breakfast we discussed our route going forward. Soon we'd come across Ymir's Scar, a huge canyon that divided the landscape. We'd needed to cross it, which was only possible at one of four bridges that had been built along its length. The closest one also happened to be the one I had the most reservations to cross, as it was only a rope bridge. Traveling to another one of the bridges would have taken us several hours at least though, so it wasn't practical.

“Why is it called Ymir's Scar, anyway?”, Alisha asked as we traveled. “Who was this Ymir?”

I honestly had no answer for her but Selene spoke up:

“It's part of a myth the followers of the Aesir are told. According to our stories the world was created when Allfather Odin killed Ymir the world giant and then used his corpse to create the world we live in. All of our mountains are Ymir's teeth, for example. So I guess whoever named this canyon thought this was once a scar on Ymir's body.”

“That's kind of morbid”, I commented. “So what is water then? Ymir's blood, his sweat? His—”

“I don't think it's supposed to be taken literally”, Selene interrupted me.

I shrugged. “So, any other weird stories of the Aesir?”, I asked.

“Well”, Selene said as she thought, “there was that one time Loki turned himself into a mare to get impregnated by a stallion and then gave birth to Allfather Odin's horse.”

Alisha had been drinking from her canteen and spewed it out at that, then started coughing.

“What can I say? Zeus once turned himself into a bull to fuck a woman and she gave birth to the first Minotaur”, I offered.

“Your gods are weird”, Alisha said once she'd finally calmed down.

“Come on, surely there must be some weird stories like that of the Tuatha Dé Danann”, I said. “All gods are weird.”

She thought about it for a bit, then said: “Well, there was that time Midir stole a noble's wife away and when he demanded her back Midir tricked him into sleeping with his own daughter instead.”

“That's kind of messed up, too”, I commented.

“But at least it's not bestiality”, she countered.

“What about your gods, Yume?”, I asked. “Any weird stories about them?”

Yume seemed surprised that I had involved her in our little discussion as she'd been content with listening in and chuckling along up until that point. Finally she shrugged. “Lots of weird stories, but most of them end in someone's death, like when the moon deity Tsukuyomi killed the goddess of food for creating a feast by throwing it up. The sun goddess Amaterasu was so angry about that she refused to ever look at Tsukuyomi again and that is why night and day alternate.”

“At least you're no longer in the land of such uncivilized gods”, the Chosen One commented and my women glowered at him.

I decided to ignore his comment and instead told Yume: “I actually like your explanation better than the Olympian explanation, where the sun god Helios rides a chariot with the sun chained to it through the sky every day, because our story doesn't even try to explain why he is never around his sister the moon goddess.” I turned to Selene and added: “You know, the one you're named after.”

She blushed.

“Why are you named after an Olympian, anyway?” Alisha wondered. “Last I checked your village worshiped one of the Aesir.”

“My mom doesn't”, Selene explained. “My dad met her in the marketplace in Rhine's Cradle and it was love at first sight, so he took her back to his home village.”

“Aw”, Alisha commented.

Just then we'd reached the rope bridge. To my surprise it looked far less flimsy than I'd feared. The fall down into the canyon would certainly be lethal so I was glad to see that if we fell it would not be because of shoddy craftsmanship.

Walking over a long rope bridge was a harrowing experience, even if you did not have to fear it breaking under you. We walked in single file, not speaking, not joking, just listening to the wind and the creaking of the ropes and trying to hear if anything approached with ill intent.

We had almost made it to the end without incident when I saw it. At first I didn't even understand what I was looking at. A writhing something was moving towards us, three goblins around it, trying to herd it our way.

“Get off the bridge”, I told my group when I saw it, “something's coming at us.”

Thankfully nobody questioned me and we all hurried to make it the last few yards until we got off the bridge. Once I stepped off I finally saw what it was that was being herded towards us and I started swearing under my breath. The writhing tangled thing was a hydra. Quite a small one, clearly, given that an adult hydra would have been visible from the other side of the canyon, but each coil was still easily as thick around as a young oak tree and even balled up as it was it covered an area roughly eight feet cubed. Some people seemed to think that a hydra was a normal snake that split into several heads at whatever passed for a snake's neck, but that was false. Hydras were a bizarre type of flightless dragon, a bulky lizard body with four stumpy legs and a whipping barbed tail but instead of having a single head it had multiple long necks coming out of its body, each of which ended in a separate head.

There were many different types of hydra, some had venomous fangs, others had flared hoods like a cobra, yet others simply had large circular chasms filled with teeth for heads. This one looked more like a dragon than any I'd seen before, each of its five heads sporting a pair of curled horns like an antelope and its mouths lined with sharp teeth like a crocodile, though with a slightly shorter and more rectangular muzzle. Its scales were a dark blue and it would have looked quite pretty if it hadn't been big enough to bite our entire party in half at once.

Selene and my usual strategy of dashing behind and cutting out the legs wouldn't work on something like this, so we needed a different plan of attack.

“Yume, can you cast Stupor on it?”, I asked as I drew a greatsword. My normal longsword just wasn't big enough for this.

“Yes, but this thing is strong. I can give you five seconds. Tell me when and I'll do it.”

“Thanks”, I said, then looked at the Chosen One. “These things regenerate very fast. If we cut off a head, can I ask you to cauterize the wound so it doesn't grow back?”

He nodded tersely.

“Alisha, normally hydras are poisonous so I'd like you to focus on healing anyone affected, but this thing looks more like a dragon than usual. I'm worried it'll have a fire breath or something, so can I ask you to focus on defense and adapt to what it tries to do?”

“Of course”, she said. “Pretty sure my air magic won't be able to pierce its scales anyway.”

I turned to Selene. “Alright then, Selene, we're up.”

Selene nodded and drew her sword while Alisha made a contemptuous gesture and three air lances took out the goblins before they could make nuisances of themselves.

The hydra reared four of its five heads back to strike and I yelled: “Yume, now!”

Instantly the beast rocked back as if Yume had slapped it as light blue haze circled around it and Selene and I both ran towards both of the outermost heads, her on its right and me on its left, and started hacking at the thick necks. It took Selene three good chops to hack through one and me five. I really needed to find a sword with a sharpness enchantment. Once she'd cut a head off Selene jumped back to give the Chosen One a clear shot on his flame lance, which he took without hesitation, cauterizing the wound and stopping the already bubbling flesh from growing back. If you kept a hydra well fed it could regrow an entire head within minutes, which we clearly had not wanted to happen. Once I managed to cut through the head I'd been working on I, too, jumped back and the Chosen One cauterized that stump as well.

By that point the Stupor had worn off and it was a good thing that its outer heads were both gone and Selene and I had jumped back because the thing went absolutely berserk as its body suddenly registered all the pain at once. Its middle head struck out at the Chosen One, who was standing in front of Alisha and Yume, and he only barely managed to block the hit with his sword, though I heard something cracking under the blow. At the same time the side heads flailed around, trying to get Selene and me, but we had thankfully gotten out of reach. The Chosen One did not fall backwards but it was a near thing and Alisha had to cast her minor healing miracle on him while Yume was trying to cast some other illusion spell judging by the way her tails were wagging with a light blue haze surrounding them.

I decided to run in and start chopping into the hydra's legs, but the barbed tail had me scrambling backwards. Selene gritted her teeth and her hand clenched on the hilt of her sword before she carved a rune shape into the air and an ice storm swirled around the hydra, pelting it with brutally cold air. She hadn't used that miracle since she'd beaten her Dark Lord, but clearly she'd just decided that we were more important than her pride. Out of the ice storm the middle head struck the Chosen One again but this time it was frostbitten so badly that its lips and teeth shattered when its head struck the Chosen One's blade.

When the ice storm petered out the hydra was covered in a layer of rime and it had trouble pulling its middle head back, the neck frozen stiff.

I dashed in, trying to hack through the middle head and managing to chop through most of it, when it roared. The roar came from all three remaining throats and went on and on until a swathe of fire came out of its mouths.

I scrambled backwards and Alisha used a massive blast of air to push the fire back into the hydra, trying to either smother out the flames or, better yet, to burn it from the inside, but whatever mechanism in the hydra's body allowed it to breathe fire was shockingly powerful and when the two forces clashed there was a huge shock-wave that rocked everyone back.

At first I thought that was a good thing as the blast tore the hydra's wounded middle head off but then I heard a yelp and saw Yume flying over the edge of the cliff. She'd been standing closest to the edge and the blast had been enough to take her over. I ran for all I was worth, threw myself into a slide and was just barely able to grab the fox girl by the wrist.

I wanted to shout for someone to help me but the others were still busy with the two remaining heads, which had been dazed a bit but had not been taken out of commission.

As I kept desperately holding on to Yume's wrist we both kept sliding towards the edge. She wasn't all that heavy but she was already wholly hanging off and I had no leverage.

“Let go or you'll fall too”, she told me, resigned.

“Screw that”, I growled and tried to pull her up.

I was actually gaining ground, actually pulling her up, when one of the hydra's remaining heads sensed the opportunity to get rid of two problems at once and headbutted my back, sending me over the edge as well.

Despite her resigned attitude before Yume was yelling and windmilling through the air but I pulled her close, wrapped myself around her, deciding to shield her from the impact with my body. That should make for a heroic enough death, shouldn't it?

But then I heard Alisha's anguished shriek.

“FELIX!”

Well, I guessed I'd be leaving this world with at least one regret. I'd made Alisha cry.

But Alisha wasn't just my lover, she was also a powerful and talented mage. And to this day I am still in awe of her ingenuity at that moment.

The two of us wore a matching set of pendants made of fairy quartz, a stone that amplified air magic that was channeled through it and the two pieces had gained a certain affinity through law of contagion. Not only had they been cut from the same original piece, they had also spent a lot of time together, first at the stall of the merchant who'd sold them to me and then by the fact that the two of us wore them all the time.

So Alisha cast a very simple air magic spell, a sphere of hardened air meant to slow falls and brace against impacts, but instead of casting it on herself or trying to cast it on a target that was rapidly hurtling out of range she used the connection between the two pieces of fairy quartz to send the spell through from her pendant to mine, wrapping the protective shield around me, slowing Yume and me down from terminal velocity and protecting us from subsequently drowning in the river we had slammed into.

It did absolutely nothing to stop me from losing consciousness, though.