Chapter 51: Puppet Master
Chapter 51: Puppet Master
Word of the two strangers had spread across the whole village before they could even set foot in it.
When Ethan and Laira followed Vesna out onto the empty patch of bare earth at the center, the villagers had already gathered. Dozens of creatures of every conceivable shape stood in an arc, silently watching the two newcomers.
And immediately, though not a single one spoke a word, Ethan sensed it.
There were two currents in this crowd.
Some gazes carried a wary curiosity, even a flickering trace of hope, the look of creatures who had been steeped in despair so long that anything new made them lift their eyes a little. Most of those were older Partners, ones who had lived here for many long years, long enough to learn how to stop hating.
But the other current was entirely different.
It was cold. Hard. Laden with hostility.
And it gathered, densest of all, on one single point.
A woman stood at the edge of the arc, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. She bore a human shape, her figure slender, her long black hair hanging loose, her skin white to the point of chilling. The garments on her, though worn thin with the years, were arranged neatly to an almost severe degree, not one excess crease. But the thing that pinned Ethan’s gaze was her eyes, deep black, razor-sharp, looking at him the way one looks at something filthy that had just crawled into one’s home.
And behind her back, suspended in midair without need of a single string, were three wooden puppets.
They stood motionless. But through his eye, Ethan clearly saw the threads of energy, fine as spider silk, running from her fingertips to each puppet, taut, ready to jerk them upright in the blink of an eye.
"An Awakened." Her ice-cold voice cut clean through the silent air. "Vesna, you led an Awakened into the village."
"Lěng Ruò Yān." Vesna turned toward her, her voice mild. "He carries no killing intent. I’ve heard it already. He’s only a person who’s wounded and lost his way."
"A wounded person." Lěng Ruò Yān let out a laugh, but there wasn’t a shred of warmth in that laugh. Her black eyes didn’t leave Ethan for even half a second. "Do you know how many of us were left behind by an Awakened who once swore he needed us? Who once said he’d take care of us? Who once stroked us and called us companions?"
She stepped forward one pace, and the three puppets behind her swayed faintly along with the motion, as if they too were angry.
"Every single creature standing here once placed its trust in an Awakened. And that, precisely, is the reason we’re all in this wretched place."
The whole arc sank into silence.
Ethan understood. This hostility was not without cause. It was the most justified hostility he had ever had to face in his life. These creatures didn’t hate him for anything he had done. They hated what he was. An Awakened. The very kind that had summoned them out of the darkness, wrung them dry, then tossed them away like a broken thing.
And he couldn’t blame them, not even a little.
...
Laira stepped up, the flame beginning to kindle in her palm again, but Ethan placed a hand on her shoulder, stopping her.
"Don’t," he said quietly.
Then he stepped out of Laira’s shadow himself, standing alone in the middle of the arc, exposed beneath dozens of gazes both hostile and wary. His silver-gray armored arm was revealed in the sunlight, the red veins running along the metal surface faintly glinting.
Lěng Ruò Yān glanced at that arm, and her eyes narrowed with suspicion.
"I didn’t come here to summon anyone," Ethan spoke up. His voice was still raw with exhaustion, but every word was clear, resolute. "I didn’t come here to use anyone. I was hunted by my own kind, framed and cursed, thrown out of their world. I fell here only because it was the only place the transfer device took me. Nothing more."
He swept his eyes across the whole arc, from one face to the next, avoiding no gaze.
"I’m not asking you to trust me. I know I have no right to that." He paused a beat, his voice dropping low. "I’m only asking for a place to rest my feet. For me, and for her. Just until we’ve recovered enough strength to move on. After that we’ll leave here, and you’ll never have to see the face of another Awakened again."
The silence stretched on, taut as a wire.
Lěng Ruò Yān looked at him for a long, long time, her black eyes not softening by even a fraction.
"The promise of an Awakened," she finally said, her voice so quiet it was almost a whisper, but sharp as a blade. "I’ve heard flowery words exactly like these before."
She turned to leave, the three puppets drifting silently behind her back like three shadows.
"Stay, then, if Vesna has agreed. I won’t stop you." She glanced back over her shoulder, and in that moment, one puppet behind her abruptly turned its head, its lifeless wooden face staring straight at Ethan, making the back of his neck go cold. "But I’ll be watching. And the very moment you reveal the true nature of an Awakened..."
She narrowed her eyes.
"...I’ll be the first to finish you."
Then she strode off, and the crowd gradually dispersed after her, leaving Ethan standing alone in the empty patch with Vesna and Laira.
Vesna let out a soft breath. "Don’t take Ruò Yān’s behavior to heart," she said, her voice somewhat apologetic. "She isn’t a bad person. She’s just..." She stopped, seeming to search for the right word. "She was abandoned more recently than most people here. The wound is still very fresh. And people need time before they stop bleeding."
Ethan followed the slender back of Lěng Ruò Yān with his eyes until she vanished entirely behind a rooftop.
"What was she abandoned for?" he asked.
Vesna was silent for a moment.
"Because she was too costly," she finally answered. "Her ability is strong. Very strong, if nurtured the right way. But nurturing it costs too many resources, too much effort. Her master sat down and weighed the gains against the losses, then arrived at the conclusion that investing in her wasn’t worth the money. So he threw her away, and spent his money buying another Partner, cheaper, easier to order around."
Vesna turned to look straight at Ethan, her silver eyes quiet.
"She wasn’t abandoned because she was useless. But because she was too valuable, and no one was willing to pay that price for her."
Ethan didn’t answer a single word.
But deep inside him, looking toward the vanished back of that girl, something faintly stirred awake.
...
That night, Vesna arranged for them to take temporary shelter in an empty house at the edge of the village.
It was a small house, only a single room, with an empty window looking out into the darkness of the valley. Vesna left them a little water, an old blanket, then quietly departed, the two butterfly wings at her temples still trembling faintly, as if even while walking she were still listening to the world.
Ethan sat leaning back against the wall, letting his worn-out body finally rest. Laira sat down beside him, a little closer than usual.
Over the past several days, amid the ruins, amid the encirclement, amid the brushes with death, they hadn’t had a single moment with just the two of them. And now, in this small dark house, when the whole world had finally consented to fall silent, Laira felt her heart settle in a strange way.
She leaned over, meaning to rest her head on his shoulder, her voice dropping very soft, tender in a way she very rarely let show. "Ethan, it’s so quiet tonight. I almost thought..."
She didn’t finish the sentence.
Because at that exact moment, Ethan’s ears caught a sound.
Very faint. A click of wood. The sound of joints scraping against one another.
"Get down!" Ethan shoved Laira aside.
Right where her head had been resting on his shoulder a second before, a wooden hand tore through the air, five sharp-clawed fingers driving into the stone wall, gouging out five deep holes.
A puppet.
It had slipped in through the empty window without anyone noticing, and if Ethan had been half a beat slow, those claws would have driven straight into the back of his neck.
...
Laira sprang up, and this time there was no more flickering flame of the exhausted. A halo of deep red fire blazed up around her, fierce, furious, lighting up the whole small house. Her red-orange eyes locked onto the wooden puppet.
"You have some nerve," she hissed.
The puppet didn’t attack further. It only retreated, turned, then leapt out the window, vanishing into the night. As if it hadn’t come to kill. It had come to lead the way.
Ethan understood the intent at once. "It wants us to follow."
"Then let’s go." The fire in Laira’s eyes burned fiercer. "I want to see who dares reach into where you sleep."
The two of them rushed out of the village, chasing the puppet’s flickering shadow through the night. It led them across the hillside, over a rocky crevice, to a desolate patch of open ground far from the village, where the moonlight poured down cold and no one could hear anything that happened.
There, Lěng Ruò Yān was waiting.
She stood in the middle of the ground, beneath the moon, her black hair hanging long, and now there weren’t just three puppets. Six wooden puppets hovered around her, each connected to her by fine threads of energy, all of them turning their heads toward Ethan.
The puppet that had just ambushed them drifted back to join the ranks, becoming the seventh.
"I knew you’d reveal yourself in the night," Lěng Ruò Yān said, her voice icy. "You Awakened are always like this. By day you speak kind words, and only by night do you do what’s truly in your hearts. Speak." Her black eyes bored into him. "What did you come to this village to do? Don’t fabricate any more of that lost-your-way business. No one falls onto a village full of abandoned Partners by accident."
"I’ve told the truth already," Ethan replied, his voice still calm. "I didn’t choose this place. It chose me."
"Lies."
The seven puppets all faintly raised their hands.
But before anyone could act, Laira had stepped up to shield Ethan, and the anger in her, the thing that had been smoldering from the moment the puppet reached its claws into where he slept, now blazed up beyond restraint.
"You." Her voice dropped low, dangerous, and the halo of fire around her was so hot the grass beneath her feet began to curl and blacken. "You just reached into where he was lying."
Lěng Ruò Yān glanced at her, not flinching in the slightest. "I only wanted to test how your Awakened would react. If he’s really as clean as he—"
"I don’t care what you wanted to test." Laira stepped forward one pace, and the heat radiating from her made the whole space begin to warp and shimmer. This was no longer the exhausted dragon of that afternoon.
This was the Crimson Dragon, the thing that had once incinerated an entire pack of monsters with a single flick of the hand. "A whole quiet evening, a rare one, with just me and him. And you shredded it apart, then aimed your claws at the back of his neck."
The flame in her palm coiled into a blazing red sphere, lighting up her face, and in that light, Laira’s expression was chilling.
"Do you know," she said, one word at a time, "how hard I’ve had to struggle to keep him alive until today? How many people like you have aimed their weapons at him already? And you think I’ll stand still and let a wooden puppet do what an entire task force couldn’t?"
The heat rose to the point where the nearest puppets began to smoke, the paint on their wooden faces blistering.
Lěng Ruò Yān’s expression changed slightly for the first time. She jerked the puppets back, but her six threads of energy all pulled taut at once, ready.
"So," she said, her voice now somewhat strained under the pressure of the Crimson Dragon, "the dragon is just a guard beast after all. Protecting its master to the point of being willing to burn alive anyone who comes near."
"I am not a guard beast." The fire around Laira roared. "And he is not my master. He is the one I chose. You just laid a hand on that person, so now..."
The sphere of fire in her hand swelled larger.
"...I’ll burn you to ash."
The air in the open ground stretched to its utmost limit. The seven wooden puppets stood bolt upright, the six threads of energy trembling. The deep red flame of a Crimson Dragon licked up at the night sky, reflected in the black eyes of the puppeteer and the red-orange eyes of the dragon.
And standing between the two women about to hurl themselves at each other and tear the other apart, beneath the cold moonlight, Ethan slowly stepped forward one pace.