Chapter 53: The Reluctant Guide
Chapter 53: The Reluctant Guide
The next morning, Ethan packed up his meager belongings and prepared to leave.
He hadn’t slept much. All night he had sat calculating, and the conclusion still didn’t change: he shouldn’t stay. He was a wanted man. Damien’s transfer device had thrown him beyond every safe zone, but that didn’t mean the ones hunting him would stop. And a village full of abandoned Partners, creatures who already lived on the margins of the world, didn’t deserve to be dragged into his troubles.
But the moment he stepped out of the house, Vesna was standing there waiting.
"You mean to leave?" she asked, the butterfly wings at her temples trembling faintly.
"Yeah." Ethan nodded. "Thank you for giving us a place to rest. But I shouldn’t stay long."
Vesna didn’t step out of the way. She only looked at him, then looked over at Laira standing behind him, and her silver gaze came to rest on the dragon’s torn wing.
"You can’t leave," she said gently. "Not today. She can’t."
Ethan turned to look at Laira.
In the daylight, her wound showed far more clearly than the night before. The torn wing still hadn’t knitted, tendons exposed where the wing membrane had been ripped open. She stood upright, trying to act as though she were fine, but Vesna had been right: every movement she made dragged along a pain she was gritting her teeth to hide.
"If you force her to travel a long distance in this condition," Vesna continued, "the wound will only get worse. And a Partner wounded in the wing, if not given proper rest, may never fly the same again."
Laira opened her mouth, clearly about to protest that she was fine, but Ethan raised a hand to stop her.
He was silent for a moment.
"I’m being hunted," he finally said, his voice dropping low. "I don’t know how far the ones hunting me will go. If I stay here too long, and they track me down, this whole village will get pulled in. You people have already lost too much. I don’t want to be the reason you lose more."
Vesna looked at him for a long time.
Then she smiled, a smile touched with sadness.
"You see," she said quietly. "That’s exactly what I heard in you."
Ethan frowned. "What did you hear?"
"That you worry about others more than you worry about yourself." Her silver eyes softened. "A bad person, when driven into a corner, will cling to any shelter, no matter who it brings harm to. And here you are, meaning to leave, though you need this place more than anyone, only because you’re afraid of endangering creatures you only just met yesterday."
Ethan was silent.
"If you’re really worried about being hunted," Vesna said, "then I have something for you."
She sat down on the doorstep, gesturing for him to sit with her.
"Not far from here, there’s an ancient ruin. It’s a remnant left over from the apocalypse eighty years ago, when the first Void tears ripped this world open. Most of it has collapsed. But inside, there are still a few gates."
Ethan lifted his head. "Transfer gates?"
"Not exactly." Vesna shook her head. "They don’t lead back to any safe zone. They lead to other places. Some open onto another world. Some are trial spaces, like the trial towers you Awakened still use, but far more ancient, and not under anyone’s control."
A spark of light flashed in Ethan’s eyes.
A trial space. Like the Abyss Tower. And if it was like the Abyss Tower, then completing it might bring a reward. Possibly a Blind Box draw.
Power.
Exactly what he needed.
But Vesna seemed to read that thought on his face, and her expression turned grave.
"I know what you’re thinking. But hear me out to the end first." She looked straight at him. "Those gates have never been verified by anyone. They don’t display a difficulty. They have no warnings, no classification, nothing. A gate that looks harmless could throw you into a place even a peak Awakened couldn’t survive. No one in the village dares step through them. Those who once tried, not one has come back."
The silence stretched on.
Ethan looked out at the village, where the abandoned Partners were beginning their new day, the day exactly like every other day, unchanging, without a future.
"I understand the risk," he said quietly. "But I don’t have many choices."
He looked down at his armored arm.
"Out there, there are too many things that want me dead. My clan has cast me off. An entire Council sentenced me. And there are other things, things I don’t yet understand, watching me." He thought of the purple-black eye in his nightmares, of the name the sanctuary gate had called. "If I stay this weak, then there’s only one ending for me. I’ll die. Soon enough."
He lifted his head, his gaze already resolved.
"I need to get stronger. At any cost. Even if that cost is stepping through a gate when I don’t know what’s on the other side."
Vesna looked at him, and in her silver eyes there was no surprise. Only something close to understanding.
"Why are you helping me?" Ethan asked. "You only met me yesterday. I’m an Awakened, the thing this whole village hates. And yet you’re showing me the path to grow stronger. Why?"
Vesna smiled.
"I told you already. I hear everything people carry in their chests." She tilted her head. "And what I hear in you is that of a good person."
Ethan shrugged and turned his face away.
"You heard wrong," he said. "I’m not a good person."
He didn’t explain further. Because a good person wouldn’t think of stepping through a death gate just to grow stronger. A good person wouldn’t carry within them a list of names that needed to pay a price: Nolan, Victor, Ryan, Selene. A good person wouldn’t coldly calculate the lives of others the way he had at the anchor point.
He wasn’t a good person. He was only someone who hadn’t yet let what the world had done to him turn him into something worse.
Vesna didn’t argue. She only smiled, as if she heard something in his chest that he himself couldn’t hear.
"All right," she said gently. "Then let’s say I heard wrong."
"But," Vesna stood, brushing off her dress, "if you mean to go to the ruin, you can’t go alone. The land around here is very dangerous. There are areas full of natural traps, there are monsters no one has ever named. Take one wrong direction and you’ll be hard-pressed to make it out alive."
"Then you just show me the way," Ethan said.
"I don’t know the way as well as you’d think." Vesna shook her head. "The one who knows the terrain best in the village is Ruò Yān. She goes out often to scout the land, to keep watch. She knows every rock crevice, every area with monsters around here. She’ll guide you."
Ethan grimaced.
"...Does it have to be her?"
The expression on his face at that moment made even Vesna laugh. It was the expression of a man who had just been informed that to escape one bit of trouble, he’d have to spend many days beside the very biggest bit of trouble he had encountered the night before.
"She sent a puppet to ambush where I sleep," Ethan added, his voice full of grievance. "I’m afraid I’d be safer sleeping with one eye open than letting her guide me."
"Ruò Yān won’t harm you." Vesna was still smiling. "She’s just being cautious. And once she’s agreed to guide you, she’ll guide you all the way there. That’s the kind of person she is. Stubborn, but reliable."
Ethan sighed and scratched his head.
He looked toward Laira, hoping to find an ally. But Laira only crossed her arms and let out a huff, clearly hating the idea of traveling with Lěng Ruò Yān even more than he did.
"I’ll go call her," Vesna said, then hurried off toward the center of the village before Ethan could think up another excuse to refuse.
Left alone with Laira, Ethan flopped down onto the doorstep and let out a long, drawn-out breath.
"Why do I get the feeling," he muttered, "that this trip is going to be more exhausting than that whole Anomalous Coordinate?"
Laira sat down beside him, rested her head on his shoulder, and this time no one came to ruin the moment.
"If she dares pick a fight," the dragon said quietly, her voice full of anticipation, "I’ll burn her hair off. Just the hair. You can’t forbid that one."
Ethan burst out laughing, tired as he was.
"All right," he said. "Just the hair."
For the ruin. For the gates. For the power he had no choice but to obtain if he wanted to survive.
He’d just have to wait. And endure.