Born a Monster

Chapter Type: Social

This was how we traveled for five days, stopping at a barn, the front yard of a farmer, and so on. Lord General Ding slept indoors; most of us slept outdoors.

I had enough magical stress keeping myself free of disease; I just couldn’t do it for twenty people. Not while marching, which was a weakness I could remove – once I got second level in Shaman (or another divine class).

We knew when we crossed into the Ricelands themselves. The smell and sight of water would have given it away, even if we couldn’t identify the rice plants themselves. With harvest less than a month away, it would have been difficult not to recognize them.

We traveled quickly; neither the militia nor news of them reached us from behind. From ahead, messages arrived by mounted courier, and Lord Ding responded to them. “My wife has been very busy.” he said with a smile.

“When my wife has been busy, bill collectors show up to sell my things on the open market.” one of the bodyguards said.

“House husbands are worse.” insisted Jun Mah. “They’ll gamble away anything that looks like a coin, and you won’t have anything to show for it.”

“Which gossips more, wives or husbands?” Dai Oya asked.

.....

“Hah. Husbands do.” Lord Ding said, as though that resolved the issue. Nobody pretended otherwise, and we reached Second Ramaul later that day.

I have indicated several times that villages call themselves towns, and towns claimed to be cities. Second Ramaul was an actual city. A small city, perhaps twenty or thirty thousand souls, but a city nonetheless. It didn’t have just streets dedicated to the major crafts, it had districts. It was roughly twenty four streets running north to south, and twenty seven streets running roughly east to west.

In the heart of the city, two rivers met to become Ding River. In the midst of this intersection was Ding island, which held (as one would expect) the Ding mansion, a double winged affair of four stories, painted and designed to look like an eagle from above.

One might wonder at this, as Ding has the six black spheres above three black lines on a background of white as their heraldry. The house was designed by Jianying, a competing noble house who mistook the island as theirs in the early days of Second Ramaul.

History records that after a period of prolonged struggle, burning nearly seven of ten structures to the ground, the people called for both families to intermarry. Although this happened in the time between the Dragonfall Wars and the Oni Kami Rebellion, the bodyguards warned me off asking Lord Ding for specifics.

Frankly, I was just surprised to learn that the island had been a prison for that long. Six centuries... this couldn’t be the first rebellion they’d seen. And yet...

But I had little time for unraveling the mysteries of the city’s history. Lord Ding made a short speech, announcing his retirement from military matters for the immediate future, and told us all that we were free to find employment elsewhere.

I’m sorry, what?

I mean, the Soldiers nodded, and some cheered or clapped. They seemed to have no shortage of job skills; in retrospect, new militia needed training, throughout the Ricelands.

Likewise, there was a pronounced shortage of carpenters with construction experience. Had Second Ramaul been a recruiting ground for the ill-fated bridge?

Oddly, I never did get a formal job. It turns out that if you preach a faith, the Daurians saw you as a cleric, oracle, or speaker. And although I repaired river barges and boats, most of my coins came from tending a shrine to Sobek. Annoyingly, we never had more than nine worshipers, and I’m convinced that Do Jen was there only to take over after I left.

In short, clerics were Merchant, the least among the classes. Although I could perform minor magic, most of my food came from summoning the miko light, or reducing the impact of diseases. Mostly diseases, if I am honest; even with sewer systems, the cities of Athal seemed to breed the damn things.

But I’m getting ahead of myself; the militia arrived like conquering heroes. Those who retired back to their lives of peace were left be. Those who came to Ding Castle expecting to be paid were quietly imprisoned and beheaded, all of their possessions forfeit to the state for commission of war crimes.

Initially, for about two days, this was seen as sheer greed on Lord Ding’s part. Then the news of the Slaughter at the Rice Bridge reached the public.

I had seen towns under siege, when the walls fell. The riots that struck Second Ramaul weren’t quite on that scale, but they were impressive. It started in the Poor Quarter, and burned its way to the Soldier’s Quarter, where the Soldiers just weren’t having any of that nonsense.

“What were the rioters thinking?” I asked one man, whose wife had been in the riots.

He shook his head. “Most direct route to the lord’s mansion, is all I can think. This burial is free, right?”

I nodded. “You have lost enough. Let the healing begin.”

“Oh no,” he said, “I am going on a drunken binge with the coins I save. Recovery sounds like something to do with a hangover.”

Well, to each their own. I said the blessings over her, and commended her body to the river spirits. There were other bodies in the river, some more properly interred than others. It helps to be able to actually talk to the river spirits; I am certain that every body I turned over to them made it to either the ocean or an ecosystem.

Other than that, though, the city received the news, agreed they were outraged, and then proceeded getting ready for harvest.

The Liberation Army was getting ready for harvest, as well. They sent two regiments to the Ricelands, one for the greater Ricelands, broken up into squadrons, and a large force that took up residence in the Soldier’s Quarter.

How hard is it to find one boy with solid black eyes? I wasn’t about to find out; I told Do Jen that his day had come, handed over control of the shrine in a semi-formal ceremony, and swam down the river toward the sea.

And it gave me time to think. I could, in theory, turn left, heading back toward the central conflict. I would arrive just in time for harvest. Or, the path of diminishing returns, I could turn south and spread the elemental message.

So – death or death?

Oh, or I could go straight, and try to cross the ocean. Death.

I was tempted to just become an animal there in the river, and live there until an entire generation had passed. I had the biomass for... not much.

But it wasn’t the physical that turned me northward. I had friends and a wife. Okay, friends and an enemy-ally of...

You know what? I didn’t care what Madonna was to me. I’d said that I wouldn’t oppose or hinder her stupid devil quest. Leaving her to die seemed like exactly the sort of thing I ought not to do.

Besides, there were still Kismet and Gamilla, who... were they friends?

I engaged Titanic Swimming to make up for lost swimming time spent wondering about that.

Given the choice between death and death, and death choosing death was obvious.

What hadn’t been obvious, at least to me, was that I’d had a choice for a good long while. I’d been making choices, and living with the consequences for some time. I had nearly died so many times on this cursed island that I’d just stopped counting.

I may not have the power to change the course of the war; I might not be able to fulfill or avoid this dumb prophecy about killing Lord Xaodong Hwang. In fact, I wasn’t sure that I even fully controlled one Rhishisikk.

Stupid flaky System.

It took four days as the shark swims to get back to the outer crevasse, sea scavengers and predators having already picked clean the rubble of the fallen campsites. Even the bones were already serving to root anemones. Not every bone, but enough.

I moved cautiously across the site, avoiding the remaining wildlife. I had been expecting the Brood to have a presence here as well, but they were not in evidence.

Other than barnacles, the cliffs were... well, they were cliffs. Climbing them in the dark was difficult, and tiring, and partway up, I grew talons on my fingers and toes just because most of my climbing experience relied on them.

I put off the calls for [Lucid Dreaming] until I was at the top, and a good two Pings from the ledge. Probably-Not-Sobek was enraged that I had abandoned the shrine, and equally enraged that there was no free Water node near enough to it for them to claim. “It doesn’t count until and unless both requirements are met.” I remember him telling me.

Not all truths need to be told; I was probably going to die before getting back to that task.

I would learn that the original Ramaul was a town within Lord Ding’s ancestral holdings back in the Empire. It probably wasn’t even the only settlement so named in the northwestern territories. But this is not the time to go into the naming conventions of Daurian cities.