The Nextworld Invasion and the Death of Magic - 8. Chapter 8 - The Debris Field

Tigath awoke in darkness. It was the middle of the night, and Othri was in another one of his night terrors. Tigath looked at Othri’s muscular silhouette, twitching and shifting beneath the sheet. He was going to let him remain asleep, but Othri let out a whimper, and Tigath decided to wake him. He reached out and placed a gentle hand on Othri’s chest, and his body fell still. One of his hands came to the back of Tigath’s.

“I was dreaming about the dead,” Othri whispered.

“I know,” Tigath replied. “Are you okay?”

“Just be close to me,” Othri replied, and the two men returned to their slumber.

The next morning, the four travelers left Olington behind and continued to follow the river. One day led into another with little variation, and they crossed paths with no other travelers as they made their way through the wilderness. Othri’s wound continued to heal, but the group’s progress was slow. On the ninth day after he and Tigath left Nuji’s cottage with her, a quartet of spires crested the far horizon.

“Is that it?” Alydrael asked in excitement. “Are we there? Have we finally made it to the Yellow City?”

“No,” Nuji replied, pulling out her map, “we haven’t gone nearly far enough. We’re nowhere near the coast yet. This must be…” she paused and squinted at the image printed on the piece of paper in her hand, “Riverside?”

“Let’s try and find an inn with a pub,” Othri recommended. “I’m ready to eat something that’s not fish.”

It was late in the afternoon, and the sun had not yet started to set, when the group made it to the town. At its edge, they located a hotel.

A sign read Lunch Special: Fresh Catch of the Day, and Alydrael snorted a laugh. “Othri, looks like you’re in luck!”

They entered and were greeted by an elderly Noktar man seated behind the counter.

“Welcome! You lot here for supper, or staying the night?”

“Good evening, sir,” Tigath replied. “Can you accommodate the four of us for the night?”

“I certainly can. Please, input your information into my guest log.”

Tigath reached out to accept it. “Not a problem.” Before he entered the group’s details, he turned and recommended to the others, “Why don’t you three head into the tavern and order some food?” They agreed, and he focused on the logbook as the handsome, stocky, muscular, hairy man behind the counter began to chat with him.

“Where are you coming to us from?”

“One of the women with us lives in the forest,” Tigath replied. “The other recently left a tiny village, and the two of us guys are from Vuliburge.”

The Noktar man looked up at Tigath, and his eyes were full of sorrow. “All those poor people in Vuliburge… how did you escape the Humans? The invasion has been in the back of my mind ever since three survivors made it here maybe a week ago.”

Tigath explained. “The two of us were in the forest when they attacked. We watched it happen and hid deep in the woods for a few days. The Humans killed so many people, and they’re still occupying the city. We went back to help, but there was nothing we could do. We’re headed to the Yellow City.”

“Good,” the Noktar man said with a grin, “it’s a good place. Was born there, meself. Grew up in the cheese district.”

“Oooh, I love a good cheese,” Tigath cooed with a flirty grin. “We’ll have to look up your old neighborhood when we get there.”

In the pub, Nuji, Othri, and Alydrael were all immediately served goblets of water, and each of them ordered ales. They asked the barkeep to pour one for Tigath as well. A few minutes later, when he joined them, the malty beer was waiting for him on the countertop.

“Whot’ll it be?” the barman asked the group at large.

“He wants a fish pie!” Alydrael teased, jabbing her thumb at Othri.

“No, thank you,” Othri quickly replied. “Meat? A steak? Chops?”

“Housemade sausages?” the barkeep offered.

“Done,” Othri said with a satisfied smile, “I’ll take three.” He looked at the others. “What are you all having?”

They ordered, and after the filling meals, they left their bags in the rooms and headed out into the Riverside town square, which was busy with the city’s inhabitants. At the square’s four corners stood the spires that the travelers had first seen while following the river. They consisted of a belltower, a watch tower, an obelisk, and a statue of a naked Urcai man carved in a bolt-upright position with his legs together and arms at his sides. The enormous figure was expressionless.

Nuji stretched out one of her long arms to stop her three companions, and she declared in an angry voice, “Don’t bother with her!” The others did not know who or what she was talking about, but she was scowling with her exaggerated features in the direction of the statue’s feet.

Another Rothian woman was seated in the monument’s shade with her bony knees out to the sides. She was holding a grey bowl with what looked to the others like little grey twigs in it.

“Do you know her?” Tigath asked under his breath, as if any of the busy people in the bustling square would have heard.

“She’s a dead skry.”

“What do you mean,” Othri asked, “she predicts when people are going to die?”

“No, dead skries use the physical remains of their fellow Rothians to…” Nuji paused and finished sarcastically, “to divine wisdom. It’s forbidden magic in most places. There’s always an annoying man skrying in the little town near my home.” She nodded at the woman at the base of the statue. “That woman’s conning people into believing she has some sort of eldritch knowledge about things that they don’t.”

“If doing that is forbidden,” Alydrael replied, “how come she’s allowed to do it here, and why is the man able to do it near where you live?”

Nuji scrunched up her face in frustration. “He’s brother to the local high Rothian mystic, and I suspect it’s something similar with her. She has probably been granted a special dispensation to practice the forbidden art here in Riverside.”

“And what did you mean,” Tigath added at a whisper, “that dead skries use the remains of other Rothians?”

Nuji looked away from the woman. “You all know about our thaumal muscle, right?”

“That’s what produces the magic in you Rothians, isn’t it?” Othri replied.

“Correct,” Nuji confirmed, “we each have a unique organ inside us that generates magic. It’s a complex muscle, right here.” She brought a palm to the center of her torso. “Bones are attached to it, and depending on our access to the magic, we all have either two, three, or four. The very strongest of us can have five.” Nuji pointed at the dead skry woman. “She’s holding a Rothian skull that’s been broken open to be used as a bowl, and inside it, there are thaumal bones. I’m really opposed to that kind of magic. Let’s leave, I don’t even want to stay one night in this town. Let’s go back to the inn and get our stuff.”

The others did not question or challenge Nuji’s feelings, and after collecting their things and informing the innkeeper that they would not in fact be staying, the quartet headed through the small town of Riverside and continued on their journey.

Following the river, the land was flat, and the hiking was easy. Mountains sat along the far horizon to the north, and the river led east. Night fell only an hour and a half after they left the town, and Alydrael sat beside Nuji as she cast the spells for their campsite. Nuji had given up trying to make the young Urcai woman stay back while she was performing her magic.

Six more days came and went, and on that fifteenth evening, the group bedded down in another of Nuji’s braided enclosures of living plants, and they expected another uneventful sleep. However, in the middle of the night, they were awoken by a gentle rumbling that felt like an earthquake happening very far away. It was immediately followed by a brief rain of what sounded like small hailstones in the darkness. Everything was over as quickly as it started, and the weary travelers were soon back to sleep within their protective night dwelling. The following morning when they awoke, they realized the area was scattered with strange flecks of metal.

“What are these?” Alydrael asked the world at large. She reached down and picked up one of the shards, but she cried out in alarm. “It’s sharp! It cut me!” Red droplets of blood bubbled up from her thumb and index fingertips. Nuji immediately began treating Alydrael’s two minor injuries.

“This bit doesn’t look sharp,” Othri commented, carefully attempting to pick one up as well. It did not cut him. “What is this junk? It doesn’t seem natural.”

“And what’s that thing in the distance?” Tigath added. He was pointing downriver.

The small chunks were spread out on the ground across a wide area leading up to a large silver-grey something that reflected the sunlight. A column of smoke was issuing up from it that made the thing look like a weird, lonely volcano, but it was not the right shape or color.

“I don’t know what it is,” Othri replied.

“And I’m not sure we can continue the way we’ve been traveling,” Nuji declared. “Walking on these sharp fragments is going to wreak havoc on the soles of our shoes. I think we’ve got to go around whatever this mess is.”

“Ahoy!” called out a gruff voice from behind them.

The four turned to see a Noktar woman piloting a fungi-barge down the river toward their campsite.

“Do you folks need a ride? I’m headed to the Yellow City. Are you going that direction?”

“We are!” Alydrael replied. “And we’d love a ride! How much would it cost for you to take us with you?”

“It’d be my pleasure to have you; climb aboard!” She brought her barge as close to the bank of the river as she could. “I’m Gorig.” Gorig had an adorable little beard. “Hop on, folks, but please be mindful of my mushrooms. I grow them to sell at markets in several of the towns along the river.” The bizarre shapes of multiple varieties of mushrooms were poking up into the air, growing right from the barge itself. “What are your names?”

The four introduced themselves to Gorig, but as she shoved off again and continued a little way farther, all of them fell silent. They were focused on the non-hill in the distance, and they realized what it was.

The Humans had again invaded in the night. This time, one of their insect-like vehicles had exploded and crashed, showering the earth with the countless fragments of its strange metal. The vehicle’s remains were protruding from the landscape, and there was something unnerving about them. The mass did not appear to be on fire, but the wreckage was smoking.

Gorig’s fungi-barge drew nearer to the destroyed vehicle until the thing loomed above the silent travelers and cast its shadow upon them.

The destroyed craft glistened, as if it had been made of something other than just metal, and parts of it looked soft.

“There are bodies!” Alydrael cried out, pointing in different directions with both arms at the opposite sides of the river.

One of the Humans appeared to have been thrown from the vehicle. His body was on the other shore, unmoving. The man was lying in a twisted and very unnatural position. The other two men seemed to have survived the initial crash, only to crawl from the burning wreckage and die on the riverbank.

Gorig’s little flat boat floated beyond the disaster site, but as the five people aboard turned to look toward the Yellow City, they realized a far worse disaster lay before them. The Yellow City was in flames.

“We need to go back!” Alydrael demanded.

“Yeah,” Gorig replied at a mumble, “I think you’re right. Let’s turn this boat around.”

“Wait, Gorig,” Nuji interjected in a serious tone, “can you drop us on the northern bank of the river beyond the debris before you head back upstream?” She turned to Tigath, Othri, and Alydrael and quickly added, “We should go to Elstall. It’s a small fishing village to the north. It’ll take us a few more days, but I’ve heard it’s tiny, so maybe the Humans don’t know of its existence, or at least have ignored it.” Nuji then added, “Since the Yellow City is gone and can no longer provide us with anything we’re looking for, we need to see if we can find someone with a ship who could take us somewhere else.”

Gorig spoke up and asked, “Where are you hoping to go?”

Othri turned to the Noktar woman. “I don’t know, somewhere that hasn’t been destroyed by these invaders.”

Gorig looked solemn. “If there’s an uprising against the Humans, will you four be part of it?”

Nuji, Othri, Tigath, and Alydrael each looked at the others.

“You mean fight?” Tigath asked.

“I’d join,” Alydrael stated.

“Yeah,” Nuji added, “you could count me in.”

“Oh, I’d definitely fight,” Othri confirmed.

Tigath was uncertain how he would react if faced with impending violence, but he knew the Humans needed to be stopped; he just did not think this group were the ones to do it. “I guess I’m in too.”

Gorig piloted her barge to the shallower water close to the northern bank, and she gave her disembarking passengers a little sack of mushrooms as a gift. They thanked her and stepped onto dry land again. The metal shards from the destroyed Human vehicle littered the ground, but the pieces were spread out, and the group was able to avoid stepping on them. Gorig called out, “Good luck!” as she headed back upriver.

Tigath, Othri, Nuji, and Alydrael began to head north into the grasslands, away from the river and the destruction.

“Everyone in the Yellow City is being killed,” Tigath stated in a detached voice.

“We’re lucky,” Othri said to him. “During both attacks by the Humans, we were outside of town and spared from the violence.”

“But people are dying right now,” Tigath reiterated miserably.

“There isn’t anything we can do for them,” Nuji replied gently. “Tigath, we need to find people who haven’t been killed by the Humans. If we’re going to fight back, we need others. We can’t do it alone.”