(Vol 2) Chapter 52: Where Memory Died

Precisely where Merril’s psyche was, Sammy couldn’t say, only that it was like a precipice down two sheer drops — an edge he had run along that he was now sitting upon, dangling his feet over one final decline. So he stared into it, the abyss of Somewhere Else, Some Other Time, the shedding of one Systemic-Meatsack-Devil-He-Knew and all its agonies for the tantalizing blind horizon of Whatever Lay Beyond.

Shadows without the pain of revelation. Without light.

Samantha walked along it toward him, like walking an endless stone blade — relatively speaking. It was thinner than her feet, with either side dropping into nothing. She approached balanced like a tight beam walker, arms to either side, as Merril initially ignored her. But such was her absurd showing, pretending she might fall, he did finally turn to watch, frowning and shaking his head at her being so silly at such a time.

With a small gremlin-like smile, Samantha finally arrived near, sat down next to him, and gazed into the blackness with him, staying just as silent.

After a while, Merril said, “Both sides of the cliff, they’re the same. Life and death, a jump off of an edge. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Are they? The same?”

“Aren’t they?”

She didn’t answer, just smirked, and so Merril pointedly stared over at her as if he were still expecting it. She didn’t meet his eyes, looking down and dangling her feet idly.

“Tch.” Merril finally looked away again. “I feel how little things change, but these… two lives… They are so miserable. Everything I’ve ever tried to do to salvage it or find some satisfaction fails utterly. As you can see from the painful end I’ve managed yet again. I cannot see anything on this new side worth describing, but I can hope for better.”

“And the other?”

“I know what it holds. More of the same. Bringing me back here, I suppose. Painfully, step by step on the rusty fucking nails hiding under every carpet I even for one moment find welcoming!”

“So they are different, they just look the same on the surface, from here.” This time she met his gaze. “Merril, one way is just you running again, off into confusion with nothing to show for it. How much of ‘you’ that is, well, that’s debatable. What is really the other way is all the people that love you and want you there with them. Who want to help you. Who need you.”

Merril scoffed and shook his head. “Dax doesn’t need me — I’m just a burden, of which she’s said as much…”

“The petty evils inside us say things we don’t mean. You’ve said bullshit, too, and you know it. Right now, Dax is crying on her knees before your body, just as Estara is. Just as your compatriots worry and hope for you to live. You’re one of us. You can be great among us. And without you, we’re weaker. Dax and Estara would walk the rest of their lives with a curse in their heart. An unhealing wound. So would I.”

The feline grimaced and looked away again, shaking his head, able to feel that pain. The construct of his psyche all around them seemed to quake. He took a deep breath. “You overestimate me. I’ll just be back here: at death’s door. I can’t avoid it. Every single one I open becomes it! This is my fate, Samantha! There’s nothing I can do and it won’t change for anyone!”

The Fortuneteller within her did not like that at all, and rose up like a cold fire boiling up to the surface. She stood suddenly, and as she did her hand flared out to catch Merril up and lift him with a seizing, raw kinetic force, suspending the shocked feline above her.

“Do not presume to tell the mistress of the demesne the absolutes of her borders!” The voice was full of echoing rebuke as heavy as a planet, as Sammy felt herself tumbled and lost within a blurry storm.

“Your foggy little brain sees only the spacial speck lodged here — one spark burning down the tangled wick — utterly blind to the cycle’s breadth, and so you are too ignorant to the chance it presents. Withhold your premature, petty assertions and…”

Sammy finally more or less ‘wrested’ back control — almost too violently — as quite suddenly the Fortuneteller must’ve realized she’d taken it too far and retreated on a dime. There was a split-moment flicker of sheer wrongness to reality and in its wake Merril dropped down untethered and quite threatening to tumble over the edge.

His goddess instinctively dove for him and ended up tripping herself to begin falling just as she got to him. Merril caught himself cat-like on the edge and even flared out a hand to grab Samantha’s wrist as she fell, and they both hung there for a moment.

Then Samantha blinked. “Wait…” One thought later, she floated up in the air, wincing at her stupidity in that conceptual realm. Well. Instinct was instinct.

Merril was still hanging as he glared over at her, his hair bristling out, his face still a bit shell-shocked. “What the hell was that?!”

Sammy crossed her arms a bit sheepishly and shrugged as she floated in midair. “It happens. Try not to talk shit about knowing fate, though…”

“Noted…” Despite hanging on the edge by an arm — which he seemed tremendously at ease doing — his eyes fogged over in introspection. “It was not as strange as it should’ve been. Almost familiar… being yelled at and scolded by…”

He stared at her without saying anything for a while, then climbed back up to sit. “Can you… bring her back? Summon her?”

“I dunno…” The words from Sammy had a dual doubtfulness to them. She both didn’t know and wasn’t sure she wanted to do such a thing. “You do realize that — however your dying moments are slowed — you don’t have forever here?”

He just shrugged nonchalantly. Then he pointed his finger right at her. “Fortuneteller! Answer me! Tell me what I am to you!”

“H-hey! Stop that!”

He waited briefly, as they glared at each other, then he started to seem annoyed, jaw clenching. He stood and growled. “You think you can get what you want from me hiding like a coward, dangling a little yarn in my face?! Reveal yourself, tell me what I fucking am! Do I mean anything?! Anything really in this vile scheming cesspool of reality, this hideous abusive contrivance?! I demand to know my fate!”

So the Fortuneteller was summoned and so she came — laughing. It was a baleful, hair-raising thing, that sound; was horrifying. Not even a madman could share in such humor, if it could called such. “The maestro thinks the conducting baton will be placed in his hand again if he cries about it loud enough! No. You petulant little child — jump, if that is your choice! Be blind to the chaos you leave in your wake, kicking the sand castle on your way out! Ruin! Because that! Is. What. You. Do. Isn’t it, fool?”

Merril was certainly scowling. But there was a glint in his eye, too. “Takes one to know one!” It was such a childish retort, yet somehow felt all too true.

The Fortuneteller faded away without saying anything more, nor revealing much that Sammy could tell, though in her own mind, she thought she felt a wan smirk.

Sammy squeezed her eyes shut and put her hands to her temples, feeling quite a bit… jarred by everything. “Please stop doing that…”

“Sorry,” Merril said lamely. When Sammy peeked her eyes open, he was lowering to sit again, looking weary, resigned, sad, but… something else, something burning within like a bit of smoldering coal.

Perhaps the yarn is dangling after all? Please… Sammy was not happy with the Fortuneteller’s methods, but she hoped to hell they worked.

Samantha floated over to him and sat once more. Even as the greater dimension around them was utterly quaking. Ready to implode. The last chance all too near. So she dared to put her hand on his back. He bristled slightly, then met her eyes.

“Merril,” Sammy began, smiling at him, smiling because it might be the last time she could. She tried not to cry. “You do have a purpose. Dare I say a destiny. And you are meant to serve under me — you have many times — all to accomplish something desperately needed. I don’t know what, I don’t know why, I just know we want to see this through. That it’s important on a grand scale, is already the result of grand suffering… and I’m not sure I can do it without you.”

Merril took a deep, deep breath, then let it out in a sigh.

There was a long pause, but finally, he said, “Fine. I’m in.” His lips twisted as he looked both ways down the edge, one then the other. “Do you remember which one is which?”

“I do.” She smirked and pointed at one side. Behind, still.

“Ah. By the way, I can choose any class I want, apparently. That’s the death card buff. Some… glorious transformation. Bloody hell if I know what to take. I used to think Wizard was for me. I fantasized about having some stupid tower… eh. Trite nonsense.”

Samantha had to laugh as she rose, and bid him to. “So make your own fucking class, then! Can the System stop you? Any class? I bet it means Special Classes too. Pick something, I dunno… maudlin? I swear you’re like a male Wednesday…”

Merril’s ears twitched as his face changed, like she’d handed him an epiphany. “Hmm…”

“Whatever the case, we need to jump, like, now, buddy.”

“We?”

She grinned and took his hand in hers. “I told you: every step of the way. Up the mountain, and now down it.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m still going up. And I’d hope to stay at the summit-”

“Look, whatever, just respect the metaphor for five more seconds, because we’re jumping! Capiche?”

He looked from her down to the abyss, and in that moment, she saw for the first time that he really, truly wanted to. “Yeah. We are. Shall we?”

User Merril’s permanent Despair debuff has cleared. Note that behavior and circumstance can still apply it (with or without statistical effects) temporarily.

The quest “Ninth Life or Bust” is complete. +55 FE gained. 6 exp gained in [Bard]. 3 exp gained in [Wizard]. 2 exp gained in [Goddess] (reward added due to Goddess exp gain unlock). Inspire Ally (1/day) added.

Samantha smiled as wide as the world. “On the count of three! One… Two-three-jump!”

“Wha- Hrrk-!”

They jumped down into the dark unknown of life hand in hand — beyond it, within it, light blossomed again to gradually become the world. Their world.

The Fortuneteller cackled in Sammy’s head the whole way… this time, it was in victorious glee and exultation — half her own, projecting forward, transforming, and echoing back…

A place, a time, a memory of a little more bitterness dying.

✦•············•✦•···········•✦

On Calrenazzod, Merril’s eyes opened, and behind them played a ghostly light. The voice of the Fortuneteller, the voice beyond time and space, holy and cursed at once, issued from his too-pale lips. “My fate is freed for the price I paid; by the chance at fate is this soul made.”

The spinning image of the Death card appeared above him then stopped on a dime, just glowering there for a moment. Baleful, ghostly flames began to ebb and spread from it to Merril’s body, and the two women nearby cried out as some terribly cold touched them. They could only back away from it despite their distress. Because it was, in fact, the touch of death.

“It’s alright!” Sammy assured them. “He’s going to be alright. Trust me.”

The ghostly flames seemed to consume the body and generate a frosty, obscuring fog resonating through the room. The body of Merril stood calmly up out of it all still wreathed in flames — immolated. But the fire gradually died into condensing smokiness and then nothing at all, sucked and absorbed into brand new flesh. Becoming it, in fact.

A brand new Merril had been reborn out of the old ashes, to stand up tall before the world he’d finally deigned to accept. To try. To win.

The quest “The Beaten Road, or Straying?” is complete. 55 FE gained. 6 exp gained in [Goddess]. 4 exp gained in either [Bard] or [Wizard], due to Follower management, general persuasion, and successful supernatural ability use.

Bonus Reward: 2 exp granted in [Goddess] and 1 each in [Wizard] and [Bard] for exceptional performance and ideal results.

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