When Heroes Die

“A misguided soul championing contradictory causes may be in the process of genuine change, but that makes them no less a hypocrite for it.”

– Quote attributed to Tariq Isbili of the Dominion of Levant

After spending over a year in Caith, we had finally left. We had scoured every corner of the place and no progress had been made. Roland and Max had even made the effort to talk to wizards that were too dangerous for me to meet personally. We knew far more than I cared to about how to summon and bind devils, but information on demons was sparse. If I was villainously inclined and actually able to use magic as Maxime and Roland alleged I could, by now I would probably be a reasonably capable diabolost.

Roland’s Name had offered me no help at solving my problem at all. Rogue Sorcerers, it appeared, did not help demons find homes.

“World still fucking you over?” Max asked.

“Yeah,” I grimaced. The road we were on was especially uneven, and another bump against a rock jostled me from side to side. I was half tempted to smooth it out myself just for a comfortable ride, but then I would have to actively contest with the feeling of nails on a chalkboard.

The longer I had spent in Creation, the worse the feeling of not belonging became.

“How bad? Are the Angels making out with you again?”

“It feels like being hugged, not like being kissed,” I told him again. Not that it would do anything except encourage him.

Maxime cackled merrily. With that laugh, he was excellent villain material.

I never should have mentioned that the Angels are watching over me.

It had become obvious in the time that had passed since that the Choir of Compassion had taken an interest in me. If they wanted to, they were able to interact with some otherworldly part of me that wasn’t entirely anchored in Creation. Whenever they did so, I could feel a vague sense of comfort drape itself like a blanket over my metaphysical shoulders.

They didn’t do it often, usually only when my feeling of estrangement was especially bad. I knew that their intentions were benign, that they were trying to show their sympathy in the only way they were capable of. That didn’t prevent me from feeling vaguely like a wild horse that was being taught to become accustomed to touch.

“I apologize once more, Taylor, were it not for my suggestion, your situation would not have degenerated to this extent.”

“It’s fine Roland,” I turned my head to the left, facing him, “I would have tried replacing my arm anyhow.”

I turned away quickly, the glare of the morning sun harsh in my eyes.

“This does not excuse-”

“I said it’s fine,” I cut him off, “besides, it isn’t just the prosthetic arm that was the problem.”

Trying to graft on a prosthetic arm had been a mistake, although not for the reasons I would have expected. The moment I had attached the piece, the sense of alienation had amplified dramatically. I had removed it almost immediately, but the damage had already been done.

Replacing my arm would have to wait until the larger issue was solved.

My ability to manipulate biology was still not good enough to try repairing my arm that way, but I expected I would have similar complications there as well. The only positive discovery was the confirmation that I didn’t appear to be physically ageing. It’s so reassuring knowing that you’re destined to die young.

“Your belief that the shift in your demeanour is the cause of your distress has yet to be proven.”

“We agreed it’s the most likely reason. The more I change from what I was like when I arrived, the worst the problem becomes.”

Which in theory meant I could undo the damage by regressing. The trouble was, I liked the person I had become.

We passed behind the shade of some large pine trees. The early morning chirping of weaver birds called out from above.

Max looked like he was about to open his mouth. Probably that same old stale joke about invading one of the hells again. I swear, the old man needed some new material.

“No, Max, I don’t want to live in the hells. Even if I could clean one up, I want to be around people. I’m not putting myself in a prison locked away from the world.”

I’d made friends in Calernia. People that I cared about. I had come to accept that Creation was my new home, even if it hadn’t accepted me yet. Despite how backwards the world was in some ways, I didn’t want to leave it. That didn’t mean that I didn’t miss my old friends but… Missing them wasn’t the same as wanting to go back to Earth.

This was a world where heroes could win.

“Seems it's going to rain tonight, Roland. Girlie finally admits she deserves to be happy. Now we just need to find her some young lad with firm muscles, and she can retire out in the countryside.”

“I don’t think I’m ready to retire just yet,” I admitted.

“Oh, then what do you want to do?”

“… I think I want to try being a hero again in my own right, not just following Roland around.”

It would have to wait until living in the world no longer hurt, but gradually the idea had started to grow on me. This was a world where heroes could win. Not only that, it was the kind of world where idealistic heroes could win. I could try to be the type of person I would have wanted to be as a kid. The person that never compromises with evil and always tries to do what’s right.

Idealistic didn’t need to mean stupid. I wasn’t about to go charging into Callow and try to start up a civil war, that would likely cause more suffering than it ended in the process. To me, it meant finding a solution that resulted in the least amount of harm.

The Calamities did need to go, that much was certain to me. Being less bad than comically Evil didn’t make them good. But they weren’t the target I had my eyes on. There would always be another hero who rose up to fight villains like them. I had set my eyes upon what I saw to be a larger problem.

“Just want to get up and abandon us, do you?” Max sounded amused.

“No, no, not at all,” I said hastily.

“Would you be so kind as to reiterate what exactly Taylor had reflected on during last night’s talks?” Roland teased.

Our monthly discussions about past events had continued. I was still holding off about the exact details of what I did in the fight with Scion, but I felt that sooner or later I would be ready to speak on the subject. To my surprise, I found that sharing what I had been through with others was helping me to cope. They forced me to be introspective, to face the parts of me that I didn’t like and think about what I could do to change them.

Maybe Lisa was right. Perhaps I should have reached out for help sooner after all.

“Girlie told us she regretted leaving her friends behind.”

I flushed with embarrassment.

“I’m probably going to need some rules for myself, so I don’t make the same mistakes.”

“Don’t fuck off without your friends can be the first of those rules.”

“Rule two can be, ‘ask others for help when I need it,’” I contributed, playing along.

“As a corollary to that, the third principle can be, ‘accept help when it is offered to you in earnest,’” Roland suggested.

“That’s almost like the same rule,” I muttered.

“Not entirely, girlie.”

“As a change of topic, would you care to elucidate what you find unsatisfactory about how I aim to improve people’s lives?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it. I like helping you help people. It’s nice to make a difference for them. But I’ve realized something about Calernia. Heroes have been winning for thousands of years, but villains keep appearing.” I explained.

“This is to be expected. Villains are likely to surface until the arrival of last dusk,” Roland stated.

The three of had grown more experienced as we travelled, and my opinions on heroism in Calernia began to cement. The idea of stories favouring heroes no longer bothered me, but something else did.

“But it means that even when we win, we aren’t actually winning. If we were, there wouldn’t be any villains left at all. If I’m going to be a hero in my own right, I want to make a real difference. I want to do something that matters.” I emphasized. “Right now, we might as well be tilting at windmills for all the good it does in the larger picture.”

“Would you care to explain to me the meaning behind the phrase ‘tilting at windmills?’” Roland inquired.

“The term comes from a story in my homeland. It means to fight imaginary enemies. The villains we’re fighting obviously aren’t imaginary, but they aren’t the real problem either.”

There was a lot about Creation I wanted to mend. Calernia felt…broken. As if the continent itself was locked in a stasis. Never progressing, never moving forward. It felt like the mental state I was in, shortly after my arrival.

Perhaps I should adjust my expectations. Learn to live with the idea that many things that would be considered atrocities on Earth were seen as normal here. I wasn’t willing to accept that. Villains were much worse than they were on Earth. Furthermore, the world wasn’t ending. There was no need to compromise with them. I saw no reason to not just see them all gone.

Just because I wanted to stay here, didn’t mean that there weren’t parts of it that I wanted to change.

When I finally championed my own cause, I wanted the victory to be permanent.

“You sure you can’t just retire on a farm somewhere with a handsome man, girlie? You told me you don’t want to make new regrets, and this sounds like an easy road to more of them.”

I shook my head in response.

“Do you have any notion as to how you would achieve such an outcome? I am not opposed to the idea, provided you have a plan to act on.”

“I don’t,” I admitted. “But when I do, I want us to work on it together. If you’re willing to come along, at least.”

I didn’t know how to achieve a lasting victory. I had no illusions about being smarter than the brightest minds on the continent. The Calamities had been successful villains for over thirty years in a world where villains were expected to lose. That told me all that I needed to know about how capable they clearly were. All I had was a different perspective to them.

That didn’t mean I wasn’t willing to try to figure it out.

Maybe it was foolish to expect to do better, but this was a world where a close to perfect answer might just be attainable. So I would try to do it, even if I expected it to be nearly impossible to achieve. I wasn’t willing to be satisfied with a bunch of comparatively easy wins that would undo themselves a decade after I died.

In a world ruled by stories, surely there was a story that would make that victory stick.

Finding it was something for me to aspire towards.

For now, I stuck to small heroics. Just because I didn’t know how to fix the big picture yet, didn’t mean that there weren’t little things that I could do to help. Helping others was one of the few coping methods I had against the constant sense that I didn’t belong.

It was important to me that whatever I did was something I didn’t come to regret afterwards. I recalled a talk I had once had with Glenn Chambers. It had been right at the end of the world, and I had admitted to him that I hadn’t made for a good hero.

I would try to be a good hero this time around.

“It would be my honour to join you on such a venture.”

“We’ll both be following,” I replied, smiling. “That can be rule four. Taylor isn’t in charge. We find the right person to lead us, then help them every step of the way. It would be too easy for me to start rationalizing making bad choices again if I’m the one deciding what we do.”

I wasn’t sure I could stick to that rule. Most of the authorities I had heard of in Creation were worse than the ones on Earth Bet, but I was afraid that if I was the one in charge that I would start to regress. It was a hope of mine that there was someone out there that I could trust to play second fiddle to, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

“What would you do should the leader come to propose a plan that you find morally reprehensible?”

“Rule five: Girlie listens to her conscience first,” Max bellowed.

“Here’s one for Roland. When your friends tell you to fix an outstanding problem, don’t leave for later,” I proposed.

He turned away, wincing, but didn’t deny my suggestion. “I find that you too would benefit from the wisdom of following that. How about we note it down as your sixth law?”

That was… A fair point.

“I don’t like the word law for this. I broke a lot of those, and don’t want to get in the habit of breaking these.”

“Perhaps you should endeavour to break the law less,” Roland chided.

“Which of us is the Rogue?” I said.

“That comparison has no merit. When I cross the law, it is only done for the benefit of others.”

“That was what I said, too.”

Roland looked as if he had swallowed a lemon.

Rather than provoke an argument, I decided to change the topic. “If we don’t find what we need in Daoine, where should we look next? You told me the Golden Bloom is off limits, so we will have to search somewhere else.”

Much to my dismay, I had learned that elves in Calernia were not the happy hippies that Earth fiction had led me to believe I would find. They were highly xenophobic racial supremacists who would try to kill me on sight instead.

“In the event that our quest proves to be unfruitful, it may prove necessary to return to Callow proper and begin to take larger risks.”

I didn’t like the idea of being right under the noses of the Calamities again. But if there was no other option, then I would consider it. At the rate the discomfort was increasing, I would be a miserable wreck within the course of a decade.

I was about to respond to Roland when a particularly nasty pulse reverberated across the essence of me. I grimaced. It was the world pushing back against me harshly. They occurred infrequently, and we hadn’t found a method to deal with them yet.

“Need to lie down again, girlie?” Max sounded concerned.

“I do. This one’s bad.”

“Go sleep then, Taylor.”

I moved away from the front of the wagon and lay down near the rear. Closing my eyes, I tried to ignore the knives that were digging in to the back of my head. What felt like hours later, I finally drifted off.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, shaking me.

“Five more minutes,” I mumbled irritably, the afternoon sun pleasant against my skin.

“Girlie, wake up,” Max shook me more insistently.

“What is it?” I said, opening my eyes.

Suddenly, I heard a shriek from up ahead.

Hurriedly, I sat up and looked. In the distance, it seemed that one of the merchant convoys was under attack by roadside bandits.

“As if the day couldn’t get any worse,” I fumed.

“Now that you are awake, we need to swiftly settle on a course of action,” Roland commented.

“No, it’s fine. I’ll deal with it.”

“Are you sure, girlie?”

“I’m certain.”

“How are you intending to resolve this scuffle?”

“I’ll grief bomb them,” I explained.

They could have a taste of my past regrets. There were plenty of them to go around. It took a lot of negative emotions to completely incapacitate people, but it took comparatively little effort for me to make them. With a view of a full on army, I suspected I could take them all out at once.

“What about the merchants, girlie?”

“They’ll recover. It isn’t permanent.”

I wasn’t in the mood for a fight. With time, it had become clear to me just how effective emotional attacks were. I didn’t need to be able to tell who was causing problems to douse them all with a heavy helping of misery. Let them all fall over in a puddle of tears, and we could sort it out afterwards.

The other two looked at each other, their faces conflicted, then nodded my way.

“That is an acceptable resolution. I dislike the manner in which it does not discriminate between forces, but it ensures an outcome with minimal casualties.”

Reaching out, I drew deep on the emotions I felt after the fight against Scion. From the moment right before I died and landed in Calernia. I shoved the idea in the general direction of the conflict. Some grass beside the road shrivelled and died, then the sounds of fighting drew to a stop.

The effect was only short term, so they would all eventually recover from it. But in the meantime, it would incapacitate our foes without truly hurting anyone else.

We moved in closer.

There was a group of approximately thirty people. All of them were lying on the dirt road, curled into a ball and sobbing. I felt a pang of guilt.

Fuck, was I too harsh here?

The bandits looked like poverty-stricken men who hadn’t eaten in days. Their clothes were a mess of rags and I could see their ribs.

“Now I feel really bad,” I muttered. “If I could just make them food right now, I would.”

“As a seventh guiding principle, I suggest the following: ‘try to see matters from other people’s perspectives first,’” Roland chided.

It was a sound point, but now hardly felt like the right time to bring it up.

That was when five men carrying whips walked out from between the trees to the left of the road. They were led by a pudgy man in flamboyant clothing.

“What are you waiting for, slaves, I ordered you to attack them,” he shouted.

As if through magic, welts started to appear across the slaves’ backs.

Whimpering, they began to climb to their feet.

I wasn’t just about to let this happen, so I doused the slavers with a heavy blast of emotion as well.

Seconds later, they had crumpled to his feet and was sobbing in the grass.

“Why didn’t you just gut them, girlie? They deserve to die anyway.”

I shrugged, “I can kill them if we need to, but I’d rather just turn them over to the Watch. They were the ones who attacked, nobody would bat an eyelid for what I did. If we kill them, it complicates everything.”

I felt gossamer threads lightly brush against my presence. They seemed lost, though, unable to latch on. As if they were trying to attach themselves to me specifically, but couldn't find somewhere to fit. Odd. Was Creation attempting to fit me into a story? A part of me hoped as much, it meant that maybe there was a chance my problem could be solved.

Roland had theorized that if it was possible for me to earn a Name, it was one of the ways I could fit myself into Creation. What kind of story would this be? It didn't feel like the usual chance encounter on the road. What made it more disturbing is that the threads didn't attempt to connect with Roland at all.

For a fight that was supposedly part of a story that was attempting to involve me, it came as a surprise to me how easy it was. That, more than anything else, was cause for alarm. The story hadn't managed to grab onto me. I suspected that if an encounter this easy was trying to attach itself now, then I could be certain that a story more challenging was coming down the line.

“Fair enough. If you ask me, they don’t deserve to live,” Max spat at one side, “them monsters from Stygia like to inflict their cruelties on others without knowing the taste of the lash themselves.”

“I find my opinion in accord with Taylor. The Watch will almost certainly sentence them to hang. There is no need here for us to be the hand that metes out justice, it would merely invite trouble when the law here should suffice.”

The three of us approached the scene and started to take charge. It took a couple of hours before a Watch patrol finally showed up and took over. I likely would never find out what happened to the men, but I didn’t need to either. Creation wasn’t kind to crooks that were caught.

Hours later on the road, the three of us passed time silently watching the stars when Roland called out, “Does the idea of debating the merits of various political systems appeal to either of you?”

It had come out of nowhere, so I was entirely surprised.

“I… don’t really think the idea sounds that exciting.”

“Come on girlie, give it a go. It beats looking at more grass. Each of us chooses a side on something. Even if it isn’t an idea you believe in. It’ll be fun.”

To me, this sounded more like a way to start team problems.

“There are many insights that may be gleaned from talking to someone almost entirely removed from Creation. Comparing and contrasting our political systems may lead to some fascinating discoveries. Your perspective is unique, after all.”

“Fine. You make a good point. I am just stating up front that I see this leading to a fight.”

We wiled away the rest of the night arguing the merits of democracy. To my surprise, I had fun. Neither of them believed the concept could even work, considering the local version of it. In a world like this, I struggled to conceive of it working either.

Functional democracies didn’t make for good narratives, and so a story was guaranteed to kill one in the crib.