[Niles] - Two Months Prior
"Please," Gramps approached slowly, "we'd like to aid you, outsider. But before we answer, we'd only like to know your intentions."
"My intentions?" the strange man looked down on the shaky Elder - some type of smoking stick jutting from his lips. "My intentions change the longer you keep them from me. I know they're here."
"Elder!" warned one of Mother Tree's defenders - a musclebound Bearfolk man. "Let us handle this. The outsider cannot be trusted!"
Gramps raised a gloved hand to the three defenders behind him. "Sir, if you would be so kind," he all but begged the outsider. "I never received your name. If we simply allow ourselves a round of introductions, I believe we may all-"
A sudden laugh came from Smokey's yellow-toothed mouth. "Know what? I've gone about this all the wrong way. You seem a polite people. I'll play this your way."
Smokey slouched away from the baffled elder, his polished leather shoes stopping at the pond's edge. "After all, you have it so good here. Where I come from, water doesn't come as clean as this. Ours is cloudy. Scratches your throat on the way down. And you hafta bleed for it."
He crouched and cupped a handful of water out of the pond, bringing it to his lips. He threw it back. Swished it around his mouth.
Then spat it back into the pond. "Tastes like shite, don't you think?"
"How dare you!?" questioned a Koalafolk woman with a bow in her grey hands.
What the- this can't be the guy looking for his lost kid, right?
He stood up. "Don't get me wrong. The flavor's somethin' else. But when it's all so easy, what's the point?" the outsider looked around. "The pretty fireflies, the friendly little community, so much warmth and space and light, and this cost-free pond. Just look how deep it is."
His smile sagged like an askew painting. "Wouldn't your people be better off without it all?"
"Entanglement!" incanted the third defender - a skinny man with a shaved head. With two raised hands he willed weeds as tough as iron to rise from the ground under Smokey. They fastened his legs to the ground and his arms to his sides.
"We've suffered enough disrespect!" the Bearfolk declared. "You will leave. Or you will wish you had."
The outsider blew casual smoke from his lips, even as he stood restrained. "A counter-offer: you bring the whore and my child, or I show just how fragile this life of yours is."
"That's enough!" The Bearfolk blazed past Gramps. "Hardwood Mallet!"
Despite his size, he stood over the outsider in a heartbeat. The lower half of his arm morphed to take on the shape, substance, and weight of a jumbo wooden hammer - hefting it high and swinging it on the outsider's head.
He struck Smokey's hands instead.
Fingerless gloves rose to stop the hammer's downturn. The outsider didn't even wince as the wooden weapon shaded his face.
I leaned over the fence. H-how did he…?
Restraining weeds. Overpowering hammer. Both barely matched the outsider's arm. "…This really the best you have on offer!?" he demanded.
The Bearfolk pressed his other hand into the hammer to add more force. The shaved man sweated to attach more weeds to the man's arm. And… they started to get the upper hand. The hammer moved pushed slow inches closer to the outsider's face.
Two words reversed everything. "Vermin Swarm!"
A legion of purple mosquito-like insects spawned all over the outsider's skin and clothes. Most of him was buried in a hectic cloud of buzzing purple - save for his smoking face. That only lasted a second. In the next, the cloud didn't cover him.
It covered the Bearfolk.
"Gah!" the man staggered away - massive arms flailing desperately. "Get this of-"
Waves of insects suffocated his next words. Muffled noises barely escaped as they swam across his fur. Tortured noises. Like those of a man drained through a thousand tiny punctures.
No! I gotta get down there!
"Be'trand!" yelled the Koalafolk woman. Between one stilted heartbeat and the next she nocked an arrow and fired at Smokey.
He tilted his head first; half the swarm sprung off the Bearfolk and into the arrow's path. The cloud's sheer thickness caught the arrow like a stuffed animal. Chewed-through pieces quickly dropped from the bottom of the cloud and, before Ko'mina could fire a second, she also became overwhelmed by the rush of insects.
Smokey turned next to Gramps - petrified at the chaos around him. Some of the swarm broke off to devour him too. The shaved man rushed between them.
"E-Elder!" Molin - the shaved man - fell to the ground, plunged in an Abyss of pain and darkness. "Run! R-"
Cut short. Below me was only muffled screaming from three thrashing bodies, and Smokey, and the Elder.
"You should've coughed them up!" Smokey grinded the smoking stick in his teeth - the weeds around his body sinking to the ground. "How many more will you have me kill, old man!?"
The Elder took shambling steps back. His cane slipped and he buckled, falling to the floor, terror nailing his eyes wide, sweat rolling down the splotched scars on his face.
Smokey came closer - smile gone. "And they will be killed. You bunch, so fragile, so toothless." He hocked dark spit on the floor. "What a meek place to house my chil-"
One swinging kick and Smokey soared into Mother Tree's pond. Water erupted from where he plunged through the surface. But even as I rode on the speeding tail of Vine Cling, I wasn't on time. I was too late.
"Gramps!" I crouched over him. "Are you okay!?"
"M-M'lad!?" he sputtered out. "No - you mustn't be here! I beg of you, leave before-"
"I'm not moving an inch!" I loosed Vine Cling from around my arm and wrapped him tight. The man was in the air before he knew it, and after he knew it, he touched down on a nearby overhead platform.
"Wait! Niles!" he called from below. "Escape!"
That wasn't happening. Lives were at stake. And… lives were already lost. My flying kick broke Smokey's concentration on his Abyss-damned Vermin Swarm. But even though the insects were gone… their dirty work was here to stay.
Molin. Ko'mina. Be'trand. All made to be shriveled skins laid flat across the ground. No healing would fix them. They were gone. And my mind, always busy with so many thousands of thoughts that it challenged me to force a second of focus… became very, very undivided.
A hand rose from the pond's waters. Smokey's, attempting to pull the rest of him to solid land.
My vine flashed onto his wrist. I dragged him from the water like a fish on the line and slung him across the broad width of Mother Tree. Bark walls caught his slamming body; earthy noise reverberated up the wood.
That was just the start. I pulled at the end of the vine again. Only… it didn't give.
The drenched outsider rose, dark wet hair curling over his extinguished smoking stick. A burning glare cut through the falling droplets. And even though I kept pulling, I was the one being reeled in.
H-how strong is this guy!?
He rotated an arm, winding me closer with each spin. My heels dug into the wooden ground. No use. Less then ten feet quickly separated us. With his free fist he wiped the blood off his busted lip.
Then cracked me across the face.
Bells went off between my ears. Big ones. When my vision cleared up, I was on the floor. I tried to breathe. Hot liquid caught my throat.
I coughed. Sputtered. Something told me to get up, fast. Or this man would keep going.
But as I opened an airway, I realized he didn't. He looked down at me, furious, but also… puzzled?
"You…" his grey eyes were narrow slits. "Ghosthold…"
I felt myself suddenly rising. Not on purpose. Something was propping me upright.
Bony, ghostly, eerily green fingers wrapped around me - attached to an armless hand. The fingers clenched tight around me. I fought back, though. Dammit, I fought. But just as the fingers started to budge, they locked right back in place. It wasn't that their grip was getting stronger; my strength was getting ripped away.
Then I started shifting backwards, at the same pace as Smokey's forward steps.
"Those eyes," he inspected me. "That nose, and hair. Tell me, who is Urtica Hawthorne to you?"
I almost broke out then and there. "Don't speak Ma's name!" I thrashed with everything I had left. If my vine wasn't tightened around me, it would've torn out his tongue.
"Ma?" Smokey asked. Quiet laughs slipped from his lips. Then they swelled, louder and louder. Until they filled all the air of Mother Tree.
"After so, so long…" he breathed an almost endless breath of relief. "I've found you, son."
Somehow, that sapped me more than Ghosthand. "Wh-what in the Abyss are you yapping about!? I don't know you! You're just some guy!"
"I'm so much more than 'some guy'," he smiled. "Y'could have been too, you know? Then Urtica stole you from me."
My fists balled. "Quit! Lying!"
He kept going, stopping at the edge of the pond. "She ever tell you about me? About our lives together? The jobs we took and the rounds we reaped? How thrilled I was to have you? Or did she keep all that hush-hush?"
W-wait. That does sound like what she told… No! Don't listen to him!
"What about how you got here?" He wrung out his hair. "You don't believe Urtica lived here all her life? I'm sure she's tried to jell with the rest. But she's not like everyone else. Is she?"
"She's… she's not like you, either!" I blurted. "In the past, maybe she stole, hurt people. But she was never a killer. Never like what you are!"
He laughed again, gladly. "So you do understand. But you're dead wrong about one detail; your Ma and Pa - Urtica and Fraser - we're strips of the same cloth. I don't know what lies she spoonfed you, but your Ma was and is a worm in the muck."
"Shut! Up!" My body got heavier. So heavy.
"She cut scores of lives short. Enemies. Competitors. Those with bounties on their heads. Those who pissed off the wrong person. Old types and urchins and anyone in-between. She was a necromancer. Puppeteering corpses of the 'good' and 'evil' alike to suit herself. Useless terms, really. Whatever they mean to you here, in this place, they mean nothing in your true homeland. Only two camps lived there: survivors, and resources. And as survivors went, your mother was one of the best."
I fell limp. "She… she wasn't."
"Niles?" he came close, inches between our eyes.
I said nothing. He still seemed to find what he wanted on my face.
"Ha! So that is your name!" He lit up. "I'll give Urtica credit there, at least. But, Niles? Son?"
All I could do was glare.
"For as good as Urtica was - as good as I am…you could've been better. As the product of our instincts and strength, you could've been a mover in my world. A shaker. A man of importance… and a man to be feared. You still could be."
I… I don't want that…
"You'll come with me, son. You've been brainwashed, see? You never learned to accept the life meant for you. You will, in time. But first comes the tough love."
Smokey turned to the pond. "These waters must connect to this ridiculous tree's roots, deep as they are. The reservoir under our feet keeps this place alive. I'll make sure you have no reason to stay."
"Wh-what…? St…op…"
Fraser bent down. "Blight's Tears."
Blacker than the darkest black. That was the color of the droplets falling from Fraser's open fingers. The first hit the pond's surface and immediately puffed into a pitch cloud. Next came more, and more, and more of them - so many the pond's crystal blue morphed to take on the new, sickening color.
Those weren't the only tears to fall. I was always a toughie. Not then. Even I knew that what fell from his fingers was a poison. A dark corruption of the pond I lived by, drank from, dipped toes in even when it got me in trouble. And the water was just the beginning.
"There." He smiled at his dirty work. "This treehouse of yours is inconceivably huge. But with enough time, even it'll be defiled, and rot into nothingness."
All I could do was look up. By now, people started to wake and poke heads from their doors. Indescribable horror invaded their hive of unblinking eyes.
The only one who looked any different? Fraser. When he turned back to me, his face twisted with disgust. "Cryin'? At this? Urtica really has ruined you." I felt myself being spun toward the front of Mother Tree, where a massive hollow acted as our front gate. "Let's make tracks; I've a lot of work to do."
He started walking, himself and me behind, to the hollow. "And I'll give her the same courtesy of leaving while she sleeps."
Night loomed outside the hollow ahead - a black void that promised to suck me in and never spit me back out. Every step closer was colder. Lonelier. Darker. All my fight was gone. Sapped away.
I closed teary eyes.
"…Drop him, Fraser," rolled a quiet, strained voice. "Now."
My eyes shot open. "M-ma…?"
Sluggishly, I turned my head. Left. Right. Back. She wasn't in any of those directions. I almost thought I was hearing things.
Then I saw her emerge from the hollow's darkness ahead.
"Urtica!" Fraser spread his arms and smiled - though his voice was dressed in decades of hate. "You've finally crawled out of bed. Much faster than I did all those years ago - credit where it's due."
Her answer was red-hot silence. I'd never seen Ma so enraged.
But even that took a backseat to what she felt when her eyes snapped to mine.
"Ma…" I croaked.
Finally seeing her there? After so much had gone wrong, so quickly? I broke down. I wanted to be strong, I swear it. But all I wanted then was for her to be beside me. Tell me things would be okay. My arms needed to reach for hers. They couldn't.
"Baby…" her voice cracked. "I'm getting you out of this. I will."
Fraser scoffed. "Our son is no baby, though you've raised him in the mold of one - whining for his mother. We slit throats at half his age. We didn't have mothers. We didn't bawl. And he won't. Not anymore. I spent a fortune to track you after our last job, when ya made it crystal clear you wanted out. Only recently did the Brokerage catch wind of your whereabouts. And I'm not going back without a son to rule those streets."
"You tracked me?" Shock hit her face, before a realization struck next. "…My dark magic."
She slit throats? Why… why isn't she calling him out for lying?
"Didn't think it'd take eighteen years for you to touch it again. But I never lost hope. There's no escaping the life we were cut out for, after all. "
Ma closed her eyes. "…I spent so many sleepless nights wondering what I'd say if we crossed paths again. Perfecting my words. Explaining myself. Now that I'm looking at you?" She dropped into a combative crouch. "I see you don't deserve any of it."
"Y'don't really mean to fight?" Fraser seemed genuinely surprised. "You'd have been a pain all those years ago. But this place has fattened ya on comfort and leisure. I've only spilled more and more blood. Do the math."
"I did. Eighteen years ago. You think I only bought booze and sleeping potions in the months before I ran away?"
Focus twisted Ma's face. Deep focus. Reckless focus.
A lone tear ran down her cheek. The only raindrop before the coming storm behind her eyes. "Keep smiling, Niles."
None of my five senses told me so. Still something felt disastrously wrong.
Fraser's smile fell. "Vermin Swarm!"
All his suddenly tensed attention went to that art. I fell limply to the ground - Ghosthand dissolving away. Uncountable dark insects roved in a torrent at Ma.
They got to her skin. Rushed to pierce her from a thousand angles.
That only made her stronger.
"Martyr's Nightfall!"
Shadowy wings took sharp shape over her shrouded shoulders. A darkly transparent cloak came next, over a body that seemed to exist just as much as it didn't.
Filling its unreal hands was a weapon I'd never known. A formless shaft stretched sideways, and from its end curved a silver blade like the crescent moon. The faceless creature rose the weapon high.
And brought it down on my Ma.
I don't remember what happened when the blade connected. It was all too fast. There wasn't time for thought. Only instinct. The instinct to drag tired hands up to protect my face.
Then… quiet. Mother Tree. The withered floor I rested an ear against. My own thoughts. All noiseless.
Strength started to flow back into me. I rolled over to see my parents. Or what parts of them hadn't been erased.
One body laid closest to me. Shriveled like meat left for weeks under a merciless sun. There was no face. No features. And now - no soul.
Further ahead was… a crater, where purple flecks and black static surged through the air. I would've walked through whatever clung to that spot. If there was anything left of Ma to hold in my hands.
And my hands. My hands.
Whatever was left of the dark magic blasted them. Corrupted them.
That was the tipping point.
Those wrong hands sank, right into my lap, thudding against a floor that pulled further away, like my parents pulled further away, and my own body which I saw from a place that was outside it - a floating place that rose higher and higher above a cold and chilly world that blurred at the edges and got darker - darker - darker and so black and painful and cruel so fast and I didn't understand any of it even one tiny single bit and none of this was real none of it none of it none of it none of-
—————————————————————————————————
"It doesn't look good."
My eyes opened to those words. I knew that voice. Its owner stood over me with her back to my bed.
"Abyss take me…" Gramps cursed under his breath, before looking back up at the Lizardfolk healer. "Life experience told me the result already, and yet I dared to hope still."
He turned away to pace to the end of the room. By the time he turned back, my eyes were shut.
"Unrest," Gramps' voice ran ragged, "gnaws at the minds of the people, Mother Tree is dying, Urtica has passed - and now her son's been afflicted with wounds inside and out as everlasting as my own! Damnation! He doesn't deserve this!"
Footsteps came closer. A gloved hand ran across my cheek. "…I'm sorry, M'lad. This - none of this - should've ever come to fruition."
Then this… really isn't some bad dream…
He sighed. The noise was hollow and hopeless and bitter and matched the unsteady beat of my heart.
I heard a clawed finger scratch nervously against a set of scales. "Are we truly beyond solutions?" asked doctor Li'vordia. "Haven't we had past conversation about the wounds on your face? I recall you saying they weren't entirely incurable."
"They are incurable enough that a 'solution' does not beggar serious consideration."
"But what is that solution?"
I could almost hear him shaking his head. "Humorously simple, on a night less dire than this. Dark magic lurks in these eternal wounds. The one blotching my face, covering Niles' hands, and corroding at Mother Tree. Healing is nullified. Made worthless. We cannot focus on the wound, then, but on purifying the blight itself. Only one element has the traits necessary."
"Light?" Li'vordia answered more than asked. "Then isn't our next course of action obvious? None of us healers employ light magic, of course, but there must be many that do in Lumerit's cities. We'll simply petition for aid."
"Therein lies the problem. Mother Tree is not officially part of Lumerit - we cannot rely on its banner to save us. Worse, our wounds are not common afflictions. We need specialists."
"Then we-" Li'vordia stopped herself. Next time she spoke, the words came without a tinge of life. "No. Enlisting a specialist to travel a nation away - through all the road's monsters and dangers…"
"Even a saint would demand a fortune," finished Gramps.
A… fortune?
"Then, what will we do?" she added quietly.
"Ease the minds of the people - somehow. Prepare the funerals. Then… consider evacuation plans. Our botanists suspect we've three months until Mother Tree becomes uninhabitable"
Th-three months…? Then home will be lost forever? Just like…
"Sun above," said Gramps. "So much to be done. As for you doctor, you've fixed all that can be fixed with Niles, here. You should rest."
They continued to talk. Each word sounded more and more like a different language. Laying there so long, I should've gotten antsy. But I felt I could've lived the rest of my life in that bed. Doing what? Who knows. I didn't want to find out. Eventually goodbyes were said. Footsteps left the room. I opened my eyes.
Sheets slid down my chest as I sat upright, bundling over my hands. I couldn't look at them. I didn't need to. The new blank numbness at the ends of my wrists - interrupted by the occasional shard of icy pain - was hard to gloss over.
Glossing over my room was much easier. I stepped out of bed and up to my window. Raised it. And crawled out into the night's breeze.
—————————————————————————————————
Buckets and bathtubs could've filled with what spilt from my eyes. Night felt as endless as the dark sky stretching out into a starry infinity. No matter how many times I stood and sat and laid down and fidgeted on the top of my branch-home, my mind kept repeating the same sickening facts.
You're an orphan.
Your hometown counts down to destruction.
…You did this. You convinced her to teach you dark magic. That led him here. That killed them. That corrupted you.
Except… it was never just that one decision. Those Templars, and Ma… they were right. Dark magic was a taint. My parents used it for all kinds of evils. Murdered and stole and who-knows-what-else. Then they had me. It was never left in the past; it was always with them.
I clenched ruined hands. And now it's with you, too. Inside and out.
"Where've you gone, Niles? Niles!?" Gramps' voice echoed through the bark. It came closer, all the way to the window under me.
From this angle, he couldn't turn to see me. I hoped he'd turn away and look somewhere else.
"Niles?" he asked, grim and quiet. "I hear you up there. Trying to hold everything together."
I said nothing. For the first time in a long time, I didn't see a point.
"…I cannot begin to fathom how you feel, M'lad. All I can say is sorry. For this. For it all. But… there's something else. Here."
I peered over the curve of the branch. White gloves propped against the corner of the window sill.
"She knit these for me. To aid the old joints in my hands…You should have them more than I."
More quiet drifted after his words. Minutes of it. Somewhere between it all, a new thought dried my mind.
Eventually Gramps spoke up again. "…Return whenever you're ready."
His footsteps sounded away from the window.
"Gramps?" my voice came raw.
The steps stopped.
"…I dunno when I'll be back. But when I am, it'll be with the fortune we need to save Mother Tree. I'll fix this. For Ma. For everyone."
"Wh-what, M'lad? How will you accomplish that?"
Connections? Justice? Pretty Armor? Don't care.
But the rounds? Heroes must make the most out of anyone. So there's only one option. Even if I caused this…
Newfound energy pushed me to stand. And pushed me to fling myself off the branch.
"Niles!"
"Vine Cling!"
Spooling from my fluttering sleeves was yards and yards of rising vine, snatching up Ma's gloves as branches zoomed past my eyes. Canopies of lesser trees stretched into the horizon as my art retracted like rubber and brought me the gloves.
Even if I'm tainted…
I plummeted as I put them on, filled them out. And dropped through an opening in the canopies. A sweeping underside of forestry, beasties and bright bugs met me as I latched onto a high branch and evened out my momentum into a forward sling through the trees.
Even if I'm a dark mage…
The pain was there. It'd never go away. But there was hope. I didn't lose Mother Tree, or all my mates, or Gramps. There was still something to strive for. Something to save. Something to rebuild from the ashes. It's what she would want.
I'll keep smiling, Ma. And…
Dawn peeked through the leaves. I only swung faster.
"I will save my home!"