The Tears of Kas̆dael

Jasper was waiting at the bar when Ihra walked in. He’d been nursing a single ale for an hour, not wanting to be addled, when she returned seeking comfort, but it only took one look at the sparkle in her eye and the bounce in her step to realize the news she received must have been good.

“They’re alive?” he asked, as she plopped onto the stool next to his.

“Ikkarim,” she said softly. “They made it to Ikkarim. I don’t have any information after that, but at least they’re not out there…rotting in a field.” Her enthusiasm faltered for a second, as the weight of the fear she’d carried for months hit her, and Jasper grabbed her hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

“But they aren’t,” he reminded her. “Does this mean you want to go to Ikkarim?” As he asked the question, Jasper struggled in vain to recall where the city was. He’d certainly heard of it before – as one of just 5 major cities left in the province of Sapiya, its name had come up from time to time – but he was pretty sure they’d never traveled anywhere near it which probably meant, he decided, that it was somewhere to the West. “Where is it, near the capital? We might be able to detour there.”

“No,” Ihra said, with a swift shake of her head. “It’s to the south, across Lake S̆eḇūdag. We don’t have time to go there - it would take us weeks out of our way, in both directions. But at least I know they’re safe,” she added, regaining her enthusiasm.

“Are you sure you don’t want to check on them?” Jasper offered one last time, but Ihra demurred again.

“Maybe someday we can check up on them, but for now,” she waived over the barmaid, and ordered four ales. “For now? It’s time to celebrate.”

It was pushing noon when Jasper finally woke up. Hazy memories of the previous night flickered through his head – of dancing, drinking, and a particularly vivid memory of having somebody’s tongue down his throat, though he couldn’t visualize their face to save his life. He glanced at the pillow beside him apprehensively and was relieved to find himself alone. Hopefully whoever I kissed was a stranger. Despite the occasional, subtle attempts at flirting Tsia made, Jasper had little interest in pursuing either of them. It wasn’t that Ihra and Tsia weren’t attractive, but he knew that starting a relationship within the team would likely end in the sort of drama he preferred to avoid.

Thankfully, when he joined the others in the dining hall downstairs, he detected no lingering awkwardness between them. With a twitch of his fingers, he cast Circle of Forgiveness on the table and the group perked up promptly, their hangovers washed away with the power of magic. Having already lost so much time to sleep, they scarfed down their food in a matter of minutes and were packed and ready to go in under half an hour.

On the way out of town, Jasper fulfilled the threat he’d made to Gebor and stopped by the orphanage. Fortunately, the matron greeted them with a beaming smile, gushing about their new patron, and her smile only grew wider as he slipped them a few hundred guilders of his own before departing.

They rode hard the rest of the day, seeking to make up for lost time, and when night fell they had left behind the shattered environs of Hargish. Jungle swallowed them up again, and a light but steady rain beat down on their head relentlessly. They were about to resign themselves to sleeping by the side of the road, forced to lie down in the cold muck, when Jasper spied a small trail leading straight up the mountainside.

The jungle had almost completely consumed it, with vines and brush encroaching on the sliver of brown dirt and broken pavement that jutted out perpendicular to the steep slope, but he recognized it nonetheless. This is the enclave. A bittersweet wave of nostalgia washed him over, accompanied by a tinge of homesickness he did his best to ignore, but the path also offered an opportunity to avoid the rain and muck.

Bringing Dapplegrim to a stop, he nodded at the narrow trail. “There should be shelter up there.”

“Looks more like a deer trail,” Tsia replied dismissively, taking a moment to wring a torrent of water out of her hair, “and it goes pretty much straight up. Let’s just stop here. Maybe Erin can bend some of these trees enough to give us some shelter”

Ihra, though, stared at the narrow trail for only a second before making the connection. “This is where you arrived, isn’t it?”

Jasper nodded. “Ishka’s enclave is up there. Unless something major has changed in the last year, at the very least we should be able to get out of this rain and sleep somewhere dry.”

“This is the Djinn enclave?” Abandoning her futile attempt to dry herself, Tsia studied the path with renewed interest. “Anything of interest up there?”

He shrugged. “Hard to say. Last time I was there, I was just focused on surviving. Other than the glaive, I didn’t find anything special, but there was also an entire floor of the manor I couldn’t get to because the stairs had collapsed.”

“Who cares?” Erin interrupted the discussion irritably. “If there’s a place we can be dry, let’s go. You can treasure-hunting later if you want.”

The trip up the mountain was more difficult than Jasper had expected. The trail had been easy enough to follow when he was on foot, but with four mounts, the overgrown pathway was tough to navigate. They were forced to stop repeatedly while Erin shoved fallen trunks or overgrown limbs far enough to the side for their horses to pass, and true darkness had fallen before they reached the abandoned manor.

A dilapidated stable sat outside the main entrance, but they opted not to leave their mounts there. While Jasper was pretty sure Dapplegrim could take of herself, he knew plenty of predators lurked in the jungle, of which the tiger that had nearly killed him when he first arrived was probably the least. Instead, they brought the horses inside with them, carefully guiding them around the collapsed floor in the entrance hall, and barred the doors behind them.

They set up camp in the library. The floor, furniture, and even the ceiling were caked in layers of dust, but Tsia fixed that easily enough, circulating a strong wind through the room that scoured it clean before dumping the dirt in the collapsed basement in the main hall. While she did that Ihra and Erin tended to the mounts, and Jasper started supper.

Within half an hour, a warm stew was already bubbling in the library’s hearth and its savory scent was slowly driving away the smell of rot and mildew. Changing out of their dripping clothes, they draped them over the ancient couches and crowded around the fire, relishing the warmth. Jasper, though, was unbothered by the changes in temperature, and as soon as he'd scarfed down his stew, he started to wander around the room, indulging his curiosity about the books.

He’d barely glanced at the books when he was last here – paper, after all, could neither be eaten nor drunk, and books were too bulky to carry in the small pack he’d managed to scavenge – but now he had the luxury of both time and a bag of holding.

Many of the books were little more than curiosities. The single largest section of the tomes was dedicated to books on farming, botany, and potions. For someone else, it might have been a treasure trove, but there was no one in their group who had any interest in the subject.

Another sizeable portion of the collections was a series of histories. These were of more interest to Jasper, and he flipped through a number of them, stuffing a few that caught his attention into his bag. But while he was definitely curious to learn more about the Empire’s history, he didn’t exactly have a lot of reading time, at least not for things that weren’t more immediately relevant.

The next set of books he found was perhaps the most surprising – an entire shelf of what proved to be rather steamy literature. With a grin, he stuffed several of the most salacious titles in his bag, imagining the look on Ihra’s face when he ‘gifted’ them to her.

But a few gems were hidden amongst the mostly academic tomes. Three books that appeared to be about rituals went in the bag as well, a suitable peace offering for Ihra after his little joke, as well as a few others that appeared to delve into the theory of magic. Again, he doubted he’d spend the time to read through them, but perhaps Tsia would find them interesting – or even Aphora, if he saw her again. Given Ishka’s proclivity for research, there was a surprising dearth of more theoretical works, and he wondered if perhaps there was another, more secret library, waiting to be found somewhere, but with the steady rain and the lateness of the night, he wasn’t inclined to look. Instead, after he was certain he’d ransacked everything of interest, he claimed one of the sagging couches as his own and drifted off to sleep.

He awoke to the continuing patter of rain against the panes and a steady, rasping snore. The room was nearly pitch black, but Jasper could just clearly enough to identify the black blob on the couch opposite him as Tsia, mostly from the shadowy silhouette of her voluminous curls. The girl was curled up in a ball, and as he crept closer he could see her mouth hung wide open, with a thin trail of drool dripping onto the once plush velvet couch. She was most definitely the source of the snoring, but as he stared down at her, Jasper got the unsettling feeling that she was not what had woken him up.

A tingle ran down the back of his spine, and he spun around. Truthfully, he expected to see nothing, but he found a small child staring back at him. Her features were barely visible in the darkness, though the fledgling pair of horns that stuck above her slightly tousled hair identified her as a Djinn. She stared at him unwaveringly, and Jasper froze, unsure how to respond.

The massacre at the conclave Barbartu had told him about resurfaced, and he wondered if the girl had been one of those slain then. She made no move to approach him and he remained equally still, not exactly counting himself as a ghost whisperer. What would I even say to her? Go into the light? Pretty sure that’s not how it works here.

His thoughts flicked to Kas̆dael and he wondered if she could help the little spirit pass on, but he wasn’t exactly comfortable with the idea of sitting down and meditating with a ghost watching him. She hadn’t seemed hostile thus far, but perhaps she was just waiting for him to close his eyes and then she’d be on him, in a flash of fang and fury.

As if reading his mind, the girl took a small step forward and he tensed, reaching for his essence – and that was when he realized there was something behind her. A monstrous tiger emerged from the inky darkness, brushing against the girl’s body with a striking mimicry of corporality. Its coloring was darker than normal, but a faint glimmer of sparks occasionally rippled along its back.

It took another step forward, placing itself between Jasper and the child, and bared its fangs, revealing yellow, stained teeth large enough to be mistaken for a walrus’ tusks. And then, much to his surprise, it began to change form.