Arcanist In Another World-Chapter 41: Wailborn

Valens stood by the carriage, utterly motionless, peering at the sacred warriors as they hauled the steely cage off from the extension. Faces straining, it took three of them to place it to the bare patch of dirt by the path, the first lights of the day sprinkling across in the backdrop, the captain watching all of it with a solemn face.

It had been a silent evening, and Valens slept through it all, caring not the occasional jump from the holes across the path that caught the Ironmanes’ hooves. The creatures were masterful in their ride and had provided much more comfort than Valens would’ve expected.

“It can’t really be a ghost, can it?” he muttered as the morning breeze picked at the tails of his robe. Marcus was eerily silent a few paces ahead, while Celme had decided to steer away from him after the night’s talk, sneaking glances from him as if Valens had grown a third eye by the side of his face.

“It’s a shadow,” Captain Eldric answered as the cage thumped hard into the ground, the four corners of it sinking deep into the earth. “One that has a few differences from the ones you’d often see in kids’ books.”

“And you’ll burn it?” Valens scowled at the cage, at the frequencies seeping from between the gaps of the bars. Something was decisively wrong with the tunes as if an outer influence purposefully jabbed at them to scatter their rhythm. What was this outside influence, though, Valens had no clue. “Because fire is the answer to anything that’s wicked in nature?”

“Fire is for making sure the shadow can’t latch onto anyone else after the purification,” Captain Eldric said gravely. “To do the killing, we use something else.”

Garran patted his hands off once he was done with the cage, trudged silently back to the carriage and reached underneath it, picking a long, wooden stake that was strapped there with both hands. One edge was sharpened in a way that resembled the tip of a sword, the shaft riddled with runes and characters that seemed to have blended into an unreadable mess.

“That’s for the killing?” Valens embraced Apathy lest he’d gawk at the absurdity of it. “You’re going to stab her with a wooden stake.”

“More or less,” Captain Eldric said and waved a hand at the warriors. The fourth member of the group, whose job was to handle the horses, a scarred man with a balding head but still clad in golden armor, reached forth and tapped at the side of the cage where there was a small lock.

With a click, the bars dropped into the holes below. They didn’t go all the way down but folded neatly out of sight, revealing the figure inside the cage.

It really is a woman.

Valens expected to get a clearer sense now that the cage was open, but the rhythm of the woman’s song was still reflected over the Resonance as a scattered mess. So then, he presumed, the cage wasn’t that outside influence that kept her a mystery, but rather something else was at play here, something that was affecting the woman from within.

Her long, dark hair was smooth and glinted under the dawn light. Sharp nails protruded from the tips of her fingers, elongated and disturbing, scraping against the ground when she took a step forward. Her skin was deathly pale, save for a pair of eyes gleaming with a dark light.

No whites in those eyes, and her teeth… Uh, she might use a dental operation.

A rotten cave of a mouth, full of jagged teeth dripping with pus, drops of it sizzling down through her skin and burning holes in her white, ragged robe. Her breaths came out in short, sharp hisses. There was a collar wrapped around her neck, fitted to a pair of long chains rattling with every motion.

Mas and Dain, the fourth member of the group, grabbed the chains while keeping a healthy distance from the woman. Not that she seemed to be in a state that would suggest immediate danger. Her black eyes were blank. She barely seemed aware of where she was.

Valens checked her.

[Nursemaid - Level 27]

“A Nursemaid?” Valens arched an eyebrow at the name. “That is her class? Thought you told me she’s a Wailborn?”

Captain Edric’s face creased as he glanced at him. “She is still a Nursemaid. The core part of her is there, underneath the shadow that took her. It’s a trick of the Tainted Father. She was a lively young woman with a beautiful face when we found her, a promising talent three months deep inside Countess Margarette’s Mansion.”

“What did she do to… turn into this?” Valens asked.

“A promise from a distant voice, the allure of becoming something more than a maid. Too much to walk away for certain people. In her case, she was poisoning the children of the Mansion and the Countess herself. A slow, deliberate process that would leave no clues behind. Lucky for us, she’d been keeping her tools in her closet. Dark things.”

“Dark things?”

“Three goat heads fixed into a chain, washed with her own blood and stabbed with the hair of each victim,” Garran said, leaning over the wooden stake that was as high as he was tall. “A classic ritual from Sibylloth’s diaries. The Veiled Mother of Fates loves to seduce these young women.”

“Not the Tainted Father?” Valens dearly wished he had a diary now.

“Shadows belong to him and him only,” Captain Edric said. “Yet he’s a wide array of outer entities working under him, which makes our job a little complicated. Start the fire, Mas. Let us get it done before we lose the lights.”

Dark clouds stirred from beyond the horizon, carrying inside the promise of another storm, creeping slowly to coat over the dawn and turn it into night.

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Mas handed the chain to Dain before he went over to carry logs from the carriage. He piled them down by the cage, enough of them to last for a full-pig roast, and set them ablaze with a match.

The logs caught fire like hungry beasts, fire roaring from between them with its tongues lashing at the empty air. The woman snapped suddenly at the sight of them, eyes narrowing down. She tugged at the chains for a second before Dain tightened his hold over them to fix her in place.

Afraid of the flames, but what’s a shadow without a light, eh?

Witnessing an occult practice here was one of the last things Valens thought he would see, but having been through a Rift and coming across a Necromancer did a number on his sense of normalcy. Coupled with his interest in any novel path of magic, he was rather eager to lay a hand on the woman.

What would the frequencies be like under that skin? What’s hacking at them with such force? An infection, perhaps, resembling a curse in nature?

A ritual was how he transcended the gap between the worlds, but he did it by relying on the Void Sphere rather than using some strange play of magic to hurl his soul off to this place. Therefore, he suspected there could be a similar trick here, one that may have been related to a sickness. Delusional disorder seemed like a good fit, not considering the fact that the woman kept strangely to herself all this while.

Garran dragged the wooden stake by the flames as Mas and Dain yanked at the chains to force the woman to turn at the logs. Valens stepped aside to get a clearer sight of her face.

Barbaric, he thought to himself when Garran stabbed the stake in the middle of the logs, sharp tip facing skyward. Done with that, he aided the other two with the chains and strapped the woman’s hands and arms tight to her body. She barely blinked at them as they pushed her closer to the fire.

“You can’t help yourself, can you?” came a voice from the back, the familiarity of it bringing a smile upon Valens’s face. “You want to check her. To see if there’s anything you can do about it.”

“Considering the short time we’ve spent together, I’d say you’ve learned much more about me than I did with you,” Valens said, glancing over his shoulder to Celme. The woman still carried that hesitation in her eyes, but she seemed to prefer his company to an oddly silent Marcus or the sacred warriors. “I don’t believe what we’re dealing with here is an evil shadow. Something must have happened to her.”

“It’s my first time seeing it,” Celme said gravely. “You hear rumors about it here and there, but the Golden Church keeps a tight scrutiny over these things.”

“Why, that doesn’t make much sense,” Valens said. “One would’ve thought they’d be using the fact that they’re fighting a holy war against evil to garner more attention and devotion from the masses.”

“The real battle is in the Broken Lands,” Celme said. “A mere shadow or a ritual is nothing in the face of scores of dwellers brooding beyond the reaches.”

"Oh," Valens smiled. "So, they’re striving to maintain a pristine reputation in their Kingdom, are they? The sort of 'Look, the evil resides in the Broken Lands, but it shall never reach you here. Not while the mighty church and its ever-watchful grace shield you from the shadows' kind of arrangement?"

“That’s what the Templars are for,” Celme said, frowning out into the dawn lights.

“Templars. They do look like the part,” Valens said, then smiled at her. “I’m glad we’re talking again.”

“I’m still not over last night’s talk. You are not a simple man, and I’m not sure if I should trust you.”

“Never been my thing, really,” Valens said. “But I’m not a minion of that Tainted Father, either.”

“That’s exactly what a shadow’s piece would say,” Celme said, her lips curling into a faint smile.

Valens gave her a look.

“Yes, I get it. You would’ve been trying too hard if you were a shadow’s piece. I doubt any of the Tainted Father’s minions would have cured dozens of men just for the sake of it,” Celme said. “But you can’t tell me that you’re not hiding anything from me.”

“You’ve told me that’s what everybody did, haven’t you?” Valens shrugged but sighed when Celme glared at him. “Fine, your words do have merit, but there is a time for everything, and right now I have to find a way to stop this madness before it gets too late.”

“This is real, Valens,” Celme said, then raised a finger to the woman. “If you don’t believe me, then take a look at her shadow.”

The fire roaring around the logs had cast a deep shadow of the woman behind her, which Valens was sure had been perfectly still a moment before. But now… it wriggled there over the ground, dark lines flailing, the edges of its outline squirming as if the shadow tried to rip itself off the woman. Yet they were bound to the tip of the woman’s heels, tied to each other like fascia to a bone.

Valens frowned as he glanced up at the woman. She hadn’t yet moved a part of her body, remaining like a soulless puppet being dragged to its doom, barely flinching as embers of burning wood drifted over to her skin.

“I refuse to believe it.”

“Wait—“ Celme tried to reach for him when Valens sprang toward the fire, face twitching as he regarded the warriors handling the woman. The captain’s eyes snapped to him, a lion weighing every motion of him in mild expectation.

“Stop!” he demanded, Apathy flickering over his emotions. He did not want to be reminded of his rage, not when there were shadows dancing down the ground. “I’ve said stop!”

“Back off, Healer,” Garran said sourly as he glanced at him. “Don’t interrupt the work.”

“Heretic!” Mas spat at him, halting with a hand over the sheath. “He’s trying to save this damned woman!”

Valens breathed in and let Apathy take control when faced with four warriors all looking equally dangerous. He couldn’t let his emotions get to him, not when he was already in a precarious state with these men.

“Captain, may I?” he said, trudging over to Captain Edric with a frown on his face. “I’d like to do a check on this woman. Allow me to take a look, maybe it’s something I can fix.”

“You dare lie under the Sacred Father’s lights?!” Mas basically roared at him, face gone red. When he turned to the captain, he was much more controlled in his approach. “Captain, how long will you let us hear this nonsense? First he was carving people open, and now he’s claiming he can fix the damned!”

“You’ve told me she’s still in there,” Valens ignored him and focused on the captain. “I don’t claim I can heal her with my skills, but no harm in trying, eh, Captain?”

“It’s too late, and I can’t let you touch her, Healer,” Captain Edric said. “We can’t have that shadow seep into your skin. Don’t you see it’s struggling, trying to break free from the woman’s body? Our runed chains are the only reason why it's still imprisoned there, and it’ll die with the woman to never return.”

“This is murder you’re speaking of,” Valens said solemnly. “An easy solution to a problem you have no other way to deal with. Is this what you do in the name of cleansing the evil, captain? Killing people just because they’ve fallen into a trap? Who knows if she’s not suffering from an insidious sickness? Let me. Whatever it is, I promise it can’t latch onto me.”

“Liar!” Mas hissed.

Captain Edric scowled at him before turning to Valens. “I have to admit you’re a good Healer, but even you are not above the Tainted Father’s tricks. I don’t think you’re ignorant of the fact, yet you’re bold and perhaps foolish enough to be overconfident in your skills. How can you be so sure that you’ll be free of that shadow’s claws?”

"Because if it takes fire to cleanse a shadow," Valens said, reaching out to his inner mana pool and feeling the Inferno’s spell formulae waiting eagerly at the back of his mind. He raised his right index finger and twirled it around, calling forth the fires lying in wait inside him.

And come forth, they did. Streams of burning flames poured from his fingers, blending into waves that roared over the warriors like a firestorm, blinding lights reflected in their wide eyes.

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"I have more of that in my hands than your pitiful logs could ever provide."

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