Chương 66: Chapter 65: Matters of family

++Alira Bella Paula was one of the more interesting people I met early on, though I could not articulate why until well into our… association. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. The freight train was not very nice. It did not like me, and I did not like it.

Every so often it would hit some minor, possibly imaginary imperfection in its tracks, and the whole vehicle would squeal like a stuck pig, shudder like a hypothermic, tremble like an electrocuted man on the brink of collapse. I felt each and every time this happened, because I was sitting in a cargo compartment. Paula seemed to find this hilarious. Though she was rocked just as much as I was, the woman bore it all well and her face scarcely even changed.

I, on the other hand, was buffeted like a balloon in the wind.

"Damn it!" I snapped, not bothering to keep my voice low. With the sounds all around us I could have screamed at the top of my lungs without a risk of being overheard.

"You need to keep your centre of gravity low," Paula advised me.

"I am!" I growled.

"No, you…uh, you aren't."

"What? Yes, I am." Paula cleared her throat, then gestured at something. My chest. Ah. Puberty was largely behind me now, but its final effects were still very much fresh developments. I kept my torso a shade more hunched, and that helped things. Marginally. The rest of our journey was as unpleasant as the opening stretches, and I made a silent promise to myself that I would one day seek revenge upon freight trains in all their wretchedness when it was within my power to do so.

Yirin greeted us after less than a day, fortunately. Despite its relative distance from Laugrey compared to Lachfel, travel by freight train, which did not limit its speed over petty considerations like 'not maiming human passengers' saw us there a good deal sooner. The deceleration was our price to pay for this, sudden and jarring. Paula and myself may actually have been hurt if we had not shielded ourselves in flexible aether as the train ground to a stop.

The crates around us strained against their bonds precipitously.

"That was exciting," I grunted sardonically. Paula said nothing, and I looked over to find the woman swallowing as she seemed to retreat into herself, face carefully blank and good humour all gone in a flash.

"Thanks again," she whispered.

"You didn't need to come though. I… wish you hadn't." She looked away, and I suspected, had she not, that I would have seen tears in her eyes. We headed out of the freight train shortly. Yirin was a different place to Greater Laugrey, or even Rashun, the country in which Lachfel rested. Or at least this corner of it was. The countryside itself was not so dissimilar to the hills I had grown used to in the region of my rebirth, all green mounds and sparse trees.

The weather, too, was about the same; grey and miserable in ways that boded well for farmers but not for anyone else. In the distance, I could see a modern Garamon city, though it was not as big as Laugrey or Lachfel and lacked a few of their key traits.

"There are no factories?" I asked Paula as we walked, hoping that the question would snap her from the almost trance-like state she seemed to be falling into. It took a few moments, but I received an answer.

"There…are, a few, but mostly Yirin produces other things than what you'd get in one. Mills and presses are more common here." I looked back around, arching an eyebrow.

"And where are they exactly?"

"My family didn't live in a big city, but we're not far from Yir. That city, over there.." I had heard of that place of course, Garamon did not have enough cities for me to be unfamiliar with any but a few especially insignificant ones. Yir was the namesake of the surrounding country, Yirin.

"That city is where the money-lender lives, I take it?" She nodded.

"He's going to do something when we get there, and I want you to leave before it starts. He's also…he might try to hurt you, too. He'll know you're a magician and probably won't want to risk it if you show that off, but…the risk is there. You should know that, before we reach him."

"I am coming anyway," I said without hesitating. I saw Alira's perpetual grimace melt a shade.

"Thank you," she breathed.

"Thank you." Alira walked in silence for a few more moments, then shot a look at me, piecing something together.

"Did you agree to come just for a chance at killing him?" she asked.

"Yes," I replied. Paula did not seem to appreciate my problem solving skills.

"That's insane, do you realise how dangerous that would be?!"

"I was going to take precautions," I was already regretting my honesty.

"Your family would have been safe from any possible repercussions." That, and my own safety was taken care of. The weight of my new amulet where it hung from my neck reminded me of that. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

"Assuming that's true," Paula growled, "you still can't just go around fucking killing people!"

"Why?"

"What?"

"Why can I not do that?" I asked.

"Why can't you kill people?"

"Yes."

"Because…fucking, you just can't!"

"Why?"

"Because it's wrong!"

"Is it?" She looked pained suddenly.

"No, not now, the guy's a prick, but still you can't just…" she sighed, inhaling deeply and seeming to steady herself for a moment.

"Because if some of us go around killing whoever we think deserves it, then the world will fall apart."

"Only I will do it, then. That way everybody else can continue behaving as normal, and there is no problem."

"Holy shit, what's wrong with you!?" The conversation did not get any more intellectually stimulating after that. Fortunately, I was not left bored for too long before we reached what was clearly the home-village of Paula's family. I had gotten used to sprawling city-civilisation. To the metropolitan giants of modern society. So used to them, in fact, that it felt actually strange for me to lay eyes on what was still a larger settlement than most of the ones existent back in my first life.

It was a town called Garynford. Not large by Garamon's standards, it held a thousand or so people, mostly in smaller and humbler buildings than the great peaks of a fully developed cityscape. The most notable thing about it was the lack of any belching chimneys. There were smaller ones, venting the smoke from household fireplaces, but none of the vast, smoggy tunnels emptying tons of coal-fumes out into the sky like I would have seen in even a smaller city. I allowed myself to smile as I soaked it all up.

Once, many thousands of years ago by this physical world's reckoning, I had been journeying East in search of a magical tome I had hoped to acquire and expand my magic with. In the search, I found mud huts. Seeing them had instilled in me the very same feeling I experienced now. A sense of shocking regression, a recontextualisation of what I had looked at before. It was a reminder of how time marched forward always, and made all things that are currently big eventually seem small.

The house we headed to did not need the progression of time to seem small, however. It was already a squat thing with narrow walls that seemed fit to hold only four, possibly five people. Paula knocked and fidgeted as she waited before it, repeatedly glancing at me.

"Be nice," she told me.

"I am always nice," I frowned. Paula stared at me in what seemed to be abject horror for a few moments, then the door swung open and revealed a man on the other side. He was already wrapping his arms around the woman before either of us could even move.

"Alira!" he grinned, planting a series of kisses on her cheek, jaw and, I thought, eyeball. Suddenly I appreciated the relative lack of affection in my household all the more. Paula, Alira, hugged the man back.

"It's good to see you, dad," she sighed, wrapping her arms tight around him. I studied the display. It meant nothing to me, but I knew that raw emotion like this was weighed very heavily by wider society. Learning to mimic it effectively would be no small advantage. Unfortunately the exchange did not last more than a few moments more; the pair parted, both smiling now, before Paula's father turned his gaze to me.

"Uh, this is…?"

"Right," Paula looked nervous again suddenly.

"This is Isabel Vornholt." I was expecting the surprise that followed, naturally. These last two years had made me more than a little famous.

"I have…heard a lot about you…uh, your ladyship," Paula's father laughed nervously. The expression looked strange on him. He was a big man with hard features, the sort of face that looked custom-made for hiding thoughts and hardball negotiations. Paula found the sight of it churning up like that as amusing as I did.

"You don't have to call her that, dad," she giggled.

"She's a friend. Just Isabel is—" —"no," I cut in.

"You are to call me Isabel the Great And Terrible: Supreme Mistress of the Universe and Genius of the Arcane. That full title, every time. There is a colon in there, after the word terrible, I want you to picture that in your head as you say the title each time. I will know if you do not." Paula's father stared at me like I had just threatened to eat him, but before I could order him to tell me he understood, his daughter spoke up.

"Isabel's just joking. She likes to say weird shit like that sometimes, as jokes. Right Isabel?" There was a note of warning in her voice that almost tempted me to disobey on principle alone, but I had not come here to create unnecessary friction.

"Yes," I confirmed.

"I am notorious for my sense of humour and girlish whimsy, ask anyone." The man relaxed a shade, which deeply offended my sensibilities. One day nobody would relax in my presence again.

"Come in, both of you," he smiled. I was ushered inside to find that the building was just as unimpressive inside as it was out. The ceiling was low enough that an exceptionally tall man may have felt his hair brushing it, and most of the furniture looked aged and well-worn. There were, of course, no servants, and Paula's father prepared both of our drinks himself. Tea, and of a cheap sort. I let mine sit there.

"You didn't have to come here, Alira," he told his daughter.

"You shouldn't have in fact."

"I just wanted to see you," she lied. He rolled his eyes.

"If you're going to bullshit me, at least do it well," the man sighed. He paused, then glanced my way.

"Uh…pardon my language, you—Isabel."

"She doesn't mind that, either," Paula cut in, before I could deny him forgiveness and order him to earn it through loyal servitude.

"And I'm an adult now, I don't need your permission to go where I please and…deal with whatever problems I wish," she continued to her father.

"These aren't your problems," he countered. The man was nothing near as weak as he had struck me before, not now. His eyes were hard suddenly.

"Alira, I didn't want you going to that Institute, but you went anyway. You defied me and…I think you were wrong about it being best for you, but I respect that you went your own way in the end. But this is my business, and you have your own life ahead of you. I don't want you to get tied up with these people. Please don't." It was funny, I thought, how many people turned to pleading so easily when force stopped working for them.

"I didn't come here to ask you," Paula replied in a terse voice. I recognised it. She had used it rarely, on those occasional times she chose to control her temper.

"I didn't ask you to go to the Institute, when it was my choice, and I'm not asking now." Her father met her stare with an almost identical expression.

"Don't do this," he answered in a warning tone. Paula was already on her feet by then.

"Where are my brothers?" she asked him.

"Out."

"Good, didn't want to see them anyway." She headed for the door, leaving me to stare and try to work out what exactly I had just witnessed. Emotions were as easily seen and irritatingly complex to interpret as ever. I followed the woman, who led me a good street-length away before finally slowing and speaking.

"He's always tried to protect me," she said at last.

"But some things I can't be protected from. And rather than accept that, he'll make me watch him fall into ruin. That's not fair, is it?"

"Fairness does not exist," I told her.

"Only what a person can or cannot do. You can change things here." Paula's eyes narrowed, and I saw her decision come fast.

"You're right."