Othercide

 “Imagination is only intelligence having fun. A healthy mind knows how to switch between worlds, and which one you need to eat and sleep in”.

TERRY PRATCHETT

Othercide:

 

            The worlds were like broken glass, shattered and blurry, but forming a perfect mirror during the night. It was then when sneaking between them was feasible and when heroes hunted down fearsome monsters, beasts and demons, crossing beyond the boundaries of reality.

            The night was the door and magic was the key.

 

            “You shouldn’t be here”, Alma stated, clambering over the battlements with her eight spider legs, adjusting those belts on her leather armour.

Tilman a chubby thirteen years old human child was hugging his knees, downcast, surrounded by papers full of doodles and written lines. He looked at her, trying to keep his tears.

She swifty covered the distance between them and hugged him tightly.

“Cry, Til, your tears mean your granny was important and we need to honour her memory letting your pain flow from your heart.”

She also let herself drop her burden off and some minutes later, when both of them were wiping away their tears, she told him:

“Do you want to show me what you have written?

He let an embarrassed smile slip away amid his blush and commented, a bit on the defensive, that he didn’t know yet what genre the story was going to be, nor what was he going to write about exactly, how would that all of that have any connection with his granny or even what aspects of her should he pay homage to, so they began speaking about life and death about memories and imagination.

 

Markus went on, exhausted, his back started aching some minutes ago and he had started panting some seconds ago.

            “Do you want to take a break?”, Hilda asked, leaning her weight on her staff, not trying to hide her own fatigue. She was ay younger than him but she was also a person accustomed to use spells to organise her desk or tying her shoelaces.

“Yes”, he said while dropping his heavy backpack on the floor, “I’m still trying to understand how a spider woman has been terrorising that village when there’s been no harm or damage done.”

“They’re dangerous”, Hilda said, squinting at him. “You know it very well, mages are dangerous too.”

“Yes, but the war is over, we won and we have most of those monsters confined in camps” Markus reasoned, “it makes no sense…”

“It is our duty to save and purify their souls”, Victor said, his voice made people shiver as much as the voice of any archon even when he was as young as Hilda, ”we must help them, put them away from that degenerate path and make them come closer to the path of the just. Our gods know an infinite compassion.

Markus didn’t miss that the purity of the path of the just was paved with the bodies of all of those whose salvation consisted on, basically, being dead.

 

“During the last year, she wasn’t even herself”, Tilman said, “or…was she…?”, he went on, pensively and bewildered, “but… often she wasn’t her, she didn’t who anybody else was and I wonder whether… did she know who she was?”

“You used a lot of pronouns there, Til, I got lost a bit”, Alma confessed, “I believe she did know who she was and even though she didn’t recognise us in the end, even when she didn’t know what our names were o who we were, she knew we were a safe place, that she could trust us, that she had not forgotten. She was never afraid when we were by her side. Plus, we can remember her for all those years of her stories making us laugh all night long.”

“Maybe this tale could consist of her traveling to a special place, where we all are, when she feels good… But I guess some action would be needed: maybe she could not remember which place was and everything is turned into stone, covered by fog and she has to speak with strange creatures, solving riddles and beating enemies by using her intelligence and wit. Do you think it’s a good idea?”, he wanted to know.

“Any idea is a good one if well developed”, she nodded—. Everybody says teenagers are too confident in whatever we say and, look, I don’t think so, and maybe I’m wrong because it seems that only because I lack experience, I am not allowed to pontificate anything, totally absurd, a lot of categorical statements were said by people who wasn’t even sober, I don’t know, but I do believe any idea is good for a tale provided it’s well developed”, the spider girl answered.

“Oh, yeah? What do you think about evil underwear as a concept?”, Tilman defied her.

“Forget what I’ve just said”

“The only bad point is, to write truly intelligent stuff, no tricks, one must be as intelligent as their characters and that would force me to train my imagination by writing, it’s a vicious circle, Alma.

“Train your imagination?”, she was curious.

“They say you learn better when you’re having fun and creativity makes your intelligence have fun. I’ve read it”, he firmly affirmed.

“Good point.”

 

“Is it here?”, Markus enquired.

The stopped before the overgrown ruins of a lonely tower upon a hill.

“There’s a portal here”, Hilda said, “it totally covers the watchtower and I can activate it.”

Some almost demolished spiral stairs in a very poor condition clang to the present as tight as they could, trying to climb the three stores the tower was divided in.

“Do you believe”, Hilda started to say, “we can cover more ground if each one of us goes to a different floor?”

“And how would the inquisitor defend himself, with his firm moral sense?”

“I took part in Kerala’s war.” Victor pointed out, “War uncovers and takes of that mask we have to wear in society. It frees us.

“Which is interesting because there’s who claim Kerala, far from being a war, was a massacre”, Markus commented.

“Only a good man is able to sacrifice who he is, what he believes in, in order to do what’s right”, the inquisitor answered.

“Justice is nothing else than a tale disguised as moral”, Markus replied in turn.

“That’s why what’s right must be one step ahead justice” Victor resolved.

“I’m concerned about them being able to escape” said the mage hunter, in an attempt to go back to the main topic.

“I would rather have this mission accomplished with zero casualties”, Markus claimed.

“However, you cannot disobey me”, Victor rehearsed the sweet smile of who holds the power and knows he can punish other at his discretion. Hilda and Markus turn towards him. “We will take separate ways: Markus, go to the third floor. Hilda, go to the second, when we have our positions secured, open the portal and send us to the other side.”

Hilda and Markus went to part their ways on the second floor.

“Do you truly believe this doesn’t make sense?”, the mage hunter probed.

“I’ve never been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but as I see it all those monsters were expelled to another plane of existence, they were blamed for breaking the mirror, even when they had no other way to flee, take shelter and seal the way they escaped from. And even when we have exterminated them here or we send them to the camps. And if they are still blamed for this world’s evil, but they’re not an agent of change in it anymore, there’s someone who is guilty but will be never judged. For sure this is not as simplistic as conflating legality with justice, for sure everything that happens is due to many causes I am not able to understand, of which nobody told me.

“You’re a demon hunter, why don’t you just be it? You’re good at it.”, she said, trying not to look haughty, she really thought it was a positive comment. But he didn’t understand it the same way:

“Because then I could believe I’m intelligent while I’m engaged in killing mages, being myself a mage, without wondering what will happen with me when all those other wizards that I have to kill run out.”, he reproached her.

“We are dismantling an oppressive system of power, perhaps you don’t remember Norvell pogroms.”

“Have you ever checked in history books; what kind of people carry out pogroms? You haven’t been in those concentration camps, right?”, he sharply interrogated, “I guess the world is much better now”, he cynically answered as he irritated went upstairs. He lately understood everything less and less and, of course, he didn’t comprehend anybody ready to ally with a power that ultimately would destroy them. But what did he know? He knew he was furious and he knew anger was a love letter to oneself before injustice.

Only a type of human being could punish another creature in order to win the fight of good against evil. Markus wondered where the hell that fight was and where he was within it.

“I’m in position!”, Markus yelled, unsheathed his sword and raised his shield.

“I’m opening the portal!”, Hilda responded.

 

“Fuck”, Markus mumbled, throwing his sword to the ground, silently shaking his head and giving up. The portal closed behind his back. Before him there was only a couple of children, one of them, human.

Alma had unsheathed her twin sword, with an embarrassed but genuine expression of defiance, now, however, she doubted.

Hilda went upstairs, preparing some kind of fire spell.

Nevertheless, the spell vanished between her hands.

“It cannot be!” she exclaimed in frustration after a couple of further attempts. She tried other hexes but there was no magic left within her, and to her incomprehension arrived and with incomprehension, fear.

A wave of tranquillity washed her fear away.

“I’m sorry”, Tilman apologised, while he paid the price for using his power and blood started flowing from the wound that was opening and crossing his right eye, rendering him blind as scar tissue began to cover that tearing just afterwards, “I don’t like entering people’s minds.”

“Will I recover my magic”, Hilda wanted to know, collapsing on the floor and frightened.

“No, I am truly sorry”, Tilman sentenced.

 

“Let’s get out of here, Hilda”, Markus asked, sheathing his sword after picking it up. Steps were heard slowly ascending the stone stairs, Alma hurried to cover up the stair’s opening with her web.

“How many of you are there?”, the spider girl hastily interrogated.

“There’s an inquisitor”, Hilda managed to say with a tiny voice about to break. She felt already broken either way, an important part of who she was, that shaped who she was, her very essence, her purpose, was gone.

“Take care of her”, Alma told Markus.

Tilman activated the portal, which opened again, dividing the tower by half.

“I don’t think Victor will cross the portal back without killing you first”, he clarified, helping Hilda to lean on him to go towards the portal.

“Then we can abandon him here”, Alma concluded, peeking over the battlements. “He probably has the portal on one side, my cobweb on the other, otherwise he will be trapped between two portals. By the way… he hasn’t any fire with him, right?”, she pensively questioned.

As an answer she heard the sound of some sort of glass jar breaking into pieces and immediately afterwards her web started burning.

“Markus, you are well aware of the sentence imposed for treason”, Victor reminded him with a perfectly calmed voice, “but I can still be magnanimous. We must eradicate the monster, pull the human out of it”, he shouted.

Two blades pierced his thorax, Alma had quickly covered the distance separating her from the inquisitor. She extracted her bloodstained swords off him and tried not to look that corpse slamming that stone floor turning red.

“Apparently he knew how to fight against unarmed people”, Markus confirmed casually. “I’m sorry”, he said after thinking for a moment, vaguely gesturing everything around him.

Hilda and Markus traversed the portal.

On both sides of it only wounded survivors were left.

“They should start living a bit”, Tilman pointed out. “That would let us live”.

“It must be terrible overcoming adolescence and still think there are people who are born in the wrong species or the wrong way, and they must be punished for that. A bad point about that reasoning is that, of course, if you thoroughly search, there’s always someone who is different enough from you and who can be hanged from a tree at the same time.”

 

 

Othercide by Marta Roussel Perla is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://martarousselperla.blogspot.com/.