Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 832: The Short Road

They met in the great hall before sunrise.

There were not many of them. Almond and Lily, Big D, Rudra, Ainen, Natalia, Marcus and Kael. Hessa sat at the end of the long stone table with her eyes half closed, still watching something none of the rest of them could see.

The walls around them were covered in names. Big D had read every one.

"Tell us everything," Almond said.

Hessa opened her eyes.

"Frosthold came through about an hour before I found them," she said. "Eleven thousand, give or take. All F. They don’t know anything. They don’t know what an Ender is. They’ve lit more fires around your friend’s fire, because they think that’s what it’s for."

Ainen put his face in his hands. "Oh, no."

"And the thing coming for them?" Rudra asked.

Hessa was quiet for a moment.

"I’ve never seen one," she said. "I’ve heard of them. Old stories, from people who heard them from older people. It’s a Forgetter."

"What does it end?"

"Memory." Hessa looked down at the table. "First the small things. Where you put your knife. What you ate this morning. Then names. Then faces. Then who you are, and why you’re standing where you are. And then people just walk away into the grass, and lie down somewhere, and never get up."

The hall was very quiet.

"How big?" Big D asked.

"Bigger than the Lull. Much bigger. It walks. It’s slow, but it doesn’t stop." Hessa closed her eyes again. "At the rate it’s moving, it reaches the Door tomorrow night."

"Four days," Rudra said. "At least. That’s how long it takes to walk from here to the Door. Five with a party that has to stop and sleep."

"Kael could do it faster," Natalia said.

"Kael gets six steps, then he has to walk until he can breathe again," Kael said. "I could do it in three days. Maybe. And then I’d arrive alone, too tired to lift a sword."

"Then what?" Almond asked. "We can’t just watch."

Nobody had an answer.

Then a voice spoke from the doorway.

"I might."

They all turned. Clovelle was standing there with a cup of something hot in her hands. She had obviously been listening for some time.

"Sorry," she said. "Ainen said there was a meeting. He didn’t say I wasn’t invited."

"I didn’t say you were," Ainen said.

"You didn’t say I wasn’t." She came in and set her cup down on the table. "My imprint is Fold. You saw it on the Gorger. I can fold space a little. Ten feet. Twenty, if I push."

"That won’t get anyone four days’ walk," Rudra said.

"Not raw. No." Clovelle looked at Almond. "But you killed six Closers on the first night outside Greywatch. They end distance. They’re suddenly beside you without crossing the ground between. And every one of those parts went to somebody else, because nobody had an imprint that fit."

Almond sat up slowly.

"Fold," he said.

"Fold," Clovelle agreed. "I think it fits. I think it fits better than anything I’ve held yet. But all six Closers are gone. I need a fresh one."

Natalia found one before the sun was fully up.

She stood on the city wall with her hand shading her eyes. She looked out over the grassland to the south, and her orb took the mark through hills and trees and distance.

"There," she said. "Three miles south. Alone. It’s hunting something in the long grass."

They went out in a small party: Natalia to mark it, Kael to kill it, and Clovelle to take what was left.

It did not take long. The Closer saw them coming and closed the distance in a blink, which was exactly what they had wanted it to do. Natalia had marked it from a mile out, so they knew where it would be. Kael was already moving to meet it.

Quickstep.

Four steps to close. One to cut. One to get clear.

The Closer’s long bone neck came apart in the grass.

Clovelle knelt beside it. She did not take the beak or the neck. She ran her hands along its body slowly, feeling for something. At last she stopped at a hard ridge behind its head, where the bone was thickest.

"Here," she said. "This is the part that does it. I can feel it. It’s still trying to be somewhere else."

She held it in both hands.

Fold.

It did not crumble. It did not twist or fold slowly. It simply vanished from her hands, and in the same moment a small orb was lying in her palms. It was a pale silver color, like water seen from far away.

[Power Orb: Short Road]

[Quality: D]

[Fold the ground between here and any place you can see. Those holding your hand come with you.]

Her status changed.

[Life Rank: D]

Clovelle stared at it.

"Any place I can see," she said slowly. She looked up at the hills to the south. "From the top of a hill, I can see a very long way."

"Eight," Almond said. "No more. Clovelle can’t carry more than eight hands."

He did not have to think hard about who.

Clovelle, because there was no road without her. Hessa, because her orb could see the Door and the Forgetter. Big D, because something that ended memory was coming, and nobody in the world held memory the way he did.

Marcus, because if eleven thousand people were forgetting who they were, someone would have to talk to all of them at once. Rudra, because his heading could not be turned. Natalia, to mark it. Kael, because he was fast.

And Almond.

Lily did not ask to go. She had known before he finished counting that she would not be on the list. She walked him to the south wall while the others were gathering.

"Brightwater needs someone," she said. "Forty thousand people who just found a home. Somebody has to stand in the square and be there."

"I know."

"And I’m being careful."

"I know." Almond took both her hands. "I’ll be back in three days. Maybe four."

"You’ll be back," Lily said. She squeezed his hands. Then she said something that surprised both of them. "Write my name on your arm."

Almond looked at her.

"It ends memory," she said. Her voice was steady, but her eyes were bright. "Hessa said so. First small things, then names." She pulled a stick of charcoal from her pocket. She had brought it on purpose. "So write my name on your arm. And Big D’s. And your own."

Almond held out his arm.

She wrote her name on the inside of his wrist in large, careful letters. LILY. Then, under it, ONE.

"So you remember what you’re coming back to," she said.

They left from the top of the south wall.

Clovelle stood at the edge with the others holding hands behind her in a line. She looked out over the grassland to the farthest hill she could see. It was a long gray hump on the horizon, at least ten miles away.

"Don’t let go," she said. "I don’t know what happens if you let go. I don’t want to find out."

Short Road.

The world folded.

There was no rush of wind, and no sense of moving. One moment they were standing on Brightwater’s wall. The next, their feet were on the gray grass of the far hill, and Brightwater was a small white ring on the horizon behind them.

Natalia let out a shout of surprise. Kael laughed out loud.

Clovelle sat down hard in the grass.

"Ten miles," she said, breathing fast. "That costs. Not like raw. But it costs."

"How many can you do?" Almond asked.

"Today? Maybe twelve. Maybe fifteen if nothing goes wrong." She got up, and found the next hill, and held out her hand. "Come on."

They went south all day.

Hill to hill. Ridge to ridge. Once from the top of a lone tree, which Clovelle climbed while the others held their breath, so that she could see over a forest. Each fold took them five or ten miles, and each one left Clovelle a little paler.

In between, Hessa watched the Door.

"They’ve seen it," she said in the early afternoon. "Frosthold. They can see something big on the horizon. The old man is shouting at everyone. Some of them are listening."

An hour later: "The first ones are forgetting. Small things. A woman can’t find her pack and she’s crying about it. Nobody knows why it matters so much."

Late in the afternoon, they folded onto a hilltop that was not empty.

There were scavengers all over it. A whole pack of them, at least twenty, were tearing at something in the grass. Every head came up at once.

"Back together!" Rudra shouted. "Back to back! Clovelle in the middle!"

True Heading.

They locked into a ring around Clovelle, who was too tired to fight. The scavengers came at them from every side.

Natalia marked them as they came. Kael cut them as they arrived. Big D simply stood with his arms out and broke whatever came into his reach. Almond used Quiet Edge, and the scavengers in front of him fell without ever hearing the cut.

It was over in three minutes. Kael had a long gash down one arm. Natalia’s leg was bleeding.

"That was a bad landing," Clovelle said weakly, from the middle of the ring. "Sorry."

"Next time, look before you fold," Rudra said. He was not angry. He was breathing too hard to be angry.

"I did look. They were lying down."

Night came. They did not stop.

The rings of the higher layers lit the grass enough for Clovelle to see the next hill. They folded through the dark, again and again. Somewhere around midnight, Clovelle began to shake so badly that Big D picked her up and carried her between folds.

"How many?" Almond asked.

"Thirteen," Clovelle whispered. "Maybe two more. Then I’m done."

"Hessa?"

Hessa’s face was gray in the pale light.

"It’s at the edge of their camp now," she said. "The Forgetter. It’s so slow. It’s just standing there. And they’re forgetting." She swallowed. "The old man is walking up and down the camp, shouting names. His own people’s names. He knows them all. Every time he shouts one, that person remembers for a little while."

"And then?"

"And then they forget again."

The fourteenth fold put them on a low rise half a mile from the Door.

It was not quite dawn. The great door stood against the gray sky, taller than a mountain. At its foot, Ainen’s small walled fire was still burning, and around it hundreds of bigger fires had been lit by people who did not know any better.

Eleven thousand people were in the grass around the Door.

Most of them were not moving. They were standing, or sitting, or walking slowly in small, aimless circles. Some of them were walking away from the fires, out into the dark grass, with no hurry at all.

And beyond them stood the Forgetter.

It was white. That was the first thing Almond saw. It was white like ash, and it was as tall as a hill, and it stood on legs so thick and so many that he could not count them. It had no head. It had no face. It simply stood at the edge of the camp, enormous and still, and the grass around it for a mile in every direction had gone gray.

In the middle of the camp, a single figure was still moving.

He was an old man in white furs. He was walking from person to person, grabbing them by the shoulders, and shouting into their faces. His voice was hoarse and cracked, and it carried across the whole field.

"Dagmar! Your name is Dagmar! You are a smith from the third gate, and your daughter is standing next to you!"

He let go of that one. He moved to the next.

"Helvi! You are Helvi! You held the east wall for me for thirty years!"

His arm was bare to the shoulder. Something had been cut into the skin with a knife, in large, uneven letters.

CORVIN.

"He’s still fighting it," Natalia whispered.

Almond did not answer.

He was looking at the Forgetter. He could feel it now. It was like a cold hand inside his head, very gently going through his things.

He thought about Brightwater, and the city and the river were there.

He thought about the square, and the little shoot with the colored leaves, and those were there too.

He thought about the woman who had walked him to the wall that morning. She had held his hands and given him something to keep.

He reached for her name.

There was nothing there.