Chosen One Protective Services

Rusty's mind swam, and he dropped to his knees as the world whirled around him. His eyes blurred with colors and images that warped and flowed like running paint on a rippling canvas. He could smell asphalt, smoke, cotton candy, apples, pickles, fresh shit, and a melange of other odors that went rapid-fire through his sinuses, with such intensity that he barely kept the jerky down. A collection of warped voices and noises, a cacophony of loudness and whispers that was too discordant and mismatched to comprehend, pounded against his ears.

I'm reading a dead man's mind, Rusty held to that fact, struggled to keep ahold of it. He probably should have expected the memories to be a little mushy.

But in among them, just as Rusty started to try to pull back and find his way out of this deluge of confusion, the world snapped into harsh focus around him.

He was no longer in the little pit, in the wilds of Elythia.

He found himself on top of a building, near an antenna. There were taller buildings off in the distance, and to the side of them, a gap that showed water. There was a big statue out that way, and though the scene faded and crackled with holes and goo and running colors the further away he got, he thought that the statue was raising a torch, and had a spiky crown. And he knew what THAT meant!

“Yeshu mirad hoom bagrama,” a voice said, blurry and garbled like it was underwater.

Rusty's viewpoint— the viewpoint of the kid who'd died, he understood now— jerked and spun to face a wizard.

Rusty knew he was a wizard, just as he'd known Terathon was one. This one was clean shaven and didn't have a hat or a staff, it was true, but he wore long, dark flowing robes that fluttered around him as he descended from the sky in slow motion. So Rusty figured that assuming he was a wizard was a pretty safe guess.

“Min fara skul ban,” the wizard said in that underwater voice again, lifting a hand as the perspective wobbled and staggered back.

Had the parts of this kid's memory that remembered sound decayed? Rusty wondered.

But that theory got scuttled when the kid spoke. His voice still had that muted, muffled sound to it, but it was louder. “Who the heck are you?”

“Ib hel frummus Balangor. Wo vast ko emfeei sola Maram du pleast el fram”

The world hiccuped, and now the wizard, a tall, tall man, was crouching down to eye level with him, in front of him, mere feet away. His eyes were focused, like a cat fixated on a mouse.

“I'm the chosen one?” the kid's voice came again. “You need me to wax this dark lord guy?”

And to Rusty's shock, the wizard smiled, and nodded.

“Shit yeah!” the kid cheered. “I'll go get my survival gear! Wait here!”

Then everything went dark.

And with a feeling like he was backing out of a cold, stagnant pond that had spent a few years collecting dirt and rotting plants and muck, and feeling it drape over his skin and falling off in slopping heaps as he went, Rusty willed himself back to his own mind and memories. Sound returned, echoing from all around, getting clearer as he went. Panting, gasping, and for a second he thought an animal had come up to him and was getting ready to eat him, but then Rusty realized that no, that was him.

Then he was back in the pit, pulling his hand away from the head of the corpse. He was cold, of a sudden, and Rusty pulled the salvaged jacket around himself.

“Well that was a thing,” Roz said. “Can we not do that again? Because that was... yeah.”

“I hope we never have to,” Rusty said. “It probably doesn't feel as gross with living brains.”

“No way to tell until we find one. And I don't count. I'm borrowing your brain, so if you really want to read yourself, go ahead.” Roz sat down, and dipped his feet in the water.

“Nah,” Rusty said, looking at the walls of the pit. “I don't think I'll go back in to see how that guy died, either. It looks like something chased him, he tried a spell that was too big for him, and either the spell or the thing chasing him killed him. I mean... the only thing that bugs me is that I don't know his name. But I don't want to go back into what's left of his head to learn it. He was from New York, though. And he was the chosen one. That's what the wizard told him.”

The wind whispered in the distance, as they stared across the water. It howled a bit, as it passed over the pit they were in.

Roz eventually spoke. “So.. weren't YOU the chosen one?”

“Yeah. To put paid to the dark lord,” Rusty said, tucking his hands in his pockets. It was nice to have pockets again. It helped distract him from some looming, and very troubling questions.

Questions that Roz was only too happy to jump headfirst into. “So if HE was the chosen one, how are YOU the chosen one?”

Rusty looked back to the body.

“I mean, maybe he WAS the chosen one but he failed?” Roz asked. “And they needed a new chosen one?”

“If you're the chosen one, you're not supposed to fail,” Rusty said. “There's prophecies and things.”

Roz tilted his head. “Who chooses the chosen ones?”

The wind howled, the only sound in the silence.

There was an answer, there. It was a pretty obvious one.

But it was one Rusty desperately wanted to, needed to be untrue. Because even considering it, raised some troublesome notions. It raised the notion that he was here, on an alien world, with absolutely no way of getting back without people who at best, were liars. It made him think that the wizard, who were actually wizards, as it turned out, were not his friends, and might actually intend him harm. And it raised the notion that in fact there might not be a prophecy, or a chosen one, and that he wasn't the hero of this particular story. He wasn't guaranteed to go home at the end of this book, because this wasn't a book at all. This was a situation he had leaped into with a lot of expectations that perhaps, had been based on wishful thinking and a little too much trust.

So Rusty did his best not to consider that answer. He decided that he needed more information.

“Okay,” Roz said. “So what now?”

“Way I see it,” Rusty said, folding his new knife and tucking it away, then standing and squinting up in the direction of the sun, “Terathon has all the answers, and he told us to head south. So we get out of here and head south.”

“Pretty deep pit,” Roz said. “Got a way out?”

Rusty considered it. Smooth walls. About a dozen feet deep. Mostly full of water, save for some natural channels that the hole had bisected when it had been magicked here.

Those natural channels were at the edge of the pool. They'd been draining it. Too small to go into, but he could fit his hands into them...

“I have an idea,” he breathed. “It's time to test that new rune.”

“Think it's safe?” Roz asked. “It's pretty big, chakra wise. Using it probably uses up a lot of chakra.”

“I think we're probably gonna die in a hole if we can't get out of here. Okay, let's see...”

“Remember to use gray words. This rune's blackish-gray, so you have to match the color,” Roz reminded him.

“Got it. No silver.”

This time, it was a little easier to visualize the words. It only took about a minute and a half, and that was because it was a pretty long sentence.

“Make holes up this wall big enough for handholds.”

Create ladder in stone!

Committed chakra: 14/42

Cost: 6 chakra.

Remaining free chakra: 18/42

Rusty's shoulder throbbed, and sizzled with energy, and Roz shouted “Touch the wall, quickly!”

He slapped his hand against the wall, and a series of tiny explosions seemed to crackle up it. He blinked, as dust battered against his face, and coughed stone out of his snoot, before opening his eyes to see that yeah, there were ten holes in the wall, spaced in series of two, two feet apart both horizontally and vertically.

“Okay,” Rusty grinned.

“Not bad at all,” Roz agreed. “Now can we get going? We don't wanna catch foot fungus and need toes amputated, like Cy's friend in Korea.”

“Oh yeah...” Rusty said. “Yeah.” But as he was climbing out, he looked back to the corpse, one last time. “Sorry I can't bury you,” he told the dead kid. “Thank you for your things. I'll try to use them well. I'll, um...” he was going to say he'd beat up the dark lord for him, but it didn't feel right. “I'll look for missing kid reports from New York when I get home, and tell your family what happened,” he decided.

And maybe it was his imagination, but a pressure eased around him, as he said that. That was the decent thing to do, he knew. And now that his memory was perfect, he'd never forget that obligation.

But there was much to do before returning home, and so he set off into the wilds again.

*****

Rusty moved as fast as he could, through the marshy wilds. He was elated to find that the salvaged canteen was still mostly full. Thinking back to it, that little fire he'd lit to boil water was probably what drew the Grach down on him. Either the smoke or the heat, depending on how they sensed things.

There were also dark wizards out there, somewhere. And the way that Terathon had looked upward suggested that they were either using the trees to get around, or they could fly. So no fires.

It was a beautiful land, even if it got wetter as Rusty went. Soon his steps were stirring up clouds of tadpoles from the streams he waded through. Bright green bugs followed him for a time, landing on him and flexing their wings as they considered him up close and personal, their eyeless faces reflecting the light with emerald shimmers. They evidently didn't find him tasty, so he took no mind of them after the first couple of miles.

There were a few close calls while he was wading through the streams. At a few points he felt things brushing against his feet, saw long, ribbon-like bodies gliding past. He checked himself very thoroughly for leeches at one point, but found nothing.

“I mean, those black bugs that were eating that kid only started in on him when you started messing with the body,” Roz said. Then he caught himself when he saw Rusty's expression. “Shoot, sorry. Too soon?”

“No, it's fine. I'll figure out who he was and talk to his parents. That'll work,” Rusty said. “And yeah, you have a point. Maybe I just taste bad to the local animals.”

“That's lucky, you don't have to worry about mosquitoes. In a swamp.”

“Silver lining,” Rusty muttered. It was what Cy always said.

Two miles later, he was hungry again, and the swamp was getting soggier. It took minutes to cross the water between hillocks, and they were shrinking smaller and smaller as the land sloped downward. He was no stranger to hard work, but this was the most hiking he'd ever done, and he wasn't used to this much mud. He needed food to keep going.

“Sounds good to me. What are you in the mood to tuck into?”

“I don't know.” Rusty looked around at the sprawling morass of foliage, bugs, occasional lizards and fish peering at him from tufts of weeds, all overshadowed by the towering trunks of the trees. “I can perfectly recall the books I read on edible plants, but that was for our world. And I don't know that hunting anything would work out, either. If stuff doesn't want to eat me, I'm not sure I should be eating it.”

“Okay. Well Terathon fed you that oatmeal, if I'm reading this memory right,” Roz said, rubbing his spidery fingers on his non-existent chin. “I doubt he magicked that up. Maybe there's some oatmeal grains around here somewhere?”

“That might be our best bet,” Rusty said. “We'll still have to cook it and we don't have a pot anymore, but maybe it's okay raw?”

The upside to the spells he'd put on himself were that he could perfectly remember the smell of it, the texture of it, and how the grains looked, down to the most minute detail. The only problem was that his only experience with the stuff was that it had been cooked. It probably looked different in the wild.

But it was the only lead he had, so Rusty started checking the weeds and clumps of foliage that he passed. He focused on the ones that wildlife fled out of as he approached, figuring that if they were eating it, his odds of finding something edible were improved.

It was his best hope, but it didn't pan out. He didn't come across anything that looked, smelled, or felt like the oatmeal. And one of the plants that he started to feel twitched under his fingers, and tried to wrap around his hand, almost managed to snag him before he backed off. Only when it stretched out several vines toward him, did he see the many little bones in the muck underneath it.

“Well, we finally ran into something that thinks you're tasty,” Roz told him. “Maybe you'd find IT tasty?”

“I find it creepy is how I find it,” Rusty told him. “And with my luck it'd give me diptheria or something like that. No, I think I'm gonna have to go to bed hungry.”

“Oh man. Is it... shoot, it is getting on that time, isn't it?” Roz looked around at the swamp that had been steadily darkening around them for the last half hour. “I didn't even notice.”

“I'd have to stop soon anyway,” Rusty said, putting a few hundred feet between himself and the grabby plant. “I'm beat.”

“So where do we camp? No ruins around here. I don't know if we want to be out in the open,” Roz looked around.

Rusty looked up.

Roz followed his gaze, up to the tall tree, and the branches that were well off the ground. “Oh. Wow. That's gonna be a rough climb. Glad I don't have to do it.”

Rusty snorted. “You're all heart.”

“Don't have that. Or arms or legs. Or anything that can help here except for sass.”

“So nothing that can help here.”

“I'll cheer you on, Rusty. You can do this!” And to Rusty's amazement, Roz pulled two pompoms out of nowhere, and started waving them around in the worst cheerleader routine he'd ever seen.

After he'd stopped laughing, he DID feel better. “Okay. Thanks for the sass. Let's see if I can do this...”

It was a scramble. But the tree he'd chosen had several broken off nubs down low on the trunk where it used to have branches. Either they'd fallen off or been chewed off, whichever it was didn't matter. What did matter was that with some work, he could use them to get up to where the branches were untouched and thicker together. Which was a start, but not where he needed to end up. These were good for climbing, but too thin to risk sleeping on.

It was a race against the sun to get up into the proper part of the canopy. His legs ached by the time he found a cluster of branches that could support his weight, and were wide enough he didn't risk being blown away.

That was a concern. Now that he was up here, the winds were pretty stiff. It was chilly, too.

Rusty did his best to tuck in and wrap the boy's jacket around himself. Without it, he would have been in a spot. But with it, he managed to get himself a little warmed up. And then, just like that, he was out.

It was a pretty good plan, to be honest. Probably the best option available.

And heck, it wasn't his fault that he didn't know about the tree striders.