Chapter Ninety: Convergence

It was raining gently. I was deep in a lush forest, surrounded by dense woods and thick underbrush – a stark contrast from the cobbled streets and dark stone buildings of Derse. And I wasn't alone.

The last person in the whole universe I wanted to see was me.

But when does the universe give a shit?

I stared at Adam like some disembodied soul reminiscing over a concluded life.

Adam stared right back at me like he was looking into a mirror with a grotesque bird ghost filter.

Dangling from Adam's left hand was his sprite pendant, the same one I'd given him a lifetime ago after saving his ass from some underlings. It glowed cherry red from its recent activation.

"Uh…hi?" Adam seemed very tense, probably wondering if he should have a weapon ready. "You gonna try and kill me again? Gonna be chill this time?"

"What?"

"Cuz I'm warning you, if you try any homicidal shit again-"

"Why the fuck am I here? Send me back."

"Hey, hey, relax!" Adam took a step back, hands balling into fists. "Don't fucking do that, you're making me nervous! I don't want to have to kick your ass."

"Kick my ass?" Say what, now? "Excuse me?"

"Look, I've learned a thing or two since the last time we've spoken," said Adam, "and if you try your bullshit with me again, I won't hold back. I've united all my consorts into a single army, get the picture? All three tribes. You have any idea how fucking hard I worked to do that? I'm not afraid of you."

Oh my god, was I really this insufferable?

"Will you just shut up and send me back?" I asked politely.

"Send you back?"

"Yes. Right now."

"I don't think the sprite pendant works that way."

"Adam, I'm not fucking around," I chewed the words out like hard taffy, paper-thin patience growing thinner by the second. "Major apocalyptic shit is going down on Derse and Cass has no help. Send me back now."

"Cass?" At the mention of Cass's name, Adam's face soured. "Yeah, send you back to Cass, huh? So you can be together forever?"

"Careful," I warned.

"What, you think I didn't notice?" Adam went on, digging his hole even deeper. "She never messages me. Ever. Too busy fucking around with you, huh? Have you been creeping on her this whole time?"

"Shut up."

"You kiss yet? Have you?" As Adam studied my expression closely, horror began to color his own. "You have, haven't you. Holy fuck, you have. Oh my fucking god. Really?"

I couldn't help but notice a touch of nausea in Adam's tone. What an asshole.

Adam continued, "Are you two, like…a thing, now?"

"No."

"Don't bullshit me. You can't bullshit me."

"I'm not. We aren't."

"So you kissed, and…what? That was it?"

"Leave it alone."

"C'mon, if you're going to steal my love life and ruin everything, at least tell me what it felt like-"

My fist connected with Adam's jaw, knocking him off his feet and sending him flying onto his back. "Love life? What love life? Daydreams aren't a love life." I looked down at him in disgust. "I can't believe I was you a month ago. People aren't possessions, you little fuckwad. What, you think you're entitled to a relationship because you have feelings? It takes more than that. Commitment and patience, for example; neither of which, we can both agree, are among our immediate virtues."

Adam slowly sat up, winded, a few drops of blood seeping from the raw spot on his lower lip where one of my knuckles had done the most damage.

"You're a fraud," I continued. "You tell yourself you're in love, you ruminate all day thinking and feeling in circles, and all you ever do is sulk over why it won't happen immediately. You don't want to do the work."

"That's not fair." Adam winced, tenderly rubbing the bruise forming on his jaw. "During study hall, I walked up to her. I walked up to her, asked if I could sit next to her, and we had an actual conversation. A real one that didn't take place in my imagination, and I convinced her to skip the rest of her classes so we could hang out. Any idea how hard a sell that was? Cass never skips class."

"It wasn't your idea," I was quick to remind him.

"The hell it wasn't."

"It was Anna's idea. She showed up to lunch completely wasted, and she told you to do that."

"Oh, c'mon…"

"You never even asked Cass out. Theo had to do it for you, and without your knowledge. You put on a good show of pretending to be pissed off, but I remember the truth. We were scared, because a dream of ours was becoming real and passing beyond our control. What if I told you the real reason we never asked Cass out ourselves wasn't because we were afraid of rejection?"

"Shut the fuck up!" Adam snapped. "And stop with that creepy 'we' shit!"

"Fine. You were afraid, more than anything else, that Cass would say yes," I shot back. "You've always been more comfortable living in your own daydreams, and whatever relationship you think you have with Cass is a daydrea—"

Next thing I knew, Adam's fist was crashing into my jaw, and suddenly I was flat on my back, watching the ever crawling storm clouds.

Adam flopped back onto the ground, his fist dissolving into five aching fingers.

Both of us lay silently on the grass.

I wasn't even angry. Isn't that strange? Maybe a quick brawl was precisely what we'd needed to calm the fuck down. And maybe, just maybe I'd gotten a little carried away…

"…dick…" Adam muttered, although I couldn't help but notice a lack of venom in his barb.

"Don't be an asshole, I'm trying to have a moment of empathy here."

"How did you know all that…all that stuff? About me?"

"Because I remember it," I answered plainly. "All of it. You realize I have your memories, right? Now can you imagine how it feels to have someone else wearing your body, gawking at you with your own face?"

"Pretty fucking macabre, I guess…" Adam admitted, slowly sitting back upright. He touched a finger to his bruised jaw, checking for blood.

A flash of lightning briefly washed out the sky.

I relaxed my gaze and allowed myself to wander among the stormy cloud-terrain looming in the sky. The clouds reminded me of towering, majestic mountains, and I imagined what it would be like to fly through their valleys while dodging lightning.

Thunder grumbled quietly in the distance, and the gentle drizzle began to intensify into a shower.

The rain felt nice. I closed my eyes and inhaled gently through my nose, filling myself with the pleasant fragrance of the rain, enjoying the staccato flecks of water on my body, listening to the ceaseless patter of countless raindrops upon millions of leaves.

"C'mon." Adam's voice cut through my focus. "Let's take a walk."

Opening my eyes, I was surprised to see Adam standing over me, holding out his hand.

I accepted his olive branch warily, and he helped me to my feet. "Where to?" I asked.

"This way." Adam led the way into the woods and I followed, leaving the clearing behind. "Gotta get back before they freak out and start sending search parties."

"They?"

"All the freaking consorts, dude!" Adam rolled his eyes, something I know I do all the time, but never until now did I realize how annoying it was to be on the receiving end. "You already forget what I'm doing here? Burning Dusk has already led the bulk of the consort armies to our staging ground within the Old One's Garden. Right now the last groups are following the river to join them. Tonight we're marching on Hyperion's Palace, and at dawn we attack."

Now everything was starting to make a little more sense.

"So that's why I'm here." I made no effort to hide the resentment from my voice. "You need my help with your little conquest. You want to use me."

"I'd have been more than happy to never speak to you again," Adam assured me. "Trust me on that. But then Anna showed up, of all people, appeared out of thin air in my fucking tent back at camp. Can you imagine how the consorts would've reacted if they saw that shit go down? Anna told me to use the sprite pendant to summon you. When I asked her why, she gave one of those stupid coy winks and vanished. So fucking annoying."

We emerged from the trees only to find ourselves standing at the edge of a cliff, gifted with a stunning view of the valley below—wide, grassy, populated with light woods and vegetation. Meandering through the middle of the valley was a river, adorned on both sides by small rock formations and brightly warm-colored flowers.

What did the consorts name it? The Forbidden River? That sounded right, but I wasn't completely sure – it'd been quite a while since I'd last graced the Land of Rain and Rivers with a visit.

The river stretched off into the near distance, where the valley opened up into a dense forest and the river vanished into the woods. In the further distance, deeper in the forest, rose a trio of dark mountains, looming over the surrounding trees. They would have cast an imposing shadow were it not for LORAR's perpetual cloud cover. And rising impossibly into the sky from the trees at the base of those mountains were the fast-flowing gravity-defying waters of the Forbidden River, coiling up and around the central mountain to its very peak before collapsing into a waterfall down the mountainside.

Slithering along the riverbanks in loosely organized groups were several hundred cobra-consort warriors, moving along with the river's current toward the dense forest beyond the valley's mouth. All three tribes were represented in a rainbow display - red, orange, and purple-scaled Treefolk; yellow, orange, and brown-scaled Sand Dwellers; green, blue, violet, and indigo-scaled Northerners. They wore no armor, which was wise. Dersite weapons would burn right through anything these consorts were capable of producing. All wore swords strapped to their backs, and many of the Northerners had also donned energy rifles taken from dead Dersites in a recent battle.

Crude siege weapons were being transported between the groups of warriors. Thick, heavy wooden poles, which the cobras could lean against a wall to climb up and storm the ramparts. Each pole was carried by a team of five warriors.

The spectacle was almost adrenaline-inducing. It had taken me a month of hard work to unify those consorts.

Adam, I corrected myself. It took Adam a month.

"C'mon, over here," said Adam, choosing the more familiar direction and walking along the cliff's edge. "I took us too far out of the way. Hard to navigate when all the damn trees look alike, you know?"

Adam's course correction brought us to a wide gully offering a gentle descent into the valley below. Which was good. Otherwise, I probably would've had to fly Adam down the cliff, and in my condition I don't think I'd have made it very far before collapsing. There was little point in trying to hide how tired and beaten up I felt. My appearance spoke for itself, and as we made our way down the gully, Adam asked, "You feeling alright? 'Cuz I'll be honest, dude, you look like shit."

"Thanks."

"What happened to you?"

"Stuff."

"Really?" Adam gave me a half-frown, half-raised eyebrow. "Gonna keep on being a dick?"

"You tell me I look like shit, and I'm the dick?"

"You do look like shit. Look at you! Your glow's all dim, and what the fuck happened with—" Words failing him, Adam gesticulated with his fingers towards my wounds from Gino, where my body's usual red light was muddied by a murky brownish discoloration. "What's going on there? Doesn't look healthy."

"It's not." I could feel the beginnings of a headache coming on. "If you must know, Gino went batshit crazy and blasted me with black fire."

"Wait, wait, what?"

Oh, why did I do that? Now he was curious, and the questions would likely never end.

"Yep," I spoke quickly, before Adam's torrent of questions could be unleashed. "That's a thing that happened. And before you ask, I have no idea why or how. Didn't really have time to ask him, and he wasn't exactly fielding a Q&A."

"Did you at least kick his ass?"

"No."

Awkward silence settled over the remainder of our descent.

Upon reaching the valley woods at the gully's base, we proceeded in the direction of the river, using gentle Force to bend vines and foliage out of our path. Twittering choruses of birdsong filled the woods, mingling pleasantly with the soft rainfall, and occasionally I'd catch a flash of feathery red, darting from tree to tree.

I've always loved cardinals.

The Land of Rain and Rivers was home to many cardinals, and during my time here I'd greatly appreciated their company. They were one of the few things left from our old lives as regular people living on Earth.

A faint grin came to my face as we walked past a tree and I spotted, perched upon one of the tree's low-hanging branches, a brilliantly red cardinal. He was grooming himself, plucking with his beak at his own feathers. I whistled to him in a terrible imitation of his call.

"Adam?" asked Adam.

The cardinal flew away.

"Yeah?" I was surprised he'd called me Adam.

"Do you know why we're here?"

"You've decided to charge into another dumb battle, and you teleported me here to make my life miserable."

"No, I mean, why are we here?" Adam gestured all around. "We've been doing this for a month. It used to be easier to just focus on the quest and ignore everything else. No one wants to think about how we're all that's left of Humanity. No one wants to go crazy. But I'm tired…" He looked at me, and I believed him. "So what are we doing here? What's the point?"

"I…don't know."

"What? C'mon, you're a sprite. You know."

"I'm sorry."

"No, don't give me that!" Adam's anger flared again. "You have to know. You have to."

"I don't," I sustained. "Sprites are meant to help you start the game, not finish. Whenever I try to think of how to end the game, I just get insane dissonance in my head and headaches. I have a bad feeling, though…"

"Go on…?"

"Well, I do know about some fundamental parts of the game which we've completely neglected. And now that the Reckoning has begun, I'm not sure how we'll finish."

"You better be wrong, because if you're not—" Adam fell flat on his face midsentence, knocked off his feet by some unseen force.

I barely had time to register what happened before that same unseen force suddenly cinched around me like an invisible straitjacket, pinning my arms to my sides. "What the fuck?!" I snapped, riding the surge of anger and surprise to shatter the hostile telekinetic grip, freeing my arms.

"Talkative underling sscum," hissed a familiar voice.

I knew that voice!

"…Scales?" I stared agape as Glimmering Scales emerged from a nearby clump of bushes, fangs bared and gleaming. It was good to see him again, but he certainly wasn't sending me any cozy reunion vibes. "Buddy?"

"You may have sstolen the Knight'ss face," snarled Scales, "but it will take more than that to fool-"

"Yo, Scales, hey, chill out!" Adam interrupted, clambering back onto his feet, and placing himself between Scales and me. "Will everyone please stop knocking me to the ground? And nobody stole anyone's face."

"Why doess thiss creature have your face?" demanded Scales. "Explain yoursself."

"He's, uh…" Adam hesitated, considering how best to explain to Glimmering Scales the simple and straightforward concept of sprites.

"Creature?" I flipped Scales the double bird. "Asshole."

"Spirit guide," Adam decided quickly. "Yeah, he's my spirit guide. See how you can see through him? Kinda? Yeah. Spirit guide."

"SSpirit guide?" Scales did not sound convinced. "Why hass it taken your sspirit guide a month to reveal himsself?"

"He went bonkers and took a vacation, alright? Wouldn't you if you woke up as a wispy fucked up spirit guide? But that's not important!" Adam gabbled impatiently, eager to get moving again. "What is important is that he's here, and now we have a viable way inside Hyperion's Palace. Or were you planning on bringing down that gate?"

"Come again?" I interrupted. "You expect me to bring down a gate?"

"No, I'm breaking open the gate, not you," Adam assured me. "Not sure you're even capable, in your condition. No, all you need to do is fly me over the walls of Hyperion's palace, drop me on the ground, and shield me while I handle the rest."

"Handle the rest?" Mocking Adam was difficult, since mimicking him required only my normal speaking voice. "And what is 'the rest'? You're just gonna bust open what's sure to be a thick gate without getting torn to pieces by the Dersites?"

"Yes, if you shield me."

"Then you're dead," I declared. "I won't be able to hold up a shield like that for long. We'll need Scales, too."

"What? C'mon, I projected a huge shield during that fort battle up north, remember? That shield was big enough to protect a whole army, and I kept it up for a few solid minutes."

Scales might as well have been at a tennis match, watching both of us go back and forth. Poor guy. He was probably wondering if he'd fallen into a bad dream.

"You went into that battle in peak condition," I shot back. "You even had time to pee beforehand. And those few solid minutes nearly killed you. Listen, Gino really fucked me up, and-"

Skittering and chattering noises filled the surrounding trees, and I fell silent, dropping immediately into find-the-predator mode. That's when I noticed the curious absence of birdsong – over the course of the past few minutes of conversation, the cardinals had all fled.

Not a good sign.

Within seconds, the nearby bushes to our right erupted with imps – at least a dozen of the toothy, clawed, scurrying little assholes. We barely had time to swear before they were on us; swiping, biting, and scratching.

Scales held one imp aloft with his Force while telekinetically unsheathing the sword strapped to his back, slicing off the immobilized imp's head. He then knocked a second charging imp off its feet with a well-aimed whip of his tail. A third and fourth imp converged on Scales, tackling him.

Adam, meanwhile, was using Force to pick up one imp and hurl it into three others, tripping up the whole group. But it wasn't enough. Only one single imp had been killed, so far. Adam fell a half-second after Scales, brought down by an imp clinging to the back of his neck, by which time all the winded imps were back on their feet and ready for more.

I've had it with this shit. I'm done.

With a deep breath, I projected my will-force outward in a rapidly expanding shockwave, knocking all the charging imps back several paces. Then, in the moment while the imps regained their footing, I focused myself around their necks and twisted.

Eleven necks cracked, and in unison the remaining imps fell like marionettes with cut strings.

A little weariness tugged behind my eyes, but I was otherwise alright.

"Brutal…" murmured Adam, picking himself back up and surveying my handiwork, glancing at me with unease.

"More will come," Scales warned. "We musst go."

"No shit, dude." Adam rolled his eyes again. "Only reason we stopped is because you stopped us. C'mon, let's go."

As Adam and Scales forged ahead into the woods, for a moment I hesitated to follow. To the sky I gave a long glance, wondering how long it would take me to fly from here back to Derse. A couple days, maybe? Would I even make it all the way without burning out?

Probably not.

"Sorry Cass…" I whispered to the stormy sky. "You're on your own."