Durest:

  “I am the 59th Knight of Basilbane. You have strayed from the path, Child of Spirits. Now you must die.”

  The knight stands in the middle of the road, shorter than the 64th knight that Gareth, Nimra, and I faced. The armor is also different. Sparse. Bamboo. Laminar plating, dyed red, and a typical Eastern helm with a bucket shape and crescent metals adorning its top. The voice of this knight is female. Smooth and clear. Cruel, like cold steel.

  We all pull up next to Hui. Nimra readies an arrow, while Gareth flips his bearded axes in anticipation. Cozo starts whistling from his saddle, arms lounged over his spear. I take out my ledger in case this knight decides to use soul freeze, like the 64th. But, no purple snow has appeared from the cloudless sky. So perhaps this knight’s abilities are different.

  Hui narrows her gray eyes at the warrior. Then, the Dragon Slayer merely shrugs, slips off her saddle, and starts walking towards the knight. Gareth hooks one foot out of the stirrups. However, Hui holds a hand up. He sighs and settles back onto the horse, leaning over the mount’s head now.

  I look between all of them, confused. Tapping Nimra’s shoulder, I gesture wildly to the unfolding duel.

  “What’s the problem?” she asks.

  “He’s asking why we aren’t trying to help her,” Gareth mutters.

  Cozo yawns. “That’s because our leader is a masochist with an unyielding competitive streak who actually enjoys battle.”

  “What he means,” Nimra interjects, glowering at Cozo. “Is that sometimes, Hui wants to test the enemy. She did it with the dragons often, to gauge their power. It allows her to plan our strategy later as a team.”

  I frown—scribble out my response. WHY ON HER OWN?

  Nimra hesitates to answer that. Gareth is too busy focusing on Hui, who now unsheathes her blue-scaled dragon blade, shining with a blinding gleam in the pale sunlight.

  I turn the paper to Cozo.

  The lanky man snorts. “We call ourselves a troop. And it's true—we do often fight together. But, let me tell you something Durest: we,” he gestures to Gareth and Nimra, “can fight dragons. Hui, on the other hand, well…” He tosses his hand up in her direction—as if baffled by her very existence.

  “Hui kills dragons.”

  At first, I don’t understand what he means. But as the knight battles against Hui Long, and the two of them unleash powers that make the earth quiver in fear—well, safe to say, my little mercantile mind can comprehend that much.

  She’s on a whole other level.

  The two of them lock blades, clash elements, and are enraptured by a field of smoke. Wild sparks tell tales in the fog of their battle.

  There’s a squelch. A wet crunch of blood and bone.

  Then, a slow, grating scrape of metal.

  And Hui emerges from the plume of smoke—completely unscathed save for a cut drawn across her cheek. She drags the severed torso of the 59th Knight of Basilbane by the crook of its helm.

  My poor palfrey skitters back in a panic.

  Yet, for once, I’m too distracted to calm her down

  For my gaze is solely set upon the Dragon Slayer, her sword etched in black blood, her eyes hounding after me.

  Suddenly, I no longer enjoy this staring competition of ours.

  …

  That night, as the cold wind blows out our campfire three times, and the rock-sharded valley seems to sing with haunted tunes of predators, prowling in the dark—mountain crocs and war monkey tribes battling one another with screeching fury—Hui pops her head out of the big tent and calls me in.

  Gareth frowns, raising an eyebrow at me. I shrug back at him, just as confused. He waves me off as Cozo dithers about whether to eat a strange looking purple banana that was apparently sourced from a spirit-fertilized farm.

  Entering the tent, I find our resident silver haired hero sitting cross legged, shoes off, feet folded into her thighs in a very uncomfortable looking position.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  In a rounded pot, three sticks burn with incense. This is a familiar tradition—one that even the people of my home used to indulge in. The scent is sweet and aromatic. A hint of cinnamon.

  I sit across from Hui, one leg stretched out, the other scrunched up with my arm draped over the knee. I try to affect a nonchalant attitude, but in all honesty, I’m sweating my ass off. This woman frightens me.

  Well, actually all women frighten me, but this one is especially terrifying.

  Hui closes her eyes and breathes deeply of the smoke from the incense. Her body visibly relaxes, shoulders loosening from tension. The cut on her cheek is scarred over and already healing—thanks to her Dragon of Wood having spit some green gob of goo on it.

  I wait for Hui to speak. But she seems fine with patience—with letting me stir in my own wretched thoughts.

  Finally, after a few minutes pass, Hui opens her eyes and addresses me in that clinical tone of hers.

  Each word is like water dripping on stone in a lonely dungeon.

  “Have you ever died before, Durest?”

  I do my best to resist running out of the tent, flailing my arms, and screaming all the way back to my palfrey.

  Instead, I afford her a confused tilt of the head.

  She continues. “You look like a man who's been reborn. Who has lost parts of himself time and time again, only to graft on new, darker machinations in their place.”

  Calm down. She’s just being annoyingly metaphorical. She doesn’t know.

  I shake my head.

  “You can deny it. I did for a long time. But, the more I fought, the more death I saw and wrought, I realized how pointless it was to try and resist the tide. The change.”

  Hui looks down now, almost as if in shame. “Do you know what the difference between Destiny and Fate is?”

  Before I can even shake my head, she presses on. “Destiny is a phantom specter. A creature that visits worlds and brings with her tidings of the future. Sometimes she is right. Sometimes she is wrong. But when she’s right, well, it’s usually a monumental change that occurs.”

  That isn’t exactly what I expected.

  “Fate, on the other hand, is abstract. Threads. Lines that only a select few can sense. They show connections and happenings, both future and past. A muddied puzzle of all that is and all that was. However, unlike Destiny, Fate is never wrong.”

  I nod along slowly, not knowing what else to do. Is she just… venting to me? Or is this actually going somewhere beyond a lesson in—

  “Because of my role as the Child of Spirits, I often witness the threads. Today, I learned from Fate about something arriving in Verdan. The Northernmost Empire—a series of islands close to Catolica.”

  She leans forward.

  “And that something was connected to you.”

  What the fuck?!?

  That doesn’t make sense. I have nothing to do with Verdan. It’s not like my goal lies there, nor my quarry.

  I think she sees my confusion, for she leans back and sighs, face relaxing.

  And it is with a creeping realization that I spot her hand move away from the hilt of her blade.

  She was going to kill me based on my reaction?

  Hesitantly, I reach into my satchel, withdraw my ledger, and write down the most pressing question.

  WHAT WAS IT?

  She looks at my paper and shakes her head. “I have no idea. But I know it's… different. Not of this world, yet, at the same time, it belongs here. Sometimes I get this flash of an image—a girl or a man with pure white hair and angelic, white lightning falling through the sky. And then they're supposedly connected to a monstrous beast of a man who wields black lightning. Then its flashes of blue lightning, then green. And lastly, red—”

  Hui stops herself, as if realizing she already divulged too much information to a mere stranger.

  “Sorry to bother you with this. Perhaps the connection is… thin. Some relative or something. I don’t know.”

  But maybe I do.

  I don’t recognize this girl from Hui’s vision. Yet, maybe, I know someone who does.

  So when I get out of that tent, I don’t return to the campfire. Instead, I move to my horse and unfurl my sleeves.

  I stare at my wrist—waiting for bloody letters to etch.

  Come on you asshole. Answer me for once—

  I bite back pain as the first letter rips into my skin.

  ‘H’

  ‘A’

  ‘H’

  ‘A?’

  Are you fucking laughing at me—

  ‘HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA’

  They repeat on and on, going down the length of my arm in painful crimson. I hold back screams, collapsing to the ground and circling around my writhing arm like an animal caught in a bear trap as my tormentor cackles, taking great amusement from my continued, everlasting misfortune.