Dragonslayer, Inc.
Chapter XIX- Begin Again

I woke up in the middle of the night. It was bitterly cold, but the stars were brighter than I’d ever seen them.

The moons had gone to bed. There were no celestial bodies visible. My mind was clear, and my eyes were sharp. I spotted three meteors galloping by, then three more. Soon I realized I was witnessing a full-on meteor shower. At its peak, there were a hundred meteors crossing the sky every minute.

I was reminded of Marcinai III, the last emperor of Ancient Solania. When he was a young prince, his empire was the greatest the world had ever known, but by the thirty-fifth year of his reign, he was naught but a seventy-seven-year-old man wondering where it all went wrong.

His empire had grown poorer and weaker over his lifetime, both before and after he took power. He wasn’t a terrible emperor. Though he wasn’t the greatest, his empire’s misfortune was out of his control. He was left as a spectator as it shrank to half its size, with regions declaring independence one after another. The remaining regions were neck-deep in poverty, and their citizens soon rose up, forming great rebellions that wore down the empire until it finally, eventually, inevitably fell.

When he heard the rebels storming his palace, he went up to the highest balcony and waited for them. It was a moonless night, and he could see the stars. He kneeled down on the blue-tiled floor, removed his cap, and began to contemplate.

A meteor shower began. The rebels captured the throne room and charged up the balcony. He could hear them coming. Seconds before he was decapitated with a single swipe of a broadsword, he looked to the meteors and said, “Everything that shines brightly must eventually be enveloped by darkness.”

We had started with thirteen members. Seven were no longer with us, and six of those seven had definitely died. Half our team was gone. By this point, we were more than halfway through our journey, so if the rate of death kept up, one or two of us would survive to reach Curam.

But who would that be? There was a chance it could be me. The odds weren’t in my favor, but they weren’t impossibly against me either. I was somewhat in my right mind, and the only other member of our group who could say that was the aunt-like Slayer, and I, being a better fighter, was more likely than her to survive.

This fact got my hopes up for one selfish second, but then I realized getting to the mountain was only half the battle. Even if I did make it, I would have to face Icithan without much or any help. I calculated the chances of my surviving that scenario to be barely above zero. And even if I somehow slayed the dragon, there was the matter of the trip home. If I weren’t already dead, I’d die before I could reach Natura.

I accepted that there almost certainly wouldn’t be a journey home. I accepted that I would almost certainly never see my family or my hometown ever again.

Under these specific conditions, this acceptance had a positive, uplifting effect on me. Strange as it sounds, I felt free. I didn’t have to wonder about Andes or Natura. I didn’t have to wonder what I’d say to Acady when I saw her again. I didn’t have to wonder what I would do after I got home. I didn’t have to worry about my identity. I didn’t have to worry about confronting my inner demon. None of it mattered. I’d be dead.

I decided to live for the now, to live like there was adrenaline pumping through my veins.

This wasn’t a particularly smart decision, but it led to immediate payoffs in the short term. I stole the others’ clothes, put them on to keep warm, and strutted off, searching for the perfect spot to view the meteor shower, which I found after an hour of walking. It was an icy rock in the middle of a frozen river, at the edge of a frozen waterfall. When I leaned over, I could see all the way down. It sent a jolt of lightning bouncing around my stomach, which I liked, so I did it three times. In the luminous starlight, the frozen icicles of the waterfall looked like the gentle fingernails of a creature too beautiful to comprehend.

The meteors kept coming, and they cast their lights down on the ice as they zoomed by. It was a feast for the eyes. No matter where I looked, my vision was consumed by this time-stopping performance. I kept my mind on every detail, swearing to remember all of them, but eventually it got to be too much for my screwed-up head to take, and I started forgetting. I felt like a kid racing around a playground, trying to collect every single snowflake in their hands.

Just like snowflakes, these memories were ephemeral. I had forgotten most of them by the time the meteor shower stopped, and there are very few I remember today, but I didn’t mind then, and I don’t mind now. I didn’t mind then because the experience filled me up entirely. It was everything to me then in a way that only a small child could relate to. I don’t mind now because those memories are among the most substantial I have in my collection. Though they are surreal, they have a potent verisimilitude to them.

The rest of my journey is in a haze. I have a hard time connecting it to the life I now live. In fact, one of the main reasons I am writing this tale is to clear away that haze, and in that, I have been mostly successful, though we’ll see how well that holds up as we begin to transition into the latter part of the tale.

My memories of this experience, on the other hand, are crystal clear. I can recall them whenever I desire, and they are not fleeting. They stay with me as long as I want them to, and I often want them to stay with me for a long time. If my mind is a garden, they are the most vivid flowers.

When the meteor shower stopped, I didn’t leave right then.

There was something special about where I was standing. That one spot held intact the contemporary nature of my experiences. While I stood there, the meteor shower had not ended, only stopped, but once I stepped out of that spot, it would terminate and fade to the past. Instinctually, I knew this, and so I stayed in that exact spot for half an hour.

In that time, the winds hammered away at my illusion, but I enjoyed their cold, destructive touch. It resonated with me. My sensation-seeking senses reveled in it. For years, I remembered it and the solemn, ambiguous appearance of the sky it blasted through the same way I remembered the meteor shower itself. That is not the case anymore. I can dredge up those memories, but they are wispy and translucent. They don’t want to stay in one place. I can hold a mental grasp on them, but unless I work to maintain it, they drift away.

It was the beginning of a downward spiral in that regard. The meteor shower is near the center of my mental sea, and the half-hour afterwards is near the fringes. The half-hour after that, when I did a little more exploring, trying to further stimulate myself, is a time I can recall if I try hard. I can remember details, but not how those details made me feel. I could rattle off the places I explored, but as I’d be unable to provide much color, I don’t see it as worthwhile.

After that second half-hour, I snuck back to our camp. At first, it seems remarkable that I managed to- or had any desire to- keep track of time, but after the meteor shower, I checked the time incessantly. I wanted to know exactly when each moment I was experiencing was taking place. I would have done so during the meteor shower too, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the splendor about me.

The time registered in my head, but it didn’t matter. Ten minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, two hours, four hours, eight hours; it didn’t make a difference. It was just, like the position of the stars or the texture of the icicles or the number of meteors that came darting across the firmament, a detail to add to my collection.

Checking the time was the only action I remember taking during the trip back. Everything else disappeared from my head before morning light. Nothing else was special, and in the competition that my head had become, what wasn’t special was subservient, and what is subservient is ignored, and what is ignored tends to disappear.

I wasn’t tired when I got back, so rather than fall asleep, I sat down, swiveled my head about, and absorbed my environment. This got exhausting quickly. Soon there wasn’t much to absorb, but I didn’t let myself stop. Fear encroached on me. I was afraid the liberated joy which coursed through my body would dissipate, and I didn’t want to lose it, not realizing that I already had.

Lighter and lighter shades of purple took their place in the sky before they were usurped by energetic waves of orange. Deka, which had risen an hour before, was alone in the northern sky, far from a bank of clouds to the west.

In the east exploded the flaming chariot of the sun, and beneath it, an army led by a man dressed like a knight. It was though a mural had come to life. My first instinct was not to wake the others, but examine the leader. His exaggerated mannerisms struck a chord with me.

I realized I knew who he was.