Wonder Made

Nineteen, Part Two

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Stormholden watched as Gideon withdrew, releasing a breath as he eased his shoulders into their normal positions. Tension sluiced off him in chunks. Having no stakes in this world, and nothing further to lose in his own, he had no reason to fear the repercussions of stoking Gideon's anger. The worst he could do was kill him, and he'd done the equivalent of that already.

Yet, it took both of the captain's hands to mop the sweat pouring down his face and over his neck. His tunic stuck to his back, a perpetual tremor harassing his fingers.

What was he afraid of? Not of the madness Gideon could unleash upon himself, surely. Something else. Something that had to do with the others.

He shuddered as he recalled the faces of all those in attendance at the Song, their expressions grim and pleading. As Gideon's darkness embraced them, the last flickers of their hope had been doused. They'd given in to Gideon's power until they'd been defeated, much the way the captain had.

But the people enthralled by the siren's song of this infernal noise, who wailed and howled like otherworldly creatures, who writhed as though offering themselves to Bacchus, drunkenly and completely, hadn't lost everything. Yet. And that terror, that knowledge of what was to come, gripped the captain's heart tighter than a noose.

"Do not show compassion," he whispered. "Do not get involved. Remain static, unmoving, even if pushed. Relent to the way of things and resign."

As the captain leaned back, hands tucked behind his head, sounds reminiscent of those that had marched through the streets of Prisdiam filled his ears. He was quick to obliterate these impressions as what was the point longing for a place that was, in Gideon's words, "a bland recreation of an unimaginative medieval setting?"

Stormholden was a tale and those places were window dressing, some more interesting than others, but all with the same purpose - to further the narrative. To foster relationships that would end in tragedy, to provide a sense of setting, ground readers in the story while adding depth and making the fantasy feel real. The punchline to it all being, of course, that none of it was real.

Fiction. Every wisp of breeze, every salt-laden inhale, blade of grass or cobblestone crunched under the captain's boot heels. Every dab of sweat, or stolen kiss. A forgery. A cruelty of paper and ink, nothing more.

Do not show compassion. Be unaffected. Let the boy's actions wash over you. Weather his storm, do not get swept up in it.

The captain inhaled, breathing deep the soiled air of what Gideon referred to as a 'metropolis.' The acrid scent, pregnant with the fumes of smoke and coal, grease, and sun-baked body odor, burned his lungs. Manic howls of metallic juggernauts Gideon referred to as "eighteen-wheelers" cut through the thrum of music and delighted squeals of Gideon's companions. Beastly screeches, with a hollow, steely tone rose from the crowded streets below, accompanied by shrill angry voices protesting over things called, "parking spots."

A more vile place Stormholden couldn't fathom and that included both his imprisonment on the mermaid cove and his stint in Lucifer's Reach. He'd even brave the frontlines of the war again, where men had been put down by enemy gunfire in droves, where both the living and dead left the battlefield as ghosts than continue to exist here.

He'd hoped the privacy of this abandoned tent would afford him the opportunity to brave this new world alone, but he'd been deceived. The stank wormed its way inside him, permeated his clothes. The sounds ravaged his ears, drowning out his thoughts. Like a beast with its teeth sunk into the captain's flesh, this metropolis had made Stormholden a part of itself.