The song for this chapter is "Missing" by For King and Country. (I changed this song from "Love's to Blame", because honestly, "Missing" fits a lot better.) :)
Okay, how is this book at 15.9 k reads? O.o I thought the Mianite fandom was dead. >.> I see y'all out there. *hugs*
Well, who's ready to find out what happened with Steve? Had y'all forgotten him? >:)
*Waglington's POV*
My anger had carried me miles from Dagrun before exhaustion caught up to me. I had stopped just before dawn to sleep, setting up my tent and sleeping bag in a copse of old live oaks. I didn't bother with a fire; my magic would keep my body temperature up. Memento, however, needed to keep warm and wormed his way into the sleeping bag after me, stretching beside me rather than curling up on my chest. My anger abandoned me in the night to face my shame and guilt by myself when I woke up. I ate a cold breakfast in silence and broke camp in a detached, robotic way. Memento had vanished when I woke up but returned with a fat rabbit dangling from his mouth as I rolled my sleeping bag. We politely ignored each other as he ate his freshly caught meal. I had packed food for him too, but he preferred it raw and still warm.
Waiting for Memento to finish, I leaned back against one of the trees and turned on my communicator to call and apologize for being an *ss, but I had no signal this far out. I sighed and pursed my lips, staring at my communicator as if it might magically start working. Finally I shook my head and turned it off to conserve its battery, storing it in my pack. I was about to try contacting her mentally, but Memento interrupted his after meal grooming to remind me, No long range mind magic, remember? I'd rather not tempt fate.
Right... I couldn't call the others, physically or mentally. I was really out here on my own, wasn't I? Oh well, nothing I'm not used to. And I do have you to keep me company this time, I thought to my cat. I'll have to make it up to her when we get back to Dagrun with Steve, I suppose.
A few minutes later, I had everything packed away and properly secured. Memento and I left our camp, he on foot and I in the air. We set out for one of Steve's frequented haunts: the Black Market. I had not been there personally, but I knew where it was from Tom and Jordan. I only halfheartedly paid attention to where I was flying on the way, replaying my argument with Martha over and over in my mind.
I had messed up big this time. Martha didn't deserve me yelling at her; she didn't even know why I was mad at her in the first place. Why'd I have to go and lose my temper? I'm her champion. I'm supposed to defend her, not hurt her. She should be able to count on me.
And I shouldn't be able to rely on her? My inner cynic taunted.
I firmly shook my head, determined to not work myself back up to the anger that had consumed me yesterday. I tried to distract myself by inspecting the land I flew over as the sun reached its zenith and began descending again. The mixed oak trees were becoming scrawny and less frequent—almost entirely absent now—and the grass desperately clung to the pale, cracked earth in scattered tufts and clumps.
I had flown farther than I thought, or the Black Market was closer to our corner of Ruxomar than I had supposed. It was only another hour of flying before a line of pitch black marred the pale blue sky ahead of us. I frowned as we drew close enough for me to guess what it was. Something was burning. The smell reached us as the mild breeze shifted temporarily: burning diesel, charred wood, and something else that made my stomach turn and my nose wrinkle in distaste.
I hoped that this wasn't the place, but when I discerned the burned out shell of an RV similar to Jordan's, I knew beyond doubt that we had found the Black Market—well, what was left of it. What happened here? The roof and one of the walls of the once infamous bar were collapsed inward and blackened, the windows were all broken, some blown outward by the fire that had wracked the two storied establishment. Strangely a few of the windows appeared to have been broken inward as well. The overhang for the raised wooden porch and the porch itself had also collapsed and were little more than coals and ash.
Barrels that had likely been stacked against the collapsed outer wall were now in disarray. At first glance, it appeared they had simply toppled and rolled to the positions they now lay in, but Memento meowed loudly and stood up on his back legs briefly to call my attention to a depression in the dried, slightly sandy ground near one of the furthest barrels from the building. Okay, scratch that. The barrels had been thrown with force. Twisted and soot-stained shrapnel littered the area. I spotted one upright barrel with its upper third roughly removed; the contents were burning and spewing noxious smoke. Maybe there was an explosion? Walking among the dented and rusted barrels, I stopped myself before stepping in a wide dark stain on the ground that looked to have once been oil. The drum it had leaked from was charred and pierced by something. Pulling the projectile from the drained drum with a solid tug, I found it a tartarite tipped crossbow bolt with a blaze rod shaft. That would have done the job, I thought with a nod as I turned the red and orange arrow in my hand.
I wondered who had been drunk or dumb enough to use a fire sparking weapon close to barrels of fuel as I walked up to the shell of a building. The horrible but familiar smell I couldn't quite place was worse the closer I got to the empty doorway, stepping carefully among charred bits of wood from the porch. Memento couldn't stand the stench and stayed several yards back nervously watching me, twitching his tail and shifting from foot to foot. Um, Wag... I think that's...
I found more of the tartarite bolts driven deep into the wood of the doorframe and wall and an abandoned and broken kalendrite longsword lying in the ash of the porch. Moving to look inside without touching the precariously leaning structure, I found the source of the odor. Several bodies burned beyond recognition lay inside, half buried by the beams and shingles of the fallen roof. One body lay right next to the door and seemed in better shape than the others. I could still make out the material of his cracked armor: terrasteel.
Mianite! Anger bloomed fresh in my chest as I backed away from the destruction his soldiers had caused with my fists tightened. I struggled to block the vengeful thoughts and images that flooded my mind as I stormed around the side of the building to look for more clues, now clearly marking hasty boot prints cris-crossing the sandy ground everywhere I looked. Not everyone had died in there, I'd bet anything. A few grey clouds started to gather overhead before I got my temper back under wraps.
On the far side of the bar I got my answer. Burned bits of gear and circular scorch marks polka dotted the otherwise featureless, flat land. Someone had put up quite a fight here. Memento had followed on my heels and helped me look through the debris. I've got something. Jogging over, I saw Memento had found blood spatter and the discarded bloody arrow that had caused the wound to whoever had been bleeding. I looked up, and my heart stopped for half a second when I saw a straw hat lying forlorn, trapped under a broken crossbow ten feet away.
Oh no.
~Flashback~
Steve and I had been friends once, before the flirting started, before Martha fell asleep in my arms at that party, before she had me write her a love poem as payment for some materials I needed. I was still unsure which part had really set him off, or maybe it was a combination of all three. Whatever his trigger, when he got back from his business trip he was pissed. I was curious how he had even found out, since Martha had been gone on a trip of her own and did not get back until the day after he arrived.
"Waglington, mate, we need to have a little chat." I could hear his desire to strangle me though my communicator. I wasn't even in the Overworld at the time. So I wasn't too worried. "I've heard you've been hitting on my girl."
I paused my work on Tom's reactor—which I may have accidentally blown up—to unmute myself on my communicator. Being the incredibly clever wizard that I was, I decided to poke the angry bear. "Calling her 'your girl' is going a bit far; you did reject her after all." I could practically hear the smoke pouring out of his ears, and I just had to keep going. "And I didn't force her to do anything; the 'hitting on' was mutual." To be fair, she flirted with me first.
"Mate," Steve growled. "You're in for a right rumble."
Good luck finding me, I thought as I muted myself again and picked up another fuel rod and started fixing it in place, glancing at the open manual Sparklez had lent me. Tom had built his reactor in another dimension to power a quarry. Unfortunately, this was also the dimension I came to to test out potentially dangerous spells, since it was mostly uninhabited. I had already fired my spell when I realized my mistake, and now I had an angry zombie expecting his reactor and quarry fixed by the end of the week. I hate technology.
About half an hour of angry searching later, Farmer Steve snapped, "Where the bloody hell are ya?!"
I chuckled darkly before unmuting to tell him innocently, "Nowhere." A string of wrathful expletives that would have made a sailor blush flowed out of the communicator before I replied, "Well if that's how you feel about it, you shouldn't have rejected her, 'mate'."
I was a bit mad myself. Martha hadn't smiled or been herself for several days after he rejected her proposal and abruptly left town. What gave him the right to do that to someone—let alone someone as sweet as Martha—and think they were still his? She was a person, not property. If I helped distract her and make her feel better after that, it was his own fault.
"Fight me like a man!" Steve bellowed.
I really did not feel like fighting just then, and Sparklez sending me a private message only reinforced my desire. "M8, Steve is seriously geared up, rn. I'd run if I were u."
I was about to text back a reply when Steve stopped me cold with a threat, "Wizard, I've got your house rigged. If you don't show up in the next ten minutes to fight me, I'm blowing it sky high." The color drained from my face as I fumbled for my dimension changer.
"No! You leave my tower out of this! What did it ever do to you?" I yelled frantically, my voice rising an octave above normal. True my tower was a piece of work, but it was still mine. I also had all of my expensive and rare spell books and magical components in there and Kevin Jr.!
"You should have thought about that before trying to steal me girl, mate." Steve said condescendingly.
"Well, you should talk to her about that, because she doesn't consider herself yours," I retorted as I quickly made my way back to the Overworld; I materialized outside my tower's front door to find Steve's threat was not idle. He did indeed have a few high explosives wired to the outside of my tower. My eyes widened in panic as I tried to find a way to defuse them safely, not sparing a glance for the man floating in the air behind me.
"You messed with the wrong acolyte, mate." I finally turned around to see Steve floating there with a smug grin under his sturdy thaumcraft armor. He held a steel cleaver to rest on his shoulder in one hand and was tossing a fireball up and down in the other.
"I don't want to fight you, Steve." That was true for more than one reason. I still reached for my spell book though. I had to at least defend myself if he did attack, but I didn't want to seriously hurt him. As far I knew, he didn't have respawn.
"Fine by me," Steve said. I saw him wind up to throw his fireball, and I quickly fired my Nether banishing spell. The fireball flew over my head harmlessly as he vanished from sight. I wondered how his aim could be so bad until I heard a fuse hiss behind me. F*ck. I didn't even have time to turn around before my tower and I blew up.
I respawned at the base of my mountain, aching all over. Steve didn't waste any time in gloating over his communicator. "I've got more where that came from. Now keep away from my girl!"
I was about to come back with something that would have made him even madder, but Lady Ianite showed up then and started ripping Steve a new one over the communicator. I decided whatever punishment she thought of would be far worse than anything I could do and turned off my communicator entirely. My shoulders slumped as I started the slow trek up the mountain to whatever remained of my house, wishing Steve would just disappear on one of his trips again and not come back.
~End Flashback~
I gingerly picked up the straw hat, noting the singed rim and a spot of blood staining it. I immediately regretted ever wishing he would disappear. I guess I should be careful what I wished for.
Hey, his body's not here, and there isn't that much blood. Maybe he's alive, and they took him with them? Memento looked in the direction the scattered footprints led.
Seems like our only lead, I agreed. Looking up to the sky, I urged him on. Let's go while we still have daylight.
So we set off, following the footprints and occasional discarded bit of trash out of the wasteland and into a wooded area until the light failed us. After we set up camp and ate our dinners, I lay in my sleeping bag, staring at the stars. Memento had already fallen asleep beside me, and I every once in a while felt him twitch in some dream. I was tired and emotionally drained as well, but sleep refused to take me. After lying under the turning stars for a few hours without any success, I finally decided to pull out one of my sleeping potions. Might as well get some use out of them. I moved carefully so as not to wake Memento, and drank the potion, only starting to drift off when I drained the last of it.
Okay, thinking ahead, I wanted to ask for suggestions on something. What are your favorite Jordan/S1 Ianite and Jordan/S2 Ianite (&/or Ianita) moments?
My class has started up now. I'm re-tackling the one I failed last semester. -.- *grumbles* Hopefully this attempt will go much better. I'll already sorta know all but the last 2 weeks' worth of material. The really annoying thing is I'll have to redo all of the lab projects. Yay, 7 hours in front of a microscope to look forward to.