I Want To Go Home - 28

The New North, Weak and Conquered

The Generals had managed to convince the Ignobian Dwarves to land their army just outside the city walls. The besieging forces had then been forced to move against their landing parties, getting peppered by magic and arrows from the city walls. Meanwhile, myself and most of the others were sent down to strike from the opposite portion of the walls, forcing the Janzori armed to fight me to separate from the main army. It was only Ne’avo who was kept back, given duties with the Elven army defending the city.

What followed was another nasty and tiring fight, but the strategy worked. Sukura and I were quite able to handle melee combat against the demonic liches, while Uké’el and Aara provided support. Uké’el’s direct, with spells, Aara’s indirect as she summoned swarms of killer bees and wasps.

Nearly as soon as we’d dealt with the last of them, and began to hear trumpets of celebration from the Dwarven army, Aara called for the pegasus. The winged horse swooped down from the city walls while Uké’el unfurled her float-carpet.

“Is there a rush?” I asked, surprised to see the other three getting ready to go so immediately.

“Not yet, but there will be once…” Uké’el began to say, holding up a finger in waiting.

I wondered what it was she was waiting for.

Then I found out.

“Let’s go go go!” Ne’avo shouted, sprinting in our direction as the soldiers that had been assigned to be her royal guard scrambled after her a hundred or so metres behind.

“Are you running away from your guards?” I asked as she raced past.

“Yes!” she shouted, hopping onto the float carpet, which had already been starting to take off.

I blinked, not quite sure how to respond. Still, everyone else was leaving, so I leapt up, extending my wings to take to the air. It wasn’t hard to catch back up, leaving the poor soldiers behind to shout ‘your majesty!?’.

I flew beside the others quietly for a bit, before having to turn to them, a question on my tongue.

“They were watching you and Ne’avo both too much for us to risk telling both of you the plan, sorry,” Aara said.

“We could have asked to leave?” I replied.

“Maybe… but they’d have made us sit through a bunch of diplomatic dinners and strategizing and… all that junk,” Ne’avo muttered. “Too much politics and state dinner etiquette and… bleh.”

“You’re going to be a very popular queen,” Aara said with a grin.

“Another reason I wanted to pretend I wasn’t royalty,” Ne’avo grumbled.

My brain flashed back to various plays and movies about royals trying to escape their boring lives. Even if only for a day. Ne’avo probably was not cut out for that life. Not that it seemed worse than being a peasant, but… unpleasant in its own ways.

We flew in silence for a fair while longer, passing over desolate lands. Nothing was growing this far under the clouds, and it was clear that it was getting to Aara. It was probably getting to all of us, but to lesser degrees without the same connection to nature.

Lifting my hand, I looked at the string tying me to her and lightly held it with my other hand. Then, not quite knowing what I was doing, I decided to try to send positive energy towards her. Watching, I noticed her blink, face looking slightly less pale as she looked around. When her eyes fell on me, I offered a smile.

She returned it.

Turning my attention back to our flight path, through skies nearly as dark as night, I had another concern on my mind.

“How will we be sure we’re heading in the right direction?” I asked.

“You can probably break through these clouds,” Uké’el replied. “Every night, we’ll have you check where the northern triangle stars are, and keep following them. At least as long as there’s night… but by that point I should have a magical guideway set.”

“The Holy City is due north of here?” I asked.

“The Holy City is due north of everywhere,” Sukura said, bringing the pegasus closer.

“Pardon?”

“Right… you really aren’t from our world,” Sukura replied, blushing a little.

“The Holy City is at the northern pole,” Aara explained.

“It’s at the—” my mind froze up as ‘north pole’ and ‘elven city’ clicked together in my brain, and I struggled to maintain a normal facial expression.

It wasn’t that I wanted to laugh, but I felt I needed to have some sort of response to processing that fact. Despite the fact that it felt like a deeply inappropriate thing to notice as we flew over burnt out farms.

With a show of mental fortitude, I stayed focused on a different matter. “Will we need winter coats, then?”

“No?” Ne’avo replied. “It’s the summer?”

“Well, yeah, but poles are frozen all year,” I said, only to get stares. “I—well, the poles on Earth are… though… I guess they weren’t during, like, the dinosaur days.”

The others were quiet for a moment, before Aara spoke up.

“Your world sounds very odd.”

“I can accept that,” I replied.

-

The peaceful travel was interrupted after another hour. A roaming flock of demonic birds discovered us and swarmed our way. They weren’t a serious threat, but they were plenty annoying to deal with. Like a swarm of mosquitos, but bigger and more dangerous.

Trying to avoid them, those riding the float-carpet dropped into a dead forest for shelter. By the time I had cleared out the demonic birds and then flown down to check on the others, they’d come to the conclusion it was late and we needed to rest.

Setting up camp directly under the battle seemed foolish, but we kept low, under the cover of the dead trees, to cross a few kilometres of wooded country. In the end, we found a small cliff face with trees up to its base to make our camp. Uké’el then showed me how to create a barrier ward, to assist in protection while she and I took turns keeping watch. We both needed to be at full strength when we eventually reached the holy city, and so both rested and ate more than we normally did.

-

We rose early the next morning, wanting to be up before the sun rose. I pushed my way into the air and above the clouds, checking for the stars that made the Northern Triangle. I had learned to identify them a while ago, having spent enough time travelling under the unpolluted skies of this world, so it didn’t take long to find them.

Then I dove down to the level of the others, confirming that north was roughly the direction Aara thought it was. (And quite divergent from Ne’avo’s guess, the princess begrudgingly admitting she was still under some effects of her untraceability spell.)

Setting out towards the north, we continued to cross over dead lands. There were ruined settlements now and again, but the lands also seemed to become wilder as we travelled. Even with warmer temperatures than either pole on Earth, it was probably tricky to farm with six months of darkness.

Apart from sparse farms amongst dead forests, there were dark forces moving about. Not as many as I’d expected, though. Without the same need for logistics (thanks to the whole not eating thing) it seemed there was less need to do anything with conquered territories.

We clashed from time to time with those forces that were present during the days it took to head towards the holy city, while also avoiding anything that seemed like it would be a significant threat. Our focus was on moving northward as quickly as possible, hoping that slaying Nemza would destabilize the enemy forces. Or talking sense into her, but I was feeling less and less confident that was possible, the more razed towns and villages we flew over.

-

“How do we know she’s in the Holy City?” I asked, as we set up a camp in hills that Ne’avo said were not far from the city itself.

It was definitely cooler here, but no worse than jacket weather. Aara’s fur stood up to trap air while the rest were dressed for it, so it wasn’t too bad.

“She has to be,” Uké’el replied. “If you clear out the temples of her dark magic that binds them, then the other gods will be able to manifest in our world and intervene. Which would surely turn the tide as much as killing her.”

“Ah,” I replied, as I processed what that meant.

Did we want to let the gods back in so easily?

They were the lesser evil, I supposed. So bringing them in was far from the worst option. Though I hoped taking out the central commands of Nemza would break the enemy before we had to do that.

We were quiet for much of the rest of the evening, eating a small meal while the stress of what tomorrow would likely hold weighing on us. Sure, we’d battled Nemza’s elite forces, but there was a reason she was in charge. I remembered how my encounter with her had gone. The pain of her magical attacks stabbing into my skin. While I had spent the last months training in every way I could manage, I still had to wonder if it would be enough.

Fear of her dark sorcery was obvious in the eyes of the others as we set up camp. Uké’el made sure the defensive wards were perfect, and then made sure again. Aara had found some mushrooms growing nearby and had sat to commune with those, glad to see something living in the darkness. Sukura had practiced the steps of her bladework in silence, before slumping into her bed roll. Her going to bed seemed to cause the others to give in to their own tiredness.

When all the others had moved quietly to rest, I realised Ne’avo was sitting watching the distant horizon, hugging the Sword of Loj. She seemed quite unaware of the world around her, and it was hard to see her, a dark figure in a dark forest.

“You should sleep, you know,” I said, sitting beside her and putting a wing around her.

“It’s going to be real,” she mumbled, seeming to barely notice the physical contact. “Everyone… they’re all gone.”

With that, she hugged the sword tighter, a shiver running through her body.

“They…” the words died in my throat. I was going to try to encourage her to have hope. To try to hold on to the chance that some of them might have been made prisoners, but…

There must have been a reason she was so certain. I wasn’t there when the city fell. Maybe she’d heard confirmation some of them were killed… or maybe she thought surviving and being tortured by Nemza was a fate worse than death.

“I hate the way I’m feeling guilty,” she muttered, filling the silence I’d left.

“Surviving is nothing to feel guilty about,” I replied.

She shook her head. “It’s not about living. It’s about—about being upset that she’s going to be the only family member to ever find out I’m actually a woman. My mother and father should have gotten to see that… to see how happy I can be like this… not her. But it’s such a selfish thing to be upset about, isn’t it?”

“No,” I replied. “I’m certain your parents would have been upset to miss out on truly meeting their daughter too. I can tell you mine were glad to get to know the real me.”

With that a sob shuddered through her, Ne’avo leaning her muscular frame against me and accepting a hug as she cried into my shoulder. I tried to use the ability I’d found before once again, and did what I could to send positive emotions into her. I wasn’t sure quite how well it worked, but she drifted off to sleep as her sobs subsided.

-

The next morning, we decided to stay low for the last distance towards the city. The pegasus trotted along the ground, while the rest of us rode the float-carpet as it hovered barely a metre in the air. It was a bit slower going than soaring over, but it was also more subtle. We didn’t want to give Nemza and her forces any more warning than we had to.

“What happens if there’s alarm barriers?” I asked, some way into the morning.

“Their magic is the strongest, and therefore the easiest to detect, near the ground,” Uké’el replied. “Aara and I are both keeping our minds focused for any signs of anything.”

“Whether we can do anything about it or not is another question,” Aara added, with a nervous laugh, “but we’ll at least know we set it off.”

I gave a small nod, and went back to sitting quietly beside Ne’avo. Whether she’d worked through the emotions of last night, or just refused to show them to the others, I didn’t know, but she’d decided to spend the morning quietly running through possible lines to say to Nemza.

“In the name of the Moon and Justice I—no, no. That’s not personal enough,” she muttered. “I am the past come back to… that feels clunky to say.”

“You’re putting a lot of thought into this,” I said, keeping my voice quiet so as not to disturb the others.

“Every good hero needs something iconic to say when they meet the big bad for the final smackdown,” she replied. “All the old books have that.”

“But did they actually say that?” Sukura asked, riding close behind us. “Or is it just like how you think of the perfect reply in an argument weeks later? They realise what they should have said, and put that in the official account to look better.”

“I… uh… I suppose some of those books did say that certain elements were dramatized for greater effect,” Ne’avo mumbled, looking lost in thought.