Grace’s village was near the edge of the highlands, mere two miles from the wastes, where tall cliffs separated the rocky desert from the rest of the fertile south. Like in every single settlement in the region, the only class humans got was the Commoner, the lack of Healers and Priests making a hard life even harder.
Grace, however, wasn’t even a Commoner. Her people received their classes upon turning eighteen, and she was a month away from seventeen. With her beaten up and without a class, crossing three miles in the rocky desert with her proved more difficult than the thirty-odd they had covered alone. Yet, an hour and a half later, with the sun already hidden behind the western horizon, they were at the base of the cliff.
“We’ll climb it tomorrow morning,” Muriel didn’t hesitate before making the decision.
She and Stephan might have safely climbed the rough wall in poor light. But even with just the two of them, there was no need to take the risk. As for achieving the feat while hauling Grace up…
“For now, let’s find some shelter. Hopefully, we won’t run into a wasteland lion.” She turned left and right before picking left.
A handful of minutes later, Grace was sleeping in a nook after nibbling on what remained of Stephan’s smoked duck. Muriel grumbled, back against the rock. Wind muffled her words, yet he caught “pretty face” more than once, but she made no attempts at coherent complaints.
Soon, her breathing grew deeper and more regular. She was asleep, with only Stephan left awake to keep watch. He raised his gaze towards the distant moon and the cloudless sky.
The stars looked frozen in a swirl, sitting there, watching. And so were the gods.
Can I use the dream messages to talk to them? Stephan fiddled with the blessed dagger as he considered the thought, but realized it was almost certainly impossible. The gods would need to sleep, with their dreams accessible to whatever creature Stephan had made the pact with.
Is there any other way to communicate with them? If they can see more than I can, they could direct me toward better futures. Or places where I could grow faster?
While unlikely, it was certainly an avenue worth exploring. At worst, he would waste a dream message, and he had little need for those. The best-case scenario… he didn’t even dare imagine it. Having divine guidance and having the gods mobilize the faithful would make his tasks countless times easier.
Even though he dared not hope, he still fantasized about what he could achieve if he made contact. For example, he could reduce the number of extra lives he had so that the ones he held most dear would remember him.
Muriel roused from her sleep.
“Grab some rest,” she said groggily, and Stephan settled himself as comfortably as he could, thinking he wanted to send a message to Hope.
***
“Yeah, nice try that one.” His doppelgänger sat behind the desk in Marshal Harrington’s study. “You’re not the quickest Paladin, I can tell you that, but you eventually had the idea. I’m charging you one message even though the attempt failed, but you get to chat a bit more with me.”
Stephan’s double grinned. “I’m generous, aren’t I?”
Stephan kept thinking in silence before drawing the logical conclusion. “Are you trying to cheat or deceive me?”
“What kind of question is that? It’s like that riddle with one brother who always lies and the other always tells the truth. I’d say no either way.” The monster’s words flowed like honey, the smile only growing wider, and it didn’t care one whit for Stephan’s glare. “Of course I have a hidden agenda; there’s just no reason for you to know about it, young man.”
He cracked his neck, twisting his head full circle. The spine-breaking gesture made Stephan wince, had the nightmare anything in common with a normal human it would have dropped dead.
“Now, your petty little gods don’t know anything about your other lives. The cost of transporting you back and forth is so huge you can’t even comprehend it. And there’s no telling how much it would cost for a god to achieve something similar. If I had to guess, I’d say they would implode if they tried it, the act sucking up all their accumulated faith in a blink.”
Stephan frowned. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Just letting you know there are absolutely no consequences for your actions. The only ones who will remember anything are me and you, and my memory of your lives isn’t perfect. Besides, I don’t care what you do. So in reality, whatever you do is up to you.” The doppelgänger smiled, showing the teeth of a river dragon. “There are no morals, anything, anything you feel like doing, you can do, and nobody will judge you. Someone offends you, snap their head off, you like a woman—”
“I won’t commit the evil I swore to stop,” Stephan said with certainty, but his other self laughed.
“Whatever you say, buddy. Here’s to that.” The monster raised its glass, and Stephan was in a giant bed, longer and wider than his family’s house.
Lacy climbed in, nude, followed by Anita and Muriel, then every other woman Stephan had ever stolen a glance of.
He awoke with a start, vividly remembering his dream and the terror with which he fled from the naked women. Muriel leaned over him, and Stephan nearly screamed, barely resisting the urge to scamper away.
“Bad dream?” she asked.
“Real nightmare,” he said, not wanting to elaborate, instead noting Muriel had changed her clothes from the fine and airy desert garb to the southern all-woolen set.
“I’ll get dressed too; you wake up Grace.” Stephan went behind the rock with his pack of clothes, and by the time he returned, Grace was already awake and waiting.
“So, how do we do this?” she asked.
Stephan looked up, and he asked himself the same question. The wall wasn’t entirely vertical, but it wasn’t a long way from it. There were some angle changes and ledges, but it sparked a question.
“How did you get down from up there?”
“I don’t know,” she hugged herself, as if showcasing the cuts and bruises. “I started climbing and sliding slowly, holding the bushes with my hands and digging my feet into the ground, but then the enforcers caught up. I hurried and slipped, and then I rolled and tumbled down, grabbing at anything I could. I don’t know.”
She was certainly bruised and scraped enough to match the story; her nails a broken mess, but her luck must have been really good to survive a tumble from such height.
“And the men chasing you?”
“They were more careful. By the time I was at the bottom they were still a long way up, and I ran into the desert.”
Stephan glanced at Muriel, who shrugged. “Even if there’s a somewhat easier ridge somewhere, we’d lose more time searching for it than we would save when climbing. I can scale this cliff without a problem. Can you, with her on your back?”
“I never tried anything like scaling a cliff.” Stephan looked up and gulped. The top was really, really far up, with some scrawny trees and stubborn bushes sticking out here and there. “How about I try alone first, and then I’ll come back and carry her?”
His tone was anything but confident, but Muriel gave him a nod with a ‘that’s sensible’ face, and Stephan started climbing.
The first stretch was nearly sheer rock. Stephan gazed upwards as much as he dared, but his fingers were the ones doing the looking. Carefully he sought the holes and solid handholds pitting the face. There were enough to find the next one with each move and climb with caution, as long as he kept his mind off of the rocky ground growing further and further away from him.
Thirty feet up, he raised his arm and reached out, but found air instead of rock. His hand slowly went down, seeking until it found solid purchase, and Stephan hauled himself onto a narrow ledge, barely a foot wide. It cut across the wall left and right as far as the eye could see, at places wider, at others nearly swallowed whole before widening again.
He pressed himself against the stone, breathing deeply, using the chance to regain focus. He didn’t dare look down. Instead, he kept his eyes on the bluff. The rock had grown slightly darker with clearer layers ranging from reddish-brown to dun.
More importantly, the slope eased. It still towered above and terrified him, threatening to end his life if he grew careless, but it made for an easier climb.
That’s what he thought—right until the softer rock shifted under his fingers. It didn’t snap. A part crumbled beneath his weight, sliding and clicking as it tumbled against the cliff, then fell down into the open air below.
Every muscle locked as Stephan dug his other hand and his toes into the soft rock, hugging it with all his might. A breath passed. He didn’t slide down. He didn’t fall. The wasteland was at least forty feet down.
There’s no easier patch. I’m not even one-fifth of the way up. Focus.
The sheer rock was honest if brutal, but the gentler slope was treacherous. He continued with caution. He grabbed, slowly increasing the weight he dared rest on each limb until he confirmed the hold could support him, then moved the next limb, inching up towards the top.
The notion of progress and elevation disappeared, safety the only thing on Stephan’s mind. Then his hand brushed against something that wasn’t stone. He gripped the other handhold harder and returned the hand to the previous one before he leaned back a bit to see what it was that he had found.
A dry fiber of a dangling root. He followed it up the bluff, where he saw a bramble bush clinging to the cliff.
Stephan exhaled something between a tired laugh and a groan.
Oh that’s just perfect…