The Voice

"My, my," a voice said, "so this is where my sister has been hiding has it?"

Is this the afterlife? Zern wondered to himself. Was that a god? If it was then the man's voice seemed jovial, he'd been expecting some apathetic being, one that demanded praise rather than looked after his followers.

He opened his eyes. He was in a… cave? Yes, that was uncut stone illuminated from the bottom by a moving light, probably a fire. Was the afterlife really to start inside such a place? Memories began to flash into his mind. Memories of times when the air was thick, lives short, days long, nights painful and–for many–death a blessing. 

He crushed those thoughts in his mind, he was not in that place.

He leaned up and turned to the side to see a fire with a boiling pot bubbling along with a stew inside. A man across from him attended it carefully stirring the pot with a wooden spoon. The man had short onyx black hair and with striking blue eyes, and was whistling?

"Are you a god? Are you the god?"

"No, and no." The man said pulling the spoon out and taking a taster. "I'm a cook at the moment, and a particularly good one if I do say so myself." The man smiled at the pot, took a bowl from behind him, filled it and handed it towards Zern. "And as a cook I can offer you a bowl of stew."

Zern stared at the meat stew. He didn't recognise the ingredients inside of it. The meat was a strange yellow but appeared crusted as well, as if it had been roasted then stewed, it seemed extravagant. He quietly took the bowl and placed it next to him as the man handed him a spoon.

"If you're neither a god, but you're a cook, and I'm in the afterlife–"

"You're not dead my good friend," the man said, "and it would be a shame if you were." He raised one of his thin, delicate and beautiful eyebrows as he enjoyed the bowl of soup. "I haven't even gotten to know you yet."

"Know me?"

"Yes."

"Why would you want to know me?"

"Why wouldn't I," he smirked for a moment and wiped his mouth with a cloth, "although I understand your confusion, you're unaware of what you've done."

"What I've done."

The man nodded. "Yes, it was certainly strange to hear the dying roar of a sibling you'd been searching for, for so long but could never find."

"Was that hobgoblin your sibling?"

The man cocked his head and let out a small giggle. "Thirteen skies no, but you'll figure out who my sister was in due time, I'm sure of it, surely you can't have killed many people in such a short time?" 

The man paused and took another spoonful of stew. "You're new to this, I'll warn you, what you have inside you is nothing normal, holding one of the Words is both the honor and the curse of the cosmos."

"'The words'?"

The man nodded. "Yes the Words, you'll learn what they are eventually, it's what saved your life… well that and a little intervention from myself of course, I came here after all to see my sister."

"I don't even know who your sister is and I don't care." Zern said clearly. "What are these Words you keep referring to?"

"So many questions in only our first meeting? Do quiet yourself, I haven't even opened with a performance yet." The man said standing up and putting his bowl to the side.

"Performance?"

Standing up the man's fine clothes came into prominent view. He had a tailored black coat that covered his torso arms and much of his legs with only the other piece of clothing visible being his equally dark black pants. Neither were as dark as the man's onyx hair but both pieces still would've made him like a shadow in the nighttime.

"Yes," the man said, grabbing a flute, "what appearance of mine to someone such as yourself will be without a performance? Regardless, I'll stop speaking in the way you would desire, from now on, whether it be performance or preferential potential presentation, I'll run my tongue in the worst of ways."

Zern looked up at the man with unflinching eyes. He didn't know what to make of the man, he seemed slightly crazy, he was at least a little eccentric; the quips and wordplay gave that away.

The man took his flute and then stared at it. He looked down at Zern and sighed.

"Wouldn't be yet, that will wait, and I'll have a surprise to make. Now I'll allow you to have some venuan before you return to lose such fun."

"Venuan?"

The crazy man smiled at him and took a bow. "It is rude for a man to not introduce himself. My name is announced in many different ways, but you may call me–and it is a humble pleasure to meet you–Veen the playwright."

"Veen?" Zern asked, looking at the man whose short hair dangled over the fire as he bowed over it. "Zern."

"Zern, Zern, Zern. No, no, that's not your name, if it was then you'd be someone else, but I won't pry further, our time here is ending."

"Ending? What are you talking about?"

The cave around him seemed to shake and quake. The bowl of soup shook and liquid splashed side to side. The strange man known as Veen packed up the various cooking utensils which was scattered around the room and quickly threw them into his pack.

"This world which I constructed cannot last forever. My good friends, brightest and greatest of all have found me, not so fond are they when I build them new homes?"

Zern gave up trying to understand the man. He talked nonsense, perhaps there was some wisdom in his words but he hadn't found them yet.

The man put out the fire with a dash of blue sand and bowed once again. "I would not try to contact me unless in great need, let me find you and seldom will I ever come near you. Zern, you hold one of the lesser Words but do not underestimate it, I do not like talking within such a serious manner but the ascension of a new Wordbearer requires such a thing. Do not let the whispers, the rot and the words cloud the mind, let it guide but not consume. You are ultimately more important than the very splinters of the universe that rules the cosmos. Do not let the great game pull you away from your duty as it had done so for me, do not let the Word that you have become overtake you, speak to it for Voice may in the end speak for you or itself."

"What are you talking about?" Zern asked, staggering up.

"Farewell."

The cave shattered around him in a single glass like motion. The man–as if he was a part of this stained glass illusion–shattered into a million pieces around him. The world returned to momentary blackness before he felt a cool breeze on him. He heard voices, foreign but he could understand them. They were distant for a moment as if his mind was still stuck in that cave while his body where he was now. The voices coalesced into words and Zern opened his eyes.

He saw blue skies and three faces. One he recognised, two he didn't. There was a woman, around his age, an older man perhaps in his early fifties and then another slightly older man who he recognised. Heede was with them.

"He's alive," the woman around his age said to the older man in a language he shouldn't have understood but did. "How is that possible, he was dead yesterday?"

"Foreign men have foreign miracles." The older man said in that strange foreign language.

"You're alive," Heede said, "somehow. You should be dead. I came back to retrieve your body expecting that you'd died weeks ago but–"

"Weeks ago?!" Zern said flustered. "No, I swear I'd only fallen asleep, it couldn't have been more than a few hours."

Heede shook his head slowly. "The ambush was three weeks ago. You died, or at least should've died three weeks ago."

Zern pulled himself up. The virus of pain that he'd seemingly felt only moments before had completely vanished. He felt at the hole in his chest he should've had. Nothing was there. The too big of a hole was now non-existent, the only thing proving its existence was the crusted blood around it. 

"How are you alive?" Heede asked.

"I don't know," Zern said, "I was here one moment, in a dream the next and then woke up here."

"Dream? What happened in said dream."

Zern's heart pounded at the question. He felt a trickle of sweat running down his back, it was as if he own body was warning him not to answer the question. He ignored it.

"I don't know," his voice said, "I don't remember anything about it except that it happened, as if a thick and hazy fog had fallen from atop my mind and shrouded it in a senility."

What? Zern thought. That wasn't what I'd intended to say.

That voice wasn't his own. It wasn't what he'd commanded his body to say. It was as if when he commanded his body to say one thing it had rejected him and done something entirely different. Was his humours unbalanced? It was a possibility… but what if?

What if Veen really had happened and what he said was true.

Had that man… Veen, a babbling fool, had really saved his life or condemned him to be fighting with his own body? And what was he talking about? He didn't understand half the phrases and words the man said. Wordbearer, the Voice, that unsightly and uncomfortable yellow meat, what did any of it mean? Did it mean anything or was it simply a figment of his imagination as truly divine intervention saved him? He wasn't sure.

"He seems unsettled." The woman said, staring at him.

"Yes, very much so." The older man said.

"I can understand you two."

The two unfamiliar figures looked at him in surprise, Heede followed suit.

"Perhaps he's a little delirious." The older man said.

"'Perhaps he's a little delirious.'" Zern said in the language of the man abruptly.

The man fell onto the ground in shock. Heede too took a step back while the woman put a hand to her mouth. Zern heard his own voice and put both hands over his mouth as if thinking it wasn't his own voice.

But it was. That was his voice. There was no doubt about it, he'd understood and spoken a language he'd never heard before. That shouldn't have been possible. First it was different words, then a language he knew nothing of. What was going on? Had something possessed him? It was a possibility, after all the term 'Wordbearer' indicated the idea of him bearing something.

The words connected together in his scattered mind. If what the babbling Veen had said was true then he was a vessel to a Word? A vessel to a Word, but what was a Word? He didn't know, all he did know was that Veen had implied that this Word was Voice. Voice, but that could mean so many things couldn't it?

"I need some food," Zern said to the older man in the man's language, "some water too."

The older man nodded but slowly, he seemed uncomfortable with the idea of some he'd just met talking to him in his own language so fluently. Zern understood how uncomfortable the man was feeling, he was feeling that level of uncertainty and uncomfortability as well.

"My house is only a half day's walk away, can you move?"

Zern nodded.

The older man turned to the younger woman. "Can you ensure he keeps up, Nara?"

The young woman nodded back towards the older man. "Yes, tatus."

Zern turned towards Heede. "How long did you have to run for to find these people?" He spoke within his own native language which Heede knew.

Heede looked at him with sharp eyes as if focusing in on something specifically. "Two days before I finally found them. Another week till they let me enter their home, they must've thought I was some bandit."

"Can you play them?"

"No." Heede said, taking his eyes off Zern for a moment before returning to focus on the same spot he was looking at before. "Were your—no never mind." He said before walking off behind him.

Zern looked around. The older man and younger woman–who he only knew as Nara and as 'tatus' which he presumed was a title rather than name–had set up a small camp around him, nothing substantial, just some bedding and backpacks. They were obviously going to do something else here.

Zern focused in on the place where a hole was supposed to be in his chest before looking upwards and speaking in the other's language. "What of the caravan?"

"Burnt to the ground and destroyed," the older man said, "barely a scrap left apart from some cloth that was ripped in the raid."

"Do you know who it was?"

The older man let out a small nod looking over towards the burnt remnants of the caravan behind him. "I will tell you on the way, but we must get moving. I do not want to be caught out here at night time, and if we are, I want to be near a cave."

Zern nodded and half an hour later he was walking with makeshift crutches. The young girl called Nara travelled with him ensuring he didn't fall over when he struggled with the crutches. 

It was odd, he should've been able to walk fine but he was unsteady, as if he could fall over for no reason even if he could withstand a great gale of wind otherwise. Why? Why was his body so weird, why was the last few weeks so strange, he'd died once and experienced some type of psychosis before, or at least that's what he thought. The time when he'd been trapped under the grey monster, mixing in its terrible stomach fluids he'd thought he was dying, but then after seeing everything about his body was fine he thought he was simply hallucinating, but now… he wasn't so sure. Nothing seemed to add up.

Maybe if I'd just kept on breathing Dol—no! He wanted to stab himself at the very thought.

"Are you well?" Nara asked, seeing his clenched fist?

"Yes," he said to her, "just some phantom pain I believe."

"Strange," she said nodding, "I've never seen a foreigner speak Lihyon, and never would I think they could speak it so well."

"You're unnerved by it?"

"Yes."

"I see, why is that?"

She looked at him as if he'd said something stupid, then she studied him for a moment and sighed as if remembering he wasn't of her own people. "It's the old language of the peasantry, few speak it, most have learnt the revised language orchestrated by the Southern Administration. My tongue is dying, that is why it is unnerving to see it spoken so well by a man born so far from here."

"A dying language…" Zern said letting the words hang as he was helped down a small boulder. 

Nara nodded.

"Why is it dying compared to its revised counterpart?"

"Why would you ask such a thing?"

"My own curiosity."

"Your own rudeness." She said to correct him.

Zern saw the older man stiffen at the term as if he was uncomfortable at insulting someone they were looking after. The man did not contribute; he just kept leading with Heede behind him and then himself and Nara after that.

Then as if to spite him the older man did contribute to the conversation.

"The man who attacked you was the Grand Lieutenant."

"Grand Lieutenant?"

The older man nodded. "A fierce and skinny Hobgoblin from the Fox clan."

"Fox clan?"

He knew of some of the Hobgoblin clans, there were supposedly three in totality: Boar, Wolf and Tiger. The Hierarchy was formed around their competing methods but also singular goals. He didn't know there could be more than three, although he was never told anything more about these clans other than their existence.

"They're from the highest sections of the mountains the Hierarchy controls. They live in the most brutal and toughest conditions out of all of them, they are the most savage and brutal, they are not like the rest. They do not have honor, they have savagery. They do not have respect, they have ruthlessness. They are not calm, they are berserkers.

"The man who attacked you is their most dangerous. Drorek Fox, the Grand Lieutenant. A genius in all aspects, fighting, administrating, even what is forbidden within the Hierarchy itself, the arcane."

"Arcane?"

At the word even Heede's ear perked up. In all languages the word 'magic' or 'arcane' were similar with only slight differences, it was something seemingly universal even if its use was certainly not.

"Yes, the man is magically gifted, granted by privilege to use such powers. None else in the entire Hierarchy are permitted to do so." The older man said. "He is perhaps one of the most dangerous single men to ever command a host even if ever so small."

"Small? If what you're implying is true then this man should be commanding a host to march west."

"He is disliked amongst higher echelons," the older man continued, "power does not necessarily make a man popular, often the opposite in fact. His magic affinity only continues to sow distrust amongst leaders, they fear him, fear that one day he may command enough power and popularity to overthrow the great council itself. So they give him a few hundred men to do with what he pleases and vague orders to 'subjugate and harass'. Those few hundred men have proven effective at striking fear into those who remain this far to the north."

"A single man and his few hundred troops have subjugated an entire region?"

The older man nodded.

"They do not know who your friend is and they presume you are dead. You are safe, but myself and my daughter are not. We cannot hold on to you for long, you may stay until you are fully healed, then I cannot hold you in my care for any longer, lest you bring undue risk."

"I understand, I cannot find the correct words to thank you."

"There's no need to," the older man said, "I've seen enough death near my lands, sometimes I want to see some life as well."

The man went silent after that and continued marching forwards. The hours went past and by the time the sun was beginning to fade into the night sky they'd walked for almost fifteen hours. They'd primarily followed a small river, the man had insisted, so that if they were being tracked they could lose their trackers on it. After following that for four hours they marched through a forest which had taken most of the fifteen hour march, it had tall trees with short branches and thick grayish brown bark, finally they passed through a small rock pass where they came into a lush valley grove which overlooked a small field. At the top of the grove–which was also a small hill–sat a wooden house on stilts. 

"Is that your home?" Zern asked Nara.

Nara nodded.

"It's well hidden."

She nodded again. "That was why we were so surprised to see your friend had found it."

"It's beautiful." Zern said observing the full majesty of this hidden valley.

The trees were shaped in odd but comforting ways, the ground was filled with small spider lilies that seemed to emanate a warm red-orange glow, there was a pond next to the house with a small squadron of fish and the setting sun seemed to hit the valley in just the right spot so as to ensure rays shone through the rocks. It was like he'd walked into a paradise.

"Yes it is." Nara said softly, before walking over to her tatus.

"You did well finding this place." Zern said walking over to Heede with his crouches which he'd gotten the hang of.

"Luck. I was lucky to find this place. Pure chance, honestly."

"Well your luck has saved me and certainly done well for you." Zern said softly. "We can stay here for at least a few more days while we decide what we should do next."

Heede nodded before breaking away as Nara and her tatus called them over towards the house. 

Zern watched and put his hand over his heart. His heart was screaming at him for some reason, he'd been ignoring. He would continue to ignore it if it didn't matter. His mind was clouded, too many things had happened to him too quickly to process it.

He sighed and walked across to the small pond near the front of the stilted house. He stared into its shallow depths and at the school of fish that swam in circles around the edges of the pound. 

There was something wrong with him. Deeply wrong. He needed to figure out what it was. That wasn't his only problem, he needed to figure out what to do about this so-called Grand Lieutenant who might cause him trouble and finally figure out what to do about his whole exile thing.

Did he really want exile? No, but there was nothing for him in a land at war. He didn't want war. He didn't want to fight, he didn't want to kill, not after so much of it.

He continued to stare into the pond. Eyes inside of it stared back at him. The eyes of the hobgoblin he'd killed. He didn't flinch, or move, he wasn't startled by the things' appearance, just confused. There were so many other people who he'd killed who could've been more impactful to show him. Why did his mind manifest this one?

The face in the water screamed at him in a language he understood instantly. It was the usual thing that he would've expected a spirit to scream at him. He ignored it and dropped a stone in the water. The face inside of it disappeared.

He turned back towards the house and followed the other three inside of it.