Fugitive Status: Part 5 - Dreams of War

Hector finally reveals a brief history of his world, and the wars that formed a major backdrop to his life, and the development of Archemi itself...

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It started raining in the early evening. The water was warm, at first, beating down like a luke-warm shower. But the sky was so heavily overcast that the water was frigid by ten pm, sheeting down over the land and slowing our pace to a crawl.

Even so, we couldn't stop - not until our endurance was maxed out. We were deep into marshland by that point, wading through knee-deep water in the gloom of night. Stormy nights were the closest thing Archemi ever got to true darkness, outside of caves and dungeons. Erruku usually lit up the sky like a massive nightlight, bathing the land in a soft golden glow and deep shadows when the sun set. That light was nearly non-existent tonight. Fortunately, the Rite of Marantha had enhanced my vision in all sorts of ways, and all three of us relied heavily on my ability to see ahead as we picked our way through the swamps.

The further we went, the angrier I felt. At Baldr, at Skyr Arnaud, at my brother, at Archemi itself. The fact that we had to flee like escaped criminals through this shitty, monster-riddled landscape while Baldr camped the fucking Eyrie... I'd learned a long time ago that there was no such thing as 'fairness', not in the real world. But I couldn't shake the slow-building rage I felt, because Karalti was huddled under my wet cloak - shivering, exhausted and scared - instead of learning how to be a proper dragon from her mother.

There were very few refuges in this swampy hell: no caves, no rest stops, no discernable trails at all. With one eye on the map, I steered us toward what looked like an old peat-digger's hut on a small hillock. There were no signs of life in the area, save for the croaking of frogs and the rasp of cattails rubbing against one another in the bursts of rain and wind. No animals, no lights, no garden. There were wheelbarrows outside, all of them too decayed to wheel anywhere. There was a decrepit barn just big enough for one draft animal, which in Archemi generally meant triceratops or dwarf sauropods like Europasaurus - a cousin of the Brontosaurus about the size of a shire horse.

"This is one-hundred percent, absolutely not a house where people take other people to murder them." I steered Cutthroat toward the barn instead of the house itself. If the Mata Argis somehow followed us here, we had a much better chance of breaking out through the barn entry instead of the house. "Definitely not."

"Are we gonna get murdered?" Karalti tucked in closer to me.

“Fuck no. If anyone’s gonna get murdered, it's them.” I ducked as Cutthroat padded through the threshhold. "Don't worry, Tidbit. I told your mom that I’d protect you, and I won’t be letting you, her or myself down.”

She paused for a moment, digesting the words - or maybe the fierce feelings of protectiveness and love I felt as I cradled her in one arm, using the other hand to assist in unequipping Cutthroat’s tack. “Well… one day… Karalti will protect Hector!”

“Some day, Tidbit. You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, first.”

The barn's roof looked to be in good condition, enough that it was mostly dry inside. The building had been picked clean, too. There was nothing in here save for one rusted lantern, dirt, cobwebs, and a few moldering, empty sacks. There weren't even any rats, because there was nothing to eat.

Neither of the girls argued as I headed back outside, my hood drawn up against the rain. My own nutrition meter was low, but not critical. I was Fatigued, but both Karalti and Cutthroat were Exhausted: Cutthroat from the sheer effort of running with us on her back for miles, Karalti from being young and scared. There was no chance of me hunting any big game here, so I used rope and wooden toggles to set rabbit snares, then went down to the nearest swamp to fish for carp the way that some of southern guys in my unit had taught me - by stripping my shirt and groping around in the warm mud underneath where the surface plants grew thickest until a carp tried to swallow my fist. When I pulled my arm back, the catfish came out lashing and slippery, as big as Karalti was long. Five of those, and I set myself to my one remaining task. Traps.

I braided thin cordage from reeds and set tripwires, punji sticks, and several mean-but-effective booby traps I’d picked up during my time in the Army. Most of the traps we’d been taught involved explosives. There were all kinds of fun things you could do with grenades, but without those available, my best bets were heavy logs and springy trees. I inspected the hut for signs of civilian occupation, and when I didn’t find any, rigged the front door with a deadfall trap that would break the neck of almost anyone barging through. The path leading up to the hut had groves of plants that looked like a cross between willow and bamboo. I bent some of those back and bound sharpened spikes to them, set a tripwire, then carefully made my way back to the barn.

A couple hours later, and Karalti - happily stuffed with fish and as round as a beachball - sprawled across my chest with a contented sigh. “Hey, Hector?”

“Mmm?” I started up a little, not realizing that I’d nearly drifted off to sleep. I was lying on my back next to the embers of the tiny pit fire I’d dug, hands laced behind my head. "What is it, Tidbit?"

"How did the war start?"

“The Illian Civil War? Something about a crazy king causing the people to rebel against him, though I think it’s more complicated than that.”

Karalti chirped, and pulled herself up along my torso until she could arch her neck and peer down at my face. “No, silly. I mean, the Big War. The one you dream about all the time.”

That got my attention. My eyelids had been drooping again, but snapped open with sudden alertness.

"The Total Wars?" I hesitated. Was this really the sort of thing I could talk about with a hatchling dragon? "How about... how about I tell you when you're older?"

Karalti made a huffy sound of irritation. "Karalti see bad scary things when Hector sleeps. Why was there a big war? And why did all those humans die?"

"Mm." Grimacing, I thought it over. "Well... not much point in hiding if you can see what I dream. Hell, I didn’t even know I was dreaming, other than a couple times that I remember. I can try and explain… dunno if you’ll really understand any of it, though."

"Is okay." Karalti bobbed her head. "I try!"

Chuckling, I rested a hand on her back. "Well… I learned in school that the Total Wars started with a civil war. Not the one here in Ilia, but in a country called the USA." I took a moment to think about how to explain something as complex as the Total Wars to something that sounded like an intelligent, but innocent six-year old child. "The Second US Civil War was caused by a lot of different things going bad all at once. Environmental, social, political. The Colorado River dried up and threw the country into shambles. Then there were these things called 'deepfakes'-"

"What's a deepfake?"

"Well... where I'm from, everyone had devices they could use to take recordings of themselves, like moving pictures that other people could watch. We call them videos,” I said. “In my grandparents' day, those videos were mostly recordings of real people doing real things. And we made videos of everything: gardening, teaching lessons, playing games, reading out the news-"

"Why?"

I snorted. "Humans like watching other humans doing human stuff, I guess."

"Ooo." Karalti didn't seem entirely convinced, but she was invested in the story now.

"As the technology got better, though, we were able to make videos of other humans doing things that weren't actually real. Angry people in my country began publishing videos of our government saying and doing stuff they didn't say and do. Things were already kind of, uh, complicated before that, but by the time my parents were born, no one knew what was real any more. The country split into two sides. Both sides decided their reality was the only 'real' one and everyone else was evil or crazy and needed to be killed. The fighting started when my grandparents were about my age."

"Eeek. That's bad." Despite the mild way I was describing things, Karalti was picking up my actual feelings on the subject through the Bond. She shuddered.

"Yeah. The Second Civil War was a big bad." I sighed, gazing up at the cobwebbed ceiling overhead. "And it wasn’t just bad for us. When my country tore itself apart, it destabilized the entire world. Some bad people saw the chance to gain more power or take over other countries while the USA was fighting itself. That was the start of the First Total War, which was really a bunch of small wars all happening at the same time. It ended when all the little countries in the world became three big ones."

"Mmm." Karalti chirped to herself, curling in against my chest. "But that's not the one you dream about."

"No. All that stuff happened while I was really little." I reached down to pet her head and neck. "When I was a kid, one of the three big countries supposedly decided it wanted to take over the others and rule the world. A great big war started up again. I was called to fight in that one, but I didn't want to."

"Why?"

I shrugged. "I didn't know who was telling the truth, and I honestly didn't care that much. For all I knew, MY country was the one who'd decided it wanted to rule the world, and it was making stuff up to justify the war. I mean, my own government locked my family up in a camp when I was a baby. I didn't trust them for shit."

Karalti gasped. "Why they lock up baby Hector?!"

"Because the country my grandparents were from - Korea - had become part of the Pacific Alliance. Not willingly, mind you. But the government didn't care about that. They only cared about the fact that my granddad had originally been from North Korea." I rolled my eyes. "The fact he'd ESCAPED North Korea was beside the point."

Karalti vibrated with indignation. "That's not fair!"

"Nope. But it is what it is." I'd always hated that excuse from my parents growing up, and I hated saying it to Karalti now. But at the same time, what else could I say? "Anyway... yeah. I didn't want to go to war. I had no idea who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. When I was shipped to Indonesia, it only made it harder to tell. And then..."

"Then what?"

The words caught in my throat. How could I even describe what had happened? "One of the three big countries - we don't know which of the three - released a very bad disease as a kind of weapon. My government said it was the Pacific Alliance who created it, so that they could wipe out our people and take our land. But the disease hit the Pacific Alliance first, and they said WE had deployed it to kill them off. In the end, it didn't matter. The disease got out of control, and it ended up killing almost everyone in the entire world."

Karalti squeaked with alarm. "That's... that's bad!"

"Yeah. It was really bad." I found myself feeling kind of numb, which was a good thing. I didn't want Karalti to ever have to relieve some of the things I'd seen or felt during HEX.

The little dragon shivered from the empathic feedback anyway, rubbing her cheek against my hand like a cat. "Are there still any Earth humans? Alive?"

"Hard to say." I couldn't keep the heaviness out of my voice as I absently stroked the crown of small horn stubs that swept back from Karalti's skull. "I know that some people escaped to these great big sealed glass cities called Shards. The EU... one of the big countries, it was building a ring around the planet so that humans could live in space. It wasn't finished, but some people probably made it there."

Karalti peered up from under the shelter of my palm. "No more fighting now?"

I grimaced. "I'm pretty sure they're still fighting."

The dragon took a moment to digest the absurdity of that. "Humans are scary."

“We sure are, Tidbit.” I thought back to the expression on Baldr’s face as he and Arnaud had watched the guardsmen drag me away to the Eyrie’s dungeons, and grimaced. “We sure are.”