Weaponsmith - Chapter 74 (Patreon)

Hineni walks to the window of the room, looking down at the street below.

His mother was always a strange woman. She was a bit on the airy side of things. She was always a little dreamy and a little out there, but sharp as a tack in her younger years.

— If the fake life that he had spent with Nikyah counts, then her age had gotten to her in the end, eventually.

But he doesn’t know if that depiction of her was real or not. He still doesn’t know if that experience as a whole was real or not, or if it wasn’t just some advanced dream state.

And this journal, she had kept it in this reality and here, before she died, she was very much aware of her life and her surroundings when she wrote this. She wasn’t ‘troubled’, for a lack of a better word.

He stands there, watching people start to rush around, as rain begins to fall from the sky. Gray clouds fill the air, bringing on the break of night a few hours earlier than expected.

There are many words that have five letters. Although, he can’t think of many animals off of the tip of his tongue. At least ones that are represented by a god of some sort, in any particular manner.

But there are other gods, ones who have shown interest in him already, to varying degrees.

‘Death’, the dramatic primal god had explicitly called for him, he had explicitly tried to recruit him, to help foster what is stated to be a ‘season of death’.

But Hineni turned him down.

However, Hineni realizes, as he stares out of the window at the rain that begins to pour, that he had simply been thinking too small.

He had been thinking with threes.

He had been thinking with fours.

And he had been thinking with fives.

But the rules from the start have been, ‘don’t try to count its eyes’.

He recalls Beni’s frantic, horrified, frothing screaming, before he was pacified.

Thunder cracks outside, accentuating the heavy downpour and Hineni watches as a group of people laugh and run down the street. They hold hands in a chain on their way to duck inside through his very own door, to find shelter.

There is another word, with five letters.

It represents something divine, in a sense.

Hineni lowers his eyes to the journal, which smells of his mother’s perfume and he opens it up again, reading the only word that is written inside of it on the first page.

‘Demon’.

It’s odd.

It’s written very neatly, perfectly, as if the author had taken an exquisite amount of time to write the word once and only once with the best mastery they could possess, as if it were the display title of the book. Even the ink looks like an expensive kind, given that it hasn’t begun to eat at the paper yet, after all of these years.

He flips the page over.

However, the same word sits here a hundred times, scratched into every inch of the page and then between the margins of each word, as if she had tried to fit it in as often as she could. From here on, the journal is nothing but this. Every single page is just the same word, over and over, inked so heavily that the paper is crumbled and loose from oversaturation. It has holes in many pages.

— It’s almost like ash has smoldered them away.

Hineni lifts his gaze, staring towards the ceiling.

“Eilig,” says the man.

It is quiet.

Nothing happens.

A moment later however, a board on the ceiling shifts, presumably being below the heating shaft. He looks at the fairy’s blurry face. She is peeking down his way. She had been watching him from up there.

“Have you ever read this?” he asks.

Eilig looks at him for a moment. “…I’m not allowed to talk about that,” she replies.

“Not even that? Did you make that promise to my dad, or my mom?” he asks.

“Your dad.”

Hineni looks at her. “…So you did talk with him?”

“Well duh!” she snaps. “Otherwise it’s hard to make a promise, isn’t it? Dummy.”

Rain continues to rattle the glass.

“Eilig. I need to know, what does this mean?”

The fairy stares at him for a while and rubs her arm, looking away. “I can’t talk with you about that.”

Hineni’s fingers clench the book. “Then why did you want me to see this so badly?!” he asks, feeling himself getting annoyed. “They’re dead, Eilig.”

“You think I don’t know that?!” yells the fairy. The window crackles as ice spreads all around the room in an instant. “Dick! I hate you so much! You killed them! YOU DON’T GET TO TELL ME THAT!”

Hineni stands there and then stops, lowering his hand. A heavy silence hangs in the room. He shakes his head and sighs. “I’m sorry, Eilig. You’re right,” he concedes, lowering his gaze back down towards the book in his hand. “I just…” He stops. “It’s…”

The room is quiet for a time, as they listen to the sound of the rain pouring outside. Thunder strikes again.

“You already know what this means,” says Eilig. “So stop asking me questions I can’t answer.”

Hineni nods.

“I just need to know one thing, Eilig. I get that you promised not to talk about it, so you showed me this instead. But why?”

The fairy isn’t clear to see, but he imagines that, given the shifting of her head, she is making a very sour expression. She leans down, yelling in rage. “Because we’re FAMILY! Asshole!”

Hineni blinks, feeling something wet hit his face from above.

Her voice cracks. “I don’t give a FUCK about that brat, or that annoying elf, or any of the other shits running through MY house,” yells Eilig. “But we’re on the same team here. You and me. Just us two. NOBODY else. We’re not on fucking team owl, we’re not on fucking team frog, we’re on team US,” barks the fairy. “You dumb shit-head!”

“Eilig…” says Hineni, not quite able to decide between being deeply touched and concerned. “You’re family for me too.”

“I gotta go,” says Eilig, pulling back from the ceiling. “If I die, at least I’ll be free of this crap.”

Hineni blinks. “’Die’?” he asks. “Why would you die?”

The blob stops where it is, looking down his way. She then slides the board back into place, vanishing into the bones of the house.

Hineni watches the ice vanish around the room, slowly dripping down onto the floors and rain rattles noisily against the window.

He turns his head, looking at the face of the familiar entity floating just outside of it.

Obscura.

She hangs there in her half-human form, hovering in front of the window.

Rain drenches her and the two of them stare at each other for a time, water pouring down over her from the rain, and water dripping down over him from the melted ice.

She lifts a talon, touching it against the glass, tapping it three times. No more. No less.

Hineni stares at her for a moment longer, feeling the book in his hand. His other hand moves up towards the window, towards where the tip of her finger still rests.

— If the frog-god as a notable, but obscure goddess is capable of such powerful magic, as to alter at least a sliver of reality, in order to suit her desires, then what could be said of an entity with a name of five letters?

Hineni taps against the window twice.

Five.

The two of them stare at another, knowing that the other knows.

His mother had warned him not to open a door if anyone knocked three times.

But she never said anything about a window.