Chapter 36
Day 20
DX: Hello Anthea!
AN: Derxis
DX: You busy?
DX: Of course you are!
AN: Of course I am
DX: Ha!
AN: Why are you messaging me?
DX: Well, we haven’t spoken since Skywater
DX: It’s been like two weeks!
DX: But now Acarnus has got us on this new system so we can talk anytime!
AN: Are you trying to “cheer me up” again?
DX: no
DX: I know it is fruitless now
DX: The books are here right?
DX: The Burning Books
AN: yes
DX: I’m sorry
AN: You are envious, not sorry. You are a fool to want to see them.
DX: Can’t help it!
AN: My turn for a question
AN: why is there an orange ring around our planet?
DX: I became Champion!
DX: The first Champion, that’s me
AN: Congratulations
DX: Your hollow felicitations are to no avail! As part of my broadened suite of mind powers, I can now detect insincerity through text!
AN: oh
AN: Really?
DX: Does it matter?
AN: not to me
DX: Exactly!
DX: Not to me either.
DX: The trick is, the real trick, is that I’m more powerful the less I need to use my powers. They’re like training wheels! I will be most powerful when I never use my powers at all.
AN: That rings of self-deception
DX: It is! You’re getting it, Anthea!
AN: I do not believe I can complete my moon quest
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
DX: I agree
DX: You can’t
DX: You need a song
AN: yes
DX: But really we’re all in trouble
DX: As you know
AN: I know
DX: Our moon quests are tailored to our weaknesses. We can only finish them by working together. And in case you hadn’t noticed...
AN: I had noticed
AN: Yet, you finished yours
DX: ah
DX: well
DX: that was a mistake
AN: You attained Championship by accident?
DX: No, I mean that I failed by succeeding.
DX: Remember what I said about being more powerful the less I use my powers?
DX: It’s like that. I wasn’t supposed to awaken all of the Sentinels. It would have been better if I didn’t.
DX: I wasn’t supposed to do it. That was the real test, and I failed. My Champion status is like a joke prize.
DX: Fortunately, I’m all about jokes
DX: Speaking of which, I need to go
AN: Champion business on the Puddle Moon?
DX: Not quite
DX: Lord Fool and I are about to prank Lestradamus
AN: ...
AN: Do not kill him
Derxis quit the conversation and clutched his robes more tightly around himself. The wind had a bite this high up. It buffeted the tapestry, sometimes making it tilt dangerously. Derxis looked down, gripped his turban to keep it on, and peered past the fluttering tassels to the foothills of the High Ruins thousands of feet below. “Hey,” he asked the other passenger on the flying fabric, “you know anything about the Burning Books?” He made sure, with a pulse of his arda, to indicate that he wasn’t just talking about any burning books.
Lord Fool laughs, as is his wont. He plies the wind with effusive elucidations indicative of his deficiencies in this regard. Burning books? He has seen many! He recounts tales innumerable of scorching scrolls and searing scripts, of luminous ledgers and torrid tomes. Many are the texts which Lord Fool has himself emblazoned with sultry tongues of flame, or lit as upon funereal pyre for passage into the literary netherworld—and not all of them undeserved! Yet he knows not of these fiery harbingers of doom which haunt the Hero of Wind and entrance the Champion of Chumps.
Derxis giggled at that. Champion of Chumps! He’d be stealing that one.
Four moons in four phases marked the twilight sky in a line overhead as Derxis and Lord Fool came to the High Ruins. The moons all looked different. Different colors, different shapes. Some of them he had not visited in person. Twenty days, and he hadn’t even been to all the moons. A dim band of twinkling orange light partly obscured several of them as it arced from horizon to horizon. Hard to ignore Ardia’s new planetary ring. For Derxis, it was only a reminder of failure.
Derxis’s marvelous aerial tapestry swayed hilariously in the gaining wind, and it trailed a sparkling stream of auburn motes behind like a fizzling firework. Lord Fool jingled and hummed an indecipherable melody as he shuffled about on the tapestry behind Derxis. He was probably casting lots with himself. Derxis didn’t know how that worked or why Lord Fool did it, but he had learned better than to try to look into Lord Fool’s mind to find out. It was a madhouse in there, and the madness was contagious.
“Say,” said Derxis. “This won’t...uh, kill the spook, right?”
What, kill? Lord Fool expresses the insincerest of innocence. Only within a certain spectrum of meanings metaphorical. Yet the spook must be shaken—yes! Shaken, as all must be. The watchmen must be shaken awake, lest the walls be shaken to the ground. Ah! The didactic decarch graces the cool twilight with a paean to pandemonium, and an encomium of absurdity. And Lord Fool goes on to elaborate his meaning in the clearest possible of terms, such that even the Crown Prince of Fools can attain comprehension.
“Oh, good,” said Derxis. “I was just curious about all this napalm.” He slapped the shiny wax-sealed barrel fastened securely beside him. It wasn’t any bigger than Derxis, but according to Lord Fool it contained several thousand gallons of patent-pending blue napalm. Any or all of that statement could be a lie. For all Derxis knew, it was actually full of eggshells, or baroque hats, or nothing. But Derxis trusted Lord Fool in the way that anyone trusts a certified lunatic: that regardless of anything else, there would be lunacy. And that was quite enough to satisfy Derxis.
The screeching of beasts startled them before Lord Fool could construct a response. Winged monsters rose up ahead, disturbed from their roosts atop the spires of the High Ruins by the passage of the flying tapestry. Derxis was ready for them.
He played his zurna; he shone with orange. The music formed itself into globules of light that bubbled in accumulation around him, then flounced on ahead like jellyfish. Like bubbles rising in water, the gelatinous clumps of light sought out the monsters, adhered to them. The music sank in—soothing, calming. The dazed monsters retreated.
The tapestry flew on through the darkening night, its occupants readying themselves to wreak mischief and havoc on the learned but stuffy sage Lestradamus.
