Knights Apocalyptica

Chapter 144: Made Of Gold

It’s hell in there. Don’t go in.

The things inside don’t die; you get lost in the yellow fog. Can’t find your way out.

Take off their head, they regrow it—bury them and they crawl out.

Lost everyone in our group, ain’t fucking worth it. There is no city hidden away, ain’t no treasure. All that’s in there is death.

-Everbright, Warning Of Yellow Canyon, (234, 3rd Era)

Getting back in Yniol’s car was almost like returning home. He knew how much it meant to the man, and despite the threat, it was like the wound healed. Yniol went right back to treating him how he had before. With a bit of an odd lean. He’d offer fatherly advice—which was a dynamic Erec didn’t know how to deal with.

Enide mocked him and asked when they were going to get hitched in front of everyone. Yniol would freeze up whenever she mentioned it, and she’d start laughing.

She wasn’t the only one. The other Pendragons crammed in the car picked up on the tension point and turned it into pushing buttons and teasing her father where they could.

Though, through the conversations, they ended up explaining what a hitch-trip was. A family tradition. Before they’d accept two bonding together, the would-be couple would pick out a place on the map to exchange their vows. The longer the distance they had to go, the more fortune was said to fall into their marriage. After picking a spot, they’d each get a car, and select the men and women they trusted most. Then the road trip would begin. Along the way, they were to find something ‘priceless’ to give to the other person.

Though odd, it was a welcome tradition to the marriages Erec was used to seeing. Arranged marriages, the multi-day feasts, balls, and ceremonies given by the Church were a chore to drag himself through.

He filed it away, as yet another insight about the people outside of the walls.

The Church claimed the Goddess was the only one with the right to sanctify a marriage, but now he saw it as yet another lever of control they had over people. With the deluge of revelations he’d had about them and their control, the more he came to understand that he couldn’t live under their rule. He could only hope that whatever the Royal Family was engaging in would limit their power.

When they stopped for the night, Erec bid Enide and Yniol farewell. There’d be time to spend with them later; turning down a drink with Yniol. His top priority was to check in with his friends. After such a long drive, he imagined they’d be feeling better.

“Garin?” Erec asked, walking up to the right of a Pendragon's car. “Better?”

“…Like I’m made of gold,” his friend shook his head. “Clean air fixed me up, but let’s find somewhere I can get out of this Armor… Munchy is losing it, and it reeks.”

With a few quick words to Boldwick, Erec got approved for a ‘scouting mission.’ A justifiable excuse to clear themselves from everyone else and get some distance. He tried to get Colin involved as well, but the poor bastard was already under the heel of his father. Being dragged away for some impromptu training session.

It made him nervous since he didn’t know how well Colin could keep his changes a secret. If the Duke figured out what happened, there’d be a massive fight between him and Dame Morgana, one likely to drag everyone else into it. But that wasn’t a place Erec wanted to, nor could insert himself between.

“Well?” Erec asked as Garin clambered out of his suit.

There weren’t any monsters. The barren landscape of Worth was turning craggy instead of sandy—it’d still be a good few days before they left the boundary of the regions Erec was familiar with in their path to the west. Apparently, they’d be swinging north of the yellow gas-filled canyon, after going through the badlands. The Pendragons insisted they had secure routes along most of the West, including the knowledge of places to get nowhere near.

It only took a couple of weeks by vehicle to get to Vega. Or so Yniol said. A vast improvement over how long it would’ve taken by foot to visit all the settlements on the map.

It made him wonder why the Kingdom hadn’t adapted to this kind of technology—granted, some of it was fueled by glyph work, but the cars were fundamentally an old-world device.

Garin clambered out of his Armor, shaking loose the peels of skin that clung to his Academy uniform. Munchy crawled out as well, the fat squirrel sloppily clambering down his leg before collapsing on the ground. His stomach slowly rose while taking inhales of the sweet air; acting as if he’d been tortured.

Perhaps he had. If that dead skin smelled anything like the bile that came out of Erec, it would amaze him that the squirrel was still alive.

“Are you alright?”

“It worked,” Garin confirmed, scraping a load of skin fragments from his face and shaking it out on the ground. “No longer any Faith there. Just ‘Earth’ aspect Soul.”

“What did you see?”

Garin pursed his lips at that and looked at the ground. “I didn’t ‘see’ anything. Especially at the start. It felt like I was buried alive—the soil around me was loose enough for my fingers to barely dig through, but I couldn’t even breathe. It kept going until my lungs burst, and I thought I’d simply died and got buried in the wasteland. Only, every now and again, I got the barest bit of air. A little more to pull me along.”

“Goddess above.” Erec gasped.

“…Hours of that. Until I felt movement around me. The tiniest bit of earth stirring—though I could register the dirt shifting around, I somehow knew what was making it. Worms. Moles.”

“She made you live a nightmare!” Erec’s hand curled into a fist. His own experience had been not much better. But hearing the fear in his friend’s voice tore Erec up inside. He wanted to track down Dame Morgana and shout at her until he went red in the face. Garin stopped him, grabbing him by the arm.

“When I felt all the things around me… Something clicked.” Garin shook his head. “I was afraid since I’d been alone. I’ve always… I don’t like being alone,” he gave Erec an apologetic smile, “Never have. But, I realized with all of that movement, all those living things buried with me… I’d never been alone. It was a lot easier. I felt them, and they responded to me. They dug. More and more of them, until a tunnel formed above… Then, together, we climbed to the surface. That’s when I got the notification. No more Faith.”

Erec rubbed his eyes. “I’m sorry, you got dragged into all this.”

“I did it for me. When I said I didn’t want you to have to go on without me… I meant that I was terrified of being left behind. But you’d never do that, no matter where you went.” Garin let out a shaky breath.

“I’m considering going with Enide and her family.“

“Whoa,” Garin’s eyes went wide, bringing both hands up. “Holy shit, Erec, you two barely know each other!”

“Not because of her.” Erec insisted. Which was true. For the most part at least, “And I haven’t figured out if it’s good or not—but the place they wanna go, it’s a Vortex Industries facility,” he paused.

There wasn’t a sudden numb shock to his tongue. No muzzle on this talk. Which surprised him. He expected VAL to cut him off in some spectacular fashion. But that evidently didn’t cross the line. He wanted to tell the truth, but the pure truth would definitely end this conversation. So how did he dance around it?

“Vortex Industries?”

“That military facility had something to do with it. I saw something that said their name—and I think that android was related as well.”

“I don’t see it,” Garin shook his head. “How are the two related? Why do you even care?”

“Think about it. If that military vault was old-world, and it could open a Rift… Doesn’t that mean that the Church had it wrong? What if we found something there that proved that these Rifts were something else than caused by the Goddess? Listen, I have a gut instinct, alright? This is important. I’m sure of it.”

“You’re willing to abandon the Kingdom over a gut instinct? Goddess above, Erec. I’d almost feel better if you said that you’d fallen hopelessly in love with Enide.”

“Listen, I know it sounds sketchy, and is a bit of a stretch. But I promise you, it feels like there’s something very important in this vault. That doesn’t mean I’ve settled on what I’m going to do. I haven’t decided to abandon the Kingdom. Can you help? I don’t want to make a choice on splitting away from all of this—I want to find the road that takes us all there. To help Enide, to see what’s hidden beneath, and leave us all better off than before, together. I don’t know how to make that work, or how to get Boldwick on board.”

“The issue is that Boldwick’s about to get what he wants from this expedition in Vega.” Garin rubbed his chin.

“I know that.”

“So, it’s simple…” Garin expanded his hands, “We find a way to convince him that helping with that will get him something he wants more.”

“What does he want more?” Erec asked.

Garin shrugged. “We have time to figure that out. The two of us can do it, I’m sure of it.”

With that, Garin extended his hand. Erec took it, only for his friend to pull him in for a close hug.

“But don’t ever leave me alone, alright? Even if there are miles between us, we’re friends until the grave.”

“I’d die for you,” Erec said, and he meant it. No one else in this world so completely understood him. His best friend was someone he’d go to war for. And given what Garin just did—made himself an enemy of the church—he knew his friend felt the same.

A lightness filled his core as they pulled away. Garin went to work cleaning out his Armor, then climbed into it. From there, they finished scouted then headed back toward the camp. The entire way, Erec’s head spun with ideas on how to convince Boldwick. On how he might make his different wants come true. And then, even in Vega, what he might uncover about his Mom.

An intrusive thought rang through him.

These plans to make everything work. It was naïve. Maybe it might work, maybe it wouldn’t. But if he caught a hint of where his Mom went in that city…

Would he throw it all away to chase her?