Chapter 1406 (1/2)
When Randidly stepped through the portal to his next destination, he was surprised to see that he was not the only person nearby. A young woman grunted with exertion and stuck her spade into the ground. She was hunched over, perhaps six meters down the slope from him. With an extremely slow movement, she tossed the dirt to the side. Then she stuck the head of the shovel into the ground once more.
They were standing on the Western slope of a low mountain, exactly opposite the position where Randidly had fought Kaan Swacc several days ago. The clouds above were thick and white against the blue sky, although the wind was extremely cold. It seemed like the Earth had finally shifted toward the long-delayed winter.
Randidly recognized the young woman below him, too. It was Rose Callaway, the young woman who served as Ace’s second in command. From the look of it, she was digging a grave.
Basically, she was stealing Randidly’s thunder.
As she flipped her second shovel full of dirt to the side, she noticed Randidly standing on the slope. She stilled and looked at him for a long time. Randidly saw her trembling lips and watery eyes. He saw how red and raw her hands were. From the fact that she had only reached a depth of about a half-meter so far, she either had started her grave recently or she wasn’t very good at digging.
So Randidly took a single step forward. “Can I help?”
Rose Callaway continued to watch Randidly for a long time. She pressed her lips together so tightly that they turned white. Then, finally, she nodded.
As Randidly conjured a shovel completely composed of roots, he glanced up at the sky. More clouds were beginning to gather and the accumulation turned their countenances dark; with their luck, enough clouds would gather for a storm before they finished. Still, Randidly was an old hand at digging graves from his time on Tellus, so he quickly hopped down next to Rose and began to dig.
She quickly frowned at him. “I know you can use that root Skill for more than making a shovel. Why make us both dig…?”
Randidly took a very pointed glance at Rose’s hands. Although it had rubbed off in most places, there was clearly still blood under her fingernails. Then he glanced sideways at Ace’s corpse, which he had been avoiding looking at thus far. Even his severed left forearm had been retrieved and set neatly next to him, while his other limbs seemed to twist and curl inward on themselves with the unwillingness he had felt at the moment of his death. “Some things are worth doing by hand. It’s a sign of respect, right?”
“A sign that the other party will never receive,” Rose replied in a whisper. But she fell into place next to Randidly, widening the hole while he handled adding more depth. In order to work effectively, Randidly summoned another wave of roots, this one forming into a replacement for his left arm while his metallic arm continued to heal.
“Why aren’t you taking his body back to the Refuge to bury him?” Randidly asked casually.
A hollow smile flashed across Rose’s face. “It was… one of Ace’s earliest rules. You can only be buried in Refuge… if you die in the defense of refuge. And I think no one would argue that this was… anything but Ace’s own… labor.”
For a while, they worked in silence. Even though his mental energy was largely depleted, Randidly’s physical Stats meant that he was a veritable work crew when it came to grave digging. Within ten minutes he had reached a depth of three meters with enough length and width to comfortably lay Ace. By this point, the clouds had completely darkened from white to dark grey.
Randidly hopped out of the hole and offered his hand down to Rose. She ignored it and pulled herself up out of the hole, part of the wall crumbling down into the grave as she hauled herself over the edge. Then Rose dusted the dirt off of her knees and sat down next to the crumpled form of Ace. After burying her head in her arms, she sat there for several more minutes.
Although Randidly had other things to do, none of it was particularly pressing. So he reigned in his impatience and gave the woman a bit of space to grieve. Instead, he looked up and watched the first few flakes of snow drift downward toward Earth.
So much change, all at once, Randidly thought tiredly. It’s honestly… hard to keep up with it all.
Rose spoke in a hoarse voice, not bothering to raise her head. “Why are you even here? Why bother giving him a grave? I’m… aware of what happened. You let him die. If you think digging some fucking hole will help with your guilt-”
“I don’t feel guilty,” Randidly said slowly. He reached up toward the sky with his right hand, stretching the shoulder joint until it popped pleasantly. Bits of snow drifted downward and melted in his outstretched palm. “I’m not here as some form of repentance. I came to dig Ace a grave because I wanted to do it.”
“You watched a man get slaughtered and calmly planned to come back later to bury his body? Either you are more a monster than even your worst critics say, or you are lying to me, Mr. Ghosthound.”
Despite the fact that Randidly didn’t know this woman personally, or perhaps because of it, the first part of her statement stung. But Randidly ignored that. Instead, he just allowed a sad smile to drift across his face as he lowered his arm. “I just believe… that humans are sometimes shaped, to our detriment, by simple narratives. You cannot summarize a life.”
There were several seconds of silence. Randidly looked freely at Rose Calloway’s hunched form, trying to gauge her reaction. Her skin was as pale as a corpse and the bones of her elbow jutted sharply out from her folded, seated position. Without her expression or any noticeable images, he had to rely on just these details. This thought about simplicity had been one bouncing around Randidly’s head since the fight and Sydney’s chilled reaction afterward, but he hadn’t had the spare time to explore it fully. So if he had the opportunity to talk through it…
When Rose didn’t speak, Randidly slowly continued. “You seem to think that I couldn’t agree with Sydney killing Ace and also have enough respect for him to want to bury him. But Ace… I’ve seen too much of him. He was too big a part of my life to be summed up by a single emotion. He was… many things to me. I owe him so much, and he probably owes me a little bit more than that, but I won’t just reduce our relationship to the difference between our obligations. And I also don’t need an easy label like good or bad to understand him.”
“He was a good man,” Rose responded fiercely, finally raising her head in order to glare at Randidly. Her eyes were red and leaking tears like a rusted bucket.
Randidly didn’t try to contradict her; he didn’t even want to contradict her. Instead, his mind turned to another shadowy figure in his mind: that of Yystrix. Randidly rubbed his thumb against the knuckles of his pointer finger. If he had to qualify her as a good or a bad person…
“...but he made a lot of mistakes.” Rose’s gaze settled on the middle distance, seeming to remember the past.
Revelation energy sparked to cover Randidly’s hand. And from there, it raced up his arm and down his torso like wildfire in a dry grassland until his entire body was smoldering with it. Of all of the Skills he had used to fight Kaan Swacc, this was the one with which Randidly had improved the most. Because suddenly he realized how far his gaze could reach while holding that energy.
A threshold was a door, and beyond that door was a sea of shifting possibilities. Randidly flexed his fingers and saw the ripple he spread outward through those possibilities. Action and reaction, the connection made clear and highlighted by the revelation energy. It wasn’t perfect, of course, but still… With that energy-boosting his focus, he could glimpse the possibilities in front of him. As long as he controlled his own actions, this energy would give him a glimpse of what that would cause.
But instead of looking at the outcomes in the sea of possibilities, Randidly looked at what little he could perceive of the steps to get to those outcomes before his eyes. He focused on the details that paved the Paths to the future that he could see.
Next to him, Rose shook her head. “He was a complicated man, but I’m still going to miss him.”
“Yeah. Me too.” Randidly sighed. Knowledge often brought with it a choice: between the awareness of the knowledge he was missing or surety. The former would point him toward increasing his knowledge further but the latter was… easy.