» 10 – The Hero «

MARCHLANDS. WÙDĂO VILLAGE.

June’s arrival had woken Kyra from already fading dreams, nightmares of shadowed things backing her into a corner from which there would soon be no escape. Now, awake and dressed, she’s taken the crimson flannel shirt she had tied around her waist and put it on, meagre protection against the morning chill as they wait for June to meet them at Wùdăo’s gate.

“Thank God I had a flannie,” Kyra says, rubbing her arms to keep them warm. “It’s not nearly this brisk back home.”

Ewan nods, but his head is tilted up to examine the elaborate carving atop the dark wooden gate. It seems to depict a serpentine dragon, similar to the one in Meilin’s mother’s shrine.

“Do you think dragons are real here?” Ewan wonders. “I’d ask, but I dunno if that’s like asking if someone’s God is real back on Earth.”

Kyra shrugs, but she’s pretty sure Ewan is mostly talking to himself. Instead, she watches as Meilin descends the village path in a huff, the tightness in her face betraying an anger at something—or someone. Given they hadn’t seen her since she went to speak with her mother, Kyra guesses it’s the latter.

“You okay?” Kyra asks as she reaches them.

“My Mother’s sending me to Earth with you,” she says, mouth a flat line.

“Oh.”

Kyra and Ewan exchange a concerned look, unsure of what to say.

“You can’t tell her to fuck off?” Kyra asks.

Meilin obviously hasn’t heard that slang before, but Kyra can tell she gets the gist.

“Would that I could,” she replies, sighing.

“Could I?” Kyra ventures, a little unsure. “As the Hero?”

That manages to get a small laugh from Meilin. “You probably shouldn’t, but I appreciate the gesture.”

In the lull that follows, Kyra checks the packed lunches the village had volunteered for their trip in the handmade satchel she now wears around her shoulder. She’s not sure if the rest of the Marchlands is this generous, but she can’t help but be touched by the gesture.

“So, how long should it take us to reach…?”

“Wù-Pailou?” Meilin replies. “No more than a day’s walk, thankfully. We should get there by late afternoon if all goes well.”

“No horses, then?” Ewan asks.

“It’s cute you think we can afford horses,” Meilin says, giving him a sympathetic look. “Raptors, maybe, but we’d have had to purchase them in Wù-Pailou first.”

Ewan’s eyes alight. “Raptors?”

“Don’t explain them,” June calls out with a mischievous quirk to her lips, descending the path to join them at the gate. “Let him just seem them in person.”

Meilin raises an eyebrow but acquiesces. Ewan looks heartbroken.

“Anyway.” June’s expression dips back into a frown. “I’m sorry, Meilin. I spoke with your mother, but—”

“It’s okay,” she replies quietly. “I don’t think I want to be here with her right now anyway.”

June nods. “Let’s get going then.”

Kyra takes one last look back up at Wùdăo, memorising the sight as they start their descent back down into the moors.

A village in another world. That’s something you don’t see every day.

“Hey! Meilin!”

The party stops, and Kyra spots Meilin’s brother hurrying to the gate. Their guide walks back up the path to meet him, and he pushes a sheathed sword into her hands. She seems surprised, and the two hug, words whispered so that they don’t reach Kyra’s ears.

When Meilin returns, she’s actually smiling a little, Lei waving her off from the gate as they continue their descent.

“Is that…?” June asks, glancing at the sword.

“An ancestral dao,” Meilin replies, nodding. “Not my family’s, Lei’s. His father gave it to him. Means he expects it back, one day.”

Kyra peers over towards the sword; it’s long, but not so much as to require two hands. She notes that the blade curves a little, while the cord-wrapped hilt cants in the opposite direction. The sword itself seems entirely functional, in comparison to the more elaborate runic writing on the black-and-gold sheath.

“Should Ewan and I have a weapon?” Kyra asks. “In case we get jumped by some sort of monster?”

“Have you ever trained to fight with a knife before, or a sword?” June asks.

“No, but—”

“No buts,” June says, shaking her head. “You’d be just as much a danger to yourselves and those around you as you would be to an attacker. If we wind up in that sort of danger, you two just run, or at least get behind me.”

“And me?” Meilin asks, tilting her head.

“I can tell you can handle yourself,” June replies, causing the Marchlander to quirk her lips in appreciation.

Kyra folds her arms, making her thoughts on the matter clear with a grumpy pout, though she doesn’t push the issue. Soon after they’ve descended low enough to stand at the base of the plateau.

“So, what’s the plan?” June asks, glancing at Meilin.

“We’re almost as far west as you can go,” she replies, “So we’ll need to head south-east to reach Wù-Pailou. The old Jade Road is mostly intact, though we’ll have to do a little cross-country.”

June stretches out a leg on an outcrop of rocks at the plateau base. “Could be worse. We won’t pass too close to the Great Cliffs, will we?”

Meilin shakes her head. “I wish. I’ve never seen them myself.”

“Never been out of the highlands?” June asks.

“It’s a long way to travel without good reason.” Meilin gives a wistful smile. “I would love to see a Marchland city one day. Seems I’ll be seeing even an Earth one before that.”

“Well…” June lifts her shoulders. “You never know.”

Ewan pokes his head between them and into the conversation. “We’re in a highlands? Does that means there’s a lowland?”

“Of course,” Meilin replies. “I hope you didn’t think the entire Marchlands was like this?”

Ewan blushes. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure.”

“Well, if you think of the Marchlands as like Great Britain—and that’d be fair, the size’s are vaguely comparable—we’re up in north Scotland,” June offers.

“Significantly fewer kilts so far though,” Kyra notes.

#

The Jade Road, much to Kyra’s disappointment, turns out to be a more fanciful name for an ancient path cutting through the undergrowth—on some level, she’d kind of hoped it was going to be something like the yellow brick road.

Meilin leads them away from Wùdăo and the mountain ranges out west, travelling south-east with dirt and stone crunching underfoot. More than once the path suddenly peters out, thick grass obscuring any sight of it. It’s an easier trek than the one to Wùdăo, however, as the moors become less wetland and more grassland. Not having to worry about falling suddenly into a peat bog helps, though the mist too has mostly cleared.

Within eyesight a river flows along, water travelling in the same direction their party is. Birds flit about in the sky, competing for insects with small winged lizards. Their sounds, coupled with that of running water and rustling grass, are all Kyra can hear in every direction, an absence of civilisation she’s never truly felt before. She’d been camping with her dad when she was young, but a car, a phone, safety, was always nearby. This was different.

She and her three companions could be the only people left in the whole world.

“I have a question,” Ewan says, puncturing the silence.

Kyra almost jumps in surprise, head down as it was, trying to watch where she steps in the absence of a proper path.

“You don’t need to raise your hand,” June teases. “You can just ask.”

“Is all of the Marchlands similar to our Asia?” Ewan asks. “I only ask because those knight-guys we ran into yesterday didn’t look or dress like they were Chinese.”

Meilin gives him a blank look. “I’m sorry, Chai-nese? Like the tea?”

June laughs, and Ewan goes bright red. Even Kyra stifles her own laugh, raising an eyebrow to June behind Ewan’s back.

“Never mind,” he mumbles.

“China’s a country on Earth,” June explains to Meilin. “It’s probably where people will think you’re from.”

“Hm.” She shrugs slightly at that; put so abstractly, it clearly doesn’t mean much to her.

The four crest a small hill and pause, catching their breath. A splash of gold wildflowers dots the other side, a warm glow in the pale light. In the distance too, they can see the path begin to reemerge out of the undergrowth.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have laughed,” June says, offering Ewan an apologetic look. “Quick history lesson: Back in the day, the Marchlands was settled by two mighty empires—the Medraut and the Tiānlóng—that found out the hard way that world-spanning imperialism isn’t sustainable. They collapsed, but their people and their traditions—and the traditions of those they conquered and brought with them—survived to blend together into something new. It’s part of what makes the Marchlands so unique; a melting pot of cultures that could never have interacted in the way they did otherwise.”

“Melting pot’s a good word for it,” Meilin says, giving a firm nod. “We’re all Marchlanders now. For better or worse.”

“Makes sense.” Ewan bobs his head in acknowledgment, but his face betrays that he’s still embarrassed.

“Hey. I didn’t say all that to try and make you look foolish.” June puts a hand on his shoulder, squeezes it. “Kyra’s going to need a mind like yours to make it as the Hero. Just try not to think of this as Earth, okay? It’s far more complicated than we’ll ever know, though I’ll do my best to teach you as much about it as I can.”

“Teach me?” He raises an eyebrow. “About the Marchlands?”

“Obviously.” June’s lips turn up at the side. “You didn’t think I was just Kyra’s Guide, did you?”

#

Hours later, as the sun descends from its peak in the sky, the four take a break in the shelter of a stone ruin. Whatever it was has long since been scoured away by time, leaving behind a few broken walls in silent pilgrimage among the wildflowers.

“Make sure you stay hydrated,” June says, tossing a flask to Ewan.

He catches it, barely.

A few feet away Kyra groans quietly as she sits down on a large boulder and stretches out, certain now that she’s going to have the worst blisters of her life by the time they’re done.

“I assume there’s a good reason—” She winces, taking off her boot. “But why couldn’t we just go back via the lamppost?”

In-between sips, Ewan glances up from the flask with a perplexed expression.

“The lampposts are kind of like an emergency system,” June replies, “They can get you across in a hurry, but they’re not exactly safe or accurate. I felt kind of okay taking two of us into the open moors, but going back into a city is a different story. One unlucky trip and you end up somewhere like the Premier’s bathroom.”

“That’s an oddly specific example,” Kyra notes, and June grins cryptically.

“Wù-Pailou has a stable gateway,” Meilin adds. “Apparently it always takes you to the same spot on either side. The town grew up around it, I believe?”

June nods. “You won’t find many unguarded gateways in the Marchlands. New Albion is a different story, if only because we didn’t exactly take magic into account during city planning.”

“Why New Albion anyway?” Ewan asks. “No offence to us, but surely there are better places.”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” June shrugs. “A cynic would say the British wanted to dump their magic trouble in Australia along with their convicts. Maybe the people of Londinium were just sick of it, found some way to chuck the problem our way. Lot of generations since King Arthur agreed to take on that noble burden.”

Kyra audibly sighs. “This King Arthur thing is still throwing me.”

“Don’t get too in the weeds about it,” June says sympathetically. “Who knows how much of that is true anyway.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Merlin,” Ewan throws out, getting a grumpy look in return from the older woman.

“Well, if we’ve reached that stage of the conversation—” June gets to her feet. “Time to keep going then.”

She rolls her eyes at the cries of protest.

“How about this? We’re only an hour away at most. If we make it back before sundown, I’ll buy everyone dinner.”

Kyra’s stomach growls at the thought, even having only had lunch. Ignoring the pain in her legs, she puts her shoes back on and drags herself to her feet.

“Don’t think we won’t hold you to that,” she says, stretching out her arms as she wanders out of the ruins and onto the road. “I expect—”

She stops mid-sentence, eyes squinting at the horizon.

“You okay?” June calls out.

“Are those storm clouds?” Kyra asks, gesturing towards the dark shadows gathering in the direction of their destination.

“No.” Meilin has joined her, scanning the distance with a spyglass held up to one eye. “It’s smoke.”

~***~