Jamal III

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Jamal ran like death itself was chasing him.

Because it probably was.

Luckily, it turns out that between his lack of a need for sleep and constant regeneration, he basically had unlimited stamina. Not that he didn’t get exhausted, because he did. His ankles were screaming at him, and he’d felt the muscles in his legs tear multiple times, but he could just power through it and let his body heal as he ran.

He ran through the day and into the night, only slowing down after he tripped on a root for the third time. While his body could keep going, his mind was starting to shut down, and it was causing him to make mistakes. He decided to take a short rest, climbing up onto the branches of a large tree to hide.

He stayed up there for a couple hours, wrapped around a thick branch like a sloth. The darkness played tricks on his mind, causing him to flinch at every noise—while crickets were alright, some of the birdcalls sounded like people screaming, and that was not good for his mental state—and even though he knew it was just animals, he couldn’t help but fear that the other Queen would suddenly show up and try to kill him again.

Speaking of her, he had kept her dagger with him. As much as he was immortal, after the last few days going weaponless felt like a bad idea. It had already come in handy several times—the foliage of the forest liked to snag and cling to his clothes, and he’d had to cut himself out of more than one bramble patch already.

Eventually though, he felt he had stayed still for too long. He began to get down from the tree, but when he tried to get a handhold on one of the branches it snapped, causing him to slip and fall. He ended up hitting a rock jutting out of the ground, cracking his head open on it with a sickening ‘CRACK.’

He laid there on the ground for a long moment, staring up at the canopy above.

“Nobody can ever know about this,” he promised himself, before stumbling to his feet.

He glanced back at the rock. There was a lot of blood on it. ‘I probably should have died there. I probably would have died over a dozen times over the last few days,’ he realized, unable to stop himself from staring at the bloodstained rock.

It wasn’t a huge revelation—he had understood pretty well back when he had been stabbed through the gut, and the eye, and the chest…

‘Dang, I really should be dead, huh?’

Now that he had some time to think more on it, it was kind of fucking him up. Yesterday, he had so many other more pressing issues to distract himself with, that it kind of slipped his mind. If he was mortal, he would have died—brutally in several cases. That wasn’t something he could just shrug off. That concrete, absolute confirmation that he couldn’t die was disturbing in a way he couldn’t quite articulate.

He looked down at the Soul in his hand. Gold and pale blue threads swirled together, creating a hypnotic swirling pattern. It glowed faintly in the dark—not enough to emit light, but just enough to see every detail within the orb.

Even now, holding it in his hand, it was hard to believe that this tiny ball was the only thing tying him to the mortal plane. Until recently, it was even harder to wrap his head around the fact it was the only thing that could remove him from the mortal plane as well.

He stared at it for a bit longer, before forcing himself to look away. He could have an existential crisis another time. His enemies might still be chasing him, and he needed to get a move on back to the village.

He got back to running, though it was hard to move faster than a jog this deep in the forest. At one point he realized he had gone too far south and forced himself to move back north. The detour had cost him a little over two hours. After that, he decided to stick to the riverbanks—which further slowed him down, as he had to move through the muck of the riverbanks (his feet were caked in mud)—but allowed him to make sure he knew where he was going.

Eventually, coming up to a large clearing in the woods, he reached the village.

Or what was left of it.

Jamal’s stomach dropped as he took in the site. What had at one point been a clearing in the forest full of tents was now practically empty. Only one large tent remained, sitting close to the firepit at the center. He would have thought the place abandoned, if it weren’t for the fire burning merrily at the center.

He walked towards it in a daze, unable to reconcile the new clearing with the old village. As he made it way towards the center, his legs moved automatically to avoid tents that were no longer there, and he kept trying to listen for the sounds of villagers that were no longer around.

He hadn’t been here two weeks, and yet it felt like he’d lived there a lifetime. The village had grounded him—everything about his life had been stolen away, and been replaced with the village.

And now that was gone too.

“What…” he rasped, his lips feeling dry. “What happened here?”

“Oh! You’re finally back!”

Jamal jumped, suddenly snapping back into reality. Turning his head to the voice, he saw three people sitting around the fire.

Fei, a lazy man with dark hair and a darker sense of humor. He was the only one fully lounging by the fire. Yue, who had brown hair and was overly serious. She was sitting up straight and looked ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. And Ishi, who had a face full of freckles and—and that was all he knew about him. He was talkative, he guessed.

Despite looking relaxed around the fire, he noticed that they were all packed up—the only thing they hadn’t seemed to have taken down yet was their tent.

“What happened?” Jamal asked again, still feeling lost.

The three of them looked between each other, communicating silently with each other. Finally, Fei sighed and turned back to him. “The rest of those dumbasses are being dumbasses.”

“Fei!” Yue hissed, leveling a glare at him.

“What!? Tell me I’m wrong!”

“I mean, he does have a point, Yue,” Ishi hummed, standing up.

“I just—UGH!” Yue threw up her hands. “You could have at least been a bit more considerate about how you told him!”

“Told me what!?” Jamal asked again, feeling his anxiety spike. Whatever was going on was, obviously, not a good thing.

Yue gave one last glare to Fei, before sighing quietly. “The others have left—they decided to return to our old nomadic lifestyle.”

“…Okay. Um, should we, I don’t know, try to catch up?” Jamal asked haltingly, dreading her answer.

Behind them, Ishi began taking down the tent.

“I… don’t think that’s a good idea,” she grimaced. “They… well, a lot of people died, in your—our attack on the other tribe. A lot of those people had family, and, uh, friends. And they’re pissed. And because of that, well…”

“Stop beating around the bush!” Fei groaned. “They banished you. Said a buncha rude shit—that you were the worst thing to happen to the tribe, that you got a lot of people killed, etcetera. Assholes, the lot of them.”

Yue flinched, but didn’t disagree.

And Jamal felt… something. Like a gaping hole had opened up beneath him, threatening to swallow him whole.

“They didn’t even…” he whispered numbly, “They didn’t even wait to tell me themselves…?”

Fei scoffed. “Like I said, assholes.”

Jamal’s head snapped back down to them. “Wait, are you all…?”

“No no! We’ve decided to stay with you!” Yue yelped quickly, holding her hands up placatingly.

“And so, they’ve banished us too,” Fei drawled.

She flinched. “Aye, they did.”

“Wait, you’ve decided to stay with me? What do you mean by that?” Jamal asked, trying not to feel too hopeful. He’d been burned too often recently to put much stock in hope.

“When they decided to banish you, we told them it wasn’t fair to you,” she told him. “Not everyone agreed with their verdict—there were a dozen more people who tried to defend you. But then we were given an ultimatum—we had to choose between siding with you or the tribe. Anyone who sided with you was banished as well. Most people, well, they chose their families over you. I’m sorry.”

“But wait, if that was the case, why did you side with me?”

“Because,” Yue took a deep breath, before turning to look him straight in the eye, “nobody should be forced to be alone. I… Sometimes I wondered what would have happened, if parts of my life had gone differently. I wasn’t originally from the tribe—they took me in, after… things happened with my old family. That’s why I can’t let them throw you away—why I can’t leave you alone like this. Nobody deserves this, especially not you.”

Jamal stared at her with wide eyes, feeling completely floored. “But, if they took you in, then wouldn’t you prefer to stay with them over me? I would have thought…”

She scowled, turning to look into the fire. “It is because they took me in that I’m leaving now. When someone is alone and afraid, then another person should help them. If the one helping others is yourself, then abandoning that other person is the lowest sin imaginable.”

“Yue…” he whispered. He felt tears building up. “Thank you.”

She just hummed, some of the tension in her shoulders relaxing.

“Well, I don’t have any reasons as deep as that,” Fei said irreverently, shattering the mood. He lethargically stood up, stretching his arms behind his head. “They were being assholes—I called them out on it. Now I’m here.”

“Ah,” Jamal replied. Despite the simple reason, he couldn’t help but start crying harder. “Thank you, Fei,” he told him sincerely.

Fei just shrugged.

“Um!” Ishi called out, causing all three of them to turn to look at him. Apparently, he had taken down the tent while they were talking, and it now sat on the ground with the rest of their supplies, ready to go. “You saved my life! Back when we were escaping, you took a spear to the chest for me. And I know, uh, I know that for someone like you that may not be a huge deal, but it was really cool! And when they were insulting you, I couldn’t help but think, uh, ‘This isn’t fair! He deserves better!’ So, I told them you deserved better! And then they—”

“Alright, I think he gets it,” Fei cut the younger man off. “Though, yeah, seeing someone get impaled for you really gives you a new appreciation for skin—all our organs would fall out without it, after all.”

“Is this really the time?” Yue sighed.

“Well, when’s a better time?”

“Not—! Ugh, never mind. Anyway,” she turned back to Jamal “that’s why we’re here. If you’ll have us, we’ll, um, we’ll still follow you.”

Jamal stared at the three people before him. They had thrown away everything they knew—their lives, their families, their homes—all for him. He felt gratitude bubble up in his chest. So much that he could never express it.

He sniffled, before wiping his eyes on his sleeve. “Yes,” he rasped, smiling wider than he had in weeks. “Yes, if you’ll have me, I’d travel with you three to the ends of the earth.”

The others responded to him with various degrees of enthusiasm, and a couple minutes later they had gathered up all their belongings. The four turned in the opposite direction of the Queen’s village, and began walking west.

As they left the clearing, Jamal gave one last look behind him, dead grass and a smothered firepit the only evidence that anyone had ever lived there. He took a deep breath, before turning back forward, marching once more into the wilderness. Despite himself, he couldn’t help but smile.

‘I never really wanted to be a King anyway.’

9,993 God-Kings Remain