I don’t think we tell stories to remember the past.
Not really.
Ask the people who were there—the people with the scars, the people who can’t sleep without dreaming of blades in the dark—they have no trouble remembering how it happened. They remember every inch of the steel that gave them their wound, every drop of their own blood on their hands.
Or at least, I do.
But people aren’t meant to carry those scars, those dreams. Our bodies are too frail, they’ll collapse under the weight. So our stories change—we skip over the parts that hurt too much to remember, we make the hard decisions sound easier, we make up reasons why we did the things we did, and that they were good, and the things they did were bad, so we can pretend that we at least tried to make things make sense.
We don’t tell stories to remember the past. We tell stories to forget it.
For all the days and miles I put between me and Paarl’s Hollow, I heard the stories about it. More than a few were about me, about the killer who came to town for reasons no one knew and left it like she left every other town she visited. A fair amount were about the Beast, about how it was punishment sent for some transgression no one could begin to guess. And some were about the bandit lord Dread Niri and the army of unstoppable, fearless murderers she commanded.
None of them mentioned Rogo. Or Virian.
But maybe that’s for the best. Maybe it’s better that no one really knows what happened—sometimes, I have trouble putting it together myself. And maybe it’s better that we have these stories instead of the truth that a lot of people died and a lot of shit got broken for reasons no one’s really sure of.
Or at least, on that night, I sure as shit couldn’t figure it out.
From high on a ledge, I stared at the ruin of Paarl’s Hollow, searching through its rubble as if I could find the cause for how all of this went to shit. But from up here, it barely even looked like it had once been a town.
The walls were completely gone, the heavy stones that had made them haphazardly strewn where they’d fallen after the Beast kicked them down. The forges and looms and wagons were buried beneath the imprints of colossal feet, fossils of a long-lost civilization that died only that day. And the houses…
Outside the collapsed walls was no better. Even the scorched-out hellscape of the forest had looked better than the shredded earth the Beast’s stride had made. And that trail of destruction continued all the way to the horizon.
Where I could still see it.
Hours later, miles later, it was still so huge that I could see the Compass Beast’s muscles twitch and jump as I lumbered across the land, tearing apart forests and crushing hills under its feet. And throughout its rampage, it did nothing more than let out a low, rumbling groan, never anything more than inconvenienced by the destruction it wrought.
Did it care that it had just destroyed an entire city in a few steps? Did it notice what it crushed underfoot? Had it ever been moved by pity, at some point, by compassion?
Or did it just see what I saw that night: a city that had been destroyed by people just as handily as it had been destroyed by a giant monster? Did it see us, fighting and killing each other and burning down everything, and figure, “Well, shit, I might as well?”
Maybe it didn’t care. Or maybe it just figured we didn’t.
I couldn’t find the answer in the ruins.
But someone did.
I squinted to see, but in the darkness of the night, I could see tiny lights moving. People in simple clothing picked their way through the ruins, pulling out timber or metal… a few bodies. Without ceremony, they carried the retrieved to a pair of wagons pulled by farm birds. Materials were placed in one. Bodies in another.
The people of Fleatown. Picking through the ruin of Paarl’s Hollow with the same lack of ceremony as their massive patron had destroyed it.
But then, my thought came unbidden, why are they bothering to pick up the bodies?
I saw more lights on the road of destruction that the Beast had wrought. A train of people followed the great creature, carrying their camp on their backs. Walking among the simple clothes, I saw fancier outfits and hides—people who’d survived Paarl’s Hollow and the Children who had survived me, now both just more Fleas clinging to the ankle of something bigger.
This morning, they’d been willing to kill each other. Months ago, they’d been willing to let each other die for more metal. And now… now…
What the fuck was it all for? I wondered. All this fucking trouble and they just end up together? Just like that? Why the fuck did we fight so hard if it wasn’t worth it?
That was the question I asked myself.
The question I desperately struggled to avoid asking myself was different.
If everyone else can just decide to stop, I wanted to wonder, what the fuck am I doing wrong?
I got an answer.
Not the one I was looking for. An answer on a voice of flame and a smile of cinders, in a surge of pain through my arm and a heat so deep and angry it put the worries to the flame and I felt them burn away to nothing inside me.
The Cacophony, sheathed at my hip, urged me not to think too hard about it.
And maybe that was the right choice. Or the wrong one. I doubt I’d ever know that, either.
I clambered to my feet. My leg felt better—whatever weird shit they’d given me at Fleatown worked, apparently. Another thing not to think too hard about. I found Congeniality pecking half-interestedly for mice in some tall grasses, collected her reins. Together we started off down the ledge.
Most of the time, I don’t mind traveling alone. Easier to get around, less worry. But then, most of the time, there’s usually something chasing me so I don’t have to think too loudly. On nights like these, nights when there’s no danger to think about and the sound of the ground crunching under my feet is too soft to drown out the noise in my own head… well…
They don’t tell you about these nights in the stories, do they?
That must have been how she snuck up on me. I wasn’t listening to the sounds around me, just the questions and troubles rattling around inside my skull. I wasn’t even aware of her until I heard the groan of her crossbow string as she drew it back and leveled it at the center of my spine.
I stopped in my tracks. I didn’t look behind me. I didn’t let Congeniality off her reins. I didn’t try to stop her.
I tell myself sometimes that I didn’t try because I didn’t want to deny her revenge. It’s a hard thing to stare down someone who took something from you, even if they have it coming. I didn’t want to put her through that, I told myself, and maybe some of that was true.
But not as true as the fact that I didn’t want to turn around and see the same look in her eyes that I had.
“Hey,” I said, without turning around.
Virian didn’t answer.
I was content with that. Content with this being my last word, this being my last moment—or so I told myself. But that couldn’t have been true, either.
“My leg got better.”
Since I just kept talking.
“Listen…” I sighed. “What happened in the town—”
“You killed him.” She hurled the words at my back, a thrown knife. When I didn’t bleed as she wanted me to, she spat them at my feet. “You’re here and he’s not, right? You killed him.”
“I did,” I replied.
I heard the rattle of her crossbow. She took a step forward. Hatred was in her voice.
“You murdered him.”
“I didn’t.”
“Birdshit you didn’t. You fucking killed him, didn’t you? How did he die? What did you do to him? Who…” She swallowed something hard and sharp. “What did he say before he died?”
I didn’t move. I didn’t answer.
“Did he cry out? Did he beg? What did he say?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied.
“Like fuck it doesn’t! What are you trying to do, protect me? You fucking killed—”
“Yes, I killed your father,” I shouted back. “I killed your father because he gave me scars that hurt like hell every fucking morning. I killed him because he took what was mine. I put him on the ground and put a sword in his chest and stood there until everything bled out and there was nothing left of him but glass. And nothing I said or he said or ever would say will change that. And that’s why it doesn’t fucking matter.”
She didn’t shoot me. Which was bad, because for some reason I just couldn’t shut the fuck up.
“It was always going to be this way,” I said. “He was always going to die. I was always going to kill him. He and I both knew that the day he, and all the others, didn’t kill me. You weren’t going to change that. A new name and a new city weren’t going to change that. You can’t take back the shit that we did.” I paused. “He and I both knew that. Every Vagrant does.”
A pause, timid and wary, before a whisper. “What was he like?”
“Huh?”
“My… him. What was he like? Was he a good man?”
Another pause. Colder. Angrier. “I don’t know.”
“What? What do you mean you don’t know?”
“What I said.”
“But… you knew him. You were—”
“I knew a blade in the dark. I knew my blood on his hands. And little more. Whoever he was after, whatever he did…” I traced a long line of knotted flesh across my chest. “They don’t make these things hurt any less.”
Silence. The loudest kind. The kind that only comes before mistakes. I could feel her hand on the trigger, her eyes full of tears, the great and bitter thing rising in her throat that would decide whether she was going to shoot me or not.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have said anything.
“Listen, kid,” I said, “if you’re going to do that, stop and ask yourself—”
“Don’t,” she snapped. “Don’t you dare fucking ask me if this is what he would want.”
“I don’t know what he’d want and I don’t fucking care, either,” I growled, “but before you hit that trigger, I want you to ask yourself if this is what you want. Maybe you want to be the woman who killed Sal the Cacophony, maybe you even deserve to be her, but do you want to remember the weight of that bow in your hands your entire life?”
No answer.
“Do you want to remember how easy it was? How satisfying it was? How it still didn’t make anything hurt less? Do you want to know all the things you’ll kill trying to make it go away?”
No answer.
“And when you wake up in the morning, and when you go to sleep at night,” I whispered, “do you want to know how much time you’ll spend going down every name of every person who ever hurt you and wonder which ones you’d have to kill to make it stop?”
Nothing. No words. No breath.
I held my hands out.
“You want to be the woman who kills me, I won’t stop you. But you sure as shit don’t deserve that.”
I waited.
Waited for the click of the trigger. Waited for the sound of her wailing. Waited for her to curse or to shout or to keep talking. I would have accepted any of them.
When I finally turned around to look at her, though, she wasn’t there. I hadn’t even heard her leave. Nothing remained but a few messy footprints.
The sound of wheels turning hit me. I peered out over the ledge. Far below, I saw a single wagon pulled by a weary bird rolling down a lonely road. In its bed, the glistening metal of machinery rattled alongside a complicated crossbow. At the reins, Olio and Virian sat in silence and stared ahead.
Two kids, a bird and a printing press. The only things to make it out of that city intact.
Not a good story, I thought as I mounted Congeniality and spurred her ahead into a tired walk. No moral. No heroes. Not even very good villains. And a shitty resolution—what had been the fucking point of it all?
I reached into my pocket, pulled out a folded-up scrap of paper and a pencil. I unfolded it, looked down the list of names in black until I found the one I was looking for, and drew a line through it.
Rogo the Dervish.
I stared at that line, waiting for the moment it would make me feel like it had all been worth it.
I’m still waiting.
Not a good story, is it? Not now, anyway. In the months and years to follow that day, the Day of the Beast they started calling it, it would change to something better. Bards and poets would tell of it in taverns and courts. Old men would bicker and bet over how things really happened. Parents would tell their children a tale to keep them in line.
And every so often, someone might ask me what I thought about what happened on that day. And one person in particular would ask me if it had all been worth it, or at least, if I could be satisfied with what I got from it.
And I’d tell them what I’ll tell you.
It doesn’t matter.
Rogo was dead. Paarl’s Hollow was gone. However I wanted things to go, however they should have gone, wasn’t going to change any of that. No one would still have their homes. No one would walk away from this with new ideas.
It wasn’t a good story. It wasn’t a good ending. But we don’t tell stories to remember the past. Sometimes not even to forget the past. Sometimes we tell stories to survive. And sometimes surviving is all we get.
And sometimes, that has to be enough to keep doing it.