Order and Chaos

the moat

Of course, the moat! I leapt into the waters, warm as usual, and swam to the wall, which I began to scale with ease. My troops followed behind me in a line.

That's when I realized something was off. Surely, the mermaids would have stopped me before I got to the wall... I looked down. The water level was rising back up to meet me! I climbed as fast as my economist's arms would carry me, but I was not quick enough, and soon enough I was deep under. The water grew frigid around me as I swam like a madman towards the surface.

I broke through the placid top of the body of water, gasping for air and grasping for land. It was only then that I realized my folly. I myself had outlined that it would take at least two years to journey back to Vendet, and here I was, running headfirst into it uncritically after only two hours. I would be lucky to survive two more hours in the icy pond I had inadvertently led the troops into!

I finally managed to grope my way back to dry land. One of my men lent me his loincloth, which was more than enough to stave off and reverse the effects of hypothermia and frostbite I had been suffering from. Most of the people I had lead into the illusory "moat" I never even saw surface. I gathered myself and re-surveyed the area.

I had no idea by where we had come in, nor in which direction we were to head, partially due to the dupe stupor we had been entranced within, but mostly, I reckoned, due to the reduced visibility from the near-blizzard that raged around us. Furthermore, I had no real way of knowing whether I was still operating in a undead-divine-induced hallucination; the fact that we were not currently being constantly tormented by curses at the moment did not support the theory that I was not, frankly.

Nevertheless, I figured, illusion or no, sleep was sleep, and it was as good a place to any to set up camp for the night. Maybe visibility would clear up tomorrow morning.

My bunk was cold and lonely that night when I fell asleep.

-----

In my dream, I was in a void, on fire, safe.

"Gods' apocalypse soon," said De.

"How?" said I.

"Cats go."

"Then?"

"That's it."

"...Really?"

"If people went..."

"Fair."

"King'll kill gods today."

"You?"

"Either first or not." Typical. "You're safe always. Go west. Be good." De hugged me. "Wake."

-----

I woke with a start and a gasp like I had been drowning. It was quite the opposite, actually: all around me bodies were suffering from various degrees of burns, attended to by efficient nuns who were quickly trotting out the dead and bringing in the live to treat. I turned my gaze to the vaulted ceiling of this large, large room, and to a wooden sign above the gigantic door that most everyone was hustling through which read:

OUR LADY BREVITY
Sin is bad.
Quiet is gold.

Mysteriously, though, I was almost completely unharmed as far as my own inspection could reveal. There were no burns to speak of, although my fingerpaint had peeled off entirely from the flames and, as I ran those very same fingers through where my glorious mane of white hair should have been, I discovered I had been burnt bald, down to the eyebrows. I had no idea where my clothes had gone off to, but I could take a guess. (They were dreadful rags anyway.)

The charred skeleton next to me, on the other hand, was unrecognizable but for a mysteriously-flame-retardant sash that identified it as the corpse of none other than my shotgun husband, the mayor. (To be frank, I was relieved of the burden. I guess you could say I made the decision... in the heat of the moment! Get it? Because I was already suffering from the deleterious effects of smoke inhalation from the wildfire at the time! I guess what I'm saying is I don't mourn his death at all.)

That's when a nun surprised me. "You OK?" she said.

"Uh, yeah," I said.

"Out," she said, and snapped. She was startlingly curt, but not exactly impolite or unfriendly.

I clambered out of the bedroll, nervously protecting my decency with my hands. Immediately, two more nuns scraped a body off a stretcher and into my ex-bed. It was Alexis. She was asleep, and looked healthy, because her armor had protected her, at the cost of melting to fit her body and face exactly. I wasn't sure if she'd ever be able to take it off again. The nuns carrying the stretcher collected the Mayor on-board and trotted out of the room.

The first nun, struggling to lift Alexis' face-shaped face-plate, said to me: "You're blessed."

"Thanks?" I said.

She nodded and pointed to the entrance/exit. I walked over there, past rows and rows of the dead and injured, and thought about how culpable for their deaths I could be considered for just providing the matches. I knew Smokey the God Bear of Forest Fire Prevention would disapprove, but he always places the blame for any given forest fire on "only" whoever he is currently speaking to or about, and besides, would probably be dead at my father's hand by sunset. (I also thought about how naked I still felt without my nose paint, and also literally being naked.)

By the time I got to the exit, I had freed myself of all second-hand guilt.

"Stop," said the nun at a desk set up before the exit. She gestured for me to take a seat on a stool, which I did, then she grabbed my arm and started painting my fingernails yellow.

"Uh," I said, pulling my arm back into place where it could act as a cover.

"Decency," she gently chastised me, yanking my hand back into place.

"Clothes?" I said. She stopped, looked at me, shrugged with her eyebrows, and got briefly up to search under the desk. She returned with a pair of — what else? Briefs, which she brusquely tossed over the desk and returned to her painting. I slunk into them. Now my second hand was free.

After my nails were yellowed, she gave me a pen and had me sign a guest book (as "Mary Lee Invictus") and then practically shoved me out. A short line had formed behind me.

I left the monastery to see I had been taken almost all the way over the mountains, and into the desert. I could see the black smoke of the fire hovering in the sky over the mountaintops to the east, and to the west, the sun, and a road winding through the rocky clay to a small city with massive walls. I had no real choice but to go west, for De — not even my mom had hugged me.

It would take me two hours to arrive at its gigantic double-doors, walking. What kind of city laid behind that gate? And more pressingly, what in the world was I going to do when my bare feet started to get painfully hot from being on the baking ground?