13 - First Drops

 

Luitold sat in the comfort of his bed, his body exhausted from another day of training. Though dusk wouldn’t be for another two hours, the tranquility of his bath just earlier had relaxed his body and mind, and the dark cloudy skies overhead provided the illusion of night.

Just as he was about to doze off, however, the boy was interrupted by a frantic series of knocks at his door. Fearing he had accidentally made a mess of some sort at the bathhouse, Luitold quickly got out of bed and opened the door to see his messenger. On the other side of the door, though, was no such messenger. Instead, it was his mentor, Bernhart, who stared at him with a look of terror in his eyes and a tightly clenched jaw and lips.

“Luitold, we need to talk,” he said between heavy breaths, “Urgently.”

Luitold confusedly stepped back, allowing Bernhart to come inside and take a seat in the chair beside his room’s small desk.

“Shouldn’t you be with the princess right now?” Luitold asked, shutting the door behind him and sitting on the side of his bed across from Bernhart.

“Dietrich is back early,” Bernhart told him, “And he’s planning something worse than we could have ever imagined.”

“Lord Dietrich is back already?” Luitold replied, “But it’s supposed to take this long just to arrive at Vandemar alone.”

“I don’t know how he did it, but he has returned,” Bernhart reaffirmed, “He plans to marry Lady Agnes without her consent to take advantage of the King’s sickness and ascend to the throne.”

“You…you’re serious..?” Luitold asked, “That’s why she’s here?”

“I’m afraid I am,” Bernhart said, “And to make matters worse, Dietrich has learned to use the power of the beast himself.”

“What?”

“I overheard it. When Agnes denied his proposal, he shattered a jar of Heaven’s Blessing and became a beast to threaten her into submission. It’s possible his trip to Vandemar was just a guise for him to spend time elsewhere learning to control it like you have.”

Luitold shifted uncomfortably on his bed, trying to process what he had just heard. Was this what all his training had been for? Just for Dietrich to use him for research and become a beast of his own?

“What can we do?” he asked.

“I haven’t had much time to think about it,” Bernhart said, his face hardening into an expression of deep-seated anger, “One thing I do know is that my loyalty to Dietrich is over.”

Luitold’s eyes opened wide as he heard his words. Something had changed in Bernhart since he first met him. The dutiful and subservient knight he once knew had now become something closer to a bravehearted rogue. Though he had heard Rudolf criticize the Count before, he never anticipated he would hear something similar from Bernhart of all people.

“I want to do whatever I can to protect Agnes and the King,” Bernhart continued, “If that means an attack on Dietrich, then I’ll do it. We likely don’t have much time before the marriage is in place. We need to form a plan quickly.”

“I feel like before anything is done, we need more information,” Luitold said, “I still have a lot of questions. Heaven’s Blessing seems to be the thing driving the Count’s plan forward. I want to fully understand what he’s going to do with dark magic, with the beast’s power.”

“And how do you suppose we go about doing that?” Bernhart asked.

Luitold thought for a moment before conducting his answer.

“Rudolf said all of my training functioned as research as well,” he said, “and the head of research on Heaven’s Blessing is Dietrich’s alchemist Quintus. If he knows about what we’ve learned from our training, surely he knows a lot more as well. He might know what Dietrich is planning, or what he was doing while he was gone.”

“Do you really think Dietrich’s court alchemist would just spill everything he’s been hiding without any resistance?” Bernhart replied.

“If he doesn’t, then we use force,” Luitold said.

Suddenly, the sound of thunder cracked in the distance, and a cascade of raindrops hitting the keep’s walls and roof began to echo throughout the building. Bernhart rose from his chair, appearing poised with determination.

“I like your idea,” he said, “Let’s go now.”

Without another word, Bernhart led Luitold out of the room as they swiftly traversed through the castle’s dark echoing halls. Soon enough, they had reached the keep’s back door. Just before they walked outside, a guard stationed beside the door interrupted them.

“Hey, have you not heard there’s a storm outside?” he asked.

Bernhart stopped in his tracks and turned to face the man with a polite smile.

“We left some clothes at our training grounds and need to bring them inside before they get soaked,” he said, “We shouldn’t be gone long.”

“Very well,” the guard said, backing away from them.

The two continued outside into the cold rain. Strong winds blew the drops into Luitold’s face as he shielded it with his forearm. Every few seconds the sky illuminated with a bright flash of lightning from above, a repeated warning of the danger they were walking into. Before long, they had reached the unsightly stone building that sat beside the pit. It would be the first time either of them set foot inside, despite it being so close to the grounds where they had rigorously trained over the preceding week.

“Let’s hope he’s inside,” Bernhart said as he reached out his arm to the building’s door.

As Bernhart pulled the handle, however, he was met with no reaction. The door did not budge at all, leaving the two of them stuck outside in the pouring rain.

“It’s locked?” Luitold said in dismay.

Bernhart growled and rammed his shoulder into the fortified door, again to no avail.

“God damnit!” he roared, kicking the door in rage as he backed away from it, “What now?”

“I’ll take a jar from the pit and see if the beast can tear it down,” Luitold said.

Bernhart turned away from the door and looked down at him as he regained his composure.

“Good idea,” he said humbly. 

Luitold made his way around the side of the laboratory, returning to the all too familiar pit that laid behind as the rain slowly turned its dirt foundation into mud. Climbing down the slippery wooden ladder with care, he reached the pit’s bottom and dragged his feet through the wet ground as he headed towards the shelf of jars embedded in one the pit’s wood-panelled walls. Once he retrieved one of the many jars, he made his way back up the ladder, carefully holding the jar at his hip so it wouldn’t slip from his grasp and fall back down,

Luitold returned to the laboratory door, Bernhart leaning against the wall beside it as rainwater descended down his face.

“You ready?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Luitold said, “You should back up.”

Bernhart stepped back as requested before Luitold threw the jar at the ground, sending glass flying as the smoke of Heaven’s Blessing surrounded his body and encased him in darkness. Being so familiarized with the process, Luitold hardly paid any mind to the crystal tree anymore, instead focusing on awakening to the beast’s body as quickly as possible. Before long, the eyes of the beast opened, exposing Luitold to the mysterious world of blood once more. Beside him, Bernhart now appeared as a beast as well, as all people did when Luitold viewed the world from these eyes.

“Here we go,” he said in the beast’s voice.

Luitold shot his arm forward, digging his fierce nails into the firm wood of the door. Pushing into it with all his strength, he eventually was able to grip his hand around a singular plank of the door, squeezing it tight and ripping it out with an explosive pull. The opening left behind made the remainder of the door far less cumbersome to destroy, the hole making for easy points to grip onto and rip more planks out. Before long, the center of the door was completely open to the inside, revealing a dim room filled to the walls with strange trinkets and tools, all glimmering against the light of a burning furnace. The rustic smell of iron radiated from within, though to Luitold it wasn’t as poignant as it would have been to most, considering an iron scent was always at least the smallest bit present when he was in the blood world.

“Stop! Who goes there?” a man yelled from inside.

Luitold, standing at a near seven feet in height, had to lean down to see the man’s appearance. As his head peeked through, the man inside screamed in terror, clumsily backing away into a wobbly table of assorted items as he pulled out a dagger from behind him.

“We have some questions for you,” Bernhart said as he peeked through the hole as well.

The man stayed frozen in place, evidently uninterested in whatever the fearsome duo before him had in store.

“I guess he doesn’t want to unlock the door for us,” Luitold said, “We’ll have to crawl in instead.”

As he suggested, Luitold elongated his right leg through the door’s broken opening and slowly followed with the rest of his body behind it, bending his upper half inward to fit through. The squeeze did not pose nearly as much of a challenge for the normal-sized Bernhart, who quickly entered the building after him.

“Quintus, am I mistaken?” Bernhart said as he brushed fallen wood splinters off of his body, “I’ve never seen you in person, so I can only guess.”

“Bernhart?” the man replied, his eyes darting frantically between his two assailants, “Yes, it’s Quintus! What the hell do you want?”

Though in Luitold’s eyes, Quintus appeared as a dark and inky beast like everyone else, Quintus was a short hunched man in his middle ages, completely bald on the upper half of his head but fashioned with a long grey beard on the lower. In the hand not occupied by his dagger was a wooden walking stick, one befitting of him in its strange warped features and general roughness. The alchemist was clothed in a concealing brown robe, which looked to be thick enough to withstand a small explosive reaction had it ever occurred in his experimentation.

“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll drop that weapon,” Bernhart told him, “We can let you walk out of this unharmed, but only if you tell us everything we need to know.”

He and Luitold approached the alchemist in unison. As they came near, Quintus dropped his dagger and shifted uncomfortably, leaning his head in the direction opposite of Luitold, as if he wanted to increase the distance between them as much as possible without moving.

“Alright, what do you want to know?” he said hastily.

“Heaven’s Blessing, tell us everything about it,” Luitold said to him, “What is dark magic? What does Dietrich want with it? Why were the jars we use here also at the battlefield in Rheinmark? Tell us everything.”

Luitold leaned in extremely close to the man’s face, seeing the terror in his eyes grow as his hot breath spread against him.

“Heaven’s Blessing?” Quintus asked. His face contorted into a smile, though his brow was still furrowed in discomfort, “Has Rudolf only told you its name given by the King? Any man with expertise regarding the material calls it by its alchemical title, Novum Verum.”

“I don’t give a damn what you want to call it,” Bernhart remarked, unsheathing his sword and holding it to the alchemist’s neck, “Just talk.”

“The King calls it Heaven’s Blessing because he believes it was a gift from God,” Quintus said, “As if the material’s existence wasn’t secret enough, he tells everyone he entrusts with it to call it by that name, just to hold up the lie of what it really is. The magic this kingdom is known for is fake, every last bit of it.”

“Huh?” Bernhart replied, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Novum Verum is a naturally occurring mineral in the earth’s rock, with the property of creating illusions in the human mind,” Quintus said, “When you breathe in its dust or fumes, you see things that don’t exist.”

“Rudolf told us it only exposes the magic that can’t normally be seen,” Luitold interjected, “Do you mean to tell us it’s all fake? I’ve seen what this magic can do, it’s absolutely real!”
“I’m afraid your baron friend’s a liar, and he knows it, too,” Quintus said, “All magic known to the people of this kingdom is an illusion, dreamt by the imaginations of man under Novum Verum’s influence. The wonderful thing about Novum is how real it truly feels. It’s that very property that made the Count wonder if it could kill, if it could trick the mind into thinking it’s been slain. That has been the premise of our research these past few years. Before long, with the help of Baron Rudolf, we found that the key to dark magic was just a sprinkle of his land’s brimstone. If I’m not mistaken, Luitold, you grew up mining brimstone in Holzstadt. Well, all of that material you dug up was sent here and used for our research. Even then, you helped us without knowing.”

“If magic is all an illusion, then how do I exist before you right now?” Luitold said, “The beast is a product of dark magic as well, is it not?”

“That’s what’s so interesting about you, Luitold,” Quintus said, “Through the things you told Rudolf, we’ve learned a lot about what gives Novum Verum the property of deception it’s always had. You spoke of another world, one with a great tree made of white crystal, likely Novum Verum itself. Beyond it was yet another world, one similar to our own, only slightly different, with skies made of blood and humans appearing as beasts like yourself. These descriptions align with things said by citizens of the capital, a place where Novum Verum is dispersed through the air at all times. Your data has made it clear, Novum Verum is the natural link to another realm congruent with that of our own. The conclusion we have come to is that the human mind refuses to see what exists in this other realm, which we call the bestial realm, so much so that it actively creates false information in the places where these realms collide. That is what magic is, just a bandage to hide from us what we are not meant to see.”

“You mentioned the capital,” Bernhart said, “What do you mean their descriptions align?”

“Like I said, the bestial realm, and Novum Verum by extent, is an entity foreign and antithetical to humankind, which is why our minds block it out,” Quintus said, “What you’ll find is that those exposed to Novum Verum to a certain extent will begin to lose their ability to hide from the other realm. Over the years, as the citizens of Old Corvel have been shown countless displays of the King’s false magic, some have fallen victim to a disease we simply call Novum Verum sickness. After so much exposure to the material, they have begun to see a mix of both realms at once, noting things like blood falling from the sky and the faces of others looking bizarre and unsettling. With their bodies and minds being unfit for the bestial realm, they slowly fall into a state of apparent psychosis before they eventually meet their end.”

“How long does it take?” Luitold asked.

“For the citizens of the capital, decades,” Quintus told him, “For someone like you, exposing yourself to high dosages day after day, you may only have weeks.”

“What?” Luitold yelled.

“It’s simply your fate. You are likely the person closest linked to the bestial realm in all of human history,” Quintus said, “There’s no chance you come out of this unscathed.”

Bernhart gave Luitold an uncomfortable glance before he continued with his questions, seeming unsure of what to say on this particular matter.

“Tell us, what is the beast?” he asked.

“That we can not be sure of,” Quintus replied, “Although there are certain things we do know. For every person in the human realm, there is a beast counterpart in the bestial realm. That is why Luitold sees us in a similar form to himself. The reason Luitold is able to appear as a beast in our realm is the particular way he interacts with the jars. When a large jar of Novum Verum and brimstone is shattered, the materials within violently react and disperse from the jar all at once, creating a gas concentrated enough to merge the two realms completely, though only across a small area. When Luitold breaks a jar, the space surrounding his skin becomes part of the bestial realm, which is why only he becomes a beast and not the people around him.”

“I see,” Bernhart said, “Well, the science of this all is not what really concerns me. Now I want you to explain how Novum Verum fell into the possession of Alemannia. Their magic was able to kill, but that was a technology you developed, isn’t that right?”

“That I am strictly forbidden to tell you,” Quintus said.

“Bastard! I have a blade to your throat! You will do as I say!” Bernhart roared.

Quintus loudly swallowed as beads of sweat began to form on his bald head.

“Fine,” he said shamefully, “The war with Alemannia was a carefully orchestrated ruse by Dietrich.”

“What?” Bernhart’s pupils contracted inward as he looked to the man’s face with shock.

“Under normal circumstances, Dietrich would not have been allowed counsel with the princess,” he continued, “For his plan to work, he needed leverage over Old Corvel. He provided King Étienne with Novum Verum and the knowledge of how to use it in exchange for sending his men to invade Rheinmark. He was willing to let the county fall if it meant proving to the King that his technology was needed for defense. That’s why the jars of Novum Verum you saw there were already placed across the battlefield. Dietrich requested for Count Varen to set up the fires, knowing they would be used to spread weaponized Novum Verum through the air and kill his own men under the guise of a dragon attack.”

“I can’t believe it,” Bernhart growled, “That bastard really is the devil.”

Luitold stared on in silence. As the conversation went on, his mind stuck to what Quintus had told him a minute earlier. Heaven’s Blessing, or Novum Verum, was a poison, and he had spent the last week racing to the end of his life without knowing, inhaling jar after jar as he split his soul between the two realms. It was just as the tree spirits had warned him. Was he really going to die so soon? Just from a simple mistake? For now, all he could do was hope his condition was different from the people of the capital. Nothing about his situation so far had been normal. Who was to say his fate wouldn’t be unique as well?

“Anything else you want to know, traitor?” Quintus asked.

“Just one more thing,” Bernhart said, “What was Dietrich really doing during his absence?”

“The Count simply took a daytrip to the nearest barony of Colgestien. There, he took refuge in its baron’s castle, where he practiced mastery of the beast in secrecy,” Quintus said, “He had grown fearful that Rudolf was conspiring against him, and needed to ensure he would be well enough equipped to smother an insurgency. He told me he would borrow a handful of men as well, though I don’t know what he has planned for them.”

“So my suspicions were correct, Dietrich has become a beast,” Bernhart said, “Well then, that should be everything we need.”

Bernhart lowered his sword from the alchemist’s neck and buried it into his sheath.

“Don’t we have to kill him?” Luitold asked, “The moment we’re gone, he’ll tell Dietrich that we know his secrets!”

“Dietrich will know something is up if we kill him, all the same,” Bernhart said, “Where we stand, the point of no return is already behind us.”

Bernhart began heading to the lab’s front door, only to turn back around and face Quintus. He struck the cowering alchemist against his cheek with all his might, knocking his circular body to the floor in pain.

“Even so, you can go to hell, Quintus,” he said, “Let’s go, Luitold. We need to tell Rudolf the news before things get worse.”

“Right,” Luitold replied.

The two of them approached the door. Once at its reach, Bernhart effortlessly moved its small thumb latch, unlocking it from within. As they stepped outside, Luitold found his skin steaming once more, and he waited a few seconds to transform back into a human before he continued walking. Knowing everything he had just learned about Novum Verum, it was a relief to be back in the human realm, where his body belonged. 

Bernhart looked to the sky.

“Hm, it stopped raining so soon,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Luitold asked, “The rain’s not gone, it’s only slowed down a little.”

Luitold had little idea of what Bernhart meant by this. It was obviously still raining, he could feel the drops on his skin. He even looked down at his arm to confirm it. That was when he noticed the liquid dripping from his forearm was thick red drops of blood. As he looked up, the other raindrops falling from the sky were red, too.

“Hm?” Bernhart said, “Are we seeing the same thing, here?”

“Sorry, I don’t know what I’m saying,” Luitold replied, shaking his head rapidly as if he needed to wake himself, “I think I’m just tired.”