Part Three: Graduation
Chapter XXI:
Reunion of Shadows
In his first few years of John's adopting him, Kurt Eisenforst attended school at Temek Elementary, with other child soldiers.
His memories of the taboo smashing war were a vague few brief moments, while his memories of a lifetime in the future seemed far more vivid and concrete.
By age eight, he learned to read and write and at the age of thirteen began to record in a journal what he still remembered from the vision;
there were fragments he could recall, a partial tale he crafted though details from the first hours upon waking from the shadow world, though after days and years the memories became harder and harder to retrieve.
At age fourteen, starting High School, two of his classmates, a handsome boy and a beautiful girl, both fair in skin, their eyes somber and sorrowsome would gaze at Kurt and each other in an unspoken understanding of fear.
The boy and girl were aloof, quiet, expressionless and cold, the girl in particular. She was a new student, having spent time in Vargia before moving to the R.C.Z. The girl, Verity von Herrenhausen, was for Kurt all but unknowable.
She avoided Kurt though he perceived a hesitancy in her striding, a magnetism as they sat at opposite ends of the classroom.
The boy, Etzel Galvan, was always mum when they passed each other in the halls, but an electric spark flickered in his dark eyes, a recognition of Kurt being someone more familiar than a scrawny fourteen-year old nobody.
A month into the school year, Kurt finally spoke to Verity passing him outside the gymnasium, its mountain-facing wall emblazoned with the painted image of a fierce pouncing Jaguar, the gym’s iconic exterior a popular crossroads for students in Temek Valley High School.
She quickly looked at him, and darted her gaze away, as if it were a mistake.
"You see me, Shadow," said Kurt.
Ahead of him, Verity halted, and without looking back, said, “I’m no shadow.”
“Neither am I…but we were. We were shadows. You remember. Don’t you?” said Kurt.
Verity turned her face away. She spoke softly. “What was real, what was illusory?…It couldn’t have been real...”
Tears welled in Verity’s big, beautiful eyes.
She continued,“How do you know? It was the war…we were kids…Until we weren’t. But it was just a dream...We were traumatized by the fighting...it's how we coped. Make believe.”
She turned to him, wiping tears.
Kurt shook his head.“A dream we both share? That Etzel shares? We were kids, and you, me and Etzel were shown our impending future.
It was real, I felt every moment of agony and every fleeting instance of comfort. I am no fourteen year old and neither are you...we have lived and experienced millenia, the Eldermark, and witnessed the end of the world...”
Verity whispered. “If it’s all real...then I am a monster.”
Kurt was drawn back to Verity’s eyes and beauty. He thought of the blade he stuck in her needle covered flesh.
Verity turned away again and said,“I’ve seen the spark in his eye, Kurt. Etzel knows...He fears me, he thinks I’m a demon.”
“He may fear what both you and him are capable of…the demons though…that is your choice…you wouldn’t accept the apegift would you? The apegift to kill him or kill your bodyguard at least?”
“Of course not!!! How could you think that???…”
“Then how do we prove our collective memory wrong? What do we do instead?…when do we act? Do we wait a month, a year, a century for everything to come to that reality? What will you do, Verity?”
They had moved under an oak, its shade providing a modicum of relief from the sunlight cooking the blacktop ballcourt beside the gym.
“I’ll fight, alright? I have this.”
Verity pulled on a chain around her neck, withdrawing glimmering silvery tooth. “The...Tooth..But what good did it do? I do not remember much of what we used it for..., ”said Kurt.
“From what I remember…we need it to bring back the Weever, an ettin slaying creature split into five parts. From my memory, the parts did not come together…"
I do remember...I had an Eye...there was a tail too, and a scale...yes...Embla! And a heart! Rammbock...But what can we do but wait...until he comes for us.”
Verity shook her head. “…It’s about the pulver, Kurt. Do you remember what material Orbaulker is made of?”
Kurt had not considered that the vaighlings were anything but some sort of horrid animal, made of flesh and bone like steel.
“Pulver, Kurt. Nearly 100%. Ettins are 30, 40, 50% of the stuff. But where does it all come from? What is the source of that filth?”
“I don’t know...” said Kurt.
“My dad knows. Your dad-Carolus- knows. Few others alive do. If we cut off the supply of pulver it will dismantle the entire lifeblood, production, surgical construction of the ettins...Pulver is ground up ettins and vaighlings and men, Kurt, digested and vomited upon the world.”
“Digested by what?”
“Azza," answered Verity.
Kurt recalled his encounter in the throne room.
“I see...so he’ll keep producing more and more as long as he has enough fodder.”
“Yes,Kurt. But his body is full of the stuff as well. Quickore destroys pulver, and so we need to get it right this time. We need to resurrect the Weever and strike Azza directly.”
“So, the Weever then…it needs its parts to be reunited,right,” said Kurt, "Its Tooth you have, the Eye John has…Grimnar has the Tail, and the scale…”
“Embla,” said Verity softly.
Kurt nodded,“Embla…and where are her allegiances these days?” Verity shook her head. “She lives in Subohemia. You would not wish to know who they say her lover is these days…”
“Grimnar?”
“No! The Geissmeister...”
“The Geissmeister? One of Adatmen’s stooges?”
“He is more than that. A puppet of Eugenius Geissler, incredibly strong though practically brainless. When one of his iterations fails his maker, he is scrapped like junk metal and reconfigured.”
Kurt shook his head,“If she is cavorting with these sorts of fellows I fear she will not be so kind to our cause...How can we convince her to join us?…"
Verity shook her head. “That I don’t know.”
"And the Unghost...where do find him?" said Kurt.
"That I do know...there is a ceremony on Subohemia to be held next month. A graduation ceremony for the students of Subohemia High School...the rumor is Azza will be an attendance."
Kurt looked out to the mountains, towards Temek Hill. “I need to talk to John…he might have an idea on what we do next…”
Verity spoke hushed,“Don’t let anyone else hear about this Kurt…even Etzel…”
“But why? Etzel was one of the shadows as well!”
“But he fears me now, and that fear can become a weapon against us…just be careful," said Verity looking into a crowd of students who were bursting into a fit of laughter.
“There is much we collectively know…we all saw it, that future…But how much do the others know?…the ettins...the Groomslayer?” said Kurt glancing at the gym.
Under the jaguar emblem stood a man, his face covered by a surgical mask, his hair like dried yellow grass.
Staring at Kurt, he tapped his ear, eyes smiling, before walking into the gym.
“Who was that?…” said Kurt under his breath.
“Who was that?”repeated a crackling voice close by.
“How much do the others know…how much,Kurt?”
"I heard it too, Kurt...go. I know him. I'll be safe...," said Verity whispering.
"Oh, she'll be safe...she'll be safe...."
Kurt excused himself from the oak, storming away from the school, terror overcoming him.
They were being watched. Listened to. Of course they were.
+++++
That night, John returning home from his mail route, kicked his rattlesnake boots up on a stump on his patio overlooking the valley below; the purple mountains crowned with an sunset, stars beginning to poke through the blue heaven.
John sipped his firewater and greeted Kurt who had been inside the house that afternoon writing.
Under Kurt's arm was the journal, sitting himself onto a stump beside his adoptive father, he passed it to John's whiskey free hand.
“What’s this?” said John flipping through the journal.
“Read a bit…It’s important.”
John began to read, continuing for a few minutes before shutting the journal and passing it back to Kurt.
“There are some things in this life we ought not know.”
“You believe I did those things?” asked Kurt.
“When I received the…Eye…I was told you would play a big part in this drama. Well, here we are," said John sighing.
“They know about this…the ettins,” said Kurt in a hushed voice…,"we-I was followed today by someone, an ettin probably.”
“We?”
“Yes…well, I wasn’t the only who knows about this stuff.”
John scratched his five o' clock shadow.
“I see. And they couldn’t keep their mouths shut…what you know about their plans for this world are probably too threatening for them to let you all live…Or worse. Maybe they want us alive. Want to torment us," said John placing his glass down.
Kurt felt sick.
John reached into his pocket pulling out an egg-shaped object, the bleeding Weever’s Eye.
“It’s yours now. It will protect you. I was planning to grant it to you much later, when I had figured out our escape and attack plan…but you probably know about that already…”
"But if I take it...it will cease protecting you...I can't accept it..."
"Hellfire, Kurt, that's an order! Take it!"
Kurt reluctantly took the Eye and placed it in own breast pocket.
It felt hot, familiar.
“Whoever was watching you before is watching us now…let ‘em. But Kurt…Not a word more about this vision.” John threw the journal into the crackling fire before them. “This record is too dangerous to be left to their hands...Today, it begins…the end.”
John motioned Kurt indoors. Inside his den, he pulled maps and weapons from drawers.
“This all familiar to you, Kurt? It’s familiar to me too...I thought it was a damn dream, the damndest of dreams...but it was real. All of it...”
His face dour, he looked to Kurt.
“You were there? You saw it?” asked Kurt.
“I saw my death...that was it.”
“There’s more, John. Much more.”
“Then, let’s see it...Let’s leave now, ride out...come on.”
The house shook.
The men looked to the window. Lightning bolts like ropes unfurling whipped the house’s foundations.
“Go!” John ordered.
Kurt said nothing, taking his pack; the Eye. He flung the back door open to see a wall of fire circling the house.
Within it stood a winged creature, skeletal, eyes burning with the same fire enveloping the house.
“Living Man, have you forgotten to whom you belong?” Todteld stretched out a hand, bearing the flaming wolf-head saber Deathbrand.
“Todteld. What have you done to my home?”
“I have come to take what is mine. The man Ormsvard has relinquished his protective sheath: the Eye. Now you are under my mantel. Take on the armor of Rammbock or die with him.”
John’s home was aflame.
“John!”
“As of this afternoon, you and the girl Verity are targeted by the sons of Orbaulker.
The Groomslayer has determined you to be a threat.
He knows what the Unghost knows. And he knows far more than what is obvious on the surface.”
Kurt had already rushed to the house, but the fire burned to a volcanic temperature.
In moments, where the house once lay, only ash remained.
“He plans to take the girl. The heir to the Weever's Tooth; bring her to the Chateau of Carolus Eisenforst for nefarious ends.”
“John...” said Kurt wiping tears.
“Do not mourn him, he granted you life in exchange for his own. He will be exalted and raised again.”
Vaighlings watched them in the black of that night, their red eyes aglow their fangs bared, flapping and whispering in their crooked tongue.
“Do you accept the armor of Rammbock?” Todteld asked.
Kurt looked to the ash, the vaighlings and knelt before the errandghost, restraining his weeping.
"I accept."
"Good. Now promise me something..."