Quiet Emptiness
The comment landed with the jarring impact of a dropped plate in a silent room, which thankfully still remained on the table. Mark, who had been carefully reassembling the fragile walls of his composure, felt a hot flush creep up his neck. He coughed, the piece of meat he'd just swallowed suddenly feeling lodged in his throat.
"What?" he managed, the word coming out as a flustered croak. "What are you talking about?" The implications were… confusing. He replayed his joke from earlier about the three women following him. Was this what Dawn was referring to?
"How do you two even know each other?" he asked, deflecting while attempting to regain a little control. "Is Enceladus that small?"
Dawn shrugged, completely unfazed by his reaction as she cleared her plate. "It's simple," she said after swallowing. "She's a medic. I'm a huntress."
She paused, as if that explained everything. Seeing his blank expression, she let out a small, almost imperceptible sigh of exasperation. "Things attack back, Mark," she stated, her voice flat. "Beasts in the high peaks, Gorge-Crawlers in the chasms... they don't exactly lie down and let you get on with it. When a hunt goes badly, someone has to patch you up."
As she spoke, she casually pushed up the sleeve of her left leather bracer. Etched into the weathered skin of her forearm, running from just below her elbow almost to her wrist, was a scar. It wasn't a clean, surgical line, but an ugly map of old violence, the pale, jagged lines a testament to a wound that should have crippled her.
"A Gorge-Crawler got lucky a few years back," she explained, her tone as matter-of-fact as if she were discussing the weather. "Tori was the medic on duty who put me back together." She pulled the sleeve back down, covering the mark as if it were nothing. "That's how we know each other."
With a short break she added, “You, well she raged for a while about stuff she saw in your head.” pausing as she wiped the last of the meal up with a slice of bread, “Then about your nose healing straight. You did a number on her somehow.”
“Nose? What?” Mark instinctively reached for his face, remember a lot of pain from the injury from the imp and more from the infirmary? He was missing something in the context here…
“Anyways.” She avoided another answer with a smile, the meal finished and the strange, fragile truce between them holding, Dawn pushed her chair back from the table. The quiet, domestic moment was over.
"I need to go," she said, her voice reverting to its usual, professional tone. She stood, her worn leathers creaking softly in the silence of the house. "Thank you for the meal."
She walked to the door, then paused with her hand on the latch, looking back at him. "I have to submit my report on your movements," she stated, a simple reminder that despite the shared coffee and confessions, she was still on duty. "And I have to report the Masons' intervention. Alex Smith had no authority to approach you like that."
She met his gaze, her sharp eyes holding a flicker of something he couldn't quite read. Resignation? A hunter's pragmatism? Genuine concern?
"It's going to cause issues," she finished, her voice a flat, simple statement of fact. And with that, she opened the door and was gone, leaving Mark alone in the quiet house with the lingering scent of cooked food and the subtle promise of new trouble.
The quiet of the house settled around him, a stark contrast to the storm of revelations and confrontations that had defined his day. The lingering scent of food was fading, replaced by the clean, neutral smell from polished wood and cool stone floor. There was one last task on his schedule, a final, non-negotiable appointment with Sam's crinkled piece of paper.
He cleared the space in the living room, his movements more fluid than they had been that morning. He began the routine, the familiar sequence of stretches and core exercises now a known quantity. He braced himself for the usual agony, the trembling protest of a body pushed beyond its long-neglected limits.
But the agony didn't come.
There was a burn, yes, a deep and satisfying ache in his muscles as he held a plank, his form steady. The leg lifts were still a challenge, but he completed the set without his legs shaking uncontrollably. He moved through the entire routine with a slow, steady rhythm, his breathing controlled, his focus absolute. With everything answered through the day, his mind was clear, empty, and the routine flowed unquestioned.
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When he finished, he didn't collapse. He simply lowered himself to the floor, breathing heavily, sweat beading on his forehead. He was tired, yes, a deep, cellular-level weariness from a full day of walking, failed revelations, and giant-sized confrontations. But beneath it, for the first time, there was a reserve. An energy he hadn't possessed before. The exercises hadn't drained him completely; they had just scraped the top layer off a well that was, slowly, getting deeper.
There was consideration at the revelation, the sets needed updating, but that's for Sam's next visit, by then maybe there would be a reason more compelling than a routine to complete.
After a quick rinse in the shower, he stood in front of the large mirror in the bathroom, wiping the steam from the glass. He looked at his reflection, searching for any sign of the change he felt. There was nothing. No new lines of muscle had appeared on his arms. The same soft middle, though perhaps fractionally less pronounced, was still there. He looked practically the same as the tired, out-of-shape project manager who had stared back at him in his Manchester flat, just now with a badly maintained beard forming.
A wry, tired smile touched his lips. He raised his fists in a clumsy, awkward approximation of a boxer's stance, his elbows too wide, his guard too low. Cursing the waste of effort in the numerous self-defense courses he had done over the years, there was no street training against mountains or wherever else was waiting for him. He threw a few slow, pathetic punches at his own reflection, a bad impression of shadow boxing, his reflection if possible would have felt sorry for him.
Then he laughed.
It was a quiet, genuine laugh, born from the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of it all. He thought of Alex Smith, of the crack of stone and the furious red glow of his tattoo. He thought of the sheer, overwhelming physical power that man possessed, and that was only from observation, with the strange magics of this place, what would a monster like him truly be able to do.
What would a true monster here be capable of?
That thought joined the others in the pit of despair he was still orbiting around, with Dawn now gone the pretense of a way out of the knowledge he now possessed wasn’t needed. Alone…
He dropped his hands, the laughter fading into a shake of his head. He never would have had a chance. It wasn't even a contest. He had faced down a mountain and won, not because he was strong, but because the mountain hadn't expected him to simply walk around it.
The quiet emptiness returned with those thoughts. He was tired, a deep exhaustion that settled into his bones. The day was finally over, this was his life, still standing after 2 weeks of… all of it…
He made a slow, methodical circuit of the ground floor. He gathered the plates from the meal, rinsing them under the blessedly hot water and leaving them to dry on a rack by the sink. He took his workout clothes, still damp from his earlier efforts, and placed them inside the strange cleaning alcove Sam had shown him. He didn't know the mechanics of it, only the outcome. He pressed the glowing rune on the wall beside it, and a soft hiss of steam filled the small space for a moment before falling silent. Magic as a utility. Another impossible thing that was becoming mundane.
Upstairs, the large, comfortable bed was a silent invitation to collapse, to let the dreamless sleep he craved take him. But there was one last thing, a thought, an action, something that may have meaning, or may be nothing.
He opened the drawer of the bedside table. Inside, placed neatly in the center, was a small, plain book. It was bound in simple, unadorned dark leather, its pages clean, white and empty. Beside it was a sharpened pencil. The house had everything in some way or another, a writing pad could have just been there, or was it another anticipation by the powers that be.
He sat on the edge of the bed, the book in his lap. It wasn't a diary. He'd never been one for chronicling days, events or even his feelings. It was to be a project plan. The only project he had left, the failed project.
He opened it to the first pristine page. The crisp smell of fresh paper was a small, comforting anchor to his old life. At the top of the page, in his neat, blocky handwriting, he wrote a single, definitive title.
Objectives
About half way through he added another title, the same blocky handwriting as before.
Goals
For goals it was easy to write, but hard to work back from, he knew so little, but it was the last string and from a being that apparently was Knowledge herself.
- Go to First Landing?
Long term, and punctuated with a question mark, it wasn’t what he needed.
Turning back to the first page, the first title, he stared deep in thought.
Beneath it, he wrote the first item on the list, the critical path from which all other tasks would flow.
- Find a way forward.
He stared at the words for a long moment. He didn't have any other answers yet. He didn't know what the next steps were, or the ones after that. But he had an objective, and a goal even if laughable.
He drew a series of empty bullet points beneath the first, a silent, waiting list for a future he now had to build from nothing. His task now was to fill them… It was his promise to himself to fill them…