Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Sleep came for Almond like a wave.

It did not hurt. That was the worst of it. It felt like the end of the longest day of his life, and a soft bed waiting, and someone he loved telling him he had done enough.

His knees started to bend.

Deny.

He threw it at the wave the way he had once thrown it at a beak, and at a falling leg, and at a strike that should have killed him.

The sleep did not arrive.

It stood just outside him, pressing, the way the Closer’s beak had hung in front of his eyes. He could feel it leaning on him with the whole weight of a creature miles long. It would not stay out for long. He had a few heartbeats at most. He had held a falling tree with that imprint for two heartbeats, and this was heavier than any tree.

He did not waste them.

He looked up at the Lull’s head, ten yards away. At its great pale eye, open for the first time in two hundred years. At the heavy gray lid above it, which had been closed for so long that grass had grown along its edge.

That lid was the thing that brought the sleep. He knew it the way he knew his own name.

Quiet Edge.

He crossed the ten yards without a sound. The Lull did not see him coming, because nothing made a sound to warn it. He drove Ainen’s cleaver into the edge of the lid.

Sever.

The line was there. It was thin as a hair, right along the fold. He cut it, and a strip of gray hide as long as his arm came away in his hand.

The Lull flinched. Its eye blinked, and the blink was crooked now. The lid did not close all the way.

His heartbeats were running out. The sleep was already pushing through Deny like water through a cracked dam.

He held the strip of eyelid in both hands.

Deny.

It folded.

It did not crumble, and it did not twist slowly the way the others had. It folded all at once, hard and fast, like a door slamming. The orb it left in his hands was the pale gray of first light before dawn. It was cold enough to sting.

[Power Orb: Unclosed]

[Quality: D]

[Sleep does not arrive for you, or for anyone you carry.]

The orb went into his palms. His status changed.

[Life Rank: D]

[Power Orbs: 2 of 10]

The wave of sleep hit him at full strength, and it simply did not land. It broke around him like water around a stone.

Almond stood in the grass, wide awake, and breathed.

Behind him, eight people lay in the grass, and one was standing.

”Almond,” Big D said. His voice was very tight. ”Whatever you just did, do it to them. I can’t hold much longer.”

Carry.

Almond reached for all of them at once.

It was nothing like the crossing. There were only eight of them. But they were so deep under that it was like pulling people up out of deep water. He took hold of them anyway, one after another. Rudra. Natalia. Kael. Ainen. Orla. Marcus. Silvester.

And Hessa, lying in the grass beside a low green mound, twenty yards away.

The moment he carried them, Unclosed covered them too.

They woke.

Rudra came up off his face, gasping, with grass in his mouth. Natalia sat bolt upright. Kael rolled onto his knees and grabbed for his sword.

Silvester opened his eyes and lay there, staring at the sky.

”I didn’t get up,” he said, sounding very confused. ”Why am I awake? I didn’t get up.”

”I carried you,” Almond said. ”Get up now. We need you.”

Silvester got up.

Twenty yards away, Hessa had opened her eyes too. She was still lying on her side, with her hand on the mound. She did not move. She just stared at it.

Then the Lull lifted its head all the way off its tail.

It was much bigger standing than lying down. It reared up over them like a gray hill coming to life. Its one good eye fixed on Almond. The other, under the torn lid, blinked over and over, crookedly.

For two hundred years, nothing in its ground had stayed awake. Now ten things were standing in front of it, looking back.

It was not tired anymore.

It opened its mouth.

”Ainen!” Almond shouted. ”What does it taste like?”

Ainen was already on his feet. His eyes were closed.

Taste.

”Hungry,” he said. His eyes flew open. ”It’s starving. It’s been asleep as long as everyone it put to sleep. It hasn’t eaten in two hundred years either.”

The Lull’s head came down at them.

It came fast. There was nothing sleepy about it now. Rudra threw Natalia sideways. Kael took one step and was gone. The great gray jaw slammed into the grass where they had been standing and threw up a wave of dirt and roots.

Ainen did not run.

He pulled his pack off his shoulder and tore it open. Bread, dried meat, a pot of the honey Hessa’s people had given him at Greywatch. It was everything they had left for the walk home.

He held up the loaf.

”You must be starving,” he said to the thing that had killed sixty thousand people. ”Here. Eat something.”

He threw it.

The Lull’s head turned. Its mouth was already open, and the bread went in, and the jaw closed on it by itself before it could have thought about it. It had never been offered food in its life.

Open Table.

The orb took hold. It was not like the thin, straining binding he had held on the Gorger. It was easy. It was a handle, not a bare back.

”Anyone who eats what I serve,” Ainen said, ”can’t raise a hand against my guests until the meal is done.”

He spread his arms wide to take in every one of them on the grass.

”You’re all my guests,” he said. ”And I am a very slow cook.”

He tossed the strip of dried meat.

The Lull caught it. It reared back. Then it lowered its head and stayed there, with its great pale eye fixed on the little man with the pack. It was waiting for the next course.

”Go,” Ainen said, without turning around. ”I’ve got maybe half a pack of food. I’ll make it last as long as I can. Go.”

”Natalia,” Almond said. ”Where’s the heart?”

Natalia was already looking. She narrowed her eyes at the huge gray body.

Mark.

Her second orb took the mark through the hide, through the fur and the fat and the bone. A dull red light bloomed deep inside the Lull’s neck. It was forty feet up, just behind the head, under a thick ridge of gray fur.

”There,” she said. ”It’s deep. It’s very deep.”

”Kael.”

”Six steps,” Kael said. ”That’s all I’ve got.”

”Take me up.”

Kael grabbed Almond by the back of his belt.

Quickstep.

The world blurred. Kael took two steps across the grass and three steps straight up the Lull’s side, running on fur as if it were a road. With the sixth, he threw Almond the rest of the way.

Almond landed on the ridge behind the head and grabbed fistfuls of gray fur to hold on. Kael dropped back to the ground below, gasping.

The Lull felt him land. It did not strike at him. It could not. Ainen was holding out a strip of meat, and it was still eating. But its whole body shuddered, and Almond nearly lost his grip.

He crawled forward until he was right over the red mark. Then he drove the cleaver into the fur and began to dig.

It took far too long.

The hide was thick. The fat under it was thicker. He cut and pulled and cut again, and gray fur came away in handfuls, and the red light came closer with every stroke.

Below him, Ainen threw the last of the dried meat.

”Two courses left!” he called up. His voice was strained. ”Bread and honey! Then the meal’s done!”

The Lull ate. Its great eye rolled up toward the thing digging into its neck.

Almond found the line.

It ran right across the red light, deep in the meat of the Lull’s neck. It was thin as a hair, and it was the only soft thing in all that gray mass.

Quiet Edge. Sever.

He cut it.

The cleaver went through the line without a sound. Dark blood welled up around the blade.

The Lull did not die.

It shuddered. It shook so hard that Almond was nearly thrown off. But it did not fall. The heart under him was still beating. He could feel it through his knees, slow and huge, like a drum.

”It’s not enough!” he shouted. ”One cut isn’t enough! It’s too big!”

”Last course!” Ainen yelled. He held up the pot of honey. His hands were shaking. ”After this, it’s free!”

Big D started to climb.

He did not have Quickstep. He did not have anything that made him fast or light. He grabbed the Lull’s fur in both hands and hauled himself up its side, one fistful at a time, the way he had climbed out of the bottom world.

Rudra came up behind him. Then Natalia, then Kael, with no steps left in him at all.

Silvester was the last.

He slipped halfway up. He fell fifteen feet and hit the ground hard, and lay there for a moment.

Get Up.

He got up and started climbing again.

Ainen poured the honey out onto the grass in front of the Lull’s mouth. He did it slowly, a thin, golden line. He took as long as he could.

”That’s the meal,” he said quietly. ”That’s all I have. I’m sorry.”

The Lull licked the last of it from the grass. Its eye closed for a moment, almost peacefully.

Then it opened again, and it was free.

It reared. It flung its head back to throw the climbing things off its neck. Rudra lost his grip. Natalia lost hers. Both of them fell.

Big D did not.

He held on with both fists wrapped deep in the fur, while the whole neck whipped back and forth, and he did not let go.

Unbowed.

He reached the ridge where Almond was clinging. He looked at the bleeding cut, and at the heart beating behind it.

”Again,” he said.

Almond swung the cleaver into the same cut, as hard as he could. The line had closed. He found it again. He cut it again. The heart shuddered.

Big D put both his huge hands into the wound and pulled.

It was the same thing he had done to the Wearer. There was nothing clever about it. He took hold of the thing that was beating, and he leaned his whole weight back, and he did not let go.

The Lull screamed.

It was the first sound it had made in two hundred years. It was high and thin and terrible. It rolled through the whole valley and off the walls of the empty city.

Then the heart came loose in Big D’s hands.

The Lull came down slowly.

Its head sank to the grass beside the river gate, right where it had rested for two hundred years. Its long gray body went loose all the way around the ring of white stones. The last breath went out of it, mile after mile, like wind dying in a field.

Almond and Big D slid down its side and landed in the grass.

For a long time, nobody spoke.

Rudra was sitting up, holding his wrist. Natalia was lying flat on her back and laughing quietly at nothing. Silvester had fallen on his face, then gotten up, then fallen on his face again. He seemed to have decided to stay down this time.

Ainen sat cross-legged in front of the Lull’s head, with his empty pack in his lap.

”It ate everything,” he said. ”Every crumb. It must have been so hungry.”

Kael limped over and sat down beside him.

”You fed a region lord,” he said. ”And it couldn’t touch us until it finished.”

”I’m a very slow cook,” Ainen said again. His voice cracked a little. ”I’ve never been so slow in my life.”

Hessa had not moved from the mound.

Almond walked over to her after a while. Big D came with him. They stood beside her in the grass and did not say anything.

She was sitting with her knees drawn up and one hand resting on the low green shape. Her face was wet. She did not wipe it.

”I was going to lie down,” she said. ”I wanted to. I knew it wasn’t him and I didn’t care.”

”I know,” Almond said.

”You woke me up.”

”I carried you. That’s all.”

Hessa was quiet. Then she patted the mound twice, gently, and stood.

”His name was Tomas Reed,” she said to Big D. Her voice was steady. ”He was a C. He made bad bread and good jokes, and he was the bravest man I ever met.”

Big D listened to every word.

”I have him,” he said.

Hessa looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded once, and turned away, and went to look at the dead Lull.

She knelt by its great pale eye. She laid both hands on it. Almond did not know her imprints, and he did not ask. He watched the eye fold, slowly, into a small dark orb. Hessa held it for a moment, and then it was gone into her palms.

”What does it do?” Natalia asked.

”It keeps watch,” Hessa said. She did not explain further.

They walked into Brightwater at sunset.

The white stones glowed faintly as they stepped between them. It was a soft light, like a lamp being turned up in a dark house.

”It knows we’re here,” Orla said, in a hushed voice. ”The line knows. I’ve never seen one do that.”

The city inside was very quiet.

There were bones in the houses. There were bones in the streets, lying where people had sat down two hundred years ago and not gotten up. Nobody spoke as they walked past them. Big D stopped at a doorway where two small skeletons lay curled together, and he stood there for a while before he walked on.

The river still ran clear through the middle of the city. The towers still stood. The roofs could be mended. The fields beyond the houses had gone wild, but the soil was black and good.

Almond stood in the main square and turned in a slow circle.

”Sixty thousand,” he said.

”Sixty thousand,” Big D said. ”With room left over.”

”We have to bury them first,” Almond said. ”All of them. Before anyone else comes. They’ve been waiting two hundred years. They don’t wait any longer.”

Nobody argued.

Big D reached into his coat and took out the seed. It was warmer than it had ever been. In the twilight, it was glowing faintly with its hundred colors, as if it knew where it was.

”Not yet,” Big D said to it quietly. ”Soon.”

He put it away.

That night, Almond sat on the steps of an empty tower and looked north.

He had not slept. Unclosed did not let sleep arrive. He found that he did not mind. There was too much to think about.

He thought about Lily, three days south. He thought about a faint line of light that said one. He thought about sixty thousand beds, and how he would tell her.

Then he felt it.

It came from far to the north, past the edge of the valley and the hills and everything he could see. It was not a sound, and not a sight. It was the feeling of being looked at, from very, very far away.

It was patient. It was curious. And it was very, very large.

You are heavy, for newcomers, the voice had said, on their first night. That will help you. It will also be noticed.

Almond did not look away. He sat on the steps of a dead city with a cleaver across his knees and looked back.

After a long time, the feeling went away.

He did not tell anyone about it that night. In the morning, he told Big D.

Big D listened, and nodded, and said only one thing.

”Then we’d better get everyone inside the stones,” he said. ”Fast.”