A Weapon’s Serenade

It was the end of the girls’ second day in Cologne, a day filled with visits to all the museums. Not literally all of them but a lot of museums. And, of course, delicious food. Now, the three were walking along the rhine, enjoying this wonderful summer evening.

“We need to go to all the museums everywhere.” Anne held Melody’s hand.

“Yes please. I looooove museums so much. Best place for a date, even better than a good library.”

“You absolute nerd. I love you. And yes, obviously the best place for a date.”

Melody chuckled. “I love you too, you nerd.”

“And of course I love you too, Kuria.”

“I love you too.” Kuria smiled at her girlfriend. The disguised demon was hanging back a bit and enjoying the gentle breeze quietly.

“You know what’s crazy?”

“Hm?” Melody raised an eyebrow.

“How familiar this place feels. I mean, yea, we are still in Europe and pretty close to home, but we are still in a foreign country and it just feels… human.”

“I mean, there is an entire channel and multiple countries between here and home. But you’re right, this feels very familiar and not in a bad way.”

“Things might change a bit once we go further south and into the countryside. We don’t have mountains at home.”

“True. Black forest will be fun.”

“I mean… it’s the only time we’re cheating. Can you imagine having to hike with all our luggage?”

“Hell no. I’m glad we can cheat like that. But no cheating the train tomorrow, we need to be at the station a little bit past nine.”

“Then we don’t even need to cheat sleep. No magic needed tomorrow morning.”

“Hopefully.”

Magic was needed in the morning, of course Anne and Melody barely had gotten any sleep. Kuria was happy to provide her humans with a little magical push. There was thankfully enough time for breakfast at the hotel and to get in another walk along the rhine towards the train station before the train departed to Frankfurt, where we girls would spend the day with Nadine before heading to Trier the next day just after lunch.

Now, the girls sat in the train to Frankfurt. It would just take an hour and nine minutes, if there were no delays, to get to their destination.

“I just got a text from Nadine.” Melody put her phone away again after responding to the message.

“Everything going as planned?”

“Yea, she will pick us up as planned but the lunch reservation is half an hour later than planned.”

“That’s not a problem, we’ll find something to do.”

“That’s what I told her, yea. It’ll all be fine. She also managed to get a field bed from a friend. We will all fit into the living room.”

“Oh, nice.”

“She does know that I don’t need to sleep, right?”

“Yea, she knows but she insisted.”

“Fair enough.”

“Fahrkarten bitte.” An older man in a Deutsche Bahn uniform stood beside the girls.

Melody dug out her phone again and showed him the digital ticket. A short scan of the QR code later, the man nodded. “Okay. Gute Reise.”

“Herzlichen Dank.” Melody thanked him for his wish for good travels and the man moved on.

“It is always nice to see how far humans have come. The few times I… you know how I mean this, I had to travel in the past we had to use a horse.”

“Wasn’t there an Asuran travel stone network that connected the larger cities?” Melody tilted her head slightly.

“For the larger cities, yes. We didn’t leave the emperor’s side much until the purge and when we did, we were sent out to deal with issues further away. In the cities, the emperor could just call upon the local guard but the rural regions weren’t loyal enough for that. Of course, after the purge we no longer had access to the network, which also stopped working shortly after anyway.”

“Stopped working? Why? Just naturally or…?”

“With the empire in disarray and the Hand incapable for proper leadership, a lot of things fell into disrepair. Whenever those teleport stones were moved, the enchantment on them broke and the entire network had to be re-established to recognize the moved stone as a usable destination again. So, one by one the stones were moved for various reasons, storms, floods, fighting, and eventually no stone was there to serve as a destination anymore. The Hand had forbidden magical practice outside their purview, and they didn’t have the proper knowledge of how the network worked. I assume they tried to fix it a few times but failed.”

“And with the network gone, long distance trade became too difficult. Centralized government became impossible and the knowledge of the dangers of the radioactive rocks barely spread either.”

“Exactly. With the core means of travel gone, an empire quickly falls to whatever tiny hurdle it runs into. Just that this hurdle wasn’t tiny.”

“Yea, you can’t really overcome an epidemic of radiation sickness if nearly all citizens are affected.”

Kuria nodded. “I think I was what protected Vashta from suffering the same fate as most Asurans. She had to deal with the radioactive stones often, disrupting illegal trade and all that. The royal assassins weren’t just political assassins, as much as that image was propagated, they were also problem solvers. The people you throw at something otherwise unfixable, just to make the problem go away no matter how. The illegal accumulation of radioactive material by the Hand was one of those problems. Sadly, one we never fully solved.”

“I mean, if you had, the Hand wouldn’t have taken over.”

“That’s true. In a way I am glad they did. When the emperor decided that we had become too powerful to remain at his side, it was only a matter of time until the already growing paranoia would have torn the empire apart anyway. An inepter central government at least gave the outlying regions the chance to find their own path and fight the inevitable. I didn’t check if this was true, but I remember hearing of a small city and its surrounding villages in the far north of the empire holding on to Asuran culture for centuries after pretty much everyone else had fallen.”

“Maybe Atryca knows something about that.”

“Hm. I guess it would be worth asking her. If they left any documents behind, as would be dictated by Asuran law, the library would have something too. I just didn’t think about that city for a long time. It would be nice to find out that they were real and maybe upholding the culture I, well… the culture I grew up in.”

“That’s a cute thought honestly. Not just that there was one last holdout of Asuran culture that outlasted the empire by so much, but also that you consider Asuran culture the one you grew up in. With what I said to that priest, that I grew up surrounded by demonic culture but in a human environment, I took it for granted that you had the same experience, but you have so much more. All those millennia before you truly awoke are still things you remember, experiences you had. All that time to grow up and become my big sister.”

“I thought long and hard about when I grew up and if that even applied to me. You are right. I came to the conclusion that the hosts that shaped me the most were Vashta and you. My first and my last. I still carry many of the Asuran cultural norms and expectations with me. And yet I don’t know if I would call myself Asuran. Or if I would accept it if someone else called me that, even Atryca who is the last remaining authority on that.”

Anne made a thinking noise. “I might be overstepping but… wouldn’t it be right to call yourself Asuran because you and Atryca are the last remnants of that culture? Even if you aren’t an Asuran human or really conscious at that time, you were part of that culture. You were Asuran through Vashta just as you were a student in Vengeance’s philosophy class through Melody. You said you still hold on to aspects of the Asurans, so why not embrace that? Atryca and you, you two are the heirs of the Asuran empire. The last living witnesses of its height and its fall.”

“That is one hell of a point… I don’t want to just decide that on my own though. Atryca is the last living undisputed Asuran. If she were to proclaim me as one too, you have convinced me to accept that. I will go talk to her about that once we are back.”

“Oh, I didn’t expect to change your mind there. Woops.”

Kuria chuckled and shook her head. “Don’t be so surprised, you keep managing to talk me out of doubts.”

“I will believe that that’s my superpower. Besides being hyper observant.”

Melody grinned. “And your many other talents. Just a little bit more and we have Anne the omnipotent here.”

“Oh, don’t oversell me. I will only reach omnipotence in a few millennia at best. No need to rush into apotheosis already.”

“N’aww and I already had plans for a temple. Dammit.”