"Welcome to the conclave!"
As I've done many times over the past decade, I fought against rolling my eyes at the exuberance of my Doppelganger. Here we were, at the base of a forested mountain range in the dead of night. And he was screaming.
"The hunter or the beast." He pressed on in a devious spectacle of a whisper. "To find the path of the Ranger means to find either of these beings within ourselves. Our…" he rolled his hand as if to find the word. "Playing with those Tengu pushes us towards the beast, the divine beast, within ourselves. Here." He gestured to the vast expanse a final time. "We shall find it.
"Alone!"
The final word was like a resounding beat of a war drum, signaling the disappearance of my clone into my shadow and bringing about the peaceful silence of the night. Leaving me, at last, alone or, perhaps accompanied by whatever beast my clone assumed was inside me.
As Toril, Ed, Lucia, Giorno, and Jonet- oh Jonet- had done, I've grown ever closer to my clone since the day he was summoned. Though I felt no need to do something as ridiculous as giving him a variation of my name.
Regardless, he was me, and he was my opposite. Thus he knew the repressed or unacknowledged things locked inside the deeper parts of my mind. He could see the beast within me as clearly as I could see the stone outcroppings peering from the trees above.
"Are the others aware of this as well?" I asked the endless echoes of the night, knowing full well the answer.
Duke, Curious Twig, Rebecca Plassein, Zeke Smeal, and Toni Forester. The other Rangers. Somewhere in the endless reaches of the Bodhi Tree's territory, they were in their chosen environments. Be it in the swamps or forests or badlands or the sky itself, they were given the truth from their other selves. And then they were left to fend for themselves.
"Of course they are." I found myself sneering just as I noticed the ground passing beneath my skipping, paper-wreathed feet. "Trained in the ways since birth, most of them. While I, Jaimess Corey, studied to push quills."
It was not a statement born from resentment. Only a fact. An acknowledgment of the cards we were dealt at birth. Of the ways we were expected to spend our years of living. I, for one, was groomed to work numbers. I wanted to work numbers.
Until I met the Tengu.
Naturally, I knew already the answer to my dilemma. To hire someone else or have my Doppelganger run finances in my stead. Aside from that, I could be both a Ranger and the Executive Officer of the Legio Noctis. I knew that. What I knew not was how to awaken this supposed beast within me.
While my mind had been distracted, my body had been running as if it was a separate entity. Covered from head to toe and backed with wings of paper, I've been prancing up the cliffside, searching for a hole or cave to call home. Gripped tightly in my right hand was my favored mace while one of the many leafed short-swords made by the artificers sat in my right. A new addition to my skill set since I began my tenure at the Bodhi Tree, duel-wielding.
Though my sixth sense wasn't as nearly as strong as that day, my other senses were heightened to the extreme. Through the mana fueling my nose and ears, I felt as if I had the smelling and hearing prowess of Skoll or Hati. Through my brimming eyes, I had the sight of Pora Bora. Bringing the clarity of this foreign environment into sight no matter where I looked.
Despite our travels across Epethia and my time here, these lands- woodlands- were an enigma to me still. The greens and browns of the forest canopy and floor held so much variation of contrast when compared to the grays and whites of Odissi. The snow-capped tundra was like the Underworld itself in the face of the million sounds spreading from unseen directions.
Everywhere, there was life.
Overwhelmingly so, at times.
"Have I made a mistake, choosing this place?" I again asked the air as I sat atop a perch before a dim cave near the peak of a great cliff. "Should I not have chosen a tundra or snow-capped peak? Or are all mountain expanses the same to the likes of Tengu?"
I knew not. And that, I disliked more than most things. Not knowing. Losing my sense of self, becoming bestial, or succumbing to the primal urges that dwelled in all humans was something I disliked even more. And the fact that it only increased my self-doubt, I disliked that too.
Growth. That was something I loved, though. So I stepped into the dank cave and immediately felt something amiss. A presence, powerful and primal yet intelligent, watching me from the many corners of the stalagmites and stalactites breaking up the rough stone.
It was something large. Large and full of malice.
Sensing its intensity forced my fingers tighter around the hilt of my weapon almost in an attempt to summon the beast within. If it worked or not, I couldn't say. I could say only that I was reminded of the Tengu once again at that moment. Though they seemed different. Human. Like me in my winged paper form.
I held onto that image and thus those feelings- feelings of joy and gaiety and the high of my mana senses being overcharged, and allowed my instincts to toss my weapons aside.
Knowing that the reaching hands of my clone would pull them to safety, I began hopping in place excitedly; for whatever reason, but only twice. Then balanced myself atop a single foot. I placed the sole of the other flat against my knee. Raised my right fist overhead, and readily held my free hand outward in a loose fist. Then spread my senses outward. And waited.
A far-too familiar crackling vibration of the air spurred magic from my body without my conscious action, shrouding me in a veil of black powder before an electric lance harmlessly crossed my chest.
Meanwhile, the beast within charged right into its open maw while I attempted to study its features. Only a scaled, serpentine thing with many legs made its way into my perception before darkness spread around me. Then came an immense pressure as if the cave itself had collapsed.
It wasn't until I heard a distinct cracking that the beast within looked around and saw jagged teeth peering from the dim light of the red-hot stone of the cave wall. I was in the serpent-thing's maw, I realized, but not before the beast thickened our skin with a third and final layer of obsidian that broke into countless shards on the creature's grating teeth.
I felt my mana trickling from my well as one hand pressed against the roof of the monster's mouth. Then I felt a wide smile spread across my face as my bones and muscles burned with the gentle prickling feeling of a bolstered body.
The ribbed fleshy plate before me cracked against my palm a moment later, but the beast paid it no mind. With a spear of obsidian protruding from my back, holding me in place atop the tongue, my legs spun out in a dance that cracked or shattered the beast's teeth outright.
It thrashed about with a quickening pace with each damaged tooth, squealing so loudly in pain that it forced me to increase the density of my carbon layer lest I be rattled to death. But only after I spawned obsidian daggers to keep myself held affirm to the tongue.
While it flailed, I clawed forward ever-deeper into its maw. And when I heard that distinct crackling, I clawed more manically until the sound of the attack and the dim light of the electrical blast was far behind me.
There, in that dank cave of acid, flesh, and goo, I focused again on the beast within and on the exchange that had just happened. And soon after, looked down to see an obsidian fan looming from a diamond handle gripped in my hand.
Seeing it spurred the beast into a frenzy of spinning and slashing- nay, dancing and frolicking through the length of the dark cave, displacing voluminous pockets of air and slicing through the soft innards of the beast with no regard to its well-being.
The beast within was having fun. Thus I was having fun.
We were engrossed in play.
Up until the thrashing stopped and I saw light once again.
I emerged from that dank cave and stepped into another. One filled with as much bloodshed and carnage as there was stone and dust.
The creature was perhaps ten meters in length, a measurement made difficult by its mangled body. Nevertheless, the serpentine body was covered in blue scales, which would have given me the initial impression of a dragon, if not for the dozen clawed feet running along its length.
I watched those very feet be dragged away by none other than my Doppelganger and undead companion, though I paid them no mind. I was somewhat entranced by the duality of mind I was experiencing. Wherein confusion and respect for the monster ran through the mind of Jaimess Corey while disappointment and boredom ran through the mind of the beast.
"I'll be sure to add it to the list." I snorted after noticing my clone's knowing stare. "Whatever it is."
My clone was uncaring of my rhetoric entirely. He instead tossed a few books my way and I needn't even glance at them to determine what they were, so I turned my sights on the tenebrous woman brooding alongside him.
"You stay for a moment," I said to her. "I wish to talk."
My clone, knowing the intention behind my actions, only stepped towards the shadow. Calling over his shoulder. "Don't take too long. You don't wanna lose that feeling."
"Right," I said, taking both a seat and the books from the ground to flick through the former.
As expected, the topic was centered around surviving in the environment I chose. How to find food. How and where to build shelters. And the types of creatures that called this place home, most importantly.
That was the topic of the first one at least. The second was about an art called Bushcraft. Making structures with wood from saws, knives, and hands. Surviving using natural resources. Ranging with little danger, essentially. A useful set of skills, I was sure it would come to be just that. Though many of the structures called for a not-insignificant amount of labor and wood.
While I had the first in excess, the second was a limited supply. Even in this vast forest, dead trees were a limited resource and the need for firewood was a near-constant. And so too were those structures flammable.
"Perhaps that's why you are here with me?" I turned back to the woman as I sent a few paper goats to keep watch along the cliff face. She had a doll-like face that painfully reminded me of Jonet. Though her features were the same as any other shadow undead, there were no death marks on her, that I could see at least. Giving the undead woman an eerie sense of innocence. "To cover the flammability of my paper?"
"It is." She curtly signed.
"You remind me of Jonet, you know?" I said back. "Are you a part of her family?"
"No idea who that is." Came her signal.
"Alright then." I sighed. "Tell me of your sentencing. Why were you to be executed?"
"Piracy."
"You were a pirate?" I scoffed. "That warrants execution?"
"It does when you sink a cruise ship ferrying some Phaegrathean VIPs."
"And even in undeath, you show little remorse." I rolled my eyes and began to wave her off. But she surprised me with what she waved next
"Execution was the price of my crimes. A price I've long since paid. In undeath, I've been blessed with a chance to serve God and do more right than I have wrong in life. So, no."
"You want to do right by our God." I chortled. But not because my words were rhetorical. Far from it. It was because despite her being undead, despite her connection with Amun, she seemed to have no clue as to his true nature.
As did most of the Legions.
"Closer to a villain than he is a hero, our God. But he is neither. He is simply Amun. A divine drow-devil we can't come close to comprehending. We are the heroes and villains bound to his soul. Both sides, embodied into one being, as extensions of our God. To some, our actions will be good. To others, evil. Even his actions will see us as heroes or villains in the eyes of others.
"Doing right and wrong are matters of personal perspective. But being good or evil isn't such a thing for you, or even our God to decide. So, let us make a bet on what the realms will think of us at the end of this journey.
"Will we be heroes? Or villains?"