Vol.6 Ch.2.1 – Of Travelers And Fire-Bearers I
Chapter 2: Of Travelers And Fire-Bearers
“You're not really the welcoming committee I had expected,” I told the messenger of the gods as he hovered in the air above us, his sandals flapping their wings furiously to keep him aloft.
“Fuck you too, Tailor,” he said. As he spoke he slowly descended, though even when he reached eye level with us he didn't actually touch the ground. He always did that. Before this whole mess I had always thought he considered himself too good to touch the ground but after seeing him all serious I knew it was because it was much easier for him to stay airborne than to descend and then take off again. “I could think of a hundred more pleasant things to do than to play chaperon for you but unfortunately Tina is still busy and asked me to.”
With a few days to get back into shape Hermes once again looked like the arrogant bastard I'd first met years ago. He was just slightly shorter than me, though not by much. He had a laurel wreath in his curly golden hair and his eyes shone in a riot of colors. His toga was a lot shorter than normal for the Olympians, but it made sense given his role. He had to be nimble, after all.
“She's still talking to Zeus?” I asked.
He sighed, the standoffish act bleeding off him. “Father is being... obstinate.”
“I mean,” I said, “If he's not willing to deal with us then I'd be more than happy to just tell everyone about what happened here and who saved you guys.”
He chuckled. “That's the problem. He hates the idea of negotiating for your silence but he hates the idea of what happened here getting out even more. He's just throwing a tantrum.”
“Should we be worried about Athena?” I asked.
Hermes raised an eyebrow in extreme skepticism. “You? Worried about Tina?”
I held the wince in. I'd come dangerously close to admitting that I cared about the stuck-up bitch goddess I'd spent a decade hating. Then again, I was under no illusion that Hermes hadn't figured it out yet.
“So,” I said, deciding to change the subject, “if you're not here to take us to Zeus, wh—“
“You can wait in my tholos until Tina comes to pick you all up,” he said, then turned and slowly started flying toward his tholos.
Tholoi were a special kind of temple structure of the Olympian faith, circular structures ringed by marble columns, dedicated to a single god. And on Olympus, nearly every Olympian had one of these tholoi to themselves. We'd visited over half of them back when we had liberated the place and Hermes had been one of the more pleasant ones. On the floor it had little other than a desk and a hammock but the whole structure was overgrown with vines. The vines snaked up the columns and in those vines sat several smaller platforms, each dedicated to one of this flighty god's aspects.
Hermes was a god of mages and alchemists, of diplomats and wayfarers, of cheats and cutthroats. And so one little platform held a small alchemist's laboratory, one held tomes on magic, one held maps and scrolls and one held an assortment of playing cards and other utensils used for parlor tricks.
I was rather looking forward to spending a bit of time at his tholos and so we followed him. This time we did not travel across the clouds that surrounded the rock plateau at Olympus' center. Instead we took the streets, which looked surprisingly clean once again, no traces of blood and worse clogging up the drains or smearing the walls. If you ignored how empty the place was you could almost convince yourself the place hadn't been overrun by monsters just days ago.
Finally we walked over a bridge of light that connected the main plateau with the rock spire Hermes' tholos was built on and reached the messenger god's home. It looked exactly as I remembered, though there was a bit of clutter on the table at its center.
“Make yourselves at home,” he said as he waved his hand airily. “Again.”
I snorted, then reached into my bag of holding and pulled out a couple bottles of beer. “Here, to top you back up.”
He eyed the bottles skeptically, then turned one around in my hand to look at the label. Finally he took them from me. “Thanks,” he finally said as he stored them in his ice box.
He had admitted before that he enjoyed a cool beer every once in a while when he was sick of Dionysos' wine and we had taken a couple bottles from him last time, so I supposed it was only fair.
The others huddled up together to chat while they waited, leaving me more or less alone with Hermes. Only Melinoe lingered near us. I took the opportunity to look at something on the table that had caught my eye. A map.
It wasn't just a map of the Trismegistian kingdom, either. It was, as far as I could tell, a map of the entire world. I had never seen one of those before, hadn't even known such a thing existed, but that had to be what this was. But, for the life of me, I couldn't make heads or tails of the thing.
“Hey Hermes,” I finally asked, “where is the Trismegistian kingdom on this map?”
He was instantly at my side and he looked as if he'd just licked a lemon. He reached out as if to snatch the map away but then deflated. “Clumsy of me. You weren't supposed to see this.”
“What's that supposed to mean?” I asked. “What's so bad about this?”
“That map isn't of our world,” he said.
I blinked. “Wait, what?” I was instantly on guard. The last person who had spoken of other worlds had been...
“Oh calm down,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I'm not one of your enemies.”
“Then what's going on? What do you have to do with other worlds?”
He looked me straight in the eyes. “What do you think being a patron god of wayfarers entails?”
My eyes widened. “Travelers are real?” Travelers weren't real, were they? There weren't actually people from other worlds walking this one, were there? I mean, that was a stupid question. There were three knights from another world currently locked up on Olympus. But did they really count?
“They are," he said.
“And why don't you want people to know about that?”
“Because you don't need to know all that,” he said. “Take all that stuff the goat told us all. You still remember that?”
“She spoke of a multiverse,” I said. With each sentence I spoke his expression turned sourer. “Of a White King. Of Sanctuaries. Of Creation. And of how dungeons end up here.”
“And all of that is stuff you're not supposed to know about,” he said. “You're not supposed to know that there is a multiverse, you're not supposed to know that this is a Sanctuary and, being of a Sanctuary, you're absolutely not supposed to know who the White King is.”
“So what, you're gonna take those memories away?”
“Oh come off it, Tailor,” he said. “It's annoying that you know it but it's really not my problem that you do. The multiverse is a term for the myriad worlds in existence. There aren't infinite worlds but they are countless and they shift constantly so there might as well be. We refer to all of those, collectively, as Creation. Because all of them, every single one, was created by a being called the White King, a god among gods among gods. But He very specifically created Sanctuaries like ours to be outside of His direct control. So, again, completely irrelevant to you, it's just annoying that you now know there's a god we answer to.”
There was a certain irony in that, true. “And that's why you don't want people to know about this?”
“No, the reason I don't want people to know about this is because it complicates something that isn't.”
“How so?”
“What, precisely, did this change for you?” he asked. “You now know that the very world you live in is an infinitely small speck in the greater scheme of things. You know that, even if Empty Night comes to pass, it doesn't mean anything for the rest of Creation. It means that this gambit of the Black Goat, as monumental as it is, probably means nothing in the long run. But you're still not gonna roll over and let her destroy the only world you have, are you?”
I gritted my teeth. Well, if he put it that way... “Yeah. You have a point.” I looked around for something to calm myself down with and landed on the map that had started this whole conversation. “So, what does this map have to do with Travelers, then? And why did you leave it lying around when you don't want people to see it?”
He seemed grateful for the change in topic. “Of all the worlds that aren't Sanctuaries, most share this map, or at least something very similar. So whenever I meet a Traveler I show them this map and ask them where they're from.”
“So, you've showed it to the knights we captured?” I asked.
“Them, too,” he said. “But just before Tina asked me to fetch you I was talking to a Traveler, a real one, not these invaders.”
“So they're really real?” I asked. “How do they get here?”
“You're not going to let this go, are you?”
“This is fascinating stuff,” I said, “and much less gloomy than thinking about how insignificant we are.”
He chuckled. “True enough. Alright, fine. There are two kinds of Travelers. There are those that are sent here from another world and then there are those who arrive here as the last survivors of a dying world.”
“You mean alongside dungeons?” I asked.
“Yes. Sometimes a Traveler comes out of a newly appeared dungeon. I rarely deal with these but when I do meet them they spin harrowing tales of their dying worlds. But most of the Travelers I deal with appear directly in my tholos, sent here from other worlds.”
“How does that happen?”
“Usually a god sends them,” he said. “Sometimes a normal god, but usually Death.”
“You mean a death god?” I asked. “Which one?”
He groaned. “I'm not talking about a specific god, I'm talking about a Primal.”
“Didn't you just complain about not wanting to talk about complicated things? What's a Primal?”
“We're long past that point,” he said. “A Primal is a god that... You know how to kill a god, don't you?”
What did that have to do with anything? “You deprive them of worshipers,” I said. “When they run out of those they turn mortal and you can kill them. Allegedly. But has that ever actually happened?”
“Many times,” he said. “But I won't tell you which gods died that way, as knowing of them can be enough to bring them back. Anyway, a Primal is a god of a concept so self-evident that existence itself sustains them.”
“You lost me,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “Take Life and Death. You don't need to worship either of them for them both to be real, right? And so long as they exist, their influence is felt. Thus, their existence itself sustains them. And Death in particular sends me most of the Travelers I meet, usually people that fall through the cracks and refuse to choose an afterlife.”
There was too much to unpack there so I decided to press on.
“So this Death sent you a Traveler,” I said.
“Indeed. Odd fellow, wants to be a chef of all things. So I gave him a bag of holding, filled with mun and warded against pickpockets, and sent him on his merry way.”
“And where on this map was he from?” I asked.
He pointed at the northwestern landmass. “He was from here. The realm is called USA but don't ask me what those letters stand for.”
“And what of those knights?”
His finger stayed on the same country. “Same place,” he said. “Which means they're not from the same world because the Traveler said nothing about his world being overrun by Outsiders.”
“Fascinating,” I said.
“Much more interestingly,” he said as he traced his finger to the ocean in between the southwestern landmass and the large landmass in the center of the map. “The knights all say their liege has his base here, in Atlantis.”
“So that fictional island isn't fictional in their world,” I muttered.
“Indeed. Although even the Traveler thought that island was fictional, which explains why it's not on this map.”
A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Say, about those Travelers that arrive with dungeons...”
“Yes?”
I looked over at Anna. “Any chance that the royal family...?”
“Almost certainly,” he said, confirming my suspicions. “Their ancestor very likely arrived alongside the dungeon, meaning their family line is as old as the Crystal Crown itself.”
“So the reason they were powerful enough to unite the kingdom was because they had centuries' worth of materials and generations' worth of training available to them,” I said. I'd already known that, unlike what the gods claimed, the royal family didn't rule by the grace of the gods, but this still put things into perspective. They were a power on par with the gods themselves without worshiping any of them. Then again, looked at from a certain angle, so was I.
“So does that mean Anna and her family aren't really part of this world?”
“No,” he said with absolute certainty. “They've spent centuries in this world, maybe millennia. There is a certain scent to Travelers and I assure you the royal line does not have it, nor have I ever smelled it on any of them. By the time they revealed themselves to the world that scent was long diluted into nothing.”
“I see.”
“So, did that sate your curiosity?” he asked. The question had sounded annoyed but I could tell he'd had fun sharing this with someone for once.
“It has,” I said. “Thank you.” I considered whether to be even more impertinent, then remembered that I had a reputation to uphold. “But there was something else I wanted to ask.”
His glare looked almost convincing.
“I want to meet someone.”