My sudden promotion to leader of the Nekromel Liberation Army did not make me want to go out and buy myself a new sabre to rattle. I was in danger of being railroaded into a situation I’d have no control over and which would land me in the middle of a fight I had nothing to do with.
General Dorma probably expected me to jump at the chance of being in charge—people with a thirst for power usually assume others must crave it as much as they do.
Or, he might have expected me to be too cowed by the huge crowd to object. The many, many faces staring at me looked eager to accept me as their saviour. They would have accepted a donkey with a bag of lucky rocks as their commander-in-chief if they thought it would save them. I had no intention of saving anyone but myself.
Finding my way out of this predicament was the problem. Public speaking has never been something I enjoyed. Standing up at the front of class at school never went well. But in this case, I decided words needed to be said. And quickly.
“First of all,” I said, “please stop hissing at me. I realise it’s how you express your approval, but it’s stupid and getting sprayed with a mist of saliva is no fun.”
I sneaked a look over at Dorma. His eyes were wide with shock and his mouth hung open. I had expected a little more rage and was speaking quickly so I could make my point before he sent his goons to shut me up, but he hadn’t made any moves in that direction, which was a little surprising.
“I don’t even know what makes you think his plan will work. Because he has lovely blue eyes? I understand you have been under the control of the masters for so long any alternative seems preferable, but do you really want to swap one power-mad tyrant for another?”
There was a strange atmosphere in the room. The crowd was quiet. They didn’t seem particularly for or against what I had said, just confused.
Dorma still hadn’t given his men leave to drag me out and beat the shit out of me. My plan had been to go in hard and get a reaction out of Dorma which would show his true colours. I certainly had no intention of becoming his scapegoat. The idea I would lead this revolution was preposterous and possibly a ruse to put me in the hands of the masters.
But Dorma didn’t react the way I expected.
“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” he said rubbing his hands together. “I wasn’t referring to you, I meant Commander Varg.” He pointed to my left.
I looked over my shoulder. A giant of a man in full armour and carrying a sword I could have used as a surfboard was standing there. He didn’t just look like he could lead an army, he looked like he was the army.
“Oh,” I said, mouth dry, palms moist, a faint singing in her ears, “sorry. My bad.”
I stepped backwards, hoping to disappear behind my party, but they also stepped back giving me nowhere to hide. Bastards.
“Commander Varg,” Dorma said in an attempt to introduce the real leader of the fighting force.
There was some half-hearted hissing, the crowd hesitant to go full throttle after my attack on their culture. The man-mountain Varg awkwardly pushed past me and made his way over to where Dorma waited for him.
Jenny grinned nervously and shrugged her shoulders. “Sorry,” she mouthed as she also moved away so no one would think she was associated with me.
There are indeed things worse than death.
You might think you know how I felt. You might have experienced the heat of embarrassment spread across your face.
You know nothing.
True mortification does not produce a healthy, rosy blush. It is the end of the world where the skies are radioactive clouds and the sea is acid. Its colour is grey and it burns deep in your core.
It is one of the traits of modern life, back on our world at least, that we try our hardest to avoid danger and difficult situations. A safe, secure life is considered the ideal.
However, that isn’t how nature works. Nature’s method of teaching us how to survive is to try and murder us. The nearer to death you get, the better at avoiding it you become. Assuming you survive.
As human beings, we are constantly striving to not play this game. We intellectually figure out what to do in any situation so we won’t actually have to work it out through trial and error; where the ‘error’ could turn out to be something horrendous.
Nature doesn’t give a shit. As far as she’s concerned, there are a lot of us and if some fall by the wayside, no biggie. As long as most of us get through the gauntlet of near-misses that is childhood, job’s a goodun. After that, you’re on your own. Adapt or die.
Humans, being the devious little shits we are, still do all we can to reduce our exposure to life’s tomfuckery. Thanks to society’s safety nets and technology that allows us to overcome even the worst of what nature throws at us, we have it pretty cushy.
The problem with this, though, is that we also don’t gain the advantages that come with surviving disaster. You learn from failing. You grow from defeat. You gain strength from suffering.
A parent might think they’re doing the best for their child by keeping their environment clean and bacteria-free, but if the body never learns to deal with germs, the first time the kid gets a cold, he’ll die.
Despite the risks involved in facing danger, life has been set up so it’s the best way to achieve your potential. You can get by keeping your head down and letting others protect you, but you will be weak and feeble.
The universe makes us suffer because it’s trying to teach us to try harder, be better. Well, fuck that.
Not all horrible experiences lead to you levelling-up. It’s hard to learn the lesson when the lesson leaves you in the foetal position, unable to make coherent sounds.
“I think you’re blowing things out of proportion,” said Jenny.
After the meeting, where Commander Varg gave a rousing speech outlining how they would defeat the demon horde on the Day of Welding when they were at their weakest by doing this and that—I can’t remember the details, I was too busy trying to crawl inside my own wretchedness—we were taken back to the brothel and given rooms upstairs.
“Don’t worry about it so much,” she said in a voice that was meant to be comforting but only rattled my eardrums without making sense. “There were only a few hundred people there. Maybe a few thousand. Even if you did make a fool of yourself, think of it as character building.”
My face was buried in a rank-smelling pillow that had probably recently been used to support some hooker’s sweaty bumcrack as she was pounded in her nether regions. I didn’t care.
“Go away,” I mumbled into my stinky new friend.
“It’s not like anyone was mad at you. They understood you panicked when you thought he was asking you to lead the rebels.”
That was true. They had been very nice about my outburst later. No one asked me to explain myself, they just patted me on the shoulder and gave me a look that suggested they realised it couldn’t be easy being such a huge retard. Dorma even thanked me for complimenting his eyes.
“Really, you shouldn’t blame yourself.”
I sat up, enraged. “I don’t blame myself, I blame you! You’re the one who said he was talking about me.”
“It was an honest mistake. I’m sorry. Really, I am.”
“I was so happy being alone,” I lamented. “Alone and miserable—it was great. And then you tricked me into sleeping with you and look what happens.”
“It wasn’t a trick! It was love.”
“Bah! Potato, po-tah-to. I don’t know what you’re endgame is, succubus, but well played. My life is a horror show, all thanks to you.”
“So you’d prefer it if you were on your lonesome, would you?”
“Loneliness never let me down.”
“It never lifted you up, either,” said Jenny.
“Yes! That’s good. The higher you go, the further you have to fall. You ruined my life.” I fell back onto the bed, which had probably been pickled in the juices of a thousand gruesome fucks, and chewed on the sheets.
“Can’t you just slap him?” Claire asked from the doorway.
“He’s a little upset,” said Jenny.
“I know,” said Claire, “we can hear his whining across the hall.”
“Fuck both of you. I am not whining, I’m undergoing a trauma-induced breakdown. Most people have to go through a war to experience this kind of PTSD, I just had to hang out with you lot.”
Claire and Jenny exchanged eye-rolls. I saw them do it and they knew I saw them, but they didn’t care. No one cared about what I was going through. I should just kill myself and get it over with.
I sat up. Then I stood up. “That’s it! I’ll kill myself. I’ll go back and relive this whole thing and do what I should have done in the first place.” I turned to Jenny. “Completely ignore you.”
“So,” said Claire, “you weren’t prepared to go back in time for any of our sakes, but if it’ll save you a little embarrassment, then it’s worth facing off against your dream jester?”
“That’s right. I only wish I could go back further in time, back to the first day I met you bunch of albatrosses. I’d tell you all to go take a flying fuck. I’d walk out of that shed and never look back. Finally, a plan where I don’t have to rely on anyone but me. I just have to figure out the least painful way to top myself.”
“Slitting your wrists would take too long,” said Claire. “And cutting your own throat is a bit fiddly.”
“Stabbing yourself in the heart would probably work best, “ said Jenny, “as long as you’re accurate.”
Those answer had come very quickly. “Have you been discussing ways to kill me?”
“Ah, well...” said Claire, shiftiness personified. “Yes and no.” She slid her gaze over to Jenny. “Mainly, yes.”
Jenny gave me the nervous grin again. “We might have discussed what to do in an emergency where we needed you to go back in time and you weren’t being… cooperative.”
It was outrageous. “So you planned to kill me? My own party? Great! No, really, that’s brilliant. Why wait for the universe to kill me when you can take out the middleman and do it yourselves. Brilliant, brilliant.”
“It’s not like you’d die,” said Claire, “not properly die. You’d just go back and be able to fix things. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t love being Mr Know-it-all, predicting things before they happened.”
She did have a point. It would be amusing to be able to know what was going to happen before it happened, but that didn’t make it okay for them to have a plan in place for how to send me back without my permission.
“Oh, I’ll fix things. I plan to make a number of changes. I hope you’ll like them.”
Claire’s squinted her eyes and sucked in her lips. “What’s that supposed to mean? What are you going to do?”
I hadn’t thought of anything in particular, not yet anyway, but I would. “Oh, you’ll find out. Don’t you worry.”
“It’s fine,” said Jenny, guiding Claire towards the door before things got heated. “He’ll be okay once he’s calmed down. He was much worse than this before. Said he was leaving and started packing.”
“Packing what?” asked Claire. “We don’t have any luggage.”
“Something like that. Nowhere near as useful as it looks, sadly. But combined with the abilities of someone like yourself, we would make quite the team. Our first goal being to get the hell out of this shit hole. What about it Colin? Fancy dumping the deadwood dragging you down and teaming up with me?”