Mark of the Fool
Chapter 534: The Traveller

Was she really there?

For a time, Alex’s mind seemed to freeze.

The battle had stressed it. The Mark’s punishment had pushed his nerves to the limit. Everything he’d just learned from her book had filled his mind, bringing it close to being completely overwhelmed.

And now, this… Alex sat cross-legged in the middle of a ritualistic circle, in a domain of the Endless Hells with the Saint of Alric—a woman he prayed to—floating before him.

A woman who’d died over three hundred years ago.

It was too much, and he wondered if his sanity had finally fled.

For her part, Hannah Kim looked just as confused as he did. She took in her surroundings like someone awakening from a long dream and spoke a single word he’d never heard before as her eyes traced the circle below.

The symbols at the circle’s edge was what she seemed most focused on before her attention turned to Alex.

The woman startled.

And the young wizard’s mouth opened and closed like a beached fish. “It can’t be…you’re dead. Baelin said nothing could bring back the dead.” He said aloud, talking more to himself than to her.

Bewilderment clouded the Saint of Alric’s expression. Her brow creased, and as her form flickered, dread fell over him again. And just for a moment, that feeling of something being close to him that shouldn’t be, returned. He opened his mouth to speak.

But she spoke first, and—this time—her words were in the common tongue. “Who are you? Where am I?”

Silence.

Alex cleared his throat. “Well, um, I’m Alex Roth from Thameland. From, uh, Alric actually. You are Hannah Kim, the Traveller, aren’t you?”

More silence.

“Alric?” she frowned at the burning walls around them, distrust clear on her face. “These are the hells.”

“I know, I know, but things are a bit complicated.” He pointed to the circle. “See? We took your artefact from Kaz-Mowang’s palace.”

The Saint of Alric looked down, gasping when she saw her belongings. Her hands flew to her cheeks. “Oh my goddesses, you found my phone!”

“Yeah, I—your what now?”

“My phone. I thought I’d never see it again, even if I did manage to come back. I can’t believe this! Oh!” She looked at Alex again, lowering her head and giving him a little curtsy. “I’m the Traveller…oh wait, you used my name. Well, I’m Hannah the Traveller. Thank you so much for finding my phone and…for bringing me back for a bit. You did what I have been trying to do for…for…how long have I been dead?”

“About three hundred years,” Alex told her. “We’re in another cycle.”

“Oh…that long…I’ve been struggling for that long?”

“Struggling with what?” Alex asked. “I don’t even know how this is possible, you tell—”

Suddenly, that dread spiked again. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. Hannah’s form flickered briefly, but a wave of divine calm flowed from her spirit, banishing alluneasiness.

“My time will be limited, so we have to work fast.” She gave him a warm smile. “I’m dead, so my questions don’t matter as much as yours do, child of Alric. If you summoned my sword, that means you went through a lot of trouble to read my book. You know what it contains, and I’m sure you have a lot of questions.”

“Yeah, but…” Alex paused. “Okay, tell me this. How are you here?”

His mind raced. Her spirit was back from the dead. Did that mean he could see his parents again? Could Selina?

The Traveller looked at him for a long moment, as though she was gazing through his soul. She sighed. “If you read my book, you know about my power. I could go anywhere with it in life. When I woke up…on the other side, I still had my power. It was part of my soul. So I’ve been trying to use it to leave the afterworld. It never seemed to work…but something’s changed lately. My spirit’s been growing stronger, different. The last few attempts I made to travel beyond the afterworld nearly worked, and then when you lit the beacon…wait…”

Her breath hissed. “You have my power! You must have formed a bridge between me and the world of the living!”

“Right…since I have your power, the beacon must’ve been a lot stronger than you intended—”

“Why do you have my power?”

Alex paused.

“Alright, I’ll try to be quick, because it’s a long story.”

And Alex told his story: getting Marked as the Fool, leaving Alric, their encounter in the Cave of the Traveller, finding her book and touching her power with his own. He talked about how Alric had changed and how the Generasians had come to aid Thameland.

He talked of his search for answers about dungeon cores and having unknowingly taken up her quest.

“I’m worshipped in Alric?” she said, her tone was amazed. “That’s…that’s something I never imagined. But…maybe that explains a few things. Many deities gain power from faith, and now people are praying to me. But I only felt strong changes very recently.”

Something struck Alex like a thunderbolt. “Hannah, there’s been a few of us that have completely stopped praying to Uldar. My girlfriend and I pray to you directly: you’re getting all of our faith. You deserve it a hell of a lot more than Uldar does, I have to say.”

Hannah’s cheeks reddened slightly. “That’s probably why I feel so much stronger. I’m gaining divinity.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Alex said. “I don’t know how any of this wor—”

Another pulse of dread.

Hannah grimaced. “It’s pulling.”

“What’s pulling?” Alex asked, a chill running down his spine.

“The afterworld,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be here and it’s pulling me back hard. My time is short.”

Hannah locked eyes with him. “If you’re taking on my quest, then I need to warn you about something. You’ll find it in my memory shard, but it’s better if I just explain it to you right now.” Her face was grim. “The church is working against you.”

“I know, they’re keeping secrets—”

“That’s right, that’s what I meant,” she pushed on. “Kelda and I had a theory: there’s a reason why you don’t really see successful Fools in the history books. When we were investigating the dungeon cores, there were people watching us and anyone else who was working with us. They moved in the shadows. Spycraft, that kind of thing.”

Her jaw clenched. “There’s a secret arm of the church, we think. We could never confirm it for sure, but we had a lot of evidence that convinced us that what the church says, isn’t actually the way things are. One time, we were attacked by a group of people that were really well trained in divinity, stealthcraft,and combat.”

Alex shuddered: he remembered seeing someone with the Thameish delegation who surprisingly, had perfect control of his body language. The man had given him the impression that he’d been reading the people around him. “I…I think you’re right. By the Traveller—”

Hannah’s radiance flared as he used her name. She blinked in surprise, looking down at her hand. “...huh.”

“What happened there?” Alex asked.

“You used my name in the way you would a deity’s, like you were invoking it…I felt power for a second. Just a tiny, tiny bit of power…but I felt it.”

Alex filed that away for later. “Interesting, but what I was going to say is that we also came across someone that was probably from that secret arm of the church. Do you know where to find them?”

She shook her head. “Wherever they are, they’re very good at hiding and their agents take their own lives when they’re captured. We never were able to track them down.”

“Wow, they’re really committed to their cause, if they’re taking their own lives… that’s still a good lead,” Alex mused. “I wonder if the Saint knows anything. I might be able to get the other Heroes to ask him on the sly.”

She looked at Alex sharply. “You mean the other Heroes know about this?”

“Yes,” Alex said. “All of them except the Saint.”

“And they’re on your side?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re already doing a lot better than we were. Kelda and I didn’t have many allies, and none who knew exactly what we were looking for…sometimes I regret all the secrets. But, you should look at the church closely. Try and find out if there’s anywhere specific they could be hiding. They’d need space to train warriors as elite as the ones we faced.”

“Right…” Alex nodded. “I might be able to look for the—”

Another wave of dread.

The Traveller grimaced. “The pull’s getting stronger.”

He looked at her with concern. “Wait, wait…please.” He clasped his hands in prayer. “Traveller, I ask you, please do not depart yet. I pray to you.”

Her radiance flashed again, and that dread diminished.

“By my goddesses, that feels weird,” she shuddered. “But I’ll take it. Quick! Whatever questions you have, I want to help you. I don’t want you to fail like I did.”

Alex swallowed, looking down at her book. “You said in your journal that you realised something about the Mark of the Fool. What was it?”

Her eyes turned sad.

But Alex pushed on. “I read what happened to Kelda, and I can’t imagine what that was like for you. I can imagine what she went through though, being a warrior and having all that taken away because of her Mark. I get the desperation she must’ve felt because I’ve been there too. And with what happened to her, I know you might not want to tell me but please, I need to know.”

He jabbed a finger at his marked shoulder. “This thing makes no sense. Uldar made all the Marks to be effective with no weaknesses. Why does this one have so many constraints on it? How many lives has it ruined? How many Fools died because monsters, or even the damned church tried to kill them, and they couldn’t even defend themselves? I just had the fight of my life, trying to defend my companions and this Mark tried to destroy my mind for it. Why? I have to know what you know, please.”

For a long silent moment, the Traveller stared down at Alex.

Emotions warred on her face: regret, guilt, hope, grief, fear…and finally resignation.

“Fine. Don’t make the same mistake as Kelda did, but you deserve to know. All the Fools did.” She took a deep breath. “How should I explain this…” Hannah touched the sleeve of her robe, pinching the fabric.

“Tell me…do you know what a patch is?”

Alex frowned. “Like on a piece of old clothing?”

“Something like that. I couldn’t remember if I wrote about that in my book…” She took a deep breath. “In my old world, there’s something we use called ‘programs’. They’re a bit like spells, except they’re made by a central, um, company. Uh, place. Then users of these programs use them, but they can’t change them.”

“Okay…” Alex said slowly. “But, what’s that got to do with the Mark?”

She frowned, looking as though she was sorting through her thoughts. “Well, when a company puts out a program and they want to change it, they release something that’s called a ‘patch’. It’s new code—uh, a new piece of a spell that goes over top of the old spell and changes it.”

Alex could have been blown over by a stiff breeze. “So you’re saying that somebody…changed the Mark? That it was different before?”

She nodded. “After Kelda heard about patches, she spent a long time examining her Mark: the very fibres of magic it was made of.”

“You can break it down?” Alex asked. “Even archwizards haven’t been able to do that.”

“She had the Mark, she had my knowledge, and she had to build some very specialised equipment using materials you can’t even get in your world. But she built them and used the Mark to get good enough at using them to examine her Mark and mine.”

She tapped the Mark of the Saint, which still shone on her soul. “Mine is one complete piece of magic: the original version is the one that existed in my time and I imagine still exists today. But hers and yours? There’s signs that they’ve been patched. Someone changed the Mark of the Fool after it was originally made, Alex. It’s been altered.”

“What?” Alex cried, jumping to his feet. “Someone tampered with it? You mean it wasn’t always so restrictive?”

“We didn’t find that out.” Hannah shook her head. “All I can tell you is that it was changed after it was originally made.”

“But who could have tampered with it?”

The Traveller’s expression turned grim. “That’s the thing about patches, Alex. They almost always come from the person or company who created the program in the first place.”

“So, Uldar. Uldar himself likely changed it?” Alex was stunned. “But why?”

“And that's the right question you have to ask. Go seek the answer to that very question.”

“Wait, but, from the sound of it then…Kelda found a way to remove the patch?”

“...the process obliterated her soul.”

“But did it work?” Alex asked.

The Traveller took a deep breath. “Swear to me you won’t go looking.”

“I’m not swearing to anything! Please. I’ve got to know.”

She sighed.

“...for a moment, Kelda’s Mark began changing. She looked so happy. But, yes, if you want it put simply, it worked. We were able to remove the patch for the briefest of moments…then, the very worst happened. Her soul was destroyed.”