Downtown Druid

Book 3 Chapter 18: No Such Thing as Doom, No Such Thing as Fate

Godfrey stood there for a moment with his calm smile. He was wearing a stunning red vest with golden flowers woven across it and held a thin rapier in one hand as he looked at Dantes, Gren, and Jacopo. His eyes lingered the longest on Jacopo, but when he spoke it was to Gren.

“So little mist, your master has chosen to make another move? I can tell you now that it doesn’t matter. With or without me pulling the strings Rendhold is doomed to fall. I just moved to make that fall as spectacular as possible.”

Gren flickered a bit. “No such thing as doom, no such thing as fate. They’ve been rotting as hells since long before your master split himself from his brother.”

Dantes loosed the pistol from his holster as they spoke, and Jacopo slipped his fingers through a pair of thick brass knuckles. They both knew what those coins across the floor meant. Their encounter last time had shown that Godfrey was able to teleport between golden coins. Dantes had only managed to hit him by tricking him into getting very close, and even then he'd had to run.

He forced himself to relax, being too tense would make him slower.

Jacopo took the opposite tactic, amping himself and readying himself to launch toward him the second he appeared somewhere else.

Godfrey shook his head. “Well, I’d say that’s enough talking. Time for you to ineffectually flail at me while I end your lives and less than lives one at a time.”

Gren faded into mist and rushed toward him.

Dantes began to summon in all of the rats and roaches he had managed to get on board, and began to have them swarm across the room and cover each coin with their bodies.

Just before Gren could reach Godfrey, he blinked back to Dantes’s left.

Dantes quickly raised his pistol and fired, but Godfrey was already behind Jacopo.

Jacopo whirled around and caught a flick of Godfrey’s rapier on his brass knuckles, parrying him.

Godfrey blinked again and managed to strike Gren with his bare hand.

Whatever essence Gren was made off seemed to burn where Godfrey struck, causing the scent of sulfur and blood to spread through the cabin.

Dantes pretended to stumble a bit from the rocking of the boat falling backwards and Godfrey quickly capitalized, teleporting in front of him and driving his rapier toward him.

Dantes blasted him with the concentrated mist from the purple marble Sunset.

Godfrey began coughing as he teleported away.

Dantes was watching his movements carefully. So far, he hadn’t teleported onto any of the spaces Dantes had managed to cover with vermin, that meant that either he couldn’t, or it was a feint.

The fight continued, with Gren, Jacopo, and Dantes taking Glancing blows as they slowly pushed Godfrey into a corner. He was uninjured and seemed nowhere near slowing down, but if they could pin him down to a single spot then the fight would be at its end.

"Yes."

"I've gotten out of those a few times."

Gren's eyes seemed to twist as he laughed a bit. "I must go. I cannot pass the edges of the bay." He faded into mist and drifted through the ceiling.

Jacopo and Dantes went back onto the deck, stepping around pools of blood, and grinning corpses wearing golden masks. Dantes felt wasteful leaving all of the gold on board, but it had that same rotted feeling that everything touched by Greed seemed to share.

“I don’t think we could kill him,” said Jacopo.

“Godfrey, or Gren?”

Jacopo scratched his cheek. “Either.”

Dantes nodded. “I agree. They’re out of our grasp for now, but now we know a bit more about both of them. Did you see how Godfrey’s touch seemed to damage him? Not to mention his apparent inability to leave the bay. There must be a reason for that. Maybe it’s the way godstuff interacts with demons like him. I seem to remember priests at the temples making claims that even the dirt the gods had walked upon could hurt demons. I’d assumed they were just trying to sell poor people dirt, but maybe they were on to something." He shook his head. "Killing him... overthrowing Argenta directly. I'd rather find a more subtle way to make it happen. Another method of control."

Jacopo shrugged, licking some of the blood from his coat.

Dantes and Jacopo looked over the edge of the boat. A number of ships were moving to intercept it, and some smaller guard boats were moving up the shore toward them.

“Well, no reason to wait around to deal with all of that.”

Jacopo nodded, and they both shifted into pigeons to fly back to shore.

...

Dantes and Jacopo floated above a now very familiar scene. The man in blue with the smirking face sat next to the green woman with a feral smile and all of her pets. As with last time, they had switched which game they were playing, but this time there were two new figures at the table sitting across from them.

Across from the man in blue sat a man in a black cloak threaded with gold wearing a cruel smile that mirrored his brother’s smirk. Next to him sat a woman wearing a cloak so black that even just looking at it made Dantes feel as if he would fall into it. The man in black and gold he recognized from before, but the woman in the cloak of black was new to him. He looked at her closely and noticed small drops of moisture were falling from the blackness that was her face, like tears.

He recognized the game that they were playing immediately. The man in blue showed everyone two dice that he held between the fingers on one of his hands. One dice was gold with black marks, and the other was green with blue ones. He threw them all into the air, and caught them deftly in the cup. He then shook them in the cup, causing a rattling noise so loud that Dantes's eyes briefly opened in the middle of the dream before closing again.

The woman in green threw in a shining green coin that seemed to glow. The woman in black tossed in a black coin that seemed to eat the light around it. The man in blue threw a platinum coin, which Dantes found himself reaching involuntarily for. The man in black threw a gold one.

Before the man in blue revealed what was under the cup, Dantes felt eyes on him and looked across the table. Floating above it on the other side, behind the man and woman in black, was a man with a smiling golden face.

Dantes began to focus on that smiling face when a sense of dread began to fill him and a shadow fell across his back. He turned around to see a man holding an axe in the air behind him. Closer than he’d ever been before.