The mirror in the corner of Asper’s room showed his wife’s work. Six white, sealed wounds ran down Daniel’s spine in two columns. Underneath the shine sat a thread of gold. Perfectly smooth skin, without a bump.
“It looks lovely, angel. I suppose I can wear clothes with a back now.” He grinned and tossed his hair back. “Jealous? I bet you are.”
Asper looked painted against the wall.
“Who are you talking to?”
“My wife.” He noticed the man’s expression and laughed. “You can’t see her.”
“Right… What happened to the…”
Asper trailed off, pointing at the mirror, where his back showed.
“These? My wife seared them off while I slept and healed them. Pretty good job, huh? Something about soul stability. She’s my doctor.”
The man’s cheeks sucked in as he nodded.
“Invisible wife doctor… Got it. So, uh, Julia and I managed to cover up your back before the others in our party saw you. But probably best not to mention you’re a fallen angel. Did I say it’s been three days?”
Daniel swapped the [Server] card away from the case before sliding the hand-sized box of cards into his borrowed trousers’ pocket. He sat on the side of the bed and leaned back against the sheets to stare at the ceiling.
“You didn’t. So I’ve been under for three days. Felt shorter,” he mumbled, feeling a tad bad for his wife if that was all three days unconscious bought her. “Good to know.”
He pulled the card up and turned it around a few times as Asper watched. Beside him lay the piles of coins, and gradually his mind was clearing.
I need to get moving and make a plan.
Experiment time.
He sat up and tossed the card to the middle of the small room.
Asper immediately shrank to the corner as a faint light brought a fold in space. It peeled back like a veil, releasing the smell of clean linen and cold stone. A tall man now stood front and center, dressed rather well. He had gray at the temples, a black coat, and no smile.
The butler looked at Daniel, and he performed a bow.
“Your Majesty.”
The door opened without a knock, and who he presumed was Julia dropped a pan. The chestnut-haired woman’s mouth was agape, her eyes as wide as saucers.
“Yo.”
Asper quickly recovered, dragging her in and shutting the door.
“Majesty?” he blurted out. “You’re angel royalty?”
Julia gave him a look that said: Wasn’t that obvious?
“Pfft! He’s the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen. Of course he’s a prince.”
“King,” he mumbled in return. “He’s got an invisible wife, apparently.”
“Oh…”
Daniel had to laugh at the disappointed note and sinking shoulders. The butler stood by without a word. He addressed his man as the pair listened.
“Do you have a name or any memories of what happened before?”
“I do not, sire. I have no identity other than the office to draw from. As for my memories, they are of a land of darkness. Others move within it, but there is no light to see.”
“I see. The office of butler.” Daniel stood and stretched out. “I would rather not give you a name that is not your own. Perhaps I was too hasty with Night. In any case, I have a lot to do.”
He noticed the outfit held on Julia’s arm.
“Dress, breakfast, and shopping,” he decided in the silent room. “I have a hairbrush and supplies to send my destitute wife.”
Daniel wanted to see the look on her face after that poke to her cheek. He’d have to wait to be punched by her wings.
Just hold on, darling… I want to make you feel beautiful and loved.
Butler went to work collecting Julia’s items, from her pan of food to the clothes, and guided the whiplashed woman into the hallway. He shooed out Asper next.
The butler dressed him, then used the products Julia had brought to clean his hair.
“You keep pulling things out of nowhere,” he noted as the man began putting things away. “You wouldn’t happen to have a hairbrush for Clara?”
“That, sire, is something I do not have.”
“Shame. We really need to start collecting. And I need your help for that.”
“Then I suggest we be swift, Sire.”
“Right.”
Throughout it all, Daniel kept pondering what he knew and asked questions. Butler couldn’t give him a lot of answers.
The butler had an hour, so Daniel sped things up.
He called the two in and ate with them. Breakfast took nine minutes. Apparently, the room came with the inn’s general menu for the day. The inn was three floors of grey stone and black timber, leaning over a street too narrow for the wagons that used it anyway. He noticed slate roofs and chimney smoke were common. A city built by people who expected a harsh winter.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
The place was called Vashen Row, which was a district and not a city. One confusing note was that Julia and Asper couldn’t agree what the city name was. He just stuck with Julia’s Border Town.
Currency ran iron, copper, silver, gold, ten to one all the way up, and everybody dealt in iron because everybody was poor. A Contractor was a person who had bound or made a contract with something and could call it out. It wasn’t extremely rare, but was respectable, and paid well in groups for their versatility.
Daniel put down his empty bowl of soup when the pair got to Dungeon Cores.
“They’re rare and dangerous,” Asper noted. “This one is a six-story manor estate. It sits right on the border between the elven kingdom and ours. So it causes a lot of skirmishes. We’re about a three-day ride from the Core, at this border town.”
Julia opened the window and pointed at the big stone walls that rose above the buildings.
“We have the wall to protect us. The elves aren’t the only thing you have to worry about here in the borderlands. Monsters roam the area beyond the city boundaries.”
Butler finished gathering up the coins as Daniel motioned for them to go downstairs.
“What about the labyrinth underneath it?”
Both looked at each other and shook their heads.
“No one’s heard about that,” Asper said. “We were kind of shocked when we saw the stairway down. What’s it like down there?”
“Annoying… If you could draw me a map to it later, that would be great. For now, let’s just get to shopping! I have a wife to spoil.”
The two looked at one another, but led the way out.
Vashen Row in the daylight was cobbles, hand-carts, and awnings in six colors. Storefront glass glowed in the noon sun, and a public pump stood at the center with a queue at it. A clock face on a tower told him the same.
He noticed a vehicle that was not a cart zip past toward the west. Daniel felt like those shouldn’t exist here. Julia said it was a new, wealthy invention called a car. There was a clear divide between districts.
No one flew on wings, but there was small evidence of magic. However, Asper informed him it was different forms of calling upon higher beings. Julia corrected him, saying there were items forged by other races and found in Dungeon Cores that held their own power.
So, humans mainly gain their strength from calling upon higher beings.
I can see why an angel might be tempting to try to use for power.
He got about twenty paces before he understood what Asper had been so nervous about.
A woman at the pump stopped pumping. Two men outside a cooper’s stopped talking. A girl carrying eggs did not stop walking until she hit a post.
“Everyone is staring at me.”
Asper groaned.
“It’s going to be a long day. Celestial Moon, bless me for my deeds.”
Julia was walking backward in front of them so she could watch it happen.
“Told you. Everyone with eyes would be staring.”
“Julia.”
“What? I’m being useful, Asper. He’s gorgeous. It is what it is.” She spun back around. “So who are we shopping for? The imaginary one?”
“My wife,” Daniel corrected. “And I need help. I know what a woman needs about as well as I know this street. The obvious is the obvious. But maybe I should struggle for her entertainment,” he mused. “She can be a tad insecure.”
“An insecure ghost wife,” Julia nodded with a giggle. “Then it’s a good thing you’ve got me.”
“You’re a wife?”
Julia missed half a step as Asper snorted.
“Hey, I could be a great wife! Stupid oaf.” She kicked his feet, making him stumble with a laugh. “I may not be a wife yet, but I have plenty of daydreams. Trust me! You have a decent stack of coins, but that can vanish with a snap of a finger.”
Daniel had assumed shopping meant walking into places and pointing.
Julia treated it like a campaign. She did not enter the first shop she liked; she entered the third one, after standing outside the first two long enough to be seen leaving them. She priced soap in one stall and bought it in another. She asked every merchant how his mother was doing, and every single one of them told her.
Butler carried, paid, and produced the pouch out of his coat.
“One does not carry it loose, Sire. It sings when you walk.”
“You keep saying things like that. Remembering your past?”
Butler scanned the stunned faces as they walked.
“Only vague recollections… There is a woman. My mother, I believe.”
“I can’t wait to meet her.”
“Me, as well, Sire.”
They came away with soap that smelled like lilacs, a small mirror in a tin frame, a paper of pins, a wide ribbon in dark blue, and a knife for Daniel that Julia had loudly declared was not a gift for his wife. A man needed a knife, according to her.
Then Julia stopped at a stall of folded cloth, put her hand flat on a bolt of pale grey, and told him that if he wanted to make a woman cry properly, he bought her fabric. Fabric, dresses, and little accessories.
Daniel could just imagine his wife sorting through all of it from the chest.
I can’t wait to see what you do with all this.
“Why are clothes so important?” he asked, running his hand over what felt like satin.
“Status, craft, the idea of being seen.” Julia shrugged. “Every woman on this street is wearing something she’s mended twice. You give her enough for a new dress and she’ll…”
Daniel slowed, thinking back on the table and his wife’s shrinking gown. The way she’d smoothed the front of it and changed the subject felt heavy on his heart.
I don’t mind spending every day fixing that broken smile, Clara…
Until you know you can never be unloved.
“How much for all of it?”
“More than you have, bud!” Julia laughed. “We’ll need to dungeon crawl and up those coins.”
He glanced at Butler at his simple gesture.
Has an hour already passed?
I need to get cores.
“Then I’ll get what I can. Julia, Asper, on a proposition front, how would you like to crawl with me?”
Julia choked as Asper laughed, the woman’s face going pink.
“That is not a phrase you should be using in that context. It has…provocative undertones. Crawling in dark places, isolated, there’s just a lot of dirty phrasing involved with dungeoneering. Bunch of hedonists…”
Daniel laughed.
“I’m learning so much. Is that a no? Or will you return with me? I need money. A lot more money to make my wife smile and make her feel beautiful.”
That got another look from the pair. They shrugged and nodded.
“Sure. Our group was going to go through the manor. We can meet up with them.”
“Perfect.”
Hold on, darling. I want you to have more…
He saw the image of his six-winged angel, standing at a window, no chair in the room, staring out across their ruined kingdom.
Daniel picked up a set of hairbrushes, soft, tooth, and bristled.
Butler accepted the chest card Daniel handed him and dropped the assortment of goods they'd collected into it. Somewhere in their tarnished realm, an angel was getting a special delivery, and that made him laugh inside, imagining her puffy feathers and squeals.
A moment later, he bowed and vanished in a ray of light that got more than a few gasps from those who had followed their journey. Julia called them stalkers. Daniel wasn’t concerned. He only had one goal right now.
He looked up as the roll of thunder came from the distance.
Julia sighed.
“Looks like we’re going to have to bring coats.”
You can’t even feel rain, darling…
My heart breaks.
What will it take for you to stand beside me?
I want you to have so much more.
But this will do for now.
If you’re going to hide your tears behind those pretty wings, I know you’d want them brushed.