Arthur and the Paladin Rune
?
Le monde s'achève par où il a commencé, et le beau
est toujours bizarre.
Sans amour, il n'y a pas d'espoir.
?
By: Sir Leuroy
? Minus ∞ -
“It’s over, Miguel. This wooden door won’t hold when they find us;
it won’t last, not even with what’s left of my powers or your
blessings, if you even have any left…”
“All that’s left here and now are ruins, but thanks to Miguel, we
found this room intact.”
“Arthur, step away from the door.”
Miguel raised his battered hands with difficulty, kneeling to keep
from collapsing under the pain he felt. Suddenly, a light began to
emanate from between his fingers. I noticed that some of his
wounds stopped bleeding and closed up. The light was a pale blue
that turned orange as it moved away from him, almost like a flame.
The light traveled through the air and struck the door in front of
me. In that dark room, I could only see the stone blocks
surrounding us. As soon as that flame hit the door, it completely
engulfed it and then vanished.
“That light… Miguel, you can’t use that kind of magic. A cleric is
forbidden to —”
“Do you prefer to die?”
I, a newly sworn paladin, wearing plate armor with a hole in my
ribs, breathing only with the help of the last blessing from the
greatest cleric in this universe—my last and greatest living
friend — I shouldn’t be questioning this right now…
“None of that matters anymore, Miguel. All of our friends…”
“Arthur, be quiet.”
“No, Miguel. Hope is gone, man… I failed you all.”
“SHUT UP, ARTHUR!”
“No, Miguel! No… I ruined your lives… I don’t want to die, but
there’s no choice.”
“Arthur, it’s not your fault! But that bastard is... Without you,
we wouldn’t have survived this long. If everyone is dead, it’s
because we weren’t cowards, and we chose to do our best. None of
us regretted it until the very end.”
“Forget it, Miguel. I think I saw a crack in the wall back there.
Maybe if I use my hammer, you can escape, and I’ll defend the
door. I don’t think we’ll get a second chance.”
“NO! Sofia gave me a gift the day I became a cleric. I didn’t
understand it… Our second chance is YOU…”
BAP-BOOM!!
“The damn skeletons are here. From the sound of it, they’ve got a
powerful weapon this time. I’m sorry I didn’t kill him when I had
the chance.”
“I believe in you, Arthur. He won’t be the one to kill my faith…
AHGH!!”
“Miguel! No!! What did you do!?”
The sound had distracted me towards the door, and the darkness
didn’t help. Now my friend was lying in a pool of blood. I
abandoned the door and ran to help him.
“Just a little closer, Arthur. Let me make this symbol on your
chest.”
“Damn it… Miguel, you’ve opened your chest, there’s so much blood,
not even you will be able to recover…”
? ?ntoarce-te la via??, ?ntoarce-te la ?nceput. ?
That’s what Miguel chanted as he drew something on my chest. I
didn’t understand until I started to feel it.
“My hands are burning… they’re on fire and… Miguel, I’m
disappearing…”
“Arthur… cough… don’t forget, the right choice… hck… isn’t
vengeance…”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Prologue -
Every 100 years, S?o Paulo faces such an intense temperature
change that it causes the thermometers to drop, increasing
humidity in succession. Floods begin, and storms ravage the rest
of the country, so powerful that they rip roofs off and destroy
shanties in poor communities throughout the city. Lightning
strikes become so frequent and strong that they cause electrical
discharges, explode transformers, knock down trees, and even kill
people, reaching the point where it even snows.
The first recorded occurrence was on July 23, 1825, but few
people remember this fateful event. As a result, there were almost
no reports in books or personal diaries. The witnesses were
primarily noble bourgeois from Portugal, since there were no
newspapers in S?o Paulo focused or even concerned with recording
the weather. Instead, they were busy covering the city's turbulent
political scene, which was taking shape at the time.
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On July 23, 1925, exactly 100 years after the discovery of a
single record of that event, in a diary found in an abandoned
noble house mysteriously left without a trace of its owners'
departure, the pages described the hallucinations of a person in
the midst of the storm, evoking lights and incomprehensible
things. A meteorologist of the same period, named Belforte Mattos,
claimed to have seen snow on Avenida Paulista. As the head of the
observatory at the time, Belforte recorded everything in his book
for reporting purposes, noting: “... a thick fog was descending
from the hillside, and the temperature was -3°C...”. He detailed
this for the print and radio newspapers of the time, giving a
truly astonishing live interview.
"That is not normal in our city; when have you ever seen it
snow in S?o Paulo?" he asked rhetorically. "Something is affecting
our climate, and our equipment is not capturing everything; there
are interferences of all kinds, magnetic and static, and strong
lightning is taking down our antennas — this is not normal!" he
exclaimed to the radio host.
This caused a huge uproar among the wealthy community of the
time. After all, Brazil is tropical and had no infrastructure to
deal with snow or temperatures below 5°C, despite being a rainy
and moderately cold city. But it didn't last long, as the
government hurriedly decided to cover up the whole affair and soon
sent another meteorologist, Mr. Carlos Mangas, hired to refute
Belforte's statements and records. In a calm and almost mocking
voice, he said on the radio station:"What he saw was just a sublimation of fog with solid
droplets on the ground, very similar to the snowflakes seen in
North American cities and France, as well as lightning, which is
common and trivial at this time of year, nothing that interferes
with our typical climate in a tropical country city," he replied.
The following week, Doctor Belforte was fired.
"Why are you doing this to me?" Belforte asked indignantly.
"Inciting disorder and violating state security laws!" replied Luigi Fiesta, the director of the Observatory to whom
Belforte reported.
"But that's not fair!" he exclaimed indignantly. "You saw it
too, that is not nor—"
"IT IS NORMAL!" Luigi interrupted Belforte. "Everything that
happened that day will be recorded as a heavy frost, and you are
fired!"
"But Luigi, listen to me..."
"No!" Luigi interrupted, getting up from a leather chair and
pushing it back with such speed and force that it fell over,
already slamming both fists on the carved oak desk in front of
him, almost like a punch — a desk that had just arrived, along
with the chair, outside the Observatory's purchase records,
ordered by the tax authorities. He continued, "You didn't want to
listen to me; you wanted to tell everyone that something was
wrong, but I warned you it wouldn't work. There's no fighting
against the power of these people; now I have this beautiful desk
and a bigger office, and you are fired and will pay for your
mistake."
"You've always been a sellout," said Belforte, standing up
with his eyes red with anger and a vein pulsing on his forehead,
seemingly ready to burst. "And you never respected the scientific
community," he continued, looking directly into Luigi's eyes.
"You're a joke."
Belforte slammed the door behind him and returned to what was
now his former office. He saw that right next to the door, his
belongings were already on the floor and in boxes, with an
Observatory employee arguing with a nervous-looking skinny black
boy who was pulling a box from the employee's hands.
"You have no right to do this; he's been working here for
years; you have no right!" said the boy, with a tear running down
his face.
"JOSé FERREIRA!" Belforte shouted in a clear, deep tone
directly at the boy, who immediately froze. "Let go of this man
now and help me carry the boxes out!"
"But sir, h-he…" the boy was interrupted by a tug on his ear.
"He is doing his job, and we can't do anything about that,"
Belforte said, now pulling the boy by both ears and making him
stand on his tiptoes. "Now help me before I stretch your ears so
much you'll pick up telegraph signals."
The boy stopped whimpering and ran to grab the heaviest box,
heading out of the Observatory, followed by the doctor with two
more stacked boxes, but not before hearing something from the
employee.
"Watch out for this little black boy; he'll bring you
trouble," Belforte heard. He neither looked back nor paid
attention to the employee, but he made sure to slam the door so
hard on his way out that the glass window ornamenting the wooden
door cracked.
"Now listen carefully," Belforte said, looking at José. "Be
careful whom you choose to confront because if they have more
power than you, it might be your last fight."
The boy didn't seem to understand. He assumed Belforte was
talking about the employee who had thrown them out and just
nodded.
"The cold seems to be decreasing every day; if my records are
correct, that anomaly really emerged from nowhere, just as the
diary said," he murmured to himself aloud, almost wanting to hear
himself despite the street noise — full of boys shouting newspaper
headlines they carried under their arms, trying to sell to
everyone passing by, cars with their noisy engines, especially the
Ford Model T, the “Bigode” that drove by, raising a wall of smoke,
and of course, some street vendors trying to make money off the
few good fruits left after the cold that had destroyed their small
crops.
"But… what are we going to do now, sir?" José said, panting
from the weight of the box he was holding, pressed against his
chin to keep it from falling.
"We're heading straight home; tomorrow, we'll move to a plot
I've prepared near a neighborhood forming in the countryside," he
replied quickly, with an expression of urgency, and continued.
"They're calling it Morumbi. We'll set up some things there, but
I'll explain tomorrow," he said, smiling at the boy who looked at
him apprehensively and still panting.
The next day, they were already approaching the lot he
mentioned, with a friend's car loaded with equipment, but José
didn't dare question anything. He felt something was wrong, so he
remained silent throughout the journey.
"We're almost there now; it's not paved, and these dirt roads
will be a problem, but there's a small garden and some animals
there. We'll be able to work in peace," Belforte said with a pale
smile. "I'll just have to go back to get the compensation for the
last days I worked at the observatory. You'll have to take care of
things until I return, but only for a couple of days… at most," he
said, avoiding looking at José's astonished face.
"But sir..." José began, only to be interrupted.
"Stop calling me that; your father was my best friend, and
when you were a child, you always called me Uncle. I prefer that.
Besides, calling me sir was just a protocol of that damn
observatory; now it's just you and me," he said, with a sad look
at the road.
José wanted to continue and say he didn't know how to take
care of animals or gardens and that he needed at least an
explanation for why they were going to the countryside, leaving
the big city where everything was, but remembering his father left
him speechless, and the sound of the gunshot still echoed in his
ears.
After passing through a small wooden gate connected to barbed
wire fences that surrounded a small plot of land with a corral to
the right and a garden to the left of a small dirt and grass path
with wheel tracks leading to the front of a two-story house with
white walls and red details on the main beams and also on the
windows and roof.
Parking in a small driveway for a car, it was a simple garage
with just a red-tiled roof cover. But right in the middle of this
house and on top of this roof was an antenna that was as tall as
the house and a bit more, drawing attention as it looked like a
power line tower, similar to those just beginning to be built in
the city.
~~
