The Apocalypse Charm

The door to the tavern bursts open.

BOOM! 

Every manner of creature and human or half-breed alike fixated on the source. My name is Ushor, and my life will never be the same.

"Have you seen him?" says an upset young nixie.

Oh, she was beautiful. I'd never seen someone so elegantly concerned as if the world was going to end yet not look like hell froze over. Of course, I'd never seen a nixie either on account that they kept to themselves and rarely were ever seen in towns or villages.

Nixies weren't a favorable term but a slur for those who meant nothing in the schemes of the Imperial Archons, the so-said saviors of the masses. I never trusted them, but no one wields the power they have to say otherwise. How do we fight a tyrannical group of patrons who wield the light of the universe?

"This person has it. Please! Tell me if you sawr them, or the world will end. Please!" she says.

Well, that escalated, but still, I find myself distracted by abnormal height, short in comparison. The Nixie must be quick but elegant and well-shaped, but her eyes draw you in. They were amethyst in color with a single spec of red in the center of a black iris. I could only imagine one stumbling upon such a rose and thinking of nix in the presence of such rare ambrosia.

"You! Serf man," says the Nixie.

I hate that term. Should I be mad? Of course, I should, but she's so cute. Crap, she's walking this way. What do I do? Growing up an orphan and inheriting a tavern accordingly never prepared me for talking to girls. Crap, crap–

"--he was... it-- I mean you, no?" I said with a big cheesy grin.

She grabbed my apron at the mid-section, which made me giggle, but a split second of her glare with those entrancing eyes turned elegant into dangerous. Needless to say, my face fixed itself without having to apologize.

"Focus! The man you saw. Was he wearing a trench fashioned with shiny mail, his eyes white of light or silver?" asks the Nixie, her grasp firm despite her size.

"He was wearing some kind of eye shield. I thought it to be curious, but he was strapped with a crude blade and the mail you spoke of, which is odd--,"

"--focus. Did he say anything? Think!" say the Nixie.

It was so strange that her eyes went from serious to sorrowful as if my next word would determine the world's fate.

"If you know something, then your words could determine the fate of the world, serf. Speak!" she says.

Great, it's almost like being trapped in a lousy fantasy written by our local legend Edendan Woe. I loved his stories. Thankfully he came into the tabby a lot, so we blustered up a rapport, and he taught me to read. If only he'd had learned me to talk to girls.

"You aren't by chance seeing anyone, are you?" I asked. I had a huge smile and this sudden realization that now was probably not a great time.

"And they wonder why nixies stay to themselves," says Nixie. She releases Ushor and walks out of the tavern.

One of the Rhinosaurons throws a cup of the mead at the door.

"Un'yarno ghatz meech-mon casta illumiou," the Rhinosaurons says.

I can't explain these brutes, but let's just say horns, teeth, tall, and immovable when stampeding, so let's state for the record that I was a coward at this moment. No shame in my survival game, and while there is some security in being the only tavern game in town, I'd rather not tempt the Oracles. Oh my, she's run off.

"Mr. Khatz! You have the floor tonight. I must, huh, step out. Thanks, bye!" says I, a fabricated story for sure.

I can read, and while I don't know much about adventure, I've read enough to know how one starts. My heart has never skipped a beat, and I can't leave this feeling to chance. Mr. Woe always said when he described the feeling of love in the adventure as a feeling of flight and that you must stop using your eyes if you want to see yourself in a world where you could fly. And she just flew the coup.

I burst through the tavern doors.

BOOM!

"Wait! Wait. Nixie?" I say as I throw off my apron.

She was in a hurry. Her scarf danced in the air tunnel behind her striding, occasionally stopping to look down a narrow alley. I wonder if Mr. Woe ever wrote about someone stupid enough to leave his only life behind with nothing in the world that eats serfs like him as chasers with an early morning brand.

Then it happened. The light. It lit up on the dark-stained road we were running down. That's when the Nixie turned around awestruck. I had this feeling that someone had died or was about to die. Mr. Woe had a knack for writing these cheese-in-a-pot moments where the bad guy would suddenly appear behind the good guy as the good guy was speaking about what they were going to do to a particularly diabolical bad guy.

"Isn't that where your tavern was?" she asked.

Crap.

I turned around, of course, and sure enough, we caught a glimpse of lightning reigning down from the sky. My tavern was on fire with the only survivor. A grumpy old frenzied Rhinosauron bursts out of the tavern running with immoveable speed. His back had caught fire. He broke through a wall across the road. I turned toward the Nixie and smiled, but to be honest, I was a little in between feelings while patting myself on the back for saving my own life. Or did I? I mean, if it wasn't for her, I'd be on fire or living my worst nightmare as a Rhinosauron stamped and approved round patty. Urgh, what squeamish thought.

"I'm sure the union treasury will reimburse the damages," I say.

Now, a considerable noise came over us both. I thought it was my nervous gas pains. It usually happens when I'm scared. I discovered I get pains in my stomach when I'm being yelled at or experiencing something that makes me concerned for my future. The owner that left me the tavern, my guardian, made me feel this way all the time. The old bagger couldn't ever handle his own skin, so he made a game of peeling mine. Figuratively, oracles no. All my skin is intact.

"Look out!" says the Nixie.

She pulls out a small branch, which at its tip garnishes a tiny blossom of a flower I had imagined when describing her eyes. I was frozen, still ignoring the significant bumbling noise. Come to think of it, that might be my heartbeat, but it wasn't. The tip of her branch illuminates a magenta color, and energy springs forth, enshrouding me and carrying me fast toward her, toward my Nixie. I mean... towards Nixie. Then I hear it as I crash into Nixie. The wall behind me explodes open, sending stone and wood debris everywhere. The Rhinosauron had been demolishing the interior of the linen factory across the street.

He was monstrous in size. Drinking so much mead must have caused the fire to spread as boils swelled beneath his scales, rupturing into lesions atop his tough skin. Smoldering burnt skin deformed his facial features, which now looked terrifying as yellow and red mucus-like discoloration covered his new face.

"How did you do that?" I asked as I came too.

Being so close to her was breathtaking.

"Chainmodha!" she yelled.

I looked back, realizing we were about to be pressed to the cobbles and corporeal chains lifted from the grounds binding the Rhinosauron. And I thought bears looked ferocious bound, and caged.

"You need to run. Leave," says Nixie as she scurries to her tiny feet and makes a break for it.

"USHOR!" screams the Rhinosauron.

Arrgh!

Indeed, I had nothing to do with why he was so upset, but I wasn't about to stick around to find out what lies at the end of a Rhinosauron bar fight. Not that I have a bar to fight in now. Before I could dwell on the consequences of a Rhinosaur beating, a flash of streaking light struck the ground. Rocks sizzle with steaming vapor coming off their mantle-crusted surfaces. A man, cloak of black, mail weaved into its myriad symboled material, lined with silver buttons, each one connected to the next with a crystalline chain linked together glistening in the illumination from beneath this dark crusaders eye shields as he rises from his very imposing and intimidating entrance. 

"THRANE!" shouts Nixie. 

Thrane drops his hood. Pulling from his unique hand-crafted leather holsters unsheaths a pair of very intricate and overawing pair of arcing swing blades. It's hard to explain these ones, but they resemble a sword that follows your arm and is fashioned to a plate that you can carry in the palm of your hand keeping balance by shoving your ring finger on the opposite side of the plate. I didn't understand the little crystalline embellishment on top of the blade, but I found out. Thrane pointed one of those crystals right at me, creating a green of light upon my head, but instead of shooting a light ball at me, he exploded into a small cloud of black dusk, a lurking shadowy creature.

"Nixie, I told you it would end. All of it. Now go. Go!" says Thrane. 

I looked at her, this whole almost wetting my knickers hunched, shocked at the moment this grand event unfolded before me. Edendan was right about something. You can never be too outnumbered in an adventure and not call it beating the odds. Mmmm. What a strange old man. 

"I can't do that, Thrane. That charm is my honor. If you destroy it, nothing will mean anything," says Nixie. 

"That's the point, little one," says Thrane.

There it is, that look of deep sorrow. It's almost as if the Nixie's woeful countenance turns plants around brown of color, drained and unencumbered of the life around her. Thrane slowly pulls down his eye shield revealing the silvery glow of his eye, an unlit fire of perfection without any material to start the blaze but the warmth. Calming even put a stop to my over-sharing perception of forethought. The Rhinosauron came to and worked his way to his gargantuan feet. He looked at the hooded stranger from behind, still enraged from the pain of feeling the fire. He charged belligerently, flailing to and from. 

"Watch it," I yelled. 

Before I could finish my outburst, he spun around, inverting his weapons, and gut-punched the Rhinosauron. The impact knocked the wind out of him. The Rhinosauron explodes backward into a vicious role as his limbs and body strike coble after coble until he is down. Thrane rose from his kneeling lunge spinning his blades back around, his middle fingers flawlessly catching their ring holes. He turns back to Nixie and then looks at me sternly, unwavering. 

"The Oracle's words mean little now. The world ends today in Gretchin Grove, the grave of my graves," says Thrane. He receded into the sky with a flash, fading as a lit silhouette in a cloud. 

"I told you saw him," I said. 

I really should be more prepared with my words. Mr. Woe used to tell me that all the time, called it "thinking brain," he did. 

"Now, I'll never get my charm back," says Nixie. 

"Charm?" I replied. 

I usually don't notice much busy focusing on serving others, but I just couldn't help but notice this little sterling shine around Thrane's neck, but I sawr it fell off him when he gave that Rhinosauron a beating. Still laying on his tail. I looked to the ground behind me and then snapped back to the Nixie. Her face turned a shade of pink, and the sorrowful pain he had felt before drifted into an aroma of soothing relaxation. She floated toward me, glared at me with infatuation, then hovered over to the charm. 

"NIXIE!" shouted the sky. 

The clouds lit up as the drums in the sky roared to life. Bolts of light crackled the sea of clouds as the Nixie snatched up the charm letting herself down before grabbing me by the hand and leading me in a direction where light couldn't barby your backside for supper. 

"We have to go; no time," says Nixie. 

"Wait, no time? And what's with the weird demi-gorg man chasing you for a charm," I demanded. 

Of course, now is a great time to assert my personal right to understand what in the blazes is going on. 

"You're the worst. We have no time," repeats Nixie. 

"My tavern is gone. I was almost mauled by an enraged Rhinosauron. And I barely escaped death by simply being unimportant enough to harm. You keep saying the world is ending the creepy cloud fella is made that we took his lucky charm that belonged to you that sent me running after you because you were just too beautiful to let out of sight," I said. Wait, I did? Crap. I'm really not good and talking, period. 

"Beautiful?"

"Huh, Yoy. I mean, yek, yes," I replied.

She stepped into me, looking up at me, our eyes intertwined, fixated on the galaxy of possibility floating in our seeing nebuli's. She takes my hand. 

"But I am Nixie. We are nothing; we come from nothing. What could you possibly want from such a beautiful nothing?" she asked. 

To which I replied, "I am Ushor, a Nix."

Her eyes filled with tears as her focus zoomed in on Ushor. 

I added, "I was nothing to once until someone named as is our custom, right?"

"That means," said Nixie.

"Because I'm named--"

"I can name you," we say in unison, except she said me, not you, oh, never mind.

The roaring sky blundered our eardrums as the hooded man Thrane zipped and zapped from cloud to cloud in the distance toward us. At that moment, she was frozen, just as I had witnessed not an hour before this end-of-world moment. Her small size and face shape. All in orbit around her mesmerizing eyes. The color of her magic only deepened the tones and shades of Amethyst.

"Say it," she says softly.

"In the night of nights when the loud thunder claps, the people of nothing will nix the lights collapse," I said.

"Amethyst, a Nixie no more I name thee by my solemn light; you shall live with purpose as my guiding light, night of my night," I finished. 

A twinkling of silver glazes in a blink over her eyes. Her admiration glazed into a fawning glare of hopefulness. She leaned up, grasping my neck and head. Suddenly, she brings my forehead down to hers.

"Ushor, nix no more I accept your name Amethyst as your guiding light and do solemnly so swear our names into love without blight, my night of nights," she replies. 

"Wait, the lost nothings on the night of nights? The Oracles," says Amethyst. 

"We're the key. I'm the key," says Amethyst, stepping back and holding up the lightning bolt-shaped charm as lit silhouettes clap into view. 

"Oracles? Nights of who?"

"The Oracles said a lost nothing would gain the light on the night of nights, and that's when I was honor bound with keeping this charm safe from the demi-gorg and his Archonian handlers," says Amethyst. 

I won't lie; a little of me died inside, sucking wind from the world when she mentioned the light-bringers more like harbingers. 

"Then why didn't you let him take it,"

"Because he would have opened up the world and sucked us all into a fake world where light is the source of our experience, not love,"

"I don't understand, Amethyst,"

"I didn't either until now. Step back my night of nights," said Amethyst. 

Nix and Nixies are two different people from the same race of nothing, a race deemed by the majority of intelligent creatures in our plane of existence a lost race. Our peoples were slaves to most but thrived as keepers of nature. After decades of misfortune, we created a culture from an ideal called The Naming. It was our way of expressing love and defining our purpose as a people. Through ceremony, we named many, and when one was named, they were gifted the purpose of reclaiming our lives, so we were someone more than nothing. 

Before I could tell her how much love I had fallen for her in just a moment, she lit her charm with a small wooden wand. The charm begins to fracture. Suddenly, at that moment, Thrane crashed from the sky above Amethyst, but it was too late. The cracks broke free fissures of light, bursting into shards of crystal-like glass crumble. The burst of light turns Thrane into million frozen pieces of crystals. I blew backward, slamming into a wall from the impact of a burst of energy. Amethyst was gone. 

Or so I thought. 

"My night of nights?" she asked as she extended her hands. 

When I came too, I stood up in awe of the reality that had changed around me. A bright sunny day illuminated a white city as happy everyone walked and celebrated. I couldn't believe that I barely made it up the street and had an adventure so life-changing that the whole world was full of people where everyone had a name. 

And no one was nothing.