- A Game of Dice and Chance [pt.2]

Lia could see the suspicion and pertaining look pouring off Arnold's face, but it didn't bother her. In fact, Lia was more or less glad Arnold had revealed what he did, as she still did not know what Rian had asked of Cain the night before.

It made her heart warm to think that Rian was helping someone else and was willing to go through such lengths to help them.

"Well, did you know about it?"

Lia took in a breath, meeting Arnold's eyes with a smile.

"No. But I did know the person behind it."

"Will you not tell me who that is?"

"What does it matter? You asked if I had my hand in it, I said no. Who did it does not matter so long as the question was answered. Thus the rules of the game."

Arnold clenched his fists, his gaze hardening at Lia's words.

"I'm beginning to dislike this little game of yours."

"Then why play it?"

"Because I feel like there's still more that I can learn."

"Then roll."

They rolled again; Lia won with an 8 while Arnold lost by a hair at 5.

"Your son, what was he like?"

Arnold raised his head, his eyes narrowing as he looked over Lia's unwavering and impassable completion. She gave away nothing and where he once respected her for that, he now found himself hating her for it.

"Why ask me that? I thought the entire point of this game was to answer the unanswered. Not learn about each other's past and personal lives."

"Answers are found in unlikely places."

Lia shrugged, clearly not minding the fact that she had wasted a question in Arnold's eyes. It was something she needed to know and there wasn't much else she could ask him, so she kept it simple, clean and confusing.

At least to Arnold.

"My son is as normal as any man would be. He is a young adult now and has seen many seasons and many years. He's strong in many things but…"

"But you don't think so?"

Arnold shook his head, confirming Lia's words as he looked down at his dice.

"My son has his heart set on the right things, but he has neither the strength nor the courage to grab them. I ask him to stay out of my way and he throws himself into danger. He's weak, fragile and will easily break."

"So do you believe you're protecting him?"

"I believe he needs to protect himself. I can't be around forever and so long as he stays out of the way, that end won't be coming anytime soon."

"Don't you think you're mistaking his ambition for his weakness?"

Arnold eyed Lia for several moments, realizing quickly why she had warned him at the start of this game. While she had only asked one question, he had answered more for her than what was asked.

It was a game of the mind and he found himself failing. He hated failure.

Smiling a bloodthirsty smile, Arnold frowned deeply, grabbing his dice in one hand as he began to shake them.

"You want answers, roll."

***

The house was torn to shreds, chairs thrown against the wall, shelves were ripped from their places bolted and nailed into the wood. The dishes the farmer's wife had been clearing only minutes before were shattered against the ground like pieces of broken glass.

For many the place would look like a war had broken outside, and in all truth it had. Cain stood drenched in blood from head to two, the red murky liquid sticking and drying to his face like glue.

He held in his hands the very thing that made the farmer, who cowered on the floor as he pushed away from Cain with his feet, so afraid of him. His eyes were wide with terror, his face was horror stricken and pale, yet to Cain it all looked more like a front than an actual representation of fear. He knew fear and this was not that.

The farmer's eyes turned from Cain's blood soaked face to his hand where the head of his wife rested, held up only by her hair as Cain silently let out a long held breath.

"Golems. It seems you know more about them than I thought."

Can pulled the head by the hair, bringing it level to his face. He could see the small patch work here and there, the spots that the farmer must have sewed back together and the loose fitted facial expressions that looked to just hang there on her face.

"You know, you can always tell a golem from a person because they have black blood. Well, it's not really black, more like a rotting color of red, but still…"

He threw the head behind him, hearing it shatter against a wooden desk, chair or table - to Cain it didn't matter. His focus was on the famer now as he shivered with his fake fear.

"...you could have done better."

***

10 and 4. Lia lost.

"Alright, my turn."

Arnold rubbed his hands together, any sign of the once angered and scrutinizing face that he wore just moments ago, disappeared in a wave of excitement.

He was like a kid ready to win his next prize.

"Answer me this; Becka. If it is as you've said and you had no hand in healing Becka, then who did?"

Lia watched the window filled with the brilliance of the lamps and their light that lined the streets filled with cobblestone. The candles that sat on the window sill and their dancing flames, the sound of the people outside cheering - it all melded into one.

"My summons."

The words were out of her mouth before she even realized she said them, but even as she did she did not stop herself. She let the words flow from her lungs and into Arnold's mind as his face turned from one of excitement to one filled with a deep frown.

"Your summons? That wasn't the answer I was expecting."

"What did you expect? Last I checked, no normal human being can use magic."

"I would have thought a potion to be the one responsible for this change, but you say it's your summons?"

Arnold leaned back in his chair, his chest rising with his deep and steady breaths as he thought hard on her words.

Lia eyed his rising stomach, the sound of his calm breathing filling the room that found itself silenced by everything else but the sound of air. Not everyone could breath so calmly and Lia noted how one would have to be steadily trained in all things fitness and battle to have such a calm breath. But still…

…it was nothing like Cain's.

His breath was like a mountain breeze, as calm as the wind that blew on the updraft and as steady as the beating of the mountain's heart. Lia recalled that once she had heard Cain's heart beat, perhaps from the time he held her close to his chest when he was healing her in Neverdark.

His heart was like a beating drum that defended her ears, and filled her head with nothing but the sound of its rhythmic beats. His heart was filled with life, life that reminded her of the forest, the earth and the sky.

"...Lia?"

Lia snapped out of her thoughts, eyeing Arnold who had his dice in his hands.

"Are you alright?"

She took a moment to regain her thoughts, realizing that she had been out of the present and too focused on the past.

"Yes…I'm fine. Are you not going to ask anything else about my summons? Surely this must be a surprise to you?"

Despite Lia's knowledge of how deep Arnold's curiosity ran with her - though she was sad to say it did not go vice versa, as she cared little for this man - he shook his head, breaking her assumption.

"No. There's no point to it now. I'm beginning to realize what you meant about asking questions that have meaning behind them. We have to be careful and calculating with the ones we ask."

Lia didn't like the smile that was making its way onto Arnold's face, seemingly reaching to his ears as his face hid behind the mask of a warrior who had seen more than war.

She didn't like it, but she had to roll.

"I hope that lesson is learned well then."

"Oh it is, especially since I will see your summons up close soon enough."

The dice fell from her hand as she rolled but her mind was elsewhere at the moment. Her mind was racing through his words, pounding against her heart in warning.

Was it a threat, or was it a lie?

If it was a lie, then she would silently curse herself ro falling under such obvious attempts to spike her fear, make her worried and unfocused.

But if it was a threat…

Well, Lia feared she would soon find out.

***

The farmer's neck fit easily into Cain's hand like it was meant to be, his face turning into a smile so sinister that the farmer had to keep himself from wetting the floor. His feet dangled in the air as she struggled for breath, but Cain also knew this was a lie.

'For a farmer rippling with muscles he's surprisingly light.'

He wasn't even holding on tight enough for the farmer to be choking, yet the man made it appear as though the very breath in his lungs was leaving him as they spoke. His own words came out in choppy pieces of broken words and speech.

"Pl…please…wh-what do you…want?"

"I want what you have."

Cain gestured to the dead wife - or rather, the dead golem the farmer called his wife. Her real body had been dead for probably decades, the only thing keeping her alive was the Soul Stone Cain had ripped from her chest.

"Tell me all the information you have on Golems."

"I..I don't know…khe..what y-you're talking about."

Cain smiled, a smile that told the farmer he didn't believe a word he was saying.

"Where."

The hand gripping his throat tightened harder and the farmer found he could no longer breath.

"Are."

But something was wrong. The farmer had a natural sense to his mind and he knew that a hand trying to choke him out would never be gripping his throat so hard. It felt like he was trying to crush his neck within his own hand.

"The Golems."

And the farmer didn't doubt he could do this.

"Please….please, I know nothing!"

The farmer was now crying, his tears running down his face like hot sap that stuck and clung to the trees outside his home. Blood stained his face from the drops Cain had flung against him when his golem wife had her stomach torn open.

"I…I know nothing-"

The hand closed around his throat and no air dared to enter the farmer's lungs. He was trapped within the palm of this man's grasp, his red eyes burning into his own like an iron burning with fire.

"Please…"

Whatever he could say came out in a meek and gurgling sound as if the farmer was a drowning man being pushed farther and farther down into the cold and empty waters.

But Cain's eyes showed no mercy. The farmer's pleas had entered one ear and left the other, shown by his next words as he carefully spoke with such meticulous planning it set him at odds with the farmer's appearance.

"Liar."

The hand closed around the farmer's neck, splattering into a paste of blood and flesh that clung and stuck to his hands. He wiped his hands against the table cloth beside him, watching the head of the farmer fall to the floor in a pool of his own black and murky blood.

Cain only had one thing to say as he looked at the scene with cold eyes.

"...a fake?"

***

6 and 8. Lia won this time but she feared it would be the last. They had been going back and forth, one winning the other losing and then in the next run it was the opposite.

She knew this luck would never work with her, only against her as it had always had done.

"You claim your son is weak, that he always gets in the way. Why?"

"Why what?"

"...why do you hate him?"

Arnold frowned again, but this time it wasn't out of anger. It wasn't out of rage or suspicion but instead, Lia could see his mind working behind his eyes, a small sadness creeping through him.

"What makes you think I hate him?"

"The way you talk about him. You've not once mentioned his name but instead only called him 'your son.' You say he gets in the way all the time, though your tone of voice tells me that you find it more of an annoyance than you do a fear."

"So you think I hate him because of his weakness?"

"I think there is a reason for his weakness and that is what you hate."

Arnold grew quiet for a moment, his mind reaching back into his past as he brought the sadness deep in his soul from his family back up to the surface.

"Years ago my wife was killed. She was traveling with my son to meet me at one of my guilds camps. We hadn't seen each other for two months and they were both happy to see her."

"How did she die?"

Arnold eyed her still figure, emotionless as she silently listened to his sad tale, casting his look of distaste at the ground because he could not find the courage to cast it towards her.

"A group of passing bandits. They saw a mother and her kid, thinking it would be an easy kill, an easy job… My son hid while his mother was killed, beaten and watched as they did things to her that I would have stung their organs up on a pole now. If they were still alive."

"So you blame him for not stepping in."

Arnold raised a hand, realizing that he was in the midst of falling down the rabbit hole all over again. She had played with his emotions and he thought it more distasteful than the idea of his son.

"No. I was hardly present in his life after that, but no I don't blame him for her death. The bandits drew the blade, not him."

Lia straightened up, crossing her arms as she realized this was her chance. Her chance to find the reason as to why Arnold was searching for his son, why he as so willing to kill for him.

And how she could chase him away.

"Then why do you hate him?"

"That's another question -"

"No. You still haven't answered the first one. Why do you hate him?"

Arnold took a deep ragged breath, as she could feel the sadness practically flowing from him as he struggled to stop tears from flowing down his cheeks. He loved his wife, that was clear.

But his son…?

Arnold seemed to struggle with the words.

"...I hate him…because he reminds me of the grief. How I lost my wife. Everyday I see his face and I know he hasn't gotten over it, how he hasn't overcome the terror he felt then. I hate him because I'm reminded of a memory I want to forget."

"So you hate him for that? Because he is weak in his heart?"

Lia couldn't stop the anger in her tone and the distaste she found for Arnold. To hate a son as much as Arnold did, to do the things that Lukali had described - even now still living with the scars of his father. How could he?

What right did he have?

"You hate him because you can't get over your own grief and he just reminds you of that weakness?"

Arnold slammed his hand on the table at Lia's rough tone, grabbing the two dice in his hand with one swoop.

"I have taught him everything I can, turned his focus elsewhere but he refuses to forget! Now! Roll!"

Lia grabbed the dice, her anger getting the best of her and she realized too late that she didn't need to play the game anymore. She didn't need to give him anything else.

It was a while before her ears turned to the window and she and Arnold realized the sounds of the party were now gone, replaced by an eerie silence. The dice fell to the floor, falling from the table with no hand to stop them. There was no reason to, as both Arnold and Lia now looked out the window, their senses screaming the same thing.

The once bright lamps that lined the streets were gone, the sounds of music and chewing had vanished.

Instead of the once beautiful and delicate flames that danced in the city's night air, now raged in a flame that threatened to destroy it all.