Chapter 4

Baron Douglass walked up the stairs of his manor at a leisurely pace. They had been crafted from incredibly fine wood grown safely within the great walls and nurtured by an uncommon user until they'd been ready to be harvested. For that reason, as well as the common servants tending to the manor, the staircase looked just as pristine as the day it'd been built.

The entire manor was much the same. Everything was lavish, or as his father would have described, built to last. Not that it mattered, the family was in ruins, or at least it was as he saw it.

A noble with only rares isn't a noble at all. If his son, Samuel, was still here then it'd be different. The kid had been a prodigy, and the obvious choice for the legendary once his grandfather had passed away. The things he could do with that card were art.

Dougles sighed at the thought of his son and paced slowly through the manor before finally arriving in front of his bedroom. He placed his hand against the handle and moved to open the door when all of a sudden the door was blown from its hinges, throwing Dougles back as fire poured into the hall and covered him entirely.

= = =

Daniel slowly stepped down from what he roughly guessed had once been a bed. Although he wasn't entirely confident in that assumption given the charred nature of what he was standing on, and the fact it had become little more than a singed spot on the floor. 

The walls around Daniel were scorched a smoldering red, which for some bizarre reason were holding up remarkably well. It didn't take Daniel long to piece together what could've caused the room to become a convection oven. The golden card was the obvious suspect, but what surprised Daniel most was that the heat seemed to have no effect on him. Flames danced upon the floor and fluttered through the air, but to Daniel the temperature of the room seemed almost pleasant. 

'Well, that explains why the corpse was still at the bottom of that cave and not burnt to dust. Although that does raise a concerning question. Why is a wooden wall holding up better against the card's fire than cave walls did?'

Daniel was forced to disregard the thought as movement caught his eye. The door of the room had been blown clean off, allowing a point for the immense heat of the room to spread throughout the rest of the structure, and rushing through that immense heat was a tall man with silver hair and finely trimmed facial hair wearing a luxurious black cloak and really old-timey clothes.

The man yelled with excitement upon entering the room, "Samuel, you're back!" 

He was smiling like a madman, but it faded to nothingness as his eyes locked onto Daniel. The man's eyes quickly scouring the rest of the room before they inevitably hardened and turned back towards Daniel, his tone now cold as ice.

"Who are you?"

Daniel stared at the man as he thought through what to do next. The man looked pissed, and if Daniel was being honest with himself, he was well in the right to be so. He had just turned the man's home into a bonfire, willingly or not. 

Daniel had several options before him, but not one of them was calmly explaining to the man what had just happened to his house. The man's eyes promised violence, so Daniel figured he wouldn't give him the chance. 

He mentally flipped the switch in his mind and appeared back in Limbo. Immediately smoke covered the floor as the walls turned to chitin. Everything in the dimension followed the same patterns they did back on earth, and the only concerning thing was that he could barely see through the fire. It almost seemed to meld together with the ever-present smoke that covered the ground, creating a wavy film that he could only see glimpses through.

'Another downside of the card to take note of,' Daniel thought bitterly.

He walked across the room at a relaxed pace. Rushing would use more oxygen than it was worth. The man probably couldn't see him, unless of course he had a card of his own that let him. Daniel could only assume that more cards existed in this world, the fact that his own had a rarity was a pretty significant indicator that there were at least lesser variants of it. How common they were was up to question though.

But as for whether or not the man had a card to see him with. Daniel doubted he did. With just how specific his own card was, the odds that another would blatantly let someone else move or see between worlds was rather low. Unless there were duplicates, but that was a whole nother can of worms to deal with if that was the case.

Daniel walked to the door, but as he moved he stepped three paces to the right. The man's eyes didn't follow him, instead they stayed locked onto where he'd been. Which likely meant he was in the clear, but Daniel's attention was much more drawn to the man still standing in the doorway and how he very much did not look okay. 

He was muttering under his breath, and while Daniel couldn't really see more than a smokey outline of the figure. What he did manage to catch glimpses of through the raging inferno was small beads of smoke fall from the man's face to join the smoke resting on the floor.

"You're really gone, aren't you Samuel? Though I suppose I already knew you were. I was a fool for hoping."

Daniel, seeing that things were going to get ugly if he stuck around, moved through the man standing in the doorway and speedwalked down the hallway. He could already feel the strain on his lungs despite not being in Limbo long.

It was only after he'd made it halfway down the connecting hall that Daniel realized something was off, he'd heard the man speak while in Limbo. Hearing someone talk was such a natural thing that he'd forgotten that Limbo as he understood it, should be completely silent. 

Daniel quickly thought it through, 'Ok, so either he has a card that lets me hear him, or I can hear everyone that has a card while in Limbo. Either option isn't that bad of a scenario, he still couldn't see me. Or he at least pretended he couldn't.'

But just as Daniel had that thought he heard the telltale sound of steps racing down the hall. They were deafening amidst the otherwise complete silence that permeated Limbo. 

Though what the man's smokey figure was doing was what truly startled Daniel. Several doors had been left open in the hall, all of which led into a servant's quarters or nonconsequential storage room. The man was closing every door he came across as fast as he could. 

'He knows how my card works,' Daniel realized. 

The second he had that thought Daniel ignored the burning in his lungs and raced down the hall. Rooms flashed by Daniel's vision as he ran, the vast majority of them barely distinguishable amidst the chitin walls that surrounded them. 

But the man made from smoke was far, far faster than he was. He rushed by like a blur and slammed closed the double doors at the end of the hall, which led toward a stairwell and presumably to an exit. 

The man of smoke turned away from the door and watched the hall with the intensity of a hawk. He didn't move, but Daniel could make out the faint smoke trail that drifted down from the man's hand forming the shape of a long, curved blade. 

Daniel's lungs burned in his chest as he watched the furious nobleman, 'He should have no way of knowing I'm still in the hallway. He either has a card letting him know I'm still here, or he's working off of anger and the hope that I didn't make it out in time. I'd prefer it to be the second option, but it's probably more likely to be the first.'

Daniel reached into his pocket and felt the cool steel of the revolver resting there.

'Should I use it on him? Would it even work? No, that's to rash of an option right now.'

The man spoke back into the empty hallway with a tone full of vitriol and hate. 

"I know your still here. Answer me, you killed Samuel, didn't you? Though I suppose somebody would've had to with how long it's been, but after so many years I'd truly hoped that he'd found a way to stay in the other world. He didn't have a way to remove the legendary when I'd last seen him, but a new world leads to new opportunities, no?"

Daniel watched the man standing before the exit with the same caution he'd have given a wild animal. That speed that he'd demonstrated running down the hall hadn't been natural, and worse, Daniel was almost positive that that corpse at the bottom of the cave had been the man's son.

For now, Daniel didn't move, instead deciding to conserve oxygen in the slight chance that the man didn't have a card letting him know he was still in the hallway. It wasn't the likely option, but it was worth putting at least some stock in. Because if that was the case, then there was a chance the man would lose his nerve and rush out of the hall in search of Daniel sometime soon. 

That optimistic hope was dashed when the man next spoke, "Of course you'd be a coward. Staying hidden like this. You've no respect for yourself or what you stole from me. So know the name of the man who will kill you, I'm Baron Douglass, and I'm going to personally rip that card out of your corpse before feeding you to a hoard of cavemorphs."

Daniel watched on with slowly widening eyes as Douglass continued his rant. 'Change of plans,' Daniel thought. 'This guy is absolutely going to stay in this hallway until I need to breathe.' 

Which meant Daniel was going to need to rely on the backup plan, which of course was the ever-growing inferno that was slowly stretching out from the room he'd first appeared in. It crackled and burned as it stretched out from the doorway, climbing up the walls and enveloping everything in its path. 

Whatever had held off the flames initially was obviously failing, and Daniel planned to do his absolute best to make the house fire work in his favor.