The Quest of Words: To Lead the Lilim Read online

  Contents

  Contents

  The Quest of Words

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I Arc I - Fall Chapter 1 - My Life as it Was

  Chapter 2 - Messing with Menus

  Chapter 3 - Silliness, Sadness, and a Long Night

  Chapter 4 - Bandits

  Chapter 5 - Jax

  Chapter 6 - An Agreement Made, a Destination Set, and a Bit of Walking

  Chapter 7 - Our First Dance

  Chapter 8 - Camping, Dreams, and Terror

  Arc II - Tutorial Chapter 9 - Fun and Games

  Chapter 10 - Spat

  Chapter 11 - Disco Time

  Chapter 12 - The Sand Man

  Chapter 13 - Puzzles and Prizes

  Arc III - Traveling Chapter 14 - A Light Vengeance Before Bedtime

  Chapter 15 - On the Road Again

  Chapter 16 - Civilization

  Chapter 17 - A New Skill, A New Destination, and a Little Excitement

  Chapter 18 - The Hopak on the Hill

  Chapter 19 - Catch and Release

  Part II Arc IV - Scouting Chapter 20 - Dancing in the Dark

  Chapter 21 - Walking in the Dark

  Chapter 22 - A Crystal, a Song, and a Thing

  Chapter 23 - Explosions, Changes, and a Bit of Discussion

  Chapter 24 - Seduction Techniques for Noobs

  Arc V - Flowers Chapter 25 - Stats, a Skill, and a Riddle

  Chapter 26 - That Which Lies Beneath

  Chapter 27 - Dive Prep

  Chapter 28 - A New Agreement

  Chapter 29 - For Science

  Chapter 30 - The Tongue-Flower Two Step

  Arc VI - Trap Chapter 31 - Adjustments

  Chapter 32 - Heavy Things

  Chapter 33 - The Rodent Rodat

  Chapter 34 - The Long Talk

  Chapter 35 - Finding the Key

  Chapter 36 - An Accidental Self-Discovery

  Chapter 37 - A Trap with a Side of Rats

  Chapter 38 - Enough with the Rats!

  Arc VII - Enflame Chapter 39 - Pay Off

  Chapter 40 - The Subtle Art of Pulling

  Chapter 41 - A Simple Plan

  Chapter 42 - What Does That Mean?

  Chapter 43 - Consummation

  Arc VIII - Hole Chapter 44 - No Soup for You!

  Chapter 45 - Hanging Out

  Chapter 46 - The Vigil

  Chapter 47 - Out of the Pot...

  Chapter 48 - ...And Into Hess

  Chapter 49 - The Death Rattle of Shame

  Chapter 50 - New Toy, New Enemy

  Chapter 51 - Good Enough

  Chapter 52 - The First Boundary

  Chapter 53 - A Powerful Thing

  Arc IX - Exit Chapter 54 - The Gigue with the Giraffe

  Chapter 55 - The Second Binding

  Chapter 56 - Arx

  Chapter 57 - A New Class, A New Skill, A New Problem

  Chapter 58 - The Mirror

  Acknowledgements

  Back Matter

  The Quest of Words

  To Lead the Lilim

  by

  Nathaniel B. Logee

  Copyright © 2022 Nathaniel B. Logee.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author at the email address below.

  Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.

  Front cover image by Dragan Paunovic.

  Edited by Josiah Davis.

  J.D. Book Services.

  www.jdbookservices.com

  First published 2022.

  Email: [email protected]

  Website: www.patreon.com/Seleroan

  This book is dedicated to my grandmother, Marion Stephanie Anderson, without whom this novel could never have been written.

  May she rest forever in our hearts.

  It was one of those nondescript, single-story office buildings that dot the landscape in the Midwestern United States. Boxy construction. No windows. Sadly, it was my current place of gainful employment. Although, really there was nothing gainful about ten dollars an hour. But hey, in another three months I would qualify for insurance, and that would only cost me about a third of my paycheck. So that was… something.

  The place was named Steg-o-call. It even had a cute little stegosaurus wearing a telephone headset on the side of the building as a mascot, which probably had a name of its own. No one had told me. When I had first been hired, I had been glad to get any sort of job. At the time, I was about two weeks away from getting evicted, and I would have worked anywhere to avoid homelessness. So, here I was. In a call center.

  Call centers, if you don’t know, are businesses that do not serve the public. Instead, they provide a service to other businesses who had somehow managed to convince themselves that they don’t need a customer service department. Of course, they obviously did, otherwise we wouldn’t exist. We provided all of the things that upper management looks for—low pay, poor facilities, and most of all, someone to point the finger at once the low quality that inevitably leads to comes to light. In short, we were cheap and easy to fire.

  Our current client was a TV cable/internet company. I was pretty sure we had others, as well. Knowing that wasn’t my job, though, and I wasn’t paid enough to care. My job was primarily in providing technical support for their customer’s internet service with the rare cable problem sprinkled in. Initially, I had been a little excited to work in tech support. I liked computers, after all. I had built a few, mainly for gaming purposes. Sadly, I’d never gotten to assemble one of those mega battle stations that you see people brag about on the internet every once in a while. Never had the budget for it.

  Training had been a three-week-long affair. We had each received a massive handbook filled with all sorts of information on the various ways a person’s internet connection could get fouled up. It had even been divided up based on operating system, although Linux was conspicuously absent. They probably figured no one capable of running Linux would ever bother to call us. They were likely right, too. Personally, I knew less about Linux than I did MacOS… and I wasn’t sure if my coworkers had even heard of it.

  The trainer had been a nice lady who delighted in giving us all sorts of little computer puzzles to solve. It was quaint, but enjoyable in its own way. Over the weeks, I had gotten to know my fellow trainees. They each had their own little quirks and foibles, and we had become friends… or as much as coworkers ever are. On the very last day of training, we’d had a barbecue cookout with cake and everything. We even got to sing a little karaoke. And then the day after that, we had been ushered out onto the main work floor, and everyone just… vanished.

  That had been nine months ago, and I had never seen any of those people again. They were lost in that special no-where land known as cubical hell. I wondered if they had quit. Or been fired? Or maybe I was now stuck in some limbo dimension where no one ever smiled or laughed and eye contact was to be avoided at all costs.

  I quickly discovered, once I was actually on the work floor, that all of that training had been a complete waste of time. For the most part there was only ever one problem and one solution to it. Every day, all day, my job was to help people understand how to reboot their modem—after having listened to a recording of a man explaining exactly how to do that while they waited on hold.

  If that failed, I was to send out a service technician sometime during the following week at the most inconvenient time possible during a three-to-five-hour time slot. Worse, the technician would regularly arrive either five minutes early or five minutes late and then leave, claiming that the client hadn’t been at home. It was almost as if they had been trained specifically to do that. And even when they did show up, whether they did anything or not, the client was charged fifty dollars an hour.

  Those two things accounted for about ninety-five percent of my calls.

  You see, if I actually tried to figure out what was wrong with their internet connection, that took time. That time increased my call time numbers. Increased call time numbers in turn increased hold times. And that was the only metric that management ever really cared about. Management, I was pretty sure, didn’t know a god-damned thing about customer service. I couldn’t stand it.

  That particular day, I was sitting at the ‘bad’ cubicle. Every office has one. It was one of the byproducts of a low budget and scarce resources. Every shift change, bands of scavengers would rove the cubicle wasteland in search of decent equipment—a practice I myself often participated in. In any case, as a result, all of the barely functional or outright broken crap would end up filtering down to one cubicle in the corner. There it would sit, gathering dust. Somehow, though, it still worked, and that was all anyone here cared about.

  The computer featured an ancient cathode-ray tube monitor sitting atop an even-more-ancient desktop console. Its age was given away by the 3.5” floppy disk drive installed in it. This was probably my third time having been stuck there, and I still hadn’t gotten over the discovery. They were practically antiques! Meanw
hile, the desktop was running some version of Windows, but I wasn’t sure which. Not the current one, I knew that… probably not even the one before that.

  I had arrived at work only just a hair late—and was therefore instantly written up for tardiness—so, naturally, it was the only cubicle left. Getting one that wasn’t absolute garbage was the only motivation anyone had to actually get here even one second early. That day, it seemed, I was the only one whose motivation had been lacking.

  There had been no office chair stationed at the cubicle when I got there. I’d had to hunt one down along the wall. The ‘wall’ was where office chairs were pushed when they needed to be repaired. Not that repairs ever manifested, of course—or, at least, not since I had been there. The chair that I had found had a hole worn into the back and canted slightly to the left. One of the wheels kept popping loose. On the bright side, I’d discovered that if I turned in the chair just so, it would respond with a satisfying vibration and squeak. I had been taking advantage of that for the last fifteen minutes or so, but I was starting to attract dirty looks.

  I reached up to rub at my aching ear. The headsets provided by the company were some of the cheapest money could buy. The earpiece was a flat piece of plastic with a bit of a wire over top to attach it to your head and a little adjustable microphone out front. This being the ‘bad’ cubicle, however, the bit that actually held the microphone in place was only just hanging on. You had to hold it up to your mouth by the wire any time you wanted to talk.

  Incidentally, you could buy a pad to fit over the earpiece from the company. They cost a dollar—a fact that I felt deserved a congressional hearing. That they would cost anything at all was inhuman. Of course, my ear pad had a hole worn in it. That meant I would soon need to buy another one. And I would sooner sell my firstborn child than pay these people for another ear pad. So, my ear ached.

  At the moment, I was on one of the rare calls that actually had to do with our cable service. I knew what the problem was, of course. The old woman on the phone had accidentally sat on her remote control. This had pressed some button, and now her television was only showing static. All she had to do was press the Source button on the remote to switch it back from her DVD player to cable. Unfortunately, she was half blind and deaf from age, and a helpful grandson had taped up most of the remote in futile effort to prevent this very scenario. The task of explaining to her how to fix her problem on a remote I was unfamiliar with for a TV whose brand I didn’t know was Sisyphean.

  I had been on this call for twenty minutes now—I had checked. She was in the middle of her third pass at explaining her problem. I wasn’t sure if she honestly felt like that would help, or if age had made such an ague of her memory that she wasn’t aware of it. Shaking my head, I decided that the only recourse available to me was to send a technician, which I desperately did not want to do. She did not deserve that.

  Here she was, an old, retired woman, living all alone, her only companion her television. And because of a simple mistake, she was going to be without said companion for weeks. Because, of course, the soonest one of her area’s technicians was going to be available was the Wednesday after next.

  I decided to try one last Hail Mary.

  “Ma’am, do you have a neighbor that you might be able to call? Or maybe your grandson? If so, maybe one of them could come over and help you with this?” I suggested hopefully.

  There was a pause, followed by her quivering, “Well, my grandson works in Branson…” I had no idea where that was in relation to her. I assumed it was a no go. “And I think my next-door neighbor is at work right now. Do you think I could call her when she gets back from work? What time does she get off work?”

  Is she… asking me? How could she expect that I would know that?

  “I… see. Well, if she works a day shift, she’d probably be home around six o’clock? Maybe a bit later depending on errands or her own schedule. Why don’t you try calling them over around then and see if they can’t fix your problem before I call out this technician. I don’t want to have to charge you for a service call you don’t need.”

  “Well… Alright, then.”

  “If you decide you need that technician after all, do please call me back. Okay?”

  “Alright. Thank you, young man. You’ve been very helpful.”

  I wished that were true.

  As the phone disconnected, I quickly set myself to INACTIVE. I only had a few minutes of INACTIVE time available per day, and technically you weren’t supposed to use it just to take yourself out of the queue—it was only for bathroom breaks and the like. But I just couldn’t handle another call right then.

  Ripping my headset off, I took a moment to rub at my aching ear and stretched. To be quite honest, it wasn’t even that the call had been so bad. The old woman had been polite enough, if long-winded. I’d take that any day over some of the more… disgruntled customers. It was simply the knowledge that inevitably—

  “Ho, there!” an overly cheerful voice called, and I winced.

  Taking a deep breath, I slowly turned to the source of the annoyance. Sure enough, one of the many floor managers was there, as if I had ritually summoned her. I had no idea what this one’s name was. There were too many to keep track of—and frankly, I didn’t care. This particular individual was short, and like everyone else that worked here, she was rather taken to fat.

  “I noticed that your call just now ran a tad long,” she informed me unnecessarily, scrunching up her face in what she must have thought was a sympathetic expression. “Make sure to keep an eye on that. Your average is already running a little high this week.”

  I just stared at her, my will to live slowly draining away. We both knew what that meant. If my average call time got past a certain threshold, I would be out the two-dollar-an-hour weekly pay ‘incentive’ for keeping it low. This one phone call had probably cost me an entire day’s wage!

  Eat my ass, you piece of shit—

  “Right, sorry,” I murmured, struggling to stretch a smile across my face. “I’ll keep an eye on that.”

  —whore-ass motherfucker!

  “See that you do!” she returned my smile brightly, either unaware or not caring how forced my own was before taking note of the flashing red light on my console. “Oop! Can’t stay INACTIVE too long, now, can we?”

  With that, she hit the button to return me to the queue, turned on a heel, and pranced away. I watched her go, the faint sound of a call already beginning to chime in the broken headset sitting on my desk.

  “Hello?” a tinny voice called from the hateful piece of plastic. I ignored it.

  I desperately needed a new job. At that moment, I would rather work the lava forges of the Mines of Moria than sit for another hour in this hellhole. Sighing, I rubbed my eyes and sat back to stare at the drop-down ceiling—my chair giving an unstable wobble.

  “I wish I could be anywhere else than here.”

  That, of course, was when I fell through the hole.

  There was no earthquake, or sinkhole opening up, or really any indication that something like that was going to happen. One moment I was sitting there, bemoaning my lot in life, and the next, the floor was just gone. With a squawk, I started falling through empty air. Wild panic set in as the air screamed past my ears and whipped my hair about. As I tumbled in free fall, my eyes strained to make sense of my situation. But there was nothing to take in. There was only blackness all about me—all save for the hole rapidly receding above me. Even that vanished in mere moments.

  For a long time, I screamed and tumbled in the black. I was awash in the sensation of air ripping past me. My ill-fitting khakis and cheap polo shirt were not designed for this kind of abuse and soon began to rip and tear. This continued for an interminable amount of time, but eventually I remembered to stretch my arms and legs out stiff into a pose I had seen skydivers assume. That helped, and slowly my tumbling stabilized.