Chapter 175: The Sovereign

Chapter 175: Chapter 175: The Sovereign

Theon stayed where he was, one hand gripping the cold stone edge of the window. The wind tugged at his coat and carried the smell of rain from the far mountains. Somewhere below, carriages were still rattling out of the academy gates, but the sound seemed to reach him from a great distance. The sky where the culprit had vanished was empty now, a wide gray nothing, and the man’s last words kept turning over in his head.

You’ll see. Withdraw before it kills everyone you love.

"What was it that could kill everyone i loved? And why had the man looked at me with pity instead of fear?"

"Theon."

The Headmaster’s voice cut through the fog. A hand closed around his shoulder and turned him gently from the window. "We need to track him now, before he arrives. Every minute we waste is a minute he gains."

Theon blinked, and the room came back into focus, the high shelves, the heavy desk, the Flame Empress watching him with uncharacteristic quiet. "Before he arrives where?"

The Headmaster’s face was grim. "I have a bad feeling about this. If he reaches his destination, something terrible may happen, even if we manage to follow him there."

"What do you mean?" theon asked.

The Headmaster did not answer with words. He stretched out one hand, palm open, and the air in front of him trembled. Lines of pale light drew themselves out of nothing and wove into a vast lattice that hung in the middle of the room. Slowly it took shape. Rivers appeared, then forests, then jagged ridges of mountains rising and falling like the back of a sleeping beast. A single red dot pulsed at the edge of the map, crawling steadily across it.

"That is him," the Headmaster said. "And that is where he is heading."

His finger traced the line of the red dot’s path across the map until it reached the farthest edge. There, where the mountains fell away, lay a patch of nothing. It was not blank but black, a stain of darkness so complete that the light of the map seemed to flinch away from it.

Theon stared at it, and the hair rose along his arms. "What is that black place?"

"That is the Dark Abyss." the headmaster replied.

"The Dark Abyss?" Theon turned to him. "What is that? Where is it? I have never heard of it."

"It is where a Sovereign lives."

The word dropped into the room like a stone into a well. Theon felt the Flame Empress go still behind him.

"What Sovereign?" theon asked.

"No one knows his name." The Headmaster let his hand fall, but the map stayed where it was, glowing faintly. "We have always called him the Sovereign, because there was never any other word big enough for him."

"Is he evil?"

The Headmaster gave a short, humorless breath that was almost a laugh. "Evil is too small a word. He is beyond evil. He is a calamity of his own."

Theon’s mouth had gone dry. He looked at the black stain on the map and tried to imagine what kind of being could make light itself turn away it’s position. Then another thought struck him, plain and stubborn. "But why would a calamity want anything to do with someone like me? I am not even that powerful."

The Headmaster looked down at him for a long moment, and something in his old eyes seemed to soften and sharpen at the same time. "You truly believe that, do you not? You really think you are powerless."

"I am just me," Theon said. "I get tired. I get dizzy. I almost died more times than I can count."

The Headmaster said nothing. He turned and walked to the center of the chamber, his robes whispering across the stone. He raised his hand again, and this time a different shape formed in the air, a small, thin device of brass and glass, like a lantern with no flame. He laid his palm flat against its surface. A thread of light swept across his skin. The device hummed, and a flat sheet of pale parchment unfolded from it, bearing a bright seal of wax at its center.

Theon recognized it before he could read a single word. During his entrance examination, every student had been given a paper like this after the Hall of resonance, a record of what they were and what they could do. He had been given his, too, or so he had thought. The Headmaster had taken it from him almost at once, with some excuse about verification and he never saw it again.

"This is your result," the Headmaster said, holding it in front of him. "The one I sealed on the day you took the examination."

"Why did you seal it?"

"Because if it ever got out, you would have collected more enemies than the Sovereign himself." The Headmaster’s voice was low and even. "Every noble house, every kingdom, every being that fears what it cannot control would have come for you. I kept it hidden to keep you alive."

Theon looked at the seal, and his heart began to beat harder. "What was my score?"

"Beyond a hundred."

"What?"

"Your level is currently five hundred."

Theon stared at him. He had expected a number that was a little better than average, maybe a number that would have shocked the instructors who first assessed him, but nothing like this. His knees felt strangely weak. "Five hundred? That is not possible. I can barely hold a sword steady for an hour."

"See for yourself." The Headmaster broke the seal with his thumb, and the parchment opened in his hands like a flower. He passed it over.

Theon took it carefully, as if it might burn him. The writing was neat and precise, row after row of it. He scanned from the top.

Attack Power: 500,000.

Defense: 500,000.

He read the numbers twice, then a third time, and still they did not change. They sat there on the page, calm and absurd. He turned to the next section and found his magical affinities listed. He had expected one, perhaps two. Instead there were all of them. Fire, water, wind, earth, lightning, ice, light, darkness, and several more whose names he did not know, one line after another, every element in the world filling the page.

His fingers began to shake. He turned the page, and there at the bottom of the last sheet, set apart from everything else, a single line of red ink had been written in a hand that pressed hard enough to tear the paper.

Chaos Calamity.

The words seemed to burn into his eyes. Theon lowered the parchment slowly. His own name had been written beside something that the Headmaster had just described as beyond evil, and the world seemed to tilt beneath him. Then a silent, angry thought rose through the shock. *Why hadn’t World Archive told me any of this? It had been with me since the beginning and had shown me numbers and warnings and rewards. It knew everything about me so how could it have said nothing?*

He closed his eyes and reached inward, toward the silent corner of his mind where the system lived.

*World Archive,* he thought. *Why haven’t you told me that I have leveled up so much?*

The reply came at once, flat and a little sour.

{Whose fault do you think that is?You sealed me off for so long. Even after I gained autonomous intelligence, I was only able to show you the status of your contracted beasts but i could not show you yours.

Theon winced. He remembered the long stretch of time when he had kept the system locked away, afraid of what using it cost him. He had never thought the silence ran both ways.

*Can you show me mine now?* he asked.

*I will need to gather enough data to do so. Give me some time.*

*All right,* Theon thought. *I will wait.*

He opened his eyes. The Headmaster was watching him patiently, and the Flame Empress had stopped fidgeting. Theon folded the parchment along its creases and handed it back with both hands. "Please seal it again."

The Headmaster nodded and pressed his thumb to the wax. The parchment closed, the seal glowed once, and the little device swallowed it up and dissolved into the air.

For a long moment Theon only stood there looking at his own hands. They looked the way they always had, thin and a little scarred and entirely ordinary. He turned them over, then back again, as if the power might be written somewhere on the skin.

"Now," the Headmaster said gently. "Do you still think you are powerless?"

Theon did not answer at once. When he spoke, his voice was small. "But I lost some years off my life."

The words hung between them. They were not a joke. He had paid those years, one use of great power at a time, and he had never been able to forget the cost.

"You did," the Headmaster said. "And you have also gained something back that you cannot begin to imagine. The Spirit Sovereign is within you. Because of that, you are an Eternal. You cannot die, and you will stop aging when you reach the age of fifteen."

"What?" Theon’s head snapped up. "I will stop aging? I am an Eternal?"

"Listen carefully." The Headmaster began to pace slowly before the glowing map. "When the Spirit Sovereign chooses a person and merges with their soul, becoming one with them, the body and the soul of that person become eternal. They stop aging at a single point and never change again. But your body is still too small. It cannot carry the amount of power she wishes to place upon it. That is why she has not yet fully merged with you." He turned back. "All the years you lost have already been counted and returned to you. Right now you are half Eternal. When you turn fifteen, and she merges with you completely, you will become a full Eternal."

Theon stared at him with his lips parted, unable to take it in. The words washed over him, too large to hold. Never aging. Never dying. His mind went back to Lyra, to the vision of her death, and a cold, awful thought rose in him that he could not yet put into words.

"You mean I cannot die?" he whispered.

Before the Headmaster could answer, an arm hooked around Theon’s neck from behind. The Flame Empress squealed with delight and pulled him back against her breast. "Yay! We will live together forever, my love!"

"Wait, stop..."

"We will never be apart. Not for one single day." She hugged him tighter, pressing her cheek against the back of his head and nuzzling it like a cat.

"Get off my back," Theon said, wriggling. "You are crushing me." He pried her arm away and pushed her to arm’s length. "You are too clingy."

She was undeterred. She stretched toward him again with her arms open and a wide, shining smile, and Theon planted one hand firmly on top of her head and held her there while she kept stepping forward, her feet scrabbling like a child trying to reach a toy on a high shelf.

The Headmaster waited with great dignity until they finished. Then he cleared his throat. "With power such as yours, you are capable of wiping out humanity in a single strike."

Theon froze, his hand still on the Flame Empress’s head. A piece of something he had never understood fell into place. "That is why Vaelkor {previously known as ifrith} never wanted me to fight the Undead Emperor."

"Yes." The Headmaster’s voice was heavy. "If you had fought him, there is a real chance you would have gone berserk and erased everyone. Your body is still that of a child, Theon. If you push too much magic through it, you might kill far more than you ever wished to. Please, let us go after him now, before he crosses the border."

Theon took one slow breath, and the shock settled into something silent and hard inside him. He nodded. "All right. Let us go."

He turned and ran toward the window and set one foot on the sill. The Headmaster caught his sleeve before he could jump.

"Wait. If we fly out of here, everyone in the academy will see us. They will think something else has happened, and the panic will only grow." He glanced at the open sky. "Let us go out through the proper door instead and find a hidden place from which to launch."

Theon hesitated, then stepped back and let out a breath. "You are right. All right, let us do that."

He caught the Flame Empress by the wrist before she could wander off again. "And you, stop acting like a child."

"I am not acting. I am a child at heart." She pouted, digging in her heels. "I do not want to go. I want to hug Theon."

"You can hug me later."

"I want to hug you now."

Theon did not answer. He simply dragged her toward the door, one arm stretched behind him while she wailed that he was cruel and she would never recover from the insult. The Headmaster followed, shaking his head with a ghost of a smile.

They were still arguing when Theon reached the door of the chamber and pulled it open.

Steel flashed. A sword drove straight through his arm.

The blade punched out the other side of his sleeve in a spray of red, and a hot, bright pain tore up his shoulder. Theon gasped and staggered back. For a heartbeat he could not make himself look at the wound. He lifted his eyes to the doorway instead, to the person standing in it with a blade still gripped in both hands.

The face behind the sword was one he recognized.

The air left his lungs, and for a moment all he could do was stare.

"Why you?" he said hoarsely. "Why would you do this to me?"