Chapter 155: Warm up [1]

The other Spires kept talking and laughing behind them and not a single one of them had noticed.

Alden noticed.

Leon’s head had dropped. His pupils were trembling and his teeth were pressing into his bottom lip hard enough to leave a mark. His whole body was trying to keep something buried that clearly wanted very badly to come up.

Leon was fighting a memory.

A younger Leon on cracked arena stone. Battered and exhausted with mana bleeding uselessly from his hands.

Across from him Arvendis standing calm without a single drop of sweat on him and his weapon already lowered at his side. Up in the gallery above a sea of noble faces watching with cold indifference. And somewhere among them a young Aurelia frozen with her hands over her mouth staring down at the broken boy below her.

"The winner is Arvendis."

Leon blinked.

The memory shattered. He was back in the cold marble corridor with his fists clenched white at his sides and his chest moving in short uneven breaths.

’Please just go away. I already buried that. Don’t drag it back.’

Alden stepped forward and put his own hand on Leon’s opposite shoulder and said in the most casual tone he owned "Come on Leon. It’s late and tomorrow’s going to be a long day. We should sleep."

Leon turned his head toward him. The fog took a second to clear but it cleared.

"...Yeah," Leon said. His voice came out rough. "Yeah okay."

Alden steered him sideways and forward and Leon went without argument stepping clean out from under Arvendis’s hand. They walked down the vaulted corridor together at a steady pace and Alden didn’t look back for the first fifteen seconds.

When he did Arvendis was still standing exactly where they had left him. The smile had fallen away completely. His face was blank and dark and unreadable in a way that was somehow worse than the smile had been.

Then in the span of half a second the charismatic pleasant expression came back like a switch being flipped and he raised one gloved hand toward their backs.

"Have a restful night boys!"

Alden turned back around and said nothing and kept walking.

They put enough distance between themselves and the council chamber that the voices behind them faded into stone and silence. The corridor ahead was lit by low torches and empty.

After a long quiet Leon spoke. "Thank you Alden."

"For what?"

"For earlier." A small self-conscious laugh. "I know I would’ve gotten it together eventually. But thanks for pulling me out of there."

Alden stopped walking.

He turned and looked at Leon properly. "Your whole energy shifted the moment he touched you. You were fine ten seconds before that and then you looked like someone who just saw a ghost they thought was buried."

Leon let out a dry sound that was trying to be a laugh. "Am I really that obvious?"

"To anyone actually paying attention yeah." Alden’s tone dropped into something quieter. "Are you actually okay?"

Leon looked away at the torchlight playing against the stone wall. He was quiet for a while. Then the practiced smile came onto his face. "Yeah. I’m fine."

Alden looked at him for a moment longer.

He’s hiding something enormous.

And whatever it was it involved Arvendis and Princess Aurelia and a private arena and a defeat that had clearly left marks in places that don’t heal clean. None of it was in anything Alden had ever written. He had built this world and drafted its history and he had never put any of this into it.

Which meant the world had kept going without him. Growing its own history in the gaps he had left when he stopped writing. Filling in the spaces with things he had never decided and never controlled.

’This isn’t just a story I’m living inside anymore,’ Alden thought. ’This world has been breathing on its own for longer than I’ve been in it.’

Leon turned and pointed down a branching hallway. "My quarters are this way. I’m going to call it a night."

Alden nodded. "Get some sleep."

"Thanks again man." Leon gave a small wave and turned the corner. "Good night."

"Good night."

Alden stood in the dim empty corridor for a while after Leon’s footsteps faded. Looking at the space where his friend had disappeared.

Then he went to bed.

__________

Morning broke over the capital.

The Grand War Arena was a colossal colosseum cut from black granite and it was packed beyond anything Alden had seen before. Over a hundred thousand people filled the tiered stone balconies from floor to the very top. Grand nobles in silk. Military officers loaded with medals. Academy students. Merchants. Common citizens who had gotten here before dawn to get a spot.

The sound of that many people in one place was something you didn’t just hear. You felt it in your chest.

The arena floor below was wide and spell-reinforced and surrounded by forty-foot walls of ancient granite. Every single person in those stands knew why they were here. Today the Spires were deploying to the frontlines. And before they marched the kingdom wanted to see exactly what stood between them and the vampire army.

Up in the VIP gallery Roselle caught sight of a figure in a Silver-Red familiar uniform near the balustrade.

"Oh! Senior Seris!" She waved enthusiastically.

Seris turned with that faint elegant smile and gave a polite wave back. Nicholas beside Roselle offered a respectful nod.

Then Darius’s voice hit the arena like a thunderclap.

The man was standing at the central high platform with his hands behind his back and his deep voice carrying through mana-amplification that made it reach every single person in the colosseum at once.

"Good morning citizens of the realm!"

The hundred thousand voices dropped to something almost quiet in about three seconds.

"Today marks our official mobilization against the vampire forces. Our Spires will soon depart to hold every line. But before they march it is only right that the people see exactly what stands in front of them!"