Chapter 125 - Book 2 Epilogue III

++I have regrets. Of course I do, I have existed for more millennia than most people have years. Regrets are inevitable when a life stretches on as long as that. Perhaps that is a sign that my will, however great, is not infinite. Even I cannot dedicate a whole existence to doubling down.++

- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E.

Fiq hadn’t had much time to pack, just the bare necessities. As much water as he could scrounge up from ruptured wells, thick and insulating clothes that wouldn’t allow much of Irucci’s desert sunlight to penetrate and warm him too fast. Boots that would survive enough marching to erode stone, let alone leather.

It felt like nothing, because it basically was. Fiq didn’t need a heavy pack, and though he was bringing a gun, he also wasn’t taking the masses of ammunition he’d be expected to carry in the army.

He was, in fact, a deserter. A traitor. A hanged man running from the noose. That was fine, he had something as scary as any executioner after him regardless.

Fiq would’ve liked to continue living in Garamon, among people who didn’t fuck corpses and eat their own shit, but he’d settle for just living. While Orapathaqi was still in chaos, he fled for its outer wall and took flight into the desert around it.

Magicians couldn’t make quite the same distance as warriors under conditions like this, but they were close. Fiq’s concerns were heat and exhaustion. Mostly, that just turned into heat. His body generated warmth by moving, the farther he moved the hotter he got. The hotter he got, the more effort it took to move, and the more heat. All the while he’d be blasted by more sunlight every hour than Garamon proper got in half a day.

His odds of collapsing to decompose in the sand were upsettingly high.

But they were better than his odds of surviving Vornholt’s wrath back at Orapathaqi, now that she’d gone full, unmasked traitor she had nothing to lose by fighting him directly. Her and her brother.

Fiq moved himself with a combination of physical strides and magical assistance, halfway-lifting himself to practically glide along the sand. A horse would’ve been slower on solid ground.

South. He had to go south, south and then west. There were plenty of other regions of Irucci not yet bound under Garamon’s colonies, and in those regions there would be opportunity. If Fiq ran far and fast enough, he might still escape this with his skin intact.

He got almost a league from Orapathaqi before that particular illusion was shattered.

Something dropped from the sky, like a piece of atmosphere had come dislodged. It hit the ground ten paces in front of Fiq and just blew him right off his feet. When the flying sand had finished falling and his teeth had stopped rattling, he looked up to see Isabel Vornholt herself standing in front of him.

“You took longer to leave than I expected,” she noted. “Not very intelligent, are you?”

Fiq said nothing, frozen like a deer locking eyes with the wolf. Vornholt, for her part, looked about as threatening as a bunny rabbit. Her usual scowl was gone, and left her seeming even less of a physical presence than her teenaged features would normally have conveyed.

However stupid Fiq was, it wasn’t enough to fall for that illusion.

“Just hurry up and kill me,” he said. His voice had been intended as a proud and manly sort of tone, one last act of defiance. He ended up squeaking out his words instead of spitting them, but it was as much dignity as he seemed likely to get today.

Vornholt still just smiled, cheery as ever. Like she wanted to be nowhere else more than she was right now, and wanted to do nothing more than whatever was about to happen.

“That would be a waste,” she hummed.

Fiq didn’t dare to hope. “It…it would?”

“Oh yes,” Vornholt nodded. “Not much of a waste, mind, but…well, when one has an especially well-trained rat, one might as well make use of it. Besides, you have actually been very productive towards my plans. I doubt you intended it, but were it not for your interference in recent events, I would most likely be enjoying a subordinate position where I now lead, and would not be nearly as powerful as I am currently.”

She smiled like that, and it was a shark’s smile. Fiq tried to feel her mana and found that he could sense no great change to it. Maybe there were a few extra pinches of power wrapped into her Vessel, but nothing that he wouldn’t expect to come from a few weeks of training anyway. Was she being metaphorical when she claimed to be more powerful?

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Or did she have some means of hiding this power?

“Are you listening to me?” Vornholt asked, her voice suddenly sharp.

“YES!” Fiq blurted out, feeling all the fear rush back and basically just squeeze the thoughts right out of him. “Yes I am, uh, what…what do you need me to do?”

Vornholt smiled again, and now Fiq got the impression of the shark seeing movement as it slid through the deep ocean. Of its body tensing in preparation for a lunge.

“You are going to be very instrumental in helping the spread of Sakhent’s cult.”

***

Bullying Fiq into obedience was no difficult thing, a startled gerbil would have put up more resistance to my will than he did after recent events. It was also one of my last tasks in the city of Orapathaqi.

There were a few other trivialities, but nothing too demanding of my focus. I had the citizenry of Sethira’s resistance move around and gather intelligence on which people of the city had seen what during the battle, ensuring there were no informational leaks. I carefully mapped out the new section of the crypts Sethira’s cult would be operating from, and helped Sethira herself seal it off from the compromised portion by essentially welding its stone walls in with magic.

I made sure, once again, that my brother was still unhurt and safe. And I felt a sting as I did that, remembering my conversation with him.

Agrian was a weakness. I knew that, it was so obvious, so undeniable at this stage, that I would have been a fool to deny it. Somehow, through means I did not fully understand, that simple, mortal boy had acquired the ability to…wound me.

I still felt the lash of his tongue even hours later, and nothing I did quite seemed to distract me from it.

But that also did not matter. My first instinct was to destroy him and remove the source of my vulnerability, but that was unthinkable. Years ago I had sworn my oath to protect our family. I would do that.

And I did not feel like I was shackled by this fact.

I felt exhilarated, almost energised. I felt a rush of something long buried and forgotten. What was this? It was not just idiotic excitement at feeling an unfamiliar sensation, no. Something more than that. Something deeper and more complex, that I was struggling to articulate even to myself.

Whatever it was, I grasped the sensation with both hands and held on for dear life. This was new. It was a part of myself that was new. I had never met this Lord Dread, I did not know what she would do next.

And I was thrilled to find out.

But there was the guilt, too. The gnawing, creeping, melting feeling of regret and irritated bitterness, as well as another, deeper sting. What was it I had once said to Paula?

All people are your enemies, no matter how much you think otherwise. You cannot rely on them, they will fail you in the end. Or turn on you.

I had told that to Paula, warned her of the inevitable. Perhaps I should have told it to Agrian instead. I had failed him. He had trusted me, and I had let him down.

I waited for my guilt to deepen and grow worse, but instead a sudden clarity just overcame me. Of course I had let him down, and of course others would do it in the future. I had merely demonstrated my own lesson from the other side. It would be one thing if I had poisoned him with false promises of love and affection, but I had never told that particular lie. Allowed him to tell it to himself, perhaps, but never told it with my own lips.

And now Agrian knew. All people were his enemies, even me.

That lesson was never pleasant. Remembering when I had first learned it still occasionally sent a tremble through my mind. The feeling of betrayal, of disbelief. The feeling of sling stones breaking my bones, somehow the physical pain had been less than the mental. Somehow, even as I lay dying in my own blood, I had taken many hours to finally realise what had happened. To finally understand that I would not see my tribe return, weeping and apologetic, tending my wounds and promising me their betrayal would never be repeated.

But when that crushing, heart-rending realisation had finally come, it tempered my will in a way nothing else in the world could have managed. If I had truly failed Agrian in any one way, it was by failing to replicate that feeling in him.

He deserved that despair. All people did. They deserved the strength and certainty that came from it. There is nothing in this universe that can match the power of a truly determined individualist.

I was achieving little by thinking about my brother, though. My mind soon moved onto more important matters, namely my next move. Orapathaqi had given me more than I could have possibly hoped, with the vast cult of Sakhent under my command I now possessed some level of subtle influence in much of the world.

But subtle influence was limited in use compared to open power and authority.

Given the spectacular failure of this Estalian offensive, my prospects of spreading my name much more were looking grim. Aryqatan would, I was confident, accept my offer to lie for each other’s benefit, and in doing so she would cause my family’s social esteem to reach the stratosphere. That was a start. Esteem was not the currency of Garamon, however.

Indeed, shillings were the currency of Garamon. So how did I go about getting those? The answer seemed obvious.

Orapathaqi was in need of a governor. Someone proven to be loyal, with the favour of the divine and, of course, a history of actual leadership in his family’s background.

I smiled to myself once more. Agrian Vornholt was going to get a new job, I just had to go and convince Aryqatan of the benefits she would reap by making that decision.