The Storm King

Chapter 552: Light Research

As Leon opened his eyes in his Mind Palace, a tiny, quiet part of himself was relieved to see that everything was, at least by cursory inspection, exactly as it ought to be. He didn’t have much direct reason to think otherwise, but he’d had a few quiet worries that the bird that he’d been able to see was due to something screwing with his head. If something was messing with his perceptions, then anchoring the magic in his soul realm would be one way to make it last.

But that wasn’t the case. So, while Leon was relieved to see that it wasn’t, it still left unresolved the issue of just what in the hells that damn bird was.

With a quick hop and a step, Leon got out of his throne and found himself in front of Nestor’s ruby. With Xaphan busy in a healing trance and the Thunderbird out in the mists somewhere, Leon had no one else to speak with, at least for the moment, about this problem.

“Hey there, dead man,” Leon said as he sauntered over.

“Ugh, must you refer to me as such?” Nestor asked, his voice tired and not at all hopeful that Leon might change, or even apologize.

“Yes,” Leon replied, proving Nestor’s unspoken assumption true. “I have a slight… problem that I could use some advice about, and while I’m rather loath to ask you for anything outside of your assigned duties, I have no one else I trust enough to ask.”

“Well, don’t worry,” Nestor said, his voice taking on a hint of mockery in response to Leon’s unrepentant and casual attitude, “such problems are very common and happen even to the best and manliest of men. It’s nothing to be ashamed of…”

Leon scowled. “We’re clearly not on the same page. Or maybe you’re just randomly flipping through the book just to piss me off.”

“Who can say? Alas, a mystery it will always be!”

“All right, dickhead, maybe if this problem continues to fester, I’ll just feed your damn ruby to whatever is causing it!”

Nestor sighed in contentment, his brief revenge for Leon’s insult taken and savored. “Very well, boy, what is this problem you have?”

Leon ground his teeth a little bit, the temptation to verbally strike Nestor again quite powerful, but he resisted.

“I’ve… been seeing something that others haven’t,” he said through a stiff jaw. “It hasn’t happened much, but the fact that this… whatever it is, has been so helpful in a very practical way, I can say with little doubt that there is some kind of intelligence behind it. I want to know what might cause this, if I can defend myself against it, and if I should even be worried about it…”

Leon proceeded to fill Nestor in on everything that had happened between him and the Thunderbird look-a-like, from the very first time he saw it in Kraterok and finishing with its sudden disappearance after it showed him the map of the next island, along with Xaphan’s reveal that he hadn’t been able to perceive it.

“That’s… I can’t say for certain, but I would be cautious when dealing with this thing in the future,” Nestor said. “I can think of several things this might be, and at least some of it can be defended against with conventional means.

“First and perhaps least likely, this is an actual bird, in which case if you wanted it to stop following you, you could use blade and bow to ward it off. However, the fact that it looks so much like our Ancestor and the fact that no one else has been able to see it, either with magic senses or physical senses, disturbs me greatly. Still, maybe its physical resemblance to our Ancestor is just a coincidence and it simply has various powers that keep it hidden save for those it chooses to reveal itself to. I know of several applications of light and darkness magic that could accomplish such a thing.

“The second possibility, however, I think is much more likely: this is some kind of illusion that is being sent directly to you through darkness magic. It read your mind using darkness magic, and then used that knowledge and magical connection to make you see something that you trust, in which case your problems are much worse than they might be if the first possibility is true.

Leon stepped back, his face paling by a few shades. If something could magically enter his mind deep enough to be able to display an image so alike to the Thunderbird, then he would have no secrets before them. Theoretically, they could make him see whatever they wanted him to see, perhaps even muddling his mind enough that he didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.

“Now, now, boy, don’t go getting weak in the knees,” Nestor chided. “You have been practicing those techniques that our Ancestor and that arrogant demon gave you, right?”

It was with a grimace that Leon remembered the several times he’d asked Xaphan and the Thunderbird for help in defending his mind against mental invasions of this sort. The vampire Bran had used such a technique against him during the war with Talfar, but it wasn’t until Nestor used a technique to deliver information straight to Leon’s mind while he was in his family’s archives that he started to realize just how vulnerable he was to such things. Xaphan and the Thunderbird had both given him a few techniques he could try practicing to shield his mind from such invasions, but there had been so much going on recently and so much on his plate—specifically, enchantments—that he hadn’t had much time to practice those techniques.

But he regretted that lapse in judgment now—he should’ve made time to brush up on these defenses even though they weren’t strictly needed just yet. If this was some kind of hallucination being sent straight to his brain, then he needed some way to defend himself. If whatever was doing this could get to his brain, after all, then there was a strong possibility they could also get to his heart, and thus, his soul realm.

“I wouldn’t worry too much, Leon,” Nestor said in a somewhat soothing tone. “Such powers have limits, no man could ever recreate the world with enough detail that it would fool you—you’d probably realize that something wasn’t right eventually, so convincing you that everything you see isn’t real is off the table. I mean, just look at this, you’ve only seen this bird a few times, and already it’s been revealed that something’s off about it.

“Additionally, you’re uniquely qualified to defend yourself against such attacks, or have you forgotten the power that you inherited from our Ancestor?”

Leon took a deep breath and calmed down. The Thunderbird’s lightning was unique in that it had the power to free the mind from all external forces that inhibited it. His mind couldn’t be controlled, and every time his lightning coursed through his body, any power that might be making him see things that weren’t there should be cleared up.

Should. Leon was still a little wary that there might be exceptions here or there, but at least for the time being, he managed to force himself to relax. His lightning had fought off the effects of banshees and the darkness magic of the vampire Bran, so he could easily place his faith in it.

“All you have to do,” Nestor continued, “is give yourself a quick blast of lightning the next time you see this bird. Let your power flow through your body and mind, destroying any foreign magic that it comes across and freeing your mind from any control or sensory illusion it might be subject to.”

“Assuming I see it again,” Leon said.

“Assuming that, yes. However, given how much you’ve seen it, I’d wager there’s a damn good chance that you’ll see it again.”

Leon nodded. “I don’t suppose you’ve noticed anything out of the ordinary in here, have you? Anything that might indicate some kind of power being used on me?”

“No,” Nestor replied. “If such a power were used on you to influence your thoughts and perceptions, there wouldn’t be much point in targeting the soul realm as well. It might actually tip you off that something was wrong, to be honest, so if someone were trying to influence you, going after the soul realm as well would only have downsides. Someone skilled enough to try swaying your mind wouldn’t make that mistake.”

Leon nodded again. “Good to know…”

He stood there for a few more awkward seconds, knowing that he didn’t have much else to say on that front until the Thunderbird showed up for their training session and he could pick her brain. But that wasn’t to say he didn’t have other questions.

“You know,” he began with a bit of hesitation, knowing that the legend that Jormun told him could just be a whole load of crap, “I was told something recently…”

He quickly recounted the parts of Jormun’s tale that he thought relevant—namely, the Serpent’s supposed reign of terror and the arrival of three heroes bearing the power of lightning, wind, and water who arrived to slay it. He hoped if he had more information, even if it was only hearsay, then he might have more insight into Jormun’s goals. At the very least, it cost him nothing to ask.

“… does any of that ring any bells?”

“Can’t say that it does,” Nestor replied. “I wasn’t all that invested in the daily goings-on of this plane. I was mostly involved in research and little else. I never had much stomach for the problems and politics of the lesser peoples we conquered.”

The edges of Leon’s mouth turned downward into a deep frown. “Man with a heart of gold, that’s you, Nestor,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Don’t act like you’re superior, kid,” the dead man replied. “You care about as much for the common people as I do.”

Leon had to fight the urge to grimace. Nestor wasn’t entirely wrong; after spending much of the first day in Kraterok ruminating on how he’d deal with the people of the Serpentine Isles if he were the Bull King or otherwise in charge of their handling, he’d almost completely forgotten about them as soon as something more ‘interesting’ came up, aside from the occasional musing as he’d walked through the city’s streets during that first week in the Isles. He’d been thinking about almost nothing but Jormun since Turiel was revealed to actually be the pirate in disguise.

And even then, his interest in the Islanders was largely restricted to threat evaluation and hypothetical theories. He didn’t know these people, and he hadn’t done much to try to get to know them, either.

Nestor spoke again before Leon could respond.

“If you want to know about that time, go speak with the Librarian. I built that thing to keep our Clan’s records, so if anything might know if there was such action in these islands, it would be that golem.” Leon could practically hear Nestor’s dismissive wave in his tone, subtly telling him that the conversation was over and to leave him alone.

With a roll of his eyes, Leon obliged, leaving the ghost alone. He didn’t want to talk to the man anyway, not with the sudden shame at being called out for his hypocrisy.

So, he moseyed on over to the simple library he’d built for the books from the archives and the golems. Decidedly less aesthetically pleasing than the archives building, the large stone box was at least functional in all the ways that mattered. There was more than enough room for him to store the thousands of books he’d taken in whatever order the golems wished, but as Leon pushed open the door and entered the somewhat dark and dreary chamber, he figured a little bit of sprucing up was in order.

With a few quick thoughts, he extended the building back a bit and began adding more stone to the sides of the box, rounding out the edges until the box had become a squat cylinder. Then, he built alcoves all along the edge with practically no space between them, turning the cylinder into more of a gear shape. Next, he raised the ceiling, rounded it out into a large dome, peppered its surface with simple square coffers, and cut a circular hole in the ceiling to let in a great deal more ‘natural’ light, as opposed to the magic lights that he already had lying around the library chamber. With another quick thought, he cut tall, thin windows into the walls of the alcoves and topped them with partial domes. Finally, he used the great deal of new space he’d created to add a central reading area beneath the hole in the roof, with a long table and a comfortable chaise lounge, and did a little bit of rearranging of the bookshelves around that reading area, though he left most of the organizing for the golems to handle.

The structure he wound up with was much better looking, even if it still lacked artistic flourish, but Leon was much happier with it, now, and it had given him somewhere to channel his frustration with Nestor, leaving him feeling much better. It had still taken about an hour to complete, however, and the structure was left much too big to hold in his Mind Palace, forcing Leon to carefully and painstakingly move it out of his palisade and set it down in the field of purple grass that surrounded it over the course of another ten minutes.

When all of it was finished, Leon finally turned his attention to the Librarian. The golem had hardly been waiting in the wings for Leon to arrive, and so in the few minutes between Leon showing up in the library and the Librarian coming to greet him, Leon had already thrown himself completely into the work of expanding and prettying up the place. Still, the automaton was nothing if not patient, and so waited, almost frozen next to Leon, until the young man was finished with his work.

As he put the finishing touches on his work and collapsed into the lounge, Leon turned his gaze toward the nearby golem and tiredly said, “Sorry about that, I didn’t mean to make you wait, I just couldn’t stop that once I got going…”

“It’s no matter,” the golem replied, its metallically resonant tone one of complete sincerity. “This one exists to serve at the pleasure of the Clan.”

“That hardly makes me feel better about ignoring you when you’ve been right there practically this whole time…” Leon self-consciously replied. Of course, the Librarian said a few words after that excusing his behavior, but if anything, it only made Leon feel even more self-conscious.

He couldn’t help but imagine himself being in the Librarian’s position, which he felt like wasn’t too far-fetched—if he’d been born into the Clan during its heyday, he supposed he might’ve been given some kind of menial task like maintaining archives; he’d earned nothing else, so far. If someone had kept him waiting like that and then expected him to be polite about it, Leon would have left them wanting.

“Is there something you require of this one?” the Librarian eventually asked, helping Leon to move on.

“Yes,” Leon said. “Is there any information here from back when the Clan was first occupying this plane regarding the… well, I don’t know what they were called back then, but nowadays they’re known as the Serpentine Isles.”

Leon quickly relayed the relevant parts of Jormun’s story again, for however much good it did.

The Librarian froze for a moment, marking the first time Leon had seen it had ever taken so long to give an answer. After almost five seconds, it eventually said, “This one’s catalogue suggests there were records at some point, but most have been lost.”

“Most?” Leon was a little surprised, he hadn’t realized that there was anything left for the Librarian to find. He remembered that House Raime hadn’t known they were a part of the Thunderbird Clan, so the records within the archives couldn’t have been particularly complete.

“A few scant references can be located of a conflict happening that matches your description,” the Librarian explained as Leon noticed a few other golems suddenly stop what they were doing and start rummaging around through the stone shelves. “Factual, first-hand reports, however, were not contained within these archives,” the Librarian continued. “Later legends abound.”

The other golems moved quickly, and with his magic senses watching them, Leon felt whatever hope he had in his heart for an answer to his questions deflate. The golems were retrieving children’s books and collections of myths. The latter might be useful, but he doubted it.

Over the next few minutes, the golems brought him several books. Most were useless—or so Leon judged after a cursory glance through their pages—but one seemed promising. It contained a short poem written about how an island people came to the Clan’s doorstep seeking aid against a terrible serpentine monster. The Clan’s Princess, seeking glorious battle, took three hundred of her personal guard to slay the beast. She returned triumphant, but the islands where the battle took place had been devastated.

What exactly ‘devastated’ meant, Leon was unsure, for the poem was short, light on details, and seemed to exist mostly as a way to hype the Princess up. It didn’t even mention the Thunderbird’s power anywhere, nor did it dwell on the monster overmuch. Still, Leon could see a few common elements between the poem, Jormun’s story, and the evil spirits of the Valemen.

Leon sighed, unsure of what else he could do. The fleets would be sticking around for a few more days, so he supposed he could hitch a ride to one of the bigger cities on the island and ask around for any more local information about Jormun’s Serpent or the ruins found further inland, but he doubted how much information he’d be able to find. The Islanders, as a general rule, apparently didn’t stray too far into the jungles.

Still, even though he’d accepted the decision of the Fleet Legates to take their time going after Jormun, he couldn’t help but dwell on the idea that they were playing right into his hands. He couldn’t wait until they finally left this island and moved on. They needed to find this damn pirate and stop whatever it was he was doing.