Unwieldy (Fantasy & Hammers)

[Sarius]

Chapter 90: Carnival Games

Blue-Finger.

I hadn't heard of the name, probably because I spent my time with those in the upper classes so far, with almost none of them having significant ties to Vahla. It sounds more like information that you'd only get your hands on if you spent a significant period of time there, or knew someone who had.

But as soon as the name, or moniker, had been spoken—little ideas started to pop into my head. A brother and sister, a betrayal, partners in crime, Shed, Blue-Finger. I wonder if it was just something that my mind was capable of doing now, or if I'd always have made the rather obscure connection.

Lauka and Tohn had slowly taken to the ideas that I laid out in front of them, even so much that they had let their attentions slip from the children that crept out of their room to eavesdrop once again. I caught them out, of course, looking at them as they peaked around the corner and into the doorway of the kitchen and dining area. They retracted themselves when they made contact with my glance, but I had time to play with them, gleefully balancing on the edge of pretending that I hadn't noticed them, and small moments of knowing that always seemed to shock them, not matter how many times I acted them out.

I said the confidential words in the moments that they weren't paying enough attention, and leaving the analogies and broader strokes to when they listened intently, trying to understand what it was that I was saying.

They didn't understand, of course, they lacked too much context to really put the pieces together, but they also weren't stupid. They did a fine enough job of putting two and two together and creating somewhere close to four.

The conspiracy that they couldn't quite understand excited them to no end, even letting that excitement grab a hold of their hearts and squeezing as they let their minds wonder what it could be, and what change it could bring.

The two women were, secretly, just as enthralled. As soon as someone realises that I am a train that won't stop, even if you don't get on, opinions change from conservative to progressiveness. I theorised that it was more to do with the fact that I offered a stability that you didn't usually see within an 'uprising'.

The successful uprisings in the past of Earth were always headed by someone, someone charismatic and motivated towards their own goals, pursuing them with a crazed fervour. Now, I might not quite be that exact character, but I was close. I'm clearly charismatic and saying that I wasn't wouldn't even be 'humble' at this point, it would be almost delusional.

I wasn't crazed, though I wouldn't be surprised if it seemed that way, so it counted. The people in the little circle of rebellion leaders that I was slowly putting together had been horrified about Alena's existence, and even after I explained it to them as best as I could through an esoteric round of delving into their minds and emotions, they were still wary.

Tenra specifically can barely stand to be in the same room as Alena, his emotions filled with a darkness that I'm not happy seeing in someone. Even now, I could feel the barest hint of Yeram's presence when he had tracked me through the streets of Crossroads, his emotions quietly interspersed with a clinical wonder of whether he should just kill Alena.

Of course, all hell would break loose, and I'd make sure that he burned in its fires, but he restrained himself due to a future hope he held. Self-serving? What did you expect from an ex-assassin; that he'd be a jolly man with a heart of gold?

Either which way, Lauka and Tohn were in,—even if they didn't know their exact roles to play just yet. Though, they likely had an idea with how long I'd spent on talking about the power structure of Shed's gang, and even a little on Haedar Kout's gang.

I had left Lauka's quaint home, making sure to conclude the little game with the children by means of a look directly into their eyes as they curled themselves into a ball in the corner, desperately hoping that neither I, nor the two women, would notice their presence.

I left Lauka's home with the small satisfaction of their shocked expressions in my memory, though I had only given them a wink before I'd disappeared from the home altogether, moving on to my next task of the day which was…

Actually, no. It was still light outside, and that was a particularly poor time for a conversation the likes of which I wanted to have. I had time, and so I was going to use it for something I had neglected for the most part, time having flown by while I immersed myself in my assumed role of the insurrection leader and inspirer.

Training.

It was almost strange to go out to the open fields that I'd done some training in for a few days before I'd become preoccupied for a few weeks, and it was even odder that I encountered someone when I arrived there. I looked out over the fields at the tall, dark-skinned woman wearing training clothes and swinging a large sword, a claymore.

I observed the woman's movements with an interested eye, finding much of what Rethi had learned from Mayer in her steps, and even a few that vaguely simulated the Sharah. Though it was as if a pinch of a spice had been added to a traditional dish, hard to distinguish what was different about it in comparison to just any old movement.

I summoned my hammer beside me, allowing myself to lean up against the massive shaft with my full body weight, not eve coming close to the weight I'd need to actually budge the thing.

From then it took almost ten minutes for her to spontaneously turn in my directions while swinging her sword in a practice form that Mayer had drilled into Rethi mercilessly while I tinkered with the Sharah at the sidelines.

"Maximilian!" She yelped, before stopping and correcting herself hesitantly, "Er, Master Maximilian?"

"Both are me." I shrugged with a grin, before stopping in much the same way as she had, "Is there another Maximilian around the place that I need to be worrying about?" She looked about ready to answer me truthfully, before catching onto my teasing and scowling at me.

"Well, I'm sorry that I have no idea how to address you!" She yelled defiantly, "We talked once! And somehow you wrapped up my entire life into training and then the realisation that my personal aide is a Shadow Walker!" There was a note of actual anger in her voice as she brandished her claymore subconsciously, probably a response from training with Rethi. The boy will certainly do it to you.

"Need I remind you," I said casually, "that you are just as capable of walking away as anyone else is in this little mess that I'm pulling together? In fact, I'm surprised that no one has yet. I was sure it'd be Venn."

"I thought…" she began with a growl, before sighing, "I don't know! I thought you'd at least show up during training." I rose an eyebrow as I pushed off from my hammer, standing myself upright and walking towards her almost teasingly.

"Didn't Yeram ever tell you to not trust the mysterious boys?" I goaded with a grin, and she scowled.

"Mysterious? I can see right through you, Maximilian Avenforth!" She scoffed with a loud tone, it was almost like an announcement, though one that wilted almost the instant that she'd finished her sentence. "No, I can't. I don't know why I even said that."

I gave the girl an appraising look, one that she seemed to feel was one of harsh judgement. I'm not quite sure why she was exacerbating my each and every action to such an extent, and I was all too happy to make it my goal to find out.

"Not so sure of yourself as you once were, Valeri Ephars. What changed?" I asked as I did a mock march around her, throwing my leg out with each step as I eyed her.

"A lot?" She answered truthfully, though it was almost as if the was under oath in a court, "Training has… shown me how weak I am."

"As it should. It sure did for me." She gave me an odd look, and I scoffed, "You think I was always this infallibly amazing? Once upon a time I was worse than you! Two left feet and barely a muscle on me."

She rolled her eyes at me, easing ever so slightly with my false pompousness. Valeri's slight comfort didn't last too long as she looked behind me and noticed the massive hammer I'd been leaning on only moments before.

"What is that?" She asked dumbfoundedly craning around my body to get a look at it, her thin eyebrows raised sharply and her seemingly perfectly smooth skin crinkled with her surprise.

"Oh that?" I turned nonchalantly, "That's my weapon. A little hammer."

"Little? In what world?" She said as she sidestepped past me and moved closer to examine it closer, even as she felt like she was encroaching on dangerous ground. Apparently intrigue beats out self-preservation with Valeri, something that I guess I could have realised from the moment that she'd allowed herself to be whisked out into the night by a random boy for no more reason than he'd asked.

"None of them, I can assure you." I laughed pleasantly as I walked back on over to the hammer, watching as she tried to examine the large, boxy head of it, and the bright energy that pulsed in its runes. Her interest twigged slightly with my vague comment but was too enthralled by the weapon to question me.

"Can you even use it? It'd weigh–" Her teeth clacked loudly as she forced her own jaw shut, swallowing against a shock of nervousness, "I mean, uh…"

She didn't follow up with a continuation to her self-perceived blunder, but I made it known that I was aware of it. Frankly, it was a little ridiculous the way that she was acting. I grinned toothily at her as she sweated with the anxiousness.

"Do you want to try it?"

"What?" She said dumbfounded. I nodded to the hammer that she was standing in front of.

"Lift it, and I let you ask any question you want. I'll answer truthfully and to the best of my abilities." I set a challenge with a grin, a wager that I'd have loved to be making over a bar, with a flagon of ale in hand. An instinctual instinct almost. Valeri gulped, eyeing me suspiciously.

"And if I can't?" I gave her an offended look, hand to my chest.

"You truly believe that I would set a game that you couldn't win? How uncouth!" I couldn't help but grin at the awkward look she donned, but I waved away any response she might've been concocting.

"I will be the one to ask a question, in that case. Nothing too horrendous, I swear."

Valeri looked between me and the hammer, letting her eyes dance with the intrigue, the curiosity that I knew was going it kill the cat. She reached out a hand to grab the hammer's soft, leather-like handle, but stopped when I clicked my tongue warningly.

"You touch the handle, you agree to the wager." I said, tone snarky. She clenched her jaw, but I felt the evil grin on my face widen to Cheshire levels, watching as her hand inched closer to the grip, even as her face seemed to be warping with the instinctive knowledge that it was a trap.

Then her first finger touched it, then a second and a third. Then, as she realised that the mere touch had sealed her fate, she wrapped her hand around it fully, then her other hand as well. It was as long as she didn't try to inject her own ether, or any other energy for that matter, that I could allow her to touch it. At least for a while before my Soul Weapon cracked the shits and decided that she was disallowed from doing so.

I watched as she readjusted her grip minutely, and then prepared herself for a mighty pull, but it was then that she saw my face, grin almost sliced into my expression at that point. Her eyes widened as she pulled as hard as she could…

And it didn't budge at all.

I watched her pull on it over and over, grinning all the while, before I looked up at the sky and laughed loudly.

"Well," I announced, "I think I'm going to go do something else! You can… have fun with that. Might take you a while." I laughed manically as I walked away, waving over my shoulder at the woman.

"Oh, and no shifting ether into it please! I'll have to punch you really hard if you do that."

I ignored her response, my mind recalibrating from that amazing mood that had put me in, into something a little more sombre. I had an appointment to keep, and the other participant didn't quite have it pencilled into her schedule.


A/N: Hope you're all chilling nice and well!

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[Sarius]

Chapter 91: Forever

Even though I left Valeri behind to pull at the ludicrously heavy hammer, I wasn't quite so rushed.

I could probably stick around and laugh at her while she failed to lift the hammer over and over, but that sounded rather sadistic, and I could only endure so much sadism in one day.

Instead, I decided to take it easy. Something I've found increasingly difficult to do. Since leaving the little road town, I've let my life flutter into a whirlwind of movement and preparation, most of it being as esoteric as could be. I built on the initial plan that I held within my mind, increasing its breadth to match the task I'm trying to undertake.

But I was the lynchpin of it all, and if I didn't move, no-one else would either. So sure, I could take a solid day's break, but during that time nothing would happen. Maybe some of the little things that I had already set up would continue, with Valeri now training by herself without Rethi's guidance, and Alena and Rethi sent to earn the trust of the lower classes with free healing.

But all of that was small potatoes, and most of the actual forward action required my own movement to compliment it.

If I didn't move, then Lauka would quickly fall back into a scepticism of my idea, and soon enough she would decide against the plan for the sake of self-preservation. I was building a fragile machine, and everything was time sensitive.

Thus, sitting atop a roof and dangling my legs over the walls as I looked down towards the warmly lit streets of Crossroads, with customers of various races, lifestyles, and status, walked among each other with the bubbling excitement a crowd always seemed to possess.

It was hard to sit still, now. Too many things compelled me to continue moving at full steam, to force the plan forward with my unerring gait, but… I needed to sit.

I wasn't tired. No, in fact, I was the most energised that I've ever been. I could just about tackle any task that was thrown at me, even to move a mountain with my bare hands. That wasn't the point.

It was the quiet dread that laid within me. Too easy to ignore, to pass off as a slight nervousness. But if I had to sleep every night? Lay in the soft sheets with my head resting against the plush pillow, then that quiet dread would become a screaming storm.

It was a dread that I couldn't do anything about. It simply sat there, reminding me of the things I've lost, and all the things I need to gain. The responsibilities on my shoulders now outweighed anything I could have possibly imagined only a year ago, as I lived on Earth, enjoying the strange transitory experience of young adulthood to adulthood.

How old was I now, even; twenty, twenty-one?

I certainly don't feel twenty. I feel… old. Is that what responsibility does to you? Aging your mind faster than your body has time to keep up?

I focused on the feeling of gentle tugging on my soul, placed so far away from me. I'd never actually been so far away from my Soul Hammer before, and it was almost nerve wracking if I couldn't make it back to its location in a few moments, courtesy of the Sharah.

I couldn't even find it funny, for some reason. My mind was resistant to the idea that the practical joke I'd played on Valeri was even worth a smirk. Maybe that was what made me realise just what I was hiding from myself.

Hah. To think that I'd be the one who ended up with repressed emotions. It was so easy to point at someone and tell them that they were a fool for not opening up about their emotions and experiences, something that even I had done a few times after I'd arrived on Virsdis myself. Rethi's Mother, Alena, even Mayer to some degree.

Yet, here I was, with a searing pain in my heart as I forced my mind away from the world I once lived in.

It was stupid, really. It wasn't even negative things. I wasn't exactly involved in any wars, or anything even remotely traumatising to that degree. It was the good things that hurt me so bad. I could touch on generalities for a moment, cars, planes, technology in general…

But not specifics, even if Rethi would have loved nothing more than me expounding upon the inner workings of the mystical 'computer' that I'd alluded questions of for months. I'd alluded those questions so often that those who asked them had stopped.

The pain only worsened as I reminisced to the fateful moment that I'd cut ties with my home as a whole.

It felt like millennia ago that I made that choice. And I didn't regret it, logically. There was nothing to regret. I wasn't going to be the sole winner of this Champion War bullshit; it just wasn't going to happen. The best that I could have pulled off would be building a force of Champions and then betraying them last moment, though I'd just as likely be betrayed too.

The moment I was sent here, I was stuck. And unless I can find someone who has the ability to send me home, probably surpassing what the Gods of these worlds can even accomplish, then my fate is sealed.

But that was logically. Emotionally, it was a black pit.

My past was gone, only manifesting itself in my morals and my damned suit. The world I had grown up in, learned in, lived my short life in… it was as good as dead, stuck in a moment of time within my mind.

I didn't do anything to deserve this. I wasn't sure that any of the other Champions did either. I wonder if they were faring better, enthralled by the world around them or assuming the stubborn mindset of being the one to return home.

Time rushed by me as I thought, like a stone standing in a stream of water, though far less serene than it might look on the surface. Though, there is nothing quite like the sound of someone climbing the wall right next to you to wake you from your funk.

My mind kicked into gear, giving me the character to play, the social beats to follow, the emotions to illicit, all so easily displayed in front of me like you might expect from the choices right out of a visual novel. It was all so easy, such a simple equation that seemed to grow ever more innate as I closened myself with the Hearth Court, with my own natural empathy, and the people who constantly surrounded me, growing my mind broader…

But I didn't pick anything. I looked down at the slowly thinning crowd that bustled beneath my feet as the almost silent sound of someone climbing the wall to the roof I sat upon, and I realised something.

I didn't want to play a character right now. I didn't want to be someone else, not that any of the masks I wore were inherently false. They were all me, but not genuinely me. And today? I felt like being genuinely me.

The person climbing the walls pulled themselves over the edge agilely, almost like someone flexing a muscle that they'd let go slightly rusty. I didn't bother to turn to them, simply staying exactly like I was, dangling my legs ever so slightly as I observed those beneath me.

They didn't notice me, the inherent expectation that there would be no-one atop the roof, overriding their ability to actively perceive the surroundings.

"I came here with a plan, you know." I spoke from the edge of the roof, a massive spike of adrenalin and heightened senses coming from the roof's other occupant, "A character I'd play, the right words to say, the motivation that would make you say yes. But I don't feel like it." I shrugged my shoulders, not receiving a response from my unwitting companion.

"You were born in Vahla?" I asked gently, letting my morose tone waft through the air and reach the ears of their target. They shifted their stance, unsure whether they wanted to run or not, but I continued onwards.

"Maybe not born, but close to it at least." I mused, though I let the rooftop go silent—my companion nowhere near comfortable on the dark rooftop. The silence eased the franticness, and after the initial fear of retaliation for any movements they might make, they even did so much as let their form slacken.

"Does it pain you, to have left your life there behind?" I asked the quiet night, and I received a response.

"No." The simple word came from a light, feminine voice, filled with the slight affectations of Gek speech. I nodded deeply, even if I knew that the answer she'd given wasn't even close to the truth. Regret, betrayal, fear, heartbreak… all of it brought to the surface by the very mention of her past.

"That's about as convincing as me saying that I'm just a regular priest of the Hearth, Gehne." I turned my head to the woman, her form clad in a minimised version of her usual work dress, having removed the dress itself. Underneath was a form fit pair of pants, pure black and melding easily with the night itself.

"What are you doing here, Maximilian?" She said gently, the most she'd outright said to me since I'd involved myself deeper into the burgeoning insurrection.

"Mourning." I said, only able to bring a little smile to my face to hide the pain that the word served to inflict on my own heart. Gehne was almost taken aback, so thoroughly expecting an ever-charismatic response. She thought I was a snake, and she was right, to some degree. I was coming to realise just how much social power I could exercise. A few days of work, and I could probably crush someone's life from the inside out, by whispering a few words in the right ears.

"What could you have to mourn?" She accused, though some of her tone held a genuine question. An interest. If I were trying to, I could leverage that right now, twist that interest whichever way I so pleased. But I couldn't be bothered.

"You know, if we are picking at the disguises we wear, I could take a look at your own, Blue-Finger."

I ignored the spike of fear, realising that any cover she had has been blown. Of course, the deduction wasn't as simple as Gehne literally having blue skin. That would be ridiculous. The fact that blue skin was already a niche subset of Gek definitely helped, though the real kicker was the emotions I had pulled from her surface memory with my little mind tricks. It fit with Blue-Finger's origin too well, and while I wasn't trusting the information so strictly, too much pointed in one direction for it to be coincidence.

"I have a lot to mourn. Just like you Gehne." She fought down her anxiety to scoff.

"'We aren't so different; you and I?' Seriously?"

I turned back to her, my mind lighting up with surprise at the familiar phrase. The laugh began softly, then rising in tempo and volume, so much so that the pedestrians below even began looking up in confusion. I ignored them, wiping at my eyes with a sudden wave of tears that bubbled up from somewhere deep within.

"You guys have that trope too?" I giggled though the tears, wiping at them lazily, "Man, I haven't read a book in so long." Gehne was confused by the display, not understanding just what had set off the explosively emotional reaction.

"Not books, street plays." She corrected, moving a few steps closer to me warily. "Families who were starving would create plays and act them out in hopes a few hum would be thrown their way." I snorted, something that oddly comforted the woman further, letting her close the distance a few more steps.

"I used to read books by the cartload, anything I could get my hands on would be read within the day. Since I came here though…" I shrugged, tapping at the rooftop's edge between my legs as they dangled in the cooling breeze of nightfall. The crowd below thinned even further, leaving only particular parts of the streets still lit—namely the bars, especially ones that offered 'night service'.

Gehne stood behind me, broken by indecision, though after a few moments it was almost as if she flipped a mental coin and took a leap of faith—probably a learned trait to stop her from locking up in a serious situation.

She walked over to me softly, her bare feet padding across the roof's surface and using the strange biology of them to help her move more cleanly than a regular human could, more silently too. She sat down only a metre from me, her blue skin glistening with a slight sheen in the remainder of the light, something that I imagine she solved in much the same way that Lauka did, by wrapping herself in black cloth.

"Where did you come from?"

It was the inevitable question. One that I had passed off a hundred different ways by now. It came in different packages with different intents, but they all sought the same information. Who was I? Where was I from? What was I?

"Would you believe me…" I began slowly, halting my tapping and staring down at my own fingers, "if I said that I came from another world?"

I could almost feel her throat close up, having to swallow heavily to restore her own breath. Her eyes danced across me, and I could feel them over my skin, even though I wasn't looking at her. The adrenalin flooded back into her system, her emotions flipping over themselves as she realised that she could tell that I wasn't playing her for a fool.

"Orisis?" She said, almost hopefully. At least then she could explain it within herself, but I snorted weakly—what really amounted to me exhaling out of my nose a little more vigorously than a regular breath.

"No, Gehne." I said softly, like you might say the words to a child's lullaby, "Somewhere much further than Orisis." I looked up at the planet in the sky, its massive mass blocking out the sun for the night, almost wishing that it were my actual home. At least then I could see my goal, much like we of Earth can see the Moon.

"Where?" She asked, bracing herself for the answer before I'd even given it, fearful of the world that I was going to open her mind up to. I turned to her, her shimmering blue skin complementing her sharp eyes as they stared with a restrained existential fear. A weak smile wormed its way into my expression, along with the softest glow of a warm fire in my eyes, radiating in her own large orbs.

"I come from another world, so, so far away. You see, we aren't very creative there–" I grimaced against the instinctive joke, pushing down the character I was letting slip out to protect myself from the terrible, ripping pain in my chest.

"I come from Earth." The sadness dripped from my words like an addictively sweet honey, calling you back for more despite the sickness in your stomach, "It was where I was born, where I lived, where I learned to be who I am today… and it's a place that I can never go back to."

My lips twitched with the horrifying wave of emotions, betraying any stoicism I might've been able to claim. Gehne watched as the veneer, the veil itself, shattered right before her eyes. Her understanding of the worlds, the universe itself even.

But also, me. The man that she'd built up in her mind; the snake, the Peace Bringer of the Hearth, a Blessed even. All of that was dashed, leaving only the commonly dressed man with brown hair and brown eyes, standing a little taller than average, with a slight glow within his eye.

"And you know…" I looked back up to Orisis within the sky, watching as the stars that filled the space around it blinked into existence within the blackness. "Forever is a long time. A really, really long time."


A/N: Sad boi Max for a bit never hurt anyone. Turns out, opening up is hard when you're almost a living enigma.

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 92: Decide

"No, I mean–" I thought for a moment, trying to work my memory back to what felt like decades ago, "Honestly, I don't really know how they work. We used to joke that we'd managed to trick rocks into thinking."

"Like Runework?" Gehne answered thoughtfully, having managed to get past her initial shock. Though, she treated almost everything I said with a degree of scepticism—probably a protection for her mind rather than trying to take it all in and treat it as gospel. It was just too far out there to relate to, even for many people back on Earth.

"Well, I can't really say yes if I don't know what Runework is." I jibed gently, though I kept it light. She turned an independently moving eye to me with disbelief.

"Uh, it's just shifting in physical form?" She said roughly, her explanation more of a dulled down conceptualisation of it than anything.

"Oh, sorry," I said, "I can grasp the idea of it, but whether it really has all that much to do with what I'm going on about is different. How I shift is a little odd, and I'm not exactly classically trained." Gehne widened her eyes slightly, jaw dropping and parting her bright lips, shimmering in the remaining light.

"You can shift?" She exclaimed, incredulous. I nodded easily, almost smiling.

"You know, I was led to believe that shifting was a whole lot more common than this. I've only met two, maybe three people that have any ability in it." I gave her a wry shrug.

"How could you think that it was anything less than rare? Shifters, of any sort, are extremely valuable! Learning even the basics force even the richer folk to open up their coffers." I laughed shortly, the woman eyeing me with interest.

"Well, my teacher was proficient in shifting himself, and I found a way to shift unintentionally. So, I thought that sort of thing would happen at least every once and a while." Gehne scoffed heavily.

"For the extremely talented, maybe. But they always end up whisked away to some other Empire or Kingdom and get trained or something." She sighed, looking over the rooftops with a faint sense of longing, for a past she had left behind, "Sometimes I wonder what I would do if I could learn to shift. It would change my life, surely… I just don't know how."

"Shifting is just a tool, Gehne." I said sagely, assuming a stereotypical wise-man tone, "A powerful tool, but a tool, nonetheless. It's all in how you use it." She gave me a bored look which made me spilt my face with a grin.

"If you could have all the abilities of, say… a shadow shifter tomorrow," she jolted with the comparison, but I pushed on, "what would you do with those abilities?"

"I guess…" She started, but quickly weighed the idea in her mind against something else and dropped it, "I don't know. Should I know?"

"No, probably not." I said easily, "Who does that actually happen to, you know? Sudden gain of massive power is something straight out of a story book." Though, while I spoke those words, I turned to her, smiling gently.

"But it happened to me."

We sat in silence for a while just looking at each other critically. I didn't bother to look to her emotions, finding myself too emotionally tired to undertake the effortless action. She leaned back slightly, though it wasn't to distance herself from me and more to sit in a comfortable position.

"How much power?" She asked gently, almost sadly.

"Enough." I replied cryptically.

"Enough to save the worlds?" She followed up, using my own words against me. The words that I'd used to pacify my little group of discordant miscreants. I shook my head.

"Not quite. The foundation for that kind of power? Maybe." She looked me over, once again trying to reconcile the man that she knew, the man she saw, and the man I was saying I was. A difficult task it seemed. I laughed softly, deciding to give the woman a somewhat morbid frame of reference.

"You know Shed, Kout, and the Officials?" I asked, pointing to the south-west, the south-east, and the north-east, respectively. She nodded hesitantly; her eyes dubious at the change in conversation.

"Well, if I left this roof now, it might take me three or four hours to return."

"Return? After wha–" She stopped herself, her eyes going wide and almost fearful as she realised what I meant. I nodded gravely.

"Less, if I knew exactly where they were." I lifted myself from my spot on the edge of the roof, but before I could move anywhere, I felt the tight grip of a hand close over my wrist. I looked down to the blue hand, feeling the strange, ridged fingers suction to my skin—then looking up at the face of pure surprise that Gehne now wore.

"You aren't going to–" I barked out a light laugh, a genuine smile making its way to my face despite the accusation.

"No, that would make our jobs exceedingly difficult. Though…" I lifted my arm, dragging the woman's arm along with my own, her fingers latching themselves to my skin with an exceptional adhesion, "it is an inevitability. That they will need to die, I mean."

She gulped, unlatching her fingers from my arm, letting me free from her grip. I grinned as I began to gently move atop the ledge while inciting the Sharah, reciting words I'd practiced for thousands of hours. I let myself flow through the moment for a while, my feet and mind guiding me through the frivolous movement, taking me across the side of the building and defying gravity for moments at a time.

I bathed in the wind's caress, the stone of the building beneath my feet gladly receiving my movements, allowing me to push my speed further and the power of each step to amplify each of my next steps.

The Sharah ramped up, only allowing you to add more and more momentum and strength as you move. With the amount of power that I could produce from my impossibly efficient muscles, far surpassing anything conventionally possible, the Sharah only allowed me to compound that strength further.

The earth, the walls, anything my body could touch, was all my playground for movement and artistry. In the moment of blissful surrender to movement, I realised that someone who was sufficiently skilled in the Sharah, and had the ability to perform it flawlessly and indefinitely, could potentially generate enough force to shatter the world itself.

I stopped, my mind halting with the morose thought. Well, if you were extremely skilled in the Sharah, I guessed. The Sharah might allow you to multiply the force you could wield, and while I had the ability to do so; taking the kinetic energy from something like a punch, and using that to lift my hammer, to then use that force to create a kinetic blast—I couldn't do that infinitely.

Diminishing returns were a bitch, and the multiplier I could apply to a powerful stomp to the ground was massive, but after that it more than cut in half, eventually only allowing me to maintain a large amount of power, if I were smart about it.

I sighed, before looking back to where I'd once been sitting, finding my company standing on her feet, her jaw so lowered that I couldn't help but think that it'd come unhinged. I spread my arms slightly, doing a formal half bow that you might see from a dancer to their partner.

"And that, miss Blue-finger, is only the beginning of the power I've found myself with—and it's not even remotely enough to do what I strive towards."

She clicked her jaw closed, shakily gulping as she eyed my warily. "What was that?"

"The Sharah." I said simply, though she didn't seem to know it. Not even Rethi, who seems more than a little obsessed with collecting legends from travellers passing through, had known of the esoteric movement style.

"If that isn't enough…" She halted her speech as her voice hitched, "then what is?"

I looked her over, feeling a little more power in my bones after the scant moment of tapping into the flow that I had learned to traverse over months of non-stop training. The woman standing across from me was probably some mixture of terrified and in awe, being unlikely to have ever seen someone shift before, let alone to the degree I had. Defying gravity was a great way at astounding just about everyone, even the race that was literally renowned for their ability to climb just about everything.

"People, Gehne." I grinned, finding some of my humour again, "What I can't do alone, I just ask others to do for me."

"Use them, you mean." She said sourly, managing to pull herself back from her surprise and back into the slight distaste she had for me—something that had festered despite our positive initial reaction.

"Use them?" I laughed, "Sometimes. Depends on how you look at it. Am I just using you as an outlet for pent up distress, or am I offering you a chance to stay, to make more of yourself? Is it 'using someone' if I'm giving them what they want?"

"You're offering me something?" She asked softly, her eyes piercing. I shrugged, walking over to my spot, and easing myself back down to sit.

"I have my ideas." I laughed at the prickle of disbelief I felt in her emotions, powerful enough of an emotion to seep into my mind without even trying to feel it. Not that it was often I actually had to put forward effort to feel someone's emotions.

"So; you lure me in with an emotional appeal, telling me about this world you came from, something you could've easily made up, and now you want me to go along with whatever you've been planning?" Her tone was indignant, but she had a hard time believing her own words.

"Sure." I laughed merrily, letting her believe whatever she wanted, "But I'll tell you what, Gehne. There are a lot of things we learn on Earth, a lot of it is just about as stupid as it can get, but one thing that I did learn is that forcing someone into a situation they don't like is a good way to get yourself betrayed."

"You don't say." She said scornfully, but I powered forwards.

"Honestly, you can run away and never come back for all I care. You can tell the world what I'm planning, if you even know enough about what I'm doing to meaningfully expose what I'm up to. So, let's be real, right now." My voice dropped to a powerful, low note. Not intimidating as such, but more on the commanding end.

"You're milling about through life with no idea what you want. You wanted to be out of danger, and out of crime, so much that when you got out, you realised that you had no plan. The life you ended up with was underwhelming and you don't like it as much as you thought you would."

She took a step back, her eyes widening, but I didn't do anything more than look right at her, my mundane brown eyes giving her a long, bored look.

"You hate the way things are, so much so that you tentatively joined the Skinned Lizard's little enclave of five, but you have no idea what you could actually do. You ended up telling at least Tek about your past, and that you personally knew Shed—but you insisted that you 'didn't want to get involved' and ended up ostracising yourself from the group further than you'd intended, leaving you as a tag along in truth."

"Who are you to say that I don't do anything?" She whispered; her mouth slightly agape with a brutal fury written on her features.

"I'm the only one who's been moving forward your little group of play-insurrectionists, I've probably done more than any of you have in years, barring Tek, who seems to be the only one with any real intention to do anything." I said, keeping my tone supremely flat, watching as she fought with her own expression, "Don't even pretend that you've done anything more than nabbing a few bits and pieces on Tek's say so."

She made an angry growling sound, though the sound tapered into a higher pitch at its end as I furrowed my brow severely.

"So what do you really want, Gehne? Do you want the quiet life, away from the action, or do you want to be in the thick of the danger once again? Do you want to risk it all for something better than what you've got? Risk this quaint little life you've built for yourself for the sake of everyone else?" I tilted my head to the side, "Or is that too altruistic for you?"

She scoffed, spinning around to walk away, but only managing to pace backwards and forwards from me, unable to force herself to run away. She whipped around to look at me again, scowling with a furious intensity.

"How dare you." She hissed, "It's so easy to reduce me, and everything I've worked for, down to a few questions, isn't it? To make it all so simple when you know that even posing the question is enough to change my life forever."

"Gehne." I said, my voice exceptionally quiet, only barely travelling over the night air, and maybe it was the warning in my voice, or maybe it was the power of the Hearth that blazed with the heat of a live campfire.

"I'm going to make this easy. You've done nothing, and just because you used to be Blue-finger doesn't mean shit. So now is the time to shut up and take action. Otherwise, you're doing nothing more than playing around with adults in the war room." I left the air full of silence, though the woman was just about shaking with a deluge of emotions so violently extreme that I couldn't bare to delve into.

"So what will it be, Gehne. Will you choose to go home, and keep things exactly how they've been—or will you change things and become more?"

She restrained another growl, clenching her jaw as she stared at the ground desperately, as if it would give her a satisfactory answer to the demanding question. I didn't let up, my eyes boring into her bowed head. I was resigned to whatever answer she'd give whether or not it worked in my favour.

But… as her head turned up from the ground, rage in her expression, I found myself grinning from ear to ear. It was a gratification like nothing else, making the power of the Hearth radiate from me like a billowing furnace of heat, infusing the night air with an almost vibrating power.

She had her answer.

"Good."


A/N: Sorry for the break, life is a bitch. Hope you all have a good one!

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 93: Heave

We moved swiftly through the dead of night, late enough that even the most avid of drinkers and revellers were finding a quieter place to ride out the remains of their day—or the horrid beginning of the next.

Gehne was furious, of course. But it was easy for me to distance myself from the girl's emotions, almost finding myself in a moment of serenity within the storm. I didn't like that I was so much more at ease as the object of anger and spite than as an emotionally vulnerable target.

What was it that made me that way? I had started so well, managing to talk about some of the things that I hadn't touched upon in what felt like years. I had even managed to explain some of the concepts of computing I had picked up in my days of learning about hardware as a casual layman.

But then… then I'd let my goals take over. They were ever-present and slyly waiting for the moment that I felt most comfortable to make themselves known. The machinations of my own mind seem to conspire against me, like a calculator in the back of my head, constantly performing grand equations for each and every social chess move.

Some of it was me. Some of it was my Domain. Some of it was the empathic link that I couldn't help but have with those that surrounded me.

As I walked with a purposeful stride, moving out of the city and past the homes that surrounds the hub, moving towards where I can still feel Valeri trying to move my hammer, I couldn't help but let my mind run amuck.

I hadn't thought of myself as socially adept on earth. In fact, for many years as a child I had been a nervous wreck around any new social situation. Something I'm sure is a pretty normal phase to grow through. Later on, in late highschool and beyond, I found myself slightly more at ease, capable of forming groups of people without much difficulty…

But nothing like this. Not even close. Maybe I had a decent basis to work from, and the empathy certainly added to that like powerful headlights in the dead of night, but it was when my Domain mixed with the other two that I truly began to feel as if the ability was truly inhuman.

Oh, and I can only imagine that the increase in the Mind stats helped immensely, back when I was still linked to the God from Earth. It was hard to remember that I once had an actual stat screen—an idea so dichotomous with the reality that I found myself in. I'm glad that I had Mayer to help me break from that fantastical mindset that I'd first arrived with and feared that the others who had been brought here have not.

My real fear, however, was in just how much I've changed. Am I even quantifiably the same person than I used to be? As I search more into that question, I start to terrify even myself. My morality, something that I place to highly within my mind, something I let guide my actions in pursuit of even this small step forward towards my goals; did I even hold my morality to this before I was placed on Virsdis?

I didn't let the internal discomfort detract from my image, however. Not with the patently furious Gehne walking behind me, a mix of shame in her that she'd had to bow her head to play into my hand. I was offering something that spoke to her, deep down, and I'd done everything short of pushing her from that diving board myself.

Just another part of myself that I was becoming increasingly unhappy with but found no way around. Manipulation and other conniving social tactics. It didn't do wonders for my reputation, but it certainly gave me results. As distasteful as it could feel to pull on someone's heartstrings, I couldn't quite disabuse myself of the option. It was just too useful to bar myself from.

However, despite the dark tone that my innermost thoughts had taken, I could almost feel my emotions lighten as we finally made significant headway into the fields of grass, the clear air and the cool breeze managing to refresh my mind even in the conflicted state it was in. The grass beneath my feet was almost silky, the cool rushes of air giving a slight rippling effect across the dark green grass, like a bed of liquid laying across the slight dips and rises.

With the fields being so open, it wasn't too long till you could see a very strange sight in the far distance. A small silver spire rose just above the surface of the earth, with a strange form leaning tiredly against it. Well, it certainly seemed small until we walked closer and closer, where even Gehne, through her anger and frustration, managed to feel a significant spike of strange awe.

My Soul Hammer was huge, especially with the 'upgrade' that it'd received after my meeting with Gallar. From its very tip, to the top of its head, it was easily taller than me—where it had only been an inch or so taller than myself. Any practicality, however, had been totally thrown out the window when divinity had been involved, altering my soul, and thus the Soul Weapon irreparably.

It stood at easily my height and a half, the massive block of metal that served as its head, with its tapering horned side included, would likely have more volume than my body does—though its mass undoubtedly quashes my own by a landslide.

It was almost terrifying, now that I looked at it against the form of the much smaller Valeri Ephars. She was at least six foot even, and the gargantuan thing made her look hilariously small. Any regular person would take a single look at the thing and think that a giant would be its weilder—apparently, they did exist somewhere within the mountains to the north—or at least one of their much smaller, and far-removed relatives—members of which I had seen a sparingly few times and had never managed to learn the name of their race due to their scarcity.

Valeri, absolutely exhausted by her attempts, saw me in the distance, the bright white of her eyes stark against her skin as they widened almost comically. Even from what would have been five hundred or so metres away, I could feel the wave of last moment desperation as she realised that she was in imminent danger of losing the bet I had posed.

I'd expected something similar to this. Even with her enhancements to strength, a courtesy of being blessed by a Goddess of Might directly. I had hoped that she would lift it, even a mere centimetre, for the sublime moment of being proven wrong that I found myself secretly craving.

And then, something magnificent happened. Something that made a small part of me grin in glee, mirroring itself onto my face with its radiating power from within.

I heard a hum of sound resonating and powerful, though not necessarily as deep as you might think. The moment I heard the resonating tune as it leaked from Valeri's lips, a wave of goosebumps spread over my entire body, flooding my body with a burst of adrenalin that told me one, extraordinarily simple thing.

A God's power lay near.

It was nothing so visibly clear, but it's feeling was undeniable. I had felt the presence while sparring with Rethi, though his was mostly a dull, detached feeling rather than the overwhelming presentness ahead of me—like a sleeping mountain opening an eye from its rest.

Though, according to Rethi's account of his fight with Yeram, it wouldn't be too long before he too was capable of such a clear call upon Divine power, if he hadn't already done so in the last moment of his fight.

"What is happening?" Gehne screeched from beside me as the hum somehow managed to consume our hearing, replacing it with nothing other than the whispers of strength that laid beneath the surface of people, of the earth, and even within a simple emotion. I held out my hand towards the screeching Gek, bringing her to a hurried stop as I continued forwards, her voice lost within the hum that resonated through the earth and into our bones.

I walked forwards easily, even though the powerful hum wished to bring me to my knees before the display of its might. Valeri herself had her hands clenched against the long shaft of my Hammer, her eyes closed as she created the resonating sound from deep within her chest.

My steps drew closer and closer, threatening her with the bet we had made, which was now entirely superfluous to the spectacle that sat before my eyes. And it was with that threat that she opened her eyes, shining with a brilliant strength that owned no colour other than its overwhelming bearing.

"Earth, lend me Might as I have done for you." Valeri's voice commanded, the Divine presence of who could only be Tarania lingering within her powerful tone. With a command from the Blessed that assumed the words of Tarania herself, the dark earth around her complied willingly, surrounding her limbs with stone that shot forth from the loose soil that sat upon it.

The stone wrapped around her body, immediately bracing against her back, legs, and arms with the light mixture of what must be a shifting technique and Tarania's power intertwining to give the greatest effect.

I knew I had lost my bet as soon as the stone had burst forth from the earth, watching as her mouth opened into a scream of exertion, even that being drowned out by the hum that still lingered despite Valeri no longer creating the noise.

The hammer, heavy as it might be, lifted. Only a centimetre, if that, with the dirt and grass beneath it only slightly decompressing from its massive weight as the sound abruptly cut short, with the Soul Hammer falling that miniscule distance, right where it had been moments before.

The sudden, deafening silence allowed for me to hear the ragged breaths of the woman behind the shattering stone as it lost the power behind it that allowed for it to hold the shape. She stumbled to the ground, only just possessing enough strength to lower herself slower with the shaft of the hammer.

The girl groaned, the strength totally leaving her body after a moment, laying her head down on the head of my hammer, her dense plume of hair flattening itself against the dark silver metal.

"Well, colour me impressed." I said as I crouched down, making contact with her eyes as she breathed heavily, desperately trying to catch her breath as her expression lit up with pride.

"Bet…" She gulped hard against her dry throat, struggling to find the wind for the words, "you didn't… expect that." I grinned, letting out a hearty chime of laughter.

"No, no I didn't. Maybe I could claim that I had hoped you would." I gave her a short wink before standing up, moving my hand towards the familiar grip of the hammer, its end towering above me, though close enough for me to comfortably reach.

"You might want to move you head, fair warning." I said merrily, as the girl hastily moved her head off of the massive hammer, shuffling her body away from me and the hammer with as much speed as she could. I grinned cockily, even laughing at the sight briefly, before making a statement of my own.

It'd been difficult to wield such a beast of a weapon, the thing being almost too heavy for someone to reasonably wield due to some basic laws of physics that I half remember from a video I watched online. But, well, I'm not sure that modern Earth's physics accounted for the addition of kinetic shifting.

With a quick glance in the direction of Gehne, who had moved closer in the time I'd been talking with Valeri, I let my face split into a wide smile.

All it took was one stomp of a foot, and a feat of strength was performed. With a small movement, aligning the complex sentences of the Sharah into something resembling transmission of kinetic energy, I amplified that kinetic energy from the powerful stomp to the movement of the Hammer as I swung it up from the ground.

The massive hammer's head kicked out from the ground, sending it arcing out and over my head, and with a few small movements, I nullified much of its force as part of the hammer's handle would have smashed onto my shoulder.

The oversized weapon now rested on my shoulder, the long length of it mostly in front of me, and its head sitting only a little way behind my own.

I looked to the two girls, each of them giving me their own best impression of a silent scream, and I let myself laugh massively, revelling in the moment of awe that my feat of extreme strength had created.

"Welcome, you two…" I gestured to both women, finally making them notice each other in full, "to the second round of training." I walked around nonchalantly, despite the fact that the massive weight of the hammer still was painful to hold, even now, though I was astoundingly good at working through pain and physical distress. In fact, most of the muscles in my body were constantly working at full force just to control it when I used kinetic shifting to give it power, let alone trying to do that all physically, without shifting.

"Second round?" Gehne asked before Valeri could get her own words out, making them look at each other in confusion, before turning back to me.

"Indeed! The second round." I said, nodding to Valeri, "She's the one that needed training first. You're good enough as is."

"Good enough for what?" Valeri said testily, her voice still breathy from the exertion only moments prior.

"Why, to learn the Sharah, of course!" I announced cheerfully, making the two women both ask the same question unison, tones almost identically wary.

"The Sharah?"


A/N: Here's some more! Still working on being consistent again, but there's only so much time until my university starts up, and life will change then. We'll have to see, hey?

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 94: Underlying

The two women just looked at me with a lost expression.

The shock was enough that Gehne's rage had almost completely subsided, and even Valeri's exhaustion seemed to leave her expression while she stared on in bewilderment.

Well, I guess if anything was going to knock someone's pants off, it was going to be told that they've involuntarily been admitted to training in an art of movement that lead to shifting. They might not understand what the Sharah was, or what kind of shifting it actually enacted, but both of the women knew well enough that I was capable of quite a few things—and I was offering to teach them.

"The Sharah," I began, pacing back and forth in front of the two women with a mock officiality, "is an art of movement created by the Sharah'hin people of Orisis. Unfortunately, I don't know much of the history of it, but I do know that they place a massive importance on it and the correct way for someone to learn and perform it."

"Uh," Valeri stammered out intelligently, "is that going to be an issue? Wouldn't there be some sort of… procedure for this?" Her question turned out the be markedly more intelligent than I was honestly expecting. Valeri would be one to know about tradition and procedure, I suppose, with all that political training she had no doubt received in her youth.

"Of course there is!" I exclaimed happily, spreading my unoccupied arm wide with a grin emblazoned across my face, "But I wouldn't care about it either way. I am a blasphemer to the Sharah'hin, so that boat has already sailed."

Both of the girls looked towards each other anxiously, then back to me with wide eyes.

There was a reason why the religious presence in Crossroads was low, and it wasn't just from a general apathy to the concept or it being viewed as something deeply personal. It was more than just that, it was an issue of conflict.

See, when a community like Crossroads appears, with being a veritable melting pot for a handful of races and cultures, where most of its inhabitants hadn't been born there, you get lots of tension. Lots and lots of tension.

Religion wasn't just taboo because people didn't care for the Gods, like Gehne had seemed to believe long ago. Maybe she had believed so because that was true for herself. But instead, it was a cautionary tactic to reduce the likelihood of a religiously fuelled rift to appear. Crossroads already had a race rift, and a wealth rift. Adding a religious motivator to the mix would be absolutely disastrous on so many levels it was almost terrifying.

Hence why I hadn't just walked around and sang to the high heavens that I was an icon of the Hearth Court, though that was a stupid idea all on its own. I hadn't tried to make contact with any enclave of Hearth devotees for that reason as well. My interests, at least in this case, needed to be entirely secular otherwise a great majority would simply see this entire ploy as nothing more than an invasion of a Hearth cult—if such a thing existed.

So that was why they looked at me with such worry, even if they didn't know the exact reason themselves. They were worried about the backlash even learning the art would bring upon themselves and, possibly, wherever they settled in future.

"What?" I said, my tone holding a derisive mockery, "That's all that it takes to scare you off?"

Gehne's slitted nostrils flared with indignance, lending a vaguely dragon-like impression to her face, "Scare us? You are telling us that we'll make an enemy of a group of people who can do something close to what you can!"

"I have to agree, Maximilian. We can't just make random enemies without knowing who they are." Valeri joined in, both women seeming to find a comradery between themselves to rally against the injustice that I posed. Though I just laughed, long and hard, the tone deliberately offensive to their ears.

"I love that you think you can gain any power at all without making any enemies." I cocked an eyebrow, giving them a toothy grin, dialling up the villainy, "You want power? It has to come from somewhere. Someone's time, someone's money, someone's technique, someone's life."

I looked heavily from woman to woman, my eyes connecting with their own with a precise confidence, something that likely came off as arrogance. They sent back their own glares, but they were weak in comparison to the tidal wave that I represented. They couldn't exactly fight something they so badly wanted to embrace, after all.

"Sure, you're going to royally piss off a group of really old, likely extraordinarily powerful race of people on Orisis by learning this from me. Maybe one day, you might actually get the honour of meeting one of the race that we're stealing from for our own benefit, but unless you're interested in finding a way to jump to Orisis, then I think we're pretty safe." I looked between the two as their expressions of indignance crumbled into just your run-of-the-mill unease. Unease with a side of a blood feud of sorts.

"Okay." Valeri said, first to break the silence and playing into my hand, "Alright… so we'll be learning this Sharah? The weird dance you do, right?" Gehne whipped her highly mobile head around to the woman, shooting her a scandalized look, before Valeri just rolled her eyes at the woman.

"Weird dance?" I said with mock mortification, "I'll have you know there is thousands of years of history behind this 'weird dance'!"

"Is there really?" Gehne said flatly, regaining a healthy amount of her anger from earlier.

"No idea. Maybe." I shrugged nonchalantly, "But what I do know is that it's a little more than a weird dance. It's an entire lifestyle, story, language, and journey, all told in movement."

It was then that the mood took a change towards the serious. All it took was one step for me to make the concept suddenly real for the two women, standing by the wayside. I removed my hammer from the equation, pulling it easily back within me and relieving my body from the immense strain from even holding the thing.

It was just one step that I took before I transported all three of us to a new world altogether.

I began the sequence of movements that I had once so desperately tried to imitate alongside Mayer's own performance of what was a never-ending, ever-evolving pattern of movement.

Not once would this pattern repeat in it's entirely; the minutia of each movement was simply to complex to ever need to repeat. Long ago, I would have had no choice, as not only was my teacher not truly proficient enough to perform it to even the pattern's base potential, but I wasn't exactly the brightest star either.

Even I, as I stepped forward into that first movement, understood that I was not enough. Not truly. It was humbling, to take that first step on the path that the Sharah lays before me, one that I had almost forgot existed.

The next step came, and then the one after that as well. Along with the wind, the earth, each muscle in my body breathed and soared, synchronised to their invisible thrums of power. It wasn't borrowing from those powers, simply following the lines that they draw through the world itself—with bursts of power from other, lesser forces that only yet again added another factor to the Sharah's infinite fractal of movement.

The Sharah was not just a technique of movement, nor a method of shifting, nor a pseudo religion either. It was an approach and a mirror to life, at its basest form; being both the path, and the steps that walk it, all at once. Each step was simply a reaction to the forces that underly it all, something that sat as the intermedium between the Divinity that lorded over those aspects of the world, and the ether that allowed for those to pull on that power, a trade between mortal and Divine made in power and faith.

I performed the steps, each coming as easily the last, as if the world itself was supplying me with my movements rather than pulling on them from the instinct that I'd built over a thousand, possibly thousands of hours of focused training.

I didn't even have to know what the two girls were doing, where my total lack of further communication would suffice for their standing orders.

As far as I was aware, this was the way that the Sharah was taught to the Sharah'hin, and how Mayer had haphazardly taught it to me. The only reason I had ever bothered to abridge the Sharah was because Mayer hadn't been able to train me literally twenty-four hours a day.

The two girls, however, could never hope to pull off something so ludicrous. Though just by being here Valeri was likely going to end up spending about one and a half days awake. She was Blessed though, so she'll survive. I probably wouldn't make Gehne do the same thing.

After that, I really didn't check exactly how long I was spending on the esoteric movements, enjoying the rare look that I could get at the underlying principles that the Sharah worked from. I have no idea how someone found out that you could do this, but it was undeniable. I also have no idea what any of it really meant, past an instinctual understanding and a vague intellectual one.

The whole 'forces of the world' thing was a little over my head at the moment, even though it was rapturous to behold the way that they moved and interacted. What did make more sense was how the Sharah related to that.

Long story short, the natural movements of the Sharah were just movements that allowed me to follow with the flow of those forces. The 'language' and 'sentences' of the Sharah that I used were derivatives of that. They were little flourishes that I could add to the movements I already walked, calling on the remnants of energy that the shifting tectonic plates of power created.

It was its own friction, and it was what allowed me to so easily manipulate kinetic energy with the Sharah. I didn't understand it, and I'm not sure that I ever would, really. It was a little far out of my ballpark, and just because I was using it, didn't mean I necessarily needed to understand it to get the most out of it.

I started to wind down my movements, however, despite the subtle amounts I was learning from performing the Sharah in what I believe was the intended way. I can see why the Sharah'hin might take offense to someone abridging it from that, but the abridging gave power, even if you had to push back against and possibly leave the intended path for a moment at a time.

I didn't actually slow my movements, or the complexity of them at all, but I was winding down nonetheless. It reminded me of the days, long ago, when I'd so fervently tried to catch up to Mayer in his performance of the Sharah, a performance that I'd even once believed was perfect.

Now, I knew better, as the subtle language whispered softly of the inevitable end to my movement. Not all could hear the language of movement, Mayer couldn't for one, and if Mayer wasn't really capable of it, then it was probably pretty rare that you could. However, I had a feeling that the two women would be able to hear it, if only slightly.

It was maybe another hour before my foot finally planted itself on the earth for the last time, softly breaking the other world that I'd sent myself and my students to. I just let myself breathe for a moment afterwards, though I definitely didn't need the recovery, but I felt as if it warranted a moment of reflective silence.

The moment passed and I looked up and around me, quickly finding the two women standing adjacent to me and breathing heavily, their bodies weak and brittle from the hours and hours of training. It was late afternoon at least, now, and both of the women were as broken by the physical strain of it as they could be.

But in them, I saw that spark. It was the same little feeling that I'd once felt when I had realised that the Sharah was more, and that learning it would be nothing but extremely beneficial. I grinned softly, letting the abrasive façade from earlier slip away in favour of my most genuine emotions.

"How was that?" I asked, and both Valeri and Gehne's heads tilted up dramatically to meet my eyes, their mouths dropping agape ever so slightly. They stood in silence, unable to find what they wanted to say, thought that silence broke after I began to brush myself off from the small amounts of dirt that had been kicked up and clung the leg of my pants.

"I—" Valeri began, though stopping herself mid word and grimacing, "I don't know, sir? I saw things; when you were moving… but I don't understand it at all." She said, her tone proper and put together, referencing me in the most official way she could manage with the rapture I'd delt her. At least it wasn't the strange, anxious speech that she'd tried to reference me in at the beginning of the day.

"Is that what shifting is like?" Gehne almost whispered, echoing the same sentiment as her sister-in-training.

"No, not really." I said easily, "That was a special occasion, a specific pattern that allows us to follow the Sharah's path of least resistance. It is both easy and immensely difficult." I looked down to the dirt at their feel, searching the worn patch of bare dirt where I could see their every movement like a faded letter written in the handwriting of a very young child.

"You both did better than I expected," I intoned warmly, giving them a smile that more than just reached my eyes, "soon you will be able to learn to shift like I can, to some extent. With dedication that you showed by staying here and continuing training despite your tiredness, I'm sure that you will be able to reach my level in only a decade, maybe less."

They grimaced at the time period I gave them. It was the brutal reality of it, and it ripped them from the sense of empowerment and improvement that the Sharah gave you, whispering in your ear the power that you could possess for practicing only a moment more.

But not everyone could be like me. Or Rethi, for that matter, who would definitely be able to shift using the Sharah if he wanted to train himself to do so. But Rethi had his blade, and only used the Sharah's movements to bolster his own ability, rather than dedicate himself to it the way I had. These two women didn't have any other choices, they were stuck with the Sharah as the shifting and combat technique that they had access to.

Valeri may have access to earth shifting, if I remember correctly from our talk so long ago, but her shifting wouldn't have been good enough to pull off the feat that she had earlier today. Lifting my hammer was an almost impossible task, and even though she was a Blessed of Might, it was still beyond impressive.

But it had really been her Goddess who had done all the work, and she knew it. Her Goddess was just waiting for Valeri to call upon her power in truth, and when she had, she made sure that she made herself known. Something that I can see mirrored in Rethi's connection with Hindle and, possibly, the God of the Sun who had once forged it from their power.

Though Rethi's connection was far more… worrying than Valeri's own.

I looked back to the two women after my praise, both of them too tired to do much else than nod at my light praise. "Both of you, rest. We will continue tomorrow night, as the sky gets dark. It will not be as involved as today. Until then…" I looked upwards towards the sky in thought, trying to decide what to do, before coming to somewhat of a conclusion, "I need to go have a chat with someone."

And finally, with a warm smile that I knew confused the both of them from my very hateable persona earlier, I started to leave. "Rest well, both of you. And prepare yourself for the road you'll need to travel henceforth."


A/N: Thought you all might appreciate some more words to chew on!

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 95: Fault

Alena reached out a hand and touched the expectant mother with a soft hand, wrapping her fingers around the scaled woman's arm ever so slightly as the power she'd been so hesitant with only a month ago eased into the Tiliquan's arm and diffused through their body with a precise focus and an efficiently guided instinct.

The first few Reptilia that she'd worked on were a challenge even if they weren't that biologically different than a human. It was still tricky to understand, with how their skin and scales worked, their muscular structure and the remnants of what was once likely a tail that they'd evolved away from over time.

Of course, their organs functioned differently in some ways, bone structure and exact chemicals being thrown around—while sometimes remarkably similar—were always different enough to make it hard to fix things she would easily be able to do so on a human.

Thankfully, this was a relatively easy case. Loss of blood and potential premature birth due to stomach trauma. After fixing the muscle and tissue that had been damaged quite severely, the work almost did itself, allowing the womb to retain its structural integrity. It appears that they had somehow evolved to birth children much like a human would, though there is technically a pseudo-egg that exists within their womb that the infant would hatch from before being birthed live.

The hadn't been any significant amount of damage to the egg, so they were safe in that regard. Alena wouldn't have been sure how she would've actually fixed the egg, had it been broken, but she would take it.

She released her hand from the woman's arm, her view snapping back to the reality that surrounded her in a way that was jarring and somewhat nauseating when she'd first began healing tens of people within a day's work. It had started with those who were most desperate, then it had become those with the mildest injuries…

Then the wave of people with odd and totally bizarre injuries and illnesses flooded in. Those few days had been easily the most hectic of her life, healing person after person where she'd never seen the last issue, or the next issue before, and certainly had never healed it. She'd been detailing all of the strange injuries that she could within her own bound notebook, consolidating them so she can think about them more when she actually had time to do so.

Right now, however, she was hard pressed to find time to sleep. As she had slowly become better at using her own life shifting efficiently, the energy restrictions that she'd been limited by was now lifted. So, instead of her energy being the issue, it was how much she slept instead.

She'd called the bottom line at five hours, though she'd slipped beneath that at least a few times. By this point, it seemed that Rethi had forgone sleep for at least a week now, if he hadn't slept for a few hours here and there.

At first, it had merely been something she'd begun doing because Maximilian had told her to do so. She'd though it would remain that way. She hadn't always been the most empathetic person, though she'd had her moments, but now things were different. Every day she woke up, and within an hour she was out in some side alley, healing anyone who needed it.

Interestingly, it was far less about empathy than she'd initially thought. She was no bleeding heart, but it was the responsibility that she'd found herself with that suddenly motivated her so severely. As she went to bed at night, she couldn't help but feel like she was wasting time that could have been spent healing just one more person.

She'd encountered a shocking amount of people who were on death's door, some who didn't even know it. One person had material that had been healed over within them that had probably been slowly shifting in their body for years, and if it had been left any longer, would have likely cause debilitating pain as it pressed against their nerves.

Debilitation was a death sentence. With no physical ability, you need mental ability. If you don't have mental ability, then you cannot make money, which means you can't eat, which means you die. Simple as that.

She'd healed hundreds who were close to, if not already debilitated. From pain, to paralysis, to the effects of exposure to chemicals, she was coming to the point where she'd seen most everything that the common causes had to give. Yet, every day there would be a new, strange thing that shocked her. Today had been massive abscesses, where one old man had somehow managed to accrue three separate abscesses that had been under both arms and on one of his sides.

Thankfully the solutions were pretty easy, though she had told the woman that was taking care of the addled old man, who must've been his daughter, that he would need the toilets shortly.

Alena had found that it was quite easy to use the latter part of the digestive tract as a disposal system for anything that exists within the body that shouldn't. In rare cases, she'd had to pre-emptively give their intestines and colon enhancements that would only last long enough for the waste to be excreted harmlessly.

It was something that she had based on her boyfriend's own biology, having been altered significantly since the induction of Divine energies into his body. The temporary nature of it was because the flesh itself wasn't all that changed, just that it required energy to power it, and Alena had realised that her own life shifting left a certain amount of power inside of body afterwards, and once that power was completely gone, any sustained changes that had no longer had that power to fuel it deactivated. Somewhat predictably.

This little discovery, while somewhat mundane from that angle, was actually like opening up a set of doors into a whole new world of biological treatments and, potentially, enhancements. That power that remained could theoretically be given orders to execute on after her direct interaction with someone, so she could, again, theoretically administer further treatments from afar. That was if she intentionally left an excess of energy within the body so that those processes had enough to execute.

The next was opportunity from that was enhancement itself. And while she would never be able to infuse enough of her own ether into someone else's body to keep an ether enhancement running forever, it could likely do so for at least a little while. If they had their own source of ether, and she the enhancement with extreme thoroughness, theoretically she could give someone a permanent enhancement via ether.

Of course, that wasn't even beginning with the enhancements she could render with just the biological components, even before ether enhancement was introduced as a concept at all.

The opportunities were… terrifying to Alena.

They represented a part of her that could easily begin tweaking small things and quickly go off the rails, performing mass editing to someone's body to test enhancements. If she failed? They would become an abomination like the hordes that had existed by those life shifters who had gone mad, run by instinct.

Alena found it hard to believe that she'd fall to that so easily, but she was also too terrified to find out if she was right.

The day slowly drew to a close, night rolling in over the streets, plunging them into a darkness, leaving only the most desperate to be healed waiting for their chance with the legendary 'Mercy'.

Yes, Alena hated the name, but it had spread like wildfire through the communities that needed her healing most. Mercy and Midday, both of their personas were believed to even be angels of envoys of the Sun Court, though those that thought so were few in number.

Before long, however, there was no-one left to heal. The side streets became dangerous at night, and they would much rather live till the next day and find where Mercy and Midday had set up than put themselves in too much danger and potentially be stabbed.

Alena found the dark streets to be daunt, but with her boyfriend constantly nearby, she couldn't help but feel comfortable. She'd seen what her boyfriends could do in a fight, against Maximilian, no less. But, even still, there was a small part of her that resided deep within her gut that spooked at the shadows of those streets.

Alena and Rethi stood in the small cross path between the mess of buildings, not speaking or breaking the silence that their personas stubbornly remained in outside of necessary words. Rethi subtly signalled the direction that they would walk, and she easily followed. There was almost always someone looking to follow them back to wherever they might be spending the night, so Rethi had become good at navigating the little side streets and finding a dead end that they would mysteriously disappear from.

What would actually happen is that Rethi would simply jump to the top of the buildings with Alena in his arms, then race away as Alena closed her eyes and shut out the world around her while the wind whipped against her skin and clothes.

However, tonight that didn't happen. Alena and Rethi both turned towards the direction that he had chosen and began walking with sure stride. They took three turns, with Rethi signalling to her with disguised motions, and they would have taken a fourth, but the way was blocked.

Alena, who normally paid close attention to only Rethi's movements, was confused when he stopped dead in the middle of the road. After another moment, she looked up to see a man lying in the street, almost totally still other than the slight quaking of his muscles.

A list quickly appeared in her mind; male human, mid-thirties, not quite unconscious, wounded. She looked up at Rethi and found his dull metal mask peering between her and the man on the ground. A mute conversation ran between the two of them, just from the small moments of eye contact.

'It's a trap.' Rethi posited with suspicious eyes.

'He's injured, badly.' She returned.

'We should leave him.' He ignored her own response, flicking his eyes in another direction, away from the one that the wounded man was obstructing.

'No.' She replied simply, with steely eyes. Rethi closed his eyes, wishing that he could convince her out of the act, but an argument with her now would be foolish. Rethi nodded concisely, both of them stepping forward towards the body in lockstep, shoulder-to-shoulder.

It only took a few more steps, with each of them being long and purposeful. Alena reached the man and immediately knelt to observe them. With a mere touch, she could tell that they were bleeding out, and awfully close to legitimately dying. She searched around in the man's body for a moment longer, and other than a few old wounds, nothing seemed out of place.

The man, who wasn't quite unconscious, lifted a weak hand to clasp around hers, his rough fingers barely able to hold against her wrist as she observed. She paid the touch no attention, instead diverting all over focus into his body as her power pushed into him and flooded over his organs and quickly began to repair them and any damage done to the skin and tissue from the blade.

But as soon as part of the wound had been healed, the man woke from his semi-conscious state and his hand grabbed around her wrist hard. She felt herself jump as she was pulled back to reality, about to tell the man to release his grip, when she looked up to see his eyes.

That moment lasted for an eternity as she looking into them and understood what was coming. The man's head was tilted up just enough for her to see his wide, terrified eyes, his pupils trained on her with a horrible exactness.

She watched, almost in slow motion, as the man shifted his weight and pulled a long dagger from underneath his side and shoved it towards her with a speed that she'd never be able to react to in time.

She felt that dread, as the dagger drew nearer to her throat, knowing that if that blade cut where it was meant to, then she would die in a matter of moments, far too little for her to heal her own body for the first time with life shifting. She was staring death straight in the face.

Yet, as the dagger drew fatally close, there was a bright flash of light—intense beyond words.

The flash was so intense that it completely blinded her for a few moments, before an accompanying heat blasted past her body at a heat that would have surely seared her skin to a crisp. But it didn't, instead it was almost comfortable.

When she blinked rapidly, trying to get her vision to return faster, she could hear a gurgling, wet sound. When her eyesight returned, she wished that it had stayed gone. In front of her laid the man, his arm still outstretched weakly, the blade dropped from his fingers to the cobbled streets below. But it was his chest that was the main point of interest. Or the lack of.

A massive hole was blasted into the man's chest, the flesh simply burnt to char at the hole's edges. It wasn't a perfect hole, more in a diamond shape than anything.

The man, knowing he was dead, tried to gurgle something, but Alena couldn't bear to look into the man's eyes and wonder what he was trying to say for the rest of her life.

She looked up to Rethi, her horrified featured hidden under her mask, but not in her eyes, and she saw that very same expression in his eyes.

Rethi had killed a man. And it was all her fault.


A/N: Oof.

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 96: To Kill

Can you mourn the life of a man you never knew?

Can you mourn the life of a man that you killed?

Was it self-serving to do so, or even disrespectful to the man himself and those that may have loved him? Rethi didn't know, and he might never truly know that answer either. Maybe his master might know, the man sometimes seeming like he had the answer to everything you ever wanted to know about the way you feel and who you are, even who you could be.

But right now, Rethi couldn't bear to go to the man, not like this. Rethi wanted so badly to go upstairs from the dining floor of the Skinned Lizard, to go to his room and find himself in the soft comfort of Alena's arms, the comfort that he knew would be waiting for him if he only just let himself fall into it.

Emotions weren't an overly private thing for him, like they had been for his mother and many of those he'd grown up around in the tough life of living at the edges of civilisation, or something like that. He'd been an open person for a long time, so it only confused him more when he found himself trapped within his own chest, the emotions like the titanic waves of a raging sea. Or, what he would imagine a sea was like from what he'd been told.

Instead of going to Alena and letting his heart pour out through the words he could put them into, or simply going to Maximilian and watching as the man understood it all—knowing that the man could feel exactly how Rethi was feeling… Rethi decided to sit in the dining room in front of a drink that hadn't been touched, in the severely diminished crowd of patrons.

All of the patrons were Gek, with lankier of the two overwhelmingly common Reptilia species having rather fluid sleep patterns. He'd been sitting at this table for hours, staring into the wooden grain of the decently made table. Tenra, who seems to have been working alone for the night, had checked in on Rethi a few times but hadn't come by for a while after Rethi had refused any services.

The Tiliquan, while older than Rethi by quite a handful of years, hadn't been able to approach the sandy blonde-haired boy with enough confidence to strike up a conversation. But there was someone who was confident enough, and Rethi could only assume that they had been informed of Rethi's odd mood.

Rethi's dull focus on the table's grain had stopped him from noticing the man approach, even with his sizable form, both in height and in stoutness. The Tiliquan, a fair amount taller than most others of his race including the more physically adept females, stood at the other side of the table, looking down over his wide snout at Rethi.

Rethi glanced up and saw Tek's impressively intimidating guise, the large burn down the side of his face only adding to the effect, having long since destroyed the scales on the left of his face and down past the collar of his shirt.

"I hear that your day has not been a good one." The man's voice rumbled as he sat at the table without invitation. Tek was not someone who waited for invitation, he was either there or not, which was its own form of extreme confidence. In a way the Tiliquan was much like Rethi's master, in his own specific ways of course.

"You could say that." Rethi said, finding his voice weak and weary in comparison to its normally powerful and confident tone. The confidence was something that he had initially imitated from Mayer and Maximilian, in the way they held themselves and talked, and that confidence had slowly become his own, one that matched his still youthful face and happy demeanour. But this tone he found himself speaking in… it made him sound shockingly old.

"Ah." The Tiliquan said, nodding as he crossed his powerful arms, a mean set of claws resting against his scaled skin. Rethi found his attention pulled towards the eyes that he'd found so unnerving in his first days within Crossroads, the eyes so expressionless and cold in comparison to those he was used to.

But he'd soon found a fascination with trying to understand the gestures and movements of the Reptilia repertoire, and that had spawned an interest in their eyes—quickly departing from their almost predatory image in his mind to an intensely expressive window into thought.

Tek looked at him with narrowed, slitted eyes, but soon after they had relaxed into a more open form as the Tiliquan sat back in his chair and sighed deeply.

"A babe who has tasted the lifeblood of another in combat." He shook his powerful head, his face morphing into a close approximation of sadness as he returned his gaze to Rethi's green, clear eyes. Rethi felt his throat bob as the man looked back at him, a different kind of understanding than he'd expected.

"Is it that obvious?" He intoned weakly, his voice dry and scratchy, as if he'd been crying for hours despite not having shed a single tear.

"As my mother once told me and all of my sisters;" Tek looked Rethi in his eyes, the intensity of his slitted eyes growing as he assumed a more powerful pose, "The stench of blood lays thick on claws as clean as yours."

"You've killed?" Rethi asked, though he barely needed to ask the man for an answer. There was something about Tek that screamed 'warrior' that Rethi wasn't quite sure if he possessed.

"Many." Tek said deeply, though not quite with sorrow, "The warring between tribes to the west were brutal—are brutal—and I was a peak warrior of my tribe. I did not just kill, Rethi. For many I was the nightmare of their battlefield."

If it had been anyone else saying those words, or if Tek had said them in any other tone than his deep, resonating voice—like a man decreeing himself guilty—then Rethi would have thought he was bragging. But no, there was no ego in that tone. It was merely a sliver of his sins, displayed in the rawest of words, almost bleeding in their cutting exactness.

"I killed someone who didn't need to die." Rethi said, his voice almost silent, but Tek heard them with crystal clarity. As if the words were broadcasting to his ears at a frequency only he and others of his ilk could hear and understand.

"We walked right into a trap, knowing it was a trap, and when Alena's life was that close to ending," Rethi held up two fingers, only a centimetre or two apart, "my power moved by itself before I could stop it."

"And you killed him, when you could have simply disarmed him?" Tek completed, looking at Rethi with searching eyes. Rethi nodded slowly, shame rushing to the forefront of his mind as he realised how easily he'd ended the man's life, when it would have been just as easy to knock the blade from his hand and leave him to heal from the half-healed wounds he'd surely been given to attract Alena's attention.

The Tiliquan man let his gaze rest on the younger man's face for a while, maybe trying to decipher the expression that Rethi wore, which even Rethi himself wasn't truly conscious of, but after a moment of silence, the man stood from his chair and gestured for Rethi to follow with a clawed finger.

It took a moment for Rethi to react to the man, but as the powerfully built Tiliquan disappeared into the kitchen, and then hearing the distinctive sound of the door to the back rooms opening, Rethi got to his feet and followed quickly. It wasn't the most graceful walk that he'd ever performed, but it got him through the kitchen, and then through the open door towards the back rooms that had been left open, which he then closed.

However, there was one door at the end of the short hall that Rethi could feel the slight breeze against his skin from, a door to the outside where the night air had cooled and the light had diminished to the point of painting the sky an inky blue. He emerged through the door and into a small dirt courtyard.

The courtyard was unblemished, simply dirt ground and nothing else. But as Rethi's eyes trailed its edges, finding that there was not one window looking into the small space between buildings, Rethi realised that it was more than that. Tek stood in the centre of the courtyard, watching as Rethi came to stand in front of him.

"Do you know the reason that you killed, instead of simply disarming?" Tek said, his voice bouncing off the walls and only adding even more power to his already impressive voice. Rethi looked up at him, but even as he racked his brain, he couldn't come up with an answer that quite fit how it felt.

"It is because you don't know how to truly kill." The Tiliquan's voice sent an intense shiver down Rethi's spine. It wasn't anything that he'd ever truly felt before just today, it was the overpowering feeling of impending doom.

The Tiliquan didn't even move, not even an inch, and yet the emotion was so intense in Rethi's mind that he couldn't help but take a step back. It was more than just battle prowess, which Rethi and Maximilian had trained to have in droves. This was what it felt like to stand against Mayer, on occasion, but never once had it felt so raw and exposed, hidden underneath a layer of instruction and protection.

But Rethi could feel the blood leaking from wounds that the other man hadn't inflicted upon him yet, the feeling of claws rending his flesh whispering in the back of his mind like a ghost.

"I am not as powerful as you are. You are a weilder of a Divine Blade, and I am merely a mortal warrior." The words shook the air around Rethi with a terrible urgency and impending danger, "But in this I am superior to you, child."

Rethi gritted his teeth against the intensity that he almost couldn't believe was anything but divine or ether powered. For it to be so distinct, the danger so viscerally real, was almost flooring to the boy. Mayer had always said that Rethi had good sense for combat, and it was only now that he began to actually understand what that meant.

The Tiliquan in front of him, Tek, was the most powerful person Rethi had met who didn't have some form of shifting or divine energy.

"You have killed, and that is irreversible," the almost soft tone didn't do anything to diminish the warnings in Rethi's mind, "and you will find that those you have killed will weigh on your mind more as you age, the emotions maturing into their own trees within your mind. You will never be absolved of those you kill, but you may yet learn to kill and what it truly means."

Tek's eyes drew into a pair of terrifying slits, and if Rethi had thought the man was dangerous before, then he now realised that the idea had been total folly. The Tiliquan uncrossed his arms, taking a step forwards with his eyes trained on the younger boy, like a true predator seeking its prey.

In that single moment in time, Rethi could swear that the pungent smell of iron had diffused through the air, the taste of it as it rotted all within an instant of touching his tongue. The moving Tiliquan was covered in the red, having long since dried into a black armour that surrounded him, and the fresh red that leaked from his claws.

Rethi's mind, frozen in its horrified awe, couldn't react when the man's form snapped forwards long and powerful arms blurring as his wide torso compacted itself into a dense wall of muscle. The claws of his fingers glinted in the dull moonlight, their black lustre tainted by the ephemeral blood that Rethi's mind had created so vividly.

The claws drew nearer, at a pace that Rethi had blocked and countered thousands of times in spars with Maximilian and Mayer. But this wasn't the same. His master's blows weren't ever intended to kill, to rip the life from him so cruelly, they were meant to force him harder, to push further beyond his own perception of his ability.

But these claws were death itself, and as they approached his muscled chest—seeking to rip through the bone of what Alena calls a sternum and into the muscle of his heart—time slowed to nothing. It was the terrifying understanding of being unable to stop what was going to happen, complete consignation to fate's grander plans.

Rethi could feel the exact moment that the hard and sharp claws touched against his skin, the hand splayed wider than a human's hand could, perfect for ripping and tearing through flesh. But it wasn't the feeling of those claws ripping into him that woke him from his horrified stupor.

It was the feeling of something else standing off to his side, a presence so undeniable that it blasted away the illusion of death that Tek had so heavily instilled in his mind. The world began to move again, the claws pressing harmlessly against his own rough shirt, then removing themselves and pulling back to their owner.

Rethi followed the arm back to Tek's intense eyes, finding them hard and unforgiving, as if he had truly just killed Rethi rather than leave him alive without a scratch.

"You are not prepared to die." Tek's voice hissed with viciousness, "I will make sure that you are."


A/N: G'day! Hope you're all having a good day, whatever time it might be. Currently, on Royal Road, I'm advertising Fixture in Fate using their ad system, and it's been interesting. Not sure it's really been worth it, to be perfectly honest, but it's mostly an experiment to see what it can do for me!

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 97: Paper

Valeri Ephars shuffled home, muscles sore and mind tired to a degree that she'd never quite forced herself to before. Though, despite her exhaustion, she found herself still stopping every ten or so steps and grimacing, before picking up where she had left off.

Of course, this odd, stilted movement was due to the Sharah that the Demigod himself had deigned to teach her. Being taught the Sharah was shaping up to be both the best and worst thing that had ever happened to her. She had no doubt that it would consume her time for years to come as she dedicated herself to its intricacies.

But at the moment, it was only pain, and a great deal of frustration. It was like watching someone take something so intrinsic to day-to-day life and do it ten times quicker because they learned a technique that you hadn't. Now, after doing that same thing for your entire life, you were now trying to break the habits that you'd built to replace them with something that took practice to make faster.

It was frustrating, and even doing so much as walking had become an infuriating chore, where every tenth movement somehow broke the flow of the Sharah and required her to stop and reset her posture and begin again.

The walk home was almost embarrassing, with the few of those who roamed Crossroad's main streets this early in the morning staring at her and instantly believing her beyond inebriation. Who else would be stumbling around on the main streets the way she was without at least a little alcohol in her system.

However, she pushed forwards without shame. The Sharah held an undeniable power, and she'd already learned some of it when she'd been sparring and training with Midday, or Rethi if she was brave enough to use his real name. The boy might be exactly that—a child—but damned if he couldn't be just as ludicrously powerful as his master. In fact, Master Maximilian was less scary than his young companion, if you didn't count him being a literal Demigod.

Valeri finally made it home, after an infuriating walk at a pace far slower than she'd normally walk. She walked through the side gate of her family's home, walking through to the servant's door with a painful shuffle, her muscles screaming at her in discontent the entire way. She opened the door to find the hallways empty, lacking the usual woman who always seemed to wait up late for her to come home. Apparently, the lack of her presence for the day had been enough to dissuade her from staying up too late a second time.

Uaele, the servant of her family who'd been helping her with any grazes or wounds she'd accrued during the weeks of training, had usually been the one to help her into the house in need be. She'd been an immense help, taking care of her when certain days had been really tough. Not having her there, waiting for her, after a long day almost felt wrong now.

Maybe it was more than just her absence, however. There was a certain air as she walked through those hallways, like a cold breeze in a normally warm location. It was just… off, however indescribable the feeling was. Her skin prickled gently with a small wave of cold sweat from a totally irrational fear, something that she couldn't possibly justify as she finally made it through the last door, entering into the main corridors that were only metres away from her own room.

She turned to walk towards the door of her room, but felt herself jolt as she was confronted with the form of her long time attendant. She let the momentary shock drain from her muscles, glaring at the man with as much force as she could muster.

"Good morning, Miss Ephars." He intoned neutrally, as if she didn't know about his vicious flipside, the Shadow Walker that laid beneath the surface of the agreeable veneer.

"Don't even bother, Yeram, if that is even your real name," she spat, "I know that you've been keeping an eye on me all day." Valeri didn't know this, but there was almost no chance that Yeram hadn't at least dropped in to see what she was upto once, if he hadn't been on guard the entire time.

The man looked at her with an unimpressed glance, and she turned up her nose at him, electing to move past the man and try to make it to her own door before he could speak again. But that was when something unthinkable happened. Yeram moved to block her way. He looked deep into her eyes with his deep black ones, stopping her dead in her tracks.

"Miss Ephars." He stated clearly, his voice reverberating with an ever so slight measure of power, "Your father has requested your presence."

Valeri's blood ran freezing cold. Her father had requested for her presence. That wasn't just an oddity, or an irregularity, it was some that was so rare that she'd only ever been called for by her father three times.

Each of which had ended very poorly.

"Why?" She asked, her voice a little quieter, though just as unhappy, "Answer me, Yeram."

The average looking, middle-aged man resisted for a moment, though in his own calculatedly precise way. She had no doubt that this entire interaction had been formulated like an equation before they even began speaking, the counter opposite to the wild unpredictability of interacting with Maximilian Avenforth.

"He has requested your presence due to your recent misconduct." The words were placed with an unerring precision, leaving Valeri feeling even colder, and even some confusion.

"You told him?" She asked, but the man didn't respond. She couldn't parse what that meant, even though she'd known the man most of her life, but her father had found out somehow, and it was almost irrelevant whether it'd been Yeram's mouth or not.

"When?" She said, the words almost demure.

"Now." He responded in kind, the closest thing that she'd get to empathy from the stone-cold killer.

"Fine, let me change." She said, trying to push through the man and into her room, but a soft hand placed itself against her shoulder, softer than she'd have thought an assassin would have.

"Now, Valeri."

She stared down the man, a spark of offense worming its way into her heart as she felt the soft hand burn against her shoulder. It wasn't hot, nor did it legitimately hurt, but it was such an oddity for the other man that her body revolted against its presence on the rough training clothing that she'd been wearing for weeks, something she'd trusted Uaele to acquire for her with a sizable finder's fee to compensate her.

"His office?" She squeaked out through her throat, clamped shut with the wave of nervousness. She watched the solemn man as he nodded, and then hesitated for a moment, however uselessly. She could barely think straight, but Yeram's coal black eyes straightened her mind as she turned to walk in the direction she most dreaded.

The sound of her own shoes against the stone floors echoed through the cold hallways, untouched by the morning sun and its warmth. She felt herself missing the midday sun, after having trained with a man that may as well have embodied its brightness and power. There was something about the sun that gave her energy and strength now, an unmistakeable confidence while it shone upon her dark skin.

She could hear the Shadow Walker behind her, though only because he wanted to be heard. The dark before the sun rose was likely the time when the man felt most confident, capable of appearing and disappearing at a moment's notice, using shadow itself as a cloak.

They turned a few corners, the corridors becoming even more lavish as Valeri travelled towards the most trafficked part of her home. The main entertaining areas, and then the most lavish parts of the home where her father eternally sat. His office. The two massive wooden doors, intricately carved to intimidate as many people that walked through them as they could, softening them with the effort of opening the doors in the first place.

Valeri wanted the hesitate at the boundary into the other man's demesne, but she didn't allow herself, easily pushing against the doors and opening them as she walked into the room powerfully. She turned from side to side, scanning the room that just about bled wealth, cases of extremely fine knickknacks that Valeri could personally care less about. However, the office lacked one vital part to its décor.

Her father wasn't in the room, behind the massive wooden desk that he'd had to tear out a wall of his office to insert. In that moment of suspicion, she felt the heavy blade on her back weigh even heavier as her mind turned to the blade at the first sign of something being off.

"To your left, daughter."

Valeri's blood turned to ice, the voice of her father radiating its unmistakable coldness, the callous sounding voice only held any beauty at all because of the accent that he'd inherited from his earliest years in Veringohs, which lilted and swayed like a sultry dance. To Valeri, however, the beautiful accent which many sought after for the possessor's singing voice, only sounded like cold anger.

There was very little beauty in it for her now, the sound of her mother's warm tone having long since faded from her mind, replaced by her father's cold indifference.

Valeri turned her head to her left, finding a bookcase that had been shifted to reveal a door, a bookcase on a set of rails to move out of the way and allow entry to the door that rested behind. Through the slight crack in the doorway, she could see a warm light within, no doubt a warm fire of some description. She didn't give Yeram and perceived satisfaction by turning back to him, so she just pushed through the door and entered her father's secret study, one that she'd never known existed.

She looked around the room briefly, finding it to be a far more functional room than the one she'd come from, a much smaller desk and shelves upon shelves packed with papers and folders. In just paper alone, the room was likely worth a small fortune, though selling pre-used paper was just about impossible. The room held no personal affects whatsoever, which fitted her father all too well.

The man himself sat behind the desk, his willowy form almost looking emaciated since she'd last seen him. The man, despite his stick thin limbs, was aging gracefully, even his greying hair only toed the line of being the odd grey hair on an otherwise youthful head of hair and looking more 'official' now that he had a sizeable streak at the sides of his head.

He was probably aged somewhere in his fifties, though she'd never cared to learn his exact age, nor did she specifically care to. Her father's skin was noticeably lighter than her own, like a dark tea that'd been diluted with a decent portion of milk. Her dark skin, one of the many signs of royalty in the kingdom of Veringohs had been inherited from her mother, though some of her facial features had been taken from her father instead.

"Valeri Ephars." Her father intoned, his face clenched in an emotion that made the otherwise warm room feel freezing cold with distaste and disappointment.

"Jitah Ephars." She shot back, matching her father's energy and denying to sit in the chair that had clearly been placed there for her to sit in, with the chair not at all matching with the surrounding décor.

Her father didn't even bother to comment on her snide remark, putting himself above her with a distant glare before he looked down to his papers and began to scratch at them with his inordinately expensive metal pen.

"It seems that learning the rapier was not enough for you?" His dry voice intoned, smothering her in the room that was made to feel claustrophobic, even though it wasn't anywhere near that small. Valeri glared at the man who had continued his work in the silence. She'd begged him years ago, through Yeram, to allow her to learn the rapier. He'd agreed, under the conditions that she'd have to do any other classes that he so pleased.

Of course, when she learned that she had a distinct distaste for her teachers, her father didn't let her renege on the agreement. As was his way.

"It wasn't. It never was, and you know that it wasn't." Valeri said, her voice only just keeping its levelness.

"You broke the terms to our agreement." The cold voice returned, though Valeri found herself oddly unaffected by the voice that had haunted many of her dreams. It was the voice that stood as the precursor to a decree. A singular word could instigate a crushing slew of consequences…

Yet, for the first time ever, Valeri could feel the heat of strength warm her muscles as she stood in the presence of her father. The man had once held an indomitable power over her, and in a way he still did. But why did she feel so different about it now? What had changed?

She waited for a moment, before a small lock on a door in her mind broke, blasting the door wide open and unleashing something in her that she would never had dared to allow out around her father.

Anger. Actual, full-fledged anger.

She reached behind her, unlatching a few little ties that held the scabbard to the harness she wore for the blade to rest across her back. With the few small movements, she grabbed the scabbard that dropped from her back as she undid the last tie.

Then, with a powerful slam she brought the blade down across the man's desk, the violence of the movement making the table shudder and creak under her strength. Her father, ever the stoic one, managed to keep his composure as the force of her movement blasted the papers off the table and to the floor, leaving her father with a spilt ink pot, which had managed to cover many of the documents that had remained on her father's table.

"That is what you care about?" She hissed, allowing anger to filter into her voice, "You care that I broke your stupid agreement?"

He looked up from his table to stare at her with a severe gaze, allowing her to see the first genuine emotion on her father's face for what may be the first time in her life. Her father's jaw, defined even with his slight frame, was clenched with an anger that mirrored her own.

"It is all I care about." He growled, his tone beyond furious, "If I did not, then the power I hold would be nothing more than the paper upon my desk that you've so disrespected. I would be careful, Valeri, my power certainly does not end in paper."


A/N: Sorry about the gap there, got a bit slack with my writing. Admittedly I felt a bit sick, but I've dealt with that enough that it shouldn't have been an issue. In other news, I ran a TTRPG session based off the setting of my other fiction, Fixture in Fate. It was run using a modified version of Weaverdice, funnily enough. It was pretty dope, tbh.

Thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; Dyson C., and TheBreaker. Huge thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun. Massive thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., and PortlandPhil!

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 98: Written in Blood

Valeri stood only half a metre from her father, the man that her mind had almost deified for most of her younger years.

He had been both terrifying and awe inspiring at the same time. He'd come from some wealth, but nowhere near the wealth that he and, by extension, Valeri now possessed. He'd turned what was effectively a small sum into a truly ludicrous amount of money, and he'd done it with economic tricks and contracts.

Contracts that he was extremely good at collecting on.

How else would he obtain the services of someone as extremely competent as Yeram, a Shadow Walker? One of the few that were professed to be the most dangerous assassins even outside of the Brauhm Empire. While she didn't necessarily believe that every Shadow Walker was as good as legend told, Yeram certainly wasn't a slacker.

Her father had no doubt put the man in paper bonds but left him with something that gave Yeram the incentive to stay by her side for far too many years. Her father was a master of doing that, of putting people in jail cells that they wouldn't mind living in for the rest of their life. In fact, he'd done so with herself.

All it had taken was her desire to learn the rapier for him to bind her with limitations. She couldn't be let to break from the little dollhouse that she'd been placed in; too useful an asset to be used and then pawned off when the opportune moment revealed itself. She'd learned all the skills that would allow for her father to plant her within another family or trade syndicate and have her control it from the inside out.

She'd followed that path, even after her mother's God appeared in her dreams for a moment, granting her the power of Might for no understandable reason at the time. But now she had come to understand what Tarania had been doing, what the random gesture had been—other than a desperate last bid on a horse before you'd gambled away all your money.

Tarania had cracked the veneer, showing Valeri that the surface behind the cell her father had put her in was just grey stone, rather than the warm and comfortable interior she'd believed it to be. It had been years ago when that had happened, after her mother had left. But since, the veneer had grown decrepit, unmaintained by her mind as she lusted for what laid outside the window of her cell.

Then Maximilian. Gods damned Maximilian. Or, if Rethi was to be believed, Demigod Maximilian. However that was even possible, not that she was going to naysay it. He'd stood right outside of the window of her cell, staring in at her with a stark grin against the miserable life she'd found herself locked in. He hadn't reached in and grabbed her, as such. Instead, he'd done the next best thing by loosening the bars and then given her the tools to work with, and a pressing need to do so.

Midday, the man she still considered her trainer, had given her even more complex tools, working directly with her until she was ready. She hadn't known what she was being prepared for, even if she was being trained to fight, but now that she stood before her father with genuine anger and spite roiling inside her gut, she realised that she really was ready.

She was ready to break from her cell, and use the steps that Maximilian was now teaching her to walk her own path, rather than be restrained to one that existed at her father's whim.

"Your paper is so important to you, father?" She snarled, towering over the much shorter man who'd spawned her, "Your little bonds and contracts do nothing against people who disregard the fallacy of your power. Your power only exists within its little bubble, and there it is almighty. But I'll have to warn you, Jitah Ephars, that I have a big fucking bubble-popper."

Valeri leant down to tap the scabbard of her massive claymore, burning holes in her father as she did so. The man's expression soured, finding himself at a junction in front of his suddenly assertive daughter. Of course, this is what he had feared, that her natural assertiveness that had served her so well in her learning of social techniques would one day extend further outside of where he wanted her.

"You wish to be rid of the Ephars name?" He asked darkly, still maintaining an equal footing with his daughter despite her obvious physical evolution since he'd last directly met with her, "To be rid of our legacy, our power, and our influence?"

Valeri barked harshly with laugher, "Our legacy father? Our power and influence? I am no fool, and I haven't been for a long time. You cannot preach to be about a legacy built on the lives of those born below our means. Do not pretend as if you haven't been buying and selling slaves that passed through Crossroads at a discount from Vahla, and taking the risk of carting them to the Brauhm Empire."

Valeri's words spat like acid, her eyes growing even angrier as she let the burning liquid of her most repressed emotions sear the inside of her throat and spray from her mouth. She could feel the beginnings of tears and sobs, but she took the rage that was overwhelming her into the mess of tears and clamped down on it, her voice going cold.

"I've known for years how you do business, father." The two members of the Ephars family stood opposite each other, both combating the other with their eyes and expressions, but Jitah was the first to sit in his chair, looking up at his daughter with no admission of defeat.

"Uaele, one of the many maids in this household, has been relieved of her duties. It was not in her job description to treat you as anything more than her mistress apparent." Jitah said, his voice just as cold as her own. Valeri could feel the cold shock of it, even if she'd felt the strange disturbance of routine earlier, but to imagine that woman, the woman who'd taken care of her like her own child, being anything other than venerated was offensive.

"Trying to pull the rug out from under me, Jitah?" Valeri snarled loudly, a renewed fire making its way into her voice like scorching magma. "You want me to walk back into your cage and watch you lock the door that much? I'm sorry but I've come to the sudden realisation that you simply aren't necessary."

The man's face creased with a slight shock before pulling back to his iron façade, "Not necessary, Valeri? What, do you believe that you could run the empire I've built? You believe that you can hold my position and keep the power that you've enjoyed your whole life?" The deriding words struck Valeri in the chest like she'd imagine Maximilian's hammer would, resonating and deep. But that was only until a flush of energy washed over her, reassuring her like a mighty hand pressing against her back.

"No. You aren't necessary. Men like you sit at the top, believing themselves to be sacrosanct, protected. But you aren't." Valeri's words resonated just a little too deeply, echoing impossibly off of the walls of the little room, Might flooding the room from her body, "You bleed just as well as the common man, and you die a hell of a lot faster."

She watched as her father's throat hitched, the subtle display of a snaking, genuine fear seeping into his mind. Valeri grabbed the sword from the table, finding the long and heavy metal piece far lighter than it normally would be. In fact, it was almost featherweight, though Valeri's enraged mind didn't amuse itself with the baffling change in weight for very long.

As Valeri placed the sheathed blade to rest on her shoulder, she felt another wave of Might echo forth from the body, more noticeable to her now than it had been before. The man, who she regretfully called her father, grinded his jaw ever so slightly before glaring at her in a way that only further made himself look weaker in her presence.

"Yeram, if you would enter the room." Jitah called, making a spike of fear shoot down Valeri's spine. Her father was calling her jailor, and she was almost certain that she wasn't able to win in a fight with the extraordinarily powerful man. She'd seen the man go toe-to-toe with Rethi, before he'd glowed so bright that he may as well have been the sun.

Valeri heard the door click, though the sound was so precise that she couldn't help but think that Yeram had intentionally made the noise as he'd opened the door. With a few silent steps, Yeram stood just off to the side of Jitah's desk, head bowed slightly in a servile stance. However, Valeri did take note of one thing.

Yeram did not move to stand close to her father, or close to her. To both of the Ephars, trained extensively in the insanity that was politics, they immediately understood what Yeram was doing. Jitah, who had done so much as call the master assassin and shadow shifter into the room, did his best to not show the pang of sour that bloomed within his chest.

"Sir?" The Shadow Walker that Jitah had spent an inordinate amount of money and time procuring stated simply. Yeram's voice remained purely neutral, just the way it had been for the countless hours that he'd spent watching over Valeri as a child. The same way that he'd spoken in those countless mundane conversations that she'd tried to rope the stoic man into each and every day.

The fear that had shot down her spine began to ease, and then finally dissipate before it had ever reached her gut the way that true fear did. Instead, it changed into a sort of calm, and as she looked back over to her father, she began to wonder what he could possibly offer the Shadow Walker who'd played as her minder and protector for so many years. What would he be able to offer that could make the man sway towards Jitah's control once more?

"Well, father. It seems that the power of your contracts are beginning to wane." She said, her voice only just disguising her snide snarl that she desperately wanted to show. Her father looked up towards the Shadow Walker, meeting the eyes of the middle-aged man who'd served under him for at fifteen some years now.

Jitah had realised that he had erred in his judgement, when his eyes met with the other man's. They weren't filled with fury, hardly something that inflammatory, but instead as if he were looking at a stranger, coldly and with an exactingly critical eye. In but a moment Jitah had gone from being a master that Yeram had been faithful to for years, to just a stranger.

And it was all because he'd left the man to protect his daughter. Or, more accurately, to protect his investment.

Jitah leaned back in his chair, regarding his daughter and the man that did the equivalent of betraying him, if only in the smallest gesture. Was Jitah convinced that the man felt a genuine affection for his daughter? Not entirely, not after what information he'd procured on the Shadow Walkers. But there was clearly something that she could offer that he could not, but what that was…

"Ah." Jitah said letting his muscles relax as his mind came to an understanding, "It's the boy, isn't it? Maximilian Avenforth." Jitah's eyes never left Yeram's dark irises, but Valeri turned her own gaze towards the Shadow Walker as well, questioning the man lightly.

"No, it is not." Yeram responded, and even with the neutrality his voice was accustomed to, Valeri could still hear the slight distaste in it as he talked about the veritable Demigod, "But it will suffice for brevity, sir."

"For brevity?" Jitah responded coolly, "You come here with split alliances, yet you don't do your old master the kindness of telling him what the other party's offer is?" The two men stared at each other for a moment before Yeram let his posture relax out of the intensely formal stance he had taken since Valeri could remember.

The man hummed slightly as he took off the coat of a head servant and threw it down onto the table between them, then rolling up the sleeves of his white dress shirt beneath, displaying the powerful arms that were covered in horrifying and disfiguring scars.

"Well you see," he responded, the neutrality slowly evaporating from his voice and transforming it into the quiet tolling of a bell in the distance, "you have no counteroffer, Jitah Ephars."

"I'm not sure that I've ever been told that there was no offer that I could make, Yeram."

"Is that so?" Yeram spoke, his voice lowering to the point where it drowned out Valeri's echoes of Might, then somehow dipping even lower below that still, "Would you be able to declare war on the Brauhm Empire and the Church of Daylight?"

Valeri's eyes flew wide open, then turning towards her father whose expression warped with such violent speed that she could hardly recognise the man in front of her. Jitah Ephars, for the first time in many, many years, was truly and completely shocked.

"Have you any idea the absolute ruin that'd follow after that proclamation? The Brauhm Empire is no mere border city." His eyes wandered from the man to eye his daughter in her moment of shocked weakness, "Are you willing to do that, Valeri? Sacrifice everything for whatever dream you've cooked up in your mind?"

There was a long moment of pause in the atmosphere, and for just half of that, Valeri found herself genuinely unsure. She hadn't known of this, about this war that Yeram desired. Nor did she know why or how they were supposed to do that. Yet…

"Yes." She said, her voice filled with a supreme wave of Might, her skin suddenly glowing with power, looking as if obsidian had a bronze light shining through. "I trust him, as much as I might dislike who and what he is. If it is a war that he desires, I am certain that his reasoning is sufficient."

The words were surer than she felt internally, but as she said them, she realised how true they were to her. Yeram was a man who she felt she could trust, even after she'd learnt just the surface of his secrets. She hated that the kind, if stoic man that she'd known through her childhood had to be such a monster underneath, but… had he ever been anything but himself, even still?

"What reasoning might that be, oh Shadow Walker?" Jitah Ephars snarled as he realised that he was impotent here, having lost any power he had over the two others in this room. Without a word, Yeram leaned over the table, placing his mouth awfully close to the Jitah's ear and whispering a collection of words that Valeri couldn't quite make out.

But she could see the horror dawn on her father's face. That moment was enough to distract her from the black shadow that had been leaking from underneath Yeram's clothing, snapping outwards and lashing at her father's throat without a single sound. The dark, cloying mass of shadows lingered around the man's neck for a moment as Jitah's face seized into an expression of extreme pain, then dulling into something that looked more like a doll than a human expression.

Valeri couldn't quite understand what was happening, but as Yeram's darkness pulled away from her father's neck, she found herself staring at a neatly cut hole in the man's throat, which only then flooded the front of his clothing with crimson blood.

The shock was immediate, but Valeri didn't have a moment of time before the murderer of her father turned his dark eyes to meet hers.

"Jitah Ephars has been killed." He intoned, filling the room with finality, "Call the Officials."


A/N: Shit meet fan.

Thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; Dyson C., and TheBreaker. Huge thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun. Massive thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., and PortlandPhil!

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 99: Sacrificial

Gravity.

That seemed to be the theme of my life, as of late. It'd almost been calm for a while there, despite my business. Sure, I'd spent most of my hours in a day working on something, progressing towards some goal or another, but they just didn't seem quite real. In the same way as someone would talk about how painful an injury was, but until you were the one who was suffering through that pain it just had no weight to it.

Hence, 'Gravity'. It'd been quite a few days now, since a storm had kicked up, and now I was beginning to see the might of Crossroads that had been resting on their laurels this whole time. The Officials were on the move, or the guard if you weren't a fan of the special name they'd given themselves.

Men, and the odd woman, dressed in mostly blue and white clothing now roamed the streets with a vigour that hadn't been present before. It was staged as a 'crackdown' on crime within the lesser districts, to the rich of Crossroads of course. The poor weren't so disillusioned, however. They knew that it was a punishment for the assassination of a bigwig.

Most of them wouldn't recognise the name Jitah Ephars, probably because he owned the companies that owned the businesses that people would actually recognise. However, the Ephars name was influential enough that the few people in the lower echelons who did know, were able to tell everyone else what was going on.

Before long, it became obvious who they were targeting. The Reptilia population was being placed under heavy scrutiny, and while that might immediately call upon ideas of prejudice, it was actually mostly because Shed had never sold out to the Officials. Mostly.

Haedar Kout had long since sold out his little gang to the Officials. And while it was a common enough rumour, the man's gang had members who'd been indoctrinated since early childhood, rising through the ranks since Kout himself had formed his group in his own late adolescence. It was a little genius, really, and the man might be horrifically racist and probably every other '-ist' you could list that wasn't any good, but he clearly knew what he was doing.

Rumour also says that Haedar has more than just sold out, but that he has a legitimate link into the Officials and holds more power than his little gang would imply. I, for one, wouldn't be surprised by that much.

The Officials were going after anything they deemed to be gang activity, or crime in general, which had them patrolling Reptilia populated neighbourhoods like flies. They imprisoned a stunning number of clearly innocent people per day, something that had Tek, Tenra, and Gehne a little worried. Thankfully, all of them were capable enough to keep away from the Officials.

Tenra seemed to be the weakest link in the Skinned Lizard's main group, being physically lesser in some way or another to the rest of the group asides from Venn, who was more transient than the rest. But even so, he'd managed to get into a scuffle with about five or six Officials trying to arrest a family of Reptilia without so much as a scratch on his person. Impressive, to say the least.

Even still, I was left with a sinking feeling in my gut as I saw the cogs turn just as I had thought that they might. I was no masterminding genius, and most of my plan I had made up on the fly, like any good plan, but I could predict enough of what was happening for it to be sad when it did happen. In a way, because I saw it coming, it almost felt as if I were the perpetrator of the people's woes.

Sure, it didn't make that much logical sense, especially when you accounted for the fact that I was working on a solution since before it even began. But still I was left with that horrible emotion in my gut.

The others who surrounded me did not help. The downsides of being an empath to the degree that I am, I guess. My empathic abilities are effectively only growing stronger each and every time I use them, and that leads to me having a clearer understanding of someone's emotions. It also means that I can feel them too. Empathy, it's in the name.

Rethi had killed someone. I could feel the guilt and self-hatred, the disgust and conflicting righteousness. He was working with Tek, and each time he did so I could see feel the death leaking from Tek's emotions, bloodlust if we were relating it back to something I was more conceptually familiar with.

Valeri was within her room, a room she had rented in the Skinned Lizard for an indeterminant stay. She felt similarly to Rethi in many ways, but there was a strange mixture of mourning and hating that she was mourning all at once. I could sometimes feel the distinctively cold and harsh emotions of Yeram enter, the man making it all the way to the door of Valeri's room or window, but never taking the last step of calling out to the girl within.

Gehne was simply conflicted and confused, angry in a way too. She knew that I had something to do with the way things were going, especially with the timing being just too convenient. And she was right, in a roundabout way, though she'd not settled for speculation very long. Instead, she had come to seek answers from the source.

I sat atop the roof, a place that I'd found myself enjoying more as of late. It wasn't that it was a position of power, but one that reminded me just how big the game I was playing actually was, and who it involved. I'm not sure that the rooftops held that much sentimental value to the Gek woman, but as she pulled herself over the edge of the roof—her blue-skinned hand glistening slightly in the moonlight—I let my eyes connect with hers as she appeared in complete silence, startling her slightly.

"Good evening." I said quietly, though it was far past the evening hours. She gave up on stealth hesitantly and walked towards me with some gusto, reinforced with the teachings of the Sharah that I had continued to supply her despite Valeri's absence from training. She was actually picking up on much of the initial steps quicker than I had, relative to hours spent. It was impressive, but she was still looking at it too much like a set of rigid movements, rather than the artform it really represented.

"What did you do?" She asked bluntly, and I raised a subtle brow at her bluntness. It was a good sign, in my book. I would rather a blunt compatriot than one willing to pull the wool over my eyes in moments like these.

"I didn't do anything, not directly." I said, but before she could display her displeasure with the answer I continued, "But I knew that something like it would happen. Jitah Ephars was likely going to end up dead for this whole thing to work, or at least absurdly willing to cooperate with our goals. It seems that he was not."

"You still orchestrated this! I know people that have been put into prisons for this; they think it was Shed." She growled lightly, keeping her voice down but still retaining the oddly intimidating vibration in her voice.

"They might, but it's probably just a reason to try go after him. They probably know that it wasn't Shed, at least the higher-ups would know that. They just don't want to entertain the idea that it was anything else." I kept my tone light, though not flippant. The ease in my tone seemed to sooth the woman's intensity, and while it wasn't quite anger, it was close enough to be blinding. It was possibly Gehne's largest flaw, whether or not she knew it or not, with both this intensity and fear so easily able to cloud her perception and narrow it so severely.

"Shed doesn't do assassinations." She said heavily, though I just shrugged at the new information.

"That's great, I'll just go tell them that they're going after the wrong guy, and just because he's capable of getting in basically wherever he wants without detection doesn't mean that he would abuse it for the right amount of money." I gave her a dry look, and she grimaced lightly. She knew as well as I that it was an impossible thing to convince someone of. If you could then people will always think that you would.

"Why'd you let this happen, then? Even if it wasn't you who did it, wouldn't it cause less damage if you did it quietly?" The words, despite being abrasive and searching, were actually said quite softly. I couldn't be perfectly sure still, but I think that she held a strange trust in me. I hadn't exactly shown her my most trustworthy side, though she was probably one of the few outside of my main cohort that knew of my exact origins, whether she believed it wholly or not.

"If it happens silently, Gehne, then it may as well not happen at all." I said, spreading my arms out wide to encapsulate the city within my arms, "This isn't a grab for power that I'm going for. I could care less about the political power I could gain here. What matters is that I put those I believe will do their best in positions where they can do that."

"You still haven't answered." She hissed stubbornly, her bright eyes flashing in the dull light of night that I still called moonlight habitually, "You are skirting around the question like the snake you are. Why did you let it happen?"

I gently tapped at my knee in a rhythm that not even my conscious mind cared to know. She was right, honestly. I was skirting the issue, for good reasons and bad. Good reason is that basically anything I said about my movements and plans were beyond sensitive information. It was information that was absurdly valuable right now and, if Gehne so wished, she could sell it and skip out of town like nothing else.

Of course, that wasn't going to happen. Gehne just wouldn't, and I could tell that from being around her for long enough to know the majority of her emotional states at rest. Emotions that would lead to that just weren't in her repertoire, so that got rid of that easy motivation.

The bad reason that I was holding that information from her was simple. I didn't like that I felt I had to make the decision to use someone's death as an inciting incident, one that would lead to at least a few deaths at the hands of Officials, and one that would spell more still in the future. In fact, while Valeri might feel guilty for her part in her father's death, in some ways it was far more my fault that he had to die.

"You know, back on Earth we learnt a lot about what sacrifice meant." The words I spoke were casual, but they held a gripping interest for Gehne. Any mention of Earth had the woman secretly as excited as Rethi tended to be about the topic. "There were wars and such on a scale that can likely match the large wars in Orisis' past, though I don't know for sure. What I do know is that generations suffered for those choices that were made, and the sacrifices it took to stop the effects of them lasted even longer."

I looked over the city using my senses to the best of my ability and overseeing the world around me as it changed, fear and anger spreading like a disease. It was a disease that I had let loose, and it hurt even as it infected more and more people, ultimately in service of the goals that I held for this little city.

"When I grew a little older, probably in my mid teenage years, I started to realise just how much things were affected by those events that had happened lifetimes ago. It had affected those that were originally involved, then their children, then their children's children. It seemed so silly that there would be that much of an effect, that it wouldn't have just stopped after the first generation.

"So then I started to look at the world in a way that… adjusted for that. I let myself contemplate the long string of events that seemed to lead to the way people interact, the way they think and feel, how they eat, their humour, their…" I trailed off for a moment, finalising the thought with the allusion to the endless list that could be made, "I began to see the beginnings of them, the actions that led to events that led to more actions, and here is no different."

Gehne looked at me quizzically, trying to parse the jumble of words and thoughts that never quite reached to the heart of the issue, my hand shying away from the words I knew rested there. The blue skinned woman tried to keep her features harsh, but I think she realised that she had found herself poking at a raw wound of mine. She struggled, but she managed to formulate at least a few words into a question, an important, cutting question.

"What do you see, then?" I closed my eyes against the exposure that the words made me feel, practically demanding my full honesty. I could feel the cool breeze across my skin, my own emotions projecting upon them and making them almost desolate in the way that they dragged on my clothes. Before long, I forced myself to open my eyes and sigh deeply.

"In five years, the Brauhm Empire would truly have its hooks in Crossroads, their money will have corrupted everything by then. Not long after, slaves would start to be taken from Crossroad's population, and the rich would get richer while destitution became death and slavery. In ten years, the Empire would rush in as 'saviours' and cull the rich and 'reform' Crossroads. The Empire would control it all, and it will fall just as fantastically as Vahla had." I chuckled wryly at the fear that had wormed its way from her heart and into her eyes.

"Instead of watching that happen, I decided to kick start it when we're strongest…" I looked down at my hands, the wry smile that had made it to my face had soured into a horrible thing, I could tell, "and hopefully, just maybe, the suffering wouldn't be as bad this way. Otherwise, the blood is on my hands, Gehne."


A/N: Heya! A new patron after so long going dry haha, thanks Joseph! Hope you're enjoying Also, going to try and be consistent for a bit, though I'm working on some stuff behind the scenes so bear with me a bit. Hopefully it'll pay off for both of us!

Thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; Dyson C., and TheBreaker! Huge thanks to my 15-dollar Patrons; Jokarun, and Joseph! Massive thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., and PortlandPhil!

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 100: Cogs

As more days passed, I was thankful that the whole situation wasn't entirely out of my hands.

I had orchestrated the vague happenings that led us to where Crossroads now sat politically, with the faceless bigwigs simultaneously taking advantage of the situation to further their own political agendas, and also afraid that they were next. There were ideas on who had done it, and why, but when you were working with assassins good enough to kill a high-ranking merchant with clear ties to the Officials, then you weren't going to get answers to easily.

The Officials had sent a high-ranking officer to the Skinned Lizard while seeking Valeri, who had continued to stay as a resident in one of the many rooms that the inn had open. It was clear enough that they were suspicious of her activity around that time, but with the story that she had prepared herself, just about as ironclad as you could make it, they really had nothing to work with.

It also didn't hurt that Valeri was the heir apparent, and there was no one who had the legal merit to question it. Valeri was, for all intents and purposes, the head of the Ephars family and the empire that her father had built. There wasn't much you could question about the woman when she had the money on hand to crush your life in any way she so pleased.

However, I wasn't just focusing on Valeri while she wallowed in her depression. That would be an egregious waste of time. Instead, I spent my time in keeping up with old friends. Two sets of old friends, to be exact.

Gehne and Lauka, and the flamboyant and powerful Lucae Milna and his cohort of connections.

Gehne wasn't necessarily aware of Lauka's existence, but I had changed that after the cogs began to turn. There was no time to allow them to form a true bond of any sort, something that I'd had to have cultivated weeks before in lieu of other important things. I decided to trust them both with a degree of professionalism, that they would work together smoothly.

Lucae Milna was a different beast altogether. We had only truly had one meeting, one that had ended with me asking about the Shadow Walkers, that had then led me to find more about them from Illias Traniel, the man who I'd effectively made into my own pawn. He was more from Valeri's world, but she was out of commission for at least a little while, so he was quickly becoming my best option.

I almost didn't want to drag Lucae into this, nor those that he surrounded himself with, but it was important that I did. He might hide himself and the little community he'd cultivated away in his estate, but the power that he held in the public's eyes was almost unrivalled in comparison to the other big wigs of his size. The Milna family, while not economically as powerful as the Ephars family, were significantly more so politically. This was something that Jitah Ephars was clearly trying to change with his daughter.

I had sent Gehne to Lauka's home, notifying the other woman that she'd need to brief her on the current tensions in Shed's gang. They'd need to actually start planning what they were going to do and how they were going to do it, then after that I would monitor their decisions and see what else could be done. I wasn't as well versed in the inner workings of a gang as they both were, with the higher-class politics making more inherent sense to me.

Either way, I'm almost entirely certain that Lucae was not expecting to have a servant be sent by the doorman to tell him that one Maximilian Avenforth had appeared at his grandiose door in the mid-morning. I had been placed inside of a well-furnished waiting room in the meantime and when the door had swung open to reveal a tamely dressed Lucae, though not without colourful flair, the shocked expression on his face was worth the trip alone.

"Well, I never!" The man exclaimed exuberantly, straightening out the suit which was closer to the current fashion than my own, though I could see some distinct similarities between my own suit design and his, "The ghost that had disappeared as quickly as he had appeared within my own home, no less! I believe that there are quite a few noblewomen asking after you." He winked a hazel eye gratuitously, though I could feel the relief that laid under the surface.

"You can't get rid of me so easily, Lucae." I snarked, grinning at the man as he pulled me from the seat, and gave me a quick hug before leading me out of the room and down a short hallway to a set of double doors which opened into what I imagine is his personal study.

"Well, your sudden disappearance had me worried, I won't lie." He said, his voice shifting to become instantly more serious as the door to his study closed, "It had me thinking you'd found yourself in a situation you couldn't handle on my information."

"I'll have to assure you that there aren't many situations I can't handle, Lucae." He gestured me to a comfortable chair while he rounded the desk and sat in his own, chuckling lightly against his more serious tone.

"I'm coming to believe you, Maximilian. Especially assuming that you've been successful in your investigation?" I grinned, contrasting myself with his seriousness, trying to give the man an idea of how little danger I was actually in.

"More than successful, Lucae. I managed to… make some connections." I smiled slyly as the man's face went sheet white, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed the information heavily.

"You talked with one? A Shadow Walker?" He said incredulously, some doubt even worming its way into his mind. The idea was so incomprehensible that he couldn't even fathom it being a reality.

"Not just talked, Lucae." I said lightly, and then I set back and watched the show begin.

The thing about having an empathic ability on par with my own was that you could almost see someone thinking. Not their exact thoughts, but a surprising amount of emotion was linked with words and ideas inextricably, and 'thinking coldly' was a skill that very few cared to develop and was more likely to be a coincidence that they were capable of it rather than trained in it.

As such, Lucae's emotional sphere lit up like a heat map. The emotions almost jumped out at me like experiences, colours, smells, and sounds, a facet of my empathy that I had neglected because of the sheer time investment that I'd need to train in it. The man in front of me was far, far more intelligent than he even seemed to give himself credit for, and I was just waiting for the words to come out of his mouth that would confirm his brilliance.

"Jitah Ephars." He said, and immediately I felt a wave of gratification flood over me as my hunch proved itself correct, "You were behind that, you had him assassinated."

"So close, yet so far. But for now, that is more than enough to prove to me that you're important here, Lucae." I said softly, losing the snark and exchanging it for a soft smile. Lucae looked at me with a refreshed view, and while it definitely wasn't fearful, it also wasn't warm and happy. Such was the way of the revolution, I suppose.

"You're wrapping me up in this plan of yours no matter what I say, aren't you?" He whispered defeatedly, leaning back in his chair when I nodded in the affirmative.

"Unfortunately." I apologised, expression heavy with a sad smile, "But, I don't think you'll be so against the idea of wresting power from those that sit atop Crossroad's political strata."

"To what end?" He responded, his voice more analytical than I'd ever hear before, a direct view of his most intelligent side in his well-taken-care-of complexion.

"Simple, to provide those who live within Crossroads a proper place of security and comfort, without fear of falling to the same depravities that Vahla fell to or being subsumed by the banner of the Sun God to the north." I shrugged, leaving it at that. The motive was just that, simple and understandable. It was just something that didn't lend itself to easy execution.

"You speak a big game, Maximilian, and I'm starting to think that wagering on your success is a good bet." He said, his voice dangerously cutthroat, just like you'd expect from the son of one of the most politically powerful men in Crossroads. I tilted my head to the side, feigning thought for a moment in an attempt to play the game.

"I do, and I am more than confident in my own wager, Lucae. What is really more important here…" I paused for effect, looking the man in the eye with a grin, "is whether you're willing to compete with your father and overthrow him to begin a new age in the political elite of Crossroads."

The silence hung between us for a good minute, the other man's mind a whirr of emotion and calculation. I let it all happen, absolutely confident in the man's answer, and I was only confirmed in my confidence when a small smile began to grow exponentially on the usually flamboyant man's face. It was an expression of daring and cunning, a predator's smile.

"It seems that I'll be paying my dear old dad a visit. Now, tell me, what exactly are you planning, dear?"

I grinned to match the man, wolfish and filled to the brim with an amusement you could only truly share with someone else just as cheeky as yourself.

"Oh, nothing that special…"

---

​

It was in the darkness of night that Rethi managed to get both himself and his girlfriend home to the Skinned Lizard. The inn had long since quieted down to nothing, leaving the empty building open for them to enter, despite both of them still wearing the masks they donned to work in.

They'd returned to work shortly after that incident, continuing through the streets to heal those that needed it. And boy did they need it. Alena had seen a massive increase in the sheer amount of Reptilia that needed to be seen, with anything from an injury from a thrown stone, to a blade wound. It was frankly terrifying to see how quickly the tenuous peace had devolved and unravelled into whatever it currently was.

The really terrifying thing, however, was the implications for this. Rethi had no doubt that Max had been involved with what was happening, one way or another. Rethi was hardly willing to question Max's goals and plans, but when the effect of whatever he was doing was so apparent to him, it made it difficult to even comprehend what would be worth this much suffering.

Rethi, while a smart kid, was smart enough to know that even if Maximilian were to sit down and explain his every idea he would still be confused and require it to be explained many times over. Simply put, Rethi's understanding of grand scale social politics was minimal at best, and he didn't quite have the innate gift for it that Maximilian seemed to hold.

But it was hard to ignore when things right in front of you were starkly changed by what he knew to be his master's actions, or as close to them as they could be.

Alena murmured something, trudging her way to their bed while hiding away the mask in her cloak. Rethi watched her go, somewhat bitterly. He was watching the world affect her so much more now, and it was hard to watch, but it was important to her, so it was important to him. He let her go, letting her sleep as much as she could before she inevitably woke up in cold sweats within six hours.

He was about to make his own way upstairs, though to a separate room to give her some peace, when a gruff voice called out to him in the silent dining floor.

"Hey kid," Tek's voice said, boomingly loud even with the man controlling his volume, "can you take this up to Valeri's room for me? She didn't eat dinner and she didn't eat lunch either."

Rethi adjusted to the other man's presence quickly, and then taking off the iron mask that he'd left on, not to hide his Midday identity, but really more out of politeness. Rethi, looked over at the man who peaked out of the service window, staring at him with a questioning, slitted eye. Rethi walked over wordlessly and found a bowl of hot stew sitting on a wooden tray being offered to him by the man, and he nodded easily, which the other man seemed to appreciate as he left the kitchen moments after to assumably go to sleep.

Rethi picked up the surprisingly heavy tray and began to walk up the stairs to the rooms, then further down a long hall where Valeri's door sat, almost the furthest down the hall you could be. Rethi easily held the tray with one hand as he knocked gently, and then a little harder after a moment of non-responsive silence.

After another few moments, he heard the scuffing of a foot on the wooden floorboards, then a slight shift as the door's lock clicked and the door gently swung open enough for him to see the tall, dark-skinned woman who'd been holing herself up in the room for days.

"Food." He said simply, offering her the tray, and after a moment of looking at it with her sad eyes, she opened the door to grab it, and then simply stood there, staring at Rethi. Rethi almost turned and simply left to his room for the night, but when he looked deeper into her expression, weary and depressed, he sighed deeply, wondering if his master had foreseen such an encounter.

"Do you… need someone to talk to?" He asked, and before he knew it, he'd signed himself up for one heavy conversation.


A/N: Aaah, chapter 100! That's got two zeroes, see? That's kinda neat, right? Also, another Patron; thank you Victor for your support!

Thanks to my 5-dollar Patron; Leon E. Large thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; Dyson C., TheBreaker, and Victor! Huge thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! Massive thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., Joseph, and PortlandPhil!

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 101: Casual

Rethi sat on the floor of Valeri's room, back pressed up against the side of the girl's bed, head resting gently against the edge of the padded mattress.

Valeri herself had stayed upon the bed itself, having finished the food that he'd brought hours ago. Since then, they'd simply talked and talked. Before this, he'd known the girl as a slightly haughty and overconfident rich kid, living out a fantasy of training to be a fighter. She'd known him as the gruff and almost heartless trainer, Midday, a man who held power beyond even her current comprehension.

They'd both known parts of who the other person was. Rethi had come to know her as she nervously confronted her own future in the microcosm of combat training, and Valeri coming to know Rethi in his bitterness while he tried to piece together his dawning understanding that he may never truly know exactly why his master might tell him to do something.

As they had talked, only as Rethi and Valeri with no pretence, they had come to find their lived experiences as almost entirely different. A pauper and a princess, a warrior and a socialite, two dichotomous lives standing independent from each other entirely. There was almost nothing that they had in common, not in their personality or in the way they had both been once.

And that was a powerful distinction. The way that they had both been once. Rethi had once been a beggar, and Valeri had once been a dove trapped within a cage, but now they were far more than just that. Rethi was now a Divine Warrior, inexperienced in legitimate combat as he may be, and Valeri had broken from her cage and was now taking her first, rather hesitant steps into the wide world beyond the gilded bars.

So what gave them all that they had in common? Well, that was an easy question to answer.

Maximilian, damned, Avenforth.

It was almost a little scary just how much Maximilian had influenced in Crossroads already, and just how far reaching the effects of his actions were. At the very least, he'd converted Valeri into someone willing to act for the sake of the people, even if that went against her own self-preservation and the fear that she'd held for her father for her entire life.

But Rethi knew that it was more than that. Max had changed him severely as well and going out with Alena to protect her while she healed countless people with a power many were terrified of, Alena herself included. The way that the Skinned Lizard had changed, the people within it acting with more decisiveness to desperately try and match the effort that the other man was putting forwards.

It was likely only the surface of what he was doing, with Rethi not actually being privy to much more than Maximilian's basic explanations. The change in the Officials and their violence against the Reptilia population became clearer to Rethi as he had talked with Valeri, her understanding of that whole political situation was far more comprehensive than he'd have assumed of the girl.

"–so the Council of Justice have been going after Shed and his little gang for years, but the more 'moderate' parties on the Council have been holding back against a majority vote just slightly. But, after my father was…" she stopped for a moment, her expression dropping slightly, "assassinated, it was easy for the pro-gang crackdown members to convince the Council to overturn past decisions and go after Shed's gang under that assumption."

Rethi sat in the uncomfortable position he was in on the floor, finding himself too lazy to move, unable to actually look the woman in the eyes as he contemplated a strange sense of déjà vu. It took him a moment of silence to pin the feeling on the donkey.

"You know, you kinda sound like Max when you talk like that." There was a long, drawn out silence after his words which almost made him move from his strange position, but before he could, he was hit on the head by what could only be a pillow.

"Hey!" She exclaimed loudly, her voice scandalised, before simmering down to a confused tone, "I don't know if that's a compliment or an insult."

Rethi laughed deeply, though keeping himself quieter than the girl had been, subtly reminding her that it was the middle of the night and other patrons—the few that they were—are well and truly sleeping by now. They both quieted down, falling into a more contemplative atmosphere.

"I don't really know either." Rethi said, clarifying himself, "Maybe that's just what a politician sounds like, and Max just talks that way. But at least you both sound honest when you're talking."

"Only sound?" Valeri said, mock offense in her tone, "I'll have you know that I'm always honest!" Though Rethi just snorted at that, rolling his eyes even though she couldn't see them.

"Yeah. When you're telling the truth, or at least being honest about not telling the whole truth, it's pretty obvious. Max is the same, it's not like he hadn't been deceptive and downright manipulative in the past, but even when it's happening you can tell that it isn't entirely honest. At least you know that he's obfuscating the truth, or bending it in those moments."

"Why would that matter, though?" Valeri asked gently, "Wouldn't that make him just as bad as anyone else with a little bit of charisma and a goal, manipulating their way for their own ends?"

Rethi couldn't help himself as he barked out a laugh, the horrifically uneven comparison of Maximilian against a someone with a 'little bit of charisma' being actively hilarious. Though, the question was thought provoking.

Max's approach to things, while backed with what Rethi believed to be a strong moral compass and code, was inherently grey. You couldn't quite call it an evil approach, though it could certainly be used for evil reasons, but it paled in comparison to the option of simply going on a mass slaughter and 'solving' your problems that way.

However, it wasn't a totally morally upstanding approach either, and Rethi would be more likely to attribute that to what Alena was doing, offering her whole support to the communities affected most and allowing them to strive for a better future. Problem is that approach takes way more time.

Time was a resource that they didn't have much of, and this little city was almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. Maximilian putting forth the effort to fix Crossroads, or do the best he could, was already way underutilising his abilities. By now, they could have easily been within the Brauhm Empire and trying to hinder their incredibly expansionist ideology, maybe even try to correct some of the worst parts of their society as it is.

But they had already spent months here, before the action began and the change started happening in front of their eyes. It was scary, to see the city go from a tense silence straight into what was effectively a civil war on its own populace, though still restricted to some degree.

"I don't know, to be honest." Rethi said, laughing at his own insufficient answer, "Sure, his methods are less than typically moral, but my bright idea was to just run around the place and chop the heads off of all the important people and 'fix' it."

Rethi could just about feel the mortification on the girl's dark complexion, making him chuckle further.

"My God, who taught you that you could solve problems that way?" She groaned, almost amused by the sheer insanity of Rethi's old idea.

"That's just the common belief. Someone's causing lots of problems? Kill them. That's what they do in small towns, and while I never saw someone be killed, I know that someone was stoned for being unfaithful with another farmer's wife." He could hear the squeaking in Valeri's voice before she managed to collect herself enough to reply.

"No, I guess that's fair. I really shouldn't be the one to talk, being witness to my own father's death."

There was a cool breeze of silence between the two after she said those words. It wasn't as if they had just slipped out, they were a tacit confirmation of Rethi's theory that she'd been involved with her father's assassination. If she was involved, then Yeram and Maximilian were likely involved as well, somehow.

"Maybe not, but there was more at play there than infidelity, Valeri." He said, finding the spot in his throat that he could pull Midday's voice from, an almost natural voice for him now that he'd used it so much. "It probably didn't help that Maximilian was searching for an outcome like that."

"Maybe," she said immediately, her voice a little more confident than it had been when she'd started with the topic, "but regardless of what Max had to do with how Yeram or I acted, the decision was made independently from him. While I certainly don't like that I could attribute part of the reason of my father's death to him, it was far from the main part."

They sat there, bathing in the words that'd been said, both of them trying to scabble together ideas and understandings to formulate into a half reasonable sentence, but they continually failed. Rethi must have opened his mouth to speak five times before a sound came out on the sixth, a random idea from the very base of his skull somehow bubbling to the surface.

"Do you like him?" Rethi asked, the curious thought slipping through his lips as his mind cackled evilly while the rest of his conscience caught up to what he'd just said. He was about to apologise for the question, going way over the comfort line that they'd quietly established between them, but when Rethi realised that she wasn't answering the question with a scandalised tone…

"Well, I mean…" She said, drawing out the words hesitantly, making Rethi's neck go slack and allow him to turn his face into the side of the mattress, muffling his voice.

"Oh Gods," Rethi groaned, "please don't tell me. It's so gross."

"Gross?" She exclaimed, embarrassment layered thickly in her voice, "You're the one in a teenage relationship! I'm hardly gross."

"Ew, ew," Rethi continued to whine, a mix between actual revulsion and mocking, "no way, it's so much worse than me and Alena."

"Oh, shut it!" She shot back, hitting the top of his head with her pillow once again, "You're already with someone, how are you so childish about this stuff? At least be consistently childish!"

"But it's, like…" Rethi struggled for a moment, trying to come up with a reason for the disgust in his stomach, "it's like you're going after my older brother or something. It's just gross!"

"Boys." Valeri decreed after a long moment, shaking her head imperiously, as if she'd judged him guilty of a severe crime. Though Rethi just snorted powerfully, actually moving from his uncomfortable spot to turn and look at the woman.

"Oh, so I guess you wouldn't find it weird at all if, say, Gehne was to go after Yeram?"

The imperious expression on the woman's face went from placid to entirely horrified within a split second, warping into a manifestation of disgust so severe that it made Rethi burst into forceful laughter, falling back onto the wood floor behind him with a thump. He tried desperately to keep his voice down, but the expression on her powerful features was just so hilariously extreme that he couldn't even restrict himself.

After a while of laughter, which Valeri eventually joined in on, he was pushed out of the room under the concern that it would become way too late, and that they'd end up getting a knock on the door from Tek asking them to shut up.

Rethi managed to walk down the hallway, only chuckling to himself lightly, trying to forget the absurd expression on the woman's face. He passed by the room that Alena was sleeping in, and instead walked into one of the other rooms that they'd rented, quickly throwing off much of his clothes and diving into the bed, allowing the soft bed to comfort his body and mind.

He no longer needed sleep, but he had come to realise how impressive Max's willpower was, to deny himself sleep altogether until his mind and body truly got used to the new reality, he was forcing it through. Rethi had managed to do so with middling success, but he always ended up taking a few hours of sleep every other day, sometimes more.

It wasn't idea, or even all that efficient, as Maximilian would put it, but it was slowly getting there. Either way, he was slacking on training, mostly because he was trying his best to juggle protecting Alena when she was out healing people and the late-night training that sometimes happened with Tek.

He looked out the window in his room, peering into the dull light that washed over the cityscape, and just quietly wondering what the next day, or what Maximilian, might challenge him with.

Hopefully nothing as horrifying as getting together with Valeri. Not yet at least.


A/N: Enjoy!

Thanks to my 5-dollar Patron; Leon E. Large thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; Dyson C., TheBreaker, and Victor! Huge thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! Massive thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., Joseph, and PortlandPhil!

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 102: Personal

I sat within the Brightspark relaxedly, drinking from a cup of pleasant-smelling alcohol which left something to be desired from the taste. I lounged within the fourth-floor bar room, entertaining myself idly with using the whispers of the Hearth influence that I'd once received from Ehra. I could still somehow delineate between good and bad drinks, sometimes even getting flashes of momentary inspiration for something to add to the drink to fix it.

This bartender, while decent at his job, was nowhere near the standard that the Ehra faithful had set for me. His concoctions were uninspired and textbook, and while that clearly serviced the gold encrusted fools in the bar with me, it wasn't anything special no matter how you sliced it.

Of course, the rich kids probably couldn't tell either way, the different qualities of the alcohols in their drink less important than the amount of money that the drink itself had cost, with aged drinks being so rare due to the short time since many of the races had actually been put on Virsdis.

It was interesting, and one of the few liquor brands that had managed to start aging alcohol early enough to get fifty-year aged rum was clearly going gangbusters, though it wasn't that much more special than the rum you could get your hands on in the northern street stores. If you went west and made alcohol out there, the natural heat of the weather, in what was effectively a dry plains, would make it great for quickly aging alcohol.

Though, that was if you had a way of dealing with the quite hostile Tiliquan tribes. Being attacked every other day would certainly make it difficult to offset the cost of, you know, dying.

Anyway, long story short, the alcohol was decent, and the bartender was horrifically misusing it for the sake of the dollar tag that could be ascribed to it. He also wasn't making personalised drinks, just those off of the board that could be seen by anyone, which meant that each drink had a social value within the establishment.

Though, the most expensive drink tasted like absolute ass, which was hilarious to me after I had watched in horror as the man mixed together the liquids soullessly. When I had downed it, like you might a shot, the surrounding inhabitants of the bar had looked at me like I was insane. Which, if I had a regular human body, would have been a horrific choice.

Thankfully, alcohol is effectively a strong-tasting juice, and unless I actively let it affect my brain there is next to no effect for more than a few scant moments. Just another thing that can't kill me. I'll take it.

I lounged within the plush chair for a long thirty minutes, my mind slowly ticking over the ideas I kept hidden away from the world. Honestly, I found it somewhat amusing to plot the downfall of much of Crossroads' elite while I literally drank exorbitantly expensive liquor right next to them.

Some of them I remembered from passing encounters, my brain no longer one to misremember something so simple as a name and a brief history. Though, I almost wish that my brain would just forget them and their petty little lives. They were just about as inconsequential as it got, in the grand scheme of things.

Maybe one or two of them could minorly sway the outcome of any given action I took, but nothing so grand as to ruin my plans in any overt way. They may be rich, but they were all pomp and vanity, barely sharing a practically minded braincell between them. So that was why I was here, other than just to drink the revolting cocktails for my own amusement while I planned.

My mind helpfully kept tabs on the emotional sphere that sat around me, the majority of it being rather dour for a place so filled with alcohol, though the lower floors certainly tried to make up for it with the party that seemed ready to persist late into the night. The floors up from there got progressively quieter, and the floor above was even cold.

It wasn't cold in that there was no one within the rooms above, but that those inside the rooms above us were like you'd think a snake would feel. Without the breadth of emotions you could witness just by walking down the street, those inside those rooms were filled with the calculation you'd expect from someone of Yeram's past.

Though, with the sorts of wealth that those above possessed, they'd almost have to be that way. Only very few I have met stayed independent enough from the source of their wealth to remain untouched by its influence. Valeri and Lucae being the only two I could think of off the top of my head, though there were certainly others that held the ability to be so, if they were half as determined as Valeri or as wickedly sharp as Lucae.

I hummed gently into my glass as I savoured the mediocre taste of the drink within, something that sorely needed a generous splash of a citrusy juice of some kind. As I dreamed of a better tasting drink, I felt an emotional presence I was keeping tabs on leave the top floor, slowly walking down the stairs that dared to connect to the floor from behind the bar.

I had been keeping tabs on the bar and those within it idly, just with the spare brain power that was left over between other thoughts. I had clearly realised when a man, one that I didn't immediately recognise, rose from his seat and left the bar through the main doorway, a moment of slight anxiety fixating his mind as he came to the grand flights of stairs and ascended to the top floor.

I had felt the man's vague emotions from the floor below, not quite able to read them with the veracity I might be able to if he were to be in the same room as me. Certainly not as clearly as If I were looking him in the eye. That had continued for likely close to fifteen minutes before the man descended once again, down a pair of service stairs that led to a door behind the bar.

I gave a quick glace towards the door, training my eyes on it as it opened outward, obscuring my view of the man while I heard the faintest noise as he called out to the bartender. After a brief moment of conversation between the two men, the door remained open as the bartender moved up against the bar top and swallowed deeply before opening his mouth to speak.

"Maximilian Avenforth." The man called; his voice surprisingly pleasant in comparison to his mixed drinks. I turned a lazy eye towards the man, finding him looking directly at me with a solid eye. The room came to a stop, the bubbling conversation came to a quiet hush as eyes turned and whispers grew.

For just a moment, I let my eyes lock with the man's delving deep into his emotions and finding them to be perfunctory at best. The man didn't care, past a slight interest in why I was being called to the room above. The shared gaze gave me the orders that I needed, then a slight gesture of his head towards the door behind the bar, clearly pointing towards the way they would like to receive me.

I stood from my seat, looking towards the door pensively as it remained open, coaxing me to enter it… yet I wasn't quite interested in taking the service stairway. What an ingenious way to shape the relationship that you had with those that sat above. A nice bit of social power to exercise over those that walked up those steps, that were likely to be as demeaning as possible for those who lived the high life like they did.

I brushed off my pants lightly, then adjusting the cuff of my blazer slightly while letting a large grin grow on my face. The man smiled back, a reflex of his service industry training, but that smile evaporated quickly when I did a ninety degree turn and began striding towards the main doors of the bar.

There was a moment of stunned silence before I could feel the bartender's shock turn into action as he no doubt alerted the other man of my departure. However, as I made my way out of the doors of the bar and felt the other man start moving, I grinned wolfishly as the doors closed behind me and blocked off any sight of me.

I walked down the short hallway with a quick step, then hopping lightly onto the bannister that separated the walkway from the precipitous drop down a flight of stairs, walking on the wooden railing for a moment before jumping almost weightlessly to the other side of the building, skirting across the wall that surrounded the flights of stairs before truly enacting the Sharah and simply walking up the wall between the gorgeous stained-glass windows that opened it up to the outside world.

As I reached the top of where the fourth floor's ceiling became the fifth's floor, I jumped from the stone wall, flipping gracefully with my legs outstretched towards the roof, arcing down and impacting the floor with the flats of my feet solidly. My shoes held admirably, the shoemaker—which I have since been informed is a 'cordwainer'—had done excellent work with making them as tough as reasonably possible. They hadn't fallen apart just yet, and it seemed that they would be staying that way.

I strode down the hall in the direction that I could feel the passive emotions of the few that existed on this floor, all within one room. I could feel the emotions of the man who'd been sent to collect me as he ran through the service entry and up towards that room. However, I was faster, and my steps reached the door of that room before the man had even made it halfway up the stairs.

So, it was with a grand flourish and loud bang that I pushed the double doors open to reveal a large sitting room, walls filled with books and liquors, while the floor was crowded with chairs of various sizes and makes. However, it was the centre of the room that I was looking for. In four chairs sat three men and one woman that I'd never seen before. Though, just from a cursory glance, I could hazard a guess.

The man closest to me, with his back turned, was tall against the lower back of his chair. His chocolate brown skin stood in stark contrast to the crisp white collar of his shirt, the back of his head covered in short and almost clumped into small bundles until it reached the top of his head which faded into a full and tightly compacted layer of hair. The man didn't bother to turn to me, but I could hazard a guess at the young master of the Teren family.

Julian Teren, a descendant of a princess from Veringohs and a massively wealthy merchant, wasn't quite as impressive as Valeri's family name, but it was enough for him to make it into this room. If he were to stand at full height, I could guess that he'd likely dwarf my own height, making him a strikingly formidable posture outside of the taller races.

The woman, sitting just to his right in the little circle of chairs, was probably Werna Litz, a native from the Brauhm Empire whose mother was insightful enough to realise the potential that Crossroads had as a trade partner with Brauhm.

Across from Julian directly sat a short, pale man, almost sickly in comparison to Julian's healthy brown complexion and physical stature. The man barely had his eyes open, and a quick look into his emotions told me that he was currently making big choices, though I couldn't exactly glean any real specifics from sight alone. I couldn't get a read on the man, but from the small patch of blue and gold on his suit's collar, I could hazard a guess and say that he was likely a son of a high ranking Official.

The last man laid slouched in his chair, suit ruffled and creased in places while he held a wide and stout glass I his hand, slowly sipping on the drink as I paced into the room, grabbing a large chair nearby and easily swinging it over my head as I walked right into the middle of the circle and placed it dead centre.

The man looked up at me lazily, his actions drunk and sloppy, but his eyes and emotions sharp. But, almost in protest, I took a seat, looking directly at the man, crossing my legs and grinning right into his face, his unruly brown hair not all that dissimilar than my own, though considerably longer and more unkempt.

"Well, I heard you called after me?" I asked with a note of jolly in my voice, waiting only a moment longer as the man who had been sent to fetch me burst through one of the side doors and entered into the room with a moment of bluster before seeing me sitting there.

"Thank you, Owen." The woman said, her voice imperious and cold, "Please return to the bar downstairs. I will send the noblewoman of your choice to your bed tonight, as a gift."

The man, who I hadn't even bothered to look at, seemingly nodded and retreated from the room slowly, leaving us to sit in silence as I stared towards the interesting man in front of me. There was a light cough, trying to break me from my interest in the somewhat famous young master of the Bluze household, the drunkard merchant.

Funny that I would meet with the grandson of the man who had the foresight to start making liquor from day one after being put here. Though, I'm not sure that he'd be particularly proud of the excess that had been borne from his success.

"Yes, we did indeed call for you." The deep, silky voice of Julian Teren spoke, resounding around the room as if it were played through an amplifier, "And we are… interested in what it is you might be doing in our city, Mr. Avenforth."

I didn't turn away from the drunkard I'd set my eyes on, a grin growing on my face as the other man's expression grew increasingly neutral on his pensive features. Hayden Bluze was an astute man, and I wouldn't be surprised if my next words were already dawning on him before I'd even said them.

So, with a regal laugh, I let the grin grow wider and spoke my magic words; "Oh, nothing special. Just a little insurrection, of course!" I turned quickly towards the son of an Official, who had since lifted his face to look at me, shocked. I let my grin falter theatrically, a moment of manufactured awkwardness, "Nothing personal?"


A/N: I've been getting pretty negative reviews lately, and it's been wearing on me pretty bad. It seems silly until you get anxiety even opening the site. Hopefully that won't be forever.

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