assistirfilmes Chapter 295: A Story Told
Chapter 295: A Story Told
Thank you to my beta reader and editor, GlassThreads!
Toren Daen
Cylrit was there nearly immediately as I stalked out of the vault, no doubt because of the rumbling of my aura and how I’d slammed Viessa into the vault floor. He suspected a fight of some sort and he was ready to throw himself into the metaphorical fire that could have erupted down below.
When the stalwart Retainer witnessed his master hauling Viessa Vritra out by her purple hair, trailing blood and unconscious, he didn’t even hesitate.
“Master,” he said, bending the knee, ”what must I do?”
Seris’ cool gaze passed over her Retainer, something there still disturbed by my actions in the vault. “Scythe Viessa encountered… complications,” she said, voicing the greatest understatement ever spoken aloud. “See that she is cared for before she awakes.”
Cylrit raised his head, opening his mouth to speak. When he saw the shadow marring my expression, however, he became more solemn.
I didn’t stay for their ensuing short conversation. I couldn’t stay for their conversation, not with the confusion and rage festering in my soul.
I swept past them, my aura pulsing like a distant star. Up and up I ascended the stairwell like a soldier marching to war. Each step of my boots on the stones sent my sound magic through the earth, Sonar Pulse returning me a detailed overview of the castle.
I tuned out the terrified pulses of the distant soldiers’ heartbeats. I snuffed out my sense of their terror as I struggled to contain my emotions.
Up and up and up I ascended, like a mortal man climbing towards the heavens in an act of utter hubris. My feet moved on their own, each step like the routine piston movement within an engine. I used the fuel of my anger and shame to push those pistons. Up, down. Up, down.
And suddenly, I was beneath the sky.
The night still gripped the world as I stood atop the castle ramparts. Her shadows stretched far and wide like rippling black silk across countless plains. To the north, just across the winding Sehz, I could see the Dicathian camps. Their cookfires sparkled merrily in the night, each like little fireflies captured from the night and superimposed over the vast canvas of the world. The light of artifacts and campfires stretched around this simple bastion far into the blackness, denying Night her due.
And high above, clouds blanketed out the stars.
I gritted my teeth in anger, my shrouded wings growing around me. They shivered with crystalline refractions as the torches across the ramparts cast light through them.
I bent my knees, glaring up at those clouds. And in an instant, I flew.
Up and up and up I went again, trying to capture that sense of vindictive pride and certainty I’d embraced when I’d fought Taci. The clouds had been my stepstools and my allies then, another visitor in my domain. But as the air burned around me and the sound barrier broke from my ascent, I could only see them as an obstacle.
I punched through them, water streaming off my shroud as I gnashed my teeth. The wind whipped and pulled at my long hair, creating a tapestry of golden blonde behind me. Higher and higher and higher I went, demanding the ambient mana take me above. Above all of this, where I didn’t have to worry about it all. Where I didn’t have to think about Aurora’s relic connected to me far below. Where I didn’t have to think about how she was talking with her son.
With my brother.
I emerged from the blanket of the clouds, finally able to feel the welcoming breath of the moon on my face. That distant body had just started in its journey towards fullness, and its light was a pale reflection of the sun.
And the stars—there were so, so many of them. So many stars, all twinkling merrily and with their own light.
The wind pulled at the clouds below me, drawing them on toward a destination I couldn’t comprehend. But I hovered there in the sky, my wings splayed out as I felt it building in my chest.
The actions I’d taken against Viessa burned in the back of my skull. I had torn at her mind in a manner I had only ever known Agrona to do.
Aurora and I had acted together, then. Our minds had melded and meshed in a way we had not experienced since that pinnacle in the Hearth, where we’d managed true equilibrium. And the rage that boiled from the depths of my soul had been just as true and scalding as my bond’s.
Because some part of me—when I had seen that illusion of a corpse—had seen Norgan.
He doesn’t deserve that spot in my soul, I seethed. Norgan had been my brother. He had been there for me, my partner in crime and best friend and everything. When everyone in my life had been gone, Norgan alone had been by my side in East Fiachra, working tirelessly with me for years. Our bond had been built upon sweat and blood.
Memories flickered in the back of my mind, returning me to one particular day. Trelza, stone-faced like a statue, had released me early, determining I was unfit to continue working that day. I remembered leaving the East Fiachran clinic, stumbling over my feet, my face pale.
He was right. Because someone we had been trying to save had died under our care.
I couldn’t remember the man’s face, what he looked like, or even his name. Only how my hand shook as Trelza’s cold, emotionless voice announced his death, and that there was nothing else we could do.
I’d nearly fallen in the canals of Fiachra on my way home. And when I’d finally reached the doors of our simple apartment, I had collapsed onto my bed.
And Norgan had stopped his training. His brow furrowed as he sensed that something was amiss. I’d stared up at the ceiling emptily for an hour, just… processing it all. Processing that I had failed. That a life was no longer in this world, and it was my fault.
Norgan hadn’t spoken. He knew—brothers as we were—that speaking wasn’t what was needed. What use were words like “It’s going to be okay?” Nothing would make that man’s death okay. Nothing would make the loss of life okay.
And he had understood that. Because he knew me. Because he was my brother.
What fucking right did Chul—murdering, genocidal, bastard—have to take that spot in my mind? What Fate-damned reason did he have to evoke memories of someone far better than he would ever be?
Those emotions didn’t belong to him. All he had ever done was take. And now he was taking my one solace away from me.
I erupted with a rabid roar that made the very clouds shiver around me. Sound magic flooded from me as I imposed every ounce of my anger upon the world around me. Resonant Flow pulsed, my veins alighting with heartfire as I professed my pent-up emotions.
The clouds parted from the expulsion of power, my body burning like a star as fires churned around me. My voice slowly grew ragged and broken, no longer a demon’s warcry.
When it was done, I felt like I had vomited up the very seas themselves. Despite this, my mouth was drier than the deserts of Darv below. I heaved for breath, my heart aching as the lights simmered away. My shoulders slumped as I continued to stare up at the moon.
“Does it help any? Yelling like that?” a familiar, feminine voice asked from not far away. “Does it release the burden on your shoulders?”
The wind blew harder for a moment, the breeze dragging her soft fingers across my face.
I didn’t turn away from the waxing crescent moon high above, its cool light soothing some of my aches and pains. “Sometimes it does,” I admitted, my voice hoarse. “But it’s not really working right now.”
Seris perched upon the clouds themselves, the wind pulling on the silver silk of her hair. The barest touch of the starlight high above reflected against her pale skin alluringly this high in the clouds. Her horns were nearly invisible in the night, only illuminated by the breath of the moon. She looked like some sort of storybook phantom, emerging from the highest clouds to bestow prophecies upon unwary travelers.
She didn’t say anything, the high wind pulling at her dark dress. Neither of us spoke as we stared up at the stars.
“I’ll need to leave,” I admitted. “I can’t go back to Alacrya when this war is over. I can’t ever go back, not until I’m powerful enough.”
Agrona wanted something from me. Part of me felt like half of this war had been designed with me at the center, an unwitting pawn. And with Rinia’s warnings and how Sylvie had barely spared me from the intervention of a true god, it was growing clearer than ever.
“Where will you go?” Seris asked, her voice quiet and sorrowful. She was brilliant. A genius of the highest caliber I had ever encountered. She didn’t contest that I needed to leave, just asked me how.
I clenched my hands, my eyes
Seris tilted her head, trapped as she was in my arms. Her eyes were narrowed at me as if I were some sort of madman hauled from the High Sovereign’s torture pits. “No, I don’t,” she replied succinctly. “It seems very foolish to me.”
“Is that a bad thing?” I asked, pressing my forehead to the Scythe’s.
Seris shuddered in my arms, a ripple going through her that intimately passed between us. “I still want to understand it,” she said, almost a pout. “But I can’t.”
We kissed there for a short time, immersing ourselves in the closeness. When we separated, the Scythe had completely and utterly lost her composure. I hadn’t noticed when it had happened, but somehow a few locks of her hair had managed to drift out of place. I readjusted them with an artist’s care.
“That just makes it my secret,” I whispered. “One you won’t be able to have.”
The Scythe scoffed in her normal way, turning away from me. But when my notebook drifted closer, her attention shifted.
The book held itself out in front of the Scythe, waiting for her to take it. I felt my heartbeat rising as I struggled to maintain the spell, some primal part of me still wanting to stow it away or burn it or something. Anything to keep me safe.
But when Seris gently plucked the notebook from the sky, I had no more recourse. She leisurely opened it, inspecting the pages with a raised eyebrow.
She looked at me, to the pages, then back to me. “Ciphered, Toren? Really?”
I gave her the most annoying and irritating smirk I thought I could manage. “Please, Seris. Did you ever think I’d make it that easy for you? You have to actually try.”
Seris rolled her eyes dismissively, before focusing on the mangled mash of words on the page. She hummed for a few seconds, a slight smile adorning her features that made her look truly beautiful.
And also really, really fucking terrifying. As Seris’ eyes slowly roamed over the very first page, the swell of content confidence that slowly leaked across her intent created an inverse reaction in my emotions. “Hey, uh, Seris? I don’t think it’s that easy to—”
“You are an idiot, Toren,” the Scythe interrupted, not looking away from her reading material. “Substitution ciphers are exceptionally weak to frequency analysis. Already, patterns arise across this first page. If I were to take a gander at all the methods used…”
“Now, hold on—”
“Knowing you, I’d wager a sort of block-shift cipher was involved,” the Scythe mused, making my face drain of color. “You’d want to use something that would make you feel intelligent, too. That’s in your character. A cipher method that is easy to memorize, does not hinder your ability to write swiftly, and would make use of knowledge from your Earth, then? A date-shift is likely, based on what I know of you. A date from Earth, though, because you would really like to feel like you’d pulled one over on anyone who got a hold of this. And considering what I know of the stories you’ve told me of your previous world… The early 2000s? What year was it that you died, again?”
Every sentence created more and more cracks in the depths of my ego. I could almost imagine the knives sinking deep into my very soul.
Seris looked back up at me, quietly savoring the utter corpse I had become as she casually obliterated any sense of pride I’d had in my makeshift encryption. “You are simple to understand, my dear Spellsong,” she said, enjoying every ounce of her victory.
“I didn’t get into any encryption classes before I got hit by a fucking truck,” I muttered, dejected. “I thought it was smart.”
I should’ve majored in cybersecurity, not computer science. Then she wouldn’t be so smug.
Seris shook her head in disappointment. “Ignorance is not an excuse for idiocy,” she said, the exact opposite of reassurance. She returned to studying the book, humming to herself as her eyes sparkled with interest and rising desire. “Though if I were to put this together…”
The woman stared at the book for a few seconds, running through calculations in her head. Then, she began to speak. “ ‘Three weeks ago, I awoke in a place I shouldn’t be,’ ” she started. “ ‘I was surrounded by the corpses of… skaunters. I thought I was dreaming, but it appears I am in the world of—’ ”
Seris had spoken every word with slow, deliberate enunciation as she worked through the deciphering in her mind. My first reaction bordered along the lines of “How the everloving fuck?” as I watched her decode it all in real-time in a very blatant flex of her utter genius.
Then the Scythe’s brow furrowed. “The Beginning… After the End?”
She looked at me, confused. After all, those words didn’t really make sense together, not without the context needed.
My second reaction very quickly became “Oh, fuck.”
I coughed slightly, moving my hand. I gently closed the notebook, allowing it to rest in her hands. “Do you have anything left of that Sandaerene Red?” I asked, remembering the wine Seris had drunk in the wake of my fight with Arthur and Wolfrum’s flight. “You might… need that.”
“And why might that be?” she pushed, honing in on this very different avenue of uncertainty like a cat sensing the movement of prey. Her horns glistened in the starlight as she leaned forward with restrained and characteristic interest.
I worked my jaw. “Look, it gave Aurora an existential crisis. I wasn’t lying about that. It might be… difficult? To read?” I offered. There were only so many ways one could take that information.
Though as I thought about it more, I suspected Seris would appreciate at least some parts of what my notes told me. Like how some version of her decapitated Sovereign Orlaeth. That would probably be satisfying to read.
“Was the future granted to you that horrendous in nature?” Seris asked, more intrigued than disturbed. “Is it lacking in parts that raise more questions?”
I winced, recalling precisely where I’d stopped reading. Before I’d been hit by a fucking truck.
I hate isekai rules, I cursed internally. Damn stupid.
Because I had died immediately before Arthur Leywin had been set to meet up with Seris’ rebellion hunkered inside the Relictombs. Seris would have probably really, really wanted that information on what had happened.
“It’s not really about that, but how the knowledge was conveyed,” I admitted, rubbing the bridge of my nose. I felt strangely ashamed for not knowing more. Why couldn’t that truck have hit me a couple of weeks later instead? “I, uh… Well, there are questions it brings up. Lots and lots and lots of them. That might not be able to be answered.”
Seris did not seem perturbed by my warnings. If anything, she looked even more invested. Fuck.
“Just promise me to read it sometime when you can afford to have an existential crisis?” I begged.
Seris laughed. It was a sound I had heard often, but the sheer volume and scale of it was not. She laughed so hard that tears started to burn at the edges of her eyes. “Vritra’s horns, Toren, you’re serious about this insistence, aren’t you? You think I will have an existential crisis?”
“You might!” I affirmed loudly, annoyed by how Seris wasn’t treating this seriously. “It’s weird and strange and outside of context!”
What even would Seris do if she decided that every moment of her life had been dictated by a book? She’d probably leave TurtleMe to a slow, agonizing death, I wagered.
Seris’ eyes rolled, and she swatted at me playfully with the book. “Very well, my dear, worrisome Spellsong. You’ll have my word that I’ll have a bottle of wine at the ready when I read your little secrets.”
“Again, it’s not lit—”
Seris cut off my words by pressing a finger to my lips. “Just hush for a time. I can only make so many promises in one night.”
Her smile was true and pure, wide and free as the sky around me. And I just… didn’t want that to go away. But nonetheless, my shoulders—which had been tensed in a sign of agitation—reluctantly slumped. Sensing my quiet acceptance, the moon-blessed mage retracted her finger, watching me as if I were a child who might misbehave.
Seris turned slightly in the sky. “I think we should go back to the castle,” she said after a moment. “Stay too long with your head above the clouds, and you might forget that there’s a ground below.”
I sighed in quiet agreement. “I suppose there’s merit in that,” I replied, feeling a bit lighter inside as Seris threaded her arm through mine. “And I don’t think Aurora’s going to be done with her talk for some time. We have some time to ourselves.”
Seris’ eyes flicked to me, a slight smile on her pale face as we drifted arm in arm back down through the clouds. And though any other night, I might feel anger rise from the mere mention of Lady Dawn’s son, right here? Right now?
I could feel nothing but that kindling fire of happiness and hope.