Waver (Part I)
Revok
--50 years earlier--
Caer Akris
“I present to you – your Don!”
A day of celebration. The people of the Sand town corralled into the palace courtyard wearing the proud togas that they had no choice but to wear. Their faces shone with strained smiles, their eyes looking at the Tigran Guards that stayed poised at regular intervals along the courtyard walls. When the gatehouse of the palace closed, Revok stepped out onto the balcony and stood beside his Lord. Jael had come in his battlearmor – gilded pauldrons glistening in the hot desert sun, silvery threads of hair flowing in the wind. He was like the angel he’d told these people he was when they came down here.
And the angel reached toward Revok’s wing, grabbed it with force, and threw it into the air.
“Hail Don Revok!”
The banners of the Argents hung from every corridor, every inch of the walled city, and above them all the golden domes of the palace were draped in the grey sigils of the order. Inside, Jael’s Dauntless waited. But it wasn’t them Revok was thinking of right now.
It was of the people down there. People with hope in their eyes. Resolve in their hearts. Perhaps they each harbored in their foolish breasts the fleeting notion that he would be their salvation.
They had no idea who he was. Who he’d been.
Or who he was going to be.
But they still cried out his name all the same, like an army of little tanned puppets under Jael’s command:
“HAIL DON REVOK!”
“HAIL DON REVOK!”
“HAIL DON REVOK!”
He heard them say it so many times that he stopped registering sound after a time. His wing went limp in Jael’s hand and yet, still, his Lord did not let him down.
“Hear them, Revok?” he asked. “That’s you they’re cheering for.”
Young Knox was down there in the front row – scarred mouth upturned in an odd little smile for his friend – and mentor’s – day of coronation. His eyes were just as transfixed as all the rest.
All his brothers and sisters in arms down there, all those waiting to go below - all those who would leave them behind. Their faces flashed through his mind, coupled with the crumpled, burned bodies of his parents turned to ash by Amarata on the surface of Minthros.
And when he looked back down at the baying crowd eating out of the palm of Jael’s hand, he realized the truth: he hated them all.
His eyes turned towards his Lord in that moment. And only then, hidden from the crowd beneath his cloak, did Revok finally understand the full extent of his fate.
“You always were a troubled Jilae,” Jael said, as Revok’s eyes lighted on the wisp of ethereal energy he held in his gauntleted hand. A corrupted, angry thing. A cosmos-changing thing.
A thing born of a darkness beyond the skies that blanketed their world.
“Your gifts are a blessing and a curse both,” Jael continued. “For though you see all the options before you, your feet still waver on the right path. Yet you’ve always known what that is, haven’t you?”
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Revok didn’t move. Then, after recovering from the initial shock of the sight, realized he couldn’t.
STATUS: PARALYZED
SPELL EFFECT: SOULBIND (MAGISTER LVL, VOID)
And, looking with silent pleading into the face of his Lord, he suddenly realized that he had been forsaken the moment he’d followed him down here.
“Hesitation is only natural,” Jael went on, never dropping his smile as the glowing orb of virulence edged towards Revok’s chest. “It is a product of our fear before we take the step into greatness. It was foolish of me to expect you to walk this path alone. So, I am removing your hesitation for you.”
He struggled. He tried to draw his sickles. He didn’t even see that the crowd had now dispersed below just as quickly as it had formed.
And when the soul was finally pushed into his chest, he opened his beak in a silent scream.
“Hail Don Revok,” Jael finished. “Layer Lord of the Shifting Sands.”
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---Present Day---
He didn’t even hear the echo of his footsteps behind him.
When he opened the doors of the throne room, with the blinded Knox dutifully following his tail, his first desire was to breathe in the air of the palace one last time.
It smelled…stale.
That was perfect.
He gripped the railings of the balcony as he cast his eyes over all the servants – men and women who were his. Nothing else.
Their faces were not the hopeful faces of the old citizens of the doomed city outside. Their faces were beyond such puppets.
He looked at their ragged clothes, pilfered weapons, and awestruck eyes as they looked back at him, and he felt himself smile unconsciously.
Avarice was what he saw in those eyes. Malice. Greed.
He breathed again.
Humanity.
“My Argents,” he began.
His first words were met with a cheer of triumph. Even Knox seemed taken aback behind him.
“The eve of our victory – is nigh!”
Another cheer. Cheers not for glory, but for the spoils of war. That’s what they wanted. That’s what they all wanted.
That was why he left us behind…
“The Lightbringer has come to our Sands!” he bellowed, shaking the thought of Jael from his mind. “She has freed our prisoners and now takes them as her own. Wretches without a shred of skill to their names. Remnants of the past.”
He held his tongue. Watched their faces.
They waited for him.
“I ask you: after all we have done to secure the beauty of this realm, after we have given its people shelter, culture, and protection from the beasts of this waste – I ask you: are we to simply lay down our arms and be swept away?”
“NO!” came the answer. Resounding and repeated. The chant became an echo that drowned out all thoughts in his mind.
Good. Good. That’s what…that’s what I need…
“And yet,” he continued after the enthusiasm drained. “They are coming. They are coming to our walls with fire and sword, and they are coming with hatred. They are coming with an Argent who is born of the dark.”
The side doors of the throne room opened gently. The Tigran guards marched in, lined the walls, and kept their halberds up, poised.
Sharp.
They stared at the crowd as some faces started to flash from them, towards the doors, towards their blades.
But when Revok spoke, those eyes returned to him.
“They are coming for us,” he said. “And they shall show no mercy. They come to kill us all. They come with the tenacity of animals. They come with the childish notions of prophesy speeding them on. And, unlike us, they come with a single, unified purpose.”
More guards filed in. And the last ones brough the tubs of broth with them.
“And what do we have?” he continued as a murmur of doubt began to spread through the crowd, and Knox’s fists clenched with restrained excitement. “A kingdom of ruin. Depravity. Degradation. Those who write the histories of Averix say this: empires fall not with a boom, but with a sad, subtle whimper. Glory is corrupted slowly, but surely, by moral decay and squalor from within.”
He swept out his wings to cover them all.
“Look at the person beside you!” he commanded. “They are a reflection of the same stench that lives inside us all. The stench of mortal nature.”
The broth started being poured into wine goblets. Golden encrusted capsules for a liquid from beyond…
The same thing he’d forced into Nils. Pieces of the girl. Pockets of her power.
“What is there to believe in?” he asked the crowd as the goblets were passed out among them. “Gods? The eyes of Amarata and Yevua do not see below their precious surface world. Family? Each one of us would sell out our brothers and sisters for scraps from a pauper’s table. Honor? A vestigial word made up by terrified men asking their sons and daughters to go to war in their name.”
They looked at the black liquid in the goblets. They felt its power. And it felt the life beating within their hearts.
“I will tell you what to believe in,” he continued. “Greed. Avarice. Selfishness. Mutilation. War. Poverty. Sickness and…lies. Those are our virtues. Those are the tenants we live by.”
Even though he couldn’t see him, he could tell Knox was smiling as he took a glass and started pouring beside him.
“And so, I ask you one last thing, my Argents.”
Their eyes switched between him, the bubbling drinks, and the blades of the programmed Tigrans.
“To defend our way of life, we must move to a place beyond. We were not chosen to go below, but with strength in our hearts, the depths of the abyss shall come to us…”
His children cupped their hands round the thing they held in their hands, a frothing mass of living divinity…
“Steel your souls, my children,” he said. “Let the young go first…”