Harlan left by gate, and as soon as he was sure he was alone he moved to the swamp bunker.
Then he made a call to Dearil.
“I’ve made my scene, he is probably going to be rushing home without making any stops.”
“Did they seem convinced?”
“Every emotion I felt was exactly what he showed. I read him like an open book, now it’s time for a burning. And remember, the wife and the kid are to be left alone.”
“My men will do everything they can, but if something goes wrong in the middle of a battlefield, there is only so much that can be done about it.”
“And that is why my golems make up the bulk of the force and why they are the ones who get the kill.
Your men do not step within 15 feet of that carriage.”
“I’m getting the feeling that you don’t trust me. Cold feet? Worried about having collateral damage?”
“I’m doing something far greater than trusting you, I’m working with you knowing that I don’t trust you.”
“The attack will commence soon. Will you be there?”
“Neither myself nor any of my mirrors will be there. I’ve learned from others that you keep as many degrees of separation from yourself and your work as you can. Hence why the one that I sent to you was not built like me, I’m lithe, he was bulky, I’m six foot, he was squat, his features were soft, mine are sharp, he had a full beard, I let my fiance shave me every day.”
“Now it just sounds like you’re showing off.”
“Depending on how this goes, and what other dominoes are knocked down, I might need to do this again.
If things go really well, and we continue to work together, I am willing to flesh shape you into a younger body, give you back use of your legs.”
“So then, what is the stick? You are dangling that carrot in front of me.”
“I kill you.”
“Well, I feel this conversation cannot go much further after that. I will contact you again for gate.”
“Good. And do remember that the stone I gave you is a prototype, destroy it after it is used, assuming it doesn’t blow someone's hand off. And pick up the pieces if it does, both the hand and the stone.”
Harlan, both of him, went to make witnesses.
For the main mind and body, he took Adina out for dinner, for the other him, he was back at the academy, teaching his students.
Haldren moved slowly along the road.
“My goodness, honey, those bruises are terrible. Shall I get my blush?”
“I will bear with it until we reach home. No sense in covering it up.”
“Daddy, does it hurt?”
“It’s fine, just a small pain.”
“What a horrible beast of a man. And how dare he use his title to get away with attacking you like that.”
“How he believes that I killed some servant I’ve never heard of I’ll never know. But I will not let him think he can insult me without getting insults back.”
“He must be removed before she takes the throne or he’ll be around this kingdom forever. A man like him does not deserve to live forever.”
“A baseless rumor.”
“Was it baseless when he took his own life, more than once, just to show that he couldn’t be so easily killed? Shame that he didn’t arrive at the funeral with both of them.”
“Darling. Did you?”
“He needs to die or be driven away. If only he didn’t have such tight security around that little sister of his. I’m sure an Unseen taking her life would be all it takes. If he reacted like this to some servant, imagine how he-”
“We must do these things together. You failed to hire the right men for the job and it is going to cost us.
Now we are too far in, I will hire the right people this time. It is going to take time to get rid of him, killing would be harder than making him run away. Once his immediate family is gone, he is likely to fall off the face of the planet into some dark hole where he can-”
The count heard the explosions, fireballs and firearms.
He tried to use his amulet to call for reinforcements, but found that it could not connect to anything.
“Direct hits on all targets, estimated deaths are 221. Begin charge. The Kalak will remain as sharpshooters, taking out the mages.”
Along with being along the only bend in the road, the reason for the bend was a hill, one which the flesh golems worked to painstakingly carve a great deal of runes into.
The face of this hill slid down as a mudslide which killed another few dozen and revealed the hill to have been turned into an impromptu fort with kill windows and ramparts and cannons.
Now it was time for the golems to charge.
They slid down the hill on tracks using anti-friction spells, slamming into the enemy forces like charging bulls.
The soldiers were off kilter, but they had been expecting something and they had expected it to be here.
From the eyes of the bird overhead, Harlan saw a fraction of what war looked like with his soulsmithed items.
His vision turned into nothing but fire in moments as hundreds of spells from both sides were fired off one after the other. For a simple fireball the recharge time was less than a second, not truly instant, but fast enough that both sides could lay down a blanket of fire.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
It was great and terrible as they continually clashed, the sound was deafening, requiring the units on both sides to use veils to avoid losing their healing until they could see a doctor. Yet Harlan saw the cracks in the air as they popped one after the other.
Something like this was new, soulsmithed on soulsmithed armies hadn’t yet clashed even on this level. The Reinoans refused the equipment, for revolutionaries vs the army, one side always won out too quickly for what happened next.
The air, consumed with flames, got hotter and hotter, the explosions stopped simply exploding, they started to hang in the air.
Each form of mana, which remained nearly balanced with a slight edge in earth due to the area, suddenly turned to fire. A chain reaction had begun, the spells fed the mana, which fed the spells, so long as people continued to cast, it got hotter and hotter, the spells got stronger and stronger.
Harlan could only look on in terror as he realized what was about to happen.
Xol monitored for certain events.
The natural birthing of pure elemental mana was normally a prediction of volcanic eruptions, massive hundred mile wildfires that threatened to consume swaths of the country.
This, was very unnatural. It happened too quickly, and in a location which lacked heightened levels of fire mana only an hour prior.
“Harlan had a court case in that area, didn’t he?”
“We should go there, find out what is-”
The map they were looking at went dark, the entire area turned into a dead zone.
Harlan was jolted back to his body, he could still feel the searing heat.
Adina picked him up from the floor of the restaurant in Dullen.
“What happened? Harlan, are you alright?”
“Madam, should we call a healer?”
Harlan’s eyes flashed black and then returned to normal many times.
“Something has happened and The Darkness says that I need to find out why.”
He handed a gold coin to the waiter to cover their meal, his tip, and the damages.
He had seized for a moment and upturned the table.
Harlan gated to a second area within range before actually heading to the site of the blast.
But when the gate opened, the heat was too intense for him to step through, so he moved a dozen miles further away.
It was… odd.
There was nothing, he hadn’t been anywhere without minds around in a long time.
He saw the city walls, the ones closest to the heatwave, had been reduced to slag.
“Divine for people. At your range you might find survivors.”
Humans, no response.
Deer.
Cats.
Birds.
Worms.
Harlan fell to his knees, when his tears hit the dirt, covered in desiccated grass, they boiled away in moments.
“You… I don’t know what to tell you.”
“It’s my fault. I killed them all.”
They let the silence hang in the air.
He suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder.
“This is what revenge will do. When people do something that they can never forgive themselves for, they have two options. They either go all in, they let themselves turn into monsters who will do anything. Or they spend the rest of their lives trying to make up for it.
I remember when I told you about my past, I killed men out of anger and I put their heads on pikes. The blood of thousands are on my hands. There was once a city, they had turned to cannibalism. Looking back, I should’ve seen it for what it was, people pushed past the point of humanity..
Instead I let my disgust at what they had done, and my anger that someone I knew went missing as a messenger in the city overwhelm me. I stood on the wall and cast my spells, the city drowned in fire, men, women, children. I burned more cities, places that my small mind couldn’t understand as being full of desperate people, not monsters. I’ve made no small number of mistakes, and I’ve been trying to make that right for over a thousand years.”
“Did you?”
“What you did was a mistake, and accident, something you couldn’t have known.”
“What did I do?”
Xol raised Harlan from the ground.
“Boy… no, Harlan. What was happening there, can you tell me?”
“I recruited the Kalak Revolutionary Army to help me kill Count Haldren. I supplied them with hundreds of flesh golems, weapons, armor. Both sides just kept throwing fireballs, my golems were acting more defensively. They were fighting fire with fire. I saw the mana start to shift, the water mana was driven out, then everything changed, too quickly. It was like everything flipped, it all turned to fire, and then it went to pure fire in an instant. I didn’t know what was happening, I should’ve stopped my golems, I- Why did this happen? Does this happen during wars?”
“You flooded an area with so much mono-elemental spells that the mana reacted.”
“If I hadn’t made soulsmithing, had I never let them so easily throw out so much fire, this-”
Xol slapped him hard across the face.
“Honey, are you alright?”
Marigold was more worried about her husband being so upset that he struck Harlan.
“I’ve been alive a very, very long time, I’ve seen two worlds. I have lived and died hundreds of times.
I have lived in Reino under those Fae, I’ve lived in Ragne under tyrants and Yggdra. I’ve been human, Beastkin, and more. Every time I died my soul found a new body, any infant who happened to be stillborn, some empty vessel. I’ve had families, friends, people who I waved too on the street die from that war.
That war that you stopped.
I’ve been experimented on by priests who realized my immortal soul was a source of limitless power.
Harlan you are not one of those men. That you are crushed under the weight of your sins proves this, so stand up, see where you went wrong, and fix it. You can never ”
Harlan slapped Xol back.
“I CAN’T FIX THIS. I CAN’T BRING THEM BACK TO LIFE.”
The crystal rose staff shattered in his hand as he gripped it.
“When things go bad, and I have seen them go bad, you are going to be the one at the frontline fighting until you can’t stand, then you’ll change your body, and you’ll do it again. If I had half of your strength of heart, half of your drive, I wouldn’t have been a miner who died in a cave back home, I would’ve ruled the goddamned world. Right now you don’t need to be coddled, you do not need to be comforted, you need to do something. Let me take you somewhere that you can do good, to show you that you are good even if you made a mistake.”
Xol opened a void gate.
“You said that-”
“There is almost no magic I’ve not cracked, if it kills me in the process, I come back. I’m jealous of you and Sepul, you are both so talented that it disgusts me.”
“Xol, where are you taking him?”
“To see the outside world, to help him understand some things about life. Darling, please watch his family and friends, he is going to lose connection with his other bodies outside the veil.”
Xol waited for Harlan to speak.
“Boy, I don’t keep my soul in any of my bodies, the central point exists inside of my small world.
You were supposed to ask why I won’t lose connections.”
“I don’t care.”
“Use the extra space freed up by not controlling extra bodies into beating yourself up, use the rest to be the young inquisitive boy who my wife loves like a nephew.”
“I need to explain to my student what is going to happen.”
“Marigold can do it.”
Xol tossed him through the portal.