Harlan opened the gate to his war room and rushed through, ready to repel any attacks.

“What exactly are we fighting here?”

Joan was sitting at the table, though Harlan had plans to put a map on it and hopefully one day it would be able to shift around and show where his forces were, right now it was just a nice table.

“Harlan, I need to impress on you exactly what the Cast are.”

“Just tell me what we are fighting.”

“The Cast are evil, it is not culture, it is not a difference of opinion, they are evil.”

Joan hesitated to continue.

They sent an army of child soldiers. From the looks of things, young as 12, old as 15.”

“You sure they aren’t Bijou?”

“They are Faun. They won’t arrive for at least another four hours, but they have materials for constructing siege equipment and they have at least two battle tanks. I need to know how you want this handled.”

“What are the numbers?”

“3,000.”

“What is a battle tank?”

“A purely mechanical vehicle, normally piloted by Bijou so they can fit more armor and weapons on it.

The ones here are 30 or so feet long, 14 wide. Each has two large cannons on top and a smaller rapidly firing gun.”

“You have guns out here?”

“Why is that surprising?”

“They are a recent invention inside of the veil.”

“We’ve had them for hundreds of years, but the Cast have a monopoly on them and they exist in small numbers. The odd part is that they are out here. We are thousands of miles away from the capital, and those technologies are more restricted the farther away from the heartland they are.”

“Interesting, but not important. I’m going to go there, see the situation for myself.”

Harlan always found it somewhat jarring when he opened a gate to radically different weather conditions.

The blizzard he was walking through was sudden and focused, it likely wouldn’t even end up reaching Kor.

He used invisibility and snuck right through the camp.

The children didn’t seem upset at being there at all, they just followed the orders of their Cast master.

He saw a few of them praying to an altar of some kind, a large medallion showing a white silhouette of a man on a gold colored rod.

He could hear them whispering wishes to the emperor.

Harlan kept looking around, trying to find a solution to his problem even as they began marching again once the storm passed.

The children all held small rifles designed for them and had bombs dangling from their belts that clattered as they made their way through the snow.

He was currently riding on one of the tanks and it made him feel nauseous, not that it wasn’t a rather smooth ride, but rather he could feel something inside that was emitting an anti-magic field.

Then he noticed the oddity of them.

He had yet to see any magic being used at all.

If this was their plan, to use anti-magic and thus make him vulnerable, it wouldn’t be entirely unfounded.

But sigils still worked, them existing on a higher level than this anti-magic. And when he shifted his body he was still relying on the natural laws, lessening the effectiveness of such a plan

A plan formed in his head.

Harlan had moved away from the marching troops and took to the sky.

If they stopped for the storm, then he needed to bring it back or make a new one to slow them down.

Harlan dragged back the storm as best he could and enhanced it with more magic.

The blizzard itself was small, but it was heavy enough that they couldn’t see more than 15 feet ahead, and thus had no idea exactly how small it really was, extending across the tightly packed army but then only another 100 feet on each side.

While he maintained the storm he sent orders to have construction golems raise walls and make ditches to slow them down.

He thought his plan was perfect, but after an hour they decided to push through the storm, not wanting to fight in the dark.

When they encountered the wall one of them went forward with a siege ladder which was made from smaller ladders that easily slotted and locked into one another.

When they said the wall wasn’t very thick everyone backed up and the tank fired to open a hole where they then placed a white block which had wires connected to it.

But then one of them pulled out a small handheld object that had no wires, and when they pushed the red button the white block exploded, startling Harlan.

He had seen the bombs the army used, black powder or in some other cases alchemical powders like flare dust. But that white block looked like some kind of clay.

They continued marching through the storm and past the wall.

Harlan kept making everything colder, but maintaining the storm and moving it alongside them was becoming too draining as a northern wind threatened to blow it away and he now had to also fight against that.

An hour away from the city meant that he had already been out of free mana for an hour himself.

He wasn’t drained dry by any means, but he refused to use any more unless it was absolutely required.

With what he had he could fully shift his body, open a gate, and use three war spells without running out, giving him a little wiggle room to do something else small like close a wound long enough to use mundane medical techniques to stabilize.

Unfortunately, none of that helped him.

Warmagic was out by its nature, it was designed to kill.

He had done work on expanding the size of his gate, but it was nowhere near enough to move an entire army… unless.

They wondered why they hadn’t reached the city yet, their compasses said they were going in the right direction, but they were an hour past schedule.

They would’ve liked to use the stars to check their location, but it was heavily overcast.

They had to camp for the night, and once the clouds cleared up the scouts came together to figure out what had gone wrong.

Nobody understood how, but they were not even close to their goal, and in fact were hundreds of miles back into imperial land.

All Harlan had to do was make a blizzard which was strong enough to hide that there was a large gate, and because they marched in a rather narrow line, they all fit inside.

Because they used the road instead of marching through a forest, he just needed to place it somewhere that didn’t have any clear landmarks and then have it go somewhere else that had no clear landmarks.

Back in Redhaven Harlan finally came to pick Darrath back up.

As they were not actually needed for a fight, Harlan had also dropped the Goliaths back in Lith.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

He entered Carmilla’s room after a maid had directed him that he was allowed inside.

Darrath was nowhere to be seen however.

“Where is he?”

“I’ll tell you as soon as you explain what happened.”

“The Castian Empire sent an army of child soldiers.”

She set down the book she had been reading on her bed.

“I’m certain it was hard, but you really had no choice.”

“I didn’t kill them. I managed to trick them through a gate, sending them a few hundred miles back into their lands.”

“Why would you do something so stupid?”

“I’m not going to kill a bunch of children.”

“And how will you deal with them next time? Do you intend to find a trick every time for the next few decades?”

“I’m not going to kill children.”

“While I find a man with solid morals alluring, you’ve shown the empire that you are too weak to fight against them.”

“I’m not changing my mind on this, there is a line that I won’t cross.”

“Yes, and how many other uncrossable lines have you already crossed?”

She picked her book back up.

“He is still in the library. Collect him and be on your way.”

Harlan grumbled and had a sour look on his face the entire way to the library.

After signing in at the front desk Harlan used divination to find Darrath and then gated to his location.

“Papa, are you an idiot?”

“Why?”

“Terrance kept asking what kind of idiot leaves their son here for so long.”

“Who?”

The father of the group who got stuck with watching Darrath meekly raised his hand.

“My apologies.”

“I understand, it took longer than I thought it would to remove the enemy army. Thank you for watching my son. Where is the rest of your family?”

“They left so they could get some sleep.”

He noticed how tired the man looked, which wasn’t a shock considering Darrath was a ball of energy and curious like Harlan was, or rather still is.

Harlan reached into his pocket, seeing the fear in the man’s eyes.

And then he pulled out a handful of gold coins.

“I assume you paid for his food, and this is also for your time.”

“I couldn’t possibly-”

Harlan looked cranky and tired, and it was hard for him to resist the sneer that was creeping on his face.

Politeness was great, a wonderful thing, but not when someone is trying to do something nice after using up most of their energy and they want to go to sleep instead of ending up in a politeness standoff.

“Thank you for the coin.”

“Darrath, what do you have to say?”

“I read books about druids, and swamps, and trees, and books, and how to make paper, and-”

“What do you have to say to Terrance?”

“Goodbye.”

Harlan didn’t have the energy to wait for Darrath to find out what the right answer was.

“Say thank you.”

“Thank you.”

Harlan went back to the front desk, signed out both of them, and then gated back to their home.

He put Darrath to sleep.

Despite his cries that he wasn’t tired and that he wanted to talk about the books, he lasted only a few minutes before his eyes closed.

Harlan had gotten a few complaints about how Darrath always slept under his dresser and the maids were scraping their arms or banging their heads trying to get him out from under it.

So Harlan raised the bed up and hung thick black sheets over the sides so Darrath could sleep there on the floor, as Darrath also didn’t like the softness of mattresses or bedding.

Harlan laid there on the carpeted floor, watching him sleep, thinking about Darrath and the child soldiers, about how long he was going to keep him away from the terrible realities of the world.

No matter how hard he tried, could he even make it 11 years, at least as much as Harlan had?

He wondered, what does it have to be this way? Was there no path to destroying the Cast which wouldn’t also destroy his heart?

He sat across from himself on a porch in a place he didn’t recognize.

A faceless doll of a woman poured both of them iced tea from a pitcher.

“You know you gotta do it.”

“I have other bodies, but I didn’t wake up in one of them, and I know what death is like, so what is this?

Just a dream? It doesn’t feel like one.”

“Eh, kinda. You’ve spent enough time with a split mind that you didn’t realize there was one more inside of you.”

“I’m not comfortable knowing that I misplaced a mind.”

“Well, that is your problem, and by that I mean ours.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since Redmond. It’s actually kinda funny, because when you go insane, you don’t really realize it, everything still seems normal. Meanwhile I’ve been where you’ve dumped all of that anger and grief, because there is no way in hell that you are really handling this shit on your own, you just aren’t strong enough for that.”

“It’s odd, I feel alright now. And you, you don’t feel like me.”

“When you make a mind intentionally, it’s different then what I am. Kinda like how Dun’Kel or Kleon don’t act like Xol. As for why we both feel alright, that is a matter of empathy and dreams playing tricks on us.

Another night we might feel like complete shit, or be blinded by rage.”

“That sounds like bullshit.”

“I’m trying to figure out what is happening, and all I’ve got to work with is what we both already know, so I can’t really come to a conclusion with real certainty. I wonder if the other us did the same thing.

I really hope he didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m terrible, a real monster. I don’t possess all of our shared emotional intelligence, and if I ever decided to try and take over for even a little while, I’d probably do something terrible.”

Harlan sipped on his tea, finding that in this dream his taste buds didn’t function.

“Where are we?”

“I decided to construct a place that isn’t anywhere, a home, something that is mine before I end myself.”

“Who says you have to do that-”

“I’ve been thinking, that’s all I’ve been doing. I exist to run parallel with you and come to a conclusion about something.”

“Which something?”

“Trying to use empathy to keep a population docile, and about the virus.”

“I’m not going to target an entire people, it would be genocide.”

“That’s what I thought, but a month of doing nothing but thinking on just two things does a lot for your perspective. And today, this here, the army of children, that is what tipped the scales and made me decide that this thought had reached an ending. I’d explain more, but when I… I guess when I die, you’ll start to process my memories and understand how I reached my conclusion. You’ll also see me process a month of grief and anger, and that was not nearly enough time to get through all of it.”

Harlan awoke to Darrath clinging to his arm like a caterpillar before it enters its cocoon.

He raised up the heavy black curtain that blocked out all light and helped Darrath feel comfortable sleeping, finding it was still too early to wake him.

So he laid there, processing the memories of his parallel mind until a maid peeked under to wake him and got spooked by him.

What bothered him was that he could see every bit of how he decided that it was right to unleash the rust, and he couldn’t say with absolute certainty that he disagreed with himself.

The maid lifted the curtain again.

“Your majesty?”

“Yes?”

“I am sorry for my reaction, I just-”

“You didn’t expect to see me under here.”

“Yes.”

“I am going to let him sleep in today.”

His cold tone and statuesque expression unsettled the maid.

“Of course, your majesty.”

When Darrath did wake up he finally let go of Harlan’s arm.

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“Why are you here?”

“I slept next to you last night.”

“Oh. Ok.”

“I’m going to be gone, probably for a week or so, not sure how long it will take. But I’ll be back by the time Carmilla invites us to dinner.”

“We are going to dinner at the red lady’s house?”

“Call her Lady Carmilla or Queen Karmine.”

“Ok. Are you going to make my pet soon?”

“I’ll make it soon. But now you need to get up, eat breakfast, and start on your studies.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to the library in Karmine.”

“She has a library in her?”

“No, the city is also called Karmine, just like her name. Come on, let’s both get up and get to work.”

----------------------------------------

Xol put the object obtained from the vault in Boulder in the slot on the board and started connecting the cables.

It wasn’t quite like what he had back home, thousands of years had passed, but he had been constructing the device and troubleshooting what was missing for decades already, sending parties to scavenge what they could from where the Blackship crashed.

He cracked his knuckles and started tapping on the keys. He wished it had been in English at least, but it was the only keyboard he found and he didn’t know how to manufacture one of his own.

The screen lit up and he reached the login screen, he hadn’t seen something like this in Eons.

When he saw that it was password locked he wanted to smash the entire thing with a hammer, but instead he remembered an old adage and started on his infinite monkeys instead.