The sickly tearing sound of skin being pulled free from muscle was a familiar one to Tyr. Whether it be a fresh kill in the forest to one day serve as his supper, stag or boar most times, or a man, it all sounded the same to him. A slick sliding as connective tissue and fat tore with the jerking of his arm. But this time, it wasn't Tyr with the knife. It was Tiber.
“This is disturbing.” Tiber grimaced in disgust. “Even for me. Are you sure about this? My implantation procedure went a lot differently...”
Tyr couldn't speak, only nodding feverishly in response. They both knew that they had to move fast. The deuritium nails beaten into his bones, and the stake through his heart were making him burn as hot as coals in a hearth. Turns out it wouldn't, in fact, kill him. Tyr didn't need a heart, but at least it meant that he wasn't some kind of higher undead or related construct.
Probably...
Hell, he hoped that wasn't the case.
But he was aware he couldn't be, not exactly, Tyr was 'unliving' – there was a distinct there. He'd never died and turned, it was like he'd never been alive at all, if that even made sense.
It didn't, not to him, but the 'healing factor' he'd often considered his greatest power was nothing so simple. Tyr simply 'was', unless his body was harmed by a great flare of spira, rejection from the world, he was quite literally invincible. Even if thrown into the sun, he'd manifest again and again, though testing that was obviously out of the question... In truth, given the way his body refined itself through the experience of a death he could never truly fall into, he might become incredibly powerful. But with that came the voices, and with them came the difficulty of ensuring he remained stable and independent enough to remain in control.
Valkan had refused to help, until the first attempt had been botched and Tyr had been forced to carve his own arm off with a knife so that it could 'heal' back the right way. The familiarity with pain existed in him still, and that was good, but the resistance to it was gone in the presence of the stakes. It was agonizing, those new nails grinding on his bones, buried deep in his marrow. So painful that though he recognized the men standing over him, he would have beaten them to death without a second thought should someone, anything, promise an end to it.
Even though he'd asked them to do it himself. An anchor to keep him physical, a way of granting him incredible strength without falling into the madness of a splitting mind.
“Nobody has ever tried this in all of history.” Valkan could understand how Tiber felt. Reaching inside Tyr's body to pull and push at organs while forceps placed the bones where they belonged. He nearly flinched back at the muscle fibers shooting out like a striking viper, greedily sheathing the pieces of metal. “If they had, I'm sure it'd be forbidden.”
Deuritium was an odd substance. Auronite was liquid in its natural state, by comparison, but it wasn't hot, it ran like mercury. Among Valkan's people, they considered the two metals akin to twins born under different moons. So similar and yet so different. In its natural state, deuritium was glassy, like obsidian – but when smelted it was freezing cold. Not warm in the slightest when molten.
Deuritium would remain as dust unless proper stimuli was given to it, not unlike coal, it was soft and brittle and chalky. It hardened in the presence of raw mana and stayed that way unless something else was done to it. In the same way that auronite grew soft around mana, just the inverse. It could not be alloyed, any metal mixed within its structure would become deuritium, the black steel that came only from the sky. No veins on the continent held it. It would land intermittently in certain places, gouging craters from the earth and rapidly oxidizing to nothing unless it was contained or happened to strike a mana rich environment.
Just now, they were removing Tyr's bones and replacing them with deuritium casts. Valkan had never seen, nor heard of anything like it. There were moral implications, but Tyr had shown him that once torn free, his body would eventually reconstruct itself in the 'natural' way. His flesh would spit out any other foreign material, be it something as mundane as the ink of a tattoo or a piercing. Only accepting things that made it stronger, including deuritium – apparently. A shot in the dark experiment that had borne some success, impossibly.
This was, by Tyr's reckoning, the only way to defeat Hastur. He was not immune to enriched deuritium, but once refined and depleted, Tyr showed little in the way of an adverse reaction. He'd been wearing a bracelet made of the stuff his entire life, since childhood. Perhaps this had inoculated him, long term contact with the metal.
Fit with runes only he could beat into it, another deus ex machina of sorts, they would 'stick', but only Tyr's. All in a language even Valkan did not understand. And his body accepted them like anything else with some tweaks to their structure. Everything Valkan knew about the premiere 'anti-mana' material was being challenged as it became one with the body of a living thing. A living this with mana of its own...
Though it did not come without cost. Tyr was suffering for it, but he had insisted to the point of threatening those around him – even Valkan himself for the first time. The Anu didn't fear him, but something was terribly wrong with the young man. A desperation that went beyond reason, though he grit his teeth through the agony, the ripping and tearing, gnawing and thrashing.
It was painstaking work. The operative part of that word being pain, but Tyr remained quiet. Patiently waiting until even the smallest of his joints was replaced with the metal. Every knuckle, vertebrae... Everything except for the skull which was too complicated to forge an equivalent. Slotted into casts to match his bones, they fit snug and perfect, and his body accepted them without complaint. This kind of implant wasn't unheard of, Tiber's limbs were cast from mithril now in a recent and similar procedure, but a man could only take so much.
Only Tyr, who couldn't die, could do something like this. Unfortunately and by the same token he would recover too fast from anesthetic, forcing him to remain awake. Eventually coming to scream bloody murder, enough force in the howls to shake an entire wing of the academy as they went about the fel project of making him 'better'. That obsessive need to progress pushing him through as his sanity frayed under the gums itching force and nausea of his mana running wild within his body.
The vast majority of the prosthetics were forged by his own hand under Valkan's supervision. And finally, it was done. A near full body implant, something out of the sagas, but Valkan didn't feel proud about it in the slightest. Only observing such a profane operation because he was the only one with the expertise, and Tyr's trust, who could. If not, the boy would've tortured himself endlessly.
Already had.
“How do you feel?” Valkan asked as Tyr rose from the bed he lay on. Covered from head to toe in his own blood, twisting his wrists and clenching his dominant hand. A series of popping noises and a sickening rattle rising from the chest that sent Valkan's hair on end. The relief was palpable, Tiberius sighing in exhaustion and plopping down into a nearby chair with his head in his hands. “Nausea? Inflammation? Any interference with your six senses? I am not sure what to ask, frankly...”
Tyr giggled like a child just then, his eyes and mind clearing for the first time in weeks. His skin tingled with vitality, his breaths coming steady, no longer feeling so broken. His mind stilled by the pleasant feeling of the artifacts making themselves at home in his body. Bones that became his own, hardening yet further within him and enhancing... Everything.
What have we done... Valkan frowned, though it was certainly too late for regret now.
Something to make him the monster they'd feared.
Slowly but surely, as he'd learned from his first test, his bones did not remain deuritium. His body adapted, changed, the runes became part of his flesh. The metal was purified until it bore none of its anti-magic properties. Confirming another theory. Deuritium was not anti-magic, it simply had too much of a capacity for it, it was vampiric and magnetic – a gluttonous thing with a need to feed so similar to that own gnawing in his gut. Only in a place so energy rich as his body could it stabilize properly. What it became was something else, something that might never have manifested in living history outside of a living being. Perhaps not even then.
Tyr's smile was enough to shake Valkan to his core, still bare of any clothing and whispering a melody to himself under his breath.
'I am the king of demons. Lord of legions. Shaped of lesions. Bloody and screaming.'
Power overwhelming crashed through him. The more it settled, the stronger he felt, his bodies own natural mana capacity sucked greedily into the stuff. This was him. Tyr. The nascent god. He yearned to find his father in the moment and see just how strong Jartor truly was, win or lose. Most assuredly the latter, but with the energy came the need to test it by any means necessary.
“How do you feel?” Valkan repeated softly, reaching out to his apprentice.
Tyr rose, his entire body vibrating with new energy. “Dauntless.”
–
“Approach the target dummy and fire when ready.” A lazy eyed attendant repeated for what must've been the thousandth time this week. They were responsible for assessments, it didn't matter which academy did it, but people naturally wanted to come to the Red Dragon. Tyr thought the man both looked and sounded familiar, but it wasn't a priority. With arm flexed and held at his hip in the horse stance, straight in the back, he didn't over-complicate things.
From a materialization standpoint, Tyr had improved by at least half again as he'd been before, but more mana meant more time, which meant it hadn't changed much in terms of efficacy. He could push his magic further, but it hadn't fixed the 'problem' of his spells being so simple. In essence, it was no easier than before to cast a spell.
But the generation... The amount of mana his spells were capable of carrying in one emission if he simply threw open the gates with abandon...
With the movement of a piston his right hand struck forward, wide and clawed, whispering softly.
“Incinerate.”
All he saw after that was a blinding flare of crimson brilliance, but he felt it. A whistling noise, the tea kettle left overlong on the stove again. A whirring pop and a release of fire bursting from deep within his core and racing up his arms, veins jumping into relief and glowing molten. Still flawed, he needed to practice, feeling like he'd been living with a weighted jacket on his entire life. Everything was new, colors blooming until everything around him was cast in bright watercolor shades of yellows, oranges, and reds.
Four bands of crimson coalesced in his open hand, like petals to a flower closing in on one another and merging. Forming a scorching projectile that shot toward the target with a screaming shriek as it began to roil in the air. A red line of crackling fire that burst on contact, quite appropriately incinerating both the dummy and the wall behind it. And... The wall behind that. Causing the entire assessment field to erupt into a mass of acrid black smoke.
Chunks of half melted masonry raining all around, shuddering against the mana barrier serving to protect the dumbfounded attendant and those behind him. All of them felt their faces go limp, mouths hanging open for a while before recovering. Where Tyr had been, there was nothing but a human shaped silhouette of charred stone.
“Where did he go!?” Tiber cried anxiously, until following Valkan's pointed finger to what remained of the young man, plastered into the wall behind them. Dragging himself from the rubble, a blackened half-skeleton fitting his jaw back into place. “Hells...”
Tiber would've screamed his praise, so proud of how far the boy had come. But this was power he'd never seen before out of any human mage... The mana, if he'd had any familiarity with it, seemed to be buzzing excitedly – willing itself to be gathered again and put to purpose. Tyr's entire body was magnetized, taking what amount to a cracked clay pot of a reservoir and forging it anew though no larger. This had always been him, simply better in all ways.
“Healing factor, I'll continue calling it that, has been enhanced slightly in terms of rapidity.” Tyr said calmly, his voice artificial and airy. Perfectly audible through the soundproofed bunker they stood in. “Twenty percent. Power generation, maybe fifty percent. I can't tell, I hadn't expected it to be that fierce a backlash. Definitely not appropriate for a real battle given the travel time from focus to target, and I broke my spellbreakers... Physical durability near 400% improvement across the board, mana resistance following a similar trend, but it's far from perfect. Assessment?”
Valkan coughed, waving his massive hands to clear the smoke from the room. “High level spells require anchor arrays, Tyr. That's how archmages ensure they don't hurt themselves with their own magic. What if there was someone behind you?”
“That's why we're here.” Tyr said, rolling his right arm back into place. A slight dislocation, he punched his hand into what was left of the wall and tugged backwards. Sloughing clean through the stone... Physical capability had improved markedly as well, yanking and letting it pop back into position with a shudder of pleasure. The power had been extreme and his body could feel it, shaking in excitement and ready for another round, the fire was screaming at him – begging to be let out. He didn't feel an ounce of exhaustion, as if his mana was infinite. Properly stepping into the realm of the wildest power fantasy he'd ever felt in his life, he want to burn something bigger than that wall. “...Assessment?”
“Mid to high level four.” Valkan replied in place of the assistant that was currently gaping at the damage done to his facility. “Mana emission, that was level five, but it's only a single element. In any case, worthy of an archmage at the lower level. Of course people don't just become archmages because they're good at blowing stuff up, that would've been easy for most people to avoid. But still, I'd say that's a successful field test, I can't believe I'm saying this either – but well done. We're both proud of you, let's go get a drink to celebrate.”
“Not quite.” Tyr said with determination. “We go again, I can do better – and we're not stopping until I figure out what my limits are.”
Even though... Deep down inside of himself, he doubted there was any such thing. All he needed was to keep turning that pulley and buckets would continue rising from the well within him.
“...Please don't destroy my facility!” The attendant whined, managing to shake himself from the fugue state of watching a mage in his early to mid 20's silent casting a level 5 mana emission. 3.5 seconds to generation, that was all, something that would astonish most senior battlemages...
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–
“The mountains look so pretty today.” She said, staring off at those stark and distant peaks only visible from the highest point on the dormitory tower. Its roof of green turf and vistas all around, just barely able to see the northern mountains from their vantage point. So far off. Crossing the borders of two nations to start into the third. In all actuality, Micah was quite sure she was seeing the rim of clouds on the horizon. Maybe some trees. Geographically, the two hundred and fifty miles or so separating them from the mountains beyond the span should be a bit too far off to see. Everything closer was more akin to tall hills, but he wasn't about to correct her.
Gods, she was everything. Hair a shade lighter than honey. Soft brown eyes and a pair of full lips that could never smile too often. Her heart shaped face and all the right proportions. He had no idea how he'd gotten so lucky as to so much as meet such a phenomenal woman. She wasn't smart in the common sense, but genius in the academic. Such soft, rosy skin she had. Micah was smitten, and he knew it.
Truth be told, the others had no idea how rare this feeling was.
He'd had a dozen girlfriends in his time here, all while Brenn remained a virgin and Tythas for all he knew only had the one. Something about the gift of those braces Sigi had given him seemed to draw them in, among other things. Little rumors and hearsay. But Micah loved his mother, and through his bonds with the others he'd come to respect women a great deal. The mother he'd had and the mother that would come later, he still had love for them both. His sisters too, all five of them. He didn't kiss and tell, but he wanted to tell the whole world about Maria, one day.
He didn't know where she'd come from, his Maria. One day she'd simply... Been. It hadn't taken long at all for him to notice her. Though, truth be told, Micah expected it had been the opposite way around for whatever reason, Maria was always there – watching him. She'd said she loved his sincerity, an odd thing to name. He, personally, loved everything about her, small or large, it didn't matter.
And the day couldn't be more fair – a bit chilly but blue skies in all directions.
“So beautiful.” She mused with a soft smile.
Micah returned her smile, reaching out a hand to grasp her own in an uncharacteristic display of bold affection, squeezing her gently, pleased to feel the affection reciprocated. “Not nearly as beautiful as--”
BOOM.
A cacophonous explosion split the air, the force behind it sending them sprawling. The academy was made for accidents such as this, the wards catching the catapulted debris like hooks on a fishing line. From their vantage point on the roof, Micah could both hear and see the students below screaming and scattering. Literally built for it, it wasn't supposed to just... Break like that.
Smoke was pouring violently out of the highest floor of the evocation tower, one of the test rooms was in flames and even as he watched, the wards began to reconstruct the building. Through the smoke came a blackened figure of a man, legs missing. Shooting like an arrow directly toward them. Micah watched, aghast at the carnage, lost in the screaming and shouting. Mages below casting wards preemptively, the whining gears of the mana towers around them spinning into motion to intercept anything the shields might have missed before shrapnel could strike the ground.
Blasting away, smashing masonry from the air with glittering tongues of azure light and the wild barking sounds of their own emissions.
But up here, on the rooftop, they were not afforded such protection, the towers were too slow and Micah too startled to act. Watching as Maria shoved him aside heroically, flung bodily from their perch by a passing stone no larger than his clenched fist. It all seemed to be happening in slow motion.
Maria falling as he reached out to her. The shards of rock flying by, glancing her head and flinging her off the tower, to the ground hundreds of feet bellow. Anguished, he cried out as she disappeared over the precipice.
Replaced by a smoking corpse that cratered into one of the walls framing the roof of the tower. Not a corpse, it was moving... Squirming around and rattling a baleful tune from a tongueless mouth.
“Ah!” Micah cried, but he recovered well enough. For vengeance. For his Maria.
“FIST OF THE WAR GOD!” A blueish, warped film burst into the air above the figure, crashing down to shove it deeper into the tower structure. Flipping over and trying to feel out with his spatial magic in a vain and wholly unsuccessful attempt to save her. It was too late.
If not for the merciful smoke shrouding her body, broken and crooked on the stone below... It's my fault...
“Oi!” 'It' cried, raising a half skeletal hand aglow with pale blue runes. Impossibly, it caught the gravity magic as if it were an object, squeezing until the array shattered. Somehow taking a thing with no physical form and simply... Crushing it. Those bony claws ripping straight through the magic and sending Micah reeling closer to the ledge. A skeleton, with bones that seemed cast of black metal, each of them covered with harsh lettering – even the smaller bones and vertebrae seemed enchanted to some degree.
“Oh man, that could've been bad. Thank the gods I landed on this roof instead of someones head. Are you alright?” The skeleton reached his hand out to Micah as its bones began to... Inflate? No, the fibers were all individual pieces of component muscle, and the organs within looks like little balloons being filled with blood.
“...Tyr.” Micah wanted to scream, wanted to... Too many feelings, he was at a complete loss. He felt empty, the woman he planned to ask out for real this time after many failed attempts, and she was dead. Why wasn't he sad? Wasn't this one of those dramatic moments he was supposed to beat his fists on the ground and howl vengeance to the sky? He wanted to sleep, that was all... Gravity magic was powerful, and it drained him a great deal. He wasn't like the others, he was so weak, so human, and now she was dead because of it. “You killed her.” Micah managed to utter that, at least.
The gears of the mana towers all around whined again as they continued plucking the debris from the air. Some of them were harrying Tyr with incapacitation spells, but he simply ignored them. Until, abruptly, they were deactivated and an attendant below shouted a rushed apology. Nobody knew what had set them off, but this technology came from a time before their own. An era where man had been... Better, perhaps. They didn't truly understand it, nor why they had suddenly registered Tyr, a professor, as an enemy. Notably, a signature that was not recognized even in the least bit as human.
“Who?” Tyr asked, twisting his neck into the proper position and plucking Micah from the ground, noting that the servos at the mans hip were damaged. Whining and clicking in an attempt to remain standing and stable. Servos? What was a servo? Why did Tyr know what a servo was? He had no experience with engineering, and yet he stared at the harness around Micah and wanted to frown at how crude and primitive it was. Even though Sigi had worked so hard and done something few people would've been able to equal. Replacing a limb was cheaper than building an enchanted exo-skeleton, and most children were healed at an age where this condition wouldn't be so permanent. Irreversible. “Nobody was here, I aimed myself in this direction because... Because nobody was here. But you're here. Right? Are you real?”
“You're creeping me out.” Micah sighed, sadly peering over the ledge. He was supposed to be sad, but he felt absolutely nothing – and in that realization he felt everything. It reminded him of something, from a past he'd buried long ago. Thought he had. “What is up with you lately?”
“Oi, oi...” Tyr whined. “So, apparently, I just killed somebody and you're asking about me? What's wrong with you?”
“You just said there was nobody else here!” Micah cried in frustration.
“There wasn't...” Tyr replied, his reconstituted nose sniffing aggressively at the air like some kind of canine picking up a scent on the hunting trail. “You're still not here. How did you get inside the walls? Oh, you're back again. That's odd, right? Am I slipping? How many years has it been, do you know? Smells like Nala here--”
SMASH.
Tyr was crushed underfoot as a woman in a half burnt dress descended from the sky, four feathered wings at her back and a ferocious aura that made Micah's gums itch.
“FILTHY RAT!”
“...Maria?” He asked, slack-jawed.
“It took me weeks to design that body, it's not so easy to shape these forms!” She stomped, Tyr grunting in discomfort under the incredible weight of the woman. “What were you thinking, using that much...!” Maria turned, staring Micah in the eyes with hers becoming baleful slits. “The little monkey is listening, and now my cover is blown. Not to mention, you can stop whining, I'm not that heavy!”
“I didn't even know you were here.” Tyr groaned before his leg began to shake under the beating he was receiving, whimpering suggestively. “Ah, wait, ooh, a little to the--” Nala punted him in the back of his raised head, sending him hurtling off the tower like some kind of bobsledder riding a chunk of masonry, sailing off with a choked cry. The mana towers didn't seem content to just catch the bricks she'd kicked free, opting to swat Tyr from the sky like a bug and send him away an incredible distance.
There was something innately comical about the 'ah, shit!', cut off just before he'd finished uttering it – being zapped by the mana towers and flying off into the forest beyond the academy walls. Hundreds of meters at a minimum, exactly what he deserved from so recklessly compressing mana and spira together like that in full view of humans...
“Huh...” Micah mused, staring at it all with no small amount of confusion. It had been so perfect a day, too...
Now the two were alone on a roof that had begun to reconstruct itself like all of the other facilities damaged by the explosion. Through the hole in the wall, Micah could see Tiberius Scarr and Professor Valkan poking their heads out and looking about with lost expressions. Behind them, he could hear the voice of Assistant Reyes demanding that they leave his examination room.
“The headmaster will hear about this, and you will be billed for the damages! AH!!!”
Odd, really. Reyes was such a nice person normally. Sure, he didn't much enjoy his job, but he had a motivation to stay in that capacity given the salary far beyond his below-average talent in magic. His daughter Emily was about to turn that age where she'd be looking for elementary schools. Micah could understand why he was mad this time, though... Tyr had just destroyed his place of work and likely all of the personal effects held within...
“Alright, kiddo.” Nala... Or, Maria? Who was Nala? She was holding up two fingers and thrusting them toward him. “Two choices. Forget what you saw here and never speak of it to anybody. Or die. I will kill you without a second thought if you expose who I am. Make an unbreakable vow and I go on my way, nice and easy for you.”
“I don't know even who you are.” Micah sat on the half destroyed bench and buried his face in his hands. What was happening right now...? “You're not Maria, are you?”
Apparently, this 'Maria' he'd known these last few months didn't exist.
“No. I am Nala Thuum, Grand Matriarch of Royal Saorsa. Truthfully, we don't typically use our clan surnames, but since you so earnestly gave me yours in the past – it's only right.” Nala said. “Such a nice, kind, mannerly boy. Men with hearts like yours are rare, but you are far too lascivious. Some feedback for improvement to better your future, but I suppose this component of you is equally charming – boldness is to be treasured. So...?”
“I'm not making an unbreakable vow to anyone ever again.” Micah replied flatly. He'd made that mistake once before, and now he couldn't walk. Once, his injury might've been healed – but the men that had taken him in, the inquisitors, had duped him. Congenital, his ass. The world was a cold, cruel, and unfair place. It hadn't given one lick about the fact that he'd been tricked into doing it by the Marquis, and now here he was. Forced to make up some story about a childhood injury or medical condition, both of which weren't complete mistruths – but a broken back had become a permanently dead vertebrae to prevent him from running away. He felt sick for lying, but after keeping up the lie for so long, it got easier. Funny how that worked. “And you can't kill me.”
“Oh?” Nala raised an eyebrow, her form alternating between what he remembered Maria looked like, and that dark skinned woman he'd seen kiss Tyr at the tournament. Flickering like an illusion, not melting like he'd heard skin changers did when their forms were damaged “A brave little mouse, aren't you?”
“Not at all.” Micah said. “I am a coward. I am scared of everything. But I know that if you hurt me, Tyr will kill you. It's not my time, yet, not any time soon. And I thought you were dead...”
“The little wolf is no match for me.” Nala chuckled. “Granted, I also do not wish to upset him overmuch. He has enough on his plate, but I doubt he cares for you the way you presume. I don't think he cares about anything or anyone, not even himself as he often claims.”
“Then you don't know him!” Micah protested angrily, passionately gesticulating his hands in the air before him. “Tyr cares about all of us! Even you!”
“Little mouse...” Nala tutted, patting his head in motherly fashion. “His is a dark and lonely path, following those threads of his. You see too much with your heart. He is not a man to count on unless there is prey that needs killing. I like this little wolf, but I see him for what he is. That is exactly why I favor him, it is a shame that he'll be gone soon.”
“Mmm...” Micah nodded. Everyone knew Tyr had faults, but he knew. Might have been the only one Iscari had truly told. He knew Brenn 'knew', but Brenn was who he was. The gods pave the path of the righteous thus towards the heavens, or something stupid like that... Faith was a strange thing. Micah didn't have faith in much. He trusted Tyr, because there was nobody more trustworthy in his mind. One could scour the world and find naught but one who would always behave so true to their nature. The man wasn't tricky in the slightest, push an issue and he would answer or do anything you asked him to within reason. He didn't connive, steal, or cheat. In the rare times he'd been caught being cunning, he'd fess up almost immediately.
That was Micah's perception of the man.
Micah knew, so he had faith in his way. Tyr was his faith, in a manner of speaking. Because they were friends, but also because in the darker recesses of his mind left bitter by losing his entire family – he wanted to watch Tyr kill them all. It made him sick again. That brutality. Micah hated the warlike successor states and longed for the day they were brought to justice. Hated that system that hadn't provided him with the proper education to control his powers until it was too late, leaving him wanting to watch it be torn down. And that day was coming, he hoped, Iscari had said it would.
That Tyr was the hero.
Iscari claimed they'd do it together, that he'd seen it in a vision and the quest of the twin primus' was to correct all inequity in the world. To institute a benevolent global autocracy, it sounded ludicrous, but Micah could think of no better pair. Iscari to hold the leash and Tyr to be... Who or what he was.
Tyr made Micah sick, too, in a way. His tenacity, the way he'd started unremarkable and started to sprint past him until Micah could barely see his shadow, and then he'd turned out to be a primus. Watching as he began grinding himself down to nubs, gobbets of flesh and bits of bone, but he just wouldn't stop, ever. Torturing himself constantly, and he had the ability to make things right again, maybe the will to do it, too. All while his wives harassed and insulted him, Tyr had never lost his path and it had made him famous – often the muse of bards and skalds traveling through the kingdoms to sing at the inns.
Each and every ballad a tragedy, the Red Moon and the Wolf that Weeps.
A life lived like that, surrounded by people who hated him, and still the man had managed to reach for greatness. In Micah's mind, Tyr was a living example that one day even someone as foul as himself could be redeemed.
Tyr had been weak, but now he was... Famous, talented, able, reconnected with his wives, had made things right, at least from Micah's perspective.
Another thing the world would take away from him, something even a primus couldn't stop. Or so Tyr claimed. Even after watching Tyr kill 'Maria', Micah could never look at him with anything but unabashed love. First among brothers, the apple of his eye.
“Then at least allow me the chance to die fighting.” Micah said, widening his stance and feeling the electric mana rushing to his fingertips. The Harani way, he was pure blooded – green eyed and western – though most of his life had been spent far afield of his homeland. He'd reconnected with that part of himself and found that he liked the custom of honesty and valor in all things. Or if not valor, simple stubbornness viewed through the human prism, perhaps.
“Those are not the words of a coward, little mouse.” Nala smiled in amusement, but her head was held high and imperious. Her mouth a little too wide to look natural. “Fighting. Human honor has stained your mind with this concept that a death can be worthy. Worthiness comes from your everyday deeds among the living, not from your last and final stand. Your gods have fooled you into believing that a single moment makes you a gallant thing. But honor, like everything else relative to your disgusting race, is a lie. Men never face their end with calm and quiet hearts. Everything is all chivalry and duty until the limbs come off, nature is about survival against all odds, not screaming the name of a god as you throw yourself into the lion's jaws.”
“I think I loved you, if it was you.” Micah said with a sigh, looking back toward the horizon. And all of a sudden that familiar vista was so inherently different, as if the world had flattened out and he could see all the way to the far frozen shores of Oresund... “And no, my heart isn't calm, I feel like I'm going to puke, but I thank you for giving me what I needed if only for a little while. I really did enjoy my time with you, you made me very happy.”
Nala cursed, flattening her lips and stomping angrily on the ground, lowering her hands and surrendering to instinctive impulse. Nala was no fighter, and never had been, only ever the mother – her children were the warriors in her line. Ability or not, she simply had no taste for martial challenge. “Fine. No death. But you're going to do one thing for me before I leave.”