Nicala Aldo sometimes thinks back to how he first felt when he was hired to be the royal advisor. He had entered the court with a hundred schemes behind his robes just like a hundred other of his Aldo predecessors, prepared to lie, cheat, and bribe his name into the history books.
Then, just a month into his job, the Kepian Civil War started, and he had spent the next year or so making sure that there would still be an actual nation he could lord his status over.
By the end of it, he still had schemes, but they were much more tempered. Rid himself of any plans that could possibly ruin the nation, but still have a few in place that he could use to make his life more comfortable.
He was just about to start a harmless little plot to embezzle some funds from the yearly tax income, but then three quarters of the Navy rebelled against the crown, denouncing its actions during the civil war and creating a pirate fleet with so much power that it might as well have been a new sovereign nation.
The embezzlement plans fall through, and he spends another year running damage control.
Now there’s this stupid plot with the Tudors, and Nicala is slowly realizing that maybe managing a nation isn’t really as cracked up as people make it out to be. Of course, he could retire and spend the rest of his days in a mansion somewhere in the High Greens, but at this point he is also too terrified that his replacement won’t be able to do his job as well and cause the downfall of the nation.
His knees jolt in pain as he misses a step, and he almost starts tumbling down the damn staircase. He looks at the remaining way to go in despair.
He wasn’t even 35 yet, so why in hell does it feel like he’s pushing 50 after just two years in office?!
Two more flights of stairs down and the magical aura hits him in a wave of icy fog. It feels like he has just been dipped into the icy waters of the Swallowed Isles, and for a timeless moment his body forgets how to move or breathe, and he drifts like a limpid water flea amidst dark deep ocean currents.
Then his right foot lands back on the staircase and the feeling leaves him as quickly as it entered, the only thing remaining being a sense of exhaustion. He pauses to catch his breath and looks around at the ruined, peeling wallpaper.
It was a real shame. Wispgarden had once been a symbol of luxury, an underground palace of oaken roots right beneath the capital itself. He had originally planned to buy a home here, as did nearly every noble in King Thalian’s court.
Then, like all things he had set his sights on after landing this damned job, it was promptly taken away from him due to some nation crisis. Good old Van Kanker, the newest and only member of the Raingarde’s first division, had decided that he wanted to take up residence here.
Given the absolute havoc his magic unleashed on his surroundings, Nicala personally feels that this individual would be much better suited to working in a dungeon somewhere in the castle’s prisons. Unfortunately, not even the collective ire of every lord, merchant, and rich busybody in Kepia could challenge the authority of the Raingarde, especially if it was the once per generational talent of its first division.
One step after another, his thoughts start to numb over as he goes deeper into Van Kanker’s mana. It slips away piece by piece from his skin like rusted flakes peeled over summer-baked railroad tracks, and he has to start running through mana control exercises so that it doesn’t escape through his skin into the swirling eddies passing him by. The walls and floors around him do not have such mental capabilities, and their cracks and chips grow slightly larger as the mana corrodes Wispgarden away chunk by chunk.
He finds Kanker sitting in the middle of some sort of hotel reception hall, fingers crooked like rotting spider legs over the chest of a freshly dead body, the latest death row inmate sacrificed for the good of the nation. There is a wispy ball floating above the body’s torso, which slowly gets absorbed into the fingers. It glows pale blue like muted moonlight, and grows dimmer by the second.
Nicala tries to speak, yell, even scream, but is unable to open his mouth. There is a furious ball of magical energy right at the pit of his stomach, and it will get pulled out of him as soon as he opens his mouth. Even with it closed, bits and pieces seep out between his nostrils and the gaps between his teeth. Memories are dragged up to the surface of his brain and leave just as fast. The smell of the roses in the air on the day he confessed to his first love. The taste of the steak from that restaurant he likes to frequent after work. It all unveils before him like an art scroll, leading directly towards Van Kanker.
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Then Kanker actually looks up from the corpse, and suddenly the environment is back to normal, though a tad bit more dilapidated than before. The sudden change is nauseating, and Nicala has to half lean half fall into a nearby wall.
‘Apologies. It seems that I have lost track of time…’
Kanker does not have a face. Or a body. He, or it, is a floating cloud of underwater pale green light, a floating sailor coat creating the illusion of shoulders and torso. Two massive skeletal hands hang at the sides, each one blueberry blue like a freshly deoxygenated body and as large as a man is tall. The accompanying voice seems to originate from somewhere inside his skull, its vibration resonating painfully with the bones along his inner ear. A crackling baritone that sounds like a mix of radio static and wooden dice.
Nicala responds, but it is in a voice choked out by dust, tongue made numb and stupid by a thick layer of bone dry chalk.
‘What is the status of your reserves?’
‘Hm… Not particularly high. I’ve barely had a chance to absorb 70 since you’ve last sent me out…’
The first statement is always a lie. Kanker is like a hive queen, always hoarding away as many resources as he can get his hands on. He just needed to figure out what his actual goal was.
‘You’ve had an entire year since we sent you out to Fikiri. Are you saying that you’ve only managed to absorb 70 more since then? Even with the constant supply of people we’ve been sending down here?’
‘What can I say? My absorption has been rather slow as of late.It takes me around three days or so just to finish one.’
‘That body… It hasn’t even been a day since he was sent down here. At that rate, you should have at least 400.’
Kanker has the audacity to shrug, the cloak bobbing up, then down like a toy boat in a child’s tub, too smooth to be anything that could be mimicked by actual flesh and blood.
‘Do you drink, Sir Aldo?’
Ah, there’s the left field question meant to throw him off. He knows it's meant to disorientate him, but Nicala still feels the anger in his chest bubbling.
‘No, I used to… but stopped.’
‘In excess?’
He used to during the civil war. Then he stopped when the decisions he made while drunk got an entire village wiped off the map.
‘I fail to see why you felt the need to dig into my past. Is this question meant to go somewhere?’
‘The absorption of a soul to me is akin to an indulgence of drink to you. Time often passes by without my knowledge. Have you never vowed to drink only a single glass, only to wake up the next morning with an entire bottle gone?’
This motherfucker was taunting him.
‘Forgive me if I sound skeptical. You seem remarkably composed compared to what I normally see from someone who is intoxicated.’
‘A mere consequence of our physical differences, I assure you. I lack legs to stumble with or a mouth to slur my speech with, but my focus on the absorption process is genuine.’
‘Well I hope you enjoyed it thoroughly, because you have a new assignment. You’re to leave for Mirragan immediately, details are in this missive.’
He tosses the scroll of parchment over, and it is promptly caught in a blob of some sort of jelly-like transparent substance that appears in midair. There is a brief pause while Kanker runs his aura through the indents of the missive.
‘... Caltomarra, hm? Surely a mere 400 or so souls are insufficient to deal with someone of her calibur?’
‘We’ve been giving you captured rebels this past year, some of them are even North Sea officers. Even with the lower number, you should have absorbed enough to stand a chance.’
‘True, the quality is higher, but don’t you feel like the numerical difference is still too high? I spent at least a thousand at Fikiri…’
‘You lost a thousand because you decided to spend all of your reserves nuking a city into fucking oblivion instead of following your orders.’
Shit, that came out a bit too heated. Kanker stares at him in silence for some time, and he starts to worry that maybe he went to far and-
‘So be it. You are correct. Compared to the thousand or so souls of common folk, 400 soldiers is about equal if not better.’
Just like that, Kanker passes by him and leaves, which was an absolutely horrible thing now that he’s actually stopping to think about it.
Kanker hordes his souls like a starved animal hoarding food. He had come down to Wispgarden with a literal book’s worth of arguments and reasons to make him accept the mission. The only reason why he was so quick to accept was because he thought that it would increase his soul count more than what he would need to spend.
That initial reluctance and mentions of drink were meant to upset him, draw him into argument mode, otherwise Nicala might have even retracted the order and went back to the king for counsel out of suspicion.
There’s no way he can catch up with Kanker now, especially considering that the latter could literally phase through walls and just fly out of Wispgarden. He had fired a literal bullet of mass destruction, and no longer had a way to take it back.
…Fuck
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Arevik’s skin is cracking. Every gust of wind that flies through Step-Valley Gulch stabs through him in sharp slices of razored sand. The cold he could stand, but the dryness he couldn’t. Spending a lifetime aboard the North Sea Fleet had accustomed him to damp winds and roiling midnight fogs. The icy mists coming down from the Swallowed Isles dry him out like a rotten peach buried in sandy beachside pavement.
Move forward step by step. Occasionally eat a slice of jerky. Drink a sip of water. He moves through the canyons as a machine choked on half baked parchment scripts. The next bite of jerky comes pungent with iron, dripping with blood from his cracked lips, and he begins to question why he is even here.
Then his fingers brush the flower pendant hanging off of a side pocket, and it comes rushing back all over again.
Roxanne. Hackobyan’s Gulf. The battle to rescue her.
Her execution right in front of him, butchered like a goddamn animal.
The anger flushes through him anew, hot boiling liquid iron jump starting his capillaries, iron barb nerves twisted into gordian knots of galvanized fury.
He is alone, but half of the fleet are out there, each traveling their own hidden paths through the canyonlands, all making their way towards Mirrigan. Their numbers are hundreds.
False Eden. One of the thirteen legendary tomes of the Valtien.
Roxanne will live again, even if he has to slaughter his way through an entire city to get his hands on that damned tome.