Chapter 75

  The Children

Sylas sighed, staring emptily into the darkness. Another thing—another thing was added to the ever-growing list of things that caused his head to hurt. And, like most things that made it onto that list, it wasn't the sort of thing that he could just ignore. It was a monumental, life-altering thing. After all, the young girl, unconsciously, blew up the entire castle into smithereens. Why?

"The fuck if I know…" he grunted, though was a bit dishonest in his words. He had the suspicions, naturally—self-defensive mechanism in the face of imminent death, perhaps? But he wasn't convinced. After all, Ryne was similarly threatened back when they crossed into the north and faced the rain of the dead. She didn't blow up then. "It was those shadow thingies, probably. The question is… what the fuck was that?"

Sylas was truly lost. As far as he knew, it could have been anything—it could have been because of the disease, maybe someone was smoking some meat in the floor down below and the smoke went up through the cracks(though, admittedly, this one was unlikely), it could have been magic, it could have been a myriad of fantastical and unimaginable things… or it could have been nothing. He could have fathomed up that whole scenario.

“No, no, let’s not go there. Not opening that can of worms,” he quickly dismissed the last theory and went back to the likeliest one—magic. He’d come to realize that the ‘magic’ had become a good scapegoat for him, as whatever was even mildly outside his scope of understanding, he just attributed to some or another form of ‘big voodoo unexplained magic’. And even if he was right in most cases, he was right for all the wrong reasons. “Just make sure Ryne doesn’t fall ill, I suppose. Yep, just put it back in the corner. Until it eventually blows up in my face. Like most things…”

Sighing, Sylas decided to truly ignore it—not completely, but for the time being. He decided it was time he went about asking things and figuring out the answers to questions he had fashioned before he first encountered the castle on fire. Namely, he wanted to squeeze answers in regards to the 'Children' from Derrek. After all, the man supposed Sylas was one of the 'Children' despite suspecting they had gone extinct.

As such, he spent the next few loops—never going past leaving the bandit’s camp, actually—trying to figure that answer and that answer alone. Until he did. Well, it wasn’t much of an answer, not really. Like most things, it was a heap of vague notions wrapped in what was clearly the legendary example of a myth getting overblown in the course of decades and centuries.

According to Derrek, ‘Children’ were one of the ‘ancient’—a word that meant both five hundred and five thousand years in this world, it seemed—Ways. Way, as far as Sylas understood it, was simply another way of saying ‘school of magic’. As for the number of Ways, Derrek didn’t know. Nonetheless, the few things they learned about the ‘Children’ come from the remnants of their Way that died out some six hundred years ago.

From the sound of it all, ‘Heartless’, as they were worldly called, was a school of magic that specialized in assassinations. What set them apart from other assassins, however, was that they were very open about it—in that, they preferred killing their targets in broad daylight, and publicly owning up to the kills.

As such, most of the world didn't even consider them assassins, not truly. They saw them as duelists and, because of that, the stigma that usually followed the schools of assassins didn't accompany the Heartless. In fact, they were fairly well respected and even up until they died out as an Order, held a decent sway in politics, and were considered exemplar nobility.

The reason Derrek called them ‘Children’ is that it was a term they used to describe themselves. In fact, the entire way’s mantra was, according to the last of them, anyway, ‘We are Children of Those Who Speak Not, See Not, Fear not; and we are Ancestors of those Who Do Speak, Do See, and Do Fear’. As for what that meant, Sylas had no clue, and Derrek didn’t seem to either.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Though they were public about their ‘assassinations’, that same transparency didn’t extend to their Way. Unlike a decent number of other Ancient Ways, such as the one Derrek’s Order was practicing, actually, the Children never shared theirs. Though they proudly declared the name, Heartseeker, that was as far as the public’s knowledge of the mantra went.

The records Derrek studied relayed that the last Child of the Way destroyed all documents and training scrolls by setting himself and the entire mansion on fire. It is said that the fire burned for seven days and seven nights without a stop, impossible to extinguish through any means, before abruptly stopping at the dawn of the eighth day.

As per usual, Sylas learned a lot, and yet very little at the same time. He wasn’t bothered by it, however. Similarly, he didn’t think the ‘system’ was some remnant soul of the Heartseeker feeding him their mantra to, once more, rebirth the Way into the world. In fact, Sylas suspected that the only reason he was given Heartseeker first was likely that it was one of the easier, yet ‘good’ Ways he could learn.

He had no proof for his conjecture, yet was fairly confident in it. Nonetheless, what he was happy about was figuring out the larger framework of magic in this world—the schools were referred to as ‘Ways’, and the only reason why the way Derrek and Ryne taught him magic was the same was due to the fact that they weren’t teaching him a ‘Way’, but just the basics of basics that one could learn everywhere, regardless.

Methods of the schools, however, were strictly guarded, and teaching an outsider was punished by death. Sylas wasn’t worried about it—for now, at least. Since he was stuck in the castle for the foreseeable future, there was no reason for him to worry yet.

Beyond learning about the children, there was one more important part right here—the Shard that Valen found in Dyn’s tent. Ever since Valen first gave it to him during the first ‘playthrough’ of this loop, Sylas never went back to it, not during the entire year and a half that he spent pointlessly trying to figure out how to kill the Thrall.

In part, it was because he didn't know what to do with the Shard, but in part, it was because he'd completely forgotten about it at a certain point. The only reason he even remembered it was that, during one of the loops, Valen caught up to him midway through the night and showed him the rock, once more.

Currently, Sylas was holding it between his fingers—it wasn’t all that different than the Shard in the castle, one he was yet to pick up, save for the slightly different tint and weighing slightly less. Unlike with the Shard of Ascindium, nothing happened when Sylas tried pushing magic into the rock. For all intents and purposes, it reacted the same way an actual rock would do—as in, it didn’t.

And yet, Sylas had a quest in regards to it—he was supposed to fill a charge in order to gain some information about the shard. The irony was that the information he wanted was, well, how to charge the damn thing.

“Life’s often a cruel—hmm, Everfrost, Thrall of Frost… it, it’s not that simple, right?” he mumbled. “Things in this place rarely are. And yet… it seems appropriately ridiculous and anger-inducing for this world. Haah, I’ll have to test it once we return.” He wasn’t in a hurry to, though. He spent about a week in total writing and memorizing not just what he learned about the Children, but the remainder of knowledge he had.

He’d gotten into a habit of doing so during the excruciating year and a half of being stuck. Knowledge, after all, was remarkably fleeting he learned. Even some of the things that seemed entirely basic to remember—like names—tended to get away from him if he didn’t think about them for too long. For instance, he’d completely forgotten the name of the castle’s Commander. He knew that the castle had one and he’d seen the man quite a few times, but… he’d simply forgotten the name.

In fact, there was a brief stretch during the year-and-a-half where he even managed to forget Tebek’s name. It was brief, lasting only a week, but it was a good wake-up call for him that he shouldn't take things for granted.

Ever since then, virtually once a week or, at worst, two weeks, he would take a moment to write down everything, and repeat it several times over, as though he was studying for a test. If only I could carry a piece of paper with me through the loops… he didn’t say it out loud, however, from fear of the system picking up on it and offering it to him as a reward. Though it would be nice, he’d much rather get rewards that would make him stronger and offer new information. For now, writing down things wasn’t a big issue.

Eventually, though, it would be. As his wealth of knowledge continued to increase, there would come a point where it becomes simply too much. Too much to simply write down and study. The amount that needed to stay permanently written.

“Ah well,” he sighed. “I’ll cross that bridge once I get to it. Now, I need to see if the Shard has anything to do with Iun. Ah, I swear to God…”