Chapter 370 - Epilogue: Finis Coronat Opus

The god-king of Cadria stifled a yawn as he flipped through his uncle’s old notes. His eyes were lifeless, moving across the pages without a hint of motivation. The only thing that kept him going was spite, and even that was starting to dwindle. He had spent four entire months working through the mysterious documents with practically nothing to show. Over ninety percent of his observations had stemmed from the first few sessions and he hadn’t made any discoveries of note in weeks.

It was almost starting to look like he was at an impasse, like the writings meant nothing at all. As much as he doubted it, he couldn’t help but suspect that his uncle was simply a mollusk-loving degenerate. But at the same time, he struggled to believe that the papers were truly his uncle’s handiwork at all.

The most jarring red flag was the level at which the text was written. Ferdinand may not have been a scholar, but he was a well-educated man with a good head on his shoulders. He was often responsible for preparing eloquent speeches and key government documents, and he was known for his impeccable, error-free work.

The papers at hand, however, did not share that particular trait. The perfect penmanship certainly screamed Ferdinand, but the pages were riddled with spelling mistakes and grammatical mishaps. They were still legible with some effort, but they were clearly suspicious. The misspelled words most likely served as an input for some sort of coded message. It clearly wasn’t a simple shift; Virillius had tried mapping every letter to every other, even knowing that it was a waste of time. The double letters and word lengths did not match with that of the standard Marish tongue.

When it came to ciphers, his uncle was only really a fan of the vigenère in the first place, and if anything, he was more inclined to use one of those. Virillius tried every key previously used in a military application, as well as a number of others he presumed that the man might consider. But alas, he had no luck, so he switched up his approach. He tried everything else he could think of. He changed out the errors for keywords and built up a list that crossed document lines. He substituted the gibberish for symbols and even guessed with random words. But at the end of the day, he was left with nothing but senseless erotica.

Sighing to himself, he continued to sort through the document in front of him, listing all errors of each type for his tracking purposes. He compiled them per paragraph, per page, and per document before tallying up the stats and seeing the same nonsense as usual. The number of each error type was random, fluctuating heavily from story to story. The only constant he found was the relative frequency; the grammatical mistakes were few and far between.

He would have to include the sentences that contained them to get them to a comparable length to their spelling-based counterparts, though doing that netted him nearly double the page count.

Sorting the errors into their own respective stats, Virillius tapped a finger against his desk. And then, suddenly, a realization. An epiphany.

He began combing through the data immediately, organizing it based on the positions of the grammatical mistakes. The sentences were rarely cut in half by the random punctuation marks, but counting the characters and compiling said counts provided a shocking revelation. Their lengths were the same. If spaces were excluded, the sum of the number of characters in each sentence, prior to a grammatical error, was the same as the number of characters that followed to its end. And both were greater than the total length of all the spelling errors combined.

He had found his key. Or rather, his keys.

The way forward was clear. Ferdinand had used the vigenère approach, just with an extra twist. First, he encrypted them with one key, and then, he decrypted them with the other. It didn’t make sense the first time around, nor when he tried with the second key. But by reversing the second key, and then decrypting with the first as is, he finally cracked his uncle’s code.

The output was not perfect. As was the case with the input, some of the words were missing letters, while others had extra inserted, likely so that they would work better with the cipher.

But even with its spelling thrown off, the message was loud and clear.

Constantius was alive.

He was living in the Pollux Marsh.

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He had disguised himself as a farmhand named Stanley.

And as Virillius had always known, he was a master of bird and beast.

___

The goddess of the eternal flow watched quietly as an infinite amount of text scrolled across her terribly finite display. Each line that appeared on her monitor was an explicit event, something that happened in the world, significant enough to leave a mark in the system’s books. Green acquisitions and red executions were among the most common records, second only to the grey bits of telemetry that raced across the foreground.

The amount of information and the rate of its production was far too great for any mortal mind. It captured everything that occurred in all seven realms at every single instant in time. Most of them were filtered or otherwise handled automatically, with Flux only needing to address a few hundred entries each second herself. All things considered, it was a slow day. And perhaps that was why she noticed a certain soul the moment it entered the pipe, even though it was the sort she would have normally overlooked.

With a gentle flick, she pulled it from the queue and piped it through the manual process. Said process was typically reserved for her believers, but she saw no harm in engaging. The deceased mortal had piqued her interest, her agenda was practically empty, and Altea rarely processed her chosen in person. She likely would have taken him already had she the intention; Flux was free to do as she pleased.

“Klint Harper. Welcome to the hall of passing.” She slowly walked towards him as a grand hall formed around them, her steps echoing off the non-existent walls.

“Thanks,” he said, quietly. The two-legged lizard stayed on one knee as he gazed upon the celestial chamber. It had started as a hall only in name, featuring only a marble floor with stone pillars along its sides, but the walls soon phased into reality. They were porcelain white, made of the same godly stone as the supports and ceiling.

It was one of the rarer reactions—for most, the hall’s construction was hardly the most pressing concern—but the man, the Ace of Diamonds, was not lost in the sorrow of death.

He wasn’t without grief—no one was—but Klint was content enough to meet the deity’s eyes.

“Never thought it’d be the goddess of the flow that I’d see at the very end.”

“I do not see any reason for you to complain,” she said. “Was it not precisely the twists and turns like this one that gave your life its meaning?”

The man shrugged. “Guess so, Goddess. But I ain’t alive anymore, am I?”

“I suppose not.” The goddess smiled. It was a loving, motherly look, even though the mortal was far from one of her own. “Do you have any regrets?”

For a moment, only truly the briefest of moments, Klint—Ace—clenched his fists, curled his tail, and gritted his teeth. But then he took a breath and closed his eyes. Allowing the stress to leave his body, he faced the goddess with a goofy, boyish smile. A smile he hadn’t worn in a long, long time.

“Y’know what, Goddess? I don’t think I do.”

She watched him for a few brief seconds, giving him a chance to change his mind before she nodded her head.

A single portal opened in the space behind her, a swirling, cosmic mass, dyed with purples and blues.

He advanced without any explicit instruction. His first step was swift, without hesitation, but he paused briefly right after, to look at the goddess who smiled at him again.

It was her reward, a final treat for the man who had unwittingly served her purpose.

Every step was accompanied by a memory, a view into his life from another lens.

He saw his mother look so affectionately upon him as he hatched in the nest beneath her. He saw the pride in his father’s eyes when he first took up the sword, as well as the worry that he always tried so hard to hide. He saw all the work his mother put into supporting his growth, the little pictures she drew on his birthday cakes commending his various achievements. He saw the long hours his father worked, the extra battles he fought and the risks he took to see their livelihoods supported.

He saw and remembered it all.

When he raised his head again, he saw them waiting in the portal. They stood shoulder to shoulder, smiling, waiting for him at the edge of the great beyond.

His brothers and sisters were there as well, standing tall, having watched over their oldest sibling to the very end.

They didn’t say a word.

But he knew.

They were proud of him and the life he led. Just as he had been of theirs.

His feet grew faster.

Before he knew it, he found himself sprinting towards the portal, into the arms of the fair maiden waiting just beyond the gate.

They hadn’t been joined in life.

But she was there.

Waiting.

Just as she promised, when she had gone ahead.