“She’s… not there.” Relief and terror ran through me in equal measure. I paused, wiping my face on my sleeve, and stood, turning away from the empty casket. I’d stated earlier that death wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. On some level, I still believed that, but seeing the grave unoccupied had softened that perspective. If Lillian was in Thoth’s clutches, no matter how dire her circumstances, she could be saved.
I would save her this time. I had to. It would take time to find her, more to come up with a plan to save her that wouldn’t get either of us killed. But it was achievable now. Within the realm of possibility.
My thoughts gained momentum as I paced. “I need to speak to my father. Belay the attack at sea until we know where she is. Thoth wouldn’t keep Lillian with her. She’s too smart for that. If the surprise attack succeeds and she’s lost to the sea, there’s a good chance she’ll have someone standing by with orders to—”
I trailed off mid-sentence, because Maya was openly sobbing. Beside her, Alten looked stricken, his mouth tight.
“What?” I asked.
“Ni’lend no.” Maya embraced me. Her long nails dug into my back as she embraced me tightly. “Come back to me. Don’t break now. Don’t let her take away everything you’ve done. Please, please come back to me. ”
Unsure of what else to do, I stared at Alten, wide-eyed. Still grim and drawn, he extended his index finger behind me, towards the casket.
The scent hit me first. A sweet and putrid odor that carried on the breeze.
“I’m right here,” Maya said, running a dirty hand through my hair. “I’ve got you.”
I placed a hand against her chest, gently pushing her away. Then turned around slowly and looked back down towards the casket.
It was only then that I saw her. Truly saw her. Light of hair, but in practice it was closer to brown from dirt. Desiccated flesh where freckles used to be. Empty sockets that once housed deep brown chocolate eyes. A smile that was all teeth, gray and decayed.
Vogrin appeared beside me. I had no memory of summoning him, but I must have. He drifted quietly beside the coffin, making a few vague gestures with a hand that glowed white and drew abstract shapes into the air.
Then let the magic fade and shook his head.
Almost completely unaware of what I was doing, I traced her cheek with the back of my knuckle.
Fire rushed through me, starting from the top of my head and spreading across my entire body. The weight of a thousand worlds pressed down on my shoulders and I fell to a knee as ambient mana tore through me. I lost vision in one eye and the other grew blurry and hot, showing little more than vague outlines.
“What the fuck is happening?” Alten’s voice, sounding far away. “The wind came outta nowhere.”
“The aura is back… and—” Maya gasped. “His eye.”
“Is that demon fire?”
“No. It’s blue.” Maya’s voice was a dull echo, faintly resonating as my vision faded. “And it looks like hers.”
It felt familiar, yet entirely new. The same seething tear from a half-decade ago that rendered me damaged and unconscious on the cusp of the enclave. Only this time, it was all-encompassing, washing through every pore, every hair, every neuron of my mind. Loss, pain, anger, despair were flooded away in a torrent of white hot agony, purifying everything I was to nothing but ash.
All at once, my senses deadened. There was nothing. Either what I was feeling was too much, and part of my mind had shut down, or I was losing myself altogether.
Still, there was a sense of calmness. Like standing in the eye of a storm.
“Fight it.” Someone’s voice echoed into my consciousness, from what felt like a lifetime away.
Why?
The question resonated. It was easier to think, now that there was nothing but me and the darkness beyond. Empty and cold.
What was the point?
The naval strategy sounded great on paper. But from the thousands of years Thoth lived, and the hundreds of permutations of events she’d seen, was it even statistically possible that she’d never seen that before? That my father had never noticed her early, and thought of resorting to the methods of our ancestors to take her off the board?
Of course he had. It would fail, just as every other attempt to even unsettle her had failed.
Escape Barion’s clutches, only for Thoth to accost us in a nearby city.
Win the infernal’s favor, only for her to outsource troops for her eventual invasion force.
Her reach was unlimited. Her power, astronomical. The gap of experience would never stop growing.
It wasn’t just Lillian’s death that rended me, though that blade cut deep, tearing open scar tissue and reverting the years it’d taken the wound to close. It was the realization that Thoth knew exactly how to play with me. How easy it would be to misinterpret her actions as petty and impulsive, but that was false. Despite her acrid nature, she hadn’t mentioned Lillian’s death when we met in the Sanctum. No backhanded remarks, no cryptic vagaries. Where a storybook villain might have monologued, or thrown her vile deeds into the protagonist’s face, goading him, Thoth held her tongue.
Knowing that if she played the long game, and I blindly walked into it, the impact would be multiplied tenfold.
No. The naval siege would fail because she’d see it coming.
And when it did, who would be next? My Mother? My sisters?
Maya?
Fear crept through me as my thoughts ran in a circle, slowly growing closer to the inevitable conclusion. The only viable escape left was as inevitable as it was simple.
Absolution.
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Injuries and afflictions to the soul were the only malady that carried over between resets. Dimly, I knew what I was currently enduring had to be soul damage. It was rare. Souls naturally lost viability over time through the process of reincarnation. This could be expedited if the soul belonged to a person who’d endured much hardship, but only fractionally. The most pathetic, tormented existence would likely only lose a hundredth of their soul’s viability over the span of a long life. Most cases stemmed from rampant, unstructured casting by those with more mana than sense.
Despite being previously unversed in magic, I was warned in the enclave to take care with unstructured casting, because my soul was on the verge of collapse.
So, really, all I had to do was let go, and it would all be over.
No more resets.
No more pain.
No more dead friends.
No more shadows lurking in my footsteps, ready to rob me of everything I loved.
No more.
I grew less aware, less conscious, as the tearing continued.
Let it end.
Loud voices cut through my consciousness. One considerably louder than the others.
“What’s the meaning of this? What’s wrong with him?” A deep, unmistakable timbre. My father was here. I could see his towering shape, blurry outline as recognizable as it was undefined.
Maya answered, lacking her usual confidence. “His soul is in crisis.”
“Form a wall blocking the view from the street” My father barked at the dozen dark blurs of his honor guard, only turning back to Maya once they snapped to the order. “And you just left him kneeling there?”
“He’s keeping us away.” Alten said. “That violet flame surrounding him is putting off enough heat to melt metal, far hotter than any I’ve felt him use before. But it’s not spreading further. On some level, he’s keeping it in check.”
When my father spoke again, his voice was still dangerous but more in control. “Someone explain what happened here. Spare no detail.”
As they did as he asked, I felt the wave of tiredness again. Things that once meant the world to me didn’t seem to matter anymore. I wanted to care. Knew that I should care, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. It all felt so heavy, so unnecessarily difficult. Even if I came out of this, all the work I’d done to project strength to my father, to present myself as the sort of leader he could respect. It was obvious what he’d think of me, now that he knew.
Weak.
It’d take time and effort to regain it, if that was even possible. Judging from past experiences, he’d likely just let me burn myself out. Allow nature to take its course.
So much harder than just… letting go.
Suddenly, the roiling magic within me seemed to calm, subside. A sliver of perception returned, and I became aware of the sensation of a metal vice, gripping my upper-arm tightly. My eyes flickered open, and I could barely make sense of what I was seeing.
My father was there, kneeling in the circle swath of flame. I saw his pained expression for only a second, but it was long enough to realize the agony he was enduring. The vice that gripped my shoulder was his gauntlet, the metallic fingers that squeezed my shoulder bled molten steel. As soon as he realized I was looking at him, his expression went cold, stoic.
“What… are you doing?” He growled.
I managed a pained smile. “Sorry… father.”
For good this time.
“Stop.”
More aware now of the potential inferno if I lost consciousness, I reached out to the fire that surrounded me, feebly attempting to quench it. Despite my doubts, it responded almost instantaneously, fading to nothing.
King Gil glanced at the scorched ground, unsatisfied. “What I meant was stop dying.”
In more mundane circumstances, I might have laughed. It was just like him to command a dying man to keep breathing. For the moment, all I could manage was a weak cough. My good eye was losing focus again. “Not sure that I can.”
“And what of your ambition? The new Uskar you intended to forge?”
My chuckle sounded more like a sob. “Thoth will never stop. She’ll keep setting fires until there’s nothing left but ash.”
He made an irritated noise and leaned back to speak to one of his honor guard. “Where are the gods’ damned mages?”
“On route now, my lord.”
“I’ll have them quartered if they drag their skirts.” He muttered. There was a jostling of armor as he leaned down and spoke directly into my ear. “I’ve seen countless men lay down and wait for death. This solves nothing.”
A sliver of irritation stabbed into my mind, wresting me from the malaise. “If I wasn’t here—”
“What, your peasant girl would still be alive?” He barked a laugh. “Perhaps. But life is cheap, boy. She’s already targeted Whitefall for conquest. You think your death would stay her hand? That your peasant girl would survive the invasion you described? That anything beyond death and torment awaits those foolish enough to follow you in your absence.”
I slammed my fist against the ground. “You don’t understand.”
“Oh, but I do.” He hissed in my ear. “You believe, if you just give up while your soul crumbles to nothing, that you’ll be a martyr. That the lives you’ll leave behind will be better for it. They won’t.” A slow smile spread across his face. “And if you allow this to be your end, I’ll make sure of it. I’ll start with the infernal diplomat. Then the guard. Followed by every member of the regiment foolish enough to throw in their lot with you. Once they’re all dead, or cursing your name within the dungeons, I’ll march straight to the enclave and history will repeat itself.”
A roiling anger rose within me. Of course he’d show his true face when I was at my weakest. I spat, pinpricks of blood covering his cheek. “Fuck you.”
He slapped me, the blow so gentle it barely turned my head. “Good. Good. Hate me. Hate her. Stoke that fire until it’s so hot you can barely stand it. Burn away the grief until there’s nothing left. Direct it where it’s due.”
Images of every cruelty Thoth had inflicted flashed through my mind, much as they had before, only this time, the memories were tinged in red. The words came unbidden, bubbling up from my chest, raw and cold. “I don’t just want her dead. I want her to suffer.”
“Do I look like your fairy godmother?” He asked.
“What?”
His smile was wide and cruel. “Wishes don’t make deeds, boy. No one’s going to do it for you. And if you spend months bedridden, recovering from your injury, she’s only going to get stronger.”
“Soul-damage isn’t something I can just walk off. How am I supposed to—”
“Find a way.” He said, in a voice that denied excuse. “As you always have.”
As much as I hated him at that moment, he was right. Thoth wasn’t going to just stop existing because I was gone. She’d carry on, doggedly pursuing her mission with little care for those she trampled along the way. My death would serve as little more than a momentary satisfaction, a mundane footnote in a sprawling text. I had no idea how dire the state of my soul was, but going off of feeling alone, I’d be lucky to be back on my feet within a year if it didn’t kill me outright.
But how?
A single spark of violet flame remained on a scorched blade of grass, nearly spent. I reached out to it slowly, forcing it to burn brighter, the idea solidifying as it traveled the length of my arm and up towards my shoulder, lancing through my lips and down my throat.
My mastery of the flame of absolution had been slow. At first I’d used it primarily to seed small pockets of dantalion flame, and only more recently, to project myself to a distant point as instantaneous transport. The latter formed the base of my idea. Because teleporting wasn’t as simple as displacing myself from one location to another. I was destroying myself and recreating my form from the ground up. It was impossible to heal myself or drastically alter my corporeal form, as I was recreating from memory and drawing from anything but my most vivid and recent memory of physical presence could easily spell disaster.
Once I’d disassembled myself entirely and not a fragment of my form remained, something did. A consciousness that grew dimmer the longer I remained in that state, but a consciousness just the same.
My soul. It had to be.
The ability was so new and tenuous I hadn’t had the chance to examine it in detail. But if I was on the right track, there was a chance I could use the flame of absolution on my soul to piece it back together.
I let the fire consume me. And my vision went dark.