Once the stablehands arrived to take their horses, Suraiya took a moment to speak quietly to Valour and stroke his nose, irrelevant of what Lycinia had said, while pressing her forehead against the horse’s own and murmuring her love and farewell with soft intensity. The horse nickered at her as if to reassure her, nibbled at her golden hair, and then turned to follow the stablehand that took his bridle—and tempted him with a strange purple fruit, dusted in white, that the horse seemed to eagerly devour.
“Sugar-dusted Kelpas fruit.” Lycinia said by way of explanation. “It’s unique to the valley. It once grew all over Elysea, until the Desolation was created. It has a naturally mana-active composition which enhances the strength of any creature, or any person, that eats it. The effect has a natural diminishment though, so you can only benefit from it a few times before your body grows beyond it,” she smiled warmly. “It is wonderful for mana recovery though.”
Suraiya raised her eyebrows when, as if summoned by her explanation, a member of what she could only assume was the citadel’s staff approached with a tray of the self-same fruits, sprinkled with white powder. She immediately noticed the manner of dress for the woman in question; a shin-length black skirt, a neck-high white top of some unknown silky-white material which flowed down to her wrists, and a surprisingly stylish black jacket that hugged her figure generously.
“Thank you.” Suraiya said graciously while accepting one of the fruit, and following Lycinia when the redhead took her own and set off across the massive bailey toward the distant stairs. One more climb, it seemed, and they would enter the colossal doors to the holdfast.
Lycinia didn’t speak while they walked and so Suraiya instead took the time to look at their surroundings, all while nursing the firm-but-pliable Kelpas fruit in her right hand. The inner courtyard of Last Hope, perhaps unsurprisingly, was filled with constant activity. What she assumed were servants in the same white and black attire bustled about with purpose, and saw to various cleaning or maintenance tasks, carried parcels or supplies, or even—much to her shock—openly seemed to be taking their leisure to drink tea from porcelain cups and enjoy the sunlight.
“Morning Tea.” Lycinia explained when questioned on the matter. “One of the Regent’s edicts. Everyone is entitled to a thirty-minute abeyance during the hours between seven and eleven, a one-hour break between noon and three, and another half an hour break for Afternoon Tea between three and seven.”
“That is…”
“Normal.” Lycinia finished for her with a hint of firmness. “This is not the Grand Ascendancy, Suraiya. We don’t have slaves, but call them servants. These people are paid a good wage, granted the protections and benefits of their overlord, and given immense freedom in the allocation of duties. So long as their supervisors and department heads ensure that all the required work is completed and equitably distributed, how they choose to take their granted leisure is up to them.”
“It’s hard to wrap my head around this.” Suraiya admitted honestly after Lycinia finished. “It seems so simple, and yet the idea of such privileges never even occurred to me.”
Lycinia turned to her with an amused smile. “We don’t see them as privileges here, princess. We see them as entitlements.”
Suraiya was left to ruminate on that while they walked and, as much to give herself something to do as it was to try to distract from the increasing feeling of sick disillusionment growing in her gut, she brought up her right hand and bit down into the Kelpas fruit.
The moment the flesh of the fruit met her palate, and its juices spilled from the ripe seal, Suraiya let out a low moan of pleasure that she cut off the instant she realised she’d unleashed it. Her cheeks burned with heat at the realisation of what she’d done, and she very determinedly looked nowhere but at the fruit while chewing, and refused to acknowledge what had happened.
The feeling had been indescribable. It was a pleasure she’d never thought to experience. Her whole body had radiated with shocks of electric warmth, and powerful invigoration, and she’d felt like her nerves—every nerve, apparently—had momentarily come alive and been carressed by the sudden flow of pure mana.
Even without her embarrassment, she felt warm.
The Kelpas fruit filled her with a vigour and vitality that was impossible to properly describe. She felt the System mana threading through her body, though on a smaller scale than the first bite, and in a more detoxifying manner. She could even subtly feel her mana channels growing subtly wider and purifying obstructions, and could actually track the way that the prismatic flow of unaspected power cleansed the small increments of Desolation-borne taint that had wormed their way into her body.
Condition: Kelpas Invigoration
+10% Mana Regeneration (6 Hour Duration)
Mild Purification of Mana Channels (3 Hour Duration)
Suraiya read the alert ,noted the purple flashing icon showing the Kelpas silhouette to the right of her vision, and looked down at the fruit again in wonder. The fruit was a treasure beyond imagining. The thought that it had grown wild, at some point in the past, was staggering. The sheer amount of help even one such fruit would be to those taking their first steps through the System, especially after first coming of age to interact with it…
That thought led her to another when she finally looked up and around, and distantly noted that nobody was paying attention to her following her embarrassing slip.
The Kelpas fruit, more than even a great opportunity, represented a potential upending of everything that was thought to be understood about the power balance in the Grand Ascendancy. It was often said that the right to purify and Cultivate one’s power was directly tied to the divine hierarchy—the social strata enforced by the Nine.
With fruit such as Kelpas, and potentially others, offering ways to purify one’s channels for essentially nothing…
The cold pit in her stomach twisted further.
The more she learned about the Elyseans, the more tenuous her grip on the solidity of her worldview became. It was more and more difficult to justify the beliefs she had held since childhood. It was exhausting, in a way, to think about how incredibly wrong everything she’d been taught might have been.
It was more than just a culture shock. It was a realisation that undid the very foundation of her reality.
Were the gods… the enemy?
The thought was so terrifying she felt her Strong Will activate to bury it.
Suraiya instead focused on where she was going, and noticed belatedly that she’d already been ascending the stairs behind Lycinia and with her convoy in tow while she’d been lost in thought. She turned to look behind her, and she caught the thoughtful and, in several cases, equally haunted expressions of her Knights, the Adventurers and even some of the civilians that had accompanied her.
Just like her, they must have been rationalising what they were seeing, and making their own assumptions. Lycinia’s insights must also have trickled down among them, given the woman rarely spoke quietly. It occurred to Suraiya that, perhaps, that was intentional. The spreading of unwelcome truths was rarely a subtle thing, and Lycinia was likely not interested in needless obfuscation.
The worried looks on the faces of her people, Knights included, gave their own advocacy.
Her eyes returned to the front when she crested the final step on the staircase, and Suraiya let her eyes settle on the yawning doors to the citadel interior. Light lit the inside of the entrance hall brightly, and even here she saw the same golden-armoured warriors standing in silent vigil. The Aegii were like unmoving statues, bedecked in radiant gold and shining with the glory of their position.
It was both inspiring and intimidating.
How they could be so utterly statuesque was bewildering.
Everyone had subtle fidgets, tics, or movements that were simply part of their natural state of living. There was an unnatural discipline to how the golden warriors held themselves, and it baffled Suraiya in a way that unsettled her, and impressed her in equal measure.
Upon their entrance to the citadel, Lycinia didn’t even glance back while languidly leading them forward toward a pair of open doors at the far end of the hall, set upon a landing, and reached by a pair of curved staircases forming two semi-circular approaches from the ground level to the elevated doorway.
Suraiya glanced back, and offered her people a warm and confident smile while continuing on. The silence had dragged, but she saw no need to break it. Not yet, at least. Her eyes instead took in the decorations around them, and she found her lips parting in silent appreciation.
Large banners depicting different crests and symbols hung from high stone arches and carefully crafted mountings, each banner almost ten metres long, and stitched with ornate and complex sigils that likely had some great and prominent meaning to the Elyseans.
She only recognised one, and her eyes faintly widened when she saw it.
A golden eagle in flight, rampant on a field of red, which marked House Tollarius.
“Glory in Service…” she murmured while reading the filigreed text beneath the house’s sigil.
“At least that much stayed the same,” Lycinia said from in front of her. “We may be cousins in name only, Suraiya, given the vast generations separating us from our common ancestors… but I am proud to say that given your current comportment, and with some proper education; you would fit in well with the prime bloodline, here in Sanctuary.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“Prime bloodline?” Suraiya asked in something of a daze, while reaching out to take hold of the marble bannister, and ascend the left stairwell behind Lycinia.
“That is what we call the true-blooded Elysean houses.” Lycinia explained. “Those that were not assimilated, and then twisted by the godsworn, in the years after the Fall.”
“Then my House Tollarius is—?”
“More pure than most, in the way we’re talking about.” Lycinia said almost as if reassuring her. “But tainted nonetheless, yes. Still, you can trace your lineage back directly to the last Imperator and Imperatrix, if you try. We checked the genealogical records already. So, there’s something to be said for that. You’ve got Elysean in you, Suraiya. You just never knew it.”
The revelation wasn’t exactly shocking, given what Lycinia had said when first showing them all the entrance to Sanctuary, but it was strange to feel both excitement and revulsion at what she said—and yet for drastically different reasons than she’d have once thought. Excitement that she had Elysean blood… and revulsion at what the Ascendancy had done to her lineage.
What is happening to me? she thought with a faint flare of despair, a moment before Strong Will smothered it.
It was no time to have a crisis of identity, after all.
That could come later. In private.
Lycinia led their group of thirty-three survivors up the stairs and toward the smaller, but still large pair of inner doors leading deeper into the citadel.
Here, at last, they were challenged.
Massive greatspears crossed in their path, and the two Aegii flanking the doors turned to Lycinia with their full-face helmets, visors obfuscating any semblance of the features within. “What is your business here, Scion Tollarius?” demanded the shorter of the two warriors on the right.
“I come with ordained guests to speak with the Regent, and seek the judgement of the High Justicar.”
“They stink of godstaint.” the left-standing Aegii, who Suraiya realised with mild surprise was a woman, said coldly. Her surprise was not that a woman was a member of the collective, for gender was immutable before the power of Tempering. What shocked her was that the female within the armour must have been massive to stand taller than her male counterpart.
The armour was gender neutral, but the notable height difference was still a shock.
“As did many before they were Enlightened, Guardian.” Lycinia said calmly.
“Hmph.” the woman said derisively. “You push your luck this time, Scion.”
“Be that as it may, I have the Right.”
“For now.” the woman replied ominously, before withdrawing her massive spear.
Lycinia inclined her head in thanks and, without another word, stepped past the pair and into the chamber beyond. Suraiya followed after her quickly, offering a faltering smile for the pair that were seemingly studiously ignoring their entire group while it filed after Lycinia like a convoy of chastised children.
“What did she—?”
“It is not important right now.” Lycinia said quietly. “I will explain, if all goes well, later. For now, we must hope that the High Justicar is in a good mood.”
“Is he often not?”
“She can be… mercurial.” Lycinia said with a hint of amusement that Suraiya didn’t quite understand.
When her attention diverted from Lycinia however, she stifled a gasp.
They stood within a massive chamber that transformed, after a relatively short fifty-or-so metre jaunt down a straight path, into an immense domed throne room, its upper levels tiered like an amphitheatre.
When Suraiya and her party arrived, she was shocked to find the gallery packed with life. People of the main sanctified humanoid species; Humans, Elves, and Dwarves, populated the upper levels. There were even some Orcs, Goblins, Gnomes, Halflings, and even Beastfolk—though those races were few and far between, and clearly somewhat avoided, as was normal.
It seemed even Elyseans understood the difference between the sanctified and muddied races. Perhaps that was a commonality they’d shared, before the sundering that had torn them apart.
The collection of sapience bustled in the hundreds above them, seated and observing what, to Suraiya, suddenly felt like a pre-orchestrated show.
Then what of the Aegii? Was it all rehearsed?
Her mind spun while she tried to take in what she saw. Marble statues commemorating grand and heroic figures lined the edges of the circular chamber, and Lycinia led them down a tiered set of seven steps into the depressed centre of the chamber, to face toward what appeared to be a large blackstone throne.
It was worked with platinum veins of metal, and appeared to be carved with the likeness of two massive dragon’s wings—or at least what dragons had supposedly looked like prior to being expunged for their evil—arcing up from its back to fan out in embrace of whomever would sit upon it.
The top of the throne was shadowed by the immense head of a black dragon, and its eyes were inlaid with two immense topaz jewelled that shimmered faintly. The head of the dragon, particularly its two horns, was worked with more platinum in the shape of runes she could not fully discern, nor hope to understand.
The eyes of the head, jewels they may have been, seemed to bore into her, and she found it difficult to look at the throne without feeling an existential sense of discomfort—and judgement, as if it were weighing her worthiness at standing before it.
When the last of her people joined them in milling around the large circular area before the throne, which itself sat on a dais three steps up from the main floor, and thus ten steps up from them; a sudden ring of trumpets sounded within the chamber, and Suraiya turned to find the source at the same time as many others did.
“Focus on the throne,” Lycinia murmured.
Suraiya heeded her advice despite her nerves, and worked to stoke her Strong Will and Breath Control into helping her manage her stress, while keeping her attention on the throne.
“Announcing His Excellency, the Regent Pro tem of Elysea, and Lord-Protector of Sanctuary; Charlemagne!”
Suraiya did a double take when, as suddenly as an eyeblink, a man stood before them in the most bizarre appearance she’d ever seen.
It looked like some strange, outlandish mix of materials that made no sense to her mind. A worked robe of red cloth rife with golden stitching, what looked like some sort of massive silver cross over his chest, and a phenomenal beard waxed and oiled to perfection that covered his face, and fell in brown curls down to the middle of his chest.
His hair was long enough to settle along his shoulders in meticulous curls, and there was a look of consideration, and amusement, on his wise and ageless features. The man looked like he couldn’t have been beyond forty years of age, yet his gaze possessed the wisdom of millennia.
He even wore some sort of rounded hat on his head, and his hands—folded before him idly—were covered in ostentatious, and gaudy golden and silver rings of a design she couldn’t name.
“So!” he thundered in a voice that boomed throughout the chamber. “More poor fools caught under the thrall of the benighted ‘gods’, and brought before Charlemagne for judgement, eh? Reminds me of dealing with Carloman every time this happens. Now that man was a trumped up jack-knave! Hmph!”
Suraiya could only stare in stunned disbelief as the man, who couldn’t have been much taller than five and a half feet, stared out at them all with an air of total authority.
“I was entrusted to hold this post by Lucius Tollarius himself, you know! It was a great honour. I was an Emperor, before I was summoned to this mad world. The greatest Emperor! Everyone claimed it was Alexander, or Augustus, or Trajan, over even that overhyped fool Aurelian! But no! It was me! Charlemagne!”
Suraiya stared in nonplussed silence as the man moved between ranting, and harrumphing, without pause or breath. He seemed for all the world to be proselytising his own glory as much as he was introducing himself to them, and yet for all of that, there was an edge of cunning to his eyes and a sense of shrewd understanding to his words.
The Regent of Elysea, she realised slowly, was more than just some trumpeting fool.
He was a very intelligent, very dangerous man—and one with enough experience to make her comparatively infantile schooling in courtly politics look like a joke.
Suraiya swallowed back her nerves.
This, she realised, was going to be far harder than previously expected.
“Is that little Lycinia I see? Are you the one responsible for bringing these poor souls here, girl? Bah! Your heart is too soft.” Charlemagne declared. “Soft, I say!”
“Perhaps so, Your Excellency,” Lycinia responded unphased, “but it is in keeping with the traditions you have commanded us to maintain.”
“Hm…” Charlemagne responded thoughtfully. “Hm! True! Very true! Smart girl. Too smart for your own good sometimes, but smart nonetheless. Why if you had been Frankish, I’d have married you to one of my sons! Ha!” he laughed jovially, and then cut off with an abruptness that was alarming. “Now! Enough games. Let’s get down to business.”
Suraiya watched while the Regent, who she was not entirely sure was fully sane despite his clear intelligence, snapped the fingers on his ring-laden right hand. “Summon the High Justicar!”
“I am already here, you blowhard.” a scathing and elegant female voice said from nearby, and drew every eye in the process. Following her words, the sound of armoured footsteps on marble filled the chamber’s impressive acoustics, and an immense Soulforce blanketed the room. It was a power, and prodigious might, that eclipsed anything Suraiya had ever felt before.
“Announcing the Defender of the Innocent…” a herald began.
Suraiya turned to the new arrival, and felt herself freeze.
“...Protector of the Peace, Champion of Sanctuary, Herald of the Calamity…”
The High Justicar entered with the gait of a woman on a mission, her blonde hair spilling in ringlets across her shoulders and down her back, and her white armour polished to a shine in spite of the numerous scars and marks upon it. On her back was sheathed an immense greatsword, its blade naked within an enchanted leather sheath, and worked with shining platinum-golden runes that bled power.
“...Patrician Paramount of House Tollarius, Bearer of the Scales of Justice…”
Her eyes were blue when she turned to them, as commanding and imperious as a Queen’s, and Suraiya felt as though she had lost all sense of reality.
“...her ever-victorious Ladyship, the High Justicar of Elysea.”
“Who have you brought here for my judgement, Scion Tollarius?” the towering beauty, her lovely features marred only by a triplicate of scars over her left eye—which at the same time seemed to only enhance her terrifying presence—asked imperiously. “Who comes before the eyes of Justice?”
Suraiya heard none of what followed, for it was drowned out by her own heartbeat.
Her mouth had gone dry, her breathing had become faint, and her vision had blurred with tears.
She was looking at a ghost. A dream. A childhood fantasy given life.
Before her stood Vasilia Artoria Minerva Bellona Tollarius, Rightful Queen of Stormharrow, and Dame-Commander of its Chivalric Orders; the Adamantine Maiden, Slayer of the Beast-Lord of Gargoroth, Duchess of the Storm, Sword-Paramount of the Lightning Throne, Wyvern Tamer, Gryphon Rider, Dracolisk Hunter, and Adventuring Guild Legend.
Suraiya’s dead Mother.
Alive.
[https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1024480837296730202/1203636252935594044/Vasilia_1.png?ex=65d1d09d&is=65bf5b9d&hm=96e69200360e97b51739a461ddf5bed760c9554f14018935b96a902df11a4202&]Concept art of Vasilia. Ignore the weird forehead thing.