Xevis answered the question coldly, “Serve.” and turned to leave the chamber through a door at the end of the long hall.
In his place came a single man some seven or eight feet tall adorned in armor perhaps just a hair less ornate than the hall the two men stood in. He wore a scowl on his flat and heavy face with a thin scar running the length of its left side starting at the top of his eyelid. Henry supposed this was Regulus, and braced himself at attention in a futile attempt to dissuade the anger of this imposing man.
“You don’t even know how to stand correctly.” the captain spat, anger at last heard in his voice. Henry didn’t dare to blink, much less tremble, but the captain went on, voice no less threatening for him to erupt into violence.
“Unfortunately, I’ve been instructed by our great and wondrous master” — Henry detected an almost-imperceptible hint of malice in that phrase— “that you’ll be embedded in our company for this next mission as an acolyte. Once you’ve been brought up to speed, report for a briefing at 0600 tomorrow. I’ll be expecting results, don’t disappoint me.”
With that the man left uneventfully and a thin, short, and red-headed woman dressed in a brilliant blue robe of what seemed like satin and seemed not a day older than 19 stepped out from the shadow of this departing colossus.
“Hi,” she beamed, “I’m Amanda.”
“Hello,” Henry stammered, just barely able to choke out the words, “I’m Henry, but I guess you know that?”
“Yeah, I did, but that’s fine!” she quickly replied, approaching far closer than he was comfortable with as she spoke. The girl stood no higher than the bottom of his chest, but he felt like his flesh was melting in her presence. It reminded him too much of the anxieties in his past life and he felt on the verge of panic, yet barely retained composure. Henry did not leave as he certainly would have before, nor did he tremble or even break eye contact. Instead of allowing himself to stew in unsuppressable anxieties, unable to listen, he decided to lean on the small and yet oh so dense void of power he had allowed into himself; if it was unable to aid him now then it could serve no purpose. As he stared into her imposing and yet fragile figure the ruminations of dread and all the ways he could fuck this up slowly vanished from his mind, cast into the same void that now stood filled with a small power at his core.
Amanda seemed to notice this and frowned, stepping back as she spoke.
“Oh, you’re like Xevie then?”
“What?” Henry replied, finally able to speak semi-coherently.
“You know, taking power from a god. I use the magic essence left in the air from the departure of Yaldabaoth personally, but some people are less squeamish about whose power they use.”
She paused for a moment, finally a safe distance away such that Henry no longer had to rely on his connection to the void for comfort, then said softly where he could barely hear her,
“Do you… you know, uh, want help?”
Henry wasn’t sure what to make of that and didn’t reply. She shook her head, face having shifted from a scowl to something resembling pity for an injured dog on the side of the road.
“You don’t have to serve.. that, you know. The bond isn’t unbreakable, even if he probably claimed it was.”
But Henry liked it this way. He didn’t want to feel like he used to, and didn’t want to rely on this stranger he had just met. For that matter he wouldn’t even be able to stand in the same room as her without feeling anxious beyond his ability to stay. His time in this world had been filled with nothing but pain and death, and yet he felt… melancholic—? about it. He was sure the feeling was negative, but it wasn’t overwhelming. It was like the pain he felt just recently was a distant memory suppressed in his subconscious and only present actively in his mind when he decided to think about it. It was like the self he wanted to reject was being suppressed, and he liked it this way. He liked the idea of becoming stronger, he wanted the power that entailed.
All worlds came to an end eventually, and he didn’t even have to hasten that. All Henry needed to do was consume the things that were already dying. He didn’t need to kill, he didn’t need to hurt others for his power, he just needed to take a little off the top when it was already about to foam over the edge. And when the world was about to fade, he could take that too and use the power to start again.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Amanda stood silently for a long minute as Henry said nothing. Her eyes glinted in the soft light of a thousand orbs floating and shifting along the curved ceiling in the distance above. It was as if she too were lost in thought— or perhaps memory— and the two stood silently, eye contact unbroken, for some time. Amanda was the one to finally break the silence.
“...fine, we can talk about that later. Just… please know you have others you can rely on, ok?” and with that the topic shifted abruptly as the vacant look in her eyes returned to focus on him and her once-worried tone and demeanor shifted once again to the bubbly nature she had started with.
“Anyway, let’s get you up to speed! I’m sure you have a lot of questions but first we should talk about why you’re here and not, you know, getting executed for killing Elder Sion.”
It definitely struck Henry as odd that she delivered that line in such a chipper tone, but he supposed the answer was obvious enough— he was useful. Amanda essentially confirmed this opinion, but added that she thought he should know that entering the void was a generally bad idea not just because of the risk to others, but also because of the unknowable risks of sharing close proximity to the true form of an extraplanar deity.
“But I didn’t even see him,” Henry objected.
“And it’s better left that way! Curiosity kills more prospective archons than anything else by quite a lot, you know. Even those with training like myself or Sion can make mistakes, which you just saw for yourself. Anyway… sorry to dwell on the topic, but we’ve known— knew— each other for 200 years,” she said, looking away for a second.
“You’re 200 years old?” Henry asked, somewhat surprised and yet kind of having expected this outcome.
“No, I’m a lot older than that, but you should know by now not to ask a lady her age!” she chided him, pouting despite the upbeat tone she delivered the line with. Her face returned almost too abruptly to a smile as she suddenly shifted topics back to the matter at hand.
“So, we don’t have much time, but you’re going to be coming with us on a resupply mission.”
Henry almost interrupted to ask what for, but then realized it would have been extremely rude and didn’t.
“We’ve almost exhausted our supply of mana potions and need to replenish them in order to maintain defense of this research outpost. It’s far from our borders, which makes these missions pretty dangerous since the supply-lines are so long and thin. Xevie is super capable of defending us, but if he leaves and the base runs out of mana we would be super defenseless without our active anti-teleportation measures. While this dome does hold in mana and the orb here does have a net-positive outflow, the supply would only last a few days at most depending on how intense the fighting gets. Historically speaking, there’s going to be a battle on this mission. With who is unclear, but there will be combat. I’m sorry to pull you into this, but I think we have to.”
Her eyes glazed over again in another long pause before she finally went on.
“The last mission… didn’t end well. That’s why we need all the hands available to us. We haven’t had a resupply in six weeks and Xevis is too focused on his research for this. Don’t get me wrong, the research has been helpful, but it doesn’t give us any short-term edge. Reg and I were brought in for this after the last mission by long-range teleportation, but it’s so expensive we can’t bring many people along that way, much less more than a handful of supplies.”
Amanda grimaced as she went on,
“I know they’ve threatened you, but this doesn't have to be unpleasant. We can be friends and help each other, just… as long as you help us here I can stop the worst of their threats. Also, I’ll give you a freebie. That orb? You’re connected to it. I think you knew that, but here’s what you don’t know: we are too. Xevis gets his power from an extraplanar god that came to this world in the Great Scourge. Closing the portal would hurt us too.”
Her face softened as she continued, and Henry suspected she thought he agreed with her sentiment. He… wasn’t sure what to make of the situation. On the one hand this would be good for him, but on the other were the threats of eternal torture. It wasn’t hard to suspect he would be betrayed if he were to go against the Triumvirate’s wishes, if not by Amanda’s choice then by force of higher powers. For the moment, at least, it seemed their interests aligned. They needed supplies and Henry needed to not get placed in eternal torment, plus, Amanda was cute and that was a nice bonus. If he had to work with guys as scary as Regulus he preferred at least to have a few cute girls to balance things out, especially nice ones.
The rest of the day went by uneventfully as Amanda explained to Henry how to leverage his power. It seemed he was unable to cast any techniques, but had two advantages. When Amanda had approached him closely and he had leveraged his power to wipe away the anxiety from it, she noticed her own power being pulled toward him along with the atmospheric power in the air. It seemed his power had some kind of active pull to it, and alongside the immunity to being taken down and its slow but incessant recovery, it seemed he was well-suited as a melee fighter.
Henry grimaced at the thought, realizing he was probably going to need to train under the brutal and imposing figure known to him only as Regulus. His only saving grace was that there wasn’t enough time for any real training to occur. Amanda taught him all she could— trying also to explain that Reg was a nice guy deep down, just with a scary exterior after seeing so many of his friends die young— and then the two went to rest in preparation for the next day’s mission.
Henry was given no room, only a small sleeping bag and an explanation that he had been ordered by Xevis to spend the night beneath the floating purple puncture-wound in the world to see what would happen. The night was uncomfortable and Henry hardly slept at all beneath the undimming orbs of light above him. When he finally fell asleep he did not dream, waking in the morning unrested and unsure if he had fallen asleep at all.