“Am I going to die?” Seth asked, moving to sit. He pushed as much steel into his voice as he could, hoping it would drown out the terror and give the illusion of confidence he did not have. He was the son of a Lord, one of the strongest golds in the Baron of the Deep’s territory. He had to act like one even if he didn’t feel like one right now.
The man before him had killed an entire group of soul mages armed with weapons specifically designed to kill people like him. He’d even survived instructor Macbeth, a man strong enough to garner his father’s respect.
The priest looked at him for a while longer before returning his attention to flames. The fire, it seemed, was more interesting to him than the question of a child.
Seth decided he would not be ignored. If he was going to die, then he needed to know, needed to prepare himself. He might not be a soul mage, but he was human. Humans did not die like animals. His mind wandered to a memory of an assemblage of cars and a gold instructor and he shivered. I will not die like them.
He had no idea how they had died but he had a feeling it would’ve been horrible.
No, his mind told him. You’ll die worse than them.
He fought the thought and his head ache came alive. It grew from a hum to a throb and he felt the whisper of its need to grow more spilling across his mind until…
He froze.
Brows furrowed, Seth broke his attention in three without knowing how. He kept one on the priest, noticing for the first time that the man sat on a log. The second piece of his mind he cast to the trees, numbering them as the stars in the sky.
The third mind was taken by a movement in the grass. Something slithered across, making a mad dash away from them. Seth turned to face it, trailing its path through the trees with an odd precision. He knew it was a snake, but despite the pale moonlight, it was still too dark to make out anything tangible. He realized he’d simply been following it by sound.
A twitch to his side pulled his attention from the creature and he moved with the grace of a dying monkey. Fumbling out of the way, he fell to the side, avoiding something the priest had thrown at him. Whatever it was struck a tree ten paces from him and panic set in Seth’s heart, accompanied by curiosity. Had the priest just tried to kill him? He hadn’t even been looking at the man, so how had he known he’d moved? And why were there so many trees?
The last question was unreasonable and his mind sought to hide it away from him in one of its fragments. Seth frowned at this. He had no collection of a conscious effort to ignore the question, so why…
His breath caught in his throat. Seth’s minds grew blank as he came face to face with the priest. The man’s face was mere inches from his own.
Why… he panicked but his mind, or minds, he wasn’t sure, failed to create thought. The priest had been a good distance from him the entire time so how…
“Three,” the priest said simply.
There was no smell in his breath, nothing pleasant or unpleasant. The man was so close yet Seth hadn’t even felt the touch of air created when a person spoke.
“W… what?” he stammered.
The man nodded, rising to his feet and stepping away. “Three will suffice for now. But you will need more.”
While Seth knew he needed to be focused on the man’s word, his mind was held captive by a different discovery. The priest’s eyes were odder than that of soul mages. While their color wasn’t anything truly special, as far as he could guess, their actions were.
The priest’s eyes were not static like those of human eyes, souled or not. They did not stay in place, moving only as dictated from one point of interest to the next. Instead, they vibrated, like a tiny ball enforced on all side by opposing gusts of pressurized air. When they had watched him a breath ago, they had trembled, shivering in the very focus they held. It was as if the man didn’t simply look at him, but at all of him; every pore accounted for, every blemish catalogued, acne noted, discoloration observed. It made Seth feel naked.
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He did not like it.
“I am Seth Oden Darnesh,” he said, his voice a rising whisper, taking power from his father’s name and authority where he had none. He hoped it would at least affect the dynamic of power between them. “Son of Lord Darnesh,” he went on. “subject to Varnorth, Baron of the deep, and you will—”
“Varnoth is a thousand steps too young in a world a thousand years too late to be giving himself a title,” the priest interrupted him casually.
Seth took a moment to reorient himself. He was surprised to find the priest waiting patiently despite the interruption.
“Yet these are his lands,” Seth returned. “And an attack on his lands might as well be an attack on him.”
“Perhaps,” the priest acquiesced. “But what does it matter? What would he care of a missing child?”
“I… I am important.”
“Are you?”
Seth felt the authority of his father’s name waning. How did he command a man who cared naught for the authority he wielded, by right or by delegation?
“My father is,” Seth said.
“And who, pray tell, is your father?”
The priest sounded too uninterested for the question to be genuine. Even as he asked, he looked off to the horizon as if searching for something that wasn’t there only so that he could place it there.
Seth refused to allow the casual disinterest cow him. When he answered, it was in a tone he hoped was filled with pride and authority rather than the fear and insignificance he felt. “My father is Lord Christian Darnesh,” he said.
“And who are you?” The man still hadn’t taken his eyes away from whatever had his attention.
Seth frowned at the thought of repeating his name. The man was clearly ignoring him. But in the presence of a gold, or a potential Baron, every word was important, even if it wasn’t.
“Seth Oden Darnesh,” he answered.
The man nodded sagely. “Neutral fury.”
Seth’s face blanked at that, unable to see how his name and the man’s response were related.
As if seeing the confusion on his face even without looking, the priest explained.
“Oden is a subset of the name Odin, the all father of old Norse mythology. The name Oden means fury or wrath,” he said. “I never cared much for the Christian mythology of creation, but in it the first man had three sons: Cain, Abel, and Seth. While I have never cared enough to know their meanings I have often speculated on the symbolism of these beings. Cain performed an act that symbolizes the evil in all men when he killed his brother. Abel, in his own, symbolizes the good and necessary subservience in all men when he sacrificed his best to his creator. Seth, however, did nothing. He was simply a being I believe was designed as a way point for which his father’s progeny continued. He performed no acts worth mentioning and his name does not truly stand out in the entirety of the myth. However, I do possess a theory.”
Here the priest paused, and Seth found himself waiting.
His own curiosity angered him. He was meant to be taking control, guiding the conversation in hopes of a chance at… perhaps not escape, but survival. Yet, here he was, being led by a tale of personal reflection not even long enough to fill a page.
Still, at thirteen he was as much a child as he wished to be an adult, and the curiosity of all children was still very much alive in him. It begged to be satiated. He felt its contentment when the priest continued.
“I believe,” the priest said, turning those odd silver eyes on Seth, “that Seth symbolizes much more than even the Christians, authors of their own myth, realize. I believe Seth symbolizes the most uncommon stance of morality existent in humans: Neutrality. The being that was Seth treaded the line between both brothers. He represented neither good nor bad. And like neutrality, he was as much capable of embodying none of them as he was of embodying any of them. Thus, Seth Oden… Neutral Fury. As for Darnesh,” he made a dismissive gesture with an uninterested hand to fill the silence that followed, then shrugged. “I have not a single iota of what it could even possibly begin to mean.”
Seth let out a quiet breath. There was no world, waking or not, where he was going to control this conversation. He realized this now. If such a world had once existed, it had long since crumbled in the land of the impossible where foregone possibilities go to die. Luckily, survival was not foregone. Seth could see it in the way the priest watched him now; took interest in his name.
When the man spoke again, Seth felt a wary weight on his shoulders. The man’s words were casual, his tone simpler even than the one he’d used to berate an entire religion’s belief. Yet behind it was the authority of the world.
“From now on,” he said. “You are no longer Seth Oden Darnesh but Seth Al Jabari, first and only to his name.”
The priest offered Seth an easy smile and around them the world shook at his words.
Something had just happened and Seth wasn’t entirely certain what it was. However, he was certain of one thing: He had just been given a new name… and more.
The more, was where the problem was.