Of all the things he missed, he would have to say that breathing was the most obvious.
Not the worst, not the most near and dear to his heart, and certainly not one of his fondest memories. But certainly the most noticeable, overall. And it tended to crop up quite a bit in interactions with other, breathing people. Others spoke when they liked, trusting their bodies to provide breath as needed, since they were drawing it willy-nilly out of the air anyway. He, and others like him, had to draw breath, then speak. It required a bit of planning aforethought, and it changed the dynamic just a bit, just a tiny amount.
Fortunately, most of the people he was dealing with were in the same boat.
“Forgive me,” said the large, bull-headed armor golem. “But how do we know that this isn't a trick?”
The man known as the Phantom nodded, and took a deep breath. “The trick is done, the trap is sprung, and Eidolon's lost the day. But this shall not stand, they'll send more to my land, and so we must away.”
The Ringmaster tilted his head, and shared a glance with the black-haired halven girl. “You're rhyming. Is that significant?”
“I may have a few skills going that lend weight to my words in rhyme or song,” the Phantom shrugged. “Given that we're discussing my nation's fate, I don't see such actions as wrong.”
There was a hesitation among most of them, as they spread out around the stage and considered him. His granddaughter gazed upon him with something akin to worship, and he hated to see it. But he understood why it was necessary. The minotaur-helmed armor watched him with suspicion. Understandable, given who he was and the risk his wife had run. The halven sisters and their fox were wary, and the Ringmaster gazed at him with frank curiosity.
The little orc shaman who was currently a dinosaur looked at him with unabashed bloodlust. He didn't hold it against her. By all reports, she kept things simple. He could respect that.
Madeline looked at him with a curious gaze. She alone understood that there was no risk, here. That if there had been risk, she would have been treated very, very differently.
But it was the little teddy bear that would decide his fate, and by proxy, the fate of the Phantom's people, here. So he kept himself calm, focused his eyes on the object of his hope, and waited. And at least there was no need to hold his breath, anymore.
Still, the urge to sigh in relief rose, as the bear nodded. “We accept your surrender. Please return us to the world outside this stage and call off your army at once.”
There were many, many things that could have gone wrong with this plan. But this, the most vital one, had not.
“Done, and done,” the Phantom said, willing his Theater of the Mind skill away. The curtain fell on the stage, and in the second of darkness, the sounds of a thousand conjured props sliding away vied with the murmuring departure of the immaterial audience. Then light came once more, dimly filtered sunlight through canvas as the sounds of cannon and distant war filled the air again.
The Phantom reached into his cloak, and drew out three scroll tubes, each embossed with golden opera masks. “Jean, I must ask, of you a simple task. Run these to the commanders without delay. And I look forward to seeing you later this day.”
“Of course, grandfather,” Jean said. She looked down at her clothing, which was decidedly not a Belltollian soldier's uniform. “I may face some delays.”
“The seal on those scrolls is yours to use,” the Phantom assured her, gripping her shoulder and giving it a squeeze. His descendant shuddered under his touch... anxiety? Loneliness? Difficult to say. Her known family had been lost to her fairly early on; it was one reason why he had taken her into his service so soon in her life.
There was a temptation to embrace her, but he put it aside. Too much of a chance she would react poorly.
“So we wait until she's dahn?” Madeline asked.
“No need,” the Phantom said, waving his cane at the entrance to the tent. “I think you do not truly understand my hold upon my homeland. Come and see.”
And he strolled out into the broad daylight. Sharing uncertain glances between them, his newest allies followed.
It took a few moments for the rest of the army to notice. Oh, the intruders, no longer looking like Belltollian soldiers, drew attention right away. But as the squads hastily grabbed weapons and drew closer, their eyes widened and they stopped cold at the sight of him.
And throughout that sunny field, with the river gurgling and the falls roaring in the distance, a new sound began to fill the air. A thousand thousand whispers, as weapons clattered to the ground, the platoons mustering for the charge faltered, and the artillery buns laid off tending their weapons, and stared in slack-jawed amazement.
“It's him. It's him!”
“...Phantom...”
“The Lop Ear!”
“What...”
“The Phantom!”
“He's real!”
“Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods...”
Words flickered on and off in his vision, words he was long familiar with, and ignored with casual ease.
Your Work It Baby skill cannot increase at this time!
Seek out your guild to gain promotion!
Words he couldn't act upon, of course. He'd long ago decided that his Stage Master job was far more important than any other he held.
But it was nice to have the reminder that even the merest sighting of him could draw wonder.
And why not?
The soldiers of Belltollia knew that a legend walked among them.
There was no trouble. The lines parted for him, as his children, literally and figuratively, watched him go. He was the master here; none would dare stop him, even though he walked into the heart of their enemy's camp. Indeed, they would tell this story to their children, and their grandchildren, for years to come.
Knowing that firmed his resolve. They deserved a good story. Hopefully this would turn out to have a happy ending.
And if not, well... he had taken a few precautions to at least ensure that he met his end in style.
He flicked a heavy ear back as he heard tiny paws pattering on the grass. And a moment later, as expected, Threadbare came into view in his peripheral vision.
“I've taken the liberty of sending a whisper, to let them know we're coming,” Threadbare murmured.
“Thank you, kind sir,” the Phantom said softly back. “Your forces are formidable. Friendly fire would cause a stir— the consequences... considerable.”
Your Wordplay skill is now level 114!
Finally. It had been quite some time since that skill leveled. Once they got above a hundred, every digit was a battleground of its own.
Thoughts of battlegrounds drew him back to the present, though. And the purple-clad bodies that he was passing, on his way to that defiant hill that the Cylvanians had claimed. He looked upon the faces of his people, and it was impossible not to feel sorrow. They had not known they were sacrifices. They had trusted their commanders to know what was best for them.
Almost as if reading his mind, Threadbare asked, “Why?”
“Why tackle matters this way?” The Phantom paused, thought it over. It will land with more weight if I avoid wordplay, here. “I fear we had to approach matters in this manner,” he said, picking his words carefully. “Until the infiltrators in our midst had been lured out and dealt with, they had to believe that our goal was your destruction. And we could not sell that story without blood.”
“That was those guys back theah,” Madeline supplied. “They thought he was grabbing me to luah you heah. And he was. But not to kill yah. Just to make shoah you wah on hand to take them out.”
“It's starting to come together, now,” the minotaur— Garon, that was his name— Garon said. “You never thought we were to blame at all, did you?”
“At first, I thought you might be,” The Phantom answered. “My plan was to entrap those of you who had strayed onto my stage until I investigated thoroughly. But I was not exaggerating, when I told you the death of the garrison would lead to war. Certain elements in my nation have been pushing for the conquest of Cylvania ever since we met you. This was a perfect casus belli... one that might even be true.”
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“And what convinced you that we were innocent?” Threadbare asked.
“Come now. You heard her voice on my stage, not ten minutes ago,” The Phantom chided him. “She was very persuasive, once I untangled the sense from her madness.”
Threadbare opened his mouth, and the Phantom knelt, and put a finger to the bear's tiny maw. Around him he heard armor shift, weapons freed, and bodies draw nearer.
He ignored all that. If they struck him down now they were fools and this venture was doomed, so it might as well end here, rather than a longer, more drawn-out tragedy.
“Say not her name out here in this open field,” he reprimanded Threadbare. “Her enemies listen for it every second of every day. And that is the reason that there were ten of those assassins in my land, when normally they would send only a few.”
He stood, slowly, and saw to his relief that the bear's allies had backed off. Again he regretted a lack of breath, as he instinctively went to sigh. It was well they were not rash. This would have been a terrible ending to his story, not to mention, their own.
“Come then,” he said. “Once we get to your marvelously warded command tent, we can discuss this in more detail.”
Although, a part of him knew what waited there, and dreaded the awkwardness that was to come.
And his fears were quite confirmed twenty minutes later, after he had been disarmed and brought into the tent, to stare down at the doll that was Cylvania's last vestige of true royalty. A figure he had both wronged, and insulted.
Nonetheless, he put on a brave face and bowed. This would be a better death, more just, if she decided to give in to her temper and end him.
Although he was damned if he'd go easily. She'd have to work for it.
“Threadbare's told me about the fight, and the things you've claimed,” Cecelia— no, she preferred Celia, that was right— told him. “Why should we believe your narrative or trust you to act in our interests, even if this narrative is true?”
“Because I am not acting in your best interests,” the Phantom said, straightening up and smoothing his opera cloak down. “I am acting in Belltollia's. Did Threadbare tell you that he heard Midian's voice during the fight?”
“He did. I have to admit I don't know much about her. An insane, powerful elf he got from a dungeon?”
“Oh, is that where she was before all this?” The Phantom waved a hand. “That would explain it. She's asked me to keep her in my Stage, ever since Eidolon's assassins came for me a few days ago.”
“Your Stage?”
“It's a Theater Master skill,” the Phantom said. “It allows me to remotely access and call up the dungeon that I conquered, and turned into a stage. She's in there, quite enjoying the green room right now, I expect. You could go and speak with her, if you like... but that would entail some measure of trust in me. And I don't believe I've earned that, yet, have I?”
“Speaking tactfully, you have not,” Celia said. “Speaking bluntly, hells no.”
“Mm. Well, we have a bit of time now, so I should perchance recount my experiences. Feel free to assess their truthfulness, I will surrender to any skills used to keep my words honest.”
She glanced around at her officers, and a few departed to go fetch various inquisitors, interrogators, and other sorts. One, Cagna, he recognized. She took one look at him and put a corkboard on an easel, and pulled out string and pens as she muttered words he didn't quite catch.
“That's a new one on me,” he said, studying her work.
“It saves a lot of time,” she told him. “The more you bullshit, the less it'll make sense.”
“I'll keep my words less bovine, then,” he shrugged. “It all started after you managed to escape my dungeon...”
He'd thought for certain that the crowd would be able to slow them down in time for the doors to close. And once that happened, they wouldn't be able to leave without his permission. But someone had cast a spell, one that sped the group up immensely, and in doing so had revealed herself as an intruder.
The elven woman was remarkably unconcerned when he confronted her, and Anne Bunny, who'd stayed behind in his stage, told him of how this insane and insanely powerful guest had joined them on their travels, come aboard her airship and made it clear that she was there of her own accord, and rather unconcerned about any efforts they might put in to deter her from this journey.
The elf's madness made getting clear answers from her an exercise in patience, and after the report the Phantom had gotten from his agents in the city, he had little patience to spare. Exiting his stage, he went to check on the atrocities that had befallen the garrison, and arrived just in time to see Threadbare seizing control of the golem, and commanding it to destroy itself.
“The fact that it took you several tries, told me that this was not your doing,” the Phantom told Threadbare. “Ironically enough, if you'd managed to command it successfully with your first attempt, I would have assumed that your plan was going well, and that you were indeed to blame.”
“So you wah theah,” Madeline said. “I'm sahprised ya snuck past us.”
“I caught up at the end. And yes, I'm quite stealthy when I need to be. Flesh golems are rather good at that sort of thing, if you put a little practice into it. Much more so than the heavier models.”
“You're getting off on a tangent,” Celia told him. “Please get back to business.”
“Of course.”
He went on to tell her how he'd spent a few hours investigating matters, and using his agents to trace the golem's backtrail. It had been teleported into the city.
But when he tapped a few of his mages to trace the teleport, and started tasking other agents to investigate the history of a woman called Midian, that's when everything went wrong.
“There were two of them, and they caught me by surprise. Dapper looking men in bowler hats, with bland expressions and an inability to feel pain. I almost died... if I had still been living, I would have. As it was, I barely survived to crawl back to my stage, and lick my wounds. Deuced difficult to heal from wounds as a doll haunter. You can't sleep... anyway,” he added hastily, as Celia frowned. “Back to the point.”
It had been a rough evening, there in his stage. But the time he was convalescing and sneaking the few necromancers he had in his employ in for covert healing, was time spent unraveling the riddle that was Midian. And with the aid of a vision or two, and Anne Bunny's assistance with her well-traveled knowledge and experience, they managed.
“And what I learned half-astounded me, and half-confirmed a truth that I'd suspected for years,” the Phantom said, lips curling as he remembered the dread that had filled him when he realized the scope of what had been done to his people. “A secretive and powerful force was manipulating us for its own gain, and had been ever since we came out from the blast tunnels, after the dragons had burned the land to ash. And the name of that force is Eidolon.”
The Ringmaster and the Fortune Teller— Thomasi and Chase, he thought their names were— exchanged a look.
“This name is not unknown to us,” Celia said, considering.
“Those agents were the same as the one that went after Graves back in Cylvania,” Chase confirmed. “One of them chewed through a room full of apprentices. And almost killed Apollyon.”
“And they're the same sort that I encountered under Runcible manor,” Thomasi added.
“Dey be do ones, Dreadbear,” Zuula said. “De ones who are playing let's you and him fight. Dis is what dey been doing,” her green, plush arm swept in the general direction of the battlefield.
They believed him. The Phantom relaxed his hands, just a bit. Even though he was immortal and mostly physically unchanging now, he still had a habit of clenching his fingers when he was troubled.
It was good to do it without pain. He remembered many things of his old life fondly, but the arthritis that had near-crippled him toward the end of it had not been a good memory.
“Once I knew that they were there, I altered my strategy,” the Phantom said. He watched Cagna scribble and slap notes and drawings to her corkboard, before continuing. “I had been running my nation secretly for years. How could there be other hidden masters? I went over the ledgers, tapped agents to investigate flows of money, and sudden changes of heart in the officials and bureacrats who control much of the place, and I found the strings. Not so much by where they were, but by reading between the lines of where I wasn't. And the truth became clear. Just as I was manipulating my people, I, too, was being manipulated.”
“And if you could be bent to move against your will, what chance do we have?” Jean whispered, paling under her fur.
“Ah! Granddaughter!” he moved to her with a thought, taking her chin in his hands, and lifting it to look upon his face. “Do not cry. I found the strings. And with your help, not an hour ago, I cut them. For now...”
He released her and paced, folding his arms behind his back as he spoke, keeping the momentum going. “They had moved subtly, influenced a number of small things, many of them outside our borders. I came to find out that they had been culling our potential allies, wiping out or driving off surviving settlements in our area before we could find them. They were keeping people out of our way, limiting our civilization... and our growth. And they worked against us in trade, through many agents. They kept us relatively poor. But to what end?”
The Phantom turned. “This subtlety made the crudeness of their attacks upon me stand out, in contrast. It is true that they didn't expect to fail, and they nearly didn't—” his hand stroked his throat, remembering the slash that had almost cut his spine in two. “—but their maneuvers from that point on showed none of the previous subtlety. IN fact, their goal was quite obvious. They wished us to go to war with you, and to lose.”
They digested this, as Cagna slapped paper onto the corkboard.
“The obvious question is why?” he said, spreading his hands. “And that I do not know. Nor does Midian. But it is of no importance, in the grand scheme of things. They desire the destruction of all I— of all we have built, my children and I, and so they must be stopped. And to that end, Midian and I conspired.”
“This is why you never sent overwhelming force our direction,” Garon said.
“And why we were doing our hardest to grab one of you for a hostage,” the Phantom replied. “If we pushed you out of your position, we would only prolong the war and increase casualties on both sides.... more on ours, admittedly. Besides, we have no chance of storming Brokeshale Mountain. The dwarves have been dealing with hordes for centuries. We would just be the latest to break and fall against the hold. But if we could keep Eidolon satisfied with a show, keep them thinking that all was going according to plan, then we might take a hostage and lure their agents into a trap.”
“He filled me in on that paht while I was in the tent, getting re-programmed,” Madeline said. “Speaking of thaht...”
“Of course,” the Phantom said. “You are released by my authority.”
Madeline shook herself, like a dog shaking off water. “Oof. Thanks.”
“What all did you command her to do?” Garon asked, and his voice was mild and calm. Too mild and calm.
“Merely to stay where she was until I led her out, and to commit no violence or act of destruction upon my people or their materials,” the Phantom said. “Please. We are not savages. I'm half-golem myself, now. I understand the horrors of being trapped in one's own body.”
Celia twitched at that one.
“Ah. Anyway,” the Phantom said, shoving guilt to the back of his mind. “I did my part to set matters up by managing the generals, and staying out of sight until the time was ready to risk it all. For her part, Midian contacted her agent, and had her meet with you and assist in gathering help from the north. I'm a little fuzzy on the details of that part, but I assume it went well?”
“It did,” Threadbare said. “And this answers a few more questions. But not the main one. What do we do now?”
The Phantom took off his hat, and Jean gasped, at the clear, unshadowed view of his face. As well she should! She was seeing a countenance that he'd concealed for decades, a secret hidden more thoroughly than his true name, which not even he could recall anymore.
The rest of the tent was a bit less impressed, but the background murmuring quieted, and he knew he held them in the palm of his hand. All eyes were on him, as he spoke.
“Now we join forces and bring doom to Eidolon.”
You are now a level 41 Theater Master!
CHA+10