“Well, well.” The Great Mwagru stood. “Would you like a pot of tea?”

Ariock wondered if the seer was making fun of the serious subject matter.

“I promise, I heard the gravity of your dream.” The seer bustled about his tiny kitchenette. “But I need a moment to begin my interpretation. Let’s get comfortable. I have honeyed spice, a mushroom blend, or an herbal zest.” He used a flash boiler.

“The nightmare probably comes from my big failure on Nuss,” Ariock admitted. “I guess I don’t need professional advice to understand that. I’m sorry to have wasted your—”

“Your visit is not any sort of waste of time.” The seer’s tone was urgent. “Please, Bringer of Hope. Stay. I really wish to discuss this.”

Ariock settled back. He had a strangely vulnerable feeling, as if he was a kid.

The seer set a teacup next to his own cushiony chair and poured a few ounces for himself. “Honeyed spice,” he announced, and set the steaming pot next to Ariock. He must realize it was pointless to offer tiny porcelain tableware to a giant.

“It’s just an anxiety dream,” Ariock guessed. “It will go away in time. Right?”

The seer sat on the chair and adjusted his robes, making himself comfortable. When he finally faced Ariock, his lavender eyes were intensely curious. “Have you ever had prophetic dreams? Do your dreams ever come true?”

What a weird question.

“No…” Ariock trailed off as he thought about it. Hadn’t he dreamed of his mother impaled on a piece of metal shrapnel, weeks before it happened?

But he had been under a huge amount of stress at the time. He’d battled in an arena for a silent audience of Torth, forced to endure amped up emotions due to the helmet they made him wear. That nightmare about his mother must have just been a grim coincidence.

And he had dreamed about Jinishta dying in a raging storm.

But that was also due to stress, most likely. His dreams were full of violence and killing.

“No,” Ariock decided. “If I had prophetic dreams, I’m sure I would know.” Thomas would have told him, at the very least.

The seer looked immensely relieved. “When did you begin to experience this dream?” he asked.

Ariock thought back. Jinishta had still been alive, the first time he’d woken to find objects floating from his distress. “I guess since before the catastrophe on Nuss.”

“Ah.” The seer crossed his legs and adjusted his glittering robes. “You’ve been plagued by this disturbing dream for many pendulum swings. And…” He sipped with delicate finesse. “It has not come true yet.”

Ariock actually felt reassured. That was an excellent point. His recurring nightmare held no truth whatsoever.

“What do you fear?” the seer asked.

Ariock hesitated.

“Never mind.” The seer put aside his tea. “I realize that you don’t want to blather all your vulnerabilities to a lovely stranger.” He gestured to himself. “I respect that. So I hope you will allow me to deduce the obvious? We can use that as a starting point.”

Ariock wasn’t sure what the seer meant. He raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“I am guessing that this is your first visit to a spiritualist?” The seer’s tone was as warm and reassuring as honey. “People generally come to me for one of two reasons. Either they want assurance that their beautiful dream will come true, or they want to make the nightmares stop.”

“Oh.” Ariock perked up. He did want to make the nightmares stop. He really wanted that. “You can do that?”

“I won’t over-promise,” the seer said. “But I believe I can help.”

Ariock leaned on his knees. He was ready for help.

“Obviously, you fear losing your lovely angel from paradise,” the seer said.

Ariock nodded.

“Have you always feared being unable to hold onto the people you love?” The seer gave Ariock a kindly look.

A memory of smoke and flames flashed through Ariock’s mind. “Ever since I lost my father,” he admitted. “When I was child.”

The seer nodded in acknowledgment. “Yet you were not plagued with a recurring nightmare until recently. Your fear has grown, hasn’t it?”

Ariock slumped. He didn’t need a professional to tell him why he kept dreaming about being a colossal failure. It must be obvious to everyone in the galaxy.

He confessed it out loud, anyway. “I failed the warriors who were relying on me. I failed to save Jinishta. And Orla.”

“But that isn’t it,” the seer said.

Ariock looked at him, confused.

“You said the nightmare began before that,” the seer said.

That was a valid point. Ariock frowned, trying to figure out what might have triggered his anxiety, if not the disastrous trap which he had blundered into.

“I know the stories of your great deeds, messiah,” the seer said. “You are a hero for a reason.”

Was this professional just going to offer empty flattery? Ariock could get that anywhere, and he certainly didn’t need more of it.

“You are renowned as a fighter,” the seer continued. “When the Torth beat you, you spit out the blood and got back up. When they robbed you of your powers? You used your fists. You shoved them off a tower top in the dead city. When they pitted you against angry beasts in an arena? You discovered your powers. When the Torth had you cornered in the borderlands? You revealed the Servants of All for the Yeresunsa they were.”

Ariock wondered if the seer wanted a private worship session. How useless. He searched for a way to make a polite exit.

“My point,” the seer said, “is that something changed.” He folded his hands over his heart. “Inside you.”

Perhaps that was valid. In his darkest moments, Ariock feared that the insanity gas, or perhaps Evenjos’s healing, had damaged him in some permanent, fundamental way.

“It sounds as if you are willing to let the Torth defeat you,” the seer said.

Ariock sat up straighter, although his head poked the canvas ceiling. “No.” He was offended. “It’s not that I’m willing. It’s that I feel helpless to stop them.”

“You?” The seer gestured, indicating the width of Ariock’s shoulders. “You feel helpless?”

Ariock knew it must seem absurd to someone who lacked big muscles or big powers. “Yes,” he admitted. “I was outwitted by an enemy super-genius. That can happen again. I’m not…” He stammered to a stop, unsure if he should admit his vulnerabilities.

But his frustration was too great.

“I’m at the mercy of super-geniuses,” Ariock said. “You think I’m a great leader? Well, leaders rely on advisors. I’m only as good as the people who help me make plans.”

“Ah.” The seer studied him. “So you are having trouble trusting your super-genius friend.”

“No. It’s not that.” Ariock was tired of correcting Alashani who detested rekvehs. “Thomas is the reason any of us survived. He warned me about that trap. And anyway, I trust him with my life on a regular basis. The people in this city have no idea how much they owe their freedom to Thomas.”

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The seer crossed his legs the other way. He looked intrigued. “So,” he said, “it sounds like you worry that the enemy super-geniuses are collectively smarter than Thomas?”

Ariock nearly denied it. But he stopped.

Maybe there was some truth to that.

“You are a symbol of faith,” the seer said. “But you have lost your own faith?”

Ariock didn’t think that religion had much to do with his worries. Still, in an abstract way, he supposed he had lost some faith. “I guess so.”

“What decision has Thomas made lately,” the seer said, “that you question?”

Ariock wished he had not complained. This was certainly not a topic he ought to discuss with a stranger. Even so, as he considered the question, he realized that the seer had struck a nerve.

There were things Thomas did, lately, that made him uneasy.

Thomas had become withdrawn. He was ill-tempered. He refused to help out with telepathy lessons. He refused private council meetings. Whenever Ariock asked to hang out, he was busy. He seemed to have a simmering anger just beneath his surface.

And there were all the zombies.

Ariock tried to approve of the army that Thomas was single-handedly building with the power of his mind. But deep down, he remembered Thomas refusing based on moral reasons.

Thomas no longer spoke of morality.

Ariock remembered the story of Audavian and Unyat. Anyone with an ordinary mind—including Ariock himself—was vulnerable to that particular power. With every increase in the numbers of zombies, Ariock felt as if his side of the war was sliding down a dark path.

It was dishonorable, to rob people of their free will.

It was cruel, even when the victims were the worst sorts of Torth.

“I can’t point to any one decision,” Ariock said. “Every decision we’ve made together seems good. But…” He hesitated.

Well, a professional dream interpreter probably knew better than to blab secrets of the messiah all over the city. Right?

Ariock leaned his forehead into his hands, and took a plunge. “I’m climbing an endless mountain of corpses. That was a dream I had, when I was a gladiator in an arena for Torth pleasure. I dreamed that I caused endless amounts of deaths. Mostly Torth, but there were others. My mother included. She was dead. And then it turned out that … yeah, that dream came true. I killed her by accident.”

The seer looked deeply disturbed and sympathetic. He set aside his teacup.

“I’m a slaughter machine,” Ariock said. “I told Evenjos that this is an age of war. And maybe someday we’ll have an age of peace, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon.”

He covered his eyes with his hands. If only he could cancel out the horrors which he caused.

“Killing disturbs you.” The seer’s voice was gentle.

It felt strange to Ariock, to admit how much he disliked killing even when it was justified. His guilt was unheroic. Garrett must see it as a gross sign of weakness. Thomas, too, probably thought Ariock was being pathetic. And Vy. Everyone must think so.

And they were right.

The situation on Nuss was untenable. The Torth had reinforced their garrisons there, and Ariock’s people were afraid to venture beyond city walls. Anyone who soared too far got shot down. If his people dared to ride a hovercart, or go for a hike, they were likely to get snatched and collared.

His fault. Because he wasn’t there. Ariock was supposed to bring hope and justice. What good was he, if he failed?

“What would happen if you no longer felt guilt?” the seer asked.

Ariock struggled with that question. “I guess I wouldn’t be me.” He would become something soulless and Torth-like. “I guess the Torth would win,” he admitted.

Perhaps some guilt was good. It kept him human.

“But I shouldn’t feel so much guilt,” Ariock amended. “It’s stopping me.”

“Is it?” the seer asked.

“Yes. I’m burdened by guilt. Mostly because I keep destroying people I love. And I can’t just downplay that, or forget what I’ve done. I know everyone wants me to. But it doesn’t feel right, to cast aside all my morals so I can be the supposed hero that everyone looks up to.”

He wasn’t a hero. That was the problem. Heroes were not mass murderers. They were not butchers.

“Your morals make you a hero.” The seer made it a statement.

Ariock began to argue. But then he realized that the seer had restated what he himself had implied.

It wasn’t the way Ariock would have phrased things. If someone had asked him what made a hero heroic, he would have talked about duty and delivering justice. He would have cited the ability to be tough and determined in any bad situation.

But it was morals.

“I’m not moral.” Ariock hunched. It made him feel so small, to blatantly confess his own monstrosity. “I do terrible things.”

And not just once or twice.

Ariock thought of all the people he had slaughtered, on purpose or by accident. There was a mountain of corpses in his past and in his future. It seemed endless. The Torth Empire had thirty-eight trillion individual Torth. Ninety million urbanized planets. Was he supposed to kill or enslave every single one of them?

It would take centuries.

Millennia.

Ariock suspected that old age would not slow him down much. Not with longevity pills plus Evenjos’s regeneration healing, plus his own quick self-healing. In a thousand years, would he be more callous than Garrett?

He didn’t see any way to hold onto his humanity.

If he had to mete out death every single day for a thousand years … he would become the equivalent of a grim reaper. He would grow inured to it. There was no way around that.

“I know of the terrible things you have done by accident,” the seer said. “Those were things that Torth forced you to do. But are there any terrible things you have done on purpose?” He emphasized the last two words.

Ariock prepared to list a litany.

Then he hesitated. Would an Alashani consider Torth to be victims at all? The seer probably believed that all Torth should be decapitated, with their heads displayed on spikes.

“The ummins of Umdalkdul have a philosophy,” the seer said. “Gwat. It is easy to judge that which we do not know, but followers of Gwat take the hard path. They endeavor not to judge. I adhere to that philosophy, for myself.” He pinwheeled his hand, indicating that Ariock should go on. “If you believe you have done injustice against certain, uh…” He hesitated, clearly avoiding the offensive term. “…mind readers, then I respect your guilt, and your sense of responsibility. I have never met a Torth. Nor have I met a penitent. I cannot fully judge what sort of people they are.”

There was no sarcasm or irony in the seer’s tone. He seemed truly receptive.

“Have you done harm to innocent people?” the seer asked.

Ariock thought of Rosy Ranks and Servants of All, begging.

Crying.

Losing all of their hard-won dignity in a last-ditch, futile effort to retain their free will.

“I don’t know how innocent or guilty they are,” Ariock admitted. “But their fate is worse than death.”

He felt like a traitor, voicing that out loud. Garrett wouldn’t approve. Thomas would probably give him a hurt look. Yet still…

“No one deserves what we are doing to them,” Ariock said.

“Ah,” the seer said. “Now it is very clear, to me, why you have not jumped back into fighting. It is a great mystery to the rest of the galaxy. But I no longer have to wonder.”

The seer made it sound self-evident. He drank from his porcelain teacup.

“Do you think I’m right?” Ariock felt like a child begging for approval. The greatest minds in the galaxy believed he was too soft-hearted. Thomas had agreed to zombify hordes of enemy Torth. Although he clearly hated doing it, he claimed that it was necessary, “for now.” He received power boosts by linking with Ariock. And he had abdicated any responsibility for making military decisions.

Ariock alone had the final say.

And everyone else, from Weptolyso to Kessa, seemed to approve of the zombifying. Even the enemy Torth knew it was effective. The threat of zombification was the only thing holding them at bay. No doubt all those people thought Ariock was an idiot for dragging his heels and being weighed down by guilt.

“I believe that your recurring dream is a message.” The seer seemed very professional. “The dream shows you failing to be a hero by the definition of your friends. Instead of being a hero in the way you know it is defined—by your morals—you are trying to please your friends, to be a hero by their standards. And that is a dangerous path. It leads to turmoil, and possibly to calamity.”

Ariock wondered if he dared ignore a friend like Thomas. The last time he’d ignored Thomas, a whole lot of Alashani warriors had died.

“You look conflicted,” the seer observed.

“You’ve given me a lot to think about.” As Ariock considered the seer’s interpretation, his concern for Thomas grew.

Because Thomas also found the zombification effort to be morally repulsive.

In private, away from listening ears, Thomas insisted that renegade Torth were the key to everything. But he had been saying that for nearly a year.

There were no Torth jumping to join the good guys. There were only prisoners who could not be trusted. In many ways, the penitents were just … well, Ariock hated to think of people as worthless. But they were baggage.

Did Thomas secretly hate himself for being wrong about the Torth?

Had anyone addressed the guilt which Thomas might secretly be coping with? Did Kessa dare to discuss it with him? Or Varktezo? Probably not. Thomas hardly talked to anyone anymore. He was distant. He was brusque, even rude, perhaps oversaturated with Torth life histories.

And lately, he was hellishly overworked, now that Garrett—and Ariock—had bullied him into absorbing the minds of every single penitent in Freedomland.

I need to check with him, Ariock realized.

“I hope I have not given you more cause for stress?” The seer laughed in a delicate way. “I regret that my skills are less than what you may be accustomed to.”

“You’ve been very helpful,” Ariock said.

The seer seemed overcome with embarrassment, as if he had just remembered that he was sitting across from a celebrity. “You walk a hard path, messiah. It is like Gwat. Brutality is easy for those born with power. I hear warriors brag about how many Torth they have killed. Mercy is not in their vocabulary. But I hear it in yours.” He looked at Ariock with admiration. “Restraint and mercy are very difficult for those with power, especially for those who have been wronged. Yet this is what you have chosen. That is a point of pride, not a point of shame. I see it as proof that you are far stronger than people give you credit for.”

“Thank you.” A weight lifted from Ariock’s shoulders. This mystical seer judged him kindly, in a way that few people did. Certainly not Garrett.

“I know what warriors say about your reluctance to fight.” The seer blinked, as if to flick away annoyances with his eyelashes. “They are wrong. Compassion, even for enemies, is never a weakness.”

For once, Ariock did not want to escape. He felt seen.

“If you’d like to try the tea?” the seer said. “Let me know what you think.”

The teapot was normal-sized for an Alashani, but tiny in Ariock’s hand. He drank everything in the pot within three swallows. It had a soothing taste, as light and delicate as the seer’s mannerisms.

Perhaps he could relearn how to be a Bringer of Hope instead of a bringer of death?

“I am honored that you came to me.” The seer slid off his chair. “If I can be of service again, please let me know. And everything we discussed is private.” He swirled his cape. “The Great Mwagru never tells.”