The New Dark Lord: Book 3- Chapter 26 (Patreon)

Silenos’ reconfigured cognition had allowed many new sensations to assail her. Most, she hated. The one she felt now she hated more than even the others. It was…Shock. 

Shock was a pitiable thing. A cursed poison in her mind. Not anger, which urged haste and speed, driving thoughts towards action. Nor was it fear, a quivering, scattering sharpening. Shock was the antithesis of all such things, urging inaction and lanquidity. It was like molten lead poured into musculature, weighing it down and adding mass without force. Contributing nothing to the locomotion, and making every twitch that much more an exertion. 

There were many situations which had surprised Silenos since her displacement in reality. In fact, it seemed at times that her life for the past few months had been nothing but surprises. The most crushing one of all, however, was the realisation that she felt out of place even now. 

Now. Here. In the lands of House Shaiagrazni, finding herself escorted through familiar streets with familiar deference, being showed all the respect she was owed and enjoying all the sights she was accustomed to. The place she had grown up, become a caster and graduated from the mewling creature she had once been. And she felt out of place.

The realisation made her sick, and…Frightened. 

It did not take long for her to be led through the city and into the Central Tower, up through its bowels and into the heights within. Ensharia and Hexeri were with her all the while. Neither seemed to understand the privilege they were being shown in receiving the right to set foot within so grand a place, or at least Silenos assumed they did not understand given that neither had dropped to their knees weeping tears of joy and prostrating. She supposed the ignorance of the New World was not tied to that universe itself, they would remain hopelessly uneducated on all things Shaiagrazni wherever they went. 

Even, most dangerously, among House Shaiagrazni itself. 

“Your possessions will remain here.” One of the guards informed Silenos. It was a grotesquery, a sapient varietal made to serve the hybrid purposes of war-machine and attendant. This one was perhaps misnamed. The only thing grotesque about its features was how anomalous they were, sculpted to the very perfection of human beauty and then, evidently, taken vastly beyond. House Shaiagrazni’s knowledge of the psionic magics had served to elevate aesthetics to those with an appeal that registered on the sub-instinctual level. In this creature, Silenos saw the culmination of that.

She found it rather distasteful, but then many in House Shaiagrazni would say the same about her own tastes in creation. Until she found out who in specific had made the construct before him, she had no way of knowing whether their power was beyond hers- and thus their aesthetic preference sublime- or inferior.

“Very well.” Silenos conceded, for she knew, no matter what, that this construct was conveying the orders of her superior. She turned to Ensharia and Hexeri. “The two of you are to stay here.”

“We are not your luggage.” The paladin growled, taking a step forwards. The guards stiffened, readied to move. Silenos felt her heart race with uncharacteristic fear.

Is it uncharacteristic, though? What am I? The shed skin of Silenos Shaiagrazni, a great caster no longer for this world.

She pushed that aside, Ensharia was mere words away from being obliterated for her insolence. She did not understand House Shaiagrazni. That misunderstanding would kill her if she didn’t act.

“Please,” Silenos cut in, “Not now…Mistress.” She addressed Ensharia as she said it. The room froze. Without apologising, or wavering, she turned to the guard. “Forgive my servitor, I have taught her to sexually dominate me for recreational purposes. I fear she has taken her role too seriously. There is no need to kill her for her disrespect.”

A single glance back at Ensharia confirmed to Silenos that she had gotten the message, and another glance back at the guards told her that they, like all Shaiagraznian servitors, knew better than to question her. If they were aware of Silenos’ asexuality, they still did not bring it up. It would have been no issue even if they had of course. She’d simply have destroyed them for slighting her and thus kept the incident for her own memory alone.

Past the guarded door was Silenos’ next challenge. One she had never overcome before.

Mistress Kammani was unchanged. Literally unchanged. Her face was, on the atomic level, no different to how it had been when she had first met Silenos a hundred and forty years prior, and if what Silenos had heard from others was accurate it had been identical to that at least two centuries earlier. Devastatingly beautiful in a way she could appreciate regardless of sexual interest. There was an aesthetic quality, a starkly intellectual fact, to Kammani’s features which were the product only of her own great Fleshcrafting knowledge. Knowledge so advanced it was to Silenos’ as Silenos’ own was to most Shaiagraznian apprentices.

“Silenos.” She smiled. “It has been a while.”

From her perspective, Silenos supposed, she was not making much of an understatement. One hundred and fifty years was as great a fraction of Kammani’s life as three was of Silenos’ own. 

“It has.” She agreed. “I am pleased to announce my return to House Shaiagrazni.”

“And I am pleased to witness it.” Kammani nodded. “Your loss was felt by all, it is doubtless no surprise that we have yet to produce another prodigy of your abilities even after all this time.”

Silenos felt a stab of something at that, buried it. It was only right that her loss be assessed upon the deficit of utility it produced. 

“What has come of House Shaiagrazni in my absence?” She inquired. “How does the war progress, what advancements have been made while I was preoccupied?”

She told her, and Silenos listened. There was much to hear. Fleshcrafting had been pioneered to lengths that left her newly under-educated, updates in theory and understanding having outstripped Silenos’ own grasp. Necromancy, too, had advanced, though not by quite so much. The war had progressed and escalated all at once, with new weapons on each side and a vicious no-man’s-land now bifurcating the entirety of their planet.

Such had been the predictions, one hundred and fifty years ago. All turned from projection to reality. And none had deterred House Shaiagrazni for any of the hundred and fifty years they took to do so.

“I see.” Silenos felt hollow at the realisation. They had accomplished so very little, for all their brilliance. Expanding territory by a few kilometres, growing more efficient at killing. And yet they were still locked in battle. 

That will end, with the Tempered Schisms being stabilised. That will spell the end of any resistance to House Shaiagrazni for as long as we exist.

Abruptly, Kammani tilted her head.

“Your neurology has changed.” She noted. “Changed drastically. Insular-anterior cortex reformed, cerebrum altered for emotional processing and intuitive thought.”

She did not phrase her question as anything more than an idle observation. Still, Silenos couldn’t help but respond to it. She had questioned herself about just that enough that the thought of leaving no comment upon her master’s comment was…Irksome.

“Recent events forced me to adjust.” She replied.

“Tell me about them.” Kammani gently suggested. Some had, Silenos knew, referred to her master’s mannerisms as motherly. She could not have commented upon that herself, she had been found by House Shaiagrazni as an orphan already. She did know that among the Elders of their Household, she was unique in seeming to have maintained much of her humanity.

Some took that to be a sign of compassion or kindness in her. They were fools. Mistress Kammani was among the cruelest and most manipulative creatures Silenos had ever met, and she used her own empathic abilities for very much the same reason as Silenos. To gain an advantage over others. 

That advantage was the deadliest thing in the world for Silenos. She calmed herself, readied herself. Explained herself.

And mentally prepared to be caught in a lie, and accidentally hang herself.

She went over the events of her betrayal by Adonis, and her displacement into the New World. The earliest deeds of hers were easily explained. It was only after she reconfigured her brain, and continued spending time among her newfound allies, that her decisions became…Harder to justify.

It was strange, Silenos hadn’t realised until that moment how questionable her decision-making had been. Going over it in retrospect she counted a thousand irrationalities, and almost tripped up in keeping them all from the report. Nonetheless, she did so.

Mistress Kammani listened to it all. Considering.

***

Silenos’ message had gotten across to Ensharia perfectly well, and she’d watched the caster disappear with a mix of shock and awe. She had imagined, perhaps stupidly, that Silenos was in some way anomalous among her people. Assumed, perhaps due to some faulty belief that the universe was kind and pleasant, that there was not an entire Household full of people as or more deranged than her.

Now she knew otherwise, and that knowledge made itself known in her mind like cold fingers against a spine. She shivered, mouth dry, pacing, hands twitching for her weapons and…What? 

What would her weapons even do here? She’d seen the things Silenos improvised. This was a civilization with casters equal to her and more, who had established themselves centuries ago and prepared all of their equipment ahead of time. Ensharia didn’t know if they would even register what she carried as a tool of war. Perhaps they would mistake it for some kind of massager.

“Let’s go.” She turned to see Hexeri addressing her, fidgeting. “This place is…I don’t like it.”

Ensharia realised what she meant. The spire was a cramped place, despite its sprawling vastness. Somehow the very space- that great abscess within its every room- seemed to compress on her worse than a barely-cleared stretch of stone. 

“Let’s.” She agreed, heading from the door. If Silenos returned, she would doubtless find them soon enough. And in the meantime Ensharia wished to be as far from those upsettingly beautiful guards as was possible. Their very presence made her ill at ease, as if they lied to her with appearances alone.

She supposed, in a way, they did. 

Outside, the halls were just as broad. This one was broken up only by a single figure. Tall, with a scowl upon his face and matted hair. He looked younger than Ensharia by a good few years, and glanced irritably at her as he headed to the door at her back.

“Out of the way.” He ordered, almost lazily. It was like hearing a man give commands to his dog. Ensharia felt no inclination to obey that of all things, standing still.

“You don’t give me orde-” She hadn’t even finished the sentence when a blast of magic struck her, sent her flying through the air to rebound blinking and gasping. She landed hard, realised she’d struck the far wall some fifty paces back and felt her body aching as clumps of shattered stone fell down around her. Hexeri smashed into it a moment later. She didn’t bounce, merely stuck into the stone like a pickaxe’s head.

Ensharia gasped. She’d meant to do more, to stand, to move, to fight. All her body managed, though, was a gasp. She’d hit stone before, felt it crumble beneath her and had long months to grow accustomed to Silenos’ enhancement of her body. Whatever she’d impacted, it wasn’t stone. 

Her mouth full of blood, lungs with hot air, eyes with tears and heart with fear, she could do nothing but watch as the smug, sneering little arsehole who’d dared to give her orders slowly stalked over. His fingers twitched, eyes twitched more. There was victory in him. And, she saw, cruelty.

It was stopped only as one of the guards stepped forwards.

“Apologies Apprentice.” They began. “We would request that you stop brutalising these creatures, they are the property of Mistress Silenos.”

The boy couldn’t have frozen faster, even if he’d been turned to stone.

“Oh.” Instantly he was beside Ensharia, hands outstretched. She winced, prepared herself to be twisted and ruined…Then felt the pain subside instead as her broken form was healed. Hexeri’s had regenerated halfway by the time he even moved on to her, vampiric constitution once more making itself known. 

“Apologies.” The apprentice hastily added. “I had no idea you were…Well, send my regards to…To Silenos.” He paled, slightly, beneath the brown skin, swallowed again. “Master Silenos that is, I must…Uh, I have things to do.” He practically sprinted away. Ensharia watched him, satisfaction muted only by the…Humiliation.