An Epic Hero Story: Book 2 Chapter 45 (Patreon)

When I next met with Morlo, he had a plan. I didn’t find that out right away though, the Thaumaturge was too busy making fun of me for that.

“You got yourself shot, I hear,” he sneered, “didn’t think to shield yourself?”

Of course I’d thought of that, and of course he knew it, but I was actually pleased by the mockery. When Morlo was in a mean mood he was rarely in a truly bad one. Less pleasant, but more predictable. 

“What was the message you wanted Cedwin to deliver?” I asked him outright, having had my patience for game-playing drained out through the bloody hole in my shoulder.

All at once, Morlo’s good mood faded. 

“Gandai and I have finished translating the scripts we found, among other things,” he replied, face falling farther than if it had been cut from his head and dropped off a cliff, “it’s not good.”

I had, in fact, suspected that it wouldn’t be good. Something about having a seizure when I touched the carving had primed me to anticipate news of a distinctly not-good quality. I listened all the same, figuring that knowing more was very much beneficial to maintaining my current number of limbs. Morlo didn’t give away free information often, anyway, so this was a novelty worth appreciating just for its own sake, even if self-preservation had stopped interesting me.

“I won’t bore you with the details,” Morlo told me. “But suffice is to say that—”

—”no,” I snapped. He paused, staring at me like I’d just done something incredibly stupid. I probably had, but I was already in the hole and too young to see a better way of getting free of it than digging deeper still, so I dug my heels in and doubled down. “I’ve almost died about fifty times because you keep not telling me things, deciding what suffices. And then I almost get murdered, or melted by a demon, or have a fit when I look at a stone carving that mind-controls me into not even caring that I had a fucking fit. You’re going to tell me everything you know about this right now.”

Morlo looked for a second like he might just blow me to pieces then and there. Instead he paused, took a breath, and finally spoke.

“How much do you know?” He asked.

I spent a moment considering things myself, before answering. 

“I know that you’re not who you say you are. That Morlo the Great and Terrible is some assumed identity. I don’t know who you are behind that, though.” I’d pieced that much together only roughly, and it was more intuition than logic that gave me this answer. My confirmation came from the look on Morlo’s face when I confronted him with my suspicion.

My smug satisfaction at having gotten the better of Morlo lasted for precisely as long as it took me to remember that I was talking to a man who’d already demonstrated the willingness to kill for both survival, and convenience. How important was this secret to him? Important enough to end a man’s life just because he had one piece of the puzzle?

No, I soon found out. As usual I was precisely lucky enough to live for another day of danger tomorrow.

“What I’m about to tell you stays between us,” Morlo growled, “always us, no matter what. Understood?”

I nodded, but of course that was less about my agreeing and more about my not wanting to do anything that might tip his mental scales on whether I should be killed outright or not. 

Morlo nodded back, then entered an uncharacteristically long lull in his speech. I realised he was actually working up to talking, actually nervous. If that wasn’t terrifying then I don’t know what was, but he got to talking eventually. I ended up wishing he hadn’t. 

“Let me tell you about the Heroes, Kyvaine. You’ll have heard a lot about them. Almost all of it’s wrong. They didn’t appear one day out of nowhere to fight off evil and save the world from Demons, and they didn’t just vanish into the night as fast as they’d emerged. The Heroes were cunts, and they’re not around anymore because a few hundred years ago all the normal folk got tired of their shit and killed them all.”

This was, of course, news to me. For many reasons.

“How do you know that?” I asked instinctively. This was old lore, knowledge that even my history tutor had just thrown his hands up and confessed ignorance on as a boy. But here Morlo was speaking like an authority. 

I didn’t get an answer to my question, of course. 

“Shut up,” Morlo told me sharply. “Now listen. Heroes died out because they were arseholes, but the other big thing that people are wrong about is the idea that they’re all gone.”

“They’re not?” I felt a surge of excitement at that, I’m not too embarrassed to say. Growing up as I did, you must understand, Heroes were some long-gone abstraction borne from folk tales and legends. 

“Most are,” he amended. “Lucky for you. Unluckily, there’s still a few kicking about. Most lay low. Most pass themselves off as other beings of power, worshipped by cults or puppeting kingdoms or empires from behind their thrones. Most have amassed so much power in their centuries, through wealth or favours or knowledge, that even the magic of their minds and bodies pales by comparison. You’ve seen already how well my own Thaumaturgy did against an army.”

I had, at that. Morlo had been no small part of us doing as well as we had against the orcs, but his powers were no greater than a battery of cannons. More convenient, easier to aim, capable of riding a horse—he certainly had his advantages over them. But in the end, he could do nothing against a force of tens of thousands by himself.

“And the Heroes, the ones alive now…they all have an army?”

Morlo shrugged. “I would, if I were them. I’d have ten by now, wouldn’t you?”

I felt a chill. Somehow, grounded in something as mundane as money and influence, the thought of Heroes felt a good deal more sinister. 

Suddenly I was glad there weren’t many around, and wishing there were fewer still. 

In all my shaken consideration, it almost slipped my mind how little I’d gotten from Morlo about his own secrets. “What does this have to tell you about what’s going on with me?” I growled, irritated to have been so easily distracted. 

Morlo didn’t smirk or scowl like he normally did when someone saw through his bullshit. He just sighed, took a long pause as if working himself up to something big, and, for one of the few times since I’d met him, gave me a straight answer.

“Because you’re a Hero, Kyvaine. A real one. Not just a passing substitute, a genuine Hero.”

There’s nothing, I mean nothing, that a person could have been told back then that would be as significant as that. No burden as crushing, no secret as harrowing, no revelation that demanded half so many questions be asked in turn. A wise man, a small child or, in all likelihood, even a brain-damaged animal would have felt the gravity inherent to such a thing.

I pumped my fist high up into the air and grinned instead. 

“I knew it!” I lied. “I knew it! I always knew I was too fucking good to be some merchant’s son. What, am I descended from Vory the Flamesmith? No, don’t tell me, I…Oh bugger it, yes!” I was too busy thinking about all the ways I’d abuse my power to take note of Morlo’s rapidly falling face. 

He let me have my moment. In all likelihood, the miserable old cunt was entertaining himself by anticipating the look on my face when he punched a hole in my good mood. The puncture came sooner rather than later, and he, naturally, did not even attempt to hide the relish with which he delivered it. 

“You think you’re going to live like the Heroes of old?” 

I froze all at once. 

“...Why wouldn’t I?” I asked, already feeling the grin start to sprout on my face. The fear one. 

“Because this is a world that’s gotten used to not having any Heroes, Kyvaine,” Morlo told me. “Oh it’s one thing to masquerade as one, but start proving yourself able to do the things they can and…well. The convenience of having you as some figurehead or propaganda piece will only take you so far.”

He was actually wrong about this, in fact that convenience has taken me so far that I could stop writing this tome, head for Catun and kick the shit out of the Imperial Council and I’d get away with it. But I didn’t know that at the time. 

It wasn’t actually true at the time, either. But I’m getting ahead of myself on the specifics of how exactly I got this powerful in the modern day. Like most things it’s more about trickery than competence. 

+”And like most things, Kyvaine is finding some excuse for why his ability to do it is actually not impressive or worthy of respect at all.”+

“Okay, so keep it to myself then?” I asked.

“Within reason,” Morlo shrugged. “Behave the way you would if you didn’t believe you were actually a Hero, but wanted all the fame and fortune of being seen as one.”

I hesitated, trying to think of how to phrase what I wanted to say. I needn’t have bothered.

“Yes,” Morlo sighed. “That is exactly what I was hoping to achieve by keeping this from you, but you cocked that up by being exactly intelligent and stupid enough to cause the most issues for me. As usual.”

“Fuck you,” I said, not sure if I was being complimented or insulted and deciding to play it safe by responding with beligerence. Morlo seemed too grumpy to care about even a real slight for the time being anyway, pacing and muttering.

“That demon concerns me. I don’t know when it’ll strike again, but believe me when I tell you it will. Those beings don’t get tired of waiting, I’ve known them to bide their time for half a lifetime before retaliating against a mortal that crossed them. Some stories tell of entire kingdoms brought to ruin just because their rulers’ ancestors pissed one off.”

“That’s why you sent Cedwin off,” I realised. “You could’ve used anyone as a messenger, could’ve used an actual messenger, but by sending him you’re hoping he lures the demon away. Which means you’re planning on heading out soon, in the opposite direction to where you sent him?”

Morlo got that same look on his face, as usual. A mix of satisfaction and grumpiness.

“One day, you’re going to start thinking like that all the time instead of just in short bursts. I think when that day comes, you’re going to make some of the world’s clergymen, nobility and other schemers very unhappy.”

I will say one thing without bragging too much, he wasn’t wrong there.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t wrong about my having yet to apply that insight consistently. If he had been, and I’d been thinking about things properly the whole time, I might have realised that Morlo was now far more likely to kill me than he’d ever been before. I didn’t know his secret yet, and wouldn’t for a while still. 

But he couldn’t know that. Believe me, there’s a great many people in this world who were taken out of it when someone else assumed they knew more than they did. Life is full of these little ironies.