Book 5 - Chapter 50 (Patreon)

It wasn’t long before a support group arrived. Three Lances of [Knights] along with three healers, including Luelle, the [Wound Binder] who’d healed Galan after his near-assassination. She only poked at Brin briefly before handing him over to a [Nurse].

The [Nurse] started looking for the clasps on Brin’s armor, but of course there were none. He used glass magic to pull it off of himself, though he appreciated her assistance in pulling his body off the back pieces that were between him and the ground. Any movement at all was agonizingly painful, and he didn’t do any more than he had to.

She also only prodded him for a minute before deciding that she, too, would spend her time better by aiding the other injured first.

The newly arrived [Knights] defended the area, while some busied themselves by starting to dig through the wreckage. The [Watchful Knights] among them put their ears to the ground and then directed the efforts to the areas where they thought there was most likely buried loot.

The Arcaeneans who’d evacuated this place probably assumed they’d be back some day. Many of them must’ve buried their precious things rather than bring them on a trip to who knows where.

It wasn’t long before someone struck gold. Even better than gold, actually. Cheese. Three big wheels of it. The first was destroyed in seconds, broken apart and doled out to the men. Brin got a big fistful, though it was hard to eat. He settled on summoning a fork out of glass and then floating it to his mouth that way. He’d never been an “eat an entire fistful of cheese” type person back as Mark, but today it tasted like manna from heaven.

After that, there was a lot of waiting. The men filled the time by recounting their stories of what had happened after they separated. Hedrek’s tale was the most eagerly anticipated, but Marksi was insistent that his and Brych’s fight against the batlike familiar should go first. Then, of course, they needed to tell Hedrek and Brych all about their escape through the underground tunnels. Anwir was present in every one of these stories, but only as an absence that everyone danced around. They weren’t ready to deal with that right now.

It was nice to catch up with the guys, but why weren’t they moving? Brin expected that they would be heading back to the Order’s camp fairly soon, but after a half hour there was still no movement. It was a frustrating example of “Hurry Up and Wait.” He didn’t know why they were just sitting here, lying down in his case, and no one thought he was important enough to confide their plans in. Another group of [Knights] came with more servants, more healers, and more supplies. They had tarps and blankets so that the wounded wouldn’t have to lie in the dirt while they waited for whatever it was they were waiting for.

Since there was nothing else to do, he was forced to watch the healers at work, and that was always a gut-churning sight. In this world, the System often let people perform beyond the scope of their ignorance. For glass, that made it so that a high leveled [Glasser] could produce crystal-clear windows despite never changing his recipe. For healers, it was even worse. Luelle smeared mud mixed with fragrant herbs onto the mouth of the [Knight] whose lips were missing. Then she wrapped a scarf around it and said a prayer, and the worst part was that Brin was sure this was going to be more quick and effective than any of the best surgeons back home.

Lothar knelt in the dirt through it all, eyes open but unseeing. Once or twice, a healer approached him or Galan would try to speak to him, but he never responded, lost in the intersection between [Broken Doll] and [Paladin].

Eventually, the healers made their way to Brin. He endured a horribly embarrassing sponge bath right there in the open, in full view of both gods and man. Then they covered his broken limbs in plaster casts before finally clothing him again. He put his armor on top of that, because it made him feel stronger and he could use glass magic to hold everything in place.

Soon another group from the Order arrived, now with cots and tents. Brin began to understand. They were moving the whole Order into the city. This was their new camp; they were claiming ground.

He also had his Invisible Eyes above the city, and he watched the movements of the armies. Galan and Lyssa discussed the war behind wards, but he could tell by their tense features and the movements of the armies that things weren’t looking good.

One army would send a group of men to claim a spot that a rival army had already claimed. Each time, the men would back off with apologies on both sides; they didn’t understand yet that the overlaps weren’t accidental. The leaders were trying to amp up tensions, and the men hadn’t caught on yet that they were supposed to hate the comrades that they’d fought and bled next to.

He saw a group of [Knights] from a Prinnashian Order attempt to enter Arcaena’s fortress citadel. They flung strength, magic, and even a battering ram at the doors, but there wasn’t so much as a scratch.

When a different Ollandish Order approached, the Prinnashian Order left, and the Ollandish Order turned around as well, both of them pretending that they hadn't been trying to sneak into the citadel while everyone else was pacifying the city.

All the while that little wagon the Lance had brought along still sat in the middle of the street, untouched and unnoticed.

“Hey, Cid. What was the point of bringing that wagon, anyhow?” Brin asked.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. What wagon?” responded the Prime.

Brin’s mouth went dry. It wasn’t dread, exactly. More like anticipation. He sent his Invisible Eye to try to look inside the wagon, but his magic didn’t penetrate. He’d have to check in person. He cast a Mirror Image of himself on the ground, then went Invisible.

He thought about calling to Marksi, to bring him along. But no, Marksi knew that Brin shouldn’t be walking around in his state. He’d stop him just as surely as Cid would.

Slowly, in great pain and with more magic than muscle, he rose to his feet and started walking. It was a slow, shuffling walk. He was practically an invalid. But he made his way, slowly but surely, to the city center and the erstwhile home of the [Witch Queen].

As he walked, he watched the wagon with his Invisible Eyes. There was currently no one near it, and no one was near the doors to the citadel. No one was watching except for him.

Cati Breckon, his friend, or so he had thought, slipped out of the back covered portion of her wagon and sprinted up the stairs. He could tell it was her, though her status was hidden, her face was masked, and she had a cheap cloak of camoflague–well, cheap by his terms. She’d probably spent every cent she’d earned from Talra on it.

If other [Illusionists] were watching, others who didn’t know her very well, this could be any woman. But that was a lock of Cati’s hair peeking out from under her hood, and that was Cati’s dress, the same one she was wearing when she told Brin that she saw her death approaching with the dawn.

Cati moved quick, pulled on the giant doors of the citadel, and they opened for her. She slipped inside, then pulled the door shut behind her.

Brin followed along as best he could. The stairs were the hardest part. He couldn’t completely use the glass in his armor to lift himself in the air. He wasn’t sure why that didn’t work, but it didn’t. He used his Bog Standard spear as a crutch, and step by step he climbed to the top.

Then he hobbled over, and pulled on the door. They were locked. He wasn’t the one who could open these doors. Arnarra had been wrong. Witches could be so damn stupid sometimes. He would laugh if that didn’t make his ribs hurt.

He pounded on the door and yelled through. “Cati! Let me in! It’s me, Brin.”

He heard light footsteps moving across a stone floor, and then she opened it. “Brin?”

Brin shoved his way inside, which wasn’t as easy as it sounded when everything hurt this much. Cati instinctually closed the door behind him. She’d pulled down the hood and removed the mask, and any traces of hope that this might not be her fled.

He shook his head. “For Solia’s sake, Cati. Is every girl that has a crush on me a secret [Witch]?”

She snorted in derision. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. First off, I’m not a [Witch], and secondly, you’re the one who has a crush on me. I like Rhun.”

“How did you open that door?” asked Brin.

“It just opened. I admit, this looks a little weird, but I can explain! I thought… well, if maybe I got here first… and I did! Look! Look here!” She danced over to a huge vase set near the opening. It was four feet tall and solid gold. “Just this alone and I’m set for life!”

“Good. Then grab it and let’s go,” said Brin.

Cati blinked in surprise and then said, “You don’t want to explore just a little more? Haven’t you noticed where we are?”

Brin had noticed. He’d seen this place in Aberfa’s dream visits. This was the main hall of the citadel of Arcaena. The ceiling was so high that it seemed to be the crown of the world in the dim light. The walls and ceiling were extremely ornate, and lavish furniture and expensive ornaments hung around the edges. The floor in the middle was clear, however, and a massive portrait of Arcaena herself was built into the floor. Each brick colored to make up the whole, like pixels on a screen.

As Aberthol, he’d never come to this part of the castle. He wasn’t allowed anywhere near it. He was starting to become sure that those memories were real, locked away in the physical matter of his brain until he was in a frame of mind to accept them.

Aberfa had shown him this room in dreams, but she’d always obscured the [Witch Queen’s] face. He still didn’t know why. He didn’t recognize her at all. It was sheer hubris that he assumed that he would, that Arcaena herself had made a point of approaching him personally. Still, he’d thought seeing her face would’ve given him some kind of insight. She looked exactly how you would expect. Proud and cold, possibly beautiful but in the way that a frozen mountaintop is beautiful.

“No. I don’t want to explore the [Witch Queen’s] terrifying fortress, alone and with more broken bones than whole ones,” said Brin. “The fact that we took three steps inside and didn’t immediately turn into toads is already pushing our luck. We should go.”

Cati looked down. “You’re right.”

Brin turned to the door and pushed on it. He couldn’t open it again without her help.

“Let’s just… let’s just take a peek, ok? Behind those doors, and then we’ll come back here, grab this vase, and go.”

“You can’t expect me to believe this. You can’t expect me to believe you just came here to grab some gold. Cati, why are you really here? Tell me now, and I swear, whatever you’ve done, I’ll protect you. But you have to come clean now. How long have you been spying for Arcaena?”

Cati frowned in deep disappointment. “I’d expect that from the Prinnashian guys, but not from you. You think every woman secretly sympathizes with Arcaena? That wasn’t true before this war started, and it certainly isn’t true after I saw what her soldiers did to Awsta.”

Brin shook his head. “Then help me. Make this make sense.”

Cati stared back, intense and angry, and he met her gaze evenly until she broke. “I… don’t know what first made me think of doing this. But as soon as the idea came into my head, I knew that I would do it. There are answers here. There are things I need to see. I’m going. Just a peek.”

She didn’t wait for him to argue, but strode across the hall, right over Arcaena’s face. Brin followed. As stupid as this was, as much as he wouldn’t admit it out loud, he was curious as well. Who would he be if he didn’t indulge his curiosity? If he wasn’t the person who needed to do things, to know, to dare. He’d be back in Hammon’s Bog.

He didn’t step on Arcaena’s face, though, and hobbled his way in a wide circle around her.

Cati opened the door on the opposite side of the room and walked through. Brin could probably give a map to Arcaena’s throne room, because it was towards all the places that Aberfa had never dared to show him. He’d never seen this hall, where the portraits hung. Each was twenty feet high, and depicted a different [Witch]. Some young, some older, all full of confidence and power. Arcaena’s old coven, perhaps? Or perhaps old subordinates, long since dead.

Cati didn’t give the room “just a peek”. She didn’t glance at the portraits at all, but made her way with single minded determination towards the doors on the other side.

Then at the end of the hall, there was an archway. Cati opened two doors that were twenty feet high and made of pure marble as if they weighed nothing, and took one step inside.

When Brin finally reached her again, his breath caught in his throat. 

It was there. The throne. Up on a raised dais, surrounded by braziers of pure white flame. The rest of the room was so dark that he couldn’t see the walls, and while the flames perfectly illuminated him and Cati, they didn’t penetrate the fog of darkness all around them. They did light the throne up in perfect detail. The throne for a [Witch Queen]. Regal, dark, and dangerous, and brimming so much with the Wyrd that Brin had to pull his senses shut lest he be blinded.

“I take it back. I am a [Witch],” said Cati.

Brin laughed, and despite the overpowering Wyrd and the flames and the darkness, it did a lot to ease the tension. It reminded him of Myra, actually. She’d always made bad jokes at times like this, too.

Cati didn’t respond, though, and after a moment the tension returned twice as strong. She’d been serious.

“It’s not worth it, Cati. I don’t know what they told you, but if it were really that easy, there'd be a thousand Arcaenas running around. Don’t you dare step near that chair.”

“No. You don’t get it. I’m not just a [Witch]. I’m the [Witch]. I think… I think it takes seeing it to know,” said Cati.

Brin grit his teeth in worry. Even now, he couldn’t keep the wheels in his brain from turning. Arnarra claimed that all she had to do was sit on the throne to become Arcaena, but then why hadn’t she done it already? Because she couldn’t get through the doors? Brin knew a [Great Witch] was capable of more than that. No, it had been something else. Fear, maybe. A Fate or Wyrd-borne assurance that only Arcaena herself could sit upon her throne.

“I was thinking that if I were Arcaena, I would do like Sana did,” said Brin.

Cati looked at him in disgust. “That… that monster? An abomination with a hundred heads? That… thing?”

“A hundred heads, and each capable of independent thought, but each of them still Sana, the [Witch Mage], with all her skill and power. But why stop at heads? Could you make two full bodies, joined together at the fingertips? And if you could, what happens when those fingertips separate? I bet Arcaena is hundreds of people. Thousands. Little seeds, scattered across the realms.”

He was really onto something here, but he resisted the urge to pace. “This is how she… you mean to ascend. I’ve already learned that if I split my mind and separate the new consciousness from myself to a sufficient degree, it can be rewarded independently by the System. Arcaena is doing that at a massive scale. Advancing in the high levels is next to impossible, unless you can gather experience from a multitude of sources all the time.”

Cati’s face went through a series of emotions. Anger, fear, wry humor, grim determination, before finally settling on abject horror. “I can’t be her. I’m a good person, Brin. I… I can’t be the one who did those things.”

Brin remembered where he was, and who he was with. “We should go.”

“The closer I get to the throne, the more I remember about her. I think I can take another step and still be me,” said Cati.

“It’s not worth it. Let’s just leave,” said Brin.

“But don’t you want to know? Awsta, and all of Talra. All they suffered. And me, and even you. Everything we’ve been through. Don’t you want to know what it was all for? What is the point of all this? Just so that one crazy woman can get to heaven the long way around? There has to be more than that.”

Brin leveled his spear at Cati’s throat. “Take one more step towards that throne and I will end you.”

Cati called his bluff. She reached out with a finger and pushed his spear away. While not exactly the closest of friends, she knew him well enough by now to know that he would have even more questions than she did.

“Yeah, you’re kind of right,” she said. “All the split bodies, they’re helping her level. But that’s just a side-effect. That’s not what they’re for. Hm…”

Brin licked his lips. “Then what are they for?”

Cati’s gaze was locked on the throne now. He could run her through. He should, and she would never see it coming. But he didn’t.

“Do you ever think about [Witches]? Do you ever think about how stupid they are?” asked Cati.

“All the time,” said Brin.

“I thought I would start to sympathize with them the closer I got, but now I can tell. She… I… she. Above all, she hates most [Witches]. By the gods, they are dumb! See, they think they can move the Wyrd. Destructive, they think to lie and turn everything to their will. They think they can create a reality of their own choosing. But reality thinks otherwise, and has a will of its own. It turns their lies to their own destruction. The Wyrd thinks, don’t you see? Those fools. And to the gods, [Witches] are hated above all.”

“You literally taught these [Witches]. Why not tell them how it should be done?” asked Brin.

“I did!” shouted Cati. “The fault lies at the foundations, it lies at the very inception of this nation. I meant to give stability and ease. I imagined a place of growth and civilization. Free from the apathetic laziness of slaves, my pleasurable people would be industrious and free. And for a while it worked. But then they began to let pleasure enslave them. They became a lazy and complacent civilization lacking in growth. Ease led to stagnation. I’ll need a new nation, built from a new foundation, one without cracks. And I’ve done it.”

Brin repeated the earlier question. “Why does Arcaena create so many bodies, if not for the experience. To spy?”

Cati shook her head. “The proper path of a [Witch] is to serve the Wyrd, completely. She doesn’t dominate it. And [Queens], they are in the same prison. They also must serve their people above all. Arcaena sought freedom. Unconstrained, not weighed down by the responsibility of her own power. She wanted a real life. This way, everyone can have what they want. She has the power to fulfill all her responsibilities, and give them the proper weight, while still being unconstrained by it. Her people can serve her, captive to their [Queen] and not dominating her completely. The Wyrd can mutually serve her in turn, so long as she remains on the proper path.”

“You call what Arcaena’s doing the proper path? Are you standing close enough to that throne to know what she did to me? To Lothar? I could name countless others,” said Brin.

Cati took another step forward.

 “Not one more!” Brin shouted, lifting his spear.

She ignored him. Her voice was cold, and had a slight accent. An Arcaenean accent. “These bodies are justice, too. That’s the price: I live the same lives that I give to my people. I endure all the pain that is felt as a consequence of my decisions. And as a result, who has felt pain greater than I have endured? My people’s lives are better because justice’s price is paid with my own body.”

Cati took another step forward.

Brin gripped his spear tight. It was time. He didn’t dare let her get any closer. He couldn’t kill Cati, but he wasn’t sure this was even Cati any more. It was time. But then, rather than keep moving, she turned around to face him. Tears were streaming down her face.

“I get it. I see it now. I see it now and I understand.”

“See what?” 

“I’m ok with it. It’s all ok.” 

“What’s ok?”

Cati’s gaze firmed and the coldness returned. “We spoke of justice. Did you think you had avoided my wrath? Did you think that you have preserved your army from my retribution and that there wouldn’t be a cost? You have invaded my lands, destroyed my walls and sanctuaries. My citizens, harried by your soldiers. There will be a reckoning in blood. I would have had your soldiers pay the debt, but now I will harass your citizens. They will find no sanctuary. No walls can save them from destruction. Your lands will be invaded and all will pay the price of my retribution, until you know my fury and my justice.”

This close to the throne, there was no lying to the Wyrd. Brin saw the truth in her words, but he also saw that she was using a general “you”. She didn’t actually have any retribution for him personally. She wasn’t even tricked by the fact that he wasn’t Aberthol, and even so the Wyrd decided that the scales were balanced decidedly in his favor: She’d done worse to him than he’d done to her. Starting with attacking Hammon’s Bog, then unleashing Aberfa upon him, and even the curse currently swimming in his veins right now. Indirectly or not, on purpose or not, she’d brought him a lot of trouble, and the Wyrd knew it.

He’d never get a better chance. He stepped forward, lashing out with his spear and…

He was outside. The citadel walls slammed shut. He was unhurt, but the haft of his Bog Standard spear had been snapped in half.

He’d gotten off easy.

In halted, painful steps, Brin made his way back to the Order’s camp and the new war that was brewing.