The Beginning After The End

Chapter 485: Renegotiation

Chapter 485: Renegotiation

ARTHUR LEYWIN

The city of Everburn looked small against the sprawling foothills that climbed consistently toward the base of Mount Geolus. Although I could no longer see the small garden we had just left, I could feel Tessia’s mana signature even among the thousands of more potent auras. ‘Be careful, Arthur,’ Sylvie repeated as I sped away, flying at Kezess’s side.

Kezess himself did not speak. I had experienced his silent treatment before, and had already shown him that I wouldn’t simply sit and wait for his attention like one of his servants. He may choose to keep Windsom waiting for hours or even days if the other asura upset him, but I wasn’t one of his servants, a member of his clan, or even an asura. I owed him no allegiance.

With King’s Gambit partially powered, I was better able to think through the potential results of our conversation. I couldn’t see the future, but I could read the small movements of his body—the tics of his face and his mana signature—and pull from everything I knew about Kezess, both from our previous interactions and what I had learned in the keystone, all at the same time and at greater speed than I would otherwise be capable.

And yet this magical enhancement to my cognitive abilities also served to drive home how dangerous my situation now was. My family, Tessia, and Sylvie were in Kezess’s power, and it was well within his character to use them as leverage against me. I had delivered his greatest enemy and threat to him on a silver platter; he hadn’t even had to raise a finger, just come to collect Agrona’s unconscious body. Most dangerous of all, though, was what I now knew. The cycle of manipulation and genocide the dragons perpetrated against my world had gone on since before the asura even left it, and given his long life, it seemed highly likely that Kezess himself had been responsible for the destruction of more than just one civilization.

“What progress have you made with Agrona?” I asked to break his stony silence.

He looked askance at me as we flew, his expression calculating. He was considering whether to answer at all, no doubt. In the end, though, he elected to answer after a pregnant pause. “He remains mute.” There was a brief hesitation, and I thought he might go back to giving me the quiet treatment, but then he asked, “What did you do to him, Arthur? I need specific details. This seems…unnatural.”

I considered what had happened, and how much I could safely tell Kezess. Or even wanted to tell him. Thankfully, King’s Gambit helped to tamp down my own anger and proceed logically. “Myre has shared what I told her?”

“She has,” he said, raising one brow at my casual use of her first name. There was a deeper emotion hidden behind his placid mask, buried deep in his eyes and visible only by their slight dilation.

Fear.

I marked this emotion without thinking about it too deeply. There would be time to dissect this conversation later. In the moment, I focused on controlling my own thoughts and body language. “I’m afraid I don’t know how to describe it now any better than I did for her days ago. Perhaps walking the Path of Insight can help us both make sense of it.”

Kezess’s eyes narrowed, little more than a twitch. He hadn’t expected me to volunteer to take the Path so readily or so soon, which I had anticipated. We were flying over a wide field of tall, corn-like stalks with golden bulbs at their top, and he watched the farmers go about their work for several long seconds before answering. “I’m sure you’ve learned much in this final keystone to share. I can feel the eagerness with which your aether rears up to do your bidding.”

I knew this was a subtle allusion to my canceling his attempt to teleport us back to the castle earlier. He was showing restraint, but I didn’t think it was related to that spark of fear I had seen. Instead, it seemed more likely that he desired to keep me comfortable and confident so that I would not hold back on the Path of Insight.

He could also be sensing King’s Gambit, one branch of my thoughts identified. Windsom and Charon will have already told him about the godrune’s ability, but they only saw it fully active. Kezess knowing that I had such a tool was one thing, but I had no doubt he would consider it an act of hostility if I outwardly used it against him.

“I have,” I admitted, seeing no benefit in denying my progress. “I have no doubt I can share enough insight to keep you busy with your research for quite some time.”

What I did not, say, of course, was that I knew the dragons’ control over aether had slowly lessened over time. In the final keystone, I had learned that aether was really the distilled magical essence of a life, and even maintained some semblance of knowledge and purpose. The dragons had ended so many lives that the aetheric realm was now bursting with the remnants of people who hated the dragons, and so aether became more and more difficult for the dragons to direct.

Because my core purified the aether, it created a bond between the energy and me that the dragons couldn’t replicate, so I didn’t know how much of the insight I provided would even prove useful to Kezess.

Hopefully not much, I found myself thinking antagonistically.

Indrath’s Castle loomed ahead of us. We passed through a sort of invisible bubble that rippled over my skin like warm water. There was an inherent hostility to it, like dozens of hungry eyes turning toward me in the dark, but this discomforting sensation settled instantly. Kezess led us high up into a familiar tower.

The arched windows opened to look around in every direction, some showing only the steep roofs of the castle, others the foothills and distant fields of Kezess’s domain. Strangely, I thought I could make out Everburn in the distance, although I had never noticed it while in the tower before.

The well worn ring in the stone floor seemed even deeper than before, but logically I knew it was a trick of my perception.

“Show me,” he said simply, gesturing to the Path.

I regarded the eroded stone thoughtfully, considering the King’s Gambit godrune. Leaving it active within the Path of Insight would increase my ability to control my own thoughts and deal with whatever magic the Path bore that pulled insight directly from my mind. However, there was also risk in potentially revealing more about King’s Gambit than I wanted to, or even having my branching thoughts carry ideas into the Path that I didn’t want. The fact that the godrune broadened my consciousness and allowed me to think several thoughts in parallel could prove to be either a blessing or a curse, depending on how the Path of Insight itself functioned. l?ght\n?vel\c?ve~c`?/m. Unfortunately, I didn’t know enough about it to make an educated decision.

I need every advantage, I finally decided, leaving the godrune partially activated as I stepped onto the Path. My feet moved of their own accord, and the branches of my mind clamped as firmly in place as a steel trap around memories of my time in the fourth keystone.

First, I walked through the keystone itself, one thread of thought focusing on its mechanics, another replaying the memories of my unwinding them. There was no version of these events that I could weave without revealing the aspect of Fate, and so I stepped into those memories next, the conversations we’d had. I focused closely on Fate’s insistence that the aetheric realm was unnatural and needed to be burst. With these threads, I carefully told him a story that maneuvered around what Fate had revealed about the dragons and didn’t reveal my agreement with Fate.

But the more I attempted to hold back, maneuver around, or obfuscate, the more I felt an outside force drawing on my thoughts, pulling them in different directions. Suddenly I was thinking about the keystones and the trials that had been required to claim them. I snipped off that thread, but another was considering the complex key required just to enter the forth keystone. I quickly pruned that thought as well, focusing instead on Fate’s confusion about the memory crystal I had carried in my dimension storage rune that resulted in my quickly discovering its attempted ruse. This thought morphed into my memories of Fate itself, which spread throughout every branch of my King’s Gambit-enhanced consciousness, and for a moment I struggled to control so many thoughts at once.

Leaning into this force, I followed Fate through to the end, reliving the moments after I was released from the keystone, when Fate stood behind me after I reappeared inside Sylvia’s cave to find my pocket dimension collapsed, the sustaining pool now sitting embedded in the cave floor. The force was pulling me back, hunting for a different memory or train of thought that I hadn’t yet focused on. I cut loose the branches that required the most struggle, the fiercest control, and focused the rest on Agrona, demanding Sylvie’s life, on Nico, already near death, and on Cecilia and her refusal to comply.

The alternative thought paths came faster, and I struggled to deflect. Instead of thinking about the events, and how I had sat at their confluence, I let the pull force every branch of thought to the aspect of Fate itself. Instead of the conversations, the knowledge shared, the hunt through all those future timelines for a workable solution to the problem of aether, it was those last moments that came clear. The threads of my tangled thoughts wove together into the rough shape of a man, just as the threads of Fate formed Fate itself. And in the spotlight of that focus, it was revealed how the aspect of Fate had guided me, moving through me as if I were the one held up by strings..

Enough, I thought, trying to retake control over my feet. I stumbled and nearly fell as my body resisted me, my legs eager to keep treading the endless loop as the Path’s power siphoned my insight from me. Gritting my teeth, I forced through the unnatural inclination, and my pacing stilled. I stood breathing heavily beside the worn ring of stone.

Kezess wasn’t looking at me. His gaze pointed at nothing, focusing into a middle distance at something I could not see. Slowly, as if just waking, he looked around without seeing. Finally, a spark of life and understanding shone in his golden eyes, and his brows curved down like descending blades as he looked at me—into me.

The tower collapsed around us. I reached for the aether but, caught off guard, I could not hold back the onslaught of Kezess’s power. Beyond the tower, all the castle was collapsing into stone and sand and dust. The sky darkened, and black clouds were split by red bolts of lightning. We stood upon a precipice, a rough circle of dark stone that extended out from barren black rock over a sea of bubbling maga. The heat and choking stench scorched my throat as I dragged in a heady breath.

I wobbled, forced to shift my footing to keep upright. My heels dipped, and I realized I was only just barely standing upon the edge of the rough sphere.

It wasn’t Kezess’s power that kept me frozen, but the bitterness and frustration of his unrestrained anger as he said, “You cannot know what you know, Arthur Leywin. Alive, you pose too great a danger. Agrona thought he could learn the nature of your core even after your death. Perhaps I can do the same. Do you have a message for my granddaughter before you die?”

My mind reeled. Cannot know what I know? But what does—

All the entwined thoughts and memories of my time on the Path of Insight came crashing back in at once, and I realized my mistake.

“She knows, too,” I said, my voice raw from the blistering air and strangling smoke. “Are you going to execute your own blood to keep your secret?” Although Kezess had caught me off guard, I was starting to get my footing once again. There was a chaotic surging to the aether here, but my own remained steadfast.

He shook his head. “When you have gone as far as I have to protect your people, there is nothing you won’t do to ensure that protection remains.” His hand moved forward, a slow, inexorable motion.

Aether released from my core, flowed through my channels, and imbued the King’s Gambit and Realmheart godrunes. My vision changed, shifting to bring into visual range the individual motes of mana that I felt in the atmosphere. Wild red swarms of fire-attribute mana billowed on the breeze kicked up by the rivers of molten rock, battering against the thick atmospheric aether and creating the surging sense of chaos I had noticed before.

A wall of pure mana slammed into me. A radiant amethyst light shimmered across the rough platform in response. The division of aether and mana in the atmosphere, two forces pressing up against one another, delineated further as the purple particles pushed back against the white and red.

Instead of being thrown off the platform, I lifted up in the air. The aether trembled, but Kezess’s spell broke against me.

Instead of surprise, I saw in the narrowing of Kezess’s eyes a cold calculation. His hand fell to his side. The molten rock far beneath us hissed, popped, and bubbled, loud to my hyper-focused senses.

“I did not intend that you discover what I’d learned yet,” I said, my voice bitter-sharp. “I miscalculated my ability to resist the effects of the Path of Insight while controlling my own entwined and overlapping thoughts. Still, perhaps it is better that there are no lies between us. The aspect of Fate showed me what the dragons have done to this world, but you yourself only know half the story.”

His eyes darkened to the thunderous purple. Although he stood outwardly casual, every muscle was tensed to spring into action and heavily laden with mana. I could see the way it coiled into the dragon within him, ready to spring out and transform his flesh. “None who have learned what you have and threatened to use it against me remain. None except Mordain, who your thoughts have betrayed. I saw your journey to the keystone and his role in it. All these centuries, and not only does he survive but he continues to work against me.”

I tasted bile in the back of my throat as he spoke. Even worse than revealing what I knew about the dragons’ actions, giving away Mordain and his people was a very unfortunate result of my time on the Path. But I would have to deal with the threat between Mordain and Kezess later, and so settled it well into the back of my mind. “Once, your ancestors were so potent in the aetheric arts that they formed an entirely new world, a dimension within a dimension, to house your people, away from a world that couldn’t support you. But now, you can barely scrape by begging the aether to mold to your desires. I’m curious, Kezess. Do you even know what changed?”

A flash in his eyes. A tightening of his mouth. The most subtle shift of his feet and whitening of his knuckles. Words he wished to say were caught behind clenched teeth, and his tongue ran along the back of them to push the words down. “As maintaining a certain balance became essential, some drawing down of the dragon’s aetheric magic was also.”

I eased back down onto the platform. The stone was hot beneath the leather soles of my boots. “You know you can’t undo what’s been done simply by ripping out my core, assuming you are capable of doing so. My core alone wouldn’t provide you my insight, not only into the aetheric arts but also my capacity to draw in and purify aether. To bond it to me. Nor my ability to freely navigate the Relictombs, where an entire civilization of insight rests. I have claimed and used the djinn’s keystones, I have met Fate itself. Only I have what you need, and only as I live and remain cooperative can you gain access to it. Which is why this little ruse was never about killing me.”

Kezess’s eyes lingered on the glowing crown I could see reflected back in them. “What makes you think I am unwilling to make that sacrifice?”

“The hungry fire burning in your chest.”

Kezess gave a small shake of his head. “You truly are incalculably arrogant, child.”

Another thread of my conscious thought snagged on a detail. Although Kezess had been very cautious of his emotions leaking out, there was nothing that I had read from him that I found unusual, except perhaps one thing. Kezess had shown this front of anger because my knowledge of the repeated genocides leaked through into the Path of Insight. But there had been no sign of surprise at the events themselves. He knew about all those other genocides as well, all the way back to the very beginning.

“I think perhaps we should resume your walk another time, after we’ve both been able to process this conversation,” Kezess said.

I looked down and found myself standing within the ring worn into the tower floor. Out the window, I could see blue sky, white clouds, and distant rolling foothills. But the smell of brimstone lingered on the air, and heat still radiated up into the soles of my feet. I considered what I had said earlier about the dragons’ aetheric abilities, and I wondered. Kezess still had some secrets from me.

Releasing Realmheart and easing back on King’s Gambit enough to dispel the crown of light but keep several branches of simultaneous thought active, I stepped off the Path. “I think, perhaps, that we need to renegotiate the terms of our agreement. It was your promise to defend my people, but I need your assurance that this agreement extends not just to Agrona and the Alacryans, but from your own people as well.”

Kezess scoffed, a rare slip of his control. “You seek to renegotiate after my own end of the bargain has already been fulfilled?”

I approached the window facing toward Everburn, which I could still just make out many miles distant. I leaned into the window, my hands on the sill. “Considering what I am asking, and why, I don’t see any reason for you to refuse.”

My back was to Kezess, and I closed my eyes to better focus on my other senses. My ability to hyper-focus was far less without King’s Gambit fully activated, but my aether-infused senses were still sharp, and I still had multiple threads of consciousness running in parallel.

Kezess flexed his fingers. His pulse beat irregularly. His breathing was forced, too controlled. He licked his lips before speaking. “You don’t even know what you’re asking, Arthur.”

“Then enlighten me,” I said plainly.

My mind raced through our previous conversations, but even with the godrune, his talk about balance and his wariness to send more asura—stronger asura—to my world still did not fully make sense to me.

“We are done for now,” Kezess said emotionlessly, still as a statue. “I will consider your proposal. Now, would you prefer to fly back to Everburn, or can I teleport us the distance?”

I turned around, leaned back against the sill, and crossed my arms. “This conversation has lasted long enough. I won’t stop you from teleporting me.”

A tiny quirk of his brow was the only sign of his irritation. He wasted no time and said nothing else, but space folded as the tower moved away, and suddenly we were standing in the sitting room of our estate in Everburn. There was a beat, then my sister, who was sitting in a chair there, looked up and let out a startled yell. Boo bristled beside her, letting out a low growl and knocking over a dainty brass side table.

My mother came bounding into the room, mana already building around her hand, but she came up short when she saw Kezess. Her eyes flicked to me, then back to Kezess, and she gave a stiff bow. Ellie, recovering quickly, jumped up and did the same. The curtain to Tessia’s room moved aside, but Tessia froze standing in the doorway. I moved away from Kezess to stand beside Ellie and rested a hand on her shoulder, silently offering her my support. To Tessia, I shot a quick wink, telling her that it was okay.

“Ah, Lord Indrath,” a quavering voice said from the kitchen, which extended off the central chamber.

Lord Eccleiah was standing there beside the kitchen island, looking incredibly out of place. As before, I noted his pale, wrinkled skin, the ridges that ran along his temples, and the milky-white film that covered his eyes. His face wrinkled even more deeply as he smiled at us. He made no move to bow.

Beside him, Myre gave a respectful curtsy to her husband. “Auspicious timing. Lord Eccleiah and I were just discussing an…interesting proposal from the rest of the Great Eight.”

Myre, wearing the youthful, beautiful visage that matched her husband’s perfectly, stepped out of the kitchen and moved regally to Kezess’s side. Their eyes met, both a striking shade of lavender, and something I could not read passed between them. I considered that they had some kind of telepathy, just as I did with my companions.

As I thought of Sylvie and Regis, the curtain to the street outside opened, Sylvie holding it aside so Regis could enter first. He gave Kezess a wide berth as he circled around to my side. Sylvie herself moved to one wall and leaned against it, keeping her distance.

Kezess turned toward her, waiting.

He expects you to formally recognize him, I thought to her.

‘I know,’ she sent back, an edge to her thoughts. ‘But I owe him no fealty. Dicathen is my home, not Epheotus.’

I kept myself from smiling as Kezess continued to wait silently.

Lord Eccleiah, or Veruhn as he had requested I call him, gave a scratchy cough. “Arthur Leywin and Lord Indrath, both the people I wanted to speak to. Truly an opportune moment.”

Kezess turned his back on Sylvie, who remained uncowed. “Perhaps this is something that should be discussed in more official environs, Lord Eccleiah—”

“Because the others have been discussing, and we have come to the decision that we”—Veruhn leaned against the counter separating the sitting room and the kitchen, grinning around in his dottering way that I knew must be a projection—“would like to formally name our belief that Arthur Leywin represents not only the human interests in Epheotus, but that he himself has evolved, and is now the first member of an entirely new branch of the asuran family!”

Veruhn’s eyes sparkled as he looked at each member of the group now in the room. The only sound was a hushed gasp and the whisper of the curtain to Tessia’s room falling back into place as she stepped out of view.

“We would like to officially petition that this new asuran race be recognized, and that Clan Leywin become its founding clan.” A happy smile trembled onto his wrinkled lips. “Of course, a new race would require a new lord or lady to be appointed, and a new seat to be added to the Great Eight. Or Nine, I suppose!” The old asura chuckled.

In the center of the room, Kezess’s fiery gaze remained on the lord of the leviathan race, carefully avoiding my own. Beside him, though, Myre was staring at me with a fierce, dire expression.

“We’re going to be royalty?” Regis and Ellie said at the same time, Regis quite loud and Ellie under her breath.

‘I doubt it will be as simple as that,’ Sylvie answered.