Path of the Deathless

It is essential that you understand and internalize this fact, Farwalker: The deployment of an Endhound is an atrocity. It is an act that cannot be taken back, and it will almost inevitably damn a Sub-Mythic world to an apocalypse.

Understand that though the action may be a necessity for the continued survival of Chorus and the civilized sector of Integration, it remains an enormity. An Endhound is a creature created from the rawness of strife and ruin, and the only purpose they know, the only purpose they will ever be compelled towards, is the absolute eradication of all life, and ultimately, their own. For once they hit and exceed that ambient mana threshold, after exterminating all other existences, they too will rupture that dimension. All the mana built up inside of them will clash with that which stains the backdrop, creating a chain reaction that dissolves a section of Integration, thus severing the branch portended to intersect with and harm Chorus.

Such is why the deployment of an Endhound requires tacit confirmation from the highest halls of Chorus. All other methods of pacification and stabilization must fail before the deployment of such a creature can ever be considered; for, short of the entire dimension unifying as one to bring down the Endhound, or, in the rarest of rare cases, a singular or squad of Pathbearers defeating it in a decisive battle, the destruction of the condemned dimension will not be figurative, but literal.

For, short of an anomalous circumstance such as an Incursion Quest triggering while an Endhound is still active within a dimension (thus removing the ceiling of said dimension’s ambient mana threshold), a Mana Overload Cascade is the inevitable outcome, even if the survivors manage to hold the Endhound at bay. Even if they manage to find a way to evade it, to hide from it, their deaths are all but assured.

—Beasts of the End, First Edition — Farwalker Endhound Deployment Manual

413

Heir

“So, you're using one undying dog to kill another. Quite the bitch move, wouldn’t you say, Veronica?” Shiv rolled his wrists and cultivated some new tides.

“That's the nature of politics: you never use your own resources when you can outsource and make someone else bear the debt instead. It's nothing you haven't done to me, after all. Even if you weren't consciously practicing politics, you were engaging in it.” It was as she spoke that Shiv sensed something changing between them. The vibe was subtle, but it was unmistakable. She was trying to educate him in some way, to influence him. Perhaps one of her skills was active, trying to reshape the chemistry of his mind to her advantage. But even if she was, the Harbinger noticed, and understanding another's method of manipulation offered a reward of enlightenment all its own. “As I said before, I understand what you did to Longinus, though I suspect you were telling me the truth: that you slew him because you were forced into a battle rather than plotting to assassinate him in advance.”

The Councilwoman grew quiet for a moment, and the first hint of apprehension came over her. It seeped out from her body language, as if she was unwilling to ask the following question: "So it's true, then? An aspect of him survived? An aspect of him tied to a copy of that chef he was so fond of?”

“His name was Georges,” Shiv spat. His face went dry of emotion, and his insides boiled with awoken rage. The way she characterized Georges’ suffering—all but saying he was Longinus' rightful property—would have driven Shiv into a blind rage mere months prior. Now, anger was fuel, anger was mana, anger was focus. Shiv's Harbinger came alight in a golden shell around his body, and the idealized form of who he could be overwrote and obscured the boy yet tempered behind. “I'm going to be very polite about this as a warning: If you're going to bring him up around me, you best speak of him like you would someone near and dear to your heart too. Because otherwise, we're going to have a problem. A real bloody problem. I'm going to get unreasonable, and that debt will be on both of us.”

No chain of fear slipped out from Veronica, even as Shiv used his Dread-Tainted Feat, but a measure of respect gleamed behind her eyes, and she gave him the slightest of nods. “That’s a fair ask, and I do apologize. I understand that he was the closest thing you had to a father in this life. What happened to him was lamentable as well.”

“Yeah, lamentable is one word. Un-fucking-necessary is another. You could have helped him. You could have helped a whole lot of people who Longinus hurt. You just decided not to.”

She nodded again. “Correct. Because it would have come at a greater cost to the Republic and me.”

“That's a good excuse. Never heard the 'I don't have a choice' shit before.”

She nearly rolled her eyes, but her patience endured. “I have a choice. We all have choices. We all can make deliberate decisions. Sometimes we make unwise decisions driven by our emotions. They turn out fine because we are strong enough or capable enough to force the circumstances to go the other way. To deny the consequences because that is who we are, beyond consequence in that specific situation. Longinus was not such a situation. Longinus was a pillar of the Republic. Longinus is a fundamental aspect of the Auroral Council, a guiding star of the people and of our faith. Now, if I, for instance, declare to the people that their governing god of exploration and freedom and expression and hunger is little more than a pedophilic rapist, with little control over his impulses, driven by urges so dark and foul and benighted that it would turn the stomach of any priest, what do you think would happen to the Republic?”

On one hand, Shiv saw her point. On the other hand, he thought it was a pretty dogshit point.

For one, he barely cared about the Republic. After all, his experience had little to no good memories associated with the culture or the civilization. Even if he was studying at one of its academies, all the nobles, all the things the Inquisition had done, all the things they were doing right now in the orphanages and the prisons, the experiments, the dark deeds of the Ascendants…

There were some parts of the Republic that were good and decent. Adam might still have some fondness for those parts. Adam might still be affected by her words. But Shiv? No, the Republic was pretty much his enemy; it just wasn't his immediate enemy right now.

But as his passions climbed, so too did his awareness. His eyes settled on Veronica once more, and he studied her deeper than the language of her flesh. Her emotional core remained obscured, but her words offered him a vague map of what she believed and how she thought. His heart focused his mind, turning him away from the low-hanging fruit and the meagerest of insults.

“She wasn't lying to you before; she spoke truth in every word, at least what she believes is truth,” the Harbinger analyzed within his mind. “Longinus was a pillar of the Republic, and if Veronica struck him from the Board, she would have risked a religious schism at the best and civil war at the worst. Think of this: she is the Avatar of the Songbringer, and the Songbringer and Starhawk were already opposed. If she moved so openly against another Ascendant, then all who doubt her on the Council and above would have been driven over into the Starhawk's embrace, and she couldn't suffer that. Not then and not now. Understand that you've done her a service, rather than inflicted a wound. Her outrage earlier was likely more performance than genuine. Acted out in fear that others on the Council might be spying on her. Now this is the truth of her, the purity of her, unvarnished by her position, privileges, and burdens.”

“You really are that cold, aren’t you?” Shiv asked with a scowl. “Everything's just calculus to you: lives, atrocities. Between Longinus and Daughter, how many people have you sacrificed? How many people did you let that God of Freedom defile? How many children did you let the Deadly rip apart and wear as expendable husks? Did it ever bother you at all? Or are you close enough to an orc that it never mattered?”

His final insult pushed her over the edge, but rather than that edge signaling her rage, it was simply an expression of exasperation. She rolled her eyes without any hint of pity or regret. He had annoyed her, only annoyed her, and nothing else. “What you're attempting right now is juvenile. I am not a creature of blind regret. I have many nightmares, and I have mastered them. I have experienced them, and in time I will accrue new things to dread in my most private moments, but these are not those things. These are sacrifices I had to make for the Republic.”

“For yourself, you mean.”

“Sometimes that's one and the same. Don't try to deny it, Shiv. Think of the Republic. Think of the guiding bodies. Think of the Ascendants. Think of them and understand the truth of what they are: decaying. Lost without a shepherd and without a strong hand to guide and herd both the gods above and the nobility below and the citizens greasing the wheels at the very base, this grand enterprise, this civilization of ours, this bulwark against chaos and bloodshed and misery would have long fallen.”

Shiv breathed out through his nostrils. “Well, from where I'm standing, I'm wondering if the fall of this noble bulwark against bloodshed and misery would be such a bad thing. Because your civilization brought all that to me and to a hells of a lot of other people in spades.”

A laugh, both bitter and dry, escaped Veronica. “If you think things are bad now, that's because you are a child born to a soft age. I've told you of this before, but let me remind you of a time before the Republic, where the people were scattered under a thousand thousand petty tyrants, each one claiming the right to rule over their fellow Pathbearers, simply because they were of a higher Tier, because they had amassed a critical amount of power that no one else at the time could resist. These petty tyrants would drive their lessers in devastating wars that would plunge the population, sallow the land, and paint entire landscapes red with blood, staining the soil so deep that nothing would grow for decades until someone finally removed the last bits of sickness still buried deep in the bones of the land. Let me tell you of a time where slavery was simply the way of things, where cold chains ran across the entirety of this continent, where children were cut out of their mothers after pregnancies were accelerated so that a new batch of expendable soldiers could be cast upon the battlefield to die and do it over and over again. Let me tell you of a time where plagues swept through the world and great silences followed, for so many died during those years that it took centuries for the population to climb high enough to sustain even faint smatterings of towns across the land.”

The Deathless knew where she was going with this and felt her skill press against him, lashing at his psychology, feeding him imprints of all these moments. He did see. He saw mass graves running beyond the horizon, reaching so deep into the earth that they drove past the dirt, past the point of sand, until the bones of the dead were lying upon the bedrock of the world. He saw the cruelties and depravities people inflicted upon each other, what they forced others to endure, and what they took when they desired so. He saw generations of feral children wandering the wastes in the aftermath of great wars, fighting among themselves as rival tribes, killing one another to sate the near-forgotten and fanatical legacy left to them by their slain forebearers.

The Deathless saw all this—and endured it all with a roll of his own eyes. “Veronica, please. And you call me juvenile?”

She pressed her lips together as she realized her psychological blow failed to even faze him. So far, they were both unmoved by the other, and their jabs did little to shake the other's foundations.

Shiv took a slight step toward her, closing in just a bit so that he could impose his height without actually signaling any predatory intent. “You know, I expected something more from you. Yeah, I guess you're really ironclad in your beliefs, but you clearly don't understand me very well at all. So let me make it easier for you, Veronica. The world isn't math to me. The world simply is a series of actions and decisions, along with the environments they happen in. I decide what I want. I decide what I believe in, and then I try to meet those beliefs and decisions as best I can. I don't always succeed. Hells, I fail a whole godsdamn lot, but the thing is, I always try. I get closer every time I fail, every time I die. I don't come up with some bullshit excuse about, 'Well, I have to settle with this. I have no choice. This is the way of the world.' No, and you know better. The Republic didn't need it to be this way. You didn't need to let Longinus rape and torture his way across the world, ruining lives, twisting people, using them as his playthings. You didn't have to let Daughter take all those orphans and wear them as suits. You didn't need to torture and mutilate all those people you deemed criminals deep under the earth, right at the center of the capital, like some sort of twisted joke.”

If Shiv wasn't perfectly in control of his emotions, he would have been fuming at the mouth at this point. “Sure, you can justify all these things and more, but then again, with enough sophistry, we can all justify anything, can't we? No, before the math, you made a decision. You decided that that was the way you wanted to live. That way and not some other way. Well, that's a form of weakness too. It's a form of surrender. And not the kind I would oblige.”

He lashed her with his enkindled flames. Every word he spoke was infused with a blast of concentrated rage, and he scorned her. He looked down upon her, not because she was weak of skill or mind or will, but for a virtue of all the things she could have lacked: decency, a proper philosophy, a higher morality. She was insufficient there, as a person rather than an orc. At least the beasts, the grayskins, had an excuse, having been designed by the hand of a cruel god to possess a fundamental lack. But Veronica? She simply justified things because she was a political animal and not a Pathbearer at all. What point was there in accruing as much legend as she had and gaining power enough to defy gods if, in the end, all you did was bend and break to seize the barest of advantages?

“The world should be what we make of it, and not what it imposes upon us,” the Nihilist within Shiv crackled. “That is the only higher meaning anyone can truly declare, for all other meanings are subservient to the foundational one that begins with ‘I believe, I and no one else.’”

But though he struck her with those pitch-black flames, she stood like a mountain before his conflagration, uncharted, unharmed, even unbothered. Her eyes gleamed brighter, bearing that divine incandescence of her own grandmother residing within. Yet so far she hadn't unleashed a Songbringer's power at all, seeking to match his mind to mind, will to will, word against word.

Now it was her who took a step closer to him, unimpressed by his height and with a wry grin pulling at her features. “How very nihilistic of you. How arrogant! How childish! Understand that if I lived like you, if I was unburdened like you, if I was as carefree as you, all those words would have come easily for me too. All this judgment you cast would have been a simple thing for me to throw, and I would have torn myself apart better. I would have struck myself down already, but you are not me, not even close. You are, however, far more fragile. I do what I do because I believe in my Republic. You saw what you saw because you live from only your own perspective, where I hold the perspective of all my people. When I sacrifice them, I make sure it is worth it. I make sure that their death fuels the continuation of this project and that their children and their neighbors survive so that they may see a better tomorrow, because without the Yellowstone Republic, they would all be separate tribes and either slaves to those of the South or slaves to those in the North, or cattle otherwise to any number of petty tyrants or monsters that scurry across this world of ours.”

Taken from NovelFire, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“It's always the barbarians at the gate, huh?” Shiv mused. “Never the butchers inside the walls.”

“The butchers take their bit of flesh and spare the body,” Veronica retorted. “The monsters outside will tear you apart and leave not even the bones. Hear me again and listen to the truth of my words: I don't do things because I am compelled to. I do things because I believe it to be the best for the Republic and myself. You have not grappled with that fact, and so long as you avoid that fact, you cannot use that Harbinger of yours to strike at me. My vulnerability is not where you were looking. O Deathless, you are wandering blind. You embarrass that power of yours, devastatingly potent and worthless in the hands of a child who cannot imagine from another's perspective, from a grander perspective, from a perspective of someone who was actually responsible for the continuation of a culture rather than those few around him.”

A calculated pause entered the debate as a dark look came over her. “But I suspect you wouldn't bear my discomfort so well. If we switched lives, I would wear your skin and wield your skills with ease, but not the other way around. You would have collapsed the Republic if you were me. If you were me, your irresponsibility, your short-sightedness, and your emotional neediness would have seen you undone.”

“Yeah, sure it would.” Shiv scoffed. “But consider this, Veronica: Maybe you're just projecting. Maybe you're just making shit up inside your own head.”

She tilted her head in a pretense of thoughtfulness. “Well, Jessica told me about how you reacted after you were made to sacrifice Young Lord Arrow.”

Shiv felt his heart turn to stone. Black flames erupted from the cracks lining his body, and the golden essence of his Harbinger grew three times brighter in an instant. The mana flooding him became unbound, and time itself felt tangible, like a fabric he could rip and tear. With that spike in magic and power, however, came a new perspective. The Harbinger was centered even more, and it stopped Shiv from tilting over into tunnel vision and launching more worthless invectives against the Councilwoman.

“She is testing you right now,” the Harbinger whispered. “Her next words will seek to mock you. She will hint at the weakness you expressed, the pain you endured after Adam was rendered broken by the Challenger. She will then state that she has had to make that sacrifice over and over again and did so willingly for the betterment of the Republic. Again, she believes it, and again, in a sense, it might be wholly true. Her civilization would have collapsed without her hand, without her will, without her calculated cruelty. But we can steal these words from her. We can stop her from speaking, and we can tear the wind from her rhetoric using our act of sophistry.”

He saw she was about to speak again, but cut her off before her mouth had a chance to open. “You would have made that sacrifice easily, huh? Let me guess, you're gonna say something about how you had to do something like that over and over again. How you spent your friends and maybe even felt a little bit bad or sad at the start, like me, but that you did the right thing every time. How now you're someone who thinks beyond themselves. Someone who sacrifices because it's noble in a way. Even grim, even miserable, it's noble, because you're throwing coal into the engine of civilization and all that bullshit.”

Shiv sneered at her with pure disdain. “Yeah, so here's the thing, Veronica: I did it. I made that choice; it hurt me, tore me up bad. Look at me. Look at me right now.” He gestured at where the enkindled flame spilled out from him. “This is weakness. I am broken. I was on the verge of shattering when I had to make this choice. But my question now is, if you had to surrender Anthony's life, how would you handle that?”

“A bit poorer than others,” Veronica admitted, dryly and directly, using her honesty to nullify Shiv's counter. “But I would do it regardless, and he would understand. We strive for more than ourselves. We live for more than ourselves. We do things for more than ourselves. What drives me, as I seem to have to remind you, is a responsibility. One greater and more encompassing than you know right now. Perhaps, in time, you will learn. For now, though, that stare of yours disgusts me. You haven't paid nearly enough to judge me.”

Shiv shrugged. “I don't need to pay anything to judge you. That's the beautiful thing about judgment: you can do it whether you're worthy or not. No pride is that precious.”

An interlude of silence took hold as both of them recalibrated their words. Neither was truly injured by the other in the exchange, but Shiv was cracked and brittle now while Veronica remained untouched.

Slowly, unexpectedly, he caught a curve of her lip. It folded upward, and her empathic core sent a clear signal to him as the obfuscation cleared for a single moment. An incandescence flared out from her as another core appeared behind Veronica's, like a rising sun silhouetting upon a person, but both cores shared a similar emotion, one of begrudging pride.

But Shiv wasn't here to seek approval, and frankly, their favor filled him with disgust. “Listen, if you're gonna tell me something about how you're happy I haven't broken under your words yet, or how you managed to compel me into giving up, or how far I came since you were casually able to—”

“Break,” Veronica said, just as she did earlier, but infusing her voice with a divine might this time. The combined power of Councilwoman and Songbringer slammed against Shiv, bypassing his Shapeless Tides—paltry and insufficient to begin with—before spreading clean through his core and burrowing into his chest. His words were cut off. His mouth filled not with blood but with an inexorable emotional agony that gouged his heart, that begged him to fold, to break, to cry. The moment they decided to inflict such vulgarity upon him, to bypass the actual argument and impose their power without struggle, his anger swelled, and Shiv used his mastery of rage in tandem with his Harbinger to push her back. Black flames exploded out from him; parts of his body shattered, and geysers of blood spilled over Veronica, ruining the pristine state of her form for the first time as Shiv’s lifeblood ran down the orichalcum walls as well.

And then, from those gaps of red, came bursts of hateful black. Shiv's enkindled flames boiled and filled the room, and they swept across Veronica. They began to simmer and cook until both of them stood at the heart of a new cauldron, each facing the other down, waiting for someone to stop.

“You can break my shell. You can use the Songbringer and crack me open like an insect, but you do that, and I'll die, and I'll come back with more levels. In a month, you won't be able to do that anymore. When we get to that point, when your power is no longer your sanctuary, what then, Veronica? What words are you gonna use on me then?”

“No words, no words at all,” she replied. “The thing about rhetoric and persuasion is that someone must want to listen to you in a certain way. Debates are for an audience. Arguments are for those willing to change and surrender rather than staunchly opposed enemies.”

“That's what you got for me in the end? An excuse?” Shiv almost couldn't believe it. “Fuck me. Just crack me open with your voice and get it over with. I'll send my guard and other body after you're done.”

A high, melodic laugh sounded from within Veronica. Though that melody would've once wormed its way into Shiv's heart and mind and compelled him to fold and surrender himself in his totality to see the Songbringer pleased, now, even gouged and broken, his personal sovereignty endured, ensured so by his unbridled rage.

“What's this? No surrender. No surrender at all. How far you've come in such a short time, boy. How powerful you've made your heart and mind. How unassailable, how enticing. But the thing is, I haven't begun to sing my intro yet; don't be so assured of your own invincibility, oh, defiant descendant of mine.”

The Songbringer’s ethereal form superimposed itself over her granddaughter, and the way she regarded Shiv made his skin crawl. But it also sparked a sudden insight into Shiv. He stared back, not at Veronica, but at the woman hiding inside her, that pale parody of a god.

“Perhaps we've been striking at the wrong target this entire time,” the Harbinger mused.

Shiv grinned as blood ran down his chin, falling drop after drop to paint a spot between his feet. “Right back at you, Songbringer. Tell me, and do be honest: did you intend for Longinus to become like you?”

“Like me?”A huff of outrage slid into the strong Songbringer's voice, and though she was divine power unparalleled, her mind had long since been frayed, and her senses had abandoned her. Veronica saw what was coming and tried to get her grandmother to stop engaging, but Shiv spoke first.

“You know, another broken piece of shit that forces themselves on children. Longinus told me about you—told me that you reached into his mind and heart and twisted him. Was it always there inside of him, or did you leave a part of yourself there instead? Because something tells me it's probably more so the latter.”

The incandescence radiating from Veronica shuddered as if it had been struck by a backhand. The Songbringer suffered a wound. The Divinity around Veronica cracked as the faintest darkness spilled out. But the injury Shiv inflicted was not one born of rage or grief or regret, but indignation. A high note exploded out from Kathereine, shredding through the air to slice deep into Shiv's mind and heart. Things inside him burst. His Harbinger cracked, exposing his brittle insides as his mind tore before the Songbringer’s encroachment and his heart screamed with invasive emotions.

But he never lost that easy, mocking smile on his face, for he felt the Songbringer crack too. Though he had taken a blind shot based on what that voice within Longinus had told Shiv just before his demise, it had landed, and he found the weakness in his foe.

“Never compare me to that gluttonous, womanizing, wretched scum,” Kathereine seethed. “His sins are not mine. I am no vagabond dog. I have no need for force; mine is love and adoration. People want me. People desire me. People—”

“Have no choice because you use your voice on them. You're just a slaver like all the others, but the funny thing is, you're brittle. You're breakable. All you Ascendants are.” Mustering what remained of his power, Shiv's eyes rolled back in place, and he met Veronica gaze to gaze. Blood ran down from his orifices in waterfalls. His Harbinger was on the verge of bursting apart. Across his other bodies, he could hear people talking to him; Uva asking if he was alright; Irons checking in on him, trying to speak with him in the library. But right then, right there, he saw Veronica for what she was, and she saw him for what he was. The faintest measure of respect was exchanged, but nothing more. “How funny is that? The mortal's the unbreakable one, and the god? Well, the god might as well be glass.”

A crooning song sounded, and Shiv pitted everything he had against the compulsion to place his knees against the ground for a moment longer. “Oh, you will learn—”

“Enough,” Veronica said.

The incandescence spilling out from her stuttered. The song was cut off before it could fully begin. “Veronica—”

“Draw yourself back before he humiliates you further. You've shamed me, and you've shamed yourself. I told you to keep yourself in reserve, that you were an easy target for him, but you don't listen. You never listen.” The Councilwoman's nostrils flared, and Shiv read an emotion on her face, one of weariness but acceptance. “Deathless, a small bargain before any of the bigger ones: Don't call my grandmother a dog and crack her open further, and I will stop her from trying to make a slave of you.”

Shiv pretended to think it over for a moment, but truth be told, he was on the brink of completely unraveling from within. His bravado and Harbinger were the only reasons he'd managed to resist for so long, but if the Harbinger broke, the rest of him would undoubtedly follow, and his front of invincibility would reveal itself to be just that. And he read something in the Councilwoman's actions: She was trying to protect both him and her grandmother—from each other, no less.

He licked some of the blood off his lips. “You know what? That sounds plenty reasonable to me.”

Reluctantly, begrudgingly, and spitefully, the incandescence of the Songbringer receded, sinking back into Veronica until only her eyes gleamed with that faint spark of Divinity. The Councilwoman stood while Shiv struggled to remain upright.

Suddenly, she rolled her wrist and summoned a handkerchief to her hand before stepping forward and wiping away the blood dribbling down from his chin. But rather than cleaning him entirely, she smudged the upper part of his cheek and left a trail of blood across half his face, painting him in the red that he'd lost. She tilted her head slightly and nodded in approval. “There. Now you're presentable for the rest of the council.”

Shiv couldn't believe this shit. He laughed hoarsely again, struggled to shake his head, and he exhaled hard from his nose to clear the blood out, making it shoot into her dimensional dress and disappear. “Really? You had the Songbringer tear me up to make me properly presentable. Always another angle with you, isn't it?”

“Such is the nature of politics. Sometimes things are happy little accidents, and I take advantage of them. Other times, they're engineered in advance. But what need have I of telling you this, when you already know—or at least you grasp it intuitively.”

“Guess so, but I think I got a feeling about something else: you have me here, bloodied. You've been testing my mettle—you could have gone rougher with your Rhetoric. I know you could have, even without the Songbringer. But you didn't. You held back. You kept me from hurting her more, and you kept her from breaking me for good. Her, I get. Funny as it is, she's the weakest part of you. But me, though, I'm expendable, and you spend all that time describing me like a hound.”

She clicked her tongue, as if disappointed at his misreading of the intentions behind her actions. “You are a hound, but hounds can be trained. Hounds can be improved. And hounds aren't to be wasted. I meant most of what I said before. I am responsible for the life of an entire culture. Rogue as you are, you remain a citizen of the Republic. You are not to perish or be irreparably broken until your full use has been expended, and then some.”

Shiv's coughs turned into a chuckle. He felt the faint pang of something inside his chest. His Gardener of Doubt was triggered. It was weak, almost imperceptible, but he felt it at the last moment, and he knew that she was lying. The question was if she was only lying to him or also to herself.

Gardener of Doubt 78 > 82

Let's take a swing and try to find out.

“Hey, Veronica. Did he treat you this way?”

“Who?” she replied with indifference, examining him like a butcher would a slab of meat.

“You know. Anthony. The only guy older than you. Were you his hound? Did he try to break you, like you did me just now?”

Harbinger of Tripartite Ruin 351 > 357

Her posture didn’t change; her expression held firm; her heart and mind remained obscured. But though she was a master of herself, her control wasn’t absolute, and the faintest crack spread across her forehead as hissing fingers of enkindled darkness curled up into the air, like smoke from a single flickering candle. Still, she pretended she wasn’t affected by his insight, and he just sneered. “Hound my ass. You’re trying me out to see if I can work as an heir. A little too godsdamned late to apply for adoption.”

“When you stand before the Council, do present yourself as agitated and wounded,” Veronica said. “It would be to the both of our benefits and their satisfaction. Meanwhile, resolve our mutual Tarrasque problem, and the Republic will dispatch a formal delegation recognizing Gate Piety as a special economic zone and not a rogue colony. For now.”

“Oh, and there’s the bargain!” Shiv laughed. “Our Tarrasque problem. Yeah. The problem you let get out of hand. And I’m not letting you slither away from me: the fuck makes you think I’m going to just play along as your student after everything you allowed?”

The Councilwoman sighed. “Because you’re not a fool. Because though you’re brutish, you already understand far too much to deprive yourself of any advantage in terms of political leverage or personal power—and an additional means of education. You studied me. You listened to me. You tried to find an angle to hurt me, and—”

“I literally did hurt you like half a minute ago.”

“—all that shows me you can be trained properly, and made to see some measure of reason,” she continued, not acknowledging that victory. “But more than that, your true allies are few, and you’re inviting a sea of conflicting powers into your Gate. Roland Arrow is an ideal specimen for war, but a politician he is most certainly not, and though that skill of yours is a thing to envy, it does not come with the requisite expertise and experience needed to ensure your Gate’s survival.”

“Experience you got,” Shiv concluded, swallowing a good mouthful of his own blood. “Training you can provide. Indoctrination too.”

“Hardly,” Veronica replied. “Your mind doesn’t allow for that. No. What’s going to happen is that, like a certain girl I once knew, you’re going to try to do what you believe is good. You’re going to try and try and try, and you’re going to get your heart broken, and when you put it back together, you’re going to sacrifice goodness on the altar of what is right, and every time you do that, you will find yourself getting just a bit closer to me. But even if not, I am your most reliable enemy right now. And you are mine. We can deal with each other. We can even coexist for a time. But you will soon learn that the same reasonableness does not apply to those of the North and the South. Now, shed your Onus so you can move again. Let us not give hints about your new Toughness Evolution to those who don’t need to know.”

The Deathless drank in her words and detonated the scars imprinted on his shell. An eruption of silver radiance tore out from him—and melted the orichalcum cell down to slag. Veronica simply flashed silver once as her flesh briefly charred—but then she was back to being herself as her own Legendary Toughness triggered. “It’s always a performance with you, isn’t it?” Shiv muttered.

“The first lesson you will learn about politics: Never go against another’s emotions unless you wish to do them harm. Expectations are to be met, fed, and conditioned before any proper modulations can follow. Now: Would you like to hear where the Jotun have the Tarrasque caged?”

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