As
@Wolfy advised, I'll do a sort of looksie/analysis at the story so far.
(Reaction: 1873 words, not counting post-scriptum)
Every story spoken has been spoken before.
Couldn't possibly be more true.
Almost half of all fantasy is a twist of, "knight in shining armor saves princess from a dragon," except you replace the actors with different roles. This applies to nearly all stories.
At the outset, Star Wars is basically a fantasy story set in space. Luke Skywalker is the wide-eyed idealist with a magical sword, Princess Leia the princess they rescue (although notably more badass than the usual portrayal), Han Solo the handsome rogue, Ben Kenobi the mentor, Chewie the badass barbarian ass-beater, and the droids are the pets for comic relief, and so on. Darth Vader being the black knight of evil, and Palpatine the lord necromancer emperor who rules over a Cimmerian-esque wasteland, only in this case, the wasteland is space; and evil sorcery is replaced by sith lightning.
But enough about that, let's dive in.
The boy from Earth stumbles into another realm. A world of wonder and magic, suffering beneath the Tyrant's cruel yoke. The boy becomes a man, the man becomes a hero, the hero defeats the Tyrant, and all live happily ever after. So destiny has decreed.
But the Tyrant is not so easily overcome.
He is wise to destiny's tricks, greater than destiny's stewards. He sets the world spinning to the direction of a new master. Destiny falters; only causality remains. And mere causality does not suffice a hero from coddled Earth to stand against the Tyrant.
Naturally, this is a story in the Rihakuverse, so nothing goes well in the beginning. Happiness, where it can be found, is sealed behind gates of bronze and guarded by a thousand death beholders and elder liches who slumber in piles of gold and magenta jewels.
Power will be acquired, conflicts will be escalated; I've always found this form of moderately-deconstructive form of storytelling highly appealing, and accompanied by Rihaku's writing - which is like the prose-equivalent of a fine vintage - it makes for a very nice meal indeed.
I'm a big fan of the way this is handled. Of
course the hero is blessed; the seasons his perennial ally. After all, the plot armor is a hero's only advantage - he is from "coddled Earth." A heart full of empty, noble ideals, yet a head devoid of experience, skill, and the ruthlessness necessary to win a true conflict. The moment you remove his plot armor, he is nothing but a false idol ready to be thrown down and torn apart.
The hero fails, time and again. The people of the world suffer for his impudence. He loses an arm, an eye, half a lung, all the natural vigor of his youth. The companions with which he journeyed become a procession of the dead. His quest, prophesied as the dalliance of a season, becomes a grim slog of years.
There is no certainty of victory; barely any chance of it. But the hero's heart is full of hate, and it is much too late to stop.
He learns from his enemy. Mirrors the monster's unmerciful cunning, turns to those forbidden arts his long-dead mentors warned him against. Finds in them, at last, an arena in which his talent exceeds his adversary's.
And naturally, a heart that loses because of a head that doesn't quite know how to win, darkens and withers...
I'm more surprised - and somewhat pleasantly - the world is willing to support him. To most, it would be easy to see through his incompetence, but this means either the people shared his ideals, or the hero realized his folly very quickly and amended his initial brash cretinism. Both are good signs, and both are good things.
Years more of preparation, to realize the power that talent portends. Time bought dearly with the blood of his allies, a patchwork insurgency of the desperate and condemned. In sparse moments, the hero and his surviving companions carve out a life for themselves, stealing what joy they can. The long, bitter path of his journey trudges towards culmination.
One final sally against the Tyrant. As before, their powers are unevenly matched. But for the first time, that imbalance is in the hero's favor.
And yet even that is not enough. The gap in power does not suffice to overcome the gulf of skill still between them. There is no more time. There are no more chances.
The killing stroke descends. The hero's final companion throws herself into its path. The hero becomes a widower.
I'm not a big fan of where the "RWBY" franchise has gone, after Monty Oum's passing, but I can't help but think of "Let's Just Live" when I read the first paragraph of this segment. First, an awesome conflict against evil, a crushing loss, and then a slow, uncertain, but steady return to life; even if it is not quite as joyous as it should be.
It seems like the hero realized, at least partially, that beating the Tyrant won't be easy. Even if he'd always known that, deep at heart, maybe he realized at some point: 'It will take years. The day is distant, as distant as a child growing into a man.' It shows in the next paragraph: he settled down with a wife, had a child. I'm surprised that he agreed to take his cumbersome wife to the final battle against their adversary, however, it does well to show their bond. Either he trusted her more than himself, or she was stubborn and wanted to be there for him... and she was, until the bitter end.
I have to say, there's something really bittersweet about this part. It leaves you with this numb feeling, like you're a balloon and the knot came loose. Instead of pumping out oxygen and flying off, it leaves you slowly, until you're just an empty sack of colorful rubber devoid of anything. I imagine the hero must have felt something like that, as well, judging from his reaction.
In the Tyrant's implacable guard, a momentary opening appears.
Burning selfhood like tallow, the widower mounts one final onslaught. In his eyes there is no more victory, no dreams more of failure or success. Only the enemy which must be destroyed, no matter the cost.
The widower prevails. The Tyrant is no more. The peoples of the world celebrate their liberation. Joy and adulation rain upon their silent champion, who stares ahead unblinking.
After the parade the widower buries his wife and their unborn child. It is eleven years to the day since he arrived in this world.
Assuming he was a normal middle/high-schooler, that means our hero is, most likely, in his late twenties right now. Rather young, even by my expectations. I'd have expected we'd be handed this... wartorn veteran (not that he isn't) in, at least, his forties, or thirties like Seram was. But then again, Seram was far more compatible with the Accursed as a protagonist.
Also, where one of the previous snippets reminded me of the aftermath of the 3rd Volume of RWBY, this part reminds me of one of the endings in Fate/Heaven's Feel, where the protagonist ends up burning his magecraft up so hard that, at the end of the fight, he's literally just a blank husk: heart still beating (if barely), breaths still being taken with tired regularity, but with static noise where consciousness and memories are supposed to be. Maybe this isn't so quite extreme since our hero ends up surviving, but it reminds me of that.
Crippled by the effulgence of that final strike, the widower is a pale shadow of his prior self. But in the eyes of the people, he is still the hero that was; their protector, their shining knight, their salvation, howsoever delayed though it may have been. And, with the passing of seasons, a glimmer of hope arises in the hero's heart. That, though the cost was ruinous, more than he could bear, there was good in the world still waiting to be fostered.
Freedom, Justice, Truth. In time, democracy. A society with the power and wherewithal to be organized around its highest ideals, rather than brute necessity. It is what they would have wanted - and if he no longer wields a hero's strength, still he has a hero's influence.
There's a certain grim appeal, to commandeering the actions of someone with eleven years of experience fighting against a particularly savvy and powerful dark lord, and the disillusion it brought. He may not be in his thirties or forties, but I don't doubt our hero is at the very least of moderate competence on a battlefield, and low to moderate competence outside of.
Although, with him "burning selfhood like tallow," some of that might have withered away: both his competence, magic, and mind. It would certainly explain why his next pursuit fails so badly, where he should have been prepared for being backstabbed and having the wound salted, before the knife was twisted in the wound. Let's hope that his status as a Cursebearer, and the sudden injection of power it brings, is going to bring those lost fragments back to him.
Freedom, Justice, Truth. In time, democracy. A society with the power and wherewithal to be organized around its highest ideals, rather than brute necessity. It is what they would have wanted - and if he no longer wields a hero's strength, still he has a hero's influence.
But the world did not sit idly while he mourned. The kings and dukes who fought aside the hero have filled the vacuum of power left by the Tyrant. And they are content with the system at hand. Theirs is a society of nearly faultless structure, stably and evenly arranged. Their yoke is light, the people are fed. Is that not justice? There is no place here for the instruments of modernity, much less its frivolous ideals.
The hero is not dissuaded. Too many have died for him to surrender this dream. In that resolve the nobility see the beginnings of a Tyrant by a different name. They act. Treachery achieves what all the overlord's power could not: the hero undone at last. Discarded by those who had no more use for him.
Naivete, unfortunately. Burning away those parts of himself might have left him weak of mind, or returned him to the mentality of a wide-eyed idealist - it would explain the sudden abnormality in his choices. The sudden desire to implement modern ideals in a society with no past or interest in them would easily be explained as a malady of the psyche: after the trauma he suffered, after crippling himself with the slaying of the Tyrant, he wanted so badly to do something good, to rise above the state of things.
It was not enough, to slay an evil in the world. He wanted to place a seed of good in it as well.
Alas, fly high as they say, but if you scrape by the sun, your wings will turn into cinders and you will fall, to be drowned by the sea. Or in this case, to be drowned in his own crimson blood, at the hands of traitor kings and traitor gods. If I were the hero, such machinations would make me rather crass.
In the hero's final moments, despair and hate raging equally across his heart, comes a being with the form of a man, offering vengeance in the form of a bargain.
The being is power beyond measure, beyond the hero's wildest reckonings, the solemn steady heartbeat of all creation, the sword by which all stories would end.
The Plenary Brand foretells the Accursed's insane power. Even with his mere presence, his aura leaks as if radiation from a nuclear reactor. It seeps into the mental vessels of those ill-prepared to witness him and bedazzles them with his might.
A true god above gods, descending to meet a single ant that had been abandoned by the rest of the colony. Our hero danced in a spiral of ants, and upon his rejection, he was tossed out... and caught in the gravitational pull of something far, far larger than a mere anthill.
Also, hello Accursed! How's Seram? Are we going to meet him on one of our adventurous travails, hmmm? It'd certainly make for a riveting crossover. Think about it, the Rihakuverse Avengers! Nameless, Seram Law, Odyssial/Ulyssian, The Abandoned Hero, and maybe Hector? Oh, let's not forget Arthur Drake, from the Gardens of Enoch - that was a really fun character.
I wish I knew what Atrianome Enoch's entire deal was. Is there anywhere where Rihaku revealed such a prestigious secret to us mortals?
It's really interesting to see how the Accursed's high-level Curses interact with the world, too. It'd make quite a lot of sense if the Brand of the Champion was
the thing that forces the Accursed to give out power alongside curses, but I'm not going to presume anything.
"Are you the-"
The man cuts him off with an upraised hand. "No, I'm not the Devil, nor am I associated with any that claim to be him. There will be no souls, no contracts, no signing in blood. My offer is that of a simple transaction. I am bound by countless Curses, leaving me greatly diminished, a thin figment of what I once was. Take up a portion of my burdens, and in exchange receive a fraction of my power."
Fascinating that he has an entire speech ready for this, clearly lots of Cursebearers going around if he's so ready to unveil the full truth to a random, moderate-compatibility hero. His speech is really elegant though, feels more elegant than it was with Seram, but it might just be me. I could go back and check, I suppose, but I have some things to take care of right now, so not much time for that.
Power enough to escape this world, or remake it. This he understands without speaking. Even knowing this, he can not help but dislike the being. If this Accursed one had deigned to act sooner, could his wife and son have been saved?
But it had not, and mere dislike means nothing.
Interesting to see that people can rationalize the Curse's effects. Although it's not that far-fetched, could this be a part of the mitigation, or is this something natural to the Curse?
What else is there to say?
"I accept."
Mournfully the being closes its eyes. "So be it."
"If you wish only to survive," it continued, "I will grant you a modest portion of my burdens, and power enough to be free of this realm and its shackles. But if you seek vengeance against the powers truly responsible for your suffering here, then you must take on a far more onerous burden. In exchange, you will receive the power of unbounded progression, growth without limit or surcease."
I love how the Accursed closed his eyes "mournfully." Even not knowing the details of the future (presumably,) he knows that any being that accepts this simple transaction is doomed, on one level or another. Any hope of a normal existence after this is abandoned, although a semi-normal existence can still be led. It is nonetheless a choice that only someone truly desperate, someone ready to sing a litany of praises to a hated enemy in exchange for another chance, would accept.
And here's where we get to the choices.
[ ] Freedom - The eyes of the Accursed open. The ghost of a smile plays across his face, almost too quickly to catch. "Perhaps the wiser choice. Be careful which burdens you undertake; they will accompany you for eons to come. Go, enjoy your freedom. You've earned it."
[ ] Vengeance - "...If that is what you wish."
"If you survive, no power will be beyond you. In time, there will be no blade you cannot sunder, no force you cannot rout, no foe you cannot ruin, no throne you cannot claim. Take care that you do not become that which you despise."
See, here's the thing... while I would love to make the Accursed happy, and, indeed, a Quest about comfy slice-of-life wouldn't be too bad, the human mind reacts more viscerally to negative environmental changes: I
want to see the bitter tragedy continue, and I want to see the hero evolve past that, using the broken hatred and mouth-frothing fury around him to forge an armor and sword for himself, and to deliver punishment and justice to the heavens.
Rage against the heavens has always been one of my favorite tropes; Kratos from God of War, the Doom-Slayer from Doom, some of my favorite characters. Even if I wanted to be a Combat-type more than a Progression-type (and I don't,) this set-up is too perfect not to choose Vengeance. How could anyone rest, have peace after this? His wife and child are dead, and while he could bring them back, it does nothing to punish those who ruined their efforts at saving the world.
All of those eleven years have been
wasted. Eleven years of torment, eleven years of fighting, training, fostering a modest hatred, and learning forbidden techniques... eleven years of having your body and psyche broken down under sustained cruelty, only to end with the discovery that, unfortunately, all of that effort, all of that teeth-gritting animosity and combat... was for less than naught.
I would never accept that. Not for all the riches in the world. If any of you can look me in the eyes, and tell me that, after
everything described above, you would be able to look the Accursed up and say, "I want to break the cycle of hatred. I'm not mad at them. Just let me be free of this," then I suspect you have no idea what true pain is, or perhaps you don't care, and you would rather see a story of Freedom - a dream of the coddled Earthlings from coddled Earth.
Not me, though.
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Anyway, that's about it. Around 1873 words not counting this post-scriptum in, I believe. I hope this contribution to our Remittances is enough. Also, for the record, I don't really mind if any other option wins. While what I want to see most is vengeance, I'll be happy with pretty much any result to varying extents.
