Fanwork#2151 Words
Since the Dao of Indicisiveness gripped me where the current choices are concerned, I'll simply fall back on writing more omakes.
Omake: "Ephialtes"
The nightmare began as they always did.
The deep darkness of exhaustion slowly gave way to riotous colors and nonsensical sounds, gradually coalescing into coherent pictures and half-remembered scenes. There was a flavor of unreality to the world around Hunger, details blurred and contradictory, but as was typical for dreams, he didn't pay that any attention. The world around him resolved into an all too familiar scene, the blurry figure of his mentor leading the Hero down a forest path through the Greywoods.
They'd left their group's camp at the abandoned Fae mansion behind and were making steady progress as evening began to set in. Even though the woods had been left uninhabited for centuries, the Hero sometimes still thought he could see misty shadows shift in the corner of his eye and hear tinkling laughter that no one else appeared to notice. When he told his friends about it, they'd just shrug and chalk it up to leftover Fae magic that had a habit of lingering long after their passing.
Maybe they were right and he was just too wound up. With every passing day they stayed here some kind of tension he couldn't explain or even articulate seemed to build, an uncertain worry gnawing at the corners of his mind. It was why the Hero had blown up at his teacher about his lackluster training earlier today and what probably caused this little excursion.
He always felt like he wasn't doing enough, wasn't capable enough, that the next time the Tyrant's forces caught up with them, there would be no more second chances. His missing eye throbbed in phantom pain at the memory of his last encounter with the Tyrant, when the Hero had experienced firsthand the deep gulf in power and experience between them. He hadn't even confronted the king directly, just felt the aftershocks of the Tyrant's Pressure as he fled the Forebear's Tomb with his tail between his legs, but the memory of those helpless moments still haunted him to this day.
His teachers had told him that he was destined to win, that it was only a matter of time till he caught up with the king, but in his darker moments he couldn't help but doubt them. He was talented, he knew as much, but he was no genius to surmount the difference of centuries in months or years. He would need decades at the very least to even stand a chance, and in the meantime...
The Hero squeezed the Blade's hilt tighter, seeking reassurance in the steady thrum of power he could feel sleeping just beneath the surface. The others disapproved of Abducting the Forebear's Artifact, citing examples of Abduction's users dying to incompatibility issues or going mad or worse, but he was long past being picky about where power came from, so long as it would help him against the Tyrant. Besides, the Blade was surprisingly docile, almost, dare he say it, eager to join together with him, sometimes even smoothing the differences over on its own when they didn't fit together properly.
They'd finally arrived at their destination, a small lake tucked away from prying eyes. His mentor was looking at their surroundings and nodding appreciatively, seemingly approving of the lake.
"Yes," the old man muttered, "not bad at all."
"What are we doing here?" the Hero asked cautiously.
He'd expected getting chewed out for his impatience, not... whatever this was.
"I'm here to teach you the most important lesson of all," the man looked at him sincerely, trying to convey the seriousness of the moment. "As my own mentor passed these teachings to me, so will I do the same with you."
The Hero's expression eased a bit. So his complaints hadn't been ignored. Maybe the exercises involved water in some way? Was it the rumored water resistance training that he'd read so much about? While his magics didn't directly draw their power from the physical, the Forebear's Blade's enhancements did build upon his physical fitness as a foundation.
He tried not to get excited, but his heart began to beat faster as memories from his old world came to mind. Would he be sworn to secrecy before being taught some kind of super-secret-
"And that is fishing!" his teacher called out, having procured a fishing rod from somewhere in the meantime.
The Hero froze, thought processes grinding to a halt. They were here to waste time on... fishing? Now, when time was their most precious resource and they didn't know when they would have to flee, his teacher decided to something so completely pointless?
The anger that had subsided after their previous row started building up again, a volcano of raw emotion that threatened to erupt and destroy any semblance of composure he had left.
Then the world slammed down on him, Pressure the likes of which he'd only rarely experienced. It wasn't on the level of the Tyrant, nothing was, but the difference between an oncoming train and an airplane hardly mattered to a gnat.
"Calm down, brat," his teacher's resounded in his ears like a tolling bell.
Then the Pressure eased slowly and he could think once more. Could listen. Shame filled him, both at how easily he'd lost his temper and how impotent he'd been in the face of his teacher's Pressure.
Suddenly reality skipped, memories blurring as if a film reel missing whole sections. It wasn't really painful, but in some ways the gaping void where the mind expected to find something was even more terrifying. In his half-aware state Hunger could almost imagine something peering at him through those cracks.
Before he could linger on the thought too long the world resolved itself into the familiar scene again, fishing and conversing peacefully.
"Believe me," the old man said, "I know what you're going through. You're not the first to think that everything under the sun is your responsibility and that you have no right to rest while your enemy yet draws breath. I know. More than anyone I wish him dead."
Even now in this secluded corner of the world the Tyrant's shadow hung over them. They didn't dare say any names or titles, for it was common knowledge that a sufficiently powerful Accretion user could sense such things, their legend responding eagerly to mentions, however oblique. And whatever else one might say about the Tyrant, power was something he had in spades.
"You have to remember that you're still human," his teacher lectured patiently. "Your magics often allow you to exceed your previous limits, but you still have them. Working yourself to the bone until you break won't help anyone."
"But the prophecy..." he whispered weakly.
"To hell with the prophecy," the old man swore vehemently all of a sudden. "As if some addled old fools can tell you what you should or shouldn't do."
A shocked silence settled between them, this being the first time the Hero heard someone sound so derisive of the prophecy. In a rare moment of supernatural insight the Hero realized something he couldn't have ever imagined before. His teacher always seemed so strong, so confident and assured of their victory.
But now he could read it in the tired undertones accompanying that voice.
"You don't believe we can win," he bit out, bile rising in his throat. "You think we stand no chance against him. Why are you still fighting then? Why haven't you just abandoned us if it's a lost cause?!"
He regretted those words almost immediately, but some things couldn't be taken back. It felt like a betrayal, even if the Hero knew that such thoughts were only logical with such a vast disparity between him and the Tyrant. But the heart didn't rarely listened to logic.
"Because it is my duty," his teacher sighed. "Because I gave a promise I don't ever intend to betray. Because I cannot be someone other than myself. And that means denying him to my dying breath."
Hunger forgot much afterwards, name and features scrubbed from his memory like so much chalk, but he could never forget the terrible determination brewing in those eyes.
Then the moment passed and all seriousness slid from his teacher like water from oiled scales.
"Besides," the old man smirked mischievously, "what matters is whether you believe you can defeat him. If you don't, you still have some room for maneuver as his son-in-law, so don't worry too much. Good job with that, by the way. Never expected such cunning from someone with a gullible face like yours, but they do tell not to judge a book by its cover."
The Hero groaned and covered his face in embarrassment. Eloping with the princess hadn't been planned at all, but now everyone relentlessly made jokes about it, making him out to be some kind of Casanova and mastermind. Even his girlfriend was in on it and made fun of him for it sometimes!
"It wasn't like that and you know it!" he protested. "Me and Asherah-"
Before he could continue explaining himself, they both froze up as they heard the sound of an explosion in the distance. Whipping around, they could see smoke begin to rise in the direction of the mansion.
There was no doubt or questions about what happened.
The Tyrant had found them.
The how and why didn't really matter, the most important thing was reaching their comrades in time.
They abandoned their fishing poles and sprung up, racing towards their camp as desperation lent them speed. His mentor pulled ahead, but they weren't that far and reached their destination swiftly.
It was impossible to miss the Tyrant's massive figure as the monster wrought carnage among the Hero's friends. He'd hoped that it was one of the generals rather than the king himself that found them, but one couldn't mistake the Tyrant's oppressive presence for anyone else.
Then his teacher slammed into the Tyrant like a meteor, a wave of Pressure clashing with the Tyrant's and meeting him as an equal. For a moment the Hero dared to hope, but reality reasserted itself swiftly.
The old man truly exuded Pressure comparable to that of the Tyrant, but his mentor himself was fading and losing colors bit by bit, the signs of what it cost him all too clear.
It was an Accretion user's final remit, the forbidden spell he'd been told to never use in any but the most dire of circumstances. Pressure, had been the explanation, was akin to the warmth emitted by the bonfire of one's soul. One could overexert and even exhaust the soul temporarily, but in the end that fire normally relied on a replenishable resource.
Not so with the Burning. By sacrificing something of greater import, be it aspects of the self or one's bound Artifacts, one could make that fire reach unheard of levels of intensity.
For a time. It was an unstable effect, unsuited for prolonged battles, both because it was nigh impossible to control what exactly and how much one lost, and because at some point one simply ran out of things to burn, though few reached that far.
"Go," the old man's voice reached him on the wind. "Don't stand there like an idiot, take them and go!"
The details blurred again and all he could remember was gathering what was left of his allies and fleeing, the road ahead of them stretching and turning into a tunnel. There was a light at the end of it, but it was a fragile thing, obscured by an enormous menacing figure.
Shadows grabbed at them from the sides, hounding their heels and trying to take a bite out of them. One by one his comrades stayed behind, some to buy him more time, some just losing the will to fight the inevitable.
When the Hero reached the end and stood before the Tyrant, Asherah was the only one left at his side and he was but a pale shadow of the Hero that started this journey.
Even so, hope burned in his chest, hope that this would finally end and that all the sacrifices would be worth it.
Hope was the most dangerous poison of them all, he learned.
With a start he woke up, the Tyrant's final moments playing out in his mind once more. Sweat beaded his face and his hands shook. It took some time to convince himself that it was truly over, helped by the figures of Gisena and Letrizia that he could see sleeping not far from him.
Slowly relaxing, he leaned back once more and sank once more into an exhausted sleep. In his heart of hearts he knew it was not the end. It would never be the end while the Hidden Ones still drew breath. But that was a matter for another day.
For now he would fall back on the old lessons and try to find some peace.
