Omake: Magic Equals Friendship Squared: Part II
Crake
I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING
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Magic Equals Friendship Squared: Part II
"Must you truly do this?" Yrael asked in light reproach. He had been at Heaven's Redoubt not long ago, you suddenly realize, had likely spoken with your wife not even scarce three days past. It had always left him looking hollowed out, as drained as he was when he had stepped out onto those faded out sands of entropy alongside you, so very long ago. You felt the weight of those centuries upon your own bones even now. "You are necessary still. And loved," He said the last without even a hint of bitterness, knowing the price in blood that love was paid in the end.
He gestured at the vault which stood between the two of you, buried beneath a hundred layers of defenses and fortifications, archives and armories. The Capital housed more places for secrets than you had to keep. "Just that much alone might be worth staying for, Your Grace. Lay down the cloak upon another, a worthy heir, or battle with your comrades again until the malaise eases itself from your heart. They are still there, waiting for you. And when the time comes you might..." he trails off, as if seeing upon your face the truth for the first time. "Ah... is it so?"
Many faces and names pass through your mind, the bonds of friendship you've forged, a hundred companions and more, some who had retired to a dreamless sleep or meditative poise in the Citadel wrought where Time stands still for the appointed time of endings and beginnings. "It is," you agree, not content, not resigned. You just are.
"You've done so much," he whispers, not sad, but resigned himself. There's always so much more to be done.
You know he does not begrudge you how far your methods have taken you all, and even respects your will and dedication for one not originally born with that fate in mind, one who had madness as their companion from birth and throughout the tender years of childhood.
Yet madness was not your bosom brother.
"I will still be there," you note absently, still letting the heavy burden hover between the two of you, walking through dimly lit halls, such that none other save those that you keep company with would know the truth... except for three others. You hadn't needed to swear an oath upon anything, the secrets of your heart have always lain bare before them, for they were family and they were cherished even unto the ends of the earth. They had always guarded your secrets well, perhaps in defiance of all reason.
"A puppet," he said, with disapproval. He had not liked that at all, you knew.
"One who merely carries on my will. The mechanisms of empire have grown enough that they will keep turning a thousand years and more uninterrupted. We have done it," you told him earnestly, only the faintest glimmer of satisfaction felt from it, beneath the weariness. "We have created a God that will rule itself as a Promised King would rather than lead men to follow along tangled threads of fate. Not blinded by its own majesty or might, but to see its people prosper," you continue, feeling a sense of nostalgia when you had felt like that King. "I am barely involved, these days."
"Mm. 'Barely involved', he says," Mereth scoffs from the other side. "Just last year you staved off the end of all we have wrought in one brilliant moment of crystallized triumph and masterful planning. Your strength has always been your ability to think on your feet. This beast you've made is a behemoth, yes. A thousand stings will not trouble it, but every beast has a heart, and should it be pierced..."
"Better to hide the heart," you counter, weakly it is true, but she doesn't raise comment. "I have let this mystery rot in here for centuries because there was always so much to do. But I feel a disease in me. I am restless. A step to the side or a simple change of scenery would not lessen my shadow upon all those around me. That was the blow the Enemy struck, at the last, that is what seeks to claim me before the final battle is at hand."
You felt emptier than the words spoken. "I look upon those dear to me and I struggle to remember what ever bound us together," you admit the truth of the greatest lie you have ever woven since the very day you swore off self-delusion itself, because you know this is not the work of your own heart or mind, but a mortal blow to your own will, meant to lessen and end you before the appointed time.
The Empyreal Vault slots into place deep within the body of the earth. Golden and silverine mechanisms, gears of celestial bronze, wind and shift, a million and one.
At the center a vortex distends and then shifts aside, a cloud of an old nightmare lain to rest and a dream set to pasture, a glowing stone of forgotten beauty from time before time shatters into a constellation of stars binding glorious sun and solemn moon, before finally the hidden treasure you kept from Their sight reveals itself.
A grim smile cuts across your face.
"It's time to see what was made of Heaven's missing fragment."
...the fragment of a Mirror.
***
Jarred from all recollection and forgotten ambitions, you look at the world around you, cast into grey tones. The Path of Kings is a wide thoroughfare, one of the widest in the Capital, ensconced by massive buildings and webs of sorcery, theaters, galleries, shops and sightless paths leading those from afar, and they say one can find the path to their dreams and furthest ambitions here, that they might ascend the temple mount to light the pyre of one's own fate, for at the end of that path in place of begrudged yet vaunted honor, not leading directly but nevertheless foremost still, one might come upon the Temple to the Lady of Magic and the Weaver of Destiny's Thread.
And it is in that bitterness and resolve throughout long ages that compelled you to place her sanctum so, a patron to your House, for you have ever felt indebted to Syrax-Who-Isn't that the tangles she had threaded you through, the warnings she had delivered in the fashion they must be delivered in order to avoid certain calamity, even with the strictures of Empire and the binding hand of oaths given freely while near-a-corpse in the lands of her birth, would not cause you to bar her from your counsels when she had a mind to appear. For all of that she has ever been one to keep her own counsel, after all.
What strikes you like an arrow or shards of ice cascading from above to crack the ground beneath your feet is the mounting, sheer desperation in her gaze, that fire of building panic one does not wish to see reflected in the eyes of a Goddess who had wagered everything in madness and yet still prevailed.
"You must not do this," she pleaded. "Why risk everything so close to your ultimate triumph?"
"Say on more that you have already triumphed and the wheels of fate ever unbound, not to bind me anymore than they did your dark cloud of fortune," you tried to dismiss her but, to your own frustration, knew she was holding her thumb upon the Dream, and while you could shrug off her hand even now she would make a contest of it. The beginnings of wrath and rage long buried begin to rear their ugly head, but the baffling earnestness upon her face stifles even that small mote of outrage yet.
"You are my legacy, Viserys. You weren't the tool you insisted I treated you as, though--" she hesitates, then sighs. "You know I would have carried on should your ruin have led to the beacon being lit. I had plans to set things aright. And even then I abandoned them to keep your path forward lit, when you thought I would set myself higher than you, enshrine my brothers and sisters on thrones of tyranny forged from the bones of your empire even as we had done to our sires."
She gestures again, paved road flying from beneath your feet as the world bends askew, sky rises to meet a heart set to stone, that the joy of dominion over air cannot reach you, even here. "What now do you now see before you, if not a monument to every wrongful accusation you've ever made of me?" She spoke in anger, even as the Path roiled around the two of you as you fought for control, and revealed from temperate skies a sprawling metropolis that dwarfed the largest cities on any world you had gazed upon, sheer artifice boldly made and, you knew, the Lords of Valyria the Fallen would have counted desperation and maniacal urgency.
"Why keep me so close but deny my counsel against all sense or reason? Have I not kept my word?" She rages, but even such fury of a god falls from your shoulders like the faintest drop of rain. She nearly recoils, sublime countenance ruined by uncomprehending horror. "You have shut yourself from the world so deeply as to untether yourself completely? Have you gone mad? Only you can--"
"Enough!" The world shakes and skies shatter, revealing only the familiar wasteland from furthest memory, where the world had revealed a truth of yourself, sight unseen, and then enshrouded for all time in the turning of the burning sun over the living world around you that truth of your being. Your fury does nothing to cow her, but it does gain you silence, silence to speak or to thrust her away as you had contemplated doing only moments ago.
"Why must I mind a mechanism set to its task, with strong guardians and the compounding interest of myriad Powers who will not let it be assailed nor usurped from its rightful captain?" You scoff, as if the mere idea was but a trifle. Perhaps it had become so. "I have ever disdained of this one part of your scheming, for all you have pledged you kept to your oaths, it was the one thing I could never forgive you. You would see this behemoth fall upon my shoulders until it is inextricably bound to me, like a mantle that cannot be shed, that I might ascend as some living god and idol to secure your fated victory. It was the reason I could never accept that you viewed me as anything more than a trusted weapon, against Asmodeus, against Tiamat, against your fallen brother and your mutinous kin--against Them."
Would that you could strangle her, your rage is linked to your gratitude to her still, for favors unasked, debts that you could not repay for the manner in which they were delivered unto you by her. So clever, so cunning, you think of her. Always plotting.
"I won't become your unthinking God, your replacement for him," you spit at her. "You have always known this, and yet you still persist..."
"Because I thought you would See reason!" She all but hissed back. "No one else can be trusted! You know this, you built this, the bones are those you laid, the roads are those you paved, and in the beginning and unto the end it was only you who could bind it together. This was your fate and you were unbound from it even so!" She laughed, not bitterly, but incredulous. "I never understood, how you could be so privileged, yet so stubborn. Most men would leap at the chance to secure their legacy thus, and the manner of your ascension ensures that the Ever-Turning Wheel's hand upon you would keep you as yourself, as none other had or ever would again, keep the tide of time from undoing all that you are. And you still reject it," she said in wonderment.
And that was her failing, in the end.
"Will you move?" You ask, so politely, even smiling now as you understand what moment and place you have arrived at.
"Not until I've saved you from your own folly again," she pledged, with the same martial determination you had seen reflected in the eyes of your own sister, your mother, your sons and daughters. And yourself.
"Come," you reply, with a wellspring deep enough and freshly supped that you would make more than a fight of it, you would crush her and not by the vaunted power so divine she insists would preserve your great work in the end. "Dance with me then."
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