Chapter 23: Greed’s Hypocrisy
The village of Veille wasn’t burning, this time.
No screams. No smoke. Not a dog howling into the dark. A total silence lay over the rooftops and the alleys, so thick it could be heard, and the only sound that dared disturb it was footsteps.
Slow. Steady.
Freya’s.
She walked down the middle of the main street, Kyū held against her with one arm, his little head cradled in the crook of her elbow. Roku sat on her shoulder, motionless, his tiny weight pressed against her neck. Her suit was stiff with dried blood, and in her free hand, hanging loose at her side, was the stump of the enchanted sword, its bluish thread glowing faintly.
The moon lit everything.
It lit everything far too well.
An old man lay across his doorway, throat opened. A woman had curled up against a wall, arms closed around something Freya chose not to look at too closely. Further on, bodies cut down mid-run, face down in the dirt, hands still stretched toward nowhere. Doors kicked in. Dark thresholds.
They had been efficient. Not a single house had been forgotten.
Freya walked among them, step by step, her thumb absently stroking Kyū’s fur, a motion she wasn’t even aware of.
The strangest thing, the most terrible thing perhaps, was that looking at these bodies, she felt nothing for them. No sadness, properly speaking. No grief. These people were not hers.
But she was furious with herself.
Furious with a rage that rose from everywhere at once, from her gut, her throat, her fingertips, a heat swelling under her skin and looking for a way out. Her stupidity. Her arrogance. Her greed. She had played with this world like one more game, she had thought herself clever, untouchable, she had wanted everything, all at once, the world below, the conquest, the wonders, and while she was playing—
Her breathing shortened. Her chest heaved in bursts, faster and faster, harder and harder, and the weight in her throat swelled until it became unbearable.
So she screamed.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH...!!"
A bestial scream, torn from the pit of her stomach, the scream of the stupid girl she felt herself to be. It rolled through the dead village, bounced off the empty facades, rose toward the sky, and no one, anywhere, was left to hear it. Roku pressed harder against her neck. She screamed until her lungs were empty, until her throat tore.
Then the silence fell back.
And the tears came. Once again.
They flowed without a sound, sliding down her cheeks, clinging to her chin. One of them broke free and burst in the dust at her feet, leaving a small dark point. Another followed. Then another, while she looked, one by one, at the dead around her, these faces she had seen bow, alive, in this very place.
Her eyes rose slowly to the sky.
The moon looked down at her, round, white, indifferent.
"My mistake," she said in a low voice, to no one. "The bandit attacks. The assassins. Baron Frarken. The anonymous man..."
Her breathing was still trembling. She let the time stretch, the tears flow.
"All the evils of this world share a single root, in the end."
A breath.
"Greed."
The word hung in the cold night air.
"That is the evil of this world. The sin among sins. The one I carry deeper inside me than anyone... more than anyone in this world..."
Her voice died on a breath.
"Aaaah..."
A sound.
Behind her. A scrape, an unsteady step on the gravel.
Freya turned around, slowly.
The village chief stood at the corner of an alley. Alive. On his feet. Not a scratch on him, not a drop of blood on his clothes. Alone.
She looked at him, and something inside her began to count, very coldly. What was he doing here? He hid, then? He buried himself away somewhere while all the others had their throats cut? The children, the mothers, the old... while he put his own life first?
He was the one who spoke first.
"You... you... YOU TOLD US you would protect us!!" His arms flailed in every direction, his voice cracking into the high notes. "You assured us no harm would come to us!! No matter the situation, you said!!"
Freya watched him. Cold. Distant. She didn’t answer, didn’t react. She simply analyzed him.
The man’s legs gave way. He crumpled to his knees in the dust.
"You... you... you were supposed to..."
Then his voice surged back, thick with a hatred looking for something to bite.
"BECAUSE OF YOU! Look..." He raised his hands before his face and stared at them, as if the weight of every dead villager were carved into them. "Look at what you forced me to do..."
Freya walked toward him. Calmly. Step by step. Her voice came out level and ice-cold.
"I see the evil of this world hasn’t spared you either."
He looked up at her, thrown.
"You wanted to live," she went on. "You, before them. Before the children, before the mothers. And to bear the fact that you succeeded, you swell yourself with delusions and cast the blame on me... when deep down, you could have done more."
"What... what on earth are you talking about!! All of this happened because you weren’t there!!"
She crouched down to his level.
Her eyes, emptied of all emotion, sank into his, and the man flinched as if touched by freezing water.
"It’s what pushed you to keep these lands, when you knew you could never defend them against the power of a noble." Her voice was soft, almost patient. "It again that made you accept a monster upon them, in exchange for a mere illusion of protection. And it, always, that hid you away alone tonight..."
Her gaze slid sideways, toward the small body of a little girl lying a few steps away, face down.
"...when you could have hidden that child in your place."
The man followed her gaze. His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
"But don’t worry." Freya straightened up. "I have given myself the mission of delivering this world from that sin."
The village chief raised eyes toward her that did not understand.
They never got the time to. The last image they carried was the stump of Freya’s sword, rising toward his throat.
She pushed.
The broken blade went in without the slightest resistance, the enchantment biting through flesh like water. The man’s eyes flew wide. His hands shot to his neck, and the blood gushed between his fingers, thick, black under the moon. He tried to speak; all that left his mouth was a drowned gurgle and a spray of red that spattered the dust. He toppled onto his side, convulsed, clawed at the earth.
Freya watched him. Cold. Unblinking.
The spasms slowed. Then stopped.
She rose, and her voice fell into the returning silence.
"One down already."
She walked to the center of the square, where, that very first time, the whole village had knelt before her. She laid Kyū down there, with infinite gentleness, the way one puts a child to bed. Roku leapt from her shoulder and sat down against the little body, upright, motionless. A silent guard.
"Watch over him."
Then she set to work.
She tore the posts from the fences. Took a cart apart with her bare hands, the wood giving way under her fingers without effort. She piled up the beams, the planks, the straw, at the center of the square.
Then she went to gather the bodies.
One by one. The old man from the doorway. The woman against the wall, and what she held in her arms. The runners from the main street. The little girl. She carried them all, without disgust and without sorrow, laid them side by side on the pyre, methodically, while the moon crossed the sky. Her mind was somewhere very far away, or nowhere at all.
When it was done, she pulled embers from a hearth still warm, and lit the fire.
The flames caught gently, then all at once, and the whole square blazed with orange light. Freya stepped back a few paces, took Kyū against her again, and watched.
The wood crackled. Sparks spiraled up toward the black sky, carried off by the wind. And soon the smell rose too, thick, greasy, sweet in a way that should never have existed — the smell of human flesh burning.
She did not look away.
"There is only one way to redeem men of their greed," she said to the flames. "Only one path left open to me."
The fire roared. The flames twisted in the wind.
"The conquest of the world, followed by its purification."
Footsteps sounded behind her. Confident. Unhurried.
Aria came to her side and, without a word, sank to her knees in the dust, one hand upon her chest, head bowed. A posture of total devotion.
Freya kept watching the fire.
"I will kill the men, the women, the heroes, the beasts... anyone devoured by greed, whoever they may be. I will not leave alive a single soul who carries this evil." The light of the flames danced in her pale eyes. "And at the end... I will finish with the Dungeon Lords. I will slaughter them all."
Then Aria raised her head toward her.
And in her eyes shone a boundless avidity, immense, almost indecent, as a slow smile stretched her lips. An avidity Freya found deeply revolting. Her voice rose, silken, profoundly devoted.
"I will stand beside you with all that I am, Mistress." She bowed her head lower still. "O great Calamity of Greed... you who harbor in your heart the greatest desire of this world. You who carry the greatest greed of all."
~~
Author’s note: Pretty proud of this conclusion to the first arc... What did you think of it? Don’t hesitate to leave a review, even a negative one, so I can read you! Thank you, and see you in the next Chapter!!
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