Chapter 41: Saga 41: Baldric’s Ledger
Baldric had aged considerably in the two years since founding Azure Blake’s covert charter, though tonight, staring at the documents Adian had spread across his desk with trembling hands, he looked positively ancient, decades older than his actual years.
"The Sleeping Ruin," he murmured, tracing the ancient name with one finger like it might burn him. "I’d genuinely hoped that particular name had died along with the Concordance itself. Buried properly, this time."
"You knew?" Sylvia asked, arms crossed, watching him carefully for any flicker of dishonesty.
"I knew rumors, fragments, half-remembered warnings passed down like ghost stories. Every guild master before me passed along the same instruction to their successor: never authorize excavation beneath the palace district, regardless of reason, regardless of pressure from the crown itself. I assumed it was superstition dressed up as institutional policy, an old habit nobody quite remembered the origin of anymore." Baldric rubbed his temples, exhaustion evident in every line of his weathered face. "I was wrong to assume that. Badly, dangerously wrong."
"There’s something else," Kael said carefully, watching the guild master’s face for any reaction. "Minato."
Baldric’s entire posture changed instantly—shoulders squaring, jaw tightening, decades of grief and disbelief warring openly across his features in a way he clearly hadn’t intended to let show. "What about him. Say it plainly."
"He’s alive," Sylvia said gently, choosing her words with unusual care. "And he’s with the Black Ring. EX-Delta No. 8, based on everything we’ve gathered from our observations and Paul’s ramblings before he died."
The silence stretched painfully long, heavy enough that Kael could hear the faint crackle of the office’s mana-lanterns. Baldric closed his eyes, and when he spoke again, his voice had gone rough, stripped of its usual authority.
"I always knew," he said finally. "The body they recovered from Skarrow never sat right with me, not from the very first day. Too intact, somehow, for what the reports claimed had happened. I told myself it was grief talking, denial refusing to accept what the evidence plainly showed. I mourned him anyway, publicly, properly, because that’s what everyone expected of me." He opened his eyes, and something hard and sad had settled into them, replacing the earlier grief with something colder. "If he’s chosen that path willingly, then whatever he was to me no longer matters, not in any way that changes what needs to happen next. The guild’s duty is to the people of this kingdom, not to old ghosts I never properly buried."
"That’s cold," Kael said, unable to help himself.
"That’s survival," Baldric corrected, his voice steady now, guild master’s authority reasserting itself over the grief underneath. "I mourned my student once already, twenty years ago. I won’t do it twice, not while there’s still an entire kingdom that needs protecting from what he’s apparently become." He straightened fully, decades of command experience settling back over him like familiar armor. "Effective immediately, Azure Blake is placed on highest alert status. I’m mobilizing the Six Brigades to reinforce the capital’s defenses starting tonight. Whatever the Black Ring is planning, we meet it prepared, not blindsided the way the Concordance nearly was three centuries ago."
"And if Minato’s part of the attack?" Sylvia asked, watching him closely.
Baldric’s expression didn’t waver, though something flickered briefly behind his eyes. "Then he’s an enemy of the crown, same as any other disciple of that cult. I won’t ask any of you to spare him on my account, whatever history exists between us."
It was, Kael thought, one of the saddest things he’d ever heard a person say with such a carefully composed, level tone.
"For what it’s worth," Kael added quietly, "I don’t think he wants this fight either. Something in the way he talked to us at the Sumbiya battle."
Baldric’s composure cracked, just slightly, just for a moment. "Then perhaps there’s still something worth saving in him. But I won’t build a defense strategy around that hope. Hope doesn’t stop a Mythic-tier threat from tearing through this city."
He rose from his desk, moving to the window overlooking the sleeping capital, hands clasped behind his back in a posture Kael recognized from countless briefings—the guild master steeling himself for whatever came next. "I trained that boy myself, you understand. Taught him everything I knew about leadership, about sacrifice, about what it means to protect people who’ll never know your name. Watching him potentially stand against everything I built, against everything I still believe in—that’s a wound I don’t think will ever fully close, regardless of how this ends."
"We’ll do everything we can to bring him back, if that’s possible," Sylvia said.
"Don’t make promises on his behalf you can’t guarantee," Baldric said, though something in his voice suggested he appreciated the sentiment regardless. "Focus on protecting this kingdom first. Everything else is secondary, myself included."
He turned back to face them, guild master once more, all traces of the grieving mentor tucked carefully away behind decades of practiced authority. "Get some rest, all of you. Tomorrow, we begin preparing in earnest. This kingdom will need every one of you at full strength before this is over."
As they filed out of his office, Sylvia lingered a moment behind the others, catching Baldric’s attention before he could return fully to his paperwork.
"Guild Master. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you failed him. Whatever choices Minato made, they were his own, not a reflection on the man who trained him."
Baldric looked up, something raw flickering briefly across his exhausted features. "You’re kind to say so, Sylvia. But I’ve had twenty years to turn that thought over in my head, and I still can’t make myself fully believe it. There must have been something I missed, some warning sign I failed to catch before it was too late to matter."
"Or maybe some people just make choices that have nothing to do with the people who raised them. I’d know something about that myself, given my own family."
That earned a small, tired smile from the old guild master. "Perhaps you’re right. Either way, thank you for saying it. Not many people bother to offer comfort to an old man carrying regrets this heavy."
"We’re not most people. In case you hadn’t noticed."
"No," Baldric said, something warmer finally entering his voice. "I suppose you’re not, at that. Go on, get some rest. I mean it. Tomorrow will demand everything you have."
Sylvia nodded and left him to his solitude, closing the office door quietly behind her, leaving the old guild master alone once more with his ledgers, his grief, and the mounting weight of a war he’d spent two decades hoping to avoid.
—
End of Chapter—
Comments