Chapter 710: The Awaited Moment
Alex left the vampire crypt with a heavy heart, though not before learning the reason Lady Margaret and Elder Darrien had traveled to a place he couldn’t place in memory, no matter how he turned it over.
The Library of Kirion. A place on the continent of giants, the second greatest trove of knowledge in the world, older than most of the civilizations that now call the Ancient world home.
The reason they had gone there traced back to Queen Thagri, ruler of the giants and a friend of Lady Margaret’s. She had asked Margaret to come because the tensions inside the giant king’s court had reached the point where neutrality was no longer a position anyone could hold. A side in the coming war would have to be chosen and soon.
For days, everything had gone smoothly.
The conversations, the diplomacy, the slow work of turning old friendship into something the domain could use against the Eldravian Empire and the demons, all of it had moved the way these things were supposed to move, patient and careful and, for once, uncomplicated.
Then, two days ago, on the day the giants were meant to pledge their strength, Queen Thagri had brought Lady Margaret to the Library of Kirion to show her something else entirely.
An anti-magic spell of unknown grade, buried in the archives since the war against the outsiders, left to gather dust for what the queen called generations, until, in the last year, Keltarn, the court’s bishop, began to unravel its nature by having gained understanding of another one of the outsiders’ magic works.
Margaret had trusted her friend. She had also, some part of her, felt the wrongness of it before she could name it, the way old instincts surface faster than reasons do.
But refusal wasn’t something she could offer a friend of decades, not without insult, and certainly not on such a crucial day, so she had gone with her, not blindly, though. She had sent a message to Elder Darrien about everything before she left.
It had been a trap.
The Demon Sin of Gluttony and Keltarn, overseer of the library, sprang it together, and Queen Thagri played her part with a skill that spoke of long rehearsal, feigning ignorance, calling for aid, her reaction and actions exactly as frightened as they needed to be.
The performance went deeper than anyone in that moment could have guessed. Thagri had already pledged herself to Ahrimon. This was her proof of loyalty, and it was also, conveniently, the only way to remove the one obstacle standing between her and a throne unshared, her husband, who still wished to stand with the domain.
Bilor, the King of the giants, arrived with his royal guard, and for a while the battle tilted in their favor. Monarch against Monarch, the king against the Sin General, while Lady Margaret and Queen Thagri focused on Keltarn, who used the library’s defences to shield himself.
The ambush was a failure, but it was less because Gluttony underestimated them and more because he didn’t even really try.
The entire setup was too clumsy to be the demons’ true design, sloppy in a way that didn’t match what gluttony’s kind did when they wished something done, and that alone was warning enough that some other hand was moving beneath the surface of it.
But before anyone could ask the question out loud, Thagri showed what she had been holding back the entire time. Her true poisons, unleashed on Lady Margaret in the same breath, Pride, the second Sin General, made his presence known.
Margaret survived it only because some instinct had kept her half a step guarded, some old and unkillable wariness that had never quite trusted the queen the way her friendship demanded.
The Sin of Pride came for Bilor. And the royal guards who had sworn their lives to the giant king turned their blades on their own brothers and sisters without hesitation, as though the betrayal had been rehearsed as many times as the rest of it.
By the time Elder Darrien arrived, King Bilor was already dead. His guard lay butchered around him, and Lady Margaret had lost consciousness, but kept alive, for no reason but to keep as bait, to lure the fiend of Gore.
Darrien was a Monarch beyond match, but a Monarch against two Sin Generals and two giants at the peak of Ninth Rank left him no path out, not that he would have taken one if it existed.
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Alex sat on his throne, his eyes heavy with a darkness that had nothing to do with the light in the room. The three responsible for his teacher’s death were still out there, walking free somewhere beyond his reach, and it had taken more restraint than he cared to admit not to abandon this gathering entirely and go hunt them down himself.
Instead, he had come here, to the palace, to do his duty to the domain while every instinct in him screamed to be somewhere else.
To his left, Guardian Elmara stood with a small scowl fixed on her face, her default expression in rooms that had no new knowledge to be earned, but this time her anger was on a different issue entirely.
To his right, Varon occupied his usual position in the particular stillness that was simply and completely him, in stoic silence, his presence as steady and wordless as cold steel.
The throne room spread ahead of them.
The ceiling vaulted high above, its full height lost in shadow except where the vast painted scenes caught the light, life-like battles rendered across the stone, good against evil, the outside horror of things that had come to unmake the world set against the indomitable will of the races that had refused to be unmade.
The faces in the painting were not idealized. They were tired and furious and resolute, which was the only honest way to render people who were fighting for something that mattered.
Twelve seats on the dark, lightless floor. Twelve representatives, each carrying the weight of a people. Dragon, Undead, Human, Elf, Dwarf, Giant, Winged, Vampire, Beastmen, Fairy, Merfolk, Elemental.
There were many more races, but these twelve held the most influence, and so they represented the entire realm.
Silence held the chamber, all of them waiting on him to begin. Minutes passed before Alex finally raised his head.
The darkness receded from his eyes like a tide pulling back from a shore, and what replaced it was the particular quality that had no name but that everyone in the room recognized and responded to before they could decide to.
"Clan Leaders." His voice carried the particular weight of someone who no longer needed to raise it to be heard. "You are the pillars of this Domain."
He let his eyes move across them.
"And this Domain is the heart of this world. The birthplace of every life in this entire world." A pause. "And therefore its shield."
"I do not need to give a speech to remind you of what this Domain is, or what its fall would mean." His gaze settled on each face in turn, unhurried. "You know it well."
"So it is past time, long past time, for all of you to become serious. To set aside the rivalries and the enmity and looking only at your own survival, and to look instead at what your position as the inheritors of this domain demands. To stand against the evil that grows to consume this world. To end it at its root."
He could already see it.
The burning in the eyes across the room, frustration and rage held back with visible effort, the rebuttals sitting just behind sealed mouths, kept there not by agreement but by the particular restraint of people who had decided, out of respect, for now, to hear the rest before they responded.
He understood it.
The Domain was dying, and that was simply the truth of the situation, stated plainly.
The Devourer’s Curse had ravaged the population for decaeds without interruption, a plague without cure, each cycle claiming more than the last, the numbers moving in only one direction.
Those still alive were not living so much as enduring, their minds eroding slowly, their capacity to grow stronger turned against them, because the stronger one grew, the more fuel the curse had to work with.
The only relief the Domain’s people had found in the last century had been the arrival of the immortal adventurers, who had eased the daily weight of survival enough that ordinary life became possible again in the margins.
But even that mercy had proven temporary. The brief years of relief had been swallowed again by the rising flame of war and rebellion spreading unchecked through the domain’s own borders.
The whole of it was crumbling, and left as it was, it would take less than a few decades before nothing walked this land but Rulers and beasts, the ordinary people either dead in civil war or left frozen in graveyards that had once been their homes.
So Alex knew exactly what it had cost the clan leaders to sit here and not erupt at his words, that it was only the new and uncertain respect these clan leaders had begun to hold for him that kept the room from erupting at what must have sounded, to them, like the demand of a boy who understood nothing of what he was asking.
Understanding all that, Alex was not fool enough to make these demands without giving them something to stand on. He had not come here to demand the impossible without offering the means to achieve it.
"I have acquired the cure for the Devourer’s Curse."
The words landed like a stone dropped into still water, as some eyes widened with confusion, disbelief arriving before hope dared to. Others closed entirely, bracing themselves for news they had awaited decades to hear and knowing that it would be disappointing, even though every fiber of their being wished to be wrong.
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