Wizards are used to bleeding. We are inured and jaded to certain amounts and certain kinds of pain. A knife in the kidney is more blood and more pain than any but the most hardened warrior or criminal can endure and still think, and even she would be hard pressed to think usefully, let alone act. Aemillian, for all his power, was no warrior, and not that kind of criminal. My knife cut through his concentration as cleanly and finally as it cut through his aegis and his flesh. I reached around to take his clawed hand in mine, just in case. And then I twisted the knife, cutting up into his liver, diaphragm, and lung – just to be absolutely certain.
He shook in my grasp. His legs gave out from under him. I let him fall back into my arms and sank down to the floor with him.
“I think you always understood,” I said to him, softly, but not caring if the others could hear, “in ways that I could not admit to myself before the very end, that for our plan to succeed, theirs had to have a real chance. And that is why you dogged me. You knew that something could happen that would make me switch sides. You thought that if you reminded me how strong and how smart you are, I would fall back into your orbit. In the end, though, that was what pushed me away.”
He tried to flex his hand, to drive his claw into his body somewhere, anywhere – to fling some death-curse, perhaps. I held his hand tight and twisted my knife, still in his back, again. If he’d ever made any study of casting from a wound, he might have succeeded – not in saving himself, the wound was too deep, but in taking us all with him. He had not. He had been too arrogant, too aristocratic. The aegis had been his only plan for the risk of physical confrontation. To be fair, it had won every other battle. It would have won any other battle.
His struggle was weakening. His blood poured over my hand and into my lap, a hot and sticky mess. I pulled the emperor’s golden circlet from his head so that I could press my lips, one last time, to that noble brow.
I could hear the others shouting. It occurred to me that, perhaps, I should listen to what they were saying. I couldn’t quite make out their words over the sound of my own wracking sobs.
Then he died in my arms.
Light filled the room. The Rorgoth Throne rang like a bell. Everyone standing fell to their knees. I would have fallen, too, had I not already been on the ground.
The power that flooded me was immense. Nothing I had ever felt before, nothing I had even dreamed of, could begin to compare. Even making the siphon, tapping into the elemental power of the Holy Lands for the first time, had been nothing compared to this. Spilling the last of my mortal blood at the Eastern Veil and letting the light of the Holy Land fill me completely was as insignificant. And, although it should not have – had it not been the entire fucking point, ten years ago? – it caught me entirely by surprise.
I felt like I was two people at once.
One of those people crouched on the floor, drenched in his lover’s blood, still holding the knife of betrayal in his lover’s back. That man was a sobbing, bloody mess. He might never sleep again, or know the love of another mortal. Decades of plotting and scheming, of love and scholarship, all brought to nothing by political ambition.
The other person saw everything. Soldiers in gold livery and red-on-black armor had flooded the room and surrounded him and the companions he had brought. Only the tolling of the Rorgoth Throne had saved them. But the old emperor’s soldiers would recover soon, and … well, then it might really all have been for nothing.
“Stand down,” I said, instinctively speaking through the magic throne to which I was now bound. My voice reached through the entire palace. The soldiers in the room with me – even Elana, even Rennin – dropped their weapons.
“Derrek,” I heard Khanaarre gasp my name. “What the fuck?”
I wished I knew. But a plan was forming.
“The Solirium Dynasty has ended,” I said, again speaking through the Throne. “The Heart’s Guard is disbanded. The House Solirium may collect their fallen son, but must leave the palace immediately. Your belongings will be returned to you.”
Four Solirium soldiers stepped forward, the first to find their feet. Elana and Rennin reached for their weapons.
“Elana, Rennin,” I said, careful to use only my mortal voice, “please.”
They looked at me, wide eyed and ashen faced. I could not begin to imagine what they were thinking, but after a moment they nodded. They still grabbed their weapons as they scrabbled to their feet, but they stepped aside so that the gold-liveried soldiers could claim their dead master.
The material weight of that burden taken from me, if not the moral weight, I rose to my feet as gracefully as I could. I tried desperately to ignore the volume of wet, sticky blood that had soaked through my clothes and onto my skin. I failed utterly.
The soldiers filed out slowly. A few looked like they were contemplating their own attempts at regicide. Juggling the crown casually in my off hand, I ran my finger along the edge of my knife. I spoke the words I had mapped out years and years ago – of course I’d worked them out, even if I’d never planned to utter them in earnest. A golden glow surrounded me, then Khanaarre, then Elana, then Rennin: my own aegis, less permanent but no less powerful than the one I had just pierced. Thankfully, that was the only further display of power that our immediate enemies required. When the last of House Solirium’s soldiers had left the room, I gestured and the door closed behind them.
“Derrek Rowan,” Elana said my name strangely, thick with wonder and confusion and fear and contempt. That was fair.
“Please be patient, Elana,” I said. “There are things broken, here, that only I can fix.”
Shadows of the Aemillian’s power and misdeeds pooled around our feet. They stained every surface in the room, even the facets of the Rorgoth Throne, itself. A decade’s worth of miasma, bleeding through from the Shadow Realm into the heart of Vencar.
I turned to face the Rorgoth Throne. My legs shook almost as badly as my hands. Sick with grief and giddy with power, I sat on the obsidian throne. My companions stared at me like I was a monster. Perhaps I was.
In the embrace of the Rorgoth Throne, I was barely mortal. I could feel the parts that Aemillian had discovered and activated. I was viscerally aware of everything happening in the palace: the fear, the fighting, the petty thefts, the panicked flight in the wake of my magical pronouncements. Rennin’s desire to strike, to test the Blade of Xadaer against my aegis. Elana’s stunned confusion, her struggle to imagine how she could have failed to see this coming. Khanaarre’s comprehension and horror.
I could feel the word of my ascendancy spreading through the city, whispers and shouts of horror and shock spread by servants and soldiers as they fled the tolling of the Rorgoth Throne and my edicts of banishment. Another Great Wizard emperor. The first foreign emperor in centuries. The people of Vencar City were enraged.
With a moment’s attention, I could see anywhere in Vencar. With only a little more effort, I could see anywhere in the Compact. And I quickly discovered that, if I pushed, I could reach almost anywhere that I could see.
I found the generals and wizards of the imperial army where they had Liddarn surrounded. One by one, I reached out and touched their minds with my own. They flinched with fear, but not with surprise, telling me that Aemillian had touched them this way before, and none too gently.
“Stand down,” I said through the Throne, sharing a vision of the bloody throne room. “The Solirium Dynasty has fallen. Come home and pledge fealty to your new emperor. Spread the word as you come.”
The generals and the wizards were stunned. They were terrified. And they were obedient.
I shook my head. Even as the power of the throne poured into me, I could feel myself weakening from pain and exhaustion. I reached into the mine.
Urassarrain, I called.
*Yes, O Great … oh fuck.*
What began as congenial sarcasm faded quickly to visceral horror.
“Tell the wizards and the court that victory is theirs,” I said. And then I let the connection go, sickened by the sound of fear in the voice of a god.
I was fading quickly. I could no longer recall what, exactly, I had set out to do from and with the throne.
One last thing.
The shadowy miasma that contaminating the throne and the throne room.
Could I clean it all in a day? Was it enough to cut it off at the source? Or did I need to redouble my betrayals, and keep what I had inadvertently claimed?
Could I destroy the Throne? No. No, that would be even worse.
I would let the light of the Holy Lands pour through me and into the throne. It would drive back the shadows. Whatever I could do before my strength gave out would have to be enough.
< Previous Chapter| Home | The World | Next Chapter >
Thank you so much for reading!
New chapters drop every Sunday morning barring unexpected circumstances. New maps and art drop when I finish them, any time except Sunday morning. For the inside scoop, other stories set in Dathl’lyr, access to new chapters six weeks before they go public, and/or a look into all the other things I do, please consider joining my Patreoncampaign! Don’t like Patreon or just want to support my work? Drop a tip in my jar over at Ko-Fi!
Leave a Reply