BT IV - Chapter 31

“I appreciate the horses,” Trevor prattled, “but given that you’re somehow best friend with Sandrovok’s royal family, would carriages have been too much to ask for?”

Micah pursed his lips.  The entire Silver Wolves guild was mounted, a not insignificant expense in time of peace and prosperity, but now?

Ahead of them were the first and second battalions of Sandrovok’s first legion.  Elite units.  Blooded constant campaigns against the nomads of the deep desert as well as border skirmishes with Pereston itself.  Each and every soldier in their ranks had a specialization.  Against any other opponent, they made for a fearsome sight.  Many bandit groups and regional warlords simply surrendered upon receiving word that they were in the area rather than throw their lives away fruitlessly.

Behind them, legion after legion stretched into the distance, barely visible beyond the giant clouds of sand and dust kicked up by their passage.  Any scout or spy would see them coming from leagues away on a clear day, but it hardly mattered.  The time for stealth and subterfuge was in the past.

Sandrovok marched to war, and Micah could only hope that they had amassed enough strength.  They weren’t ready, he knew that.  If Micah could have used the 5 years provided by his blessing without the Third Prince’s interference, he could have revolutionized the country.  Transformed its military into an unstoppable juggernaut that could have conquered the entire continent in under a decade.

But there wasn’t time.  A strange fascination for someone with Micah’s affinities.  Time magic might not be the strongest in direct combat, but its ability to predict the future and enhance training were unmatched.

“We are performing the role of a rapid reaction company as part of the army’s vanguard.”  Drekt’s voice was as dry as the desert they were trekking through.  “If someone were to attack column, it is our job to be mobile.  The other two battalions will form a battle line, that’s what they’re trained to do, and our guild will counter attack, driving the attacker back and buying the rest of the legion enough time to get into position.  Horses help with mobility.  Having our entire unit mounted on vehicles would mean nothing but delays and complications.”

“Wait,” Trevor grumbled, looking from Micah to Eris, Esther, and Leeka, “is that true?  Are we seriously supposed to charge whatever horrors Pereston throws at us and hold off an entire army?  How come no one told me about this?”

“I did,” Micah said, squinting his gaze against the distant heat mirages as he surveyed their surroundings, looking for any hint or sign of danger.  “You were busy trying to ‘teach’ Esther a new spear thrust with some sort of vulgar name while she ran away from you.”

Telivern glanced back, cocking its snow-white head to the side as it glared sternly at Trevor.  He responded by sticking his tongue out at the stag, drawing a disdainful snort.

Micah just rolled his eyes.  The two of them were like children.  Telivern had long ago mastered a judgmental stare that could clean paint from a wall, but it was next to worthless on Trevor because the oaf simply didn’t care.

Despite everything, Micah felt a smile lingering on his face as he watched Ravi pounce on a sand dune near Telivern and kick out with her hind legs.  A cone of dirt and dust sprayed toward Telivern, enveloping the startled deer.  Before it could retaliate, the panther was running away, taking to the air with a flap of its wings the second that Telivern looked like it might catch up.

That was the difference between him and Dakkora.  He could still feel her puttering around behind his eyes, watching the world and scoffing at the little day to day rituals that made Micah human.  Ever since the ritual, the lines between him and his past lives have blurred and begun to fade.

She had lived a solitary life.  At first due to shunning, but later by choice.  By the time of Dakkora’s death, she would go entire months without speaking a word, entirely enthralled in her world of research and magical automatons.  When she did speak, it was almost always only to threaten and cajole her neighbors into turning over more resources for her experiments and mana engines.

He could feel himself growing a little colder as she melded into him, but at the same time, Andres’ joyful naivete and Kylie’s boundless grace balanced the changes.  It was hard to describe the changes that were happening, but at the end of the day he felt more like… well, himself.

Micah shook his head, clearing the endless thoughts.  Trevor was telling Esther a story about one of the times he had rigged a dog race, simply for the fun of pulling a fast one on a casino that had shorted him some attunement while Teliveron chased Ravi across the clear, sapphire sky.

“Leeka?”  His questioning tone startled the large orange woman.  Drawing an almost guilty look from her as she replied.

“Sorry, I was just looking at the sky Micah.  As much as I don’t like the dry air here, and as awful as it is to wake up with sand in your hair every morning, we never got skies like this back in the jungle.  Just blue as far as the eye can see without a single rain cloud in it.”

Micah looked up, biting back another smile as Ravi corkscrewed through the air only to miss a flap from her wings and plow into a sand dune.  Telivern landed beside her, and as the panther tried to dig itself out, the stag walked up beside it and shoved its razor sharp antlers into the ground.

It flicked its neck toward Ravi, sending a bucketful of sand into the air and covering the big cat’s fur in dirt.  Then, with a prim shake of its head to clear the remaining dust from its own fur, Telivern trotted jauntily away.

“Do you miss the jungle?”  He asked Leeka, turning his attention back from his friends’ antics.  “I know that you volunteered to cross the ocean with us, but I can’t think of a more different environment for you.  Between the desert and our whirlwind tour of noble courts, it must be the exact opposite of your life as a huntress.”

She thought for a second, flicking her reins to draw her horse back on track as she pondered the question.  Months of hard travel in between dungeons had long since erased any deficiencies in the parties’ riding skills.

“I suppose,” she said, finally.  “I don’t think that’s the right question though.  I miss knowing every tree and animal for leagues around.  I miss the familiar taste of danji fruit, and although I didn’t have any close friends, there are certainly people that I’d like to catch up with.  That said, I’ve run into so many new things on my journeys with him.  Jakint was my first big city, but compared to Sandrovok it was poor and run down.  The things the artificers and enchanters of this continent are capable of, well.  It was more surprising to me than finding out you actually were male.”

“I’m still trying to forget about that little misunderstanding,” Micah responded with a grimace.  “I understand that your society has taken the difference between the sexes to the extreme, but you still shouldn’t go around speculating about things like that.  It gets a bit embarrassing.  If someone tells you that he’s a guy, just believe him.”

“Regardless,” Leeka interjected hurriedly.  “I think the real question you meant to ask is if I regretted leaving the jungle, and the answer to that is very easy.  No.  Even if we weren’t saving Karell, everything since I guided you out of the forest has been fascinating.  I’ve made friends, seen new things, and more importantly, the training Drekt and you have put me through.”

She held up a hand, covering the sun with her open palm before squeezing it into a fist.

“I feel like my life before I ran into you was a dream.  The colors were faded and the sound was muted as I drifted along, sleepwalking through my daily activities.”

“Here,” she continued, tossing a bright smile in Micah’s direction.  “Even if I might die in combat, at least I lived first.  Finally, I feel like I’m actually walking a path that matters.”

“That’s a relief,” Micah replied.  “Honestly, I haven’t been keeping up as much with you as I should.  Between our journey into Pereston scouting for signs of daemonic cults and our travels across Sandrovok conquering dungeons and killing the altered forgotten, I’ve barely had a moment to myself to think.”

“It’s fine Micah,” Leeka responded, leaning over to pat him on the shoulder.  “You might have the weight of the world and all existence on your shoulders, but I’ve been busy too.  It was a bit hard at first.  I’d always been solitary, so learning to work with Devon, Mack, Lewon and all the others was a bit weird, but they’re all skilled warriors.  Maybe not as strong as your brother and Drekt, but I can see why you selected people like them for your guild.”

Micah smiled, his memory casting itself back to when they first applied to the Silver Wolves.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said with a chuckle.  “They really were a motley bunch when we took them in, but between my ability to enhance their affinities, Trevor’s natural skill with martial arts, and Drekt’s ability to train a farmer into a renowned warrior, we managed to polish them up.”

“Really,” he continued, “that’s most of the guild.  Good people without the natural talent that a noble house or larger guild would require.  We may have a lot more Common and Uncommon blessings than our neighbors, but between backbreaking training and an absurd amount of enchanted equipment, we’ve managed to carve a place for ourselves out of Sandravok’s deserts.”

He looked out over the endless sands again, smiling nostalgically at the heat mirages that cast illusions on the landscape.  Roiling shadows and dancing lights stretched like fingers from the mountains that marked the border with Pereston, grasping toward their unit only to disappear as they drew closer.

“It’s really a shame that the Third Prince forced my hand,” Micah remarked.  “We had a good peaceful life here for a while.  We were comfortable but not rich, strong but not not a national asset.  No one paid much attention to the guild, and anyone that thought to bother us was someone I could handle on my own.  It was just shy of perfect, which is of course why things had to tumble down.”

“If you had been more frantic in the years running up to the Prince’s emergence, do you think things wouldn’t have come to this?”  Leeka asked.  “I know I’m asking you to operate in hypotheticals, but you make it sound like you’ve spent the last 5 or so years slacking.  Do you think you could have simply assassinated this Baron and been done with it if you had truly pushed yourself in that intervening time?”

Micah thought for a second and shrugged.  His response noncommittal and carefree.

“There’s no way to know for sure Leeka, but like you said earlier.  I think you’re asking the wrong question.  It’s possible that I could have been strong enough to defeat the Prince if I had done nothing but train and I encountered it just after it entered Karell and hadn’t managed to stabilize itself.  But I wouldn’t want that.  I’ve walked that road before and been nothing but a training and combat machine.  I grew powerful from it, but it was a brittle power.  I had no friends, no genuine connections with the world outside of Telivern, and as dear as it is to me, that is a bleak thing to say.”

“Heh.”  Leeka’s orange face blossomed into a smile.  “Telivern is ‘deer’ to all of us.”

Micah rolled his eyes.  Sometimes he regretted letting the amazon become friends with Trevor.  He loved his brother, but the man was beyond a bad influence.

“What I’m getting at,” he continued, ignoring her pun interlude, “is that simply being strong isn’t enough.  That is how you become a tyrant, wrapped up in pursuing power for its own ends until your butler poisons your wine on behalf of a political rival.  It’s a lonely miserable existence, and ultimately, it’s hard to sustain.”

“If I had to do it again,” Micah said, looking up to the sky and watching a flock of birds cross the azure expanse, “I don’t think I’d change much.  That’s selfish of me to say.  Thousands if not hundreds of thousands have died at the Third Prince’s hands already, but at the end of the day, two things are true.  First, I don’t really think I could have beat it, even if I gave up sleep to train.  Second, I would have been fighting the daemon as a broken wreck of a man.  Even if I somehow had the raw power to defeat it, my battles with the greater daemons have taught me that indecision and weak character are a greater flaw than broken armor or a low level.  It simply would have eaten me alive in a spiritual battle.”

“Are you strong enough to beat it now?”  Leeka asked.  “I know you said that you performed a ritual that made you a lot more powerful, but right now we’re marching off to fight the daemon and its cults.  Regardless of your answer, we need to try, but I at least want to know how you think things are going to turn out.”

Micah’s answer was cut off by hoofbeats.

Baron Adrian Harris, hair askew and soaked with sweat, was pounding down the road toward their group.  HIs eyes were wild, and his usually meticulous military uniform was stained with sand from his hard ride.

As soon as the man spotted Micah, he yanked on his horse’s reins jerking the tired and frothing animal toward him, all the while muttering what looked like a prayer of relief.

“Silver,” he gasped, struggling for breath as his faltering horse brought him closer.  “Pereston didn’t wait for us to cross the border.  A military unit road out to meet us, but it’s worse than that-”

He broke down into a coughing fit, a league of hard riding through fine sand taking its toll on the scout’s lungs.

“They have almost 500 of those strange forgotten we fought in the village, and they’ve summoned a flock those skeletal birds and something… big.  I don’t even know how to describe it.  It looks like a floating diamond but anything that comes within 20 paces of it just… melts.”

Micah looked back at border.  The distant mountains seemed closer, like they were looming over the horizon and trying to drown out the desert sun.  The formerly innocent birds that had been slapping across the sky were closer now, and he could see enough details: bony wings, green crystals in their torsos, and magical attacks, to confirm Harris’ words.

“Well, crap,” Micah muttered.  “I knew things had been going too well.”