Jackal Among Snakes

“Argrave, the Hopeful is making steady progress through the southern valley,” Elenore told him, speaking directly into his head. “He’s already overrun a few of the checkpoints. The repelling enchantments we imitated don’t hinder him as much as they do others. Those shadows he projects seem to just… eat them.”

Argrave processed that information. He had hoped that when the Hopeful had consumed his flesh, the thing would’ve triggered the landmine Argrave had placed where his soul had once been. If the Hopeful had tried to read his thoughts, he would’ve received a burst of mental power equivalent to that of every living thing in the world. It wasn’t surprising he’d dodged it if he had the Heralds’ omniscience at his back.

“Sending me to die again, sis?” Argrave asked jokingly, but before she could respond continued, “Fine. I’ll deal with it. Tell Anneliese to be ready to send back vitality.”

Argrave cast one more glance at the fight against Gerechtigkeit. With the addition of Anneliese, the tide had been turned in this phase of the fight... yet above, a dark cloud formed of the ashes of his dying body, foreshadowing another battle yet to manifest. Elsewhere, his willing and unwilling slaves crept inward on Berendar, costing them more and more lives by the second. Argrave could say they’d kept their bearings in the face of this ambush, yet the fight remained of yet undecided.

With a heavy heart, Argrave again headed for the rematch against the only foe that could truly claim to have beaten him. But Argrave had definitely let him win, so it didn’t count as a real victory.

So he hoped… and coped.

#####

When Argrave alighted upon one of the many checkpoints on the southern valley leading into Blackgard, he felt that feeling of death he’d confronted not hours ago upon seeing the Hopeful again. The bestial giant clashed with one of Law’s many Justiciars. The Hopeful broke its blade, shattered its armor, and let his hounds of hunger tear into the thing before looking their way. When his dark eyes saw Argrave, he could’ve swore that smile widened.

“Your Majesty!” the commander of the fort kneeled just beside him. His tone sounded flavored with limitless relief. “Your orders, sir?”

Argrave looked to him briefly. “Take everyone. Fall back to the next checkpoint.” He looked back. “I’ll deal with this.”

“At once!” the man said, more than eager to follow that order. Doubtless he’d seen countless of his comrades die before the Hopeful’s onslaught.

As the garrison evacuated, Argrave jumped down from the fort, falling slowly and gently. He stood with the gargantuan enchanted walls at his back, facing this monster alone. He felt the fear, yet did it anyway—Orion would’ve been proud, he was sure.

“I never knew quite how important you were,” Argrave called out as he walked closer.

“I never knew how good your fear would taste,” the Hopeful answered as he shambled closer, barely fitting into the narrow valley.

The monster’s physical body did seem somewhat weakened in the confines of this valley, yet his shadows—the true threat of him—roamed all but unfettered. His advance would be slow, yet inevitable, unless Argrave could put a stop to it.

“I’ve been making a study of you,” the Hopeful continued, straining against the invisible force pressing down on him with his tremendous grin belying the effort. “Of your mother. Of your father. Of the life you lived, and the reason it is you, of everyone, managed to reach this place. None of the others cared enough, but I had little to do but wait.”

Argrave knew he should attack… but frankly, his plan of attack hadn’t changed much, and he didn’t care to die young again. So he answered. “My father was the king, and my mother—”

“On Earth,” the Hopeful interrupted, a swell of deep pride in his tone. “The things that you showed me… that war, those weapons, those strategies… they evoked a sense of remembrance in me. They spoke of things I had forgotten, of memories that my own hunger had eaten through.” The thing fell to one knee, exhausted.

Argrave laughed. “So, what, you’re like me, foreign to this world? Or you’ve a lovely new trick to try on me—a nice new angle to get me to agree to some Herald deal? It doesn’t matter.”

“I am what you’ve seen,” the Hopeful answered back. “An aspirant. A beneficiary of the coming change—perhaps the primary beneficiary. A key to this cycle. A Hopeful. It might be said that the hunger all around is produced not by some supernatural phenomenon, but as a manifestation of the depth of my desire for the coming end.”

“Coming end? It’s a cycle,” Argrave pointed out. “One that you’re trying to prolong.”

“With chemistry, craftsmanship… sometimes, processes are repeated dozens, hundreds, thousands of times, even… to remove impurity. To perfect the product. Nothing lasts forever. Everything, always, is changing all the time.”

“So the world is steel folded one thousand times,” Argrave said with a shake of his head. “Why am I wasting time?”

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Using his eyes, his hands, every dropof his being, Argrave unleashed a torrent of blood magic upon the Hopeful as he stood restrained. He could feel his link between Anneliese funneling back vitality into his system, replacing what he spent as quickly as it was lost. He scarred the mountains, broke the ground, and fought the shadows…

But the result was just as before. The shadows surrounding the Hopeful were simply too dense, too constant, for a single attack to reach his body.

“Why not prevail upon Sophia?” the Hopeful taunted, voice projected through his shadows. “Have her unmake my power, as she did Jaray. Why not use her power of creation as a fuel for your vitality, that you might prepare an attack of the same magnitude that initially struck Gerechtigkeit?”

Argrave stopped his assault, clenching his fists as they reconstituted. “My daughter is sleeping. She needs to be at her best when we take the fight to where Gerechtigkeit retreats—where the Heralds have stashed him. For you, I’m enough.”

“You’re enough? More delusions—both of kinship with Sophia, and of any victory,” the Hopeful continued, rising to his feet as he began his steady advance forward once more. “She’s using you as a puppet. Not by choice, mind you—by instinct. She’s as malevolent as Gerechtigkeit. Have you forgotten who her parents were? The blood doesn’t lie.”

“Hilarious joke,” Argrave dismissed easily. “If you’ve studied me, you’d know that I’ve overcome worse odds. You? You’re nothing.”

“You’re very amusing,” the Hopeful continued. “You’re a child who proclaims themself master of their sandbox, king of the playground. You’re a sow who claims emperorship over their enclosure, sovereignty of their slaughterhouse. A wiki editor? What a joke. The things you understand about this world are a fraction of what there actually is. Your betters are all laughing at you fumble about, acting like you know everything about anything.”

“I don’t care if they laugh, so long as they pay attention.” Argrave took a deep breath. “Hope alone is useless. You have to deserve what you want. And you? A baby bird, waiting with its mouth open for its parents to vomit food inside? You’re pathetic. I can’t lose to you.”

Argrave sent out his blood echoes from his body, abandoning the strategy of brute force that had so buoyed their cause in the past day. This wasn’t an opponent that power alone could beat—and more than that, he wasn’t someone suited to using brute force. He’d fought against Good King Norman what felt like thousands of times, and he’d eventually come on top.

This was no different.

#####

Galamon and Orion—two giants, one with hair as white as bone and the other as dark as night—stood amidst carnage, their backs to one another as they looked upon a calming battlefield with the sunset as their background. The barbarians had come in endless waves, led by gods emboldening their invasion of the Great Chu. Together, these two giants of war fought for hours and hours, acting as the immortal and untiring vanguard of a host of men and elves.

“It’s quiet,” said Galamon briefly.

“The earth shakes no more—neither from the stomping of our enemy, or the rage of that earth deity.” Orion looked around warily. “Do we move to another front?”

“This was the last.” Galamon wiped off his Ebonice axe of blood—where his fingers touched, the blood sept into his skin, rejuvenating it. Hause had brought back his vampirism stronger than ever, yet now he was its master rather than the inverse. “Well fought.”

“I should say the same is true for you!” Orion praised, kneeling on the ground as he surveyed the area. “You fought like a thousand men so that yours didn’t have to.”

“Patriarch Dras…” Galamon closed his eyes. “He held back. He let thousands of Great Chu men and women die so that hundreds of Veidimen could live. I’m ashamed of him. I thought… better of him, I suppose. Perhaps he wasn’t always like this, or perhaps I was simply blind.”

“Has he changed, perhaps? Or have you?” Orion asked ponderously.

“Hmm. Maybe he was always like this. But I met better.” He studied Orion with his white eyes. “Argrave. Anneliese. Elenore. You.”

“Your evaluation honors me. Argrave respects you greatly. It’s only today I saw the full reason for that tremendous faith in you.” Orion rose. “We should go, help restore peace. We cannot return to Berendar in wake of Raccomen’s death, but we can ensure that the Great Chu, at least, remains orderly.”

Above, both men whipped their head when a tremendous flash of light passed overhead. It was followed by absolute darkness, then a roiling storm cloud that covered all like a flood. Within that storm cloud, malignant energy brewed. Swirling vortexes of wind took shape within it, many threatening to descend.

“They said Anneliese had turned the tide of the battle, but… exceptional. Exceptional. They killed him.” Orion stared in awe. “From the moment I saw her, I knew my sister-in-law was something special. Even I couldn’t have predicted it to this degree.” Orion rolled his shoulder. “What did Argrave call this?”

“The second phase.” Orion twisted his axe in his hand. “It seems this lull in the fighting was temporary.”

“Indeed.” Orion nodded. “Before I forget, there was something I wanted to ask you.”

“Ask,” Galamon said.

“Would you care to bring your family over for dinner, sometime?” Orion smiled. “My wife is a mite intimidated by Veidimen and the authority they have over the Great Chu, and I think nothing could help more than meeting a nice family. You could bring your boy, too.”

Galamon looked at him, sporting an extremely confused expression.

“Am I asking too much? Is it too soon?” Orion kneaded his forehead, smearing blood all over it. “My apologies—I’ve never been adroit at forming friendships. When you killed that tattooed god, I simply thought, ‘this is a man I’d like to have as a family friend.’”

Galamon looked back at the sky, which was growing ever fiercer. “Sure. Dinner. My wife is a good cook.”

“Really? That’s very exciting.” Orion smiled brightly. “I’m looking forward to it. Let’s wrap this up, work out the plans. How fun. How quaint.”

All around the world, it was becoming rather clear to people why this calamity affected the whole world. Berendar would remain its focus… but no one would be spared what was to come.

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