Discordant Note | The Beginning After the End SI

Chapter 238: The Result of War

Thank you to my beta reader and editor, GlassThreads!

Arthur Leywin

After I doused the flames still burning, I had to do several things before I could afford to track the source of this beast horde. I wrote a detailed communication scroll to the Council, informing them of what I’d discovered and what steps I’d be taking next.

Sylvie and I stayed for a short time as we helped the town pull itself into a modicum of order. She hauled bodies from the rubble and healed who she could, while I conjured walls around the town in case more beasts came.

But there was an urgency in my steps and my mind that finally pulled me away. I couldn’t wait for reinforcements from the Council to finally reach my location and reinforce these people. I hated to leave them alone, but some gut instinct–some fear I couldn’t place–told me I couldn’t stay here.

Those mana beasts–corrupted, and even an S-class–had arrived at this town in a concentrated group before tearing it apart. And if there was anything I knew about Agrona from my talk with the horrid psychopath was that he did nothing in half-measures. There was more to this, and I feared to understand what it was.

Sylvie blurred through the air as we followed the lingering distortions in the mana south. They formed an eerily straight line from an indeterminate source far beyond, and traces of the mana beasts’ passing were easy to spot if one knew how to look.

They carved a path straight to that town, I thought, wondering why. They didn’t stop for water, didn’t take any detours that would make it easier. Like drones seeking a target.

Sylvie was uneasy beneath me as she beat her massive wings. We didn’t talk of the strange ability of Dawn’s Ballad that I’d just discovered, where I gained the ability to influence aether somehow by touching on our bond. I could tell questions about it lurked in the subconscious of her mind, but she was focused on trailing that path our enemies had taken.

I will have to talk to Elder Rinia about it when we get back to the castle, I thought with gritted teeth. The aether-influencing elven seer was infuriatingly vague and shifty about both her abilities and what she saw with her visions, but she was my only real avenue to learn more about the intricacies of my manifested weapon.

After all, the asura had abandoned us. No dragon besides my faithful bond would stand by Dicathen, all because of their failed assault on Alacrya.

I ground my teeth as I focused forward, thoughts of war and whatever Agrona could be planning bouncing around in my skull like an infuriating itch. Eventually, however, my mind drifted toward Spellsong.

The phoenix-blooded mage was the focus of many of my endless questions, especially as my dreams—nightmares—of my past life as Grey continued to return like painful wounds.

I wondered who he was often, even though I knew I wouldn’t arrive at the answer I needed. He clearly knew who I was in my previous life, but I couldn’t fathom him. Was he a councilmember I’d once known?

Or, I thought with dark humor, was he some unfortunate Trayden soldier I killed? That might make sense, considering he knew so much about Cecilia. About the Legacy.

But that also didn’t fully make sense, either. And even if I somehow figured out how he knew so much of my past life, that didn’t change that he seemed to know far, far too much about my new one, too.

I remembered a faint voice that seemed to touch my soul. To reverberate with the greatest pull I had ever felt.

“Because your anchors are here, Arthur.”

Sylvie and Tess.

My heart clenched painfully as I closed my eyes, letting out a breath as I pressed my forehead into Sylvie’s scales, seeking their centering warmth as I worked through my emotions. Tess knew my secret now. She knew it. Knew why I’d rejected her advances for so, so long.

When I next saw her, I’d need to–

Sylvie lurched in the air, a spike of horror tainting my uncertain thoughts a crimson red. I struggled for a moment to stay perched at the base of her neck as I was nearly thrown off, adrenaline coursing through my body as I prepared to fight. Sylvie crooned in a mix of disbelief and despair as she physically recoiled from something.

“By my ancestors,” she cursed into the wind, her shock like a bolt of cleansing fire across my system. “How… How could…”

I immediately reoriented, ready for combat as Dawn’s Ballad fuzzed into existence by my palm. “Sylv, what is it? What do you–”

I looked past my bond’s neck as she flapped her wings, hovering in place in the sky.

And my jaw went slack, a matching horror rising from the depths of my stomach. I stared for a long, long moment at our destination–because I knew this was where we needed to go. I knew, in some deep part of my soul, that this was what I’d been fearing.

My eyes drank in the sight, my nose twitching from the metallic scent. Finally, I took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of smoke and burnt flesh. The familiar scent, but not from this life.

Grey suffused my emotions as I prepared myself for what needed to be done. All my questions of Spellsong. All my anxiety regarding Tess and what our relationship would be after this. All my fears for this life and my last one.

I smothered them all as I adopted the mantle that had protected me for so long. And for once, Sylvie did not protest.

“Set us down, Sylv,” I said, my voice like iron.

My bond complied without a word, circling down before she finally set her massive bulk into the dirt. The ground rumbled for a moment before I finally swung off the neck of my draconic companion.

My shoes squelched in crimson mud. A familiar sensation, one I’d experienced many times in countless battlefields. When enough blood was spilled by bullet and blade, the very earth itself would drink the scarlet flow. And as soldiers marched onward to add their own life’s blood to the tide, the earth would claw at the feet of her children, trying to hold them back from further slaughter. To prevent them from marching to their dooms.

But the red mud did not bind my feet as I marched forward solemnly. This child had long been rejected by the stones below, and no longer did Earth wish to hold me back.

This had once been a city. Not a large one, far from it. Probably only several thousand people at most. With its well-planned roads and sturdy architecture, I knew this nameless city had once been a thriving place. Distantly, some part of me that was still Arthur could imagine children playing in the square. Could imagine merchants hawking their wares and mothers carrying their babes through the streets. As I swept my empty gaze across the shattered walls, I could almost imagine guards playing dice by the gates.

“You do not have to look,” I said, aware that Sylvie’s trembling human form stood behind me, her feet sinking into the bloody soil.

“I need to,” Sylvie said, her voice firm. “I need to see this.”

I exhaled, my eyes forward. “Okay, Sylv.”

I continued my death march forward, tasting the wrongness of the ambient mana. The world itself seemed to be stained red, each particle of ambient mana weeping tears of scarlet blood. Even the aether felt unnaturally still as I waded toward the carnage.

Lady Myre had told me that the aether had its own sort of Will. A sentience or drive that the dragons could not fully comprehend. That was why the formless energy that crafted the bowl we lived in could not be directly manipulated like mana. Because, just like one could not directly control another person, you couldn’t grasp aether with your intent.

If aether has sentience, a mind behind its unfathomable workings, I wondered, staring upward at the horrible symbol, a rotting totem to Agrona’s malice, can it feel grief, too? Can it sense the tragedy?

I thought it could. I could almost hear the world weeping.

At the very heart of this city, a tower of corpses blocked out the sun above, stretching fifty feet into the sky. Blood streamed from broken bodies in waves, like the stories of ritualistic sacrifice from my old world. Empty eyes watched as torn entrails and broken dreams cascaded down a monument of meaningless death.

Sylvie fell to her knees behind me, vomiting into the red-stained road. The bile leaving her throat was subsumed by the river of blood that soaked the streets.

There were so, so many. Hundreds of bodies, maybe thousands, created a dread statement from the lord of Alacrya. Because I understood what he meant, now. Agrona had told me not long ago, hadn’t he? And I didn’t know then. Not really.

“I’m sure you’ve seen a great deal of bloodshed, King Grey. More than most lessers. Maybe even more than most asura. So I want you to understand what I mean when I say that the blood shall flow soon…” Agrona’s phantom smile burned itself across my mind as my bond wept tears of horror and sorrow into the bloody earth. “It’s going to be the bloodiest war in history’s tapestry. Numbers cannot fathom the casualties that your continent will face.”

In my mind’s eye, I remembered how Agrona’s scarlet eyes had sparkled with amusement as he puppeteered Sylvie. As he commanded her body to preach a horrid truth she would never subscribe to.

“There will be no surrender. No sparing of prisoners. No recourse for civilians. Men, women, children… The serpent will have its fill of the crimson tide.”

As I stared up at the pile of nameless bodies–many in chunks and simply torn apart–I found myself strangely fascinated. What sort of madness possessed the Sovereign of Alacrya? What sort of twisted psyche gripped his mind, to push for such a massacre?

Because that’s what this had been. My gaze focused on the head of a young girl–there was only a head to stare at–and I wondered what she felt when she died.

But I knew. She died terrified.

I knelt, massaging Sylvie’s back as she sobbed with sympathetic grief. I wanted to comfort her over our bond, but I could not. Right now, I was Grey. Feeling anything… Feeling anything was difficult. So all I could do was be by her side.

“So many people,” my draconic bond said, her choppy wheat-blonde hair stark against the endless red. “Why?! Why did it happen? Why did he do it?” she demanded, her aura warping the air, a roar pulling itself from her throat.

I knew why this burned her so deeply. Agrona had delivered the very promise of this bloodshed through her mouth. Her lips had uttered the words; her tongue had formed the syllables. It was not her mind that had delivered the ultimatum, but my bond still felt disgusted. She felt as if this was her fault.

I laid a hand on my bond’s back as she vented her emotions, staring with dead eyes into the mound. And internally, I reasserted my vow. I would not allow Agrona to enact his plans.

—

Less than an hour later, Sylvie rested outside the walls. She was not physically tired, but she was emotionally wrung out by her entire endeavor. Her massive chest rose and fell in fitful shudders, and I could feel the uneasy nature of her dreams.

Since I had first found the mound of death, I had not allowed myself to slow down. Even as Sylvie slept, I scoured the ravaged city,

I need to hone myself further, I thought dourly, only partially aware of my surroundings. The manifestation of Dawn’s Ballad and all the imprints of mana within had led to these abilities, and I needed to find a way to maximize them. This was my path to being able to fight a Scythe. To being able to finally protect my family and home. I just needed to be stronger.

“You need to be careful, Arthur,” Sylvie said from behind me, her emotions shadowed over our link. She was still recovering from the bloodshed she’d witnessed. Processing the brutality. “Please. Don’t fall back into that darkness. I know it’s easier. But you can’t. Not with everything you have to protect.”

I didn’t turn around. “You can still feel the pain in your chest,” I said after a moment, my voice dull. “I can sense it over our bond, Sylv. And it hurts so, so much. But I can’t afford to let myself feel hurt. To let myself hesitate in my steps. While maybe the councilmembers carry the weight of the continent on their shoulders, I…”

I trailed off. I carry the weight of my loved ones’ lives on mine, I thought, but did not say. And those precious few felt so much heavier than the millions across Sapin, Darv, and Elenoir combined.

“I told you once not to fall back into that pit,” a raspy, decrepit voice said from a nearby hall. “But I can see it in your eyes, boy. That pit has already claimed you. It has sunk its claws deep into your chest and heaved you down.”

Sylvie reacted fast, moving to put herself between me and the flashing eyes of Rinia Darcassan. Her choppy, wheat-blonde hair covered one of her draconic eyes as she glared at the elven seer. I could feel her mana–dark and tinged with soulfire–churning beneath the thin veneer of a teenage girl.

“Rinia Darcassan,” Sylvie snapped, her hair practically bristling as she put herself protectively between me and the scarecrow of an elf, “you must explain yourself. You had to know this would happen. Had to know what would become of… of all those people!”

Rinia simply gave my trembling bond a sad, mournful look. On her shoulders, Avier crooned weakly. ”There are things I can see, Lady Indrath, and things I cannot. I am not all-knowing and all-powerful, child. Yet it is dangerous to influence the future in any way. To risk changing the outcome at all.”

Sylv looked ready to lash out again, tears building at the corners of her eyes. Tears of regret and pain. Tears of sympathy. Tears that I couldn’t shed–not right now.

Instead, I cut her off, placing a simple hand on her shoulders. She turned back, looking up at me with gemstones of glimmering topaz.

I kept my focus on the seer.

“Every time you’ve approached me,” I said, “it’s always been with some motive. First, it was pushing me toward Spellsong, so we would fight even when we didn’t need to.”

In the aftermath of my duel with the Asclepius-blooded Retainer, I’d learned from Tess that she had never been in true danger at all. Toren Daen had been healing her, removing the taint of Agrona from her core and taking away an advantage.

Which meant that Rinia wanted us to fight.

“You appeared in the aftermath of my confrontation with Agrona Vritra, then used an artifact to break the spell he’d placed on Sylvie’s mind,” I listed second, “and you told me only now we had a chance of winning this war.”

I leisurely shoved my hands in my pockets, tilting my head as I observed the elven aether mage. If I really, really, really focused, I thought I could see the dying fires of her lifeforce amidst the four colors of the elements. The embers of lingering aetheric motes that denoted what remained of her lifespan pulsed lowly from her heart.

They were pitifully small.

“Every time you’ve approached me, Rinia,” I said simply, “you’ve approached me with an alternative motive. You’re trying to push this world along a certain path–that much I can see. You claim you can’t tell me what that path is, for fear it might diverge.” I rolled my shoulders, feeling how loose they were. Loose, like Kordri had taught me to be. Strong, like forged steel. “Say your piece, seer.”

Rinia stared at me, her multicolored eyes bearing a profound weariness–one I knew from long ago. And even deeper, I saw the resignation in them, too. “The pit has claimed you again, Arthur Leywin,” she said quietly. “You might feel like you can never crawl out. Once, I told you that you couldn’t let yourself fall into it for that very reason.”

The old elf hunched deeper as she took a moment to catch her breath. Her limbs were thin as matchsticks, her face sunken like melted candle wax. And every word seemed to take a bit more of her withering lifespan.

I waited for her to regain her strength.

She took a deep, rattling inhale as she forced herself to straighten like a bent tree forcing itself against gravity to stand tall once more. “But sometimes, Arthur, the only way out is through.”