A King's Caution (The Eternal War Book 2)

by Brennan C. Adams

  “Thank you for doing exactly as I hoped, Raimie,” Doldimar said. “I’ve tried for ages to bring Lighteater near a tear.”

  The scrape of metal on stone signaled the Dark Lord’s retrieval of the blade. “Ahhhh…” he sighed. “That feels better than I ever anticipated.”

  “You won’t get far, Doldimar,” Raimie shouted. “We’ve had years to prepare, and this time, we have the advantage of knowing what you’re capable-”

  “I know about your preparations,” Doldimar interrupted. “Kylorian has kept me appraised.”

  Raimie went very still, his breathing, even his heartbeat pausing. “Kylorian?” he whispered.

  He’d thought Ren’s adoptive brother was warming to him. He had resigned himself to the ever-present tension between them, but with their forced interactions as King and Minister, Raimie had hoped that, given time, they might become, if not friends, at least pleasant acquaintances.

  “Yes, Kylorian,” Doldimar replied. “That man really doesn’t like you. Took a while to drag his name from him, but I eventually got what I wanted. As I always do.”

  Raimie screamed, thrashing against the stone restraining him, and Doldimar cackled maniacally.

  “I love that noise, Raimie, former King of Auden. I look forward to hearing more of it when I return from destroying your pathetic kingdom.”

  And Raimie was alone. He screamed again, pounding fists against the ground. When he was calm enough to think logically, Raimie searched for his source to either Daevetch or Ele but found neither. He tried to shade meld home, but the shadows wouldn’t accept him without Dim. Shuffling in micrometers, he eventually managed to locate a peephole through which he could peer, and his heart sank.

  He hadn’t wanted to believe what Doldimar had said, but there, outside his coffin, hung the proof. A nauseating slit of black haloed by white wisps. No wonder Bright and Dim failed to respond.

  Another fit of rage and frustration took over, one which slowly morphed to desperation. He clawed at the stone he could reach, pain flaring from his nails, mind screeching from his immobilization, before a forced wave of calm rolled over him.

  “Stop, Raimie,” Nylion whispered. “There is nothing you can do. We are trapped.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Was I simply an extension of your will for all those years? A simple tool with which to complete your chores? Did you ever feel ANYTHING for me?

  I have trouble believing you did. A reasonable person doesn’t manipulate the one she loves, but perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps your ability to see the future has warped you as far from reasonable as it’s possible to be.

  Do you know how difficult it is to be married to you, Drena? Never surprising you, always knowing you could be watching, all these and more I was happy to accept. Because I loved you.

  Meanwhile, you…

  You lied to me, Drena. How could you?

  ‘This is impossible.’

  As Kheled dazedly wandered the streets of the city he’d once called home, this thought was the only one to occupy his mind. The structural damage from Doldimar’s first successful military campaign appeared to have never existed. Beautifully familiar buildings of wood alongside regularly intervaled braziers dotted the hill he climbed, all perfectly intact, all exactly as his carefully constrained memories recalled.

  The ones which now threatened to break free.

  I know how I can repay you instead! Let me host dinner for you. A flash of bewilderment and intrigue.

  Will you need that to help you once we’re alone tonight? Anticipation and excitement.

  We’re pregnant? Eri, I need to breathe! The tinkle of laughter accompanied by joy.

  Uncle Eri, help! Despair and helplessness.

  You have to go to him. Erianger, he needs you. Gratitude to her and anxiety for what comes next.

  I'm so sorry. I should have been here. You were... doing what was needed. A hole in his heart and DEVASTATION.

  Kheled struggled to bury the memories, the sharp spike of gushing pain, beneath the weight of his thousand past lives. With a gasp, he clung to a brazier’s pole to keep from sagging. Once control reasserted itself, he continued down the street, feet unconsciously traversing a path trodden many times before.

  Maybe it was time to face those memories instead of running from them. Time to sort the grim from the ecstatic, time to confront the trembling mess the ghastly ones made of him. But not here, not now. Not in this well-known city coated by a thin film of Ele. Not while he was surrounded by fidgeting, muttering, twitching Kiraak.

  His control of his invisibility bubble hadn’t dropped with the past’s violent attack on his mind, thank Alouin, and the black-veined men and women continued to aimlessly amble or lounge nearby, undisturbed by the cessation of his quiet, hitching sobs.

  Swallowing hard, Eria- Kheled tried to get his bearings once more. He’d only set foot in the city a few moments before, his ingress delayed a day by Ele’s reluctance to come at his call. He’d entered through the east gate which made this… the slums. Or the laborer’s district as the more well-off had liked to call it. The place from which he’d come. He hurried down the street, pushing aside fleeting images of neighbors lifting their hands in greeting.

  Soon, not soon enough, Kheled blew into the merchant’s district. Glass and obsidian shops replaced wood homes, and the street widened into a large square occupied by a single, massive oak tree. The pathway narrowed on the marketplace’s opposite side. It would continue to enlarge and constrict, to breathe, until it smacked into the line which divided the merchant’s district from the district of the divine. There, it would die, once more to become a smooth, inanimate path.

  Kheled’s destination didn’t lie that way. His feet took him to the side, along an artery which funneled the people, the city’s lifeblood, into its lungs. He encountered very little pressure while striding from the city’s heart. His old hometown was long dead, and parasites infested its corpse. The further from the marketplace he traveled, the fewer of the parasitizing Kiraak clogged the streets until Kheled realized he hadn’t seen one for at least a mile.

  Unease bubbled in his gut as his feet slowed. He halted before a two-story cottage marked with a modest supply of resin coated, obsidian trim. One-part stone and one-part plaster composed the walls. Home. A shaking hand reached for the door, and he gently pushed it open. Dark shadows greeted him from within.

  Checking that no Kiraak had silently snuck up on him, Kheled dropped his bubble of invisibility, pulling Ele through his source to make a torch of his hand. Taking a deep breath, he plunged inside.

  Close the door behind you, Eri. You’re letting the cold inside.

  Numbly shutting the door, Kheled glanced around the empty living room. It was exactly as Doldimar had described, exactly as he remembered from that last, awful day. The paintings on the wall, the baby cap with stitches looped around knitting needles. Yellow, the color of happiness.

  Sharply sucking in a breath, Kheled nearly ran to the back door. The fire which had eventually consumed he and Lirilith’s cozy garden had left no mark of its passage. Trees and flower bushes flourished and blossomed in the same spots where they’d been planted long ago-Look, Eri, this dress is ruined! I’ll never get the dirt out!-and an assortment of pots which should have been shattered precariously balanced by the door. Only three new plants invaded the scene of an undisturbed, happy past: an azalea bush, an apple tree, and rarest of them all, an Eselan crafted iceflower.

  Kheled approached the apple tree first, distinctly ignoring the other two. Resting his palm against its trunk, he opened his mouth before shaking his head.

  “I’m sorry, Rafe,” was all he eventually managed to say.

  The hand slipped away, and Kheled trudged to the other two.

  “Hey, girls,” he murmured when he stood between them. “Sorry I’ve taken so long to visit. Arivor’s kept me busy with trying to fix my mistake, with-”

  He choked on the lie. Gracefully, he folded to the gr
ound before he could lose his balance.

  “I’m a coward,” he told them. “I was afraid of what a visit would do to me. My solitude is bad enough without a reminder of what I once had. I miss you two so much.”

  He trailed his hand through the azalea’s leaves before crawling to the iceflower.

  “I’ve made a friend, Lirilith,” he said. “I think you’d like him. His compassion and disregard of society’s rules remind me of you. He’s helping me heal.”

  Kheled closed his eyes, enjoying the pretense that his wife was nearby and watching.

  “I finally did as you asked, Lirilith. Me and Arivor… No enmity lies between us. My argument rests with Doldimar, the bastard who replaces my friend every cycle, but we shouldn’t discuss him. I won’t desecrate this place with a hint of his presence.”

  But he’d nothing else to say to her. Leaning over, he cupped the iceflower’s chill petals, breathing in its mildly sweet scent, before standing.

  “The next visit won’t be a thousand years from now, I promise,” he told all three of them.

  Tucking his chin to his chest, he stormed to the shed in the garden’s corner, his old laboratory. Doldimar was somewhere in the city, but it was vast. Searching it in its entirety would take a few days, and he required somewhere to rest his head for the night, an enclosed place the Kiraak would be unlikely to disturb. He couldn’t stay in the house, too many triggers which might spill memories over, but the lab, here was a place of refuge absent that particular danger.

  Even before going inside, however, Kheled knew something about the shed was off. As he approached, a sick feeling churned his stomach, making him physically ill, but he dismissed it as a result of the unpleasant task of speaking with the dead. He'd forced himself to confront his girls, the source of the hole in his heart. He didn’t stab open, festering wounds. He ignored them until they rotted from the inside, requiring excision. When he went against his natural inclinations, especially where Ele was concerned, his body naturally produced nausea and aching in reaction to stress. He assumed the same held true for the anguish he’d recently undertaken.

  When he closed the door behind him, wearily leaned his forehead against it, and opened his eyes, however, he knew he’d been wrong. Woodenly, he faced the source of the wispy light which illuminated the shed’s interior, and the tear's draw instantly captured him. The attraction was a million times stronger than when Raimie had closed Da’kul’s reality rip or when he’d shown his friend the Accession Tear. Then, he’d been complete, but for years now, Kheled had been partially separated from Ele, and the energy which composed his life force sang to him from the break in reality scant few feet away.

  He took a hesitant step forward, hand rising to reach for it. Maybe if he touched the black slit as Raimie had, Ele would rush to fill the empty, gaping chasm which rent him into a thousand scattered bits.

  “Kheled,” someone said, and he stopped.

  His hand drifted to his side.

  “It’s good to see you, son.”

  The world hushed, and numbness spread from his head down his limbs to the tips of his fingers and toes. The thought which had become a wheel, rolling over and over in his mind, was finally given voice.

  “This isn’t possible,” Kheled whispered. “I saw you die.”

  “But you didn’t. Not really. You fled before the Kiraak attacked.”

  “One of you against six of them? Those are impossible odds,” Kheled said, the whine of a beg crowding his voice’s fringes. “You told me to run!”

  “Face me, Khel.”

  It was the last thing he wanted to do. He didn’t want to see the ghost of his recent past brought to life in the vestige of his long-abandoned home, didn’t want to observe what had become of the man he’d called father. Not in this city. Not in the place Kheled knew to be the enemy's headquarters.

  But his father’s voice made the request. The man who’d disregarded racial prejudices, fallen in love with his mother, accepted him as son. A man who’d willingly became a stop gap for the hole his birth father had created with his death. The man who’d discovered what he was before his mother, despite his long-practiced efforts to hide it. Who’d watched Kheled escape death’s clutches after a horrible hunting accident. Who’d never once said a word about something most would view as a miracle or a curse. (It was a curse.) The one who’d insisted on defending Kheled from Kiraak despite the knowledge that his son would easily survive whatever the monsters threw at him. How could Kheled refuse him?

  So, he turned until he saw feet and reluctantly raised his eyes. His father’s black orbs steadily met his.

  “An Enforcer?!” came Kheled’s strained whisper. The question would have been hardly audible in a city’s noise but now boomed in the stillness. “He made you an Enforcer?!”

  Flinching, his father crossed his arms. “What did you expect to see, Khel? Doldimar’s owned me for years.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  For not staying to fight with you. For returning too late. For not searching longer for your corpse. For the urge, deep inside me, to rip you apart, make it as if you’ve never been.

  His father’s arms squeezed around his chest, and he looked away. “How’s your sister?” he asked over the top of Kheled’s head.

  “Good. Happy,” Kheled grunted, hands balling into fists at his side. “With child.”

  Surprise flickered across his father’s face. “I’m to be a grandfather?” he whispered, face crinkling. Then, his eyes returned to Kheled’s, and he winced. “Gods, it must ache to resist killing me. Your control has always been admirable, son,” he said, “but in this case, you should have succumbed to your needs as soon as they made themselves known.”

  Aghh, Kheled needed to rid the world of the filth before him! His fingernails carved crimson crescents into his palms, and his arms shook. The filth, however, was his father, and he wouldn’t be the one to end the man. Not when Raimie might cure him.

  “Why is… that?” Kheled huffed through clenched teeth.

  His father sadly smiled at him, but a hint of something else glittered in the black of his eyes.

  “Because, son,” he explained, “I’m the distraction.”

  A foreign, cold sharpness stabbed through Kheled’s back, plunging deeper, deeper, until it reached his heart and twisted. And pain, such staggering pain! His chest was fire, a giant fist squeezing his body’s engine, and he couldn’t breathe. He gasped and coughed and hacked, but nothing relieved the pressure in the space where his heart had been, the vacuum crushing his sternum to his spine.

  Someone else’s limb snuck under his arms and around his chest, taking his weight as his legs gave out.

  “Hey, E. Glad you could make it,” came the whisper.

  The supporting arm lowered him to his knees, to his side, head lolling as all energy was diverted to maintaining the spark of life in his irreparably damaged vessel.

  “Nice bit of acting,” someone rumbled.

  “Thank you, Your Greatness,” his father replied.

  It didn’t make sense! Pain, his old friend, had come to greet him, and he was dying again, but this time was so. much. worse. A ripping, searing spark located not in his chest, not where his heart had been, but in the threads of Ele which kept him rooted to this world. The absolute, mind-consuming, screeching AGONY!

  His back arched, and a shriek lodged in his mouth, on the verge of unleashing but unable to go further with his muscles taughtened to stone.

  “Hurts, doesn’t it?” said the man who’d stabbed him.

  Kheled fought through fog to identify the voice, and when he did, shock numbed him. How hadn’t he felt…? Dread broke through the gradually ebbing clench in his chest and the steadily spreading fire which consumed his life force.

  “Dol… di… mar,” he managed to gasp.

  “Oh, good. I wasn’t sure you’d realize before you died,” his enemy (friend) happily chirped. “Isn’t this exciting? I’ve never won before, E!”

  Oh,
gods, the world… the world without Ele…

  Doldimar chuckled at the desperate whine which keened from him, a snicker joined by his father.

  His father… He was… dying, and his father stood there and… laughed.

  “Why” was the world flashing in and out? What was the darkness which tugged on him? He’d died so many times before, but this… nothingness was new, different, and it terrified him. He fought to cling to the world of light and life, pushing against the nothingness with what remained him. Which wasn’t much.

  “Why what?” Doldimar asked.

  What. He’d meant to ask something before the nothingness had come calling, but his new struggle had driven it from his mind. What was it?

  “He wants to know why me,” his father supplied the question and the answer.

  “Oh!” Doldimar exclaimed, hands clapping. “This is the best part, E! Let me introduce you. Meet Coleath, aspect Deception.”

  Ah, that was it. Why was his father standing, laughing, by Doldimar’s side while his son died? Painfully. Slowly. Had Daevetch… already ensnared….

  The pressure where his heart had once beat stilled. The only source of continued pain was the flare which consumed Ele, starving as its fuel burned to smoke.

  And the nothingness nipping at his heels! He took another shuddering breath, hoping air, blessed, clean air, would drive it away, but it only advanced more quickly. It stole first his past lives, then his origins, and his current life until only the idea of Kheled stood and fought.

  Fought to keep Ele in the world. Fought for forgotten friends and family. Fought simply to be difficult.

  “What’s taking so long?” someone he’d hated (loved) whined.

  “Without the heart, the body can last some few minutes before expiring,” said someone he’d… he’d… “Don’t worry. It’ll be over soon.”

  “I want it over now!”

  A blunt object crushed his skull, and the nothingness dragged the screaming remnant of Kheled under.