The Beginning After the End: Book 7: Divergence

by TurtleMe

  I let out a primal roar, raising my sword and driving its sharpened tip straight into Cecilia’s shadowy figure with all of my might, clenching my jaw against the impact, expecting my sword to smash into her ki shield. The recoil never came. Instead I watched as my sword slid deep into Cecilia’s chest.

  I felt her weight falling into me, her hot blood running down my hands and arms. She was pressed to me, the hilt of my sword between us, her thin arms wrapped around me like an embrace.

  Very quiet, her breath ragged and bubbling, she said, “I’m sorry, Grey. This… was the… only way.”

  I let go of my sword and felt the hilt press into my sternum as she sagged against me. “W-what—why?”

  “As long as… I live… Nico will be… imprisoned—used against me.”

  I stumbled back, and Cecilia fell on top of me. To my horror, the blade sunk deeper into her and she let out a pained gasp.

  “No… no, this can’t be…” I sputtered, unable to form the rest of the sentence as I choked back the sobs forming in my throat.

  I held her in my arms until she stopped breathing and fell limp.

  “No! How? What have you done?” Lady Vera screamed from somewhere nearby.

  I turned my head towards the sound of the voice. The dust had started to clear, and I could make out two figures, one male and one female. Both were in military armor, faces covered by cloth masks. However, the male had taken off his goggles, revealing two different colored eyes.

  In any other situation, perhaps I would’ve reacted differently. I had just found one of the men responsible for Headmaster Wilbeck’s death. I had also just heard Lady Vera’s unmistakable voice and was sure that, behind the mask of the female assailant beside him, I would see her face as well.

  Nico had been right, but that didn’t matter to me right now. I had killed a friend. Not only that, I had killed the woman my best friend loved.

  The world seemed silent as I watched the assassin with one brown eye and one green eye try to pull Lady Vera away and escape.

  The referee and the judges frantically made their way towards us while the guards ran around shouting orders and threatening people, trying to control the mayhem.

  And then, near the entrance to the arena, I saw Nico as his expression crumpled in horror and despair.

  241

  Expired Arrangement

  ARTHUR LEYWIN

  Long after the sun had set and night crept in, bringing a bitter chill along with it, I sat mindlessly by the fire. Above me, the stars, so similar to those of my previous world, glimmered like crystal dust across the horizon.

  Virion had eventually fallen back asleep. His body was in a severely weakened state and his mana core had been on the cusp of shattering. Bairon still hadn’t woken up. His injuries from the Scythe were much more severe than I had originally guessed.

  Hours must’ve passed since I had last moved from my seat. After the anger had fizzled out, the plans to save my family and Tess—the plans for revenge and justice—had all faded away, drawn into a thoughtless void.

  So I sat on the ground, running my fingers idly through the soft dirt beneath me, no idea where to go from here. The Alacryans now had control over the castle—and with it, the ability to access the rest of the teleportation gates throughout the entire continent. It didn’t take a genius to guess that they would assault Xyrus City next, then proceed across the continent, slowly destroying the forces of Dicathen. The Lances were scattered, sure to be picked off one at a time. Considering Virion’s current state, we didn’t even have a leader. Once the Lances fell, the people would be defenseless.

  Leaves crunched behind me. Sylvie had come out from the earthen shelter, but one glance was all it took for me to realize that it wasn’t my bond, despite her physical form.

  “Let’s take a walk, shall we?” she said, and her voice was the same, but the cadence and pitch were alien.

  Powerless, out of ideas, and at the edge of hope, there was nothing I could do but follow. For five minutes we walked, accompanied only by the snapping of twigs and the crunch of foliage under our feet. The myriad emotions within me congealed into a single black thought: This is the creature responsible for it all—all the misery, all the deaths. I wished then that I could reach out and pull Agrona from Sylvie’s small form, wrap my hands around his throat, and squeeze…

  “Whew!” Sylvie huffed, taking a seat on a fallen log. “Controlling this body even for simple things like walking is hard work.”

  I fell to my knees before the ruler of Alacrya, the leader of the Vritra Clan.

  Sylvie’s face contorted into an expression of surprise and frustration, then quickly relaxed. “My, what an unexpected turn of events. Has the hero, the once mighty king, admitted defeat?”

  “Agrona, you’ve made your point. Please, let Tessia and my family go.” I wanted to project my confidence, my rage… I wanted to make it a threat, but it came out a plea.

  “Why?”

  I dug my fingers into the dirt. “Because I accept your deal. I’ll remove myself from this war.”

  Agrona chortled, lifting Sylvie’s delicate hand to cover her mouth. Her topaz eyes twinkled in delight. “You think our deal still stands, Grey? You were the only unpredictable variable, the only being on Dicathen that had even the slightest chance of hindering me, but as you said yourself, I’ve made my point. Even you—with all of your inherent gifts and advantages—only amounted to this,” Agrona snarled, suddenly agitated. “The very fact that you haven’t even told your bond that I’m able to possess her body tells me that you were always expecting to lose, right from the very beginning.”

  “Then what… what do you want?” I demanded. “Why did you go through all this trouble to talk again?”

  “Again, asking questions I have no obligation to answer.” Agrona’s expressions on Sylvie’s face were so foreign that I had trouble reading them. Was that a look of concern? Were his brows knit in worry? I couldn’t tell. “I don’t expect to have the pleasure of meeting like this again, so… goodbye.”

  “W-wait, what about my—”

  Sylvie slumped forward, unconscious.

  Screaming, I slammed a mana-clad fist into the ground. The resulting boom crashed through the quiet forest like thunder, and dozens of birds burst into flight from the surrounding trees.

  “A-Arthur?” Sylvie moaned, weary and disoriented. “What’s going on?”

  I let the mental barrier, which I had been honing and fortifying specifically to shield Sylvie from the knowledge of Agrona’s power over her, fall, allowing my bond to read my thoughts and memories unobstructed.

  “Ever since you broke the seal that Sylvia had placed on you, Agrona has been able to take over your consciousness for short periods of time.”

  Sylvie’s expression transitioned quickly from confusion, to fear, to disgust. Her mouth opened, as if to ask me a question, then snapped closed when she had found the answer in my mind.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

  Standing shakily, Sylvie walked slowly over to me. Her thoughts and emotions were hidden from me. Since I was still on my knees, we stood face to face. Her right hand came up and slapped me across the cheek with inhuman force, nearly knocking me backwards. The blow would have broken a normal person’s neck.

  “There. We’re even now.” Sylvie leaned forward, wrapping her arms around my neck and burying her face into my shoulder.

  I gripped my bond back tightly, so afraid to lose her as well. I was grateful when she let me back in, let me feel what she felt, so I could know she didn’t hate me for what I’d done.

  Not only had I lost the battle, I had fallen to my knees before my enemy and begged. Sylvie understood the anger, guilt, sorrow, and humiliation burning me up from the inside, just like all those other poor souls who died in the castle. Yet, the very fact that I could share these feelings with Sylvie, and that she accepted them, was enough for me to move forward.

  When Sylvie and I had eventually returne
d to our camp, we stayed together outside, guarding the shelter that Bairon and Virion were sleeping in. At some point I must’ve fallen asleep as well, because Sylvie had to prod me mentally, telling me to wake up. My eyes snapped open and I jumped up, only to see Virion and Bairon having a heated argument with Sylvie’s small human body interposed between them.

  “We have to go back! Our troops need us, Commander!” Bairon growled, wobbling slightly as he struggled to stay upright.

  “And do what?” Virion snapped. “It’s too late.” The commander leaned against the earthen tent for support. His eyes turned towards me, noticing that I was awake. “Good. Arthur, we should get ready to leave.”

  “Leave? Where?” I asked, confused.

  “Our commander says that the war is lost,” Bairon cut in, his voice dripping with condescension. “It seems as though his injury from fighting the Scythe has rendered him incapable of leading.”

  Virion pierced the Lance with a menacing glare. “The war is lost, Bairon. With the castle in their hands, they have access to all the teleportation gates throughout the entire continent. It’s only a matter of time before they’re able to figure out how to fully control it.”

  “So what did you have in mind?” I asked.

  “Camus, Buhnd, Hester, and I—along with a few other trusted friends—constructed a shelter where we could take refuge if the war went poorly… Though, I don’t think any of us ever expected an outcome like this.”

  The thought of Elder Buhnd sent a sharp wave of remorse through my gut, but I swallowed it. Buhnd had always wanted to retire and rest; maybe where he was now, he would be able to do that.

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  “You can’t be serious,” Bairon interrupted. “You are a Lance. We have a duty to uphold, for the sake of our people. Are we going to abandon them—leave them all to die?”

  “We’re not abandoning anyone!” Virion’s tone took on some of his old authority. “But if we charge blindly back into the battle, and any one of us dies, we would leave no hope for the future!”

  “The future…” Sylvie echoed.

  “Yes! The future. We need to recuperate if we want a chance to take back Dicathen,” Virion said seriously.

  Bairon’s shoulders slumped, and, for the first time, I saw the Lance let his mantle of authority and power fall, and he seemed so fragile and vulnerable. “So… there’s nothing we can do right now to win this war?”

  “We need to stay alive and gather the Lances,” Virion replied, giving Bairon a fatherly, understanding look. “It’s the best chance we’ve got.”

  ‘What do you think we should do?’ Sylvie asked, knowing that my thoughts were still filled with Tessia and my family.

  Steeling myself for the arguments I knew would come, I said, “Sylvie and I will take the two of you to wherever this secret shelter is, but after that we’re going to look for my mom, my sister, and Tess.”

  “Arthur...” Virion’s voice was hollow, pained. His eyes shone with tears, though I was surprised he had any left to shed. I saw in those eyes the fear and despair that threatened to overrun me, but, as it had with Sylvie, sharing these emotions only hardened my resolve.

  I held up my hand, showing Virion the plain silver ring that Vincent had given me. My mother still wore its twin. “This is an artifact connected with a ring that my mother has. I know she’s still alive—I can feel it—and I won’t abandon her to the Vritra.”

  The truth was, my mother could have taken her ring off at any time, or it could have been removed by force. With the constant threat of death, I had started removing my own when I went to battle since my parents had been engaged in their own battles. There were also the Phoenix Wyrm pendants my mother and Ellie both wore, which would protect them from even a killing blow, though it would only work once.

  “I need to do this,” I said, “but I’m not going to disappear. I’ll direct any Dicathians I meet back to the shelter, and I will learn everything I can about what the Alacryans are up to.”

  “I understand,” Virion whispered, closing his eyes.

  Quietly, I got to work, collapsing the earthen shelter and erasing all signs that we had ever stopped here.

  “So, where is this shelter, Commander Virion?” Bairon asked.

  Virion grabbed a stick and proceeded to draw a rough map of Dicathen in the dirt, indicating our position with a circle. “The refuge that we had found is near the southern coast of Darv, just along the Grand Mountains—”

  “Found?” I cut in. “I thought you said you and the elders had built it.”

  “We found a cave system—by all appearances, man-made. We built on top of it and hid it more thoroughly.”

  “Well, how are we going to traverse the near-thousand miles it’ll take to reach this shelter? We can’t fly; it’s too dangerous.” Bairon was staring down at the map, his shoulders drooping again.

  “You’re right, but it’ll be just as risky to try and take a teleportation gate to a city within Darv. We could fly only at night—”

  “How about this,” I cut in again. Borrowing Virion’s stick, I drew a jagged line running through Sapin. “We’re about an hour’s hike away from the Sehz River, which flows all the way down through Darv and into the ocean. We can keep to the river until nightfall, then travel the rest by sky.”

  “There are cities built along the Sehz though,” Sylvie countered. “Won’t we be a bit noticeable traveling on the water?”

  “Who said anything about traveling on the water?”

  “This is fascinating,” Virion marveled, watching the aquatic animals and mana beasts pass by from the top of Sylvie’s back as we surged through the water. I was busy concentrating on the multiple layers of spells I had to continually manage in order to make our underwater journey possible.

  I had to create two pockets of air, one over Sylvie’s back to allow Virion, Bairon, and I to breath and stay dry, and another around Sylvie’s head. While we weren’t submerged deep enough to have to worry about the water pressure, it did mean that keeping the air pockets stable was quite a bit harder.

  To speed our journey, I was using water magic to push us faster, and Sylvie had fashioned a fin made of mana that connected to the end of her tail. It might not have been as fast as flying, but we were making great distance.

  Though Virion seemed to be enjoying this new mode of transportation, the same couldn’t be said of Bairon. The poor Lance was latched so tightly to Sylvie’s back that, even through her tough scales, she complained to me about the pain.

  “How did you even think of such an idea as traveling underwater?” Virion asked, twisting left and right to see everything around us. For a moment, I was able to see the old Virion, the man I had grown up with back when I had first shown up in Elenoir with Tessia.

  “Did you forget that I’m pretty smart?” I teased, avoiding his question.

  After the initial amazement had worn off, we settled into a brooding silence. Aside from the occasional diversion up to the surface so I could refill our air bubbles, there was little to distract us from our own thoughts, and the underwater atmosphere functioned like an isolation chamber, filtering out the noise of the world around us and amplifying our own internal voices.

  The water around us grew dark as soon as the sun started its descent. Once I was confident we could fly unseen, I signaled for Sylvie to take off. There was a peculiar moment where the air bubbles maintained their shape after we left the river, billowing around us in the wind as they shed the last droplets of water that clung to them before I withdrew my mana, letting them disperse with a faint pop.

  Will you be okay flying with them on your back? I asked Sylvie, sliding off of her scales and soaring through the air beside her. Virion and Bairon were still barely able to use mana after their fight against the Scythe and would tire quickly if they had to fly under their own power.

  ‘I’ll manage,’ she replied, beating her powerful wings to accelerate.

  Below us, the shadowy landsc
ape began turning into desert as we crossed over the border into Darv. I took one last look back, trying not to think about the battles going on throughout Sapin and Elenoir, and the chaos our troops were facing as they were suddenly left without their commander.

  242

  Hidden in Sand

  “Here! We have to land here!” Virion suddenly called out as we flew over the vast deserts of Darv.

  “There’s nothing here though!” Bairon argued, his head turning left and right.

  I looked around, shielding my eyes from the sharp gusts of wind, but below us were just a few odd boulders and lots and lots of sand.

  It had been easier to navigate above the clouds, as we could map our relative location using the various peaks of the Grand Mountains as our compass, but now it was impossible to see the range of mountains, or much of anything else, because of the sand-laden winds. It would have been nearly impossible to navigate if not for the pearlescent shrouds of mana I kept around Virion, Bairon, and myself to protect from the wind and sand.

  Sylvie descended, taking Virion and Bairon to the ground, and I followed behind.

  “Flying through that was… tough,” Sylvie muttered after switching to her human form. She wore all black as usual, but her scales had formed into a thick shawl that covered most of her face and body to combat the harsh winds.

  “You did well, Lady Sylvie,” Virion said, peering through the swirling sands. “It’s nearly impossible to fly this far south with the powerful winds here.

  “Perhaps for mana beasts,” Sylvie replied flatly.

  “Ah—Of course. My apologies…” Virion muttered, still scouring the area around us.

  “So where is this refuge of yours?” I asked.

  Virion pointed at a tall column of stone I hadn’t noticed previously. “We have to head over there.”