If she’d get the chance to avenge her fallen husband.
For now, though, she would learn what Garo wanted her to know. Maybe, just maybe, she’d find a reason to live past the death of the emperor.
***
The two magi reached the courtyard. Tetra could not believe that the empire still had not moved the corpse of Indica from its resting spot. The aroma smelled as if someone had split open the guts of Indica and added burning hair to the mix, although the citizens walked past it without covering their noses or avoiding it. Two months of the stench had probably made them immune to it.
In a weird way, the sight actually made Tetra feel hopeful. She suspected if Artemia had taken charge of the empire, she would have cleaned up the corpse immediately. Artemia valued order and having things her way too much for her to fall prey to laziness or grotesque displays of false power.
Still, if the death of the emperor had happened this morning, not enough time had passed for the remains of the empire to clean up Indica. Until Tetra went into the imperial palace and saw Rufus Syrast, she could not assume anything.
Instead, she tried to move past the corpse without covering her nose to avoid suspicion. She nearly gagged, and her stomach roiled at the stench. But she made it past the cracked steps and into the foyer of the library without drawing attention. Yeva coughed once, but effectively passed it off as a general cough.
She glanced to the ceiling. The mural of the emperor and Bahamut drove her mad no matter how much she saw it, and seeing it with her husband gone only infuriated her. She mumbled under her breath some swears that grew in volume.
“Hey,” Yeva said. “Remember why we’re here.”
Tetra shook out of herself. She’d stared at that ugly painting for far too long, likely drawing a few eyes. She walked quickly with Yeva to the back, hopeful to elude the eyes of those inside. Fortunately, the emperor never pressed literacy and education—not surprising for a man as incompetent and delusional as himself—and thus, most of the citizens did not come to the library outside of schooling.
In fact, after shifting through many of the stacks necessary to reach the far back, Tetra did not come across a single other person. Nothing else brought such relief as that fact.
When she made her way to the back, a new smell came. She had forgotten the smell in her journey to Dabira and back, but now that she had encountered it once more, it brought back a vicious flood of memories. They all reminded her of why she’d left Caia in the first place.
The smell of burnt oil and burnt ashes filled her nostrils. After all, just below, the basement contained the former home of the Shadows of the Empire. Perhaps they had not hidden as well as they thought they had. It spoke volumes about the emperor’s stupidity that it had taken him so long to find them—in fact, only after seeing them escape to the very basement—that he and his soldiers found them.
She gave a brief thought to returning to the basement, but she knew nothing good would come of that. She’d remember, instead, everyone who perished, including Garo. She wouldn’t find anything of value, not the way flames and oil torched the place. She’d just see space, and she could see that in her mind.
But the awful fumes brought one benefit. If she and Yeva could tolerate them, no one else would likely come back here. It made sense that no one else was in the area. Tetra suspected the stench had made its way deeper into the library earlier. Perhaps it had subsided, but the foulness of it had not in the minds of the library visitors.
She found the secret bookshelf by removing the shelf of dusty books and immediately looked for Garo’s journals. She recognized them by their blank, gray covers, easily confused for forgotten books that no one had bothered to clear out. She gave a book about the history of Hydor—not the adulterated version—to Yeva to occupy her, and sat down with the first journal she could find. Yeva asked to read one of the journals, but Tetra would only let her after she had read them. She was his wife, and she deserved to read his thoughts first.
Tetra flipped the page and felt a tinge of emotion when she saw Garo’s handwriting. At least a month had passed since she last saw his scribbling. And if this got lost, she would never see it again.
Not that it matters. I am not much longer for this world. I have but one task, and then I will let fate take me.
She took a deep breath, reminded herself to focus on the words and their implications, not the author of those words, and dived in.
“What I have discovered through my meditations confuses even me to this day,” it began. “Half the time, I wonder if I have truly seen the visions of Chrystos or if my mind, perhaps hoping to see it, creates these images in my head. I know that this makes me a doubter, but these are things that no one has ever spoken of before outside of the occasional fable or myth. Thus, when your mind connects to our god and presents that myth as true, one can justify a small, healthy amount of skepticism.
I think I will wait to share these thoughts. Tetra—or as she now calls herself, Kara—has gone through so much, and my fellow magi have more relevant concerns when it comes to surviving than they do understanding our faith.”
Tetra sucked in a deep breath. She hadn’t read anything of importance of Garo’s from as recently written as the last century. She assumed that whatever she read would replace any pre-existing knowledge.
“Faith can carry us, but one need only have enough understanding of faith before placing their time in action. This level of faith and belief goes far beyond that. I hope that what I write here will get read and passed along someday. Even if it is false, it will allow future generations of the magi to have a starting point for conversations about their faith.”
Tetra turned the page. The slight pause brought a sting of emotion back, but she pushed it back as she read.
“Today, I went to the roof of the library in Caia to meditate. It is a strange feeling being in the capitol city of the empire, but perhaps it does me good. Perhaps it forces me to focus that much more clearly. I sought to understand the relationship between Chrystos, Iblis, and mankind. What Chrystos showed me—or, again, perhaps what I imagined and considered truth—left me realizing that no man can ever possibly hope to understand the truth.
But I will do my best here, if for no other reason than to give me something to think about—and, I dare say, a legitimate excuse to stay alive. For a man who pushes past his natural time of death had better have a compelling reason for defying the gods.
Chrystos and Iblis have existed long before mankind ever walked this world. Before man ever called Hydor Hydor, before the magi, before the kingdom of the south existed, before the empire in Mathos existed, before we existed, Chrystos and Iblis have fought. It would be easy for me to consider this a black and white battle of good and evil. Chrystos, in his revelations to me, did not explain what had happened. He merely gave me visions of what transpired and has left it up to me to interpret. The physical manifestation of Chrystos has not changed. Neither has Iblis, though I seem to forget it every time, perhaps because of the fear he strikes within me.
Instead, I must acknowledge that there seems to be something between them that goes beyond the good in Chrystos and the evil in Iblis. In fact, had I not known any better, I would even call them brothers. Of course, if one calls them brothers, the question gets raised—who is their father? Or their mother? I cannot say. Perhaps, as gods, they do not have parents. Perhaps the concept of parents does not exist in the spiritual realm. Regardless, this is a question that stretches my intellectual capabilities. Perhaps someone smarter and wiser will come along.
Perhaps most surprising, however, was Chrystos demonstrating that he is not a pure god. He is not pure good. He has ravaged the land of Hydor at times to strike back at his brother. Although there is little doubt that in the duality of good and evil, he controls the souls of those who did good and fought for their brothers and sisters, he also has a bit of Iblis in him. Likewise, it seems, Iblis has some good in him, though whether or not he is redeemable and can be r
eached is a question that also goes beyond my academic understanding. It makes me wonder, having realized this, if pure goodness or pure evil is possible. I would think that pure goodness is impossible, given that we must strive for it, but it seems frighteningly easy to act with purely evil intentions.
In any case, it would seem that this battle between the gods stretches back an eternity, perhaps beyond what I can comprehend with my understanding of time, and I see little that suggests it will end any time soon.”
Tetra, seeing a little blank space beneath that entry, leaned back. She’d knew the stories of Chrystos and Iblis, but much as her husband had talked of emphasizing actions for survival over a study in faith, she had spent the last few decades fighting the empire for a place in the world. She didn’t have time for faith. For the most part, if she went to the afterlife, she would accept whatever Chrystos judged for her.
Garo had always taken the opposite approach. It came as little surprise to Tetra that he had written these meditations within the past century.
She looked over at Yeva, engrossed in her story. Would she ever have time to study her faith? Would she have the freedom and peace to look into her soul and find Chrystos?
It didn’t matter. If not the empire, then Artemia would present a major problem. A new battle would find its way into her life.
She flipped the page and found the next entry.
“Today, I sneaked out of Caia for some peace and quiet. While Tetra—I know she goes by Kara, but I doubt I will ever see her under such a name—has made strides in growing our group, I have sought to acquire knowledge as best as I can. I cannot say enough about her progress with the Shadows of the Empire. I have come away mightily impressed with the efforts of the magi, and it gives me great joy that we will have refuge and safety for our kind with the group.”
Oh, how that stung to read that now. The passage of time, it seemed, swept away even the most certain of promises. It did so regardless of the purity of the soul of the man or woman who delivered on that promised outcome. Even though Garo had praised her in those lines, Tetra could not have read more discouraging words.
“What I have learned today has fundamentally altered my understanding of the legendary dragons, and it has made me grateful, of all things, that I did not defeat Bahamut when I faced off against it.”
Now this truly had Tetra’s attention. She’d never heard Garo speak about this before. What had changed? And why had he not mentioned this before when they had set out to defeat Indica?
“In my meditations, I came to understand Iblis a little bit better. Like a younger brother who does more work but produces less results, he has always sought greater control over the land we call Hydor, but the power of Chrystos seems so much greater that it takes far less effort for Chrystos to maintain control than it does Iblis. Given Iblis’ tendency toward anger and rage—not surprising, perhaps given his status as god of the darkness—he sought a way to guarantee control of the land. So he set out to create the perfect being. He sought to create a weapon that could defeat anything on Hydor, fight under any circumstances, and have power to call in reinforcements if necessary.
He called this weapon Ragnor.”
It sent a chill down Tetra’s spine. It then, of all things, made her snort, the beginning stages of full-blown laughter. Artemia had defeated a monster created by a god? Seriously?
The thought would’ve sent Tetra into fits of laughter if not for their location and desire to remain a secret.
But then she remembered the red crystal around Artemia’s neck. She could not have faked such a thing. Those kinds of crystals did not grow in Hydor. Even she had not believed the dragons would have them until she saw it in the battle against Indica.
She now almost didn’t want to kill Artemia so that she could get some answers. Something seemed too amiss to make sense, but she didn’t even know which part made the least sense.
“For many months, Iblis worked in secret, using his powers to prevent Chrystos from seeing what he worked on. When it came time, using his gateway to Hydor from the far south, he unleashed Ragnor. The great beast, as massive as a mountain and embedded with the ability to speak to the creatures in their own language, created terror immediately. All creatures, even other dragons, feared it. Humanity, which had just come into existence, worshiped it as a god—the dragon god.
The balance of power shifted to Iblis. He had control of Hydor. Now he wanted control over everything. Chrystos, however, saw this, and he sought to overwhelm what Iblis had created. So he produced two legendary dragons. Those, as even I could have guessed without seeing them, were Bahamut and Indica.”
Tetra shivered. She and her kind had killed a creation of Chrystos. What would that mean for their souls? What would that mean for the magi as a whole? She still didn’t have an answer to why Garo had not stopped their attack on Indica. The best she could come up with was that slaughtering Indica would lead to long-term peace for the magi with the empire. A slight imbalance in the spiritual realm would get counterbalanced by positive work in Hydor.
She shook her head. Her deceased husband had many positive traits, but his blind optimism was not one of them. She kept reading. She became nervous that she would not like the answers to her questions.
“Bahamut was set to rule the skies, while Indica became the de facto deity of the sea. While Indica never patrolled the seas, its presence contained monsters that Iblis had planned to create. Bahamut, meanwhile, fought Ragnor in a great battle that lasted days. It did not surprise me that this battle would feel so epic, given that it was the physical manifestation of two gods clashing from the spiritual realm.
While Ragnor had greater physical tools, Bahamut had a tremendous amount of magic from within. It could use magic to enhance its physical attributes, and it had elemental power that it could use in a nearly unlimited fashion. Ragnor sought to use its summoning abilities to create monsters to help it fight, but Bahamut’s power eventually got the better of Ragnor.
In victory, Bahamut used its magic to freeze Ragnor back into the depths of the south, on the border of the spiritual realm. When it achieved its victory, it moved to the north where I would eventually encounter it.
If the story ended here, then my actions would have made for an interesting footnote. But the story does not end here, because the dragons do not just oppose each other. They hold each other in check. They hold the forces of evil and good in balance. Eliminating one disrupts that balance and can create chaos. And there is only one force in Hydor that can disrupt that balance—the magi and humanity.
The problem—and, it should be noted, the necessary power—of humanity comes not in their individual ranks. Even the most powerful of humans, a magi with the greatest understanding of magic in the world, cannot disrupt the balance by themselves. Perhaps I feel I came close to defeating Bahamut, pushed by my love of my dear Tetra, but this understanding has instead led me to believe that either Bahamut had come moments away from defeating me, or that Chrystos, when he intervened, did not give me power to kill Bahamut, but push it away such that I would not risk my life.
It is a strange moment when you realize that you never stood a chance against a physical manifestation of a god.
However, physical manifestations can be broken, and this brings me back to the actual problem at hand. Humanity displays the remarkable ability to organize itself into large groups capable of mass damage. At times, this leads to division and ugly fights, such as the one between magi and the Syrast Empire. But when humanity combines forces, if the force is powerful enough—which is possible—then it may yet disrupt the balance.
Of the three dragons, I suspect Indica would most easily fall. Chrystos added it as a sort of protection against Bahamut’s defeat, but Indica only played a minor role in the defeat of Ragnor. But even Indica would lay waste to most forces of humanity. It would take a high concentration of magic, intelligence, and luck to defeat these beasts. I know Bahamut can be defeated only because it is a living being wh
ich suffers from pain and physical damage, but whether or not any human will come along remains to be seen.
However, one thing that has interested me is that in addition to embodying Bahamut as the physical check upon evil in this world, it appears that Chrystos imbues a soul every few generations in his own image, granting them power that no one else may match. I strongly suspect that I have received such power, and I cannot express my gratitude and humility enough for being entrusted with this power.
But, it also should be noted that one cannot receive this power until the last person made in the image of Chrystos dies. I have had this power for as long as I can remember—though I have had to work to perfect it—so I suspect that the person before me with this god-like power perished a generation before my birth. But this worries me. I have already lived for over two hundred years. If I continue to live, I may prevent the next person from receiving this power. In fact, I may have done so already.”
Tetra didn’t have to think at all to know who that next person would be. Garo had only blocked her temporarily. Tetra had tried to pull the young girl into the Shadows multiple times, and only the morality of her own soul had pulled her back to Hydor when Indica attacked.
“Understand, having this power does not make me like Chrystos as a person. I suffer from the same lapses in judgment and failure as anyone. If a person gained this power and decided to fight as Iblis would, I shudder to think of what would happen.”
A terrifying thought came to Tetra—if Chrystos had made a man in his image, who was to say Iblis hadn’t done the same? What if Artemia came from Iblis?
Suddenly, Tetra wanted to know a whole lot more about the background of Artemia. The fuzzier the details, the more suspicious she would feel.
“That is all that I saw for today. I shall return for more. I know now that my actions may have gotten my Tetra back, but had I done what the emperor had actually hoped I would accomplish, it would have led to the rise of Ragnor with no legitimate check in place. I am grateful that I have her back and I did not condemn the world.”
Legends of the War (War of the Magi Book 3) Page 10