Fallen Ambitions

by Vann, Eric J.

  Aziel could hear him banging from within, roaring in indignation as he tried to break free. He gave the Ogre’i warrior no more of his attention; Aziel could simply crush him at any time if he became a problem. Although Jar had killed many Grauda, he was not his target. Aziel’s eyes leveled on the vine-wrapped Neruul.

  “I did what I had to,” Neruul struggled to say, his eyes shut as a thin vine slowly wrapped around his head. Aziel closed the distance between them.

  “What you had to?” he repeated, failing to keep his anger in check. “How long? How long after the war was over was I kept in there? Why did you not let me out sooner?”

  Neruul’s blue face began to turn purple, and Aziel realized that the old Ogre’i was suffocating. The vines wrapped around his chest and neck were squeezing tighter in response to Aziel’s rage. With a swipe of his hand, the vines released Neruul, and he crumpled heavily to the ground.

  “I understand your anger,” Neruul managed to cough out, “but please, allow me to explain.”

  “Then speak,” Aziel spat, the vines looming and coiling over the old Ogre’i.

  Neruul pushed himself back against the wall. “I did what I did to save your life. Even if it might feel like a betrayal to you, it is the only reason you still draw breath.”

  “The war ended long ag—”

  “The war never ended. Kadora is still under the full control of the Seed, and we still lack a Sovereign to balance the scales.” Neruul rested the back of his head against the stone, his breathing slowly returning to normal. “I knew what the ritual would do, and like any other ritual of its scale, it bore a heavy price. More than just the lives of the Grauda and my fellow Ogre’i. I hoped that by sacrificing the power of the Herald within me, it would be enough.” Neruul shook his head. “It needed far more.”

  “So you decided I should pay the price, and used my memories to pay it. What is the point of keeping me alive if the price is who I am?” Aziel cried, barely able to hold back from attacking.

  The old Ogre’i sighed deeply. “I did pay the price with your memories, a sacrifice needed to maintain the integrity of the shell protecting you. But I also linked those memories to the races who sacrificed their lives to make it all possible. You have now met both the Ogre’i and the Grauda, Young Master. Your memories are your own again.”

  “Don’t act like this all happened as you planned,” Aziel snarled. “The Grauda were on the brink of extinction when my Champion stumbled upon them, and it was Celia who released me from the prison you created. I would still be trapped there if not for her.”

  Neruul grabbed a small rock outcropping with his only hand and tried to pull himself up. “You are right. I should have paid more attention to the Grauda’s plight,” he said as he struggled his way back to his seat atop the pile of rubble. “Even so, I intended to keep you there for a while longer. I did not anticipate a Siphon being able to find its way through as it did. That was my failing…”

  “Failing? Even now, you call me being free a failing?” Aziel asked in wide-eyed amazement. “Have you no shame for what you did to me? I called you uncle, I trusted you! My mother trusted you!”

  Neruul grimaced, but did not back down. “Do not misunderstand, Young Master, none of what I did was out of malice or fun. I did what I thought was right, both for you and for this realm. Without proper guidance, I knew it would take you a long time to grow into your power.”

  “Don’t try to excuse your behavior—nothing is worth such a heavy price,” Aziel interrupted. “I am free now, and I am fine. I did not need to be held for any longer.”

  “Fine?” Neruul said, his own rage making an appearance. “Look at you! A chosen Sovereign playing an Ascended. In your sleep and behind the protective shell you are so slighted by, you created eight Capital Crystals from the mana your body let out naturally. And now? Your vessel does not compete with your own creations. The moment you returned to Kadora unprepared, the Seed sank its hooks into you, limiting your power, your potential. If you were to bear your crown, your destiny, its power would break you.”

  Several Grauda males as well as the female had entered the mess hall now, alerted by the raised voices. They held back, watching, but Aziel could see in their posture and the determination in their eyes that they would fight if they thought he was in any danger.

  “Is she dead?” Aziel asked. The question left him without any premeditation, and a wave of regret washed over him almost as soon as he had spoken it.

  Neruul looked briefly confused before understanding dawned upon him. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I spent the entirety of the war with a small group of Grauda and my own kin, trying to find a suitable location to place your shell. It is their ancestors who survive today in the Wilds. Your mother rallied her allies to fight, a task she undertook in a manner that surpassed my greatest and wildest expectations.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Helena may not have defeated the Seed’s agents completely, but she made them pay a heavy price. Heavy enough they have not returned to the surface since then. The fact that I am able walk in the open is a tribute to how much she has weakened the Seed, a state it does not appear to have recovered from yet.”

  “I saw her…” Aziel muttered, the burning rage within him beginning to calm as a wave of sadness smothered it. “When I went down into the Underdark, I saw a vision of her fighting the Archivist.”

  “You went into the Abyssal Paths?” Neruul gasped. “A vision? Did the Nexus speak to you? What did it say?”

  “Its voice almost killed me,” Aziel replied, remembering the searing pain it had inflicted. He then proceeded to recount the full encounter.

  Neruul stared at him, his mouth agape. “Then we must obey! Build the faction and expand your follower base.”

  “And these loyal servants it spoke of?” Aziel asked.

  “It must have been referring to the Hands,” Neruul said, his gaze drifting as he thought. “Although the Sovereign commanded great power, they never left their home realms. The Sovereign’s Hands were the one to enact their will.”

  “So where are they now?”

  Neruul remain quiet, his gaze still elsewhere.

  “Neruul? Where are they?”

  “I don’t know how to answer your question—they are not people. The Sovereign’s Hands are beings of immense power, trapped within special sentient items who bestow such powers to their hosts. Kadora has two of them: a pendant named Erethis, and an orb called Reaper.”

  Their eyes met again, and Aziel could see a terror creep into Neruul. “Young Master… Aziel,” he said in a lower tone, “I would not presume to know the entirety of the Nexus’s plans, I don’t see all that it does, but… the Sovereign’s Hands are dangerous. They were tasked with bringing whole realms under the Sovereign’s control, violently so. When their hosts tap into the power those items provide them, they can become weapons of mass destruction and suffering. They have been in hibernation for as long as I can remember. If they are indeed awakened…”

  Aziel lowered his hand, and the vines dissolved into mist once more. Awakened or not, Aziel wanted nothing to do with them. If they were indeed as dangerous as Neruul believed, then perhaps they were the true threat that needed to be dealt with.

  A thump from behind them diverted his attention to the rocky tomb that still held Jar. Sighing, he willed it to release its captive. Jar literally fell out of it and rolled to the floor before scrambling heavily to his feet. His angry gaze locked onto Aziel, then flicked to Neruul, who shook his head.

  “You never told me what a Sovereign actually is,” Aziel said thoughtfully, ignoring the Ogre’i’s glare. “You always avoided that question during your lessons.”

  “Only you can answer that question,” Neruul replied with a small smile. “You are the only one who could shape what the Sovereign is or will become. A savior, a tyrant, an observer… Once you bear the Nexus Crown, you will be all that it is. It is your destiny to decide how to proceed from there.”<
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  “Destiny… never have I despised a word so much,” Aziel said. “Everything that happened was because of this destiny you seek for me. I never had a say in it, nor do I feel the need to pursue it.”

  Neruul coughed, rubbing his neck where Aziel’s vines had wrapped around it. “There is no need for falsehoods, Young Master. Though I sacrificed all of my power to that ritual, I am still the Nexus’s Herald, and I know much about you. You were conceived by the power of the Nexus. It is its power you use every day, and that same power will want to go back to its source. Whether it is today or a million years from now, it will push you in that direction.”

  Aziel frowned at that. “Its power?” he asked, trying to sort through his memories.

  “Your mana, of course.” Neruul’s smile grew wider as Jar positioned his massive bulk beside him, his club held loosely at his side.

  “Soul mana?” Aziel asked, letting a small stream of it leak through his fingers. “I don’t understand. What does my mana have to do with any of this?”

  “Is that what they are calling it—soul mana?” Neruul replied. “That mana is the foundation of a core’s power; it is the precursor for all that you see. It is due to the circumstances of your birth that you have the ability to manipulate it, a quality rarely—if ever—seen before in anyone not directly connected to a core. Do not underestimate it.”

  Aziel’s eyes narrowed. “I remember you using it, when you powered the ritual.”

  Neruul remained quiet for a few moments, before shrugging. “It was a gift given to me as the Herald, but it is a power I no longer have.”

  Aziel considered that, it must be why Neruul had survived the Siphon of the ritual, while none of the others did. If he had the ability to weave soul mana, then it wasn’t a stretch to expect him to also have Soul Rejuvenation. But as Neruul said, he no longer had this power, his ability to use it was sacrificed to fuel the ritual which imprisoned him for so long.

  Seeing that Neruul was unlikely to go into any detail on this topic, Aziel moved to the next point scratching at his mind. “This Nexus you speak of, what is it exactly?”

  Neruul chewed thoughtfully on his lip before glancing around the room. “Well, it’s everything around you. Kadora is a realm whose core had grown to the point of becoming a Nexus.” Neruul must have noticed Aziel’s unsatisfied expression, because he continued: “Although there is a core in every realm, Kadora is one of the few large and powerful enough to connect to others.”

  Although Aziel understood in part what the old Ogre’i was saying, it did not quite sink in. It was to look at the world from a point of view too foreign to him. But it did remind him of something…

  The domed ceiling, he realized, in the vision of the throne room he had seen in the Underdark. The crystals all connecting to a larger crystal at its center. “How many realms are there?” he asked, his interest piqued.

  Neruul shook his head. “A difficult question to answer. Realms have their beginnings with the formation of a core. It could take centuries for a single realm to form… or, if things align perfectly, seconds. Following some universal truths, that core then begins the long and difficult process of building its realm around itself. It is during this period that most cores perish, as they do not have any way of replenishing themselves. It is only when they reach the point of being able to cultivate life that the mana of their creations sustains them. All cores use the same primordial mana, the one you call soul mana, but they usually only specialize in one or two other mana types. It is for this reason each realm is unique in both its environment and the life which calls it home. There are necrotic realms, nature realms, light-earth realms… and all the other combinations you can think of. Kadora was birthed as a demonic-necrotic realm, the first ever to produce demonic mana, but with time and its absorption of other cores, it now combines all of them. Hence: a Nexus Realm.”

  Aziel nodded his head in understanding, before frowning. “What do you mean by universal truths?”

  Neruul sucked in his lower lip, thinking. “Well, even though realms form independently of each other, they still all share certain truths or follow universal rules. For example, all living things in all realms share the Critter to Ascended rankings. All realms start out by only being able to create Critters, and in time, expand their power to form more complex and powerful creatures.”

  He pointed at Aziel. “Ascended are the last, most powerful and most complex form of life a realm can reach, other than the Sovereign and its Hands. Once there are Ascended, a realm is considered matured—and matured realms are few and far between. The transformation creatures experience during each evolution into a more bipedal form is also universal amongst all the realms.”

  Aziel’s curiosity was exploding, a swarm of questions forming in his mind. But Neruul was not finished speaking.

  “A few of those cores may become powerful enough to form a Path which connects it to a nearby realm, and therefore allow for almost instantaneous travel between them. At that point, the core chooses someone to lead it. That someone is a Sovereign.” He gestured around them. “In Kadora, that someone wears the Nexus Crown. Until the Seed came, it was a battle of control between these Sovereigns, each trying to subjugate and absorb as many realm cores as possible to their own, and therefore expanding their own influence and power.”

  “Sovereigns?” Aziel asked with a lifted brow. “How many Sovereigns are there?”

  Neruul shook his head. “It is impossible for us to know. Any realms under the Seed would have had their Sovereign deposed, as happened in Kadora. But before that, any matured realm would have had its own Sovereign.”

  Aziel simply couldn’t absorb the scale involved. He had thought Kadora was enormous, when in reality it was but a tiny part of something much larger. There was still one massive blind spot in his knowledge, however.

  “The World Seed,” he asked. “How does it fit into all this? If these Sovereigns were so powerful, how did the Seed take control?”

  “There will be time to discuss such things in more detail, Young Master, but for now you should focus on growing your power.”

  Aziel clasped his hand, stopping the flow of soul mana through it. “I am interested in the information you have, Neruul. It is the least you can do to answer my questions when I see fit, in recompense for what you did to me. I don’t trust you, but helping me to understand what it is I am being forced to be a part of is a way to possibly change that.” He glared at Neruul, a deep resentment and anger boiling within him as he remembered his endless years of isolation.

  Jar growled at his words, his grip tightening around his club, ready to attack at a moment’s notice.

  “I understand,” Neruul said quietly, causing Jar to stop growling. “My apologies. I will answer any questions you may have to the best of my ability.”

  Aziel narrowed his eyes as he searched Neruul’s face, searching for any trace of dishonesty or manipulations. He found none. “Good. So: the World Seed.”

  Neruul didn’t begin speaking right away. Instead, he gazed at the ground, then at the ceiling of the hall above them. “The Seed was a rumor at first. It was this far-away thing—no one, not even the Sovereigns, gave it a second thought. They were too busy annihilating each other.” He shook his head. “What fools we were. Unlike everything else, the Seed did not appear to originate from any of the realms we knew of, and it did not use the Paths to travel to and from them—at least, not at the start.”

  “Then how did it travel?” Aziel asked.

  Neruul shrugged. “A mystery really. Some theorized it traveled through the Great Void, but the distances and dangers involved in such a journey… Well, I don’t see how it would have been possible, even with the strange technologies and toys the World Seed makes use of. All I know is that one day, it wasn’t there, and the next, it was in the heavens, looking down upon us. Massive constructs orbiting our world.”

  Aziel remembered the huge fortress-like structures he had seen when floating above Kadora in th
e white room. He was about to ask his next question when a thought struck him: they were discussing the World Seed. They were talking about it openly and nothing was stopping them. All this time, he had been afraid of telling others what had happened in that white room because of a perceived threat of annihilation. And yet, here they were.

  “So what did the Seed actually do? Why is it so terrible?” Aziel asked. The truth was, the more he thought about how the Seed had acted, the less evil it seemed. He remembered how the Archivist and the Overseers had practically argued over how to deal with him when he had been stuck in the white room. There were people directing its actions, which meant the Seed was a tool—and a tool was only as good or bad as the people using it.

  If not for this obsession it had with Aziel, manipulating him for ends he did not know, the Seed in fact seemed quite beneficial. Objectively speaking, its mark bestowed huge benefits upon everyone. Just the ability to use skill points to advance one’s learning was immensely valuable, perhaps enough to justify some of its less palatable tendencies.

  “I will admit,” Neruul said as he leaned back upon the rock he sat on, “while I know quite a bit about the World Seed and how it changed the realms as it saw fit, I know little of how it presents to people, other than what I’ve been told.” He showed Aziel his wrist. “As you see, I am unbound and have never been marked by it.”

  Aziel reached out and held Neruul’s hand, taking a closer look at his wrist. At first, he thought the mark might simply have been difficult to see in the darkness and against the color of his skin.

  But that wasn’t the case. There was no mark.

  “How is this possible?” Aziel asked.

  “The Seed’s mark is spread onto all things before their birth, using the very resources of the mother and child’s bodies to create it, like an organ. If any of the parents are marked, then so too will their offspring be. It is my understanding that directly marking someone is difficult and often deadly. Yet this was the first thing the Seed did when it arrived in Kadora: it abducted a small percentage of every race and put them through a process called “integration.” It would then place them back exactly at the point where it had taken them from—the people around them would not even notice they had been gone. What was particularly insidious was that the mark was invisible at first. Only when the majority of a realm was marked did it finally appear as you see it.”