Vol. 4 Chap. 56 A Fork In A Straight Road

Vol. 4 Chap. 56 A Fork In A Straight Road

The trip to Harban was dull. To his intense horror, he had run out of books. He had been right there in a small city, and didn’t even think of stopping by a local bookstore and picking up some schlocky romances. Second hand books must be cheap as Hell right now. And yet, somehow, he whiffed. Shameful. Just disgraceful.

It was a boring few hours. He tried to spend the time thinking about what he wanted his revolutionary organization to look like, but kept going around in circles. Eventually he gave up, and tried to fall asleep. Usually he was good at that. Not today. Today he got to listen to the endless drumming of the monsoon rains and the not-quite-quiet-enough noises of the other passengers on the bus. Somehow it all managed to keep him from sleeping. No reason for it. Just couldn’t quite pass the gray threshold into oblivion.

I... really don’t want to apologize to Niles. Which is pretty messed up, since I very literally kidnapped him and brainwashed him into my adoring servant.

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Yeah. Yeah I did. And worst of all, even if I knew how to set him free, I’m not going to. At the very least, not before the apocalypse. He’s just too useful where he is, doing what he is. Which makes me a complete piece of trash.

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Very in character. Very on brand. A Prince, not a King.

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A prince that can inspire fear, but not love. Not without using extreme methods.

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Right. Any servant powerful enough to be useful is powerful enough to be dangerous. Broadly defined.

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Because they are only accountable to the King. And it’s in his interests to keep them happy. So as long as it doesn’t threaten his interests too much, he can split off a portion for them. But how do you keep the masses in line?

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I’m certain it’s more complicated than that.

He sighed. The pressure was easing off now. When you got right down to it, he didn’t really believe evil was intentionally added to the universe purely to make humanity suffer. More like... incompetence or some necessary byproduct of a function he didn’t understand. Like an axle generating heat as it spun.

Truth crawled out of the culvert. The bus was trashed. Whatever happened was worse than what he had seen before. He had seen the demon powering a carriage obliterated. He had never seen one of those energy voids crush an intercity bus like a beer can. He tried to figure out what might have happened. Best he could come up with was reinforcing enchantments keeping the bus light and strong suddenly collapsing.

It seems this wasn’t the first time it happened. Everyone piled out in a panic. It wasn’t that odd- why use a load of expensive metals for rigidity when you could use lighter materials and some enchantments. It all made complete sense... until the magic vanished. Then everything contracted in on itself. You could imagine what would happen if people had stayed in the bus.

The grassy verge of the road had mushrooms rising out of the ground, swelling then exploding as their tiny physiques were overloaded by the energy hammering down into them. Truth started counting. There had been forty five people on the bus. Thirty two were still alive. How many more would live out the hour, he couldn’t say. How many still had intact apertures... well. He might be the only one.

He looked up the road. The sign for Harban was pain as could be. Just keep running. Leave them here and put those feet in gear. They would die soon anyway. Today or in a few months, what difference could it make? Hell, nothing was saying you couldn’t have two voids back to back. It was getting increasingly likely, in fact.

Yeah he could do that. But the happiest he had been recently was when he played Dr. Bone Bro. And Bone Bro would never leave them like that. He’d bitch and moan about the complete absence of bones, and about how morally wrong it was not being able to fix everything by casting ANCEF. But he would do his goddamn best regardless. The Prince was an asshole, disdaining all others. The fool didn’t have that kind of arrogance. His arrogance was of a completely different kind.

Who needed help most urgently? He reached out with his spells, trying to nudge Cup and Knife and Incisive to work together. An older man. He had a heart problem that had been fixed with a magical tattoo. Now his apertures were shattered and he was having a heart attack. Truth reached him with a single step. No problem using the Earth Folding Step at the moment.

“Alright, Senior. It’s going to be alright.” He cast Cup and Knife, riding the ebbing tide of the magical overpressure. He could feel the spell making minute changes to some of the nerves around the heart. Calming them. Slowing their pace. The heart resumed a steady rhythm. Such a tiny thing, but it was killing a man. Well, it was fixed now.

The apertures, along with all the tiny channels that ran magic through most people’s bodies, was destroyed. Utterly. The one open aperture was shattered, the channels were shattered- it was plainly fatal. Plainly irreparable. He had seen young masters torturing people by destroying their apertures. None of them had ever managed anything so categorical.

This was no longer a human capable of using cosmic energy. No longer a mage, but something else. A clay doll, permanently severed from the infinite heavens above it. It could barely see the shadows on the rock, but it could never turn around and see the truth that cast the shadows. Wisdom would never reach it. Absent a miracle.

“This isn’t how people should be. Whatever a human is, it should be able to look up and strive. We aren’t clay dolls. Even if it feels like someone is just playing with us.” Truth poured Cup and knife into the Senior’s body. The spell wove through the man, gathering all the spiritual scraps and rebuilding them. Knitting them together in a way that wholly exceeded everything Truth thought he knew about medicine.

This injury was irreparable, unless you understood what you were looking at. Manda wasn’t trying to repair a body. He didn’t give a damn about some meat sack. Manda wanted to repair souls. To bring them more in line with God. Because God was how things ought to be. At least according to Manda.

The pieces pulled together. The body, the shattered bits of soul, and those strange structures that bridged the gap between both, all came together. Meshed into a complete human being. The old man curled up on himself. Not quite sobbing, but hanging on to himself as hard as he could. He was safe now, but the whole thing had hurt.

“Now. Just need to do that thirty-one more times.” The rain was still pouring down. Living water, pouring from the heavens. Nourishing and bringing life to the dead earth below. Truth stepped to the next person, and got back to work.