Story:Kings of Strife/Int 6

Intermission Six
“I dreamt that I was young again, child.” He woke and he wept, and his body shivered with pain.

“…My Lord, I… I’m sorry.”

“It has been so long. Too long.” The majority of his vision had left him centuries ago, but he sighed and felt the familiar feeling of his eyes glossing over. “I dreamt of the nine again, and the curse of eternity…”

When his eyes opened again he knew that some time had passed, though the eighth of Haze still stood near him, hands nervously behind his back. The old man tried to focus his vision and look over the young boy standing in front of him obediently. He looked more like the fourth than the seventh, with his long face, his long navy hair, and his fearful eyes. He lacked the cleverness of his predecessor, but he had far more magic potential. He would be useful. It was not a realization. It was knowledge. The old man already knew how useful the eighth of Haze would be.

The boy noticed he woke again, and began to help the robed man out of his seat. “The time has come, my lord. The preparations are finished, just as you commanded.”

“Have you heard from your sister?”

“L9? Yes, my Lord. She… She has handled H8, she said, and awaits us in the north of the continent.”

“As I knew she would,” the old man croaked. He was on his feet again, and the eighth handed him the two staves that allowed him to somewhat balance on his own. He began to walk into the shadows and the hallway slowly, too slow, too fragile. How he hated this mortal prison and how it had decayed. How he dreamt and yearned for the days of long, long past, when he was young – when he did not have to create wretched offspring to command power again!

“The others are preparing just as you’ve ordered, my Lord,” the boy continued as he escorted the old man down the dark halls of their third hideout. He was quite sensitive in his extreme age, but even for the boy, it was getting quite cold within the earth-lined walls of this factory. The cold winds outside even echoed as they passed on a bride overlooking a great assembly line below, populated entirely by the man’s silent Scales. “C0 moves as expected. N2’s plan has gone into full force, and he has acquired the zeroth Rosary. H4 has begun his advance eastward, just as you commanded.”

“And T1,” the old man coughed, his vision little more than blurs of orange and fading, translucent faces of children that had already been recycled, in every corner of his eyes. They laughed and disappeared as he glanced toward them blindly, and it made his hands curl up into tight, gangly fists. He heard his knuckles popping along with his decrepit knees. The wind sung to him even through the earth. “The first Cardinal is the most important. He will be the last. Where is he?”

“I… We have heard little from him, my Lord. The last we heard was that he was leaving the land of seas.”

Disquieting news. It took the old man too long to process. By the time he thought of something to say, they were at the stairs again. Those bloody stairs got harder and harder for him to traverse each time he met them. The end couldn’t come soon enough… and for that end, he needed T1.

He felt himself drifting into another dream as each step jostled his knees, and he moaned in frustration, but could not keep the vision from polluting what he saw. His son in black, screaming as the sky fell with lances of white slamming into the earth around him. His two eldest daughters, forehead against forehead, tears down both their eyes. A great exodus of peoples from a risen land, doomed to fall apart when they land on the ruin below. ‘The future again, when all I wish to see is the past.’ Wondrous silver and gold pillars of a nameless temple. The wild whistling of wind long-lost of another world, another time, and another people. A great tower of every color, going from within the earth to outside of it. The smell of garlic, sex, and roses, somehow through his eyes, as he had long since lost his senses of smell and taste. Himself – young again! – alongside eight others, cursing the stars. That one lingered and repeated. He was used to it, and had even memorized the faces of the other eight. But this time they had turned away from him, letting him look on their unfamiliar backs and weep, weep for they had gone ahead of him, in life and in death, and he was left behind one last time.

Then he saw the leaving behind of all his children, the one parts of the past he hated to see. Long ago he had trained himself not to weep over their deaths, for they were tools, replacements of replacements, constructs he had built up to simulate his comrades and his ancestors from long, long ago. But seeing them always hurt. He watched the third Lance, bleeding from his mouth and his severed arm, his body rail-thin and his curls failing to hide his miserable, mourning eyes. The sixth Vapor, moaning as she gave birth, exiled, bleeding too much, crying for him long after he had abandoned her. The father of the Cardinal, forgetting how to weep and how to feel. They all looked to the shadows over their shoulders, and they could not see him, but he could see them. He could do everything but help or feel them.

Decadence and the silence of death. The firmament of his memories and his premonitions both withdrew, and he was himself again at the top of the stone stairs, shaking in the arms of the eighth Haze.

The boy looked down at him with worry and innocence. The old man could already see what he would look like dead.

“Off me,” he croaked, weakly waving one of his staves. He started to press onward, and the Knight continued with him patiently. He would have smiled, if he still had any teeth. “What about the others,” he moaned, his breath haggard and coming with coughs. His hip had gone numb from the climbing, but still sent knives of pain shooting up his spine. He cringed beneath the shadow of his three hoods. “The new ones?”

“In the Ninth Factory, my Lord? Oh, well… N3 is almost born, I’ve heard. Nothing I know yet of V9 – not yet, not yet.”

“What do you mean, not yet? When do the Hemipenes plan on doing what I command? On their own time?” He began to tremble again, this time from rage. “I will have L9 smite them. Raze them to the ground. That’s what I’ll do.”

“N-no, my Lord, I don’t think that is necessary…”

“Shut up, child. I know what is necessary.”

“Of course, my Lord. You know all.”

The old man could only exhale at that. Did he know everything? He had beaten that mantra into the very veins of his children… but did he believe it? He had been surprised before, countless times. He saw what the Crystals showed him, but what of what the Crystals deigned to hide from him?

“The six will be together again for the first time in millennia,” he whispered through his dry, cracked lips. There was a cut on his bottom lip again, and it hurt to breathe. He licked it often, but his tongue was little more than sandpaper on the exposed flesh, especially when they emerged aboveground and outside again, and the cold winds buffeted his eyes shut. Even eyes shut, he could still see.

He felt the P8 and the calloused, gloved hands of Scales lift him off his feet and lay him on the cushions of a decadent palanquin. P8 sat next to him, weapons and gas mask on his person, handed to him by the Scales below. He felt them mobilize, a small yet great army of men all in dark-emerald cloaks much times too big for them, swords and lances in hand. They rode north, through the valley, and on the cold roads leading up, up, and then up. He felt that they would all rise, higher than any man ever had. He felt the sun start to rise again on a spotless sky for the last time, and he felt his dreams coming true. His mouth curled downwards with discomfort, and he shivered. This very scene had been one of the first to taint his future-vision so long ago, longer than even his impeccable memory could piece together. It had made no sense, but it had felt glorious, wondrous to know he and the products of his blood would accomplish what no one else on the planet had ever dreamed of. Now it made perfect sense, but he had lost the feeling of glory, of wonder, and power. Now he was anxious to return, of all things, to himself again.

The carriage flanked by his army rode away from their last hideout, and the bumping ride soon drove the old man to another slumber. He slept, and dreamt again of long-dead heroes.

...End of Sixth Intermission.

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