[For those who forgot, Marceau was the Lowgold elf Jade chose to face in chapter 173 and defeated him.
Beefy chapter today. Happy reading!]
Marceau could say, with complete confidence, that he had packed more experience into his nearly twenty-five years than most people managed in twice that. Fate had seen to that personally, and not in the generous way. It had taken a particular interest in humbling him, over and over, in as many creative forms as it could devise.
Before the divine blessing that had catapulted him into the realm of demigods and handed him more raw power than he'd previously been able to conceive of wanting, he had been the firstborn son of the Southern Duke of Lithrindel. Born with every advantage available, gleaming silver spoon in his mouth at birth.
And then that filthy Duke had gone and discovered the bastard daughter he'd sired on some lowlife whore, and decided, in a failure of both judgment and basic decency, to bring that lowlife filth home.
Everything had shifted after that. Marceau still couldn't bring himself to use the word sister in reference to that creature, and he never would. He had been bitter toward her from the moment she'd arrived and he would be bitter toward her in the grave, because she deserved every ounce of it.
She didn't belong where she was. She didn't belong breathing the same air as HIM, let alone standing anywhere near the same ground. He had dedicated a significant and passionate stretch of his life to having her assassinated, poured genuine creative effort into the project, and it had failed. Every time. Every single attempt, every carefully constructed web, every resource thrown at the problem, all of it had bounced off her. She had the quality of a person the universe had decided it liked and was unwilling to part with, and there was nothing more infuriating in the world than an enemy with that quality.
To pour salt directly into the wound she had been born with icy blue hair, which was the unmistakable mark of pure bloodline connection to the Duke's lineage, and turned out to be a prodigy in the Path of the Frozen Revenant, which was the single most galling detail the universe could have selected for the occasion.
He had been hopelessly outclassed and he had known it and he had hated knowing it. The one driving purpose of his life at that point had crumbled. He'd nearly been caught in the wreckage of his own schemes, and his father, that BASTARD, had almost thrown him into exile over it. Had chosen that WHORE BLOOD over his own firstborn son. Had looked at Marceau, who was his legitimate heir, the son he had raised, and decided that wasn't worth as much as a blue-haired girl born in a gutter.
The gall of him. The absolute, breathtaking gall.
But then She had found him. Or more precisely, Her servants had, and they had looked at him and found him worthy when his own father couldn't be bothered to. The Divine Selene. Goddess of Life, whom every elf in Lithrindel worshipped, and who had, for the first time in recorded history, decided to stop being distant about it and actively involve herself in the lives of her children. She wanted them blessed with her essence, all of them, and she had sent her servants out into the world to make that happen.
There had been friction about it, naturally. The old Order of Life's Oracles had not taken well to the suggestion that their Goddess was personally intervening in mortal affairs, as there was too much institutional ego invested in being the established authority, and a whole tangle of opposing forces had sprung up around the New Order that was preaching her actual words.
Marceau had never particularly cared about any of that theological noise. His father, however, had cared deeply and uselessly, had refused to side with the New Order, had dug his heels in with the same stupidity that defined every other decision the man had ever made. THAT FOOL! He had a bumbling, moronic, shit-for-brains sack of meat for a father.
But the word of the Divine didn't bend itself around human foolishness, and so when Selene's servants had come seeking him out to carry her divine creed into the south, Marceau had felt, for the first time in as long as he could remember, like his life had a shape worth having. A true purpose, larger than himself and larger than all the petty failures that had preceded it.
As payment for his devotion, the preachers had helped him scrub away his more incriminating history. Whatever that blue-haired whore-born bitch suspected, whatever she thought she knew, she would never find the evidence to prove it. That pleased him in the deeply. No evidence meant his father couldn't act on it, and from the shadows he had quietly gotten to work, turning the south toward the New Order of Life.
That was his divine purpose, and he had embraced it with everything he had. The priests, pleased by the depth of his conviction, had sought to bless him with Her essence not long after. He had accepted with the reverence the moment deserved.
The change had been immediate. Something fundamental in him had died and been replaced by something that had no business being called mortal, and he'd known it from the first breath after. The old Marceau, who was weak-fleshed, limited, born into a body that had never truly been worthy of the mind it housed, was simply gone. The new one was different in ways he was still cataloguing, elevated not just in power but in his very physical nature, closer to divinity than anything else that currently had the audacity to walk on this land.
It had taken some effort to convincingly imitate his old self so the people around him wouldn't notice the shift, but that was a minor inconvenience against what he'd gained. As an elf he had already stood above every other race by birth. After his rebirth, that distance had simply become harder to see the bottom of.
Which made it all the more incomprehensible that he had LOST to that flea-ridden beast.
That golden-scaled Drakkari filth. High red core at most. An inferior creature by any meaningful measure, and he had lost to her, had run like a coward with mortal wounds and barely enough of himself left to constitute a person. If not for the superior physique his rebirth had granted him and the blood regeneration skill that had come with it, he genuinely didn't think his old elven body would have survived what she'd done to him. He would simply have died in a forest and that would have been the end of it.
Which didn't make the loss one fraction less humiliating.
He'd grown complacent. That was the truth of it, the one he least wanted to look at directly. Everything had been going his way for long enough that the lesson fate had tried to hammer into him years ago, to be humble, be cautious, as nothing was guaranteed, had slowly stopped feeling relevant.
He hadn't even considered the possibility of genuine threat from something he'd already categorized as beneath him. He hadn't considered caution at all. And the consequences of that particular lapse had been, to put it plainly, not good.
He had failed to achieve the objective, which was to set up a hidden teleportation gate near Varkaigrad, and had lost all the expensive materials that had gone into the attempt. Every last bit of it now sitting in a storage ring in enemy hands, which would have been a tolerable loss on its own since nobody could open the ring without him. Except that golden-scaled bitch had torn his arm apart in the last moments of the encounter, and with his blood and bone available for examination there was a genuinely uncomfortable probability that they'd managed to see inside it anyway.
A catastrophic loss. By any reasonable accounting.
Marceau shook his head and climbed on. Losses were losses. He didn't need to lose his head along with everything else. The higher-ups hadn't reprimanded him, hadn't handed down punishment. The divine design, it seemed, was too large and too certain in its momentum for even a setback of this scale to meaningfully slow it. That counted for something.
He crested the small hill he'd been climbing, a massive wave of bloody needles weaving through the air behind him like a lazily drifting serpent, his beast thralls keeping pace on either side. Varkaigrad's great walls were visible in the distance, the white moon pouring silver light down over the stone.
He looked down from the top and spotted several light sources scattered through the dark of the forest below.
The incident had carved an entire stretch of forest out of existence when the blast that wounded him went off. That golden-scaled treacherous bitch had thoroughly seen to that. What remained was now under patrol. Varkaigrad's forces were down there, Iron Pact soldiers among them, though from what he understood the Flameclaws had lately been raising pointed questions about the Iron Pact's reliability and whether their integrity was still worth the weight it used to carry.
At least the Flameclaws were moving exactly as the higher ups had predicted. The initial plan was in ruins, yes, but that had never meant they were out of options. It had never meant that at all.
For now these patrols were bothersome. Particularly with their red cores mixed in among them.
His swarm of blood needles moved at his command and punched through whatever feeble barrier was protecting the first camp, shredding everything inside before anyone had the time to produce a coherent scream. Their vitality fed him immediately in a clean surge of mana and health rushing in as they died, but he was already moving on. A crimson interface screen flickered across his vision listing the kills. He didn't bother reading it. These were weak things. Not even worth a full level at his current standing. But that was what inferior beings were for, in the end. Fuel. Raw material for a transcendence they would never themselves achieve.
He was a long way from mid gold still, but every drop added up, and he grinned as he launched himself off the hill like something dropped from a great height, shattering the slope behind him, and landed squarely in the middle of the next camp.
The ground cratered under him on impact. Two people died immediately from the shockwave alone, flung outward at speed that left nothing worth examining afterward, one of them a stain, technically, more than a body.
Now this was the approach he preferred. Tearing them apart before they knew what was happening had its uses, but it lacked texture. They needed to see him. They needed to understand, in whatever shrinking window of time remained to them, the precise nature of what was standing in their camp. He straightened up and rolled his neck.
Most of them had survived the landing. Killing too early was wasteful.
He wanted despair. He got it.
"A-AN ELF!!"
Someone stated the obvious. Others were screaming names, the names of the ones he'd already killed, working through their shock at varying speeds. The high red core leading this particular group was one of those Rakari mutts, and he had gone very still, looking at Marceau with an expression that had progressed cleanly into horror.
Marceau smiled at him.
Breaking that one was going to be genuinely enjoyable.
***
He had the patrols subdued and cleared well before it stopped being interesting, which was the natural endpoint of any exercise like this. The path was open again. Their operations could resume.
The latest order was to corrupt the ley lines running outside Varkaigrad's walls, with the Spirit Hunt underway, the timing was as clean as it was ever going to be. This section held one of them. Find it, start the corruption process, move to the next. Straightforward enough in principle.
It was also, clearly, a point of no return. Once the ley lines started going, Varkaigrad's rulers would know who was here and know it with certainty. Marceau could see the whole shape of it trending toward something final, some conclusion the High Priests had already calculated and were steering toward deliberately. That was probably why the recklessness didn't seem to concern them. They were past the stage of the plan that required caution.
Marceau still didn't know the full scope of the greater purpose, he was not yet powerful enough to stand among the High Priests who served the Elven Queen and the Goddess directly, and so certain things remained above his current clearance. He was comfortable with that. He was more than content to wait, obey, and let the divine design unfold at whatever pace it intended. His time would come.
He flicked his fingers and the swarm of blood needles rose from the treeline, pulsed three times in a subtle glow, then collapsed inward into a single dense ball of crimson in front of him. It shrank further as it drifted toward him and Marceau unhinged his jaw and swallowed it whole, feeling the weight of it hit him like something solid before his skill absorbed it all into storage. His body processed the sensation and moved on.
His crimson eyes tracked the elves who'd caught his signal as they began filtering through the trees. He sat down on a convenient stone and watched their signatures drift through his Life Sense one by one.
"Sometimes I do question it, you know," he said conversationally. "All this hiding. All this careful maneuvering and working in the shadows. Why not simply declare open war on every non-believer and have them convert by force? Once they accept Her essence they would see the truth of it anyway. They'd understand eventually. The hiding seems unnecessary when the conclusion is inevitable."
The thrall he'd made of the red core Rakari— the one whose expression had caught his fancy— just growled at him with a vacant look on his skinless face. His guts were hanging out. Several organs were somewhere else entirely, along with most of his skin.
"Hmm. Good answer. We don't know, that's actually a tremendous answer when you think about it. I might simply be too limited to understand it from where I'm standing. As they say, the will of the Divine is rarely something that condenses neatly into mortal reasoning. Trying to work it out from this semi-mortal perspective might just be—"
The world went red before he could finish the sentence.
The forest, the fire, the leaves, the night sky, the moon, all of it, saturated crimson in an instant. Then the pressure arrived, dropping onto him like something enormous. His cognition had grown considerably since his rebirth, much more faster and sharper than anything his old self could have managed, and even with that he could only process what was happening fast enough to understand it, not fast enough to do anything about it, his entire body read as already torn apart, the certainty of it arriving before the act could, and he could not move at the speed that would have been required to stop it.
Then it receded. Just as completely and immediately as it had come. The red bled back out of everything, the forest returned to itself, the moon went back to being silver, and the night sat around him like nothing had happened at all.
"What makes you think people deserve to see the truth," a cold voice said from directly behind him, "and bathe in Her precious Light?"
Marceau's entire body went cold.
He knew that voice. He recognized it even through the cold sweat currently making itself at home all over him, even through the complete and total absence of any prior warning that this person was anywhere near him. There was no presence in his Life Sense, nothing in his spatial awareness, nothing at all.
He turned.
An elf of unmistakably regal bearing stood behind him, dressed in pure white, beautiful black hair falling all the way to the ground. Hazy crimson eyes watched him with an expression that was a mix of mild interest and amusement.
Marceau hit his knees before the recognition had fully finished processing. He drove his thralls down with him through sheer force of will, the entire lot of them groveling against the forest floor.
"Y-Your Holiness." The stammer came out before he could organize it into something more dignified. "I wasn't aware of your coming."
His thoughts were already racing ahead of him in several directions at once, none of them particularly calm. What was one of the Queen's High Priests doing here? Here, of all places, personally? Had he failed badly enough that this was a house call? He'd been following orders, the blunder earlier wasn't grounds for anything that would justify — he'd been following orders—
A warm chuckle interrupted the spiral.
"I am not here to punish you, child." The High Priest's tone was entirely unbothered. "You know I can hear your raging thoughts."
"You can?" Marceau said, and immediately hated that his mouth had gotten there before his brain.
"No," the High Priest said. "I am not on a pathway that allows for that. But it is written quite clearly on your face, child." The not-quite-smile settled into something more defined. "You still haven't answered my question."
Right. That.
"I..." Marceau steadied himself as best he could under the circumstances. "I don't believe that is true. Only the most devout of Her servants deserve to be bathed in Her Light."
He had no idea if that was the right answer. He was not historically good at questions that felt like they might be tests, and this one had that texture strongly. But the expression on His Holiness' face shifted into something that was at least amused, which he was going to take as a passing grade until told otherwise.
What he still couldn't work out was why a High Priest was here at all. Nothing in their current plans had included this. None of the orders he'd received had mentioned it, not even obliquely.
The High Priest didn't offer an explanation. He moved instead, and the forest moved with him, the trees bending their trunks and roots into stepped elevations without any visible instruction, building him a higher vantage point. He settled at the top of it and went quiet, looking out into the distance.
From the direction of his gaze, Marceau could tell he was looking toward the Colosseum. What he was thinking about it, his expression gave away precisely nothing.
Marceau held out for as long as he reasonably could before his curiosity got the better of him, which was not very long.
"I apologize for the presumption, Your Holiness, but I still don't understand what's brought you here personally. Our next steps are well within our capacity to see through. We received reinforcement from both the Northern and Eastern Orders, twenty-two blessed low golds, five mid golds, two high golds, all currently housed at Blacksteepe. When the time comes, we'll have three times Varkaigrad's entire gold core count, and ours carry the Goddess' blessing on top of superior lineage." He paused. "I'm not sure what force could reasonably oppose that."
He hadn't meant it as a challenge. His mouth had simply moved.
"I didn't say what they have," the High Priest said, quietly. "I said what's coming." He didn't turn from the Colosseum. "The future belongs to Her sight. We are instruments of Her will. If She has spoken through the Queen, that is a decree that admits no argument and requires no opinion from us."
Marceau went still. "The Queen herself has spoken?"
"Yes." He turned then, and looked at Marceau properly for the first time since arriving. "What do you know of her, child?"
"That she is closest to true Divinity among all Her servants. That the Goddess speaks through her, that she is Her true Oracle." He hesitated. "I must admit, Your Holiness, I have never been in her presence. Even within the Order she is spoken of rarely. My knowledge is genuinely limited and I apologize for that."
The chuckle that came back was warm and entirely unbothered. "No need for apology. That too is by her design." He seemed to be considering how to proceed. "Let us compare her to a diviner. You know how formidable a diviner becomes at gold core. The sight they develop, the reach of it, the way it evolves into something akin to omniscience."
Marceau nodded, leaning in despite himself.
"And you know there exists a realm beyond gold."
He nodded again. He knew it firsthand in a way he would rather not have — they had been in the process of drawing one such being into the heart of Varkaigrad, the one those Vor'akhs had foolishly believed would act in their interest. The whole arrangement had been elegant. Would have been elegant, if that meddling Drakkari hadn't reduced it to rubble.
"Now consider," the High Priest said, "how far the sight of a visionary must reach, operating above even that level."
Marceau sat with it.
Diviners at high gold were already something that bordered on a different category of existence entirely, their sight threading so deep into the web of fate that the distance between them and ordinary perception turned into an abyssal chasm. To climb above even that, the breadth of what such a being would simply know, would have always known, every failure and obstacle and small hard-won victory already present somewhere inside her gaze before any of it happened—
He understood.
The High Priest watched the understanding arrive on his face and chuckled, and then the warmth left his expression as completely as if it had never been there. What replaced it was something Marceau had felt the edges of when the man had first appeared, the thing underneath the pleasantness, cold and predatory and entirely focused on the Colosseum in the distance. Even at low gold, Marceau was not confused about what he would be if that attention turned toward him rather than past him.
"But even for a visionary of her magnitude," the High Priest said, "there are those who remain elusive. Who stay outside her sight regardless of how she looks." A pause. "There is one such being inside the Colosseum at present. It is almost as though invisible hands direct her at will, appearing when least expected, disappearing when she ought to need them most, leaving no pattern to read." His voice was even but the quality of his attention on the distant structure was not. "You will have encountered her already. Golden scales. Translucent golden tendrils. She carried silver scales before that."
Marceau's mind caught on something. "The one that attacked me?"
The High Priest tilted his head. "Yes."
The floor of Marceau's stomach did something unpleasant. That creature, the one he had embarrassingly underestimated, the one he had been certain he could have handled cleanly if he hadn't been so convinced of his own read of the situation, had drawn the personal attention of the Queen. Had drawn the High Priest here in person. Had apparently been visible enough to people operating at that altitude that her movements inside the Colosseum were being specifically tracked and discussed.
"Letting her enter was already an error," the High Priest continued. "One that was accounted for. It may even prove useful in ways that aren't yet visible from our current vantage point. But we will need to be thorough when she returns. Not a single drop of her blood left behind. The rest of us will be here for that."
Marceau's thoughts snagged on the last part. The rest of us. "Your Holiness, do you mean the other High Priests?"
It wasn't his place to ask. He knew it wasn't his place to ask even as the words came out.
The High Priest did not answer the question directly, which was itself an answer of a kind.
Marceau's head was doing something it had not done in some time, which was spin. She had not been this powerful when he had faced her. She had been dangerous, yes, had caught him badly off-guard, but the version of her he had encountered and the version being described, a creature that the most powerful gold cores the entirety of Lithrindel could produce were being gathered to hunt collectively, those were not the same being. Whatever the Colosseum was doing to her, it was not slowing her down.
Just how powerful was she going to be when she came back out.
"For now," the High Priest said, and the warmth had returned to his face as cleanly as it had departed, "we begin with the weak links. The beastkin factions with enough sense to listen." He paused. "Even those proud Flameclaws would convert readily enough once they understand the true shape of what is coming for all of us."
Marceau didn't follow the logic of that entirely. He nodded anyway.
The bad feeling he had been carrying since the High Priest's arrival had not gotten any smaller. If anything it had located itself more precisely, sitting just below his ribs.