A/N
2 chapters combined into a 3k+ chap for better readability, enjoy!
I really enjoyed writing this chapter, hope you enjoy reading it :)
Chapter 790: The End of the Lie
The blue light continued spilling out from where our hands met, and for a few seconds Lady Laelyn simply sat there breathing steadily, but then her whole body went rigid all at once, her spine arching slightly, and a strangled sound escaped her throat as the Saint's Essence realised that whatever it had wandered into was dismantling it and started fighting for its existence inside her.
I had known this part was coming, and I had braced myself for it, but knowing something is going to hurt and watching it happen to someone you care about are two entirely different experiences, and so I had to force myself to keep my grip on her hand firm even as her fingers spasmed against mine and her head tipped backward.
"My lady!"
Beric was already moving before the word had fully left his mouth, crossing the space between the doorway and where we sat in two long strides, his hand reaching for the collar of my robe to drag me off of her.
I tensed because I couldn't let go right now, not in the middle of this, because stopping partway through would leave the Saint's Essence wounded and embedded and far more dangerous than if I had never touched it at all.
"No," Lady Laelyn forced out through gritted teeth, her free hand rising a few inches off her knee in a trembling gesture toward Beric. "Don't."
That single word stopped him completely, his hand frozen in the air a finger's width from my collar, and I watched pain move across his face as the two halves of him pulled in opposite directions.
Every instinct he had built over decades of service was screaming at him to pull her away from whatever was hurting her, and yet the one rule he had never once broken was obeying her, and now those two things stood directly against each other inside him.
I felt for him in that moment, I really did, because there was nothing he could do that wouldn't feel like a betrayal of something he held sacred, and the awful part was that he was right to want to intervene, since I was the source of her pain right now, even if I was also the only thing standing between her and a lifetime of having her thoughts slowly replaced by an intelligence that wanted to use her body to tear holes in the barriers of her own world.
The seizing went on for what could only have been twenty or thirty seconds but felt a lot longer, her breath coming in sharp irregular pulls, and then all at once the tension drained out of her and the blue light winked out and she sagged sideways with no strength left to hold herself upright.
I shifted my arm to catch her before she could tip onto the cold stone floor, letting her lean against my shoulder while she got her breathing back under control. I could feel the rapid flutter of her heartbeat gradually slowing toward something normal as the Genesis Seed finished swallowing the last fragments of the thing that had been trying to make her into a puppet.
"What did you do to her?" Beric demanded, and his voice had dropped to low and dangerous tone, stripped of all the gruff fatherly patience he usually wrapped around his words when he spoke to me. "What just happened?"
Lady Laelyn lifted her head from my shoulder with what was clearly an enormous amount of effort, her eyes still unfocused and her skin pale enough that I could see the faint blue veins at her temple, and when she spoke her voice came out as barely more than a whisper.
"Tomas saved my life," she said.
Beric stared at her, and I could see him trying to fit those words into anything resembling sense, his jaw working slightly before he managed to ask, "Saved you from what? There's nothing here. There was no attack."
She tried to answer him, her lips parting, but whatever explanation she had assembled in her exhausted mind dissolved before it could reach her mouth, and she simply shook her head faintly and let it rest against me again, too drained to fight her own tongue into producing the words.
So Beric turned his attention fully onto me instead.
"Who are you?" he asked, and there was no softness in it at all now. "I have watched you for over a week. I have seen frightened boys and I have seen liars pretending to be frightened boys, and you are neither of those things. A village boy doesn't make a Saint candidate convulse and then thank him for it. So I will ask you one more time, and I want a true answer. Who are you?"
At his words, Lady Laelyn lifted her gaze to my face as well, and although she was clearly fighting to stay conscious there was something sharp and searching behind her exhaustion, because she wanted the truth as badly as he did, perhaps more, since she was the one whose body had just been the battleground.
I had known this moment was coming from the instant I decided to take her hand.
There was simply no version of curing the Saint's corruption that left my disguise intact, and once I had committed to saving her then I had also committed to abandoning the comfortable anonymity that had let me carry water and polish boots and disappear into the background of this enormous Academy for the better part of two weeks, which was a shame, because I had grown rather fond of being nobody at all.
"Master," Azure said quietly in the back of my mind, "this is your opening. You've spent days searching for Kal and finding nothing, you've got no idea whether this loop is even survivable, and now you have two people in front of you who are going to demand answers regardless of what you do. You need allies, and you couldn't ask for a better pair than these two."
He was right, and I knew he was right, and the strange thing was that the realisation didn't fill me with the dread I might have expected, because somewhere over the course of this loop and the previous ones I had come to genuinely trust these two in a manner that I rarely extended to anyone in this dangerous world.
I trusted Beric because his loyalty wasn't the calculated, self-serving loyalty of a man positioning himself near power, since I had watched him across multiple loops choose Lady Laelyn's safety over his own comfort, his own reputation, and I’m sure he’d pick her over his own life. A man whose devotion ran that deep was a man whose word would hold once it was given.
And I trusted Lady Laelyn because I had read her grandmother's journal, because I had sat in this very Academy and watched her question the things that everyone around her treated as sacred, because she possessed the rare quality of being willing to follow an uncomfortable truth even when it would have been easier to look away from it.
"Alright," I said. "I'll tell you everything. But first, I need both of you to promise me you won't panic at what comes next, because what I'm about to do is going to feel strange, and if you react badly it could draw attention we really don't want."
The Blue Sun was likely suspicious of me already since in its eyes some random villager had cut its connection with the Saint, but at the moment, I was still an unknown factor to it, even though I had to tell the truth to Beric and Lady Laelyn, it didn’t mean I would be naïve enough to speak out loud and allow the Blue Sun to learn my secrets.
Beric's eyes narrowed at what I’d just said, but before he could voice whatever objection was forming I reached out with my spiritual sense, threading a thin filament of qi outward and brushing it against the edges of both their consciousnesses so that my voice arrived inside their awareness without my mouth ever moving.
“It isn't safe to speak out loud here,” I sent to them. “So I'm going to talk to you like this instead.”
Beric flinched backward so hard he nearly lost his footing, his hand flying to his temple, and his expression twisted into open alarm. "What are you doing? Get out of my head, get out right now, whatever this is, stop it!"
I didn't blame him for the reaction one bit, because having a voice arrive inside your skull when no one's lips are moving would terrify anyone who'd never encountered that technique, and although what I was doing wasn't technically speaking inside his mind so much as vibrating intention directly against his spiritual perception, the distinction was far too fine to matter to a man experiencing it for the first time.
“I'm not in your head, not the way you're imagining it,” I sent, projecting as much calm as I could pour into the sensation. “I'm not reading your thoughts and I can't control you. I'm only speaking, the same as I would with my mouth, except quietly enough that nothing in this Academy can overhear us. If you want the truth, Beric, then you have to give me the chance to actually tell it to you.”
"Beric," Lady Laelyn murmured weakly from where she still leaned against my shoulder. "Give him a chance. Please."
The old soldier looked at his lady, then back at me, and I could see the war happening behind his eyes before he finally exhaled through his nose and gave a single stiff nod, his hand still half-raised near his head as though ready to swat the intrusion away the moment it turned hostile.
I had been planning to explain it all with careful words, but standing there I understood that words alone were going to fail me completely, because there was simply too much, and the things I needed them to grasp lived far outside anything their language had vocabulary for.
So I made a decision and gathered my spiritual sense into images rather than sentences.
“Then let me show you,” I sent, and I pushed the memories of our first meeting outward into their minds.
I gave them Porvale burning with the two suns hanging in the sky above it, the raiders pouring through the breach and the villagers throwing themselves against barricades that were never going to hold.
I gave them the moment I had to make the choice to abandon the village to its fate because I wasn’t strong enough to save them. The road they had found me walking, and then I gave them themselves, the caravan slowing, Beric's suspicious questions, Lady Laelyn offering me passage, the assassins in the trees and the Lightweavers at the inn that I had dealt with in the dark without either of them ever knowing.
I gave them her grandmother's journal passing into my hands and the moment I had reduced it to ash in my mouth after committing every page to memory. I gave them the Cerulean Orb singing under my palm, the absurd accident of becoming a Saint candidate and then the Saint himself, the dying old man and the miniature sun forced down my throat, the visions of World Trees and the patient, smiling cruelty of the Blue Sun as it tried to steer me toward unmaking the barriers that kept my world whole.
And finally I gave them the Eldest Tree in the Vermilion Vale, the chains of light wrapping around me, and Elder Thorn standing over me with the character for soul severance burning against my forehead as everything went black.
When I withdrew the projection, the chamber was silent except for the soft guttering of the lanterns, and the two of them sat there with the slightly hollowed-out expressions of people who had just lived through more than their minds were built to hold at once.
"This is some illusion," Beric muttered, though there was less conviction in it than there had been a moment ago. "Some trick. Spirits in stories do this, they put pictures in your head and make you believe things that never happened."
His response didn’t surprise me. All his life he had been groomed to worship the Blue Sun, however, I knew I could turn him because he wasn’t as delusional as the others, just being part of the Velaris, he had been exposed to what most would consider to be heretic beliefs.
As for Lady Laelyn, she said nothing for a long while, her brow was furrowed as she turned everything over inside her exhausted mind.
"You knew about my grandmother's journal," she said finally. "You knew what was written in it, you knew what it would mean for me to be found with it, and just now you knew exactly what was happening inside me when I couldn't even put it into words for Beric. No illusion could account for all of that." She lifted her eyes to mine. "I believe you, Tomas. Or whoever you truly are."
"My lady, with respect," Beric started, and there was real frustration straining his voice now, "we don't know what this thing is. I'm not saying he didn't help you, I saw that much with my own eyes, but a creature that can pour visions into your skull and speak without moving its mouth is not something we simply hand our trust to because the visions felt true. The most dangerous lies are the ones built around real things."
“If you don't trust me,” I sent to him directly, holding his gaze, “then this world is going to be destroyed, and your lady along with it. That's not a threat. It's the thing I've been trying to prevent across more attempts than I can count.”
Beric went very still at that, and I watched the frustration drain out of his face and something far heavier settle in its place, because for all his suspicion he was a man who calculated risk for a living, and the risk I had just laid in front of him was the one risk he had sworn his entire life to never take.
"What do you need from us?" Lady Laelyn asked quietly.
In answer, I gathered my spiritual sense one more time and gave them the most recent loop, the one that mattered most. I showed them Kal, the tall white-haired Rank 8 who remembered every reset, and the alliance we had slowly built between us.
I showed them the journey to the Eldest Tree and the moment I had pushed the golden energy through its ancient roots, the nine other World Trees across the continent flaring back to life, the barriers sealing shut and the vast pressure of the Otherworldly Being pressing furiously against them from outside.
And then I showed them the part that had surprised all of us, Hiron completing his ritual at the burning Red Sun Academy, the sacrifices in villages I had never been able to save, the great vertical eye opening within the Red Sun, and the lich-like figure with its bone-white face that had pulled Kal's soul out through his throat before the loop reset and dropped me back into Porvale to find that this time, Kal was nowhere to be found.
"I need your help," I continued. "I have to save the Eldest Tree again, the same as I did before, but Kal is gone this loop and I can't find him anywhere, which means I'm missing the strength that made the plan work last time. And even if I manage that, there's still Hiron, and his scheme is the thing that undid everything in the end. I don't have all the answers. I just know I can't do this alone, and you two are the people I trust most in this entire world."
Lady Laelyn drew a slow breath, steadied herself against my shoulder, and then straightened a little, some of the colour returning to her face.
"Then I will try my best to help you," she said. "Whatever it costs me."
Beric said nothing.
I looked over at him, ready to give him whatever time he needed to come around, and that was when I realised that something was wrong, because his face had gone slack and his eyes had rolled back so that only the whites showed, and his whole frame had begun to shudder like Lady Laelyn's had only minutes before.
"What's happening to him?" Lady Laelyn cried out, all her exhaustion forgotten as she lurched upright.
"I don't know," I said, and I genuinely didn't, because I hadn't done anything to him.
“Master,” Azure said sharply. “I can sense the qi you used to communicate, it's doing something to him. It's moving through him.”
“That's impossible,” I shot back, my pulse climbing. “I used barely a thread of it, just enough to carry my voice. There's no possible chance that little qi could cause this.”
“I know,” Azure said. “And yet it is.”
Beric pitched forward off his crouch and collapsed onto the stone floor, his limbs jerking, and Lady Laelyn screamed his name and tried to reach for him before I caught her wrist to keep her back.
I went to him myself, dropping to my knees beside his shaking body and running my spiritual sense over him as quickly and thoroughly as I could manage, searching for poison, for a foreign technique, for any sign of what was tearing through him, but there was nothing, nothing different about him at all, his meridians as quiet and ordinary as any common soldier's should be.
I couldn't make sense of it, and the not knowing was worse than anything, because a problem you can name is a problem you can fight, and this was simply Beric coming apart on the floor for reasons I couldn't see.
Then I noticed it.
Just below his ear, on the side of his neck where his collar had pulled away during the convulsions, there was a small tattoo I had never seen before, a tiny sword crossed over a tiny shield, the lines of it thin and faded as though it had been there for many years.
“Azure?”
“There's qi coming off of it,” he said. “That tattoo. It wasn't doing anything until a moment ago, but now it's active.”
I reached out slowly and pressed two fingers against the little mark, and the instant my skin made contact Beric's eyes snapped open, blazing with a brilliant white light that had nothing of the man I knew in it, and a tremendous aura erupted outward from his body with enough force to throw me clear across the chamber.
I twisted in the air and landed on my feet near the far wall, already crouched and ready, and when I looked back up Beric was rising to his feet, and what I felt rolling off of him stole the breath right out of me.
One second the aura was weak, qi equivalent to Rank 1.
And then the next moment, the qi was equivalent to the crushing weight of Rank 7.
A/N
Comment below what you think is going on with Beric
Enjoy the weekend, we return on Monday!