A/N
I was only able to write 1 chap today, sorry, hopefully should be able to write 2 tomorrow.
Chapter 806: Not Tomas
I looked out across the square at all the raiders still kneeling under the weight of my spiritual pressure and I raised my voice so everyone gathered there could hear me.
"These men are your prisoners now, and what happens to them from this point forward is your decision and only yours to make." I pointed toward the unconscious figures near the northern fence. "Those men were minutes away from becoming Sun-Touched and I have pulled the corruption out of them, they will wake up as ordinary men again. The red sun's influence changes people from the inside, it finds their hunger and their anger and it builds on those things until there is almost nothing of the original person remaining, but I have looked underneath all of that and I am telling you that there is still real humanity left in each of them. I hope that you will help them recover from what was done to them. But the choice belongs to Porvale and to nobody else."
The square got noisy after that, people talking over each other, and then slowly the noise organized itself into actual voices saying actual things.
"The holy one says there's good left in 'em," Henrik said, speaking slowly and turning toward the crowd as he did it, "and I reckon if he can pull the red poison out of a man with his bare hands, he can probably see things in people that we can't. My vote is we tie them up and feed them and wait to see what men wake up."
"The southern harvests really did fail this past season," the woman in the shawl said, and she sounded grudging about admitting it. "My sister's husband's family comes from down that road and they have been eating their seed grain since the middle of winter. Hungry men do terrible things, that doesn't make what they did right, but it does explain some of it."
"We could put them to work on the wall," somebody else called out from the back of the crowd. "We need more hands for that work anyway, and it’s hard to keep hating a person once you have been working alongside them all day."
But there were other voices too, and an older man near the granary spat into the dirt and shook his head with obvious disgust. "Ya soft in the head, every last one of ya. These men came here to burn our homes down and take our daughters and ya want to give them a hot meal? A rope costs less than bread, that is all me saying and me stand by it."
"Al's right," the man beside him muttered. "You don't bring a dangerous animal back to health in your own house."
I heard all of that and I didn't say anything in response to any of it, because I had meant exactly what I told them. This decision was not mine and a village that had its choices taken away by a stranger floating in the air above it, no matter how holy or powerful that stranger looked, would learn nothing from the experience. Porvale would argue this out around its fires tonight and whatever they decided together would be what happens.
It was Maya who stepped forward and finally said the thing that the entire square had been working its way around asking this whole time.
"Are you..." she started and then stopped and swallowed and then started again. "Are you really Tomas? Our Tomas?"
And right then I looked toward the mouth of the northern lane and I saw them standing there, Tomas's father who was broad across the shoulders with grey coming in at his temples, and his arm was wrapped around Tomas's mother, whose face was wet and shining in the light, and both of them were looking up at me with hope and grief and fear all mixed together in it.
I searched myself for a reason to lie, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I found nothing. Every previous loop had come stocked with justifications, hidden watchers, strategic concealment, the endless chess match against enemies who might be listening, and I had worn so many false names and false histories across so many worlds that lying had stopped costing me anything, which was itself a cost.
But there was no reason to lie this time.
"No," I said through spiritual sense, keeping it out of the Blue Sun's hearing. "I'm not Tomas."
The whole square went quiet all at once, clearly not having expected a voice to appear inside their heads.
"Tomas is here," I continued, and I put my hand flat against my chest when I said it. "He is alive and he is safe and he is listening to everything I am saying right now. I’m a guest inside his body, I understand how that sounds and I know the stories people tell about hollow men, but I’m not one of those things. I’m here to protect Tomas and to protect all of you and to protect more than just this village before everything is finished."
Some of the villagers shook their heads and others actually slapped the side of their own head as though that might make the voice stop, and while they were doing that, I descended a few feet toward the ground and turned to face the two people I had never once spoken to across every single loop I had lived through in this world.
Because in every previous cycle, Tomas had already been dead by the time I arrived and I had avoided his parents with a consistency that I could only honestly call cowardice, because I had not wanted to face what it meant to be wearing their son’s face. Mrs Miller's hands were twisted up in her apron and her husband's jaw was moving without any sound coming out of it.
"Your son was chosen," I said to them through spiritual sense. "I don’t fully understand all of the reasons yet, but what I can tell you is that out of every person in this world, something reached out and chose Tomas. I believe he is going to be a part of saving it, all of it. You raised the boy who is going to matter more than kings and academies and powerful institutions, and you raised him well, and I will protect him with everything I am capable of. But right now, we need to leave."
His father found his voice, and it came out rough and unsteady. "You bring him back. Whatever you are and whatever needs doing out there, you bring my boy home when it's finished, do you hear me? He has a mother waiting for him."
"Tell him," his wife said, and she had to work to get even those two words out, "tell him his supper will keep. Tell him I will keep it warm for him no matter how long it takes."
"He can hear you," I whispered. "He can hear both of you."
And then I gathered the blue light around myself and rose up above the rooftops of Porvale while the village watched without making a sound, and I flew north over the trees and left the square and the prisoners and everything else behind.
We were a few miles out from the village with the forest moving beneath us when Tomas finally said something.
"Did you mean it?" His voice was quiet. "The things you said to my ma and da, about me being chosen, about me mattering. Or was that something you said because it would make them feel better about things."
"I meant every word."
"That is very hard for me to believe, mister priest. I'm a miller's son. The most important thing I have ever done in my life was win the log toss at the autumn fair, and honestly Breney let me win because he had hurt his shoulder before the competition."
"I promised you the truth," I said to him, "and you are about to receive all of it. But you should prepare yourself, because if you thought this morning was difficult to accept, this morning was nothing compared to what comes next."
And then I opened the connection between us, and I gave him my memories.
I gave him the loops, all of them, I gave him the experience of waking up inside his body in the middle of the raid over and over again, the rusted sword, the deaths, the feeling of Vayara's ice closing around my throat in the loops where she killed me.
I gave him the Red Sun Academy, the Blue Sun Academy, the Saint's selection process, Kal and Elder Thorn and Laelyn, the Eldest Tree, the Sundering, the entity that existed beyond the sky itself, the loop where the entire continent burned down to ash, all of it compressed and organized and given to him as gently as something like that could possibly be given to a living person.
The silence after that went on long enough that I started to worry about him.
"I was dead," he finally said, and his voice was barely above a whisper. "Every single one of those times you woke up in me, I was already dead, the raiders got to me right at the beginning and I never made it even past the first morning."
"Yes," I said, because making it sound better than it was would have been an insult to him. "And there is something I need you to understand because it matters to me that you do. I don’t take over people's bodies without their permission, that is a line I hold to in every world I pass through, and the only reason I never asked you is that there was never a version of you left alive to ask. Your body was empty when I arrived in it every single time. This loop is the first one where you have been alive to actually meet me."
"Because of the white-haired man." His voice was getting steadier as he talked. "He came out of nowhere and moved faster than I could actually follow, I just felt someone touch my forehead and then he was there looking at me with this expression like he already knew who I was and he said 'Lord Kaeven' and then he was gone." He paused for a moment. "That was your Kal, the one from your memories. You asked him to save me."
"Yeah, I did."
"Thank you. For thinking about me at all, you didn't have to do that."
"It was the very least that I owed you," I told him. "I borrowed your body, fought in it, bled in it, died in it, and wore your face in front of everyone you know. One rescue doesn’t come anywhere close to repaying what I owe you."
"This is so much," he said after a while, and there was something wandering and dazed in the way his thoughts were moving now. "You know that, right? Yesterday my biggest concern was whether the raiders were going to attack the village or not. I never thought about anything past the mill, I never really imagined any of it. Other worlds, time going backwards, suns that are actually alive, and things in the dark beyond the sky. Nobody in Porvale imagines things like that, we imagine rain and whether the harvest will hold."
"For most people that is exactly how it should be," I agreed. "Most people live their entire lives without ever touching any of this, and there is nothing lesser about those lives, and a large part of what we are fighting for is the right of those people to keep living them undisturbed. But I don’t think you’re going to get to be one of those people, Tomas. There is a prophecy and it describes a soul that neither sun has ever touched, someone with no red sun in them and no blue sun either, someone who still has to stand in the fight beside the rest of us, and I believe that person is you. So I need to ask you properly, will you work with me to try and save this world."
The forest kept moving below us while he thought about it.
"I have never been special," he said eventually. "Not once my entire life. I have just been Tomas who grinds the flour, mends the fence, and loses the log toss when Breney's shoulder is working properly. And I honestly don't understand even half of what you showed me in those memories, and I would be lying to you if I said I wasn't scared all the way through." He took what would have been a long breath if he had actually had his own lungs available to breathe with. "But my da always told me that a man who could help and chose not to was worse than the man doing the harm in the first place. So if there is something I can actually do, something that protects people, that protects Ma and Da and Maya and everyone else I know, then I will do it."
I turned north toward Lord Kaeven's manor and kept flying.
Every single loop had started with me opening my eyes inside this body, out of every person who existed in this world, and that had never been random chance. This world had been trying to show me something from the very first morning it had me, putting me inside a miller's son with a soft heart whose soul neither sun had ever managed to touch, and Tomas had a part to play in everything that was coming.
We just needed to figure out what that part actually was.