RE: Monarch

Casikas arrived with a massive satchel, shortly after I went to work on the gate. The bumbling red infernal gave me an apologetic wave and went straight to Veldani, pulling several potions out of the pack. I watched out of the corner of my eye as he tipped her head back and poured two of them down her throat.

Veldani suddenly reanimated, snatching the third potion from his clutches. She proceeded to tear into the apothecary over his bedside manner, the quality of the potion, and his brewing and grinding methods, while Ralakos tried to calm her and Casikas laughed nervously.

After Veldani drank the third potion, she pulled a section of papyrus bound with a leather strap from her robe and reluctantly handed it to Casikas.

The apothecary opened the bundle and withdrew a silver petaled flower, his mouth slack in wonder.

“Need ye to top off the batteries again.”

“On it.” I returned to the work.

The evening progressed alarmingly quickly.

Xarmos stopped in briefly with a dozen servants in tow bearing platters of food, providing a much-needed respite. Ralakos and Veldani spent much of the interim arguing, shooting glances in my direction as I scarfed down a few pieces of bread and some meat. There were more decadent options on the spread, but it was better to keep my mind sharp. At some point, Casikas had disappeared, leaving his satchel behind.

Night turned to dawn. There were no windows in the chamber, so we lacked even the infernal’s artificial sun for reference, our sense of time derived entirely from Ralakos’s pocket watch.

“Send another pulse through the base again?” Titus requested from somewhere above me. He sounded oddly aggravated.

I summoned a small spark at the base of the left side. It passed through a section of crystal and traveled beyond my sight through the panelling. Then suddenly, it winked out. As it had every time before.

“Confounded ancestors! Broodmother claw my feckin’ eyes out!” Titus kicked a piece of scrap metal, sending it careening across the stone floor until it crashed into the side wall, breathing heavily.

“What’s the problem, Titus?” Ralakos had risen to his feet during the commotion.

“Problem is, the feckin’ pathways are shot. There were one that looked promising, but it’s a durgin’s ass, just like the rest.”

“Can’t we just remove the panelling and address the issue?” I asked.

“We could.” The dwarf looked down at the bottom section of the gate. “If that wasn’t high metal. The primordial gits decided they best put extra care into protecting the pathways, with no feckin’ foresight on what would happen when future generations needed to repair it.

There was a reason it was a fool’s errand to make plate armor out of high metal, despite the material’s incredible strength and durability. If someone wearing high metal plate had the misfortune of running into something capable of damaging the armor enough to trap them in it, it was essentially a death sentence. There were means of cutting through high metal, but none that would leave the wearer—or the sensitive components within a planar gate, for our purposes—unharmed.

Titus shook his head. “Worst part is, we really only need them to get this bastard started. Once the magic begins to flow, it’ll naturally find its way to the receiving crystals. Only now, the pathways are doing the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. Keeping magic out, instead of in.”

“Then we have to burn through them.”

Veldani was standing, one hand placed on the wall for support. She was still physically weak, but her eyes were lucid and sharp.

“How?” The dwarf stared at her, then looked at me, incredulous. “Him? If he lights an inferno in there, we’ll be worse off than when we started!”

“Not an inferno.” Veldani struggled to stand upright and crossed the room, taking a moment to appraise the gate before she spoke directly to me, determination in her gaze. “Not even a flame. A single spark of absolution, small enough to avoid damaging the external components, hot enough to cut through the blockage.”

My brow furrowed. “Creating a new pathway from scratch… but that’s…”

I had enough control to accomplish the first step of what Veldani was describing. Navigating the spark through the crystal and arm of a dimensional gate up to the pathway. The problem was, the small sparks I could form were fairly inert. If there was fuel around—grass, trees, any sort of matter the spark could consume—it was a simple matter to stoke them into a massive fire, as I had during the standoff with my father. But keeping a third stage spark small and hot enough to burn through metal was—

“Impossible?” Veldani raised an eyebrow. The double doors at the entrance of the room swung open as Casikas rushed back in. He looked as if he’d been through a minor disaster during his absence, his hair askew and eyebrows singed.

“Enough of this foolishness.” Ralakos took Veldani’s arm, projecting a level of authority I’d only seen him use once.

Veldani looked down at her sleeve and turned to face Ralakos coldly. “It is not your decision to make, Councillor. Kindly remove your arm.”

“Prince Cairn already cheated death once. To put him in mortal danger a second time—“

Between the silver flower Veldani gave Casikas, to his sudden return, to Ralakos’s angry demeanor, the gears clicked into place.

“You found it.” I realized. “The hydra lily.”

I’d been scouring the Sanctum for it ever since Veldani had told me of its existence.

Said to significantly increase the potency of the demon-flame, it was priceless. But acquiring the flower was an apothecary’s nightmare. While they could grow anywhere, there were never more than nine in the Sanctum at any given time. Once all nine flowers were picked, it would be centuries before they grew again.

Eight of them were already accounted for, converted into potions and consumed decades before I’d entered the Sanctum. There’d been many organized searches for the ninth that always came up short. The most common theory was that the ninth had been consumed by a creature of the sanctum, or trampled by an errant passerby. Eventually, the infernals as a whole disregarded it as lost.

All except Veldani.

“Where was it?” I asked, still not quite able to believe it. “I looked everywhere.”

Veldani snorted. “A certain Elder resigned to the hospice many years ago with an air of tragedy about him, nothing to his name but a robe, a small bundle of books, and a flower in a clay pot packed with dirt. He never spoke. Given his state, I mistook it as a burial lily.”

Slowly, I put my hand to my face. I remembered the Elder she was referring to. I must have walked passed the lily more than a dozen times. “Elphion, I’m an idiot.”

Veldani barked a laugh. “Then I’m an idiot many times over. It was only after he passed that I…” Veldani shivered and coughed. “It was… meant to be a parting gift, left to your discretion…”

Ralakos escorted Veldani away. This time she let him. I reached out for the bottle and Casikas handed it to me quickly, glancing over his shoulder towards Ralakos. “Good to see you. Alive and all.”

“And you as well. The apothecary thriving in my absence?”

Casikas ran a hand through his thinning hair, only making the strands more wild. “Decent enough. Quiet without you banging around. I should probably get another apprentice.” He glanced at the bottle in my hands worriedly. “Can we call that even on your backpay?”

I snorted. I’d spent a portion of my first few years in the enclave working for Casikas, honing my rusty and amateurish craft into something respectably professional. He was an awkward man who tended toward impropriety at times and was terrible at reading a room, but he had a great heart.

Eventually, I took a hiatus from the work to focus on magic and training, but I returned to the apothecary for a few months before entering the Sanctum. Most of the potions I’d made hadn’t sold before I left.

“Lets see. One legendary potion, versus a few dozen run-of-the-mill potions and a lot of Iron-Lung. Yes, I think we’re more than even, Casikas.”

“Oh good.” Casikas looked almost comically relieved.

Titus bumped my elbow. “So… What’s happening here?”

I held the bottle up to the light. The liquid was almost clear. It must have given Casikas hell, refining it to this level of purity. I popped the cap and prepared to drink. “Providence.”

“Or calamity.” Ralakos had returned. Behind him, Veldani was muttering to herself.

“I know the risks,” I said.

“No. I don’t think you do.” Ralakos stared at me evenly. “May I remind you of the situation that brought you here in the first place? You underwent extensive soul damage from misusing the flame. And the history of that potion is not a cheery one. Of the eight infernals to consume a flame catalyst potion in the last two-hundred years, four died. Immolated by their own fire. And apart from one, the rest adhered to the acclimation period and refrained from using the flame for a full day. This is folly.”

I considered Ralakos’s words. He was an excellent advisor at the worst of times, but he tended to lean on caution to an excessive degree. Not to mention, from the beginning, things I set out to achieve tended to take far longer than I expected. Depending on how the next few weeks played out with my father, it could be years before I made it back to the enclave.

“We don’t have a choice.” I insisted.

“Delay is the only option.” Ralakos countered emphatically. “It is important for any warrior to know when he is beaten. Those who surrender may live to fight tomorrow. There will be other opportunities.”

As much as I respected Ralakos, he only knew a fraction of the truth. Like many others, Ralakos believed I received visions at key moments, when in reality, I’d lived through those moments with perfect clarity. Veldani and Morthus knew more than most. Which I suspected was why Veldani was willing to risk giving this to me at all.

Only Maya knew everything. The person who had placed her life on the line for me, yet again.

Don’t waste this.

“I’m sorry, Ralakos. This has to happen now.”

Ralakos’s mouth hardened, and he snapped his fingers.

A servant I hadn’t even noticed appeared at his side. “Yes, Councillor?”

“Fetch a life mage, along with as many jugs of rosewater as my servants can carry. And keep the water coming.”

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