RE: Monarch

I had it all figured out.

Gods.

How long had it been since I could say that?

There were a few inconsistencies left, a few things that didn’t quite mesh, but I felt such palpable relief at the idea of the end of the road being in sight that I couldn’t bring myself to ponder them.

I held out a hand towards the chasm, fingers reaching out into the dark.

My friend. The first real friend I’d made in such a long time. She was down there. Time would finally begin to move forward again, and I would finally, finally be able to see her.

Maya.

I didn’t blame her for telling the wrong person. In many ways, that it was divulged at all might have saved my life in more ways than one. The fact that the enemy knew my ability likely caused them no end of logistical problems in getting rid of me, made the whole thing much more difficult and complex, required them to remove themselves from the picture entirely.

My chest tightened, and I forced myself to breathe. It was almost over. I just had to stay strong for a little longer. A memory nipped at my consciousness and my back and my arms flared uncomfortably, hot and itchy.

I pulled the aquamarine memory orb from my chest pocket and focused mana into it, feeling a dull suck on my forehead as the memory was copied. I’d taken Erdos’s advice. Viewing the more traumatic memories without relieving them helped me fight down the episodes.

I saw Ozra, vigilant in the background as a shadowy demon held a scalding brand against my cheek. There was no sound, only images.

It wasn’t that bad, I told myself. Just a couple of burns. They’d done far, far worse before that nightmare was over. Then I found my mind drifting to those worse things, and closed my eyes, trying to prevent the downward spiral that would lead to.

You are lucky. I said it to myself, over and over. You are lucky.

I would not let the things that happened to me change who I was.

My fist holding the memory orb slammed against the metal of the bench with a loud clang. Passing faces turned to look my way, then hurried along on theirs.

I was close now. So close.

There was no point in lying to myself. Things were going to get worse before they got better. But if I did it all perfectly, timed it all perfectly, this would finally be over soon, if not this time, in one more reset.

Just one more.

Drying the sudden moisture that dampened my gaze, I stood. There would be time for rest soon.

I went home. Ralakos had posted additional guards, and I was surprised to see a small group of Guemon’s green. Ralakos must have talked to him. I hugged Kilvius and Nethtari. They were relieved, I think. The way I’d been acting lately, I probably seemed like an entirely different person.

For the first time in over two months, I volunteered to put Agarin to bed and told him a story. He giggled and cooed as the fairy cleverly outwitted Sir Gantry, and this time, he did not fall asleep until the end.

----

I sent a runner with an official invocation to Ephira the following morning, stating urgent matters. It was something I hadn’t done since we hammered out our first deal in the early days of removing the blockade.

Bemusedly, I compared that meeting—which had been all cookies and tea—with the rather unsettling meeting from the previous restart. The woman knew how to treat her friends and her enemies, and I had to be one of the few people unlucky enough to have seen both sides.

I wondered, almost blandly, which version of Ephira I would meet.

The summons went unrecognized for a few days. I spent them relaxing and studying magic. My left hand was mostly bandaged and immobile, so I hadn’t faced the reality of the loss yet. There was a tranquility to those days that was native to my earlier time in the Enclave, a time I’d nearly forgotten.

I studied the asmodials in greater detail, learning as much about the hierarchy and culture as I could stomach.

The arch-fiends of a given legion were fiercely territorial amongst themselves. But rarely, a leader would emerge, one capable of aligning the infighting warlords towards a greater goal. This was almost always preceded a major uprising, not unlike the one stirring within the Enclave.

It confirmed, in my mind, that this was a big deal. I wouldn’t be surprised if some version of this had happened in my first life. The violence itself had been long in the making. Someone was just using it for their own personal gain.

I took Jorra along with me to harvest the rest of the garrote caps and gave him half the profits. His eyes bulged out of his head when Casikas gave us the final normal, and he stuffed the purse deep in his rucksack and sprinted home.

It took a lot of experimenting and a lot of funds, but I eventually came up with what I wanted. A very specific, very weaponized version of the mage’s bane. With some effort and adjustment, I’d managed to reduce it to a concentrated powder form, making the taste of it far more subtle.

I couldn’t tip my hand too early. That was crucial.

----

I received my summons to meet Ephira at a little café she owned in midtown. It appeared I was getting the tea-party Ephira, rather than the mind-games Ephira. That was good. However, decent sceo was, I had no intention of eating it again any time soon.

She had selected a private room within the cafe’s isolated upper level, one far from prying eyes. A single guard was posted outside the room and opened the door to let me in. I nodded to him in appreciation.

Ephira was dressed in light pastels. She stood and curtsied as I entered the room, and awkwardly, I bowed in return. The contrast was… stark.

“Cairn, I was delighted to hear from you. But less delighted to hear about your…” she glanced at my bandaged wound. “Misfortune.”

I smiled weakly. “It’s alright, councillor, I have eight more.”

“Too true, too true. You know, the alabaster elves of the Nalore Tundras used to teach their children about frostbite by exposing them to it at an early age. It wasn’t uncommon for them to lose a finger in the process…” Ephira poured us tea and prattled on for a while in that over-animated manner socialites use to remind everyone else how worldly and interesting they are.

“Try the tea. It’s to die for.”

She was completely open and unguarded.

Without knowing it, Erdos had played his part exceedingly well.

It felt like such a huge, terrifying step to take.

I opened my mouth and spoke the words.

“You know, the last time I lived through this, you weren’t nearly this friendly. I dare say you were borderline hostile.

Ephira froze in place, and her eyes glazed over.

“That really put me off target. Had me completely turned around.” Slowly, I opened the parcel in my pocket and reached out for the air, summoning a pocket of breeze to carry the mage-bane to her tea in a rotating funnel. I wanted to move as little as possible to avoiding snapping her out of the fugue, and the process was slow.

“For the longest time, I didn’t know what to think. Guemon was the obvious choice. He hated me. He advocated to have me killed. But the isolation, due to the poisoning, made me consider other possibilities. Then you put me onto Ralakos. The dead son gave him a solid motive, and the fact that almost everyone who holds one hand out to me tends to hold a dagger in the other didn’t exactly help matters.” I stirred the tea thoroughly, added several scoops of sugar to mask the muted taste. “But at the end of the day, that didn’t make sense either. It would have been trivially easy for Ralakos to kill me—I was often alone with him—or if he wanted to distance himself, to have Erdos kill me any number of times, either via training accident or some other drummed up bullshit.

I thought through it.

“Then Persephone. Gods, if you want to know the real hero of this story, it isn’t me. It’s the little girl who pointed me towards Persephone. Who knows how long I’d have wandered around looking for the answer before I found Persephone on my own.”

I squinted, trying to remember her face. She’d seemed so incredibly familiar, yet I still couldn’t place it. The few times I’d been near the Thulian district I’d kept an eye out for her, but never seen her again.

“Persephone points me to Mifral. Persephone seems smart. Rational. So, why is she sending someone she just met to rob a priceless artifact? To make you lose face, or at least, that was what I thought. Not to mention, the gate was cut through with demon-fire. So, Persephone has access to demon-flame, or at least a way to mimic it. That’s huge. World shattering. It changes everything the moment someone discovers it… only no one does. Weird, how nothing ever came up about that. Only it wasn’t. Because someone covered it up.

But that’s easily explained away as you running interference for me. That was still possible. We had an agreement and you nabbed Shear.

But then, the mining facility happened. I was still too focused on Ralakos to notice at the time, but Persephone was off her game. Really off. I mean, I gave her an award-winning performance the first time I met her, and she nearly called me on it right then and there.

Someone that savvy, that clever—someone perceptive enough to pick up on the slightest shift of an accent suddenly loses her cool so easily when faced with outside interference during a negotiation?

I don’t buy it.

She practically chased Mifral into your arms. Only, Ralakos showed up and complicated things. Then the demons killed you, Persephone, and Mifral. And they captured Ralakos.

Gods, that was a close thing.

If Ralakos hadn’t recognized me, hadn’t tipped his hand, this whole thing might have gone very differently.

But he did.

That stumped me.

I ran through that scene a dozen times. Persephone, torn to pieces. Mifral, cut in half. Ralakos captured, and you… your throat cut. Compared to the way the asmodials kill, something I’ve witnessed first-hand dozens of times at this point, your death was almost… civilized.

Only, your throat was cut. The blood should have been bright red, arterial. Not dark.

Nothing really came into focus beyond vague suspicions until I confirmed the missing piece with Nethtari: Maya. Maya went to you to beg for a method of saving my life—though I’m still foggy on the particulars of that conversation—and knowing that, it all clicked. She told you then, I think. She told you that I had visions, that I could see the future. That I was worth saving.

And that changed everything.

You had to be careful, Ephira. You had to make sure that my killing couldn’t be tied to you even from the grave. In fact, you had to go out of your way to mislead me, keep me tied up in circles chasing dead-ends until the timer ran out. First Guemon, then Ralakos, then Persephone.

Gods, you really did plan for every contingency.

But you made a mistake. You couldn’t control Guemon, and he pushed far too hard at the trial. That tipped off Ralakos, who had men following me for my protection from that day onward. I suspect, without that misstep, it would have been much easier to kill me earlier on. I think that's why you had Erdos poison him. I've done some research in the interim. It's desperately tricky to poison someone with garrote cap. The slightest miscalculation in dose and you get an organ shredder instead. You didn't want him dead. You wanted him angry and scared of me, cornered and conveniently out of the way

In a classic mistake for a despot, you were prepared for everything but basic decency. Erdos was supposed to make sure I died during the ambush. But I saved his men trapped under the ice, after you sent them to die. With that, and the realization you’d set them all up, Erdos chose to save me.

And Persephone. I don’t know all the sordid history between the two of you, but I know enough from what I saw in the mining facility to know Persephone’s hate for you is not an act. I knew you had to have something on her, something big, to use her to get in touch with the asmodials and get Mifral to surrender the scepter in time to use it for the attack.

My guess? You threatened to expose her son.

I’m not sure why she wanted him hidden, but she did. And as soon as he was threatened she folded. A hardened duchess of the underworld, undone by the love of her child. Then she told the story I asked her to tell:

The story you tried so desperately to make me believe.

The story of how Ralakos had turned on me.

Erdos listened in, as I expected he would. Then Ralakos’s spies confirmed he took the story straight to you that very night.

And that brings us here. You, welcoming me into a neutral location, with open arms, alone, and practically unguarded. And I know almost everything. The only question left, is why?”

I stopped, feeling spent, almost dizzy. Ephira’s eyes unclouded, and she stared at me in momentary confusion.

“I’m sorry, I lost my train of thought,” Ephira said.

“You were telling me about the tea,” I said.

“Ah, right.” She held it to her lips and took a long pull.

I drank from mine. There were no delusions. This wasn’t over. It was probably too late to stop the attack. But I’d learned to revel in the little victories, the small things.

And as Ralakos’s men rushed in, pressed her down against the table and threw the manacles on; as she struggled, and shouted, and tried and failed to summon, I found myself smiling. Ephira was right.

The tea was exemplary. 

----

AN: This has been a long time coming and there's still more to reveal. Be careful not to spoil your fellow readers on RR and lower tiers :). 

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