The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 466

Chapter 466

Chapter 464: The Order

SETH MILVIEW

It was a cloudy day, a good day for a fight. Deep red clouds hung low overhead as if they were laden with blood about to spill over us. Is it my blood, though, or my enemies? I wondered idly, hand clenched around the hilt of my blade.

“Se-eth! Se-eth! Se-eth!” the crowd chanted, my name becoming two syllables as they roared it loud enough to shake the soil beneath my feet.

I looked across the battlefield at my opponent. Her thin and bedraggled hair hung down over her drowned-pale and puffy flesh, a tinge of green to it. She looked like she’d wrapped herself in an old bed sheet, or maybe a curtain, instead of clothes. Sickly waves of poisonous mana wafted off her, but I didn’t mind.

I wasn’t scared. Not even a bit. I couldn’t quite escape the feeling that I should be, but with my sword in my hand and my name in the air like thunder, it was impossible to be afraid of anything.

Giving Bivrae of the Dead Three a winning smirk, I sauntered forward. Only…my feet didn’t move. It was as if I were rooted to the ground, stuck fast. My hand grasped the hilt of my sword, which was in its sheath, but the blade wouldn’t come free. I tugged and tugged, but it was futile. Then, suddenly and with undeniable certainty, I understood that I was going to die.

My body was frozen as the nightmare woman scuttled across the stadium floor toward me. I tried to shout, but the noise choked off in my own throat. Mana swelled in the atmosphere, building and building until—

I jolted upright, blinked rapidly against the sweat stinging my eyes. Groggily, I looked around, struggling to make sense of what I was seeing.

The dimly lit interior of a simple one-room dwelling opened to an outside shaded by twilight.

I jumped off the rough cot and grabbed my turnshoes, slipping them on and hurrying to the door. “Seth, you fool, you fell asleep!” It had been a long couple of weeks—maybe a bit more, I couldn’t be quite sure—since the Sovereign’s appearance and the attack. I’d only meant to lie down and shut my eyes for a minute, but…

Glancing westward, the sun had already gone beyond the distant mountains. I’d slept away the entire afternoon!

As I looked around in search of Lyra Dreide, a deep frown worked its way onto my face. Something was wrong. Everyone had stopped, and they were staring south. My own gaze followed theirs, and I suddenly felt it: mana, so much mana that I could hardly make sense of it. It swooned and swelled, battering back and forth, casting a distant pink glow against the twilight sky.

“Vritra’s horns, but it can’t be a battle,” a young woman I didn’t know said from a few feet to my right. Sensing my gaze, she met my eye. The color had drained from her face. “What kind of battle could cause such a…a…” Her words trailed off as she struggled even to think of an appropriate description for the sensation.

Then we all, as one, ducked or flinched, cries echoing across the encampment as a shadow fell over us, dim in the wan light. Looking up in fright, I watched as two huge, winged reptilian beasts flew by overhead, leaving the encampment behind in a moment as they sliced through the air toward the distant battle.

I swallowed heavily and unrooted my feet, an echo of my nightmare momentarily quickening my pulse. I needed to find Lyra or Lady Seris!

As I burst into a run, the unmoving scene around me unfroze as well, and people hurried to find their blood—their families—with a few others shouting out for leadership, and some eagerly grouping up to discuss the event. More than one, I noticed uncomfortably, watched the southern treeline with hungry expressions that seemed out of place with everyone else’s fear.

I hadn’t run far when Lyra Dreide strode around the corner of a larger family-sized building, her brows knit, her expression intense as she watched the dragons melt away into distant dots before being hidden by the horizon.

“Lady Lyra, something’s happening,” I said breathlessly. “A battle…in the Beast Glades.”

Her red eyes settled on me, and a strange expression softened her features. Goosebumps rose along my arms and neck, and I took a step back.

“Come with me, Seth,” she said, her voice soft, a kind of…ache half hidden within it. Without waiting for me, she walked past, heading for the southern edge of the encampment.

There, we found most of the villagers—those who stayed there permanently and a large number who were only there for a couple of days to help build a few new houses—already gathered, and they were almost all still staring south. Many turned to watch us, and a few shouted out in response to Lyra’s appearance.

“Retainer Lyra!”

“What is it, what’s happening?”

“A dragon! I saw a dragon!”

“High Sovereign Agrona has finally come!”

The crowd went silent, and all eyes turned to the young soldier who had shouted this. She seemed to realize her error immediately and shrank under so much attention—most of it clearly hostile.

“Please, I must urge you all to be calm,” Lyra said, her voice projecting across the small town so it sounded to each person as if she were standing right next to them. “Do or say nothing now that you may regret in an hour's time. We must trust that the dragons are protecting us as they’ve agreed, until such a time that we are given reason not to.”

“Where is Lady Seris?” a man with short black hair and a slightly ragged beard asked, stepping forward out of the crowd. “Surely she would have more to tell us than that!”

“Sulla,” Lyra said, placatingly. “I understand your fear, but regardless of what is happening to the south, we cannot panic.

“I’m not suggesting we panic, but perhaps we should do something besides sit here and wait to be saved,” he shot back.

I glanced between them rapidly, momentarily stunned by his attitude before remembering that Lyra wasn’t a retainer anymore, just as Seris wasn’t a Scythe. They had made themselves our equals, but that didn’t stop most of us from looking at them like our leaders. In Alacrya, she probably would have flayed the skin from his bones without a thought, but then, that was exactly what we’d worked so hard to escape.

“If it seems as if danger is—”

I fell to my knees as the world trembled. The skin of my back burned as if I’d been branded, and a presence—a consciousness not my own wrapped in a sheath of power—clawed into the space just behind my eyes. I tried to look around and see if it was just me, unsure if it would be better that way or not, but I couldn’t focus, could hardly see, as if a thick, gray woolen blanket had been pulled over my eyes.

And then I heard the voice, and I knew it wasn’t just me, because all around me, people screamed. The rumbling baritone made my bones quiver with desperation, like my skeleton wanted to rip its way out of me and run away. Even if I’d never heard that voice before in my life, I’d have known right away who it was.

“Children of the Vritra,” it began, rumbling so I couldn’t tell if it was in my head or booming out of the air itself, “you have waited. You have bided your time so very patiently, and now your long wait is at its end.”

My vision slowly returned, and I saw dozens of other Alacryans in the same position as me. As if I’d been forced to kneel before the High Sovereign himself, I thought wildly. A few had stayed standing, swaying on their feet or leaning against a wall or fence, but only Lyra seemed physically unaffected. The way she focused into the middle distance, staring blindly at nothing at all, was enough to tell me she could hear the voice as well, though.

“The time has come. The war begins anew, and you will be the edge of the blade that will slit your dragon overlords’ throats. You will lift up arms once again, and your subjugators will become but dust and blood trod into the roads on your way to victory. It begins with the one who put you here, who stole your strength and your freedom.”

Without looking at me, Lyra’s hand took hold of my shirt and lifted me uncomfortably back to my feet. It stayed there, clenched into the fabric like the claw of some mana beast, as the color drained from her face.

“Find Arthur Leywin. Find the Lance they presumptuously call Godspell, and bring him to me. Alive if you can, but his core will suffice just as well.”

Like a stone falling from the sky, a figure slammed into the ground nearby, pearl hair fluttering around her horns before falling back down over her black battlerobes. Seris’s dark eyes tracked over the crowd, settling on Lyra. She looked grim.

“Do not refuse me.”

I flinched so bad I might have fallen if not for Lyra’s grip as the same man from before shouted into the sky. “But I do refuse!” His voice cut across the stillness like the noise of a sword clashing against a shield, then hung there uncomfortably.

“Sulla, be silent!” Seris hissed, taking a step toward him and waving for him to settle down.

Instead, he took a few steps out into the open, turning to look at everyone else. “I don’t know what magic this is, but he’s just trying to scare us! Pick up our blades and go to war? Most of us did everything we could to escape our eternal service to the Vritra! We risked our lives! Fight for him now? No. No, I don’t think so.”

I caught sight of Enola pushing her way forward, her face set, clearly ready to join him, but her grandfather took her by the wrist and jerked her back, scolding her so viciously that even my dauntless classmate paled and was silent in response.

But others did come forward to stand at Sulla’s side. I recognized them all, even if I didn’t know them individually. Most were those who had fought alongside Seris in Alacrya as part of her rebellion, but a few I knew had been soldiers. Among them was the Sentry, Baldur Vessere. I knew him pretty well, as he’d worked closely with Lyra, having become a de facto leader among the soldiers when Professor Grey—Arthur, I reminded myself— tasked Baldur with rounding up the troops after the route at Blackbend City.

“Lauden, no!” a woman hissed, dragging my confused gaze through the crowd to where a man was pushing away from an older couple—clearly his parents, he looked just like them—and striding proudly to join the growing crowd.

“Please, mother. We’ve come this far. Haven’t we already given up every shred of power the Denoir name once carried? Abyss take us, but it was right, wasn’t it?” He clapped Sulla on the shoulder. “I won’t recant now.”

Lauden Denoir. Lady Caera’s brother, I acknowledged dimly, my thoughts refusing to come into focus. My brain felt like it was being compressed within my skull.

“Stop! Be still, be silent,” Seris commanded, suddenly shrill, a panic growing in her that I’d never seen before. Beside me, Lyra was tense, the hand clutching my shirt trembling.

“Lady Seris, we all swore ourselves to your cause back in Alacrya,” Sulla said. “I won’t cow before Agrona now, and not ever again. Not when I—I…” Sweat was pouring down his face, and he grimaced as words seemed to fail him. One hand began scratching at his back, and a growing terror fell across his features. Suddenly he was clawing at himself, moaning low in the back of his throat, and all those nearby stepped back, aghast.

With wide, horrified eyes, he looked at Seris, but she was shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Sulla—all of you. I’m so sorry.”

His shirt, which covered his runes, was smoking, a glow emanating through the cloth. As it lit on fire, burning outward from his spine, he fell to his knees and screamed. A sudden burst of black-tinged wind lifted him off the ground, spun him around, and slammed him back into the soil. Blades of wind and fire sprouted from his body, spraying blood in a halo around him, then spun, eviscerating his body and silencing his agonized screeching.

Too late, I turned away and closed my eyes.

“Still your minds!” Seris shouted, both hands pressing down into the air around her as if she could smother the growing terror. “Do not answer him! Not aloud, not in your own thoughts, keep—”

Someone else cried out, and I couldn’t help but look. One of those who’d joined Sulla was engulfed in blue flames, their skin blackening and their eyes turning to jelly as they clawed at the ground.

The crowd screamed as one and pulled back yet further from the small cluster of those who had been brave enough to stand up and shout out their denial of Agrona’s orders.

Terrified, I tried to do as Seris ordered, smothering my own thoughts. Without meaning to, I inched closer to Lyra, and her arm wrapped around my shoulder, pulling me close.

But my eyes fixed on one person. Lady Caera’s brother, Lauden, was stumbling back from the crimson stain that had been the man, Sulla. He was smeared with Sulla’s blood, but his face was blank, confused. I thought distantly that my own face must look pretty much the same.

Beside him, another person began to die, their runes igniting and their own spells ripping them apart from the inside. Lauden’s eyes pierced through the crowd to find his mother and father. The woman was weeping openly, pleading with her husband as he held her back from running to her son.

My stomach clenched, wriggling sickeningly inside me, but no matter how much I wanted to look away, I just couldn’t. I couldn’t.

And so I watched, wreathed in the unexpected comfort of Lyra Dreide’s arm, as Lauden Denoir’s runes burst, their energy burning away his shirt and the skin of his back. Mana spilled out of him like blood from a butchered wogart, bubbling up from his lungs and out his nose and mouth as he choked and drowned in it. A vein in his neck burst, spraying outward, then another, and then…and then I did look away, in the end.

For a moment, I was afraid that the same thing was happening to me, but when I wretched, only bile and my mostly digested lunch came up, spattering the ground and my shoes.

“I gave you the power you wield, and it is mine. Work against me in action, word, or even in thought, and the magic that was my gift to you will become your bane. These first brave few, for acting as my example to you, have spared their bloods from the same fate, but any others who disobey condemn their mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters to share their painful and gruesome end.”

The voice went silent, but the clutching presence still pressed against my lower spine. As I wiped my mouth, I looked up, back into the village, and met a pair of laughing red eyes.

Standing as if petrified, with my sleeve half-dragged across my lips and my back hunched as I attempted to straighten, I stared at the Wraith. Perhata, I remembered. The woman who had subdued a Sovereign.

CAERA DENOIR