Chapter 728 - It Takes a Monster

Zeke sat beneath the tree, leaning against its trunk as he toyed with the threads all around him.  He’d been experimenting for the past week, and he’d made stunning progress in manipulating the strings that comprised every part of existence.  As he tugged on the thread, the leaf to which it belonged disintegrated. 

Sighing, he picked up another and continued his efforts. 

He’d intended to change the color from reddish brown to green, but his control was less than ideal.  Destruction, as it turned out, was easy enough, and he’d yet to find a string he couldn’t move.  By comparison, preservation or transformation, he’d discovered, was far more difficult. 

So far, it had been impossible for him, and yet, he’d kept at it.  Zeke knew that, one way or another, he’d need to figure it out.  So, as the hours passed, he continued to destroy one leaf after another until he felt someone nearby.  He didn’t need to look up to know it was Talia.

The sense wasn’t a result of his power.  Rather, he could smell her distinctive scent.  Like a fresh, winter breeze.  Almost like mint, but less overt. 

“We’re almost there,” she said, her voice just as cold as her scent.

Zeke didn’t respond.  Instead, he retrieved another leaf, then plucked one of its threads.  Each one was different.  Every string was a building block of existence.  Zeke just needed to figure out how to recognize their purpose. 

When that leaf disintegrated into nothing, he let out a sigh and asked, “Are you still angry at me?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything I can do?” was his next question.  Then, he looked up to see her standing over him, arms crossed and a neutral expression upon her face. 

“Let me go with you.”

“You know I can’t do that,” he said.  “And you also know why.”

Their upcoming assault on Okanar and its moons – Imilar, Estilar, and Cylikar – was on the horizon, and everyone suspected that attacking would garner attention from Aja.  Perhaps not, but the death of so many worshippers would cripple her.  What’s more, it would signal a new phase of their ongoing war. 

To date, they’d kept their actions primarily to the Eternal Realm, which meant that the tree goddess had no real recourse.  Certainly, she could empower her people, but that would require her to turn the flow away from herself.  From Zeke’s experience, no greater god would ever do that. 

They didn’t see their people as assets.  Or as their relationship with their worshippers as a responsibility.  They would protect them, but only so long as those followers funneled faith upward, resulting in divine energy.  Otherwise, greater gods like Aja felt no obligation. 

Or so Zeke had been told, usually by Oberon.  The dwarven greater god held no small degree of enmity for his peers, and he wasn’t shy about showing it, either.  Still, his tales smacked of truth, and nothing Zeke had seen since climbing free of hell had pushed him into believing anything else about those greater gods.

They were selfish.

Self-centered. 

And most of all, they were short-sighted.  Even as Zeke beheld the threads that made up his reality, he could see them beginning to unravel.  At first, it hadn’t been quite so evident.  But with every passing minute, it became more obvious. 

They were on a timer.

How long remained on that timer wasn’t obvious, but Zeke suspected that the timescale was, at most, counted in centuries, rather than millennia.  What’s more, the greater gods had shirked their duty, remaining in the Ethereal Realm rather than ascending to The End and joining together to shoulder some of the Creator’s burden. 

But at the moment, he was more concerned with Talia than with the existential nightmare that came from an unraveling reality.

“We used to fight together,” she said with a sigh.  Then, she sat.  “It was one of the things I loved about us.  You never tried to protect me.  You didn’t treat me like I was made of glass.  You trusted me to do what needed to be done.  You respected me.  I…I just want to go back to that.”

Zeke reached over her shoulder and pulled her close.  She laid a head on his chest.  “I know,” he said.  “But there are some places only I can go.  Some things only I can do.  I don’t like it any more than you do, but that’s just the way it is.”

He wasn’t certain how true that statement was.  The first part was fine.  He was special, and he’d come to terms with the fact that he was fighting a lonely battle.  He was less sure about the assertion that he didn’t like it.

Because deep down, he did.

Not the uniqueness of his situation.  Not really.  Rather, he’d long enjoyed the feeling of standing alone against unequal odds and somehow coming out on top.  He’d been doing it from the very beginning.  Since awakening in that cave, he had been scratching and clawing against a situation that should have long since overwhelmed him.  By all rights, he should have died a thousand deaths.

Yet, he kept going.

He kept fighting.

Because that was who he was.  That was what he needed.  Without that, he had no idea what else he would do.

“War is a lonely thing,” Talia breathed.  “In the end, every man stands alone, shielded only by the morality of the path he has chosen.”

Zeke opened his mouth to respond, but no words came out.  His first impression was that the idea was nonsense.  Plenty of people fought in armies, so by definition, they were not alone.  What’s more, the notion of forging bonds through battle was very real.  Zeke had experienced that himself in hell’s version of Valhalla. 

But then he realized it was a metaphor for death.  Whatever else happened, that was a journey meant to be undertaken alone.

“Poignant.”

“Just something I heard from one of my mother’s generals,” she said.  “Abdul Rumas might have met a bad end, but in life, he was a wise man.”

Vaguely, Zeke remembered that name, but it took him a while to recall the origin.  Suddenly, the image of a hulking knight, undead but more than a zombie, appeared in his mind. 

“He was a good person,” Talia said.  “I frequently think about him.  About what he might have become.  I also think about my place in the world.  If I had never met Micayne, who would I be?  Would I have ended up staying in the Mortal Realm?  Probably.  Maybe the necromancer would have still swept across the Radiant Isles, the same as this timeline.  But maybe I accepted my role as a healer.  Maybe I joined the church.  I could have helped a lot of people.

“Did you know that my mother wasn’t crazy?” she asked suddenly.  “I understand so much more now.  She was sick from staying in the Mortal Realm for too long.  It created a disconnect.  From other people, from reality…sometimes, I tell myself that’s why she did what she did.  Do you think that’s true?”

Zeke didn’t.  The woman had been a monster, and writing off her misdeeds by considering a result of some side effect of remaining in the Mortal Realm for too long was, in a word, objectionable. 

But still, he said, “Maybe.”

Of course, Zeke wasn’t sure that he had any room to talk about monsters.  At his order, hundreds of thousands had died.  By anyone’s reckoning, it was a genocide cloaked in the guise of war.  Did it matter that he’d only ordered it because it was necessary to save reality?

No.

A just goal required just means.  But Zeke had become a monster well before he’d given that order.  He’d been killing people for so long that he knew his soul was irredeemable.  And yet, he also knew that he couldn’t stop now.  Otherwise, the many sins of his past would be in vain. 

Besides, the world didn’t need heroes.  Saving reality was a job for a villain.  A ruthless monster who let nothing stand in his way.  Not morality.  Not justice.  And certainly not sentiment.  His heart needed to be hard, his darkened soul unassailable.  Anything else would be a half measure.

“I sometimes think about forgiveness,” he admitted. 

“Whose?”

“Everyone’s,” Zeke said.  “If they knew what was at stake, would they forgive me for killing them?  Would they lay down their lives for the greater good?”

“Would you?” she asked, looking up at him.

Zeke shrugged slightly.  “I don’t know.  I want to believe I would,” he said.  “But there’s a part of me that knows otherwise.  I think if someone told me I needed to die so everyone else could live…well, I’d just keep fighting.  I’d go down to my last breath, but I don’t think I have it in me to give up like that.  Even for the right reasons.  Even to save the world.  Or all of reality.”

He looked down at her. “More evidence that I’m a monster, right?”

“We’re all monsters to one degree or another.  We’ll just be monsters together,” she responded, once again laying her head against his chest.

Zeke wasn’t surprised to hear her say that.  Talia had come to terms with her own nature long ago.  She readily acknowledged what she was.  She’d been reborn as an undead revenant, after all, so she knew what it was to be derided as a monster. 

They remained like that for a long time, and though the perception of the threads kept trying to intrude on the moment, Zeke kept it at bay.  Instead, he simply enjoyed Talia’s company, ignoring the fact that she, like everything else, was just a collection of strings. 

Like all things, that brief respite eventually came to a halt.  In this case, the end came when one of the kobolds informed them that they had arrived at their destination. 

“The moons,” Zeke said to Talia.  “Do not come to the main planet.”

“I know the plan.”

Indeed, she’d helped create it.  That didn’t mean she liked it, though.  She did not, largely because she wanted to accompany Zeke.  But he felt certain that she would follow his direction.

Soon enough, they’d exited one of the tower gates onto the Mercury, which was docked at a newly built station.  It had been under construction for months, and though it was little more than a hunk of rock in the middle of space, it had the advantage of being in close proximity to their targets.  As such, it made for an ideal staging ground. 

A thousand ships were moored there, each one built on the same blueprint as the Mercury, which meant that they resembled ocean-going vessels.  However, they were much, much bigger.  Far slower as well, but that didn’t matter.  All that counted was that they could move the maximum number of troops – mostly kobolds – from the staging ground to their targeted moon.  And in that endeavor, they were unmatched.

“How many soldiers per ship?” Zeke asked Silik.

“Twenty thousand.”

“How many ships?”

“A thousand.”

Twenty million troops.  It was a daunting number, but from what Zeke had learned of Okanar and its moons, it was necessary.  Some of the generals, Silik included, had even lamented that there weren’t more soldiers available.  If they’d waited another decade or two, they might have doubled the army’s size.

But Zeke had no desire to waste that much time.  Aja was as weak as she was ever going to be.  Any delay would only give her an opportunity to rebuild her strength by cultivating more worshippers.  The time to strike had come. 

Still, Zeke hesitated.

He knew the cost.  Millions would die in this battle.  Many of those would be innocents.  Most, even.  And yet, he also knew the stakes.  When weighed against the destruction of all reality, a few dead students was a small price to pay.

He gave the order to proceed, and the engine of war sprang into motion.