Chapter 725: Nigh-Impossible Goals

As Jason and Allayeth continued to meander through his garden estate, Allayeth had the chance to see much more of it. In the manicured gardens that didn’t tower over them, she could see the looming pagoda at the centre of the estate. A network of small creeks flowed through everything, notable for the fact that they weren’t filled with water but with unadulterated mana drawn from the astral.

“Have you considered opening a spirit coin farm here?” she asked.

“I have it on good authority that several gods like the economy where it is. I'm not above snubbing the gods, but not just because I can. Usually. And messing with the economy always ends up hurting the people at the bottom of it, while rich pricks like me make more money than ever.”

“It would take a significant introduction of coins to affect an entire economy.”

“I know, right?”

They paused halfway across a massive rope bridge that spanned over a sharp gorge. The walls of the gorge were covered in thick moss and creeper vines. The bottom was shrouded in spray from a river that emerged from a cave, barrelled along the bottom of the gorge and disappeared into another cave.

“The underground areas stem from my dark essence,” Jason told her. “They have some spectacular glowing mushroom caverns.”

They carried on, passing buildings that ranged from gleaming glass and metal to old mansions reclaimed by nature to the point that they were hard to spot amongst the overgrowth. Oddly, she saw Jason, time and again. Meditating, sparring with himself.

“Avatars?”

“Yeah. I can only make them like me in here. I can make avatars in my cloud palace too, but they're the creepy cyclops fellas you've already seen.”

Along with duplicates of Jason, she saw messengers. Some flew in the sky while others were wandering around, floating over the ground or even standing on it. Solitary messengers looked introspective and conflicted, while those in groups conducted quiet conspiratorial chats.

“What are you doing with them?” Allayeth asked.

“Stopping you from doing things with them. They won’t talk, whatever you put them through. But you know that because you’ve tried it with the ones captured during the Battle of Yaresh.”

“And other conflicts, yes. But you could make them talk in this place, couldn’t you?”

“Yes. Silver-rankers I could make talk anywhere, I suspect. But that is a process I refuse to undertake unless the alternative is worse. Thus far, it’s only ever been the one time.”

“I’m not sure I follow your meaning.”

They were in a section of garden that looked like an abandoned English estate gone to seed, the once carefully manicured gardens having grown out unevenly. Buildings were half-crumbled and mostly overgrown. Jason nodded at a dilapidated farmhouse where a messenger was perched in a crouch on the rooftop, wings spread out to balance her. She had no eyes for Allayeth, staring death at Jason.

“That’s Tera,” Jason said. “She doesn’t like me very much.”

“She is your prisoner.”

“Being a prisoner she can accept. It’s being free that she struggles with.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Tera is a true believer in the messenger ideals. But she was going to die and I had to do things to keep her alive. Namely, I had to break her.”

“She doesn’t seem broken. Just angry.”

“Yes,” Jason said with a wide smile. “It worked out very well.”

“Most people with a messenger obsessed with their death wouldn’t call it working out well.”

“The first messenger who obsessed over my death was the Builder, so anyone else is a bit tame by comparison. But I will have someone else explain Tera’s situation and that of the other messengers. Do you know who Marek Nior Vargas is?”

“A messenger commander. A capable one. Also, the one you captured.”

Jason nodded.

“Marek,” he said. “Attend us please.”

Jason sat in a picnic chair that Allayeth was sure hadn’t been there a moment ago but she didn’t see appear. Failing to notice something happening that close to her was unsettling, and she was certain it was no accident. She checked behind herself and there was a chair for her too, plus a third when she looked forward again as she sat.

A messenger descended out of the sky, throwing a glance at the one Jason had called Tera. She continued to watch as Marek arrived, his wings folding back as he alighted upon the ground. Allayeth recognised Marek from having seen him across the battlefield while besieging messenger strongholds. He was less ostentatious in his appearance than most messengers, both in his garb and the way he carried himself.

He could have easily been a celestine adventurer with the wing essence if he was a foot shorter. He didn’t stop at tucking his wings away but absorbed them fully into his body, something messengers could all do but rarely chose to. There was also something odd about the way he moved and it took Allayeth a moment to realise what it was.

Marek didn’t make every move as if everything around him was his to command. Messengers believed themselves inherently superior and it was reflected in their body language. It was odd to see its absence, especially in front of Jason. It was one of many traits Jason shared with the messengers.

“You know each other,” Jason said, certain but sounding surprised. She assumed he read that from their auras, something she was not used to. It had been years since someone else could read her emotions while theirs were closed off to her.

“We have met on the battlefield,” Marek said.

“Marek, if you would be so kind, would you tell Lady Allayeth here how and why you came to be here?”

Marek looked at Jason.

“What should I hold back?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Lady Allayeth made a gesture of trust to come into this place. Diamond-rankers don’t put themselves at the mercy of others very often. It’s now my turn to put some trust in her.”

“If you are sure,” Marek said, his tone making it clear that he was not.

“I am,” Jason told him.

“Very well,” Marek said, then turned to look squarely at Allayeth. “The path that led me here started long ago, when I first became aware of a faction within the messengers called the Unorthodoxy…”

***

“What you’re telling me,” Allayeth said, “is that the messengers are an entire people made up of slaves who have been brainwashed into thinking they’re lords.”

“Yes,” Marek confirmed.

Allayeth slumped back in her chair as she rubbed her temples in one hand, her mind churning away.

“That makes so much sense,” she said. “It explains so much of the contradictory behaviour, the dissonance between their attitudes and their actions.”

She looked up at Marek.

“I respect what you want to do for your people,” she said, “but there is little practical assistance I can offer you. The messengers are still invading our world, still killing our people. We are going to kill them right back.”

“And I respect that you have not asked me for information on the strategic disposition of my people,” Marek told her. “My gratitude for what Jason Asano has done is almost boundless, but not quite. He has given me the chance to free my people, but I will not let the price be making it easier for you to kill them. I will not sell out my own kind, even when they are victims without knowing it.”

“I understand. And when I said there was little I could do, I did mean little, not nothing. Here is what I propose: I attempt to sell the Adventure Society on Jason being given all messenger prisoners to contain.”

“I’m not going to go soul-torturing every messenger we encounter to try and turn them from the dark side,” Jason said. “Tera was an exception by circumstance, and don’t think I’m going to go challenging messengers to reproduce that circumstance.”

“I understand that. But from what Marek Nior Vargas just told me, you didn’t torture him. He wanted this, and convinced his people to go along with it. The ones who are still stuck in their indoctrination you can contain safely here, but there may be others you can help.”

“Not all of my people could bring themselves to open their souls to Jason,” Marek pointed out. “Even willingly, fighting past the self-preservation instinct to make yourself that vulnerable is not easy. You expose the most core parts of your being, and one of my people died trying and failing to do that. Because he couldn’t get there, the astral king was able to kill him because she still had a hold over his soul. Even here, he was not safe.”

“I understand that,” Allayeth said, “but they wouldn't fare any better in Adventure Society custody. Any time one of our messenger prisoners shows any intention of talking to us, they die. And the ones who hold fast and give us nothing are ultimately executed once we're convinced they are of no use to us. Here, they can be contained and maybe even turned around by messengers like you. And I imagine there are more like you, biding their time and hoping for an opportunity that they believe will never come.”

“There are,” Marek said.

“Someone should stay here when I let the rest of you go,” Jason said. “Convince any Unorthodoxy sympathisers to let me free them from astral king control.”

“Assuming you let us go at all,” Marek said. “You, yourself, have voiced continuing doubt on this point.”

“Honestly, that was more due diligence than anything,” Jason said. “I all but decided to let you go almost immediately. I’ve just been looking for reasons to change my mind. The problem is how to do that without having people like Allayeth here notice and take umbrage. Her senses are good enough, and she pays enough attention, that I can’t just let you loose. And if I go far enough away that she can’t sense me, someone else will. There are a lot of diamond-rankers that didn’t go back into seclusion after the monster surge because of you and yours. They’re always on the lookout for your kind, and if they sense me open up a portal and let a bunch of messengers out, they’ll take my head off and shake it to see what’s going on in there.”

“Yes, they will,” Allayeth agreed. “I can possibly talk the Adventure Society and the Yaresh government into allowing you to take in all the messengers, but that is no certainty. What is certain is that even I won’t convince them to have you let those messengers out again, including the ones you already have. We need an ally who is more compelling.”

“Who do you have in mind?” Jason asked.

“Liberty,” Allayeth told him.

“Just to be clear,” Marek asked, “are speaking of the goddess Liberty?”

“That’s a great idea,” Jason said. “I never even considered that.”

“That does not surprise me,” Allayeth said. “My research suggests that, despite trafficking with them more than anyone who does not serve them that I know of, you have an inherent distrust.”

“That’s fair to say,” Jason said. “I don’t trust religion, I don’t trust authority and I don’t trust anyone with more power than one person should have. Vast cosmic power falls quite thoroughly into that range.”

“You have vast cosmic power,” Allayeth pointed out.

“Yes,” Jason agreed.

“You don’t trust yourself?”

“No.”

“Yet you seek out even more power.”

“Yes.”

“How do you reconcile that with a lack of trust in yourself to use it responsibly?”

“I try to be patient and thoughtful in my actions. To consider my motives in making them, to see if the reasoning behind my ideals has been warped by my pride and vanity. Mostly, though, it is the same answer I gave to your earlier question: friends. A friend will support you when you are doing well and things are easy. A good friend holds you to account when you are in danger of losing yourself.”

His smile mixed sadness and happiness, his eyes holding a look of reminiscence.

“I’ve faced that danger more than once in the last few years. I’ve looked long into the abyss and crossed line after line until I don’t recognise the man who was pulled into a magical world he didn’t understand. Every time, my friends were there to help me find myself. Who I was after. And to stop me when I came to lines that were too far.”

He looked at Marek.

“Your kind are easy to hate, Marek Nior Vargas. You make it so easy to justify performing the most heinous acts upon you. I should thank you for that, in a way. It helped me, through my friends, realise that I was on a trajectory that had to change. That I had to stop escalating the violence and the terror or I would inevitably become the very thing I was fighting. I would have taken ownership of you instead of setting you free, convincing myself that it was justified. For a greater good. But, as my friend Humphrey tried to tell me long ago, we can't always let our morals be relative. We have to choose for ourselves what our absolutes will be. Create our own objective anchor, and only then can we securely let ourselves ride the currents of circumstance, knowing that we won't drift too far.”

“Mercy,” Marek said. “That is the anchor you have set for yourself. We have discussed this before.”

“Yes. Mercy won’t always be possible, but it’s what I want to pull myself back to after rough waters drag me away. But don’t forget about the power of friendship, either. It helps you secure that anchor. And this is something you should pay attention to. I’ve seen you with your companions here, and I know you feel friendship, but I also think you underestimate the power of it. Don’t. I used it to defeat the Builder. You’ve set yourself the nigh-impossible goal of liberating your people, and the power of friendship is how you do it. You and this kernel of people you love and trust have to become the seed that grows into a mighty tree.”

“I’m not sure how that works,” Marek said, his expression uncertain, and Jason broke out into laughter.

“I hate to break it to you, bloke, but that uncertainty is not going away. Take it from a guy who’s done the impossible enough times to know how it plays out; you’ll always be uncertain, every time.”

Jason turned back to Allayeth.

“Your idea is good. I’ll seek out the goddess Liberty.”

“Perhaps you should let me handle that, at least initially,” Allayeth said. “I know that she will love what you have done with Marek and his companions, but the first approach should not be from someone whose idea of praying is ‘oi, god, get down here before I get cranky.’ They don’t respond well to that.”

“I’ve never said that. I don’t think. Out loud.”

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