The Trial: Journey's End
Written by: AtheistBasementDragon
Edited by: The Usual Gang of Drunken Perverted Idiots
Chapter 20: Making Up
Neia lay quietly in the bed of her divine father. 'Albedo's perfume.' She thought to herself as she snuggled into the huge pillow, 'I'll bet she lies in here all the time. What a wonderful and thoughtful thing to do for my Lord.' Neia thought as she closed her eyes and savored the rising warmth of the sheets.
'Her children will be very lucky to have a mother who loves them so well.' Neia pondered with envy and tried to picture what they would be like. She found quickly that she couldn't. 'I'll need to redouble my efforts... and add new items and new things in nature to the list of priorities for the my explorer priests, somewhere out there, there will be materials that will let my lord become as he wills, and sire the brilliant heirs every empire needs to be well ruled.' Neia pondered that in idleness before she drifted off.
However her eyes snapped open when she heard a voice that always stabbed her in the heart.
"Are you... awake?" Tuare asked.
Neia clutched the pillow as hard as she could. "I... yes. Yes I am. Did you need something?" She asked hesitantly.
"I... no, well... I wanted to talk, really." Tuare wrung her hands in front of her, and as she turned her eyes over the slender maid, she noticed the girl tenderly caressing the wrist Neia had accidentally snapped.
Guilt ran through her like a stampede of horses, and she slowly sat up in bed and rested her back against the headboard. "Yes...?" She asked with her eyes lowered to the sheets.
"It's been awhile, hasn't it?" Tuare asked in the timid voice she always had.
"Doesn't feel like it, it seems like only yesterday that Kami Miyako was on the verge of collapse, I haven't seen you since the day I met your price, so... what did you want to say to me now? Did you come to tell me I brought this on myself? Did you come to tell me you'll sleep better from now on, now that I've basically thrown away my chances for the sake of one more brutal killing?" Neia snorted and looked away, she folded her arms decisively in front of her small chest and muttered, "I already knew those things."
Tuare shook her head vigorously and brought her hands up into small fists in front of herself, "No, I came to tell you not to give up!"
"What?" Neia whirled her head over to face her former victim and looked at her as if she didn't quite understand what Tuare had said.
Tuare rushed around to the side of the bed, only a foot away from the woman who'd once become the cause of renewed nightmares. "I said, don't give up!"
Neia stared at her, "Are you Pandora's Actor just screwing with me here... because if you are, it isn't funny."
Tuare turned red in the face, reached out, and slapped Neia sharply across her cheek.
The Black Paladin looked up at Tuare, then touched her spot where the maid struck it.
The little maid's words poured out like a waterfall, "No! I'm me! I'm Tuareninya, I know you didn't expect to hear this from me... and... and I know you must feel like half of those you love and respect best have turned on you but... but it isn't true! And more importantly I saw! I saw what you did to that man! And what his words did to you..."
She grabbed at Neia's wrist and held it as tight as her feeble strength could manage, and Neia looked up at the lovely little woman, "Listen to me! Lord Ainz hates this even more than you do, I've cleaned his office sometimes since this began, I've done it many times over the last few years, and when he goes over things pertaining to you, I can feel his anxiousness. He's not the only one! Lord Cocytus, Sebas, even Vanysa wants you to go free. Please believe me, it isn't over yet. So don't give up, OK?"
Neia smiled up at the maid as broadly as she ever had, "You're quite an amazing girl, Tuareninya. Sebas is lucky to have you."
The maid blushed a little, but carried on, "I have forgiven you for what you did to me, I know it was an accident... I've learned a lot about what you dealt with, and that made forgiving you easier. But that won't do you any good unless you forgive yourself at least a little, too. You made a mistake, but don't cling to it forever, if I haven't, you shouldn't either. Besides... you killed the sort of man today... who would have been a regular visitor to the hell that was my former life. You'll save or avenge many in the future. But only if you get through this. Just don't lose yourself, and I will be proud to serve you, not terrified of it." She then drew Neia's hand up, and lowered her face to kiss the Pope upon the back of her hand.
"You'd make a kinder and wiser pope than I, I think." Neia said with genuine praise in her voice as Tuare stepped away from her.
"I hope I live to see the world that needs a pope like that." Tuare said with the gentle smile on her face that she knew her husband deeply loved to see.
"Me too... and by the way... thank you." Neia said and lowered herself back down into the sheets, cuddled against the blanket, thoughts of her wife and their child to be running through her head as she drifted off to sleep again.
...Hoburns...
Skana watched from the balcony as her wife thrashed and wailed first in a rage, and then in agony, half a world away. "Why... why is this happening to her..." She shook like a leaf, reminded of the helpless time when she was nothing but a weak peasant watching through the woods as demihumans destroyed her village and ruined her life. Then the way it felt when she was a captive and first beheld the woman who was now screaming to the world to make the pain stop, after having utterly destroyed the body of the human that stood against her.
Skana clutched the stone of the palace balcony tight enough that she felt the stone give slightly beneath her grip, and crack. "What else... why must I always watch... why... why...? I can't even go to her!" Skana begged for answers that the woman whose arms folded around her, could not give.
Queen Calca wrapped her arms around the young warrior woman... the second most dangerous woman she'd ever known... and so hard was Skana's heart beating in her chest, that even pressed against her back, through cloth and flesh of her own, that Queen Calca could still feel it pounding within.
"I'm sorry... I'm so sorry..." Calca whispered comfortingly into Skana's ear and tightened her embrace as much as she could. The body of the warrior woman was at odds with her own in all ways. Where Calca's body was soft, Skana's felt like it was carved out of wood and polished smooth, ripcord muscles were reflected in even the smallest gestures, and it was easy to forget that the one eyed woman who was the lover of the demon of the west, was just a young woman herself.
Except... in moments like this. Skana's pregnancy was now obvious, and her body was racked and spasming with sobs while Neia's body, already bloodstained and begun to shred from the use of that terrible aura to crush the one she hated, was further wounded when she smashed her head on the stone at her feet in her desperate attempt to stop the pain coming from within.
"I... don't even know what that is... what just happened... but please be calm. She's alive, she's alive, she'll get better, you'll see her again!" Calca promised urgently, "Just remember your duty as the acting Pope and commander of the armies of the faithful! Go out and speak to the public in every city, do as she does, encourage confidence in justice even when people care more about seeing the end they want."
"This is why I can't really be a pope. I'm not Neia." Skana said and slowly turned around to take Calca's hands. "I love His Majesty as a father in law, I'm loyal, I follow him, I believe in him. But even for all that… all I want is my wife back home." Skana's eyes welled up, "What is just to the rest of the world, is unjust to me! Unjust to our baby! I don't care about the world, all I want is her home again!" She said with desperate urgency. "I'll do my best, I'll tell stories of what we saw together, what she's done and what she endures… but with her friends and allies arrayed against her as they are now, all I want is to be with her. Not out here." A trembling smile made its way to Skana's lips as she weakly brushed away a stray auburn hair from her face.
"Not exactly a woman of legend, huh?" She sniffled derisively.
Calca brushed back the hair of Skana the bold, tilting the warrior woman's face up so that they were eye to eye, and said with matronly gentleness, "Maybe not of legend, but of a sort anyone with a heart would understand. Use that. She may be a grandiose speaker of rare order, but don't try to be that. Just be you, pass from [Gate] to [Gate] city to city, and touch hearts in ways even she can't do. With the simple loving appeal of one to another, to understand not only why this is happening, but what good may come from it. Calm the elves, move the humans, make the dwarves cry in their beards and the orcs toast her courage. You can do this, you can endure, I believe in you."
"Thank you… I'll need a bath, but then… then I think I'll be ready to go out there and do what I need to do, what she needs me to do, and I won't fail her." Skana said with a confident air that marked her once again under Calca's eyes as the warrior she knew.
...Kirakira Prison...
Mu'Ulm swung his wooden axe at the elf, only to find that not only did he miss, but the damn thing got under it easily and hit him on the leg without even trying.
The damned elf just kept dancing around him, his unusual acrobatics were maddening. Finally Mu'Ulm slammed his ax down with frustration, kicking up dirt as he did so. "Why can't I hit you little bastards?!" He snapped, and the elf stepped back and pointed to the ax.
"Because of that." The slender elf pointed to the ax itself. "You minotaurs are very strong, very big, so you've gotten the idea that bigger is better, and... sure that ax looks very impressive, and I'll bet it could bring down a horse in one swing, or even break up a formation. But it's almost useless in anything else, any twit can see it coming a mile away. We're tailor made to fight bigger than us, even up close. Neia wanted us to be that way, so we could fight beings like you. You're just not adapted to our methods. We could do this all day, and the outcome wouldn't change."
Had the elven warrior's tone been mocking, things might have gotten ugly, but he kept his voice professional and critical, ticking off his points and explaining the defect.
"I can't fight like that! Minotaurs are not good for acrobatics." Mu'Ulm pointed out begrudgingly.
"No, you're not, or for archery, from the way your arms move. We need to adapt this to your own people's physical qualities. Blend methods so that they work. Maybe change your equipment up to allow more flexibility." The elf thought the matter over.
"Your grips are good but... what if... wait here please." The elf said and rushed over to where the carpenter was working, a few whispered words and a handful of minutes later, the elf came back holding a very large, round wooden shield.
"Try this. It's crude, but... swing it." The elf said confidently.
Mu'Ulm brought it back and forth across his body a few times, first slowly, then faster.
"Harder to avoid, good protection, and if you use a smaller ax..." He held out an ax half the size of the one in Mu'Ulm's weapon hand, and the enormous minotaur reluctantly took it.
It swung faster and closer, "You're a large people, getting up close is better, use the shield to create distance when you need it and to guard against faster opponents, and use your smaller ax to get in close and really hack away at it."
Mu'Ulm chewed on his tongue as he thought about what the elf was saying, he was still turning the matter over when the elf brought over the practice dummy.
"Give it a try." He suggested tentatively and held his arms out as if presenting the target while he stepped clear.
The huge shield cracked hard on the dummy, secure to its springy surface, it slammed down to the ground and then snapped up, only to be smacked by the wooden ax, bounce against the ground on the other side, and then as it came backup, it was bashed in the neck by the ax as it flowed smoothly the other way.
Mu'Ulm's heart began to race with excitement he hadn't felt in a long time. He began to improvise, alternating different blows and motions to move around and strike at different points of the dummy, with both his smaller ax and his heavy shield, it proved a potent combination that began to draw the eyes of not only the prisoners above, but the guards above.
"Amazing." Mu'Ulm said breathlessly, "I want to try this out on her, when she gets back." He added with a huffing laugh that spoke of battle hunger.
"Oh you haven't seen anything yet." The instructor remarked with a grin. "After we work this out, we're going to adapt it, and show you how one can be greater than one hundred."
Mu'Ulm looked at him as if he had gone mad, but the elf only laughed as the various instructors, seeing that their students were distracted by the new method, called a halt and enough shields and short axes had to be produced for all of them to practice.
...E-Rantel...Arwintar...Hoburns...Kami Miyako...Yaksun...Menowa...and more...
"The ropes they bound to my wrists were tight enough that they began to cut into my flesh, and my blood ran down my arms as I begged for mercy over the theft of bread... from the garbage." Zanac shuddered as the passage went on, and finally he marked the page and set the book down. "I can't read more of this now… I'll finish it later."
"...I was the overseers favorite plaything at night, because I had been sold along with my daughter to the farm, and I would comply with everything on the promise that she be spared their attention. This seemed to greatly amuse the master and mistress of the house, who often threatened to sell her... or me, to ensure that I would perform ever more degrading acts, and inform on my fellow slaves. Which meant none of my own could trust me either. This game of theirs went on for twenty years, until the harvest failed, and the master of the house was forced to carry out the threat that had kept me in terror. I still have not found her, and search for my child down to the date of this publication. Laitha... if you read these words... if you still live... come to the square in our village, and I will find you again..."
Jircniv read the passage of the book his wife had brought to read, "I may have earned my name as the 'Bloody Emperor' but even to me that is… well that is what evil looks like."
"...It seemed to amuse them, to watch young elf boys and girls fight and beat each other. When I was free, I never thought I'd find occasion to curse healing magic, but the fact that our worst wounds could be cured with a little mana, meant they cared nothing for hurting us as much as they wanted. I'd heard those stories, but when I stumbled across the red grain, I knew I'd never think of healing magic the same way again. A hollowed out circle of grain, where those few yards had been laid down in the center to make a golden arena, were where the overseers and breakers would make us fight, winners were rewarded by not being put to the pain, losers... got a lot of pain. They made us hate each other as much as we hated them. That was the real insidiousness of their actions, and I still can't look at my own the same way as I did before..."
High Priest Sudon marked the page and set the book down, then went to the balcony and looked out over the city of Arwintar. 'If these narratives are selling everywhere… I doubt the temples of the six will ever really recover, not when their greatest advocates were doing 'this' in the name of the six. No wonder Neia did what she did. Given my youth back again, I might have done the same.' He thought, and walked away from his view of the world and glanced at the wall where the sword he used in his youth still hung.
"I wonder… maybe? Would he permit it, the living of a life over again if it were offered to his service?" Sudon pondered the thought with genuine curiosity… and resolved to ask the Emperor tomorrow.
All over the Sorcerous Empire and beyond, slave narratives flew from the shelves like grain with hunger on the horizon. Hands of all kinds, snatched them off the shelves of book shops and lending libraries, cafes and tea houses alike were packed with people. Most of the books bore some variation of dedication beneath the title on the inside. 'With special thanks to our liberators. His Majesty, Neia Baraja, and Black Justice...'
Many, though not all of the books, contained stories of encountering her priests or soldiers, or following her army after they were free. A fair few contained stories of their observations of Neia and her high command in an emotional moment of rescue... when the pope beat an overseer to death with her bare hands when she found him over the body of a slave, or her wife, whose perfect sword work and adamantite enchanted blade cut through chains like butter. Some few reported on the tortures they were trapped within, when Neia arrived in person, and went into great detail at the agony and rage they saw from her.
Mothers clutched their children tighter as it chilled their blood to imagine their own subject to such dread ends, fathers were no different in that regard, and so many were the shudders and shivers from one corner of the Sorcerous Empire to the other and beyond, that one could be forgiven for thinking winter had descended upon the summer afternoons and stolen away all warmth.
"Let her go." Again became a popular phrase.
In the palace of Crescent Lake, Zesshi sat up in bed, alone in her room as she read on, turning pages as fast as she could devour the words. More than once however, she had to stop and drink, it had been three bottles already.
She dropped the latest bottle... empty. That was four, it fell with a dull thud on the floor next to her enormous bed and rolled away to where the others lay, clinking lightly when the glass touched.
'He liked to ask if it felt good, sometimes he wanted me to say yes, sometimes he wanted me to say no, if I said nothing, he hit me. If I said the wrong thing, he hit me. It was a game to him, they liked their games there, and the only way to be safe from them, was to be dead. Many times after I was sent staggering to my bed of straw, I thought about ending it, and would have... except I knew what would happen to my body. They would throw me in a hole on some farm, use me to nourish the crops that nourished their bodies. In this way, right to the end, they would devour me, and everything I was. And I didn't want that, if they got a bite out of me, I wanted them to choke on it. So I stayed alive. Alive until I met a boy who treated me like a person, who tried to protect me, and through him, I found out I had a big sister, who tried to save as many of us as we could, and avenge the ones she couldn't. I wasn't the least bit surprised when I heard they'd started eating elves in Kami Miyako. After all, they were only one step removed from that for the entire time I lived there...'
"So this is what they were doing to my baby sister while I was protecting their sorry asses." Zesshi slurred out drunkenly. "Aorli... if only I'd known you sooner..." She muttered, and went on reading until she closed the finished book and began to slip into unconsciousness, with a little help from the copious amount of wine she'd consumed, which blessed her with a long and dreamless sleep.
