Track 4: Where the River Flows
In my old world, I didn't have older brothers or sisters. I was an older brother, and to be perfectly honest, due to my upbringing, I was never particularly close to my siblings. In this second life that once used to be chock-full of brothers and sisters from all ages, older and younger, that seemed to hold true as well. The age gap between my original siblings and I didn't help our case either, I was too old, and they too young, and although I'll forever question "if I was a good brother", and will now be forever unable to answer them, something clicked in place when the first thing I saw after waking up from that inferno, was not the face of a nurse, or a maid, even less my father, but that of the eldest brother I had in this life, the face of one Marx Alexander du Nohr.
I'm not sure what possessed him to be the one at my side. For all I knew then, I had earned myself a one way ticket to the guillotine or worse, father's axe.
Silence reigned when I stirred awake. Xander did not say a word, and I couldn't say much either. What he did do, however, was offer me a glass of water without enunciating a word. I just followed his eyes to the nightstand beside the bed I was in (I didn't recognize the room I was in either), and with a nod, Xander poured me a glass and offered it to me with a rigid movement, his face stone cold. I could not decipher him whatsoever.
When I tried moving my left arm to reach for it, I felt a stinging pain push me completely awake, and upon inspecting my naked body, I found that I was wrapped in bandages from the neck down. My body denied me from even taking the glass myself, and as the pain subsided, if only a little due to me relenting my efforts to move, it was only then that Xander stood up from his chair, and placed the glass on my lips. The liquid was a godsend for my dry throat. I choked a little because I drank too fast, but composed myself soon enough. Xander did not say a word.
I spent the next few minutes venting, trying to gather my thoughts, and mostly failing to do so. My mind was not in the right state to be articulate or eloquent. I had no desire to play my usual mind games, and I knew there was a pretty low chance to fool Xander even then.
It was only when he spoke that I had a thread to hold onto.
"Why did you do it, Ignis?" Was his simple question.
I didn't realize I started crying the moment he finished the question.
"Because I'm an idiot," I responded, way too crudely for an 8 year old.
"Did you mean to do it?" Xander questioned me again, and again I was unable to decipher anything from either his gaze or tone.
"No." I responded.
"What are you going to do now?"
"Do I even have a choice?"
"I am the one making the questions, Ignis." Xander's tone became dangerous for the first time in the conversation. I could feel him slicing me into tiny little pieces with his eyes. "I will not repeat myself. What are you going to do now?"
"Is he dead?" I ignored him nonetheless. And that seemed to be an armor piercing question for him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Xander's expression darken.
"Yes." He responded simply, dryly; just like I did to his question.
"It wasn't supposed to be like this…" I whimpered miserably.
"How was it supposed to go, then?" Xander retorted, with bitter incredulity coating his words.
"He wasn't supposed to be there!" I cried to the lone room. "I… I didn't mean to hurt him…"
"Ignis, you killed Victor and his mother."
My blood ran cold then. At that point I hadn't known his name, I had actively refused to remember his name. In my mind, there were only 4 siblings that mattered, only 4 of them that should survive, that were necessary, and amidst the madness that I had grown in, I never once deigned any of our other brothers and sisters to anything more than obstacles and possible danger to me. I hadn't even considered that maybe Camilla, Leo, or Xander himself could be the ones to end me. I lived to survive, and when the one thing of normalcy I had in my life, that being my mother, was taken from me, I threw everything away for a stupid ploy of revenge.
A revenge that got an innocent kid killed, all due to my short-sightedness and stupid, stupid wrath. Revenge that in hindsight, I didn't even have solid proof to base it. I just picked a target in Victor's mother once I saw how smug she had been when my mother was taken away. I justified it in my mind. Victor's mother's had the contacts, the means, and the perfect opportunity once my mom went on her march against Mrs. Sorel.
It was not definitive proof. But I didn't care.
I couldn't rationalize it. I had never faced a situation like this in my previous life. I had never needed to kill in my previous life, I had never had anything taken from me in such a way. Was it fear for my own life, knowing that I might die? Was it a desire to avenge my mother, rationality be damned? Was it anger for everything that's happened to me ever since I was reborn into this bizarre world? I don't know. I don't know and I don't think I want to ever know.
I wanted to lash out, but my body stopped me. It seemed like I was given the minimum attention to not die. I had a combination of burns and bruises all over my body, but I was alive.
Alive while that kid was dead… and I would never be able to fix that.
So I cried my heart out in front of my older brother.
And, for the first time ever, I had company that would let me do it until my tears ran dry.
The marks of Victor's teeth in my left forearm would be the last proof he had even existed within the Royal Family of Nohr.
I was discharged about a week later. I had spent 3 days unconscious since the fire. Xander had been unable to come see me during that time, and I hadn't received any other visits either. It was downright miraculous I had just received burns and bruises. The burns would leave scar tissue after some time (decades the doctor said), tissue that would surely accompany me as long as I inhabited the body of Ignis Perdido down to the grave, and they still hurt like hell to touch, forcing me to use a rather impractical cane as I limped a bit on my right leg and had been prescribed some painkillers (medieval medicinal opioids ahoy!), while I would have to visit the clinic daily until told otherwise.
All this was a price far too small and unjust to pay for the atrocity I committed. I had a bunch of burns across my torso, arms and back mostly. I also had a few scars on my face, although according to the doctor, it won't interfere with my daily life whatsoever once I healed enough, and dammit I wished we had Healing Staves back in my world. I guess the Dragon Blood within this body also helped. I have no margin of reference to my previous life, but between the dual color between the healthy and still healing one, I truly feel like this should have been fatal and that some of these scars should have left me charred rather than just with an irregular tan, though for all I know I could be exaggerating too.
My bad habit to wallow in self-deprecation may just become worse if this keeps up.
Not even sure getting psychological help will help me in my particular case either. At this point I have the mangled body of an 8 year old housing the mind or soul of an adult. Not sure even Freud could help me with this one. I don't want to be taken in a straitjacket either; pretty sure there'd be more than a few women delighted to see that happen.
I spent the next following weeks recovering and trying to catch upon my missed classes, a process which was quite strange, as I noticed as soon as I returned to the castle that everyone from the maids to my siblings looked at me with wariness.
Rumors fly fast, after all, and it wasn't every day that one of the children, even less one turned orphan recently, pulled a stunt like mine and lived to tell the tale, taking both the mother and the child in one fell swoop. I was also quite worried that being sent back in my weakened state would incite some opportunist to finish me off.
Surprisingly, no interrogations ever came. The maids avoided me like the plague now more than ever, and the children would speak in hushed voices and also avoid me even more than they did before, and I don't even want to think what the concubines said behind my back.
Physical training took a backseat until I recovered enough motor function and strength, so I instead devoted that time fully to learning magic. I wouldn't start casting Thunder anytime soon, that was obvious, but I received the most unexpected of help from Iago during that period. I don't know what he heard or thought of my return, but he was… different to me compared to before. While he still was a stuck-up snob with a few too many sticks up his ass, Iago eased up on me in the strangest of ways. Rather than berating and belittling my research, essays and circles, he started giving me cryptic but genuine advice to improve, mainly by indicating which parts in particular were wrong or doing some insane analogy that bordered on troll logic to solve my dilemmas.
The more mundane classes were no problem. I had barebones knowledge of accounting and a lifetime of math solving from my past life to help me through the number crunching, and it would be quite a while until I had to study truly loaded humanities (I dreaded the day I'd have to study Nohrian law thoroughly), so I only had to worry about my calligraphy and high nobility shtick. Thankfully I didn't have to deal with Mrs. Sorel, and though the replacement instructor wasn't much better, I wasn't deliberately picked on anymore.
Since I had quite more free time compared to my siblings, I decided to start rummaging more thoroughly through my mother's chest. I found out some interesting trinkets.
First of all was a peculiar steel sword that was too big, heavy and unwieldy for my 8 year old self. I had seen the standard issue Iron and Steel arms that were distributed to the soldiers in many of our classes up close, so when I studied my mother's sword up close, I found out the Grimwood family seal embedded on the pommel. I had no real way to tell if it was of better quality to the standard run of the mill blade of the same material, but I wanted to think it must have something going for it. Either way I wouldn't be wielding it anytime soon, so it was the one first item to be sealed again.
Next was a broken gauntlet, also too big for my current self. The fingers were damaged and bent in unnatural angles rendering them immovable, which I supposed had come from a nasty blow of some kind. The metal was also rusty as hell and dulled. After giving it a little cleaning, I found out a strange emblem engraved on the forearm that resembled the Grimwood insignia, though it wasn't quite the same as the one on the sword, as it was less fancy. It was made of a curious steel that I suspected was enchanted in some form, but since I didn't have that much knowledge yet on magical weapons or armor, I left it for another time, since it'd also need repairs.
Aside from that there were a Thunder and Fimbulvetr Tomes. Both which I wouldn't be able to use anytime soon, but would definitely serve me to get started in more advanced magic. In a bizarre mirror to the game, there were 4 standard issue Tomes distributed to the Mages in Nohr, those being Fire, Thunder, Fimbulvetr and Ragnarok, and each of those were taught in the same order due to the harshness of their handling.
Fire was the most basic tome due to its ease of use. Surprisingly, in this world willing fire to act to your will was very easy with just a bit of aptitude to magic and a Tome to supply you. The way magic works here is that the Tomes serve as a catalyst and bridge to manipulate the elements around you via their magic circles, glyphs and spells, and by memorizing the chants and imposing your own will upon the material world, you'd produce a natural effect via unnatural means. In the case of Fire, you'd warm up the air enough to combust it, using your own internal energy reserves as the fuel, so magic casting is as much of a physical as a mental task. Thunder and Fimbulvetr manipulate their appropriate elements (thunder and ice), and due to the number of chants and strength they took to cast, were considered higher tiered magic. The odd tomes like Mjöllnir and Lightning were special cases in the sense that they were both hard to produce and find, as well as manipulate in comparison to the standard issue tomes, so getting to use higher tiered Tomes boiled down to either trying yourself to use the magic and fail at it, either via not producing any significant effect, or depleting your energy. Ragnarok and beyond though, those were a bit of a special case, since no matter the strength of the caster, the "B Rank" tomes and beyond in particular tended to be quite intensive on the caster, which I guess reflected their debilitating effects. From what I heard, even Iago wasn't much of a fan of the Ragnarok Tome, preferring instead to rely on Mjöllnir, an advanced spell within the Thunder line, considered on the same tier as the basic Fimbulvetr spells, and often boasted that he'd soon have the chance to try his hand at Ginnungagap, one of the rarest Tomes within all of Nohr. Seeing firsthand what he can do with Ragnarok when he's serious, loathe it as he might, doesn't inspire much confidence in me.
Poor training dummies.
Then there was the equivalent of what is the Resistance stat from the games. In this world, every single living being will resist the effects of magic to some degree via by outright interfering with the force that makes the spell, an effect that can be further supplied with charms, wards, armor and the like, which is why Iago would never be hurt whatsoever with our spells, no matter how hard we tried. This was also a source of eternal debate within the studious, hermits and elders, I soon found out. Basically, some argued that "Resistance" as a principle is something that varies from person to person as well as object, and is something that can grow accordingly, while others claimed that it was a static force bestowed upon us by the Dragons of old, and rather than being our own, it was a blessing of sorts, that was different depending on principles like faith and a spiritual link of sorts to the world. This was explained due to the fact that "Resistance" meant squat when one was asleep, because those who believed in the second doctrine said that in a sense we left the material world when snuggled by Morpheus' sweet arms.
That was where I got the idea to burn Victor's mother down should she survive.
Fascinating as those principles may be, I don't care much about their study. Part of our magical training did include combat, combat in which we fought against each other with magic. Let me tell you those weren't pretty. Back when we first begun, we started out using the Ember spell (which is actually part of the Fire Tome's repertoire) to "lightly" char each other. From those tests both our magical strength as well as Resistance were defined. Yours truly was average in both fields, of course, which got me a lot of wollen skin and minor burns.
Nothing compared to that, of course. There's still a difference between magical and natural fire, and actually a whole field of study pertaining the interactions between the magic users and natural phenomena.
The most important things I took from the chest were, by far and beyond, the documents with the Grimwood emblem.
Now, I'm by no means well versed in laws and politics, and as a child, I didn't know much about Nohrian law (other than the infamous "The charge for treason is WELCOME TO DIE!") either, but I have enough knowledge to understand the gist of what I was looking at.
My mother's will included a small vault of a few thousand golden coins to my name and me alone, no relationship to the crown or the Grimwood family in any way or form. It was not much in the least, and wouldn't see me through at all if I were to leave the castle, but it was nice knowing that if shit did go south completely, I'd have a minuscule buffer to survive. What surprised me the most though, was a deed for a small farm in the outskirts of Nestra. It was just a couple of hectares long, and I of course would never know its state, it could have been completely rundown and the land unusable, but it warmed me a little bit knowing that I wouldn't be left completely homeless. That deed was stamped with my mother's maiden name as well as my grandfather Perdido's signature and personal stamp. I decided that deed would never leave the chest.
The other documents were actually interesting too. Even as a minor noble house, the Grimwood family needed contacts to survive like anyone else in Nohr. I took a read at the list of names categorized in four sections: those I could fully trust, those I could trust to a degree, those that I should be wary about, and enemies I should always be on the lookout for. It was both fitting and ironic that at the top of the last section were the concubines, but something that surprised me was that Arete was not in any of those lists.
The section containing the people I could fully trust would set me off to wreck canon… to a strange degree.