Path of the King - Chapter 11 (Patreon)

One of the biggest regrets of my first life was that I’d never really had a chance to travel the world. I’d barely skimmed the surface of what my own country had to offer, much less witness the wonders of the world at large. Vacation had usually meant driving a few hours to visit relatives, not trips to Europe or Asia. I’d left the United States a grand total of twice in my entire life for just a few days both times, and Canada––particularly the single heavily urbanized city I’d visited––barely even counted as a different country. 

There was never the time. There was never the reason. There was never the money. 

And then it was too late. 

I refused to live a second life full of regrets. What was the point of a second chance if you just made the same mistakes over again? 

Thankfully, traveling was a lot easier this time around. I may have been born without functional magic circuits, but I was also born into the sort of generational wealth that would have been utterly inconceivable to my past self. As much as I couldn’t stand the sight of my parents, I had to admit––at least in the privacy of my own mind––that they could have been so much worse. I was a failure, but I was family. And family was everything. 

Even before I’d left for college, I’d visited more countries than I would have once thought possible. My family owned properties all over the world and we typically spent part of the unbearably hot Egyptian summer when the Council of Sands went on recess in either Greece, Switzerland, or the south of France. I’d also accompanied my parents on several diplomatic trips to mage organizations in Southeast Asia, across the Middle East, and one very memorable trip to Brazil. 

We’d also gone to Ethiopia to visit my mother’s and paternal grandfather’s relatives a few times, but I had stopped joining my parents and sister for those trips after news of my infirmity had come out. Both my mother and grandfather had been selected specifically to strengthen our bloodline, and things had been somewhat…tense ever since I’d been found wanting. 

And, once I was free to make my own choices, I’d finally made good on my long-ago dreams. I had a lot of other work to do, but I’d made time to visit places I’d only ever read about or seen pictures of. The world was filled with wonders, natural and man-made alike, more than a single man could see in a lifetime.

I took a deep breath of sweet, cool air flavored with the sharp scent of pine sap and the unmistakable salt of sea spray and stared out into the distance. From my rocky perch, I could see for miles. The fjord stretched out before me like a great sinuous serpent, crystalline blue waters tinged with turquoise winding towards the distant sea. Sunlight, as bright and hot as it ever was this far north, shone down from a nearly cloudless sky, catching on ripples like glass scales and refracting across the waves. 

From the ocean depths rose massive walls of granite, their faces etched by millennia of ice and cold. In places, cloaks of pines and birch trees covered the bare stone, bright splashes of green against stark gray stone and the shimmering white snow covering high peaks in defiance of the summer heat. Here and there, waterfalls tumbled down from on high like stands of silver ribbon, their distant thunder a whisper on the breeze. 

The first time I’d visited one of the many fjords that cut into Norway’s coastline, I’d been struck speechless. Even now, dozens of trips later, I still marveled at the beauty of it all. It was simply incredible, magical, a vision of nature’s splendor untouched by the crude hands of men. How any mundane could look at a vision such as this and doubt that there was magic in this world, I could not fathom. 

There was no one else around for miles in every direction except perhaps for down. I could see a handful of boats out on the water, so far away that people looked like nothing more than colorful specks, and I doubted that any of them could see me. The area was remote enough that I hadn’t seen any other hikers since I’d arrived, and the closest true settlement was hours away. 

With great reluctance, I tore my gaze away and took a few steps back from the edge of the cliff on which I stood. The ground beneath my feet was solid rock, worn mostly smooth by millenia of rain and melting snow, but my boots––rugged and expensive, designed for just such conditions––gave me plenty of traction. 

I took a drink from one of the bottles I’d brought with me and stowed it back in its place before slinging my heavy pack back over my shoulders and buckling the straps across my chest that held it firmly in place.  Time was ticking, and I still had a good half-hour of hiking ahead of me before I reached my destination. I’d rested more than long enough. I’d barely been tired when I’d decided to stop, and what little weariness I’d been carrying had been washed away as I marveled at the world’s splendor. 

My feet were sure and my breathing even as I continued onward along the mountainside. I was moving quickly, much faster than I had the last time I’d come here. My pace would have been grueling for a regular hiker, particularly with a backpack as stuffed as mine was, but I barely felt the strain. Everything had been so much easier since my last visit home. Each breath filled me with strength in a way they never had before, magic washing through me and taking my tiredness with it as I exhaled, and my steps felt both utterly weightless and as certain as the heart of the earth. 

I hadn’t been joking when I’d called this place magical. The mana in the air was far thinner than it had been in the Isles, far as we were from any significant nexuses of Dragon Veins, but it was still richer than it had been in the city. Paradoxically, if the mana in Oslo had been like the thin air upon a mountaintop, here in the mountains it was more like I imagined it should be at sea level, while England had been like one of those hyperbaric chambers that forced more oxygen into your blood. 

I wondered if this was how everyone capable of proper Breathing and Walking felt. From what I’d heard from my teacher, I suspected it wasn’t, though he’d already been a trained magus capable of reinforcement long before he had mastered the skill so it was hard to say for certain. He’s been long used to possessing superhuman abilities so it had become just one more strength among many.

I wasn’t certain, but I suspected I was getting a much greater benefit than most people would have. My magical circuits may have been malformed and useless, but I was the product of millenia of selective breeding for maximized magical potential. Even if I didn’t know how to use the power I absorbed with every breath, my body did. 

I wondered if this was in some way related to one of those secrets Anet couldn’t talk about. Did the Vorontsov have some technique for modifying their bodies to be more compatible with magical energies and thus capable of far cheaper and more effective reinforcement? 

Probably. Perfection of the human form was their entire thing, and the family was well known for being impossibly strong, fast, and durable compared to other magi. 

I reached my destination a little before noon. The cave entrance was tucked into a small nook in the rock, hidden by foliage and nearly invisible if you didn’t know what you were looking for. Out of an abundance of caution, I’d also covered it in a subtle bounded field meant to deter animals and casual observation and rigged a few cameras around the area. It was far from a perfect setup, but there weren’t exactly all that many people poking around so far from civilization. Anonymity was a much more reliable defense than anything I could put together myself.

I set my bag down by the entrance, taking with me only the long, fabric-wrapped package attached to the side of my pack, and slipped carefully into the vertical crack in the rock. The passage was narrow in some places and the ceiling much too low in others, forcing me to first shuffle sideways and then crouch down until I was on my hands and knees. After the first few feet, the path took a sharp right turn and the faint sunlight illuminating my path vanished into nothing, plunging me into near total darkness. 

I continued onward, moving slowly but surely through the tunnel. I kept one hand on the rough stone wall to my left, memory guiding my footsteps and reminding me when to duck my head or step over an obstruction. The other was gripped firmly around Gáe Bolg’s shaft, carefully angling the spear to avoid banging it against the stone walls closing in around me. Soon, a new light appeared from up ahead, a trickle of warm sun that illuminated the dust kicked up by my footfalls. It was faint, but enough to let me speed up slightly. 

The tunnel ended as abruptly as it had begun. The claustrophobically tight walls fell away, expanding out into a chamber nearly as large as the apartment I’d once grown up in. The walls and floor of the cave were surprisingly smooth, but the ceiling was jagged, varying from just a few feet high in some places to a domed spot near the middle of the room where it rose up more than ten feet from the floor. 

The source of the light I’d seen was immediately obvious. A shining beam of sunlight poured through a narrow shaft in the ceiling and fell upon a shallow pool of crystal clear water at the center of the room like a golden blade. The pool almost seemed to glow in the dim light of the cavern, shining blue turning as dark as the night sky where ancient stone hid the pool from the sun’s gilding illumination

The air in the cave was cool and slightly damp, but without the stale mustiness I typically associated with being underground. The two passages into the cave provided a surprisingly large amount of ventilation and over the past year I’d been coming here, I’d thoroughly cleaned every inch of the stone of animal refuse and random debris that contributed to the stench. 

Looking around, the cave looked just about like how I’d left it. The pool in the ground was a tiny bit deeper than it had been––there had been an unseasonably large amount of rain this past month––but the things I’d left piled in various corners seemed entirely undisturbed. The cameras hadn’t noticed anything, but it was good to confirm. 

I reluctantly set the spear down, leaning it carefully against the wall by the tunnel entrance. I was loath to let it out of my sight, but I couldn’t carry both it and the rest of my bag through the narrow confines of the tunnel at the same time. Despite having only had it for a few days, I’d already grown incredibly attached. Having the spear in my hand gave me a sense of safety that only Anet’s presence had previously inspired. Without it, I was a squishy human at the mercy of any supernatural man or monster. With it…I was still a squishy human, but a squishy human with razor-sharp teeth and a chance. 

Devil Kings had always been known for their luck, bending reality to their will one die roll at a time. I was not one yet, but it was only a matter of time now. 

A chance was all I needed.

It took four trips to move everything into the cave. I’d stuffed my camping backpack full to bursting and then strapped yet more packs and small bags along the outside, leaving it far too large to squeeze through the narrower sections of the tunnel. I probably could have managed things in three, but I didn’t want to risk an errant bump or jostle damaging anything. The solstice was tomorrow. There was no longer any room for error. 

By the end of it, my long hike was finally starting to catch up with me. I wasn’t tired, per se, but I could feel the ache of exertion in my muscles. Extensive combat training and exercise had left me in incredibly good shape even without considering the addition of magic, but a long, mostly up-hill hike across rough, rocky terrain followed by several measured scrambles through a cramped tunnel used my muscles in a way they were much less used too. 

When I finally deposited the last armload––an eclectic mix of expensive magical reagents, highly illegal modern armaments, and camping equipment––on top of the sleeping bag I’d left here months ago, I sank down after it. The ground was cool and smooth, without any of the usual odd bumps or ridges that inevitably ended up digging into your legs or back, and my neatly-folded jacket served as a more than adequate pillow for my head. 

I stretched my legs out and tilted my head back, my shoulders loose and my eyes closed. I clenched my toes, muscles squeezing as tightly as I could manage, and held it for several seconds before letting all the tension flow out of them in time with a weighty exhale. I took several slow, measured breaths, my toes loose and relaxed. Then I inhaled again and pulled my toes towards my chest, tensing my calf muscles. Once again I held them like that for several long seconds before exhaling and letting the muscles relax.

I continued on in that vein for nearly ten minutes, slowly moving up my body one muscle group at a time, pausing between each exercise to breathe in the sweet mana swirling gently within the cave. By the time I was done, my eyebrows dropping as I released the tension in my forehead, I felt as limp as a deboned fish and my muscles were as loose as a magi’s moral code. It felt amazing, like I could sink into the cold stone beneath me as though it was a goose-down mattress and sleep for a week.

I sighed heavily, the sleeves of my shirt rustling as my shoulders rubbed against the stone behind me. There would be plenty of time for sleep later. 

Through half-lidded eyes, I slowly surveyed the room. It was almost hard to believe this was the same musty cave I’d finally managed to track down last summer. It felt like I’d done more cleaning here than I had in the rest of this life combined, bringing the ancient cavern back to a state much closer to what it must have looked like centuries ago when it served as the meeting place of one of the region’s many religious cults. In places you could even still see the carvings the cultists had left behind, though whatever paints they’d used hadn’t survived the passage of time as anything more than chips of color. 

I wondered what those long dead men and women would have thought of my plan. On one hand, I intended on doing something they’d no doubt dreamed of all their lives; luring their god free from his Myth to descend upon the mortal world once more. On the other hand, the only reason I was doing so was to commit the highest form of sacrilege possible. To slay the god they revered, banish him from this world, and usurp his power and Authority.

In my mind, the two balanced out pretty nicely. I somehow doubted they’d have considered their god’s death a small price to pay for power beyond the reckoning of mundane magi and lesser practitioners. 

“Sucks to be them,” I mumbled, my eyes lingering on a circle the size of a dinner plate carved into the stone high up on one wall, from which radiated a dozen straight lines and which was surrounded by a half-dozen evenly spaced concentric circles of steadily increasing size. 

I stroked my thumb across the flat of Gáe Bolg’s long, leaf-shaped spear blade, the wood cool like metal and smooth as glass beneath the pad of my finger. My other hand was wrapped loosely around the shaft, fingers falling neatly into grooves that guided me into holding the spear just so. “Soon,” I crooned, “soon you will taste…” divine blood. I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud even now, years of hiding my plans guarding my tongue. 

I blinked, some of the tension returning to my muscles and my fingers freezing. The fabric that had been wrapped around the spear lay in a messy mound beside me, but I didn’t remember unwrapping it. I’d planned to keep it hidden until it was needed, my ace in the hole. 

I sighed and resumed stroking the spearhead. I must have been more exhausted by the hike than I’d thought. Or maybe it was the hours and hours of drilling and spear forms I’d done over the last few days, consuming every moment of free time I could spare. I had a few more things I needed to prepare today, but perhaps I should turn in early tonight. My sleeping bag called to me already, and there were still hours and hours before sunset. Whatever I didn’t finish now, I could take care of in the morning. 

For the first and last time in this life I raised my voice in prayer. “Scáthach, Gatekeeper of the Land of Shadows, you who seized immortality by the strength of your arms and the swiftness of your mind, guide my spear and bless my hunt. 

“Pandora, True Goddess of the Earth, All-Giving Mother, Witch who brought forth all the World’s Evils and a shred of Hope, she who gives grace to Man and God, see my dedication, mother, and ready your Circle of Usurpation.”

I paused, and then my lips formed the name and titles of one last god, though no breath escaped my lungs to give rise to sound. Not here. Not now.

But soon.

I smiled, pearly white teeth standing out in stark contrast against my dark skin. “...die for me.”