Forde Voss: Chapter 3 – Take the Children Inside (Patreon)

I had this one half-written before the food poisoning incident derailed everything. So, I decided to finish and post it to help get my brain back into the writing place before I start writing Vol 5 and new Rinn's Run chapters. . ~Eric

***

Voss stopped near the gate of the town and stretched. He’d been saving this town as the last stop on his tour of the empire. While he hadn’t really thought it would take that long, he’d gotten distracted several times during his travels. He’d lost nearly a month when he found an odd old man fishing by a river. Except, it hadn’t been like any kind of fishing that Voss had ever seen before. Most of the fishing he’d seen had involved nets over the side of a ship or lines on poles dropped straight into the water with some kind of bait on it. The man by the river had been doing some else. He still had a pole but the line on the pole had been extraordinarily thin and made of some material that Voss didn’t recognize. The old man would whip the pole back and forth in the air, slowly feeding out the line, until he whipped it out deep in the center of the river. Voss had never seen such insanity before. He watched the man for almost two hours before the old man finally got sick of it.

“Either come over here and learn something or go away. But you need to stop staring at me. It’s distracting as hell.”

Voss hadn’t been addressed so flippantly by another human being or cultivator in, he thought back. He literally couldn’t think of a time in the last few hundred years. A little piece of him wanted to be angry, but he reminded himself that he wasn’t the Dark Lord anymore. He was just a man who had, in fact, been rudely staring at someone for hours. He doubted he would have been so patient about it. Shaking his head a little, he walked over to stand next to the old man. The old man squinted up at the hulking Voss.

“You got a name, boy?” asked the old man.

Voss snorted a little at being referred to as boy, but he just nodded. “Forde.”

“Mercin,” said the old man.

Voss didn’t know if it was the man’s first name or last name, and he decided it didn’t really matter. “Nice to meet you.”

“Well, I guess we’ll see about that,” muttered the old man.

“What are you doing here?” asked Voss.

“Fishing. Haven’t you ever seen fishing before?”

Voss decided that he liked the gruff old man. “Many times. I’ve just never seen fishing like this.”

“Well, I guess I can’t rightly blame you for that. I invented this.”

Voss eyed the man briefly. “Fair enough. Why did you invent this?”

“Because the good fish are out there,” said Mercin, thrusting his chin toward the middle of the river.

Voss let his spiritual sense sweep out over the river. The old man was right. The good fish were out in the deeper water. He was startled when the old man threw his pole on the ground and gave Voss a death glare.

“What did you do that for? You scared them all off!”

Voss blinked at the man for a moment, before he scanned the water again. A brief surge of guilt passed through him. Mercin was right. He had scared most of the fish off.

“Apologies,” said Voss.

Voss stood there in a mildly bemused state as the old man muttered about careless cultivators ruining a perfectly good day of fishing. After getting his ire off his chest, the old man thrust the pole at Voss. He took the pole, only to cast an uncertain look at Mercin.

“You might as well practice while there’s no fish.”

And, so began a month of discovering that world-shaking strength as a cultivator meant exactly nothing before the cunning of fish. Oh, certainly, he could have killed the fish with a wave of his hand, but that wasn’t the point. If he wanted to catch the fish as the old man did, he had to put all of that away. He was forced to relearn the fine art of patience. The old man slowly walked Voss through what Mercin referred to as casting. Voss assumed that it would be simple with his body cultivation. It was not simple. Yet, the process of learning it was strangely satisfying. It wasn’t going to save his life or conquer a nation, but it called for his total focus. It wasn’t enough to just get the hook out into the water. He needed it to go where the fish were, and he couldn’t use his spiritual sense to find them without making them scatter. He had to think his way through the problem and process. When the pull of travel finally grabbed hold of him again, he felt a little tough of melancholy.

“Thank you,” he said.

Mercin just lifted an eyebrow at him. “For what. You still look like a monkey waving a stick around. Although, I guess that is better than looking like a donkey waving a stick around.”

“Agreed,” said Voss. “Be well, Mercin. I hope we’ll meet again.”

“Be well,” said Mercin before a twinkle came into his eyes and he winked, “Your very Dark Lordship.”

Then, the old man was gone in a burst of qi. He left Voss standing dumbfounded by the river with nothing but the pole and string. Did I just have a fortunate encounter, wondered Voss. While he never came to a conclusion about just who or what the old man had been, he had taken the pole with him. He’d never gotten distracted like that again, but he had found himself lingering in certain places. He had revisited places where he’d fought battles all those centuries ago. While he often couldn’t remember who had fought, he remembered the places, the way they had looked after the battles were over. Those memories had formed his impression of the empire. Yet, now, many of those once bloody and scarred fields of conflict had cities standing on them, or villages and crops were blood had once watered the fields.

It left him feeling oddly disconnected like there were actually two empires. There was the empire in his mind and the empire in fact, and the two bore scant resemblance to each other. He was always happy to see the schools that he’d worked so hard to ensure were built and staffed. That had been the true battle of his early days on the throne of the Dark Lord. For all that he’d claimed that title, he’d always thought of himself as more of a benevolent dictator. Evil in name more than deed. Which wasn’t to say that he hadn’t associated with some truly horrendous pieces of shit in his day. He’d had to cull a lot of people from his government in that first century to prevent the kind of excesses he’d never really wanted any part of, such as mass ritual sacrifices. He’d proven something of a disappointment to all of those demons and demonic cultivators out there who had served in his armies. They’d been expecting a never-ending bloodbath. He’d even delivered them a bloodbath. It had just been them on the receiving end. He expected he’d proven pretty disappointing to some evil gods or goddesses, too. But he’d never really pretended that he’d bought into their worldview. He’d risen to the top on the basis of strength, not commitment to evil.

Shaking off those old memories, he strode through the gates which were oddly unmanned. He’d almost decided not to return to this place. He’d avoided it for thousands of years. He’d actually been surprised to learn that it still existed after the war. Yet, even for a cultivator, there was an inherent draw to the place you grew up. He was a little relieved to see that there wasn’t anything left that he really recognized. What was odd was that there was no one around. It wasn’t a massive place. He doubted more than three or four thousand people lived there, but it was the middle of the day. Those people should be out and about doing village…things. He would have thought the village had been abandoned save for the many chimneys that let smoke drift into the air. He casually let a little of spiritual sense spread out over the town. He found that every living person was gathered in the center of the town. Voss wondered if there was some kind of holiday he’d forgotten about. Curious about what had drawn so many people, he wandered through the empty streets until he found the central square. It turned out that it was not a holiday.

A platform had been erected in the center of the square and Voss could see that some kind of dark ritual had been set up. He could probably have figured out what it was for, but he didn’t care. He did care that there were what appeared to be a family tied up in the center of that ritual. He most certainly did care that he’d personally outlawed those kinds of rituals. He knew that they still happened sometimes, but never in town squares. Never out in the open. No one would dare defy his…then it struck him. They wouldn’t dare defy his decrees, but blonde guy? Yeah, they’d absolutely defy his word and law. Unless, of course, an example was made. Voss let a bit of his aura slip free and the crowd parted before him. Voss felt his fury grow as he saw that the people in charge of this little ritual were part of the local military. He’d had a hard time completely sweeping the demonic influences out of the military, and here was the evidence that he’d failed more completely than he’d ever imagined. Old instincts surged inside of him. He found himself speaking before he even realized it was happening.

“You are in violation of imperial law,” thundered Voss, drawing every eye in the square. “You will cease this ritual at once.”

He wasn’t sure what he’d thought would happen, but it seemed he’d masked his true presence a little too well. Most of the cultivators on stage started hurling techniques at him, regardless of how likely it was that they’d kill the civilians. Voss gestured and shoved the villagers away from him as gently as he dared. He kept walking toward the stage, the techniques exploding against him or around him, all failing to find purchase. Most of them didn’t even manage to damage his clothing. When he simply walked out the other side of that storm of death, everyone on the platform stared at him in stunned terror. Good, he thought. From one step to the next, he covered the distance between himself and the platform. He had his hand locked around the throat of the highest ranked man on the stage. As he prepared to make an appropriate example of the worthless bastards, a thought struck him. He turned and looked out the crowd. They looked confused, hopeful, and afraid. He sighed as one little girl stared up at him with blue eyes as big as apples. He decided that it would be terrible form to butcher these assholes in front of a bunch of kids. He gave her a gentle smile.

“Take the children inside,” he commanded.