Wizard Trials: Chapter 147 (Patreon)

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          “Do not act so surprised, Draevin,” Istven said, sounding annoyed. “Loyalty is a rare commodity. You may not be aware of this, but Kranin and his companion were sent by Caelnaste to spy on us. He refused to comply and even killed his companion in order to not betray us.”

          Kranin rubbed the back of his neck. “I would hardly call being tortured by vampires a relationship worth being loyal to,” he said. “I was just doing whatever it took to get out of that situation alive.”

          “Nobody mentioned this to me,” Draevin said.

          “Would you have kept me around for so long if I’d told you the real reason we met?” Kranin asked.

          Draevin thought about that. “No,” he decided. “Probably not.”

          “And now I have an administrator I can trust who is resistant to coercion,” Istven said matter-of-factly.

          “I guess that’s… useful,” Draevin agreed.

          “We leave in an hour for the Arena,” Istven announced. He downed another mana potion.

          “Wait,” Draevin said. “What about the dragons?”

          “What about them?” Istven asked. “Did they offer to help in any way?”

          Draevin bit his lips. “No…” he admitted reluctantly.

          “Then our plan remains unchanged,” Istven said. “Time is limited. Even if I believed negotiation would get us somewhere with Tarrish, we do not have the luxury of waiting for him to change his mind. We still have a moon to move and Chaska’nal is positioning troops in a hostile stance as we speak. It is enough for now that the dragons do not seek to stop us. Let them do what they want. When I am done, they will become irrelevant.”

          Draevin thought—no hoped—that assessment was just conceited. If Istven was planning to gain enough power to steamroll the Telnarim Empire, maybe Peter’s concerns actually had merit. Only time would tell if Istven ended up being the savior of Eldira or its oppressor.

          “Do you even want to try?” Draevin asked. “If you tell me what you want to say I could try to approach the dragons with a message from you. They have a means of holding back the Blackroot, and that’s something we desperately need right now.”

          “No,” Istven said, “we do not.”

          “We don’t?”

          Istven glared at Draevin, then sucked down another mana potion. “If you do not plan to listen when I talk, I will not bother wasting words on you, Draevin. Go talk to Sylnya about it.” He waved Draevin aside and beckoned Kranin forward. The fancily-dressed elf—who was suspiciously not bald anymore—started reading Istven off ration reports. Draevin decided to take him up on the suggestion of finding Sylnya.

          His old dryad friend wasn’t hard to find. There were still a few long black vines trailing off her body along the floor. Draevin followed them and found her leaning against the outside wall of the spire, out of the way of all the crates of potion and moving soldiers. She had a dagger in her hand and was tossing it up and catching it. She perked up when she saw Draevin and snatched the dagger out of the air, only to balance it on her palm, blade up. “Hey, Drae,” she greeted him. “Istven just got back.”

          “We spoke,” Draevin replied. “I tried to tell him we should be making a deal with the dragons to borrow their method of holding back the Blackroot, but he said that wasn’t a problem. That I should talk to you about it.”

          “Oh, right,” Sylnya said, rolling her eyes. “As if you could help with that.”

          “Help with what?” Draevin asked.

          Sylnya tapped her forehead with the tip of her dagger. “Oh nothing,” she said, “I’m just going through my memories, looking for another solution. Haven’t found one yet.”

          “What are you talking about? What solution?”

          “To our Blackroot problem,” Sylnya said. “Istven restored my old memories. I ended up getting more than I bargained for. It was… unpleasant. Probably good you weren’t around for it. He said I was all mixed up inside. He had to go in and manually ‘restore’ my mind. I don’t really remember what happened, but all the non-Sylnya memories are sort of… far away now.”

          “That sounds… yeah, I probably wouldn’t have been much help,” Draevin said. “What sort of memories did you get that were more than you bargained for?”

          Sylnya let out a sigh. It was one of those learned gestures she did for dramatic effect since she didn’t actually need to breathe like elves or humans. “This and that,” Sylnya said. “Some past lives, a bunch of orcs I’d fed on, some memories from the Blackroot itself.”

          “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Draevin stopped her. “That’s not just ‘this and that’, I didn’t even know the Blackroot had memories. That sounds serious.”

          “I knew you’d say that,” Sylnya said, eyes rolling. “And I mean that literally. I have some of your memories bouncing around in my head now too. But yeah, the Blackroot is… alive? I think you might call it the first god, or possibly the second one depending on your stance with the World Tree. He was just some deluded asshole from a thousand thousand years ago that wanted so much power he tried to eat the world. As far as we can tell, the entity he became is so consumed with growing stronger you can barely call it conscious anymore. Kind of like what happened to the Everstorm, but on a world-spanning scale.”

          “Right,” Draevin said, remembering his history, “Sho’tan wanted to destroy all the other gods and ended up becoming a living storm consumed by the hunt. I’m still not sure how you got your hands on some of the Blackroot’s memories though.”

          “Apparently we’re related, or at least this body is,” Sylnya explained.

          “I knew it!” Draevin exclaimed. “That tree that formed after it fed on Istven looked way too much like a traut’ska. I wasn’t sure how to bring it up with you.”

          Sylnya shook her head. “None of that is important. At this point the Blackroot is just some cosmic being of unfathomable power that eats worlds and twists everything inside itself. I’m pretty sure if you hadn’t removed that piece from Istven, it would have turned him into another Demon Lord. Scary stuff.”

          “Yeah,” Draevin agreed. “Did you learn anything useful, like maybe a weakness?”

          Sylnya chuckled. “You sounded just like Istven there for a second. Yes. I did. A memory from a very long time ago. Pain. One world that it tried to eat that fought back. Instead of converting it to another hellscape, the Blackroot was injured. It was injured and destroyed in that world for good.”

          “How?” Draevin asked immediately.

          Sylnya pursed her lips and didn’t answer right away. “Have you ever… wanted a fresh start?” she asked instead.

          “Uh, sure, I guess,” Draevin said. He wasn’t really sure where Sylnya was going with the conversation, but he was willing to give her space and let her come to the point on her own time. He got the feeling that Istven had already shaken the answers he wanted out of her and he didn’t want to be like that. “The responsibilities of defending Arena City really wore me out, if you recall,” he reminded her. “That’s kind of the whole reason we started our journey in the first place.”

          “And have you ever wanted a fresh start so bad you killed yourself?” Sylnya asked.

          Draevin hesitated. He didn’t have an easy answer for a question like that. “Uh… what are you getting at exactly?”

          “My memories,” Sylnya said. “Not just the last few months, all of them. Dryads aren’t supposed to retain memories when we reincarnate. Apparently I was Belorian’s personal plaything in a past life, then in another life I led a coup to take Setsya back from the myconids. We butchered them. True death; no replanting. That was Dwyra’s family.”

          “Oh, wow,” Draevin said. “That sort of explains a lot.”

          “It does,” Sylnya agreed. “I learned the history of Setsya, I just had no idea I’d had a personal part in it. I can remember it all now. Cutting down enemies in battle, ordering executions… I… I don’t think I can believe anymore that I’m a good person, Drae.”

          Draevin grabbed Sylnya by the hand. Little vines immediately dug into his skin. He ignored them. “No, listen to me, Sylnya. None of that matters. You, right here? Right now? The you you are now? That’s what matters. I know you’re a good person. I won’t let anyone say otherwise. You included.”

          Sylnya gave him a half-hearted smile. “I hope you’re right,” she said. “I know how to stop the Blackroot. This body? The vines I make? They’re a creation of the Blackroot. You could say I’m one of his children now. I can connect to the network; create a vulnerability for someone powerful to exploit, like Istven. That was how it was done the other time it was stopped. One of the Blackroot’s children—what the orcs call a Traut’nak’shul—betrayed him.”

          “That’s fantastic!” Draevin laughed out loud. “We have a real chance then. With Istven’s power, and you on the inside we can really destroy it once and for all. We can even bring back the Conflux and wish to fix everything.”

          “Or more likely Istven will just absorb all the power of the Conflux and use it to fix everything himself. Let’s be honest here about what’s more likely, Drae.”

          “Sure, fine, I don’t care how everything gets fixed. As long as it happens,” Draevin said. “What was with that speech? You almost sounded all depressed. This is good news!”

          “Not… entirely,” Sylnya said. “The thing is… if I do this… in order for Istven to… I won’t survive it, Draevin. The me you know now will be burned out. It’s the only way for it to work.”

          Draevin’s heart felt like it skipped a beat. The temperature in the air dropped several degrees. “I… no,” Draevin said, then more loudly, “No! You can’t do this!”

          “It’s the only way,” Sylnya said with a sad smile. “You saw what happened when Istven tried to touch it. The thing eats gods, Drae. Do you have a better plan? I’m trying to come up with one here. Centuries of memories and I’ve got nothing. This is the only thing that’s ever actually worked. If we try to fight this thing head on, we’ll lose. Do you maybe happen to know another Traut’nak’shul sympathetic to our plight? No. Didn’t think so.”

          “Then we’ll find a new way,” Draevin insisted. “The dragons can do it, I know they can! They’re using that floating continent of theirs to keep it at bay right now. There was a beam of—”

          “That’s not a solution,” Sylnya interrupted him. “That’s a large scale spatial isolation spell. It’ll last at most 3,000 years, assuming they even get it up in time. Is that what you want to do? Abandon half the planet and try to pretend everything is fine? I’m talking about actually burning it out, saving everything.”

          “I don’t care about everything!” Draevin shouted. It was true. All he could think of was Sylnya’s rant about sea turtles, the time she thought people had to fill their eyeballs with blood to see in the dark, taking bets about their survival she couldn’t possibly collect on if they died. And most of all… always being there for him. Draevin didn’t want to live in a world without Sylnya in it.

          “You don’t mean that,” Sylnya said. She sounded disappointed, but also… slightly happy? Draevin couldn’t decide if that was relief he was seeing in her or he was just shit at reading emotions, like usual. “I already mentioned this to Peter,” Sylnya continued. “He said he might have some ideas for an alternative plan, then he went back to charging up mana potions. If you’re so dead set about coming up with an alternative, go talk to him. I’ve already been thinking about this for hours and come up with nothing that will actually work.”

          “I am dead set on it,” Draevin said. “I don’t know why you’re even considering a plan like this.”

          “Because,” Sylnya said. “Because if somebody doesn’t do anything about this, the world we know and love will die. The plants that survive will be twisted abominations; the people that survive will be monsters far worse than vampires; Eldira will just become a staging ground for the next horde of demons to invade another world. And on, and on. It has to stop here. I’m willing to die to save the world. Aren’t you?”

          “Yes, but—”

          “No buts,” Sylnya interrupted. “There’s no point in saving ourselves just to end up in a world like that. Go talk to Peter. Maybe he really did come up with something. If anyone could, it’d be him. When you’re done, I’ll be right here. Reminiscing. Istven said we’re leaving in an hour.”

          Draevin stomped away. He was angry, and frustrated, and more than a little upset. When were they planning to tell him? If Istven hadn’t told him to talk to Sylnya he might have just been blindsided by the whole plan. It almost felt like a betrayal that he was the last person to find out. Then he saw Grrbraa, happily stacking up crates of jars onto his back. He probably didn’t know either. Did Grrbraa deserve to die so that Sylnya could live? Was it even fair to ask anyone to make that kind of decision? Draevin blasted into the air and launched himself up the side of the spire, unconcerned with whether the back blast of his steam annoyed anyone.

          “You’re back!” Peter said when Draevin settled back on the roof. Then he frowned. “Why didn’t you bring any bottles with you?”

          “Because,” Draevin said, “I didn’t come here for that. I came here to talk about your plan. What is your plan to deal with the Blackroot that doesn’t involve sacrificing Sylnya?”

          “Oh,” Peter said. “That.” He bit his bottom lip. It looked like he might be coming up with a convenient lie and Draevin didn’t like it one bit. “She told you about that already, did she? I told her it would be best if we waited until the last minute to tell you.”

          “Your plan,” Draevin pressed. “I don’t care who told who what or when. Sylnya said you might have an idea about how to take out the Blackroot that didn’t involve her sacrificing herself.”

          “I do,” Peter said. “I’m just not sure if it’s something I can figure out by tomorrow. We need the Conflux to stand a chance. We can’t afford to wait.”

          “What is this plan,” Draevin demanded.

          “Well, you remember that rift-net device? The thing that had the bit of root that infected our world in the first place?” Peter asked. “The amount of energy necessary to hold a rift open for that long should have been tremendous. I had a theory that the bits of root were the power supply. Obviously it would be insanely risky to use considering what it did to Istven, but it has massive potential. I mean, those roots aren’t sucking the life out of our planet for nothing. All that power has to go somewhere. If we could figure out how to tap into it, we could use the Blackroot to destroy itself. The way I see it, that’s basically what Sylnya will be doing anyway.”

          “Great,” Draevin said. “How do we do that?”

          Both of Peter’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, wow. I was expecting a bit more resistance than that. Not even a lecture about me being reckless? Are you sure you’re feeling like yourself, Draevin?”

          “I’m not in the mood,” Draevin said. “I don’t care how dangerous it is, as long as it works.”

          “Okay, well I left that rift-net you covered in ice back in my room,” Peter said. “Why don’t you go get it for me?” Draevin turned around to do just that. “And just for the record,” Peter added to his backside, “even I think trying to tap into the Blackroot as a power source is incredibly risky.”

          “I don’t care,” Draevin said without turning around. “I’ll try anything else.” He jumped down the empty shaft and went straight to Peter’s bedroom. The door was still cracked. He pushed it the rest of the way open and scanned the junk scattered around the room. On the center of the desk he spotted a round metal device still covered in a layer of ice. Considering it was the only piece of scrap in the room covered in ice he figured it was a safe bet that it was the rift-net he was looking for. Draevin was in a hurry so he flicked his wrist to command the ice to follow after him. It didn’t move. Not only did it not move, but he actually couldn’t feel any cryomancy in that direction. Strange…

          The hairs on the back of Draevin’s neck pricked up, but he brushed off the oddity as likely being caused by whatever corruption was in the piece of root. He walked up to the desk and covered his hand in a thick glove of ice. When he was sure it wouldn’t touch him, he reached down to retrieve the thing.

          Draevin’s hand sunk right into the rift-net, touching nothing but air. His hand continued forward, then he felt a sharp pain. Something Draevin hadn’t seen in a long time then happened before his eyes.

          An illusion faded. An illusion of an ice-covered disc sitting on the top of the table. It was replaced by a spring-loaded trap that Draevin’s hand was stuck inside. The evil black sliver of root had been forcibly stabbed through the ice glove and into the back of Draevin’s hand. He had a single moment of surprise, followed by horror as he felt the root come alive and start wiggling inside his hand. The pain was an unbelievable lance of fire through his soul. He tried to scream, but no sound escaped his throat.

          “Sorry,” Peter’s voice said from the doorway. Draevin turned to see him standing there, a crooked frown marring his face. “I couldn’t let you interfere,” he explained. “This needs to happen. She’ll only be dead for a little while, just like you. Once I’m in charge, I’ll bring her back.”

          Draevin’s longtime friend and ally stepped back and closed the bedroom door. The metal rattled as he bolted it closed from the outside. All the while Draevin screamed wordlessly with seven layers of pain and betrayal. The Blackroot wiggled inside his hand, growing, expanding, eating. As he collapsed to the floor Peter’s words kept ringing in his mind.

          Once I’m in charge.

          Once I’m in charge.

          Once I’m in charge…

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