The team awoke fairly quickly after Leon’s lightning cleared the darkness from their minds.  Nara rose quickest of them all, which surprised Leon not at all since he was the strongest.  The Prince, after opening his eyes and looking about in confusion, sprang to his feet with Cloud Piercer drawn, though he stumbled a bit, his legs appearing still a bit weak.

“What happened?” he demanded of Leon.  “Is the cultist dead?”

Leon had been passing the time by studying the schematics Mari had given him for her Ulta suit.  If the woman didn’t wake even after Leon blasted her suit with lightning, then he’d have to open it and drag her out, after all.  Following Nara’s question, he spared the Prince a stoic look and said, “He isn’t, though he’s gone.  Were he not, I’d still be trying to kill him.”

Ard’Nara seemed ready to argue for a moment, but after glancing at the damage Leon’s lightning had wrought to their surroundings—and no doubt sensing the traces still left of Leon’s power in the environment and on his own person—he relaxed minutely.  “The crystal?”

“Destroyed,” Leon succinctly answered.

“Good,” Nara replied.  Then, he stiffened, his eyes locked onto something over Leon’s shoulder.

“He’s dead too,” Leon said, too mentally tired to put much emotion into his voice.

Despite this statement, Nara walked over to where Iluva, the tenth-tier mage he’d escorted to Naxor Amis’ hinterlands, lay.  Leon had, before cracking open the Ulta schematics, done the dead man the courtesy of pulling his body from the rubble and cutting him free of the crucifix, but aside from laying him as respectfully as he could on the ground, Leon wasn’t quite sure how to handle him.  Cremation, burial, or taking him into his soul realm and transporting him back were all options to consider.

Nara took a long few minutes to stare at the body before slowly walking back over to Leon, a complex look on his face.  The Prince took another moment to inspect Tir’Anu and Mari’s Ulta suit before joining Leon on another nearby rock.

“Will they wake?” he asked after a moment of silence.

“You did,” Leon pointed out.

“Were you responsible?” the Prince followed up.

“I like to think so,” Leon replied.  “My lightning can fight against mind-altering magic.”

“That’s convenient,” Nara said with a touch of accusation, though his body language was devoid of any threats.

Leon cocked his helmeted head at the Prince.  “Are you going to complain?”

Nara snorted.  “I’m well past that.  When in a desert, don’t question from whence the rain comes.”

Leon nodded in appreciation and neither said any more about it, to his silent relief.

Tir’Anu soon after began to stir.

“Almost a shame he yet lives,” Nara said more to himself than to Leon, though Leon decided not to take the statement as rhetorical.

“Harsh, though I get the impression that it’s hardly unjustified.”

“He’s still taught as a lesson on how not to run a Kingdom,” Nara stated.  “He had a vision for what the Blue Sky ought to be and pursued it at first with the flawed belief that it would aid the common people.  When it did the opposite, instead of changing his opinion, he simply grew more brutal in forcing his ideas onto us.”

“What, precisely, do you think he wanted?” Leon wondered aloud, noting what the Prince said alongside what Khaji’Yun, Mari’Kha, and the man himself had claimed.

“What I have always wanted,” Tir’Anu said as he sat up with obvious pained effort.  “Virtue.”

“Virtue cannot be imposed,” Ard’Nara stated.

“No,” Tir agreed, “it cannot.  I should have known that, but… Wise Farangeun has never favored me with his gifts.”  The old monk struggled to his feet and his brown and green eyes scanned the battlefield much as Nara had done, but his eyes seemed a little duller than usual.  He asked no questions about what had happened and instead turned from Leon and Nara and walked over to a slight depression in the dust and dirt and sat down in it, his back to the others.

Nara was apparently fine with this behavior, and Leon thought he knew why.

Khaji’Yun had attempted to get into his head—and had been at least partly successful if the visions Leon had received of his family were any indication.  After blasting the others with the Devil’s power, Leon thought it likely that they had all received visions of their own.  Tir’s behavior solidified Leon’s suspicion, even if Nara seemed to still have his composure.

After several more minutes of silence, Leon asked Nara, “What are the burial customs for your people?”

“Our dead are burned, so that the fire might light the Red-Eyed One’s journey to their soul, and then to the courts of Just Helior.”

Leon nodded, then jerked his head in Iluva’s direction.  “Low chance of it, but did he ever mention anything in that vein…?”

Nara looked confused for a moment and Leon wondered if his idiom translated well.  But after a moment, Nara simply replied, “No.”

Leon sighed and reached out with his power, taking Iluva’s body into his soul realm.  He’d brought the stone giants back to their home; he figured there wasn’t much reason not to do the same for Iluva.

‘If I ever get the chance…’ he thought.

It wasn’t much longer before Mari woke up, and when she did, she didn’t take nearly as long to rise as even Tir had; almost as soon as Leon heard her stirring in her Ulta suit, he heard the sound of retching, and the suit sprang open where it lay, disgorging Mari onto a pile of dust.  The young woman barely managed to roll onto her side before emptying the meager contents of her stomach onto the ground.  Once it was done, she lay there shivering and gasping for breath, her eyes wide as saucers, her aura as shaky and stable as a cloud.

It took her several minutes to compose herself, and when she did, she weakly looked at Leon and Nara and did her best to push herself up into a sitting position, only managing to prop herself up against the side of her Ulta suit.

“Fuck…” she whispered.  “By Carfen’s curved cock, that was terrible…”

Despite the tired and quiet atmosphere, Nara strangled off a chuckle.

“Visions?” Leon asked.  Mari numbly nodded.  “I’ve been hit by such things before.  They’re designed to put you in a bad mental state, which will make you more susceptible to other mental attacks.  Shouldn’t be any adverse long-term effects, though I encourage everyone to tell me if there are.”

“Ya mean aside from the sheer soul crushin’ mind fuckin’ I’ve just had?” Mari asked.  “And not the good kind?”

“That you can joke about it is a good sign,” Leon pointed out.

“It ain’t easy to have everyone I’ve known and loved walk into my mind and be like, ‘Hey Mari’Kha, you’re shit!’”

“Hey Mari’Kha,” Leon said with a wry grin, drawing a look of exasperation from the young woman.  “You’re not shit.”  He clapped her on the shoulder as a show of solidarity, and she stared at him for a second before almost exploding with a great cathartic guffaw.  She threw her arms around him and hugged him tightly, and he returned the embrace with only a little bit of awkwardness.

“Thanks, Lele,” she said.  “You’re kinda nice, ya know?”

“Don’t tell anyone,” he whispered.

She laughed again and released him.

“Might want to check your suit,” Leon added.  “Had to shock you pretty good to get through it.  Sorry if I broke anything.”

“Good idea,” she said as she walked back over to check it over.

While she did that, Leon sighed and glanced over his shoulder at the other problem on the team that he needed to deal with before leaving—Tir hadn’t moved since all but collapsing into the dust.

Leon walked over, making sure to make a bit of noise as he did to not spook Tir, who seemed lost in his own world.  He sat down next to the old monk and just waited, hoping his presence would be enough to tell Tir that he wasn’t alone.

He didn’t have to wait long—only a scant few minutes—before Tir asked him, his voice strained and choked, “Leon… do the ends… justify the means…?”

“No,” Leon easily replied.

“So quickly answered,” Tir said with a bitter smile.  With a hint of sarcasm, he asked, “Does Wise Farangeun speak through you?  Or is this just the arrogance of youth or Royalty?”

Leon took a minute to put his thoughts in order before responding.  “It’s always best to try and accomplish your task with as little collateral damage as possible, and with the lowest expenditure of resources as you can manage.  Let’s say you’re trying to make money.  You want to make one thousand… the currency doesn’t matter; you want to make one thousand ‘monies’.  Is it a success if you spend two thousand monies to make one thousand?”

“Hardly,” Tir stated.  “Edge cases could be argued, though.”

“Reality will always ruin philosophy,” Leon conceded.  “But I get the impression that your question wasn’t meant to be purely philosophical?”

Tir sighed and seemed to crumple in on himself.  After a moment, he glanced at Leon and asked, “Eight hundred monies.  Is that enough of a cost to make a thousand?”

“In a purely financial sense, I’d say sure.”

“What about nine hundred?” Tir asked.

Leon shrugged.  “We’re getting into the space of asking about other practical concerns like how much time I would have to devote to make one hundred monies, and how much value that actually is.  Reality and philosophy.”

“There was a time,” Tir said quietly and slowly, “that I believed in my heart, as surely as if Mandious, Lord of All in Heaven, had told me himself, that the ends always justify the means.  Blasphemous though it was, I had a vision of bringing Heaven to Arkhnavi, of turning the Kingdom of the Blue Sky into paradise.”

Tir paused a moment, and though he had quite a few responses he could make to that, Leon refrained, sensing that Tir was working up to something and not wanting to interrupt him before reaching it.

“In my younger days,” the monk continued, “I thought myself blessed.  I walked around like I was Valiant Ashatar’s favored son; like I was exceeded in my wisdom only by Wise Farangeun himself.  King Ard’Khil did much to reign in my ego, but when he gave me power and position… my ego ran unchecked.  I thought I knew exactly how to build the perfect society!”

Tir smiled self-deprecatingly.

“I had already found out the Blue Sky’s fatal flaw, you see, their greatest obstacle to achieving paradise in the mortal world.  Can you guess?”

Leon thought he could hazard a guess, and after a moment’s thought, he said, “Vice.”

Tir nodded in confirmation.  “Unchecked greed, lust… pride.  I saw it everywhere.  I decided to use the power entrusted to me to return the Blue Sky to the virtuous path.”

From the rock he sat upon, Nara responded, “A dead Kingdom is not a virtuous one.”

“And there is the mistake I now see, by Wise Farangeun’s grace,” Tir whispered as his head lolled upward so that he could stare at the stars—the hole Leon had punched in the clouds was rapidly closing but it was still quite large and revealed much of the night sky.  “I believed laws would be enough to enforce virtue upon the people.  Those who broke those laws by gambling, by fornicating, by cheating and stealing and murdering and a thousand other crimes… were dealt with.  Permanently.”

“How many?” Leon asked, to which Tir seemed about to answer but he choked up before getting the words out.  It was Nara who spoke the number.

“Sixty million, five hundred and eighty-eight thousand, three hundred and eleven.”

Leon’s eyes just about bugged out of their sockets.  “That many?!” he exclaimed.

Tir grimaced in shame.  “Not by my hand, but by order,” he said.  “Entire towns were often discovered to be in violation of the law, to be wanting for virtue.  I believed that the threat of punishment would not correct behavior if punishments were withheld, so I stuck by the executions and the tortures and the property confiscations.  Every one of them.”

“A pointless waste of resources,” Nara grumbled.

“And misguided from the start,” Tir said with a glance back at the Prince.  “Virtue must be pursued but never imposed.  It is our choice to be virtuous that matters.  If the only reason we behave in a virtuous way is because of a threat of punishment… then are we virtuous in truth?”

“Which is more important?” Leon asked.  “Actions or intentions?  If I see a beggar on the street and I give them some money, does it taint the charity if I only give them money because I think they’re an eyesore and want them out of my sight?”

“By the gods, I don’t know,” Tir whispered.

“Of course it doesn’t!” Nara said as he practically jumped off the rock and joined Leon and Tir in the depression, seeming almost comical in his eagerness given the fact he still wore his full black lion armor.  “Mandious, Lord of All in Heaven made the rule clear without any kind of qualification: charity is a virtue.  End of discussion.”

“You follow the Illor Conclave’s ruling on the matter, then?” Tir asked.

“I do,” Nara responded.

Tir audibly scoffed.  “A brutally simplistic view of things that I always tried to steer your father away from.”

“I may be an Illorite,” Nara said with pride, “but my father always followed the rulings of the Je’Har Council.”

“That men are made in the image of the gods,” Tir recited.  “That we are beings of both mortal body and immortal spirit, and that our thoughts and intentions are inseparable from virtue, for it all leaves its mark upon us.  That we are still riven with vice if virtuous actions are done for sinful reasons.”

“And that we are virtuous if sinful acts are done for virtuous reasons,” Nara pointedly said, to which Tir stiffened.

“A flawed view,” Tir whispered.  “How can one be virtuous if he destroys what he hopes to save?  What is the point of making one thousand monies if two thousand are spent?  The pursuit of virtue is a worthwhile journey all on its own, as is the attempt to create a more virtuous society, but if that society is destroyed, then what was the point?  What is the point of trying to demand virtue if so many are left dead in the end?  What is the point if I failed?”

“You failed spectacularly,” Nara viciously stated.

Not arguing with the Prince, Tir added, “And I learned nothing.  I am still the same man I was then.  Nothing has changed.  The pursuit of virtue is worthwhile in and of itself, but I have pursued it for half a millennium, and I have never found it…  And now it comes back to haunt me.”  Tir glanced at the broken dais where Khaji’Yun had waited for them.  “My mistakes have destroyed this plane.  I am responsible for this, for the release of the devils!”

“I’m going to stop you right fucking there,” Leon said, clapping Tir on the shoulder hard enough to shake the man down to his toes.  “You’re responsible for your actions—and only your actions.  That cultist…”  He momentarily debated with himself whether or not to reveal the man’s name and claimed history, but decided that this wasn’t the moment to do so, even if it might be important in the long run.  “That cultist owns this.  He can’t pass the blame onto you just because he thinks you wronged him.  Personal losses don’t justify destroying entire planes, do they?”

“That’s unacceptably extreme,” Nara said, “but Strong Ashagon encourages a revenge killing or two.”

“And Bright Lucaelior, Valiant Ashatar, and dozens of others besides abhor such behavior,” Tir stated.

Leon almost visibly cringed—a discussion on the morality of revenge wasn’t one he thought he’d come away from looking good.

“What do you think of all this philosophizing, Tir’Anu?” Leon asked.  “Or Tiraeses?”

“Tir’Anu,” Tir clarified.  “I am clearly the same man.  I clearly lack virtue.  I…  Despite the offer, how can I accept any kind of forgiveness when my crimes are so severe?  Even if some might absolve me of responsibility for the destruction of Arkhnavi, I am still responsible for the deaths of so many…”

“Forgiveness is on the wronged party to offer,” Leon said.  “No one else’s.  Whether or not they choose to offer it is entirely up to them.  Whether or not they mean it is between them and their Ancestors.”

Tir’Anu closed his eyes for a long moment.  Leon didn’t think his words had much effect on the man, but when he opened them, he at least looked like he’d regained a bit of purpose.  He pushed himself up to his feet.  “I’m feeling better, thank the Mothers Above and Below.  Thank you both for the conversation; I needed it.  Now, King Leon, Prince Ard’Nara, what more do we have to do here?”

Leon and Nara shared a look; Leon was happy to move on, while Nara seemed like he was more than willing to continue the discussion until it turned into an argument.

But they had other priorities at the moment.

“Let’s start over there,” Leon said as he pointed to the broken dais.  “I’m relatively certain that the enchantment that anchored the first Devilish ritual was located at least partially on that thing.  We may find some clue as to how to deal with this Primal Devil if we study it.”

“All of the cities we retook were studied extensively,” Nara stated.  “We found little information that aided us.”

“Did you ever find an anchor enchantment for the original ritual?” Leon asked as he led the group of three over to the dais while Mari stayed with her suit inspecting it for any damage.

“No,” Nara admitted.

“Then already we have more material to study,” Leon said with a researcher’s smile.  There weren’t many pieces left of the dais that were larger than his head, but there was enough left intact, he hoped, that studying any magic in and around it and the park would be worthwhile.

‘Hells, might even have to check out the entire damn city,’ Leon thought as he widened his awareness to include all that he could sense with magic.  ‘This is going to take a while…’

He sighed, not truly feeling that upset at getting the opportunity to study the enchantment work of a Primal Devil, and got started.

—-

—-

Thank you to my Apotheosis-tier patrons:

Ari Noordermeer – McVerisimilitude – Easyreader – Scarab6 – Caleb – A.M.R. – Laggmonkei – Stretchheart – CWMA – Tae – helvetica – Murigi – DJ9warren – Gabe9230 – sperg – zachary R Sellers – Twist3dOas1s – Caleb – Johnny – Matthew Schultz – Divine univers – Paul Whatever – Atom – Kenneth House – Etez – Craxuan – Josh Turple

---

Please be sure to visit Royal Road and leave a rating or review!

Patreon (Up to 40 chapters ahead)

Discord