“If I had broken my pact... I did it once before, why didn't I just do it again?” he muttered as he walked too and fro. Finally he opened the door and walked back inside, witnessing the carnage that befell Yveth's henchmen when she left.
“Did you catch her?” Quentin asked as he cleaned gobbets of flesh and gore off his body. The room was a mess. Bodies were strewn everywhere, some rotting and sizzling due to toxins they had been doused in, some strangling their companions amidst their own death throes, and some simply beaten to death. There was only one survivor; a young man who was holding out a red, leather-bound book like it was some kind protective talisman.
“He does not look like he caught her,” Jim replied as Laurence just stood at the door mutely.
“Why is he still alive?” Laurence asked, venom dripping from his voice as he pointed at the young man.
“Well I mean he's holding your Book, we thought you'd want to deal with him yourself,” Peter barked with laughter as he trod around the room, carefully sprinkling a different dust upon the bodies of the Avalonians. “Try not to touch any of the corpses from here on in. They need to be detoxified.”
Immediately Ruko pulled her hand back from a body she was about to touch and then rushed with Fen towards their master. The children had been good when the fighting was going on. They had sat in the corner of the room, watching the combat as the four masters before them gave a crash-course in expression of power, and using their abilities to their advantage. Some events were easier to understand than others, for instance Quentin fighting and beating people while only using his mana to restore his flesh to the peak state was eye opening for them. Even the Avalonian technique of sucking the mana out of the flesh was worthless when he had such fine control over his mana that there was none on his flesh.
In comparison, Jim's combat had been the most esoteric. They had watched bizarrely as his existence was ignored by the Avalonians, but yet they still fought each other. The screams of “For Avalon”, or “For my Lord!” were heard all the way until the end of the bloodbath, and even as the last breaths were fading from the controlled fighters they still tried to cry their allegiance with determination, as if it would have some way of stopping them from succumbing to their wounds and the poison that floated through the air.
Laurence’s combat, in comparison, had actually been the least helpful to them. It had the combination of an obscure grasp of the Book of Creation, as well as an obtuse fighting style. When those two issues were matched together, it meant that it was incredibly difficult for the two children to glean anything from watching him, even if the fight itself was relatively simplistic.
After being corralled by Peter they sat facing each other and began discussing what they had learned in hushed voices. Placing their hands together they made incredibly small movements as they spoke, comparing the concepts they had come up with at lightning speed. Just as quickly they moved from the concepts they learned to countering and dissecting the concepts instead, picking them apart until the truth of all they had experienced came together into something that they could use with ease. It was slow going to begin with, but the more they comprehended, the quicker they became.
While the two children sparred Laurence stared at the man with the Book in his hands. He desperately wanted to end the man but he could not bring himself to. The man held a Book, and more importantly, the book was of Creation. The man was an Avalonian, but at the same time, he was a Hephaistain. For whatever reason, Creation had chosen him, and Laurence could not deny that.
“Who are you?” he asked through gritted teeth. “And how did you get that book?”
As the full force of Laurence’s aura crashed down upon the young man, he could not help but let out a squeak. All the air was forced out of his lungs and he began to sweat profusely. He struggled to open his mouth, but other than the squeak he could not speak.
“You’re not going to get much out of the guy if you crush him, Law,” Jim said, chuckling as his own aura relieved some of the pressure from the Avalonian, allowing him to breathe.
“Ayven,” the man cried, gasping for the fresh air that had been starved from his body. “My name is Ayven.”
“So, Ayven,” Laurence said, the venom dripping off of every word, “Where did you get that Book? And what in the name of Babel herself were you doing in a crypt made by, and for, my family? This place was not for you.”
“I... we... err...” Ayven desperately tried to stammer out a sentence but it was obvious to everyone that the words were not coming. Sweat started trickling down his forehead and onto his nose. He twitched, but did not dare to wipe it off. He barely dared to breathe, let alone move to wipe off the offending beads of fluid. “I... I was given it!” As he finally got the words out he let out a gasp of air.
“Who by?”
“The lady... she had it with her from the beginning.”
“Yveth? That witch?”
“Yessir, the lady gave it to all of us, but I was the only person it reacted to. We tried to use it as an inert book to get past the traps, but like that it did nothing.”
“The Book,” Laurence growled, “Is blank without the spark. All the Books are. If you have no talent in one of the six paths then you will never get started with it, no matter how hard you try. You, however, seem to have a gift for Creation, whether you realise it or not.”
“I’m actually connected to the damn Tower? The lady... she lied... she said I wouldn’t be... I’m going to be a pariah! Avalon will never allow me back! She lied! Yveth LIED!” The longer he spoke, the angrier he became. His voice cracked under his distress and the pressure that Laurence was still putting him under. Tears began to well up in his eyes, “What do I do?” he cried.
Seeing the obvious distress that the man was experiencing, Laurence softened slightly. He was still guarded against the man, but he did not doubt his distress. Ayven had been cast out by his clan, abandoned and left to rot by the people he was supposed to be supported by. There was always the chance that the man was bait, a trap of some kind, but Laurence was already coming up with an answer to that.
“I can give you a place to live. But it will come with a price.”
“What? Why would you help me?”
“Because I want something. I want to know what they intend to do with the Well, and how they managed to find out about it.”
“I... they... they wanted the Well because it‘s the answer to our curse, the curse that came with the gift of the Kimbra. It has hung over our heads like an axe for centuries, turning the chance for destruction into certainty and cutting us off from the immortal way.”
“I know that,” Laurence interjected, “Your leader cannot possibly hope to squander the few wishes that the Well actually contains, on something that it cannot give him. It is made to subvert Babel’s will subtly, not spit in her eye.”
“But the augers... lord Gawayen... they swore...”
“They lied. Or were mislead.”
For a moment Ayven just sat there, shell-shocked by what Laurence told him. He opened his mouth as if to rebut the man, and place his faith in Avalon once more, but he found that he could not do so. He had been cast away by them, like a filthy rag after a lifetime of use, and now the one piece of faith that he still held was being trod on by the man who offered him salvation. “Am I going to die?”
“Everyone dies,” Peter said, retrieving Rose from storage for the first time in hours. “Most people within the Tower die in combat of some kind, swathes through old age, and some by their own hand. Life is pain, and death is a return to the soft chest of the mother herself. But Avalon? They subvert her will. They break the cycle of reincarnation by stealing peoples destiny, condemning them to oblivion and not returning the essence of that which they took. There can be no new life with Gi.”
“Are we not doing the same thing?” Laurence asked as he gripped the crystalline pendant around his neck.
“Oh, we are. I don’t expect either of us to have good ends,” Peter said, laughing, “Doesn’t mean we can’t try though.”
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