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Chapter 52
🕑 Added 2024-09-20 13:20:01 +0000 UTC“Wake up!” Mitchell shouted to the drunk bandit and delivered a solid smack across his unwashed face.
The man groaned and his face twisted into a rictus of pain at the force of the blow.
“Ssstollar’s cock! Lemme ssleep, you sssack of jivi ssshit!”
Their captive never even opened his eyes, instead trying to turn over. Except he couldn’t with Allora’s foot pressing down firmly on his chest. He struggled once against her boot, then finally opened his eyes.
“Whaddya wa–?”
He blinked rapidly trying to clear his ale-clouded gaze and saw all of the six foot-tall elf towering over him, the gems in her krisa glowing brightly in the dim light of the cavern. His eyes widened, but it didn’t appear to be in fear. A grin split his face at seeing the knight’s beauty come into sharper focus, and he hadn’t yet realized the situation he was in.
“Well, hello, my lovely. I didn’t think we had the coin to pay for whoresss thisss far wessht but you look like your worth every copper!”
From behind Mitchell, Lethelin made a groaning sound that was in time with a severe hardening of Allora’s lips and a narrowing of her eyes. Rather than speak, however, she pressed down so hard with that Mitchell heard something pop in the man’s chest.
The man howled in agony and let forth a string of curses, spittle erupting from his lips and flying off in all directions as he tried to get out from under her. It was then he finally realized how securely he was bound, and panic began to set in.
“Whass goin on? Who are you? Where’sss Larek? He’sss gonna bloody kill you, you whor–”
Mitchell unleashed a slap across his face again before he could finish that word, then grabbed him roughly by the chin and forced him to finally look at him.
“Hello. I would like it if you didn’t call her a whore again.”
“Thank you, dear,” Allora said and gave Mitchell one of those little smiles that were just for him before turning her cold violet eyes back to the prisoner. Mitchell tried to ignore the flutter in his chest at her calling him dear and focus on the task at hand.
“Larek,” he continued, “whichever one he was, is dead. The rest of them are dead, too. I haven’t yet decided if you’re going to join them.”
Mitchell turned and nodded to Allora. From her side, where she’d been holding it, she held up a sword. It wasn’t nearly as imposing as her own, but it did have an emblem engraved onto the cross guard, that of three crystal shards behind a cathedral-like structure.
“This is the blade of the city watch in Lorivin,” she began, her voice clinical and devoid of emotion. “Although, it has seen better days.”
It did indeed look in long need of a polish. Allora had drilled into him the importance of maintaining one’s weapon, and he never went to bed after a sparring practice without tending to it. This one hadn’t seen a sharpening stone in weeks, at least. The edge was notched in several places and the point had been snapped off. Rust was beginning to spread through the fuller down the middle of the blade.
“It matches the scabbard that is still attached to your belt. Is it yours, or did you steal it?”
The man’s chest was heaving now, and his body had gone still. He looked wild-eyed between Mitchell and the towering Allora. The pain and the fear seemed to be sobering him up a lot quicker than sleeping it off had.
“It’s mine,” he gasped, at last, when it looked like Allora was about to bear down on him again. “I was in the guard. But that’s all gone now, so it don’t matter.”
He wheezed, his chest clearly paining him. Mitchell wondered if she’d cracked a rib.
Allora narrowed her eyes once again, and Mitchell felt him shrink away. Mitchell released the man’s jaw now that they had his full attention and sat back to let Allora interrogate him. When she’d found the blade next to the fire as they cleaned up and prepared for their meal, she had immediately begun searching for the matching scabbard. Not finding it among the odds and ends, she checked first him since he was the one remaining and, luckily, he had it still on him, and she didn’t need to search the bodies down in the ravine. Finding it buckled to his belt, she had gone very quiet and ate her dinner without speaking.
“What is your name, rank, and who was your commander?” she demanded, her voice containing a hard, military-like edge to it.
He swallowed then answered.
“Kole. Kole Norwell. Guardsman 1st class. My commander was Riston Havel.”
Allora’s eyes widened slightly, so Mitchell guessed that she knew him.
“Did Commander Havel survive the coup?”
Kole wobbled his head.
“He and all the commanders were executed, and Milandris placed his own people over the city watch.”
Allora looked away then, her eyes seeing nothing for a long moment.
“And how did you come to be here, Master Kole, among bandits?” she said at last.
“Wasn’t nothing left for me in the capital. I fled. Wife was in the guard too, but she was killed the night it happened. Her unit charged into the palace. They never made it out again. I ran into the countryside, used up what little coin I had, then had to steal to get food. Eventually met up with Larek.”
“You swore an oath,” Allora’s voice was tight with barely contained rage. “You swore an oath to the people of Awenor, and now you rob them? Kill them? Have you no honor?”
This accusation seemed to hit the man somewhere deep. He surged up so quickly that Allora almost lost her balance as her foot rose up against Kole’s chest. Mitchell quickly grabbed his shoulder, but the man had stopped. His eyes were glowing with rage.
“What of King Baylor’s oath?!” he screamed. “What of his oath to serve the people and protect us? Protect my Mekena! My wife! If he hadn’t spent the last years fucking and drinking himself into a stupor, maybe Milandris wouldn’t have been able to do what he did!”
Allora did step back then, some of her anger flowing out of her at the man’s grievances.
“And what of the oath of the Knights?” Kole demanded. “Why didn’t they stop Baylor, may Denass burn his soul?! Why did they stand by and do nothing while Awenor started to fall apart?! Don’t speak to me of oaths, woman! There are no oaths left in Awenor. They died with the knights! They died with my Mekena!”
The man slumped back to the ground and stared blankly at the ceiling of the cavern. Mitchell didn’t think he was really seeing it, though. His body was limp and unmoving.
Mitchell stood to go to Allora, who looked at Kole with a look of horror on her face.
“Are you okay?” he asked gently.
He put his hand on her arm, and this seemed to startle her back to the present.
“I…” But she didn’t continue. Instead, she looked down at the sword in her hand and then to her own sword, wrapped once again to hide the stone in the pommel. She placed the guardsman’s sword gently on the ground.
“I need to be alone, please. Excuse me.”
She turned and went outside into the pre-dawn light. Lethelin came up then and watched with him.
“Going to go after her?” she asked.
“No. She needs the time. I’ll give her a bit.”
They both looked back at Kole who still hadn’t moved.
“Do you think a lot of people feel like he does?”
Lethelin inhaled and let it out slowly.
“Honestly, yes. I don’t think Milandris would have had nearly as easy a time as he did taking over if the knights had survived. Losing Baylor was shock enough, but for the knights to be killed…”
She wobbled her head.
“I think everyone just lost the will to fight anymore. It broke something in us, Mitchell. I think a lot of people feel exactly like he does.”
Mitchell put his arm around her slender waist and pulled her to him, then kissed the top of her head.
“This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”
Lethelin snorted.
“If it was going to be easy, I wouldn’t be charging you so much.”
He looked down at her, arching another eyebrow, only to see her grinning back up at him, a twinkle in her green eyes. She popped up on her tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the lips.
“Don’t worry, I’m worth it.”
****
After about a half an hour, when Allora didn’t come back, Mitchell decided to go and check on her. The prisoner had stopped responding to questions altogether after his outburst, so they let him be for now. He found Allora sitting cross-legged on a small bolder with her sword across her knees, staring west across the wide expanse of Awenor as the sun crept up over the mountains. They were still deep in the shadow of the peaks, but just high enough that Mitchell could see the golden rays light up the farthest reaches of the Shadow Glen.
“Hey, you,” he said quietly in English as he stopped next to her.
She turned to look at him and cocked her head slightly.
“Haaa yoo?” she repeated back to him, trying to mimic the unfamiliar sounds of English. “What does that mean?”
“It’s a greeting to someone special to you.”
“Oh,” she said and turned to look back at the horizon.
Mitchell had seen that her eyes were a little puffy. She’d been crying. Suddenly, she turned back to him with her small smile and said, “Haa yoo.”
“Going to have to teach her English diphthongs, I guess,” he thought to himself with a chuckle.
Mitchell looked at the rock and thought there was just enough room next to her for him to join her. He hopped up and squeezed next to her and took her hand into his. She gripped it tightly and returned to staring at the horizon. Mitchell joined her, and they sat quietly for a time. He knew she would talk when she was ready.
“We tried,” she said, her voice almost plaintive. “The other knights, I mean. I was not in a position to do anything.”
Mitchell said nothing, just squeezed her hand by way of encouragement.
“Baylor was the monarch. We could not give him orders. My mother and father did all they could do to remind him of his duty to the land and to the people. He did not care. All we could do was advise and counsel him. My father told him what was happening, and sometimes he would remember himself and give orders but, in the last few years especially, it was all we could do to get him out of his chambers. He had given up. He lost all interest in governing.”
“You said he was old, a monarch for seventy or eighty years, right? And he was human?”
“He was 103 years old when he was killed.”
“That’s really old for a human. Maybe his mind was going.”
Allora gave him a puzzled look, then raised her eyebrows in some realization. She smiled and looked slightly embarrassed.
“If the coup had not happened Baylor could have expected to live at least another 60 or 70 years. Maybe longer.”
“How is that possible?”
“The heart stone,” she explained. “It will extend your life significantly. I am sorry I did not tell you sooner. I did not think of it.”
Mitchell was stunned.
“You mean I might live to be two hundred years old?”
“That would be the upper limit for a human, I think, but I suppose it is possible.”
Mitchell’s mind reeled at the thought. What would that even feel like? But then he had an idea.
“Lora… How many humans have been the monarch of Awenor?”
She furrowed her brow, and he could see her running through names in her head.
“Three,” she said at last. “You will be the fourth. Why?”
“Did they all experience problems in their later years?”
She frowned, then turned her attention inward, perhaps trying to remember history lessons she’d had as a girl.
“They did,” she said at last.
“The one you told me about before, that killed a bunch of people and made Awen change her mind about giving monarchs crystals. Was he human?”
Allora’s eyes started to widen.
“Yes!” she exclaimed, as she started to make the connection. “Do humans all go mad on your world?”
Mitchell grimaced and started to shake his head. Then he corrected himself, and wobbled his head the way they did here.
“Not exactly.”
“What is it then?”
It was Mitchell’s turn to furrow his brow as he tried to figure out how to explain what he thought the problem was. Realizing it was too complicated, he asked her to use the language spell on him. Something she hadn’t needed to do for a while.
“The average life span of a human on Earth is about 80 years, give or take. Our technology has gotten to the point where there is a real possibility that we could extend life well beyond that. Not yet, but in another few decades, they think humans might live to be even older. Not with magic but with powerful medicine that repairs the damage of aging.”
“That sounds like it would be a good thing,” Allora commented.
“On the surface, yes, but our species didn’t evolve to live that long. One issue that has come up among scientists is a concern about what such a long life would do to our minds. The older we get the faster time seems to pass. Most people die before it becomes an issue but as we start living longer the topic comes up more and more. What would a significantly longer life do to us psychologically? As we age, time starts to feel different for us. We perceive it differently. What long term effects would that time distortion have? What would it mean to have a head so full of memories?
“It may be that we figure out how to live for centuries but go insane well before then. We don’t yet know what effects that will have in the long term but I wonder if what has happened to the human monarchs is one example.”
“Baylor was only 103,” she said.
“That’s still older than most people on my world and we have all kinds of medicines and machines to keep people alive. The vast majority die well before that. We have more than doubled the life expectancy of our species in the last century or two, although that has more to do with keeping infants from dying in child birth, but still. Many illnesses that would have killed people just a few decades ago can now be treated or cured.”
Allora turned inward again and went over the implications of this new revelation about humans.
“I tell you this so that you know that I don’t think what happened to Baylor was anything the knights could have prevented, especially if no one even understood the problem. If I’m right, anyway. This is only something the people of my world have recently started talking about and I’m just speculating. But I do know that our species simply didn’t evolve to live that long. Even if the stone was keeping his body in good condition, it sounds like it doesn’t do much for their—our—minds.”
He pulled her hand to his mouth and gave it a kiss.
“It wasn’t your fault. Or your father’s fault, or any other knight.”
Allora was silent for a while as the sun crept higher, illuminating more of Awenor before them. It was her way. Mitchell loved that about her. She never spoke in haste. She always considered her words.
“Thank you, Mitchell.”
She turned slightly towards him and brought her head in close. Mitchell mimicked her movement and their heads met in the middle.
“Will you execute him?” she asked quietly.
“I was worried you would ask me that.”
“The decision should be yours. He is a criminal, almost certainly guilty of murder. Despite what he was, and what happened, he chose the path of the brigand. It is punishable by death.”
“Of course it is,” he sighed.
In the back of his mind, he knew that something like this might happen. If not today, then in the future. He was expected to be a ruler here, not just a soldier. He would hold the fate of men and women in his hands. He doubted telling Allora he’d always been against the death penalty would be of much use. This wasn’t America.
“Time to face the music,” he said reluctantly.
“Always music with you,” Allora chuckled. “I want you to fix your device so I can hear it one day.”
“As my lady commands,” he said as he hopped down and held up his hand to her.
She took it with a smile, dropped down, sheathed her sword, and they walked together back into the cave where their prisoner waited.
Comments
Josh
> He doubted telling Allora he’d always been against the death penalty would be of much use. It might be. This is a former guard, who turned to thievery after losing hope and feeling like the monarch had betrayed the country (which, mental health notwithstanding, is kinda true). That doesn't make it right, but it makes it potentially forgivable if they didn't actually kill anyone. It seems at least trying to figure out if they actually killed anyone, or just stole things; right now they're assuming that but they don't have evidence of it. (And they are, after all, traveling with a thief.)
DevonHexx
Allora is speculating. She thinks it might be possible for a human to live that long.
Codewrds
Hold up. If the human monarchs live for up to 200 years, and the system has been in place for 1000 years, then does that mean there has only been one or two non human monarchs? Assuming the non human monarchs live longer
DevonHexx
The system has been in place for almost a thousand years. There have been three human monarchs.
DevonHexx
Yeah, I’m aware of that. The more of our lives that become habit the less we actually remember the day to day things. The brain glosses over the mundane. I’m still playing with that idea here. You can’t have novel experiences routinely for a hundred and fifty years. Elves and dwarves, for example, are typically described as very long-lived. Tolkien’s elves were immortal. So, injecting a little reality into the fantasy, their brains would need to have evolved to process experiences differently. But humans have not evolved with that capacity. At least not yet. Really, it’s just a case of me saying ‘if X were true, what might that mean for the character?’ If a human could live well into their second century with a brain that evolved to only function well at a third of that age, what kind of effects might we see?
Josh
If there have only been a few monarchs, I wonder if any of them spent an extended period of time talking with Awen? Couldn't hurt to try.
Josh
Cause and effect aren't entirely clear there. Time dilation may not be a function of aging; it may be a function of having less interesting events going on. Have you ever noticed that when you travel, time seems to expand, and two weeks of vacation feels a lot longer than two weeks of work (if your work isn't something you find compelling)? Many people, as they age, spend less time with friends or family, less time doing intellectually stimulating activities, and otherwise give their brain less to do. That may be at least one of the causes of that time dilation effect.
DevonHexx
Robert Heinlein's book Time Enough for Love deals with people dying from plain stupidity fairly well.
DevonHexx
So, addressing the aging/cognitive issues, with this. It’s something I tossed around quite a bit. I’ve come across conversations about time dilation as we age several times over the years. That feeling of time speeding up as we get older. Summer break felt like years when you were ten but whole years feel like months when we’re in middle age, etc. As our lifespan increases thanks to better health, fitness, nutrition, and medicine, how would our brains deal with that? It’s not dementia or Alzheimer’s, it’s just the way our perceptions get distorted as we age. I’m only speculating, of course, but as a species that, as far as nature and evolution is concerned, stops having any real purpose past our 20s and 30s, our brains aren’t designed to experience 200 years of life. My guess is, as we get better at living longer, this will have some strange effects on our mental condition. But as I said, all just speculation. A wrinkle for them to deal with. It may be that for the human monarchs of the future there will need to be a sort of retirement if things like what happened with Baylor are to be prevented in the future.
Codewrds
It seems like awen isn't able to help with mental issues. Perhaps because she isn't mortal she can't fully understand a human psyche?
Trevayne
Good update and an interesting perspective on aging. Maybe the next Awenor monarch might be evaluated and directed to abdicate before they become unfit to perform their duties. They could set up a regency council whose function is to periodically review the monarch (say every five years) and contact Awen. For that matter, does Awen protect against Alzheimer's or other dementias? For another take on aging, I remember reading somewhere that if humans were made immune to aging and disease, their life expectancy would still be only about 700 or so years, even though they are theoretically immortal. They looked at the actuary tables and concluded that even without disease or aging, people would still die from accidents or suicide, keeping the life expectancy under 1,000.
Tnrkitect
"if no one even understood the problem. If I’m write, anyway." Should be "If I'm right, anyway."
