Saturday, July 30, 4 S.E.

  Leonidas stood in the chamber of arches in a daze.

  His gaze was unfocused, staring at his shaking hands in silent contemplation of what he had seen, what he had experienced, what he had felt.

  The first trial had been bad enough—a stream of memories and realizations that had encapsulated a cyclical failure of judgment, from refusing to accept the responsibility of Kingship out of fear of his own power, and what his [Cataclysm Core] might push him to do; to turning a blind eye to the machinations of the Haelfenn Nobility in the vain hope that Aylar would handle it herself.

  He had felt Deckard’s reprimand, despite the man being an unknown factor to his true life, like a blade through the heart. Every word, every expressed castigation, every criticism levelled against him had fallen with the weight of a mountain, and he had very nearly buckled under the immensity of his failure.

  “You forgot what it was to be human.”

  The words had haunted him more than anything else after the scenario had ended, reminding him of similar expressions from his time in Elatra. He had been trained by Miranda to be a sheepdog in a world of wolves, and in Deckard’s recrimination, he had been forced to confront his colossal failure at embodying that deepest truth. He had deferred responsibility, out of fear of his own nature, and been the fulcrum for his own species’ irrevocable fall into second-class obscurity as a result.

  In that sense, his inaction and fear-motivated inadequacy had been just as destructive as Azrageth’s genocidal conquest, save in a more subtle, insidious way.

  The fundamental truth was that Leonidas had not failed in his duty through active inadequacy, but had instead abandoned it completely, ruled by his own self-doubt and the lingering traumas of Elatra to such an extent that he had turned his back on what was happening—in so doing, he’d doomed the Terran Nobles to betrayal as surely as if he’d raised their standard of defiance himself.

  His eyes drifted toward his companions, and he thought about the second trial as they did, lingering on Synthra, who was sitting beside Aylar and talking to her softly.

  The love he’d felt for the two women in the trials had not been sourced from nothing: it had been a natural escalation of his own confused feelings, and likely theirs as well—twisted, amplified, and measured in years instead of days or weeks; but based on a foundation regardless. He’d loved them—he could feel that certainty, feel it within him as surely as his own heartbeat. It was strange how real the memories of those feelings were, even being so distant from his conscious mind.

  His mental landscape was a mess, but some rational part of him could remember the grief, the rage, the powerlessness he’d felt when Aylar had commanded him to halt; wielding an [Oath of Fealty] he’d placed upon himself for her when abdicating Kingship, and tying his will to hers. He’d done it to diffuse threats against her reign, to forestall any attempt to use him as a weapon against his ex-wife, even after her own actions had seen his family slaughtered over his pleas—but he’d never expected her to wield it the way she had.

  Watching Synthra and knowing she would die had killed some part of his future self, destroyed a fundamental aspect of his soul that he’d known, intrinsically, would never recover. Love had always been something Leonidas had struggled with on Elatra, and it was something he still shied away from—something he feared, not because he didn’t think others deserved it, but because he feared the cost of his love on them. He feared himself, and what he could be driven to, were he bereft of the rationality he desperately held onto in order to ground his most savage impulses.

  Which, of course, brought him to the third trial.

  That, more than anything else, had shaken him.

  The first and second trials had been emotional crucibles, ripping at his deepest-seated insecurities and aversion toward intimacy, reminding him of his failures, and amplifying the guilt and self-loathing he felt at his own inadequacy on Elatra. They had highlighted his faults, his fears, his fundamental cowardice in confronting the issues that still haunted him day by day.

  They had eroded his control, flared his trauma, and incited his deepest fears.

  They had been brutal, but they had been fundamentally human—highlighting the truth of his traumatic baggage in how impetuously he had charged into the third archway, seeking to flee from the sympathetic looks, the offers of comfort, the damned pretense at understanding. He had wanted no part of that. He hated it when people tried to comfort him, as if he were the victim, instead of the one responsible for the horrors that had transpired—as if he weren’t the one who had, through his weakness, permitted Azrageth’s rampage to become so much worse during his time as the Hero.

  The third trial had been the natural evolution of that, writ large, as his rationality had overcome all sense of emotional responsibility.

  It had subsumed his pain and his fear, and replaced it with nihilism.

  Logic, cold and certain, had dominated his mind—he had not just accepted the inevitable, lulling call of his Core’s dirge; he had sought it, even before he’d stepped foot through the third arch, and that alone disturbed and distressed him more than anything else. Leonidas had not been coerced nor enslaved by his [Cataclysm Core]’s insidious song; he had run headlong toward it, seeking a reprieve from the guilt that ate at him like a festering wound.

  Elatra, the thousands of dead, the souls he had put to the sword—as much for convenience as for necessity, as much for expediency as for protection of the greater whole. Leonidas had been the Hero, but when confronted by difficulty, he had chosen massacre and slaughter in lieu of the more tumultuous choice of sorting the corrupted from the pure.

  He had been a coward, in his own mind, and he had hated himself for it.

  So instead, he had found peace in the embrace of oblivion, but in doing so, had lost some fundamental part of himself he’d never realized he’d needed.

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  His eyes moved to Bardulf, and he found the Shadowblade looking at him in kind, his expression strained with uncertainty.

  Leonidas still remembered, with horrifying clarity, how easy it had been to rationalize impaling Bardulf.

  The only man he could conceivably call a male best friend on Terra had become a number to him—a calculation of difficulty, and without hesitation, he had culled the interfering factor with no consideration for the fraternity between them. He had remembered, in the third trial, the years of their friendship and the brotherhood they’d crafted; he’d simply been too cold, too rational, too immersed in the Song of Cataclysm and its Dirge of Destruction to care.

  When he’d teleported away from Bardulf, he’d not even thought about what he’d done. The Shadowblade had been an obstacle, not his friend, and he’d removed a variance in his final equation. What truly chilled him was how easy it had been, how simple the decision process had felt within his waking mind.

  That’s what I could become, he accepted silently. That’s my future with inaction.

  His eyes drifted back to Aylar again, and there he caught the Princess-Royal looking at him, her beautiful blue eyes fixed to him as Synthra’s golden followed in kind—the three of them meeting gazes in silence, the unspoken question lingering between them.

  Not ‘is what we saw inevitable’, but instead, ‘how do we stop it from happening?’

  Leonidas didn’t have that answer, and as his eyes returned to his shaking hands, his unsteady heartbeat told him plainly enough that it wouldn't be readily forthcoming. Some small part of him was stunned by his own ability to be stable enough to be inflective despite everything.

  The Ace before the trials would have expected himself to be more unsettled by what he’d seen, more unstable—part of him had expected to break down weeping or turn catatonic, but that had been a leftover from a more unenlightened time. The truth was that such reactions, while perfectly reasonable, defied the nature of who he was.

  He had fought his trauma every step of the way, and other than his deterioration during the first days of his training with Ceruviel, he’d held it firmly at bay. He hadn’t addressed it, but he’d become proficient at locking it behind layers of steel will, harnessing his Intelligence and Willpower to create certainty of self in combating its insidious tendrils as it tried to warp his mind.

  The trials had not weakened those barriers; they’d shattered them, but in so doing, they’d also elucidated upon a truth he’d been hiding from for far too long: avoidance was only the delay of an inevitability. It didn’t mitigate what happened; it only kicked the proverbial can further down the proverbial street.

  His fists clenched, still shaking, as he considered that and took an unsteady breath.

  He could see the future now, in some strange way, and could understand the choices that led him to it. It was foolish to assume he’d never succumb to them, or that he didn’t need to be wary—that wasn’t the point of the lesson. The System had shown him, as much for its own survival as anything, he was sure, the causation that led to the effect. It had granted him foresight into what could be, if he did not change what would be.

  His breath left him in an uneven exhale, and he looked up to the ceiling, searching the murals in silence.

  He had felt powerless and angry after the first trial; overwrought by guilt, by shame, and by fundamental failure that had riven all sense of control from him. He’d clung to the idea that power could be the factor of difference in changing his fate, and then the second trial had served to viciously disabuse him of that fragile hope by forcing his inaction when Synthra had died.

  It was that sense of despairing lack of agency that had led him to impetuously charge into the third trial, seeking vengeance against an infinite construct whose vastness he could barely comprehend—exactly as he’d monologued in the scenario itself. His plan had been built on a foundational desire for self-determination, not a true wish for blind destruction.

  Annihilation had been a mechanism, not the true end goal.

  Ultimately, he’d simply wanted to be free from subverted agency.

  The comprehension of self which that unlocked was something priceless, something understood that was difficult to put into words, even within the safety of his own mind. He had not realized how desperately he’d yearned for that freedom, that escape, that end to what felt like a collative stacking of vicissitudes that coerced him toward predetermined pathways.

  Leonidas had always hated being led by the nose—which is exactly what his life had felt like since the first time he’d awoken on Elatra.

  Ceruviel had given him a choice, an objectively tilted one, certainly, but a choice nonetheless—it was what had made him agree to be her Apprentice, to be an Archon, to follow her guidance and accept her Mentorship. She had offered him a path of his own choosing, selfishly motivated though it may have been, and Leonidas had latched onto it like a drowning man sought the security of flotsam.

  He didn’t regret that choice, even if he resented others—not that one.

  Becoming an Archon was a path to freedom, even if it took some winding turns to get there, and it was one he was set on following.

  The question, then, was the greater evolution of that.

  Did he want to be a King, the King, and carry that burden?

  Did he want to love in truth as he had in possibility?

  His eyes drifted over to Aylar and Synthra again, and his heart thundered in his chest as he considered it. The memories of their disparate lifetimes echoed in his mind, not influencing but curating—creating a tapestry of possibility, each sourced from a different outcome built on wildly different choices. A threat unaddressed, a catastrophe unmitigated, a failure of self-discipline evolving into nihilism. He saw each potential life and could extrapolate a dozen more from branching possibilities.

  But none of them were the future; they were simply a future.

  So then the question remained, burning, searing, dancing within his mind.

  Did he want to be a King, and if so, what sort of King would he be?

  The boy who wanted a pretty girl and a happy life said yes, the man who survived the demons and wanted it all to end said no, and the Knight that defied the heavens and demanded answers from the System said maybe.

  But what would Leonidas choose? What would the man, the Cataclysm, the Archon—the him of the now, forearmed with the knowledge of his darkest futures and most profound possible failures, truly choose?

  That answer eluded him, and as he returned his gaze to his hands, he found that the certainty of that uncertainty had reduced the shaking. Only slightly, but enough that it gave him a clue as to how to proceed. He couldn’t be the same person he was; he couldn’t run away from the nightmares, the pain, the regret, the agony—but he could choose to accept his flaws, own his failures, and move beyond them, to accept his own shortcomings and become better for that acceptance.

  Ceruviel had told him, during the time she’d trained him for the Arena, that he had not wanted to die—he’d simply stopped desiring to live. There was a wisdom in that observation that resonated within him in that moment, hearkening to a foundational change he had undergone with her tutelage, with the long hours of her aiding his grief, counselling his fears, and helping guide his ability to withstand the weight of his trauma—for no reward, save his own mental stability.

  It made his epiphany both obscure, and somehow incandescently obvious.

  Perhaps it was time to stop living despite his fear and traumas.

  Perhaps it was time to move past the lingering specter of self-hatred.

  Perhaps it was time to begin to forgive himself.

  Perhaps it was time to leave the Hero behind.

  Perhaps it was time to just start living.

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