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last_herald_mage2018-01-28 02:50 pm
Leareth/Ma'ar-POV stuff
This is deliberately pretty OOC from Ma'ar/Leareth in canon, because I find canon!Leareth pretty boring and he also wouldn't have a chance against a more rational version of Vanyel or a competent Valdemaran administration, so he also has to be way more competent.
I think I would prefer him to come across as less sympathetic and more creepy than he does in this, but then again, his side of things would be biased to be more sympathetic.
CW for discussion of rape.
Chapter 1 - Yet Another Birth
The boy is alone, crouched in the meagre shelter of a bush, behind a screen of trees that line the tiny river. Beyond the trees is an abandoned field, left fallow for years now, choked by weeds and saplings. The light is fading, the sun hidden behind clouds. A storm is coming.
He is perhaps sixteen years old, rawboned and underfed, his cheeks windburned and hollow. He wraps a stolen cloak more tightly around his shoulders, shivering in this minimal shelter from the wind.
(Somewhere else, in a place of void and dusted light, the curled-up shape of something-that-was-a-mind hides, a hole in a hole, looking out along fine tendrils of power. There? Maybe…)
The boy looks down at his hands – callused palms, knuckles dry and cracked. He looks around; his eyes fix on a piece of deadfall. After a moment he reaches out and takes it. He breaks it into several pieces, stacks them carefully on the ground.
He closes his eyes, and calls the fire.
It does not matter who he is, or why he is here, because this is the last thing he will ever do.
(Magic flares, and the something-in-the-void slips through the cracks into the world.)
The shape-that-is-a-person uncurls, slowly, in the spaciousness of a new body, a new brain. It looks through its new eyes, at its new hands.
No, not it. He. His name is… What? He has had many names, over the years. But his first name was Ma’ar. Right?
The past is hazy.
He does not remember all of his names, or all of his lives, but after a moment he remembers how to find out. Remembers old plans. Remembers who he is, and what, and why.
He needs a name, he thinks. The boy’s spirit is already gone, pushed out into the void (where something, somewhere, will hold and remember the bare seed of it), but the husk holds memories, and he shuffles through them. A name to match the region, he thinks, as he babbles out loud, playing with this new tongue, the phonetics of a strange language. He recognizes some of the grammar, but he will have to learn it well – the memory-traces remaining in this body will fade, he cannot rely on their for long.
Arvad. That will do.
And so Arvad-who-was-Ma’ar sits back on the damp carpet of leaves, and raises his hands, so recently the rough hands of a farmboy. He closes his eyes and pulls on the threads of power, re-exploring the use of magic in this body. In moments he weaves a shelter against the elements, a heating-spell, wards and alarms. He rifles through the boy’s memories and in a moment he knows where he is – far from the nearest farms and towns, in lands lately abandoned to the wild. Times have been hard, in this new here-and-now. In any case, he will be safe enough here for one night.
He needs to sleep. Needs to dream, to settle his spirit into this new home. He lies down, wrapping himself in the boy’s cloak, and closes his eyes.
#
Arvad awakens to dawn, and the cries of birds. Fragments of tangled dreams and memory drift through his awareness as he rolls over and stares up at the sky. Clear blue, visible between knotted branches. The storm has passed.
After a time he sits up and stretches. He will need to prepare. A scrying-spell, to start; he must know where exactly he finds himself. (From his temporary hiding-place in the void, he sees only hints of the world outside.) He will need to plan. His last body died in the far west, after two hundred years of ruling from the shadows. He knows where to access the written records of that time, and from there he can find his pointers to his other records, of all of the other times and places.
But one thing, first. He closes his eyes and tries to remember a night a long, long time ago. How long? He is not certain, the times that followed were troubled and no consistent calendar spans them, but well over a thousand years.
He remembers the plains of his first home, his first childhood. Remembers being a boy who climbed a hill and lay, alone, staring up at the stars. Remembers how beautiful they were; remembers the awe he felt, gazing at thousands of distant lights, and remembers how when he stood up, he saw the distant lights of half a dozen campfires. His clan, though even then he felt apart from them. He had imagined the whole world laid out before him, like a hawk might see from above – there would be other fires, other lights. So many.
But not as many as they were stars.
Life on the plains had been hard, violent, often short. Even as a youth – how old had he been? He couldn’t remember – he had watched his brother bleed out in the snow, as the raiders of another clan rode away. Watched his sister die, screaming, in childbirth. He remembers the pain, and the anger.
How could anyone think that this was all right? That this was what life should be?
He must have been thinking it for many years, even then, but he remembers that night, because it was the night he had made a vow. A pact – not with anyone, he had no one he truly trusted – but with himself, the self that would live in the future. He had sworn, somehow, to fix this.
No matter how long it took. No matter how hard it was. No matter what he had to sacrifice.
After that night it had taken him, what, perhaps five years? To realize that no course of action would let him save everyone, and that no one man’s lifetime would be enough.
And so he had taken himself apart, and spent years devising his first great work – the spell that would give him time. Enough time to, maybe, someday fix the broken wreck that was his world. He would have preferred an option that did not involve murder, of course, but even as a young man he had killed – killed men who were trying to kill him, sometimes with his bare hands.
And so he had claimed the safest, best option first – he had learned to leave his body and travel to the strange place that was the spirit-world, the Void between the Gates, and he had built himself a hiding-spot, a void-inside-a-Void, and tied it to his current flesh. Blood magic, the oldest and strongest form of power.
He had laid in place other plans, afterwards, plans that would not demand such high a cost, but when the final test came, none of them had worked and this one had. He accepts it now. A low enough price, really, compared to the stakes he works for. To be honest, it no longer bothers him. What would be the point? A peasant boy, an ignorant child, who would have amounted to nothing.
He remembers, vaguely, the details of that first life. He had not made it as far as a century in that body – he had killed himself with his own hand, when his first clumsy plans went awry and it finally seemed it was too late to win there and then.
(Before, for a long time, it had been his greatest regret, that he had to kill the old man. Urtho was the first person he might have learned to truly respect – his first potential ally. But they had never trusted one another, and the Mage of Silence had been too inflexible, too set in his ways and his flat conception of morality. And so they had fought, and they had murdered one another in a final, explosive Cataclysm that even now cast its long shadow forwards from his past. But regrets are pointless, guilt when he has already learned what he needs to learn and made the required updates serve for nothing.)
The hazy memories are all that he has; the records of that first short and messy life have been lost forever, destroyed in a disaster at least half of his own making. (Oh, he could blame the old man for his half of it, but what is the point in blaming a dead man? Nothing to be learned there.) He can never get that knowledge back – if he had realized sooner, in one of his early incarnations, that memories would fade, perhaps he could have saved more of it. But he had failed to realize, then, because for all his youthful optimism, he had not yet learned wisdom. That had taken much, much longer.
But he still remembers that night, with the clarity of a thousand mornings like this spent remembering. For something over a thousand years he has followed this North Star, the goal that drives him through an endless litany of days and nights, strategies and plans, battles and failures.
He may fail time and time again, but in the end, someday, he will succeed. He will build the world he has always dreamed of – one where no brothers die in war, where no sisters die screaming in pain, where no children go hungry and no cities ever burn and no stupid, pointless wars ever destroy half of a world.
Someday.
No matter the cost.
#
By the end of the third day, he has oriented himself, extending his power to see the world for hundreds of miles around, even as he changes his new body with magic – it will not do to wear the face of a young farm boy.
He finds himself far, far to the east of the plains from his first childhood – perhaps the furthest east that he has ever been reborn. In fact, he is only perhaps a hundred miles from the Eastern Sea. The land has changed – new fiefdoms and states have sprung up, and others have fallen and vanished.
These lands are, if not quite in a state of war, at least in a state of great disorder. This is frustrating, but it does mean certain opportunities are present. There is the kernel of an empire, not far from here – it has shrunk a great deal since its peak, but the core of its administration is intact.
By the end of the fourth day, he has the beginnings of a plan.
Magic is strong, here. It is something that varies a surprising amount within the geography he has explored so far, in his many lives. Not only are the ley-lines and nodes plentiful, but after a few initial explorations and some calculations and projections, he believes that the local population base bears a higher incidence of mage-powers than any he has seen yet. He suspects one of his own blood-descendants might have emigrated here, once upon a time – not a body he ever wore, of course, but in any case they had clearly sown their seed wide and far. That is very, very promising.
So, he has magic at his hands. He is a long way from his original home and from the Goddess-sheltered tribes that have claimed those lands for their own – he ought to be beyond the scope of their interference. And the strange mind-gifts that have begun appearing more and more in the far west seem to be rarer here. That simplifies things as well.
All in all, it seems a ripe opportunity for a new experiment, one he has been mulling over for several centuries now. He will have to access his notes; it ought not to be too difficult, the religious Order of Kalai that he founded once upon a time has a few temples not so far away, and from there he can sent requests for his coded texts. They will take years to arrive, but he has years.
(He cannot use Gates, or Portals as they seem to be called nowadays, to visit places that he has known in previous lives. As always it is a source of great frustration, and a problem he has poured years of work into solving with no success. But he can still use magic to travel much faster than a horse’s pace, and he will find time to revisit some of his key locations.)
Most of the plan is flexible, adaptable to circumstances as they arise – he has long learned that plans for which this is not the case are worse than worthless. He does have one decision to make now, however.
In the past, when establishing himself a place in an existing government, he has generally stolen the identity of some highborn, usually a second son of a minor noble family from an outlying region. There is some risk there, but less than one might expect; he can reshape his body with magic, so that his face will match that of the individual he replaces, and he can learn all he needs from them with compulsion-spells. He finds this much more humane than torture. This plan will allow him to enter the capital with an established social position.
He can also choose to go as he is now, an anonymous farmer’s son fleeing in search of a better life. The initial stages will take longer, if he chooses this option; he will have to prove himself over and over. Yet he will have a certain freedom, if he chooses to do things this way; he will not be bound to match his story or personality to that of an arbitrary young noble to avoid the suspicion of relatives.
And what difference will five years make, really?
(He remembers how he burned with urgency, before. How high the cost of delay loomed in his mind, how even a wasted day galled him. He moved quickly, ruthlessly, he took risks without a second thought. The wreckage of a hundred hasty plans looms higher, now. He can better afford delay than mistakes.)
So. He will travel to the seat of government of this empire, and establish himself – starting low in the ranks, but he has time, oh, he has plenty of time. He has learned patience. By the time he is ready to move on his eventual plans, these people will know him as one of their own.
He has some ideas about how one might run an Empire somewhere like this, where magic is fertile. He looks forwards to seeing if those hopeful plans will bear fruit.
#
Arvard-who-is-Ma’ar reaches the capital city one month after he awoke in the body of a nameless boy in the hinterlands.
The Emperor is seated here, and though his realm is called only ‘The Empire’ in the local tongue, what he rules over can barely be called an empire now. On paper his power is absolute, but in reality his position is weak, and he follows the whims of those landholders that still call themselves part of his state.
Within a day, Arvad is a member of the city Guard – just a low-ranked infantryman, for now. He works nights at first, and the hours are along, but he allows himself little sleep, and there is time left over for his other work.
(He can go without sleep entirely, if he needs, replenishing his body with magic rather than rest, but he has discovered the importance of dreaming when it comes to remembering who he is. Two thousand years of memories haunt his nights. They follow him from one incarnation to the next, but if he does not attend to them, does not revisit and recall them until they solidify in the structure of a new brain, they fade. Even with the mnemonics he uses, the notes he stores with his tame temple order and retrieves as necessary, and the nights of lucid dreams spent wandering through a hundred lives, most remembered sounds and images become mere skeletons of words and concepts, simplified down to the bones of thought. He rarely dreams in visuals at all now, let alone in colour, only in skeletons of words and concepts.)
He reveals to no one that he possesses magic. The time for that will come later.
With his fellow guards, he is steady, quiet, perhaps more serious than most youngsters – though he has changed this body and face with magic, and now appears about twenty-five years old. He makes only one other modification, turning the hair from dun to black, the colour is not so rare in this region and he feels more at home in a body that matches his first in that one small way.
Within a week he impresses his commander in his handling of a minor situation, quelling a riot in progress. To his face he receives only gruff praise, but he sees the way his superiors watch him now. Keep an eye on that one, they will be saying amongst themselves. This is how he intended things to go, and he checks off the step from a mental list.
He establishes a second persona in order to reach his contacts with the Temple of Kalai, a shy and devout clerk – the role is easy to play, he is rarely required to speak any lines – and within three days he has requested the sealed records of five previous incarnations, according to perfectly correct internal communications. The Order of Kalai has no idea how many of its copies of ‘holy books’ are in fact the memories of an immortal mage, recorded in his personal cipher. The chances that anyone could decode them at all are low, let alone by accident, and in any case his notes would mean little to anyone else.
He is bored. Surrounded by mere children, in the decaying heart of a slowly crumbling kingdom, laying his groundwork for a time decades in the future while he waits for his notes and texts to reach him… He takes the feeling and sets it aside, it tells him nothing he does not already know.
CHAPTER TWO
Chapter Two - Foundations
Nearly six months goes by before anything interesting happens.
Summer has passed and gone, and the harvest has been poor. Autumn brings constant rain, and with it floods, and the winter promises to be bitterly cold. The price of bread triples. On his nightly circuits through the city, he counts the number of beggars with no place to sleep. There are children among them. Sometimes he finds their bodies.
(Once, a very long time ago, he remembers a different city, a different famine. At the time he had been advisor to a mad King, his days occupied, but he remembers giving up sleep for nearly a month, spending each Gating to farms outside the region, purchasing sacks of grain with stolen coin. How many lives had he saved, that winter? Perhaps a few hundred, almost certainly less than a thousand. He knows the cost he paid for that month, now, in lost memories, and even a thousand dead children cannot tip the scale.)
He has no trouble sleeping at night.
He does find the time to establish a minor persona, as a scholar, and offer economic advice to the Emperor and his Council, though he is not sure if they follow it. And he takes a few minutes each night to purify the city’s water supply. It takes only a little magic, and no illness comes to the city that autumn.
War comes that winter.
Winter is never a good time for a war, for any of the parties involved, and he admits to himself that he did not predict it. Of course, he has no network of spies reporting to him, not yet, only the gossip he overhears in taverns with his fellow guards. If he had seen this coming, perhaps he could have prevented it – but perhaps it would not have been worth the cost of his time.
As always, he records his thoughts and then sets the past aside.
It begins when Lord Kathar of the Krevan province does not pay the taxes demanded by the Emperor.
The Emperor sends armed men to collect.
They return empty-handed with a diplomatic note. Lord Kathar wishes to peacefully withdraw his province from the greater rule of the empire.
The Emperor does not wish him to do so. Even with the crop failure, his lands are fertile and productive.
The Emperor raises his army.
Arvad, such a promising young man and never mind his dirt-grubbing background, is promoted to lieutenant and placed at the head of a platoon. Twenty-four men, all conscripted farmers. They train for two weeks before they march. Two weeks is not long enough.
The night before they go out to meet Lord Kathar’s forces, Arvad stays awake. His men trust him as much as can be expected, and fear him the right amount; for all that he finds this role deeply irritating, he has enough practice at leadership to ensure that. Still, it is not enough. He lays compulsions on them – subtle, deep spells, if he goes carefully the men will not be aware that they are being controlled. He has practiced with this for centuries; he can speak to them in their own inner voices, plant suggestions and moods that hold stronger than orders.
They march, part of a company of roughly 300, nearly all as haphazard as his own unit, untrained farm-boys and men past their prime.
They are ordered to take a town. The town is called Lavale. The maps he is given by his captain are rough, but he scouts the area with magic. Lavale holds perhaps five hundred souls. What little trade they have is in wood, he thinks; the town lies on a river and possesses a sawmill. They are hungry, but not yet starving – though he thinks that if Lord Kathar’s bailiffs had collected their taxes in grain, they might be by now.
He improves the maps, and carefully plants suggestions in the minds of his superiors that of course they were always this way, and no one notices if
The night before Arvad’s first battle, though of course it is not Ma’ar’s first battle nor even his thousandth, he leaves his men sleeping, with the assistance of a little magical push; they will fight better if they are fully rested. He climbs a hill and looks at the stars.
(For centuries, he did every night. But for all the patience he has learned, there is never enough time, and he knows what he is fighting for even without a nightly reminder. Still. In battle it is easy to be…wasteful. He prefers to avoid anger, that hot-blooded holdover of his animal body, but when decisions must be made in an instant, the heightened senses and sharpened reflexes are necessary. Oh, anger can give strength, physical and emotional, it can make that split-second ruthlessness come easier. Sometimes too easy.)
When the sun rises, he will go out with his men and fight the simple farmers and woodcutters craftsmen of a town that has, really, done nothing wrong in this game of power. He will kill some of them with his own hands. And yet he does this to save them – not as individuals, one person is such a small grain of sand, but all the people like them, now and in the future. He fights for illiterate woodcutters and their children as much as he fights for anyone.
He watches the stars and he thinks, carefully, and calibrates the compulsion-spells on his men as they sleep. He should let his men loot; knowing the state of the Empire’s treasury, he doubts they will see the promised amount in wages; and he should allow some amount of casual brutality, if it helps to cow the villagers they will have their victory faster, and ultimately at lower cost. But at this point he sees little tactical benefit to harming children, if they are not a threat. After all, they wish to keep this region within the Empire, and it would not do to foster resentment.
They ride out at dawn. By high noon, they have taken the town. The casualties are not so bad, better than he had predicted. Eleven townspeople are dead, thirty-some are injured, and he has lost none of his men. His healing magic is rusty, studying his notes has not been a priority yet in this incarnation, but he quietly does some minor healing for his injured men, injuries that might otherwise have been mortal but will now only be marks of heroism.
(In lives long past, he made a great effort to remember the dead. The ones he couldn’t save. The men he kills in battle are really no different from the children who starve because he has not yet succeeded at fixing systems of farming and food distribution. He remembers writing down their names, but he has not consulted those records in many centuries, and he no longer tries to remember. There are too many to mourn every one, and he knows there will be many more before he wins, because nothing is ever straightforward and he is no longer so naive as to be optimistic.)
He has never liked speeches, but he can give one if needs be, and he speaks to his men. They have performed well. Only because of his control-spells, of course, without that they are all stupid children. But the praise will give them pride in themselves, and trust in him.
The next day he receives a message from his captain. No praise, only their next objective, but he knows they will be speaking amongst themselves of his success.
#
The campaign lasts three months, all through winter.
Arvad’s platoon loses only two men – one to a moment’s distraction freak arrow, the second to an idiotic duel with a man from another unit. Arvad hates the custom of duelling. He will outlaw it, once he rules this place, but for now it is considered honourable and he says nothing.
Midway through the winter, someone notices his platoon’s performance, which is outstanding – again and again, they achieve their objectives ahead of schedule with a minimum of casualties. He would be disappointed if this were not the case; after all, he has about a hundred times more tactical experience than anyone else in the entire army. In fact, he holds back, refraining from too much cleverness, following orders even when they are less than optimal. He hopes to attract attention, but not suspicion, nor envy.
He is promoted again, to captain, and given charge of a slightly understrength company, about two hundred men. He chooses his platoon leaders from the best of that first unit, men who trust him and each other with their lives.
He uses his magic sparingly, saving his energy; he can tap nodes to replenish it, but the army has mages, and he prefers not to attract attention. Not yet. He lays only the most necessary of compulsions, scouts the area with scrying-spells only when he does not trust his superiors’ information, and reluctantly abstains from healing magic if his energy is low. He does place discreet weather-barrier spells on his men’s tents, subtle enough that they will be attributed to good design rather than magic, and he preserves their food and purifies their water; he can do this for two hundred without straining himself and it is well worth it for maintaining their strength and morale.
With his superiors, he is careful never to reveal any signs of great education in his vocabulary or mannerisms. He is supposed to be just an ambitious farmboy, and if they attribute his judgement and skill to good natural instincts, all the better.
His company soon has a Reputation. He controls them with an iron fist, hidden under a velvet glove. His men are proud of their work, even as the winter wears on and the rations run short. You are good men, he tells them softly in their dreams. Good men must be brutal, sometimes, and because we are good men, we do what we must. You are loyal to your Empire. You wish its citizens to live well, and Lord Kathar wishes to pull your Empire to pieces, and so he is our enemy and we must stop him and we must be ruthless in doing so – but the common folk are not our enemies, only misguided, and we will do only the harm we must.
They have a Reputation and they are given the more difficult targets, and finally on a late winter day, they are part of the formation that pincers Lord Kathar and the remains of his forces between a regiment of cavalry with two mages supporting them, a thawing river, and two companies of infantry. The mages perform well enough, Arvad observes; they are powerful, if ill-trained, and mere children cannot teach themselves, so he cannot blame them for their lack of skill. He will find something to do about their training later; this empire’s lack of any standardized magical education is a disgrace.
Arvad kills Lord Kathar, though not with his own hand; he has played the cautious, disciplined leader, and it would look odd for him to abandon that now and dive into single combat. Instead he sends in a squad, and when the time comes he snatches control of one Private Eddard, an intelligent youth who he thinks might have some usefulness, in the future. He plants the suggestion in young Eddard’s mind that the stakes of the moment have given him strength and courage he never knew he has – Eddard will never question that the actions were his own – and when Eddard takes a wound that would have been fatal, he intervenes from a distance, discreetly healing him enough that his life is in no danger. A hero wounded in battle – oh, the boy will be heaped with praise. And worship his first captain, whom he had looked up to from the beginning, who taught him everything he knows.
And Lord Kathar’s formation falls apart, which was the goal anyway.
By spring, the province that once belonged to Lord Kathar, some eleven hundred square miles of land – nearly one-tenth of the entire area still considered part of the empire – is now under the control of General Enor of Vadaran, with the backing of the forces they were able to raise, nearly ten thousand men under his command. He establishes himself in the late Lord Kathar’s manor, sends a messenger back to the capital, and awaits further orders from his Emperor.
General Vadaran summons young Captain Arvad, the lowborn youth from the provinces who has risen so far so fast. He invites him into his private office, a plain enough room, and offers him fine spirits in a crystal glass.
“I’ve been watching you, boy,” he says, half smiling.
Inside, Arvad is amused by the irony of it, this man who cannot yet be fifty calling him ‘boy’. “Sir,” he says, meeting the man’s eyes. He would like to lay a compulsion or two, but it appears that General Vadaran has a mage or two serving him, as well as a little Gift of his own. He is thoroughly shielded.
“Your men would die for you,” Vadaran says. He is still smiling. “You’ve accomplished incredible things, out here, and I know what your starting material was. A bunch of green country bumpkins who hardly knew which end of a sword to hold, and you made heroes out of them.”
He looks away, feigning bashfulness. “I did my best, sir.”
“Well, I’m damn pleased. I do have a question for you. You court-martialed one of your men. Rathan, was it?”
He nods, calmly. “Sir. Private Rathan disobeyed his lieutenant’s orders. He was given two warnings.”
An eyebrow is raised. “And which order was this order, exactly?” From the look in his eyes, Arvad suspects that he knows which.
“Sir. I ordered the men not to–” He hesitates, because young Arvad should be shy about this topic, even if Ma’ar is not. “Not to violate the women or children. Sir.” He raises his eyes, intending to reveal a flash of boldness. “I think it was reasonable. Sir.” At the time it had been irritating, and he had considered drawing the boundary further, he cannot really bring himself to be disturbed by the rape of adult women. It is not like it is so much worse than the rest of their lives. However, it may prove to be useful to have been seen as scrupulous.
“Yes, yes, of course. You’re a good man, Arvad.” The General slaps his shoulder. “We need more like you.”
“Sir.” He feigns bashfulness again, though he is bored and wishes the conversation would get to the point. He has been cutting sleep this last week, trying to push through to the end, and though his tap on a nearby magical node gives him energy and wakefulness, his sense of self is looser than he would wish.
“I have a proposition for you, Arvad,” Vadaran says. “I expect the Emperor to grant me the title to this province.”
Arvad nods and feigns a little surprise and awe, though he feels nothing of the sort. Despite leading an unpleasant winter campaign, Vadaran is a popular commander, and the Emperor is not in a strong position and will appear indebted to him. Arvad will not be surprised at this outcome.
Vadaran smiles. “I’m going to need people out here. Good, reliable, intelligent people. People just like you, in fact. I’m sure that you’ll be offered another promotion, quite possibly they’ll give you a battalion in the standing forces, but I’d like to ask you to consider a different position. I need a seneschal. Work with me, and we’ll whip these lands into shape in no time, and earn the Emperor’s favour.” His smile broadens. “These are rich lands, boy.”
Arvad knows. He has been collecting census data, as part of his mapping and scouting, and he thinks that nearly sixty thousand people lived under Lord Kathar’s fealty – somewhere between one-third and one-fifth of all the souls in this shrunken Empire, no one is exactly sure how many people live in the poorer northern regions. He will have to do something about that, once he is in control, but that time lies in the future.
He considers the options, very quickly. He had planned to ingratiate himself directly with the Emperor, but the Emperor is an old man, set in his ways, and Arvad does not think him particularly intelligent. He thinks he will prefer Vadaran’s company, as much as he can enjoy the company of any ignorant child.
“Sir!” he says, and he lets a little eagerness break through, as though he is trying to hide it. “Sir, I– I don’t know what to say. You honour me too much.”
Vadaran slaps his shoulder again, then lifts the decanter and refills his glass. “To our future!”
Arvad meets his eyes. “To our future, sir.”
He will have to betray the man later, of course. He has seen Vadaran’s thoughts, and he is no more or less corrupt than most men in his position, but he is so limited. Like all of them. He cannot fathom Ma’ar’s plans, and though he can be ruthless in his own small-minded way, he would flinch away from the scope of them. He wishes to be Emperor someday, of course, and maybe he will; it could be be a good intermediate step on the way to Arvad-who-is-Ma’ar’s final plans.
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I'm looking forward to reading this!
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(Looks like the cut closed too soon - see if the Dreamwidth cuts FAQ here helps).
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I probably won't splice this part specifically in; I maaaaaybe want to splice in Leareth interludes that are happening at around the same time as the rest of the story, or possibly various conversations that he and Van have while in the lucid dream together. (My main issue right now is that nothing before about 150K words in has anything to do with the MAIN PLOT. But also every time I try to write the Van/Leareth dialogue and boot up my character models of both of them, they stare at each other and don't say anything? Is this something that happens to other people?) Anyway I want to sort out what I'm doing with that before I put stuff online, so I don't end up wanting to go back and restructure everything.
Plz feel free to not read part 2 yet, the version I posted was a pretty early draft and I've made a ton of changes. I was curious if you had other feedback on part 1 though.