The Wise Men Who Choose Eternity, Not Eternity (3)

What I held in my hand was the heart of the darkness itself, and all the while, the dark blue sky and the great darkness that had covered it trembled.

“Look what I have here in my hand, and step out a bit further,” I said as I squeezed the organ that I held.

“Don’t do that, eeeh! Eeeeh! Eh eeh eh, you’ll just burst my heart!” came the begging scream from the mass of darkness.

“Ida hah heh, that language you speak! Jeh heh heh heh heh!”

I found this to be quite a tacky response after the prestigious entrance that had been made.

I smiled and beckoned at the floating blob of darkness. “Come down here at once, it hurts my throat to keep shouting, and it hurts my neck to keep looking up!”

The darkness lingered for a while and then descended to the earth.

‘Shiiink,’ came the sound as both Adelia and Arwen drew their blades out of instinct as the darkness neared us. Boris had been aiming her bow at the blob from the moment that it had materialized. Then came a great noise, and it seemed to shake the world, almost as if reality was having a seizure.

I knew that there was no possibility of a fight, for I held the Life Vessel firmly in my grasp. The darkness was merely studying me, now standing tall before us like the shadow of some great tree.

“Strange,” I said, and the darkness trembled as I spoke. “I think you have recognized me, so why are you still keeping to your shadows?”

There came no answer.

“Ah, so you’ll be pretentious to the very end? That’s it then,” I goaded and squeezed the heart in my hand once more.

“Ooohhhh... Ohhhhh! That’s enough!” screamed and begged the blob, and it at once shuddered and slowly began to fade until it had dissipated completely. The figure of a mage, still shrouded in darkness, was revealed before us. Under the deep chasm of its hood, one could see the gaunt features of its skull and the ominous glow of red eyes, and no face was visible in the darkness.

It was as if we stood before a star that had once shone so brightly in the sky but then had fallen into the deepest darkest night.

“It’s been a while, Ophelia.”

She was a white night mage who had fallen here four hundred years ago.

She sighed deeply. “Even though its bloody shell has changed, its nasty temper is still much the same.”

I laughed at the fluency and ancient accent of her language, and as I had expected, she had recognized my identity at once.

Not even an elder high elf who had lived for a millennium had been able to pierce the truth of my identity, and I knew that this was due to Ophelia’s [Mind Eye], a talent which she had been born with that allowed her to see into the true nature of things.

It was nice because I was so very glad that at least one person remembered me and had been able to recognize me.

It was far different than my meeting with that lunatic elf, for unlike Sigrun, Ophelia wanted nothing from me.

I laughed in joy as I considered such things.

“What is the purpose of all this?” Ophelia asked, terribly annoyed.

“Come with me, Ophelia.”

She sighed. “Well, you have found my life vessel, which means I don’t have much a choice in the matter. Really, you haven’t changed at all in four-hundred years.”

She lamented her fate again and again.

“It’s really ugly that I’ve become entangled with you once more. Last time didn’t work out well at all! And now you force me to move against my wishes.. ah.”

“Well, Your Highness?” I heard someone ask, and I realized that Arwen and the others still had their weapons at the ready.

“You can sheath your swords!” They would have followed my orders under any other circumstance, but their entire beings rejected my words on this day. Given the common public rumors about liches, it wasn’t strange that they were so reluctant to stow their weapons.

A lich in the eyes of the common folk is the ultimate symbol of an evil wizard, a terrible monster that despises all things living.

That was not true at all.

A lich is just a wizard who has become suspended from death for a while so that they could complete the labors of their lives. After achieving what they had wished to achieve, most of them destroyed their tokens of immortality and returned to the dust and dirt of the world. Even if they were the dead who invaded the realm of the living, they would never harm anyone as they were still wise and beneficent hermetical wizards.

If a lich does harm the world, it’s not because it is a lich, but rather due to some original flaw in the wizard’s personality. Therefore it could be stated with some certainty that the commonly held rumors of liches and their evil ways were utter hogwash.

Just because something is colored black does not mean that darkness resides within its heart, and just because something is dark does not mean that it is evil. Still, even after so many hundreds of years, people judge a thing by its form rather than its essence.

I clucked my tongue and explained all of this to my companions, telling them that Ophelia was not evil even if her form appeared to be unpleasant. I went on to say that under her hood and robes, she had possessed a body that had been idolized by all the kingdom’s men when she was still alive, so treating her like a monster now would surely not be pleasant to her.

Arwen and the other two relented and stowed away their weapons. However, they did not once keep their hands far away from the hilts of their blades until we had left behind the Frost Mountains, and I could do nothing about that.

* * *

“From this point on, we enter the area that the rangers patrol,” Boris told me when we left the Frost Mountains and ascended the first slope of the Blade’s Edge Mountains. As she told me this, her gaze remained firmly fixed on Ophelia.

Maybe she was worried that the rangers would make a fuss upon seeing the lich, or maybe Boris just did not like the idea of a skeletal mage walking around. Ophelia did not respond to such scrutiny, she rather seemed lost in her own thoughts, and perhaps she had already prepared herself for resistance in some way that we could not discern.

The magic of a sorcerer who had followed the secret mechanisms of the universe up to the level that she had was as subtle as the footfalls of a master thief running along a wall at night.

“Loyalty!” came the call of rangers, and we met them on their patrol. “We heard that you had entered the Frost Mountains, so we are glad to see that you are safe,” the lead ranger said with a happy face. I looked behind me without conscious thought and saw that Ophelia’s skull could still be plainly glimpsed, yet the rangers did not respond to her revenant appearance at all.

“Uh.. Fine job, men,” I said and bade them goodbye. Even as we left them, I heard not a single word of surprise at the leech that walked with us. That situation was repeated many times as Boris led us, and we chanced upon patrol after patrol of rangers.

None of them so much as noticed Ophelia’s existence, and the same thing happened when we arrived in Winter Castle. Not one person noticed her presence as we passed through the gate, passed by all the crowds in the courtyard, and entered the keep itself.

“I came because you asked me to come, so now please answer my questions,” Ophelia said, a bit fearfully, as I closed the door to my rooms.

We had not seen one another for some time, yet her directness was not strange at all. Wizards were generally beings of original thought, for they preferred to find answers on their own rather than asking others for the truth.

“The combination of your spirit and body is too tightly-wound to be considered instinctual, artificial,” Ophelia stated.

Wizards are beings who first think of thousands or tens of thousands of words that could be said before saying a single one.

“It’s also improbable that your case is one of reincarnation. What happened to you?”historical

Her first question was not about why I sought her out, but rather why I was no longer a sword. I explained my entire story to her, and she did not comment on it, storing the tale in her thoughts like any other morsel of data. I left it at that, for some aspects of my tale remained a mystery even to myself. I clapped my hands together and once more called Ophelia’s attention to me.

“You will fulfill your personal desire in your time,” I told her as she looked at me. “There is something you need to do here first.”

I then educated her on the kingdom’s political reality, its treaty with the empire, and my plans for constructing a Spire. She gave her own insights as we went along.

“Is it really necessary, to give it but three floors!?” came her somewhat erratic question. I once more told her of the exact details of the treaty and how the kingdom has little choice but to go along with it.

“Time is terrifying. To see the Shining Blade, once so bright become so dull,” Ophelia said, a wistful sorrow creeping into her voice.

I could not respond, and she continued.

“Or, did you pass into another, more human form, and in so doing, not see the true essence of things?”

Her sudden ridicule made me frown, yet I chose not to push her. I merely waited, waiting for her to give me a convincing explanation for her musings.

“Just because it is called a tower doesn’t mean it really is, or has to be, a tower,” she said almost happily as she looked at me.

“It’s just a gateway to the mystery, to all the mysteries.”

As she said this, her fingers pointed to the ceiling and the unseen sky beyond, and then back to the floor.

“It is not even necessary to build a tower, to lay a single brick.”

The feeling that her words invoked in me opened my eyes to other possibilities.

“Third floor up, but seventh floor down?” I asked, and Ophelia’s skeletal jaw rattled as he laughed.

* * *

Ophelia decided to stay in my room for the while, and her stated reason was that she didn’t want to appear before others before the construction of the tower commenced in earnest.

I knew that she had never been a person who liked hanging around with people in her original life, and besides, I had no intention of exposing her at that point in time.

I knew her well, knowing her to belong to a class of person that was easily pleased and fed. Whenever I looked in on her, she was working day and night, drafting various plans for the Spire’s design with great excitement.

Four hundred years had passed, and she had changed little, yet that did not mean that she was easily handled or even easy to talk with.

She was a mage who had created six circles four centuries ago, and I could not figure out what great levels she had reached since then.

Ophelia might have become such a great mage that she had created seven or even eight circles. She was bound to her Life Vessel, and I knew if I treated it carelessly that she would find a way to plunge us both into utter destruction. I had to use it sparingly, then.

And while Ophelia fervently drew up the designs for the Spire, the Marquis of Montpellier was eagerly ‘raising’ the funds we needed for it in the capital.

“I have covered about half the costs,” he told me, and I knew that while the royal treasury had not been touched, quite a few nobles had to dish out and pay from their personal reserves.

After some time, a few of the Silver Foxes, who had been sent out by me, returned. The secret knights of the royal family, who had been forced to break their rings due to Adrian’s betrayal, came with the mercenaries.

They were a gaggle of twenty-one men, their hair tangled, and their clothes ragged and messy. They looked more like peasants than knights.

I frowned, for the smell of alcohol exuded from their bodies.

“Did you give them booze?” I demanded from one of the Silver Foxes, but before the mercenary could make his excuse, one of the knights made it for him.

“Hey! If I don’t drink, huh, how can I face that face of yours!?” he shouted at me, his voice cracked and bursting with emotion.

His pronunciation was slurred and messy, yet the utter resentment contained therein was all too clear.