Discordant Note: Crescendo | TBATE

Chapter 201: Seer

Arthur Leywin

The door of the prison cell closed behind me, the echo of the metal ringing throughout the dim hallway. I let out a sigh, my banished emotions slowly slipping back into place. Like water filling in a parched reservoir, the sensations took a moment to truly settle.

"I don't like this side of you, papa," Sylvie said as the barrier between us gradually relaxed."You're too cold. It's... scary."

A bit of guilt swelled in my chest as the heartfelt emotions of my bond made themselves known over our empathic link. Sylvie was still higher up in the flying castle, nestled around Uto's horn as she siphoned mana from it. So while she wasn't here to see me personally, she still had an intimate perspective of my mind whenever I was down here.

Every time I stepped into that cell, I pulled on that buried, ignored part of myself. I called Grey to the surface, suppressing Arthur and his emotions.

So I could do what needed to be done.

I'm sorry, Sylv, I said, gritting my teeth. But you know I need to, just for this.

"Isn't there anyone else you can ask?" she asked, her voice uneasy. "It can't always be you. It's not good for you, Arthur," she said weakly.

I paused outside the door, flexing my mana and burning away a few drops of black blood from my hands. Uto only responds to me, I thought back. We'd had this conversation before, and I suspected we'd have it again, too. And the information I've been able to pull from him, however gruesomely, will help us in this war.

Sylvie simply went silent, her nervous disapproval warring with the acknowledgment of the truth of my words.

In the short time since my first meeting with Uto inside his cell, the Retainer had slowly broken more and more as I returned. The combination of Spellsong's predictions–or as I'd more recently learned he was called, Toren of Named Blood Daen–and my own victory over the Retainer without any clear sign of loss had sent him raving mad. His mind became a jumbled mess, and those were the perfect times for... interrogation.

Already, I'd managed to extract a great deal from the captive Retainer. The magic system of the other continent was one of the first things I'd managed to divulge from Uto over the course of our sessions. It wasn't common knowledge amongst our troops yet that the Alacryan way of magic was entirely different: only captains were fully informed of the Alacryan's inability to use organic magic, with required checks for runes made a standard protocol to watch for infiltrators. But that was the easy part.

I looked at Gentry, the spindly man who, until my intervention, had been in charge of torturing Uto for information. He sat dejectedly near the wall, a slump to his shoulders as I exited the vault.

"You got more out of him, I assume?" Gentry said, sounding strangely sad.

I raised a brow. "I did," I acknowledged. My mind flashed back to Uto's broken gaze as he rattled off names. Viessa, Melzri, Dragoth, Cadell, Seris... And there was one more. One he refused to utter, the barest spark of sadistic defiance lighting up in the recesses of his soul simply by the action.

Uto was broken. But not entirely.

"We have names for the Scythes and their Retainers, now. This information will be helpful in knowing our enemy and their capabilities, but..."

Gentry caught my hesitation. "What, did he try and lie to you? If that's the case, I'm sure I can do something to loosen his tongue." He rubbed his hands together, looking almost like a scheming rodent as he did so.