REAPERS - Book Two: The Hunger and the Sickness

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Through those gems of wonder and woe he witnessed the rise of the Dek Harcuru and the Fall of Xadanys and all the doomed dynasties between. Rattanak saw the histories of entire empires that far eclipsed the greatness of his own, from their humble beginnings to their imperialistic expansion to their inevitable downfall. Many were now buried under sand and time, as forgotten as this tomb in which the August One intoxicated himself on raw understanding. Bygone too were his own domain and claims to birthright. Rattanak saw that the world was dominated by those outside the natural order, that the ancients played history like a game of Utopis and even those scions and paragons were themselves pieces. Liches and entropic outsiders and grandmaster magi and things from the far deeps of the cosmos and sea all clashed over ephemeral scraps of land and fleeting glory. Rattanak's ambitions were dashed upon the rocks by witnessing the rise and fall of so many others such as himself. Worse than the futility of conquest, Rattanak understood with great ennui, was awful infinity itself. That the worlds were endless in number, and the planes of existence as well. The Emperor once thought himself a god. Now he knew that he was a speck of sand in all the wastes. He began to understand sorcery was not a fitting tool for those who sought power and in truth made a slave of those who wished to master it. All were destroyed from within by the hubris of it. Every single record of conquest Rattanak could find in that vault of knowing led to the same ultimate outcome—and that was oblivion.

— • —

Without warning or explanation the August One went quiet. Halo woke to find himself in rare control of his own body again. Had Rattanak found some way to slip from his gemmed prison and enter the greater world—or yet some other dimension of existence entirely? Had he achieved enlightenment, transcendence, nirvana? Or had the pharoah delved so deeply into the minds of his erudite victims that he had lost all contact with the physical plane? Gone were the hobgoblin's endless streams of ambitious thought and plans of ultimate conquest, replaced by a silence nearly as unsettling. Halo was sealed in a tomb with the blade. He pressed against its lid. It moved not at all. His supernatural strength was gone.

"Rattanak, are you there?" Halo asked with his mind and then his lips. "Mouth? Narder? Anyone?"

No one. His runes had been tampered with, he now saw, many of their lines brutally severed. Halo did not fully know the function of the compromised glyphs, denied the meaning of the very sigils he himself etched under torment. He screamed but knew there was no one to listen.

"There is no point," said Rattanak. "In time it is all dust, as I said but did not understand. My conquest means nothing. I see that now. I have come to know too much—and now all there is left to do is forget."

Halo's mind went to his father Leofrick who spoke so strongly against sorcery and the sheer nihilism and corruption it brings. How right that man had been.

— • —

The figure in Halo's mind emerged from the 'Angry Chambers' himself an angry man. The Senate had bickered on many points that day and in the end had voted against Leofrick's particular interests. First the majority went against him on the forced conscription of women to serve as nurses on the fronts (he said nay and they said aye), and then a competitor of Leofrick's had been selected to redraft the Nation's customs protocols in the island territories known as the Gnamem Chain (home to a race of lizardmen with fine scaly skin and faint vestigial gills, rumored to be descendants of mermaids who mated with sailors—or the spawn of frogfuckers and toadfuckers). Leofrick would have to grease more palms, win more allies, eliminate more foes. He had other sources of income in place that had once been steady and well-lubricated streams of coin but things were drying up. But new prospects were on the cusp, many of them thanks to his widespread military contacts. The manufacture of weapons, the transport of supplies for the war. His new enterprise of 'god biscuits' for the soldiers... "godwater" with a new name, smite in an altered and Diluvian-approved form—now sanctioned by the Nation to allow its troops to battle for hours on end without pause. And though Leofrick's pressure got up in the wake of a frustrating day such as this, he was ultimately a cool-skulled man with such matters. Any law made by society could eventually be overturned or manipulated or broken. What troubled him more were those certain unwavering laws that all men must obey no matter their wealth or station. Those of nature—the law of hunger, the law of sickness, the law of death. It was to those truths he must quickly attend. Father Death's own patience was running out. Leofrick's teeth had ached for some time and had started to become loose in their seats. He watched the other senators and aristocrats succumb to the graying and the twisting of their bodies and ultimately the dying. He was not so ready to go. He had once thought himself so, prepared to bequeath his empire and all his knowledge and web of contacts to his son Donric who seemed born with a halo 'round his head. Leofrick saw a strength in Donric he did not have in himself. True honor. Patriotism. Wisdom. He spoke of all those things to his son, yes. Of nation and family and sacrifice. But he did not fully believe those lofty words himself. He was too much a realist for that. Leofrick's fatherhood had been a sham. He lied for the better. The aging senator wanted an heir that he could march out proudly before his peers. A successor with a chestful of medals. One that could perhaps hold higher office than he someday. Perhaps even become the Minister of the Shield, if he played his cards right. It wasn't out of reach. But all hope of that legacy was gone with Halo's vanishing. At least for now. And now Leofrick had been summoned by Ogerius and his army of advocates to the courthouse to testify on his son's history and character. They meant to harpoon his bloodline, a casualty in their larger and longer war against the secret arm of their own army. Leofrick had encountered "The Ogre" in passing on occasion, and the old highman had no good words to say about the events at Fort Nothing, nor his son's role in the saga. Rumors spread that Donric had been a deserter. A recreant. A coward.