Unravel

You adjust your rifle’s set upon your shoulder and reaffix your gaze down the tunnel. Your prospective new protege, Raum, has urgently demanded your presence. You must attend to this promptly, as you doubt these summons are trivial. But truthfully, in the wake of this past hour’s events, whirling yet as a tempest in your mind, you question your ability to regard his report as much more than noise.

Memories blaze through your vision, battering you like a pleading eyewitness: have you considered this? Considered this? Considered this? As though any conclusion raised from any alignment of these scenes could fix the miscarriages that led to you almost dying this night.

Mason solved your scheme before you could reveal it. On the very night you had fantasised of for months — years — decades, what you ultimately saw was not this man curling in revelatory horror, dread, betrayal, and despair, but instead of him holding your natural anathema, the blade Kingslayer, over a vessel of your soul, the feather. He ordered you to talk. You barely distracted him long enough to retrieve your feather and run.

You could have realised sooner he wouldn’t need Kingslayer, and not armed him with it in the first place.

You could have committed properly to either reliance or distrust toward your protege, before he found a need or opening to work at cross-purposes to you, and consequently not led Mason to your vault of his family’s confiscated letters and presents.

You could have not bothered with Raum at all, and snuffed Mason’s jealous suspicions before they were roused. And removed the complication of this witchhunt. And wisely accepted you truly did have nothing left but this loathing, as you had accepted long before.

Ah, poor Faron, he would weep to know what you’ve done.

You could have stuck to your first plan.

You’d have won.

Raum turns this information around, repeats it back, patches the implications together.

“You were always going to backstab my dad," Raum chooses as his starting point. Aquila nods yes as he hoists himself to sit on the rim of the basin. Though still ragged and weeping, enough form has returned to his bloodied lower half that he can set his hands in his lap and receive Raum’s observations patiently.

“Or that was the point… to backstab my dad," Raum tests. Again Aquila nods.

What the hell kind of conspiracy was this where you destroy your own national property, exterminate your own loyalists, and start a terrorism scare just to fuck over one guy? No, Raum needs to understand more.

“But you changed your plans, because of me," confirms Raum. Again Aquila nods. Correct.

“…So were you maybe going to, figure out something with him, last night?" This time, Aquila shakes his head, smirking bitterly.

Too hopeful. Dumb question.

Raum takes a breath and tries to reorient his track, but there are so many tangled threads to everything that’s happened that he cannot find where to begin. Aquila advises him to start from the beginning, wherever he reckons that beginning might be.

Well, for Raum, this all began with the invitation to his grandfather’s funeral. Obviously that had been a pretext to get Mason out of Ordanz. That Raum, Reyl, and Desiree came too wasn’t strictly essential, but inviting them simply made sense given the set-up and cleaned up those loose ends. So the funeral had been the best opportunity Aquila could find to get his hands on Mason?

Aquila tilts his head and strokes his hair. Somewhat close. No, there were plenty of pretexts he could have used to draw Mason from Ordanz. In fact it was more difficult, when first he proposed his plan to Mason, to find a good lie as to why Aquila hadn’t simply lifted his exile years prior. The significance of the funeral is that it was a comprehensive gathering of the Whitewoods after Faron Whitewood, their patriarch, was dead. Faron was Aquila’s godfather to whom he owed a life debt; he was not going to move against the family until he had naturally passed.

…So me and Reyl?

“Incidental," Aquila answers. “I’ll admit I was curious to see what…" Aquila’s mouth quirks and he glances aside, but dispels the discomfort with a shrug. “…hilarious, gutterspawned mutants he might have sired in Ordanz, by what shameful thing he had taken as a ‘bride’, and whether he had formed emotional bonds to either. But among the slurry of vault genetics, it seems that decent stock found him." Aquila tilts his head, smirking. “Not that that went without hardships either, I hear."

Geeeeez.

This was the kind of honesty he was looking for, but beyond the harsh tongue that apparently runs in the family, the edge to Aquila’s antagonism is flatly just cruel. Shitheap’s worse than me… suddenly, Raum can believe it.

Seeing Raum’s uneasy silence, Aquila smiles thinly. “These are not glorifying admissions to my ears, either."

Raum pinches his brow and forces his judgements aside for the moment. “…Right. But — right." If part of the funeral’s significance was that all the Whitewoods would be there — that is, that the Whitewoods dying was integral to the plan… well, why? From Raum’s view, it’s beyond drastic.

Aquila says that to answer that question he will simply explain his machinations directly; but does Raum not have any suspicions first? He is curious how his actions look to a reasonably informed outside perspective.

Raum recounts his speculation from the night after his dinner with the Baron of Pikiny: Aquila had been following an accidental command from Phoenix that forced him to give monarchical power to one of Phoenix’s agents, such as Morgan. In retrospect, Raum sees this theory does not account for Mason at all, nor can Raum begin to imagine how Mason plays into the picture.

Fist to his chin, Aquila grins slyly. “How rudely seditious. I would hope those notions came from known terrorist and usurper, Toreas of Lacren."

A good chunk of them did, yes.

“But, ah, how might I say," Aquila pats the ruff of his coat, as if stroking the spine of a snake. “He did know that much, at least."

There were two dimensions to Aquila’s plan.

The first was political. Mundane as it was, and straightforward as it was, the issue of succession was as much of a problem as messy inheritances always are. From the instant, twenty years ago, when Aquila realised he could not sire a child, his mind shot first to methods to fill the void in succession.

However, the greatest concern for Aquila was not finding a suitable person to inherit the country. Any heir chosen to rule after Aquila’s departure would inevitably lose everything, since without the Asphodel family’s sanctified blood holding the nation together, hundreds of ancient territorial vendettas would burst back to the fore, old kingdoms would secede, and old kingdoms would war. After the Tyrant’s Reign, nobody wanted that. Such, short of resurrecting some departed ancestor, Aquila would have to remain in the picture to supply his blood, just not as a ruler.

Most likely, that would mean some religious, or ceremonial position. Aquila can see the compromise: some Duke’s son takes the throne to continue court politics as usual, keeping the nobles happy in their influence, while Aquila abdicates or is otherwise sidelined into a position as the head of church, in itself a decently influential place considering he should be naturally dead. It’s a hard proposition to argue against without seeming a despot.

The problem with this is that Aquila has no plans to abdicate and no desire to relinquish even one scrap of power. Indeed, as is the rationale of a despot. It serves him better practically to war against God as a King than a bishop, for one, and emotionally the insinuation nobles deserve a ‘turn’ ruling a kingdom sovereign to Asphodel deeply disgusts him. Any nation lacking his blood in its rulers ought not be called Asphodel, even. Still, there are only so many times you can say ‘no’ to nobles before they get antsy and conspiratorial, so if Aquila were to be a good diplomat, he would fold.

How to maintain his influence upon the throne, then? Ingratiate himself to the new Kings and Princes the same way the courtiers do to him now?

No.

He would just do the same thing that Phoenix did.

He would subvert the souls of young monarchs with compelling geas, such that they would be his puppets. He could say, jump, rebuff, ally, kill: they would assuredly do it. Of course this was all inhumane and a moral atrocity that would earn him infamy right next to Phoenix, but unlike Phoenix, Aquila understood the definition of ‘subtlety’.

The murder of the Whitewoods was conducted to leave behind one very obvious and powerful pick for heir, which Aquila could single out as his subverted puppet.

And in the question, ‘who?’, strikes the second dimension to the plan: the personal dimension.

He would use the body and identity of Morgan Whitewood, exonerated and revealed to the public.

Contained in which would be the soul of Mason Whitewood, Aquila’s pet thrall, henceforth passed down, body by body, through the miserable generations.

This was the proposition that had hooked Mason. Ascension into kingship for centuries or millennia, as the loyal agent and sole confidant of his powerful friend as they duped the nation, with a dash of revenge against his family for texture. Of course Aquila didn’t mention the part where he would geas Mason into his personal china-doll, but, details. Aquila kicks his legs playfully at this thought, like a child on a swing.

Raum’s stomach twists. Every answer Aquila gives just leaves him with more questions, most of them accusatory. But the truly sickening thing, beyond his openness to soul-warping witchcraft and callousness at the fate of the country, is the note of deep desire and affection in Aquila’s tone every time he talks about obliterating Mason.

Raum wonders, again, if he’ll be leaving this crypt alive. His body’s basic prey-animal senses are beginning to doubt it.

Fleeing those chills, Raum forces as much of a different track as he can find. Aquila has divulged his plot, but mentioned nothing of Phoenix’s geas upon him. Maybe he’s barred from talking about it, but surely he isn’t dominated into silence like Raum is. So time for hints? Hotter, colder?

“Yes…" Aquila squints and purses his lips, dropping that unnerving glee in an instant. He clutches his hand over where his heart would be. What do you suspect? Given your experience with him. What maladroit bounds would that myopic imbecile place upon one with my unique position?

“Eheh, hey, PSA, my experience with that kid’s a nada," Raum’s voice says automatically, accentuating his claim with a swish of the fingers.

“Tah hah hah, que juegos tontos, de nada." Aquila waves his hand as if dismissing a waiter. “Hypothetically, then."

Clean. Raum knows Phoenix disliked the Whitewoods, and that despite his crazy, he does like the country. He did speculate earlier that Phoenix may have bound Aquila to destroy unsubverted Whitewoods from a personal grudge, or perhaps fear.

But as Raum considers this thought, another possibility strikes him that would just as easily, and in fact more effectively, reach such an end without fretting over the mechanics.

—Did he make you hate the Whitewoods?

…Is that kind of thing even possible?

Maybe he’s hoping too much in the intrinsic goodness of man, but Raum would like to believe Aquila’s joyful loathing of Mason is at least a bit artificial.

Aquila stands up with a grim smile, clenching his breast feathers tightly.

He releases his hold, pats the feathers down, looks aside while grinning. “Not them. I ask, how thoroughly have you read that ledger?"

The darkness in Aquila’s smile whistles down Raum’s spine like a dagger. As if urged at knifepoint, Raum’s fingers clench the ledger on his belt. He withdraws it promptly, flips through pages, and pages, and pages, like a bushman shouldering his way through tall grass, hoping for his mark to pounce upon him like a snake.

And it does. At the threshold to a wall of blank, unfilled lines, the pages settle still on the very last entry.

Among its chattels, the ledger of kidnappings lists one ‘Phoenix A.’.