Peace Sprig

With both gates to Pilamine closed, the coalition soldiers repelled, and the Pilamine forces beaten or fled, the evacuation is now over. Many thousands of civilians remain in the city, rounded up to be drained for water. Every slide of his sword across a civilian’s neck drives Renard further and further from his sickened body, as though it were someone else doing this, the movements mechanical — and still, the screams and the gurgles and the bodies and the souls littering the cobbles repulse him, leave this objective observer shouting, ‘how! How! How! How, why, why was this let to happen!’.

He returns to Sebilles too sick to be numb. As other soldiers unload the many barrels of water produced by this conquest, weighing them and sorting them for transport to Lacren’s main wells, Renard retreats to the castle and, in there, to the laboratory of Pleione.

Pleione jolts at his arrival. Rather than press her on that reaction, Renard asks how the research into the purification of ghouls is going.

Given that Renard was adverse to the prospect before, Pleione regards this line of questioning as odd and senses something has changed. Moreover, though she was not personally there, stories are already wafting out of Pilamine, and she carefully prompts Renard by observing that people have been saying the Pilamines were slaughtered.

Renard breaks down, sobbing, vomiting. Unlike before, where he could say there was a greater cause to his actions, there is absolutely nothing about what happened in Pilamine that Renard can say was right. The last horrible moments of hundreds of screaming, crying old men, women, children play again and again under his eyelids, unnumbed by any kind of ‘principle’ or ‘resolve’, each herded along and bled like animals.

Pleione swoops down to hug him. Renard wails into her embrace like a boy, messily, too distraught to care about anything except crying this pain and these visions out.

“What have I done!" he screams.

Pleione squeezes him tighter.

What have I done, he repeats, every one of his actions since meeting the Iron King flashing through his mind. All of them, all of them — mistakes. Everything he fought for — wrong. And all those people who told him, from the very beginning, exactly what the Iron King was, exactly what an error it was to follow him, exactly why such creatures as him are so uniformly reviled as evil — they were the ones he should’ve listened to. Had chosen, so many times, not to listen to! Pleione rubs his shoulder and draws away as he composes himself, forehead in his palm, breath ragged but no longer sobbing. She produces a cloth and tamps his chin clean.

“You must think me a fool, after all I have done," Renard grimly laughs to Pleione.

Pleione hesitates, but nods. Evil, though deceptive, rarely hides its nature. Renard let himself be idealistic in the wrong direction, idealism in itself not being a sin, but a lack of wisdom in using it being deeply contemptible.

“The wisdom of boyhood," Renard bites back in defence, then laughs at himself. As if it matters. That was only true at the beginning; at some point, he should have grown to know better. Fist clenched, he divulges how truly horrible the slaughter at Pilamine was, how he cannot believe that monster did something so… so…

He hesitates to use the word evil, but struggles to find an appropriate substitute. Renard sighs, unclenching his hand.

I don’t understand how he could have surrendered to that, Renard confesses. In his mind, it’s inconceivable someone would throw away prospects of love, trust, veneration, glory, victory over one’s own nature… for what? From what? Because it was hard?

Pleione suggests that there was nothing to surrender to. He was always simply like that.

Pricked and uncomprehending of her surety, Renard counters by asserting that he has assuredly seen the Iron King operate at a higher level than that. Many times, he felt more loved, understood, and wanted by the Iron King than anyone else in his life, and equally seen genuine hope, devotion, and aspiration towards good prosperity from him. Could those have all been deceptions?

Pleione considers her answer. No, and she thinks Renard also knows they were not. She does not doubt the Iron King’s devotion to humanity is genuine, but it is only so in the same way that a dog, chained out of reach of food, will madly guzzle any meal placed before it, and howl in agony once it is gone. The impulse is not fake.

Renard falls quiet.

But the mind is not real, Pleione’s voice softens. This man you love died a very long time ago.

As these words sink in for Renard, a horrible pain lashes across his chest, followed by a deep numbness. That glorious, shining vision of the Iron King with his hand aloft withers grey and disintegrates into dust on the wind. Renard covers his brow in his hand, hiding his face and trembling lips. Pleione is right. Renard has grown enamoured with the ghost of a dead man, and so attached himself to the churning dregs that defile his memory.

It is agonising to know what the Iron King ‘could’ have been, to have seen glimpses of hope and potential, and simultaneously understand that the potential truly meant nothing, ruined long before Renard ever came in the picture. A deep infatuation holds for the person who could-have-been, as does an overwhelming pity for the confused remnants of him that have screamed to exist, but a sober reality falls when his mind shifts to the present. The thing that killed Herjas and bled Pilamine was not a human. It was a ghoul.

A profound despair settles over Renard at this realisation, but there is nothing to blame it upon. Even the foolish decisions of his younger self come from a sentiment of innocent admiration and desire for love that Renard can’t begrudge. Could he have done or said something that would have changed the Iron King’s course? Speculating it only brings pain, and even then, the answer is inevitably no.

Renard chews his lip, staring into the distance. Once again he desires to run, as though he may simply exit this scene and return to a peaceful meadow, rescinding his decisions up to now as a poor experiment, and delivered to a world where he never made them. Reality, though, is more claustrophobic, and affords only one real course.

Soberly, but with quiet hope and determination of knowing the right thing to do, Renard asks Pleione how the Iron King can be killed.

Pleione pauses as she considers this question, impressed by Renard’s certainty that she would have such an answer. She concedes, glancing aside, that she knows.

Renard jumps to his feet. You must tell me!

Rattled by Renard’s enthusiasm, Pleione lets herself speak more openly. Truthfully, a major reason for her coming to the West was to conduct research on a miraculous substance called ‘argent’. She believes it one of the fundamental elements to understanding the riddle of creation. It is hard to distil in most cases, but she knows stories of one specific way that appears to yield consistent results.

She tells Renard a story from a Palidan tribe that spearheaded her branch of research. In the custom of this tribe, a young boy was undergoing his trial into manhood by attempting to slay a ghoul. This ghoul had been prepared for him some months in advance, originally a sick man kidnapped from another tribe, who predictably died despite their hosts’ stringent ministrations. So recent was his death, however, that he had not fully transformed into a ghoul when he faced the boy — the conversion process was still ongoing, even as they fought.

During the brawl, the boy bit and unwittingly swallowed a mouthful of the ghoul’s half-transformed flesh. The boy then puked up a mouthful of argent, which ran down his chest and bound on the feathers of his shawl. The ghoul, screeching, would no longer touch the boy, who finished off the creature adroitly.

It is from this episode that Palidan mystics conceived the existence of ‘witchbane’ — a specific form of argent produced when a human swallows parts of a soul that are yet undergoing the transformation into a ghoul. The swallower’s soul rejects the corrupted material as it attempts to bind to the swallower’s essence, and the remains of the failed binding are excreted as argent. Specifically, as argent inherently opposed to ghouls, witches, and other perverted materials, that will frustrate their magical powers.

Slaying the Iron King, then, could be achieved with a weapon infused with witchbane. Pleione herself had been considering this track, as an alternative to purification, when she heard of the stories from Pilamine. It is better though that Renard be the one to do it. He’s a superior fighter, and has more opportunity to be close to the Iron King.

Which is all wonderful to hear, but there is the fundamental problem of supplying a newly-dead soul that could be used to produce the witchbane. If they wish to act promptly, Pleione sounds to be suggesting murder.

“No," Pleione quickly dismisses this thought. She has a better idea. She will go into communion with the ancestors, and request that one of them shed a fragment of themselves that she may use to make the witchbane instead.

That is to say, she will ask a star to fall. Though she sounds confident about this plan, and concludes the talk having resolved what to do, as Renard nods and leaves the room, he feels only doubtful.

It strikes him as odd that Pleione, knowing this information, would not have imparted it to the coalition. Further, it’s odd that she would not have crafted such a weapon the second she got involved with the Iron King, or even as preparation in coming to the West. It suggests she herself doubted whether she could achieve what she’d claimed, and so never tried it before. What she’s proposing is untested ground for her, too.

Which means it could go wrong.

Uneasy about leaving it all to Pleione, Renard grasps the hilt of his sword and nods with determination.

He, too, has an idea.

After that talk with Pleione, Renard departs Sebilles to return to his hometown.

He does so without telling anyone, and only sends a letter back to the Iron King once he has put days’ worth of distance between himself and Sebilles. His excuse? Scouting around the borders for possible coalition spies, or for chokepoints coalition scouts may exploit. As viable a reason for his absence as any.

As wheat fields and paddocks swallow the scenery around him, Renard soon reaches his village.

Little has changed since his last visit. The same thatched buildings are all in their same places, the same stores are run by the same faces, and the same townsfolk Renard has always known still follow the same humble routines they did years ago. The sheer constancy evokes a certain nostalgia, as the dust of the road settles around his horse’s hooves, but also tells Renard how he has changed.

Pedestrians turn with mild alarm to acknowledge, “Renard’s back." Renard grins through his anxiety and informs with a warm flourish that ho, he is on business. People nod and return to their day. Yup, that is Renard.

Moved by the familiar ease the town has towards his presence, Renard slows his horse, his heart contemplative as he passes each building.

His last visit, it should be said, was to see his family shortly after achieving the title of Cavalier. He had rushed to them with hope that they would cheer for the accolade.

To put how it went short, his father was not impressed. Apart from visiting Isen’s grave, he did not spend much time in town after.

The sight of the town’s little church breaks Renard out of his thoughts. He had never been very religious, nor had his family ever attended church outside of service days. On those rare attendances, Renard never cared to listen so much as find ways to make fun. With Pleione’s words misting through the back of his mind, Renard hitches his horse on a strange impulse and enters the church.

Like the rest of the town, nothing inside has changed. Flanked by empty pews and tall windows, Renard wanders up the aisle, as if to feel in the air that sacred essence Pleione seems to see in everything. He cannot say he feels stricken by anything particularly holy, but it is quiet and peaceful in a way that inspires pensive calm.

Soaking in the atmosphere, Renard lays his hand on the wooden altar. Quiet footsteps pad behind him. He turns to see the priest, who even more than finding an unfamiliar horse hitched outside the building, is surprised to find Renard approaching anything — much less religion — with an air of humility. Not to say it’s a bad thing. Just odd.

They talk. Over the course of the conversation, the priest informs Renard that Renard’s mother passed away in the last couple years and, after that, his father left town to live with his side of the family. Though shaken by this news, Renard swallows his alarm so he can focus on returning to the house, which indeed is empty.

That Renard was absent in his mother’s last years moves him with profound despair. In retrospect, she had not been in great straits when Renard visited, and in his excitement for his parents’ approval, he had not focused much upon it. Rather, he refused to acknowledge it. Perhaps what he should have done then was retire. Renard sighs, knowing it fruitless. Sitting on his old bed, the stillness and emptiness of his old house soothes his sadness for a more sombre nostalgia.

Deciding he’s spent enough time immersing himself in memories and ghosts, Renard gets up with a determined huff. He retrieves a shovel from the barn and marches out to the bog.

It’s late summer, almost autumn, and well into the dry season. The bog has dried as expected, leaving that old, dead tree standing not on an island in the middle of thick muck, but in the middle of a plain of parched, cracked mud. Renard throws the shovel into the air and watches it spin.

Back when Isen died, so many years ago, the village fretted persistently over the whereabouts of his body. Obviously, it had sunk into the bog, but even after several years attacking it every summer, nobody dredged it up. People could only speculate that it sank too deep for them to find, that it shifted into a spot nobody thought to try, or that nobody had properly remembered the point where he fell in the first place and over time lost it completely. Eventually, everyone gave up, and a gravestone was stood with no body. Heavily distressing to Renard’s mother, every year, or so was the word.

The shovel spins through the air, and bounces to the ground with a clatter. Where its head points, Renard decides must be the spot. And so he drives the shovel into the dirt, digging with total confidence in his method, as though the air that twisted that shovel carried in it the guidance of God, despite the persistent failure of all others who tried.

What worried people more than the body, though, was the fate of Isen’s soul. A misplaced body made tearful mothers — a misplaced soul, if the resultant ghoul was dangerous enough, could wipe a town off the map. But again nobody could find it, and neither had anybody seen it dislodge. After days, then weeks, then months without word of trouble from the bog or any other indication of a ghoul forming, the townsfolk hesitantly but hopefully concluded that the soul must have also sunk into the muck, and the ghoul suffocated without complications, or, and this truly was a merciful thought, that the soul had never touched the air, never contracted the rot, and never morphed into a ghoul in the first place. If so, then for all these years, Isen’s soul has remained as pure as the stars in the night sky, as though equally selected and treasured as a pearl of the Demiurge.

That prospect did balm the tragedy. Nobody could say it was true, but Renard, preferring not to think about the subject at all, had at some point decided it must be.

And that is why he is here, and why he is digging. Because if Isen’s pure soul is sitting here somewhere under this mud, that is the perfect material that could be converted to witchbane.

Renard wipes his forehead, sweat dribbling down his back in the sweltering sun. Shades of orange and purple tint the horizon. His jaw clenches with abrupt dread. If this wasn’t the spot, then what has he come out here for? He would return to Pleione, head hung in shame, quietly knowing that he had failed.

Which is an odd thing to think. Rationally speaking, he could just try again in a different spot if this hole produces nothing, since it’s not as though tonight is a deadline. Still, Renard feels his enthusiasm with the shovel slow, resigned that if he finds anything, it will be the remains of a ghoul. Well, even finding that would be its own kind of success.

The shovel bites into the dirt. When it comes away, it unveils a glint of silver beneath.

Renard’s eyes bulge and he redoubles his digging like a madman. He kneels down, wipes away the dirt, and plucks the finding out of the earth. He laughs in disbelief and heaves himself out of the hole, then observes the silver orb in his palm shift into fractals, bloom into liquid, vaporise and twist in odd patterns. This is what he came for. He has found Isen’s soul.

An air of dreamy unconsciousness unfurls over the skin of Renard’s palm. But his hand trembles with disproportionate terror, soon quaking, as his throat tightens, gut twists, and eyes peel near to bursting out their sockets. Renard throws the soul to the ground with a squeal, but its imprint lingers in his fingers. Renard dry-heaves into his hands, scrapes at the skin, shoves a digit in his mouth as if to bite it off entirely.

The air around the soul lurches. Renard strains to refocus, sweating with wide eyes. What was formerly a pleasant atmosphere of a mind hung in the dream between waking and sleeping now prickles with confusion, discomfort, and fear, but not in any way that snaps the consciousness inside into lucidity. Rather, it is the air of one wracked with extreme dementia, unable to comprehend what is happening even as a beast rakes them with its claws.

Renard punches himself in the head and screams. Stupid, stupid, stupid! If Isen’s soul has been at peace this entire time, why did Renard disrupt that! Was killing him just not enough! Impelled to eat dirt and grovel for forgiveness, with frantic explanations how he just wasn’t thinking and didn’t mean to do harm whizzing in his head, ultimately Renard can say nothing when he knows the recipient of his words would be an unresponsive orb, and just groans.

The agonised air around the soul prickles and twists. The rot has taken hold. Renard squeezes his eyes closed, opens them, but nothing changes. No matter how he hesitates, there is only one action he may now take.

Hope to me a thousand hopes say’d truth from that medicine woman. So steeling himself, Renard reaches for the soul.

Well brother, I’ll need your strength again. Hoh, I never did find how to do much uprightly.

Not allowing himself to think, in one sweep, Renard scoops the soul into his mouth, and swallows.