More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Flos smiled as he looked out over the battlefield. There was so much grass there. He could see it even in the darkness that now enveloped the land. But soon that grass would be muddy and trampled, stained with blood. That bothered him as much as the lives that would be lost.
Is Flos good guy?
He was thousands of miles from the place he had grown up, in a distant land, about to fight another battle against a nation whose name had already been forgotten. But here, in this moment, he was home.
“I’m just saying, if it was a train station it would make sense.” “You’re not Harry Potter. You’re not good enough to be Ron Weasley. You don’t have a wand and you can’t do magic. What’s wrong with a subway?” “I dunno. It’s just…weird. And I could have a wand. They exist in this world.”
Flos might be King, but Orthenon was the one everyone went to for instructions.
It was a sight to behold Mars the Illusionist. She looked like a champion out of stories, and she was one. But Trey had a hard time staring at her face. Perhaps it was the lack of armor, but he couldn’t help staring at her bare chest. At her breasts. They were large.
Trey had never seen her central eye—it was injured. Apparently, a girl from his world had actually poked it out. Trey had no idea who would dare to do that—he wondered what kind of maniac would even try.
She stood next to Trey, shaking with anger. And he remembered, dimly, that it was always Teres who started fights. When the twins got angry, she was the one who popped her lid first. He stared at his twin sister with horrified admiration as she finished shouting at the King of Destruction in his own bedroom. “No matter what you say, we won’t change our minds, you—you bloody twit!”
“Are you afraid of war?” “War? No.” Something shifted in Flos’ eyes. He smiled, and his gaze revealed something hungry and eager. And just as quickly it was gone, replaced by another, somber thing. “I am not afraid of war. I do not fear battle. I long for it. But it is the cost I think of. I cannot shake the cost from my mind.”
It was a strange thing. Wearing a different face and speaking with a different voice—even without his aura of command, there was something about Flos that drew people to him, made them listen to him. It wasn’t just that he’d done twice the work of anyone else in the same amount of time. It was that he cared. When he spoke, Trey believed without a doubt he was telling the truth from the bottom of his heart.
This was Flos’ kingdom. Dying. They had come to life, but that life was fragile. Tenuous. They were what remained, but if Flos rode to war, there would be nothing left. Trey looked up and saw Flos looking at him. The King nodded, and turned back to the laughing men and women. When he spoke, it was quiet, but his voice quieted the loudest laughter. “What a terrible King.”
“What was it like?” “What?” “Being hit? It looked like he squashed you with his sword.” “That’s right enough.”
“I know it is an imposition. But I ask it of you.” Trey wanted to say no, but he couldn’t find the words. Instead, he resorted to a cowardly, if effective tactic. “Only if Teres says yes.”
Trey searched for words to describe the feeling. “It’s like, you know, even if something bad happens, whenever we follow him, something exciting happens. And it’s usually good in the end, right? It’s like the grandest circus and movie and video game all put together. You can’t help watching him, the King I mean. And you want to be part of it.”
I do hope he's good.
Trey thought he understood how someone could follow him and keep faith with him after two decades. It was because when you listened to him, you could believe there was a better place just over that mountaintop. And you would fight for it. You could follow him for that dream.
That was the first time Venith had ever wept in public. He ran after the King of Reim on the day he declared war against the Black Judgment. For a child. For justice.
Awww...he IS good.
“I am no petty tyrant, no fearful monarch! I am Flos, King of Destruction! My heart is large enough to suffer a thousand insults, but too small to accept the loss of one friend. I care not that you renounced your oath of service, Venith. I care not that you swore a vow against me. Join me, and we will fight together as before.”
“Ah, Trey. Don’t look so depressed.” Flos jovially slapped Trey on the shoulder. Now Trey’s shoulder hurt too. Trey glared up at the King of Destruction. “I’m not good at fighting. Do I have to do it?” “Unless you prove you can shoot lightning, or you find another class more suited to you, yes.”
Flos stood up from his throne and smiled. Teres and Trey exchanged a glance, and they came to the oddest part of their daily routine. Teaching Flos. Story time with the King of Destruction. Flos’ school hour. No matter how Trey said it in his head, it didn’t feel any less surreal.
Out of every thousand ships that has dared to travel to the edge of the world, past Baleros, past Rhir, only one or two ever comes back.” “Really?” Flos nodded, meeting Trey’s gaze somberly. “Yes. They come back screaming of a blackness which the water pours into, a place where light does not exist. The end of the world. So you tell me the world is round in your world, and I believe you. But what is true in your world is not true here.” The twins stared at the King and felt the ground beneath them shift. A world with an end to it.
“If any leader can be killed by a fool with a second of training, how can your world have heroes? How can people look up to those who would inspire them, when they are as vulnerable as the next person to a weapon which kills in an instant? How can children sleep safe at night, when they know their lives may be snatched away in a second?”
“Where the average man goes without, the poor man dies. That is how it has always been. You do not need to tell me it is so.”
A [King] should wage war for his desires, yes, but never for greed.
She turned her head then, to smile at him. Trey blinked at her as two of Gazi’s eyes focused on him. She was smiling as always, but there wasn’t anything scary about her right now. She was just smiling. Like a normal person. It was disconcerting, coming from her.
Now kiss.
Flos. The King of Destruction. He had awoken. He had returned at last. Trey slept with that knowledge ringing in his ears and heard. The declaration of war reached the palace the next day.
Mars grinned as she tapped her chin. “Did you see the way he kept it raised the entire time he was talking? The royals have a way of talking and standing that just screams their class. It makes you want to trip them whenever they walk past.”
He told Trey that he just needed him to watch what he was doing. So Trey did. He watched as the second declaration of war reached Flos in the throne room. And then the third. And the fourth.
Trey couldn’t help but keep glancing left, to where Gazi stood with arms folded in one corner of the war room. No one was standing with her. Teres was deliberately sitting with her back to the half-Gazer. Now one of Gazi’s eyes turned towards Trey. He looked away quickly.
They're gonna get married.
They were refugees. People without a home, forced out of their country by war. The very definition of refugees. It surprised Trey, that there would be that kind of people in a fantasy world, a magical one. But that was what made it reality. Refugees, and dead children. It was too real for Trey. But still, Flos kept him by his side.
Flos wept and the twins left the room, shaken, hearing the past echo around the King of Destruction. They knew him well, after having lived and heard his more secret confidences for a month. And yet, they knew him not at all. They did not know what he had lost.
Flos nodded. He still didn’t look concerned, but perhaps that was because he was a King and couldn’t afford to show weakness. Trey could do that for the both of them. His heart was pounding out of his chest.
She was busy telling the twins about fog arrows, which wasn’t helpful. Because what they did was apparently create fog. Lots of fog.
Flos rode like the wind. No—the wind was weightless. In that case, Flos rode like thunder.
Flos was covered in blood. His eyes were still wild with battle, and his soldiers and vassals shouted with victory. Trey stared at them and then saw Teres with that same smile. But he didn’t smile. He felt like a stranger, even more so now than before. A stranger, staring at something he couldn’t quite understand. Something that called to Trey. Something wonderful, horrible, enticing, revolting. Something foreign.
“It’s—it’s not the same.” “Isn’t it? It sounds like hypocrisy, to me. Your world claims to own no slaves, but you enslave your criminals. Well, in Chandrar we do the same.
He couldn’t explain why slavery was wrong to Flos. He told the King of Destruction the sky was blue, and Flos said it was green.
“I don’t want to be here, Gazi.” She looked at him with a bit of sympathy. “I know. But you are here.
The [Servants] rushing to open the doors themselves backed off as Ressa held the door open for Magnolia. They knew the pecking order, and in that sense Ressa wasn’t a bird but a [Hunter] with a bow and arrow.
A [Lady] shouldn’t stride of course, but Magnolia was a high-level [Lady] and a good one at that, so she managed to stride with grace. One could call it gliding, or some other suitable appellation that might make it more acceptable, but Magnolia knew when she was striding.
“Lady Magnolia. I am honored to greet you on this day.” “Lord Tyrion. I’d rather hoped you would have eaten something ghastly and exploded by now, but fortune hasn’t been kind to either of us, has it?” The man’s eye twitched a bit, but he covered the motion by passing a gloved hand over his mouth.
“It’s not that I’m angry, Klbkchhezeim. I’m just disappointed.”
Ouch.
“Let me get this straight. You like birds.”
Bird is the best.
Bird was weird. Even for an Antinium he was weird. Pawn thought he was weird, Anand and Belgrade agreed, and Garry—well, Erin hadn’t gotten a chance to chat much with Garry, but the Antinium had definitely mentioned Bird’s weirdness when he’d helped Erin out at the Christmas party. She was just trying to figure him out. And it wasn’t working.
Was it odd to own an inn and have a [Princess] working as your barmaid? Was it odd having a white Gnoll child—a furry hyena like species that lived in tribes—running around holding maggots? Was it a bit disconcerting to sit with an Antinium, one of the insect-like people who lived underground, and talk about hunting birds? Maybe, but Erin had gotten used to it long ago.
Toren poked his head around the corner again, and eyed the bulging cavern of Shield Spiders and the obscenely glistening eggs hanging from every web. He thought for a second about cause and effect, about actions and consequences, about the nature of causality in general. Then he got bored, threw a stone at the nearest cluster of eggs and ran for it.
A new part of Toren, coming to life, speaking to the rest of him. It was a vague sense of style. And Toren felt the cloak had style in spades, especially around his shoulders.
Toren had no good answer, so she shrugged. She was quite entertained by the notion that they thought she was like them, and wondered if she should disabuse them by stabbing them in the face. But she thought it would be more entertaining to see how long she could keep up the ruse.
“Well, we shall not bother you, yes? We are exploring this dungeon as you are, Miss Adventurer. Unless there is something you wish to warn us of?” Toren thought about all the horrible ways to die she’d discovered and thought about how much she cared for this group’s wellbeing. She shook her head lightly. “In that case, we shall be on our way.”
He thought about the female swordswoman, how mysterious she was, and wished he could have looked under her mask. Was she injured? Had some accident damaged her throat, and that was why she didn’t speak? Or was there another reason? He wondered if he’d ever meet her again.
Toren has a boyyyyyyyfriend.
He wondered whether Ceria thought she was on his side, or if she was warning him. It didn’t matter. Pisces had no side. He was, and always had been alone. Friendships were fleeting, and alliances were simply the prelude to betrayal.
Ryoka wasn’t sure how dangerous telling people about Az’kerash was, yet. So she wouldn’t tell Erin. There was a pang in Ryoka’s chest as she thought that. Wasn’t the key problem in every stupid B-grade film keeping secrets? Only, there were some secrets that needed to be kept. Even from friends?
