Furious Scribe
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58. Hull - Who You Really Are
🕑 Added 2024-11-30 23:39:46 +0000 UTC
Chapter 58
Who You Really Are
I stared at the charred husk of my father where it lay, pathetic and powerless in the crater made when the Orc general had laid my brother Gerad low. They were both there now, a stone’s throw away from the corpse. Gerad had the same stunned, hopeless look on his face that I felt in the pit of my stomach. I wondered if he was thinking the same thing as me: I wasn’t the one who got to kill him after all. My very soul throbbed and burned at the thought, but it was a cleansing heat.
Gerad got to his knees, face still bloody, a hand outstretched toward the dead man. He was oblivious to the Orc who’d nearly killed him scrabbling in the dirt nearly within arm’s reach. Targu’Thal, thank the Twins, only had eyes for Hestorus and the child figure who bent over his husk. “Stop!” the Orc bellowed, stumbling to his feet. “Yveda, wait!” I could hear him clearly from where I’d been deposited by the wall.
The child – me, as a child, as strange as that was to see – didn’t pause. He pulled a card from the dead king’s mouth. It shone as if infused with sunlight. He held it tight in one hand while he probed behind Hestorus’s ear for cards from the Mind Home. Something must have been odd about that, because the boy – my Twins-damned mother, using my old soul card as a disguise – frowned and stood up without taking anything. The burned body sparkled with light and in seconds blew away into shining dust almost like a defeated card soul. That got an even bigger frown, as well it might. Real bodies didn’t do that.
“We are meant to share in it,” Targu’Thal said as he trotted across the distance between them, focusing on the tiny sun in the boy’s hand. “This was always the plan.” He sounded scared, almost desperate.
“Mmm,” the child said in a dismissive way. “Like your kind are so fond of saying: I just don’t feel like it. To the victor go the spoils, and that’s me.” He tucked the shining card into his tunic, turned instantly into the sallow-faced older man with a braid I’d seen before, and then vanished from sight.
“NO!” the Orc screamed, rushing forward. He swept his hands through the air where the man had been mere moments before, finding nothing. “You cannot! Come back, demon. We will hunt you to the end of forever and beyond for this. YVEDA!”
There was no response. I couldn’t help but give a bitter chuckle. Expecting anything but betrayal from my mother was a fool’s bet. Part of me wanted to see him catch her and rip her in half, but the other part found a bittersweet symmetry in her being the one to kill him and take his card. She should have been his queen and I should have been their prince, and now she’d made him pay for all the years in between. I rubbed at my chest, feeling the burn of grief, thwarted anger, and who knew what else besides. It wasn’t the ending I’d hoped for, but it was the one I’d gotten. Maybe part of growing up was accepting that some dreams would never be.
Targu’Thal rounded on Gerad, balling his fists. He must have dismissed his axe when the arena disappeared, because I didn’t see it anywhere. My asshole half-brother was on his feet and ready for him, armor donned and sword in hand, his full hand of 11 cards floating off to the side.
“Some of us were letting our Mind Homes refresh while others were busy depleting their decks in the arena,” Gerad said grimly. “How many cards did he leave you with – five? Fewer than that?”
With a snarl, the Orc general turned and ran back to the scattered lines of his army in the near distance. He’d handed Gerad his ass before, but even someone driven by Chaos had to see that now he had the losing hand. All the nearby scattered Orcs and undead who’d been watching the drama warily decided to follow their leader, preferring to retreat to safety now and attack in force once they’d rejoined their fellows.
I was grateful I’d cleared the ground around me of enemies before the apotheosis began; it gave me time to resummon and reset. I’d been pulling cards since I first touched down, and I’d been lucky enough to draw my Yveda the Endless, so I summoned him.
“The other Yveda killed the King,” I told him. “She’s my mother, by the way.”
“Bad luck for you,” the demon said, shaking his head. “How’d she end up with a puny human child like you?”
“The King,” I said shortly.
That got a mirthless chuckle suddenly echoing in two throats instead of one. “A lifetime of pain expressed in two words. How perfect.”
I nearly dismissed him for that, but right at that moment Halifax landed next to the Prince, Gale atop the griffon’s back. I’d been nervous to approach an armed Gerad on an empty battlefield, especially after what had just happened, but he wouldn’t kill me with others watching… not with the enemy breathing down our necks, at least.
They were arguing as I approached. “If we don’t rally now, what’s the point?” Gerad demanded.
“The vanguard of our army is still half an hour away,” Gale replied, sounding as if his patience was strained. “Look around! The city is breached and the defenses are broken. The enemy will regroup and be on us in less than five. I don’t care if you magically pull every last defender to this spot; you won’t last twenty-five minutes. You try to hold this position and the city will get to watch their King die twice today.”
Shit, that’s right. He’s the King. That’s not going to go well for any of us. Looking to Gerad, I had to admit that he at least looked the part. He was a cheat, a murderer at heart, and a preening, arrogant asshole, but the people would love him anyway. Any heart the people had left would break if he died now. “Gale’s right. You can’t fight.”
Gerad rounded on me, furious. “Look at the city, Hull. Look!”
I looked, and my already-sore heart clenched. Smoke billowed in all directions, and renewed screams echoed tinnily along the stone canyons of the streets as the infiltrating forces got back to their spots and started murdering again. Had they reached the Lows yet? They’d tear through them like cheesecloth when they did.
“You want me to just let that happen?” Gerad demanded.
“You can’t stop it,” Gale said severely. “You’re the King now. I’m taking you to join the army. That’s where you’ll be safest, and that’s where you can actually do some good. Mount up… your Majesty.”
Gerad swung his head like a street dog being beaten by two sticks at once, unable to face either problem without being overwhelmed by the other. “Just do it, you dickhead. You know he’s right.”
“I don’t need advice from gutter urchins,” he said icily as he reached for Gale’s hand and mounted smoothly. “Do the decent thing and get yourself killed out there, won’t you?”
I opened my mouth with a blistering insult on the tip of my tongue, but I never got to let it fly. Something wrenched at me from the side, and suddenly I was gone, flying through some smeared, colorful in-between space where my eyes couldn’t focus on anything and everything seemed to be rushing past at incredible speed. I clutched at my hip, which seemed to be pulling me along, and felt something vibrating hard in my pocket. The stone. That Twins-damned Nether stone.
As soon as it started it was over. I stumbled to a stop, my head whirling and my stomach unsettled. I still felt that strange pressure in my chest, too. “What,” I stuttered, shaking my head to clear my eyes. “What the hell?”
“Not hell,” a woman’s voice said, “but it’s close enough to be going on with, I suppose.”
I turned and saw a gaping portal into some other world, a window as large as the city gates looking onto a strange, shimmering place of purple, black, and red. It sparked some dim recognition in me even though I’d never seen it before.
In front of the hole in reality stood a lovely, statuesque demon woman in a fine dress of black silk. A crest of horns sprouted where her hairline should have been and spread back and out like a street artist’s crude rendering of a long mane of hair. Glowing points of red shone along the lengths of those horns like windows into a furnace, and glimmers of the same heat sparked in pupils of her eyes in the center of emerald-flecked irises. Her full, red lips twisted in a familiar smirk.
“Mother,” I said dully.
“Thank the Greater Chance you kept the stone,” she said. “I half thought I’d summon nothing but a few bits of trash.”
I looked about, seeing the city in the distance and the dust smudge of the army milling around it. Sure enough, just as Gale had said, another smudge was approaching from the west. A great anxiety warred with the heat inside my chest. My friends were stuck in that. We’d held out almost long enough for the army to save us. Instead, everything had gone to shit at the eleventh hour, and the person responsible stood right by me. My mother, finally unmasked. The selfish, cruel demon who’d brought me into the world and done nothing but hurt me ever since.
“Send me back,” I demanded.
“I couldn’t if I wanted to,” she said blandly. “Those are called summon stones, not sending stones. And the whole point was to pull you clear before something unfortunate happened.”
“Something unfortunate?” I echoed, incredulous. “Like maybe the king being killed? You know, my father?”
“Don’t be petty,” she said dismissively. “You’d have done it yourself if you could.”
“Maybe so,” I said, feeling the fire inside me warm and spread. “But not when it meant the whole city would fall!”
“They’re humans,” she said, shrugging with a look of blank confusion. “They’re dead before you can blink twice anyway.”
“I’m human!” I shouted, clenching my fists.
She slapped me in the face hard enough to make me shed a card. “You’re my son; that's who you really are, and I’ll not sit and listen to you malign yourself. I should have brought you back home years ago; look what being among them has done.”
“Hard to bring me home when you thought you’d killed me,” I snapped. I was tempted to put some Nether into my hand and hit her – my knuckles were as hard as oak after all those weeks of punching practice – but I knew that even with her having an empty Mind Home that wouldn’t turn out well for me. She was Mythic, and she’d just killed a Legendary.
“Let’s talk about this later,” she said, waving my words away. “Come on, I want to introduce you to some friends of mine.” She reached for my shoulder, pulling me toward the rift. It was a demon rift, my painfully-slow brain realized now; the one that Edaine had promised us we’d raid into back before everything went to shit. My mother wanted to take me to the Demon Realm.
I dug in my heels and pulled away from her grip. “I don’t want to go.”
She rolled her eyes. “There’s nothing here for you anymore, Hull. Revenge on your father? That ship has sailed. Your brother likely has half a dozen plans in place to discredit, humiliate, and execute you once he’s on the throne. Your friends are either dead already or soon will be.” She pointed to the haze of purple and black behind her. “That is where you belong. Fighting, learning, growing into the powerful demon you were always supposed to be. With me helping you, you’ll have the Primarch watching his back within five years.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but standing there, really seeing her for the first time in my life, the thing I’d been dying to say ever since that night at the Gala popped out. “You had my card all along. You lied.”
“Of course I did,” she said, in that same baffled, patient tone she’d used before. “You give real information when you’re forced to, not before. That’s one of those things you’ll need to unlearn.”
“I slept in shit and ate garbage for years because you took it,” I said, the words raw in my throat, the fire still searing in my chest. “You thought you killed me when you took it. I wasn’t even sick, was I? You just wanted it and so you took it.”
She sighed from the bottom of her soul. “The same old song again. All right, how about this?” She reached behind her ear, pulling out a card. “Come with me and I’ll give it to you.”
My hands reached for it without my consent, but she pulled it back. “Ah-ah. You’ll get it when we arrive home, not before. I’ll not have you dashing off with it.”
I curled my hands into fists and forced them down to my sides. “Why would you even offer? After everything, you think I’ll believe you’d just give it to me?”
Her eyes glinted with a greedy light. “Here’s the truth, my boy: I need to know how you survived. No one else has after I successfully ripped their card out, not ever. Is it something about the melding of demon and human stock? Is it unique to you? The rarity of your parentage? These things have to be tested, and I can’t do that without you by my side. That’s worth giving up an Epic, even one as handy as this has been for me.”
I wanted to say yes. The word formed on my tongue and danced there. The card held my gaze in a way no other had since I’d first seen the Sucking Void in the tailor’s card shop all those months ago. The card spoke to me. It was me. What would it be like to summon myself? To talk to the younger me and re-learn all those missing memories I’d thought were gone forever? What if… what if Penkmun could teach me how to reintegrate that Soul into my own? Maybe the demons had methods of their own. Would I have all of its power plus what I’d earned since? Would I automatically jump to Epic? Letting my Twins-cursed mother poke and prod at me for a time was well worth it. The card filled my vision. I had to have it.
I wrenched my eyes away, turning my back so I couldn’t see it. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, and I had to fight several times every second to keep myself from sweeping back around and staring at it again. Desperate to distract myself, I looked around for anything else. My eyes fell on the city. Basil. Esmi. Bryll. Afi. Roshum. Naydarin. Penkmun. I could see from this vantage point that the Lows were burning. She’d said they were all dead, but she couldn’t know that. The woman lied as easily as breathing.
“I can’t,” I said, the words falling from my mouth like rocks. Flat, hard, inevitable. It wasn’t what I wanted to say; it was what I had to say.
“I won’t make the offer twice,” my mother said.
“Sure you will,” I said, my back still turned to her. “I’ll just have to have something you want badly enough… or be able to kill you.”
She laughed merrily. “I’m glad to see you’re not a total loss. But what makes you think I’ll let you walk away when I want you here?”
“If my corpse could do the job for you, I’d be dead already,” I said. “You must need me alive, and you’ll have to kill me to take me, I promise you that.”
She sighed noisily. “So much wasted effort over a few humans. Fine. Go, then, if you really mean it. Walk away from your mother. Walk away from your own soul card.”
Lifting my foot was even harder than turning away had been. It was as if I had the weight of all Treledyne strapped to my bootsole. Chest burning, lungs heaving, I groaned and took the step.
Power burst out of me, sending up a puff of dust in a circle all around. I gasped, clutching my chest, and fell to one knee. It felt like I’d just run a race. In a way, I had. In a single day, I’d managed to step away from both the tyrant father I wanted to kill and the absent mother who dangled promises forever out of my reach. Closing my eyes and looking within, I felt a smile tug at the corners of my mouth. All that pain hadn’t gone to waste after all.
“A momentous decision,” my mother murmured, obviously having seen what happened. “Now that you’ve gotten the benefit, there’s no loss in reconsidering.”
“Go home, Mother,” I said, not looking back as I got to my feet. “I’ll deal with you when the time comes.”
I ran, and her mocking laughter followed me. She could have stopped me, of course, but it was as I’d said – she needed me alive, and now she saw that her hold on me wasn’t strong enough to lure me away. I’d said she’d have to kill me to take me, and I meant it.
The city was only four or five miles away. If I ran harder than I’d ever run before, maybe I could still help. My Yveda card was still amassing copies out there; I’d force him to help. The city had fallen; there was nothing either of us could do about that now. The moment Hestorus had died Fate had sealed it as fact, no matter whether an army was on the horizon or not. But if Fortune was kind, maybe I could find my friends. We could gather to the Lows. And maybe, just maybe, I could protect what mattered most.
The people I loved.
Comments
iridium248
I can't wait for the Epic elevation 'Even Bigger Man' and the Mythic one 'Biggest Man'. Presumably the Legendary Card will just say "I AM HUGE".
iridium248
The duel was 2v1 from the start, I think. Hull's mom just went invisible.
Sharrif
He just became Uncommon! And it looks like it's a potential buildup to be something devastating (maybe even similar to how his original Epic Soul Ability was like)
Myrdin
We still didn’t learn why Hull’s mother was able to join the apotheosis duel and make it 2v1
Myrdin
Uncommon
RainbowPhaze
Interesting to see the way Hull is growing as the Big Man as opposed to Ticosi. They both have powers that strengthen themselves, but Hull's are with the purpose of aiding others whereas Ticosi's just directly benefits himself.
Pranshu Dhungana
is he uncommon now? or rare
Knyko
Nice going on hull with another elevation! What rarity is he now?
Hailhound
Yeah, but it’d have to be able to kill him, which means no armor or cards in hand or in the deck. Pretty big cost and risk to get there. What if someone can nullify an ability for a round? Then he’s brought himself to mostly dead for them and they just have to finish the job. That combo would be the most nether thing ever though, self harm into absolutely OP
Joxter
Double intervene and damage reflect if he ever integrates with his epic will be a killer combo
Joxter
Will be interesting to find out
Scarred Ragdoll
Well, isn't the way the king's body disintegrated interesting. Wonder if that means he got his ascension after all.
Jakob
Thanks for the chapter!
Izzay
First!
