24. Romance of the Tower Pt 4

  Shisuke sat in the cafe, quietly drinking coffee and listening to the mortals speak in a language he didn’t understand. He was a thousand miles away from Nonpo, and he’d made the majority of that journey as a mortal would. On his own two feet.

  He shook his head in disbelief. He’d been in this cafe once before, as a young lad. His father had sent him out with on of their merchants to learn how logistics and trade, and the merchant had taken him across the sea to one of their distant ports of trade.

  He had never expected to come back.

  The old man who had run the cafe was dead, as was his son. A new old man ran it now. The coffee tasted much different, but that could be a number of factors. A different type of bean, grown in a different soil, roasted in a different way, ground to a different grade, prepared differently, he didn’t know.

  It could even just be that he’d been in the purification realm and now stood on the Golden Path.

  In fact, now that he thought of it, that was probably what it was.

  He tipped the proprietor and quietly left, making his way through the busy port. One of the central hubs, it was said that it was only three waygates from any major city in the alliance. He joined his mortal guide, who didn’t know his identity, and requested to be escorted to the waygate to Mer’cah. It took twenty minutes, walking as a mortal does and not standing out in the crowd, but between one step and another he was on a different continent.

  He asked his mortal guide to arrange another local guide, but none could be found who spoke Nonponese, so he paid the man for his translation services and the local guide to bring him to the Many Peaks Alliance headquarters.

  The mortals were happy to take his coin, and within fifteen minutes he was standing in line to gain entrance to the public buildings of the Alliance which was conquering the world without drawing a single blade or casting a single technique.

  He wondered, briefly, whether he could put an end to it right there by destroying the heart of the beast. But he put the thought out of his head. No, at this point nothing except for killing the worldfather himself would solve that and--

  “There he is father! Standing in line!” A boy shouted, pointing right at Shisuke. Shisuke blinked, wondering what he had done to draw attention, when the worldfather himself walked up and greeted him with a smile.

  “Thank you, Atla,” the worldfather said. “Hello Shisuke. I’m pleased that you’ve come to visit. We don’t typically make visiting heads of state wait in line, however, so if you’d like to come with me, I’ll show you to where Di Phon and Lady Di Tonilla are preparing to negotiate with you for full membership in the alliance.”

  “I see,” Shisuke said, his shoulders slumping slightly. “Your spies have read my mind, for I did not know that was my purpose when I came here, but I see now that my enemy knows my mind better than I do myself. Rather than fight against the rising tide, I shall … I cannot think of a metaphor. I surrender.”

  “I do not accept your surrender,” the worldfather said, “for this is not a war. I defeat an enemy by making him a friend, Shisuke, but we were never enemies. We both want to see Nonpo shine and rise to heights never before seen on any nation on Atla. But while you hope for the rise of Nonpo alone, I share the same hope for all nations and all people.”

  “And I stand in your way, so you—”

  “I make you my friend, Shisuke,” The worldfather said. “But that does not mean that I ever saw you as my enemy.”

  Shisuke was silent as he contemplated this impossible man, whom he had witnessed opening a waygate with his own eyes. Through an avatar no less.

  “I am not ready to call you my friend,” Shisuke admitted, “But perhaps I am ready to discuss matters of how we might bridge the gap between our perceptions of this gap between us.”

  “Good, Shisuke. Believe it or not, simply getting everyone to sit down at the table is always the hardest part. So yes, let’s do that.”

  “I’m going to go play with penguins,” the boy said, and he promptly vanished.

  Shisuke blinked at the empty spot that the boy left behind, wondering for a second if he’d even been there at all. Then he shook his head, and prepared to negotiate for the future advantages of his nation.

  He might have been defeated without either side drawing his blade, but he would bleed his foe on the negotiating table. This, at least, he could swear.

  ~~~~~~

  It was not hard to find the first beast king.

  But I could not kill it.

  It was not a matter of strength.

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  She was a thunderbird. Beautiful, majestic, and the perfect mate to the Tunrida I had met six years ago now, who longed so desperately for a mate that he was willing to hang his hopes on my ability to raise a chick to be his equal.

  I knew that there were but ten divine beast kings on the planet, for I saw the strands of fate leading me to each of them.

  But when I saw this magnificent beast, I knew that I could not complete the task as it was given to me.

  I made my camp miles away from the thunderbird’s nest and meditated on the problem. At a confluence of ley lines and near a natural rock formation, I heard the voice.

  My eyes opened, certain that it was an illusion.

  I closed my eyes and listened closer.

  “Grow strong,” the voice sang. “Strength. Grow strong. Grow grow grow strong.”

  Beautiful and melodious, the singer was not using a voice.

  It was the song of the earth itself.

  Nervously, I reached out as I had five years ago to Atla,

  And the world reached back.

  She took my hand,

  And snatched up a piece of my soul, completing the Xian bond.

  ~~~~~~

  “Hah, I told you he’d take the bait, pay up,” Duke Doe said, even as the credits were automatically transferred into his account across cosmic accounting systems.

  “Do you think he sees the trap?” Ostoin asked, cocking her head to the side as she examined the hologram in her board room. She had lost six billion credits on this wager. Enough to buy a small planet. Not on the scale of the one that Duke Doe had just lost to this wondering Xian, but a nice one. Stage five or six, maybe?

  Not a stage ten like this particular tower world.

  “Either he saw it and stepped into it, knowing it was there and that the snare would strangle him, or he’s a greenhorn who doesn’t understand what happens when an Avatar is cut off from the prime body for so long,” Beailor said from her own porch in the prairies of her core world. “If it’s the first, then we ought to be wary. If it’s the second, then he might not be so valuable of a piece as we thought.”

  “What sort of fool would invite a tribulation?” Ostoin asked.

  “Someone who knew that he could withstand it?” Valan suggested, sipping wine in a party in another galaxy.

  “Even so, it’s not worth it,” Ostoin said, shuddering.

  ~~~~~

  It took hours for the Xian bond to settle into place. I meditated quietly, listening to the voice of this planet.

  “What is your name?” I asked it.

  “Strong,” she said. “Grow strong.”

  I sighed. She said nothing else. She was not like Atla, who had reached out to me in confusion and hope. She had simply seen someone strong and reached out to that strength to make it stronger. The Xian bond had slipped into place naturally because that she wanted to be strong, and she wanted everything on her surface to be strong.

  She was obsessed with strength to the point where she thought of nothing else.

  It worked, I reflected. With her senses, which I unashamedly utilized for my own purposes, I scanned through the strongest beings on the planet. There were more platinum ranked beast kings than I’d originally thought, with the majority of them in the oceans and on another continent.

  A continent without towers or humans living on it. Nothing but wilderness, and the endless drive to grow stronger or die trying.

  It was simplistic and honest.

  And it was so far from the world-child that I loved that it was heartbreaking.

  It wasn’t her fault. She’d been raised this way by whoever had quickened her.

  I spent three days in communion with her, trying to break her out of her endless song.

  “Strong. Grow strong. Be strong. Grow strong,” she answered.

  I doubted that I could even get justice for her, as the one who had done this to her was eons dead.

  “Why?” I asked once more. “What purpose does strength serve, Majeesha?” I had at last coaxed her name out of her, or perhaps it was simply part of her song. “Grow strong on Majeesha” now rang out every few minutes, mixed in with the rest of it.

  “Strong,” she answered. “Grow strong.”

  I sighed. “Very well, Majeesha. Let me show you my strength, and perhaps then you will answer me.”

  Flexing the world’s power, which I had claimed for myself, I flew back to the tower.

  To put an end to this farce once and for all.

  ~~~~~~

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