MEMORIES OF AN OVERLORD
by Victar (vctr113062 [at] aol [dot] com)
Victar's Archive: https://www.vicfanfic.com
"I wasn't her boyfriend. We weren't... intimate. He was the one she liked. Maybe even loved.
"If I had been her boyfriend, if I had been any closer to her than I already was... I think I would have shattered completely."
Chapter Twenty-three
Memories of a Priestess: Love
In the late night hours, two days after Kreisia's most unlikely Savior repented his attempt to abandon his duty, the Priestess of Salvation who had summoned him sought to speak with him alone.
Anemos and Laminah had retired for the night. A whisper of divination magic informed Cynthia that Yusis was still very much awake, in a quiet back room of the inn where the four of them were staying.
There is no better time than now, she resolved. I must have courage.
She found him reading books borrowed from the Alteans of Ascendance City. He sat at a long table with open tomes spread upon its surface, and two chairs on the same side. Enchanted candles, crafted with magical safeguards against accidentally starting a fire, burned nearby.
Yusis was not studying in silence. He muttered softly, while jotting down notes with a quill pen enchanted so that the tip of its feather could absorb its own writing. Cynthia could not fully discern his words, but he did not appear to be reading aloud, or conversing with the Holy Brand Aldea.
Yusis rubbed his eyes under his reading glasses, so absorbed in his undertaking that he did not notice Cynthia's presence. He did not react when she quietly shut the door behind herself.
Cynthia directed her thoughts to the Holy Brand, resting in its sheath on Yusis' hip.
Aldea, could you...?
*You are far from the first Priestess of Salvation to desire privacy with the Savior. As you wish. I will keep watch for monsters or other threats. I will return to the Savior's side if I am called, if either of you are endangered, or when dawn breaks.*
The holy sword became a whisper of light, and the sense of its conscious presence receded.
"Wait, what?" Yusis blinked several times, as he removed and folded his glasses. "Cynthia - what? Why did you-?"
Aldea must have said that to both of us.
Cynthia willed her heart to be calm. "Yusis, you've told me that direct honesty is best-"
"Oh, no." The glasses fell out of his hand, and dangled on the cord around his neck.
"-in situations like this-"
He started shaking his head. "No, this is not happening, not now."
"-so I'll be direct, and honest."
"Did I fall asleep reading? Am I dreaming again? No, Cynthia. Don't-"
"I really like you."
"-and there it is," he sighed, lightly tossing the quill pen onto the table.
"I know you have strong feelings for me. My head wasn't completely cloudy, when we talked in the Royal Library. I remember what you said."
Yusis rested his elbows on the table and put his face in his hands. "Where do I even start on this?"
"Anywhere you like. Anything you have to tell me, I can take it. I can take every last word of your honesty. Just don't..."
She sat in the chair next to him, and put one arm around his shoulders. "Don't shut me out without saying anything at all. I don't think I could bear it."
He shuddered, but did not pull away from her.
She added, "If I hear the words 'personal space', I will singe your hair with holy fire."
"You really are serious," he observed, removing his face from his hands. "Okay. Direct honesty it is. All of it."
"I'm listening."
"Cynthia, you literally untangled your mind two days ago."
"I won't 'tangle my mind' again. Not ever, not for anything."
"So you just decide everything's okay inside your head now, and it is? Is that how mental problems work, in Kreisia?"
"I've decided I won't hide from the awful truth anymore. I don't know if that means 'everything's okay'."
"You remember that day in the Royal Library? Well, I remember seeing you switch yourself off. Right in front of me."
"I know. You started to clear the fog in my head, and I panicked. The fog is all gone now, and I haven't 'switched myself off'."
"Maybe you were better off with the fog. You were happier. A lot happier."
"You were also happier when you didn't know the cycle's price, but we were wrong to conceal the truth."
"Don't be so sure." His reproach had an acrid edge.
"Don't be so doubtful." Her response was gentle, and quiet. She removed her arm from his shoulders and turned a little in the chair, attempting to look him in the eye.
He steadfastly gazed straight ahead. "Cedric knew what he was doing, when he made that call. So did Aldea."
"Cedric is very smart, but he's not perfect. Neither is Aldea. They can make bad decisions. All of us can, and did. We should have been honest with you from the beginning."
"You have no idea what real dishonesty is. Almost no Kreisian can tell a truly evil lie. Most Kreisians believe that only undead monsters would use lies to hurt or kill people. Even Anemos doesn't completely get it. He thinks he lied to me, and maybe he sort of did, but he doesn't really know how to destroy people with words. Not like I do."
"You've never done that to anyone, and you never would."
"I know how to, though. I know what those types of lies are, and how they're used. Lies like that are how Begiad manipulated Anemos, and I knew exactly how to counter them. Did you ever wonder how I made Anemos confess so easily?"
"You got through to him because you cared."
"Sure. I cared enough to stage a special performance, copied straight out of a TV show. The really messed up part? It was one of the TV shows that-"
Yusis interrupted himself in mid-sentence, and gritted his teeth.
"Never mind," he growled under his breath. "On the day I met Laminah, she promised to help me any way she could. On the day we arrived at Aldea's shrine, you reminded me that Laminah really meant what she said. After the ambush happened, I remembered all of this, and asked Laminah to help me with... let's call it a 'good Savior, bad Royal Guard' routine."
"A what?" Cynthia whispered, taken aback.
"Did our role-playing fool you, just like it fooled Anemos? I can't take all the credit. I'm not sure how much of Laminah's threatening behavior was from my instructions, and how much was her true feelings, but she played her role amazingly well. Aldea was also supposed to guest star; when it decided to exit stage right, we had to improvise."
"I didn't know..."
"No, we decided to keep you out of the loop. Laminah and Aldea agreed with me that your mental problems were too big of a risk factor. I might have been feeling overprotective toward you, or petty, or even worse than petty, but the mess inside my head doesn't make their judgment any less sound."
"Even when my mind was fogged, I understood the need to keep a secret," Cynthia calmly returned. "Now that the fog is gone, I realize that I put you in a difficult situation. I think I could have cleared away the fog sooner than I did, but none of you knew that at the time. Not even Aldea's power to read souls can perfectly predict what any person will or won't do."
"Since 'the fog is gone', I should tell you another secret. You didn't know that Laminah has been carrying teleportation beads ever since we set out for Aldea's shrine, did you? Three of them. They're the last three from the Royal Treasury."
"You're right, I didn't know that. I'm pretty sensitive to magic, but small magic items like beads are tricky for me to detect."
"Laminah told me about her teleportation beads when we talked strategy after the ambush. I asked her why she'd kept them secret for so long; she said it was because I was irrational, you were mind-addled, and Anemos couldn't be trusted. She was right on all counts, you know."
"Yusis, you're not-"
"Are you really going to finish that denial with a straight face?" he challenged, sharply.
Cynthia sighed.
"If you can, then maybe you're a better role-player than I gave you credit for," he continued, slightly easing his tone. "You've role-played with Laminah and me before, without knowing it."
Cynthia raised both eyebrows in surprise. "Really?"
"Yeah. When I first learned about Laminah's teleportation beads, I decided to hold off on using them, since I couldn't wield Aldea for eight days anyway. There was one problem; Aldea had learned from Anemos' mind that another ambush would strike after we left the second Lesser Seal shrine. Laminah and I had arranged for the ambush to be intercepted, but if we walked out of that shrine and didn't get ambushed, then Anemos would know we were on to him. I had the idea to manipulate Anemos into offering another of his beads; if that didn't work, I'd pretend to be surprised when Laminah offered one of hers. You chimed in at just the right moment to make our role-playing more believable."
Cynthia pondered what she had learned.
"Everything you did was to help people," she reasoned, thoughtfully. "Especially Anemos."
"That's the only real difference between me and Begiad."
"You have a power the rest of us don't have. That's all."
"Aldea has a name for my power. It's called 'corruption'."
"Your power is no more dangerous than my power of magic, Laminah's power with weapons, Anemos' power of chants, Cedric's political power, or Aldea's legendary power. Any of our powers can be used to protect, or misused to destroy."
"My 'corruption' is why all of you were right to withhold the truth about the cycle, for as long as you did. If you had told me everything at the start, then I would have immediately demanded to get out of this 'dream'."
Cynthia firmly shook her head. "No, you wouldn't have. It wasn't the awful truth that unbalanced you so greatly. It was the shock of learning that we hid it from you."
"Believe what you want."
"If we had told you everything at the start - if I had told you everything when I summoned you - then you would have awakened from your 'dream' sooner. You would have dedicated yourself to breaking the cycle then and there."
"I take it back. Don't believe what you want, because you're believing in me way too much."
"Yusis, can you stop doubting yourself for even a little while?"
The harshness in his voice intensified. "I'm not going to tell you what happened when I shrugged off my doubts, so I could watch my favorite TV shows. I don't want to 'corrupt' Kreisia with bad stuff from my world."
She responded slowly, and carefully. "Did this 'bad stuff' on your world destroy friends of yours?"
"Yeah."
"The day after we defended Melusine, Laminah approached me. She said you'd asked her to tell me why you won't comb your hair. She didn't completely understand your words, so she suggested that I transcribe her memory of what you said."
"You can do that?"
"Memory transcription is a minor magic spell. It isn't hard. It's widely used."
"I thought these books were written kind of weird. Maybe that's because they weren't 'written'; they were copied out of someone's head."
"I reread Laminah's memory of what you said over and over, until the transcript I'd conjured vanished from my hands. I didn't understand your words any better than she did. "
"Figures."
"What I did understand was that you lost friends on your world."
"I didn't even try to help them, when they needed help."
"The spell to summon a Savior... it doesn't call just anyone. Every Savior in history suffered a heartbreaking loss, before they came to Kreisia."
"Too many people on my world have suffered much worse than I have, and lost more than I ever did."
"And, the spell can only call a Savior who doesn't have young children, or anyone else depending on them for survival. I've read speculations that this restriction is so summoning the Savior won't deprive a child of their parent, or leave anyone abandoned to a sad fate."
"I already knew about that. It's a holy magic thing."
"I believe the two factors are connected to each other, in a tragic way. The summon spell always calls a Savior who is willing to leave their world behind, and give up their life to save our world."
"There has to be more than that to why your summon spell chose me."
"There is."
"So, what's the rest of the deal?"
I want to tell you. I want to tell you more than anything, but...
No, I can't. I must not. The faith you need has to come from within.
"I'm not saying the rest," she softly denied. "Not yet."
"Whatever."
"I will when I think the time is right."
"Not like it matters. I'm actually glad your spell chose me, over someone who could do my world any good. I was a useless screw-up there. A few people will miss me, but no one there was asking me for help. Not anymore."
Cynthia tenderly put her arm around his shoulders again. She felt him flinch.
"Yusis, I used to think that I shouldn't get too close to you, so you wouldn't be sad when you went home to your world. Now, I know how precious our remaining time is. I'm not going to let it escape me without telling you how I feel."
She used her other arm to give him a small hug. "I really like you."
"That makes one of us," he murmured, bitterly.
"Yusis..."
"If Cedric hadn't forced me to wait a night and think about it, then I would have abandoned all of you."
"If Cedric hadn't forced you to wait, then you still would have decided to stay at the last moment, or maybe before. You could have gone home as soon as you learned about the cycle's price. You could have teleported us to a summoning station, and told me to reverse the summon spell then and there. Instead, you chose to confront Cedric."
"I didn't think he'd stop me from running away."
"You knew that the Royal Capital's interior barricades teleportation. Aldea announced that it could override the barrier, but you knew that Aldea wouldn't help you leave Kreisia. You also knew that wards against monsters, like what all cities have, interfere with the summon spell."
"Cynthia, I didn't think about any of that. I just wanted to make Cedric stop hiding what he's really like on the inside, and destroy the principled image all of you had of him. I got one out of two. Turns out his principles aren't an image. Mine might be, though."
"No, Yusis. Yours are not an 'image', and you know it."
"I yelled at all of you, treated all of you like dirt, almost deserted you like a coward, and none of you would even hate me for it. The whole time, I wanted to be hated as a coward, and the only one who could or would do it was Aldea."
"I don't think you demanded to be sent home because you were afraid. I think it was because you doubted yourself."
"Putting a different label on the mess inside my head doesn't make it any neater."
"Yusis, can you stop doubting yourself for even one instant?"
"It's not only myself I'm doubting. You, too. It's been two days. That's nowhere near enough time to-"
"We have journeyed together for much longer than two days," she firmly interrupted. "I am not a completely different Cynthia. I'm just not a prisoner to my own illusions anymore."
"Yeah, well, which 'Cynthia' was ready and willing to send me home when I demanded it? Which 'Cynthia' didn't say 'Think about the consequences', or 'If you leave us you're a self-doubting coward', or 'No, deal with it'?"
"No Cynthia would say any of those things. I am who I am."
"Yeah. Someone who should not get close to the likes of me." Yusis gestured to the musty tomes spread out on the table. "These books are full of legends about Yumarac. They go on and on about him as the revered off-world ancestor of the Alteans, whose super-strong magic could stop time itself; as the hero who led a great army against Orzand, then made Orzand sleep for centuries; and as the creator of the Holy Brand Aldea."
"Do the books say how Yumarac put Orzand to sleep? Undead monsters are immune to sleep spells."
"I haven't come across anything about how or why Yumarac could do that. I've only found confirmations that Lesser Seals and the Overlord are immune to sleep spells, same as other undead monsters. Maybe Yumarac was just that powerful, or maybe the legend got the details wrong. That's not where I'm going with this, anyway."
Yusis tapped a passage of text in one of the open books. "Remember the story Anemos told us, about the cycle's origin? Yumarac was married to a Lunarl priestess. He used Altean chanting to guide his wife, while she shaped the Holy Brand Aldea out of Kreisia's raw holy power. She didn't survive. The Alteans are convinced that Yumarac didn't mean to kill her, but who knows? Accidentally or not, she died."
"Yusis..."
"Aldea is the keystone of Kreisia's cycle. The all-devouring cycle that was Yumarac's idea. I wonder if his wife died because the responsibility for creating such a cruel way to protect Kreisia was too much for her. She deserved better than someone like him."
"He was the one she chose."
"She didn't know what she was choosing."
"You didn't know, either. You chose to be our Savior right after I summoned you, without knowing what the cycle would do to you."
"That's not what hurts."
Cynthia silently waited for him to continue.
"What I said before - 'you summoned me to make your own death happen' - it's a twisted distortion, but it hurts. It's almost more painful than I can stand."
Yusis' voice dropped to a low, tremulous tone, with undercurrents of agony and terror.
"You're going to die and become a Lesser Seal. Ten years later, you'll rise up as a miasma-filled thing and murder everyone you ever knew, starting with your parents. And I'll be your undead Overlord, sending you power and monsters to fuel your killing spree."
"It won't happen like that," she replied, with quiet conviction.
"Uh-huh. Really?"
"My parents are very strong, and they'll have support from the Royal Capital. They'll strike me down before I kill anyone, whether or not the next Savior arrives in time to help."
"Really." Yusis bowed his head and covered his eyes with one hand.
"Or, we'll end Kreisia's awful cycle before it reaches that point."
"I wonder how many other Saviors promised to break the cycle," he darkly reflected, lowering his hand. "Maybe Begiad's Savior made an empty promise, forty years ago. Maybe that's what pushed Begiad over the edge."
"We are going to end the cycle, Yusis. The only questions are when and how. We may not find a way before we're turned into monsters. Whether we're monsters or not, I won't give up, and I know you will never give up."
Yusis said nothing for a long moment.
Then he put one hand on his chest, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and slowly exhaled. The fear, pain, and bitterness threading through his composure receded.
"Okay, Cynthia," he sighed, opening his eyes and letting his hand fall. "Tell you what. If we break the cycle, and we're not undead monsters, then...
"...then...
"...you know what? I'm not putting the rest into words. Just, 'then'. If we break the cycle, and we're not undead monsters, then. Fill in the blanks with anything you want. Anything."
"Is that a promise?" she whispered in his ear.
"Yeah. I promise."
She squeezed him with another hug, and let go of his body. Then she adjusted her position to sit on the table, so that she could see him face-to-face, and raised her extended index finger before his nose. "What if we break the cycle, and only one of us is an undead monster? Do I still get to 'fill in the blanks'?"
Yusis stiffened with shock. His eyebrows snapped all the way up; his eyes grew wide and frantically zipped left and right. He rapidly babbled, "Cynthia, that is really weird and really, really creepy and I can't believe you even said that and-! You're laughing. You're laughing at me. That was a joke."
"The look on your face is priceless," she giggled.
Small chuckles started to work their way through him. "That was - heh - a good one. You really - heh-heh - fooled me." His laughter subsided, but in its place, a sloppy grin spread across his lips.
"At least I got you to smile," Cynthia trilled, mirthfully. "Goodnight, Yusis. Don't stay up too late reading." She gracefully eased off of the table, and moved to leave the room.
"Cynthia, wait," Yusis requested, when her hand touched the door.
She turned back. "Yes?"
His grin transformed into a cagey expression. "If one of us has to be an undead monster, then I pick me."
Her long, furry ears flapped once. "Are you trying to make a joke, now?"
"Not even. I've started to wonder if the power of the Overlord could break the cycle. So, if only one of has to be an undead monster, then I call me. Dibs. No takebacks."
"Do you think that would hurt me any less, than if it were the other way around?"
"I don't know and I don't care," Yusis smirked, tilting his head and closing his eyes. "If it's only one of us, then I choose me, and you'll just have to deal with it."
End of Chapter Twenty-three: Love