Chapter 106: Dishes Served Cold

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i7KDryQhuq-NdB2B0Eq4EiEl3nxM8sQTO9Rl4MSqt9c/edit?usp=sharing

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Velic made a strangled gurgling noise as Cayden’s sheathed claws tightened around his throat, and the boy’s eyes were wide without their usual calm superiority.

But then Cayden felt the cold touch of metal against his throat and looked down to see Marvenal holding a tiny blade against him. It wasn’t one of Marvenal’s usual blades; it was only an inch long, and emitted a strange pale light. A drop of blood beaded from where the blade touched Cayden’s skin.

“Release him,” the rogue growled, and Cadyen’s hand opened, dropping a coughing Velic to his knees in front of him. Marvenal held the blade to Cayden’s neck for a moment more, considering his next move, before he stepped back and helped the noble boy, the knife gone as quickly as it had appeared. But Cayden’s thoughts were elsewhere.

Velic’s words had clued him in to the truth, but as annoying as he could be, Velic wasn’t the one responsible for what happened to Cayden’s parents. Cayden needed to find those who truly were to blame. And he knew of only one person who might be able to identify who they were.

“The princess…” Cayden mumbled under his breath, before turning and marching out of the library.

He heard both Velic and Elise yell something from behind him, but he ignored them – he had more important things to focus on.

Everything made sense – the way they’d practically kidnapped Tiana, the way they’d tried to keep her from reuniting with him. They were trying to build loyalty from the very kids they’d orphaned. And while he hadn’t known how it might have been possible as a kid, he had much more experience now. For someone with power and influence equivalent to the top instructors at the academy, engineering a monster attack on a rural town would have been child’s play.

The only truly difficult thing about it was the complete abandonment of morals the action required.

As he marched across campus, he felt an old, familiar anger burning in his heart. He thought the anger gone, left behind in a previous life, snuffed out by the love of family and caring friends. But now he realized it had only been dormant, simply waiting to reignite – and Cayden eagerly fanned the flames.

For so long, he’d trained to delve dungeons. To fight monsters in order to prevent what happened to his family from happening to anyone else – yet all along, the true monsters had remained hidden in the shadows. They went to school with him, they employed him, making him think they were doing him a favor by ‘freeing’ his sister. Freeing her from the very situation they manufactured.

Cayden slammed through the front door and into the stairwell of his dorm building, uncaring of the cracking wood. He wasn’t sure what he was planning to do, but neither did he care. Over a decade his parents had been dead, unable to rest easy with their true killers unpunished.

No longer.

The princess’ dorm room was on the fourth floor of the building, and Cayden stomped up the stairs without a care for the students who dodged out of his way with wide eyes. He was making a spectacle, he knew – good. The crimes against his parents had remained hidden for too long.

Halfway up the stairs, he saw Delphia coming down from the other direction, her hood glancing his way, and then doing a double-take a moment later. She said something, but Cayden paid her no mind. From behind him, Elise’s voice yelled through the cracked door of the stairwell, having chased him across the campus, but neither did he pay that any mind. He simply pushed past Delphia’s small form without slowing. But she was quick, and she ducked back around in front of him, both hands held wide to block his way.

For the first time since he’d left the library, Cayden truly looked at one of the students who were around him, and Delphia flinched under his gaze – but she didn’t flee like before. She held her position in front of him, arms held wide as she refused to move out of the way.

She said something, but Cayden didn’t bother to listen. She was one of them. A noble. One of those in power. Even if she didn’t directly cause what happened to his village, she was part of the system that allowed it to happen. She was part of the problem, and deserved just as much of his ire.

Before she could react, Cayden reached out, grabbed her shoulder, and shoved her out of his way into the wall of the stairwell. It was sudden enough that she didn’t get a chance to brace herself; she impacted with a heavy thunk and cry of pain before tumbling to the ground.

And for the first time – after many classes, battles, and delves without issues – her shadowed hood failed her. For the first time, it fell back, and Cayden saw her face.

She was pale, unnaturally so, with hair completely white. Albino, Cayden realized. He didn’t think that was an effect of being shaeden; she must have already been albino before the change. Her face could have been considered cute, with a button nose and almond-shaped pale blue eyes that appeared red in the light – if it weren’t for the scars.

Every inch of her face and neck was covered with scars. Dozens, perhaps even hundreds. Some of the scars were thick and ropey, protruding in gross lumps. Others were pale and faded, barely visible against her even paler skin. But every inch of skin was crisscrossed with scars.

And at the sight of her scarred visage, Cayden’s anger guttered.

Cayden had many scars of his own, from his initial days delving with Elise’s early healing potions. But healing potions of even moderate quality were typically enough to remove most scars, as long as they were taken within a reasonable timeframe. How could Delphia end up so scarred? Were they all from her skill, from the injuries she’d absorbed from others?

And then Cayden noticed the red that dripped from her forehead – the potential for a new scar from where he’d thrown her into the wall.

And his anger cooled.

“Agh–I’m…I’m sorry,” he struggled to speak, kneeling down next to his roommate.

Delphia seemed dazed, her eyes vacant as she looked up at Cayden. But as Cayden reached for the potions he knew she always stored in a pocket of her robe, her eyes jumped back into focus as shadows enveloped her. She scooted back against the wall and flipped her hood back up with a quick motion of her hands before reaching into the pocket and tossing back a healing potion.

“Ah…I’m so sorry,” Cayden said again, lamely, backing up to give her space. “Do…do you need help standing? Or getting back to your room? Or…do you need to see Instructor Tilda?”

His anger and desire for vengeance, burning so hotly a moment before, now only smoldered. It wasn’t gone – he could still feel it in his chest, and he knew it wouldn’t be going away anytime soon. But it wasn’t as pressing, no longer calling for action in that very moment.

His parents had waited ten years for their vengeance. Waiting just a little bit longer in order to ensure that Cayden’s roommate was okay was a price they’d be willing to pay.

Elise burst into the stairwell behind him, gasping for breath. “Cayden! Wai…what happened?”

Cayden looked between Elise and Delphia, his arms raised in surrender over his head before he brought them behind his head to rub the back of his neck.

“...I would like to know as well,” Delphia said in a small voice, and Cayden sighed.

Delphia wasn’t his enemy. Now that he wasn’t caught up in his rage, he could see that truth. Not only had she been less than ten years old when the attack on his village occurred, she obviously wasn’t someone without her own pain.

And…she was his friend.

He would give her the truth – he owed her that much.

“Do you mind if we use your dorm, Elise?” he said after a moment of consideration, dismissing the two notifications of new berserking skills as he did so. “I’d rather not have Velic walk in on us.”

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“My sister is a fateweaver – a powerful race which allows her to ‘weave fate’.” Cayden shook his head. “Don’t ask me what that means, I’m not entirely sure myself. She’s explained some of her skills, but not much – the important thing is that it’s powerful and rare. Powerful and rare enough that the kingdom has a compound set up exclusively to train fateweavers loyal to the crown, recruited from around the kingdom.”

They were sitting in Elise’s small dorm room. There were only two chairs, so Cayden had elected to crouch against the wall. But Elise and Delphia had, for some reason, chosen to mimic him, claiming spots on the floor as well – Elise by his side and Delphia across the room.

It had only taken a few minutes for them to cross the campus to get to Elise’s dorm, walking in absolute silence, but it was long enough for Cayden to question his earlier convictions. How much did he know about what actually happened to his parents? All his suppositions had been based on a single sentence Velic uttered, which led him down a rabbit hole of conspiracies. It had made sense at the time, but how much of that was Cayden’s imagination running wild?

Regardless, he continued the explanation.

“That’s the reason we came to the capital, actually. Well, at least the reason for me. My sister’s letters weren’t being sent, so I came here to track her down. But that’s not as important. What’s important are the requirements for becoming a fateweaver: to survive a disaster that you had less than a one percent chance of surviving.”

Next to him, Elise sucked in a breath between her teeth. Cayden hadn’t revealed any new information, but she evidently was coming to the same conclusions he’d come to earlier. She didn’t interrupt, though, and Delphia also remained silent, so Cayden continued.

“My sister and I both qualified. We survived a monster attack that destroyed my village and killed my parents. We…were the only survivors. We hid as everyone else was being killed. Hid until legionnaires showed up to ‘rescue’ us.” He paused. “...I was six years old.”

“...I’m sorry,” Delphia said in a quiet voice, and Cayden started, not having realized he hadn’t spoken for almost a minute, lost in his memories. He gave Delphia a nod.

“Thanks, but I’m not looking for pity – you just need to know my background to understand what’s going on. Elise is attempting to publish a book on races and race requirements so that commoners can more effectively choose races before their change. Evidently, Velic is preventing it from being published. We confronted him and a clerk in the library, and…I don’t remember exactly what he said. But it amounted to the fact that there was nothing new in Elise’s book that the nobility didn’t already know. Which got me thinking…what if it’s true? What if the nobility know how fateweavers are created? More than that, what if they want fateweavers to be created? What if they’re the ones creating them?”

By the end, his voice was desperate, hoping that Elise or Delphia would tell him that he was wrong, that he could put his fears to rest. It would be embarrassing after his display across campus, but better a little embarrassment than learning his parents and the rest of his village had been murdered just so that Tiana could get a few special skills.

Elise was flipping through her notebook with focused intensity, reading a few lines before turning to a different page. “It’s possible. They unquestionably know how fateweavers are created. But would they be willing to stoop so low as to intentionally create them?” She snapped her soul notebook shut, looking up at Cayden. “I doubt they have been keeping race requirements from commoners for the purpose of creating fateweavers, though. That’s something that’s been around for generations, and as far as I can tell, the fateweaver compound has only been around for the last fifty years or so.”

“And the rest? Is it possible, or am I just going crazy?” Cayden asked desperately.

Elise pressed the heels of her palms her to eyes, rubbing them before looking up at Cayden and shaking her head. “I don’t know. It’s possible. And certainly suspicious, considering how quickly Tiana was picked up for the fateweaver compound after going through her change. But still…I don’t know. If it is, if the crown is destroying villages for the purpose of creating races…it’s big. Like, possible revolution big.”

Cayden blinked in surprise. So far, he’d only considered the possible ramifications of the truth for himself and those on whom he’d need to take revenge – it hadn’t even crossed his mind how the rest of the kingdom might respond if it became common knowledge.

He looked to Delphia, who sat back against the wall across the room. “What do you think, Delphia? You’re a noble – could the crown or…someone…stoop so low?”

Delphia didn’t respond immediately, simply looking at her lap beneath the shrouded hood for so long that Cayden began to question whether or not she’d heard his question. Until finally, with a quiet voice, she answered.

“...I don’t think you can underestimate how low the nobility can stoop.”

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