A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 1124 A Changing World - Part 2
1124: A Changing World – Part 2
1124: A Changing World – Part 2
Thoughts weren’t enough.
He’d begun his training thinking that he could think his way to a breakthrough – that had been folly.
There was so much more than thinking taking place.
In thinking, he limited himself.
Instead, he gave himself away entirely to flow.
He recalled the flow of the battlefield and he attempted to emulate it in himself, in the confines of the forest, where there did not seem to be a man for miles around.
Only the occasional deer, and angry bore, and at times even a lost goblin, though the goblin populations could not nearly compare to the Black Mountains of his home in Solgrim.
Ingolsol pulled Oliver one way, and Claudia pulled him the other.
They both talked, but it was their wills that did the talking as of late.
Oliver didn’t speak to them with words either.
All three of them pulled in different directions, threatening to tear the soul of Oliver Patrick apart, in an effort to make it larger and to contain all that was required of a man of the Fourth Boundary.
It was a torturous affair at times .It reminded him of the wounds that he had endured from the Fragments of Divinity that had inhabited him briefly during the Battle of Solgrim.
Fear came with that, and fear Ingolsol fed on.
It made him stronger.
Oliver allowed it, as the Fragment’s laughter grew.
He knew just how dangerous it was to make Ingolsol any more powerful than he already was, but in his situation, he needed that danger, and so he allowed for that same growth, retreating further into himself, as he tried to make himself large enough to match Ingolsol, and he tried to coax Oliver towards the same.
He slept at the most irregular times, and he ate even more irregularly.
Sometimes he forgot to drink, until the moment that his vision dizzied, and he threatened to collapse from dehydration.
If anyone had been watching him, they would have called it a madness.
He tried everything and anything he could to reach through.
In the past, he had mocked the mages in his mind for their maddening grasp for mana, but as he threw himself at the Fourth Boundary, he found himself doing the same sort of grasping.
He was a man willing to sacrifice whatever it took within himself to make the progress that was required of him.
It was torturous, ever so torturous.
And he did so, his vision of the world around him grew obscured.
He saw places that weren’t there, and he was reminded of people that he had not seen in a while.
“Nila…” He said, thinking that he had caught a flash of red.
He heard laughter in his ears, and he saw something disappear behind a tree.
There was a strange quality to the laughter though, it was a hollow laugh.
It sounded more like despair than it did excitement.
It was strange, Oliver would reflect in the years to come, just how much can be perceived, when all is surrendered, and vision is expanded.
For it might have seemed like mere coincidence to many, in hindsight, that he heard Nila’s voice then, and he thought her to sound so terribly sad, so terribly despairing, but Oliver knew it could not have been mere coincidence.
The events lined up too perfectfully.
The timeline was completely set.
As Oliver looked for progress towards the Fourth Boundary in the forest, Nila dealt with the problems that came with governance in Solgrim.
She had seen Greeves with blood on his hands days prior.
Blood, and a grim look on his face.
She’d known what he’d been up to, and yet she’d dared to ask regardless, knowing that the reply would not be one that she wished for.
“You did it?” She asked, barely suppressing a shudder.
Greeves looked at her, and he heaved a long sigh.
“I did it.”
He looked more and more like a broken man these days.
“I wonder why it weighs on me so heavily the fact that I did it… But I suppose this is my role.
Even Judas is beginning to find swimming in darkness to be difficult.
So it’s my role, girl.
I do think.”
“Then did you learn something, for all that you have done?” Nila said.
“Aye, I did,” Greeves replied, standing, and reaching for a bottle, about to pour himself a drink.
His hand hovered slightly before he did so.
Ultimately, he decided to pull away, a torn look on his face.
“But I don’t think we’re better off for it.
The boy put trust in the two of us while he was away, but I didn’t think he would expect for things to get this bad.”
“This bad?” Nila said warily.
“How bad are we talking, Greeves?”
“Bad enough that they’ve sent this many spies,” Greeves said.
“We cut him and we cut him until he confessed.
Didn’t look like a man in the end… A man shouldn’t be able to live on with that much flesh missing.
He didn’t even break his promise of loyalty – he broke his mind, and madness muttered the truth as he slept.
Ha!
Ha… What a sight that was.”
“What is Greeves?” Nila said, her face pale.
“I do not know specifically,” Greeves said.
“But I can guess.
He was charged with looking at the nature of our defences, that one.
He was looking at how many troops we had left.
That can only mean one thing, can’t it?”
“…” Nila was quiet.
She thought that by not acknowledging it, somehow, she could avoid the nasty truth.
But the truth came regardless.
The days passed, and the threat that Greeves had feared so had arrived.
On the horizon, with the coming of dawn, there marched an army of a thousand.
Their fur clothes and their round shields marked them as Yarmdon men.
But for Yarmdon men to manage to make it as far as Solgrim without inference… That wasn’t something that anyone supposed would be likely.
Besides, these men were far too clean to be called Yarmdon.
They didn’t look like troops that had endured the hard march over the Black Mountains to reach them, nor the rough seas, if they had gone by boat instead.
