Oscar

He remembered the presence of the Emperor, how strongly rooted it was in every living thing whose feet left the ground. He held it all back as it swept toward the city in a wave – and in the moment when he stood strong against it and held up the wall of pure thought and will, he could see everything – the trees, the walls, the earth, the glistening river under a scarlet sky. It was beautiful. And at the center of the horrifying nexus of hell that invaded his mind when he closed his mage-blinded eyes, there was a man. Just a man, and a plain one at that. Smiling a fixed smile through the storm of pain all around Him.

When the Emperor died, Oscar was there – though his body rested at the heart of the city, he felt every blow that landed on His body. The spirit fled, that nexus of hell, and Oscar followed it, grabbing onto its end, slowing it, weakening it – making it dull against the coming threat, and weakening Zhiren too, so that he did not know what was coming for him until the axe was already too close to his neck.

As the Battle-Clan made their final charge, losing half their number in the muck, Oscar stood silent psychic guard, protecting the dying from the horror of the Emperor’s torture, and guarding the living from His influence, so that they saw Him clearly.

And when it was all over, he remained a nameless no-one to most of those who fought that day – but the Battle-Clan remembered. And his friends remembered.

Summer. 245 YT, aboard a train west across Corod

Oscar jerked awake and glanced to one side, then the other. He expected to see the sprawl of the blanket over his shoulder and chest, but only saw the flames of human presence – remembering as he woke who he was and what had been done to him. The fabric of the blanket was soft against him, and when he reached out with his right arm he felt the padded back of the next seat forward, the fur lining of its trim edges – although it was quite warm inside the train compartment, someone had felt the need when designing this train to build for maximum comfort. He appreciated it, nestled as he was with his feet stretched out as far as he could. This still left him with some bend in his knees, and a twist in his torso, as he faced the seat behind him. His forehead went up against the scratchy grain of the fabric seat front, and, stirring, he slowly shifted, slight jerking movement by slight jerking movement, into a sitting position.

In the seat behind him, he recognized the flames. Badem was a chain of disparate lights that danced in pattern, thin and wispy and tall. Avishag was singular and small and bright. Behind them, then, was the merchant from Dresh – homebound, faint but strong, and never flickering. In the seats in front of him were the Battle-Clan warriors, the ones who’d started calling themselves Graoungers in Exile, though they hadn’t come originally from Vallr. Most of these men were originally of Durheir, before all of this. But Oscar had ‘given them victory’, or so they said, and he was of Graoungers no matter what the king thought, or so they said – so that made them men of Graoungers.

He still had not learned to differentiate all of them by the flames their souls cast in his mage-blinded vision. But he recognized them by the way they spoke – and never stopped speaking, or so it seemed. And all their flames were just as constant as their jovial voices, and bright. They filled the seats in front of him. They were making some of the other passengers uneasy – the ones on the opposite aisle, whose flames tilted away from the group of Battle-Clan warriors.

Oscar shifted his position and pulled his knees up to his chest, sitting with his back to the window. The glass pane was warm against his shoulders and neck. It was sunny outside. When Oscar moved, he pulled the blanket from the back of his seat and put it around the front of his shoulders. Then Avishag moved, leaning forward, flickering.

“Hey,” she said. “You’re awake. I thought you’d sleep through the day. You’ve been doing a lot of that lately.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said, leaning his head forward and rubbing the back of it with the palm of his hand. “I’ve had a lot to think about, and I get tired easily these days.”

“Good to hear you’re thinking again,” Badem’s voice cut in, a slight mischievous bent to it, with a note of resentment buried underneath. “And that you aren’t running off to the north to get yourself killed.”

“Don’t worry.” Oscar shrugged. “It was a momentary lapse in judgment.”

“Trying to flee back to Nie-Wypsa where you’d inevitably be executed for ‘treason’ “ – the warrior of Graoungers in exile who leaned back against the train seat, making it creak, so that his voice was closer to Oscar, said that word treason with more scorn than Oscar had ever heard from him. “ – that was a momentary lapse of judgment? Sounds like a pretty big one to me.”

Oscar tilted his head in the direction of the voice, taking in the bright and pulsing flame, and bared his teeth. “Yes,” he said. “It was momentary, though. I… well, you keep saying I brought you victory. With that over, I didn’t have much of a reason to live anymore, did I?”

“Of course you do! You’ll bring us victory again, otherwise why are we here?”

Oscar chuckled nervously. “Victory against what?”

“Against whatever the future holds.” The warrior said it with such confidence – as though he wasn’t currently in a train full of simple civilian passengers on a journey to Dresh, highly unlikely to come under any kind of attack in a land currently free from conflict – that Oscar couldn’t bring himself to argue.

“Alright,” he said, turning back toward the back of his seat and bunching the blanket up under his collarbone.

“No reason you can’t start something new,” Badem said quietly. “If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be here either.”

“Or me.” Avishag laughed. “But hey, I guess now that the siege is lifted, Dresh isn’t so afraid of angering the Invictans by letting some Valer girl into their school.” Oscar heard the rustling of paper, the same rustling he’d heard at least twice before by this point in the journey. “Vale’s almost empty of Invictan troops now. Even Oxdal is… well. As free as it can be.” Her voice fell there at the end, and Oscar saw fit to quickly change the subject.

“So this school, what’s it like?”

“Well,” Avishag said, her voice getting brighter again, “I don’t really know, to be honest. I know it’s one of the best engineering schools in Dresh. And the only reason my application got accepted so quickly, according to the person I talked to anyway, is because of two factors outside normal application materials. One, what they referred to as ‘ingenuity under pressure.’” Oscar couldn’t see Avishag rolling her eyes at that, but he didn’t need to – he remembered what a motion like that looked like, well enough, and he knew Avishag well enough. “Code for, they don’t want to say out loud that they pity me for being a Valer in the year of our eternal derangement 245.”

“Eternal… derangement…” Oscar couldn’t help but repeat the odd turn of phrase under his breath.

“And also, because the admissions officer just happened to have a friend who works as an Ultrastructure engineer in z’Ark city, who just happened to have noticed that a certain someone was messing around with their virtual architecture from all the way in the Vale, using technology so old it could have been early reconstruction era…”

“I still can’t believe you actually were doing that,” Badem murmured, and from where he sat came the sound of a forehead hitting the palm of a hand.

“Oh yeah?” Avishag said in a tone of voice that was – obviously – accompanied by sticking out her tongue. “Well, you just don’t understand how technology works.”

“You’re right, Avishag, I don’t, that’s why you’re the one going to engineering school and I’m the one who’s going to make sure you don’t burn Alaba’s house down in Dresh, her very nice house that she very graciously offered to let us sleep in for a while when we arrive there.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Avishag said. “I’m very thankful to her royal richness for letting us sleep in her house.”

“You should be,” Badem growled, but there was no force in it. His voice was smiling, anyway. Oscar smiled, too, hunching his shoulders and pulling the edges of the blanket over his back, and around, so that the corners met. He wished he could have looked out the window to see the wilderness beyond through which they traveled – if wilderness it was – but even without it, he was content. The way ahead of him was peace, and safety. And the way behind – though he did not wish to retread it – would be safe enough for those who remained behind.