Chapter 706: The Formal Meeting — The Before and After of the Dispute
Nightingale had given Roland the full account. He’d spent the subsequent hours reconstructing what it implied, and had arrived at the meeting with an extensive list of things he wanted to know.
The office was not quite what it appeared. Leaf was stationed near the window with two potted plants arranged as decoration, their vines dormant and indistinguishable from ornamental growth until someone triggered them. No potted plant had ever looked more harmless. No vines had ever been more ready. If Phyllis activated the God’s Stone range and stalled in place, the time between stall and retaliation was a matter of seconds. Scroll and Sylvie completed the perimeter, quiet and unhurried. Nightingale was in the Mist.
The setup was necessary. It was also, Roland hoped, invisible.
When Wendy led Phyllis through the door, he smiled and said, “Welcome to Neverwinter. Can I interest you in any tactical eyepieces?”
Absolute silence.
Nightingale’s hand found his shoulder from somewhere invisible and applied pressure with meaningful specificity.
“Your Majesty.” Her voice was a murmur. “Please.”
“Ahem.” He straightened and recovered his composure. “So — you’re Taquila’s No. 76.”
“My name is Phyllis.” She placed one hand at her chest and inclined her head — the gesture of a formal delegation meeting royalty, the edge angles precise. “No. 76 was a name suited to a disguise. Since that purpose has passed, so has the name.” A pause. “My dear King.”
The wording was slightly off — too archaic, calibrated to a court protocol that predated his kingdom by four centuries. He didn’t mind it. Words were less interesting than what lay behind them.
“Sit. I have questions.”
“If I’m able to answer, I will.” She settled across from him with the particular posture of someone maintaining dignity in conditions that had not been designed with dignity as a priority.
He poured tea, considered his starting point, and chose the one he’d been most curious about.
“The first thing I want to understand is you — and the Union’s history. If we’re going to work together against the demons, knowing each other accurately matters more than knowing each other politely.” He set down the pot. “I’ve always found it difficult to understand how the Union divided. Witches pursuing their own kind — especially after the perfect God’s Punishment Army form existed and didn’t require killing witches. Why did it happen?”
Phyllis appeared to have expected other questions first. She was quiet for a moment.
“No one expected things to develop this way,” she said at last. “Before we entered the maze ruins, none of us could have predicted what we’d find there.”
“The split is connected to the ruins?”
“Without the ruins, there’s no Soul Transfer. Without Soul Transfer, the survivors have no method of continuity.” She paused. “But in the ruins, they found something else as well. Something that divided Lady Natalyae from the Queen of Starfall City. Whatever was found there — I can’t describe it yet. Not before we’ve identified the Chosen One. At that point, Lady Pasha will speak with you directly.”
“Pasha.”
“The successor to the Three Chiefs. The leader of the surviving Taquila witches.”
Roland thought about this. A group of desperate people, fleeing the fall of their civilization, taking refuge in an ancient ruin — and finding something there powerful enough to split them from each other even as the demons closed in. Whatever it was had to carry enough weight to matter more than survival itself.
He set that aside for later and returned to the nearer question.
“Could the two factions not coexist? If the perfect form of the God’s Punishment Army didn’t cost witches their lives — if it was truly voluntary — why did Alice need to become the absolute ruler? What was the compulsion?”
Phyllis’s expression shifted. Not dramatically. A quality that hadn’t been there before appeared in it, and he recognized it as the look of someone about to say something that cost them something to say.
“Not cost lives.” She said it softly. “Your Majesty… no. That is not what the process was.”
“Explain.”
“The shell I currently occupy came from a God’s Punishment Warrior whose transfer failed.” She looked at her own hands — the gesture of someone checking inventory in something they don’t entirely trust. “When I first inhabited it, I could not stand. Holding a cup required effort I don’t have words for. Walking — the simple mechanical action of walking — I had to rebuild from nothing.” She looked up. “It took nearly fifty years before I could move through the world as though the body were mine.”
The witches in the room were very quiet.
“The magic that runs through God’s Punishment Warrior blood destroys most of the physical senses. Touch, taste, smell — gone. The reason these warriors don’t feel fear of injury is that they don’t feel injury. For us, inhabiting these bodies meant erasing the physical history of everything we had been. Every sensation we’d built our experience of the world on: absent. Every learned movement of the original body: useless. Starting again.” She paused. “For combat skills and weapons — if you’re counting those — measured in centuries.”
Roland was doing the arithmetic. Fifty years to hold a cup. Centuries for combat. And the shells themselves age and fail, which means the process repeats.
“Alice needed shells in quantity,” he said.
“Yes.” Phyllis’s voice was even. “A warrior who has spent two hundred years in a shell is exponentially more capable than one who has spent twenty. When a shell ages beyond use, if the soul can transfer into a new one, it brings everything accumulated — compressed and condensed, not lost. The adaptation time shortens significantly: years rather than decades. But the shells had to come from somewhere.” She paused. “From weak witches. From the ones who were unlikely to survive to advanced age regardless. That was Alice’s reasoning.”
“So she needed authority over those witches.”
“She needed absolute authority. To use some as material, she had to eliminate any structure that would prevent it. The Union’s original governance had too many points of resistance — the Three Chiefs, the Quest Society, the various councils. She had to replace the Union with something she controlled completely.” Phyllis closed her eyes briefly. “Under the pressure of the approaching Battle of Divine Will, most of the senior staff eventually acquiesced. The cost of opposing her outweighed, in their calculation, the cost of compliance.” She opened her eyes. “If the ruins hadn’t produced a different discovery — if Natalyae’s faction hadn’t found what they found — the God’s Punishment Army would have become the only future available to any of us. And Alice would have built it on whatever she needed to build it on.”
The room was quiet for a moment.
“What did Natalyae’s faction find?” Roland asked.
“Patience, My dear King.” The faint, bitter edge in her voice had not entirely cleared. “First — the Chosen One.”