Chapter 692: Blood Feud
At some point, Argrave stopped thinking about what was happening and what he was doing to stop it. It was as though he retreated within himself, going from an actor in a movie to someone watching it. He saw the spells being cast, saw his body rot away again and again to fight against this corruption encroaching upon the world, but he couldn’t say that he was the one doing it.
That was the only way he managed to stay sane.
It was impossible to distinguish between the wounds he caused himself and the wounds Gerechtigkeit imparted. They were one in the same, fundamentally—pain brought about because of an enemy. But as he all but showered in the embryotic tissue of the calamity of judgment, he began to see strange things—impossible things. It was as though time itself warped, bringing him back to eras of the past where the battle still raged.
Argrave saw great scores of enemies standing up against Gerechtigkeit. He saw Vasquer and Felipe I in their ranks, saw gods like Erlebnis and Law. He saw them rage, fight, and struggle against the calamity. He saw Gerechtigkeit’s hand, too, weaving things in the background. Manipulating. Corrupting. Exposing. Controlling.
The time-warped hallucinations came without an end in fragmented flashes of hardship and terror. He saw, for the first time, the perspective of the other side of this calamity of judgment. In coming so close to this embryotic tissue, he was exposed to the fundaments of Gerechtigkeit, who’d been born out of the child that’d once been Griffin. It wasn’t some curated propaganda piece, either—it was the true essence, showing the utter depths that Gerechtigkeit had been willing to sink to for the vaguest chance of victory.
Argrave saw that he’d attempted to create an infected lineage that permeated throughout the beast races, securing their loyalty in the next cycle—and in so doing, engineered their genocide. He’d played subtle roles in countless revolutions, ensuring that they never ended as ideally as those who’d began them intended. Argrave saw over a thousand revolutionary advances in magic and science utterly squashed in a deliberate effort to keep people ignorant. His watchful eye was a constant headwind against all progress in the world.
Argrave had always known that Gerechtigkeit’s influence wasn’t limited to the brief period that came once every one thousand years, yet he’d never pictured how extensive his oversight was.
He’d create great empires in one stroke, and have them cannibalize each other in the next. He used the lessons of one hundred thousand years to goad people into repeating cycles that he’d mastered. Jaray had been skillful, but Gerechtigkeit had mastered this. The gods were his only foil, the only countering force that brought forth their own power and experience sufficient to banish him every time. The gods were isolated, yes—but they were safe, and not at all inferior to him in terms of power. They balanced the cycle, ending it every time.
There had only been two exceptions to that rule: Argrave himself, and Lorena.