Chapter 149: Unique and Temple
They compromised by leaving the system priest’s right hand free so he could write, putting a pencil in it, and then leaving him almost completely alone on a chair by the seashore. Aethe was watching him, of course, but without anyone talking to him, he was free to make whatever notes and write whatever explanations he wanted. It took him a few hours and a few revisions to get it right to his own terrified, desperate standards, but when he was done, he had failed to so much as try to escape or launch an attack the entire time.
“Here,” he said. “I did my best.”
Marco glanced at the Gulf Isle priest and Elisa, who had been monitoring his efforts at discreet points during his writing time. They seemed to agree with him. Whatever he had written, it was the best he could do.
“Thanks,” Marco said and turned to the Gulf Isle priest. “Here’s some gold. Could you feed him and keep an eye on him?”
“You aren’t worried he’ll try something?”
Marco looked at the nervous, broken man in front of him and shook his head. He had never seen anyone so broken and unlikely to cause trouble in his life. He suspected when the man finally found a quiet, lonely place that he’d cry for a while before he ever considered doing anything else.
“No. He’ll be fine.”
The crew of the sinking ship was left where they were, though Marco had the Gulf island priest arrange for them to be fed, too. Once everything was set and their surroundings were clear, he handed the papers to Elisa to read. She shuffled through the small bundle of essays, pulling two clear of the others as she did and handing them to Marco.
“Here. He was very thorough, but none of it really matters besides those two. Tatric’s is on top, so read that first.”
Marco set down the other sheet and put his gun down on it to hold it in place while he read the note on his father. It wasn’t incredibly long.
| On the location and status of Tatric As the reader of this missive already knows, Tatric was approached by the system authorities with a small contingent of troops and forced to leave his home for the regional capital. In this, he showed very little resistance and appeared to expect the process to have occurred at some point or another. Tatric was allowed some amount of freedom while the team extracting him from Gulf Isle restocked their ship and rested, and he spent it saying goodbye to various friends and family. He appeared to leave a similar message for his adoptive son with each of them, which he was allowed to do. As you have likely guessed, Tatric himself is of little interest to the capital government or the system priesthood. He has neither substantial power nor a unique class and is of note only because of his close associations with an escaped unique class. He has been fed and kept in relative comfort during his stay at the capital, a prisoner only in the sense that he is not allowed to leave a relatively large defined area or to do anything that would present a danger to himself. He is in large part what you would consider to be bait, a method of luring his son to the capital. I can confirm that whatever scenarios the capital’s forces had in mind, they did not expect someone who could easily demolish their system-scorch defenses with superior force, and would not have attempted to lure you in if they did.
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