The Greatest Archmage To Have Ever Lived [OP MC, LitRPG]

The nimbus cloud drifted low over the Darransh and began its descent as Sael sat cross-legged near its center with his hood up and his coat buttoned to the throat.

The gifts from Antor were in his inventory and the Vaelith Needle was in his coat pocket. He kept it there instead of storing it. He wasn't sure why. It felt like it should be closer.

Oz stood at the edge of the cloud, looking down. He hadn't spoken in over an hour, which was either contemplation or sulking. With Oz, the two were sometimes indistinguishable.

Sael had slowed the cloud on the way back as he'd been hoping the conversation from earlier might resume, the one about where Oz was going, what he wanted, all of that. It had ended abruptly when they got too close to something real and Sael tried to ease back into it from a different angle. Oz answered with a grunt. He tried again, lighter this time, and Oz looked at the horizon.

So that was that.

Soon, Darransh came into view below them.

The city spread across the base of a wide plateau, white stone and open colonnades catching the last of the evening light. The cloud touched down on the hill east of the city. Grass flattened under it, then sprang back as it dissolved into mist beneath their feet.

The sword of Succession was still there.

It was planted in a boulder at the hill's crest: a single blade driven into grey stone up to the crossguard. The rock beneath it was enormous, twice the height of a man, cracked along one side and covered in moss where the rain hit. The sword itself was old, much older than Sael himself.

People in Darransh gave directions by it. Turn left at the sword. Just past the sword on the hill. Nobody had tried to pull it out in a long time since Sael. There were stories about what would happen if someone did, but the stories contradicted each other, and at some point the city had collectively decided it was easier to just leave it alone.

Sael walked past it without stopping, and Oz followed.

The path down the hill was paved in broad, flat stones set into the earth so long ago the edges had worn smooth. Olive and apple trees grew on either side, they were gnarled, leaning things, all of them older than the current buildings by a few centuries at least and the evening air smelled like something burning. Incense, maybe. Or pyres.

One of the trees rustled as Sael passed. Then another, and there was no wind.

Sael slowed. "Hello there. Long time." He touched a trunk as he walked. "Hello. How are you?" He passed a smaller one, thinner than the rest, and paused. "Oh. You're new."

"What are you doing?" Oz said.

"Greeting them. They greeted me first."

"...The trees?"

"Yes." Sael moved down the row, nodding at a few more. He couldn't name them — they were trees, not people — but he could feel them the way you'd feel a room full of faces turning toward you. They remembered him, or remembered something about him. The land did, at least, and the trees were part of the land, and he was its king, even if he'd been gone a long while.

Something dropped from a branch above him and he caught it without looking. It was an apple, small and a little bruised.

"Thank you, apple tree," he said.

Oz stared at him for a moment, then strode forward down the path without comment.

Sael tucked the apple into his coat and followed. "Goodbye," he said over his shoulder, to no one Oz could see.

They passed the first people near the bottom of the slope. A pair of soldiers in Darranshi attire standing at the edge of the avenue. They noticed Sael and one of them started to raise a hand halfway to a salute before he seemed to remember he wasn't supposed to.

The other just stood very still, as if trying to figure out the correct thing to do and settling on nothing. Meraine and Darransh's most decorated general had introduced Sael to the army a few hours ago. The guards, the officers, most of the garrison. It had been a strange afternoon. These were people who'd probably grown up with his name on documents and carved into walls, a king who had been symbolic for over four centuries, and then one day their general lined them up and said, this is him, he's back, and also please be discreet about it.

Sael smiled at them as he passed. The one with the half-salute lowered his hand and gave a small, uncertain nod instead. The other opened his mouth, closed it, and stepped aside.

They were getting better at it.

More people came into view as they moved into the city proper. Citizens in white and grey linen, moving between the colonnades slowly. A woman was hanging dark cloth from the lintel of a doorway and a man sat on the steps of a fountain with his head in his hands. Two children stood near a pillar, quiet in a way children weren't usually quiet.

The steward of Darransh, Fassel Grenn, was dead and the kingdom was mourning.

Sael kept moving through the crowd.

"Excuse me." A sidestep around a woman carrying a basket of linens. "Sorry." A half-turn to avoid a man hauling a crate of something that smelled strongly of salted fish. "Pardon — yes, sorry, just passing through." He kept his hood up and his head down, observing the people.

No one looked at him twice. He was a man in a coat and the city was full of men in coats. They were passing a low stone wall near the mouth of an alley when a cat appeared.

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It was sitting on the wall, one leg raised and tongue mid-stroke against its inner thigh. It was a large, gray tabby and upon seeing them, it stopped grooming.

Its eyes — flat, yellow, unimpressed — found Oz, who stopped walking.

His head turned slowly and locked onto the cat.

A long moment passed. The kind of moment that, in nature, typically preceded a very short and very decisive event. And the cat licking its mouth seemed to only confirm it.

"Oz," Sael said, without looking down. "Do not kill the cat."

"I would not call it killing," Oz said. "It would be natural selection. If it cannot recognize a being of incomprehensibly higher order for a common bird, then the failure is architectural. I would merely be... editing."

"Oz."

"The species would thank me, in time."

Sael turned to the cat. He crouched slightly, which put him at eye level with it, and said, "Please go."

The cat looked at him, understanding Sael's message, then it dropped off the wall on the alley side and vanished into the shadows.

Oz watched it go as his feathers settled.

"We'll have to find a way," Sael said, straightening up, "to channel whatever that is into something more creative than murder."

"Murder implies a victim of consequence," Oz said, resuming his walk. "That was a cat."

"Still murder."

"Debatable."

Sael was about to say something else when he heard a gasp. It came from the right, so he turned in that direction and found a man sitting on the ground against the wall of a shuttered shop.

He was perhaps around fifty. His clothes were wrinkled and a bottle of something amber rested between his knees, half-empty, clutched with both hands. His eyes were wide and aimed at Oz while His mouth was open.

"I—" He swallowed. "Is that chicken talking?"

Oz stared at him, making Sael sigh.

The silence that followed was very brief and very full.

"I," Oz said, "am a rooster."

The man blinked. "...What?"

"A rooster," Oz repeated, turning his full body to face the drunk. "A rooster. The male of the species. Note the comb, the plumage, the spurs as well as the carriage, the stature and the the bearing, all of which communicate, in terms that should be legible to even the most profoundly pickled human mind, that I am not a chicken. A chicken lays eggs. A chicken clucks. A chicken is a round, dull, waddling thing with the cognitive architecture of a warm stone. I am none of those things. I am a rooster. If you are going to hallucinate, at least have the decency to hallucinate accurately, youimbecile."

The man stared at his with wide eyes.

"Tsk."

Oz turned away and resumed walking.

Sael considered several possible things to say, weighed them, and settled on: "He has a temperament."

Then he followed Oz down the avenue, leaving the man on the ground with his bottle and his new understanding of the world.

They walked in silence for the rest of the road until a building announced itself even before they reached it.

It started with the paving. The streets in Darransh were white limestone, fitted and maintained, but at some point the stones underfoot changed. They became darker, wider, and unevenly spaced, not from neglect, mind you, but from scale. They had been cut for feet much larger than human ones.

Then the columns came. They rose on either side of the avenue, twice as thick as anything else in the city, carved from a stone so dark it was nearly black. The carvings on them were worn down but still readable if you knew where to look. It depicted titans.

They had been here before the age of men. Before Darransh was Darransh, and what was left of them was this hall with gates over ten meters tall.

Sael stopped and placed both palms flat against the stone and pushed.

The gates moved with a low and grinding sound and Sael walked in.

The ceiling was so high the brazier light along the walls didn't reach it and the hall was full of people.

They were seated along both sides of the central aisle on long stone benches that had been fitted with cushions, probably in the last century or so, because titans didn't need cushions. Darranshi nobility was there: men and women in whites, greys and deep blues, many of them wearing mourning cloth over one shoulder. The city's elites. Merchant families. Military officers in dress attire. Advisors. Minor officials whose titles Sael had been told once, earlier that day, and immediately failed to retain.

Meraine was seated near the front with a small group of other priests of the Light. Their robes were pale, almost luminous against the dark stone.

Oh, and Robin was there.

The fox was off to one side, sitting on a bench he had clearly claimed entirely for himself, eating grapes from a bowl. He was eating them one at a time, plucking each grape with his fingers and placing it into his mouth.

Sael took all of this in from the doorway.

The feeling that arrived was the one he'd been expecting. It was the reason he had walked through the city instead of flying or teleporting, why he'd stopped to greet every tree on the hill and let a conversation about Oz's species classification with a drunk man go on longer than it had any reason to.

He'd been putting this off.

Not deliberately, but some part of him had understood that this room was waiting at the end of the walk — a hall full of people who needed things from him and were watching the door — and that part had found every available reason to take the long way around.

But it had to be done. The orcish uprising hadn't ended when the fighting stopped. There were consequences. Political, military, territorial. And Corruption had been involved. Leaving the matters unaddressed would be the kind of neglect that turned a bad situation into a catastrophe six months later and he felt he owed these people more than avoidance. They had lost a steward, had questions, were mourning and uncertain, and they had gathered here because they believed he had answers, or at least a direction. So...

Sael walked forward.

The first person to notice was a soldier near the entrance, who rose so quickly his cushion slid halfway off the bench. Then the man next to him stood. Then a woman across the aisle. It moved through the hall the way these things did: row by row, bench by bench. The nobility. The officers. The merchants. The officials. Meraine and the priests. One by one, then in groups, then all of them, until every person in the hall was on their feet.

They faced him, and they saluted like they do in Darransh: right hand to the left shoulder, fingers spread, a small bow of the head, which happened to be the salute of a people to their king here.

Sael stood at the head of the aisle with his hood still up and his coat buttoned to the throat. The expected thing was a speech... or a greeting, at minimum. Something kingly and resonant, appropriate to the grief in the room and the weight of what had brought them all here.

Hmm. He was certain he had prepared a few word of introduction for this moment, while on the cloud, but when he opened his mouth, nothing came.

His mind, which had been perfectly adequate all day, supplied him with exactly zero usable words. A hundred and some people were standing with their hands on their shoulders, looking at him, waiting.

"Hmm," Sael said.

It was not a kingly word. In fact, it was not a word at all, but in Sael's head, it had meant something closer to hello, possibly even hello, I acknowledge your grief and I am here, but the distance between what a sound means inside your own skull and what it communicates to a hundred people standing in formal salute is, sadly enough, vast.

The silence held, and a few of the people in the front row glanced at each other.

"Hello, sir!"

It came from the side, completely indifferent to the solemnity of the moment. Robin had a hand raised in a wave and a grape in the other. His tail swept once behind him, easy and loose, and something in Sael's chest eased.

"Hello, Robin," he said.

This one came out naturally, and because Robin had given him a foothold, Sael took the opportunity to fix his mistake. He looked out across the hall, and said:

"Hello, everyone."

Hmm, maybe a few more words.

"Shall we begin talking about what to do next?"

There. That was perfect.