13-19. Making Connections
Benedict stood atop the low wall making the boundary of Dravkein and watched Elijah walk away. He knew he should be going with him. His sense of responsibility demanded it. And yet, his feet remained rooted in place. He couldn’t force himself to take a single step, much less to embark on such a long journey across the desolate world. He stood there for nearly an hour before a subtle and unique aroma, born on the back of a light breeze, reminded him that he was not alone.
“Am I a coward?” he asked aloud, the simple question echoing the singular thought that had been racing through his mind since Elijah’s departure.
“No,” came a feminine voice.
“I feel like one.”
The exchange came via the language of Gorveth, which Benedict had picked up remarkably easily. He’d always had a talent for linguistics, which had served him well in his use of ritual circles. The glyphs that comprised them were very similar – at least in function – to logographic writing systems. They were far more complex, but the similarities meant that the time he’d spent learning Mandarin in his youth had laid a foundation for later expertise in understanding glyphs.
He'd spent time in college learning other languages as well. After all, what else was he supposed to do with his free time? He’d never had friends. He didn’t care much for games. And watching movies usually reminded him just how out of touch he was with everyone else. His only real entertainment came from reading – usually romance novels like the ones his mother had always enjoyed.
But studying had filled the gaps. Mostly because learning seemed to be one of the few areas where he truly excelled. He couldn’t play sports. He wasn’t good in social situations. And most people found him odd and off-putting. But he could learn.
Of course, he was aware that the combination had given him a false sense of superiority. He’d often found himself thinking of everyone else as slow-witted troglodytes that simply couldn’t understand a genius like him.
That was comforting.
But it also served to set him even further apart.
And that wasn’t even considering his home life, which had never been ideal. His father had always dreamed of having a son who followed in his footsteps. An outgoing, boisterous, and athletic young man he could put on a pedestal and show off to his friends. Benedict was none of those things, which had sent his father down a very dark path.
The abuse didn’t start suddenly. Rather, it ramped up over time. What began as frustration soon became dismissive comments. And that eventually turned into insults. Finally, on a particularly bad day when Benedict refused to return to little league baseball practice, it turned physical.
Of course, beating him didn’t send him back to playing a sport he hated. It didn’t mold Benedict into the sort of son his father wanted him to be. It only made everything worse.
Until his father disappeared.
No one knew where he ended up. There were no notes. No phone calls. Just a missing car, a packed suitcase, and a man who couldn’t take it anymore.
Only Benedict knew the truth.
Only Benedict knew that his father’s body ended up in the bay, where it had presumably been eaten by hungry sea life.
Killing him had been easy. Just a few crushed pills from his mother’s medicine cabinet, added to his father’s morning coffee when he wasn’t looking. He passed out and died in his sleep.
Benedict would always remember looking down on the man who’d caused him so much pain, and rather than relief or happiness – or even grief, as odd as that would have been – he simply felt nothing. Getting him out of the house was the worst part, but Benedict had managed it. And by the time his mother returned from work, it was like nothing had happened.
Except for the missing husband, but even that failed to elicit the reaction he’d expected. Things hadn’t been good between them – not for a long time – and she seemed more relieved than anything else.
When the police came, they made their reports and vowed to look for him, but even Benedict – at only fourteen years old – could see the writing on the wall. He knew that no one would ever really look for Keith Emerson. He just wasn’t worth it.
That was the only person Benedict ever expected to kill. Not because he didn’t want to. Rather, because it was the only real opportunity. Not until he got a taste of real power.
Looking back, Benedict knew that he’d experienced something of a psychotic break. Rationally, he could recognize that he took things too far. While his former bullies might have deserved punishment, they probably didn’t need to die. And that town he slaughtered just after coming back from the Trial of Primacy?
He regretted that.
But he would never regret killing his father.
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And now, he regretted not going with Elijah.
“You are no coward.”
With a sigh, he glanced back at Jasai’i. The cracks in her skin constantly pulsed with malevolent power, surrounding her with an aura of corruption that, while too weak to actually affect anyone, was just strong enough to put people off. She was like him. She’d spent her whole life being shunned, and for something she couldn’t change.
Perhaps that was why he was so drawn to her.
Benedict had no idea why she reciprocated that attraction, and when he’d first noticed it – almost a week after it should have been obvious that she’d latched onto him – he thought she either had ulterior motives or was playing a joke on him.
But it soon became clear that that was not the case.
She wove her arm under his. Only a couple of months, and she already felt like she belonged next to him. It was like one of his romance novels made real, though without the excess drama that came with those soap-opera style plots.
It just felt good.
Right.
As if it was always there, waiting to be discovered.
He sighed. “Do you think he’ll make it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Ithalon is thousands of miles away,” she said. “Even if he can survive the touch of the abyss for that long, he still must contend with the monsters.”
“He can do both,” came the reply. Often, Benedict had found himself thinking that if his traveling companion hadn’t been saddled with his presence, Elijah would have been perfectly at home in the abyss. It still wore on him, but he didn’t seem to be nearly as affected as Benedict.
Which made no sense.
The excised world was one of extreme desolation. The only remaining life had been twisted into all-consuming monsters, both dangerous and disgusting to behold. And yet, none of that seemed to bother Elijah. If he encountered a monster, he killed it, and he seemed to appreciate the stark beauty of the environment in a way that Benedict never could.
That wasn’t to say that it was easy for him. It clearly hadn’t been. But when Benedict compared his own reaction to Elijah’s, there was a clear difference. And it had been the same in the Labyrinth, where they’d endured multiple deaths during the time loop and had been forced into hundreds of deadly battles along the way.
Elijah had seemed unbothered by that as well.
Meanwhile, both Benedict and Hu Shui had reached the ends of their ropes early on. From there, it was a free fall into horror.
“He’ll make it,” Benedict reiterated.
“Even if he does, Ithalon will break him.”
“Is it so bad?”
“It was.”
She didn’t need to say anything else. She had been born well after her people had settled in Dravkein, but the collective memory of that horrible city lived on. The simple fact that they’d fled – as a group – across thousands of miles said everything that needed to be said. That it was worth it showed what they thought of Ithalon.
“They will not allow him to use the Branch. Not unless he pledges allegiance to the Synod,” she pointed out.
“I think you underestimate Elijah.”
“He is only an ascendent,” she said. “A powerful one, to be certain. Achieving a Mantle of Authority at that level is unheard-of. However, an ascendent can only do so much. Even if he was a demi-god, he could not stand up to the entire Synod. Each of their leaders is a late-stage demi-god on the verge of becoming deities. The power gap is too great. If your friend fights them, he will die.
“Or worse,” she added.
“He wouldn’t reveal Dravkein’s location.”
She shook her head. “Everyone breaks. When he does, he will happily tell them what they want to know, just to make the pain stop. We never should have allowed him to leave,” Jasai’i said.
“Trying to stop him would have been the last mistake anyone here ever made,” Benedict replied. “Zek understood that no one here had the power or authority to stop him.”
As a low ascendent, Jasai’i lacked the context to understand just how powerful Elijah really was. On a rational level, she could tell that he was different. The existence of his Mantle of Authority was evidence of that much. Yet, she likened it to an ability that mimicked their crystal pendants.
It was so much more than that.
Even Zek, the town’s most powerful hunter – and her surrogate father – had told her as much. But Jasai’i simply wasn’t equipped to understand that, when it came to power, levels and tiers weren’t everything.
Elijah was a man who’d conquered multiple Primal Realms, and in two cases, he’d done so entirely alone. And those accomplishments paled in comparison to the fact that he’d survived for months on an excised planet, and with nothing but his Mantle of Authority for protection.
What’s more, he’d dragged Benedict along with him.
No – there was no way that the people of Dravkein could have stopped Elijah from leaving. Or from doing anything else he wanted to do. And if it came down to a fight between the Druid and those demi-gods in Ithalon, Benedict felt certain which side would emerge victorious.
And it wasn’t the Synod, that was for sure.
After a few more moments, Benedict finally took a deep breath and turned away from the desolate landscape. The sight of the farms was comforting. So too was the low wall and cluster of buildings in the distance.
Civilization.
Belonging.
Survival.
It represented so much that Benedict had long sought. That it had taken falling through a portal and into the abyss to find it was surprising, but he was prepared to accept and embrace the oddity of his situation.
Together, he and Jasai’i returned to the city. At first, Benedict had been a little put off by the deformities he saw among the people, but that had only lasted as long as it took him to realize that no one there cared about appearances. Certainly, they noticed them, but from what he could tell, they cared about those mutations as much as people on Earth cared about a person’s hair color.
Of course, there were differences.
Jasai’i represented one of them, though that was assuredly because of the aura of abyssal corruption that surrounded her. It was subtle. Barely even noticeable. And it didn’t really affect anyone, save to influence the way they saw her.
Benedict didn’t care, though. He saw past that and to the kind, generous, and beautiful person she was.
As they entered the city, he was once again taken aback by the organization of it all. Everything was in its place. Everyone worked together. It was what he’d hoped Benediction would become.
Flawed? Perhaps. But a functional collective nonetheless.
So, as he strode through the town, he found his mood brightening. And by the time he reached the dwelling he’d begun to share with Jasai’i, he felt grateful for his situation. After all, how many people could claim to have been dumped into the abyss and survived?
Was he worried about Elijah? Yes. The same could be said for Earth’s fate. But his concern for the latter was muted by the fact that, with Benediction’s fall, there was nothing tying him to the planet he’d once called home.
Earth had shaped him into the man he had become, but if he was honest with himself, he would shed no tears for its excisement.
Did that make him a bad person? Maybe. But in that moment, he just didn’t care.