A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 1917: Tears of the Gods - Part 6

He ran, and he ran, trying to maintain it all. Desperately trying to hold himself above water. He performed all those tasks that a team of men ought to have been required to perform. He pulled down the sail of that ship, resting in his soul, lest the wind tear him apart. He rushed to grab a bucket of water, to empty out the hold. Then clothes to stuff those holes that had already opened up. A mad, pointless game. A game with no victory, only delay. The only future was for those churning emotional waters to drown him. For no matter who a man might think himself to be, he could not declare war on the sea, and expect to win.

The waters turned red before his eyes. In between the real world and the imagined did Oliver dwell. Cracks in his heart, tarred closed by the imaginary. The storm and the rain were so real that he could feel it. The rain came as blood now, cast down upon him by the edge of his own sword. Three corpses of large armoured men were by his feet. His men gave up their cries in battle, they held their ground. Menacing things they were. It was hard to tell what exactly they were fighting for. Oliver didn’t think it was for him. There was the vague memory of a sense of Command in it all. But that was a thing of the past, something temporary. He’d snatched at it earlier, gathering a false sense of power inside himself, supposing that, by sheer will, he could force himself through. And all he’d succeeded in doing was determining their own demise.

The faces that he’d looked upon, the pikes that had been drilled cruelly through them. It did not seem a product of this world. It seemed like a lagging reality. Disbelief, that was the emotion he felt most strongly of all. When he turned his back on them, he could almost believe that it wasn’t true. At least with his mind. His body knew differently. The grim certainty of that sickness. Stickily it came, making him gag, fighting back the urge to vomit in the midst of combat.

"My Lord—" Words breaking through the void. Oliver turned towards Verdant, and saw his lips move, but he did not see the rest of his sentence. A man that Oliver relied so heavily on, but now, in the heart of the storm, he too turned to cruelty. His words were as sharp as what he already faced. There was no comfort there, only more pain.

Blankly, Oliver looked back. Pride still existed, despite it all. The unwillingness to let any see the true emotion in his breast. An emotion that he himself could not yet even process. A thousand different thousands, a thousand different weaknesses. They swam through him all together. So much demanded his attention. His mind raced towards the lesser problems, dealing with them first. Memories again, from years ago. Sentences said in jest, only to see the look of hurt upon their recipient’s face. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Had he not seen that in Asabel more than once?

A stab to the heart, a groaning. A brief pause in combat, as Oliver hurried the death of the enemy in front of him, finishing him with a slash across the neck, so that he could grab at his chest, and barely steady himself. Cement between the ribs. Hard it was, that heart which ought to have been beating. No blood could run through it lacked that. That expression, he’d overlooked it in the moment. That look of barely hidden hurt. Oliver was not truly the fool he claimed to be. There was weakness in him, that he disguised under that falsehood of foolishness. He did not miss the look on Queen Asabel’s face, when he had told her of Nila, and he had expressed the strength of his feelings for her.

No. No more. Oliver battered that line of thinking away. He could not afford it. A dead woman she was now, cruelly done. He could not allow himself to think that he might have been a piece of that cruelty. He couldn’t think upon the last months of her life. The tears that had undoubtedly run down her face. The resolve she’d strode forward with, pushed indeed by Oliver himself amongst all others.

Had they been foolish? Was Tiberius not in line with the laws of nature? Was he not very much a representation of its harsh rejection? Was a creature like him not inevitable, when they strove to do as they did, in pushing forward in this civil war of theirs? In overturning centuries of stability and tradition, all because of a grudge that had begun first with the name Patrick?

It was their mistake. They ought to have been satisfied with less. A single victory, that was all they needed. The magic that had been done against the Emersons, and then the claiming of Pendragon territory that had come with it. They ought to have realized then, that such a thing was the limits of their ability. They should have sued for a favourable peace. Oliver himself should have pushed them towards it. He understood not the nature of his victory – why did he assume that which he now felt, that source of strange understanding, that such a thing was benevolent? Why would it be? Why would he, the pupil of Dominus, with his understanding of the laws of progress, not be more mistrustful of it than anything?

A flash to the First King. A connection of memories. No straight lines in thought anymore, but manic flickering. Water eternally searching for gaps, trying to see it done, trying to see the creature known as Oliver Patrick permanently broken now. Drowning in that sea of his own making. That First King, his brilliance, had Oliver not had that exact thought. "He goes against the naturalness of progress..." Oliver had thought, in seeing the lay of his battles, and then the explosions of brilliance that went along with him. There was a magic to him that nature ought not to allow for. And yet, he had built it, the Stormfront as Oliver knew it. The history that they’d been unable to overwrite and fight against. That they’d been punished for trying to overturn.