128. Welcome to Krongard

  Two months and change into her ascension, Serac’s opinion of Krongard and its residents was at an all-time low. Even so, she couldn’t pretend to dislike the ride up to the Realmtree’s Crown.

  Gulloyne the Fjordstrider, head freshly regrown, lived up to its epithet, breezing through the Roots’ gentle slopes before making equally short work of the steeper Trunk. Even the near-vertical escarpment that led up to the Crown barely troubled the giant salamander and its reptilian feet.

  If anything, Serac had a much harder time keeping her breakfast as she took in the head-spinning view. The escarpment, known colloquially as the Neck, was a true sight to behold, branches of the Sanzu River sliding down its cliff-face as waterfalls. Sprays of droplets then caught and bent the morning sun, ‘bridging’ the cascades with rainbows.

  Beautiful. Breathtaking. But also… forbidding. Serac now understood why King Tyr never needed to defend his palace from would-be intruders. The Crown’s natural landscape had already done the job for him.

  I wonder if Ash could hack it? It did use to scale the two walls on either side of the Fibrinous Canyon. The problem is its ‘teeth’ would absolutely leave a mark, and not a pretty one at that.

  In that sense, Gulloyne displayed not only efficiency but also genuine respect for the Realmtree. Even as it moved at speed, it picked its landing spots with care, leaving nary a felled tree nor trampled bush in its wake. Its Realm-loving manners reflected its master’s attitude, and at least on this count, Serac could give credit where credit was due.

  The master himself made for interesting company along the way. It’d been three days since the Realmhunt, and a much smaller ‘party’ had made the trip to officially welcome Serac and Zacko into the Kronvakt. King Tyr acted as chauffeur, holding the reins to Gulloyne from inside a leafy cabin atop the salamander’s head. As for Serac, she’d been given the ‘passenger seat’ right next to Tyr, where Queen Loha normally sat.

  “Gorgeous, isn’t it?” The Yaksha king boomed, louder than the wind that whistled all around them. “I love everything about the Realmtree, but I’ll say the Neck is my favorite spot. I’d do this everyday if I could, but I know that’d be asking too much of old Gulloyne. Might not look it, but she’s getting on in years, you know!”

  As tickled as Serac was to learn the giant salamander was a girl, she decided to focus on her Yaksha companion. It was rare for the king to travel without Loha’s wiry figure tucked somewhere within his shadow. The queen’s absence, funnily enough, had the effect of making Tyr appear just a tiny bit more ‘man-sized’ than usual.

  On this occasion, Tyr had done away with his royal regalia in favor of a breezy tunic. Much of it now fluttered incessantly in the wind, save for a pauldron and chestpiece fashioned from the Frostkrill’s jade carapace. More notably, the king had come equipped with his Immortal-grade Instrument.

  Even from up close, Serac found it difficult to define exactly what TAMPER was. The closest reference point she had was a hammer, wooden shaft slung diagonally across Tyr’s back and metallic head sat just above his unarmored shoulder. Specifically, it was this head that defied Serac’s knowledge of hammers and their ilk, for it was shaped like a flat, square plate. She tried to imagine it in battle… and pictured someone being flattened into the ground rather than bonked in the head.

  Despite Serac’s incomplete understanding of TAMPER, she took note of its resemblance to certain objects of significance. One example was the hammer-like weapon wielded by a Hunter from her ‘vision’ of a bygone Realmhunt. Another was DREDGER, a blunt Instrument slung across a much smaller back. Knowing what Serac knew now, her throat tightened again as she thought of the pink frog.

  How can you sit here and be jolly when you’ve got all that darkness hidden inside your chest? She all but blurted, right then and there. How can you pretend everything’s fine, after all that you’ve put Renate through? Your own daughter!

  But now more than ever, Serac must seal these loose lips of hers. She and Zacko were on a mission, and they could ill afford to give away the game before they’d even infiltrated the palace. To that end, she settled for a much more neutral question, but one still intended to probe.

  “How did you become Pretjord’s Realm Immortal?” she asked, careful not to sound accusatory nor to put too much emphasis on ‘you’. “I’m still pretty new to this, so I’m trying to learn as much as I can. As I understand it”—as briefed by Trippy, but the king didn’t need to know that—“Immortalization, strictly speaking, is a kind of transmutation, isn’t it? But whether an Anchored soul becomes Wayfaring or Immortal depends on precondition and intention.”

  If Tyr had detected unfriendliness behind Serac’s words, he didn’t show it. He took a moment to give the question due thought.

  “Couldn’t have summarized it better myself.” Tyr turned to his passenger with a serrated smile. “You do have a way with words, Serac Edin”—not her words, but the king didn’t need to know that—“but I suppose you’ll be wanting the specifics.”

  Tyr paused again, ready to uncork a whole lecture.

  “To borrow your parlance, the ‘precondition’ to Immortalization is for the Realm to be ‘between Immortals’ at the time. That’s a simple fact: a Realm can only have one Immortal at any one time. It’s true for all instances of a new Immortal coming to be, whether it happens in Naraka or Suradao or anywhere else in-between. The second part, intention, is much trickier to establish, and is often what delays the process. So much so, sometimes, that it can leave a Realm ‘Immortal-less’ for hundreds if not thousands of years. That was the case with Pretjord… before I came along.”

  The king momentarily fell silent. Serac too kept quiet, sensing the man had much more to tell. To get out of his chest.

  “Have you ever seen a Starveling, Serac Edin?”

  The sudden turn in the conversation startled Serac, but it happened to be one for which she had a ready-made response. “Not here in Pretjord, thankfully, but… I’ve seen its equivalent in Naraka. More times than I care to count.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Tyr nodded grimly before continuing, “Then you understand there are forces in the afterlife that would drive a soul away from his true nature. Or perhaps Frenzy is our true nature, and everything else an ultimately futile struggle to delay the inevitable. But I digress. My point is, souls would do anything to keep the claws of Frenzy at bay. Things they would never dream of in their better moments.”

  A hell bumpkin Serac might be, but she was a bumpkin who’d seen some shit. She remembered hangry Zacko and his threats to salt and grill their mackerel friend. She remembered hopeless Pazu and head-bashing so severe it kept his horns from healing. Most of all, she remembered herself groveling at a Jailer’s feet, just to avoid spending another second inside a black-hot Furnace. She knew exactly what King Tyr meant.

  “Before I became King, the Realmtree was a war-torn hellscape, perennially on fire from all the fighting on the ground. Yaksha against Yaksha, brother against brother, father against son. No one knew for certain who started the war. We just knew we needed to keep fighting, if we had any hope of sating our hunger. Of living to fight another day.”

  Serac held her breath. Subconsciously, she looked over her shoulder, at the handful of Kronvakt members who’d accompanied the king on this trip. Resplendent in their jade armor, they clung to Gulloyne’s back with casual ease, chatting among themselves or watching the scenery go by with bored, distant looks. (Zacko was among this group, having tied himself down before promptly, incredibly, falling sleep.) They looked far, far removed from the kind of fighting their king now described. Did they know anything about Pretjord’s war-torn past? It was certainly the first Serac had heard of it, and she turned back to Tyr, rapt with attention.

  “I was a general in one of the warring factions,” the shark man went on. His eyes pointed toward the canopies above, but who could say what he saw there? “Which faction? It doesn’t matter now, and perhaps it didn’t matter then. At the time, I was an Anchored soul, but strong enough to be feared all over the Realm. I daresay none could best me in battle, not even the Wayfarers. Except one.”

  Somehow, Serac knew Tyr’s next words, even before they boomed against the wind.

  “Loha of the Reticent Tribe. The first and only ascended Narakite in gods knew how long. And what a treat it must’ve been for her! To have escaped literal hell, only to be met by a reality perhaps even more hellish than the one she’d left behind. But that didn’t stop her. Nothing could stop her.”

  As he told the story, Tyr’s eyes began to dance with unbridled passion. Serac understood that he indeed was reliving his past. That he was falling in love again.

  She recalled hearing a similar but more sanitized version of the story, this time two months ago at a moonlit dinner table. Whether it was the way she’d reframed the question, or that the king was simply in a sharing mood, hitherto unthinkable details spilled out. Not the least of which was that Loha had met Tyr before the latter had become an Immortal.

  “She put us warring generals in our place, one by one. She blew out the fires that had ravaged the Realmtree for centuries before her arrival. Most importantly, she showed us Pretjordians a different way. She taught us that we could all eat at the same table, as long as we laid down our arms for long enough to lift each other up instead. Imagine that? A Rakshasa from hell teaching us Yakshas of the land of plenty… how to feed ourselves without killing each other for scraps.”

  Serac did try to imagine, without much hope for success. To her surprise, the notion didn’t feel as far-fetched as she might’ve expected. Maybe because it hit close to home.

  “Before long”—Tyr again—“as I fought shoulder to shoulder with Loha, and as we began to build rather than fight, at some point, her calling became my own. Then I wondered, not about the then or the now, but about what might follow after we’re gone. We might have built peace—a table where everyone can eat—but how long will it last? With no one to carry the torch from generation to generation, won’t the Realm descend again into the ruinous free-for-all it’d once been? And as I wrestled with this conundrum and worried my fins off for Pretjord’s future… before I knew it, I’d become Immortal.”

  Serac blinked several times. “Wait, that’s it? Just like that?”

  “Just like that.” Tyr nodded with a smile of amusement. “I understand you Wayfarers receive these… messages… but it wasn’t like that with me. One day, I was an Anchored soul like any other. The next, I was Tyr Djofulsen the Realm Immortal, with centuries if not millennia (fingers crossed) for me to wrestle with my conundrums and worry over my Realm’s future. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

  Tyr Djofusen the ‘Great Pacifier’, Serac added in her mind. Now I understand where that epithet came from. And because she understood, she found herself all the more bewildered. What had happened to this once great man who’d wanted nothing more than for everyone in his Realm to eat at the same table? To the wise woman who’d dared him to dream so in the first place?

  Now that he’d gotten his story off his chest, Tyr leaned in closer and lowered his voice.

  “Don’t repeat this to anyone else, eh?” he said with a conspiratorial smile. “We Pretjordians have had a good thing going for more than a few generations now. The younglings today don’t know anything of the wars from before my reign, and I’d like to keep it that way. Between me and Loha, it’s enough that at least two of us remember. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have told you, Serac Edin, but then I suppose there’s just something…”

  Tyr trailed off. His shimmering-black eyes took on a wistful haze as they fixed upon Serac’s cinnabar face. The Rakshasa felt deeply uncomfortable, as though she might be intruding on something private. But she was unable to look away. And as she stared back at the king, she wondered exactly who he saw sitting in his passenger seat. Serac Edin? Loha of the Reticent Tribe? Or a third—?

  “Sometimes, I find myself wishing it hadn’t been this way.”

  Serac waited for Tyr to continue. After some time, she prompted, “Meaning?”

  “Meaning… I wonder if I was meant to be a Wayfarer instead of an Immortal. I envy you, you know. In a way, you’re more invincible than I could ever hope to be. And I’m not talking about your ability to reconstitute; gods know there are many ways to cut short a Wayfarer’s Path, if one were so inclined. No, I mean your freedom. The freedom to fly wherever you dream of, to live however you please, to die in a blaze of glory—should that be your calling—with each and every Ksana of your journey seared fresh in your mind.”

  Serac not only listened but watched intently. A sudden change had come over Tyr, one she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Indeed, she wasn’t entirely sure if the change was of a physical nature.

  “Because, you see,” the Yaksha king continued, “when you’ve been around for as long as I have, you start to forget things. Faces. Names. Tales shared over a hearty meal. Desires loosened and pried from drunken lips. Heartaches spilled onto a lover’s shoulder. Then there are also things… that I’d rather forget, but will nevertheless haunt me for the rest of my days—however long that might turn out to be.”

  White hollows at the centers of shimmering-black orbs. Ripples of the past, present, and future. Dredged up, only to be tamped back down.

  Serac almost said it then. Almost gave away the game, right then and there, if only to see how much of the mortal dreamer remained in this immortal ghost. But that was when Gulloyne the Fjordstrider slowed its strides, as the Neck’s cliff-face made way for the Crown’s dense, lush greenery.

  “We’re here,” Tyr murmured hazily, as if waking from a dream. He then composed his face into another smile, teeth well-hidden. “Well, you’ve made it, Serac Edin. Welcome to Krongard.”

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