The New Dark Lord: Book 3- Chapter 34

Silenos did not appear upon the ground, this time. That was a surprise, and not a particularly pleasant one. By the time she had re-oriented herself, located Hexeri and Ensharia falling beside her, the opposing forces of gravity and air resistance had already agreed upon a compromise of seventy metres per second for her velocity. It took her the remaining kilometres downwards rather fast.

The first thing she did was look to her allies. Ensharia, she knew, would be fine, though she fell notably faster than Silenos did given the weight and density of her equipment, nothing shy of a supersonic impact could seriously injure her as she was. Hexeri was the greater concern. Already wounded, barely conscious. Were she to strike something hard—stone instead of dirt—she might well be destroyed. 

Calling on her Fleshcrafting, Silenos shaped the flesh of her back outwards into a makeshift gliding mechanism. It caught the air, immediately doubled the ratio of drag force against gravitational acceleration, and slowed her to just slightly shy of Hexeri’s own falling velocity. She was now closing in on the woman, reducing the ten metres between them by a few every second. 

Silenos caught the vampire, then expanded her gliding flaps again. Their velocity halved, thirded. The ground, at last, embraced them. She barely even felt the impact, so little was its speed. Silenos had taken a stronger blow seemingly every week of her habitation of the New World. She still did not care for it. 

The dust began to clear as winds carried it from the point of impact. Silenos stood up, surprised to find the turbulent weather around her. 

Unnatural. She realised, noting the strange localisation of it, the intensity. Then she noticed other things, as yet more of her sight was freed up by thinning debris. 

Men were fighting all around her, some in large, coherent ranks while others merely scrambled about in a frenzied disorder. Magic was in the air, thrown one way and the other. Silenos recognised the feeling of it soon, saw the sight of shadestuff washing over a tall, bearded man in his middle years and dissolving his body down to the bone. 

Shadestuff.

It was Sphere’s shadestuff, and following its arc soon revealed the sight of Sphera herself. She had not, yet, noticed Silenos. And Silenos decided to spend a few moments more examining her surroundings before announcing herself. 

Every new sight she found only deepened her fury.

Kaltans were fighting in one corner, Arbites in another. They did, at least seem to be on the same side, and yet far above, at the centre of it all, Silenos saw Galukar and Lilia turning their magic against one another. And between them, lying in a steaming crater…

The breath caught in her throat as she saw Nemo’s broken form, and made her way to his side with no small measure of haste. He was, fortunately, still alive. Just. Silenos hurried in healing him, not bothering to limit pain or discomfort as she prioritised tissue regeneration and speed over all else. It was for his own sake.

Nemo gasped, eyes shooting wide and body convulsing from toes to crown as life suddenly surged back into it. His head jerked around, dazed expression clearing as he eyed her.

“Who…Silenos?”

That surprised her. 

“You recognise me?” Silenos frowned. Her new body did not particularly resemble the old one, genetic clones often had notable differences even without accounting for her change in sex. 

“Your magic is the same.” The boy explained, as if it were obvious. Indeed, it was. But not for one without House Shaiagrazni’s training. 

“Stay here.” She instructed him. “Do not die again.” Silenos got up, raised her gaze to the skies and locked it upon the imbeciles now warring among the clouds. 

There were several ways Silenos might have gotten their attention, but most relied on patience. A traitor to House Shaiagrazni, a failure of her own ethics, she had found herself suddenly without patience. And so Silenos merely loaded her cannon with a particularly large shell of blasting oil and fired. The projectile struck exactly where she’d aimed, detonating between the two combatants mere metres from either and forcing them separate. By the time they had both righted themselves, before the wafting smoke had even finished dissipating across the dozens of metres it was spread, she had placed herself in their midst. 

At any other time, the look of shock upon both of their faces might have amused her. She was too angry for that now.

“What in the world do you blithering idiots think you are doing?” She snarled, flitting her gaze from one of them to the other. Galukar spoke first.

“Who are you?” He demanded, Godblade raised, body tense and wary. Silenos rolled her eyes.

“Only you could miss something as obvious as this, you drooling primate. It is a mystery to me how the protoplasmic sludge responsible for eventually congealing into your ancestors even withstood its surroundings. Surely idiocy of this magnitude must permeate the gap between prokaryotic and eukaryotic life. What next, do you have questions about the colour of the sky? The direction of gravity?”

He blinked, realisation dawning.

“...Silenos?”

“We will speak on the ground.” Silenos informed him, not bothering to answer his moronic question as he turned to Lilia. “You, use your mental powers to halt the fighting this instant.”

She paused. “I…I can’t, the Godblade—”

—”The Godblade responds to Galukar, it will not interfere with you under these conditions.” Silenos explained. “Provided its grunting apeman of a wielder does not still insist upon fighting.”

As it happened, Galukar did not. 

It didn’t take long for Lilia to calm the battle, and yet the damage done already was more than enough. The air reeked of blood even minutes after the brutality halted. 

At Silenos’ word, each and every one of her closest allies—the defacto leaders of her coalition—were gathered up around her. All looked at her with awe. Disbelief, and, for those few intelligent enough to realise the situation, fear. 

“Silenos,” Baird began, “You’re—”

—”Silence.” Silenos cut in, letting her fury show. The quietitude that followed left ample room for her to speak. She began with the most pressing concern.

“Each and every one of you is a genetic failure.” She began, letting her eyes roll across the group as Ensharia and Hexeri slipped silently into the background of it. “You.” Silenos aimed a finger at Nemo. “Tell me what happened, and everyone else fill in any gaps.”

It did not, fortunately, take long to have everything explained. The events had happened with remarkable compression. 

When the recap was done, and Silenos had processed it all, her rage redoubled.

“So, to clarify.” She growled. “You,” Her finger aimed at Baird, “Chose to immediately retreat to your own city and form a single alliance purely out of self-interest.” Baird met her eye without flinching, though she did not miss the tremble which suddenly racked his legs. 

“You.” Silenos continued, pointing now at Ado, “Did much the same, and yet somehow managed to lose the city in question.” Her eyes dropped down to her feet, humiliation clear. Silenos caught Sphera smirking from the corner of her eye, and chose her next target thusly. “While you immediately joined a treacherous force turning against the coalition out of fear.” Her head turned now to Felicia. “And you decided to leave her, a valuable ally, to perish at Mafari’s hands out of some simian need for vengeance.” The Arbite seemed rather less chastened at that, though there was a weakness to her. “And you,” she pointed now to Swick the Swift, “enabled her.”

The next target for her rage was natural, Lilia. The vampire bore it with perhaps the most dignity so far, yet even she seemed chastened. 

“I had no choice—” Silenos was so enraged by the excuse that she could not even bring herself to hear its completion, merely strided forwards and glared down at the imbecile making it.

“If you had all cooperated, this Mafari hedge-caster would have been nothing. Less than nothing. A mild irritant, at worst. And a great victory to show the world at best. Instead you bickered like children, and defeated each other for him.”

She held Silenos’ gaze for all of one second, then lowered her own. Silenos turned again. 

“And you.” She glared at Sphera, watching her apprentice melt back like ice before a volcano’s breath. “You tossed yourself in with Lilia, despite having been tutored by me personally.” The woman’s terror was clear enough, and Silenos took a long moment to enjoy it before turning again. “And you—”

She pointed, now, at Nemo, and hesitated. “...Actually, no, you did fine.”

The boy exhaled so greatly in his relief that Silenos feared he may actually lose consciousness for a moment, then her attention was turned back to the group as a whole.

“You are, all of you, inept morons who have disappointed me in every way I might have imagined, and several I could not. It will not happen again. Not because I believe there is some guarantee you will perform better in the future, but because I have now learned to expect less than nothing from all of you.”

“Silenos—”

“Be silent.” She replied, not bothering to even check who was speaking, “I have not yet finished explaining what pitiable specimens you are. If a juvenile of House Shaiagrazni behaved in the way I have seen from you, they would have been immediately sterilised to keep their genetic inferiority from further corrupting our people. And yet not a one of you so much as realised the error in your judgements—”

“SILENOS.”

She paused, felt her temper fray at the audacity of the interruption. Turned to punish it duly. Silenos halted only as she realised that it was Ensharia who had spoken, her fury wavering in the woman’s face.

“Ah, I forgot you were here. What do you want?” She found herself with suddenly less patience, the bombardment of idiocy having stripped much of her nerves away as it was revealed to her. 

Ensharia had the look of a woman suffering patiently, which baffled Silenos as it was not her who had been faced with so much ineptitude in so short a time. The paladin did not answer verbally, merely stepped to one side and gestured behind her. 

Silenos followed the woman’s hand, and felt herself stunned by the sight it led her to. 

Arion Falls descended from the sky upon a cushion of dense air, his features lined with uncertainty and his body trembling with fear. Silenos watched him land on shaky legs and begin walking them over to her. It was only with an exertion of will that she brought herself to walk over in kind. 

“Master…Is that you?” He seemed wary as he asked the question, which Silenos considered a justified enough response given what he had been subjected to.

“It is.” She confirmed. Arion Falls’ next response came almost all at once, words blending into one another they were spoken so fast. Silenos heard a half-dozen apologies in as many seconds before raising a hand to gesture him for silence.

“You did not fail me.” She replied, finding her voice seized by a loathesome shake and trying as best she could to suppress it. “You did all I asked and more. I apologise to you, Arion, for…Pushing you to destroy yourself in the attempt.”

He stared at her for a moment, eyes wet. Then lunged forwards and wrapped his arms around her waist in a hug. Silenos spasmed, her body almost taking conscious control from her as every instinct she had urged her to strike the wretched creature daring to lay—

She paused, calmed herself, forced her limbs to behave, though they remained wavering at his sides rather than returning his embrace. Falls stepped back at that, looking concerned again.

“I…Apologise.” Silenos continued. “For not returning…I am autistic.”

Falls frowned. “Is that something I’m going to…Learn?”

She decided to ignore that question. There were more important ones to address, and not just pertaining to Falls.