• • Raydorn: The War in the Black
• July 12, 2024

Raydorn: The War in the Black (Chapter 61)

“Two people arguing cannot both be right, but they often forget that they can both be wrong.”

Lato Macedon Tritus, sorcerer of Krone, 434 A.C.A.

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The members of the Black Legion were no strangers to visions. Astrid had always had them, which is why she had a certified cult following her around. Then Andy started having them, and even began to share them with the whole group.

Jack was far less enthused to have visions of his own. Ever since he failed to get information out of their captors, he dreaded going to sleep, but he didn’t expect what he got.

Visions of his childhood friend with the sword of his lover buried in her chest. Her eyes were blinking between signs of life and unlife. Between black darkness and the bright lights of the void.

And then Jack would blink, and in her place would lay his love, with the a sword in his chest, a carolingian, the swords Andy preferred.

“Save my blood,” the words of god spoke to him, the images of his friend and lover blinking between flashing lights. The lights should have blinded him but their burn was most sweet.

“Save my blood,” she spoke to Jack in his sleep.

“Save our love.”

When Jack woke that morning, it was in another cold sweat and a throbbing leg, pained both from the newly sewn cut and the less than clean break.

Jack had spent the first day of clean up in a rather foul mood, trying to discern what the dream meant, though it was rather obvious. When Malum and Quintus spotted him on their way to Astrid, they misinterpreted his grimace to be for them when it was for the world.

The Goddess is fucking with me, she must hate me. 

His goddess was presenting him with a choice, and he refused to acknowledge that there was even a choice to make.

Typically, it’s only those who are close to god that receive her visions. Men would be considered prophets just for listening to god’s beliefs on what people should eat for breakfast. Yet, here he was among friends, arguing over what to do next, and he was committing what a cardinal would deem a prophet’s worst sin…

He kept the word of god to himself.

They have several problems, and that fact is the only thing they can agree on.

“Every minute we wait,” Quintus argued, “is another minute the warlock could be dissecting Andy.”

Their friend was taken, proving to be the object of warlock Amidala’s desires, and they could infer that it was for nothing good.

“Every minute we wait,” Astrid argued instead, “is another minute we’re sitting ducks for another attack. They know where we live, we can’t stay here. This isn’t a fortress, we can’t defend it from an invasion or siege.”

Once a hiding place is found, it’s never quite as good a hiding place as before. The only way to ever convince a hunter that the prey was not where they were found before, was to not be there when they come back.

“You two have been arguing back and forth for an hour,” Lucy growled, stepping between their verbal assault, “and if you think I’m going to be stuck in this tent listening an hour more, you have another thing coming. Do either of you have an idea of how to fix either problem?”

And to Lucy’s question, both of them were silent.

Malum broke the silence first.

“It may not seem like it, but we’ve been limiting ourselves.” 

Astrid crossed her arms, channeling her inner Andy, and mocking, “Uh, is this the part where you go full border lord?” only to find that it didn’t really fit. Malum didn’t even have to retort for Astrid take a punch.

Jack, still barely following the conversation, questioned, “Border lord?” 

Lucy told him, “Basically when you can cut yourself on Malum’s personality.” 

The pirate turned to find the assassin staring at her. It was one of those moments when the unblinking nature of the mask made the long-standing glare felt.

 “Are you done?” he asked, his almost father-like disappointment being palpable. “Make fun of me all you want, our friend has been kidnapped by a psychopath who wants to use her for some kind of sick sacrifice, and we’re refusing to help her, and not even because we’re helping others. We’re just wasting time.” 

“Um,” Lucy shook her head, bewildered at Malum’s words like they were some uncalled for accusation, “excuse me, we’re all trying to think of something-” 

“Are we?” he snapped back. “Are we really doing everything?” 

Quintus crossed his arms and the tent could her the stretch of Quintus’s skin as his muscles tensed. It was enough to draw them to him before he spoke. 

“Is there something you want to get off your chest?” he asked Malum. “Go on, clearly there’s some dark twisted secret you have that you think might help us figure out how to find Andy.” 

Lucy was happy to jump on her lover’s derision of the assassin. “And while you’re at it, why don’t you stop acting like we all have something to hide.” 

Malum’s mask didn’t move, but Lucy could feel his sideye on her. It was all about the way he showed her the bottom of his chin. “Of course we do, Lucy, I just want to know that we’re all going under together, not just me.” 

“How about you tell us what your big bad secret is and then we’ll decide if its worth trading for.” 

“Why should I? Because I’m only one willing to admit that I have secrets?” 

“You wear a mask all day, we already knew you were a secretive cuck.” 

And just like that, the tent had again devolved into petty slights and arguments. Jack was barely listening at this point, but from what he did hear, he knew, These people weren’t capable of saving Andy.

Quintus slammed his hand on the table to silence the argument, and his voice gathered the tent’s attention to them. “People! Andelyn is counting on us to trust each other. She’s counting on us to find her and bring her home. Maybe this is a test of wills, our great trial of character, where we overcome the hardest thing we ever will and learn to trust ourselves and each other. Can’t we…” 

Quintus paused as he looked around the people who stood with him, and he realized who they were… what they were. His voice was failing as he finished his thought. “… can’t we do that?” 

The tent remained speechless, closed off, unable to open up about their potential resources, or connections. They held their secrets to their chest, unwilling to put themselves up first to try and save Andy or the people of the Icy Pearl Isles.

So dangerous their secrets, that hundreds could die because of them.

So to little surprise, Quintus threw himself on the pyre first, and asked for no thanks.

He let loose a deep sigh that anyone could have seen a mile away, but it was necessary to gather all the strength he would need to speak. 

He placed his hand over his heart before he misguidedly bore it to them. “When I was a slave under the Kronish Empire, I didn’t spend my time in the mines or in any fields. I was bought off the slave ship almost immediately, at an auction by a man named Lato, Lato Macedon Tritus.” 

Lucy would have spit out her drink if she had been drinking anything. “Your- your dominus was the sorcerer of Krone?!” 

There was a pause, where Quintus could not speak, nor move his eyes from the floor. 

He’s there again, in that place.

“Yes, he was…” Quintus tried, but he knew such words would fail him. “He raised me.” The words he chose served him no better.  

“Groomed you,” Malum corrected on the spot, with little tact benefitting him.

Quintus slammed his hands on the table again, but the ‘umph’ wasn’t there. “That isn’t the issue now. I’m saying… after he freed me and gave me my name, we were on good terms. He might be willing to help us, he’s the only one I know who would be able to fight Amidala.” 

“I’m sorry,” Jack interrupted. He was no longer reeling from the knowledge that Quintus has a direct line to one of the most important men in Krone, second only to the Emperor himself. “I’m missing a few steps here. Why would the magical power behind Krone, a country from which we are fugitives, help us? And how the hell would we even find him in the biggest empire the world has ever seen?” 

Thump.

Lucy elbowed Jack. “Let Quintus fucking speak and maybe he’ll tell you.” 

Quintus tried not to bite too hard down on his tongue. Of all of his secrets that he was willing to reveal, this was perhaps the most damning. Even if truly didn’t endanger them, there was reason to believe that they wouldn’t believe him.

Still, he had to show them, and he slowly reached for the waistband of his pants.

Astrid raised her hands in protest. “Whoa, whoa, not swinging anyway does not mean I’m okay with seeing anything.”

“It’s not that,” Quintus said, as he slow tugged down, just enough to show the mark that laid on his right hip, just below the waistline.

The brand of the green dragon. 

“I… I still have my mark, the seal of my patron branded on me.” 

Lucy’s hand covered her mouth, the horror on her face not for the mark, but for how familiar she and the mark were. 

“They branded you…” she muttered. 

Astrid raised the back of her hand to her face, as if to shield herself from a sight she couldn’t look away from. “I knew it was a bad omen.” 

Quintus lifted his pants to cover his mark, as he explained it’s importance. “Lato is no mere man, he made it possible for me to call on his patronage if I ever needed it.” 

That statement made their necks tweak a bit differently, and their eyes trace around the room as they wondered if the others thought the same thing they did. 

Malum was the point to say what they were all thinking. “Is… is he able to… track you… through that?” 

Quintus sighed, knowing what was to come. “I suppose-”

“He could have tracked us down at anytime!” Malum snapped at him, the assassin uncharacteristically seething, his shoulders bunched up and trying not to rise and fall with each breath. “Do you know the danger you’ve put us in?! How do you know it wasn’t the Krones who tipped off Amidala?!” 

Quintus may have let Malum finish speak, but he roared back at the assassin. “If I really thought he was a threat I would have removed the mark months ago! Do not pretend to know Lato as I do!” 

Astrid’s hand wasn’t even on Kan Bujian when it lit up, blinding the tent and reminding everyone that they are supposed to be having a discussion. Now, all they were doing was groaning, grunting, and growling to themselves.

As the light dimmed, and they remained timid under the standing threat of being blinded again, Astrid threw her hat into the ring, unabated. 

“Quint, how could you possibly know a man, who thought so little of you that he believed he could own you?” 

Quintus’s eyes healed first, just like how everything in his body recovered first. When he recovered, his eyes were threatening Astrid with a hint of red. 

Through her own eyes, Astrid sent forth pity. 

As tensions rose high and irises were recovering, they waited for someone else to take charge, and throw their hat in the ring. The silence that then pervaded them rang like a gong.

Lucilla tried to silence it, but like her legs, her voice shook with trepidation and the burning pain in recovering eyes.

“I… I think… we may have gotten away from the plot,” she tried to say, while covering and rubbing her eyes profusely. Sadly for her, octopuses were not quick to recover from temporary blindness. 

“I think, based on my time as a dragon, that Lato is not a threat to us right now.” 

As he was rubbing his own eyes, Jack questioned, “And how do you know that? No one seems to elaborate on their thoughts.”

“And no one seems to give anyone else a chance to speak.”

“You literally paused-”

“Regardless,” the pirate interrupted the ex-Stormguard, “if Lato was going to capture and kill us, the Kronish armada would have slaughtered us long before Amidala’s forces got here.” 

Malum had righted himself, trying to pretend his eyes didn’t still suffer from Astrid’s attack. He couldn’t quite notice that he wasn’t perfectly facing Lucy when he reminded her, “We still don’t know how she found us.” 

“Really? It’s obvious to me, she followed all of you back.” Then once again, the finger was being pointed at someone.  

“That doesn’t make sense,” Jack snapped, “how would she have beat us here if she was following us?” 

“We can worry about that later,” Quintus grumbled. 

Malum was quick to question him. “Can we really? That’s another thing we need to deal with as we keep forgetting. Can we even stay here anymore? We have people relying on us, can they all stay here that much longer after we’ve been attacked? We have no defenses, we’ve been lucky to survive this long without anyone realizing we’re here.” 

“Malum’s right,” Jack said as he planted his hands on the table, started to squint at the map on it. “Someone needs to lead them somewhere else.” 

Lucy reminded him, “We have nowhere else to go.”

“That’s…” Malum spoke up as he raised his finger, only to let it droop down as all eyes slowly came back to him. “That’s what I wanted to talk about…”

“Oh, and what shelter do you have in mind?” Astrid said as she rested her hands on her chin and her elbows on the table. Her entire posture mocked him, from the casual way she sat, to the smirk on her face and her straightened eyebrows just above it.

“Fadrian,” he suggested, and her whole expressioned twitched, before it joined everyone else in confusion.

“Can someone translate that word he said?” Jack asked the tent.

“It’s a place…  a place called, Fadrian. I can’t say how I know of it, or how I will find it, only that there is definitely no one there, and that I will find out where it is.”

The other four all traded looks to each other. 

“I know that sounds confusing-”

“It’s confusing because you won’t tell us the full story,” Quintus reminded him, “I was honest-”

“And here I am without a medal,” Malum cut him off, “but I have a plan, and I’m telling you ahead of time that tonight you will not be able to find me until I find it. Come the morning, I will have a place for us to take our people to.”

Lucy pressed the table to slow down. “Whoa, whoa, let’s assume we believe you, and it happens, how would we get there?”

“Sailing and then walking,” Malum told her, “you know, how one gets anywhere.”

Lucy mocked a smile at him.

“So that’s one problem solved?” Jack asked.

“No,” Astrid said, “we have no idea what he’s talking about or what his chances are-”

“My chances are guaranteed-”

“Why?” she interrupted him back. “Why?” she repeated with a shrug of her shoulders. “Why are we supposed to just trust that?”

“Have I not earned your trust by now?”

She nodded her head, looking at him sideways as if he asked the most ridiculous question in the world. “Can we not ask the same of the man in the mask?

“Do you desire us to shed our own secrets first? Is that it?”

The questioned lingered as the assassin pondered it.

“Maybe so…”

And to think that Malum struck me as a man who always finishes first, when it turns out, he wants to have the last word, Jack thought to himself.

“Fine, I’ll let you in a little secret of mine, if that will implore you to stop acting like you’re the only one who’s earned our trust.”

Jack’s first thought judged Astrid harshly. You never give ground like that. Going out into an open field it may seem like a taunt, a way to draw them out, but not always. Not when you leave your best exposed to a volley of arrows.

“I almost had her,” Astrid admitted, her hands tightened into fists against the wooden table. “I nearly had the chance to kill her, and in the moment, something she said threw me. Something she said made me toy with her because I wanted to know more.

“She mocked me with the location of my mother’s corpse, and in the moment, I didn’t think much of it, but she said she left my mother in the riverbed of the Soday Mountains.”

Quintus was quick to say, “Astrid, I’m so sorry I had to go through that.”

“Thanks, but think more about the last thing I said,” Astrid told him as she waved away the hand that aimed to rub her shoulder. 

Of those in the room, few were familiar with the geography of their own country, let alone that of Raydorn. All save for one.

“There is no river that runs through the Soday Mountains,” Malum realized.

It brought a smirk to Astrid’s face.

“None that we know about,” Astrid said, “and I’m willing to bet that if we find it, it’ll take us to wherever she’ll take Andy.”

“And how are you supposed to find a river that no one’s ever found?” Jack asked.

“I’ll consider why it’s never been found for one,” Astrid said with her arms crossed, her eyes closed, and an arrogant smirk on her face as the others stood and stared. 

The four of them trade looks.

“Today would be nice,” Malum said.

Astrid opened a confused eye. “Oh that’s right, you’re not figments of my imagination, you can’t hear what I’m thinking.”

At that point in their relationship, only Jack appeared confused. The others groaned.

“So you see, humans have only been able to explore the land for so long, and with the griffins we’ll soon expand into the sky-”

“Please just get to the point,” Lucy interrupted her to say.

Astrid stopped and glared, her hands mid-gesture. The pause she held just to glare lasted longer than the previous one.  

“Soon we’ll expand into the sky,” Astrid continued right where she left off, “but that still leaves one place left.”

“The ocean,” Malum guessed immediately.

Astrid excitedly jabbed her finger in the assassin’s direction. “You are smarter than you look.”

Lucy muttered to herself, “Why does he get to interrupt…?”

Quintus moved past it. “You think the river is underground? Is that a thing?”

“Aren’t currents just underwater rivers?” Jack asked.

“Very astute of you,” Astrid complimented him, “I’m liking the inquisitive energy we’re building here, here’s hoping Lucy doesn’t ruin it.”

“What the fuck-”

“Especially since I need her to find it.”

Lucy immediately looked up at the ceiling of the tent, fighting the urge to roll her eyes.

She failed that fight.

“Of course you do, and what do you want me to do, swim up and down the southern coast of the peninsula?”

“Actually, it should only be less than a square mile where the Soday Mountains touch the Secan Sea. You search for currents from out of the Soday Mountains, then swim me up. From there, I can whistle for Little Stinky to come bring Quintus and Jack to us, and… I guess Malum can follow?”

“That’s a lot of faith to put into a bird,” Malum quipped.

“We put faith in you,” Astrid quipped back.

“That’s a lot of faith that there even is a river,” Malum pointed out, “and that the river leads to the Soday Mountains… and that Amidala is planning to do something on the river.”

“It’s the best lead we have,” Astrid said.

Quintus crossed his arms as he arched his brow. Her words surprised him when his own suggestion seemed far more likely to help. “Lato seems like a much surer bet.”

“Surviving the meeting, not so much,” Malum sniped. His dishonest smirk may have been hidden behind his mask, but his voice gave it away.

“You’d prefer Astrid’s plan?” Quintus asked.

“I’d prefer splitting up and doing both. We have the numbers and we have multiple things to do.”

I can see the logic behind that, Jack thought to himself.

Jack posited to the table, “So how about Lucy and Astrid try looking for this river, while you follow the stinky bird, while me and Quintus see this Lato?”

“No, that’s a terrible idea,” Malum said before anyone could respond, garnering a groan from Lucy.

“Then what’s your great idea?!” the pirate yelled at the assassin.

“Quintus is the only one who Lato might not kill, he brings anyone else other than you, and they might get killed, but since you’re needed to help Astrid, Quint should go solo.”

Lucy’s lips parted just enough that everyone saw her shock, but closed fast enough that she could speak long enough to be interrupted. “Are you nuts-”

“I think it fits,” Quintus of all people interrupted her, “Lato will be more likely to speak among friends and friends alone. That gives you all more backup in case you do find Amidala before I get Lato’s help.”

“No, I suggest that only Lucy and Astrid look for this undiscovered river,” Malum corrected. “You’re not the only one with connections, and we should be using them all.” Malum gestured to Jack as he said this, drawing the Starshield’s confusion.

“I guess that makes sense,” Astrid admitted, almost begrudgingly. 

The four others set their eyes on Jack, and for the first time, seem to come into complete agreement. “Why… does that make sense?” Jack asked as his eyes bounced between them.

“Your sister, nimrod,” Lucy reminded him.

“You should go to the Golden Plateau, see if you can find out anything from her, or among her things,” Malum suggested. The assassin’s fingers moved to trail over the map as he muttered, “That woman seems to have her finger on the pulse of Raydorn, we can use that…”

“That just leaves one thing left,” Astrid pointed out, drawing the eyes of everyone but Malum. “Where will you be, oh masked one?”

“Leading these people to safety,” he said, “I already said before that I have a place where we can hide and won’t be found. I’ll get it’s location tonight.”

“How you’ll be doing that, you failed to mention,” Lucy added.

“What does it matter as long as I get results?” 

“What do results matter if they can’t be trusted, 100%?”

Malum shrugged. “Depends on the percentage. I’d be fine with 90% or above. Regardless, we don’t need me on any of the three missions, but we do need someone to lead people while we’re gone, and that can be me.”

“Yeah, just the one with all of the secrets,” Lucy made sure to point out.

Malum pulled back from the table and made sure to visibly cross his arms before them. “You either trust me or you don’t. We can’t proceed otherwise.”

Quintus was sure to shut down the assassin’s ultimatum. “Actually, we can, we’ve pretended to trust each other when we didn’t because we needed to. There’s no reason to pretend any differently and let you think you possess something you have not earned.”

“I have more than-”

“Time and time again, you earn a bit of trust just to burn it away,” Quintus interjected, his voice looming over Malum’s the same way his larger form does. “Time and time again, you reveal that you hold some kind of information or plot that we must deal with or utilize, but never share where these sources come from. Even after Astrid and I both made ourselves vulnerable to your scrutiny, you refused to do the same for us.”

“You assume such things are equal. You cannot assume that your secrets are as great or as damning as mine.”

“Then you had no right to judge me for not revealing the name of my old master.”

On that point, Malum shifted his shoulders, as if to speak, and when they stiffened nothing came out. 

The point was made.

“Let us not sully each other’s moods with company any longer,” Quintus told them, “we have work to do.”