He Who Fights with Monsters 11

3

SHARE THE RESPONSIBILITY

Both in the underground realm of the brighthearts and previous transformation zones, dimensional powers had been tricky. Still floating in the air with his familiars, Jason tried opening a gate to his soul realm and was pleasantly surprised to find that it worked. A circle of milky white stone appeared in the air and was filled with rainbow light as the portal opened.

At least in the territory he had claimed, Jason had access to his soul realm and the resources within. What he needed right now were the messengers he had stashed away at the end of the messenger invasion of Yaresh. Jali Corrik Fen and Marek Nior Vargas emerged from the portal.

Marek was a gold-ranker who had led his personal followers to Jason in hope of escaping the oppression of the messenger astral kings. His obsession was joining the Unorthodoxy, the messenger resistance movement. Before that could happen, however, he needed to convince Jason to set them free.

Jali was only silver rank. Despite a life of misgivings about messenger doctrine, she had carefully avoided becoming entangled with the Unorthodoxy out of fear. Used as a pawn by her masters, she had been liberated by Jason.

Messengers were far from aerodynamically sound, but the magic that allowed them to fly was primarily seated in their wings. Marek and Jali both spread their wings to hold themselves aloft, situating themselves in front of Jason and his familiars. They turned their gazes upward, sensing hundreds of messengers released from stasis, purged of the corrupted messenger tree’s influence. They had stopped descending and were having some kind of discussion.

“Where are we?” Marek asked. “Some kind of dimensional space? A spirit domain? I can feel your power everywhere. Who are those messengers?”

“It’s complicated,” Jason said. “For now, just stand behind me and don’t say anything unless I tell you to.”

“I am your prisoner, Jason Asano, not your servant.”

“Then go back through the portal; there’s too much to explain right this second.”

Marek looked at Jason, then the sky above them and then the still-open portal.

“This is not the moment to test me, Marek,” Jason warned.

“Those are my people up there.”

“You don’t know what they are. And I just realised that having you here was a mistake. Go back in.”

Marek stared Jason down for a long moment before turning and vanishing through the portal.

“He’ll want them for the Unorthodoxy,” Jason explained. “I can’t let that happen.”

“Why not?” Jali asked. “Are you concerned that the other astral kings will actively pursue you if you start freeing messengers in large numbers?”

“I am now,” he said, giving her a pointed look. “But my concern is about something more important than that. These messengers are young. None are more than a year old, and until moments ago, their minds had been corrupted for their entire lives.”

“I can sense their confusion,” Jali said. “Their uncertainty. They’re worried about coming down to face us. Where did they come from?”

“They were elementally corrupted messengers.”

Jali had been one of the few messengers to see the underground realm and get out alive and uncorrupted, so she knew what he referred to.

“The corruption was removed when they were brought into this space, but it left them in a condition I suspect your kind are in directly after being created. They are, practically speaking, newborns.”

“That would mean they needed to be imprinted.”

“Because I’m already imprinted on this territory, it tried to spread my imprint to them. I intervened and had them form their own marks. Like you, but without the need to access your soul.”

“That’s normal for new messengers, but I’ve never heard of messengers being born without an astral king to obey. Not surprising, given that they’d probably purge entire collectives to cover something like that up. Where did they come from, though? There are more messengers up there now than were corrupted when we went down there.”

“A corrupted birthing tree.”

Jason pointed and Jali followed his gaze to the massive tree on the horizon. Her jaw dropped.

“That’s perverse,” Jali said. “A birthing tree outside of a birthing world? The messengers it produces would be⁠—”

“Twisted monstrosities?” Jason finished. “Yes. But this place seems to have rectified the corruption.”

“It doesn’t matter. There’s no way they would ever be accepted. There’s a reason we worked with the Purity church to summon our forces into this world. Our doctrines fall into alignment in areas such as on excising the tainted.”

“Will you be able to accept them?”

“I don’t know. My whole life, I’ve been forcing myself to follow the line, even inside my mind. I need to re-examine everything I believed.”

“And Marek?”

“I’m not sure. He rejects the astral kings so absolutely, yet his thinking remains extremely traditional. But if he thinks he can use them as a weapon, he will.”

“So much of what I’ve learned about your kind has profoundly disturbing implications. The need to brand newborns? I won’t let Marek have these children.”

“They’re not children,” Jali said. “We come into being with ancestral knowledge. Language; an understanding of the cosmos. The ways of conquest and war.”

“Knowledge is not wisdom. It’s not experience. You, of all people, understand the harm that can be done from an insulated upbringing built around a single, extreme point of view. I support the Unorthodoxy in principle, but Marek would turn them into child soldiers. I won’t let him have them any more than I would an astral king.”

“And if they want to go with Marek?”

“Then they’ll have a chance to make that choice—once they’re ready to make an informed one.”

“And who decides when that is? You?”

“Us. You and me.”

Her eyes went wide.

“I’m not ready to take responsibility for that. I’ve barely broken away from my own subjugation.”

Jason laughed out loud.

“You think being ready has anything to do with it? I would love the chance to be ready for things. It would have made the last half-dozen years a lot easier. I’m sorry, but if you only want to do things you’re ready for, you need to get very far away from me. And, if I’m being honest, I think you’re too late for that to be an option.”

“Where would I go anyway? I don’t want anything to do with the astral kings or the Unorthodoxy.”

“You don’t?”

“Marek Nior Vargas is passionate, but he’s also driven to the point of rigidity. Whether serving or fighting the astral kings, he is entirely defined by his relationship to them. I want to figure out what I am apart from all that. The people that enslaved me as well as the ones fighting them. I don’t know what to do or where to go, even assuming you allow me to go anywhere. I don’t even know where I am now.”

“I know that feeling. Lost, directionless. Suddenly aware of just how wrong you were about everything. Don’t let it show. It’s going to take some time to figure out, but until you do, don’t let the world see it.”

“Is that what you did?”

“Yeah.”

“How did that work out?”

“Mixed results, if I’m being honest. But these messengers up there? Deciding if they’re going to come down here and face us? They’re more lost than you or I will ever be. We should at least give them the illusion that someone knows what they’re doing.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Jali said. “What you’ve brought me into. But it’s obviously complex and ongoing. It would have been more practical if you’d let your brand imprint on these and change it once things have calmed down.”

“Even assuming the next crisis would be kind enough to wait for this one to pass,” Jason said, “that’s not acceptable. Yes, it would be more practical, but the thing about good and evil is that no one ever chooses evil. They choose selfishness or prejudice or easy answers over hard truths. They choose the expedient path, even if it means getting their hands a little dirty because they can make up for it later, right? Sometimes getting your hands dirty is what it takes. The ends justify the means.”

Jason looked down at his own hands.

“I’ve told myself those things. Sometimes I’ve been right, and sometimes it was just an excuse. It would be easier to let those children become slaves. To pretend they’re adults because they look like it, despite only having been truly conscious for a matter of minutes. If they do what they’re told, at least for now, we wouldn’t have to deal with their confusion. Instead of a liability, they would be an asset, and a much-needed one for what lies ahead. And I could always erase my brand when it’s over. Of course, that would be cutting them loose to face everything serving me pushed aside, plus the trauma they’d just been through. And there will be another threat they would be so useful for. I can set them free when there’s time to stop and help them properly. I’ll just leave the brand for now.”

Jason’s face was filled with disgust.

“We like to think we’re better than we are,” Jason said. “I’ve had to confront the fact that I’m not, but I’ve also seen that I can be. It takes discipline. Diligence. Determination. Recognising that while sometimes you do have to compromise, other times, you don’t. The temptation doesn’t come with a choice between right and wrong. It comes with a choice between right and easy.”

He ran his hands over his face and took a deep breath.

“I have a habit of going off on moralistic rants,” he explained. “It’s one of the ways I work through my insecurities about my own moral worth, and my friends tend to get caught up in it. And my enemies, sometimes. My dad. I have a lot of family issues, but I have trouble imagining a life like yours where the concept of family is so alien. We think so differently, yet I find myself searching for common ground. I never found it with Marek.”

Jason and Jali were floating in the air. Their heads were at the same level, which left the much shorter Jason’s feet somewhere around her thighs. He looked at her, his nebulous eyes searching for something within her own.

“Does anything I’ve said make sense to you?” he asked. “I’ve been trying to find some empathy in Marek for a while now, but you were right: his first concern is taking the fight to the astral kings. Even his companionship is more camaraderie than friendship. That’s not inherently bad, but it’s a more mercenary sensibility than I’d like. I have higher hopes for you.”

“Why does any of this matter?”