Chapter 22

Aris hated his new-found notoriety. He hated the stream of penny-paper reporters that hounded him whenever their seedy eyes landed on him. He hated how recognized his face had become. All Aris wanted was the relative anonymity he had once had. He longed for the times before the attack when he could walk the streets unrecognized. It was all Aris could do to keep reporters from breaking into his breaking into his house. It had taken him breaking the hands of one particularly intrusive reporter that had broken into their property for the newsmen’s efforts to calm down.

His hard demeanor had only added to the mythology that the penny-papers and the public had built for him. It wasn’t long before Aris denied interviews altogether and took to disguising himself before leaving his estate. He prayed for the day his notoriety died down to happen soon.

He knew his fame would diminish soon, it always did. Few people remained in the spotlight in Fiell for more than a month or two, but still, the notoriety was a harsh burden to bear until that day his name faded came.

What would the public think if they found out that with each passing day, he was coming to understand, and even agree, with the actions of the would be assassins more and more?

What had happened to him? What were those visions? What could they mean? Why did they seem more real to him than the life he knew?

Aris used to be filled with unquestioning loyalty, but the visions had changed him. His other life told him of the monster Emperor Evrain truly was. Aris was terrified that he found himself believing the alien memories.

Why?

Aris didn’t know what was real anymore. The visions provided clarity. They broke through a fog that the General hadn’t realized he’d been living under.

But they couldn’t be true, could they?

What did it say of him if they did somehow happen to be true? He had pledged his life in service of the Emperor. Had he been the sword arm of a monster? Was he little more than a glorified dog for a man that had destroyed their nation and stolen its soul?

If that was true, how could Aris live with himself? How could he reconcile his pursuit of truth in everything with his service to a monster?

Aris didn’t know the answers to those questions and it haunted him.

The problem hounded his every step as he kissed Corrine goodbye, then skulked through the streets he’d once marched proudly through in order to avoid the eye of a public that would martyr him in a second if they ever heard of the doubts boiling in his mind.

“What's WRONG with me? Why am I letting these visions get to me so much?” Aris interrogated himself.

Aris knew why though. It was because, somewhere deep down, he knew the visions to be true. Aris had dedicated his life to a pursuit of the truth and knew the sound of its call.

It explained something that had bothered him for a decade.

It was his brother Van had died.

Van was charismatic and had risen quickly through the military ranks. He easily could have reached the rank of General long before Aris had he not suddenly retired from the service. Aris had never known why his brother had done so, and had been perplexed and devastated by Van’s sudden betrayal that had ultimately led to his execution.

Van’s love for those he protected put even Aris’ now lauded devotion to shame. He would only have ever been involved in the rebellion if he truly believed it was for the good of Vealand. He would not have joined with the rebellion lightly.

Van had never told Aris why he had joined the rebellion, even in the days leading up to his death he would only ever say it was for the good of the Empire. Aris had thought his brother insane, but despite that, had ultimately fulfilled Van’s last wish by not attending his funeral and taking in his daughter Sephira.

The visions showed Van in a new light. They explained the actions that had perplexed Aris for years. They explained why a man who’d dedicated his life in service of Vealand would betray it all in an attempt to kill its leader.

Could the visions be true? Why did they have truth’s ring to them?

Could Emperor Evrain truly be the monster that Aris was learning his brother had thought he was?

What frightened Aris was that, with each passing day, he was finding it easier to believe. The truth called to him and he would follow it wherever it would lead.

Even if it plunged him into the depths of hell.

*****

“Sir,” a guard saluted Aris as he walked through the servants entrance to the keep that he’d gone through thousands of times before. There were stars in the young man’s eyes.

“Would he still look at me the same if he knew I was questioning everything I knew? What would he think if he could see that with each passing day, I find myself cursing the fact that my intel saved the life of the Emperor?” Aris thought while he gave the young soldier a polite, but strained smile.

Aris bowed his head as he walked through the servants corridors, there was no way he wouldn’t be recognized, but at least the servants understood the concept of silence and personal space. Many watched in wonder as he passed, but none spoke. Aris silently thanked them for their silence.

He had forgotten how precious it was.

By the time Aris made it to the offices that made a ring around the great hall where the Emperor entertained his regular guests and held state dinners, he found himself in a dark mood. Not even the thought of his loving family at home, which buoyed him daily, was enough to lighten his mood.

Unlike all the other state officials, Aris had forgone having a secretary, few were more than glorified lovers anyway.

Aris preferred to escape communication mishaps by personally dealing with whatever came his way, so as he entered his office, Aris closed the door and threw himself into the piles of paperwork that had been stacked on his desk.

Aris dove into a spate of recent kidnappings that plagued his city. They were happening again. Why? It seemed as if every two or three years, there would be a burst of child abductions. What was behind them?

The cases had chafed at Aris for years. They were the one crime that seemed to grow more muddy with time. Every time Aris revisited those piles of cases, things just became more and more confusing.

As Aris perused the pile of reports on the kidnapping something clicked.

An alarm had gone off in Aris’ mind. There was something there. He just could place what it was yet.

What was it? Why was the report bothering him so much? There was something there. He knew it.

The answer eluded him.

Despite his best efforts he couldn’t dredge up whatever his subconscious had grasped.

“Emperors balls!” Aris cursed as he resisted the urge to scatter the pile of reports in frustration.

“This is getting me nowhere. I need to take a break. There’s something there. I know it. I just need to find out what it is. But I’m never gonna figure it out by staring. Something needs to be shaken loose.” Aris thought as he got up from his desk and made his way to the nearby water gardens housed next to Emperor Evrain’s dwellings in the keep.

Aris would go there whenever he needed to think. The calm bubbling of the waters soothed his mind and helped him to focus. Despite his fear of swimming, the brooks soothed Aris.

Their beauty refreshed his soul.

Aris didn’t know how long he’d spent sitting on his favorite rock next to the smallest —but in his mind, most beautiful— waterfall in the gardens, but it mustn’t have been too long because when he’d cleared his mind and felt focused again, the sun had barely seemed to move.

He let out a long sigh and stared up at the evergreen trees that towered above the gardens. They were a deep verdant green despite the sun shining brightly into his eyes.

Green.

Green.

There was something there. Something about the color.

Green.

The trees were a brilliant shade of green.

“That’s it!” Aris hissed in excitement, his mind finally made the connection it had been searching for.

Aris ran back to his office. He tore through the piles of case notes on the kidnappings. Where was it? How long ago had it been? Nearly fourteen years ago?

There!

Aris found it near the bottom of the pile of reports on the kidnappings he kept in a corner of his spartan office and would often revisit.

There was the report. Aris tore it open. He devoured every detail of it. Everyone had noted the unsettling deep emerald of the child’s eyes. The drawing that the the inspector had made was striking.

They looked exactly like the eyes of one of the Inquisitors that Edrian had used to kill Dren.

The faces were the same.

The eyes were the same.

*****

The revelation hit Aris like an avalanche.

The Emperor was responsible for the kidnappings! The man he had served for decades was the man behind the abductions that plagued the city Aris served!

How could he do such a thing? How could he take children and groom them into monsters?

“What reason could Emperor Evrain have for this horror?”

A sudden headache hit Aris. A vision crashed into his mind.

He was talking to his brother Van, lines of worry painted his face and the heavy dark bags under his eyes told him that Van hadn’t slept well in weeks.

“I don’t know if I can keep doing this,” he said to Van. “How can I tell them the truth? It would break them even more.”

Van’s strong hand grasped him by the shoulder. “We do this to keep there from being any more children like him,” Van pointed to the body of a young man, little more than a child really. “We keep doing this so we won’t have to kill anymore sons and daughters who were stolen from their families and warped into monsters.”

His mind jumped back to the young man whose life he had just taken. He had barely been out of puberty but his body already had a latticework of scars crisscrossing all over it. The years of torture the boy had undergone coupled with his grooming in violence had made the child into a deadly assassin, one that could overwhelm the minds of his victims with visions of horrific torture.

The young Inquisitor must have been tracking him and when he had left Van’s side for but a minute, he had attacked him out of nowhere.

He nearly blacked out from panic as memories of having his fingernails torn off and then jammed down onto the bloody stubs where they’d once been had made him lash out in a panic. It had only been by sheer luck that his blade had caught the boy in the neck and had severed his carotid artery.

The look of despair and betrayal in the boy’s eyes as the life left him along with the blood that pooled beneath him as he fell to the ground, bleeding out, and the Emperor’s spell wore off would haunt him for the rest of his days.

It was the memory of the look in the young man’s eyes that he latched onto. He steeled his resolve and turned towards Van.

He nodded, knowing that Van understood he would do whatever it would take to tear down the Emperor. He would fight until his dying breath to save just one more child from the fate that the young one he’d just killed had suffered.

When the vision passed, Aris found himself curled up on the ground next to his cherry-wood desk. His head throbbed.

It was nearly a half an hour, and two cups of coffee —a guilty pleasure he had shipped in from the south— later that his headache abated and he was able to re-center himself and dig into the stacks of reports on the abductions he’d gathered over the years.

Aris felt like an idiot as he searched through the various stories. Could the sense of dread that the witnesses reported feeling be due to whatever dark power the Inquisitors used?

Were they kidnapping children to groom into becoming members of their monstrous group?

Aris didn’t know. But he did know that they were involved in the kidnappings.

He just needed to figure out how.

“They’ve got to be intertwined somehow,” Aris thought. “But how can I figure it out? Who can I talk to? I can’t pull aside an Inquisitor and interrogate them, that would let them know I’m on to them. What can I do?”

He wished he could go home and tell everything to his wife Corrine, but the thought caused him to panic. He needed to protect her. The last thing Aris wanted was for the Inquisitors come after her.

No he needed to keep her safe. He couldn’t lose Corrine.

There had to be someone. Someone Aris could confide him. Someone with unusual wisdom…Someone like his old commander.

The man who had helped to form him into who he had become.

The man who had strangely disappeared around the same time Van had become involved with the Rebellion.

Someone like Wallace.