In the time since I’d blasted out my ritual shredding pulse into the night and stalking the estate looking for Orleander and the Baron, the whole place had snapped back to life. Now that I’d freed us all from the shroud the ritual tried to smother us in, I couldn’t even imagine how I’d missed how subdued everyone had been.

The conference room didn’t yield me any results in my search for Orleander, so I started searching door by door, barging in without knocking in my search. Most rooms on this level showed no signs of habitation, but I figured I’d find him eventually.

‘You always find it in the last place you look’ is such a dumb turn of phrase, because you stop looking when you find what you’re looking for… of course it’s the last place. But in this instance, it really did feel like the last door I barged through was the last place I could have looked, and I barged into an unexpected scene.

Orleander lounged in a recliner, looking over some paperwork, while Ms. Black stood in the middle of the room, head completely uncovered, with a shocked look on her face. She might be surprised, but in a contest of who was more surprised I would have been the champion. Her uncovered features were shockingly familiar. Shock all around then.

In her features, deep chocolate brown eyes and lustrous long brown hair, I clearly saw the resemblance to my best friend and Marshal of my army, all whose death I’d caused. My best friend’s daughter, who should have been dead for 20 years, stood in front of me. There could be no mistake.

“Oh shit.” I really needed to work on that.

“Yeah, oh shit is right.” She rasped out, then stormed out of the room, wrapping up her head again on the way out.

I watched her leave, then turned back to Orleander. He hadn’t even bothered to put down his paperwork, and showed me a lazy, unconcerned smile.

“Deep Gods, why didn’t you tell me? You had to have known.”

“It was none of your business, nor my place to tell you.”

“You don’t think a potentially vengeful daughter of my former best friend and supreme commander of my army, who by the way, all died horrible deaths as a result of my actions, wasn’t my business?”

Orleander started to say something, stopped to think for a second, then said, “Well, since you put it that way, there may have been a reason to tell you after all.”

I paced around the room for a second, trying to work out all the ways this could go wrong, before I remembered why I’d come to find him in the first place.

“She isn’t set on a path of vengeance, by the way,” Orleander said, interrupting my attempt to start the conversation I wanted to have.

“I can worry about long lost daughters seeking retribution for their father’s death later. Right now, we need to talk about what the Inculids are up to. Did you feel anything in the last 30 minutes? Did you feel any change? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“Now that you mention it, I was preparing to retire for the night when I suddenly had too much energy. I was speaking to… well you know who she is now. I spoke to Kayla about it and we both had similar bursts of energy, so I decided to get some work done. Kaya decided to take a walk, and you found her preparing to go out.”

“Exactly. They’re suppressing us. They’re making us tired, squashing our consciousness. I’m not sure exactly what form it takes, but I tore it up, ripped it right out of their ugly little chitinous hands, at least temporarily. They’ve got a ritual going that’s reaching us all the way out here. We were already being attacked, and we didn’t even know it.”

“What did you do, exactly?

“No point in me explaining it, it would be like trying to explain colors to a blind person. The thing is, I can’t cover everyone at once, and it’s not permanent. It’s creeping back in, but I can’t cover the whole town at once. I need you to help me figure out how to get me the greatest coverage with the fewest locations, so I can squash this little trick of theirs. You’re good at that sort of thing.”

“Ah, you want to maximize your efficiency then.” Orleander said it in a half-joking manner, but I spotted a genuine smile creep up onto his face.

“Exactly.”

“Let us fetch the Baron then, and some maps and a drawing compass.” Orleander lifted himself out of his lounge chair, composed himself and his clothing, and we left the room in search of the Baron.

Unlike me, Orleander seemed to have a handle on who was where, so it didn’t take us long to round up Baron Palambre and some equipment. We sequestered ourselves in the conference room.

I guesstimated the effective range of my own abilities, but that didn’t account for the resonant effect I’d felt. There was no telling how far that reached without some extensive experimentation.

Using the drawing compass, Orleander mapped out three places on the map of the town that, between them, would encompass the entire town.

“The main problem is that I can’t keep it going, my interruption of the effects of their ritual. If I could just keep it going, I could ride around town and bash my willpower out into the world, but I have to sit and reach a certain state of mind before I can do it, which will limit my mobility during an attack.”

“I don’t have a particularly military mind, but I would imagine that with the addition of the Ilfid Brutes to our forces that you should not be forced to take the field yourself. You should have plenty of opportunity to act as you wish,” Orleander replied.

“Almost all of my forces should have arrived by mid-morning as well,” the Baron chimed in.

“If I’m out of commission because I need to navel gaze to do what I need to do, then that leaves nobody to be in overall command.”

Kan’on probably had the training, just as part of the total indoctrination of his militant lifestyle, but I doubted he had the experience. Besides commanding the Brutes, which still surprised me, knowing him he’d want to be out in front looking for strong enemies to duel like an idiot.

“Kayla will be there. She is not the commanding type, but she has a knack for being where she needs to be. And despite your opinion of Clyde, he’s a capable captain at the very least. He will follow your orders and even has a modicum of initiative about him. You should be able to rely on him to maintain the situation for the times when you must be ‘navel gazing’, as you put it,” Orleander said.

I flinched at hearing Kayla’s name, then scowled at Clyde’s. Clyde the gaudy clod. I resisted the thought of relying on the deeps taken idiot but thinking back I couldn’t remember a time when his actions proved him incapable.

“We’ll see. They have shown no signs of approaching the town yet. For now, let’s retire. I think we’ve figured out all we can for now.”

At their nods, I left the room and started making my way back to my lair, but stopped and sighed. I had another problem that needed to be addressed before relaxing.

I reached out with my newly discovered tendrils into the Flow, searching for Kayla’s familiar presence. Finding her, I weaved my way through the hallways to the ever-popular front courtyard, to see her posted up against the wall, staring at Kan’on contemplate his failures as my student.

I stopped next to her, quiet, not sure how to start a conversation that was bound to be awkward.

“You know, this is a stupid conversation to have to have,” she said, her raspy voice piercing the silence of the courtyard. “I did everything to avoid it. If it were up to me you would have never known who I was.”

“Damn, you beat me to it. I thought I was finally going to have the chance to be the jaded and wise old man.” I paused for a few seconds to gather my thoughts. “Blood tells, you know. I knew who you were the very second I saw your face. I thought you had died along with everyone else. I looked for you.”

“I was away, at a cousin’s estate. Listen… I don’t want to do this. I hated you when I was younger, but the older I got and the more I learned about the circumstances, the less I hated you. Now, I still blame you, but I at least understand the why of it all. When Kings and Dukes get greedy, shit happens and the ones who pay are the help.” She paused, appearing to choke on her next words. “And in your case, you also paid with literally everything and everyone. I don’t hate you, but we’re never going to be best buddies.”

I sensed venom in her voice, but it was mild at best. I tried to work up old feelings, old emotions attached to her father and family, but came up empty. She may as well have been a complete stranger, no scratch that, she had only been five years old at the time, she was a complete stranger.

“I’m with you. We just need to be able to work together until this is all over, then I’ll never bother you again,” I finally said.

“Agreed.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

Kayla walked off to find her own space and I slouched my way over to Kan’on and plopped down next to him.

“You know, drama follows you around like the smell of rotten fish; it stinks and clings to everything and you can never get it out,” Kan’on said from his pretend meditative state.

“Don’t you start in on me also. You’ve got bigger things to worry about, like stopping me from tipping you over like a newborn faun.”

He snorted but didn’t deny it.

I leaned back on my hands, watching the horizon slowly light up as dawn approached. I always enjoyed sunrise in the mountains. The sky lightened more than it would have in flatlands, then the sun burst over the horizon, piercing my eyes with spears of sunlight.

Something else came with the dawn. The ever-present thrum wasn’t such a thrum anymore. The Inculids pumped it up a few notches, and now a deep beat stabbed itself into my consciousness. If I were a betting man, and it was obvious to literally everyone that I was, I’d bet today was the day they would come for us.