Chapter 27 - I'm Open To Suggestions

“What do you know about the Tale of Dusk and Dawn?”
“Corbin, are you trying to distract me?”
“Please, it’s important,” I insisted, pulling one of the table’s chairs out and gesturing to it for her. I quickly cleared the table of my reagents, pulling them back into my bag, before taking a chair opposite of hers.
Willow watched me do this for a moment, held up a finger, then went to my kitchen where she found a glass and poured some water out of a skin I’d left on the counter. Then she came back and took the seat I’d offered. It was only after she took a sip that she spoke.
“It’s one of the oldest prophecies the Fates delivered from their temple atop Dawn’s Peak. It’s something like, umm… When Dusk starts to rise and darkness becomes inevitable, a Hero of Legend will emerge to claim the title of Dawn’s Chosen to shine light across the land once more,” she explained, watching me a bit warily, her hands wrapped carefully around the glass. “The Hero has three destined companions: the Shield, the Priestess, and the Stranger, who are meant to travel with him to collect the dark relics of the Lord of Dusk before he can retrieve them from the prisons they’ve been hidden away in. They are meant to find the First Jewel of Dusk from within the Mountains of Mystery, where the Stranger will light the path to the next. I’ve heard a few different songs that say different things though… One says the Hero’s party fights the Lord of Dusk at his tower… another has it happening in the Mountains of Mystery and I’m pretty sure I heard one where the Lord of Dusk brings the ancient dragon Wingguard in Dusk’s Chasm to his side… I’m not sure if that matters or what you’re getting at though…”
“Missing a lot of details, but that is the gist of it. I’m sure Gwendoline would be happy to recite all three acts of the Church of Dawn’s historical record of the Tale,” I said with a nod. “But notice what’s missing? What none of the tellings actually say?”
“Umm… no?” she said, a finger making small motions on the glass.
“Where the Lord of Dusk comes from…” I said. I expected this to be met with some level of understanding, that she’d put the pieces together without me having to actually say it since it was easier when I could just agree with the guess…
“He’s the embodiment of darkness… why does it matter that the prophecy doesn’t say about where he comes from?”
“I’m not the—“ I cut myself off, the assumption striking a nerve. There was no confusion this time and Willow’s eyes went wide as she stood up hard enough to knock her chair over.
“Wait, are you saying that you’re–” she hesitated but refused to blink. “Corbin… are you the Lord of Dusk?”
“No…” I said. She didn’t relax. “And yes. It’s… complicated. Please. Just, let me explain.”
“As if I’d go anywhere after you said that,” she said, though she notably was still standing, her hands braced on the table.
“I’m not the Lord of Dusk… not yet,” I explained, already feeling the urge to rub my temples.
How did you explain the concept of Prestige to a world that didn’t know about it? It had only taken a few resets before I’d started digging into the system, trying to uncover as many secrets as I possibly could. In all of that research, I’d never found a single mention of another soul that had the feature, let alone anything like my entire Escape Artist trait.
There’d been one life where I’d managed to bring the eastern chapter of the System Archivists under my thrall and I still found nothing. I’d done research. I’d traveled out into the far reaches of each of the frontiers. I’d even gone through the ridiculous ‘ceremony’ that the Ashborn call “Welcoming” to be allowed into their libraries and still found nothing. Not a single historical record of anyone else in this world whose life was in a torturous, repetitive cycle.
It was only after the Cult of the Crow formed during a life when I’d been in a particularly… uh… piratey mood, that I stopped letting my followers know about my many lives.
“The darkness grows stronger each time it’s extinguished,” as the Grand Crow of the Cult had put it when I found myself choking on the poison they’d fed me… I survived just long enough that time to make sure I took his head. I certainly wasn’t going to die alone and he had it coming… It was a good last memory for that life all things considered.
“How old do you think I am?” I asked, the silence doing nothing to ease the tension in the room. Willow, still braced, looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
“What? What’s that–” she cut herself off when I sighed and then actually looked like she considered the question. “I don’t know… a year older than me? Three-and-twenty?”
“Give or take a few… decades, probably…” I said, trying to mentally go through it in my head. “I could probably figure out the exact number if I really thought about it… but off the top of my head… while I might look younger than Daniel, I’m–mentally at least–just over a thousand years old.”
“What?” Willow said, laughing a bit sarcastically. “If you’re going to just lie to me–”
“Willow,” I cut her off, staring right at her. She stared back, considering it for a moment before her nose scrunched.
“Stars… if you’re that old…” she said, quiet enough that I wasn’t sure I was meant to hear it. She seemed to briefly get more disgusted by the thought then shook her head. “Were you, what… just around when the prophecy was made? Are you immortal?”
“Dusk take me, I hope not,” I said, leaning back and looking up at the ceiling. “I’ve never been physically older than… maybe sixty? There might have been one time I made it to five-and-sixty. Not sure why, Frederick always gets a bit more fervent by mid-life about eradicating darkness from the world.”
Willow’s posture finally relaxed just a bit. I looked down from the ceiling just in time to see as she picked up the chair and sat back down. She looked down at the table, reaching up and biting on the back of a finger as she started to mutter to herself. I watched her carefully, waiting for the next question instead of immediately offering more. When more than a minute had passed and she hadn’t looked up, I started to get a bit more concerned though.
“Willow?”
She held up a finger, another few seconds passed, then her eyes met mine.
“How many times?”
“How many times what?” I asked. That was a rather broad question even though I logically knew exactly what she meant.
“Corbin… how many times have you done this? If the Prince always gets some way during a specific point in his life, that means it’s happened more than once… and if you’re over a thousand… mentally at least as you say… then… how many?”
“Across fifty lives so far, I’ve fought with and against Frederick… and he’s killed me at the end of all but four of them,” I said, feeling a weight lift from my shoulders. She raised her brow at the obvious question and I brought a hand up, lifting a finger as I listed them off. “His tank Gregory killed me in one of them after I’d managed to get Frederick trapped in a pit of Strangling Snare Vines. There was one where I was poisoned by a cult that decided it was better that I got stronger every time I died. Wingguard, that dragon you were talking about, yeah he ate me in one… even after I fed him a Stoneboar and offered all the gold I had on me.”
I stopped just shy of explaining the last one… and of course Willow noticed.
“That’s three…”
“I… Let’s just say I’ve been alive a long time and a few lives before this one where I finally realized I’d gotten really, really tired of it all…”
“Stars…” Willow said with genuine awe. It was surprisingly short-lived as she refocused. “Why? Can’t you just… not do it? Why does he almost always kill you?”
“Because the prophecy says the Hero of Legend shall strike down the Lord of Dusk… and Frederick is a man who wholly, with every ounce of his being, believes in the prophecy. And sometimes, believing in it is enough to make it true,” I sighed.
“But why you?! You said you’re not the Lord of Dusk this time… why not just… not be the Lord of Dusk?”
“Stars, Willow. What do you think all of this is? Why do you think I basically begged you not to say anything?!” I said, feeling just a bit frustrated. “Everything. Every last thing I’ve done this time around has been to avoid exactly that. And yet here we are, with Gwendoline lingering around town and this unbelievably pompous, rootrotted moron is about to go hand deliver the news to Frederick all because he thinks it’ll give him control over it!”
“That’s… oh…” she said, still chewing on her finger. “Can’t you just…”
“He won’t accept no… not from me. Frederick will do everything he can to follow the prophecy, right to the letter. Three companions. Nine Jewels that he’ll destroy without caring what he’s doing.”
“The Jewels? Aren’t they… the embodi– sorry,” she said, cutting herself off when her eyes met mine. She didn’t exactly shrink back, but I must have made a face the moment she started to say the word. “If they aren’t just pure darkness… what are they?”
I stared at her, debating if this was something that she actually needed to know or not… Sure… she’d been getting angry at me for exactly that mentality, but this wasn’t something she’d be able to unlearn… Not without me dying. And while she might have been able to accept the truth, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know, just in case she wouldn’t.
“Can I not tell you… not yet?” I struggled for the words. “They aren’t just darkness and they don’t deserve to be destroyed just because some random mystical people said thousands of years ago. But knowing the truth… it’s a lot, and it doesn’t matter to the rest of it.”
She seemed to take a beat considering it, watching me with emerald eyes that seemed to be watching for any sort of reaction. After a moment passed, she nodded.
“If knowing what they are doesn’t affect what you’re telling me… then fine… for now,” she said, and I felt a wave of relief. That was odd, since theoretically I could have just lied to her or even not said anything. A thought seemed to occur to her and she perked up just a bit. “So wait… the relics are the reason you always become the Lord of Dusk?”
“Not exactly,” I said, my brow pinching together. “They were the original reason… but every time since has been because that’s where it inevitably leads.”
“And if you just… choose not to do anything?” she asked, and I looked at her again. She shook her head, “I know… I know… that’s what this is… humor me.”
“I’ve tried a lot of different things… maybe not everything but enough that I can guess the outcomes of most choices,” I explained. Though there was still tension in the room, the longer we talked, the easier I found it to just… tell her. “And yes, I have tried walking away before… but I did it by isolating and trying to hide from everything. Sure, I’m sort of doing that here now… but it’s not quite the same. No random cult here just yet luckily…”
“But you haven’t actually tried everything?” she asked, ignoring the last bit after I’d muttered it.
“I haven’t been alive nearly long enough for that. But, like I said–”
“You can basically guess the outcome, yeah I heard you. But you also thought there were only a few options for dealing with De Numont and we just figured that out with the others pretty easily.”
“Did we?” I asked, looking over at her. “I’m not trying to be pessimistic or talk down to you here… but I’m pretty sure ‘do nothing and just deal with Frederick when he comes here’ was one of the three options I’d said I had before they stomped in here.”
This brought her up short. While she could have argued that it was somehow different, she thankfully didn’t. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try to find at least some sort of answer.
“But… but you haven’t done anything. You’re an Alchemist… I mean, won’t that be enough to make Frederick decide you’re not his companion? Won’t that fix it?” she asked. I felt my shoulders drop a bit. I understood what she was doing. She was grasping for anything possible and I couldn’t exactly be mad… I’d been there, desperately searching for the one route I could take that would free me from this nightmare.
“Willow… I know it sounds ridiculous… but that won’t change anything. I’ve never been an Alchemist, or any Utility class for that matter, but he’ll find a way to make it fit into the prophecy. I’m the Stranger. Not the Shield… not the Priestess… I’m the one he needs to find the Jewels. The Stranger… from the strange land.”
I found myself staring at the photo again and this time Willow took notice, following my gaze and looking at it. She reached almost tentatively toward the frame, but stopped just shy of it. Then, she looked over at me, silently asking for permission. I nodded and she picked it up, examining it a bit closer.
“Who are they?”
“I’m… not entirely sure,” I admitted, a frown pulling at my lips as my brow furrowed.
Willow let the moment linger, not pressing me and I felt oddly thankful. I took a few breaths, steadying myself before I said something I hadn’t admitted to anyone in… honestly, I wasn’t sure how long.
“But I think it’s my mother and me. I can’t guarantee it’s exactly us… I altered it a long time ago, changed the clothes and the background when I realized that it would only raise questions otherwise,” I explained slowly, clasping my hands together. “I… I don’t really remember her… or where I came from for that matter. It’s faded little by little and now it’s just, a feeling.”
She’d seemed to have missed the obvious implication when I’d labeled myself the stranger, but her eyes widened as it finally clicked.
“You’re not…”
“From this world,” I finished for her, my gaze falling back to the table. “No, not originally. But after all this time… this world is my home. If time passes differently, there’s no one back there that would even remember me… and if it doesn’t and everything is still the same back there from when I left… I don’t know if I’d remember them.”
“Stars…” Willow said, more gasp than anything. “Corbin, that’s… I’m so sorry.”
My head snapped up to hers, slightly confused.
“For what?”
“For… well all of that… to not remember your family… or where you’re even from. That must be terrible…”
“That’s not– I didn’t tell you that to make you feel sorry for me,” I said, just barely stopping myself from snapping it at her. “The point I was trying to make is that it doesn’t matter that I’m an Alchemist right now, once Frederick is positive that I’m the Stranger, and he will be positive about it now that I have a class, he won’t leave me alone until I either lash out or go with him.”
“Which… would just lead to the Jewels issue,” she said, looking back down at the table.
“If I went with him, yeah… I’ve tried collecting them and hiding them before he could get to them. I’ve tried directing him to other targets. I’ve even tried telling him right from the start that I would literally become the Lord of Dusk to stop him because he didn’t know that destroying them was the same as… sorry… nevermind. Anyway, that time, once I’d convinced him I wasn’t lying and told him there was nothing he could say that would change my mind, he decided the solution was to stab me. Repeatedly.”
“I’m… okay, well I suppose that explains why you don’t want the Prince coming here…” Willow said, chewing at her finger. “But… how do we stop him from coming without…”
She stalled for a moment, looking back up to meet my gaze before she resolved herself. There was still a bit of fear in her eyes, but it was far more muted than I’d seen from her.
“How do we stop that without you… killing De Numont?”
I was about to ask her what she meant by “we” but stopped. There really wasn’t much of a point to sidetracking us with something that I felt like I could probably guess what her answer would be. I thought about it for a moment, then shrugged.
“I’m honestly open to suggestions.”