And those were only battles that I heard about recently…
Thinking about all of that was stressing me out, so I changed the channel and focused on finding this codex. One persistent problem at a time.
After Jacidia gave me directions to the bathroom, I lingered along the halls, acting like I was lost. Every now and then I’d ask a member of the court where the bathroom was. On my defense, this place was immense, so no one really faulted me for not knowing. Although some did ask me what I was doing here, and I told them I was a guest of Jacidia. After that, they left me alone for the most part.
I had one curious geezer tail me at a distance, so I had to slip into the bathroom. But once a few minutes ran dry, I left to pursue the codex again.
The stairway to the cellar was a bitch to find, but I reached the subfloors without any more complications. Within the darkness, I kept my hand along the spiral stone walls, trying not to trip over my feet as I descended further down. I could hear dripping water somewhere down below, though I couldn't tell if it was from a leak or something else. The air was cool and damp, and I tried to fight my nerves away from making it worse. Soon, I found the door that I was looking for, hidden in a corner behind a pile of crates.
Shoving the crates aside, I pushed the door open and stepped into the room, which was another space swallowed in further darkness. Alone, I figured it safe to slip on my cyber arm to use the blaster in my palm as a source of light. The room was filled with shelves stacked with books, some of them so old that they looked like they’d crumble to dust if I touched them. I had never seen so many banged up books in one place before, especially for a storage room used for wine.
“Doesn’t look like they even have any of that here,” I whispered to myself, until I turned a corner, noticing a small segregated room with one dusty desk holding a broken lantern on top of it.
I went inside, a cold chill immediately pushing me back. There was something about this place that instantly made me feel at home, and not in a good way. The aura I was feeling wasn’t too far from my own experiences with my old man, breaking open old wounds I’d almost forgotten were there. I inched further and noticed carvings on the wooden desk, initials J.P written on it…
“Was this where they kept Rufian?” I whispered to myself as I searched, opening drawers in that desk until I stumbled upon a journal. The pages inside the leather skin seemed empty, but when I shone my blaster light on it, I saw the words.
“How foolish you are, how foolish you’ve acted. When the time comes, you will learn to regret your old ways. But by that time, it’ll already be too late.” I read on, the journal heavy with dark emotions and promises of revenge. It sure sounded like Rufian, and his extreme hate for his father ran so deep that I could see it pouring beyond the pages of the book. I was getting goose-bumps the more I flipped, but my curiosity got the better of me.
I continued to turn the pages and found that the journal contained more than just Rufian's aggression against his father. It was filled with hate of his own race. He’d been stuck in an area with Senterrians for some time, and instead of terrorizing and tormenting him as his father suggested, they welcomed him with open arms. The picture his father had painted for humans was stained, and the time he spent in the district 5 village was the best time he had in his life. He felt liberated, but that changed. When the baron found him, he immediately accused the humans of kidnapping his son. He punished them in front of his son, burning the humans alive. He watched on with pain pitted in his heavy heart, hating his father all the more.
He despised fae, and understood from then on that all they knew how to do was destroy.
From that moment, he had plans of taking over the fae council. He’d planned on stealing the Grimoire for a while, but not to destroy it like he’d told me he wanted to do. No, he wanted to use it. He wrote down specialty items he needed to get it done. He had a thirst for power, wholeheartedly believing that fae used magic solely to suppress, terrorize, and destroy humans. Rufian swore he could do better. Rufian wanted to shape a safer world. He went on and on about being a god and showing the rest of Mavriel how ruling was done, and it was down-right frightening. He was just a boy judging by these dates here. And while he had good intentions, I could tell he was damaged, just like I was, and those motives could turn sour in a heartbeat.
According to his records, he had tried to secure the Grimoire and failed, and was severely punished for it. At the demand of the High Order, he stayed with the council for a while, promising the baron that they could shape him into a better man. Rufian refused, but his father didn’t give him much of a choice. My heart raced at how terrified young Rufian was at the thought of being around those men, and how he tried to reach out for help among his family to no avail.
The last few pages talked about his stay with one of the council heads, and things got worse from there…
“Shit…” I breathed in a pitied voice. The accounts were hard to read, details of experimentation done that mirrored that of being a human guinea pig. I started feeling sorry for him. His stay in the council only fueled his hate for fae and his disdain for magic. There were a couple years missing from his journal, and I couldn’t understand why. But when I looked up at the corner of the page where he’d aged an extra four years, I saw droplets of blood leading to the rest of the page.
There were two lines in the middle of the page. It read in bold terrifying letters, “MY PROMISE TO YOU, I WILL END YOUR REIGN OF SAVAGERY AND SET FORTH A NEW WORLD, A WORLD YOU AND YOUR SELFISH AND HATEFUL PEOPLE WILL NOT BE PART OF! I WILL PURGE THALIAN AND HARVEST THE PARADISE SHE DESERVES.”
I was right… I was fucking right all along…
My blood ran hot. After that clear decisive statement, there was nothing left to read. Not that I could stomach anymore of it, anyway. Ever since I partied with him, I was aching to know who I was traveling with. Everything Rufian did was on the surface. And those times where he showed me a deeper side, my perception was hazy. He was always complicated to decode, sometimes righteous, sometimes an antihero. And other times just plain fucking evil. But now I knew his backstory. He’d hinted at it before, but I wanted to believe differently. I wanted to think that Rufian wasn’t that much of an extremist, however, the asshole was the very definition of the word.
That, and a better fucking liar than he led me to believe.
I literally felt sick to my stomach. Rufian was using me to get the Grimoire so he could send Mavriel into the abyss. Every last air breathing fae would be wiped off the face of Thalian. In fact, every other race would go down with them, leaving only humans. A second Earth, a perfect paradise.
I couldn’t understand how someone so smart could completely negate the truth. No one was perfect. There’s always going to be a good and bad bunch. In his master plan, he was eliminating innocent lives. But in this journal, he made it clear how he felt about the other races. They all had a part of themselves they couldn’t control. It was part of their DNA. The need to dominate and conquer… it was in their blood. The history of world-spread submission of human beings was proof that Senterrians didn’t have that need. They kept to themselves and learned to live peacefully. Only when the dungeon core introduced cyber sense did they become destructive, and even then, it was only because they had to defend themselves from the rest of Thalian.
He’d told me this already, I should have caught on and read between the lines.
Fuck—I was played! Raging, I slammed his journal on the ground and flipped his desk. I tossed the bookcase down and threw everything I could get my hands on. Forgetting where I was, I made a hot mess in the basement of the baron’s court, holding myself back from going up there and bashing Rufian’s face in.
“You piece of shit…” I grunted through my teeth as I hunched over and paced my feet, trying to calm my nerves down. My adrenaline was pumping, and I was so heated that I was starting to sweat. But in my hysterics, I noticed something in the scattered books along my feet. There was one that wasn’t like the others. The spine was dusty and torn, but the front of the book looked brand new. The leather was trimmed with gold and embossed with seven emblems, two of which I’d already seen before from Gavori’s house, and Rufian’s. The cover of the book was like a painting embedded in the leather, depicting a female surrounded by fire and water. In her hands, she held an orb, and with the lack of color, I couldn’t make out what it was. But one thing was for sure, she was enticing me to open her up, and even though the book had no script on the cover, I already had an idea what it was…
The master codex.
My chest thumped. It wasn’t sitting on a pedestal, protected by a powerful source of magic. It was right here, ripe for the plucking…
I picked the book up off the ground and wiped away the dust. When I opened it up to the first page, the huge symbols popped at me. It was in a strange language, Mavrelite. While Alzera-Kar gave me the ability to talk all languages, I didn’t have the ability to read all languages. So I pulled out my fae decoder ring and began working its gears to decode the symbols. “The title, the codex,” I whispered to myself, then flipped beyond the title page, reading, “This book unravels the fruit of our history, decoding the secrets of our most powerful ancestors. Only the worthy may possess such knowledge...”
I couldn't believe it. My luck finally fucking turned for the better. This was exactly what I had been searching for!
“Please proceed with caution,” I read, but the next few pages… my ring couldn’t decode them. “What the hell? These symbols are different. I thought I’d be able to—”
“Hello?” I heard an echo coming from the stairway, and I instantly jumped. Closing the codex, I searched for my options of escaping the cellar. I sent the codex into my secret box in my inventory. The sound of footsteps threatened my choices, and I was afraid of being caught if I stuck my neck out there and searched these dark halls for a way out. The onset of panic made me fish out my last resort—my last round from my teleportation crystal.
I didn’t think twice, triggering the bad boy just to go a level up into the main area.
But I wasn’t out of the clear just yet…
I was conflicted with another dilemma. Did I say fuck it and leave Rufian here alone? Or go back to the parlor and pretend I saw nothing?
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t have time to decide where I’d go from here, because as soon as I turned the corner, I saw Rufian, standing there with a huge smile on his face.
“Ah, there you are!” he tweeted. “Ready to head out?”
“Damn it!” I heaved. “You fucking scared the shit out of me!”
“Hmm? What is that you’re wearing?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” My eyes caught on to what he was staring at, and I froze. In my teleporting out of the cellar, I hadn’t realized that I was still sporting metal. I yanked my cyber arm off and tucked it in my inventory before I noticed the shifty smile Rufian was giving me.
“Oh, Silas, you can truly be clumsy sometimes, you know that? You’re lucky it was me and not any of my siblings or other relatives who have caught you.”
