A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1542 - 1542: Where Art The Fire - Part 7

"But those are the sorts of creatures we are," Oliver told himself, knowing that he was no different to Greeves. A sudden malicious impulse, and he might have done the same, and he might have forgotten his honour in making use of the cruelty that he had so inflicted. The way the years warped him, it would not have surprised him to catch himself in that very act.

Two little pine saplings, covered in snow, were beginning to shoot up out of the little square where Oliver's hut had once sat. They made use of the ashes that he had left behind, and reclaimed something for themselves. Oliver thought there to be some kind of poetry in that, some kind of inspiration that he could draw from, but he didn't know what, and he fled from that site soon enough, hounding his way up the steep mountain track, deeper into the woods.

Here, the only footprints were his, and those of the animals. He saw the forked feet of a bird that had hoped across the track, only to disappear once more into the woods. And then he saw the wavey little pattern where it had beat its wings and taken flight once more into the sky, growing tired of the gravity that tugged at all the mortals.

Oliver smiled grimly at such an interpretation. He felt tired of his own gravity, tired of the direction that fate pulled him in, and the direction that he pulled himself in. He could imagine no happy ending in his future. He could not imagine this war going well. He imagined his future to be cold, and lonely. That was the only destiny that those who sought power truly deserved.

He wanted to cut away the blackness of corruption in his heart – for it indeed, to him, was that. It was impurity, and weakness, and if he had a knife that could reach straight towards his soul, and amputate it, he would have done so without a second thought. So against his honour it went.

The man that he held as highest in his head, Dominus Patrick, had sought no reward for all that he had given. He sought no power, no position. He was content to be entirely apart from the world. Oliver wondered on that himself, in a way that he hadn't considered it before. If the High King had done to him, as he had done to Dominus Patrick, what would his reward have been?

The flickering of rage in Oliver's heart told him his answer. He would have raised a war of the very sort that had been raised up now. Selfishly, he would have plunged the realm into chaos. If he had lost a dear friend to the High King's manoeuvring, in the form of Verdant, or Blackthorn, or – Gods forbid – Nila, he dreaded to think of all that his anger might scorch.

Perhaps Dominus had seen that in himself. Perhaps he'd been conscious enough of his honour, to see that his rage would do nothing but burn the populace. They wouldn't reach all the way up to the gates of the High King. As a single man, he was insufficient to do anything… And so he had made sure that he could do nothing.

"Ah, but he did something," Ingolsol said. "You. He sharpened you, didn't he? Are you not his tool for vengeance?"

If Oliver could have punched at Ingolsol, he would have then. If there was any way of warring with the Fragments inside of him, he would have attacked with his full might. "Don't you dare, Ingolsol," he warned. "You can say what you wish in any other regard, but I will not allow you to sully the name of my Master."

He silenced the Dark God against further replies, and continued on his way into the forest. The snow grew deeper the higher up he went. The degree to which it had piled up along some of the slopes was to the point that Oliver found it shocking.

The world was practically untouched, save for those few animal tracks, and it made spotted the streams that he knew to be there that much harder. The little valleys that they had carved for themselves had been easily bridged by the snow, making them practically invisible, unless Oliver paid the utmost in attention, checking for all the signs that were available to him.

The slightest depression in the snow was all he was allowed for one. Then he kicked out with his foot, stomping where he thought the stream to be, and a thin sheet of ice was set to collapsing, along with all the snow that had gathered atop it, revealing the icy stream for where it had been.

He recalled being forced by Dominus to swim in such a stream, in just as icy a condition. It had been a miserable experience at the time, but now, years later, it brought a smile to his face as a fond memory. That which he had least enjoyed doing, in all the years that followed it, struck him to be the most significant things.

He found the stones that he had once lifted under Dominus' tutelage, all of them wearing little hats of snow. They hadn't been moved since his own time toying with them. The smallest of them seemed like it might have been toyed with to the slightest degree – it was only slightly bigger than a man's head, after all – but none of the others seemed to invite a purpose to any of the hunters that passed through in getting them to be moved.

The next size up was large enough that a normal adult would likely struggle to lift it a few times. And then the size after that neared the size of a small torso. Oliver recalled how hard he'd had to work to lift that at first. But so quickly had he had advanced, that two more stones had needed to be added in, to the point that the final stone now stood large enough that it might have been called a boulder.