A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1546 - 1546: Where Art The Fire - Part 11

"You were the only student I ever took," Dominus' voice told him, as crystal clear as if it had been right next to him. "That's as close to a son as I could have. Feel your fear boy, do not shy away from it. I will allow it of you. But I will not allow you to stand still in the face of it. To feel the fear is wise. To stand still from its burden, that is cowardice."

Oliver gritted his teeth. He had felt fear so much more strongly years ago. At a certain point, it had started to dull. When he had first put the dagger in his hand, and gone to hunt goblins, the fear had been overwhelming then.

What of the fear that he lived with day to day? He could not deny its dull throbbing. The anxiousness he had felt when each winter had come, wondering whether he would be able to make it through. Every day hung in the balance. Every day was a constant battle to make sure he had what was necessary to survive. His meagre winnings from his day's work were rarely enough to put enough food in him to keep him warm. Then darkness would fall ever so early in those winter months, and he would have to do his foraging for firewood in the dead of night, going further and further afield.

He remembered the awful feeling he would get, when the embers that he had tried to keep safe from the night before had gone out, and he would struggle so heartily to get something alight again. He'd steal away birch bark, or pine pitch, and do what he could with a flint and steel to light it. But his flint and steel had never cast enough sparks, and the damp would make it difficult to strike even that reasonous material that he had so carefully selected.

Yet he had endured anyway. The fear had been constant, and he had contented himself with it. He wondered when something else had taken over, and he'd begun to think to himself that he could exist beyond the fear, that there was some comfort to be had.

His fingers curled sharply around the frozen branch in front of him, digging their way in, to the point that the wood started to creak. There was a dangerous look on his face, as he gnashed his teeth, feeling a flood of anger.

"I'm terrified," he admitted to himself. "But what am I doing mopping? Have I not always been afraid? Is this not who I am? Fear is the very air that we breathe, and behold, we have the grandest of all fears set before us! A task of the most impossible sort…"

"…A task, whose failure, will mean the destruction of everything that I hold dear," Oliver said, the power quickly fading from his voice, as he imagined his village burned to the ground, and the people that he had sought to protect laying dead and charred in the street, as he had once seen so many of them during the Battle of Solgrim. He imagined too, a world without Nila, and that put such a knife through his heart that he might have fallen from the pouch that he sat on.

That fear was overwhelming enough to bow him over the branch that he stooped over. Each friend that he considered losing, along with the men that he had lost already, in Lombard, in Tolsey, in Dominus, and so many that he held dear… They were each blows that threatened to strike his equilibrium. Each one individually could have thrown him from the tree. But Nila had seized a part of his heart in its entirety. He did not think it was physically possible to live without her anymore.

They had kissed, and that kiss had wormed them closer. But it was last night, when she had sought him out, with her hands protective, that had truly crushed him, and defeated him, and put him at her mercy. It reminded him of his past weaknesses, and it alarmed him. He'd wanted to sprint away from her, fearful of her ability to pinpoint the smallest points in his armour, the parts he least wanted to reveal to anyone. But the same impulse had kept him close to her, returning her touch, his heart fluttering, somehow safe, in the arms of a woman smaller than him, and supposedly weaker.

That fear was the most crushing of all. He could do nothing against it. The situation that he had dragged them both into, it seemed a thing impossible to overcome. The more he thought on it, and all the problems that he was set to endure, the more certain he was in the impossibility of his task. There was naught to be done… There was naught but fear.

Beyond the present, he saw nothing but darkness, and the worst of outcomes. Everything positive he tried to consider was soon enough snatched away by an even more likely, and even more crushingly terrifying outcome.

"…And yet, for the now, I do still have Nila," he said, resting his chin on his hand, allowing the sorrow to wash over him.

There seemed a time limit on the bliss that she provided him, a haunting hourglass that he was forced to watch the sand spill out of. He thought that he feared that hourglass, and the running out of time more than anything else. It chilled him to the bone. When she disappeared, if she ever did, he would disappear with her, he was certain. Surely he had done enough for that to be allowed of him? Surely, his years of fighting could be considered done, by the time it came to that?

He had his promise to his family, and he thought that perhaps, after all, he had fulfilled it. "Look how high I have climbed," he told them, in his perch in the tree, with a certain element of madness, as he gestured to the encampment below him. "A symbol, mother – father. Mine. My words brought this about, behold what your Tempest has done. See me, little sister. You were not wrong to believe in the dreams I told you of. For here they are, on the horizon… And they are so much more burdensome than I could have ever imagined… Would that I could take them away, and replace them with something simple."