A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1685 - 1685: Like a Bird - Part 2

"…And then, in a few weeks time, you will look down on yourself, and wonder when it was your flesh became marble, and when it was the Gods did take up chisel and hammer to sculpt you in their finest image," Oliver concluded, almost jokingly, but the excitement in the eyes of the men told them that they didn't see it as a joke, and he continued, just a degree more seriously. "But more importantly, you will find yourself, with your weapon in hand, facing off against men who ought to be far more experienced than you – and far better trained. And you will pause in wonder. You will wonder how it is that your sword can reach them. You will wonder how it is that you can make them struggle. How it is that you can force them on the back foot, and even overcome them. And I will remind you, in your confusion, when you give way to doubt, just as I have told your peasant companions before you. It is the very fact of the difficulty of your station that allows you to come so close. Nothing is useless, my friends. Your years and decades spent in hard labour can become just as powerful tools as years spent with the spear, if we do control it rightly enough, and make the best use out of it."

With those final words, he left them to Firyr, and to Jorah, noting the sparkle in their eyes.

"You're getting rather good at that," Nila noted as they left them. "It took a while with the other group, but this lot are all excited straight away. What do you suppose that is?"

"I wonder," Oliver said.

"Hmmm…" Nila studied him from the side, not saying anything, well aware that by now Oliver had fallen back to brooding on the earlier topic of conversation, and she would be unlikely to get anything more out of him.

It was only three days hence when Oliver saw the riddle solved himself – and like all riddles, the answer was glaringly simple. He had his close subordinates in front of him, and was in the process of giving them orders, as they prepared their own sorts of plans for defence.

It was then that the freedom of Oliver's situation struck him. Particularly in the moment when Greeves perked up and said. "Can't we just do that ourselves?"

"As in, take a party outside the walls, and see what we can gather ourselves?" Nila asked him.

"My Lord did say as much in the meeting with Blackthorn. He pushed to be allowed to lead his scouting parties alone," Verdant said, reminding Oliver of what he himself had said.

Oliver raised his eyebrows in surprise. There were moments like that, where it seemed as if a part of him knew better than he did. For whoever it was that had the cunning to raise such a point in the meeting with General Blackthorn hardly seemed the same person who had agonized as to what he might do in the days that followed. Some part of him had seen a necessity in pushing for the highest form of freedom, and that part of him had created the current little field that he stood on, so ripe and fertile and waiting for all forms of seeds and freedoms.

It was then, with a finger on his chin, where that feeling of freedom truly began to overwhelm him. It swam in his heart as a building wind. It made his legs feel light, and his fingers feel tingly. It made him feel as if he had all the power in the world – but not a heavy, demanding sort of power. It was the power to go wherever he wished, and solve whatever problems there were in any way that he did wish.

It was entirely different from having Ernest to command himself, though that had come with a strange sort of freedom too. It was the lofty flight of a man that had been suddenly relieved of the earth's gravity that had been pulling him down, and he found in himself the weightlessness of a bird.

For over a month, he had agonized under the weight of that responsibility, and even when he had won the battle, the burden had hardly lifted. He had kept himself in check, to the best of his abilities, casting his eyes eternally outwards for any signs of issues, knowing that he held hundreds of lives in his hands, and if anything were to go wrong, it would be his fault entirely.

Now Blackthorn, willingly, had set him from those chains, and the strategies that had been available to Oliver in times past multiplied seemingly tenfold, or even more. Nila noted the look on his face first, the way his lips curled into a smile that was almost childish, and the way his fingers clenched themselves into a fist, as if they were grasping at some invisible piece.

She had to hide her own smile, seeing the innocent look, knowing very well that it wouldn't be the sort of thing that Judas, and Firyr and the rest of the gathered men would be able to resist making fun of. The General that they so admired showing any instance of such childishness was a thing of the greatest humour.

"Very well," Oliver said, nodding his head. "We have two weeks of this, did General Blackthorn say?"

Verdant confirmed that fact for him, noting, just as Nila did, that air of excitement that was streaming off Oliver, as he took in all the possibilities that they had open to them. There was that deviousness that had caused so much trouble at the Academy, when the stakes had been low enough that he could afford to pull such tricks at times.

It had been so long for Oliver since the world had felt truly that light, and to feel it, right in the midst of a war, right before almost certainly there was set to be another battle coming their way – it was the strangest thing. And though he hated to admit it, there was likely only one reason for that, and it was the presence of General Blackthorn. Even if Oliver consciously wasn't sure how much he liked the man at times, some deeper part of him had given the General such a level of respect, that he seemed to trust him implicitly. He seemed to suppose that it gave Oliver himself the leeway to make mistakes in a way that he wouldn't have been allowed to before.