A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1723 - 1723: VOLUME FIVE - FATE'S TEMPEST - CHAPTER ONE - THE PIECES

VOLUME FIVE – FATE'S TEMPEST

"Conjecture, would you not say, master?"

"Hm?"

"The stories. From Solgrim and the like. The tales of the Hobgoblin. What do we have to base that event on?"

"Well… We've accounts from those that lived around the time, do we not..?" The old man said, shifting uncomfortably before the fire. He'd fallen quite heavily into his storytelling, and he had to admit that he'd grown carried away with himself. If there were areas of his historical accounting that could be poked through, his student ought to have had the easy capacity to find it. The man knew he'd hyperbolized some accounts, for the sheer flair of the storytelling.

"Do we?" The student asked. He'd been standing for a good while. He'd listened in his chair for an hour or so, and then he'd stood, and went about striding around the room, as if he could bear not to sit still whilst listening to stories of the heroics of the past. It was a feeling the old scholar certainly shared. The stories had fascinated him as a youth to the point of animation, and even going into his eighth year, they still filled him with vigour. Greatness, it seemed, was near eternal in its reach. "Your telling of the tale seems to state that those around him hardly knew of the fact. There was the Lady Felder, and the merchant Greeves, but did they not keep the strict origins of Oliver Patrick's birth hidden?"

"And yet, we know of it," the scholar pointed out, taking a careful sip of his tea. Sometimes, fewer words were better when dealing with the sharp minds of the youth. They were sharp swords, all of them, looking to cut down whatever they could.

"…You mean to say that the news got out eventually, in some way or another?" The student said. "But that does not necessarily mean it came to be in his lifetime."

"Quite right."

"You say that as if you don't know. You most certainly do, master. If you wished to tell me, could you not?"

"That is an area for your own personal research, or perhaps now, you might find it in the story, as I continue to tell it to you," the old man said. He looked out of the window. It was a rural cottage that he'd secreted himself away to for the last years of his life. When night fell outside his window now, true darkness coated the world, unlike that which one would find in the city, where torches burned eternal. "I suppose it is late, however. Your questions come from impatience, do they not? Rest, perhaps, you seek. Perhaps we ought continue this tomorrow."

"How could we?" The student said, twisting his face, and forcing himself down in the opposite chair with a degree of force, making its legs shift on the stone floor. He was an old enough man now that he had the beginnings of stubble appearing on his youthful face, but his youthful temperament had still far from faded. "I am quite ready to listen."

"Wellll," the scholar said. "Listen, you might be ready to, but do you have the right state of mind to listen? Have you forgotten the aim of our craft in your listening? Do you listen as a boy listens to fairy tales, or do you listen as a historian that uses the tales of the past to sharpen his scalpel."

"I am neither of those things," the young man declared.

"I am well aware, my Prince," the scholar conceded, once the prince pushed his chest out and reminded him of his title.

The Prince's shoulders quickly fell, however. "…But as we quickly learn, title means very little. Title does not grant one the roads to greatness that Oliver Patrick trod through. You know very well that is what I seek."

"A proper education in the matters will not go awry," the scholar said. "Even he attended the Academy, for as unruly as he was said to be, he paid the matters of his studies the diligence that he could. Likely out of honour to those that had sponsored him, and seen academia as a possible pursuit, if we are to assume anything about his character… But later, we are quite certain that he was heavily influenced by the works of the First King."

"…A name even older than his," the Prince said thoughtfully. "I ought read such works myself, and see what I might be able to glean that Oliver Patrick did not."

"We've no complete surviving copies of it left, I am afraid," the scholar said. "The civil war saw to that. There be a few chapters, but not the entirety of the thing. We only have Oliver Patrick, and his accounts of it. Him, and the other Generals and scholars that were privileged to read it in their lifetime. We might be able to assume what influence it was that affected him, as he walked into the battle with the Emersons."

"Would you say that was his grandest victory?" The Prince asked. "The battle with the Emersons? To be outnumbered as he was?"

"That is a matter of opinion. What do you think, my Prince? His career is littered with such impossibilities. Greatness, indeed, might be a tightrope. Impossibility after impossibility, a road that no one else could tread but the man that it was intended to walk."

"Is that a warning? You fear that I will fail to follow it?"

"There will never be another Oliver Patrick," the scholar said. "Just as there was never another First King. His style of battling, and his personality, Oliver Patrick drew from, indeed, we can see him searching for something, as he did that battle with the Emersons, from all the accounts of those that described the strangeness of the scene, but can we see the will of the First King truly present there?"

"…Not entirely," the Prince said. "In some things, perhaps. It seemed as if Oliver Patrick truly was trying to emulate him."

"He fought that particular battle as if he was governed by a thousand men, rather than one. Chaos reigned in his head, and his heart, I think we can strongly assume that. We know the pressure he felt in the weeks towards that battle's build up, and how it was he saw his prospects of victory," the scholar said. "An interesting attitude, it was. Another thing we can draw from, to learn of what it was that made Oliver Patrick."