A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1760 - 1760: Clashing Storms - Part 2

Oliver had turned to go with him, but Hod had stopped him there, when he was all but the last person in the room, aside from his own retainers.

A finger to the chest. That was how Hod held him in place, as he stared him down, as if trying to see through him. Oliver frowned his annoyance. Everyone seemed to be seeing beyond him these days, as if there was a second him present in his shadow that they were all trying to find. But it was hard to complain when the man doing that staring was as perceptive as Minister Hod.

"In a handful of days, I will need you to be capable of handling King Germanicus yourself," he said finally. "Do you believe that you are capable of such a thing?"

"…No," Oliver said, quite honestly. "No. I really don't think I am. Germanicus is something else entirely. He's of the Fifth Boundary at least, isn't he? But what God or Goddess works through him? I understand him not."

"And if I told you it was Gaia, would you begin to understand?" Hod asked.

Oliver shook his head again. "I know not of her. I have fought none that have borne her Fragment."

"Then ask your own Fragments," Hod said. "She is an ancient thing. A strange thing, to our modern eyes. I cannot give you the sensory information that you are looking for. Such a thing you will need to understand yourself."

"I do not understand how you can continue to place such weighty expectations on me, Minister," Oliver said. "Your strategy is in a realm that I will never be able to understand. Do you even really require me for this, when you are capable of doing so much yourself?"

"I am not a General, Oliver Patrick," Hod said. "I am a strategist. I am limited. Perhaps you thought that I equalled Tavar today – but you would be mistaken. I do not have Command to buoy my troops with. I fight behind several walls of glass. I can not touch pieces as he does. I have to move them through other means. Do you understand? Being evenly matched against such a man as Tavar is not good enough. I fight in the sea against a man that was born in the water. I require more. Realms that he can not seek to influence. You are a piece that exists beyond those walls of glass, Oliver Patrick. I begin to understand you. I require you to make up for my deficiencies."

"Blackwell would be far more capable," Oliver said, not entirely understanding Hod's metaphor. "He knows the battlefield better than me."

"I do not require the normal understanding of a battlefield that normal men have cultivated in themselves," Hod said. "If I try and aim towards convention, at this late stage in the game, I will never find the time to match Tavar. I have not the experience. We require a different, untested approach. Something that is almost a trick of magic… Have you heard that the blue flames around the Kingdom are disappearing one by one?"

Oliver shook his head, doing his very best to keep up with Hod's sudden change in topic. "Someone might have mentioned it, but I don't think so. Why do you bring it up?"

"Great powers stir," Hod said. "Strangeness distorts what we aim for on the simple military level. The High King, in his infinite wisdom, sought to grasp for those powers better left alone, I do imagine. And he has awoken something that we preferred to let slumber. Three mages that we did not even know still existed have turned up dead. Their bodies all displayed rather publically, held up by crudely carved stakes. The mage Fagan was amongst them – a singularly troublesome man."

"Mages…" Oliver said distastefully.

"Indeed, mages," Hod said. "The entire kingdom shakes, General Patrick. The winds blow. A storm is being built up. Leaves without involvement are being cast into the air. Everyone looks for opportunity. A creature capable of killing mages – and capable of snuffing out those blue flames that our High King sought to rely on. I suppose that to be the mage Magnus. A more troublesome creature it would be hard to imagine."

"…Why are you telling me this?" Oliver asked.

"You look in front of you. You grasp your sword, and you think in the same physical realm that you always have. You pick up the snow in your hand, and you feel its coldness. You feel the solidness of the ground beneath its feet. The reassurance of the known world – you dwell in that, you cling to that. But you battle with the Emerson's, General Patrick, you found that which was beyond that. That path which no feet had trodden before. A realm that lesser man might simply call that of magic. You have been there once – I need you to go there again," Hod said. "You have five days. That is the best I suppose I can give you."

"…I don't know if I can," Oliver said. "It is not as though I understand why I won. General Fitzer, General Blackthorn, they've both asked me the same. But it was hardly me, Minister. I don't understand it at all. It was the hand of the Gods – not mine. I could never do that. Not now, not again. I couldn't do it twice."

"Not your hand, was it?" Minister Hod asked, with a raised eyebrow. "How interesting. For when you scored that victory, it was your name that the realm spoke, not that of the Gods. You do not know quite how harshly and how far the winds of the storm you created blew. The entire country felt those effects."

"…Frustrating," Oliver said, clenching his fist. He'd earnestly tried to do exactly that, in all their days before battle – to try and discover that space in which he had inhabited during the battle with the Emersons. And now Hod was telling him to do exactly that again, when Oliver had already come well and truly to the conclusion that it wasn't him. That it wasn't something he could work towards by his own will.