Jackal Among Snakes

Chapter 650: Hedonistic Scholarship

From birth, Traugott had always felt like his life was tied to the abyss. It consumed all he felt endlessly. There was little that inspired anything inside of him. Though he felt emotions like rage, sorrow, happiness, and all others, it was as though they existed outside of him, pouring into a hole that never ended. Nothing that affected others had ever affected him. Even the things that others called needs—the need to sate hunger or quench thirst, for instance—had little bearing on his life.

He neither liked nor disliked pain. At some points in his life, he had inflicted it on himself repeatedly to discover how it worked, because there was only one thing that truly stimulated him in any way: learning that which he did not know. Even that was fitting, as the very nature of the abyss was something that could never be known or understood. Curiosity was his first, true love that allowed him to visualize what the term even meant. He never grew bored of her.

To his parents, refugees from the Burnt Desert taken in by House Parbon, his inquisitiveness had been the sign of a precocious child who possessed a certain brightness. It had been enough to cultivate a thin veneer of normalcy that allowed him to operate in peace. They grew wealthy enough from selling out their former tribesmen to the present margrave of House Parbon that they could afford to send him to the Order of the Gray Owl. Their craftiness taught him much about the realities of the world. He didn’t enjoy doing the things that led to learning, but he did enjoy the learning itself. To that end, their callousness had aided him. He never forgot that.

He had gone through life learning so much. He was smart enough to know that he would need power to learn all he pleased to learn, and so he quietly advanced as they wanted him to in the Order of the Gray Owl. There, his parents were no longer of any use, so he cut ties with them. It had been easy to feel alive, back then—he was a dry sponge in an ocean, absorbing the vast stores of knowledge accumulated over the years.

Past a certain point… there were diminishing returns on well-travelled fields of study. Studying elemental magic, he would need to put forth ten times the effort for the same level of stimulation as exploring entirely new fields—necromancy, for instance. He had grown empty, hollow, adhering to the rules of the Order of the Gray Owl. Castro was an ever-watchful leader, ensuring none of the Magisters put a single toe into anything forbidden. It was restrictive, and many of Traugott’s days were spent existing in the empty void that was his life without stimulation.

Until, of course, all of this.

Argrave had broken him free of the period of blackness when he delivered a book to Castro. It spoke of many things, foremost among them Gerechtigkeit. Traugott followed the leads described therein and bore witness to the vast changes the world was about to undertake. That awakening had all culminated in the grand opening of the Shadowlands. Here, he explored the depths of something that simply could not be in their realms. If he’d had it his way, he would have simply spent his time wandering the Shadowlands, preparing all its denizens for his gambit against Argrave. Unfortunately, the power structure here was deeply entrenched. Fortunately, he was able to end it, aiding his long-term goal—moving beyond this cycle of judgment.

There was so much to look forward to. So many things that had never happened. There was Sophia—he was eager to discover her intricacies, doubly so after his experimentations with Norman. He had theories about how her power might be used to make more of Gerechtigkeit than the calamity ever made of himself. There was so much to learn, so much to see… and at the end of it all, Traugott saw a way into other places. Places beyond this one. The Heralds had spoken to him, and through their dialogue, he saw the ecstasy of learning repeated to infinity. They promised new realms, new existences. The idea enthralled him.

At present, however… another such fascinating thing had come to him.

Traugott stepped out into the changed world that his people were so rabidly fearing, curious to see what he would experience. At once, familiar yet muted sensations returned to him, most prevalently sight. It took him some time to adapt to the reality of what he saw, and he blinked his eyes rapidly in adjustment. For the first time, it would seem, his world had come to the Shadowlands rather than the Shadowlands coming to his world. Free of the abyss, he was once again in the form of Good King Norman in Shadowlander flesh.

In the far distance, he saw a locust plague tear through countless of his subordinates. The black clouds of destruction were far too dense of an attack to make any sense of what was coming. These bugs, which he identified as magical in nature, seemed to eat through the very shadows themselves. Thereafter, like drifting petals, a pleasant whiteness replaced all that was erased before settling down into the bleak gray world stretched out before him.

He looked to his left, witnessing his lieutenant emerge from the abyssal Shadowlands of yet untouched by their attacker. Inside the abyss, such details weren’t clear, but here, she had genuine features his human mind could understand. The shadows still wreathed most of her, but he could distinguish white hair that looked like silk and deep red eyes. Only her eyes had color, bizarrely. A fascinating quirk that he would love to explore. The eyes were genuine windows to the soul, as his experiments had discovered. Would they retain that color, then, removed from the body?

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“Is this another of the Hopeful’s machinations you’re aware of?” he questioned, his voice coming out in a fashion as he hadn’t expected it. Another fascination—was it his ears hearing incorrectly, his voice box malfunctioning, or a translation applied by this changed realm?

“No,” his lieutenant responded in the same voice. “This is something none of us have ever seen before. In power, I believe I am superior, and yet… there may be more to this attack, and so I would advise caution.” She peered out.

“Hmm.” Traugott rubbed his hands together, unconcerned. “What can you tell me about our attackers? Their appearance, that is. I cannot see so well.”

“They are a varied group. The one that causes the most damage is a tall human with black hair. He leads that plague of locusts—and I expect the rest of group, as well.”

Traugott started to smile, kneeling down and squinting hard. “Could it be? No…” he shook his head, not quite believing it. Yet a smile did rise to his face at the thought of it. When he saw a familiar coat through the haze of it all—though the coat was somewhat in tatters—his jubilation finally met its target. “It is.”

People spoke of the complexity of the higher species like elves or humans, but Traugott had always found them no different from any other animal. The only thing that made men better than mice was the fact they thought they were. Some select few had drawn his interest, but it was about the same level of interest he had seeing an unusually-colored animal. Smart, talented people with strange applications of magic or bizarre constitutions could not compare to the pleasure brought from exploring the depths of things untouched by human hands.

But Argrave… he was different.

He’d had countless theories about how Argrave had come to know so much about the world. In the end, one of them had been directly confirmed by the Heralds; Argrave was from another reality entirely. The Heralds said little more than that, playing upon Traugott’s sole desire to convince him to do their bidding. They wanted Argrave neutralized more than anything. They wished to use Traugott as the cudgel to achieve that. He was happy to play into their hands, because he was a rather simple person. He knew he could outmaneuver them in the long run. He had never met anyone he’d consider a peer, let alone a superior.

“You should capture him alive,” Traugott said as he stared. “Go. I look forward to results.”

His lieutenant looked at him. “When last we fought a devastating battle, I advised our retreat. You refused. I obeyed, then, despite my protests. My protests were correct, and we suffered great losses. After that incident, I see not the reason to repeat a mistake.”

Traugott looked at her. Like any others, the Shadowlanders could be manipulated. He’d done well so far in using this woman’s hope for herself and her people—and besides, the ability he possessed to free their people was too valuable for her to abandon him.

“If you can catch him alive, I have no more reason to be fearful of what lurks on the other side,” Traugott said. “He is the only one who poses a genuine threat to me on the mortal world. You can tell as much, because he’s come here, hunting me.” He smiled at her. “Bring him to me… and I’ll open the portal to my realm you so desperately desire, granting you freedom.”

Her red eyes focused on him for a long, long while. Then, she declared calmly, “If it is not so, our partnership will not be maintained. I will not be toyed with. A lying life cannot continue to persist in the Shadowlands.”

After threatening him, she left quickly. He wondered if she’d die. If she did win, she could probably enact her threat, but he was confident he could placate her without actually fulfilling her request. If she died, it didn’t matter. It was worth sacrificing all he’d built for a chance at capturing the man from another realm. Argrave had handled a great deal. It was a shame he had morals, elsewise they might’ve had a civilized conversation so long ago.

He heard a strange sound, and turned his head. There, a familiar face stood. Anneliese. She let out a sigh.

“I was so damned terrified. But… it worked,” she said.

Traugott saw her draw a blade out of a fancy-looking staff, and his eyes darted around the area. There, more figures revealed themselves—concealed by southron elf illusion magic, it seemed. Rather fascinating. Argrave, as ever, continued to impress. They had followed him here, and now, had set up an ambush for him. Fortunately, he’d prepared some contingencies for this, largely in case the people he’d collected turned on him. Perhaps it was time to leave.

The moment Traugott did move to leave, he felt a strange pressure on his chest. He grabbed at it, then attempted again. It grew stronger, straining against him proportionally. Yet when he advanced forth, it faded.

“I hate you a great deal, Traugott. There are a lot of reasons for anyone to hate you, but in my case, it’s unreasonably so,” Anneliese said. “The only thing I lament is that I’m forced to give you a quick death, because it’s most practical.”

Fear poured into the abyss of Traugott’s body, and as ever, he wasn’t affected by it. He considered what was occurring calmly, accepting that there was a force at work preventing his flight. He reasoned what would be the best course of action, and concluded that it would be best to fight as desperately as he could, calling all of his allies back to him.

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