The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son'-Chapter 504 - Truth & History Is Stranger Than Fiction & Mystery
"There were students who showed promise in spiritual cultivation suddenly dropping out. Instructors who pushed back against the lack of certain training methods disappearing to other posts. Artifacts went missing from expedition reports, usually with someone taking the fall for it exceptionally quickly."
Twirling her Mist into a foggy figure that was similar to herself, if her hair had been chopped short, Nojuste raised her hand to its ’neck’ and gripped to disperse it. Flicking the condensation off of her fingers, she turned around to face the person she’d come to find and talk to about all of this. With so much corruption in the nobility and outside of it, allies were few.
"It took me time to piece it together because my sister’s dying words were rather revealing, but still lacking. Getting caught in the middle of a bandit suppression mission I happened to be on was bad luck for her, she claimed."
"You killed her yourself?"
"No, hardly. Do you not remember how she liked to knock me down in training? Did you think I was letting her do it? And that was even before she has used her Graft Physique to meld... whatever ancient creature those two giant claws were ever from right onto her forearm. I guess that was one such thing meant to have been ’stolen’."
Blinking while trying to picture that teenage girl disfiguring herself in such a way, the listening cultivator wasn’t given the time to really settle in her mind the things she was being told. It was like gossip was being combined with a history lesson - and told with the care of someone only talking about the change of season.
"But I was around when she was finally subdued. My sister sneered and gave a terrible, unredeeming confession speech to me while fatally wounded. One that made me *want* to choke her to death for her stupidity. Another decade after Nomersi died passed along before I could unerringly connect Velauyn to the events and try to trap her. Now she is missing too... and I can only await another extra lucky suppression event."
Rubbing her nose, Corde never thought she would miss the dry, detailed reports penned by the noncombatants of the Void Defense Society. Which isn’t to say that this woman was particularly emotive, but that the Frozen Duskblade simply became annoyed listening to her voice only giving enough details to barely understand. She thought it could be lingering pressure from their teenage years, where their seniors in the Guild were treating the twins and her as a ’unit’ and ’rivals’ all at once.
But more likely it was just that the swordswoman was unsociable, unless it was furthering *something* in a clear manner. The fact that she didn’t know where this all was going was only increasing her irritation!
"So. Basically, the woman I thought I killed so long ago is alive, as far as you know."
"As far as I know, yes. That is a good way of putting it. Scurried away like a cackling insect, leaving me with only the knowledge that it wasn’t just her at fault. Unless she is immortal and can be in a thousand thousand places all at once. Which would be a neat trick."
"More plainly, please?"
"Her notes stretched back centuries of events. Stretched across *continents*. With a single word, or name, devouring our potential like a parasite in the shadows of society. Ouras."
Sitting down on the edge of the table, Corde hez Iralev - veteran of four Descents and Hero who had been invited to so many gatherings over the years that she had learned enough tricks to shut her ’displeasure’ down and... *mingle* - took a stab in the dark. In order to either end this conversation or make it make sense. For she’d come all the way here to put things to rest, not open up new mysteries...
"Are you writing a play again? Did your great great grandfather put you up to this?"
"My family has not seen him in over fifty years. For all I know he died of old age in his bed. Nor have I engaged in theater since my sister went missing. I wrote them for her - because she bullied me less if I could entertain her in other ways. What made you bring him up?"
"Because this seems like one of the classic dark plays of the Acid Tongued Villainess. Cultivators slipping away from their certain death, unrepentant to shirking their responsibilities to the end. Schemes and destruction. The scope and subtle fear you are weaving would bring many nobles to the sorority’s playhouse if you used his name and fame to draw the crowd."
Raising a finger to her lips, Nojuste tilted her head and nodded. She was the type of person who could fully appreciate a sudden tangent... and her junior was right. Inside, she already started adjusting some plans. A ’long lost manuscript’ was certainly one option!
"Pushing the story out in such a form might indeed be a good way to draw attention to it. I’ll work on that on the side. But I’m talking to you in all seriousness, Little Feather. Velauyn was one of them and she molded my sister to be one too."
"If you could not call me that, I would appreciate it."
"Stop being younger than me and then we can discuss that again. Now, listen. They don’t all meet in secret temples or ruins. They don’t wear matching outfits or symbols like the Guilds. Most of them probably aren’t even aware that they’re part of it. For every two or three that work together, there are seventeen who’ve never met another member. But they all serve the same cause - it *is* a maliciously religious cult, I can assure you."
Pointing towards the leather case, like it contained all the necessary proof, the slightly older cultivator met the pair of dark eyes with extra sharp confidence in them. Even with all the decades between then and now, the swordswoman remembered how... *relatively honest*, the noblewoman was. The twins did like to occasionally pretend one was the other one, though she was now suspecting that such a thing was more the deceased sister’s idea.
However, a spectacle such as showing off her Mist Element early was the very kind of authentication she might use to prove herself. Explanations done blatantly in between the lines, rather than outright, was the kind of thing that Corde hated the battlefield of socialization for. Feints with a blade were so much easier to read and see coming than with words!
"A hidden cult."
"Yes."
"That you have located members of yourself and found secret evidence of."
"...Yes..."
"What was that hesitation?"
Eyes that had met hers so easily moments ago drifted away. Her voice grew quiet, slightly ’sullen’, and her shoulders tucked in defensively. Because she had been *blatantly* caught in a little lie. The reaction felt so familiar that it was like over seventy uncanny years had just rolled right back.
"...I may have made my husband do most of the running around. Such gruntwork is beneath me. That doesn’t mean I haven’t worked hard. I knew you would nitpick over this, why can’t you just listen and start working together with me? You’re so stingy with your trust. Look what it got you. I bet you have no friends still, you common-"
"Why are you trying to attack me with your words if you want my help?" 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶
"Who needs your help!?"
Huffing and pacing away, Nojuste angrily kicked at the Mirror on the wall. She thought she’d outgrown being affected by things like this, but it turned out she also just hadn’t had a good ’bad’ friendship in all the decades since the barbarian little commoner stole a boat to go and be with her own kind. At least, that was what she’d told herself to get over missing someone back then. How quickly it riled her blood that the woman didn’t at all seem happy to see her!
The students she taught and her son and daughter would probably not believe she was the same person. Though her husband would.
"Take the stupid evidence. Bring it back to your continent’s Void Defense Society. To members you trust, not just anyone. I’ve tried sending copies through intermediaries to them, the local Guilds, the Court of Nobles... and it resulted in nothing. There are more of them in high positions than you think. It’s like they are everywhere. Like anyone can be one."
"Even you?"
"Or you. Don’t get so smart suddenly, commoner. You just keep swinging that sword which apparently deserves its own name around. While running about forever a spinster, adopted without providing children to that poor family name that took you in. So ungrateful. I have no idea what the people of your continent are thinking, revering someone like you."
As Corde watched her stomp toward the stairwell, she realized that she herself... was smiling. Not a lot, but more than she should be after getting insulted and debased. Nojuste paused on the third step and looked back, making that brief expression she hadn’t expected to ever make in her homeland... hide itself.
"I don’t care when you leave, but take those with you. The Featherbound Frost Sorority has no use for a Mirror that cannot show off their beauty - or any object that can’t even be picked up and moved without a certain Physique. I’ll also strike you from the membership roll. You clearly have *no* intention to return."
"...Well, who knows. I had the belief that I’d never come back in the first place. But here I am."
The famed swordswoman did want to go back and apologize to Qatrand gil Yecine. Perhaps try to wait and talk to the missing Elua er Goltbred. When it came to work, if more people like her former instructor were around and influencing society... that did seem like a big deal - one which would fall under her out-of-Descent duties. But after that?
"Hmph. Don’t expect a high class meal if you show up without notice again. The seas are vast, but ships and letters travel them all the time."
"I don’t really write letters that aren’t reports..."
"Did you think I was asking you to write me a sonnet or a diary entry? Keep me updated on how your continent is dealing with things, Corde. I swear, you show a little kindness and people just-"
Rushing up the stairs, the rest of the woman’s sentence was lost to the sound of her fleeing footsteps. Leaving only Mist she had brought down behind, to cling and start to freeze against the Frozen Duskblade’s sheath. Drawing the blade and sweeping it through that fog in slow arcs... a short Frost Sword Dance - that she had learned the basics of in this city were elementalism was so well thought of - gathered all that moisture into shapes that would crack the moment her attention wavered.
Also known as the minute in which she, a warrior and not a scholar, turned around and tried to figure out how to even remove an object buried in a wall that no one else had been able to. Which led to wondering why she should take it at all, after it came off easier than expected as soon as the other artifact was brought nearby. The backing seemed to be made of similar but shorter little pointy spikes that had somehow held it in place without leaving a mark on the wall which the material should have been piercing.
"...Few years late, but maybe I can call it a wedding gift for my apprentice? If she’ll accept it. And if our researchers determine it is not dangerous..."
