The Sovereign was silent for a long moment. The chasm stretched around us, the thousands of vats glowing like a field of captive stars, as the hooded statue loomed at the center, its face hidden in shadow, and its hands folded in eternal patience.
Then he spoke, and his voice was quieter, as if he was speaking to himself as much as to me.
"He is what happens when a man who should have died goes on living."
I waited. The Sovereign did not seem to need encouragement.
"I have been alive for more than eight thousand years," he said. "I have seen empires rise and fall. I have seen gods die and be forgotten. I have seen the world change and change again. And in all that time, I have never met anyone like him."
Then he looked at me, and he sort of smiled, or maybe it was a frown. It seemed my question had made him look deep into himself, and I don’t think Sid was liking what he saw.
"You want me to tell you he is cruel?" he laughed. "That would be easier for you. Yes, I know it would be, after all, a cruel thing can be hated, and when you hate something, you can fight it, and I can see it in the shape of your body and the way you move... You are a Battle Mage boy... for someone so young, hatred must have driven you to become this thing of lightning and blood."
He turned away from me and looked at the face of the hooded statue, "He is not cruel, Elric. I need you to understand that before anything else, because everything you do wrong from here will come from expecting cruelty and finding something worse."
The memory of that shadow entered my head, and its voice, which I would never forget until I die, flashed through my mind.
"Oh, this is marvelous. I have ascended through eleven heavens and consumed the light of forty fallen worlds, and I have never once found a world that fights back by folding its own hours. "
I shivered, "What is worse than cruel?"
"Indifferent."
∞
"I have met him three times," the Sovereign said. "In eight thousand years. Three times. The first, when he set me here, and gave me the slave name... Sid."
He looked at me with piercing eyes. "I find it fascinating that a me from a broken time had told you of that name; I must have been in quite a broken state."
I remembered the broken figure of that old man screaming at me to stay away from him with no demeanor of a Sovereign, and I shook my head.
The eyes of the Sovereign tightened, "Nevertheless, if we meet again after this moment, don’t call me Sid anymore, but call me Seed... I will be able to understand that you have fled outside the cage of control, and I will know that we have a deal outside what has been laid down for us."
I nodded, and he sighed, "That was the first time I met him, of course. At that time, we all knew who he was; it was impossible not to know of him, eight thousand years ago. When I first met him, he branded the Soul Flayer to my skin, but you see, he could have easily placed it in my soul, and I would forever be bound... like I told you Elric, he is not cruel, I think in a way, he wants me to escape the hold of the Soul Flayer, such a thing, I think, would amuse him."
I felt a thread of anger in recognition of what Seed had just said. Was I not the same? The Sovereign of the Stars had challenged me to go against his plans, and he did the same thing here... Was the whole world and everyone in it a game for him to manipulate as he wished?
"I met him the second time when the last Overseer failed, and I was moved from one duty to another. The third, once, in passing, when he came to look at something, and I happened to be in the room."
The grey eyes of the Sovereign were flat as he quickly spoke. "Three times. And every one of them, he was kind to me."
"Kind?"
Those eyes focused on me, "Courteous... I would even say attentive. He asked about the facility. He remembered a detail from four thousand years before and inquired whether it had been resolved. He was, in every meeting, a gracious and considerate master."
Seed let that sit. "And in between those three meetings, across eight thousand years of me tending his... temple, feeding his statue, screaming under his parasite, I don’t think he thought of me once. It took me a long time to acknowledge that he did not do this out of malice. He simply had no reason to. I am a well-kept tool in a house he owns among many houses, and when was the last time you thought of your tools?"
I looked at the hooded figure, and I thought about the shadow in the pyramid that had said I will let you try.
He had not been taunting me... the bastard had been amused, faintly, like I was a small animal who was capable of a clever trick.
"Then how do you fight that?" I said. It came out quieter than I meant it to, and I felt the claws of the fox on my shoulder dig into me with quiet desperation.
"I don’t know." Seed said it simply, "I have had a long time to think about this issue, and the funny thing is that the best answer I have found is you."
His grey eyes fixed on me. "The plan was for you to never wake up, and the fact that you could break his hold over you in such a short time means everything. You are now in his blind spot, and at the moment, you are beneath his attention, and that makes someone like you... Very dangerous.
I stared at him. "Why does it feel like you are beginning to believe in this crazy plan of mine?"
"Oh, you will most likely fail," the Sovereign laughed, "But your unique nature means that failure means nothing to you, and that is a terrifying thing, since you only need to succeed one time... I am betting on the one time, Elric Voss. So, now that you see the scale of what you need to do, are you willing to go through with it?"
My back straightened, and I nodded, "I shall break myself against the eternal mountain in front of me until I shatter it to dust."