Chapter 1182: A long lost dream(4)

Alpheo lunged back into the world of the living with a gasp so violent it tore at his throat, as if he had never took air in his life.

His chest felt heavy and restricted, as if pinned beneath an invisible masonry that made every inhalation a struggle.

His eyes darted frantically. Part of him expected the suffocating stench of the Lampianis, the cold reach of the red mud embracing him, or the merciful silence of the void bringing him to the final deep .

He almost hoped for it, to wake to the simplicity of the end, rather than this lingering, ethereal half-life.

Instead, he found Egil, waiting for him as he always had been.

His friend was perched on the edge of the table, his wide shoulders slouched with a weariness that looked heavy enough to crack stone. He was staring out the doorless entrance, watching the stillness as if waiting for a guest who was already late.

"What was that?" Alpheo’s voice was a dry rasp.

Egil’s blond hair whipped around as he turned, a flicker of genuine surprise crossing his features before a look of quiet...joy? Bloomed in his eyes.

"Take your time, Alph. I’m sure your head is spinning like a top."

"Rattled" was a pathetic word for the disintegration of his sanity.

"What was that?" Alpheo repeated, sharper this time. He didn’t want comfort; he wanted the world to make sense again.

"Exactly what you think it was... probably." Egil’s blue eyes locked onto his, unblinking. "Unlike what you may think, I haven’t become omniscient just because I stopped breathing."

In any other life, Alpheo might have laughed at the jest. He had craved Egil’s irreverence for years, but now it felt like a distraction from a looming precipice.

"What did you give me to drink?" Alpheo demanded, his hand lunging for the carafe. It was bone-dry. He remembered it being full to the brim, he had felt the weight of it. He jerked his head around, searching the rotting floorboards for a spill, for a stain, for anything to prove the physics of the room.

Did it dry? How long was I under?

"I told you. I don’t know the name of it nor what it was," Egil said softly.

"Then what did I see?"

"A great deal of things. Right now, they’re nothing. In the future, maybe they’ll be everything." Egil shrugged, a careless gesture that set Alpheo’s teeth on edge. "I know what you saw, but I don’t know the meaning. I wasn’t the philosophical type, remember? That’s Asag’s territory. I’m sure you’ve got books in that big library of yours about prophecies and shit. You can look it up when you get home."

"No. No, no, no." Alpheo collapsed back onto the bed, kneading his forehead with the heels of his hands until stars danced behind his eyelids. "It’s wrong. It’s all wrong.I did not see that.’’ he hyperventilated ’’ Gods do not exist.They do not. There is only the hand of man, not god, but man. There is no royal architect in the sky dictating the fall of a leaf or the rise of a fucking Prince."

He had built his entire life on that foundation. He was a man of the gutter who had climbed to a throne because he had fought harder and thought faster than those who opposed him. To accept this was to admit he was merely a piece on a board he couldn’t see.

He refused that.

"Who put you here?" Alpheo asked, his voice trembling with a sudden, sharp suspicion. He looked at ....was this truly his friend?

"I don’t know. I came when you came. I simply knew what I had to do."

"Am I truly to believe a god in the clouds orchestrated all of this?" He searched Egil’s face, begging for a contradiction, for a logical exit.

"Mad shit, eh?"

It was a useless answer, like asking a dog the meaning of the stars.

"I refuse to believe such foolishness!" Alpheo roared, his voice echoing off the moss-covered walls. "No god looked out for me! Everything I achieved, I did by my own hand, with my own blood! I put the wood down! I drove the nails!"

"Is that really what’s important right now?" Egil asked. He reached up and scratched the back of his head, a gesture so profoundly human and mundane that it grounded Alpheo more than any sermon could. "I mean, you’re still you. Everything you built is still there. Does it matter if you had a bit of help you didn’t ask for? Provided there was any. I certainly did not see any angel with a flaming sword coming to rescue us when we needed. You have to admit, with you standing here .. it gives you food for thought."

"Maybe it was just my mind," Alpheo whispered, clinging to the last shred of his skepticism. "Just a fever dream, like I thought before."

How many times he used that lie?

"Alph." Egil’s voice dropped, the humor vanishing completely. He looked at the Prince with a devastating, piercing clarity. "I didn’t mean it that way. And you bloody well know it."

Alpheo looked up, and suddenly his throat felt like it was filled with ash. He stared at Egil, feeling exposed, stripped of his armor and his titles. For the first time in his adult life, he looked like the child he had once been, a boy whose most shameful secret had just been found out in the dark.

"You... know it?" Alpheo’s voice was barely a thread of sound, fragile and thin.He never felt so bare.

"Let’s not linger on that,what good would that be?" Egil said, dismissing the weight of the secret with a gentle wave of his hand. "You had your reasons, Alph. What matters is that... I missed you. I truly thought that once my mission was done, that would be the end of us. No more bickering, no more wine. I like to think of this,’’ he waved his hand ’’ this moment right here, as a gift. If you’ll allow it." He smiled, though it was a bittersweet thing. "Please, don’t rattle your brain. I don’t have much more I can give you, and you’ll have a lifetime to turn it over in your head.Long will be your road."

"It made no sense," Alpheo admitted, his fingers knotting together. "It was like watching a tragedy from afar, paralyzed. Like hiding under a bed while a murder happens in the next room. I was there, but I wasn’t... I could do nothing.What was that?What did that meant?"

He forced his breathing to steady, the cold air of the hut helping to clear the lingering ozone of the dream. Egil was right. He would have years to think of the flames, the biting cold, and that shadow of a man. Was it a fight he had seen? An embrace? Why had he been shown the destination if he didn’t know the road? Did it mean the future was a stone already carved, or was it a warning? If it couldn’t be changed, why show it at all?

The questions were a swarm of hornets, and he had no net to catch them.

"As I said... I’m running low on answers," Egil continued, seeing the Prince’s tension begin to bleed away. "And before you ask, no, I didn’t see the face of whoever pulled the strings to put me here. For all I know, it was my god, the one true one, who was right all along. The great horse.

Which would make the rest of you miserable heretics. Imagine that? Right up Jarza’s fanatical ass..."

Against the crushing weight of the supernatural, Alpheo found himself chuckling. It was a dry, hollow sound, but it was human. He was human.

"Whatever the case, I’m fairly certain I’d be a heretic to all of them, regardless of who sits on the clouds.Provided indeed all that is happening here is not a play of my subconscious, or whatever it is that think before death...."

"That ought to change, shouldn’t it?"

"Hard to convert when I don’t know the name of the master," Alpheo countered.

"Given who you are..." Egil leaned back, his eyes twinkling with that old, familiar mischief. "I think that doesn’t really matter to them."

Alpheo looked at the rotting ceiling, then back to the ghost of his friend. The reality of the mud and the blood began to call to him, a dull ache in his phantom limbs. "What happens now?"

"Now?" Egil let out a soft sigh, his form seeming to flicker for a fraction of a second, like a candle caught in a draft. "I know very little about the ’now.’ My advice? Push it away. Lock it in a box and bury it for a later date. You have more than enough on your plate back in the muck.The answers will come to you with time and with it there will be

yours

."

Alpheo nodded slowly. It was true. He had a battle to finish, a son to protect, and an army that perhaps believed him dead. The metaphysics of the soul ,future, and religion would have to wait until he wasn’t bleeding out in a riverbank.

"How do I go back?" Alpheo asked. "Provided I even can. Is there a door I missed?"

Egil shrugged, his expression turning playful once more. "Maybe you’ll just wake up in the middle of a conversation. Or maybe you’ll just blink and find a lance in your ribs again. I’m just the welcoming committee, Alph, not the navigator."

A long silence lingered between them then. It wasn’t the heavy, suffocating silence of the woods, but something shared, a quiet bridge between the living and the dead. They sat in the ruin of the house, the Prince and the drunk Thief, watching the dust motes dance in a sun that wasn’t real.

"Egil?"

"Yes?"

"Before you go... or before I do. There are things I’ve carried. Things I always wanted to say when the world wasn’t screaming."

Egil leaned his head back against the rotting wood of the wall, his expression softening into something remarkably human. "Hardly a better time, Alph. I’m not exactly booked for the evening."

"I’m sorry," Alpheo said, the words heavy and honest. "For all of it. You were right. I shouldn’t have pushed north. I should have listened to you.Romelia was nothing but a hole in the ground. It would have swallowed all of us were it not for you."

A flicker of the old Egil returned, the one who could find the ego in a tragedy. "There was a time when those words would have been umsic to my ears."

"Too late for that?"

"Fuck no," Egil laughed, a bright sound that filled the stagnant room. "It feels better than I’d like to admit, being told I was right. I miss that almost as much as the wine and fucking.There is much of both here."

They laughed together then, a sudden, sharp burst of mirth that stripped away the titles, the obsidian armor, and the ghost-flesh. For a heartbeat, they weren’t a Prince and a memory; they were just two boys made slave who had survived against the odds.

"Alph?" Egil’s laughter subsided, replaced by a gaze that was suddenly, piercingly serious.

"Yes?"

"Perhaps there is one last thing I can give you. A piece of advice from a man who’s already seen the end of his road."

"I’m listening."

"Whatever comes next... don’t go in alone. And I’m not talking about dreams or whatever bastards are hiding in the clouds. Trust in your friends. Trust in your son. I’d say trust in your wife, but fuck Jasmine, I never liked the bitch.

My point is... you might be the key to what’s coming, or you might not be. But if you try to carry the world on your shoulders alone, you’ll break. The end isn’t written in stone yet. Let others take a share of the burden. Let people in, Alph. Stop being a fortress."

Alpheo looked at his friend, feeling the familiar sting of tears. "I feel as though this is a farewell now," he muttered, his voice thick.

"I feel it too," Egil nodded, he expected light, merging with the golden dust of the hut, but there was nothing, he just felt it. "I suppose this is the moment for some profound, deep-as-the-sea parting words... but I never was much for poetry. So, I’ll leave you with a secret I thought I’d taken to the grave. Which I did, technically."

He turned to him pain in his eyes at what this moment meant.

"Remember the dead rats you found in your boots? Right before we marched into Yarzat for the first time?"

Alpheo blinked, the memory resurfacing. "Yes. I beat the shit out of Laedio and put manure in his bed for that."

Egil grinned, a wide, wicked flash of teeth. "It was me all along."

"I made that man’s life a misery for a month!"

"Well, it was he who challenged me to see if I could get past your guards," Egil chuckled, his voice starting to sound distant, as if he were speaking from across a wide river. "So at least the manure didn’t go to waste. "

Alpheo laughed, even as he felt the wall go.

He felt sadness grow in him. "This really is a farewell, isn’t it?"

Egil stood up, and for a moment it was as if he were with him al along "I think I found those deep words after all," he whispered.

He turned back to Alpheo, his eyes burning with a fierce, protective pride. "Listen to me, Alph. Whatever the future holds, whatever the dreams try to tell you, whatever they means... I am proud of what we built. You, me, Jarza, Asag, Laedio, all of us. We made a paradise out of a graveyard."

He reached out a hand, though he didn’t touch him. "Now go back. Go back and fuck every one of those bastards who wants to ruin what we made. Show them why you’re the one"

With a final, jaunty wink he gave his farewell

"See you around, Alph.

Go build our paradise.

"

Darkess consumed the house, the moss, and the ghost, and Alpheo felt himself falling, not into the dark, but back where he should have been all along.Where he knew he had made the decision to which he could never go back.

All men must die, he knew that and yet...if such was the destination, it would not feel such fear at the next.