Return of the Runebound Professor

Jalen excused himself shortly after Vermil started explaining his plans. Sticking around for the reasoning always made things considerably less exciting. At least, that was the reasoning he gave them before he vanished.

If one were to get particularly technical, he hadn’t even actually excused himself. He’d just left. But that was semantics, and Jalen had never been much a fan of those. They were a waste of everyone’s time. After all, nobody gave a shit about what was technically true. All that mattered was the result.

And thus, he found himself standing in a room that he hadn’t been in for quite some time. Familiar occupants greeted him.

A lone desk piled high with teetering stacks of paper that he didn’t have the slightest intention of ever reviewing.

A chair beside it, nice and comfortable whenever he was left alone for long enough to actually bother trying to sit down in it. At the moment, he was sorely tempted to toss it through a window.

A window — the one that Jalen was tempted to toss the chair through.

That was it. And, bar the papers, Jalen didn’t particularly mind the room so long as the door remained shut. He didn’t deem the door worthy of acknowledging, as it tended to admit people that he had absolutely no desire to waste time with.

Jalen flicked his fingers. A haze of purple energy washed over the piled papers and, with a loud pop, the space above the desk collapsed. Air whooshed through the room as the papers were sucked into a twisting vortex, leaving the desk completely empty.

He sat down in his chair and leaned back, kicking his feet up onto the top of the desk. And there he sat. His fingers twitched and tapped against his thigh and he stared up at the ceiling. It was one that he’d stared at many times before. He knew every single crack, every mar in its surface.

Jalen drew in a deep breath and let it out in an explosive sigh. He pushed his chair back, teetering dangerously on its hind legs. His stomach churned with a mixture of impatience and discomfort. It had been too long since he’d been alone. He already got precious few moments of silence.

That was intentional, but even he had his limits.

“You’re growing complacent.” A familiar voice echoed in Jalen’s ears, but he didn’t so much as twitch. He knew the voice well. It was a voice he rather liked, as it happened to be his own.

“I am enjoying a long awaited rest. The gods know I deserve one after all the bullshit we’ve put up with for the past few hundred years. You can’t tell me that you didn’t want to take a break yourself.”

“There is a difference between taking time off and… this. Even if the title has lost all the meaning it once had, you are still the head of a great Noble Family. You are Jalen. The weight of the lives we have taken could sink a city to the core of the planet.”

Jalen rocked his chair even farther back and let out a derisive snort. This wasn’t the first time he’d gotten into an argument with himself, and he highly doubted it would be his last. There were many times in which he’d found himself greatly in want of intelligent conversation.

That conversation rarely came from members of his own family, so he’d had to adapt and get very, very used to his own company.

“I don’t recall being so melodramatic. Life goes on. I am simply enjoying the small things.”

“Is that what you call dallying around and hoping that someone will play a game with you? We used to take what we wanted. There were precious few that could do anything to stop us. What stimulation is darts? We could seek out a true challenge. A battle for the ages. When is the last time we had one of those?”

“Boring. There is no joy in crushing those who cannot fight back. Everyone of worth in this Empire is hiding or dead. What’s the point of crushing some worthless little worm? In darts, the scales are evened. It is gives me a taste of what once was.”

“Is that so?” the voice was mocking now. “But you know that isn’t true, Jalen. There’s so much more that you have done. Even a few scant months ago, there was more. You have never been content to sit back and let someone else take the wheel.”

Jalen leaned back just a bit too far. The chair tipped and he crashed to the ground, landing on his back with a loud thud. He didn’t blink. His gaze didn’t even move from the ceiling above him.

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“What do you think I’ve been doing for the past decade?” Jalen asked. “Don’t answer that question. You know what I’ve been doing. You’re me. I’m me. I’m just in an argumentative mood.”

Jalen’s own smug laughter echoed in his head. That was particularly annoying because he was the one doing it. One could only wipe a smug grin off someone else’s face. It wasn’t like he could beat the shit out of himself and still claim victory.

At least, he was pretty sure he couldn’t. It was probably worth trying at least once. Fortunately — or unfortunately, as that would depend on whether beating oneself could be considered winning — he wasn’t in the mood.

And most certainly unfortunately, the voice in his head was not done talking.

“The last decade and the last few months have been vastly different. You are putting great amounts of interest in Vermil. Too much. Who is he to tell us what to do?”

“I play along because I enjoy his antics. You can’t tell me they aren’t funny.”

“They are,” Jalen’s internal voice admitted. “It is not Vermil that is the issue. It is you. We are bored. When did you become satisfied being a teacher? Sitting on the sidelines in case another Rank 6 shows up to mess up Vermil’s plans?”

“It feels like today is a nitpicky day. What do you think we’re going to get out of this conversation?” Jalen asked, scratching at the side of his nose. “There’s a Rank 7 coming to visit. Can you possibly think of anything more interesting than that? A chance to finally do something new.”

“That will be exciting,” the internal Jalen admitted. “I am not saying to leave Vermil’s group. We are aligned there. It is your approach that you take offense with.”

“Don’t start that. You can’t go claiming that I’m the one taking offense with my own actions. I made you up.”

“Or perhaps I made you up.”

“No, you definitely didn’t. I made you. See? I’m talking out loud. You’re in my head.”

“You are also saying my lines out loud,” the internal Jalen said, and it struck the external Jalen that the former was right. He’d been speaking out loud the entire time.

“Oh,” Jalen said. “Fair point, then.”

“I always have fair points. I’m you, and we’ve never been wrong.”

“Now that’s just a stretch.”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps.”

Jalen, both internal and external, remained silent for a few moments.

“What should I do, then?” Jalen asked, but he was no longer sure which version of him it was that was talking.

“I don’t know,” the other Jalen replied. “I haven’t figured that part out yet. It’s been far too long since I’ve had any real purpose. For years the empire has been rotting from the core. For the longest time, I thought there was nothing worthwhile left within it at all. Vermil proved that wrong. Him and his students — they are the first of a young generation that has garnered my interest. Perhaps there have been more, but I simply missed them because I have not been paying attention.”

“Perhaps. But we can’t control that, can we? There was one thing we promised to do, all those years ago. To ensure that we would be ready for when change came. To protect this worthless empire from itself until it was ready to be reborn.”

“Yes, yes. I recall the promises of my deluded younger self.” Jalen picked himself up from the ground and brushed his hair out. “It was the reason I bothered becoming the head of the Linwick family in the first place. A time when I felt like I was a good, noble man. How boring. Why bring that up?”

“All you have done as of late is slack off and play with Vermil and his students. When was the last time we checked the Archives? The true ones, not the fake treasury that we built.”

“Bah. Just about everyone old enough to remember those is either dead or more than aware of why those weapons were locked away,” Jalen said with an exasperated sigh. “Is that what this whole conversation was about? Slacking in my duties because I’m getting lazy? I deserve to have a millennia of doing nothing after all this shit.”

There was no response.

It seemed his conversation was over.

Jalen heaved a sigh. Despite his earlier words, the faintest of frowns pulled at his lips. He muttered a curse. Spatial magic twisted to life at his fingertip. It buzzed and crackled, burning with such energy that a mere touch from it would likely reduce a weaker mage to a pile of melted flesh.

He brought his finger down, tracing a line through the air. The Archives were well defended. When he’d been entrusted with them all those years ago, back when he had still held hope for the world, he had spent nearly a hundred years studying them. They had inspired much of his strength today.

Nobody was going to break through them. It would have taken a power that nobody within the Empire possessed.

The line snapped and popped as Jalen dug his hands into the energy and pried it apart like a pair of double doors. His teeth gritted and his eyes squeezed shut he pushed against the Archives. Even though they knew his energy signature, opening a path was an immense task.

With a groan, he felt the pathway finally snap open. The spell was not a simple teleportation, or even a portal. It was a direct connection between two points in space. He knew what would await before him. Instead of a twisting purple wall, he would see clean through it and into the Archives as if there was a door to them right within his office.

He would be able to see the immense, untouchable imbuements that had stood for hundreds of years. Ones so powerful that no Rank 6, no matter how powerful, could even dream of scratching them.

“See?” Jalen asked as he opened his eyes. “Just as it…”

Jalen trailed off. His hands slipped, then fell to his sides.

The Imbuements were dull and dead.

Something — someone — had severed them.

The Archives had been infiltrated.

“Oh,” Jalen said as his face went bone pale. “Oh, shit.”

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