The white wolf yawned widely, her round eyes piercing through Aura.
Aura cocked her head, turning to Liz with no small amount of hesitation. “Do you need a moment to wake up?”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s Cerberus.”
At last, Liz noticed that Meteia had reverted form. “Right. Um... Where to start? Cerberus, do you think you could turn back for me?”
The white wolf shook her head. Liz considered trying to explain the matter away, but it seemed easier in the long term just to tell Aura the truth. She launched into an explanation of Cerberus’s true identity, leaving it up to Aura to decide whether or not to believe her.
Once she was done, Aura nodded. “I see. Well, I don’t. But I understood what you said.” Her face was as blank as ever, giving no clues as to how much she believed, but she sounded at least half credulous. “I’ll ask Meteia once she turns back.”
“You could just wait a moment. She won’t be long.”
Cerberus nuzzled Aura’s leg apologetically.
“All right.” Aura reached down to scratch the white wolf’s head and nodded before looking searchingly around the room. “Where’s Hiro?”
“In the dungeon. I didn’t want him running off. He doesn’t figure in our plans anymore, and there’s no telling what he could do if we left him to his own devices.”
“We need every advantage we can get,” Aura said. “Someone like him on the front line could make all the difference. I wouldn’t ask, but it’s important. Will you consider letting him fight?”
“I wasn’t going to bring this up, but...maybe it’s better not to keep you in the dark.”
Liz pursed her lips and pressed a finger to her forehead, muttering under her breath as she gathered her thoughts. Aura peered at her curiously but remained content to watch, stroking Cerberus’s cheek while she waited.
Finally, Liz took a deep breath. “If I told you Hiro wasn’t really from this world, if he was someone from the distant past...would you believe me?”
“Anyone else, no. But him... He’s always been suspicious.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
While not fully believing, Aura seemed surprisingly open to the truth. Liz slumped, the wind taken out of her sails. All her anxiety had been for nothing.
“I always had my suspicions. He tries to keep it a secret, but when you look at everything around him, at Orcus, at his fixation on Six Kingdoms, at the way so many people treat him... It’s not hard to guess.”
“All right. Then I’ll get to the point. Maybe you’ve noticed yourself, but...”
Liz broke off, casting a glance at Cerberus as if awaiting permission to continue. Aura’s brows pulled every so slightly together.
“Meteia says he hasn’t aged since a thousand years ago.”
“He hasn’t aged?”
Liz nodded. “I could hardly believe it myself, but...well, it’s the truth.”
The Demiurgos had intended for Hiro to serve as a vessel for Surtr, fashioning him into a fiend so that his flesh would be strong enough to contain a Lord’s power. Yet his plan had failed to come to fruition. Instead of becoming a vessel, Hiro had consumed Surtr himself. Immortal and equipped with the right of Lordship, he had avenged himself upon the zlosta, using his unstoppable power to lay waste to the Demiurgos’s ambitions. Thereafter, he had returned to his own world, only to be summoned back to Aletia by the Spirit King a thousand years later.
“But Meteia and I have been wondering...was it really the Spirit King that called him back?”
Aura frowned. “Who else could it have been?”
“There’s no way to know for sure, but I think it might have been the Demiurgos.”
The Demiurgos had fathered the zlosta, spawned fiends, unleashed the archons, and elevated the latter into yaldabaoth. Over the course of a thousand long years, he had founded Orcus and used them to undermine the Grantzian Empire. While his ultimate objective remained uncertain, it seemed to involve establishing dominion over Soleil—and now that his plans were approaching completion, he had called Hiro back to this world.
“I think he wants a new vessel.”
Liz’s battle with the Demiurgos had been brief, but it had been enough to see that his body did not meet his needs. Either it was too weak to contain him or simply fundamentally incompatible, but he had been unable to fully repair the arm she had severed.
“Orcus has been after Hiro ever since he returned. Lucia told me they came for his body three years ago.”
The corpse had been a decoy, intended to disguise Hiro’s escape, but that had not deterred Orcus. Indeed, they had hounded him since the moment he first arrived in Aletia, even as they used Stovell and others to fulfill their wider ambitions. With the benefit of hindsight, it looked an awful lot like they had been trying to test him, to forge him by fire into the perfect vessel for the Demiurgos. Certainly, there now appeared to be no one better to serve that role.
“That’s why I’m locking him up,” Liz concluded. “I can’t let them fight.”
Aura had been nodding along in silence, but she looked up at that. “That makes sense. If you’re right, it’s safer to keep them apart.”
“That was my thinking,” Liz said. “And Meteia tells me that the Lords lost their original vessels a thousand years ago. The Demiurgos might be immortal, but he hasn’t been at full strength for centuries.”
That was to say, they could defeat him with the forces they had on hand.
Aura seemed mostly convinced, but she cocked her head. “So losing their original vessels made the Lords weaker. All right. But isn’t Hiro a Lord now? Doesn’t he need a vessel too?”
Liz went to reply, but before she could...
“I can answer that.”
Before either could so much as squeak in surprise, a dazzling light filled the room. They closed their eyes against its glare. Gradually, the light subsided. They opened their eyes again to see a nude woman standing with her hands on her hips, seemingly unashamed of her nakedness.
“Hiro has—”
Liz’s fist extended in front of Meteia, clutching a cloak. Meteia glared back, annoyed to have been interrupted, but her eyes quickly softened, and her ears flattened against her head.
“Put some clothes on,” Liz said. “Then we can talk.”
Her eyes would not take no for an answer. Meteia nodded meekly and donned the cloak.
“I realize it’s just us three here,” Liz continued, “but that’s no excuse to be shameless.”
“I know, I know. Wolves don’t need clothes, that’s all. It’s easy to forget.”
Meteia was no exhibitionist, but she had spent so long in her canine form that clothing had begun to grate on her. It enclosed her in a way that felt oppressive, clinging to her skin and chafing unpleasantly when she moved.
“Very well, I’m dressed. May I continue?”
“By all means.”
Meteia sat down in a nearby chair and crossed her legs. Liz and Aura had to smile at how cowed she seemed, but they listened without further complaint.
“By all rights, Hiro would deteriorate just like any other Lord, but he’s found a way to avoid that. True immortality, with no need for a vessel.”
“True immortality...” Aura repeated under her breath. Those words rarely portended anything good. Aletia’s history was full of rich and powerful individuals who had sought the same thing, only to resort to dubious arts and drink strange elixirs that led them to wretched ends. They had not feared death, but rather sought to preserve their worldly wealth—a temptation that led others down the same doomed path to this day.
“Becoming a fiend made him immortal in a sense, even if it cost him his humanity. And absorbing Surtr’s strength gave him incredible power.”
Afterward, Hiro had taken to the battlefield as if possessed, seeking greater strength. His comrades had feared that he was bound for disaster, but they had hesitated to intervene. It was an open secret that he was driven by the hope of saving the first archpriestess, Rey.
“As Rey’s condition deteriorated, he grew more and more desperate. He started experimenting on himself, using the immortality he had to infuse himself with curses.”
And yet, in the end, he had failed. Rey had died, slain by the Demiurgos’s hand.
“I remember it as though it was yesterday. It was raining hard that day. The two of us were fighting elsewhere when word came that her castle had come under attack.”
Rey had been recuperating in a place deep in allied territory, in a fort with no strategic value. The zlosta had struck knowing they would not survive. Numerically, the battle had been an overwhelming human victory, but their aim had been to drive Hiro to despair.
“I followed him as fast as I could, but I was too late. By the time I got there, he was weeping over her corpse.”
Beneath the driving rain, he had cried his hatred to the world. Until the last, he had clung to hope, praying to the heavens for some kind of salvation, but as Rey’s body cooled in his arms, his heart broke forever.