That night, there was a banquet on the coast near Heirelil. The ogres hauled their liquor up from the cellar and served it up to everyone, us included. It turned out the ogres had a custom of sharing a drink after making up with an opponent after a battle. They drank and washed the slate clean. That was ogre-style peacemaking.
At the ogres’ encouragement, I put back a good number of drinks. Halfway through the night, when I couldn’t take any more, I left the floor to Atofe. A drinking competition was underway between her and the ogres, so she was welcome to keep the party going.
All the drinking had made me feel sick, so I used an antidote to relieve the nausea and then wandered through the banquet for a while. It hit me that a certain person wasn’t there, so I made my way to the shore. There I found Sandor, drinking alone.
“Ah, well met,” he said.
“Mind if I sit down?”
“Not at all.” I sat down next to him and let out a breath. What was he thinking about, all the way over here? I could guess, even in my current dulled state. He was thinking about Alec. At the last, he had called Alec to surrender. Even as North God, when he faced down his son, he couldn’t have wanted to kill him. That didn’t mean I was about to apologize for doing the deed. If I’d backed out of that fight and let Alec go, we might not have been having this banquet. The North God could have met up with Geese, teamed up with the Ogre God, and attacked us yet again. Despite his pondering, I didn’t get the impression that Sandor thought my call was wrong. He hadn’t said anything, but he wouldn’t let his feelings get in the way of his judgment.
“It’s too bad about Alec.”
“Yes.”
Being right was one thing. Staying quiet about it was another.
“That boy… He was always talented. Put a sword in his hands and no one could wield it better. When he fought monsters, he saw their weak points straight away. No one in his generation could best him.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I had high expectations, you know. I told him to take the King Dragon Blade and the name of North God. I wonder if that wasn’t a mistake.”
Alec had been caught up in fantasies of heroism to the point of obsession.
“At the end of the day, North God is only a name. He lost his way.” Sandor drained his glass.
I had nothing I could say to him. With more experience under his belt, he would have acquired what he needed to merit the North God name. I couldn’t say that to him. Alec was gone.
“What’s done is done. It’ll weigh on me for a while, but you needn’t worry about it, Master Rudeus. It was battle, no more than that.”
“…Do you think so?”
“I hear you have a lot of children. Well…someday, you may reckon with it yourself.”
The feelings of a parent outliving their child were still unknown to me. I hoped they would stay that way.
“Anyway. I hope you’ll mourn my son.”
“I will.”
Our conversation petered out. I heard the crash of the waves before us and reveling voices behind us. Chatter about the last battle backed with celebratory music; it drove home that the battle was really over. We hadn’t defeated Geese, or even seen him. Even so, it was over. That cast a slight cloud of unease over the finished battle. The fight had ended up being close to a clean sweep, but there’d been a lot of close calls where luck had determined the outcome. What about next time? Could we repeat this time’s performance and win? That was asking a lot. Geese would be back with a new plan before long.
“I wonder who the Man-God’s final disciple is,” was what I said in the end. It wasn’t the Sword God, or the North God, and apparently not the Ogre God either. If Geese and Abyssal King Vita were our known quantities, then there was one more currently eluding me. The Ogre God had said that Geese had fled. If my predictions were correct, he’d have taken whoever didn’t show up in the last fight and got out of here, keeping his forces intact for next time. Something nagged at me, though, something I had to be forgetting; one missing piece. There should have been someone else who seemed like a disciple, and I should have heard something about possible candidates. Nothing had come up.
“Indeed. To be honest, I have no idea either. Perhaps there’s a different disciple working in a different place.”
A different disciple in a different place? At that, I thought of my house. The Ogre God hadn’t attacked it, but someone else could have moved on it. We still had no way of getting home. We’d made peace here…but it took longer than planned. War could have broken out in Sharia as we sat around basking in our victory.
I sighed. It was no good stewing on it. I was worried, but I had to leave things in Sharia to the people in Sharia. Only, I didn’t want to know what it felt like to lose a child. I was fighting because I didn’t want to know that feeling.
I took another drink and gulped it down to wash those worries away. I wanted to get home soon.
“What’s that?” Sandor looked up. His gaze was pointed out at the ocean. “There’s something there, isn’t there?”
I looked too. It was night, and the ocean was totally dark. I couldn’t see anything. There was nothing but the sound of the waves. I peered out with the Eye of Distant Sight but still couldn’t see anything.
“Whereabouts?” I asked.
“Look. There. It’s getting closer.” My eyes still couldn’t make out anything. I strained my vision for a while, but still nothing. Maybe Sandor was drunk and seeing things.
“Should I get a light?” I suggested.
“…Can you not see it?”
“I can’t see anything. Maybe your eyes are just too good, Sandor.”
Sandor frowned, dubious. Fair, I couldn’t really talk when I had the Eye of Distant Sight. Maybe I was looking the wrong way because I was drunk. Could it be higher up?
“…It can’t be! Master Rudeus, close your demon eyes!”
“Huh? Oh, um, okay.” I closed my eyes.