Chương 178: Book 3 Chapter 36: What Could Be

++These new creatures… they are stronger than me. It does not seem possible, but I cannot deny it. Even their servitors, the self-styled 'Demigods', boast more raw power than I do. No wonder their influence spreads so rapidly. I must move my laboratory yet again. ++ - Fragment of Lord Dread's archives, date indeterminate. It came as no surprise, a few days after my return to the refinery, that business had started drying up.

Those with permanent contracts already signed remained with us, but many prospective deals suddenly fell through. It came as no surprise, but a great inconvenience. Fortunately the worst of this was combatted by my preparation, I had already primed to lay off the now-redundant employees, cutting costs to compensate for the plunging revenue. Other steps were more proactive than reactive.

Despite the years since I had last been there, I still held a good deal of influence among the Winzorth Institute's Professors thanks to my early efforts to aid them in their research and careers. This went double for many recent graduates, especially among the boys who had benefitted from my false-courtship scheme.

Few of these were ironclad enough to win me a new magician willing to fight and risk death on my behalf, but it meant that the Vorets did not enjoy anywhere near as much success in curtailing my economic prospects as they might have wished. I found it very amusing to picture their senior circle addressing the fact. Scratching their heads and baffled at how their attempts to isolate me from the world's imperial economy could be so strongly contested.

Perhaps they assumed I had some hidden benefactor, the Grandmaster maybe. It must surely have made more sense to them than the truth, that I had in fact been building these connections since I was twelve years old. Amusement was not victory, though, and even I had to admit to facing a disadvantage in this area of conflict. I may have started at age twelve after all, but the Vorets had been building their own powerbase for centuries.

What was more promising than just the fantasy of my enemies' rage, however, was that another party soon came to the refinery, this time actually waving a white flag. Most of the mercenaries found this to be quite a funny show of theatrics and drama. I did not, because I was close enough to Blakely when they arrived that I knew the white flag in question was quite literally the only thing that prevented him from shooting on sight.

"I don't like this," Blakely told me.

"It's a trap. They want to trap you." I thought about it. Ordinarily, it was a bad idea to ambush someone under a white flag simply because it sent the message that you could never be trusted again, and ensured that your real surrenders or parleys would never be accepted. But if the Vorets planned on massacring all witnesses here, they had nothing to worry about. I thought about it.

"I will meet with them," I told him.

"Where is Sethira?" She was called on fast and ready to hear my orders.

"You know what to do if they seize or kill me?"

"Of course," she smiled.

"I will counter whatever they do." She meant, of course, that she would resurrect me, or help me reconstitute a body, if killed. And she would probably attempt to bind me into her service if she did so, either not knowing about my precautions against such attacks or thinking she could overcome them. That itself would be interesting to see. I leapt from the wall and levitated down at an angle calculated to resemble the magic of someone who could just about fight against gravity, but not yet overcome it entirely.

The strangers I approached numbered four in all, three had the blonde hair I recognised from Bagran and Backry Voret, the third was a much older woman whose hair was a mix between red and grey. She did not look impressed as I landed.

"We already know you can fly, there's no other way to explain your various sightings in Garamon," she told me.

"If you're trying to hide it now, you're doing a shit job." I almost felt embarrassed for a moment, so scathing was her look. I had not really been trying to keep it hidden, merely to leave a shade of doubt. Apparently the Vorets had been monitoring me too much even for that.

"You are here to discuss something other than my magic, I assume?" I asked. The woman sighed.

"No, of course we aren't. Your magic is what this is all about. That uncanny talent of yours. My family still wants it, and you're still holding out."

"It is mine," I told her.

"No, girl. It isn't. The moment something as powerful as the Vorets took an interest, it stopped being yours."

"Grandmother," one of the other Vorets standing beside her cut in.

"This wasn't the pitch father said to—""Your father is a drooling simpleton who wouldn't know how to persuade a girl if his life depended on it," the older woman snapped.

"Piss off." She turned to the man a moment after he failed to obey.

"You think that was a joke? Leave, now. All of you. Go, fuck off with you." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. None of the men seemed happy, but I noted that none even came close to disobedience either. They all shuffled away and left me with the impression of whipped dogs.

"Idiots," the woman sighed as they went.

"That's my legacy right there, a pack of idiots. My name is Exyria Voret, I married into this family thirty years ago. Before that I was renowned as one of Garamon's greatest magical talents. I'm telling you this to let you know that I have some insight into your situation."

"Evidently not," I replied.

"You made the wrong choice when it was your decision." She laughed.

"That's just what I would've said at your age."

"Evidently not," I repeated.

"You probably would have said something like; 'Hello, I am a totally spineless weakling who cannot think or act for herself, could you please dominate me and take away all of my freedoms so I do not have to make decisions anymore?' or something to that effect." Now her good humour evaporated.

"I'm here of my own volition," she snapped.

"You know nothing about me, so don't speak like you do."

"Okay, tell me what you are here to do for the benefit of the family that forced you to marry into them and sacrifice your freedom, of your own volition." I was not quite sure why I felt so eager to antagonize this woman. Something about her needled me, her surrender, perhaps. Her insistence on presenting strength despite being too weak to even fight for her own independence. Voret did not answer at first, she seemed to be focusing on calming herself.

"I was like you once," she said at last.

"Arrogant and young and brimming with all the potential in the world, willing to fight anyone and everyone if they tried to infringe on my ability to do as I pleased."

"And yet you gave up," I noted.

"And yet I gave up. You'll give up too, maybe not now, maybe not for a while, but it'll happen eventually."

"So this is just another attempt at persuading me to surrender without any effort on your family's part," I sighed.

"A pity, I had been hoping for some more interesting conversation."

"You'll have more freedom as a Voret than a Vornholt," the woman said abruptly. I must admit, that caught my attention more than anything else yet had.

"How exactly do you expect that to work?" I asked.

"I would have more freedom when living under the power of others?"

"You live under the powers of others now," she pointed out.

"Your father heads your family, not you. And maybe he's nice about giving you a bit of slack on your leash, but he still holds it at the end of the day. What do you think would happen to your ambitions if he made himself a concerted enemy of them?" She was growing annoyingly close to an actual point. Not a fool, this one, however much she vexed me. What she was missing, of course, was that I had used physical force to get my way with my father, emasculating and scaring him.

If I attempted that in the Voret family it would end badly, and even in ten, twenty years, when I was powerful enough that I may be able to bully such a powerful magician clan from within, they would not feel nearly as humiliated about calling on other authorities to control me. After all, a magician, unlike a warrior, saw no shame in being bested by magic. There were too many variables and uncertainties. But this line of suggestion had, at least, taught me something new about the woman I was speaking with now.

"Is that what you do, then?" I asked her.

"Influence the Vorets from within?" She chuckled at that.

"You make it sound like I'm not a part of this family, but I am. I simply get what I want from it too."

"What is that?"

"Control," she replied.

"Influence over the great political beast that is Garamon's mightiest magician clan, the ability to shape its children and determine the upbringing of the next Grandmaster of Winzorth, and a dozen other positions. Can you honestly tell me that's less than what you're doing now?" I thought about that, and could not help but smile.

"If you wield your power by influencing this family, then that would mean each new genius invited into it is incentivised to work against each other to get their own way. You are inviting a rival for yourself into the family. And I am not stupid enough to think you would do that without being certain you could overcome their own influence should they accept." She did not smile, though I got the curious sense that she was amused. I continued.

"Besides that, I have no interest in raising children to do things for me inadvertently. When people obey me, it will be because they have received a command and know better than to refuse it."

"You sure you want to be a rich woman then?" Voret asked me dryly.

"It sounds like you'd be happier as a queen." I did like the sound of that, of course.

"All things will come in time," I told her.

"Was that the end of your sales pitch?" Her smile turned crooked.

"No, not quite yet my dear. There's just one part left. The most important part. You are the most talented magician to ever exist, and mathematicians are still trying to figure out how to get a result greater than absolute zero when calculating the odds of your being born. This makes you a treasure more valuable to the Vorets than any other. You could breed a whole generation of magicians boasting near-Demigod power.

In two more generations, your legacy would be a family so powerful that even the Gods would have to be cautious about what they asked of us. But that cuts both ways. You're the greatest treasure in Garamon, and if we can't have you, we'll reluctantly destroy you to ensure that nobody else can either. You made the mistake of setting up in the middle of Poloira, and we've already started pulling strings to have Garamon turn a blind eye. You know this isn't a bluff."

I wondered, then, how much talent had been removed from Garamon's pool over the centuries as paranoid magicians slew young geniuses to keep their own power intact. What a pathetic waste.

"I appreciate your warning," I told her.

"Now allow me to give one. You may destroy this refinery and foil my plans today, but you will never make me join your idiotic family. Consider me and how young I am. Consider what I will be in another fifty years. If I am forced into obscurity because of the Vorets, I will come back one day and kill you all. Your patriarch, his wife, your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren.

I will rip babies from wombs and burn them, I will reduce your whole estate to a glassy crater, and I will destroy all trace of your bloodline having ever existed." Even Voret seemed speechless. Then her face hardened, she nodded once, and she took her leave.