Byron

It had been hours?, or days?, or weeks since his grand defeat. Byron knew one of those was right. Unless it was months, but, no, it couldn’t be months. He couldn’t have lost that much time. Not when he’d lost so much else.

Once he would have despaired at the idea of all that had been taken from him. His position, his wealth, he painstakingly curated collection of fine brandy. As he plodded along an ill defined path towards an uncertain destination though, all he could muster the effort to feel was gratitude that he’d managed to lose the things he had.

Well, except for the brandy. That truly was a tragedy.

The rest however? He could still feel the burn marks that seared his soul. He’d fought for those. The pain of his very essence being consumed the only thing agonizing enough to allow him to recall that he had an essence, an existence, that was distinct from the endless hunger and nothingness that had reached out and jumped inside him.

He hadn’t deserved that, he’d told himself, and he’d clung to that belief and wielded it as something less than a weapon. 

Hurting the [Oblivion Remnant] had never been an option. You can’t hurt something that isn’t there, no matter how much that cloud of ‘isn’t’ was puppeting you and making you do everything that you’d never wanted to do.

He couldn’t hurt his attacker, and couldn’t kill it, but, as it turned out, he could shape it. 

It was his mind the Remnant had poured itself into. His viewpoints and biases had provided the Remnant with the ability to understand and interact with the world on a level beyond simply eating it all. Those had been the tools he’d held onto. His attitude. His disregard. His overwhelming sense of self importance. They’d been what had saved him…

Hadn’t they?

Trying to steer his hijacked thoughts towards an outcome where he could be free of the corruption that had eaten his life had been Byron’s only option but since that had seemed like an impossibility he’d settled for at least trying to prolong his own tortured existence.

Then she had come along.

Tessa.

The one thing the Remnant seemed to fear.

No. That wasn’t right.

The person who’d given the Remnant the ability to fear.

Her presence had been a powerful lever to move the Remnant with, right up until the moment when it hadn’t been.

Byron had assumed that the final confrontation between the Remnant and its creator would end in death, despair, and destruction. That was likely the Consortium’s biases he’d acquired in the years he’d spent navigating their maze of treachery and ambition. They had served him well as long as he’d been surrounded by similarly minded people but they had left him ill prepared when someone chose a different path.

In the grand chaos that had followed the final Oblivion Remnant’s sundering and instantiation as a new and fully real being, no one had seemed to notice or care that Byron had all but crawled away from the assembly and began the solitary march he was still plodding along on.

They’d been in the [High Beyond] then. Some time ago. Somehow, he was on the surface of the [Risen Kingdoms] as his thoughts turned inwards, having arrived there some indeterminate amount of time later.

Had there been a portal?

There must have been a portal.

Except all of the portals had been sealed shut.

Or destroyed.

Thoughts in that direction led to the burned and still smoldering edges of his mind. The state of the portals was knowledge the Remnant had possessed, bits of reality and history that had inevitably poured into it, every bit stripping away its transcendence and grounding it in the world it was devouring. It had know what had happened with the portals. It had been there for their destruction. Hadn’t it?

Byron couldn’t be sure and had no wish to be. It wasn’t something that mattered to his current state of affairs.

He tripped and found himself on the rocky edge of a stream. It was a big stream. More of a river? He wasn’t sure. He was used to considering bodies of water smaller than oceans as being fundamentally inconsequential. 

The water was cool and clear and when it passed his lips became the single most important substance in all of creation.

With the few reserves of strength he hadn’t known he still had, Byron scrambled forward on his hands and knees until he was able to dunk his entire head into the water and drink, and drink, and drink.

He would have stayed there forever, or for the rest of his life which, granted, wouldn’t have been very long, if a pair of strong hands hadn’t hauled him back out of the blessed (if somewhat difficult to breath) flowing current.

“It’s a long run to the nearest [Heart Fire],” a woman who was at least twice as tall as he was said. “You weren’t trying to drown though were you?”

“Not as such,” Byron admitted. The idea had flitted through his head, but it wasn’t a good one. He’d fought too long and hard to give up in the face of no opposition at all.

“Oof, smells the you could use a bath,” the woman, Damnazon, said. “Want me to throw you back in?”

“We can do better than that,” a noticeably shorter woman, one only slightly taller than Byron, said. Mellisandra twitched two of her fingers in short, abbreviated gestures and Bryon felt a wave of sparkling energy pass over him.

When he looked down his clothes were repaired, and had the warm comfort of being recently pressed. Running a hand through his hair he found it bereft of twigs and dirt and the other unsavory things it had accumulated. He almost felt like a new man. Except he didn’t want to be a new man. He much preferred the old one.

“Thank you,” he said. “That was unduly kind.”

He hadn’t stopped to think about the words. They’d been the simplest and easiest reaction to the unexpected good deed. What they weren’t, however, was the kind of thing the old him would have said.

Which begged the question of where those words had come from.

“We’re traveling to [Wagon Town],” Damnazon said. “Is that where you’re heading?”

“I didn’t have any particular destination in mind,” Byron said, again being more truthful than he should have been.

Making plans like that would have meant grasping at an ambition.

Byron was done with ambition.

His careful dancing and clever scheming and desperate manipulations had all lead him to a ruin than only an unexpected and undeserved moment of kindness had saved him from.

Byron had never been a scholar, never excelled at any of the academic arts, and yet he was capable of learning, especially from his own past mistakes.

Particularly ones which had left him with injuries down into depths that he’d never known he possessed.

“You might want to tag along with us,” Mellisandra said. “We’re heading to meet up with some friends, but we can make the trip a lot safer for you until then.”

“Forgive me,” Byron asked, merely as a figure of speech. Forgiveness was laughably far beyond anything he could expect from the people of this or any other world. “From your regalia, I would have presumed you to possess the ability to teleport to the location of your choice directly. Why waste time on common foot travel?”

“We had some things to talk out,” Mellisandra said. “And our party wanted to visit their hometowns to make sure everything was still in order. [Wagon Town] was the most central spot to gather in.”

“Some of them are going to take a little while at home so we had a little time to kill,” Damnazon said. “Figured we’d scout the road between here out to [Storm Jammer Peak] and make sure there weren’t any monsters starting to move into the gap the [Wagon Town] guards had to leave.”

“That’s quite considerate of you,” Byron said, and meant it as a compliment.

Which was wrong.

Entirely wrong.

Where was the sneer? The condescension?

Where was the overwhelming sense of pride and superiority?

Hadn’t those been so integral to who he was that they’d preserved him from utter annihilation?

“Did you wind up breathing in some of that water?” Mellisandra asked. “You look a little green around the gills?”

Byron had never gone in for the sort of body modifications that would allow him to sprout gills or other body variations as he needed, but his translation implants handled the turn of phrase well enough to prevent any confusion.

“I seem to have misplaced some things,” he said. His gaze darting around the peaceful forest around them as though he might spy his missing arrogance somewhere and be able to stuff it back into a pocket before it got away from him completely.

“Were you robbed?” Damnazon said. “You looked pretty rough when we found you.”

“I suppose in a sense I was but,” and at this he couldn’t suppress a chuckle, “I’m afraid all I’ve lost is a variety of things I’m better off without.”

“Still, if they’re yours, I wouldn’t mind knocking a few [Bandit] heads in,” Damnazon said.

Byron chuckled again.

Why was he laughing? 

The absurdity?

Had his life become absurd or had it always been a joke and he’d finally woken up enough to be able to see that?

“There weren’t any [Bandits],” he said with a placating gesture. “Nor do I have any valuables to recover.”

“That’s a shame,” Damnazon said. “It’s been a while since we fought low level [Bandits].”

“They might not be so low level anymore,” Mellisandra said.

“Even better!” Damnazon said, raising her axe in a salute towards the road ahead.

Byron was briefly unsure if traveling with the two [Adventurers] really would be any safer than continuing on alone. Then it occurred to him that if he traveled at their side, neither they nor any other [Adventurers] were likely to stumble across him and decide that he looked too much like a [Bandit] or other miscreant to be allowed to remain in possession of all of his limbs.

“I thank you for your offer of protection,” he said and took a spot just slight behind them as they set off on the road Byron had been stumbling towards.

They’d walked for another hour or so, the two [Adventurers] chatting between themselves about a variety of topics. From the small furtive touches they were exchanging, Byron guessed they’d only recently decided to merge their enterprises.

Except that wasn’t right either.

It wasn’t how people thought. It was how the Consortium thought and the words felt foreign and ugly in Byron’s mind to the point where he had to resist spitting them out onto the ground.

The [Adventurers] weren’t ‘merging any enterprises’. They were dating. Or courting. Or any one of a hundred other local variations on ‘getting to know someone with whom you would like to be in a relationship with.’

Byron had never seen the appeal of relationships, though he’d always been aware of their power as a point of leverage and an intoxicant capable of dulling the sharpest senses.

The [Adventurers] did not seem to be intoxicated though. 

They seemed happy, and at ease.

And quite cute together.

Which was…was what? 

Not something he’d ever thought before? Not something he ever should have been able to think? Something he should have been oblivious to? Or afraid to recognize as having worth?

Yes. If he was the Byron he’d been then definitely yes.

Which begged an important question; was he not himself?

No. He’d had experience with being something that wasn’t himself already and these new thought and emotions weren’t that.

What had happened to him then?

Everything. Everything had happened to him.

He’d been stretched to the edges of eternity and had snapped back into a facsimile of his old state of being.

He’d become himself again, after being dissolved into nonexistence.

Except, he could never really go back to being himself, could he?

Not the old Byron. Not the one who saw ever world and word from only his own narrow perspective.

He’d been pulled apart and what had come back together, the bits that had survived that process, they were ones which had possessed the capacity for growth. Not the cruelty, or the false superiority, or the desperate demeaning lens through which he’d viewed everything and everyone.

Those were gone.

He wasn’t Byron-as-he’d-been. That entity had been destroyed. What he’d become was who that Byron could have been is the hungry parts had consumed themselves. If the raging narcissism had gazed on its own reflection and been devoured by it.

He wasn’t who he’d been. Who he’d been had led him to his destruction. Who he was had forced him to hold on and weather the ravages that still burned within him.

Both of those Byrons fell away into the past though.

They needed to be recognized and remembered but the person who mattered was the Byron who he yet be.

Once, ambition and pride would have cast the image of a great and renowned master of creation onto the Byron-who-might-one-day-be, but those leading lights in his life had crumbled as had his need for power and mastery.

In their place, Byron looked at the two people walking in front of him

The two happy people.

He wasn’t sure he deserved happiness, but that wasn’t the illumination they’d provided.

They’d stopped to help him for no reason other than they could.

They’d done something kind because they’d seen the opportunity to do so.

Was there any reason he couldn’t do the same?