Chapter Text
Iorveth had surrendered everything to his cause by joining the Scoia'tael. He had given his whole devotion, his few remaining hopes and, several times, the suffering of his body, almost his life.
As a kid, he had dreamed of perfecting his flute talent; of conquering the world with his melody; of making people dance at the rhythm of the earth, the volcanoes, and the oceans; of singing for the firmament and the thousands of stars which watched over him beyond the tops of the trees. He had wanted to compose music such that it would steal the breath of the winds, make the stones quiver, and appease the fury of the fighting.
War and humans had trampled on his naivety, destroyed his dreams and threw him in an uncertain, incomprehensible, and dangerous world where he was hunted and condemned for what he was without anything to guide him. Not a single star to look after him.
He had first fought with the hope of protecting his people from massacres, pillaging, and rape; of giving back to his family the rights they had been deprived of; of offering everyone a world at peace that would be their home. But, little by little, the desire for justice had been infected by something dark, sticky, and putrid. Pure and simple hatred had crept into his mind, had trickled down his very soul, covered every ounce of his being with its black, black, black and red, red, red hues.
Red the earth, red the skies, red the world and red - so red - his hands. Red is despair, red is loyalty and red is blue. Blue had to be covered with red. Screams were to rain with arrows piercing the sky - a cortège of violence to accompany the suffering. Otherwise, pain would hit into his bones and tear his chest to shreds. He had to kill to protect his people, to save himself.
He had seen it : every human possessed that part of madness, that unlimited ability to make others suffer, that need to dominate. Dominate the animals, exploit the land, exterminate the weak. They had to die, all of them, pay for their crimes under his blades. King or beggar, it didn't matter, it was one threat less.
Dark desires that crept under his crane. Destruction, massacre, annihilation. During years, decades, centuries. They dragged him in the unsuspected depths of his own mind. If he dived far enough, no more light would reach him. He would be in that black crevasse, bathing in gloomy streams like a fetus in its mother's womb, a monster in the making. Madness and despair as milk to feed himself, to grow up and die after performing his revenge. He struggled in the insane taking like a midge caught in the web, a soldier in the clash. He ran, he leapt, and he flattened himself against the walls of his mental prison to escape the demons who wanted to make him succumb to the pure, dazzling, and exclusive rage.
He valiantly held on to his crazy pulses, and plunged into his missions to deaden the voices demanding revenge for all the human vices. He suppressed them, asphyxiated them, and pushed them back into the darkest recesses of his soul only to unleash them during combat, without ever letting them take control of his actions. He turned his blazing fury into cold anger, his bloodthirsty insanity into rational hatred, and his pain into will.
His adversaries had yielded before him, one by one, fragile obstacles that fell out of his path to freedom. A path that rose upward and upward, and that sometimes plunged into bottomless abysses. The way twisted in sinuous bends, even wiggled, like a sick snake whose scales he had to cling to so as not to stumble and fall again into a pit of horrors. Iorveth had grabbed fiercely the paving stones of this unending road, hurting his fingers, breaking his nails, and shattering his hands in the effort. He had clenched his teeth and crawled without dignity on the ground, dragging his body harassed by the privations and tortures on the sharp edged paving stones, stretching his exhausted shoulders to gain a little more ground, always more. Forge self-serving and uncertain alliances, attack merchant caravans and supply convoys, weave plots and recruit informants. Always one more step forward, regardless the distance traveled, to go against hostile winds and enemies. Often, he had to move back, but it was to cross the crevasses and climb the steep slopes better. And if he was at the end of the line every evening, if his mental health crumbled between his fingers or frayed in putrid tatters, then what ? He had to continue, he no longer had the choice. It had been a long time since he had the right to choose.
The remains of his dreams of glory were carefully buried as he confronted men, the Blue Stripes, Vernon Roche. All that mattered was to survive long enough to cause most damage to the enemy. And what an enemy...
After all these years, all these confrontations, the commander of the Scoia'tael felt like he knew Roche intimately. Knew him like an exiled navigator would end up knowing the map of the night. After years of wandering on a hostile sea, with nothing to guide him except the stars, orphan glows of the Sun, bastard lights in the midst of the noble skies where strutted the Moon, Sun, and ancient planets. After all, the battlefield was like a court with an etiquette made of war cries and funeral songs where the powerful suspiciously turned around each other without ever touching. It was the others, the henchmen, the wretches, the little stars who killed each other. Roche was one of the brightest of them despite his halo stained with mud, tears, and blood, and Iorveth had come to know him.
Vernon Roche was not a difficult man to understand. Patriots and all those who built their entire existence around a concept as vague, intangible, and chimerical as love for a country never were anyway. Iorveth knew them well after all these years.
But there was a little more to this human.
°•°•°
Vernon Roche had always been a man in the shadows, a soldier hitting from behind, a creature confined to darkness. He was born in the worst districts, far away from the rich, handsome and happy people. He had been his king's hunting hound, the bloodthirsty creature one only released at nightfall when all the others were safe in the kennel. He had been the leader of a unit made up of thieves, murderers, and vermins of all kinds even the army did not want. He ended up as a lone wolf, avoiding cities and prowling in the woods of a Temeria fallen under the Nilgaardian cut.
His whole existence had been spent in the safety and the danger of the shadows. In their embrace, he had stolen to feed himself, killed to content Foltest and buried himself in order to save his skin. They became his game board, his element, and, like a beast that had mutated to adapt to its environment, he took pleasure there. It was a world of injustice, perfidy and crimes and he had made it his own.
He had stood a long time on this thin boundary between honesty and crime, standing on the quivering thread like a carefree and detached tightrope walker. But he eventually had let slip through his fingers a low morality that had never been but a cumbersome weight. He had let it fall, light of all his vices, to finally take off among the needy. In his youth, he never had been good at submitting to the orders and insults of his employers but stripping the oblivious peasants and robbing the condescending merchants had been child's play for him. Later, the political considerations had often escaped him but executing with discretion some noble who had displeased the king was absolutely within his skills and tastes. Finally, if commanding an army never had been a part of his highest aspirations tracking and exterminating the Scoia'tael terrorists had made him feel alive; alive and useful.
Hunting the Scoia'tael had been his ultimate mission, closely intertwined with his frantic quest to protect Temeria and its inhabitants. That long hunt had stimulated all the primal instincts he ever had, both those of the predator and those of the prey; especially in front of Iorveth. Entirely caught up in their duel as physical as moral, he had created traps each more ingenious than the one before, had tracked down without pity nor slackening his enemies and had retreated as many times as he defeated them. He had consumed all his energy, all his will, all his cunning against his Nemesis. In the fray, he would always rush past his men to cross swords with the one-eyed elf. It was grueling duels that heated his blood and gave him the feeling of having found an opponent on his own level.
Admittedly, they were neither the best warriors of their respective factions but that, what they had, never had been just a matter of punches and parries, of hatred and domination. There were also their strategies, different, personal, that said so much about them; and that almost primitive understanding, that wild thrill, recognising a part of themselves in the other. They both fought for their ideals, to protect what was precious to them, spurred on by a similar rage, and determined to fight until death if they had to. Two pathetic creatures that had accepted to become the war beasts, the bloodthirsty monsters that their causes needed. Two guardians, corrupt to the bones by violence who were waging a merciless war. Two distorted reflections of the same psyche that crossed and collided with each other at the surface of a murky and cracked mirror.
Vernon had ended up liking this endless fight and had dedicated all his being to be up to it, not to be an insult to his enemy's skills, not to disappoint the Scoia'tael commander. Hatred had gradually been tinged with respect, and Foltest's regular summons had never been enough to reconnect him to the reality of war.
For what could a king understand of the joy a creature brought up in poverty would experience in finding a rival of its kind - a playmate ?
Defeats took a taste of admiration and victories were celebrated all the more proudly. It was a dance where everyone moved forward and then backward to the crazy and ruthless rhythm of the drums of war, the cries of pain, and the music of a flute. It was intoxicating, a sedative against the moral considerations, the violated values, and the remorse; a sleeping pill that tastes of ashes and suffering.
Losses remained painful and avenged, but - damn it - if things had been different, Vernon would have paid the elf a drink with his own pay.
He was of course the only leader of the Scoia'tael to have inspired him such impressions. Colorful and pompous as he was, the elf would never have tolerated to line up nicely with the other Scoia'tael commanders as a trophy and victory of the Blue Stripes. No, he had to be and remain the only failure of the special unit, an elusive gust of wind, an arrow impossible to parry, a fucking squirrel in the trees. And Vernon had pursued him from the ground, always late but resolutely following him, looking up to try to catch a glimpse of him in the foliage; an attempt to see the glow of a star shooting in the night.
Elves in general and Iorveth in particular were very fast and nimble, often stronger than humans and good at hiding in the woods. Vernon had done his best to keep up, pushing his limits to follow the burnt path Iorveth left behind, the blazing wake of the comet. He felt like he had spent his whole life looking upward hounding a distant star whose shine would have attracted him like a moth and precipitated him further in the darkness of his world.
Now everything was over and Vernon finally lowered his head to look at the ground on which he had run, leapt and been pinned so much. Brought back down to earth, he realised he had lost any trace of his initial path. He no longer knew where he was or what he had to do. The glow of the star had disappeared in the sky. Everything was plunged into an opaque night.
°•°•°
Thinking of the man, of that man, Roche, was difficult. It was sickening. It shook something in his guts. A mixture of hatred, respect, shame and sometimes guilt. Iorveth hated him, of course. But sometimes admiration mingled with it. And remorse came after with a warm taste of silt deep in his throat. Respect was a noble sentiment, a particular nuance of appreciation and astonishment that was given only to ingenuous leaders, tough rivals and those who had suffered and stood up again to keep fighting. It was a feeling that was reserved for the best. Not for the dogs, not for the honorless whoresons who slaughtered children and adults, innocents and culprits, without discernment on the orders of a man who believed that he possessed the right to command the extermination of entire peoples. No, respect was not one of those things given to these demons. Whip, irons and death, maybe, but no respect.
He had thought that he got rid of this unsuitable feeling, but it was an invisible worm that had attacked his heart and burrowed into it to make it rot from the inside. The pest had also left there the seeds of an obstinate weed. No matter how much he tried to remove it, feeling its roots take away pieces of his flesh, it didn't stop to spring up again in the midst of the crevasses in his heart, always bigger and always greener. He respected Vernon Roche without being able to stop himself.
He had done some research on his enemy's life, of course. He had brought his vast network of informants into play and, in the little he had found - the man was cautious, very cautious -, he almost recognised himself in this man desperate to prove himself, to show the world what he was able to do, to break free from the chains of his circumstances so as to rise alongside the more powerful and to protect his country. His will and dedication were rare among individuals of his kind. And Iorveth hated him for that, for wasting these precious qualities in the service of murderous king and cause. He hated him. He would kill him or die from his filthy hands, it was their fate. And he hated the knot of excitement and rage that weighed on his entrails when he thought back to their confrontations, to that final duel from which they had nevertheless both survived. He hated to admire the strength and malice of that vermin, and hated thinking to him, to them, to everything.
Yet, alcohol coaxed his thoughts, heated his stomach, smoked his fury and hatreds out, and untied his tongue. Face to face with his fourth - fifth? - mug of cheap, gross beer contaminated by the despising spit of the innkeeper, he felt his demons coming back in his skull to dance in violent and soft whirls mad with blue and red, lighting up his universe plunged in an eternal eclipse with gloomy glows. Even thinking back to Cedric, Ciaran and all the others, everyone, became bearable. To Roche too, at the pride of place. Slumping on a shaky table in the corner of a seedy and murky inn, he felt memories scratching his mental door, pushing against the barriers keeping him from insanity so as to crawl to the foreground of his mind.
He remembered times much worse but less solitary, where familiar and friendly presences, shining like a vast constellation of affection, accompanied him on the war paths and in his battles for justice. They were there to support him when his legs gave way under his weight and to distract him when all the atrocities he had seen and committed weighed too heavy on his soul. After the fights, wounded, he had often had to lean on Ciaran who would then discreetly hold him to the healer's tent in their makeshift camp. During downtime, when it seemed like horror stopped a moment to catch its breath, he would escape in low-level taverns - just like that one - and almost get drunk to unconsciousness under the watchful eye of Cedric - in the days he was still alongside them. These guardians - substitutes for his blood family - had protected him during his greatest moments of weakness, and only the grief of their loss equaled his gratitude.
In front of them, in front of his family, he had been able to give up his armor, both physical and mental, knowing that they would not take advantage of the opportunity to put him down. That certainty had been liberating, had relieved him of great weights and pushed him to confess some of his secrets, heavy secrets. Perhaps too much. The thick haze of alcohol, the heat circulating in his veins, the muscles relaxing under his skin formed an illusionary and temporal way out into which he dived and surrendered himself to when everything was too tough. Words then escaped in confused waves and of course Roche's name had flowed from his lips. Several times.
Frequently, sitting next to comforting flames, lulled by the last songs of a makeshift celebration as his men retired in their tents, he would drink with the remaining warriors, his closest friends, as tipsy as him. With the heat of alcohol flowing like a gentle fire in his blood the glacial hatred he devoted to the Temerian special unit commander would melt. It would become a torrent hot of something, impossible to tame behind his lips. As if under the effect of a powerful flow that would have collided with a fragile dam and shattered it to pieces, Iorveth would offload his troubled thoughts with overtones of confession to his drinking companions without being able to stop.
He never really remembered the words that slipped from his mouth, but they were aberrations, he knew it. He saw it in the worried, even disgusted looks that the others had given him. He couldn't reproach them for that. His clumsy speech poorly concealed the admirative and sometimes envious tone that his voice took when, after weeks of silence, he spoke of a Blue Stripes' plan that had impressed him or of one of their victories that he had learnt of from his spies. It was even worse when he started to praise Roche's fighting skills and deplored the waste of his qualities. But nothing equaled the disgust of feeling himself stammering eulogistic inanities about a little star with a glow ferocious enough to bite the sun. Like recollections of his past, praise full of imagery fell from his lips to the forest floor - ridiculously colorful metaphora sparkling with all this naive imagination that war had restrained. A childish nonsense.
No one would ever speak about it again in the morning. Iorveth thought that they forgot.
°•°•°
If he turned over, Vernon would have seen a path paved with broken swords, cracked bolts and burnt missives. He would have seen whole bouquets of crushed lilies stained with blood, pecked by famished crows that got away immediately with disgust and anger. He would have seen the twisted and disfigured corpses of his enemies and allies, crammed without distinction of faction on the side of the road of his crimes. The sight of their bloods, mixed, that flooded into the soil between the roots of the dead, crushed, burnt plants would have pushed him down, shaken by retching and hatred against war, against all it had made him do, against himself, against Foltest, against everything. Maybe he would have let himself be swallowed up by the waves of blood and fire which rose on the horizon and which only waited to see him slow down to drown him in the horrors he was fleeing.
Vernon saw none of this, but he felt its presence and weight on his shoulders weakened by age and remorse. So he was still running, in the dark. He followed a bit of glistening stardust that marked a hesitant but familiar trail over a trampled, muddy and reddish snow. Without knowing if he was rushing into oblivion, redemption or death, without even knowing what he desired, he was running breathlessly, followed on his heels by his demons. He was sinking into familiar woods, to the point of no-return. He deliberately got lost in the midst of trees he had known so well, to the point of blurring his bearings. No more stars were visible in the sky but it was not important. The star that he was seeking had fallen, just like him. It was not beside its fellows that he would find it. It would be on the ground, among the fragments that the fall would have torn from its celestial body.
So, he was going back and forth on forgotten paths, on old battlefields. The ruins of the baths. The embracing statues. The hardly recognisable remains of a camp. And he was waiting, blind to everything.
°•°•°
He had compared his worst enemy to a diamond, to steel, to shit under his boots. He had compared him to chtonic creatures, ancient monsters, stupid dogs. He had compared him to tempests, to poisonous flowers, to fires, to the music of the instruments. To death and to a star. Iorveth had spoken of him - a lot. So much. Scattered and meaningless ideas inspired by the haze of alcohol.
Iorveth was almost sure that there had been a logic, a coherent structure, but the plans of this virtual architecture were lost to him. In view of the discountenanced looks that he remembered, the link between the dark and discreet gleam of a distant star and the object of his antagonism was not apprehensible in a realm parted with the drunk haze. The world was intricate. Hatred and inebriation were less so. Alcohol, Cedric's crazy flights of fancy and Ciaran's terribly ridiculous poems had made things easier. His duels with Roche too.
Iorveth realized that the wood around his heavy mug of beer was studded with a cloud of darker stains that was getting bigger and bigger as more marks appeared. He raised a curious hand to his cheek and felt a cold humidity stick to his skin. Dazed, he brought back his fingers to his eye level. Their outlines were blurry and he found himself sniffing miserably. He roughly wiped away his tears and got up from the uncomfortable seat, pushing his tankard. He paid for his drink and crossed the room to the exit with a sense of urgency beneath the heart.
Outside the cramped tavern, the world suddenly looked as vast and cold as the night. Seeking a particular star there seemed like a pitiful undertaking.
Still, Iorveth took the road north.
°•°•°
The grass was green, the trees vigorous, and the animals vibrant. Sun rays were flowing from the foliage of the highest branches and heated the fertile forest soil. The golden glow was reflecting on the streams, the entwined arms of lovers made of stone, and the metal of a medallion.
Roche looked vulnerable, curled up as he was at the foot of the cold statues silently towering above him.
Iorveth drew his knife.