JackRevel having sided with the Old Watch, and I being privy to this faction’s affairs, Shrike has news for me:
Lead the way! I mean that literally, Shrike, please lead the way; I’m once again hooded and I don’t want to twist my ankle or something.
I learn this guy, going by the ‘Eagle’ handle, is the only member of the Old Watch to whom speaks the Benefactor, whose plentiful moneys back the Old Watch’s vigilante endeavors.
But the conversation is cut short, for Revel deems this an opportune time to surge forth from his vehicle:
Once more every atom in the room falls under Revel’s absolute dominance; so that the air, as if congealed, precludes on our part any action, scarcely allowing us the shallowest breath. Turning to Shrike, he admonishes her, saying, “You did not see this snake in your midst? You are young, but I must question your judgment.”
After apologising for thusly depriving me of the ability to act and speak, he eventually says the following:
Damme! so the Benefactor was the one whose secretive orders saw the Constabulary barge into the clinic. Secrets are aplenty. In some circumstances people use dehumidifiers; but here I’d like to buy myself a demystifier.
In the most cryptic tone, Revel then claims I know the Benefactor’s identity. Hidden, somehow secreted away from even my own cognisance, sunk somewhere in my memories.
There is an explosion of color, a veritable prismatic blast of utmost vividity—followed by an eternity of black evoking the hadal. Then, a memory. Floating, dreamlike yet familiar, of my time as a courtesan, when I gloried in the admiration and lust men could but feel towards me.
Abruptly I am yanked out of that brief glimpse into a past I almost ignore. The better for Revel to submerge me into the distant waters of his own memories.
I recognise the trees as akin to the Ghost Tree in Amy Seagrave’s penthouse. Surely then this must be Gushan; though I wonder if it might not in fact be Krondor, for there is betrayal in the air. Is made mention of a barrier holding this woman and her kin. Then I am witness to the instant just preceding Revel’s willful sacrifice of himself, preventing thus the second moonfall from killing every one.
But just who was that woman?
He then explains that, as I already know, memories are sacrified when Shapers employ their powers. But those memories do not simply disappear, going as they do to a place Revel calls the Barren Wastes. There they linger, for an indescript amount of time, afore coalescing into “a mockery of a person.” (this person would, I suppose, be the Shaper herself?)
Circling back to the woman in his memories, he tells me she was one of the first, a Primordial, now locked under the city, behind a keyless seal against which S-Narsum is being employed as a manner of battering ram. “Make the right choices,” he says to me.
That I do right away, warning him of the incoming invasion by the Imperium troops; an event of whose motions he was of course already aware, and claims will fulfill the “prophecy of the chair.” Rocking chair? Office chair? Baby chair? But the air was still thoroughly suffused with his magic, so maybe I misheard and he said “prophecy of the Cher,” in which case we might be getting a reunion with Sonny.
Finally, turning to Shrike, he tells her:
Classic heroic villain-cum-villainous hero who, having grown powerful beyond the confines of man’s ability to reason, has come to mistake his will for Justice—with a capital ‘j’—and is utterly, almost comically oblivious of the fact.
Then, simultaneously, Revel whisks Eagle away while I and Shrike find ourselves teleported in her Saint Gorfu’s hideout.
Oh yeah, a little thing learned at some point in the previous scene: Shrike is related to Revel…
Yeah. Sure. Probably inconsequential.
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