Chapter 185
Then the Years
The loops began--they were rough and uneven, sometimes lasting a few weeks and sometimes a couple of months. Sylas wasn't particular about following a route, often diverging on his own, effectively looking for all the variables. He wasn't in a hurry. If anything, he slowed down the pace to a crawl, letting the time wash over him like the warm winds.
Though months and years passed, he hardly felt them. Bit by bit, time had begun to... seize. What was a drug alarming the brain each and every day that it was ever-so-closer to dying was now a hollow word. A pointless sound. A thing that never was. In fact, if it weren't for Asha to tell him, he would have forgotten what time even was.
By the time he had finally perfected the fight against the king who never was, the Shadow that used to torment him, he had celebrated over four hundred years of stay in the loop that never seemed to end. It was strange--having shut down like a machine, the years never ate away him. He sealed who he was within the depths of his soul and lived out the story that ought to be almost by instinct.
Today, once again, he found himself face to face with the elongating fields of green, the sprawling hills and the vast, blue sky, land unblemished by the winter. There was an ever-growing army at his back, like winds in his sails, though they hardly chanted his name. He was a desolate figure to most, a macabre thing that hung around the King-to-be.
He listened to Valen make the speech the boy had spoken into existence hundreds of times by now, so much so that Sylas remembered it word for word. He even sat down and mouthed it, word for word, with a faint smile on his face. It was strange, the anomaly--no matter the route they take... the speech remains the same. No matter what.
But for every word of the speech that he memorized, one or another memory vanished. He found himself forgetting even the day that he first met Asha, improbable though he thought it was. He couldn't be certain, not of anything, really. He had no mirror to compare his memories to. For all he knew, he'd forgotten a thousand things... and he might not have forgotten anything. But he did. At least, he forgot them. Hannah and Jake.
He caught his mind adrift, once, those two names swimming about, unattached, like the marionettes without strings. There were no Hannahs or Jakes in this world, that much he knew. And he knew, somewhere in the depths, that, once upon a time, he had a family. It wasn't difficult to connect the dots, even if they may be faulty.
In the end, though, try as hard as he could, he could only remember the names. There were no faces, no voices, no nostalgic anecdotes about waking up late one morning and rushing the young kid to school only for the latter to forget his lunch. There was only noise, the kind of noise that he couldn't explain. It hummed into infinity, seemingly holding all the secret memories that had long since vanished from him.
He held onto the names, however. He wrote them down hundreds of times, sometimes even within one loop. Hannah, Jake. Hannah, Jake. Hannah, Jake. He wrote them so many times that he'd started to think he made them up. There were quite a few years spent in the quiet deliberation of the point. In the end, he succumbed to the base want of needing the names to be true.
Perchance, he mused, even if he did abuse the infinity of time he was gifted, he would still be unable to recall more than he already did. His old life had been burned--vague things remained, concepts like technology, but anything specific had long since been shaven off in lieu of hundreds of years of suffering and numbness.
Beyond the so-called Am'on Fields, the land expanded into a flanked valley connecting two different regions of the Kingdom. This pit stop always evoked war, for a massive army awaited them within the dark tunnel. Their force of a barely a couple of thousand could hardly withstand the twenty-thousand strong onslaught. That is, so long as Sylas remained back. He never fought--not because he couldn't win, but because he wanted to see how far he could take the force without himself. Not far, it seemed.
"What should we do?!" Valen asked the Council anxiously. Others didn't look much better; aside from Sylas and Asha, they all seemed to have concluded they would die in the canyon. He had seen these exact faces nearly a hundred times now, and they hardly dented his heart. And yet, for a brief moment, he wanted to alleviate their fears.
"Want me to show you guys something cool?" he suddenly asked, drawing his eyes on himself.
"Something... cool?" Valen sang back.
"... come out," Sylas said, standing up and leaving the tent. They had set up a camp at the very entrance of the valley, a mile or so off from where the battle is to be held. Others soon followed, but he didn't stop, slowly walking toward the dip and further into the canyon. "I have been getting a bit angry watching them beat your guys' asses so many times. I guess I can vent for a bit."
While many eyes watched on in confusion, Asha merely smiled and shook her head. Sylas wore nothing but the pants still, a simple scabbard holding the blade within as it swung back and forth from his waist. Though he appeared tiny, flanked by the looming cliffs, for some reason... he seemed taller still than the sky itself. The bare back seemed to hold the weight of the stars, ineffable, untouchable.
Though the opposing force grew alarmed for a moment when they saw a silhouette approaching, upon realizing that it was a one, beggar-looking man, laughter jeered into the day's winds. Reaching five hundred feet of separation, Sylas slowly drew out his sword, his eyes glazed with nothing, tempered by the whetstone of time.
Arrows began to fall, but they burned to ash before coming anywhere near him. It was as though the invisible hands of eternity scalded them, washing him free and uncaring. Men rode horses forth toward him, shouts forming separation of sound and light. And thus he moved.
A blur whizzed forward like a bolt of thunder, a streak of light otherwise unconscious; horses' heads flew up in a spray blood and men atop of them found themselves cleaved into thousands of pieces, like mincemeat. Sylas pushed forward through the rush and rain of the blood and gore, ignoring the blood-curling screams of agony. Demon, they screamed. Hellhound, they bellowed. Reaper himself, they whimpered.
He broke into their ranks through the shieldbearers fairly easily, toppling over the vanguard as though they were made of paper. A storm of sword-suffused light ensued, afterimages of the sharp blade pairing with the upward rain of heads.
Forgiveness, they prayed. God, they mumbled. All the same, the brown canyon turned dark and horrifying. And in the midst of blood and gore that had even Derrek heaving his innards out, a figure occasionally flashed. No, more a phantom than a figure. Bearer of death, taking lives without mercy.
What began as an army of tens of thousands slowly began to thin out as the hills began to form from the number of corpses. Some were relatively whole, though most at least had a limb or two shaven off of them. Quite a few were headless, and some yet entirely turned into paste.
Sylas' sword broke a long time ago, but he simply picked up a random one and continued the wanton massacre. He stopped when the count of dead turned somewhere around four thousand. It was enough. It was enough thousands of corpses ago, in fact. But he pushed himself--pushed to see if he would feel anything. And... he felt nothing.
Whipping his hair backward and washing away the blood that was covering his eyes, he looked around listlessly. They weren't running--and those that started running... came back. Instead, they were all on their knees, their foreheads pressed against the bloody-red dirt, whimpering, crying, shaking, though soundless still.
Looking further back, he saw Valen and others--and they were hardly different. Just like those he had slain, those he slayed for looked at him as though he were bedeviled. No, he couldn't blame them. If he were an ordinary man and he saw someone do what he just did... he would be exactly the same. He lost himself in the moment, trying to capture the tiny piece of humanity within him while destroying humanity in others.
He was poison, he realized. If given time, he would inflict and infect all those around him. Sighing, he looked up at the barren sky and smiled. It was an eerie smile, especially as he was covered in blood from head to toe, but it was an honest smile still. He was larger than life, larger than death, but human still. For beneath those gazes, his heart stirred--guilt caged his soul and fueled his veins. He wasn't completely gone. And, to him... that was enough.