“-. May 4, Year 581 of the King’s Calendar .-“

  It was hard to say if I or the other delegations were more anxious to adjourn the Council when Richard dropped his accession bomb. Or my accession bomb, I should probably say.

  I took them to a spare tent that Anduin hastily ordered put up at my request, to house my unexpected guests. It was more for me than for Richard… but if he and his soldiers and even Antonidas went through so much trouble to make me king, and had the gall to blindside me with it as a fait accompli, I no longer had any compunction about behaving accordingly.

  Now, hours later, I had a clear perspective on how big, precise, and difficult it had been to craft that figurative bomb, and what mountains Richard had moved to deliver the payload where he wanted it.

  The Referendum was just one of many ideas I’d thrown into my ‘Big Binder of Being the Bigger Boy’ that I’d written up in the months leading up to the Interregnum. In fact, I had only inserted it as a last resort because I actually preferred inherited office over elected ones, by simple virtue that narcissists and psychopaths were the exception there, not the rule like all but maybe 1% of all publicly elected officials had been back on Earth, by my time.

  Admittedly, multiple citizenship and the plague of legalized bribery known as ‘lobbies’ were their own defining factors there, but while the latter could exist in a monarchy, the former was, again, the rare exception in the courts of kings.

  The countries of Azeroth other than Alterac had so far been abundant vindication for my views on this matter, which was why I didn’t put up a fuss about being essentially run out of my birth country after what I did. I was never going to stay away forever, no one was going to stop me from going home to visit. But I had assumed ruling was now out of the cards, especially without a massive world-shaking crisis like the alien invasion I was doing my best to butterfly away.

  There had been conditions, not only on Alterac’s ‘peace’ but also on its continued existence. Most had only been strongly insinuated rather than stated outright, by various envoys after my flight from Alterac City. What people agreed to while held at sword point was not the same as what they actually did when they were safe back home.

  Nobody broke their word, because this world continued to be wonderful no matter how cruel some country-sized fools became due to influences from outside this world.

  But they stretched the interpretations of their word as much as they could, and skirted around it whenever possible.

  Terenas Menethil had been shaken enough by my last words – and the matter of Tyr’s Guard – that Lordaeron only made token contributions to the foreign pressure on the middle kingdom.

  The Trollbanes, by contrast, had pushed past their healthy fear of my showing up to judge them like I did Perenolde and Menethil, depending on what Alterac – or rather I – did in the aftermath. And while Dalaran didn’t seem inclined to back Strom on the issue of whether or not I was allowed back in the country, they were willing to go to war alongside them if I seized power there. At least before Antonidas humiliated the new Council of Six into an irreparable schism. Same if dragons started to show themselves again, which was why I never sent Emerentius back there to play deterrent. The optics wouldn’t have been good in the eyes of the Alterac people either.

  Left – by me – in the position where he stared down the arrow that would spell the end of his nation, Richard and his Provisional Council were forced to sign a Tripartite Agreement with Strom and Lordaeron. This treaty was arbitrated by Dalaran, who also used the occasion to steal Richard’s transmission stone, and do who knew what else.

  Through that treaty, Alterac’s Provisional Council had to abide by three conditions. Well, there were more items in the list than those, but those three were the big ones. First, Richard and his peers would never try to ‘exalt a regicidal insurgent above my station’. Secondly, he and his would prevent the rest of Alterac’s nobility from attempting the same, by force of arms if necessary. And thirdly, Richard would remove himself from the running for the Alterac Crown, on grounds that he was ‘obviously compromised’.

  Strom had tried to remove the entire Angevin line from ever being eligible for the throne, but they’d ‘graciously’ allowed themselves to be argued down.

  The terms were blatantly conceived to destabilize Alterac even further while Strom (and initially Dalaran) prepared the war of conquest that everyone had been dancing around for the past five years. The first and third conditions were to humiliate Richard, which they hoped would weaken his position and invite internal strife that would see him forced to enforce the second condition, which would have led to the civil war that his coalition had managed – barely – to avert in the Enhaloing’s immediate aftermath.

  Perhaps treaty talks would’ve gone differently if Richard had kept Liam Trollbane as a hostage longer, or Thoras instead. But Richard believed – and I agreed – that Dalaran would’ve managed to rescue him, or any other high-profile hostages. Unless Ravenholdt were given free license to spy and kill, at least, but that would have just made everything worse in a different way. Also, that type of foreign policy wasn’t the new start Richard wanted for his country, and he wasn’t one to play such tricks anyway.

  No, Richard had his own kinds of tricks. The first was ensuring that the wording of the treaty was very precisely binding only for himself and Alterac’s nobility. The second was that he conspired with his coalition to use the second condition to lure out the last holdouts of the old regime. And the third trick was that he used the ‘One-Week Civil War’ as a pretext to seemingly spread his troops across Alterac’s major duchies and baronies as ‘enforcers of the regency council’s will’, when in reality he’d conspired with his people – and the holdouts who finally decided to accept the new pecking order – to carry out the third plan.

  In reality, the soldiers were just there to do two things: explain to the commoners and bourgeois how the foreigners were trying to stage a takeover of Alterac – which was true – and help the Church to disseminate The Confession. Of which the soldiers just happened to have a whole bunch freshly printed so it could be distributed far and wide. Free of charge. The soldiers even arranged – and some even personally held – reading sessions for those who didn’t know their letters.

  The end result was ‘mass desertion’ of the soldiers-turned-enforcers (with their official reason being that they’d signed on specifically so Perenolde-style persecution wouldn’t happen again, never mind that they were all career military enlisted years ago under that same king), followed by a ‘peasant revolt’ (actually those same soldiers in civilian clothes, with double their number of citizens enthusiastic about being taught to use firearms) that was sustained by ‘frustratingly opaque funding channels’ (the Wheel Everturning, who were now the ‘opposition’ Council of Stewardship, and who conveyed their ‘demands’ to Richard’s Provisional Government via one Orsur Kelsier), and which displayed overwhelmingly wide and rapid spread across the country through unknown means of coordination (Ravenholdt’s assassins with Orsur’s remaining knock-off transmissions stones, which eventually all stopped working but not before the plan had been completed).

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  The entire theatre ended with Richard and his Council ‘forced’ to negotiate terms with the conspicuously well-armed and disciplined ‘peasant’ militia. General Hath had the rest of the standing army all concentrated along the Strom border as usual, so he couldn’t respond in time to prevent Alterac City from being ‘invaded’ even if he didn’t have orders to stay put. Similarly, Richard’s allies were ‘slow’ to reinforce him with their reserves because the foreign powers wanted to see Richard’s authority undermined in his own country, and he gave them what they wanted.

  So what were the ‘humiliating’ terms that the ‘peasant militia’ forced Richard to agree to?

  Hold a referendum so the people could choose their own king. Thereby exalting me to royalty in absentia without any of the nobles doing any of the exalting, just like Stromgarde wanted. Because it’s not like the concept didn’t even exist in the minds of the people, before Richard sent his soldiers to plant it there.

  “It was a quite the misfortune,” Richard told me with the straight face of a man who’d just proven that he was more stubborn than me, Terenas Menethil, Liam Trollbane, the Council of Six, and all the bad actors of their respective countries put together. “But the capital still has that sprawling section completely lacking walls and any other defenses that would’ve prevented the revolutionaries from storming the little manor house we’ve had to operate out of, what with the new Alterac Castle only having its foundation set at the moment.”

  I should’ve slept on Draumstafir after all, I thought numbly. Then when I didn’t dream about being the King of Alterac, I’d have had at least some forewarning about this.

  “There is another thing,” Richard said next, sounding very hesitant now. “The main reason why I needed to get here as soon as I knew where you were, and why Antonidas agreed to become my co-conspirator.”

  I looked up, wondering what else the steady sense of doom of the past few days had… to do with…

  From beneath the collar of Richard’s breastplate emerged a spark.

  It was tiny, faint, barely there, but the Light within me resonated with a deep soul weariness as the tiny figment of Light floated towards me, fighting valiantly against guttering out if only it could-

  I surged to my feet and almost didn’t heed my premonition in time, to stop just short of its sluggish advance lest the force of my emotions accidentally put it out.

  The little Light skimmed along the edge of my spirit, tiredly basking in my aura as if drawing on my strength – I didn’t feel any pull or weight on me at all, I almost didn’t feel it at all. If I couldn’t see it with my naked eyes I might not even know there was anything there.

  “I’ve sustained it as best I could,” Richard told me from where he stood. I heard him vaguely, distantly, almost through a film of water on the other side of a dream. “It – I don’t know if it escaped or was let go, it didn’t say – or otherwise convey anything, it might not even be able to anymore. It – came to me in a dream? I dreamed of the giant elemental of Earth that attacked you back then, and this little one manifesting to face it… Except when the time came for it to leave down through the earth, I woke up to find it floating above me.’

  S-

  The little glimmer almost died just from me thinking the beginning of the name I’d mean to give it back then.

  “I don’t know why it came to me,” Richard was saying. “I tried to talk to it, but it never replied, and whenever I tried to coax a rection, it was as if my direct attention was inimical to its life, threatening to put him out completely. I’ve been living with a phantom feeling of exhaustion ever since, steadily getting worse. I’m only making assumptions, but…”

  “It didn’t want to die in the monster’s belly. It didn’t want to die alone,” I gave the only answer that made sense, eyes locked on the tiny spark of Light in my hands. “You selfless little thing, you didn’t want to die without me there.”

  Richard shifted uncomfortably where he stood. “There have been unusual rumors and reports all over the country, since you left. Mountains shedding slopes, hills losing height, sinkholes in random places that appear and disappear overnight, miners miraculously surviving cave-ins and telling of dreams of gold-lit magma flows while they were buried. There were also sporadic appearances of light-imbued plants like the ones you used to make in your mother’s old garden, which yielded miracle medicines but did not occur more than once. All such rumors and incidents ceased the moment he came to me.”

  “… Leave me.”

  Uncomfortably, Richard and Antonidas bowed their heads and left me alone.

  I sat down.

  Cleansing the land, averting disasters, nurturing the people and lightforging nature and the world. In the few months while Granodior and I were connected, I’d often fantasized about things like that. The Spirit of Alterac had even seemed inclined to lend his assistance. In hindsight, the fact he was open to it without actually knowing how he’d help was just another hint I missed, of what he’d been grooming this little being for.

  Now, when it was over, it all proved as useless and pointless as I thought it would. It all failed. Granodior… didn’t get anything. Just burned the Light of Mercy on paltry one-offs with no rhyme or reason, burned the Light until it guttered out. Without him getting any benefits other than the perspective of the self-aware eater of newborns, if only that. If only.

  I was preparing war against the most repulsive misbegotten creatures in the universe but it was this that made me go if only.

  The small Light pulsed faintly, finally emitting something like awareness of where he was. Who he was with. With Richard’s animus no longer present, the little one seemed to rouse as if from a dream. Like it didn’t have the strength to even mind its surroundings enough unless they completely changed and forced it to. He sensed at me properly then, and I finally felt a ripple of joyful, exhausted relief… before the light began to dim with aching, unstoppable steadiness.

  “Granodior let you go.” Perhaps a less obsessive spirit might have had a lapse in attention that something so small and faint would’ve escaped through, but I felt the certainty that it was not the case for this. And that the attempt wouldn’t have been made anyway. “He used you up and just let you go.”

  Inside my mind, I saw a brief sequence of images and impressions that confirmed my belief. Around me, the other eight spirits pressed close to my animus, trying to be as close to their sibling as they could without making things worse. Carefully, I activated the Aura of Vigor and conjured a small ball of Light to envelop the dying Light, but I already knew none of it would work.

  He'd used himself up. He let himself be used up until there was literally nothing left to give. Because no less – no failure less total and complete than this, at trying to gain the Light’s grace by eating it, could have driven Granodior to finally acknowledge the possibility that maybe, just maybe he was the problem.

  The little one let himself be used up until there was literally nothing left to give, and nothing left to build on either.

  “Would you make a different choice now?”

  The answer was a momentary but clear memory of Granodior’s war form, sat down and hunched on itself in the bowels of the planet’s crust, unmoving and miserable.

  “I suppose that’s a no.”

  Meanderingly, so much that I almost couldn’t tell it was exerting its own will at all, the little one floated through my aura until it was in the center of my forehead. It flashed then, weakly but clearly, one last time. I felt gratitude to me that had no place, love that could have filled the heart of a giant, and the feel of satisfaction in a job… not well done, maybe, but done all the way to completion, no matter the effort and the pain.

  The Light went out.

  I felt nothing cross to the afterlife.

  The ninth was no more.

  I sat there for a long time, looking at nothing, saying nothing.

  I didn’t move again until I could once again think things other than thoughts of furious revenge.

  here.