The Insane Regressor: Throne of Pride

At night, around a small fire by the riverbank, the five-member team sat eating in silence.

Only Lysandra was not eating.

Her amber eyes were fixed on the pale glow at the horizon, her fingers toying with the hem of her dirtied clothes. Against her will, she was reliving the moment. The moment of the soul’s detonation... when that tremor had passed through the world as if some colossal string had been cut.

In that exact moment — and for no reason she could name — a face had flashed through her mind.

’Ravian...’

Their companion whom the forest had swallowed roughly a week ago, leaving nothing behind him but confusion and questions.

Why him? Why now? No connection. No evidence. No logic. Just a cold thread that had brushed her soul in that tremor... then vanished, leaving the trace of its chill behind.

”Lysandra?” Evelyne leaned toward her. ”Are you all right?”

”Just tired.” Lysandra swallowed the name that had nearly slipped from her lips, and shook her head.

Evelyne settled for a squeeze of her shoulder. But from the other side of the fire, Isabelle was watching Lysandra in silence... a little longer than she should have. Then she turned her gaze toward the distant crater and kept her thoughts — as the Dmitris always did — behind her teeth.

Then a voice came to her from where she least expected it.

”Commander.”

Isabelle heard the call and turned her head to find Kael looking at her.

”What is it, Kael?”

Kael stayed silent for a second, as if deciding whether he should ask this question at all.

But in the end, he decided to let it out.

”Weren’t we a little hasty in concluding that the infiltrator went in the direction of the explosion?” Kael said, then continued. ”I mean... we found a lot of water traces away from the river, and we discovered the tracks of two people who had been standing in the same spot.” He was frowning now.

”Couldn’t the water have simply spilled from those two? The presence of two other people rules out the possibility that it was the infiltrator. Based on the information we have, he’s almost certainly operating alone,” Kael asked, looking at Isabelle.

”No.” Isabelle shook her head.

”Huh?” Kael did not understand that flat, certain refusal.

But what she said next answered a great deal.

”There were no traces,” Isabelle said, frowning.

”Traces?” the other four around the fire repeated.

”We know that person is skilled at erasing his tracks — and he did. There was a large amount of water on the ground at the riverbank, and yet there were no footprints in it, no marks of any other creature mixed into the water. Just water scattered from the river to the wall, then to the road, before it disappeared without any further trace,” Isabelle said. ”So where exactly did those water traces come from, if not dripping off someone capable of erasing his own tracks?” she finished, framing it as a question.

Kael fell silent, the frown deepening on his face.

But Isabelle was not done.

”And yet, that person is no fool. He didn’t bother with the water because it would keep dripping for a while but stop at some point, and we wouldn’t be able to follow it — which is exactly what happened,” Isabelle said, recalling the traces she had found there during their search, before the explosion.

”But he didn’t stop at that. He made sure to wipe away the tracks of the two people who were with him as well, so we couldn’t trace him through them.” With that, Isabelle finished laying out what she had found.

She had noticed earlier that the infiltrator’s water trail resumed after he separated from the two people he had met — and that he had somehow erased their tracks before returning to his previous route.

And it was, in truth, a correct deduction on Isabelle’s part. Ravian had refused to leave with Larette and Schmichael earlier for several reasons — among them, to give himself the chance to erase their tracks after their departure and mislead anyone who came later, in case his infiltration was discovered and people were sent after him.

And it seems the precautions he took had truly paid off now. Otherwise, Isabelle could have reached Larette and Schmichael and asked them about the person they had met at the riverbank — and the rest would have been nothing more than yet another catastrophe for Ravian.

...

And on the fourth day, the Gray City Guard arrived.

The City Guard was divided into three branches.

The first was the Internal City Guard — like the ones who had tailed Ravian on Robert’s orders before. These were the weakest of the three, specialized mostly in internal affairs.

The second branch was the Imperial Guard — those stationed in the fortresses and along the borders as the empire’s final bulwark. They were distinguished by strict, disciplined training, mastery of warcraft and strategy, and overwhelming strength — men like Thorfin and those under him at the fortress of the Light Wall.

And the third and final branch — the most dangerous of them all, not merely for their strength but for their diverse, ruthlessly honed skills, from under whose hands nothing ever escaped — was the Gray City Guard. Robert had been one of these Gray Guards.

The Gray Guards approached the perimeter of the emptiness the soul’s detonation had left behind.

Gray cloaks bearing no insignia, and faces the other branches of the City Guard knew better than to question. At their head walked an officer with the rank of Chief Investigator — a rank far above Robert’s; a thin man, absurdly tall, standing over two meters, his gray hair falling to his shoulders and lending an air of wisdom to his old gray eyes.

At the northern edge, he ordered a crystal plumb lowered into the crater on a chain of silver. The crystal went down a clear, pure white...

And came back up white tinged with gray from within — as if it had swallowed an entire day’s light mixed with some strange gray hue, so faint and indistinct that it gave off nothing more than a gray sheen.

Then something happened that startled everyone standing there.

A young investigator, the one standing closest to the edge, suddenly began to speak.

”I’m afraid. I hate this place. I... I stole from the registry’s coffer two years ago, and I put the blame on—” Without any will of his own, without any preamble, in a loud, trembling voice.

He clamped both hands over his mouth, pure terror in his eyes — the terror of a man whose own tongue had betrayed him in front of everyone.

The Chief Investigator frowned for a moment, then closed his eyes.

’So... it is what I thought it was...’ he thought, before opening his eyes again, heavier than before.

”Get him out of the perimeter. Send him to be purged of the anomaly, quickly,” he said calmly. Then he lowered his voice until he could barely hear himself — yet those around him heard it with perfect clarity. ”Near this place... human beings cannot lie.”

And in this entire world, there was only one signature that did that.

’The Taboo of Truth.’

But it did not end there. Another imprint appeared on the crystal — tangled into the first like a wound inside a wound — a second signature lay there: the residue of a soul’s detonation, with no clear traces at all...

A soul that had detonated its own core by its own will. Knowledge that was not supposed to exist outside forbidden legends; souls are torn out, souls wither and perish... but they never, ever choose to become a weapon like this.

Two absurdly terrifying things.

In the same place.

At the same moment.

The Chief Investigator’s hands trembled as he poured red wax over his report and pressed into it the seal that read ”For the Palace Alone.” Then he raised his eyes to the crater one final time, and asked in a low voice the question the entire Empire would soon be asking:

”What in hell happened here...?”