Wilt gripped the arms of his chair with white-knuckled ferocity as the battle played out on the holographic display. He wasn’t a tactical genius by any stretch, but it was very obvious what the score was. They were losing. Losing big and losing fast.
He regretted everything about the past year. Joining Bluff’s faction so that he could be on the winning side had been such a drastic mistake. His parents were outspoken critics of Bluff, so Wilt had unknowingly volunteered himself to beco a political hostage. Being assigned as an aide to the Sage of Foresight no doubt sounded like a great honor to those on the outside.
Except Foresight wasn’t in favor. Her and Persuasion were considered annoying ddlers and foreign mouthpieces. Foresight wasn’t even a natural born Arahant, just so drear elevated to a position of authority within Svarga due to the machinations of the Coalition supporters.
What no one expected when Wilt took the assignnt was that the Sage of Foresight actually had the abilities she claid. In a political system where propaganda was everything, Evelyn Smith had no need of lies – she possessed actual oracular power. She engineered victories of the Coalition Army by sending a series of letters to key decision makers. She sohow convinced rcom that they needed to accept help for a Dragon invasion. She even managed to paint Bluff into a corner so that he couldn’t stop the mobilization to assist Terra. It was all very impressive.
Which was truly unfortunate, because now Wilt was in the middle of a Dragon attack.
He’d been hoping at first that Foresight exaggerated events. Then the first salvo failed. After which everything else failed. There seed to be no stopping this creature. Wilt’s last hope died when Conflagration’s whip extinguished on contact with the miasma envelope around the Dragon. The Sage of Conflagration was the pinnacle of Arahant destructive power, supposedly able to rival Jinn war barges. In this battle, the great Sage made one useless attack and then disappeared.
Wilt looked towards General Kristi. The woman was in mumbled conversation with the other Bluff loyalists. His strict orders were to remain at the side of Foresight at all tis. Facing imminent death, though, he thought it might be a good ti to forge a relationship with the general who had a reputation for bailing on dire situations at opportune tis.
The other generals gasped and Wilt turned his attention to the holographic display, where a war barge had exploded on contact with the Dragon’s tail. The holograph kept freezing and its image quality continually declined. One of the aerostats dropped from the sky suddenly.
Unexpectedly, Foresight stood. “This is the day that humanity will rise or fall. The battle has not been lost yet.”
Wilt turned to stare at the Sage, shocked by the hollow words. He’d spent a lot of ti with this woman over the past year. She never spoke in cliches like that. Certainly she didn’t do fake sincerity. The woman could be morbidly sarcastic, deathly serious, or simply exhausted. Wilt was convinced those were the only three modes she had. Persuasion was the one who delivered the speeches full of aningless words.
Which made him wonder… where was Persuasion? She had been on a tour to raise morale among the troops the previous day, but Wilt could not recall her ever returning from that mission.
Gasps brought his attention back to the holograph, where the Dragon had ramd an aerostat. That was two of them down. The final two didn’t look like they’d be around much longer. One of them had the appearance of a lted ice cream cone.
“All executive appointnts need to report back to President Bluff. The rest of the generals need to remain in place. We will return as soon as we receive instructions on how to proceed.” The words of General Kristi were like a beacon of hope.
Wilt began to stand, sending a last glance towards Foresight. The woman he was ordered to spy on chose that exact mont to wave him closer. He rushed over. “Sage, I think it might be smart for us to use the portal. This battle does not go well.”
“No, Wilt. You will remain with until events conclude.”
“Sage….”
“This isn’t punishnt for spying. I will have need of you.”
Wilt watched as General Kristi and her fellow loyalists fled through the portal. When it closed, he felt the world collapse in on him. He was trapped in a floating Jinn city with a Dragon a few miles away. Regret for the choices he’d made threatened to drown him.
Then General Ham, renowned hero of the Archipelago War, left to make a principled last stand. Wilt struggled to keep his lunch inside him, wishing he could live even one day longer – or barring that, at least find relief from the overpowering fear suffocating him.
“Miasma levels have reached critical levels. Resonant suppression within a twenty kiloter radius estimated at fifty percent.” Following that announcent, the war barges retreated to a greater distance. On the glitching display, Wilt saw that their schism beams didn’t even reach halfway to their target now.
Movent caught his eye. General Hadrian, the Sage of Perception, was leaning against one of the floor-to-ceiling windows at the outer edge of the room, staring intently at the pandemonium below as if sothing fascinating had caught his attention.
Wilt turned towards the display to try to divine what had caught the man’s eye. It quickly beca obvious. The Dragon had done a one hundred and eighty degree turn and was bearing down on one of the aerostats – the lting ice cream one. Before it arrived at that destination, the Dragon pivoted abruptly and moved in a new direction, serpentine body undulating with agitation until it lunged forward with a snap of its jaw.
Due to his position standing next to Foresight, Wilt noticed as the tension she’d carried for as long as he knew her faded away. So pervasive had the stiffness in her fra been that he never recognized it as anything other than an essential part of her nature. Had she finally lost all hope?
“What is it, Sage?”
Foresight’s subdued smile revealed an unassailable confidence beneath her deep weariness. To Wilt, this girl who was no more than a few years his senior had never looked more like the mystical seer she tried to portray.
“Everyone who matters is now exactly where they are supposed to be.”
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