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It was a decent plan in theory, quick and easy to execute, plus he’d already decided that he had no affection for his past. The key word being decided. It turned out his feelings were not as easy to control once face to face with –
The little cottage looked exactly the same, was the thing. The afternoon light painted streaks of gold on the white walls, the flowers were blooming with an odd enthusiasm considering it was nearing on October, and the brook a few paces beyond the house babbled with the same joyful simplicity. Zargothrax peered around the house and there it was: the chicken coop and the pen with his – not really his, though, were they – goats, black and brown and spotted. He remembered their names.
He really thought he’d come here and be done with it, the easier job of the two (Dundax was a child, for Chaos’ sake, he wasn’t exactly eager to kill a child), but now, looking at what used to be his home so long ago, his grip on the situation started to slip.
He wondered, for a moment, what he might look like to an outsider. Looming in his tattered robes (he’d not had the time or resources to upgrade his wardrobe just yet), glaring at another man’s charming property with odd emotions showing in his expression. Thankfully the cottage was a ways away from the village. It would do no good to have an audience for all this.
“Oh,” said an eerily familiar voice from behind him, “hullo. May I help you?”
Zargothrax didn’t turn to face the source of the voice. Couldn’t. He waited until the lad approached him on his own, and when they were face to face, he made himself look up, straight at him.
“Ah,” said the lad after a moment’s confusion. “You might as well come inside. I’m excited to hear what this is about.”
So Zargothrax forced his legs into compliance and followed his twenty year old self into his old home, noting that he now needed to duck to fit through the door (a strange side effect of whatever the chaos magic did to him. It’s like he was stretched out like dough, taller and thinner, ghoulish, nothing like the stocky lad leading him to the kitchen).
The house looked, smelled, felt the same from the inside as well. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go, and Zargothrax knew he could have avoided all of this if he had just killed the lad the moment they met. But he couldn’t, really. He realized suddenly that he was terribly, frighteningly homesick. He wanted nothing but to curl up in the tiny bed with its many pillows and sleep for days, sleep until whatever nightmare he’d been living was over –
Stupid. He wanted to do this, needed to, in order to prevent history from repeating itself, in order to establish himself as the new and infinitely more benevolent ruler of this land. An iron fist would be needed to bring order to the place that was the Kingdom of Fife so long ago, back in a different dimension. He could not show weakness, not now.
“Bread?” the lad asked, apparently unaware of Zargothrax’s inner turmoil. “I baked it fresh this morning, and there should be some cheese if you want –”
“Please,” Zargothrax managed, because he was awfully hungry and because he remembered the bread he used to bake, airy and sweet, the dark, crackling crust flavourful and crispy. He missed that bread. He missed bread in general. He hadn’t any for years.
“Tea?”
“Tea shouldn’t exist at this point in history,” Zargothrax replied absently.
“It’s just chamomile steeped in hot water, and honey for taste. Herbal, not real tea. Which does exist, just not on this continent, you know.”
“Smartarse.”
“Sorry, you wanted any?”
Lords, the lad was irritating. Zargothrax resisted a smile. “Yes.”
The lad cut two generous slices of bread and set out a hunk of fresh goat’s cheese on a wooden board, along with a knife. The tea was served in clearly handmade, lopsided ceramic mugs, and Zargothrax realized that he used to love pottery. Never got any good at it, as the mugs demonstrated, but it was a relaxing activity nonetheless.
He reached for the cheese, trying, and based on the lad’s expression, failing to look less hungry than he actually was. They ate in silence for a while. Zargothrax stole glances at his younger self, studying the features he still considered his own but couldn’t find in a mirror, not for hundreds of years now. The rich, brown eyes (his were pitch-black now), the round cheeks (his were gaunt and sunken), the healthy flush of colour (he was pale and sickly-looking), the broader shoulders, the softer hands. There were no bones showing through, no bruising that never really went away – the lad looked like a sunny afternoon in the valley, not like the coldest day of a tough and long winter. It was concerning.
“More bread?” the lad asked, and Zargothrax nodded before he even realized he’d finished his slice. The lad twitched a finger and the knife lifted from the table and cut a slice on its own. He snatched up the bread like a starving man (half-truth; starving? yes. man? debatable.) and asked,
“Have you figured all that out then?”
“I can work it fine,” the lad said with a satisfied smile, “makes life easier. But if you mean where it came from? No clue.”
“If it’s any help, I never figured it out either.”
“I’m not surprised,” the lad snorted, “when did you throw your life away? Thirty? Thirty-one?”
“Thirty-three,” Zargothrax muttered. He tore off a piece of crust and balanced a lump of cheese on it. He shoved it into his mouth before the precarious construction toppled, and a thought occurred to him mid-chew. “Now hold on, how do you know about –”
“The chaos magic? Look at you. It’s all quite obvious. I can smell it on you. Yuck. What made you do that anyway?”
“Long story,” Zargothrax shrugged, “and I wouldn’t tell you even if it was shorter. The less you know, the better. I’m trying to save you from exactly that, in fact.”
The lad’s eyes hardened. The breadknife on the cutting board began to rattle ominously.
“You come here to kill me and have the nerve to call it saving me?”
“How do you know –”
“You could quit asking that question, it’s getting old really quickly.” The lad’s words were cutting and filled with vitriol, his face drawn up in a scowl. His eyes had a strange, otherworldly shine to them. “I’m you, remember? I know a lot of things. I know what chaos magic smells like and I know that if you’re here, you’re going to want to get rid of me to avoid a time paradox of two wizards in one timeline. Obviously, you’re here to kill me. You just looked so miserable I had to feed you, see if maybe that would change your mind. Don’t you think you made some bad decisions along the way if you’re starving to death in an alternate version of your own past?”
It would have been easier to kill the lad on sight, Zargothrax thought. The worst part was that he was actually right. Some part of him, the part that was anxious about killing a child and unsure of the truth in Kor-Virliath’s whispered promises of godhood, knew very well that he was not doing as well as he pretended to, even to himself. His body was failing, having never recovered after the ice, now held together with magic and determination, and the nightmares far outweighed the dreamless nights of sleep he got, if he had the chance to sleep at all.
“Technically, there’s more than two wizards in the timeline anyway. Or,” he frowned in confusion – he couldn’t sense Ralathor’s magic here, “there will be. I think having two of us specifically would be fine too, actually. I think there were two Ralathors for a while, back where I come from.”
“What’s a Ralathor?”
“Not what, who. But it doesn’t matter. You won’t meet him anyway.” He took a sip of his tea; the lad did the same. The tea was somehow the perfect temperature; magic of course.
“Okay, then answer me this. If there could be two Ralathors, why can’t you and I coexist? You do whatever you came here to do, and I stay here and do what I do. I’ll even send you cheese if you leave me an address.”
Zargothrax tried to remember why he wanted to kill the lad in the first place. Killing Dundax made sense. But if there was no Dundax, there would be nothing to prompt his younger self to seek out the chaos ritual, there would be no Fife, no Dundee, no annoying descendants who could lock him in an ice prison and send him off to the far edges of the solar system.
“It just has to be this way,” he said finally, picking at his nails instead of looking himself in the eye.
“Will it make you happy?”
That brought him up short. “What do you mean?”
The lad smiled. “I’m happy here. I know you used to be happy here, I can feel your regret, I can tell that you have missed this. I can give up my life if you really need me to, but I have to know. If you kill me, will you be happy in the end?”
“Human emotions don’t matter,” Zargothrax frowned.
“You’re human.”
“Not for much longer.” And he hadn’t meant to say it, it just slipped out, but it was obvious now that he couldn’t lie to his younger self, not really, and when he looked up, he could see the horror on his face.
“The solar conjunction, a thousand years from now. You don’t mean –”
“Of course I bloody mean to! Why else would I be here, fucking about in my own past, if not to prepare for my ascension? When I’m a god, it won’t matter if I’m happy or if I’m angry or if I’m dying because gods don’t feel and gods can’t die!”
All of the lad’s anger dissipated, and was replaced by something much worse: pity.
“You’re dying?”
Zargothrax deflated. “The descendant of the man I’m trying to spare you from locked me in ice for a thousand years. Also, chaos magic is highly self-destructive. I’m not doing well, no. I can last until the conjunction, save my power and achieve true immortality.”
“You’re delusional,” the lad murmured, but there was understanding in his eyes. This was a last stand, a last resort, a final attempt at surviving and coming out on the top. There would be nothing if this failed. “Fine. But I get to choose how.”
Something twisted in Zargothrax’s chest, around where his heart was supposed to be, or used to be, a long time ago. He thought he was going to cry. He realized all over again just what he was doing here: killing a young man, taking away his home and his future for the sake of his own desperate grab at power. His doubts were suffocating him and he couldn’t breathe for a moment, lost in a vortex of dark thoughts and panic.
A gentle hand, impossibly warm, grasped at his own. He noticed only then that he was shivering. A side effect of the ice, a symptom of exhaustion. He looked into the lad’s eyes and was surprised to see him smile at him.
“You better succeed,” the lad said, then leaned close and whispered the name Zargothrax had been given by a mother he could hardly remember, long before chaos filled his body and mind and gave him a new name, a name fit for a chaos wizard. It was good to hear his human name for the very last time. It was good to remember what it was. He hadn’t even realized he’d forgotten it.
“It was good to meet you,” he choked out, and then warmth flooded his veins from their point of contact, golden and strong, thrumming with life, and the lad, still clutching his hand, still smiling, was going paler with every second, the colour disappearing from his cheeks, from his eyes.
The rush of power stopped abruptly and Zargothrax heaved a broken sob as his younger self’s lifeless body collapsed, devoid of his life’s essence. His hand was tight like a vice around Zargothrax’s wrist and he couldn’t bring himself to pry it off just yet. The lad was obviously dead, and Zargothrax felt stronger than he had in years, in centuries. A gift, he realized, a gift of magic and life force, to last him until he was ready to ascend.
“I used to be good,” he said to himself, idly surprised. There was so much he had forgotten about. And then he was crying in earnest, mourning the lad who knew he was going to die all along but still invited him in and fed him, still showed him kindness because he was good, because he could have been the best version of Zargothrax there ever was, because he himself could have been this if it weren’t for Dundax.
“Right,” he said, and wiped away his tears with the edge of his ragged cloak. He freed his hand from the lad’s grip and stood, all but running from the room so he wouldn’t have to look at the dead body again. He had work to do.
He homed in on Dundax’s life force and summoned a portal. It went easier than it had in a while. Of course. He wasn’t dying anymore, down to his last reserves of power. He was doing good. He stepped through the portal, but couldn’t resist looking back one last time.
The cottage looked the same. The brook babbled, the flowers bloomed, the hens clucked. But the light painting the white walls of the house golden was paler now, the flowers were starting to sag and wither, and the wind blew sharply across the fields, kicking up dust and ruining the peace of the scenery.
The lad was gone, and with him, the magic that filled his home with life. Zargothrax snapped, and the cottage went up in flames, a terrible, white-hot roar that consumed every trace of the homestead and the wizard who once lived there.
The portal closed behind him, and he found himself mere houses away from the place where the child Dundax lived. With his eyes hard like jewels and his nose filled with the thick smell of smoke, he began to walk with cold determination.
He would make this sacrifice be worth it.