NOVEL NEXT 72 - The Funeral
The funeral was on a rainy day.
Three men had fallen in defense of Granavale County, when they stood as a vanguard against the forces of the underworld.
Archmund had to attend. His father as well.
Since they were already in town, Beatrice Blackstone, Rory Redmont, and Gelias Greenroot also stood silently in ill-fitting mourning clothes.
The Princess Angelina Grace Marca Prima Omnio, though she'd been present at the tournament prior to the tragedy and returned to address the Granavales with matters of state, was far too important to spare the time on the funeral of three commoners.
Archmund hadn't known these men. He hadn't led them, hadn't fought with them, had never spoken to them.
And yet their blood was on his hands.
While he was chasing selfish aims: seeking personal strength, training with Gems, becoming more powerful, and trying to build up the economy (which wasn't a selfish goal in itself, but his reason for doing so was seeking self-sufficiency), the Monsters had strengthened as a whole. So he'd neglected the Dungeon and the strengthening beasts within.
It had, from a certain point of view, been Angelina's fault. She'd overestimated him. She said that such explosive loss wouldn't happen anymore. But now he was on a 10 year timer.
He'd done a lot. But it hadn't been enough. An awfully common happening.
Funerals weren't for the dead. They were for the living.
And it shouldn't have been his pity party.
There had been more to these peoples' lives than being focal points for his pity. Yet here at this funeral, all he could think of was his own failure.
Was it his failure, or was it a widespread systemic failure?
A perfect storm of greed.
The Omnio Empire forcing him into an untenable position through its harsh demands for strong central control and high taxation.
The Adventurer's Guilds, with their profiteering.
Garth, for not having trained them enough. The dead, for having slacked off.
Yet beneath his wooden parasol, in his black mourning clothes, as the wind blew rain into his face, he couldn't deny that ultimately, these were just excuses.
Some of the blame undeniably sat with him.
But this wasn't the time nor the place to feel it, to process it, to let it bring him down.
Because others were hurting more.
He barely heard the speeches, going in one ear and out the other. The wives and husband left behind, still awfully young, and their barely-walking children, too young to mourn the loss of parents they barely knew. The sobbing parents, mourning their sons and daughters, taken far too soon.
Xander's brother, his hand missing fingers, solemnly describing how each of the dead laughed at particular jokes, and which of the camp foods they hated most.
Garth Alavant, a tear in his eye, describing the dead as the sharpest blades he'd seen in years, trusted fully should the worst occur.
Mother Cera, praying over their souls, assuring the gathered living that those who died in service of defending the Goddess's creation from the forces of Hell would rest forever peacefully in her bosom.
He wondered what they must think of him. Was he the spoiled young noble who'd thrown their lives away, or the hero who'd stopped it from being as bad as it could be?
In ten years, it wouldn't matter. Their sacrifice would be reduced to a footnote in his legend, when he'd slain a Monster far beyond his strength. They would be dead, forgotten, buried, remembered only by those who had loved them.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
His legend would only continue to grow.
Because if it didn't, then this failure would haunt him forever.
And once the dead were consigned to the earth, the reception began at the town tavern.
This was undeniably for the living.
Archmund had only been to a few funerals and their aftermaths in his past life, and fewer in this one. His mother in this life had died at the height of the Crylaxan Plague, so they'd only had a small private ceremony. The slow and inevitable march of death had tainted his past life as well, and yet because of how much he'd worked, those deaths simply happened as if on a distant shore. People important to him died, and he only heard about it months if not years after the fact, once he emerged from his cocoon of too many spreadsheets.
So he wasn't sure how surprised to be that this funeral was an excuse for the adults to get drunk as all hell.
"Yo, Granavale!" Redmont said, rocking up to him with two tankards. Although people generally knew the dangers of giving children alcohol, Rory was tall and built enough that he was easily mistaken for a proper young adult. And there wasn't any real rule against 16 year olds drinking. "You gonna have some? They say they brew this beer here!"
It was true. Brewing was one of the many crafts and cottage industries of Granavale County. It wasn't a horrid way to preserve excess grain, all things considered.
"What, you don't have anything like this in Redmont?"
"We got wines, but nothing from these kinds of crops. Too much clay in the dirt."
Archmund accepted the tankard and took a light sip. The beer was fairly weak, more similar to bread than to a proper hard drink. Still, he wasn't going to have any more than a sip. Rory, content that Archmund had drunken, whooped and went off to bother Gelias.
"Must be nice," Beatrice said.
Was she referring to the funeral? The funeral's afterparty?
She nodded at his tankard.
"Do you want it?"
She snorted. "I look like a child. They'd tear it out of my hands."
Archmund bit back the retort that she was a child, mainly because so was he, physically. Even if his memories were longer, his body mass was lower, so there was no way he'd be able to hold his liquor.
"So do I."
Unless his Constitution stat was high enough to give him resistance?
But that was an experiment for in private: drinking increasing amounts of alcohol in his room, testing how much he could take before alcohol poisoning, where Mary could resuscitate him in case he ended up drowning in a pool of his own vomit. Not for the tail end of a funeral, where he had to embody the honor of House Granavale.
"And your thoughts on the dead?"
"I didn't know them," Beatrice said. "They're not my people. Sorry for their loss though. I'd hate if it happened to me."
That sounded just about like her.
"Please don't talk to anyone else," he said.
She scrunched up her face. "I don't plan on talking to peasants."
He sipped lightly from his beer, idly wondering whether this small amount would be enough to get him drunk, when his eyes landed on Mercy, standing in a corner of the room, her sky-blue eyes piercing through the room.
No.
Wasn't she not here?
He blinked.
It was Sister Catherine, standing resolutely, not drinking a thing.
He sidled over.
"I'm surprised," he said, "that no one's bothering you. Given how the whole town seems to seek your guidance."
She turned towards him sedately. "The Goddess has always been kind to me. Right now, they're not going to seek her guidance."
"And what does the Goddess think of this carousing?"
She shrugged. "If she didn't want people to get drunk, she wouldn't have made beer possible."
"Unless her design was imperfect. Or meant to tempt us into wickedness to harrow the virtuous from the damned."
"I don't like Temptation theology very much," she said in reply. "If the damned alone were eternally tortured for their sins, that would be one thing. But they escape. They escape from Hell, and they slay the living, and all who remain suffer for it."
The noise of the reception echoed hollowly in Archmund's ears after that. He took a sip of beer.
"Not planning on drinking yourself?" he asked.
She shook her head. "I much prefer a clear head."
Well, it made sense. She was about his age.
"So…" he said. "Do you have any other thoughts on the matter?"
He wasn't specific. Thoughts on why the protection failed. Thoughts on what he'd done. Thoughts on if he could've done anything else. He trusted her to know what was most relevant.
"Her magic was powerful," Catherine said.
She could only have been talking about Angelina.
"And that Gem she used…"
He waited for her to elaborate.
"Do you know what Hell is, Sir Granavale?"
"The absence of God."
"I'm surprised you say that. The Vaulted Halls of Heaven are at the very top of the Crystal Tower, where the Goddess sits. And at the bottom is Hell, the furthest point of all creation from her warmth, grace, and light. That's what I've been taught, but it's not a common belief."
It was borrowed theology from his past life. Many thinkers had theorized on what "Hell" was.
Hell is a place where the wicked are punished.
Hell is the absence of God.
Hell is other people.
The mind can make a hell out of heaven, and heaven out of hell.
Hell is empty, and all the demons are here.
Catherine took a breath. "That Gem… it was not of the Goddess. Not like one of her Sacred Relics."
"All Gems are pulled from the corpses of the wrathful dead," Archmund said. "Doesn't that make them all of Hell?"
"I like to think the dead can be redeemed. The Gems you carry with you, also, have the warmth of your life within them, and the grace of the goddess on the sun-kissed earth. But even when I laid my hands upon that Omnio Gem, I felt nothing of her grace in it. More than any other, it was an object of Hell."