NOVEL NEXT 361. Leap of Faith
The baby's mouth enveloped Ike. Wet, humid air rushed past him, and gums pressed against his limbs. But it stopped there, moving no further. It breathed, and Ike stumbled in, then out with its breath. He stood there, just in front of it, meeting its eyes.
"Uh… huh?" Wisp asked, caught in the middle of kicking it.
Ike shook his head subtly, indicating she shouldn't go through with the kick. Instead, he stepped in and gave the horrifying infant a hug. "This is what you need, isn't it? Not to be attacked and hated, but loved. That's what you've been looking for all this time."
The baby trembled. Its whole body shook under his arms. Ike sweated a little bit, not completely sure of his actions. If he was wrong, he was about to get hit with the biggest smack he'd taken in a while.
All at once, the baby melted. It broke apart into all its constituent pieces, and those pieces melted away. Only a few pale lights remained, tiny, almost invisible motes of light, so small Ike might have mistaken them for fireflies if he didn't know what they were. He held his hands out, and they flew to him, the tiny, infinitesimally small pieces of the greater being that had been scattered across these thousands of infants. The tiny pieces for which they had been born; the tiny pieces for which they had died, all at the hands of an unfeeling Brightbriar. He absorbed them, and barely felt the difference, save in the weight of the will that pressed into him, the gathered will of all these lives cut short for no reason. Sadness, despair, emptiness. Not even the desire for revenge welled up from their small hearts; only confusion, that the man they thought was their father, their safety, would so suddenly turn against them and end their small lives.
Ike put his hand to his chest. You're safe with me, now. And I will get your revenge.
With nothing to kick, Wisp hopped over and peered at Ike. "You just hugged it to death?"
"Yeah, kind of," Ike said, somewhat forcibly dragging himself out of the emotional moment he'd been having. "It didn't really want to fight, I guess."
"Huh." She paused, then shrugged. "Bad news for your love life."
"What, that I'm full of a thousand tiny infants? Or that I can kill with a hug?"
"Both."
Ike snorted. "Fair enough." He looked around at all the fog, then raised a hand. "Thanks!"
"Who're you talking to?" Wisp asked.
"The ghosty lady. The one who led us here. She's around here somewhere, right?"
"Yeah, I thought so. Why are you thanking her? She led us into an ambush!"
"An ambush that helped me get stronger," Ike countered.
"Did it?" Wisp challenged him, crossing her arms. "What useful skill did you get from the babies?"
Ike opened his mouth, then shut it. He turned his attention inward, to where the energy of the pieces gathered in his core. The King radiated power. The Prince demanded it. And the infants, they… were there, weren't they? Ike searched around, sensing for their power. They were so little of the greater being, even all combined, that he could barely feel their signature at all. At last, when he isolated it, it felt… vulnerable. Weak. Like a flickering flame on the verge of winking out, something he had to protect, not something he could draw on for strength. There was a faint sensation that reminded him of the soft body technique he'd picked up from the centipede mother, but that was it. If he chased it, that flickering flame guttered, almost winking out, so he retreated and let it stand, rather than risk losing it.
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"…Something super useful. So useful I can't put it to words," Ike bluffed.
"Uh huh. But you can show me, right? Don't need words to use a skill."
Ike coughed. "Well, that is… you know. It takes some time to assimilate them! We had to go hunt the Prince before the King would give in, right?"
"What, do we have to go find the Mother so the babies fall in line?" Wisp asked.
Ike twisted his lips. "I don't think there's a mother aspect to the greater being. I'm pretty sure it's… we're… male."
"Rosamund is a girl."
"Rosamund is like these babies. She doesn't know what she is." Ike paused, then, frowning. "Why'd he let her live? If he killed all these infants for being too far from the greater being, why let Rosamund live? Was there a purpose?
When it came to nobles, why did they have daughters? The answer was simple: to marry them off to more powerful families. Brightbriar was a satellite city, far from the center of the current region he was invading. If he wanted more influence in the region, the obvious answer was to unite with the region's king. What better, more obvious way to do that, than marriage?
"Does our region have a prince?" Ike asked suddenly.
"Huh? I dunno. I don't pay attention to you humans. Plus, I was stuck in the Abyss forever," Wisp said.
"I think he let Rosamund live because he needs a daughter. This is all speculation, but if I'm right, he's looking to marry her into the royal family, use that to expand his influence, then take over the region that way. It's… really more classic than most of his attempts. There's no puppets or anything. But I guess why bother with puppets, when you can just outright usurp the royal family by marrying in?" Ike said.
Wisp nodded. "Maybe he got bored and he wants to have a wedding for fun. Ooh, or what if there's something special about Rosamund, since she's a woman?"
Ike frowned. "What do you mean?"
"Well, you're a man. He made you by squirting some greater being juice into some lady, right?"
"I despise your terminology, but go on."
"You could do the same thing, one day, hypothetically—and this is very hypothetical, but it's possible that you might one day squirt your own greater being juice into a woman and make a little Ike."
"Gods, can you use a better word? Please? I'm begging you," Ike complained, putting his face in his hands.
"The point is, you're a man, he's a man, but Rosamund? She's a woman. What if the idea is that she isn't meant to be the greater being, but is simply a vessel? A vessel that holds a bit of greater being juice, until some man comes along and squ—"
Ike interrupted her, as much to keep that word from coming into play again as because he'd figured out where she was going. "She's an incubator. She holds the egg of the greater being, so to speak. Rather than trying to use a random person as the 'incubator' to create the greater being—and what a horrible way to think about people, as tools to craft this hellish thing he's been working towards—he builds the incubator, and controls all those variables, then crafts the child within her once princey boy squ… fulfils his husbandly duties and gives her a child. Gods. Yuck." Ike shook his head, making a face. "Can a child even grow in that black gunk?"
"Who knows? Brightbriar knows more about that stuff than we do."
"Guess so." Ike shook his head. "Yikes, man. Talk about maximum icky."
"No kidding. I guess we're lucky that he needs a political marriage, or else he'd probably—"
Ike held up his hand. "Don't finish that thought. I don't want to go there again."
Wisp nodded. "It's some real gross shit, man. Honestly, Rosamund might be better off as a creepy head in your bag."
Ike snapped his fingers. "You know, her head always continued making that gunk, even after I destroyed her body… or at least, separated her a long ways from it. I wonder if that's because she's built to be an incubator, unlike the other puppets?"
"Gods only know. What do you say we get to that capital city and prevent that unholy union from occurring?" Wisp suggested.
Ike nodded. "I think it's time." There might be other pieces of him out here, but if they were like the infants, then there was no point hunting them down. The Prince and the King were powerful, and he could sense they were a large portion of the greater being—easily hundreds of times its energy, compared to the entire mass of the infant. Brightbriar had treated both of them specially, he supposed, so he made a note to contact Scar and see if she had any information on Brightbriar treating any other of his children differently, but aside from that… no, even if she came back with information, it was go time. He didn't want to deal with whatever Brightbriar was planning with Rosamund. Just the thought of it gave him a horrific feeling, like the sensation he got when a monster he couldn't beat drew near.
He walked on, turning away from the outer regions and toward the center of the region he'd come from. Wisp and Mag hopped to his sides and walked with him.
In the fog, behind them, a figure formed for a split second, little more than a shadow within the shifting mists. It watched them go, then vanished.