A Month later.....
Tim's POV
The counting took most of the day. I had not expected otherwise, E-Rantel's population had grown substantially since the shelters went up, and a population that size produced a vote count that took genuine administrative hours to tally, even with the academy's mathematics-trained staff handling it.
When the final numbers were posted, the result was not close.
I want to describe the scale accurately rather than simply state it: the combined votes of every other candidate, every noble who had brought soldiers, every house that had marched in peasants, every family that had registered slaves to cast ballots on their behalf, together did not reach even half of what I had received alone. The Church of Tim had done most of work, and for that, they had my blessing, regardless of how uncomfortable I found the religious framing underneath it.
I took the stand, where Panasolei had constructed in the town square.
"For my first rule in this city," I said, and the crowd's noise dropped to something close to silence, "all slaves that enter this city are now free. Starting today, slavery is banned within E-Rantel's walls."
The reaction split exactly along the lines I expected. The crowd, the people who had voted, the Church of Tim members who had been organising for weeks, the ordinary residents who had simply wanted the slavery question resolved one way or another, erupted into the specific noise of people getting something they had wanted and had not expected to actually receive. The nobles who had brought slaves specifically to register votes had a very different reaction, the rage moving across their faces in real time.
I was not finished.
"If you refuse to release your slaves," I said, "you will be stripped of your clothing and removed from this city. You will return to your lands BUTT NAKED in shame, and you will be permanently banned from E-Rantel."
I did not specify how the removal would be conducted. I did not need to. The Church of Tim had been waiting for orders, and the moment I stepped back from the stand, the chains came off.
I am not going to pretend the next hour was orderly.
The mob that formed around the noble retinues had the specific energy of a population that had spent years watching the gap between what they had and what the wealthy hoarded, and had spent the last several days specifically watching slaves with mutilated bodies stand in registration lines, and had now been given explicit permission to act on the accumulated resentment of both. The noble guards who tried to maintain order were overwhelmed within minutes, not through violence in the sense of serious injury, but through sheer numbers, the crowd simply removing weapons and then removing clothing with the specific efficiency of people who had decided collectively that humiliation was the appropriate punishment and were going to administer it thoroughly and personally.
I watched a dozen naked nobles and their naked guards being dragged through the streets toward the city gates, the crowd jeering, flowers and rotted vegetables thrown in equal measure, the specific carnival energy of a population releasing pressure that had been building for as long as the kingdom had existed in its current form.
I saw Panasolei in the crowd.
Wearing the robes of the Church of Tim.
I did not have words for the specific feeling of watching a noble governor I had punched unconscious in his own foyer a few weeks earlier now marching through the streets in the vestments of a religion built around my likeness, cheering as other nobles were stripped and ejected from a city he was nominally still administering on paper.
'did he want me to rule this city forever ?, is that why he first asked me be a noble lord ?'
I decided I would deal with Panasolei's career trajectory another day.
---
Fluder Paradyne's POV [level 38]
I had been composing the questions I wanted to ask Tim for three days straight, the list growing longer with each hour the cart carried me closer to E-Rantel.
The opportunity was, by any reasonable assessment, the most significant event of my professional life. I was the headmaster of the Imperial Magic Academy. I had spent six decades accumulating magical theory, had personally trained two generations of the Baharuth Empire's finest practitioners, had reached a level of magical capability that placed me firmly among the most accomplished human spellcasters of this era.
None of it had prepared me for the implications of what Tim apparently represented.
The reports, and I had read every one I could obtain, calling in favours with contacts in three different intelligence networks to secure the more restricted documents, described a human being who could transform into the physical forms of five of the six great gods. Not channel their power in the diluted way that the priestly classes sometimes managed through devout practice. Become them. Cast their magic. Access their knowledge directly.
If even a fraction of what I had read was accurate, the magical theory contained in a single hour of that transformation would represent more advancement than my academy had produced in a decade of dedicated research.
I had wanted to meet him for over a year. The Emperor had specifically forbidden it, Jircniv's reasoning had never been explained to me directly, though I suspected it had something to do with the assassination attempt the Empire had apparently commissioned and subsequently regretted, a piece of court business I had only learned about through the kind of corridor gossip that academy heads were not supposed to indulge in but inevitably did.
And then the letter had arrived. Tim's personal invitation, addressed to me directly, requesting my presence in E-Rantel to observe what the letter described, with admirable directness, as "god level magic."
The Emperor could not refuse it. Whatever political calculations sat behind the original prohibition, refusing a direct invitation from someone capable of doing what Tim had done to the Beastman Country was not a risk Jircniv was willing to absorb on my behalf. The permission had arrived within a day of the letter, faster than any administrative approval I had requested in years.
I sat in the cart with the specific giddy energy of a man considerably too old to be feeling giddy, and found I did not care.
Leinas Rockbruise sat across from me, her travel cloak drawn up slightly on the right side in the habitual gesture I had watched her perform for the entire two years I had known her, the small, automatic adjustment of someone managing how much of her face the world saw.
I had not brought her along deliberately, as she force her way into this trip.
The curse had been with her for years, a battlefield affliction, the specific kind of magical injury that resisted conventional dispelling because it had been deliberately constructed to resist conventional dispelling. I had examined it myself, more than once, with every diagnostic technique available to a wizard of my standing, and had been forced to conclude that whatever had cursed her operated on principles I simply did not have access to. Powerful magic. Old magic. The kind that ordinary tier-rated dispelling simply slid off without purchase.
If Tim could become a god, if he could access the divine knowledge of healing and life itself, the way the reports suggested he had used during the rescue of the Beastman Country's captives, then a curse that had defeated every wizard and priest Leinas had consulted across two years might be, for him, a matter of seconds.
"You're thinking about it again," Leinas said, without looking up from the window.
"I have considerable hope for you," I admitted.
"Don't get my hopes up past where they can survive landing," she said. There was no bitterness in it, simply the flat practicality of someone who had been disappointed by enough specialists across enough years to have built a defensive wall against expecting too much from any single one. "If he can't do it, I'd rather not have spent the whole journey imagining that he could."
"And if he can?"
She was quiet for a moment. The scarred side of her face, half-hidden by the fall of her hair, was angled toward the window, away from me, the habit so automatic I doubted she fully noticed herself doing it anymore.
"Then I suppose I'll have a great deal to thank a twenty-three-year-old former orphan for," she said, "which will be a strange thing to adjust to."
I laughed, and the cart continued north, and I went back to my list of questions, the structure of divine magic, the relationship between tier ten spells and the cosmological frameworks the ancient texts described but no living practitioner had ever verified, the specific mechanics of how a single human body could apparently house the accumulated knowledge of five separate divine domains without the mind simply fracturing under the weight of it.
E-Rantel was three more days away.
I found I could barely sit still.
---
Tim
[97 + 5 = 102]