Wish upon the Stars chapter 1033

“You ok?” Callie asked, sitting down beside me and snuggling up to my side. “We restrained the lackeys. And we…we made a makeshift coffin for his body.” She swallowed loudly. “I’m sorry you had to do that.”

“I FELT him die,” I said blankly. “I can’t…I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like I was holding his soul, and it came apart in my hands like sand. We were…connected. And I could feel him. He felt so happy. So relieved. He was trapped. Stuck in a bad situation, and I killed him. No, worse, I DESTROYED him.”

She took my hand. “Shane. Honey. Do you think he would have stopped? Say we captured him. Say we managed to lock him up. What then? Would this be over? Do you really believe that they would have been kind to him once they had him in custody?”

“No,” I admitted. “But that wasn’t why I did it. Not really. I just didn’t want Devon to die. And isn’t that wrong? Like just because he’s my cousin, I put his life above Roland’s?”

“Sometimes,” my wife said fondly. “You are a giant moron. I love you more than life itself, but it would be nice if you’d occasionally use your head as something other than a place to hang your mask. Roland was a traitor and a murderer. The way you had to kill him sounds horrible, and I’m so sorry you went through it, but the end result would have been the same either way. If anything it sounds like you gave him a more peaceful death than he deserved.”

I laughed at that. “Well it’s nice that you don’t feel the need to hold back on me,” I said dryly. “And thanks. Now, why don’t we go and interrogate those two. I want to make sure we took care of all the possible plots aimed at us before I find a way to contact the council about letting us get out of here early.”

It was hard to put down the grief. Not just for Roland as a person, but for the part of myself I felt I’d lost. Genesis Burst was a healing ability. I’d made it to help people. Using it like this made me sick.

Shaking that off, I focused on the here and now. Walking over to where Devon was slumped, I nudged him with my foot. “You still alive?”

His eye cracked open. “No, I’m dead. Leave me. Save yourselves.”

“Works for me,” I shrugged, turning to leave. He squawked with outrage and I couldn’t help but smile. Turning back, I grinned at him, offering my hand to help him up. He staggered a bit, clearly still torn up from whatever had happened during his fight. “So…do you know how we can leave early?”

Because this whole room was designed not to be accessible, and I really didn’t want to wait in here for days. I turned and strode over to where Franklin and Callister. Callie had locked them up using some kind of forged flame manacles. I hadn’t seen the technique before but it was fascinating to look at. It seemed like my wife hadn’t been resting on her laurels while I’d been working on my Domain and preparing for the trial. The way the flames condensed the space around them to completely eliminate leverage was genius, and I made a mental note to try to use the configuration in some fashion somewhere down the line.

A quick effort unfolded my Domain around us, and with a second effort space warped as Dantalion appeared beside me. Within my Domain, things like space were more like suggestions. Of course, this was functionally useless for travel because the Domain itself was condensed into a much small area that it would normally take up, so even I teleported from one end to the other, once I stepped out I would have only travelled about a step.

Dantalion bowed deep, his sharp eyes turning up in happiness that I’d chosen to call him out. I pointed to the two bound men. “They have information I want. I trust you can GET that information?”

“Of course, my lord,” he beamed. “I would be honored.”

He turned to look at Callister, the closest and most obviously distressed of the two. Callie snapped her fingers and the band of expanding blue fire keeping his mouth wedged open dissolved. His eyes flared. “You can’t do this!” he hissed. “We’re CITIZENS of the WCP! We have rights!”

“Yes, but unfortunately for you, you have substantially more wrongs,” I said coldly. “Of course, I’m not unreasonable. I want to know more about your plans. Your compatriots, anything you can tell me. I assume you have some kind of support structure here. You give me all of those people and I’ll let you go. If not…” my face was stone. “I’ve done plenty of things today I’m not proud of. I don’t mind adding a few entries to the list.”

He spat at me. “I’ll never talk. Your family is a cancer. I’m just sad I won’t get to see you get excised like you deserve.”

I sighed. “See, I was hoping you weren’t going to say that. This whole situation makes me deeply uncomfortable. It just feels so familiar. It’s just like my dad questioning a couple of A-rankers back on the Heirworld. I try my best not to be like my dad. We’ve moved past our issues, but he’s hardly a role model. Still, it seems like today I don’t have any other choice.”

His gaze was wary. “What are you going to do? You going to torture me?”

“Of course not,” I assured him. “Torture doesn’t work. You’ll just tell me whatever you think I want to hear to make me stop. No. I’m not planning to inflict and senseless pain.” I paused. “You’ll be IN copious amounts of agony, to be clear. But it won’t be senseless. This, in case you were wondering, is Dantalion.

“Dantalion is a demon of information. He can deduce facts by scanning and reconstructing data from a variety of sources.” I gestured at Callister himself. “Sources like you. People, though you may not know this, are made of information. The brain remembers, muscle remembers, even DNA is made from code. We’re all big collections of data. Now, scanning and reconstructing yours would be prohibitively time consuming. But if we’re looking for something specific, we can be a bit more…forceful.”

Much like Dantalion had been able to siphon information directly from the books in order to prepare to redistribute it, he could use that same function to extract it from other sources. Sources like people.

I flicked my fingers, and my staff appeared, infusing B-ranked power into Dantalion, elevating him to Tier 8. He approached the bound man. “Now as I said, this will be excruciatingly painful.” I said coldly. “So if you’d like to skip it and just tell me what I want to know, I think we’d both be much happier.”

I wasn’t bluffing, of course. I couldn’t be. If I failed to obtain all the relevant information, I would be putting my people in danger. I needed to know about all the followups they were aware of. If I’d been thinking clearly I might have interrogated Roland, but that wasn’t an option now.

Honestly, I wasn’t even too broken up about this. A little pain wasn’t going to cause too much issue. I’d been through worse more times than I could count.

More than that though, I felt almost COMPELLED to do it. After what I’d done to Roland, not extracting every last bit of information was unacceptable. It would be like I was failing to live up to his sacrifice. Maybe a warped way of seeing things, but I was sure as hell not going to let something like become pointless.

He locked his teeth together, glaring at me. I nodded to Dantalion. “Do it.”

He knelt down, hands snapping to the other man’s face and levering open his jaw. He stared into the eyes of ‘the paper king’ and opened his own mouth. Then, he inhaled. Callister locked up, all his muscles going taught, and I saw purple symbols begin to flash across his eyes.  His face turned red, his body shook, and he let out an animal wail that chilled me to my bones.

With a primal roar, he arched his back, and a small torrent of purple information tore itself from between his lips. Dantalion inhaled it all, his own eyes flashing with the same purple symbols. After a few minutes of this, he dropped the other man, and Callister lay shaking on the ground.

I raised an eyebrow at Dan, who closed his eyes. I waited as he processed, and after a few minutes, he opened them again. “I’ve got a list,” he said slowly.

“Write it down,” I told him in a clinical monotone. I turned to Franklin, who was lying on the ground, staring at his friend in horror. Callie snapped her fingers, and the gag vanished from his mouth. “Are we going to have to do the same thing to you?” I asked gently.

“No,” he rasped. “I just…help him. I you help him I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Just don’t leave him that way.”

I raised an eyebrow. Callister was fine, and would recover after he shook off the pain, but if that was his price, I was more than happy to skip the agony. I snapped my fingers and a familiar green haired figure appeared. I nodded to the shaking man. “We need a patch up job. Get him on his feet again?”

Despite it being uncomfortable and invasive, information extraction of the type Dan had just done wasn’t soul damage. Zagan could fix it pretty easily with a little elbow grease.

Zagan knelt, putting a hand on the side of Callister’s face, and he poured fire into the other man. As he did, the paper king calmed, his shaking receding as his face cleared. Franklin, who had been watching him shudder, slumped in relief. I sighed. “I can’t tell what’ll happen to you,” I admitted. “But Devon pleaded on your behalf. So if it’s up to me, I’ll make sure you end up together, hopefully safe. You telling us what we need to know would be a BIG help making that happen.”

He swallowed, then nodded. “Of course. I don’t have too many names. And he had most of them.” I tensed, and he hurried to assure me. “Not all! I know a few. Members of the local resistance. Most of them are too small time to be noticed, some have Void instruments that can suppress signs of dishonesty or cloak them from sensory powers.”

I sat, and waited. After he arranged his thoughts, he started listing people. Some I didn’t know. Most even. But a few I recognized the names of. I frowned as he listed one of the tea ceremony participants, then one of the players from Kingdom Siege. At first I thought it was a weird coincidence, but he assured me we’d been under surveillance. It made sense, given Roland’s plan.

Finally, he finished talking, then lay back, staring up at the sky. I sat down next to him. “So, do you regret it?” I asked curiously. “Knowing what happened?”

He smiled at Callister, eyes soft. “Not a second of it. Sure, I was angry, and stupid, and some of it was ill advised. But I don’t regret where it led me.” He snorted. “That probably sounds ridiculous to you.” His voice was sad, but firm, and I was sure he thought he was going to die.

I looked over my shoulder, at the way the light sparked off my wife’s glowing blue hair. At those bottomless eyes, and snorted, shaking my head. “No,” I told him bluntly. “No, that part I totally get.” Then we lapsed into silence, and just for a moment, I almost forgot where I was and why. Almost.