Wish upon the Stars chapter 924

I stared down at the papers, having finished using my Dantalion abilities to mine information from them a while ago, and all I could think was. “There are SO many spies here,” I blinked in horror at the list. “Like, holy shit. No one should ever trust anyone ever again. They’re EVERYWHERE. And they’ve been doing this for years. Like…half of the people on these lists are in positions of power now. And like…actively reporting back. This is a fucking sleeper cell RING.”

Callie grimaced as she leaned over to study the list. “Yeah…that’s not optimal.”

“The only upside is it's been, what? Like twenty years since they infiltrated this place? So while there’s been some infiltration, it’s mostly localized. None of them have made it up to the B-rank zone.” Which I’d assumed. Hell, most of the people in question weren’t even C-rank. That was why the two idiots we’d restrained weren’t past D. The branch of Void lackeys running around in the C-rank zone hadn’t made nearly as much progress infiltrating as the ones in the lower zone.

I was glad that The High Society was taking care of that shit, because the thought of trying to dig up the much more deeply rooted turncoats back in the outer ring sounded like an exercise in pure frustration.

Frankie and Dominic were nearby, restrained and watching. At first, they’d been furious. Dominic still was. But Frankie had slowly slipped from his fury into fear. The metal mouthed man was a coward, which wasn’t surprising. The restraints I used had prevented them speaking, a cylinder of rock holding their mouths open like a bit in a way that was almost definitely uncomfortable, but with so much information and such a lack of context, I needed answers, so it was time to do some questioning.

I let Frankie’s mouth close, removing the bit keeping him silent. “So. You realize your options here are limited.” My tone was not kind. “Here’s my offer. Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll kill you.”

“I don’t want to die,” he said shakily. “I won’t tell you nothin’ if you don’t let me go.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” I told him in a flat voice. “You DO want to die. In fact, you want it more than anything. The Void aren’t kind to those who fail them. You’re weak, pathetic, and easily controlled. You’ve clearly kept your mind through all this, unpleasant as it is, but if you survive the purge we’re going to conduct on the Void tainted, you won’t be useful anymore. I’ve SEEN what the Void does to weak and expendable people. Death is a much better offer.”

I wasn’t going to let Franklin live. Not because of what he’d done to me, but because of what I knew he’d done to others. Because he tormented innocent people and enjoyed it. I wouldn’t leave him walking around to hurt anyone else when he had the chance. I glanced at Callie, and saw nothing but support in my wife’s unnatural blue eyes. 

Franklin stared at me. I saw him go through several emotions, his face as plain as day to read. Anger. Hate. Fear. Desperation. And finally…acceptance. Not dignified acceptance, more like he just…broke. But he did accept it, his shoulders slumping as the light died in his eyes. “What do you want to know?” He asked woodenly.

Dominic’s eyes flared in outrage, and he snarled and spat, but the bit keeping his jaws open prevented him speaking, so all he could do was let out muffled grunts and shouts of fury. I ignored him. I was planning to kill him too, but I doubted he’d be useful for the favor. Some people were so ungrateful.

“I don’t know what I don’t know,” I told Franklin with a shrug. “Just start talking. I’m sure I didn’t get it all from the paperwork, you’d have to be idiots to write everything down. More than that, YOU’DE have to be an idiot not to have kept some form of insurance. You don’t strike me as the type to go on faith. Dominic here is a true believer, I think, but you’re just a bully who thinks the Void gives him the right to do whatever he wants.” He opened his mouth to protest, and I raised an eyebrow at him. “To clarify, I can smell lies. So don’t bother with protesting. Or trying to bullshit me.”

His mouth snapped shut, then his shoulders slumped. “I keep a list,” he admitted. “The papers are the ones who report in, but some of them just fall off the grid. They’re not all dead. Some just sort of…move on. I get in touch, and they do me favors to ignore them.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. “You built a secondary network? That’s more impressive than I’d have pegged you for. Also, how did they escape? The Void doesn’t seem that easy to shake off.”

“It’s not,” Callie confirmed. “But twenty years isn’t that long, in the grand scheme of things. You can resist. We’ve seen that. Hell, sometimes even long term. It doesn’t always manifest the same way. The Void affects everyone, but it affects them differently. Otherwise there would be no need to cultivate their forces like they do. They’d just flood the whole universe with Void taint and have everyone kill each other. The efficiency varies.”

Well, that was good to know at least. I was vague on the rules for how the Void worked, honestly, I had so little information and all of it was circumstantial. The Void forces seemed so scattered and varied that it was hard to find common elements. That was probably a consequence of them being so large and diverse, and all of that focused here into a relatively small space for this would be invasion. Or whatever the opposite of an invasion was. An exvasion? 

“Keep going,” I told Franklin. “You were telling us about your secret network.”

He couched, looking a bit sheepish. “I wouldn’t go that far. I have a few people who owe me, and I collect. Nothing as cohesive as a network. You’re right though, not all the information you need is in the paperwork. We keep records of our own, but we’re just a small branch in this zone.”

“You all seem to compartmentalize quite a bit,” I said mildly. “What’s the deal with that? Seems a bit more intentional than I’d expect from Void Children.”

He laughed bitterly. “Some of them. The Void Children are all different. Some are focused and driven, some don’t give a damn about us mortals. Most of our interactions is with the Vessels though. Vessels act as the voice of their Void Child in the world. Vessels of lower rank Void Children aren’ much, but the higher rank Vessels are OLD and scary. They all do things differently, so there’s not a lot of…watcha call it? Consistency.”

I grimaced. We’d heard of Vessels. Because of where we were when that happened and how weak the replacements had seemed, I’d assumed that Vessels were mid level threats. But thinking about it, the knowledge that there were different levels of Vessel for different levels of Void Child made a lot of sense. 

It was ALSO very ominous for multiple reasons. With the most recent task out of the way, I had officially overstayed my welcome here. I needed to continue on and get to the B-rank zone to meet up with Crell and the others, then on to where my parents were waiting.

We grilled him for a while longer. Whatever information pipeline Callie had to the Void wasn’t perfect. She knew a lot, but it was general knowledge. The specifics of intervessel relationships and Void politics were beyond her reach, and we managed to get a few leads. We also learned some fairly disturbing facts.

Becoming a Vessel provided a LARGE boost to power, and could be done at any time. It was also less outwardly corrosive. Vessels were agents that needed to function in the real world, so they weren’t mentally dissolved the way some lesser minions were. All of this meant that literally ANYONE could be a Vessel, because no one on this planet wasn’t a fan of power, and as we’d seen at the winery, people were willing to do stupid things when they felt trapped.

Once we learned everything we could, I took a deep breath and ended the lives of Franklin and Dominic. Killing cold like that still bothered me, in ways mid battle butchery never would, but aside from the fact that they deserved it, I also wasn’t lying about their probable eventual fate if we let them live.

Callie stepped up next to me, putting a hand on my shoulder. “I know it’s not your favorite part of the job,” she told me softly. “But if it helps, the fact that you still have trouble with things like that makes me so proud. Recursion can eat away at who we are so easily, but you’re still you where it matters. Still the man I married. That’s why I want you to win this so badly. Because I truly think you’re going to do amazing things as Wishmaster.”

I pulled her against me, burying my face in her hair and just inhaling as I put my thoughts in order. This whole place was a lot. Being in Dantalion for so long inside of what was essentially a torture and brainwashing camp. I’d learned so many things that I wished I’d never known. Not just useful things, but horrible, pointless cruelties that I’d have rather never been aware of.

Once they were dead, we moved on to checking on all the prisoners. Callie had freed them when she was getting the paperwork, but they were all too many different shades of broken to go anywhere on their own. Even after she used the heretic flame to cleanse them of the Void taint, the things they’d been through here were unspeakable. I made a call, and Jessie showed up along with the cleanup crew, ready to help as many of them as possible.

With that done and all our information passed on to Trellan, I moved on to meet back up with Felicity and Ellisara, as well as the rest of their C-rankers. They’d met up with a few more of our people, C-rankers from the dungeon like Veldran as well as a few from the Church my mom had dispatched to help us. Once we had that all done, we headed out, specifically, for the capital city on this spoke in the C-rank zone.

I was in such a hurry I didn’t even have time to wait for my elixirs. I just told Trellan to have them gathered in the capital to meet us. We needed those elixirs pretty badly, given they were a substantial step towards me hitting C-rank and Callie being able to integrate her Path and racial trait properly, but we didn’t have any time to lose. Especially given we were likely to hit more tasks on the way as we passed through new territories. A quick wish with one of Nat’s scrolls to let all of our C-rankers know where to meet us and we left immediately, setting off back into the forests before the sun had even set for the day.

There was some debate about camping in the wilderness, but it was decided that we had no real need to worry about that kind of thing, especially with Agares handy to help me construct fortifications.

As we headed deeper into the C-rank zone, I couldn’t help but worry. My stomach had this gnawing pit in it. We’d gotten through this little incident too cleanly, too simply. I didn’t trust when things went my way like this. There would be consequences for this quick stop later, and I dreaded to find out what they might be. Until I did though, I could only prepare as best I knew how. That was all I could ever do. Take every day one step at a time.