The tome sat open on the Archive's round table for three straight days, and by the end of the third day Remus had learned exactly one useful thing from it: that knowing how a thing was supposed to be built and being able to build it were two entirely different problems, separated by a gap the size of a kingdom.
"The forging comes first," he said, mostly to himself, tracing a line of cramped Dwarven script with the blunt end of his charcoal rather than his finger, an old habit from reading blueprints back on Earth, never touch the original with bare skin if a tool would do. "Then the incantation gets worked into the steel while it's still taking shape, not bolted on afterward like a nameplate riveted to a finished hull. That part I understand completely. I could forge the blade blindfolded at this point."
"And the incantation itself?" Pompey asked, not looking up from his own worktable, where the aetherspore microscope sat disassembled into eleven precise, orderly piles, the old dwarf picking each piece up in turn and turning it slowly under the tower's high window like a man trying to memorize a face he suspected he'd never see again.
"That's the part the book assumes I already know," Remus said. "It lists forty-some enchantments by name, the way a supplier's catalog lists parts, and never once explains what any of them actually do or how you'd go about learning one. It's like handing an apprentice a drivetrain diagram and telling him the engine's the easy part."
Leo, curled into the window seat with his own book propped against his knees, the very picture of a man enjoying his new title far too much to pretend otherwise, glanced up at that. "The Archive's collection on active enchantments is restricted to licensed Lorekeepers," he said, and there was still something faintly disbelieving in the way he said the word Lorekeeper about himself, three days in and the title hadn't stopped feeling borrowed. "I could petition for access. It would take weeks. Maybe longer, given how thin the actual catalogue is once you get past the theoretical papers."
"I don't have weeks," Remus said. "Every day I don't have a working sword, somebody else in this kingdom is one step closer to figuring out how to make one first, and I'd rather be the reason magic swords exist in this century than the man who watched somebody else get there."
"There is another way," Pompey said, finally setting down the microscope's lens housing and turning to face them both properly, the old dwarf's red cap slightly askew from three days of not caring how he looked to anyone. "The King's collection. Every enchanted blade of note taken off a battlefield in the last two hundred years sits in a vault beneath the Royal Palace, catalogued, studied, and never once put back to use, because King Belsarius the third has exactly as much interest in his own armory as he has in reading a tax ledger. If you could examine those blades directly with your Identify skill, you wouldn't need my book's catalogue at all. You'd be reading the enchantments straight off the source."
"You said this before," Remus said. "I said I'd need to do something for the King first to earn that access."
"You already have," Pompey said, and something in the set of his jaw suggested he'd been waiting three days to say it. "Word of Genesis has been outrunning you for two weeks now, and it hasn't slowed down on the way. Every tavern between here and the Southlands border is telling some version of the story where you personally faced down a million Orcs with nothing but a bow and a prayer. I've heard three separate variations myself, none of them accurate, all of them flattering."
"It was a hundred thousand," Remus said. "And I had twenty-eight farmers with crossbows and a fortress I built out of somebody else's ruin. That's not the same story at all."
"It doesn't need to be the same story," Pompey said. "It only needs to be a story people want to keep telling. That, my boy, is the entire mechanism by which anyone in this kingdom ever holds power at all, and you'd do well to understand it now rather than learning it the hard way in ten years."
Leo set his book down properly for the first time since Remus had started talking. "He's not wrong," he said, quiet, some of the old anxious hedge gone out of his voice in a way Remus had started to notice happened whenever Leo actually believed what he was about to say instead of merely hoping it. "If I'd only heard the stories and never met you, Master Remus, I'd have pictured someone considerably larger. A general. A tactician with grey in his beard already. The gap between the man and the story is exactly the kind of gap you could stand inside of, if you were willing to."
Remus turned the charcoal stub over once between his fingers, feeling how thin it had worn since Genesis, a fraction of the length it had been the day he'd first sketched a bed frame back in his own room, and thought about the word willing. He'd spent an entire first life being precisely, honestly, unglamorously exactly as competent as his résumé claimed and no more, and it had gotten him a good job, a decent apartment, and a bullet in the back of the skull from a woman who'd never once had to inflate anything about herself to get close enough to put it there. He wasn't sure yet whether leaning into a story he hadn't earned made him smarter than that or simply made him a different flavor of the same mistake.
"Send your letters," he said finally. "Both of them. To the King and to General Tacitus. I'll take whatever door that opens."
The messenger who came three days later didn't bother knocking. He simply appeared at the base of the Archive's tower with the Imperial Army's seal pinned to his collar, out of breath from having climbed the stairs at a pace that suggested he'd been told, in no uncertain terms, not to dawdle on the way up.
"Master Remus Draymoor," he said, and got it slightly wrong, the way half the kingdom did by now, saying it Drayve-moor instead of the way Remus's own father said it, "you are summoned to appear before General Tacitus in Newtown. I'm to escort you personally."
Remus tucked the charcoal stub back behind his ear, the small, ordinary motion that had become as automatic to him now as breathing, and looked at Leo and Andrea both a long moment before he answered.
"Let's go find out what a Champion of the People actually costs," he said.
The road to Newtown ran west along the river for the better part of a day, and Remus understood the city's name properly for the first time only once he'd actually crossed into it. Where Oldtown wore its age openly, medieval walls gone soft and rounded at the corners from centuries of weather, cobblestones worn into a shallow trough down the center of every street from generations of the same carts, Newtown looked like something that had been finished, not built, the way a fresh coin looks different from one that's spent forty years passing hand to hand. Renaissance stonework rose pale and precise along both banks of the Alto, unweathered, unworn, every arch and column cut to a symmetry that felt less like architecture and more like a boast, and the only way across was a single bridge crossing a moat that existed, Remus was fairly sure, purely to make the crossing feel like an occasion rather than a commute.
He noticed the streets on the other side were cleaner in a way that had nothing to do with anyone sweeping them, wider, quieter, hushed in the particular way of a place built to be admired from a careful distance rather than lived in up close. He noticed, too, a woman reading alone on a bench beside the stream that fed the moat, bronze-skinned, dark hair loose over one shoulder, and when she glanced up and caught him looking, the fierce, startled expression that crossed her face for just a fraction of a second stopped his own heart cold in a way he didn't examine too closely, some old animal instinct from a life that had already once been ended by a woman he'd looked at exactly this way. He made himself keep walking. He'd learned that lesson once already, at considerable personal cost.
General Tacitus's office sat at the end of a winding path behind a featureless block building marked only by a strange crest above its door, two birds carved facing each other behind a sword and a shield, worn soft at the edges by generations of hands that had touched it on the way in. Tacitus himself was already standing when the messenger let Remus through, a big man with big hands and a gravelly voice going soft at the edges the way a man's voice does when he's spent decades shouting over the noise of a parade ground and never quite recovered his indoor register, his hair greying fast at the temples, a tiredness sitting behind his eyes that no amount of straightened posture could fully hide.
"I expected you'd be taller," he said, by way of greeting, and there was something almost apologetic in the way he said it, a big man's habit of measuring other men against himself without meaning anything cruel by the comparison. "How does someone your size take down a hundred thousand Orcs alone?"
"I didn't take down anything alone," Remus said. "I built a fortress and put twenty-eight terrified farmers behind a wall with crossbows. The story you've heard is doing a great deal of unearned work for me, and I'd like to talk to you honestly instead, if that's an option."
Something in Tacitus's face shifted at that, a small, genuine recalibration, the look of a man recognizing a rarer thing than he'd expected to find in this office. "Sit," he said, and pulled two chairs closer to the cold hearth himself rather than calling for a servant to do it. "Before we discuss your armory access, there are some things I'd like you to understand about the kingdom you're currently the most talked-about man in."
"I'm listening."
"Do you know what the people of the Midlands have started calling you?" Tacitus asked.
"Pompey mentioned something. 'Bane of the Orcs,' I believe."
"They've made you their champion," Tacitus said, "because they haven't had one in longer than most of them have been alive. This kingdom hasn't fielded a well-trained army in a generation. Every rank above sergeant is stuffed with someone's brother, cousin, or nephew, purchased rather than earned, and half the men who could actually fight have been quietly retired to make room for men whose only qualification is a well-connected mother."
"You're one of those ranks yourself, aren't you," Remus said, not unkindly, more curious than accusing.
"I am precisely one of those ranks," Tacitus agreed, and something bitter and old moved behind his eyes when he said it. "King Belsarius the second put me in this office thirty years ago because my father held it before me, and I have let my sword rust in its scabbard ever since, serving a crown I stopped believing in a very long time before I stopped serving it. When your Orc army marched, the King wouldn't authorize a single soldier to ride east and help you. Not one. He'd rather lose an entire duchy's worth of subjects than admit the treasury he's been hoarding might need spending on something other than his own palace guard."
"And now?"
"Now I have watched a boy half my age with no title, no army, and no gold hold a fortress against a hundred thousand men because he cared enough to try in the first place," Tacitus said, and leaned forward, voice dropping low enough that Remus understood, without being told, that whatever came next wasn't meant for anyone else's ears. "What I'm about to say is treason, and I'll say it exactly once. This kingdom needs a different bloodline on that throne. One that builds instead of hoards. I'm not asking you to agree with me tonight. I'm asking you to remember I said it, for whenever the day comes that remembering it matters."
Remus turned the charcoal stub over once between his fingers, feeling the particular, specific weight of a man handing him something far more dangerous than a sword, and said nothing for a long moment, because some things, he'd learned across two lives now, cost you more to answer quickly than they ever saved you in time.
"I'll remember it," he said finally. "For now, I have three days to learn how to make a magic sword, and a King who's agreed, apparently, to let me try."
Tacitus studied him a moment longer, then nodded once, some tension going out of his shoulders that Remus suspected had been sitting there for longer than the last three days alone. "Then let's not waste any of them," he said. "I'll have a man take you to the armory in the morning. Sleep well tonight. You'll want the rest."
---