Monarch Gweren watched the drama unfold.
He let Cheal wander the maze of vaults after Cheal's main secret's one effect was revealed.
"The boy acts like one of those. So I should assume he is one."
Gweren rested in his throne waiting for the ones who have come for answers. The throne room atop the keep ever so silent since last night's general's briefing.
The stones held their breath while the light that entered the room felt to change.
From daylight to starlight.
The difference couldn't be told, only sensed. What truly was the difference between where the light originated from? Maybe there was one.
An answer the Monarch Gweren could provide. But he knew that won't be the question. He had expected multitude of questions and accusations all within their right to ask the Monarch of Riga.
He had promised to protect them, and he failed.
For the first time.
'Will this be the first domino?' He wondered of the thrones of the elements.
"Hmm, Ashtrim is strong. Even if it falls, it will be reborn." Nodding to his conjecture of the revelations he knew.
His vision went back down to where when Cheal crossed swords with another guard as he freed one more vault. The when was a past he felt.
Gweren also watched the hole in the inventory that shone in the daylight as if he himself was there. This vision held true to be a present in his insight.
He liked the work made into the wall, "quite the strength behind that semi-circle cut."
The wanderer in a brown overcoat wasn't in his vision, he still was just an ordinary traveller for him.
A knock on the keep's throne room distracted him. He didn't have to look.
"Ah, you are finally here. How about you show me the totems that let you bypass me last night?" he asked Cheal.
The knock was by Cheal. When had he opened the double giant doors was unknown to Gweren, or how did he avoid letting its sound cross into the hall.
Earlier than his expectation, Cheal arrived in a patchwork of armour, each piece handpicked from the knights he met and killed on the way, just to meet Monarch Gweren in a morbid fashion that fitted His Highness.
"At your service His Highness," Cheal bowed to the Monarch. "I am not as belligerent as I may have made myself look out there."
He smiled at the settled man. The man in front did not wear a crown, his armour was nothing more than plain clothes and an unshaved well-kept beard.
Gweren's question went unanswered for Cheal stood at the threshold. His boots waiting for when he will lift them.
Both men had patience, and tested the others.
A silence wanted to hang with them in that room, but it couldn't. The clamour of the war below bellowed high and wide.
It told tales of the truths clashing for next half an hour of stillness in the throne room.
Truths of Cheal, and truths of Monarch Gweren.
While another lie hid under the simplistic guerilla warfare that a boy in a brown overcoat with crystal boots did. Several more bodies with punctured armour and bashed-in heads littered the corridors of the inner castle.
The wanderer moved around sometimes in circles, other times in back and forth motion clearing corridors.
None of his survivors still were kids or nobles he expected in the castle. He asked to his current strangling victim, "where are the children?"
His voice was a whisper in the knight's ears.
The knight in black and red armour, a female, broke through gasps, "there are none….every single one…is in…safer…places." She passed away with open eyes.
He kicked her out the corridor into a room locking it.
Drawing one imaginary circle with three fingers then another next to it on the door he drew a vertical line in between the little space that separated the circles.
Action of earth finding the door as a structure followed and filled the empty spaces around the door. It fixed the door, sealing it maybe for forever.
The wandering boy drew in a large breath, he had drawn similar actions at different places but it wasn't time enough to drink another enhancing mix.
His next target was where he was. The corridor was empty just as he needed.
Every single entrance and exit sealed by him personally.
His mind under asphyxiation wandered, "what is Cheal doin?...Huff, huff, what of willfall? Why no reminding me huh world?!...Huh, huh."
'The torches still burned in the corridors, they haven't been extinguished since the night's raid by Cheal.' He noted that.
Looking back and forth, he checked again for people to come in or break in. None of that happened.
And thus began his preparation of turning the smoke of the corridor into the enhancing mix. He followed the procedures to the dot by using his sling's rope as a rotating whip to adjust which layer received the stirring.
He paced back and forth in sets of sixteen. Covering an entire labyrinth of twelve different corridors, he finished his last step in front of the last only door he hadn't sealed shut.
Opening it he stepped out of the smoky corridors, his nose breathing in that fresh air of blood soaked castle.
The boy turned still whipping his rope in a revolution continuing it through as he closed the gate and performed the action of earth on it while saying.
"Risening."
Monarch Gweren chose to break the stalemate of silence, "Cleaving must have been a breeze for you. Cheal?" His eyes narrowed.
Cheal's lips didn't quiver, rather he smiled ever brightly. "Ah! So he lives! Thank you for confirming that."
He broke out of the threshold of the door. Proceeding in he answered, "While cleaving was a nice bath for me, I have to answer your earlier question as well. The totems? They are a specialty of Cleaving."
He showed a dagger on his belt, while he hefted the longsword in his right hand he slid off from a different knight's skull. "I don't remember was this from a knight or a general? Maybe a captain?"
As though the Monarch Gweren could see the city of Cleaving, he looked in the direction that would be considered a mid-point between the morning's horizon and the evening's horizon.
"Some scholars call that as the Southern Frontier. I did not want to take away the best place to be a pioneer. But it was required to strangle the Kikren."
Cheal puzzled by something that lit up in him, queried, "It still is a wonder how that city has survived. Let alone was the original reason for any sort of farming to be done in Ashtrim. I mean the continent."
A slight flicker on Gweren's forehead told him everything that he had not considered.
"Maybe the one you spied on had thought of how to let Ashtrim get its next source of farming and natural forests." Cheal put in his conjectures he believed could be true.
"Kikren had taken three ascenders effect and the original throne's three effects. It cannot be allowed to be left alive. Not anymore." Gweren straightened his back.
"What's an ascender?" Cheal questioned.
"You can learn it from where you gained that secret I still can't see." Monarch Gweren smiled back widely.
Cheal was the first to attack. He threw a dagger at Gweren.
A fake sky appeared in its path vertically. The dagger tried traveling through it, but kept slowing down and down. Neither the dagger moved forward or down.
"Huh, so that's what it can be used." Cheal cut in, he jumped back some paces.
A meteorite landed right where he was moments ago.
"Do you wish to talk through the fight, boy?" Gweren stepped out of the safety shield of his fake sky.
"Nah, we can dance." Cheal's wickedness showed in his speed. He had taken several paces appearing exactly where Gweren stepped out.
Or was.
A starlight shimmered, or was it daylight ray. Cheal couldn't tell the difference. But Gweren had exchanged his place.
Cheal attempted to drag his dagger out of the fake sky using his sword. The sword felt as if it went through gel that gets thicker more you move.
He reeled the sword back out, if moving in some directions wasn't allowed then in another it has to be. He considered that would be the case.
But was a fight of this caliber the best place to have only one weapon? Cheal didn't agree as such.
Him reeling back the sword gave Gweren the time to look around the room ever more thoroughly. Cheal hadn't yet placed something ingenious, Gweren's thoughts were on how the boy managed to melt away an entire tower and broke the ground as well the fake sky of a vault last night.
'Maybe it was partly due to his secret I still can't gain insight of.' A thought ran through him while one of Cheal's dagger was a hand away from his face.
Gweren once again made his entire body of starlight and travelled to place himself in between another set of daylight rays that could accept him in the room. He couldn't move irrationally, not when dealing with an aberration.