Andrew Rowe - On the Shoulders of Titans

Tristan smiled. “A better test. Let’s see… I always hated my middle name growing up, because I thought it sounded like a girl’s name.”

“Val does sound kind of like a girl’s name, yeah. They should have gone with Valor. But a lot of people know about your middle name.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Like who?”

“I’m not feeding you more information. Nice try.” I folded my arms. “Tell me something about myself.”

“You were always jealous of my height.”

“Too generic. Anyone could guess that. Try again.”

“You were jealous of my swordsmanship, too.”

“So was virtually everyone your age and younger.”

Tristan pointed a finger at me. “Fine. Once, when you were about three, you stepped on an insect and it stopped moving. I explained to you that it was dead, and what that meant. You cried for the next hour. You were inconsolable.” He pulled a hand back to his hip. “From what I’ve seen, you haven’t changed.”

I glanced at him up and down. “You don’t seem to have changed much, either.”

“You’re wrong about that.” He turned his head away. “But if you believe my identity now, I suppose we can discuss more important things. I’m sure you have questions. Shall we start with some of the obvious ones?”

I nodded slowly, taking a breath. After all this time, it really was him.

Tristan, my older brother, was right in front of me.

I should have been happier. I should have been thrilled.

But he wasn’t what I’d expected. He wasn’t dead, or chained to the walls of a dark cell.

He looked…normal. Healthy. Safe.

I…didn’t know how to handle that.

I had so many questions I wanted to ask him. The first one that came to me wasn’t what I’d planned on. It just sort of slipped out.

“…why didn’t you come home?”

Tristan raised a hand to brush some unkempt hair out of his eyes. “That’s…sort of a complicated question.”

“I think I deserve an answer.” I shook my head. “I… Why didn’t you at least tell us you were alive? Mother, Father, and I… Everything changed while you were gone.”

Tristan shook his head slowly, a hint of sadness in his tone as he replied. “That wasn’t my choice. It wasn’t allowed.”

“Not allowed ? By who?”

I found my hands balling into fists.

“Calm down, Corin. The simple answer is ‘Tenjin’, but there’s more to it.” He let out an exasperated breath, his expression somewhere between sadness and frustration. “I wasn’t expecting you to react like this. You seem almost upset to see me.”

I took a breath. “I’m not upset to see you, Tristan. I’m glad you’re alive.” My hands tightened again. “But when you first contacted me, you lied. I asked the Voice of the Tower if they knew anything about you, and you lied .”

Tristan hesitated for a moment, a pang of guilt playing across his features. “I just said that there were a lot of people who came through the tower, and—”

“Don’t play semantics. You deliberately deceived me.”

He nodded. “I did. I wasn’t ready to tell you. There were too many other things that needed to fall into place.”

“And you manipulated me into helping with that.”

Tristan furrowed his brow. “It wasn’t my first choice. But as I’m sure you recall, the first person who found the prison didn’t end well, and I had a limited time window to work with.”

“I…” I let my hands unclench. “You don’t know what it’s been like back at home without you.”

Tristan just shrugged at that. “I heard Mother and Father split up a few years ago.”

“That was just a small part. Father pulled me out of school. He was obsessed with ‘training’ me to be better than you, just so that I wouldn’t die in the spire like you had. It…wasn’t good for me, Tristan.”

Tristan actually laughed. “You think a little training is bad? You haven’t seen half the things I have, Corin. I’m sure that Father just wanted to help you be safe.”

“Safe?” I lifted up shirt of metallic leaves, and my own cloth shirt underneath.

Even with all the healing I’d gone through, and all the regeneration items, the scars from the blade of a dueling cane were clearly visible. “Does this look like he was trying to make me safe ?”

“That’s…” Tristan shook his head. “I’m sorry, Corin. I didn’t know. But I’m sure Father was just trying to discipline you properly. You never were good at following instructions.”

Tristan smiled like it was an inside joke. Something that I should have been laughing at along with him.

I let my shirt sink back down, and I felt something in my heart sink along with it.

Tristan didn’t understand.

But how could he? He hadn’t been there.

He hadn’t seen it.

He hadn’t heard the shouting or felt the blows.

There might have been some “training” involved at first, but in the end, there had only been anger.

I turned my head away. “I can’t talk about this anymore.”

“That’s fine. It wasn’t what I thought you were going to ask about, anyway. I’m sure you have other questions.”

I nodded slowly, taking deep breaths to try to calm myself. “How are you alive?”

“Ah. Now that’s more like it.” Tristan smiled again, seeming pleased that things were going back to the script he’d prepared for. “When we grew up, they told us there were two outcomes to a Judgment. Succeed, and you earn an attunement. Fail, and you die. We always had legends about survivors, of course, but they were few. You latched onto them even before I disappeared. You didn’t want to believe the goddess would kill people just for failing some stupid test.

“The irony is that you were right in a way, but terribly wrong in another. It’s not that the goddess spares the failures, as you’d hoped. It’s that she does considerably worse.”

“Worse?” I felt my heart sink further.

Tristan’s smile faded. “You see, Corin, when I finished my Judgment, I met someone. A man appeared to me, and he told me something that sounded wonderful. That many of those who disappeared in the tower were still alive, serving the will of the goddess.

“He told me that he was one such servant — a Whisper. An envoy of Tenjin himself. And that I had been chosen as one of only a dozen candidates to remain within the spire to train and join his order.

“I knew even then that it sounded too good to be true…but I wanted to believe. And he told me that if I changed my mind, I would only need to stay in the spire for five years. I would be given an attunement — a powerful one, that no ordinary person would be given — and a new identity to use if I chose to leave.

“I asked questions. He told me about the basics of what we would be doing, and it’s much like a hundred scholars have speculated. People prepare rooms in the spire, change the connections. Prepare treasure and traps. It seemed reasonable, and I thought I could make a positive change if I stayed. Make the spires more efficient, less lethal. He assured me that others were already working to do the same. That the goddess wished to test us, not to kill us.”

Tristan shook his head.

“It doesn’t matter what the goddess wanted. She’s not paying any attention. Or, if she is, she doesn’t care.” He sighed. “The visages have been in charge for ages. And their interest isn’t in building humanity into something greater. It certainly isn’t in getting us to the top of the spires. The visages are just like any other petty despots. They have power now, and they’ll do whatever they can to keep it or expand it further.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that our society is built around a series of lies.”