The potential offer was a sickening, frightening precipice that was the cliffhanger of the offer. Secret, forbidden training. Out of the man who had just medically informed him that he was a walking, talking reality bomb that had to be disarmed. It was a proposal of strength, but what price? It was a survival proposal, but what kind of life could it be to be a gun in the shadows?
"Why?" Leo questioned, the mistrust shining the more than ever, a last effort to resist the temptation of this dark chance. "Why would you risk this? Why go against the Academy? It is against the Headmaster himself?
The eyes of Riven, so cold and detached as they were, now showed something else- something old and bitter and very personal. Since the ideal order of the Academy is a deception plastered over a base of corruption and conspiracies. The fact that the Headmaster is on a throne of things he would murder to defend his truths that are on his hands and in his soul. And because you…" He drew a little nearer, and his last words were a promise of a great discovery and shook Leo to his very foundations,...are not the first to take this burden upon themselves. You carry the Warden's debt. Still, you are not its original debtor. The issue is not whether the debt will be paid or not. The thing is, are you the one who will pay it in the last money, or are you the one who will break the chain?
The awakening was some frosty, black dawn, in the depths of the Leo soul. The Warden was not his, it was his burden, his curse with a long and bloody history. It was hereditary debt and Riven was conversant with the ledger. He now knew and was sure in a way that made his blood turn cold, that not every power was destined to be cured. There was power which was too great, too dangerous, too alien to be cured. It could only be held, kept, and exercised, at whatever price to the one who exercised it.
He glanced back at Riven, at his fiery, inscrutable face, a mask concealing as much, and as unattractive, as the darkness of the mirror, to the Oculus of Unbeing. He was gazing upon the battling presence and nothingness of the truth of his soul. The pristine, systematized light of the Academy, which had a neutralizing effect on him. The consuming, anarchic emptying of the Warden, that vowed strength but at the cost of his humanity.
This was a dilemma of utter death, two types of death.
He could refuse. He could choose loyalty. He might get out of this room and tell the Council the truth, and admit his own and undergo the slow, cold process of neutralization. That would be the prudent thing to do. The selfless thing to do. It would save the Academy, the realms, and all people, out of the monster he accommodated. It would be self-murder, but a patriotic one.
Or, he may take up on the offer of Riven. He could choose survival. He might go over into the darkness, and be an ally of a man whose motives were unknown and whose ways were doubtless prohibited. He might know how to make the uncontrollable to be controllable, how to make the un-wieldy to be wieldy. It was a trail of betrayal, of committing to the same aberration that Academy was created to eradicate. It was the road to power, but at the practically inevitable price of his soul. It was the selfish choice. The monstrous choice.
his mind went to Jax, crushed and unfinished on the floor. He had a cold, approving voice, he thought, and the voice of the Warden. Infinite and hungry, he imagined the nothingness of the mirror. He imagined his father, making bridges in the world that had lost its reality.
Fidelity was a silent and dignified death. Life was characterized by loud, dangerous, and possible damnation to survive.
He looked straight at Riven, and his voice was surprisingly steady, and had no tremor in it, as his hands did. It was the voice of a person who is picking the abyss.
"When do we begin?"