[The Garden] Praeceptor of the Reliquiae

[Nox]

It was much warmer than outside. Though there was still a chill in the air, though not one of temperature. Nox didn't set next to Eliot or Helena. Eliot had taken the seat opposite the Ascendancy at the other 'head' of the table, Nox chose a more neutral location. Jay and the other dominions stood behind him as the guards that they were. Nox was mediator, just a middle man, he honestly had no idea why he was here other than for the introduction. Eliot had mentioned he was useful more times than he could count and all the while he insulted him to his face. Not that being American was an insult, but the Atharim looked down on their American breathern with disdain. And yet he wanted Nox for a mouth peice -- at least the visibility of what his new Atharim could do.

Nox didn't sit properly in the chair, he leaned back casually, but he wasn't slouched. Just not board like straight like Eliot. He wasn't here to show the Ascendncay anything more than what the man already knew. He knew exactly who Nox was. Though he could feel the eyes of at least one Dominion on him. Allan was always watching him. If Nox didn't know better he'd think the man had a crush on hiom. But it wasn't that simple, he didn't like him for some unknown reason. But it wasn't worth the effort to figure it out.

[Ascendancy]

As Helena spoke, Nikolai fell into silence. Not the brooding kind, nor the silence of a man plotting violent reprisal, but the precise, attentive stillness of a hunter waiting to see what else might stir in the bushes. His fingers remained steepled beneath his chin, unmoving. His eyes, however, tracked her.

There was something there. Something that did not fit. She was not Atharim. He believed her. Or rather, he believed that she believed that. Her answers had the structure of a woman who had already measured the world in his term. They were calculating, unsentimental, and quietly ruthless. Her words had weight, but it was also the manner of her delivery that caught him and not just the content.

He watched her posture and breathing. The subtle shift in attention when she gestured to Nox, then turned her gaze to the Dominion at his left flank. That had not gone unnoticed.

She’s probing the structure, he thought, curiously. Most people either flattered him or feared him, but Helena seemed quietly indifferent. It made her intriguing.

Her point about the Atharim was correct: they were fractured and desperate, devouring their own from within. And still clinging to the past like a drunkard to an empty bottle. His gaze slid to Eliot next. And there… the irritation returned.

Cowboys.

Nikolai didn’t smile, though the thought of Eliot casually throwing the word around made the corner of his mouth twitch inwardly. I was an Atharim, you overconfident child, he thought bitterly, and Nikolai was far cry from the rodeo-and-spitfires archetype Eliot seemed to imagine. His memories of that period of life were twisted and bitter, but he was still insulted to be counted among their number so irreverently. He never thought the day would come when he preferred the company of Nox to another Atharim. By comparison, Nox was a prince among pig-farmers. 

Of course they would want to start in Moscow. That was always the pattern. These people, these visionaries, always started with dreams but they could never scale them. They had no concept of what it meant to bring the world to heel. And the irony? They had come to him the very man they feared as a tyrant because he understood scale better than anyone.

Still, he allowed them this illusion of progress. Let them plant the seeds. And when their garden burned to the ground? He would inherit the soil and grow his own.

I will not have to lift a finger against the Atharim. They would collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. And when they did… someone loyal would be needed to rebuild what remains.

He leaned back in his chair now, posture deceptively casual, though the Dominions behind him shifted subtly at the change.

“And who exactly,” he said at last, his voice soft and cool as glass, “will sit on this tribunal of ours?”

It was a simple question, but buried within it was a thousand others: Who do you trust with power? Who do you intend to judge the world’s gods? And most importantly: how easily could they be bent to his will when the experiment unravelled?

[Helena]

The minutiae of the plans were Eliot’s. She did not agree with everything, but she did not oppose what she might personally consider sentimentality. Others would see it as goodness; a world worth fighting for. Nox Durante certainly did, and it was men like him who mattered. Belief and loyalty were not things Helena could engender in others herself, a clinical fact she well understood about her own shortcomings. No hearts inflamed when she spoke. No one rallied to causes she nudged, unless she allowed other players to move the pieces for her.

But by his unsmiling, intense gaze, and scathing questioning, the Ascendancy himself perhaps saw unrooted idealism. She was not surprised. Had there been more natural investment in reform, he would have already acted beyond the speech which forced the Atharim into the public consciousness. He didn’t deliver a fatal blow, just one that diminished their greatest strength and ensured they would eventually gut themselves. And perhaps they would have done, if not for Helena.

Truthfully, she did not care about the legitimacy Eliot deemed necessary for his vision. Support made change happen faster, but it would not behoove them to become an overt arm of governance. There was a marked difference between men and women expected to fight alongside an enemy for a common good, and working for him. Eliot ought to step lightly, and she did glance at him then, the first time she had acknowledged his existence since they’d passed the gates. The Ascendancy was a fast moving current; one that could speed them, but also one that could drown them entire. She would speak to Eliot later of what she saw when she looked at him – the way she knew the world spiralled and bent around him. But for now, there was only the look.

Democracy was an illusion, of course. The Ascendancy must feel he maintained control. The Atharim must feel they had a true hand in their own reshaping. The populace must believe they had true protection from the supernatural beings walking freely amongst them. Eliot must balance it all on his shoulders, pulling the strings with a light touch if he truly wanted to see his dreams come to full fruition.