Dreadgod (Cradle Book 11) (62)

The Sage’s willpower slipped his restraint. His cocoon of cloud burst, his mind-constructs screamed and broke, and even space began to warp.

He gathered his thoughts and exercised his authority for restoration, healing the damage he had done in an instant. Frustration should not cost him materials.

Even if it meant he had wasted decades, if not centuries.

All this time, he’d been searching for the flaw that caused his copy to fail. Did he raise its level of existence too fast? Did he feed it too much on the thoughts of others, causing their identities to diverge? Did he feed it too much dream aura too early, and it became self-aware before becoming subordinate to him?

In the end, he couldn’t deny the pattern he was seeing. The idea the Blood Icon resonated with, telling him that it contained truth.

He didn’t fail because he created an imperfect copy.

He failed because he created a perfect one.

The Sage of Red Faith had never subordinated himself to the will of others, which he had thought would create an iron will in his Blood Shadow. Instead, it created a Shadow unwilling to work with him.

Anything he wanted, he took, because he was working for a higher goal and could put it to better use. He had expected his Shadow to understand the nobility of that purpose, but instead he created a copy that took what it wanted without any consideration for his ambitions.

Point by point, the facts became clearer until they were inescapable.

The Sage of Red Faith had failed, not because of insufficient preparation or intellect, but because of who he was.

This was the knowledge he had sought for most of his career, and now he had it. With this, he could develop a training method that would result in the more reliable creation of humanoid Blood Shadows. He could very well have achieved a breakthrough the likes of which even Eithan—or rather, Ozmanthus—Arelius never dreamed. When he perfected this process, he would go down in the history of Cradle.

It felt empty.

He felt Yerin in combat somewhere nearby. She was approaching the limit of Redmoon’s patience, and Red Faith had agreed to support her plan primarily because of how much irritation it would cause his Blood Shadow.

Now, he didn’t care much. About any of it.

He strode out of his laboratory and wandered the halls of their cloud fortress, ignoring the greetings of those he passed. He shoved the doors open when he found Redmoon—the Herald wasn’t in his audience hall this time, but in the control room of the cloud fortress itself.

Redmoon had been speaking with the pilot and a pair of navigators, but he had also sensed Red Faith coming, and so was prepared for him. The Herald wrung pink hands in impatience and spoke as soon as the Sage came in.

“I take it you’ve made a breakthrough in your research.”

Without a word, the Sage of Red Faith tossed him a dream tablet containing his conclusion and the reasoning behind it. It was short.

Redmoon witnessed the thoughts in moments and scanned the rest of the memories rather than experiencing them completely.

“I see,” the Herald said. “So the flaw was in you all along, as I proposed from the beginning.”

“The flaw is in us both, but I believe it can be avoided in others. We will develop psychological and interpersonal training to be used as part of the humanoid Shadow cultivation method.”

Redmoon tilted his head. “The flaw was in me as well, inherited from you, but I have overcome it. You cannot do so because you fail to see yourself accurately. I can indeed subordinate myself in the spirit of cooperation. I intend to serve the Bleeding Phoenix now that its will has been woken from its long sleep.”

The other members of Redmoon Hall scurried away, as they always did before a conflict between the two leaders of their sect.

The Blood Sage examined the icy fury inside of him and found it quite reasonable. “Idiot. How could you come to that conclusion with the information I provided you? We should have cooperated because our goals were mutual.”

“What do you imagine the Bleeding Phoenix’s goals are?” the Herald countered. “They are the same as any other biological being: to survive, feed, and replicate itself. Now that it is conscious, it sees us as its children, and we can accomplish our goals with its backing.”

“We can accomplish any of our goals with its corpse,” the Blood Sage spat. “It is a bird, do you understand? It is a fat mutant swollen with power; it is no god, and we have no reason to dread it.”

His boiling frustration had bubbled up and finally burst, but he knew he had made a mistake when he saw the faint hint of a smile flicker across Redmoon’s mask of a face.

Flawed or not, the Sage of Red Faith was no idiot…though he felt like one at the moment.

He saw what Redmoon had done, how the Herald had taken a false position to maneuver the Sage into a corner, but it was too late. Red Faith had been too slow to realize, too caught up in his own failure.

He didn’t need to extend his spiritual perception to know that Redmoon had activated a script on the control panel behind him, broadcasting their conversation to the rest of Redmoon Hall.

Red Faith had been too used to the status quo. His Blood Shadow had never moved against him, all this time, because the Herald needed a Sage. Only the two of them together could resist the experts of the Monarch factions.

Now, the situation had changed, and Redmoon had been the first to recognize it. He wouldn’t need a Sage anymore if he had the Phoenix, fully empowered and self-aware.