"You're telling me," he said, "that even if we somehow overcome the vord, it won't be over. Someday soon, the land itself is going to turn against us. We might overcome this nightmare only to drown in chaos."
"Yes."
"That's... a lot to have in front of me."
"Life is unfair, uncaring, and painful, young Gaius," Alera said. "Only a madman struggles against the tide."
She didn't make a whisper of sound, but Tavi lifted his eyes to find Alera kneeling, facing him, her face level with his. She reached out and touched his cheek with her frayed fingertips. "I have always found the particular madness of the House of Gaius singularly intriguing. It has fought the tides for more than a thousand years. It has often failed to attain victory. But it has never conceded the struggle."
"Has it ever faced something like this?" he asked quietly.
"When the first Alerans came here, perhaps," Alera said, her eyes distant. "My memories of it are very distant. It would be centuries before I knew your people. But they were few. So very few. Eleven thousand lives, perhaps."
"About the same size as a Legion and its followers," Tavi said.
She smiled. "And so it was. A Legion from another place, lost, and come here to my lands." She gestured toward the entrance to the tent. "The Canim, the Marat, the Icemen. All lost travelers." She shook her head sadly. "The others, too. Those that your people exterminated, over the centuries. So much lost to fear and necessity."
"When they came here, they had no furycrafting?" Tavi asked.
"Not for years."
"Then how did they do it?" he asked. "How did they survive?"
"With savagery. Skill. Discipline. They came from a place where they were unrivaled masters of war and death. Their enemies here had never seen anything like them. Your forebears could not return whence they had come. They were trapped here, and only victory gave them survival. So they became victors - no matter the cost."
She met his eyes calmly. "They did things you would scarcely believe. They committed the most monstrous and heroic deeds. The generations of your people in that time became a single, savage mind, death incarnate - and when they ran short of foes, they practiced their skills upon one another."
Tavi frowned. "Are you saying that I and my people must do the same if we are to survive?"
"I am not the one making a choice. I have no opinion. I only share facts."
Tavi nodded slowly and gestured with one hand. "Please continue."
Alera frowned pensively. "It was not until the original Primus threw down all who opposed him, carrying out brutal war in the name of establishing peace, that they began to come to their senses. To build something greater. To lay the foundations of the Realm as you know it today." She put a hand on his shoulder. "Laws. Justice. Art. The pursuit of knowledge. It all came from a single source."
"The ability to kill," Tavi whispered.
"Strength is the first virtue," Alera said. "That is not a pleasant fact. Its dis tastefulness does not alter the truth that without strength to protect them, all other virtues are ephemeral, ultimately meaningless."
She leaned forward slightly. "The vord have no illusions. They are willing to destroy every living thing on this world if that is what it takes to ensure the survival of their kind. They are death incarnate. And they are strong. Are you prepared to do what may be necessary for your people to survive?"
Tavi lowered his eyes and stared at the ground.
There was more he could do to help the war effort. Much more. There were steps he could take that he would have believed utterly unthinkable a year before. His mind had always been a steady fountain of ideas, and now was no exception. He hated himself for giving birth to such monstrous concepts, but the Realm was fighting for its life. In the dead of night, when he could not sleep, when he was most afraid of the future, the steps would come to him.
Those steps could only be taken upon the broken bodies of the dead.
Principles were shining, noble things, he thought. Those who worked hard enough to keep them polished them lovingly - but the simple fact was that if he wanted any Alerans at all to survive, he might have to sacrifice others. He might have to choose who lived and who died. And if he was to truly be the First Lord of the Realm, the leader of its people, he would be the one to make that choice.
It would, in fact, be his duty.
A flood of emotions he rarely permitted himself to feel flowed over him. Grief for those already lost. Rage for those who might still die. Hatred for the enemy who had forced the Realm to its knees. And pain. He had never asked for this, never wanted it. He did not want to be the First Lord - but neither could he walk away.
Necessity. Duty. The words sounded vile in the lonely vaults of his mind.
He closed his eyes, and said, "I will do what is necessary." Then he looked up at the great fury, and his words sounded hard and cold to his own ears. "But there is more than one kind of strength."
Alera stared at him for a long moment, then slowly inclined her head. "And so there is, young Gaius," she murmured. "And so there is." With that, she was gone.
Tavi sat on his camp stool, feeling exhausted, limp and tired as a wrung-out dishrag. He struggled to see the path before them all, to imagine its twists, turns, and forks. There were times when an odd kind of certainty suddenly blossomed in his thoughts, a sense of crystalline understanding of the future. His grandfather, like the First Lords before him, was rumored to have the gift of foreknowledge. Tavi didn't know if it was true.
The vord had to be stopped. If Alera could not throw them down, their path would end, abruptly and in total silence. No one would know that they had ever been.
But even if they somehow won through, the havoc inflicted by the war, the horrible price in pain and grief and loss paid by the people of Alera would leave them in no condition to do battle with the chaos of the great fury's dissolution. A people already steeped in violence and war would still be drunk on rage and blood, blind to any other path.
When they ran short of foes, they practiced their skills upon one another. Of course they had. It was all they knew.
How to stop it? Provide his people with another enemy, to focus their wrath outside of themselves? Tavi glanced toward the Canim camp and shivered. He thought of Doroga and Hashat - and Kitai. His stomach turned in slow, revolting knots.
It couldn't be allowed to happen. Such a struggle would not be quick. The blood-thirst of a generation of Alerans at war would be only temporarily slaked, and in the end it would change nothing. They would turn upon themselves.