Phoenix Ascendant - eARC by Ryk E Spoor Page B

aside from Aran and the Watchland, and now suddenly I find she’s…well, serious about this so-called prince I’ve never met before. Of course I’m a little worried.” He raised his head and cocked an eyebrow at the Toad. “And given what I now know about those other two, I think I have a little bit of a reason to be cautious about her judgment there.”
    Poplock snorted. “Okay, you might have a point. ’Cept it’s still not really your business.”
    “No,” Rion conceded after a moment. “But after our parents died…I guess I still want to take care of everything. That’s stupid, though; she’s obviously taking care of herself perfectly well. Better than I took care of her or me, for that matter.”
    “You got kinda suckered like everyone else. She still thinks you’re the greatest thing living; you don’t know how hard it is for her to let us stay suspicious of you.”
    A quiet chuckle. “About as hard as it would be for me, I would guess.” He paused, then smacked his sword against a nearby bush; something hissed but scuttled swiftly away, recognizing Rion was much too dangerous to confront. “Can I ask you something?”
    “Sure. Don’t guarantee I’ll answer it, but you can ask.”
    The one-time Justiciar hesitated again. “No one…no one really told me the results of your analysis, just that you had decided that I really was at least a part of Rion Vantage. Could you please tell me what you found out?”
    Poplock considered. He obviously could tell Rion everything. The question was whether he should .
    After a moment’s reflection, he decided that there was no real reason not to. It had been a few weeks. If Rion had a deeper game he was playing, it clearly wasn’t time for him to move yet, and nothing that they’d discovered would be a surprise to him .
    “You’re not exactly human. I suppose you probably guessed that.”
    “My human body was left in Evanwyl. I had hoped that it had been re-created here. No?”
    “The samples we took…well, you were saturated with magical energies, no surprise there , and there were components that were human, some that were probably demonic, and…well, there’s no nice way to say this…some that were graverisen.”
    Rion looked at him with faint horror. “I’m… graverisen ?”
    “There’s a part of some type of walking dead there—can’t tell what type, though. Plus demonic power and essence, and human. That all isn’t surprising, though. They probably took part of your original corpse as a pattern, and this Viedra guy used his demon-power to build you a new body.” He hesitated, because the next part was worse.
    “What? Come, Toad, don’t stop now.”
    “Okay, but you’ll really hate this one. He still needed a living human body as a base, something to take that fragment of your soul—something like making a new flickerflower bush by grafting a branch from it onto a simjin root. So—”
    “Oh, great Balance.” Rion’s face, always much lighter than his sister’s, looked almost white in the starlight, and he stopped walking. “I…I’m wearing someone’s reshaped body?”
    “And,” Poplock said, “one whose soul was used to rebuild yours. At least, that’s our guess. Wieran, or Viedraverion, or both were involved, and they’re like way out of my league and even out of Hiriista’s. What we found…could mean something completely different. But that’s our best theory.”
    Rion did not move for several minutes. Finally he gave such a shudder that it nearly pitched Poplock off the tall man’s shoulder. “ Myrionar’s Mercy . Someone was erased just to make an imitation of myself. For what purpose ?”
    Poplock gave a bounce-shrug. “No idea, really. We kinda hope that they just weren’t done with you, so you’re pretty much who you appear to be—”
    “—but maybe I’m not at all, and I’m going to turn on you at some point. I may not even know I will.”
    The Toad stared up at the sparkling sky, the edge of the