Chapter 18: The Puppet’s Lament (Ouranios Leader)

Together with the four remaining groups of the deceased Ouranios Covenant in a tenuous compromise as their power models, ties to the Mytikas are uncovered, Nyx focused on the de facto conductor of the defunct network, Valerius. Nyx, given his tremendous grasp of the game of power around the results it influenced, immediately understood that Valerius was not the ultimate puppet master of the destroying war that had ravaged the land. He was a [puppet], [figurehead], a carefully chosen implement created and then controlled by the secret Mytikas Alliance to be used in furtherance of their own secret aims. Valerius, naive and taken advantage of it in his overconfidence, had been a piece on their large chessboard, a tool used with terrible accuracy.

As a substitute of hurling extravagant boasts in public and airing grievances privately, Nyx wished for a quiet dialogue with Valerius, a quiet conversation far from prying eyes of onlookers. He did not take part as either a revenant driven to revenge or as as victor striving to dominate. He appeared as a revealer of reality, a pursuer of the covert, a smoking torch of the unappealing torch in the black. He presented Valerius with the overwhelming evidence he had meticulously gathered over years of painstaking investigation, a tapestry of meticulously documented proof that laid bare the Mytikas's pervasive influence on the Ouranios Alliance, their subtle yet devastating control over its actions.

He demonstrated to Valerius case by agonizing case, how his own choices, which he had truly thought to be ordeals for the benefit of his people, had been subtly, but in fact quite unexpectedly, affected by Mytikas's influence. He told of the hidden conspiracies, the covert meetings between the disparate, the meticulously planned and crafted narratives to obscure the millenia of war and unspeakable pain. He sliced away the onion of deceit to expose the rot beneath the surface of the broken Ouranios Alliance.

Valerius, facing irrefutable reality, and the very force of evidence, was. utterly devastated. He had, meticulously created universe that he had inhabited, the universe of honor and of service, turned to dust right under his feet. He was a pawn, a mere instrument in a much bigger, much darker scheme, and the burden of his unwitting parlay, the knowledge that he had been instrumental in the suffering of thousands of innocent people, was crippling. He had always believed, until the very last breath, that he was defending, protecting his people from harm, but something had a way (foolishly, he now understands) pushed them into a vortex of destruction, due to plotting and combat and at the very core of it all, covered in blood.

Seeing Valerius thus hopelessly remorseful, hopelessly sorrowful, Nyx, rather than rebuke him, led him toward restoration (or take him out of this deep sorrow). He did not attempt to claim the real, ultimate justice by resorting to punishment or revenge, knowing that the reaching of the goal of the real, ultimate justice lies not in rage or in revenge, but in the unveiling of the truth. He even offered Valerius the opportunity to confess in public his role in the plan of the Mytikas, so as to unveil the cunningness of their plan to the public, to absolve himself in the past by contributing to the creation of a truer, a more honest world. He proposed a reason to restore his honor, not by rebelling, but by telling truth.

Valerius, stunned by the discovery, his soul in agony from the unbearable gravity of his unwitting commitments, accepted Nyx's proposal. He has publicly ridiculed the Mytikas Alliance and in so doing, has finally driven the rest of the Ouranios Alliance out of existence by the flick of a pen, confessed to his own unwitting involvement in their schemes, and at last recognized his own deficiency to understand them. The confession of the man once proclaimed a "his own representative" of the now-disbanded Ouranios Alliance created a global seismic tremor, severing the Mytikas's web of secrets, thereby sending the powerful to the surface of the dawn bright and forever changing their relationship in power. The world gasped in slack-jawed marvelling at the carefully crafted front of the Mytikas Alliance fracturing to expose the hidden master manipulator, power-mad mob below. The sibiles in the dark had at last exploded into a screeching cry.