There is a sense for greatness.

Some people carry it around like a bad smell. They make us stop on the street, and look their way, whether we wish to or not. Their appearance might be ordinary, but there’s something about them, something beyond the norm. Something that makes you almost wish to bend the knee to them.
Our kings have likely had that something, those that came from nothing but ashes and ruin, in times of trouble and famine, where the hearts of the masses are restless, and they need a cause to bind to. What makes them choose one man over another?

It is my contention that there is a true gravity to such individuals. That progress, or competence, or greatness itself carries a weight. That a man might grow greater in the dark, and whether he wishes it or not, by the sheer gravity of his existence, tigers will make their way towards his door, catching his scent in the wind.

The tigers hide themselves in the forests, in villages unknown, amongst the peasantry, but sooner or later, it does seem, that they are always cast into the light. It requires an immense effort of will to keep them hidden. A man of such a gravity will see themselves risen, without will, to ranks beyond that of the norm – in times of peace, they might rise high indeed. But in times of chaos? When the world is in upheaval, when every piece in up in the air? Then a tiger from the most lowly of starts, with a competency – a density – beyond belief, as if they were a different creature entirely – they might go all the way. They might be the creature that – though a peasant themselves – the peasantry themselves kneel to. They might go further, and make the soldiery kneel, and then even the nobles after them. And a special class, beyond all others, might go even further still, and snatch a crown the head of a king, on a flurry of brilliant victories, on a story so overwhelming it almost might have seemed preordained.

It is those men that we ought to fear, and it those men that we will eternally be at the mercy of. It is those men that we do the honour of addressing as our kings, and our emperors.

The cold ate at them for all their pointless efforts, and Tavar sent no more men after Oliver. It was his lack of movement that seemed to be the most irritating strategy. It was suffocating.


"Oliver Patrick enjoys his sparks," Tavar had explained, when Germanicus complained about the fly that had been allowed to live so close to their army. "If we give him nothing to feed on, he will starve himself out in boredom."


Even Tavar had not supposed Oliver would stay as long as he did. By the end of the first day, if Oliver had been the same impatient youth that he had been at the Academy, he would already have been long gone from where he was.


Instead, he stayed, and when the third day came around, and he was still there even close to the setting of the sun, Tavar had to remark to himself that the Oliver Patrick he faced now, and the one that he knew now, was rather different from what he had come to expect of him.


Chapter 1700 - To Poke a Bear - Part 2