Abject failure wasn’t the release he had expected.

He had thought that it would break him.  Shatter him into unreconcilable pieces.  He had almost looked forward to it, in a way.  The pressure…  oh Gods, the pressure.  Feverish work every day for months.  All of the hopes of himself, his kids, his friends on his attempt.  The pressure of time.  A weight had been crushing his chest slowly, with every breath that was released allowing the weight to fall further, each breath shallower, never lifting the weight back up to where it had been.  An endless cycle of pain that seemed that it must break him at some point, but never quite managed it.

And that had all ended in an eruption of no-color crackling at the edges of a Sorcerous anomaly and the streaming into the heavens of a rogue godling.

Arhat’s Tower stood empty now.  No more need to keep watch over a fragile snarl in the Aether.  No more well-wishers coming, spending time with him.  No more people bringing him food.  The snow, the brutal cold had left as well, and in its absence stood a gallingly pleasant spring.  But he remained.  He couldn’t go home.  Not without her.  Going home would be admitting that it was all finished.  The breeze fluttered against them hem of his coat through the holes in the tower.

He thought that failure would break him.  End the pain, somehow.  That’s what happened when you snapped, right?  When you couldn’t take it anymore?

But instead he was left empty too, just as the tower was.  The pressure was gone, and in its wake was left only a yawning chasm.  All joy – gone.  His hope – gone.  Even his wish that he could remain a good father to the children without her – gone.  He was not broken in grief, nor even reforged.  He was just hollow.

He had been worried about getting drunk.  Thought he’d fall into the bottle and never crawl out, like when he was younger.  Instead, it had merely been an impairment.  When he had sobered up, it had been deeply unsatisfying.  Drinking had always been good for pushing down those wild emotions that reared up, and the chaos they had brought.  But he was empty, and pushing down a wound didn’t make it any less of a wound.

It had been easier to control himself, though.  Of course it had been.  He was just an empty shell, going through the motions.  There was no longer a hurricane raging within, twisting his emotions, bending his personality into wild shapes in its wind.

He was an empty vessel.  The glass had been poured out.

And then, one day, he realized that he was just staring.  Existing.  Not working to get her back.  And something happened - he hated himself for that.  A vile, black-and-red hatred.  It shocked him with its force.  It was the only thing he had felt for days.  He hated himself.  And he hated those who had done this.

That hatred infected him, festered, left his emotions red and raw and oozing putrescence, and he just sat and dwelled on those emotions, watched the infection progress.  He had failed them.  Everyone had failed them.  And the kidnappers had taken them.  And in that epiphany of rage, something else had happened.  Daily he had probed his bond with Navesi to see if he could sense her.  Every time, nothing.  But now…  it felt different.

He sensed suffering. Like a faint aftertaste.  And he knew, somehow.  He knew that she was hurting.  That they were hurting.  They had been gone nearly six months, and they had probably been suffering the entire time.  And that infection of hatred blossomed.  He was no longer empty, he had that calm, ragged hatred.

He got back to work.

He went back to doing nothing but sitting in his stone seat – it didn’t matter whether he used that here anymore - in the tower poring over books and notes.  He didn’t care who watched him anymore.  He was coming for them, and he wanted them to know.  Wanted them to worry.  Wanted them to feel the fear curling around the edges of their stomachs.  Letters flew out, plans spun out like kites catching the wind and unfurling.

But it wasn’t like before.  He kept the mask up this time.  He asked calm questions of Asildu.  He didn’t shout at people truing to help him.  He ate the food offered him.  It was easy.  Because there was no storm inside.  He was animated by nothing but hateful purpose.

When he fell asleep, he thought about using Aethrolysis to force Sihmiauri to solidity and cut its throat for betraying them.  He thought of burning the hearts out of the kidnappers with Blackfire.  In his sleep, he dreamed that the Heralds were responsible, and he had engineered the world in a way that made it poisonous for them, but fine for mortals.  He watched their draconic forms wither and die.

Meraud had put his stamp of approval on the Sorcery they’d wrought, hadn’t he?  The Kaldar saw Meraud as not only a god of magic, but also of love and passion and destruction.  Was he showing that side, granting his permission?

He fought those thoughts off, at first.  They were unimportant for the task of a rescue.

But those thoughts kept recurring, as he planned his experiments and sent his letters, all structured at getting closer to figuring out who the kidnappers were, and where the missing people were, so that he could get to the next step of another rescue attempt.  And he realized in a rush, as those thoughts recurred when he sat, book in lap, reading the same lines for perhaps the fiftieth time, struggling with their meaning – he wasn’t just planning a rescue anymore.

He was also planning a murder.

He paused with that thought.  He spent a couple of hours with it.  And ultimately, he nodded, and rose.  The stone seat collapsed back into the stone floor of the tower.  The spring air was crisp and cool, the sun shone gently overhead, and the birds and insects sang and as he descended the stairs and made the trip to Asemath Academy he felt a calm that he hadn’t felt since Navesi had disappeared.

He needed some other books.