The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 739

White Tower stood two hours outside New Avalon, at the end of a road the state had stopped repairing.

Beatrix drove them herself.

"You should know what you're walking into," she said.

"I read the file."

"The file's three years old. It's worse now."

She wasn't exaggerating.

The gate had rust on it. Half the outer wall was scaffolded, and the scaffolding itself looked older than the crack it was holding up. Weeds came through the courtyard stones in lines, following the joints, the way weeds do when nobody has pulled them in a very long time.

Alex counted four people in a courtyard built for four hundred.

Two of them were sweeping. One was asleep in the sun.

"Five hundred years," Beatrix said quietly. "This place taught magic for five hundred years."

"How many students this year?"

"Nine."

"Out of how many applicants?"

Beatrix didn't answer that one, which was an answer.

If somebody had told Alex the White Tower would close next month, he wouldn't have been surprised. He wouldn't even have asked why.

...

The old man came out to meet them himself.

No attendants. No robes of office. Just a thin man in a grey work coat with his sleeves pushed up, holding a watering can, like they'd interrupted him halfway through something ordinary.

He looked at Beatrix for a long moment.

"Beatrix Hargrove," he said. "What brings one of the richest people in the Arcanum State to a humble place like this?"

"This man wanted to meet you." Beatrix stepped aside. "Alex, this is Elder Elias White. Elias — Alex."

The old man set the watering can down on the step. He didn't hurry about it.

"And young man. What do you want from this old man?"

"I want to buy this tower," Alex said. "And every branch it has."

The courtyard went very quiet.

Beatrix turned and stared at him.

She'd sat through eleven years of acquisitions. She'd seen men take four hours and three lunches to get to a number. She had never once heard anybody walk into a building and say it in the first minute.

"Alex—"

But Elias White was already nodding.

"That's not a hard decision," he said. "How much are you looking to buy it for?"

Beatrix's head snapped around.

"You want to sell?"

...

Elias laughed.

It was a good laugh, and that was the worst part — there was no bitterness anywhere in it.

"Look around you, Miss Hargrove." He gestured at the empty courtyard with one thin hand. "There's nothing here anymore."

"That's not—"

"Everyone wants magic that hits things now." He shrugged. "Fire. Lightning. Something that makes a young man look impressive in front of his friends. Red Tower takes four thousand students a year. Black takes six."

"And you?"

"We teach magic that helps people." Elias smiled at her, gently. "Nobody wants it. There's no glory in it. You can't post a video of yourself setting a broken bone."

Beatrix opened her mouth and didn't have anything to put in it.

"I'm eighty-one years old," Elias went on. "I have no successor. Not because I didn't look — because there was nobody to find. In four years I will be dead, and this tower will close either way, and forty old people who gave their whole lives to it will find out what the state pension actually pays."

He picked the watering can back up.

"So if someone wants to buy it? Then thank the Creators. At least my elders get to be old somewhere warm."

Alex hadn't said anything through any of it.

"How much are you asking?" he said.

...

"We have forty elders left," Elias said. "Sixty faithful followers, give or take. The young ones will land somewhere — they're young, they'll be fine."

"That's not what I asked."

"I know." Elias set the can down again. "Here's my price. Find work for the young ones at your company. Something honest, something they can live on. And for the elders — give us enough that none of us has to work hard again before we die. That's all. That's the whole number."

Beatrix looked away.

She'd negotiated against men who'd tried to squeeze four extra points out of a dying company. This one had just asked for a warm room and jobs for his students.

"Something like ten million per elder," Alex said. "Is that good?"

Elias blinked.

Then he laughed again, differently this time — startled, almost embarrassed.

"That's far too much," he said.

"Is it good?"

"...It's too much, and I'll accept it." The old man sat down on the step, slowly, one hand on his knee. "Four hundred million. For a building with a hole in the roof and a library nobody reads."

"That's the deal."

It spread through that courtyard like water finding cracks.

One elder called another. That one called three more. Somebody ran — actually ran, at that age, across broken stones — to fetch the ones still inside.

Within twenty minutes there were forty old people packed shoulder to shoulder around a single hand-bound book, and the ones at the back were standing on the low wall to see over the ones at the front.

Nobody was talking.

The only sound in the whole courtyard was paper turning.

Beatrix stood at the edge of it with her arms folded, watching forty of the most stubborn people in the Arcanum State forget she existed.

"Alex." Her voice came out strange. "What is in that book?"

"Things they already know."

"That is not what that looks like."

"They know all the pieces." Alex was watching them too, hands in his pockets. "Nobody ever showed them how the pieces fit."

Beatrix looked at him then — really looked, the way she'd been trying not to for about two weeks now.

She didn't say the thing she was thinking.

"Come on," Alex said. "Let's get lunch. We'll come back at dinner."

"They'll still be reading at dinner."

"I know."

...

They were still reading at dinner.

The sun had gone down behind the broken half of the wall. Somebody had brought out lamps and nobody had brought out food. Forty elders in a ring, the same book in the middle, an old woman near the front turning the last pages with both hands because one wasn't steady enough.

Alex and Beatrix stood in the gateway and waited.

Nobody noticed them come back either.

The last page turned.

The old woman held it there for a while. Then she closed the book, carefully, the way you'd close a door on a sleeping child.

Elias White took it back from her.

He looked down at the cover for a moment. Then he looked around at the others — forty faces, lamplight, nobody moving.

Whatever passed between them didn't need saying.

Elias turned around.

And an eighty-one-year-old man who had run the White Tower for thirty-four years lowered himself down onto the broken stones of his own courtyard and bowed his head.

Behind him, forty elders went down with him.

"Grandmaster," Elias said. "Please. Lead our White Tower."