POV: taravangian
Summary
After his stretch of letting intellect rule, Taravangian switches halves. He braces himself and opens the dam. Worry, confidence, passion, fear, *rage* — every feeling washing through at full strength, each stronger than the last. As a mortal he had felt this only on his rare passionate days, and even then with the brakes of an old man's body around it. As a god there are no brakes. The wave is bigger than any room.
He goes immediately to Kharbranth. He blankets his home city, feeling every person in it at once. He lets himself love it without qualification — the art, the library, the steep streets and dense neighbourhoods crammed in against the cliffs above the sea. He loves the charity hospitals that take any patient without cost, the system of care he built and is proudest of. He even loves — and his honesty about this is, he tells himself, a strength rather than a wound — the secret hospital rooms where his surgeons once killed patients to harvest Death Rattles, the only window on the future he had had at the time. His policies, he reassures himself, produced the greatest good. Insignificant crime rates, achieved by exiling offenders, leaving in Kharbranth only the calm and the kind. The arithmetic still pleases him.
Was that enough, though? No. He weeps, because he knows it was not. He flicks himself to his daughter's room and watches his grandchildren play — towers of stones built up and knocked down again, the daughter laughing softly as she repairs the tower for them with the same patience he remembers showing as a young father. He should be feeling love. He is feeling fear. They are *exposed*. Exiling criminals from one city is not enough. The criminals must be punished. Annihilated, before they can reach his family. And foreign kingdoms could still come here at any time. His family will never be safe until every threat everywhere is under his control. Only then will he never have to be afraid for them again.
He does not let them see him. He gives each of them a silent, invisible hug — his daughter, the eldest grandchild, the youngest who barely knew him at the end — and goes. They must never know what he has become or what he intends to do with it; he will spare them at least that. He stands a moment in the corridor outside the room, half-tempted to walk in and tell her everything. He pictures her face. He pictures the cost to the children of knowing what their grandfather is now. He sets the thought aside. He steps out of Kharbranth entirely.
Emotion demands war.
In this, remarkably, intellect and feeling agree.
Cultivation was wrong. War, leading to his control of everything, is the only path. The boon she gave him as a mortal — the sliding mind, divided each day from the next — and the boon he has given himself as a god — letting each half rule in turn to test which holds — have led him to the same answer twice. There will be no third experiment.