Jackal Among Snakes

Chapter 650: Hedonistic Scholarship

From birth, Traugott had always felt like his life was tied to the abyss. It consumed all he felt endlessly. There was little that inspired anything inside of him. Though he felt emotions like rage, sorrow, happiness, and all others, it was as though they existed outside of him, pouring into a hole that never ended. Nothing that affected others had ever affected him. Even the things that others called needs—the need to sate hunger or quench thirst, for instance—had little bearing on his life.

He neither liked nor disliked pain. At some points in his life, he had inflicted it on himself repeatedly to discover how it worked, because there was only one thing that truly stimulated him in any way: learning that which he did not know. Even that was fitting, as the very nature of the abyss was something that could never be known or understood. Curiosity was his first, true love that allowed him to visualize what the term even meant. He never grew bored of her.

To his parents, refugees from the Burnt Desert taken in by House Parbon, his inquisitiveness had been the sign of a precocious child who possessed a certain brightness. It had been enough to cultivate a thin veneer of normalcy that allowed him to operate in peace. They grew wealthy enough from selling out their former tribesmen to the present margrave of House Parbon that they could afford to send him to the Order of the Gray Owl. Their craftiness taught him much about the realities of the world. He didn’t enjoy doing the things that led to learning, but he did enjoy the learning itself. To that end, their callousness had aided him. He never forgot that.

He had gone through life learning so much. He was smart enough to know that he would need power to learn all he pleased to learn, and so he quietly advanced as they wanted him to in the Order of the Gray Owl. There, his parents were no longer of any use, so he cut ties with them. It had been easy to feel alive, back then—he was a dry sponge in an ocean, absorbing the vast stores of knowledge accumulated over the years.

Past a certain point… there were diminishing returns on well-travelled fields of study. Studying elemental magic, he would need to put forth ten times the effort for the same level of stimulation as exploring entirely new fields—necromancy, for instance. He had grown empty, hollow, adhering to the rules of the Order of the Gray Owl. Castro was an ever-watchful leader, ensuring none of the Magisters put a single toe into anything forbidden. It was restrictive, and many of Traugott’s days were spent existing in the empty void that was his life without stimulation.

Until, of course, all of this.

Argrave had broken him free of the period of blackness when he delivered a book to Castro. It spoke of many things, foremost among them Gerechtigkeit. Traugott followed the leads described therein and bore witness to the vast changes the world was about to undertake. That awakening had all culminated in the grand opening of the Shadowlands. Here, he explored the depths of something that simply could not be in their realms. If he’d had it his way, he would have simply spent his time wandering the Shadowlands, preparing all its denizens for his gambit against Argrave. Unfortunately, the power structure here was deeply entrenched. Fortunately, he was able to end it, aiding his long-term goal—moving beyond this cycle of judgment.

There was so much to look forward to. So many things that had never happened. There was Sophia—he was eager to discover her intricacies, doubly so after his experimentations with Norman. He had theories about how her power might be used to make more of Gerechtigkeit than the calamity ever made of himself. There was so much to learn, so much to see… and at the end of it all, Traugott saw a way into other

places. Places beyond this one. The Heralds had spoken to him, and through their dialogue, he saw the ecstasy of learning repeated to infinity. They promised new realms, new existences. The idea enthralled him.

present, however… another such fascinating thing had come

to see what he would experience. At once, familiar yet muted sensations returned to him, most prevalently sight. It took him some time to adapt to the reality of what he saw, and he blinked his eyes rapidly in

too dense of an attack to make any sense of what was coming. These bugs, which he identified as magical in nature, seemed to eat through the very

attacker. Inside the abyss, such details weren’t clear, but here, she had genuine features his human mind could understand. The shadows still wreathed most of her, but he could distinguish white hair that looked like silk and deep red eyes. Only her eyes had color, bizarrely. A fascinating quirk that he would love to explore. The eyes were genuine windows to the

narrative on Amazon, know that it has

machinations you’re aware of?” he questioned, his voice coming out in a fashion as he hadn’t expected it. Another fascination—was

“This is something none of us have ever seen before. In power, I believe I am

me about our attackers? Their appearance, that is. I cannot

The one that causes the most damage is a tall human with black hair. He leads that plague of

his head, not quite believing it. Yet a smile did rise to his face at the thought of it. When he saw a familiar coat through the haze of it all—though the

of the complexity of the higher species like elves or humans, but Traugott had always found them no different from any other animal. The only thing that made men better than mice was the fact they thought they were. Some select few had drawn his interest, but it was about the same level of interest he had seeing an unusually-colored animal. Smart, talented people with strange applications of magic or bizarre constitutions could not compare to the pleasure brought from exploring the depths of things untouched by

he was

desire to convince him to do their bidding. They wanted Argrave neutralized more than anything. They wished to use Traugott as the cudgel to achieve that. He was happy to

as he stared. “Go. I

then, despite my protests. My protests were correct, and we suffered great losses. After that incident, I

far in using this woman’s hope for herself and her people—and besides, the ability he possessed to free their people was too valuable for her