Hey guys,
I'm taking a quick 3-day break from updates to prep Volume 3 of Eldritch Horror? No, I'm a Doctor.
Big things are coming next arc, so I want a little time to plan it properly.
See you in a few days!
Read chapter ahead on patreon
The Azareth Imperial Military Cemetery sat on the eastern edge of the capital, where the city ran out of reasons to be loud. Rows of white stone markers, all the same height, all facing the same direction. The Empire did not believe in distinction in death.
The procession arrived at 0800.
The coffin was draped in the Imperial flag, deep green and silver, carried on the shoulders of eight S rank soldiers. Behind them walked a column three hundred strong, boots striking the path in unison. The drums were slow. One beat every four seconds.
Ralph's wife walked with her daughter beside her. The girl was twelve. She held her mother's hand and looked at the coffin and did not look away.
The Imperial Chaplain spoke of duty, of the Archon of the Infinite Script, thirty-one years of service, and the final act that had kept three residential districts and every civilian in them alive. He read the citation. He read the operations Ralph had commanded. Each name settled into the air and stayed there.
Daniel was first to the podium. He stood with his notes in his hands, looked at them once, folded them, put them away.
"I served under Major General Waibel for nine years," he said. His voice held for the first sentence and came apart in the second.
"He held a standard that most people could not meet, and he expected it of everyone around him because he believed they were capable of it." He stopped.
"He was usually right. And if he believed that of you, that belief meant more than any commendation I have seen given in this building." He looked at the coffin.
"He was the finest commanding officer I have known."
Kai, Ash, and Jack went up together. Nobody stopped them.
Kai spoke. His voice was rough and he made no attempt to smooth it.
"We were not his best soldiers. I think we all knew that. But he fought to keep us assigned to this operation when the case for replacing us was reasonable." He paused.
"We did not understand at the time what that meant. We do now. He saw something in people that they had not yet managed to see in themselves, and he acted on it before they gave him any reason to." His jaw worked.
"We will spend the rest of our careers trying to deserve that."
Ash said only: "He was right about everything he ever told me. I wish I had listened sooner."
Jack looked at the coffin for a long moment. He did not speak. He saluted, held it, then stepped down.
Steven stood at the podium in full dress uniform. He had written something and had not looked at it since morning.
"Major General Waibel understood the weight of command in a way I have rarely seen in this profession," he said.
"He understood that the people under him were not instruments. They were people. He carried that understanding with him into every decision he made, and it cost him, and he paid it anyway." He stopped.
"On the day of the operation, when the moment came that required someone to make the choice he made, he made it without hesitation. Not because he did not understand what it would cost. Because he understood exactly what it would cost, and he decided that the lives of the people around him were worth more than his own." He looked at the flag.
"I have known soldiers who were brave. I have known fewer who were genuinely good. Ralph Waibel was both, fully, without compromise." His voice dropped.
"I am proud to have served beside him. I am sorry we do not have more time."
Then General Malvick Siven walked to the podium.
He was tall, lean, dressed in Imperial blacks. He looked at the coffin for a long moment before he spoke.
"I served alongside Ralph Waibel for twenty-two years," he said. His voice was quiet and carried across the entire cemetery without effort.
"He never told me what I wanted to hear. He told me what he believed to be true, even when the cost of saying it was high. That quality is rarer than courage, and more valuable." He paused.
"I promoted him four times. He accepted each one as a responsibility, not a reward, which is the only correct way to receive one. The Supernatural Division was his life's work, and he took that seriously every day until the last." He looked at Ralph's wife and daughter.
"He spoke of you both constantly. You were the part of his life that he was most proud of."
He stepped back from the podium. Looked at the coffin one final time. Then he walked through the crowd, which parted for him without a word, and was gone.
The final speech was Axel's. He was the ranking officer remaining. It was his to carry.
He stood at the podium and faced the three hundred people who were looking at him. He had not written anything. He had tried, and stopped, because putting it into sentences made it too real, and then he had decided that was exactly why he needed to say it out loud instead.
"Ralph Waibel was the standard," Axel said. His voice was level and he held it level.
"Not as a document or a policy. As a person. When you wanted to know what a commanding officer should look like when all the easy choices were gone, you looked at Ralph Waibel and you had your answer." He paused.
"He demanded a great deal from the people around him because he demanded it from himself first. That is a difficult quality in a colleague. It is an irreplaceable one in a leader."
He looked at Ralph's daughter.
"Your father loved you with everything he had. He spoke of you the way a person speaks of the thing they are most certain of. I want you to carry that."
He looked at Ralph's wife. His jaw tightened.
"I am deeply sorry. The Empire's debt to your husband cannot be repaid. What I can tell you is that he chose this with full knowledge of what it meant. He would want you to know it was his choice, made freely, for the people he loved."
He looked at the coffin.
He held it. The whole weight of it, visibly, in the set of his jaw and the whiteness of his knuckles at his sides.
"The Azareth Empire will not produce another Ralph Waibel. What we can do is remember what he was and let it be the measure we hold ourselves to." He stopped. Three hundred people were not breathing.
"Rest well, My friend. You gave everything there was to give. It was enough. It was more than enough."
He stepped down.
Nobody made a sound.
The rifle volley fired three times. The sound rolled out across the cemetery and faded into the hills. Eight soldiers lowered the coffin with the specific careful silence of people paying attention to every inch because every inch mattered.
The flag was folded and carried to Ralph's wife. She took it with both hands and held it against her chest. Her daughter watched the grave, and kept watching it, until someone gently touched her shoulder and led her away.
.
.
.
An hour later, when everyone had gone, Steven and Axel stood alone in front of the stone.
Ralph Waibel. Major General. Archon of the Infinite Script.
Steven had two cigars. He lit both and handed one to Axel. They smoked without speaking, and then Axel crouched and placed his, still burning, in the small vase at the base of the stone.
"You remember when he stayed at the office until two in the morning the week before the operation," Steven said.
"Going through every possible variable. Every contingency. He called me at one-thirty to ask about the clinic's structural layout in case of emergency egress."
"He called me at two," Axel said. "To ask the same question. He had already called you."
"He just wanted to make sure."
"He always wanted to make sure."
They were quiet.
"He was excited about the operation," Steven said.
"Nervous about the variables but you could see it. He liked problems that were actually hard."
"The simple ones bored him," Axel said, looking at the stone. "This one was too hard."
Steven nodded.
"He thought the doctor was going to be a disaster," Steven said.
"He thought the doctor was fascinating and terrifying and would never have admitted to either." Axel watched the cigar smoke rise.
They were quiet for a while after that. The cigar in the vase was burning down slowly, and neither of them moved to replace it or hurry it along. The cemetery around them had emptied out. Just the white stones and the grass and the sound of birds somewhere in the trees at the edge of the grounds.
This was Ralph's spot now. Shaded in the morning. The grass around the stone was well kept. He would have had an opinion about whether that was necessary.
Footsteps came from the path.
They turned.
A man in his late twenties, pale with long dark hair, a black suit worn without ceremony. He moved through the cemetery like someone comfortable with quiet places. He walked to the grave, crouched, and set down a white lily and a bottle of expensive whiskey.
He stayed crouched for a moment.
"I hope you can rest in the warmest place there is, my friend," he said quietly.
He stood. Steven and Axel were watching him.
"You knew him," Steven said.
"He helped me. More than once. It wasn't convenient for him and he did it anyway." The man's eyes were dark and entirely settled.
"I owed him for that. That's the problem with debts to people who are gone."
"Who are you?" Axel said.
"I'm Ren" Nothing else attached to it.
The name meant nothing to either of them. And yet the way he said it, carrying it without explanation, made the back of Steven's neck prick.
"Did you serve with him?"
"Not officially. We had a working relationship. The kind that doesn't have a category."
The three of them stood looking at the stone. The lily white at the base of it. The whiskey catching the light.
"He never left anything unfinished," Axel said, to the stone more than anyone.
"He always came back with answers," Steven added.
"He made sure everyone around him was ready before he ever thought about himself," Axel said.
The three of them stood in silence for a moment. Then the man said, quietly, still looking at the stone:
"He was the only one I could not save."
Steven went still.
Axel turned his head slowly.
Ren Hector looked back at them. Calm. Mild.
"It was good to meet you both properly," he said. "Take care of each other."
He turned and walked back toward the cemetery path. Hands in his pockets. Unhurried. The coat moving slightly in the wind.
Steven watched him go.
"Axel."
"I know," Axel said.
"Should we—"
"No. Leave it."
They watched until he rounded the path and disappeared between the white stones. The cigar in the vase had burned down to nothing. The smoke was gone.
They stayed a while longer, in the quiet of a morning that belonged to someone who was no longer there to see it, and did not say anything else.