Tor stood himself.
“Sir Patricia.” He said, his voice going dark and bitter, even to his own ears as the combat rage took him. She'd not only humiliated him in public, something he'd basically made peace with, because she claimed that she was doing it to try and find the people that tried to poison him after all, but the King made her do it? And even after everything, no one had told him? They were all just laughing at him then? Having a go with him? Was he just a joke or a game to them all then?
Without moving or gesturing at all the table blew away from him, lifting up and over the chairs on the far side easily and crashing into the wall behind them, some forty feet away. Everyone at the table stayed in place, having shields on, he realized, but most of them still moved away, running for the side of the room. Tor tried to calm himself, he'd done it before, but this time he couldn't care enough to drop into the needed trance state.
Instead he glared at the King.
“You! It was all your doing? What did I ever do to you? You know… Forget it. I'm out of here. Don't talk to me again. Ever!” He shouted the last part, knowing that it sounded childish but not caring. Everything had been a set up, Rich had ordered his fiancee to tell the world about how much she hated him and how stupid and ugly he was? Fine.
They could run their little war without him then. He almost demanded all the money that the kingdom owed him, but decided to just forget about it. He didn't really need gold. They could take it and shove it up their collective royal asses for all he cared.
They'd probably enjoy it even, stupid royal freak perverts.
Tor stormed out just heading towards the nearest exit once he got into the stone lined hallway. It was hard to navigate the palace, it was so huge and he'd spent most of his time in his room here, not exploring or learning the place.
That didn't matter. All he needed right now was to get outside. For a second he was tempted to just build an explosive field and blast his way through the walls, but realized that there might be innocent people on the other side. Even enraged he wouldn't risk killing an innocent person. Not just for this. Instead he stopped and looked around.
“How do I get the hell out of here?” He asked the air, his voice and body trembling hard. After a moment a man, who looked about forty, giant of course, wearing the black and purple of the Royal Guard stepped out of the wall. A panel had opened up from behind a cloth hanging.
“Follow me please, sir.” He said, his voice sounding humble and a little scared. Normally being scared of a giant Royal Guard was Tor's job, not the other way around, but that didn't make a difference right now either. Tor followed. If the man was misleading him, he'd… Well, he'd probably run away. It wasn't the guards fault if he worked for jerks, was it? They were selected for training as tiny children, it wasn't like he'd ever had a real choice in the matter or anything.
They walked down a half dozen hallways, maybe more, switching back and forth, before they reached a door that took them outside. When he got there twenty armed Royal Guards stood waiting for him. No one pointed their weapons at him at least. They didn't move on him either.
“Master Tor sir…” One of them said, a woman he didn't recognize really, but who felt familiar, if that was a thing. “We, ah, we don't really know what to do. It… wouldn't be good for you to go into town in this state, but…” She didn't shrug or do anything he could take the wrong way. Right, he was insane right now, wasn't he? But not crazy enough to stay here with these monsters that had done what they did to him. Why? Just to get the Wards? They still could have told him at any time, even if it had really been the only way, but no, he didn't rate knowing why people were destroying his life, did he?
All he had on was a shield. Not even a temperature equalizing field. Screw it, he decided and closed his eyes for a minute, still shaking. He'd built a thousand flight fields hadn't he, ten thousand? He could make one now that would be good enough to get him out of there. Raising his left hand he lifted into the air and started flying, in the dark, towards home.
It was a fantastically stupid thing to do of course.
The second the combat rage stopped, he'd be stuck, forced to land, if not just plummeting from the sky to his death. Well, he had a real shield, so he'd live. Most likely at least. A few people had crashed while flying, but so far no one died, the shields took care of that.
Torrance was tempted for a moment to turn the shield off and just let it happen. Instead he focused on the flight and twenty minutes later, as he started to calm down, he just landed, going so slowly and carefully that when the field cut out he was still nearly twenty feet up in the air. The ground cracked and thumped when he hit and his legs buckled, slapping hard into his chest, pain ripping through him.
As he lay on his side he got it. When he'd thought about deactivating the shield, his personal intent had done it. Oops. Combat rage led to direct effect, which in this case apparently led to broken legs. He felt them with his hand. No blood at least. They were broken, sure, resting at funny angles both, but not that badly, he'd live. Probably.
The worst was his right leg, halfway to the knee. There was a lump that wasn't normal at all, and it hurt a lot, so Tor did the only thing he could and dropped into a work trance, fighting to build a field around himself in the cool night air. What could he do though? A though occurred to him, one that he'd never even considered before. Could he build a healing field? They existed, Master Builder Maris made most of them of course, putting out about one per year. She only made one-ups and they cost tens of thousands of golds apiece. She only built them for a specific person too, Tor had heard. One that worked for one person didn't do it for another at all.
What did it take though? Did he have to understand the healing mechanism or… What would happen if he just told the injury to go back to the way it was before? Fix the field? Could he do that? It took hours of focus, but he had time, so just worked without concern for anything but the field he held.
Finally there was a pop, a sense of movement from his right leg, and a sudden absence. At first he wondered if he'd made his leg go away somehow, but that wasn't it, the pain was just gone. He held the field, but nothing new was happening. That being the case he forced himself out of that deep state and tried to climb to the surface, near where everyone else lived most the time. Once there Tor looked around. It was still pitch black out and he was lying on his side in the dirt. Poking at his right leg gently he found that it was there still, and more, it didn't hurt. It felt… normal. Gingerly, ready to fall down in pain again, Tor stood. The leg held, both did. It didn't even ache.
So healing could be done just by reminding a body to be healthy and making that idea strong enough? It should be possible to make an item for that. One that would work for anyone too. Complicated but doable.
Tor slapped his shield on, using it as a buffer against the dirt and lay down again. He was exhausted. Combat rage, no matter how good a reason you had for it, or even that you didn't get into a fist fight with the object of your anger, did that to you. Tor dreaded the headache he was going to have in the morning, but he'd live.
He just wouldn't want to.
Everyone had known? What the hell? There had been signs now that he knew about it himself. Ursala and Sara had both refused to tell him why Trice had done it, but they knew that she didn't mean the awful things she'd said. He'd always thought they were just standing by their friend, but now… Had all his friends been in on it the whole time?
No. Kolb didn't know… did he? Tor didn't know that, honestly. The man was an enigma. A deadly fighter, Knight and even head of the King’s secret army, but Tor had set him up in that last bit, hadn't he? So the man might or might not know.
Major Godfrey… Well, there was no reason for him to know and Sorlee wouldn't have been told anything either. She'd have probably let it slip to him, right? Even though there were no debts between friends, she still acted like she owed him for helping to save her parents farm. That had only taken gold though.
Tor dozed and, as he figured he would, woke up with an almost crippling headache, it was bad enough that he dry heaved for a while before he started walking north, towards his house. The near vomiting did nothing to make him feel better. Actually it made his head throb and feel like something inside was about to burst. He didn't know how far he'd gotten towards it the night before, the wasteland looked pretty much the same through about a hundred and fifty miles past the Capital, then the only change would be that it had a little more rock on the reddish surface. There was no water in this part, unless the falcons was up and running. If that was the case he could get some there, which shouldn't be more than fifty miles or so ahead, right? After another ten minutes of walking he had to start laughing.
He was a builder.
