“You were his intended vessel,” Luctari said.
Aleem gave her a weak smile. “How quick on the uptake you are.”
“DON’T PATRONISE me, mortal.” She clacked her tongue. A surprisingly human gesture. Her horns glowed a gaudy emerald green. “And I don’t suppose this … Sibyl character knows the precise details of how the ritual failed?” She looked as though it pained her to even ask.
“She believes that someone interfered with it,” Aleem replied glibly. He really didn’t know the answer to her question; best to let her imagination do the heavy lifting here.
Luctari gave him an unimpressed look, but her horns shimmered a meek pink once again. “You don’t say.”
“There’s more,” Aleem added carefully, and Luctari eyed him as though she would gore him that very moment for not speaking quickly enough. “Daranirajido tried enthralling three other Vriorians besides myself.” He gave her a pointed look. “All four of us are jrjis—untethered to the Grand Coral.”
Her eyes glazed over once more, horns argent with specks of gold. Aleem suddenly felt the odd urge to touch those horns. He imagined they’d feel nothing like ivory. Or anything, really. Her presence here was merely an intricate play of light. She was not corporeal after all.
“HOW?” Luctari asked, shock plain in her voice as she returned her attention to him. “How did your master come to learn of this?” She clearly hadn’t been expecting an answer because she rambled on. “I see that you’re the only one awake. The other three have succumbed to severe soul-trauma and—” her eyes widened in what he could only describe as glee. “You acquired something.” The golden glow of her horn was nigh blinding. “[Last Breath]. Oh. this keeps getting better.”
Her ramblings answered one question but raised a few others in its stead. Aleem stuck to his script. There were far more important things he needed to know. “How quickly can the ritual be … recommenced?” he asked Luctari. He hoped the answer wold be something along the lines of ‘it cannot be recommenced. The godling only had one shot, and he missed. Hurrah! You’re free.’
“There is a reason why incarnations are not a choice emanation,” Luctari said, a thoughtful smile tugging at her lips. “One must wager their divine aspects against the tides of fortuity. It is Voulu, a vile contrivance.”
Aleem perked up. He recognised that word from his mother’s notes and some bits of the game. Voulu had to do with fate-manipulation on a large scale. One of the player characters, Yamagita, was exceptionally adept at practising it.
“Heavy preparations go into this,” Luctari droned on. “If an emanation ritual fails, there is an adverse reaction. A backfire. The Iroluwan Star would have sustained injuries from that recoil. It would have cost him greatly. And that is to say nothing of all the extremely valuable integrants that must’ve been used up on this iteration. He would need to recover before making another attempt. But if he has committed to this form of emanation, he will certainly try again. He has hidden his pfad too well. I cannot anticipate his course.”
There was a sinking feeling in Aleem’s stomach. Luctari wasn’t confirming events of the past. She was speaking in hypotheticals. While it was possible that some Tutelary—one of the actual gods of Orig—had caught on, Aleem wasn’t going to hold his breath. Luctari’s show of uncertainty here was evidence enough in his eyes that Daranirajido had well and truly intended to take the local pantheon by surprise. But something wasn’t adding up. “Now that his plans are out in the open,” Aleem said, his voice only betraying some of the hope he felt, “I can’t imagine that he’ll be allowed to continue this madness.”
Luctari scoffed. Her horns had shifted to a louring slate grey. “‘Allowed’? What nonsense are you spouting?”
“You won’t be taking advantage of this?” It would have been impossible to entirely keep the desperation out of his voice, but Aleem managed. Luctari, like most godlings, was an opportunist. “I mean, surely you can find a way to … exploit him in his moment of weakness. And if not you, couldn’t some other godling capitalise on his failure here?”
Luctari laughed darkly. The horns upon her head began blooming into an earth-sun orange with patches of ash and brown. “Oh, you foolish, foolish little pawn. Why, you’re as clueless as a winter trail. What an incredibly uninformed envoy, you are. Do you know how powerful the Iroluwan Star is? Of course, you don’t. You could not even begin to fathom.”
She shook her head, her horns morphing into a pale yellow shimmer encased in grey. “He is of greater hierarchy than even Shallentlan, whom you first sought. None among the godlings would be so foolish as to get embroiled in his machinations. Your misguided master would do well to rid her mind of such vain thoughts. This might as well be a matter of sunrise. Its inevitability is beyond the influence of one so weak. There is not a single thing that can be done to alter the course of events. You will either bear witness to the imminent or shut your eyes to it.”
“What about the Tutelaries then?” Aleem asked. He knew from the game just how prone the actual gods of Orig were to sitting back and watching things go to shit, but something about this whole affair was starting to set off his gobbledygook detector. The thing struck him as lacking that signature divine passivity, there was an air of purposefulness to it. In ‘Tales of Woe’, the gods did not take kindly to supplanters. There were measures in place to counteract and severely punish such manoeuvrings, not to say that some did not get away with it. “Isn’t this failed attempt grounds enough for them to intercept Daranirajido? I don’t see why they haven’t intervened already. He clearly has designs on the seat of one of their peers.”
A low growl escaped Luctari’s lips. “ENOUGH!” Her horns sparkled with glowing specks of brown and orange and red. “HOW DARE YOU question the wisdom of your betters?” Her tone was distinctly reproachful, yet somehow Aleem could sense the undercurrent of shame in her words. “The Tutelaries have everything under control.”
A dry laugh of absolute bewilderment escaped Aleem’s mouth. “You call this ‘under control’? Has staring so intently into the past left you short-sighted?”
“DO NOT TEST me, child,” Luctari said, glaring down at him. “YOU WILL WATCH YOUR WORDS!”
“And you will watch yours,” Aleem countered, letting his exasperation with her taint his voice. “Just how much of an idiot do you think I am? There were three others besides myself. All jrjis! Daranirajido is trying to infiltrate the Grand Coral and you know it! It’s really starting to seem like the gods are lending support to an instigator.”
“SILENCE!” Her words carried no true power behind them. The Consuetude had constrained her to such an extent that there were no other tools for intimidation beyond mere speech. Yet, Aleem got the distinct feeling that if he tried to speak now, the air would refuse to propagate his voice. He glared up at her. Aleem had understood Daranirajido’s real goal to be apotheosis all along. At the beginning of the timeline in ‘Tales of Woe’, Daranirajido was already a part of the pantheon. The game’s lore designated him the youngest Tutelar, tying his ascension to the Creckowan Disaster. The details of how exactly he’d attained godhood had never been exhaustively explored, so Aleem had always assumed that the godling’s biggest advantage had been the element of surprise. Now he was not so sure. Some of Zraazrondre’s ‘peers’ were clearly content with watching her crash and burn.
Luctari held Aleem’s unflinching gaze for a moment longer, then huffed. Her working unraveled. “The Iroluwan Star is only indirectly challenging the Tutelar,” she said heavily. “While he does not possess the standing to accost a god, his actual charge is against a fellow godling, and such things are acceptable. Nothing he has done so far is out of place. The Coral is fair game. If your master doesn’t understand this much, then she must be a fledgling with even less insight than I presumed.”
Aleem’s mind whirled. The Grand Coral was a name that the Vriorians attributed to their infinitesimal portion of the Hollow-pathways, a flowery descriptor for the metaphysical dimension. ‘Tales of Woe’ had described the Grand Coral as a truly divine-grade construct, an arcane contraption beyond compare. It’d been the work of several millennia, forged by an enterprising godling, named Zraazrondre, who had ascended to true godhood afterwards. She was the patron Tutelar of the Vriorian race. But Luctari had just now implied that there was another godling equally responsible for the construction of the Grand Coral. Aleem was baffled. Nothing like this had ever come up in the game. He was really being flung for a loop tonight.
Luctari barrelled on. “The Iroluwan Star has initiated an impleader, but his true claim is not against the goddess, Zraazrondre. She is enmeshed in this conflict merely because she jointly owns the property in dispute. And she is … barred from intervening until the primary dispute has been concluded.”
Bullshit technicalities. How was it even possible for a god to lack allies to such a horrendous extent? Aleem knew from the game what had happened to Zraazrondre after Daranirajido had claimed the Grand Coral for himself. She’d been stripped of her divine essence and had lost most of her power. Only the sturdiness of her deep-rooted connection to the Vriorian race had allowed her to infuse the residue of her divinity into an avatar. If her hands were tied while Daranirajido could hack away at the base of her power, it was no surprise that she’d lost so badly.
Luctari’s horns flitted through a mix of tame-coloured lights. Her eyes crinkled at the corners as the horn settled on a pink glow striped with red and orange. “I smell hubris in you, and perhaps in your master as well. I will give you counsel that only the wise would heed.” She drew out the silence, outwardly relishing it. “There is only one possible way you could help.” She spat out the last word in sardonic distaste as though the very idea of him ‘helping’ ruffled her sensibilities. She peered down at him, gathering herself up, as though to impart something truly life-changing. “Kill yourselves.”
Aleem reeled where he sat. “What?”
Her large tricorned head leaned forward, looming over him. “You and your fellow untethered ones—jrjis as you call them—are the weakest link in Coral. My construals tell me that there are very few of you within the range of the ritual circle. If you can kill yourself along with the other three jrjis, you will greatly diminish the avenues open to the Iroluwan Star.
“He has overcommitted himself to this endeavour. Ending your lives will serve to significantly delay the inevitable. And in the right lighting, it could even pass as a form of victory. Defiance, if you will. You are uniquely positioned to help your patron Tutelary. You can buy her time. And it might even be that—”
She spoke on, but Aleem had already stopped listening. Something else she’d said had given him pause. Hope pulsed in time with his heartbeat. “Construals,” he said. “You know where the ritual circle is.”
Her mouth clacked shut, and she watched him between pursed lips and horns that shun a midnight blue encased in yellow flickers of light. Her silence was damning.
What even did she stand to gain? He couldn’t wrap his head around it. In ‘Tales of Woe’, she’d barely had any reason to concern herself with this specific conflict, mostly because Daranirajido had pretty much won by then. Could it be that she’d actually had some vested interest before things went to shit? Again, that made little sense to Aleem. He was missing something vital. She’d been focused on this region, doing Dorothy alone knew what. Had she been expecting something to happen? “I wonder,” Aleem muttered, almost to himself, “about your role in all this.” In the silence of the hall, his voice carried easily. “I mean, your scheming is self-evident. I just don’t know what exactly it is you’re playing at.”
Luctari’s horns morphed into a familiar sunny yellow with streaks of pink. “I sense,” she said by way of evasion, “a loosening in the bonds of this ridiculous observance.”
Now that she drew his attention to it, Aleem could feel it too; a nigh imperceptible dwindling of the Consuetude’s weightiness. There was still so much he hadn’t pieced together. He could do that later. Luctari had given him a lot to think on, even if most of it was unactionable information. She clearly had no intentions of revealing her goals. The cosmic balance, as appraised by the Consuetude, was only barely tilted against Luctari now. That was probably as good an approximation of equilibrium as they were going to get. This meeting was on its last legs.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
She shot him a baleful smile, and for a very brief moment, Aleem’s anxiety spiked. Luctari had only failed—by the narrowest of margins—to prise information out of his mind. If she tried again, she would fail as before, but his feeble mortal mind might not survive the onslaught. His fears were only eased by the fact that he could see her image upon the altar dwindling as well, and somehow he could tell that the Consuetude would outlast her.
Final order of business: he needed them to part on amicable enough terms. As much as he considered Luctari a sharp, fast-spinning turbine blade that pureed everything it came in contact with, she was still a godling of knowledge with far more resources than he could shake a stick at. Staying on her good side would benefit him greatly. And he also needed to keep her busy; she was a meddler with power enough to frustrate him. Best to direct her at an actual problem.
“Envoy or not,” she said in a disquieting sing-song voice, wisps of orange light drifting off her horns, “you and your so-called master have greatly humiliated me today. You have bled me of virtue. I will make sure you regret this.”
Aleem’s gut twisted in consternation and disgruntlement, but he put on a brave face. “I am a pawn, Luctari. My existence is nothing if not regrettable. And speaking of regrets,” Aleem tilted his head as if in recollection, “my Master has a timely solution to your Meksish problem.”
Luctari’s dimming gaze sharpened at his words. The air around Aleem seemed to charge. His skin tingled. The Consuetude emitted a weak pulse, but Luctari’s focus did not let up.
In the game, She and the godling, Meksish, had been on either side of a cold, century-long feud. They’d both been player characters, so Aleem had been able to appreciate their conflict in its entirety. Mostly just more divine politics and addling mind games. If Luctari was brutally self-serving and untrustworthy, Meksish was a downright scumbag with a multitude of warcrimes to his name. It wasn’t very difficult to settle on whom to screw over. Still, this would be a mild loss for Meksish, but a very important discovery for Luctari.
“There are entrysts in your nest,” Aleem said, adopting an air of gravitas. This was heavy news to deliver. It felt right for a parting gift. “Among your scriveners, to be precise. Five of them privately venerate Oukmos.” Oukmos was the god of noble conquest, and Meksish was his representative.
Luctari was quiet for the entire duration of his pause, and for once, Aleem could not tell whether she was looking at him or spacing out. Her horns shifted from a pale green to brown to ash, then a wan reddish orange.
He continued speaking. Here came the gut punch. “Todus and Golorog are the core operatives. Follow their trail and you’ll have no difficulty finding the others.” In the game learning this herself had cut Luctari like a heated knife through the heart. Trust did not come easy to her, but Golorog was the one person she’d grown to rely on. “Look,” Aleem said in a tired voice, “I know how difficult—
The air prickled his skin, and it was suddenly much harder to breathe. Aleem’s eyes widened.
The Consuetude pulsed with far more force than he’d supposed it could.
Luctari’s horns shone a dizzying blur of red. “I TIRE OF THIS CHARADE.” Her pearly white eyes shone down on him, brows furrowed in a rictus of overlapping emotions. Her voice was booming and frighteningly quiet at the same time. “YOU WILL TELL ME HOW YOU CAME TO LEARN ANY OF THIS. YOU WILL TELL ME NOW.”
The Consuetude pulsed once more, but Luctari was suppressing it somehow. He hadn’t known she could do that. An uncomfortable weight descended on him.
“Wait,” Aleem gasped out. His lungs were burning up. “I’m trying to help you!”
“YOU ARE TRYING TO CONFOUND ME!” she growled. There was a strange obfuscating effect surrounding her great horned head. “I SMELL SABOTAGE. I SMELL LIES. YOU LURK BEHIND FOUL RITES AND DEAD CUSTOMS. YOU ARE HIDING SOMETHING.”
“Of course, I’m hiding something! I know things I shouldn’t. Just—” he traded deep, arduous breaths. “Just let me explain.”
The Consuetude groaned in his awareness. It weakened even further, but still strained against Luctari. Both entities were fading away quickly, but she seemed consigned to testing just who could outlast whom. He found her reaction here inexplicable.
“IF YOU WILL NOT ANSWER ME,” tendrils of red and grey light streamed off her visage in all directions, “THEN I WILL RETRIEVE WHAT I NEED DIRECTLY FROM YOUR MIND.”
Well, fuck that.
Time to cut his losses. Aleem pulled the magically sharpened air into his lungs. It hurt so much to do so. “I revoke—
“NO.”
Aleem’s consciousness stuttered and he swayed on the floor. He had not missed that glory-speak bullshit. He rallied quickly but found that the air refused to answer him, spurned him. He could neither pull it in nor propagate his voice through it.
Even as he choked, Aleem focused the entirety of his attention on the Consuetude. He needed it to collapse. To make off. To take Luctari away with it. She had strayed from the nigh equilibrium they’d attained. The cosmic balance was well and truly tilted against her.
“I WILL NOT—”
The Consuetude pulsed ever so weakly, but there was something more this time. Something equivocal.
Albatross of orderliness, preponderance of the ancient ways; the entire framework of Old Customs was leaving. It retracted itself, its name. And it weighed close to nothing in Aleem’s mind, so much so that his consciousness laboured to maintain its own perception of the framework. ‘Old’ could sometimes mean ‘discontinued’. It hummed a tune of departure. Of recanted hospitality. Of a rubber stretched to its limit.
Of backlash.
Luctari’s colossal, vaguened visage vanished in a crack of thunder. A feisty breeze whipped up around Aleem and the sparse incense in the immediate vicinity swirled in response. He panted where he sat, doubled over on the floor.
A sudden coolness and a temporal agitation enveloped his torso, each one fighting for sway. He embraced himself, shivering. Sharp pain spiked all over his body. It felt like it was coming from somewhere within his bones. Somewhere even deeper than that. He heaved in agony, not quite able to scream. In an instant, the pain abated.
ALERT
Minimal Soul Trauma sustained
Just as well.
He’d expected this much, but anticipating a blow didn’t make it hurt any less. He lowered himself to the floor so he could lie on his left side.
ALERT
You have acquired [Cartogram]
+1 to Cognition
It was the map Luctari had given him. It’d been a good idea to collect that at the very beginning of their talk.
ALERT
Temporary sub-Diminution withdrawn
Suspension of Extraneous Titles lifted
Cold comfort.
It was a shame what had happened there at the end. He’d hoped that he and Luctari could come to some kind of arrangement. Maybe they still could. She probably just needed time to process the stuff he dumped on her.
He’d never been one for gambling and tonight it showed. Revealing Meksish’s plants among her votaries had been the wrong call. In the game, she hadn’t lashed out, and so he’d just assumed she wouldn’t do so here either. The world wasn’t a ludic box. Perhaps he should have gone with something lighter. He rolled onto his back. That had been so terrifying.
[Trance] was still active, and it seemed to have gained some levels too.
The Skill [Trance] has levelled up!
[Trance] Level 7 (< - - - 4)
He took deep calming breaths as the pain eased even more. Aleem knew it was being muted by the Skill, and could almost sense its influence on his perception of pain. This particular pain, though, was a truly novel experience for him. Even clenched, his teeth clattered.
ALERT
You have gained the Skill: [Soul Perception]
+1 to Cognition
+1 to Will
After the dumpster fire his meeting with Luctari had been this was some much needed good news, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel even a smidgen of elation. He would examine the Skill later. He dismissed the notification and another took its place.
ALERT
You have earned the Title: Brimi Oers Morquim Sophi
+5% Cognition
+5% Pathos
+10% Will
+20% Ritual Tractability
+20% Resistance against Arcane Duress
ERROR¡
Seeded Directives Detected
PROCESSING
Aleem sighed. He’d learned that a Tutelar—a god—had implanted the Seeded Directives. Which meant that it wasn't directly tied to Daranirajido. The problem was that there were seemingly quite a few gods supporting Daranirajido’s little supplantation venture. If any one of them were responsible for the Seeded Directives, Aleem might be in some serious trouble.
The Last Effect of your Title is being Attuned
PLEASE WAIT
He blinked the notifications away, and sound slowly returned. All the screams from earlier, people crying and making throaty noises. It was from outside the chaplet. He vaguely noted some singing and what might have been the clanging of metal. Invocations, as they’d been presented in ‘Tales of Woe’, were of great consequence to the populace. There was a lot of ceremony that often accompanied the otherwise straightforward affair, which wasn’t so surprising. A fragment of divinity manifesting, even if momentarily, on this—or any—shit heap brought about a profuse number of benefits. An ‘after-party’ would traditionally have been prepared ahead of time, since unexpected visitations were rather rare. But now that one had occurred, an off the cuff base-wide celebration was a no-brainer.
Aleem just lay there and recovered his breath. The ceiling seemed to be doing a lazy spin over head. His clothes were drenched in sweat and some other more unsightly liquid; he felt so cold and so hot all at once. That feverishness was back. Less annoying than it’d been with the sub-diminution, but the night was still young. He shut his eyes to suppress a tight, tingling sensation on the bridge of his nose.
“Everything is just fine,” he whispered to no one at all. He felt so disheartened. He was in the middle of a divine conflict, and his side was already losing quite badly, so much so that Luctari had seemed to consider Daranirajido’s victory all but inevitable. Aleem wanted to review everything he’d just learned, but his mental fortitude had been pushed to its limit. This was far more pressure and unpleasantness than he was used to. Maybe it would be for the best to wait till he’d had a good night’s rest. He could reflect tomorrow. In the meanwhile, there was more work to be done.
Wulry Cosk, the player character he’d been hoping to find, was here in the second zone and in this very quadrant. Luctari had said that he was ‘interned’, which implied a prison; a stockade even. Aleem willed forth the Cartogram he’d gotten from Luctari, and it unfurled in his mind’s eye. Four different paths to Wulry stood out before him. The man’s location wasn’t too far from here. Fifteen minutes maybe. It would be criminally insane to not make use of the current base-wide pandemonium.
With careful movements, Aleem pulled himself back into a sitting position. Both the incense and the magical arras partitions had become completely transparent, but he could tell that the arras was still there with how oddly incurvate everything looked. For once, he could take in the entire hall without visual impediment. Akeshi’s altar was in the middle of the chaplet, and he noticed now that there were bodies strewn about. Not a lot, but enough to surprise him. He’d assumed that the chaplet was empty when he’d entered. The hall bore the rectangular dimensions of the apotheca’s front-room. Altars were arranged against the side walls, spaced evenly.
A dull migraine throbbed behind Aleem’s eyes, and he wanted nothing more than to sleep right where he sat, but he couldn’t stop now.
There was still so much to do. “Plenty on the farm,” he hummed to himself. “Sleep when I’m dead.”