Isha fell into a smoother rhythm once they moved on from discussing the Inavarian Empire’s broader history and its relationship with magic —or ‘weaving’, as the Ancient called it. The pain on the ethereal woman’s features didn’t fade, exactly, but it changed. Like shedding an old wound for a fresher one.
For a moment, Talia caught herself wondering what it must be like, to have centuries, millennia of memories. Suddenly, the rigid rules around trauma made a lot more sense. As did the strange dichotomy around psionics.
How big can a secret get in a thousand years? How important does sapient connection become?
“Talia? You feel distracted. Do you need time to process?” Isha asked, cutting off mid-sentence.
“Er—no, I just got caught up in my thoughts,” Talia said with a shake of her head and a sheepish smile, “Sorry. Lots to take in, you know?”
The horned woman nodded regally, her crimson hair catching in the light breeze.
“I can only imagine, I’m afraid. For me, it’s more a matter of deciding what is important and what isn’t. I assume I’ve made references that will lead to more questions, but that’s the nature of the beast, I’m afraid. Luckily, we have about as much time as your mind can handle.”
Talia cocked her head and picked up her pen, suddenly intrigued about something altogether different.
“How does that work, by the way? I know— I mean, it feels like— Ugh. We’ve been here a while, right? Is there…time magic?”
Isha paused as if realizing she’d forgotten something important before shaking her head.
“Right. I suppose it must seem like that to you,” she muttered, “How do I explain this… Right now, we are being…simulated. Actually, how about this? What are you, fundamentally speaking?”
In an instant, Talia was transported back to her childhood classroom, complete with overly enthusiastic history teacher. It was somewhat disconcerting, just how easily the Ancient slipped into the role. The knowing look, the poised countenance, the leading questions.
Only difference this time is that I’m actually being taught something important. Some might even say fascinating.
Talia almost chuckled as she considered just what Callisto might give to be in her place.
An arm and a leg —hells, both legs, both arms and a few ribs, while she’s at it, most likely.
As the intrusive thought flitted away as fast as it had come, Talia pondered what Isha was asking. Luckily, biology, for all her disinterest in history, was much more interesting as a subject.
“Fundamentally? A collection of muscles, bones, nerves, and fat arranged in just the right way that it all moves and works together,” Talia rattled off.
As soon as she had, she winced, realizing that her answer was likely not what Isha was looking for. Her suspicion was confirmed when Isha frowned.
“Perhaps I was too vague. You’re right, of course, but you’ve also missed the point,” Isha allowed, raising a hand, palm up.
In it, as if it had been there the whole time, stood a creature. It was small and rat-like in both shape and stature, but without fur and sporting a pair of antennae on its smooth, burnt-orange coloured skull.
“This is an animal, a vurat, I believe the alvs called them. A pest. And yet it fits the description you gave me, does it not? Now, let me rephrase my question. What separates you from this creature?”
Talia glanced at the odd little beast as it chittered and squirmed placidly atop the Ancient’s palm, showing no signs of fear or confusion as a real animal might. A childish part of her almost snarked that she was real and the vurat was obviously just a conjured…thing. Instead, Talia went for the answer she was being guided towards.
“I’m sapient. I have a will and higher reasoning,” she said slowly, not sure what that had to do with her original question.
Isha graced her with a small smile, lowering her hand as the vurat disintegrated into a cloud of particles.
“Exactly. Now, what you don’t know is that sapience is a detectable trait, one you can observe with the right tools. It’s called Anima because, quite predictably, it is the animating force in all beings. A sort of psionic signature unique to each individual, present in much higher quantities in sapient beings. Not only detectable, but also malleable, alterable, and most importantly storable.”
Talia frowned, putting together the pieces in her head.
The soul. She’s talking about the soul.
And if it could be altered and stored, then that meant…
“You’re changing my soul?!”
If Talia had been asked if she believed in that stuff even a few minutes prior, she’d have been skeptical. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Isha had no reason to lie to her after all. But that wasn’t what stuck with her.
It was one thing to be skeptical about the existence of some other motive force. It was another thing altogether to be told by a credible source that not only did said force exist, but that yours was being deliberately altered.
Isha was quick to raise her hands.
“No, you misunderstand. If I were to truly tamper with your Anima, I guarantee you would feel it. It would be… unmistakable. The most I’ve done is coax it into restoring some of the more extensive damage to your psyche,” the Ancient reassured, “What’s important to note here, is that in the Material, your Anima is limited by your biological limits. Here, in the liminal between the Material and the Astral, those limits don’t exist. Were I to accelerate your perception of time in the real, your brain would overheat in the span of hours. And that’s if you were lucky. So, I took ‘you’ out of it. And just like that, a world of possibilities opens up to you.”
Talia squinted suspiciously at the Ancient.
“‘Just like that’? Sounds too good to be true. If that was the case, why don’t —didn’t— all of your people use it all the time? Why even live life when you have infinite—”
Talia stopped short as she realized her mistake, pulling another smile to Isha’s lips.
“Inavarians already have infinite time at their disposal, barring rare unforeseen issues. But you’re right, liminal spaces are incredibly useful for a variety of things. However, they’re costly to maintain, usually requiring a skilled wea— mage in order to maintain them for any real length of time, or barring that, wildly complex runescript and an adjutant like Byron to manage the variables.”
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Talia nodded slowly, her thoughts bubbling over the thought of runes that could manipulate a being’s soul.
So much to learn, and all the time in the world to learn it.
“It’s also risky to maintain for any prolonged period. After a few Material days…problems start occurring. But that’s neither here nor there. If you wish to learn more about psionic theory, we can discuss that later,” Isha explained offhandedly, “For now, why don’t I finish telling you my —and your— history on Sach’elcor, and then we can discuss next steps? Afterward, we can derail into tangents all we want.”
Talia opened her mouth to protest but snapped it shut with a click. Isha gave her a knowing look before settling back into her rhythm.
“It happened a few hundred years after we’d first arrived. There were six of us. Wyll, Oryx, Carmille, Eithan, Ferrius and me. We each had our own projects, our own goals to achieve. Project Terra-II, the creation of your…subspecies I suppose I’d call it, was but one of them. My magnum opus, if you will. Oryx and Carmille had been working on something related, but different. Wyll was our mission commander, and Eithan and Ferrius…they were on leave. This? This was a vacation from the front for them. A century or two to get their heads on straight before heading back out to fight,” Isha recounted sadly, her hand playing with the light of the panel on the table, drawing up a miniature city, with what looked like an immense tree in the centre, wrapped around a tower. Swirling edifices crept across the landscape of a valley like great big metal roots, meshing smoothly from building to building.
Talia stared, unable to shake the thought that it was somehow familiar.
“We left the Wards to administer themselves, as is customary, intervening only to provide mediation and information. And, of course, to monitor uplift protocols. The gift of magic, as you call it. Near the end, I think about a quarter of the population had reached a self-sustaining point. The rest required careful monitoring and tweaking of their swarm nodes, something that is only possible on a large scale with a proper psi-link amplifier.”
Talia raised a hand to stop her, getting lost in the unknown terminology.
“Sorry I just— when I spoke to the Matriarch, she said I was broken. That she could fix me. She brought me into a liminal space that looked nothing like this, help me…change a bunch of runes. There was a voice, in my head, speaking your language and I—” Talia trailed off, not quite sure what she was getting at.
“You want to know about uplifting. Right, sorry. As I said, there’s a lot to parse. Give me a moment to think about how to explain this,” Isha said, setting her chin on her palm and staring at the purple outline of the city.
“Ok. Every living being has a set of instructions within them. Smaller than the eye can see. That’s your genome. It is, in essence, what tells your body that it is a body. Think of it like the plans for a building, with each block set out exactly where it should go. With me so far?”
Talia nodded, jotting down a few notes before looking up.
“What we do to make sapients arca compatible involves adding to that set of instructions, like adding another floor to a building, but not really. Closer to adding pipes in the walls, or adding in ventilation shafts,” Isha continued, shaking her uncertainly, “To accomplish that, most use House Ordis Swarm Nodes. Each node is composed of trillions of fragments, smaller than the eye can see. Tiny, metal machines more complex than you can imagine, all working in concert within your body to make it…more.”
For some reason, the Ancient’s wording brought to mind a hive of minuscule insects tunnelling through Talia’s flesh. She shuddered at the thought, drawing a smirk from Isha.
“Believe it or not, they’ve been within you your entire life, helping you,” she teased before the smile fell, “Or at least they should have been. Now…well. Suffice it to say that on Sach’elcor we used a more experimental branch of the technology. The original versions are much more cumbersome to use, relying on drastic modifications to their host bodies in order to fuel themselves. Our version relied —relies— on Gates, arca, and runescript rather than electrical impulses and heat. Which in many ways is what brought about our doom, though I suppose if it hadn’t been the case, the Matriarch never could have helped you, and you likely wouldn’t be here.”
“So I have tiny metal pieces inside me, changing the fabric of my being?” Talia drawled skeptically.
Isha grimaced, shaking her head from side to side.
“Well, not exactly. They are metallic. In a way. They’re also…alive, in a way. A mesh between the two. Think of them like a set of countless tiny ‘artefacts’ inscribed into bacteria, that require both a host and a source of arca to live.”
“Reggie always said that putting runescript onto living beings is a Bad idea,” Talia protested, “Said it always ended with, uh, gruesome results. Fucks with the geometry, to have so much flex in the base material.”
Isha winced and shook her head.
“Runic tattoos are outdated, were outdated even in my heyday. With the right conceptual matrices they can work well, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Think of Ordis Scylla Swarm Nodes, or just OSSNs, as a modular enchantment. Each nanocyte —the individual piece of a swarm— acts as a single rune, rearranging and reforming with others on a tiny scale to produce different effects.”
Talia still wasn’t convinced, marking down a series of question marks in her journal next to her rushed notes.
“Sounds like a good recipe for an explosion, but you’d know better than me, I guess…”
Isha tsked, massaging the bridge of her nose.
“I’m simplifying, obviously. I’ll give you some of the literature that I can share so you can learn the fundamentals,” she dismissed, “Or I suppose re-learn the fundamentals. What’s important to know is that while a properly integrated OSSN can somewhat function on its own, they were always meant to function as part of a collective, connected to an adjutant to manage and guide their activities.”
“This…” Talia waved her hand in a circle, looking for the word, “Psi-link. Like the crescians’ web, but different.”
“Oh, by the empress, completely different. We won’t even get into the miracle of those arachnids now. It wasn’t even my domain of study, but Ferrius certainly talked my ear off about it enough,” Isha complained, seeming to realize mid-sentence that her…friend —Talia wasn’t all that clear on their relationship— was dead. Isha slumped, idly running her fingers across the table, seeming lost in thought.
Talia gave the older woman a moment to collect herself before prompting her for more.
“So how does this all play into the end of the world?”
Isha looked up, the glaze leaving her otherworldly eyes.
“For starters, the uplift procedure was never completed. We never had the time. So the OSSNs for your whole civilization slowly going rampant stuck between two phases, which is likely the root cause for all sorts of issues you’re facing—”
“Like mage-madness?” Talia interrupted.
“I don’t have all the data,” Isha waffled, “But I don’t see any other culprit. That’s not even the biggest problem, however. The Swarm Nodes run on arca, and arca comes out of Gates, which are powered by your ‘arcano-suns’. No more suns? No more Gates. Which means no more arca, and then people start dying as the OSSN begins malfunctioning in earnest.”
Talia sat back in her chair, staring at the Ancient.
That’s so… So…stupid. Why in the hells would they design it like that?
Any way she looked at it, the dependency on mana was a ridiculous oversight. Maybe there was more to it than she could understand, but it seemed so incredibly strange to her that they would depend on one lynchpin when the lives of so many were at stake.
“I can feel your confusion,” Isha murmured, “You have to understand, we had redundancies. Safeguard upon safeguard to make sure situations like this don’t happen. Damnit, the fus— arcano-suns themselves were a safeguard. They failed. The Scream was, I think, the single most devastating daemon attack we’ve ever experienced. At this point, I am almost certain it ended an empire that spanned nearly a quarter of the known galaxy at its peak. All in one moment. And I don’t even think we, on Sach’elcor, were anywhere near its true target. To even suggest that something of this magnitude could occur is —was— unthinkable.”
Talia gave Isha a wooden stare.
“But it happened. And now we’re the ones to suffer for your mistakes.”
The Ancient slowly sat up ramrod straight, looming over Talia like the god so many claimed she was. Jade and citrine eyes pierced down at her with the weight of eons behind them.
In them, Talia saw only guilt.
“Yes. It did. And you have. But now, I have a chance to make it right,” Isha said solemnly.
Talia held the older woman’s gaze, unsure where the sudden surge of defiance and anger had come from. She dug around for any hint of…she didn’t know what she was looking for exactly, but she found it.
“We can make it right,” Talia corrected.
“What?”
“That’s why you’re helping me, right? Telling me all this? You need me to do something you can’t, for whatever reason.”
Isha’s thin brows rose up to meet the base of her horns.
“Yes.”
“And you’ll teach me?” Talia pressed, “Train me? Because so far, I’ve been groping around in the dark, resting my hopes on something that may not even work.”
The Ancient’s lips thinned to a predatory line.
“Oh, Talia, when I’m done with you, you’ll be a force to be reckoned with.”
Talia matched her smile with a grin of her own.
Power, knowledge, understanding. All at my fingertips.
“Good. I like the sound of that. Now tell me how you fucked up, and then we can get on with fixing it.”
Isha’s smirk grew lopsided, and her brow rose even higher.
“Oh, think I’m going to like you, girl. I think we’ll get along just fine.”