After an uncomfortably quiet ride, Fomoria stepped out of the car, not bothering to open the door.
Thaul quickly exited after him.
“Sir Fomoria, please don’t get too far from me.”
“Mind that I am following you of my will.”
He had to hold back a sneer for the clearly frightened Cast.
“Of course, Sir Fomoria.”
It was hard not to notice the stares drawn to him, then the pointing, and finally, words.
He couldn’t understand any of it.
Thaul tried to explain to the people that Fomoria was just a person who lacked a body, but the busy street quickly emptied with fear.
“What were they calling me?”
“Nothing important.”
Fomoria was suddenly inches away from the Cast.
He craned his neck down as he went to ask again.
“What were they calling me?”
The Cast stepped back and gulped.
“Tr-translating to what you might know, they assumed you to be a malevolent black fire spirit. Now, there are certain cultural depths that are being lost, and the translation-”
“I was simply curious. I hope I don’t get such a reaction inside of the garden; I don’t want to disturb the people.”
“As an honored guest of-”
“Stop talking.”
Thaul sighed and guided him into the botanical garden.
It was large, filled with plants, and as promised, it was also a menagerie; he assumed that zoo was some translation.
But, Fomoria wasn’t exactly sure what he should’ve expected.
Most of the plants weren’t any different than he’d seen outside of here, and the animals were all mundane.
He expected that the great Machine God would have something more unique, and maybe she did, maybe this was nothing but a public relaxation spot.
“This is all rather boring. Is she done yet?”
“I will ask her.”
He pulled a rectangle from his jacket and it lit up.
Thaul noticed his stare.
“This is called a-”
“It’s a phone. I’ve encountered technology before, or at least equivalent approximations made by the Lich.
I imagine that thing reacts to touch, and you’re going to type out a message, which will be intercepted by a tower, or a series of them around this place.”
“Well, yes actually.”
He hunched his shoulders, his hopes of trying to gain any favor by explaining exotic tech to Fomoria died there.
With a zooping sound, the message was sent, and with a chime, a reply was given.
“She says to start heading back in half an hour. Is there anything else you would like to see? Or should I take us to a landmark?”
“Whatever will kill half an hour.”
As they were walking back to the car, Fomoria noticed a black cat with twin tails.
“Is that creature supposed to have been part of the menagerie?”
But the moment Thaul saw the cat, he attacked.
Fomoria devoured the wind bullets, and the cat hid behind him.
“Please move, that is not a normal cat.”
“Of course, I assumed you didn’t have a habit of killing cats without reason. But now I want to know why.”
“Blackship isn’t like the rest of Aarde, it doesn’t follow Aarde’s rules. That cat must be killed before it causes harm to befall humans.”
It leapt up, first to Fomoria’s shoulder, and then into his arms.
“I can hold it?”
“Just keep it still.”
“This cat is now mine, you will not harm it.”
“We don’t have time to-”
Fomoria outstretched his finger and fired two pierces at Thaul, knocking him to the ground.
“This is my cat now.”
It happily meowed.
As he laid on the ground, Thaul wasn’t sure if he was dead or not, but once he worked up the courage to open his eyes, he saw dents in his legs, but didn’t see Fomoria.
He floated up to the top of a tower with an exposed red and white frame.
The people on the platform below began to point, but they didn’t really know what he was.
He stared at the city in wonder.
If she said that hundreds of thousands lived there, he would believe it, if she said millions, he would believe it.
Nothing he saw in that garden was as interesting as this city, the scale of it, the buildings that scraped the sky, the hundreds on the sidewalks, the cars that drove here and there with almost no delay in their actions, no blockages, no arguments as a cart blocked another.
He watched as groups of children were walked from their homes to their schools, people making way for them, cars stopping when the light turned red so they could walk.
This place was unnatural in its order, its construction, but there was peace.
He didn’t understand it, how such a beautiful harmony could exist under the rule of the same god that made the Cast and their chaos, their brutality?
“Thank you for saving me. Now we must fight the right home to curse.”
“Oh, you can talk. What kind of curse?”
“Heat and cold, death, we’ll-”
Fomoria twisted the head off of the spirit beast.
It was one thing to hear a Cast say something was bad, but to hear directly from the creature that it intended to kill, that was different.
Fomoria did not throw away the body, whatever it was, he could hold it, and thus its flesh might hold the answer to his lack of physicality.
When he saw Thaul at the base of the tower with a group of Cast in blue uniforms, headed for the elevator, Fomoria went down to them.
“I am now ready to return to her, and I dealt with that cat.”
He held the two pieces of it up.
“Let me…”
Thaul seemed a bit queasy, so he turned away.
“I’ll have a bag brought for disposal.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“No, I’m keeping it. It could be a useful research material.”
“Still, a bag.”
“Would you have been so cowardly had you killed it? Splattered its blood across the garden? I killed it before it even realized what was happening.”
Fomoria laughed at him as he walked away to find a bag.
It felt wrong, but seeing the Cast upset made it feel right.
When they returned to the titular ship of Blackship, Jenny reformed out of the wall directly inside.
“I’m told you went off path.”
“Paths are used by those going places, I was simply sightseeing.”
She lightly laughed.
“What an odd manner with which you carry yourself.”
“What do you know about these two tailed cats? It could touch me, and its body can still be touched after death, so it is something passive.”
“The Nekomata are half-spirit, half-animal. You are also somewhere between life and death, though I do not know enough about your condition to confirm anything regarding why you and it could physically interact.”
Fomoria looked at Thaul, who was holding the bag with the Nekomata in it, and he wondered, why?
Why had he done that? Why had he left Thaul at all? Why didn’t he try speaking with it to try understanding its point of view at all?
“Is something wrong?”
“Are we ready to see Baba Yaga?”
“She should be done eating. I didn’t think you would want to see that happen.”
“Thank you.”
During the walk, Fomoria did not raise his head.
When they reached her cell, Baba Yaga seemed very satisfied with herself.
“My, what made the demon so upset?”
“Nothing important, Fae.”
He replied with a sneer and harshened tone.
She was somewhat taken aback by the sudden shift, but moved past it.
“Now, I will grant you the secret to using this world’s magic, as I taught to that bastard before you.”
It took a great deal of willpower to stop himself from asking details about how they met or her process for discovering how to do it.
“Firstly, breathe in, not with your lungs, but with your very being. Your soul is not of this world, but you can still interact with its mana. The goal is to bring some of the outer mana inside of yourself so it can reach a state half between your control and the control of this world’s god. Next, you use only your mind. Speaking their words and using their handsigns will shift the balance of power, and the mana will know that it doesn’t belong to you.
It will take some time before you-”
Fomoria held a fireball in his hand in an instant.
“How interesting. It took months for Xol to learn even that.”
“I have bent reality to my will before, and I will do it again.”
The fire grew larger and larger, then he threw it into the air.
Or, he tried.
The moment the spell left his hand, it instantly faded into mana and his body absorbed it once more.
“What is going wrong?”
Baba Yaga looked at him.
“Do it again.”
Fomoria tried, over and over, but any spell he used simply turned back into mana and was reabsorbed the instant it left him.
He even tried touch magic, but when he made contact it faded away without actually effecting what he made contact with.
“So, let me guess, you’ll give me the rest of what I need to learn magic if you get-”
“I do not make false deals. I gave you what I know, you are failing somewhere along the way.
Try again, feel the mana inside of you.”
She was deeply offended by his distrust.
“I don’t feel anything. The first time I felt something was when I was struck by Xol, the second was the coldness of the glass that makes up these cells, and the third was a twintailed cat.”
Baba Yaga sat cross legged in her prison.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, this has been very enlightening. What is Fomoria? He has similarities to other beings in mythology, but I have not found a direct answer.”
The crone looked at him intently as he continued trying to cast magic.
“I don’t know. He isn’t…”
A devilish smile came across her face.
“I WISH TO BE FREE OF THIS PRISON!”
Fomoria cocked his head to the side in confusion.
“That won’t work, Baba Yaga.”
“It is clear that you two have some understanding of what I am. I’d like an explanation.”
“She believes you are a Djinn. A wish granting being made from smokeless fire. I don’t believe she is entirely wrong, but, we don’t have any more Djinn on Aarde to compare you against.”
The crone grumbled wordlessly in her cell.
“If I was a Djinn, what could I do?”
“That would greatly depend on which kind you are. Tell me again, why are you here? You argued against and refused to bow to Aarde, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“I would assume you are a Shaitan. Rebellious sorts that whisper temptation into the good people.
Baba Yaga, I assumed you would know better; only a Marid can grant wishes.
He is clearly no water Djinn. Very likely, he isn’t a Djinn at all.”
“What a waste of time. I’ll just need to direct a team of Cast who can use magic.”
“I’ll set them up in a lab that functions on Aarde’s rules.”
“Thaul mentioned that things here don’t work as they do on Aarde, what exactly does that mean?”
“I power my city using Fae and Aarde’s own power, so the magic is somewhere between the two, unless I desire it to be one or the other.”
“Could it be that the reason I can’t use magic now is that things aren’t working by the same rules?”
“Perhaps. We will venture out of the city, beyond the barrier, just for a little bit.”
Jenny took control over a small drone, and Fomoria flew alongside it.
He hadn’t felt the change, but this area was cut off from the crossroads, and his rapid stepping between the worlds was gone, yet his natural flight remained.
They reached the border of her influence, marked by a mundane iron wall not more than foot tall.
“Once you step out there, you may try your magic. Assuming Aarde doesn’t see you and try to fling you into space again.”
“Aarde can’t see me, once I’m out of sight, I can’t be tracked by any means others have tried so far.”
“That does seem to make sense. I didn’t detect you being inside of that cell, though my power was able to latch onto you before you left the planet, so something clearly did detect you.”
Fomoria stepped through the wall, and a thought came to him.
“I could leave, right now. You would never be able to catch up.”
She didn’t have a face, she was a quad propeller smoothed box with a camera on it.
But, she didn’t move at all, nor did she voice any worries.
Fomoria tried to use his magic once more, but again, he absorbed back anything he tried to cast.
He angrily tried for an hour, the only sounds other than him was the quiet hum of the drone.
“I don’t think you can use magic.”
“NO, I JUST NEED TO KEEP TRYING.”
“I’ve been watching you, and I’ve compared it to all other known magical creatures. You lack flow, you cannot release what you take from others. What you drained from my system was enough to power my entire city, and the magical barrier for a month. Yet you can’t produce in effect on the world even a small spark.
Your other skill, the pierce, it isn’t even magic as I or any other I’ve seen understands it.”
He screamed, trying to influence the world in the slightest way.
But the grass was only moved by a gentle breeze.
Fomoria fell to his knees.
“I was a master, I knew more than people three times my age, now I… I don’t know.”
“There is no need to be dramatic. That piece implies you simply have some other magical system that must be worked out.”
“All I have now are my sigils, and I hardly know any of them.”
“Oh, you can use sigils? Well, that changes everything. I have a database of sigils.”
“Huh?”
He was stunned by his own stupidity.
Maybe they really were cut off, they trained one another and maintained an unbroken line without her influence.
But it would make more sense that she was the one that stored that knowledge.
“I… I can access this knowledge?”
“Once my Cast are cured and immunized, you may be granted limited reading privileges. But in time, I believe you could earn the right to the full library.”
“Then… I suppose we should go back.”
“I am aware that the mental health resources of this world are low, mental illness is rampant, but have you ever received help for the sudden, extreme mood swings you are experiencing? Or are those new?”
“I’m a passionate person.”
“We may speak about that in depth another day. Come back inside of the wall, then I will show you something before you return.”
He did as asked and she flew out of the barrier herself.
In an instant, the ground erupted and destroyed the drone along with half a mile of land.
Yet mere feet away, the small mundane fence was entirely unharmed, not a blade of grass behind it was disturbed.
A second drone, one sent in advance, arrived.
“Aarde will not let a single piece of me outside of this place, so you see why I need my Cast, and now, why I need you. In here, I am a god, but out there I am blind, deaf, reduced to nothing but a name.”
“Why doesn’t he kill your Cast then?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps being a prime race, he is limited in how he handles them, perhaps he would rather that they exist as an adversary for his own peoples. Before my Cast, things were no better than they are now, the thousand kingdoms ranging from single cities to continent spanning empires clashed constantly, and each race was put apart, genocides made trips through some countries impossible for certain people.”
“A non-sequitur, you’re justifying your own evil empire.”
“Evil is a human concept, but morally, if my end goal was to destroy these squabbling kingdoms, to put all of this world under a single banner, what evil would be beyond the good that would one day bloom from it?
Without slavery, we would be far behind the curve, we wouldn’t have been able to destroy the others as we had, forcing them to accept all races as being people.”
Her words stung at him.
He would like to say she’s wrong, that she went too far, but if her words were true, if she did have good intentions, how much different were they?
Then he thought more.
“That’s bullshit. You intended to wipe out all other intelligent life and replace them with your Cast.”
“Ah. Well, the good would still outweigh the evil.”
Her nonchalance stunned him.
She knew how to sound like she was something else, but ultimately, he couldn’t see her as anything but a cold machine; he was thinking of someone else, but they were clouded in his memories.
“Don’t hide behind what you hope for. Whatever evil I did, I did not pretend it wasn’t what it was. You claim some kind of anti-racist sentiment, but in the end you put your own Cast as a master race above all others. Whatever mixed bags the kingdoms and empires were, yours was wholly evil.”
“Well, it’s time to return to my city and fix those Cast, so maybe the new empire will be kinder, more in line with what you were making.”
He hoped it to be true, but in his mind, this was temporary, much like Aarde she would turn into a threat to be dealt with afterwards.