Quest ‘Answer’ Complete! Reward - 22,000xp
Level Up! You are now level [50] HP + 0 MP + 55 MIND + 1
Milestone Reached!
Specialisation Available!
Lieze was confused. Then she wasn’t. She wanted to pretend like she understood everything - that what Sigmund was telling her made the slightest inkling of sense. She didn’t want to be in that space of her adolescence anymore, relying on the wisdom of others to compensate for her own lack of understanding.
The projection of Sigmund continued regardless of her feelings on the matter. “You were acquainted with the bastard, I take it.” He began, “The cursed child.”
Lieze wasn’t sure of his meaning at first. In the next moment, a name left her lips, “Furainé.”
“A Sovereign name. Noble. Fitting.” The hazy, incandescent image flickered for a brief instant, “She was mothered by magic. Weaned by the cosmos. She is Empyrean-borne, but tragically mortal. Even so, the fabled blood of her guardian runs thick, and a child will always strive to return to their mother’s side.”
Lieze folded her arms, “She’s dead.”
“Unworthy, then. Just as we predicted.” Sigmund replied, “But you carry her torch.”
“Unworthy…” She repeated the term, feeling once more as if she was being swept up in some grand, celestial game, “For what? Just once, I would like to discover something without being left with more questions than answers.”
“You desire clarity.” Sigmund mulled over her statement with a cloudy gaze, “Then you will have it. But first, you must focus. You must commune with the infinite expanse of our existence, and breathe life into the world through our influence.”
He was asking for true communion, Lieze realised. Not the sort enjoyed by doddering church-goers, but the type which lit the fire of magic. He was asking Lieze to commit to him in much the same way she would plead for power from the very Gods. Was that the reason the Sages had disappeared from the world? Had they ascended to the heavens?
Lieze felt her hand being squeezed by Drayya’s. She said nothing, but her expression was resolute, attempting to push the girl forward in her own way. She was certain, Lieze could tell, that the answer to their troubles was awaiting them on the other side of that communion.
The two of them closed their eyes to focus, but found themselves wondering exactly what it was they were supposed to be focusing on. Communion was sacred, understood vaguely and practised with impunity, but the presence of the Gods was always felt. Such was the nature of faith. Sigmund was asking the impossible of them - to imagine a God that had yet to exist, or one whose influence was so meagre that their power was unfelt by mortal minds.
“Space.” Sigmund offered a single word in guidance, “The void. The celestial fabric. Acquaint yourselves with the terror of infinity, and allow your minds to conjoin with the cosmos. A presence lingers within its seams, beyond the realm of divinity and faith. That is where you shall find the Light in Chains.”
His words were incomprehensible. Esoteric. But Lieze could feel the sickening, iron taste of blood in her mouth as she concentrated. When she breathed in, lightning struck her lungs, and as she exhaled, the room around her dismantled to reveal a tapestry of faraway stars. She could no longer feel her feet on the ground, or indeed much of anything at all. Even Drayya’s presence began to disintegrate before long, until she was left with an amateurish, imperfect facsimile of nothingness.
When Lieze opened her eyes, she was somewhere else. It was a different space from the beacon chamber - probably from the world as she understood it. No matter how fiercely she clenched her eyes, there was only glaring whiteness for miles around. She stared at her hands, half-expecting to see them gone, but was surprised to find herself as physical as ever. Drayya was nearby as well, but her gaze was focused elsewhere, craning up to the distant un-sky.
“What…” She blinked, “What is that…?”
Her tone inflicted Lieze with the first inkling of fright she’d felt in years. Suddenly, she wanted to curl up into a ball on the ground and fend off the light with her thoughts. There was something grand and terrifying about that space which left her feeling exposed beyond measure. With trepidation, she followed Drayya’s line of sight towards the distance.
There, suspended by miles-wide chains extending into the hazy unknown, was a blinding orb of sunlight which somehow managed to glow despite camouflaging into the background. Lieze’s brain ached at the sight of it, as if warning her to yank her eyes away before she did serious damage to her psyche.
Four chains, she noticed, before her reality faded back to the sanctity of the tower’s hidden cellar. The second sun was being held in place by four enormous chain links, approaching from asymmetrical angles that seemed to imply the existence of others which had since been removed or broken. She felt like she had beheld something not entirely of her own world - something forbidden and unknowable.
“Ugh…” Drayya rubbed her eyes with both hands, “I’m going to go blind at this rate…”
Sigmund’s half-materialised form hovered over them like a judge ready to deliver his verdict. “Now you have glimpsed the hidden truth of our world.” he said, “Having abandoned our mortality, we - those who were once called ‘Sages’ - forced our way into the realm of divinity, and in doing so, exerted our will upon the heavens to create the phenomenon you know as the Light in Chains.”
Stolen story; please report.
Lieze’s next question was obvious. “So, what is it?” she asked.
“A weapon.” The old wizard lowered his head in thought before continuing, “No - ‘plague’ may be a better descriptor. A celestial cancer quarantined by the Gods in an effort to contain its potential. Their one and only fear.”
Lieze found herself stunned by the revelation. She couldn’t imagine something as mundane as a ‘plague’ posing any threat to the Gods. She realised it then - that the Sages, despite their supposed obsession with theology, held no love for the deities they coveted. They may very well have been struggling against the heavens, striving for a reality that wasn’t all too dissimilar to Lieze’s own idea of paradise.
“...Where did it come from?” She asked with fear in her tone - true fear. Fear of the distant unknown and the truths of the universe which confounded the Gods themselves.
“Where.” Sigmund repeated the word, and it lost all meaning, “From the darkness. From the formless twilight of creation before all things and concepts. Before Gods and matter and the advent of consciousness. There is no ‘where’, only ‘when’ - and that ‘when’ must be extended to include an impossible time - before time, even. And since that primordial age, the Light-in-Chains has been dormant. Slumbering. And once it awakens…”
There was a pause.
“...No man can know of a future outside of a future. A realm beyond realms, consumed and yet so rampant with destiny. But for the mortal and the immortal, it will be quick. They - I - will not ‘be’, and the ‘was’ will cease to exist. This is enlightenment and truth. This is the grand conclusion, and future, of reality.”
Lieze was stepping into something so far out of her league that most of Sigmund’s ramble flew right over her head. She could only understand the gravity of her ambitions through concepts that her pitiful human mind was never created to fully understand. But at least one question lingered still. “What do I have to do with it?” She asked.
“The Gods tamper. They flail and compete and struggle.” The projection flickered again, “Their ‘strength’ is freedom. Faith. But they do not understand the depth of their potential, for those secrets are reserved in a realm even higher than the heavens. The unattainable ‘Ur’. Even the Light-in-Chains holds no sway over that true beginning, where fate clicks and forbids and erases as it pleases. The Scions are to be the heroes of that will, and that is why they - and only they - can strike the iron that will enfire our souls until naught but ash remains.”
Lieze didn’t understand. She was not bothered about admitting that she did not understand.
But the solution had been presented to her. The miracle she’d been seeking was real and attainable, not some faraway dream. A ‘weapon’ designed to oppose the very Gods - for lack of spiritual enlightenment, it was destined to be her only solution. She raised her head towards the projection, parting her lips but struggling to find a response that obscured her giddiness.
“How can I release it?” She realised, for the first time in over a decade, that she was pleading with him. Across the chaotic abyss of slaughter and subjugation, she had never lowered herself to such a pitiful state. But Sigmund unravelled the mysteries freely and without restraint. She couldn’t pass up the opportunity to learn as much as possible from him.
“The Scions.” Came his reply, “Three have perished. Four remain.”
Four Scions. Four chains. In an instant, Lieze understood her objective. She nodded for her own sake before replying. “Each represents a God. Their will. Their influence over the world. When only one remains, a new patron is chosen to rule. But as the Scions perish, their Sovereigns weaken, and their power to influence the state of things is compromised.”
Sigmund didn’t so much as nod, but an imperceptible twitch on his statuesque face told Lieze that she’d managed to impress him somewhat. “Intelligent.” he began, “We estimated that 5,000 years would be allowed to pass before a suitable candidate would appear, capable of following the ephemeral trail of our influence to one of the beacon chambers.”
His gaze managed to pierce straight through Lieze, right into the depths of her soul. She could tell that the projection was nothing more than a suggestion of who Sigmund once was. Behind the veil of magic, she could only wonder as to what his true form might have looked like.
“The alchemist responsible for your creation was a formidable scholar.” He continued, “-A likely candidate for the Sages, had we delayed our ascension. Your birth marked a miraculous twist of fate. It could be said that you were destined to follow this path from the very beginning.”
He was speaking of Sokalar. For all his absence and abuse, Lieze couldn’t deny that she wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for him. It was ironic, she thought, to engineer the very tool that would one day spell your own demise. Sigmund had said so himself - she was artificial. A product of invasive science. But only someone raised to become as ruthless as apathetic as herself could ever hope to take a stand against the Gods themselves.
She couldn’t help but wonder. Her next question came out of its own accord, and would be satisfied with nothing less than a truthful answer, “If the Gods are killed… if the afterlife itself is destroyed, then what awaits us beyond the veil of death?”
“The void.” Sigmund replied instantly, “Nothingness.”
She couldn’t comprehend it. She knew it wasn’t possible, to see nothing, to hear nothing, to feel nothing. Her brain attempted to rationalise the concept, but there wasn’t a single thread of logic that could come close. But wasn’t that promise - that so-called ‘void’ - exactly what she had been seeking this whole time?
“...And you?” Lieze continued, “At the conclusion of time and space, what will the supposedly ‘ascended’ Sages turn their collective gaze towards?”
“Oblivion has been our goal from the very beginning.” He replied, “A faceless, formless world devoid of identity, conflict, emotion, expression… in other words, the only world where all walks of life can be considered ‘equal’, trapped in the sombre embrace of eternity.”
“That doesn’t sound too different from the Order’s beliefs.”
“-But so long as the consciousness endures, those who are ‘different’, even by a hair’s breadth, are fundamentally unequal. Even as our goals align, you cannot resist the urge to parse the differences in our ideologies.”
Togetherness in nothingness. It sounded absurd, but Lieze had never encountered someone outside of her own field who agreed with the idea of a greater peace in death. The revelations uncovered by her exhaustive research into the nature of the Scions damaged her faith beyond repair, but Sigmund’s words pushed her to crystallise what remained of it into something cohesive and attainable. Their goals were aligned in the most convenient way possible. She had encountered a very rare and powerful ally.
“Our time is at an end.” Sigmund’s hazy image was beginning to falter with increasing frequency, “The mana required to retain this connection is enormous. We risk damaging the beacon’s foci if we converse for much longer.”
“Hm…” Drayya wore a frown as she crossed her arms, “If you and the other Sages ascended to the heavens, why can’t you do any of the heavy lifting yourself?”
“The Gods’ influence on this world is confined to observation and bestowals of power, where appropriate.” Sigmund replied, “Only when its champion is victorious can a God truly don the mantle of divinity. We are no more than spectators and manipulators otherwise.”
The sound of glass shattering caused Lieze and Drayya to duck down. Fragments of shining, crystalline foci danced through the air like raindrops. Sigmund’s projection disappeared without missing a beat, the immaculate mechanism maintaining his image having been destroyed beyond use.
“Damn it…” Lieze cursed, “I wanted to ask more questions.”
Saying that, she was more than satisfied with what she’d discovered. It was more than a reason to struggle on. It was a solution. A tangible conclusion to the saga of her conquest. A weight like no other had been lifted from her shoulders, and for the first time in a month, she felt truly free.