Maturation 7

October 4th, 2032.

The fiasco of what those bastards had done and revealed had escalated the political shitstorm coming Caudalann’s way.

My testimony, and study of the dagger he had attempted to assault me with had triggered an outrage from the taifa. Apparently attacking a hero, and revealing the truth of how the Chantry operated had done a lot to damage their standing.

Apparently, there was a growing debate in the Grand Koza to start limiting the influence of the Chantry. Or more firmly… to start limiting the influence of Yúlukal as a whole. Which said a lot about how much the revelation about them had enraged the populace.

Breaking loyalty was dangerous for a witch of the spark, of the Red. It doused their inner flame, the very heart of their magic. It costs them to break their loyalties, damaging their power. It was why Dinah was being careful with her own loyalties, she was loyal to her parents, her clan, and her people.

Her parents were in turn loyal to King Asriel, who in turn owed loyalty to the Pale King. A nested set of bonds and connections that was hard to maneuver around for most witches.

Which was why Dinah hadn't come with us on our expedition to some ancient ruins, she was working the great game, on advocating for her… faction of sorts. Turns out she's been building up a lot of goodwill as a herald, helping out her fellow nobles and citizens as a whole. The lower house was mostly taking her side, and the upper house was more evenly split.

She was using the outrage to her advantage, shaping the wave of politics towards her own goals.

A tad terrifying actually.

So Dinah was busy ripping into the Chantry and keeping an eye on her grandmother. The expedition was a small one, it was me, Althea and Hakim with Ultima as our escort.

Reyna was going recruiting, as she made use of the new goodwill towards her species. She wanted a safe place for her kind to raise chicks, and the active protection of the taifa was it. Spite against the Chantry had only led to more protections for griffins, which was fantastic.

The Labyrinth of Azoth was far grander than I had ever imagined, and I stared at the structure with awe and trepidation.

It was an enormous tower of stone rising from the boiling sea, solid granite which was said to be infused with inchoate crystallized magic, making it almost impervious to harm and age. It was a structure of layered overlapping triangles and hexagonal voids. I'd describe it as a lattice of unusual geometry and patterns forming bridges and passages leading deep into the earth.

Along the walls were carvings, some of them hundreds of feet in length or height or width. The tower was literally raised from the sea, with no land around it for miles.

“Woah…” I pulled at the collar of my shirt, standing on one of the bridges crossing the entire span of the circular tower.

“Is this what I think it is?” Althea was huddling up next to me, keeping a steady stand on my shoulder. “Is this a Monolith ruin?

“It is,” Ultima answered with a mysterious note of unease. “The wonders of the ancients sure are something aren't they?”

“Monolith, I haven't found much on them at the local libraries. Only that they’re an ancient people, and long gone.”

“We don't know much at all,” Hakim butted in with a subdued excitement. “All we know is the stories and the legends of those who came after, the Generation of Death.”

Generation of Death is a very ominous set of words.

“The Monolith was said to be an ancient and powerful civilization, one that spanned the known world and beyond,” Ultima explained as she led us down. “Bellicose conquerors with a sophisticated understanding and working of the craft. Their empire lasted for two thousand years and yet… we know nothing about them.”

“How?” I asked as we graduated downwards from bridge to bridge within the lattice.

“People forgot how to write,” Hakim added as he carefully moved to my left. “My mother said there was a sudden collapse so drastic it set witches back by thousands of years. From advanced civilizations back to scattered tribes and city-states. We have records before and after the Monolith, but none during. Out of thirteen thousand five hundred years of civilization, two thousand years of it is just… dark.”

“Human civilization only goes back about six thousand or seven thousand years…” I murmured aloud, unnerved by that time gulf.

In that same time period, humans had gone from early city-states using copper and bronze to continent spanning civilization capable of traversing the heavens.

Civilization was twice as old in this world, and had suffered a reset so hard it allowed my world to catch up. What could witches as a whole have accomplished with six thousand years worth of development?

I saw what they were capable of here and now, and I knew there were greater powers capable of shaping worlds and nations. The Meretsegger is a god of death, an incarnation of change and endings.

What else is out there, hidden away in the gaps?

“I thought a place like this would be a good one to explore, the Labyrinth of Azoth shows us how far we have yet to go.” Ultima said as she carefully weaved magic around us to shine a light.

Well, a tower two kilometers deep and half a kilometer wide was certainly a good way to make a girl feel small.

There was a soft ripple in the void, at the edge of my growing perception.

“Move!” I commanded in an instant, kicking off the ground with full force.

I moved fifty feet in a single bound, as did the rest of the gang as a plasma beam struck where we had been standing. The air crashed together where numerous rigids had slid into existence, flywheels surrounded by rings with limbs and tools attached to them.

Why the hell are robots attacking us?!

I snarled as I fell into the pattern of void, shaping and twisting it into raw plates of force. Like two invisible hands scything towards a target.

A rigid exploded as its outer layers were crushed, the internal flywheel shattering apart. I flinched.

Had I just attacked a person or…?

“Blaster flywheels, dangerous sentient rigids,” Ultimate explained. “You’re fine.”

I almost relaxed… until I heard the sound echoing across the ruins.

“How tough are the bridges?” I asked fearfully.

Ultimate opened her mouth… then cursed like a sailor. “We’re leaving, let's—” She was cut off by a plasma blast to the face.

The bridge under our feet broke, as did dozens more above and below us. The rigids followed with radio chirps of glee.

The surface world vanished as the earth rumbled ominously, the rigids shrieking with a clash of metal and glass. Ultima surrounded us with a sphere of air, and the many paths vanished under thousands of tons of collapsing stone.

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Fortunately, I didn't pass out during our fall, but I was definitely squishy and bruised by it.

“How far did we fall?” I asked my teacher, hanging off of Althea based on the muscles.

“All the way to the bottom.” Ultima said with a sigh, eyes glowing softly in the dark. Hakim and Althea were the same way, reflecting the color of their eyes. “You should be able to tell, the air is denser around here.”

“Two kilometers below sea level does that.” I snarked, suppressing a mad giggle.

Even vacations led to life-or-death adventures.

Ultima sighed. “No way for me to step into another world, in the Human Realm we’d be in solid rock. None of the other worlds I know are at a good elevation relative to Ersete to not kill us.”

“You’ve visited about a dozen worlds in total haven't you?” I recalled her previous lessons on realm travel.

“A dozen safe worlds, it's closer to a hundred for worlds I've deemed too dangerous.” My mentor elaborated, eyes boring into mine. “Most of them… seem to be other versions of your world with different histories, different outcomes all existing at once. We use the Paths to travel between them, stable currents within the Depths of lesser worlds.”

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Right, you merge the worlds together while I negate the thin gap between worlds.” Two different techniques to traverse the infinite realms. “Is there a world in the Depths we can slip into and out of?”

Althea was glancing between us with a curious gaze. “You’ve been studying this heavily haven't you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“To answer your question… no. Liminal worlds close to ours get taken by Pathfinder witches because of the useful resources they have. Unmoored from reality, people find interesting treasures and unique Gifts from studying these worlds. Almost all the ones orbiting Ersete have been taken, destroyed, or settled down.”

“So we have to find a way out that doesn't involve us being crushed?” Althea spoke with a hitch in her voice. “Because the outer sphere here is too crowded to be safe for any of us.”

I clutched her hand like a lifeline, gently squeezing it to comfort her.

“We’ll find a way out, I've survived and helped others survive way worse situations,” Ultima promised, her staff flaring with an unearthly light.

I sighed, and sent out a pulse into the fabric of the void, making out the tiny ripples of matter within it.

This was going to be difficult, but not impossible.

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“We’re lost aren’t we?” Hakim’s voice grumbled in the dark

“Probably, but I can use sense ripples in the vacuum to find openings and paths.” I said while leaning into Althea. I couldn’t see shit, outside the auras of living things.

But I wasn’t always the best at measuring distance, and doing it in the dark was painful.

“I still don’t really understand what that means.” Althea griped, affectionately squeezing my shoulder.

“You know that 99% of existence is empty space, including us? That is the vacuum, and down at the smallest of scales, the very rules of reality change and shift. They’re ripples of… probability, particles popping in and out of existence. Mathematically at least.” I wasn’t going to be perfectly sure, my senses were only so good. “Because even in emptiness there is power, and I shape those fluctuations into attractive and repulsive forces.”

Althea and Hakim were both giving me blank stares.

“What?” I asked defensively.

Althea giggled. “I’m starting to understand why void spirits are so strange if this quantum vacuum is what they represent, they see everything that is and isn’t.”

“Some people back home theorize the universe itself was born from quantum fluctuations. So I imagine spirits which represent such forces to be powerful.” I smirked at their gobsmacked looks, preening in the madness.

Ultima stopped, and summoned a witch light with a snap of her fingers. In front of us… was the entrance to a maze a hundred meters high with walls carved with strange murals. Depicting a history buried for six thousand years or longer.

How witches of old performed rituals and created crafts of great power and complexity. Seemingly in chronological order.

The mural began with witches speaking to the Elements, wind and storm, water and ocean, earth and mountain, fire and sun. Personified spirits taught the ancient witches how to twist the physical world to their will, forming a connection to the Universe, with the smaller spirits of the world.

The beginning.

But they weren’t alone, there were other earlier murals, depicting other Beings, other peoples. They resembled depictions of… ancient hominid species, primitive but recognizable. They seemed to be worshiping the more powerful of spirits, paying tribute and respect to more powerful beings.

One tribe paid tribute to a massive giant of stone, with a ravenous and endless appetite and a brutal face that reminded me of—

“Orcus. The Patron-Spirit of Ogres.” Althea revealed, eyes wide at the murals depicting a history almost a million years gone. “A spirit of hunger, death, and punishment, a wild man. It’s said he taught them their Gifts of boundless strength, of how to devour power. Most folk have their origin myths, including mine.”

So the tribe depicted… were they the ancestors of the ogres as a whole?

A second tribe was depicted worshiping two beings of impossible beauty and symmetry, glamorous Beings, one a man the other a woman. And yet… also not.

“The spirits of Dream and Nightmare, patrons of the faerie as a whole.” Althea seemed breathless, watching the mural shift to a scene of some of the early faerie folk… turning away from their patrons, and towards a lesser, smaller spirit.

It was dirtier, less refined, but powerful all the same with how people flocked to it.

“I think I know this one, the Daydreamer, the dream spirit of personal and internal direction.” Hakim added.

“So do I.” I said with a grin. It was the difference between a sonnet and a limerick, between refinement and transgression.

This was the split between goblin and faerie then?

“This is a depiction of the origin of all of us,” Ultima looked just as surprised to see this. “I was only planning on showing you the murals on a few of the upper layers. So this is new to me.”

“Is that why there are different folks, different races and apparent species?” I gestured to the vast mural, depicting hundreds if not thousands of scenes.

“I think I’ve told you some of why Plainfolk, Oddfolk and Firstfolk exist right?” Ultima asked and I nodded, so she continued. “This is a depiction of that story, thinking beings built shrines to the spirits who taught them the secrets of the universe, taught to them by the Celestial Titans at the bedrock of our world. Most races attracted the attention of a single or several powerful spirits.”

Witches didn’t have one spirit, they were learning from all of them, the mural showed that much.

“Witches learned the secrets of the minor spirits, didn't they? So they could have a lot more flexibility with their magic.” I guessed, but had a good idea of what that suggested.

“That’s how the story goes, witches or what would become witches had far greater variety. Some diverged of course, taking on powerful patrons and being changed by it. Werewolves and kitsune are a good example, along with the Beastfolk as a whole.” Ultima said with a glimmer of wonder in her silver eyes.

I sensed another ripple, one growing in amplitude, passing through solid rock and stone.

I crushed the emerging rigid on sight with two kinetic walls, and several more emerged in an instant.

Althea called upon a few a spirits which launched at the rigids, with one bursting into flames while another froze solid.

The ripples of the rigids revealed a deep well at the center of the labyrinth like a… portal.

“There’s a way out! Through the labyrinth!” I ordered, stomping my feet for emphasis. “Now!”

All four of us dove through the entrance with rigids hunting us down.

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We had reached the very center of the Labyrinth. I had been carving us a route through cuts in space and time. Void didn’t suffer as harshly from the strange effects of the strange stone and crystal of the labyrinth. It had been a nasty surprise when we learned Ultima couldn’t teleport. All the while we had been putting down the vicious animal rigids with prejudice.

They could travel through the void, seemingly decomposing into the nothingness before recomposing back in reality. But I could destroy them as long as I twisted the vacuum in my favor.

“Okay, those things are annoying and their ability to use the void is troubling. I think I can feel the portal from here.” I pointed to the center of the labyrinth, which was a stone circle covered in glyphs and runes and active. Leading to a place I was familiar with.

“Are those the ruins my mom discovered?!” Hakim said with a slightly shrieky tone. “It’s Monolith-era?”

“Apparently.” I murmured as I swept my senses across the clearing, finding nothing aside from the resonance of the portal and… well look at that.

It was a strange clump of clay, which seemed to be manifested void, within a matrix of solid matter.

“What is that?” I pointed to the clay, though a part of me felt like it was familiar.

“Ether clay, a magical substance formed from contact with the ichor of the Others. By Hel it’s a what we use to make golems and other constructs too. It’s an amazing conduit for magical energy and responsible for allowing life to flourish.” Ultima explained while I inspected the clay with a critical eye.

“Huh, neat.” The clay rippled at my touch, and I tilted my head at the portal gate.

It had murals of its own, depicting esoteric entities made of stars and nightscapes. Chara might have some things to say about this later.

My breath fogged up with a sudden rush of cold inside of me, and I caught something at the corner of my vision. Bipedal rigids, half faded out of reality.

“Leave, quickly. Before the beasts return. Take the clay, as a gift for the trouble.” It was one of the rigid ghosts, waves of cold touching my soul.

I nodded absently, reaching out to the clay which shivered and twisted at my touch. It was rolled into a dense ball which I then placed into one of my bags.

I could feel those strange rigids as they swam through the patterns of the world.

“We’re stepping through, they’re coming and this is a bad spot to fight those things. Go.” I ordered again, body practically wanting to curl into a ball and die.

“Yep. Good thing we got pictures of this place,” Hakim said while holding my phone… When did he get that? “So let's go!”

Althea picked me up with a smirk as I stammered. “What are you—” She nuzzled me with a grin.

“You’re very pretty when you get all confident.” Was all she said as she leapt into the portal.

All of us were through right in the nick of time as a dozen rigids emerged where we had been standing. Followed by a rain of rocks and stones the size of houses.

The portal on the other end went down, and the gaping maw in reality snapped shut.

I… have so many questions. Wait, wait…

“We didn’t even spend more than a few hours there! Fuck!” I cursed aloud. “Which was the entire reason we went to begin with!” I pulled at my hairs, shaking my head.

Althea patted my head and I grumbled at my luck.

Lots of ups and downs today huh?