Maturation 9

October 10th, 2032.

“Hello there.” I greeted Chara as I watched the eternal golden sky of our shared dreamscape. “Are you doing okay here?”

The young Other shrugged at my response, clearly imitating me. “It’s much more fun when I have someone to talk to, including the spirits brought here with the Song of Creation. To be able to feel the pillars of creation again.”

“You’ve told me about that,” I smiled warmly at her quiet joy, as she held a ball of sun in her hand. “That your people all tapped into different understandings of the world, from promethean spark to primeval order. That your people were born with the Gift of the White, of the Sky.”

“I remember that at least, learning the laws of the universe is important. The law of chaos, the law of order, the law of action, and the law of knowledge.” Her smile was almost dopey as she bent plasma into a loop. “We know the law of complexity from birth through the law of simplicity is difficult for me.”

“That’s something I’ve been wondering, what is the law of complexity and simplicity?” I asked while playing with a fireball, feeling the tiny heartbeat within the flame.

Chara looked excited to teach, with eyes like sunbeams. “All the laws most mortals know best are the laws of the natural world. But there is one law that came before all else. The law of becoming, of potentiality and actuality. That is the void which surrounds all things, the field of possibilities that sets existence.”

I nodded. “I've noticed that when I sense the void, ripples of possibility shift from wave to particle and back again.” It was strong enough to let me sense the wave of possibilities before an action occurs.

Chara nodded, cooling the star into an ambient mass of light, and splitting the beams into a rainbow of colors.

“The Light is about increasing the possibilities of reality,” They twisted the ball of light into a myriad of shapes and forms. “The Light is the material, the source of form, manifestation, and life in the physical world. The other sources are the laws and substances of the Low, shaping the world. But are both acted upon by the Light and Dark. Reaching out to the laws of possible worlds and shaping them, either increasing or decreasing those worlds.”

So they could manipulate probability itself?

“So if Light is the source of the material, what's the Darkness?”

“The source of all consciousness, the river of souls. So even someone like me has a touch of darkness within.” Chara’s skin rippled in unpredictable patterns and waves. “To master the void you must master both of its faces, two halves of a paracausal union.”

“Sounds difficult,” I replied honestly, gently bumping my hip into the girl to make her scoot over.

Chara smiled. “You’re already making progress, reaching out to the connections of the world is the Dark within the void. Everything is connected.”

“Those connections, that weave of minds…” I murmured, remembering the world of strands and connections. “That’s the Darkness?”

Chara nodded. “That is the strength of the Avyakta, to shape the Darkness as we shape the Light.”

Did I just casually learn the True Name of Calafia’s people?

“Sorry, I haven't figured out how to get you out of here.” I changed the subject awkwardly.

She snorted. “This is a place built to contain Me, I wouldn't expect an average mortal to break it easily.”

“Hey, this is an ‘average’ mortal who helped defeat a god!” I protested with pretend offense at her lack of faith.

She shook her head. “Your teacher at her strongest can level several of your… city blocks in a single attack,” she said with a careful tone. “I remember being able to level mountains, and Mother was…” she trailed off with a nervous swallow. “A breaker of worlds.” Her eyes were haunting things.

Shivers ran down my spine.

“So you're saying Cassiopeia was weaker than she once was?” I asked.

“From what I remember… yes.” Chara said.

I already know the Others are powerful, being called or worshiped as God by more than one culture across the known world. Hell, the Titans were Others who had given themselves physical forms, and the largest were the size of continents. With most of their mass spread out across an entire stack of dimensions.

Spreading their wings and teeth and claws across infinite worlds.

“What was it like to live back then?” I asked sincerely, curious to hear what Chara’s reply would be.

“Your worlds were younger back then,” Chara said as she cupped motes of light in her hands. “Continents united into a single whole, filled with strange little fleshy creatures I liked to play with.” She placed her hands against her lips to make sabers.

“Are you talking about gorgonopsids?” I asked with a paling face.

“From your paleontology books… yes, yes they are.” Chara said with a smug look, practically glowing.

That was over a quarter billion years ago.

I looked around their prison, a faded world at the edge of reality, a ghost of a ghost. What was even capable of building something that would and did withstand the sands of time?

Had they destroyed the Others, and then vanished, or had it been a war in heaven that ended their reign over the universe?

“What else can you tell me?” I asked quietly, letting the Starchild into my personal bubble of space.

They beamed. “So many things even I don't remember it all clearly! Like the roads built into the world tree, or the factories, and the great gears and machinery we built! So many things…”

I let Chara talk, lulling me deeper into the Dream, as I tried to think of all the angles and all the secrets I had discovered. All with questions in mind, the why of things, the path walked on by every person before me.

What was the Truth here?

----------------------------------------

“So the Violet is what calls to you?” I questioned my companion of the day, the rigid known as Adahn.

He was positively buffeted by the Violet, like a walking storm, information dancing in a current of connections.

“Correct, I excel in manipulating the law of knowledge, of information itself.” He gestured with his upper hands, air circling around them in swirls. “I have learned many equations, functions, and deep workings of magic.”

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“I’ve noticed,” I said dryly as I watched him scribble out expressions on paper, flexing fingers in and out to count in binary. Binary on paper was represented in hexadecimal, using a series of rune notations going from zero to fifteen. “This looks like an equation to enchant a building. Am I right?”

“Affirmative, much of my craft deals with the shapes and angles through which spirits and metaphysical energy flows. Math is a logical method for representing geometry, and thus for representing the shape of magic itself.” He sounded proud of his knowledge, flipping the page to a particular equation.

I could see various operations and algebraic manipulations, which seemed oddly familiar. Some formulas were simpler, and others were enormous, taking up an entire page.

Wait.

These were the proofs for spells, not just enchantments. The hexadecimal itself was evil but the equations and expressions associated with them were not. It looked like they were using equations to represent different shapes, which became proofs for the segments of a spell…

“How curious.” I brushed my fingers along the final simplified proof. I wasn't sure if math was supposed to work like that, since each ‘function’ was more like a set of a fuck ton of expressions. Functions to begin with can't be circles for example.

Pretty sure, it reminds me more of vector graphics honestly.

Those of the Violet found various methods to create layouts to channel their magic, because their essence was manipulating the information of the universe.

Music was a form of communication, and thus another way to manipulate information. It made me wonder if there were other methods to represent magic, it seemed almost limitless.

Computers run on math, could I program a computer to encode the geometry of the craft into spells?

A question to be answered later, I mused to myself as I watched Adahn work his craft.

“How do you know Amelia if you don’t mind me asking?” My mouth moved faster than my common sense.

Adahn paused in his work, and I swallowed some saliva at his expression. Fuck, that was a mistake.

“We once both lived in the Silverlands of Jangha,” his tone had become emotionless, a bitterness I could almost taste. “It is a connection she has seemed to have forgotten in her hate.” There was pain in his voice. “We were friends once, before the war with the city of Horres, when the rigids of that city decided there was to be no tolerance for any being not of their kind.”

I didn’t know much about the kingdom of Jangha, but a war like that…

“How many died?” I asked, horror creeping into my voice.

“Tens of thousands of non-rigids were murdered in their senseless slaughter,” Adahn’s voice was mute, a low static to it as he described it. “The Chantry retaliated with extreme prejudice and a hundred thousand souls died in their manhunt. Entire clusters of rigids were destroyed, murdered without trial and reason. Both of us were forced to flee our homes in that war, and it seems she was gravely affected by it.”

I blinked, why the fuck is he being so blunt about this?

“Umm…” I flinched at my dumb reply, uncertain of how to take any of this into account.

“Apologies for my bluntness, but I theorized it was prudent to be honest. You are if nothing else, a curious person with a strong sense of justice.”

“I might technically be a knight, but my talents are more in science and craftwork than politics,” I said bluntly, hoping not to offend Adahn.

“But you have established connections among the clans and the clanless,” he pointed out just as bluntly. “You freely offer assistance both in knowledge, and your own personal power. People trust you to help others.”

I swallowed, uncertain how much I should believe him. That was a lot of pressure and expectations.

“I hope I can live up to that,” I said quietly, clasping my hands together as I watched him write more mathematical equations describing shapes and patterns of magic. “What else can you tell me…?”

“Things that are less horrific?” Adahn replied rhetorically, a hint of amusement in his voice. “There are many things I can tell you of my cluster, of my species and kind. Of our history in this world. What is your preference?”

I leaned back, eyebrows furrowing as a thousand ideas swam at the forefront of my mind.

“Tell me more about yourself.” I demanded, adjusting my posture into a more serious one. “Tell me about Adahn.”

His eyes shuttered, focusing on my face. “Are you certain?”

I was.

----------------------------------------

I stuck out my tongue as I drew out my working theories on glyph language and composition. Which had taken a fair amount of time, months of research and study wasn't a dealbreaker anyways.

It was a very simple and logical pictorial system, with simple semantics, logic and ethics. Adahn had been incredibly helpful with figuring out the basic components with his own sense of design and geometry. My ‘line letter’ theory had proven correct, and he had narrowed it down to a total of eleven specific symbols. No more, no less.

In turn those symbols were variants of three kinds of figures, a dot, a line, and a curve. Which could form thousands of combinations of possible words to create spell glyphs. Adahn was a sweet guy for a person with a heart of metal, so we had shared contact information through several means. On their own the symbols didn’t do much, but testing them within a circle did prove they called different forces. A dot was void, a line was light and a curve was darkness.

The Pillars of Existence.

I sighed, leaning back from my research and experimental glyph design notes.

“A seventeen year old really shouldn’t be the one having to handle the political fallout of centuries worth of bad decisions by an entire system.” I mused to myself, knowing my own mother and my mentor didn’t want me to go too deep into this.

Four hundred and more years ago, one man had created a system that became a horror upon an entire world. But he was still just one person upholding the beliefs of thousands, if not millions of people.

But I couldn’t just do nothing, my own morals couldn’t bear the idea.

I want to make the world fair.

But I wasn’t strong enough, not even remotely strong enough. I was one human girl with no true magic of her own, a soul without the inherent machinery that was the gift of every witch, beast and spirit of this world.

I thought back to my lesson with Adahn, how he had taught me how this world did math, and I taught him how my own world had advanced the field of mathematics. He had wanted textbooks, sources, papers and grimoires of human research.

Human research…

Research.

Why hadn’t I thought about that before? I was one person, one girl all on her own. Which was exactly the problem, I couldn’t do this on my own, even Ultima had proven that.

She was a powerful witch, one of the strongest in Danab if not Calafia as a whole. But power wasn’t enough on its own, it could never be enough.

“I need books, and lots of them.” I ran over to the bookshelf I had placed in my land for suitable reference… as well as for entertainment purposes. “Books on technology, engineering, history, society, culture…”

I wasn’t from here, for all that I had done my best to understand the culture. But I had sources of knowledge, from home, all the mistakes, all the victories, all the horrors and the miracles. But I also needed books from here, and a way to bridge an understanding between both worlds.

My hands slid down the spines of dozens of books, my lips pursed as I examined each and every title, each and every bit of information encoded in paper.

“I need a printing press, a librarian, and access to the postal service.” My mouth ran away from me as my thoughts accelerated into an unholy mess of ideas and plans and fantasies and anxious blips of paranoia. “I need people in the know, people I can consult, people I can trust.”

I can trust my friends, my teacher, maybe her friends too.

Dinah was the heir to the taifa, to this small kingdom. She understood politics and despite her misgivings she understood her people better than she thought she did. Althea and Hakim weren’t royalty or born of high status, but they understood their world just as much. I had been asked questions, but it wasn’t organized, and wasn't done right.

I wanted to do this right.

I had goodwill, knowledge, and people I could trust to have my back through thick and thin. I was tired of sitting around and doing nothing until it blew up in my face. That priest had proven I couldn’t be passive and wait until I was murdered in my sleep. I couldn’t wait until my friends might have to flee to Earth like what had happened to Mads’ ancestors.

Like I said, I was just one girl.

But what could an entire kingdom do?