Her eyes snap up to me when I dismiss the orb, and I feel like the gravity in the room has just jumped, like I’m being crushed in my seat and like I’m sliding off into the Void itself.
“Show me something interesting,” I say with a little smile, quoting her. “Seen something interesting, have you?”
“Again.” Lily’s voice is a low growl.
“That’s not asking very nicely.” I meet her eyes and smile a little, unsteadily. Her growl and her presence are both reverberating inside me. “My obligation is discharged. You asked me to show you something interesting; I have.”
“Adam.” She holds out a hand, a veneer of calm over her hunger. “Kindly give me one of those again, and let me study it this time. I don’t want to argue about the definition of shown.”
One of my hands goes up to my hair, fidgeting with my braid. “As you wish.” I toss her another orb with the other hand, and her attention snaps off of me like a circuit switching, hard and total.
I don’t dismiss it this time. I’m already regretting having dismissed it the first time, but it did seem pretty funny, and technically I had fulfilled what I needed to offer for a guest-gift, and well… I was floating a little, and feeling the tingling from my toes to my fingers to my ears and scalp, and I wanted to do any number of ridiculous things, to make any number of ridiculous jokes.
I don’t do any of them. I sit, instead, adjusting my hair, enjoying the sight of Lily as she focuses intently on the orb and its runework, dense to the point of illegibility even before they start to overlap.
“This,” she eventually says, looking up at me, “is remarkable. What does it do? How does it function? I know Motes, and this clearly uses either Conjure or Imbue Mote as a base, but there’s something more here, something I’ve never seen.”
“That.” I take a breath, knowing this isn’t going to go over well. “That’s not something I’m going to tell you, not either of those things.”
“Adam.” Lily’s voice drops again, just a little. “Don’t play fools’ games with me.”
“Not for wealth nor for the asking.”
“Do you doubt that I’ll keep a secret?” Lily’s face twists a little, in an expression I don’t fully understand. She’s using that mirroring Skill, I’m pretty sure, because it rips into me, emotionally; I desperately want to make that expression go away, to make her smile at me again. Forget two decades ago; that would have worked on me two weeks ago, for all that I knew better then just as much as I know better now. “I’ll offer an oath, if you trust me so little.”
“It’s not that.” My words are rushed, and I force myself to slow down. I can feel the dissociation cropping up in my thoughts, a little bit of watching myself act, observing the state of my body as though it’s someone else’s. “If you keep it secret, it’s still in the world.”
“In the world?” Lily quirks an eyebrow at me. She’s regained her composure; I know she thinks this is now a matter of convincing me, of deploying the right arguments and the right smiles, melting through my defenses like a thermonuclear torch. “In this Temple, Adam, we’re as far from the world as where you were born, until you cross the threshold to the surface.”
“You’re wrong.” Softly, gently. This is how an enemy is made, or a friendship mended; this is how my life is taken, if I fuck up, maybe now, maybe later. She waits for me to clarify, and I shake my head. “Do you not know? Can you not… reach out and touch it? We’re so close to the veil, here, and to the System, and that means we’re close to the world. Just… there’s something in the way that we can’t cross without a bridge.”
“The Void is in the way.” Her eyes are on mine, drawing me in. “What do you mean, that if I keep it secret, it’s still in the world? What does this have to do with the Void?”
“You don’t know?” I repeat it, softly, and shake my head, unable to look away from her. “No, you have to know. And if you know, and you’re lying to me… are you bound? Is there an oath you swore, or something more fundamental? A mental block, maybe.”
“Adam.” She snaps her fingers in front of my eyes, and I’m so lost in wondering that I barely flinch. It gets my attention, though, goes most of the way to re-embodying me, and her pressure hits me like a wave of desire and need. “The spheres. Your orbs. How do they work? What do they do, what are they, that transcends a Mote?”
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There’s a red glint in her eyes. “Anything said is said to the Void,” I hear myself say instead. “We pattern-matched to spoken words, we navigators. They anchor, anchored, a jump on both ends with the expectations, the deep down knowledge of this is the world, and that constrains things, but we still needed to chase a pattern out once we dropped.” I know I’m not making any sense. There are too many things I’d have to explain to her, too many pieces of information for her to grasp and understand. Everyone outside of the most ignorant of grounders knows so many things that I’ve taken for granted for decades. “Anything that’s said, you can hear in the Void, if you get lucky enough, and with the kind of computational capacity magic has here on Cador you can make yourself lucky enough.”
“Adam.” Her tail wraps around my knees, and I can feel myself on the verge of sliding. Her pupils are solid red, glowing like embers. “Name a price. My favor, my magic, my aid, my company. I will not be deterred by your rambling.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t say anything; my throat has gone too dry, my tongue has practically glued itself to the roof of my mouth, and my entire body feels like it’s on fire from the inside with need. A dozen different things I could say, a dozen different things I want so much the wanting itself is more intense than I can handle, pass through me, and I shake my head slowly.
Her tail pulls, and I start falling.
I swing, almost purely out of reflex. She catches my descending punch in her hand without the slightest sign of contempt or effort, her other hand rising to cup my face as I land on my knees right next to her on the vastness of her throne. Her touch is fire and her touch is balm, it’s everything I want and everything I need, her body is shifting towards mine and I need this, and my mind relaxes its grip on the structural elements of my coiffure, on the beads masquerading as jewelry on my clothes.
Four orbs and a maximum capacity load of Motes, closer to three hundred than two, fire from millimeters away from Lily.
The world stutters. The Disenchant and Dispel orbs with their attendant boosters rip away her spells, it helps that she was touching one of them, but the lance of fire only has centimeters to go and it’s a literal lightspeed attack, Lily’s head doesn’t move in time because by the time she perceives the attack it’s too late /
/ Lily’s head moves before the orbs fire, and the lance tracks her, as though it were Oh shit /
/ but even though magic flares, at her belly and heart, the lance fires at her head as her head moves I can’t /
/ space itself rips open, creating a warping effect that would draw the strike away, but the orbs flit to the side faster than even Lily’s eye can track and fire process this /
/ a mirror catches the fire strike and deflects it, but the hidden void needle passes fast enough /
/ and my perception shatters, it’s a kaleidoscope of a dozen, two dozen different presents, all fighting to be the truth, and I scream in every next moment in every iteration, and then it ends.
Lily’s hand lowers, shakily. With my Visor deployed, I can see the ambient spellwork where the Dispel and Disenchant effects were lingering, and I can see where her mana has unwoven them in the bare milliseconds she had. The mirror, shattered, that deflected the fire strike fades into mana. The rip in spacetime that caught the void needle collapses, half of it hard vacuum and half of it packed with mana, drawing the needle off course; she lets it decohere in the air, destabilizing as it consumes matter as it would not have consuming something metaphysical.
“That,” she says softly, smiling a smile I can’t at all identify, “would have worked, back when I was only a Paragon.”
I smile back at her, automatically. I’m dead if she wants me dead, might as well ask. “How many millennia ago was that?”
“Eh.” She cracks her head to the left and then the right, silently, eyes never leaving me. “Double digits.”
She’s quiet for a bit, head tilted just a hair to the side, the two of us centimeters apart. I’ve sagged down, my ass hitting the throne and my legs folded together, parallel to each other; she’s back to having one arm draped around the top of the back, the other hand still holding my fist.
“I really expected that to work better,” I hear myself say, and then I blanch. My heart is still racing, but the attempt has drained every bit of emotion out of me, and there doesn’t seem to be anything filtering my verbal output. “Sorry. That’s a weird thing to say, isn’t it.”
“I could call that a violation of hospitality, you know.” Her voice is calm, tone even. I have absolutely no idea what she’s thinking or feeling, and that’s terrifying. “You took your shot unprovoked.”
“Did I, now.” I manage to close my mouth and stop talking, but not soon enough.
“Hm.” She hums to herself softly, then in one smooth motion she’s on her feet and with her hand still clamped around my fist, I am too. “Come with me. I think you’ve spent enough time in my presence; I’ll collect my due when the time comes. You’re of no interest to me in this state.
“I’ll let your minders put you back together.”