Chapter 49 - See the Future

Jassin was right about the number of stairs we’d need to take to get to where he wanted to go. Apparently, my room (read: closet) was near the top of the Spire, even above the observation deck where we’d surveyed the city and set up Trix’s gun emplacement.

Jassin walked in front, leading me downward.

The question was: Why up here? Angol told me the practice room I’d been using as a workshop was shielded to protect the rest of the school from spooky magic stuff. Wouldn’t that contain my aura? I was willing to bet it would. That meant Jassin put me up here to minimize my aura’s effects on his people but probably also to hide me. It was possible no one knew exactly where I was, except for Jassin.

I stared at the man’s back as if it would give me some clue as to his motives. Unsurprisingly, it gave me nothing.

While we walked, I glanced at my status screen from time to time. The amount of choices was staggering. I probably just needed to start at the top and see what was there.

Consume is now level 5!

Upgrade paths available:

Mass Upgrade: Increased mass limit of material able to be Consumed. Mass Upgrade will continue to grow as Consume gains power.

Efficiency Upgrade: Consumed material is converted to energy more efficiently and knowledge of material is gained more quickly.

Reservoir: Energy gained from Consumed material may now be given form instead of processed. Conversion process has a 50% efficiency rate. Only one Reservoir may be active at a time.

Passive Consumption: Engine may now passively draw energy from the environment around you, increasing your mana regeneration. Active activation of this ability is significantly more powerful.

Well, damn. Those all looked useful. It would have been nice to have an easy choice as my first. I would have to assume that any upgrade I gave my Consume would at least partially translate to my Devouring Grasp, so I had to take that into account.

Devouring Grasp is now level 5!

Upgrade paths available:

Strength Multiplier: Strength multiplier of Devouring Grasp is increased to +100% x E (where E = current MP/s value of Engine)

Breach: Sacrifice Status Effect: Engine to increase kinetic force of Devouring Grasp by Engine’s total value.

Magivore: Devouring Grasp may now be used to Consume external, structured, magical phenomenon in a limited capacity. Type of mana Consumed retains high ratio of original type.

I didn’t have access to a Ralqir calendar, but it had to be Christmas morning somewhere. I wanted it all, and I wanted it now. However, I would have been lying to myself if I didn’t admit that Devouring Grasp having two upgrade paths that had to do with just how hard I could grip things was kind of disappointing. Oh, yes, I knew they were both powerful, given how many times the ability had saved my life, but they were too similar for my taste.

What needed to happen was synergy, something that would have these two help each other. I’d just been using Devouring Grasp as the attack version of Consume, but I didn’t have to do it that way. I could make both abilities more than what they were, together.

Magivore: Devouring Grasp may now be used to Consume external, structured, magical phenomenon in a limited capacity. Type of mana Consumed retains high ratio of original type.

Yeah, I was choosing that one. I could grab harder some other way, some other day. What’s more, I had a practitioner walking in front of me whose intentions I wasn’t sure of. Could be useful if only to knock down hostile spells when they started flying my way. How it worked… well, I guess I’d come to that.

Which Consume ability would compliment it the best? Mass and Efficiency would probably let me get more mana out of every Devouring Grasp, which was amazing. Efficiency would probably cut down on materials I would have to consume and keep me from having to spend time and/or money to go get materials to burn, saving me a mountain of stuff in the long run. The only problem was that I hadn’t run into that problem yet. I kept finding more and more good stuff to Consume, and my issues were more about getting the Engine rate right than getting material at all.

That made Reservoir an attractive option with Passive Consumption a close second. Reservoir wouldn’t even be on the short list if not for Magivore being my pick for Devouring Grasp, though. Reservoir was pretty much a much worse version of Automate, in that it let me store mana in an object but didn’t let me do stuff with it like Automate did. Tempered Channels and its nerfing of my ability to process foreign mana saw to that.

But what if I never had to have the foreign mana inside of me at all? Reservoir could do that. Maybe I could find a way to use weird mana types outside of my body, maybe as part of a construct.

I made my choices, bidding goodbye to some pretty cool options. Maybe I’d see them again some day. I had my doubts, though. When I hit ten in stealth, all of my skills seemed to vibe with my chosen upgrade path, in a way. It would probably be similar for Consume.

By the time I was done we were near the ground floor where we took a left turn and made our way further into the interior of the building, past a heavy set of doors Jassin had to use one of those magical keys on a chain to get into, though this one wasn’t on a ring like the guard captain had used. Jassin kept this on a chain around his neck and held it up to an otherwise unremarkable spot of bare wall.

An unseen lock disengaged with a click, and Jassin pulled the doors open, stepping inside and holding them open for me.

The room beyond was bare and cube shaped with another set of doors just like the first directly in front of us.

It’s an airlock.

“Shut the door quickly, please, and we’ll get this over with,” Jassin ordered.

I found myself reaching back and grasping the handle of the open door without even thinking. I stopped.

“What are we getting over with?” I asked.

“It is a security measure. Once you close the door, we will be in darkness, but I advise you to close your eyes nonetheless.”

I gave him my best skeptical look. “Did I mention I hate all this vague talk?”

Jassin sighed tiredly. “This room cleanses every being going in and coming out. It is not a design of the Dark Lord but of those that came after. There will be a brief moment of darkness and then a flash.”

“That’s it?”

“Of course that is not it. If I explained the entire thing, you would need to learn years of theory. I only told you what you need to know and you can understand. I am simply asking for one hour of trust, Ryan. Can you still do that, still?”

In answer, I shut the doors. Despite them being stone, they felt surprisingly easy to move, well balanced. I heard the lock reengage once they were closed.

We were cast into absolute darkness. I stayed where I was, feet apart, muscles tensed, waiting for whatever it was to happen. The quellstone was beyond freezing in my hand by this point, cold to the point of biting numbness.

The world flashed white, so bright it was like a physical blow. Even through my closed eyes, it was absolutely overwhelming. My head smacked into the door I’d just closed with a *thwack.*

Spots danced in my vision and the world swam. I reached out with my hand to make sure the area in front of me was clear.

“You did close your eyes, yes?” Jassin asked from somewhere in front of me.

I nodded as I tried to blink the sensation away.

“Hm. Perhaps you are sensitive to it. Concerning.”

Once my eyes healed up, we were moving again, this time through the second doorway and onto another stairwell. We were in a cylindrical tube with glossy black walls except for the stairs upon which we stood, which stuck right out of the side of the outer wall like they’d been grown there. Toward the center of the room, out of reach but just barely, a central pillar stabbed downward into the darkness and seemed to go on forever.

Jassin handed me the sack on his belt. “Here. You do not need the rocks anymore.”

I hurriedly put the quellstone back where they came from and made a move to give them back, but Jassin was already moving down the stairs, deeper into the tube.

Shrugging, I made the whole sack disappear into my spatial storage. You never know when you might need soul sucking rocks.

Down we went. We didn’t come into this room from the top, it went all the way up until I had to crane my neck to see the end of it. What really caught my eye, though, was the central pillar. It was the same, smooth, black stone as the outer walls, but it wasn’t perfectly smooth and featureless like the wall we hugged. It seemed to flash and sparkle erratically as we plodded down the stairs, subtle and just rare enough to where I’d chalked it up to my imagination at first.

Out of the corner of my eye, I’d see shapes formed in the flashes, symbols of some kind, but they were gone before I could focus on them. I tried to catch a couple by staring at the pillar as I walked but to no avail, as if even the slightest turn of my head or movement of my body ruined my angle so I could no longer see what had attracted my attention in the first place.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“The Spire, Ryan. The true Spire.”

“You are insufferable with that cryptic language, you know that?”

Jassin laughed at that. “Apologies. Over the years, I have made it a habit to only give what information is truly necessary, especially as it pertains to sensitive subjects like this. This central pillar goes all the way up to the observatory and all the way down to the base of the Spire. Further, actually. It is the central pillar upon which the Dark Lord’s dominion spell rests.”

“I’ve heard a bit about that,” I mused, recalling the snippets of history I’d gotten from Trix. “The entire city is part of the spell, right?”

“Correct. The undercity, the roads, the moon, they are all one grand ritual that draws in power and once shaped it to the Dark Lord’s purpose. The Spire is the foundation and focus of that design.”

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I blinked. If the System had any sense of humor, it would have given me a Stunned status effect. “I’m sorry, did you say the moon?”

“Yes.”

“The moon is part of the spell?”

“Yes. One part.”

“The whole moon?”

“Yes. What do you not understand about this?”

I could feel my eyebrows crawling up my forehead. “I just assumed the ritual was to anchor the moon here or something. Give the Dark Lord some shade during his retirement after the Purge. The scale is- Just-”

“I did tell you to think small thoughts, Ryan, but that was when we were trying to suppress your aura.”

I could just hear the smug on the man’s voice.

“Very funny,” I said. “Are you really going to hold it against me that I didn’t factor entire moons into the equation?”

“When there is a giant moon suspended above you all day every day, yes. With that in mind, tell me. What are your thoughts?”

“Sure. Uh,” I paused, gathering my scattered bits of knowledge I’d acquired in my time on Ralqir. “Starting with the questions: Why is the moon stuck over Eclipse? What does it do for the spell?”

“Good,” Jassin said. “Those are good questions, and you probably have the answer. Continue down that line of thought.”

“The moon must do something magical, because it’s not actually about the shade.”

“Correct.”

“You have an observatory on top of the Spire, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Who built it? You or the Dark Lord?”

“Ah. I think you’ve got it or at least the beginnings of it. The observatory is of the Dark Lord’s design, always aligned with the moon. Keep going.”

Jassin did seem to be having fun teasing the connections out of my brain. I was glad someone was enjoying themselves, at least.

“Is that moonlight shining through the central pillar?” I asked.

“No, but close enough.”

“The moon is… a filter? I saw all the different colors of aurora out there during the day, like the moon has a magnetosphere or something like it. Does it do something to the light to make it useful?”

Jassin made contemplative noises down below me. “Hmm. Close. Do you know how lenses work, Ryan?”

I went with the simple explanation. “They bend light.”

“Good. Think of the moon as a lens.”

“Where I’m from, lenses are supposed to be transparent.”

“Anywhere else, that would also be true. Not here, though.”

“To what end, though? The Dark Lord literally moved the heavens to make this happen. What does it do?”

Jassin was silent for a few heartbeats, and all I could hear was our footfalls on smooth stone.

“Right now, it is the only thing protecting Ralqir.”

“From what?” I asked.

Jassin didn’t answer. We’d reached the end of the stairs, and he was already ducking into an arched entrance. I followed him through.

Into an office.

The walls were made of warm colored wood, oiled and lacquered until they shined. Skylights overhead cast soft, yellowish light that gave the impression of it being a sunny afternoon outside, even though we were far underground. Elaborate carpets covered the floor in reds and yellows, and they softened our footsteps as we came further into the room. A simple, sturdy, wooden desk sat in the middle of the room, tall enough to work on while standing. A fireplace crackled in the corner, well away from all the wood and carpet, and a singular chair sat next to it a comfortable distance away.

Shelves climbed up the wall to our right, all the way to the ceiling which was maybe twenty or so feet high. There were no books or tools on the shelves. Instead, resting in regular intervals on every shelf were silver, four clawed stands that held smokey crystal spheres, perfectly round.

Jassin saw me gawking.

“Phylacteries. The Dark Lord did not trust his memories to paper,” he said.

“Not just that,” I explained. “It’s so- I don’t know-”

“Not what you expected?” Jassin asked.

I nodded, drifting over to the shelves and the ‘phylacteries.’ I approached one, feeling the desire to reach out and touch it, but I wasn’t stupid (or at least I was trying not to be).

I looked back at Jassin.

“It is safe,” he assured me. “For the untrained, they simply speak to you or maybe show you an image or two. If you want to dive deeper, it requires practice.”

“They speak to me? Like they know I’m here?”

Jassin gave me a non-committal wobble of his head. “In a rudimentary way. They sense you and determine the best way to communicate their information clearly, that is, if they want to. They aren’t always in a mood to cooperate. The Dark Lord was a willful being.”

It hit me then. I’d seen one of these before. It had caught fire and screamed at me, way back in the mockvine cave. I pulled up the appropriate logs, the messages I’d received when I was looting the place and I’d run into something I couldn’t store like the rest.

Vost’ralixal

I mumbled the name aloud as I read it in my log, tasted it on my tongue.

Jassin was suddenly at my side. “What did you say?”

“Vost’ralixal,” I repeated. “Before we met. I found a- uh- one of these, and the System labeled it Vost’ralixal.”

Jassin frowned and bit his lip. “The pages of history continue to turn. You humans…”

“It’s a name then?”

Jassin nodded. “It has long been suspected, but there has been no proof that this was the Dark Lord’s name. It explains much, however. Vost’ralixal was a study in wasted genius, the youngest born of a minor house that would never be allowed to rise due to his station. His holdings were nearby, across the river. I would very much like to know where you found a phylactery outside of this place, Ryan.” He paused, looking up at the crystal balls like he was currently recategorizing everything he knew about them. “But our hour is almost up. We had an agreement. Come. It is just this way.”

Another heavy stone door led to another set of stairs going down. This place, as a contrast to the office, was clean and colorless, just black on black.

We were at the bottom of the big cylinder finally. The floor was a flat, smooth surface like the walls. The room was tall, easily fifty or sixty feet high, and the central pillar that we had been following for so long came down only halfway to the floor, terminating in jagged lines. Where the stone pillar stopped, a shaft of white, pure light shined down in a perfect vertical ray so intense that all but engulfed a singular shape in the center.

I stepped closer, tilting my head to get a better angle.

On a plinth in the middle of the incandescent shaft of light was a vaguely humanoid figure. It had two arms and two legs, one head, the usual stuff, but its body seemed to have something against the concept of symmetry. It was grotesquely muscular but in the oddest proportions, bulges upon bulges stacked on one another seemingly at random like a bad drawing of a bodybuilder done from a child’s description instead of a picture.

Its chest was deep and wide, shoulders so round they came up around the thing’s neck until it probably couldn’t turn its head anymore. The legs seemed shorter than they should have been but I’d seen trees thinner than these calves. It had no genitals that I could see, just more muscle. Sharp, exposed bones jutted from its joints and out of the sides of its ribs.

The face, though, the face was bulbous, misshapen. The mouth split vertically as well as horizontally, and it had teeth to fill out both. Eyes, many, many eyes that ran over the thing’s entire head and down its neck to its shoulders blinked independently as they squinted into the light.

Its skin was a mottled contrast of flowing white and black that seemed to shift like globs of heated oil in water. The black flowed and changed, seeming to grow before my eyes, flowing through the creature's body along its arms and legs to disappear into the chest. As it did so, the muscles would flex and bend in response. Smoke rose out of its pores, and as it tried to move, different parts of its skin burned away in the harsh light only to be regrown nearly instantly.

I found myself drawn to that dance of color, and the burn. I didn’t know why. I just needed to see it, know what it was. It felt, at once, disturbing yet so familiar.

As I approached, I could hear the creature’s strained breathing, the leather-band pops and cracks as it flexed against its restraints. Its restraints, silvery barbed metal that pierced right into the skin at the wrists, ankles and neck, writhed along with the creature. Where the skin was pierced, black fluid coagulated and… moved, seeming to defy the law of gravity, trailing up into the air as if it were a living thing. That is, before they caught fire and burned down to nothing in a flash of intense heat, only to start the process again.

The smell, old sweat and unclean flesh, was so familiar, yet there was something else there too. Sweetness, rotted meat, tar, aged putrescence.

My mouth filled with saliva, and I turned away to be sick.

“What is it?” Jassin asked.

“The… smell. I don’t know.”

“There is no smell. The light cleanses all of it, even the smoke.”

My stomach spasmed, but I marshaled myself before I lost all of my stew. It was a close call.

Then I turned to find I was within arm’s length of the burning light.

“Stay back. It’s deadly.” Jassin whispered now that we were this close to the thing. “Contrary to popular belief, the moon does not shade us here in the Glade. Instead, it collects the maelstrom’s light, even when our side of the globe is in darkness.”

Another piece clicked into place. I cleared my throat to get some of the strength back into it. “And the moon focuses all that collected light here, through the observatory.” I guessed.

Jassin nodded in affirmation. “Observe how it changes, the taint that spreads through its body. The light counters it, somehow. Purges it. Any other being that stepped into that circle would die instantly. This creature has been inside of it for centuries. It will not die, not by any means we possess.”

I held my hand up to my nose, trying and failing to keep it together. Now that I’d noticed it, it was all I could do to push past the revulsion I felt.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A lens of another kind, or if you ask the Church, a fulcrum. The mechanism the Dark Lord used to create Dominion magic. Magic, you see, is a primal force, wild in its natural form. Only those with extraordinary natural talent could shape it back when the Dark Lord was simply Vost’ralixal, and he coveted this power more than anyone has ever coveted anything in their lives.”

“Cryptic. Jassin-”

“I am getting to it. Vost’ralixal’s life changed when he happened upon a being of nearly limitless potential, something not of our world. Not only did it have access to powerful magics but its magic was ordered, structured and logical, a completely foreign concept to us at the time. When he asked the visitor how it was able to accomplish this miracle, it said: ‘my people hold dominion over the stars.’ “

“And this thing is what he found?”

“Yes. He captured it when it was weak, locked it away and… experimented.” The way he said it, I could tell he didn’t want to elaborate. I didn’t ask. I probably wouldn’t understand anyway. “The Dark Lord learned much from his guest, enough to usher in a new age and rule the entirety of our world.”

“Your dominions. They all come from that?” I asked.

“The knowledge comes from the Dark Lord’s notes, recovered after his death centuries after his rule ended.”

I still couldn’t fit all the pieces together. “So, he learns everything he can from our friend here, gets his wish. He had everything he wanted. Why did he purge the planet?”

“He found out too late that the power he siphoned from his captive was tainted, a taint you can observe here. Its presence became a wound in our world, one that festered. His captive grew beyond his control, and his undead servants turned against him. The Dark Lord was a prideful man, however. He did not enjoy the idea of failure.”

I nodded in partial understanding. “So he magicked you to the Bera Maelstrom, where the light could purge the infection.”

Jassin’s voice grew quiet, as if saying the words was transgressive in itself.

“Judging by what is happening now, it appears the infection was only dormant. And now, you visit us again.”

“Wait- You can’t be serious.” I paused, peering at the thing on the plinth, how misshapen it was, mutated and mutilated. It seemed impossible.

Still, it all fit. The scourge-touched goblin conveniently at my insertion point so long ago. The constant glitching Nali was going through despite her failsafes… void corruption she called it. The way brightsteel, the crusaders’ weapon of choice, reacted to my mana. The wires down below, constantly being shaped. The dragon, how it said my people’s power was evil, insisting my ‘dark passenger’ would overtake me someday. My sensitivity to the light.

I activated Detect Cobalt.

The barbed restraints that held the thing down- They were wrapped around the creature’s bones, wound around the plinth, reached down into the floor, spread wide in branching patterns that resembled the roots of a tree. Roots whose barbed shape and composition were particularly familiar to me.

I’d found the other Animator. I’d found it, and it was showing me my future. I- No. We, Exotics, were touched. We were scourge. Carriers or maybe something worse. We brought the infection with us wherever we went, spread it, and, for a reason I couldn’t fathom, they hated us for it.

“I am sorry, Ryan,” Jassin said like he was giving me my last rites.

With the utterance of my name, something changed. Every single eye the creature possessed turned my way in that moment. Other eyes I’d not noticed flowered open on the creature’s arms and chest, straining against the light but ultimately turning my way as well. They focused their individual gazes on me, their misshapen pupils pulsing and vibrating out of sync with one another.

My body went rigid. My lungs seized, the air inside them thickening and refusing to move. I felt…

—-----------------------------

I awoke seconds (?) later back in the Dark Lord’s office. Jassin was over me, his fingers prying my eyelids open. He slapped me again, the sting bringing me all the way back to the waking world.

Jassin shouted in my face. “Ryan! Ryan!”

“Y–Yes! Ow! Stop!”

Jassin, heaving for breath, flopped down next to me with shaking hands. “I’m sorry. I saw the connection form between the two of you, and I feared the worst.”

“A connection?” I coughed. “Wh-”

A message flashed on my screen, demanding my attention:

Ephelir (Level ???) has challenged you.

Stakes: Experience, Death.

Do you accept? Y/N