FH 56 Winter, The Crystal Spire

Ever since Lilith and I started attending the Academy we had lived our daily lives in Arkaziel’s manor, with only occasional visits to the Crystal Spire. The Spire was a strange place, rooms within the crystalline structure didn’t follow physical rules like internal space being smaller than exterior space. Some rooms went far beyond violation of physical laws, like the library. Our library was infinite. Mom said it was actually a place called Binah, or likened it to something called an Akashic Record, but I didn’t know what either of those things were.

Sure, I could have looked up those terms in the library, but if you fell down the hole of looking up all of mom’s strange sayings and odd phrases, you’d never get anything else done. Not really, it didn’t happen that often, but Lilith had far more interest in those things than I did. Even now, Lilith was in the library with mommy, while mom and I were in the training room.

It’s important to understand that room wasn’t how I’d describe it and wasn’t at all accurate. As far as I could see, the ground was made of limestone. The lack of life felt absolute. There were no insects in the training room, no grass, no life of any kind except for mom and me.

There were fifteen training dummies, five of which had several of my afflictions upon them.

“It looks like your Spectrum Surge trait caps at a fifty percent bonus, your Malicious Tormentor passive has no cap, and Rainbow Rush’s bonus to agility applies after those two have already bolstered your agility.” Telos stood behind me, reading my status screen over my shoulder.

“I peaked at one hundred and seventy-three when I had effects on all the dummies.” I agreed with mom’s summary of the modifiers in play on my agility.

“You’re very focused on agility, sweety. You haven’t progressed any of your traits in quite a while, and you’ve been stuck on level nineteen for a few months now. Being fast is good, really good, but you can’t focus on it to the detriment of yourself as a whole. Your Kinesis abilities are fantastic, and Spectrum Surge rewards you for using them. How come you don’t make more use of them?”

“Uh, well. It feels like showing off or grandstanding if I go full-out with my powers. Lilith’s always there with a spell, Morgan’s ready to finish off enemies after I imbalance them, or there’s one of Derrick’s traps to kick an enemy into…” I shrugged. “When I use my Kinesis powers, it feels like showing off I guess? I pre-empt my teammates and I don’t want anyone to feel underutilized.”

“That’s fair,” Telos laughed. “But you won’t always be fighting with your friends at your back, and if you don’t practice with them now, you might not have the skill with them when it really matters. Everyone holds back, some, in a team fight. If you went all out, all the time, you’d have no reserves to draw on when the unexpected happens, or be exhausted before you got to a boss fight. Resource management is important to a party, but you and Lilith are largely free from resource concerns.”

“Sure, but there’s the mental drain of keeping track of it all.” I argued.

“Well, I suppose that’s true, but that’s because you haven’t spent the time with your powers that you should have and have been making out with Morgan instead.” Telos teased me in mock disapproval. I think it was a joke, anyway, she sure didn’t seem to be annoyed by my burgeoning relationship with Morgan.

“Okay, okay, I’ll work on my Kinesis control.” I held up both hands in defeat.

“Practice your shadow Kinesis with Morgan. Your generation of even more shadows for them opens a world of battlefield opportunities, especially combined with your mobility. There’s a lot of combos you two could pull off, the way Aisha and Lilith do.”

I didn’t object that Lilith could work with anyone. She could invoke any kind of magic, real or imaginary, with next to no limitations. Not that different from my Kinesis control, really, but still. I needed to work on my natural reaction to get defensive at any comparisons to my sister. We were siblings, we both had incredible powers and our own strengths, but for some reason it always felt like Lilith had advantages over me. Her intelligence intimidated me.

“So, what’s my grade?”

“You get an A, this time. You’ve learned all the moves I’ve taught you; you’ve gotten much better about front loading applications of afflictions on as many targets as possible at the start of a fight, and you’re cycling your Cascade and Burst between Kinesis powers has gotten better. You’re a formidable brawler with unparalleled mobility, and your spatial awareness and instinctive fluttery nature make you a great evasion fighter. So, for a job well done, you get a special guest teacher today.”

I didn’t like the way mom smiled at me with those words.

The space near us wavered, and a monkey with a staff and a weird hat appeared.

“Thanks for agreeing to this, old friend.” Mom bowed her head in thanks to the monkey. “Alexander, pay close attention to everything Sun Wukong shows you, okay? When your lesson is done I’ll be in the parlor.” Telos waved at me and the monkey, then a doorway appeared for her to return to the main areas of the Spire.

I eyed the monkey. He eyed me.

We both laughed, then I doubled over, coughing. The butt of his staff had knocked the wind out of me.

“Let’s train,” Sun Wukong told me.

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For what seemed like months Sun Wukong showed me the true meaning of evasion. The monkey showed me moves I had a hard time comprehending. From dodging by the width of a hair, to the time he sacrificed a hair and it turned into a rhinoceros and charged me! He could summersault thousands of kilometers at a time, or just a few meters, all as his battle strategy called for.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

It felt like I was fighting an impossible force of nature, one that could not be overcome, no matter what I did. If the monkey hadn’t been trying to teach me, it would have been depressing, or discouraging. Instead, I walked away from my time with the Monkey King with a new appreciation for all of the tricks he had at his disposal. I lacked some of his abilities, but I had what seemed to be his favorites at least: speed and invisibility. I lacked them in the quantities he had, but I was very young, he said.

“Done already?” Telos, Kallos, and Lilith were sipping tea in the parlor.

“Already? I was gone for months! Didn’t anyone notice?” I huffed, but I couldn’t work up any righteous indignation with the scornful look in Lilith’s eyes, or the humorous looks both parents were giving me.

“Did you forget that training room is a dream realm, darling?” Kallos asked gently, as she set her tea cup down and moved over to give me a hug, and a kiss on the cheek. “Or, perhaps, did your mother forget to tell you?”

I groaned. The whole time I had been conflicted over missing time with Morgan and my friends, and it had all been the equivalent of a dream?

“Ope. My bad, Alexander. I thought you knew that room was a dream realm.”

“I knew it was a dream realm,” Lilith interjected in a smug way.

“Show us the results of your training!” Telos demanded with a smile.

“Well, here’s the summary.”

I gestured and my recent gains showed up.

Due to intense training with Sun Wukong you have gained the following: +10 Agility, Tides of Woe has evolved, and you have gained the Class Feature: Bending Blows.

Tides of Woe may now hit multiple targets at a time.

Bending Blows: What is space? Who cares. Your limbs can defy probability and physical laws, stretching or bending as needed to land impossible hits, just like Sun Wukong’s Ruyi Jingu Bang.

“Good job, buddy!” Telos gushed in praise at me, while Kallos hugged me tightly and gave me a kiss on the top of the head.

“That’s really good. How bendy are we talking?” Lilith asked while staring at me as if I were an insect.

“Small amounts. I can’t pull off telescopic attacks, at least, not yet.”

“Obviously, you just learned it. Still, that should make you even better at maintaining our front lines in combat. Good job!” Lilith’s praise felt good to hear, but I sort of hated that it made me feel good. I wanted to be able to tell her to stuff it, that I didn’t need her approval, but I couldn’t, because I did want her approval as much as I wanted our mothers, or even Morgan’s approval.

“Who is Sun Wukong, anyway?” I asked.

“He didn’t tell you?” Telos seemed shocked.

“Just that he was a Great Sage.” I shrugged. I’d asked for more, but the monkey hadn’t been interested in telling me stories, only training me.

“He’s from the Lower Realms, and one of the more powerful entities you can find wandering freely.” Telos smiled fondly, and I had to admit, I smiled too, imagining that willful monkey wandering free doing whatever he fancied.

“You never talk about the Lower Realms,” I said slightly accusatory.

“It’s true,” Lilith agreed with me.

Our parents looked at one another, then nodded.

Kallos materialized objects from nowhere, and filled the coffee table with sandwiches, deserts, and a few different pitchers of sweet smelling drinks.

“You’re not going to distract us with Bobbi’s cooking!” Lilith proclaimed.

“Oh calm your butt, coconut. It’s a long story. First of all, it’s important for you to understand the shape of the multiverse we inhabit is similar to a tree. The foundational, lower levels are furthest away from the sunlight that nourishes them. That light is Ein Sof. Our dimension resides at the tippy top of the dimensional axis, with only Pleroma, the diffuse layers of Ein Sof, separating us from the River of Light, or the real form of Ein Sof.” While Telos spoke, Kallos gestured and created minor illusions for us.

“That looks like a spiral galaxy,” Lilith noted.

“A little bit, sure. It’s not a galaxy though. This dimension used to be the domain of the Overgod of this multiverse, until we killed him and created this existence. Kallos and I were both born in the next dimension down.” Telos grinned. “Any guesses how old your moms are? Wait, no, don’t answer that.”

“Anyway, I was born on a planet called Earth.”

“Earth? Your planet was named after dirt? That’s a little redundant, mom.” Lilith held nothing back.

“Well, technically it was Sol III, but we just called it Earth. It doesn’t matter, quit making fun of mommy’s home planet. My time there was short, anyway. I died and was reincarnated on the ancient planet of Grief, where I got suckered into climbing the Tower of Aetherius. That’s where I met Kallos, and we formed our bond.”

“Ohh, details!” I demanded.

“I was one of the Masters in the training city of Solace,” Kallos sighed.

“Teacher-student relations? Aren’t those a huge forbidden thing at Winona?” Lilith gave our parents a meaningful look, which made both blush.

“Anyway, I met Arkaziel in the Tower too. I watched him hatch and had to protect his brood mates from some StarMane predators, then his parents showed up, and it turned into a whole thing. He bonded with me, and he’s been with me ever since.”

“Hatch? I guess he is a dragon…” I trailed off.

“So, we climbed a Tower, then went on to climb another, but I was able to summon Kallos for the second one. I missed her so much, and it felt a lot more enjoyable to adventure with her. Bobbi joined us in the second tower, towards the end, too. Arkaziel tricked her into losing a cook-off.”

“Uncle Arkaziel beat Bobbi at cooking?! How?” I felt like everything I knew was under assault.

“He cheated, of course,” Kallos answered.

We talked for hours, with our parents diving in and out on small parts of their journey, or to explain who Primordials and gods were. That’s how I found out mom created the System, and their time with us had a hard limit, if we didn’t want to risk the stability of reality. Lilith acted like she had figured it all out before, but I think even she was shocked by some of the things our parents told us that day.

From the descriptions of gods, Primordials, Outer Gods, Transcendant Beings, an Overgod, Archons, and everything else, I felt like there being no gods on the highest dimension felt right. They sounded awful, especially Chaos and Sophia, who sounded like villains the way they had engineered the lives of the Metanoia family. Mom wasn’t very clear on what happened to the two of them, though, beyond that they’d been pushed into the cycle of reincarnation like all of the Primordials and gods she slew.

“Your friend Derrick was the Trap master we encountered multiple times,” was also a big bombshell to deal with. On one hand, it was things Derrick had no knowledge or memory of, but if he ever awoke past life memories, he could potentially remember mom.

My gut told me some of the others in our life were also reincarnations from our parent’s past. I felt almost certain that Morgan, for example, was mom’s friend Callie. But if that were the case, why wouldn’t she have let Callie have her memories so they could be friends again? It did explain why she’d made a personal weapon for Morgan; Telos hadn’t made anything comparable to Moral Dilemma for anyone other than Lilith and I.

It also raised a question I disliked: were Lilith and I reincarnations? But in the face of knowing we had less than two years left with our mothers, the rest seemed inconsequential.