I gave Yoshi the very quick, one-minute rundown on the Void and the Devil King while Radatina visibly seethed, which was adorable. And while it was pertinent information that he definitely needed to know, I’d be lying if I denied that the sight of the pixie’s impotent fury was what motivated me to finish up with a final warning.
“And the reason your familiar hasn’t told you any of this, and wouldn’t have, is because while it feels like they work for us, the truth is familiars work for the goddesses and you’d be wise to remember it. Above all, they don’t want any other Champions slipping the leash on them like the Devil King did.”
“That is not a suggestion that you should investigate Void magic, Yoshi,” Pashilyn interjected firmly.
“She’s right,” I agreed, nodding, as Yoshi glanced back and forth between us with wide eyes. “Void magic is bad news. Look, I’m speaking as someone who considers his only true enemy on Ephemera to be Virya and who would grab at just about any straw to be able to stick it to her.”
Everyone whipped about to stare at me—well, not everyone, my own followers were aware of this by now, but the goblins and Sanorites were all visibly shocked. Gratifying as it was to so decisively make myself the center of attention, I was in the middle of making a different point and so pressed on with it.
“The Devil King is not the solution. Any Void magic goes through him or his agents if you wanna do it without blowing yourself up, and that dude is not interested in sharing power. Involving him in your business just means adding a third nigh-omnipotent entity with a leash around your neck.”
Yoshi was frowning pensively now, half-turning to stare at the Void altar. “Omura, I needed to talk to you anyway about… Well, I’ve seen indications that all or at least most Heroes and Dark Lords were brought here from Japan.”
“It’s all of them, yes,” I said. “A Spirit told me that straight up.”
“Oh. Good to know, then.” He turned back to face my directly. “But that would also mean this Devil King is Japanese, right? Maybe we can reason with him.”
“I think you may not realize how atypical the two of you are,” Nazralind commented. “Dark Lords and Heroes as a rule have not reasoned with each other. Being from the same country only counts for so much.”
“Also,” I added, “this guy lived in Japan for…well, I dunno, but probably not much more than twenty years. He’s been on Ephemera for who knows how many hundreds, and spent nearly all of that as an all-powerful tyrant. Having some distant memories of Japan doesn’t mean he’ll want to relate to us at all, if he even still can.”
“I see your point,” Yoshi said with a soft sigh. “Okay. This Void magic, then. How do you activate it?”
Everybody yelled at him at once, our voices in perfect agreement despite incomprehensibly overlapping each other.
“Okay, okay, I heard you!” Yoshi exclaimed. “I’m not an idiot! Listen, I’m not wanting to do Void magic, your point is taken, all right? I want to avoid doing it. You made it sound like that Void altar is dangerous, so how do we avoid setting it off by accident?”
“Oh, that’s not something you need to worry about,” Pashilyn assured him, mollified. “That is not the danger of Void altars. In fact, to use Void magic you would need to be initiated and given some basic coaching, possibly by an extremely powerful Void witch but most likely by an actual devil. If you don’t have that introduction, you can’t make a Void altar do anything. The danger is that whichever devil corrupted the thing remains connected to it, and can sense anyone interacting with it. That is a main way they get further converts: anyone messing with a Void altar is likely to meet a devil with some very persuasive arguments why they should try it out.”
“Prob’ly why all these heavy-ass doors were left open,” Rizz added. “Bet it was a request of Jadrak’s devil friend. With this place empty and unguarded, scavengers will move in within hours, and innocent goblins will blunder across this damn thing.”
“Here’s the thing, though,” Pashilyn said, herself now gazing thoughtfully at the altar.
“I do not like the look on your face, Pashilyn,” Radatina warned.
“I’m sure you don’t care, but me either,” said Biribo.
“Historically,” she said, ignoring them, “devils are shy and conflict-averse, despite how powerful they are. When cornered they are incredibly dangerous in a fight, but given any opportunity at all they will avoid one. They’ll flee from attack and abandon whatever project they were working on rather than defend it, every time. It has also been noted that their activities all but cease as soon as a Dark Crusade is known to be underway, almost as if they fear even the chance of encountering a Hero or Dark Lord.”
“Priestess,” Rizz said impatiently, “when I said ‘nobody do anything stupid,’ I was referring specifically to what you’re leading up to.”
“You want us to activate the Void altar?” I demanded.
“I am only raising possibilities,” Pashilyn said in a soothing, diplomatic tone. “Our goal was to find the source of the Goblin King’s mysterious power and cut it off, correct? Well, we’ve found it, which leaves the second part. If we show this devil that either Champion is getting involved here, let alone both, the likeliest outcome is they will immediately drop this whole campaign and leave the Goblin King to his fate. And then probably never show their face on Dount again, or possibly anywhere on Ephemera so long as one of you is still alive.”
“Boy, you don’t gamble for low stakes, do ya?” Zui commented.
Yoshi caught my eye and we shared a contemplative frown. The merits of Pashilyn’s idea were obvious, but the risks…
“And what if the devil doesn’t run away?” he asked, turning back to her. “What do you think of our chances in a fight?”
“Yoshi, my point is it’s almost certain not to come to a fight. Even if the creature doesn’t retreat fully, it’s not in their nature to confront an actual threat.”
“Yes, I understand that,” he said patiently. “I’m trying to grasp the scale of the risk if this devil happens to be unpredictable. I don’t know anything about devils; can we beat it?”
Pashilyn hesitated, glancing aside at Flaethwyn, who shook her head in a furious negative. Nazralind did the same.
“If…either of you were at the apex of your career and powers, possibly,” the priestess said reluctantly. “As you are, brand new with only a few spells and artifacts each… No, neither of you is a match for a devil. Both together, with all of us backing you up…”
She paused again, then grimaced and shook her head.
“Still, probably not.”
“I’m getting alarmed that this needs to be repeated,” Biribo said in a shrill voice, “but don’t screw around with devils!”
“Okay, second opinions,” I said. “Other educated people: is Pashilyn right?”
“Pashilyn is a priestess of the Radiant Convocation and a scholar of religious history and lore,” Flaethwyn said stridently, stepping up behind Pashilyn and placing a protective hand on her shoulder. “This is her specific area of expertise. If she tells you a thing, you may take it as assured!”
“Right, thanks for that,” I said irritably. “Anybody got an answer to the question that was actually asked?”
“Well, I’m no scholar of religious history, but I imagine I’m decently educated by Fflyr standards,” said Nazralind, “and while I don’t know how much of what I’ve read is propaganda, it is well established that devils are cowards.”
“I’d put it more in terms of the Devil King bein’ the conservative type who likes to play the longer, slower game,” added Rizz, “but as to the point at hand, my own experience agrees. If there’s trouble with the Void, it’s almost always a Void witch, or some leftover remnants of something one did like zombies or ghosts wandering around. Actual devils want nothing to do with any serious opposition. They’ll skedaddle at the sight of a Blessed, even one they could easily kill.”
“Can I just point something else out?” Aster interjected, holding up one hand. “Devils pay attention to these altars, right? And we’re standing here, having this conversation, in the same room as one. The point might be moot.”
Everybody instinctively shuffled a step or two toward the walls and away from the Void altar. She was right, though; if it was too late, it was too late.
“Pashilyn?” I asked.
“It’s…not clear how closely they monitor them, or can,” she said warily. “If you try to interact with it, definitely. Just being nearby…I don’t know.”
“Radatina?” Yoshi prompted.
“Well, I don’t know!” his familiar exclaimed, doing a series of midair bounces in sheer indignation. “Familiars can tell you anything about magic in the Blessing system, but Void magic is forbidden! And for a reason! Even aside from devils and the Devil King, the Void is dangerous. Shapeless magic is inherently unpredictable! Messing around with it is a great way to kill yourself and everyone else in the vicinity!”
“That wouldn’t happen,” Pashilyn said swiftly. “As I said, you cannot activate the inherent magic of a Void altar unless you’ve received the proper initiation.”
I drew in a breath and let it out, turning back to Yoshi. “Well then, considering the risks and rewards, I’m up for the attempt. If you wanna veto the idea, though, I won’t push it.”
“Oh yeah?” Flaethwyn snarled. “You go and touch it, then!”
“That’s not necessary,” Yoshi said quickly. “If we agree to it—”
“What then, rock paper scissors?” I said, grinning. “Nah, she’s actually got a point for once. If we’re doing this, I’m willing to take the lead. A really smart guy once gave me some good advice on how to deal with a devil if I ever met one.”
“I got a feeling I’m gonna regret asking,” Rizz said in a weary tone, “but before you go and do anything with the rest of us standing conveniently nearby, what was this advice?”
I turned my grin on her, widening it. “That I should Immolate them until they learn to leave me alone.”
Everyone stared in silence for a second.
“Huh,” Rizz grunted at least. “Yeah, in fact…”
“That actually is the agreed upon best practice,” Pashilyn said wryly. “Well. Perhaps not immolation per se, but the general principle.”
“Your call, then, Yoshi,” I said. “And don’t make it out of concern for my well-being, I can take care of myself. Besides, if a devil actually shows, you’d best believe your ass will be immediately backing me up.”
Belatedly, I realized that putting it this way was laying all the pressure on him, which…oops. Too late now, though. Yoshi didn’t seem crushed by the responsibility, at least, just frowning in thought as he gave the matter due consideration.
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“I think we should try,” he finally declared. “If the devil flees, that’s the greater part of the Goblin King’s power wiped out in one blow. And if it doesn’t, we’re going to end up fighting the creature anyway. I’d rather do it here, when we’re alone with it, than later when we have to fight Jadrak and Hoy and an army of goblin minions at the same time.”
Damn, he had a point there, I hadn’t even thought of that angle.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Omura?” he asked me seriously.
“’Want’ is not the word I’d choose,” I admitted, “but we are in agreement that it should be done, and I’m not one to back down once I’ve given my word. All right, let’s rock.”
I turned to face the Void altar in the center of the room and stepped toward it.
Everyone unlimbered their weapons, taking up positions in a wide arc facing me and the altar, while Zui tugged Maizo back toward the door. Good idea; if the civilians didn’t have the sense not to join an active combat mission, at least they weren’t going to stand on the front lines.
I approached the Void altar carefully, my Surestep boots unfaltering on the uneven cave floor. It sloped up toward the base of the altar in erratic, natural-looking waves, as if what had been the Spirit had been placed upon the natural pedestal of a shorn-off stalagmite. The altar silently pulsed its warning red, the encircling error message slowly rotating around its crown where the face should be.
“Boss,” Biribo said miserably, beginning to fall behind from his usual place at my shoulder. Now that I thought about it, he’d never shied from any kind of danger at all. Could familiars even be harmed? If that was the case, it made sense that Void magic might be the exception.
“Better hang back, buddy,” I said, taking pity on him. “I can survive getting blasted, but I don’t need Void bullshit messing up my Blessing of Wisdom.”
He hesitated, jittering back and forth in midair with visible reluctance, but then bobbed his head once and zipped out of range to hover over Aster’s shoulder.
One more step and I stood alongside the desecrated Spirit. I reached out with my right hand; it passed through the illusory warning as if nothing was there. Not even a tingling sensation. The head of the altar where I grabbed it just felt like cool stone.
“Reveal yourself!” I commanded the unseen devil.
The lights on the altar suddenly switched to vivid blue, and the direction of its pulsing reversed. A single flash flowed downward, as if some information from my handprint were being conveyed into the base.
The error message also switched to blue, and the text changed.
VALIDATING CREDENTIALS
Wait. What?
“What’s that say?” Aster demanded. “What is it doing?”
Before I could answer, the blue switched to green and the message changed again.
LOGIN SUCCESSFUL
Wait, what?
“Get away from it!” Pashilyn shrieked.
I was already backing away hastily, only the artifact boots saving me from taking a tumble on the rocks. It wasn’t my most graceful retreat, and it definitely didn’t beat the speed of magic.
The next pulse of light was green, and this time shot upward—and then out, emerging from the head of the altar and flashing forward to strike me right between the eyes.
My last conscious sensation was of being hurled physically backward before I found myself flung out of reality entirely.
----------------------------------------
I remember having a high fever once as a kid. I vividly remember having the experience, even if the details of the sensation aren’t something I can specifically recall; I suspect a normally functioning brain isn’t capable of experiencing that. It was intense, though, the way time seemed to twist and dilate and compress simultaneously, the way my senses all contorted around themselves as I perceived things that weren’t there via senses I did not possess, phantoms conjured by an overheated brain. I’ve never done drugs, so the fever was the only frame of reference I have for that kind of experience.
The Void was a lot like that.
My consciousness was at once compressed into a pinpoint and stretched into eternity, unhitched from causality and perspective. I floundered in a rushing torrent of meaning, encountering nothing that I could actually experience with my body’s senses, nothing my brain could parse as such. Pure meaning is meaningless to a mind that has no direct means of interpreting it.
I flailed—not with my body, which I couldn’t feel, or even with my mind. Or maybe it was my mind? I was drowning in the unreality of my own perceptions. Nothing made sense, nothing existed, and yet I was being washed away by a rushing cascade of reality, which wasn’t shaped like any reality I knew. Everything, and nothing, myself swept along, the wrong kind of consciousness to do anything in this situation.
I needed…something. Something to grab onto. Something to focus on. Focus!
Focus burst upon me, and it was as if I…rotated. Like I was a thing of two dimensions, and suddenly shifted so that the inexplicably force which had been pushing me along was sliding past instead. And suddenly, fragments of reality became clear.
Some few bubbles did slice into my smashed, contorted awareness, bursting upon the razor edge of my perception, each dissolving into comprehensible speech. I couldn’t hear the voices—couldn’t hear at all—but I was experiencing snatches of dialogue, as if people were trying to speak to me through the torrent as they were swept past.
“You. Are. Not. Special.”
“Believe in them, as I believe in you.”
“And what is strength?”
“You are awfully confident that I’ll be in here forever.”
“If I reveal to you all the secrets of Ephemera, will you kindly fuck off?”
“I doubt many things about you, Omura Seiji, but never your integrity.”
“I had a feeling it would be you. I chose you well.”
“IS. THAT. ALL?”
I tried to grab them, as if I could hold words like pieces of driftwood. They slipped past, not even clinging to memory despite my desperate clutching.
Then a bubble of perception hit me even harder, bursting with the force of an explosive, with the weight of attention. Instead of mere chaotic fragments of comprehension, I was suddenly aware of another consciousness, focused upon me.
Speaking to me.
“Go away, little Dark Lord.”
----------------------------------------
I have never been so relieved to get a concussion.
I hit the ground hard, my Surestep Boots doing nothing for me since I was landing back-first with my feet in the air. The impact drove the air painfully from my lungs and my skull cracked against the floor, causing stars to burst in my vision. All of it was blissfully, blessedly physical. Reality made sense again!
Also it hurt. Oh, shit, this hurt a lot.
Someone was grabbing me, trying to lift me up; people were yelling and arguing all around.
“You said this wouldn’t happen!”
“Where is it? I don’t see anything!”
“There’s no devil, that was—he actually—”
It took me a few seconds to manage enough mental focus to form the weight of the spell, but I finally gathered myself enough to pull it off.
Heal!
The blast of pink radiance washed away the pain and fuzziness, fixing my abused lungs and poor jostled brain in one burst. I was mostly lying on the ground; my head was in Aster’s lap, cradled in her hands, while Zui and Amell hovered over me, the latter holding out a vial of something that smelled like peppers and sugar.
Was that…it smelled exactly like the sauce on Gilder’s favorite pepper mutton. Fucking Fflyr and their spices.
“I’m okay,” I grunted, gently disentangling myself. Aster let me up and the others scooted backward. “Wow, that was something I could do with never experiencing again. What the absolute fuck was that? Is everybody okay?”
“Everybody but you is fine,” Nazralind exclaimed. “Are you okay? I saw that Heal go off, but…I mean…what happened to you?”
“He cast Void magic, that’s what!” Radatina shrieked, zooming in circles above Yoshi’s head.
“That can’t be,” Aster insisted, “the devil must have attacked him.”
“No, that was definitely Void magic,” said Biribo. “And he definitely cast it himself. Well, not himself exactly, but the altar activated in response to him.”
“What in the hell?” I exclaimed, turning an accusing glare on Pashilyn. “I thought that couldn’t happen!”
“He must have been initiated!” The fucking pixie seemed to be on the verge of hysterics. “He’s a Void witch! Somehow he met a devil and—”
“He did not, you little pest!” Biribo snarled. “I would know if he had! This was his first-ever encounter with the Void.”
“Is that…true?” Yoshi asked.
“Well, if he says it is…it must be.” Radatina was clearly reluctant, but she was at least calming down now. “This goes well beyond Viryans versus Sanorites, Yoshi. The Void is everyone’s enemy. If you’re touched by Void magic, you can’t hide it from your familiar—and no familiar would conceal that.”
“Because, like I said,” I added, “familiars work for the Goddesses, not us.”
“Is this really the moment to be harping on that?” Biribo demanded.
“Yes, that’s a good point. I have much better things to harp on right now.” I heaved myself upright, rounding on the quailing priestess. “Pashilyn! You specifically said this could not happen! You said I couldn’t activate a Void altar by accident. You went into quite a bit of fucking detail about it, as I recall!”
“You can’t!” she insisted, more agitated than I’d ever seen her. “That isn’t—it is well known that—I don’t understand how you— That is not how it works!”
“Huh.” Rizz’s calm voice was like a cup of ice water tossed into the conversation. “So. Turns out Dark Lords can activate Void altars. How about that. I wonder if it’s just Dark Lords, or both kinds of Champions?”
“WE ARE NOT GOING TO TEST THAT!” Radatina screamed, actually slamming herself into Yoshi’s chest as if she could physically push him back from the altar.
“I swear to you, Lord Seiji,” Pashilyn said tremulously, “I would not have deliberately misled you, not about this. If you do not trust my honor, trust my self-preservation. The usual result of an inept activation of Void magic is uncontrolled chaos and destruction. If I had tricked you into doing such a thing I would immediately have grabbed my friends and fled!”
“In fairness to the priestess,” Rizz added, “I’m pretty sure nobody knew that until just now. If any previous Champion has ever messed with a Void altar at all, it’s been hushed up.”
“It makes sense, though,” Nazralind whispered. “The Goddesses would not want that getting out. And it’s terribly logical that the Devil King would design his corruption this way. I bet he’d love to get his hands on another Champion.”
“Well, I’ll just add that to my very long list of excellent reasons to stay the fuck away from the Devil King and all his Void nonsense,” I said. “All right, everybody calm down, or at least stop yelling. I’ve got a headache.”
“You just Healed yourself,” Nazralind pointed out.
“I have a spiritual headache. And that’s not just my pet name for Flaethwyn.”
“Oh, that wasn’t even called for!”
“Right now we need to decide on our next move,” I pressed on. “That gambit with the Void altar…did…whatever it just did. No idea whether that worked for our intended purposes and we really don’t have any way to check, because I am declaring this too dangerous to keep poking at. So that means our mission here is done. What’s our next move, aside from bugging out?”
“Sealing this up,” Rizz stated, thumping the end of her bladestaff against the floor for emphasis. “We gotta shut all these doors and re-arm as many of the locks as we can. It won’t hold forever, but it’ll slow down anybody poking around here. Hopefully long enough for me to gather as many Judges as I can link up with and settle this. They need to know Jadrak’s in bed with the Void.”
“Well, that should settle the matter of Judge neutrality, at any rate,” said Zui.
“You’re goddamn right,” Rizz growled. “Goblin King, Dark Lord, doesn’t matter who you are. Dealing with devils makes you the enemy. Once we get this place buttoned down as tight as we can, you lot get back to Sneppit and I’ll rally my people. Then we move on Jadrak.”
“Right, sounds like a plan,” I agreed. “Let’s get this shit locked down, pronto.”
We all turned to study the doors to the chamber. There were five of them, all bristling with multiple locks and with layers of chains attached. All hanging open.
After a moment I cleared my throat.
“So, uh… Where the fuck are the keys to all this?”