“Why?” he sobbed in the empty vacuum of space, for he knew what this was.
A Trial.
His Core Trial, to be precise. His holy ascension into Immortality. His entry into the lauded ranks of the most legendary Blessed upon the face of Bet.
He’d killed Rover, and this was his reward.
He’d had two before this, and he knew very well what to expect, by now. For most Blessed, a Trial was a meaningful thing. Some great test, physical, psychological, or philosophical. It varied from person to person, and from stage to stage. But not for Caleb. Every single one of his had been exactly the same.
His Trials forced him to re-live the worst day of his life.
The day he triggered.
There was no test, but to torture him. No solution, but to endure. His Blessing never advanced him in response to his own skill or understanding, only in times of great anguish and death, a sickening leitmotif to his trigger event.
And no matter how he plead, how hard he tried, how desperately he sought to correct the actions of his damnable past self, it didn’t matter. The outcome never changed. Each time would be the same as the first.
He would awaken to a burning church, and the realization of what he’d done.
He needed no reminder. He saw their cindered corpses when he closed his eyes. He smelt their seared flesh in every meal. He could still feel the bony fingertips of Fenlay’s charred skeleton, desperately clinging to him even in death. Saint Eward’s had been home to two Fathers, six servants, and over forty orphans.
Not one survived his trigger event.
“Why?” He wept, once more. “For what, do you grant me Immortality?”
Once more, there was no reply. What had he done to earn this? Nothing. In his childhood, he’d slain orphans. In his adolescence, he’d culled mundanes who couldn’t even fight back. And now, faced with a test for once beyond his ability, he’d been willing to sacrifice the very one who’d believed in him the most.
The blood of countless innocents soaked his hands, and he’d only been rewarded for it.
“Why make me do this?” He tried, again. Some claimed Trials were the sole manner by which a Blessing might communicate with its user, so he directed his questions at Photo Emission, itself. Not that he’d ever seen it, or even really knew it existed.
“What are you trying to teach me?” He begged. “What must I learn?”
Nothing.
“PLEASE!” He howled.
Silence.
“Please…” he muttered. “I can’t…I can’t do this again. I won’t do this again.” Caleb’s voice changed, and his back abruptly straightened.
“I won’t do this again,” he announced, resolutely this time.
A challenge.
“You can’t make me.”
Forces beyond his comprehension wished him used as a mere tool for slaughter. He couldn’t fight them. He didn’t even understand what they were. But one thing was under his control, and his control, alone.
A minute tremble, so slight it almost escaped his notice, rippled through space and time. Caleb bared his teeth in a grim smile. Invigorated, he continued.
“If you think me weak-willed, you’ll be disappointed,” he swore at the empty expanse.
“An eternity in purgatory is better than returning to that hell.”
The tremble vanished as quickly as it had arrived.
Silence, once more.
Caleb paused for a moment, looking around. Naught but the omnipresent blackness of space gazed back at him. Whatever meager presence he thought he’d noticed was gone. He slumped, collapsing to his knees on the invisible ground that somehow supported him in this place.
The nauseating memory remained fresh in his mind, and he grit his teeth as it rampaged about inside him, pulsating eclectically in cruel waves of agonizing grief. He didn’t fight it. He knew well by now that not everything could be fought.
With such things as this, all he could do was weather the storm.
Near enough to a decade of time made the process no easier, the wounds no less bloodied and raw. But he was used to them by now, at least. Caleb leaned back, crossing his legs and closing his eyes. Waiting for the worst to pass. During a Trial, no time passed in the outside world. He would not go back.
He would wait an eternity, if necessary.
His efforts were rewarded. With every pulse, the waves grew milder and milder, until his visage softened and peace was returned. They would never dissipate entirely, but he didn’t mind. He wouldn’t have chosen any different. Even a painful memory was better than no memory, at all.
Caleb breathed deeply, in and out.
Space flickered.
An all-consuming radiance suddenly blasted him back.
Caleb startled, opened his eyes, and was overcome by wonder. Towering over him, even from hundreds of miles away, was a massive, floating sun.
Its magnificence was wholly indescribable. Its beauty was beyond words. Its color was an unfathomably complex melange of golds and reds and whites and yellows, with just a hint of purest sapphire glimmering from within its core. Taller than the tallest mountains, deeper than the deepest seas, more entrancing than man’s finest works of art.
All across its unimaginable magnitude, whisps and whorls brought richness and depth to its untouched canvas, plasmic storms that had raged for one thousand lifetimes. Curling tendrils of terrifying energy reached out from its surface to brush across the endless night, casting glimmering trails of radiance lightyears into the depths of space.
It was nature’s magnum opus, the Gods’ first and most brilliant design.
It was power, and elegance, and the source of all light.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
It didn’t need to speak for him to know its name.
It was Photo Emission.
Caleb fought valiantly against the solar winds that ravaged him, clinging desperately with will alone to the fabric of this incomprehensible space, lest he be shot forcibly back.
“WHAT…DO YOU WANT OF ME!?” He bellowed, shielding his eyes with one arm, having to strain his vocal chords to the very limit just to barely overcome the roar of radiance given off by the star.
The sapphire core of the stellar body trembled, and pulsed.
REMEMBER YOUR PAST.
Its words were an explosion that sent him rocketing backwards, a fusion bomb that ripped skin and ruined ears. Caleb tumbled for miles before managing to arrest his velocity, holding fast to nothing at all, and exercising his cracked voice once more.
“NO!” He screamed, shaking with equal parts fury and fear. “I WILL NOT GO BACK! I WON’T BEAR WITNESS TO THEIR CORPSES AGAIN!”
The star pulsed again, but there was something…else to it this time. Like his Blessing was shaking its head, frustrated with his inadequate interpretation of its tongue. Relentless, it spoke once more.
REMEMBER YOUR TRUE PAST.
Caleb had prepared himself this time, and managed to resist being thrown, but was consequently immersed in the blistering heat of the atomic detonation, his skin now truly flensed. He howled with pain, tears streaming down his face.
“I DON’T UNDERSTAND!” He half-cried, half-yelled. “WHAT IS IT THAT YOU ASK!?”
The star paused for a moment, as if contemplating something. Then, its sapphire-blue core began to glow. It grew brighter and brighter still, until it had eclipsed the rest of the star entirely. An even greater heat poured forth from the stellar body, melting his muscles off the bone.
At its very center, he thought he could see the ghost of a figure take shape. A man with brown hair, and smiling eyes.
Caleb stared, transfixed, his nerve endings long-burnt by now, as his Blessing went supernova to deliver its final message.
YOU MUST REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE.
The bright blue light was the last thing Caleb saw as the all-consuming radiance burnt his retinas to ash.
And his mind, shortly after.
~~~
Dimly, wearily, Caleb blinked fresh, undamaged eyelids, allowing uncanny green light to greet his senses once more. He shuddered, his body curled into a ball upon the grey, concrete floor.
He was stark naked, and glowing slightly.
Tentatively, he rose to his feet.
Doing so felt like an alien experience. His movements were too smooth, his body too easy to control. Everything felt too light, every nerve ending firing, every tendon actuating, precisely as he directed them. His already sculpted physique had become even more so.
His skin had darkened and deepened in color, developing into a rich, almost golden tan. Every last ounce of fat had melted off his body, his many corded muscles seeming to bulge angrily from beneath skin tougher than steel.
He flexed them gently, and felt an overwhelming power surge from within.
He would never again need for sleep, nor excrete waste. He would never feel hunger, or thirst. He would not age another day. His Blessing had made him no longer mundane, but now he was no longer human, at all.
He was an Immortal.
Caleb tore his eyes from the examination of his own ascended form to behold his surroundings.
He blinked.
He’d been mistaken. The floor wasn’t grey concrete. It was pitch-black, covered entirely in soot and still-glowing magma. And it wasn’t even a floor, really.
He looked around, and his eyes widened in disbelief.
He stood inside a mammoth concrete bowl, carved somehow into one side of the pyramid, easily one hundred feet in diameter. Countless cubic meters of rock were simply…gone. Evaporated. The bowl was absolutely empty, save for a pool of bright-red lava bubbling from its bottom.
There were no machines.
Taking to the sky, Caleb’s head whipped around. He looked right. He looked left.
No machines.
Not anywhere. The entire ziggurat, no, the entire tomb was abandoned. What…what had happened? Just how much time had passed since his Trial ended? His watch had vanished, too, so there was no way to tell.
Wait…how was he flying?
Last Caleb checked, his Entropy reserves were bone-dry. Absolutely and entirely depleted. To be sure, he’d progressed a stage, but even becoming an Immortal didn’t restore one’s Entropy, merely their body.
But now, as if by magic, they were full.
Eyes now so wide they exposed his corneas near-entirely, as countless impossibilities rebounded about his mind, Caleb said the word.
“Grimoire.”
~~~
Glare, Light of Remembrance
Attunement: Photo Emission 15. Light is yours to command.
Grain: Spectrum Sight. The light reveals.
Marble: Hard Light Armor. The light protects.
Core: Stellar Heart. The light restores.
~~~
Unsurprisingly, his Core Gift was just as vague and unhelpful as the others. He’d have to figure it out on his own, later. It was his Title that demanded immediate attention.
Light of Remembrance.
Receiving a Title should have given him great joy, yet this one did nothing but fill Caleb with fear. Remembrance. It couldn’t simply be a coincidence. It was his Blessing’s reminder. It wanted him to remember his past. At first, he’d thought it meant to subject him once more to the horror that was his triggering. But he’d been wrong. It wanted him to remember his true past.
His past, before he’d been frozen in cryo.
A shudder ran up and down Caleb’s spine. The mere thought of doing so filled him with a deep malaise, an immediate internal dread. He knew so little of his true past, yet it suffused him with fear all the same.
But mixed in equal parts with the fear, was a burning desire to know.
His past was knowledge forbidden to him by the Coterie itself. Why? Why should such a powerful, world-spanning entity be so concerned with the particulars of his life? What gave them the right to keep his secrets for themselves?
Yet, how could he compel them to share with him what they would not?
“The Bern Institute,” Caleb muttered, in realization.
Host to the organization’s most premier minds, partnered with the Vault of Glass, keeper of their myriad secrets. Perhaps it was fate that he now attempted their Agoge. If Pylon still refused to tell him, then Caleb would find the answers for himself.
But first, he had to escape this tomb.
Caleb flew high with a thought, faster and smoother than he ever had before, a comet burning through the air to reach the platform at the Spire’s summit. Atop it, the defunct orb sat, dim and dead as ever. Neither had the words inscribed upon its holding pillar changed, still condemning him for his crimes.
The machine army might be gone, but without the orb his escape was impossible.
“Priest damn you, foul thing,” Caleb cursed, miserably, as he approached it. Chewing his lip hesitantly for a moment, he then reached tentatively out for it, grasping the orb in between his palms. It felt cool to the touch.
But he heard nothing, physically or mentally. Whatever intelligence within it, that had misguided Quarrel into destroying herself and taunted Caleb afterwards, was long gone. Now, it was just an orb.
Or…was it?
Caleb’s brow furrowed, and he closed his eyes. From somewhere inside its dull, sea-green depths he thought he could picture something. A…hole. An empty vessel. A receptacle.
Waiting for Entropy.
On a whim, Caleb activated his Blessing, channeling a thread-thin string of light directly from his reserves, up and through his arm and fingers, and into the orb. It was not an easy task. Blessed were incapable of manipulating pure Entropy, and even the attuned variety served only as fuel for powers, naught else.
But his own supply was deeply suffused with light, and his abilities were so very much greater now, as an Immortal, that he was just barely able to accomplish the herculean effort.
Ever-so-slightly, the orb began to glow once more.
He smiled fiercely.
This place would not be his end.
Vox would not escape.
Crossing his legs in midair, still channeling his own Entropy into the orb, Caleb settled in for the long, tedious wait.