That day had come when I started as armourer. John had the right of it.
It was a complexity, to construct composite armors that would handle a variety of damages. Enameling of steel itself made a fine thing more fine. Increased heat resistance, the ability to color or remove glare, and a bulwark against rusting. It was tough itself, and helped to disperse some shock by vibrations. Acid resistant, as well.
Forming and fitting clothes was one thing that went smooth and sure. The opposite was true when one minute mistake might make the work you are making fall apart from the bad seam you left in it. Like a tower whose foundation was crooked, destined to fail and fall the way you made it to.
Inadvertently, but you made it to. I found if you finished such a work and weren't still terrified you made a mistake, even after confirming you hadn't all along the way, you were distracted and had to regain focus in order to prevent a mistake.
"Jack. Come sit in the parlor with me a moment. You did fine with that suit, adept work for an apprentice. If it was just novice work your first, I wouldn't have kept you on. Would you have felt cheated, by that?" He asked me sincerely.
"No. Time, effort, talent and resource are involved. I'd still have learned to make fine armor, and each would be a little easier if not a bit better, to limits not so far as they were. I already have everything I need to become a master eventually, and you helped me find and earn that.
"I would have felt cheated only if you had nothing to do with me, after. That would feel like being cheated, after the time and memories we have shared." He nodded a bit, a few times, each more thoughtful and solemn than the time before. He pondered for a long while.
Then, he pointed me towards a platter with hot tea, sugar, and cream dishes on it as well as two cups. Neither of us was thirsty, it was meant to seem just a gesture, but I still sighed when I figured out me nor the this tea were the test. "Are you trying to figure something out about me?
"You know, I'll tell you directly if you put it to words. If they're harsh for good reason I won't understand yet, so be it." I began a spiel to encourage John, even if I sensed I might not like his words. "Quit, ah, boy you make my head hurt. They called me a thinker, you know, a man of means but- not money. Not when I first came here.
"I was like you, then. Young. Not Arcane. Over-elaborate as a thinker. Life here will be more easy to live yet difficult to endure for you if you pass this test. I'm only apprehensive because you only get one chance at it, and I can only teach it one time.
"It's a lose-lose situation with something precious and above either of us, so you just sit calm. Your mind closes in all around things, which is good, you are applying more of what matters to the topic at hand. However, you need to lock all of that in on one thing.
"If you can't do it the moment it is open to you, the opportunity for us dies, and is gone forever with nobody to keep the sigil. Percieving that point right before you know something just beyond a minds ability to know, right as the single chance for it perpetuates instantaneously."
He sighed, exhausted and grimly. Wiping heavily at his eyes, then dragging his hands down his face, without trying to exaggerate anxiety. "Do you understand?" 'Please say I didn't just mess this up. That wasn't the question, right?' I gulped.
"No. I only understand, that I can't- understand, unless you take a risk, to show me something you can't-risk. That tells me right away you have to find someone more appropriate. You can't doubt the person you entrust that too. I can barely handle the pressures of normalcy, John.
"I'm a common man who spends his time here while his body does busy work, and goes home to spend his mornings and nights with his wife, taking the desirable and leaving the undesirable behind to my proxy. If what you have is good, it isn't for me.
"And if it isn't for me then it can't be good." I trailed off as solemn of tone as I felt. Then, a bit defensive right after I added another thought. "I can't even be sure I would want what you offer. It really might be a bad fit for me, or just bad. The whole unknowable thing is too disconcerting in general.
"Let's just find someone else." I said. "You sure?" He looked relieved, and I was as relieved to avoid this kind of pressure or responsibility. Nobody needed that on their plate. Who would want to be friends with that guy, who messed up the kind of thing he was suggesting he had to offer, anything that special?
"Who are you, Jack? Think about your life and the things you have done all of it, and the-." "Sigil of Sign: Jack." I never saw someone disrupt their own self, and I swear, I would've shit myself except I was too scared when I saw his hands coming at me with those huge thumbs of his.
The moment he'd grabbed hold of me and spoke I'd just been doing what he said, remembering the sensation of when I'd first come to Akyria as it was my best guide at knowing who I was. The experience was nowhere near as bad as the 'skin-jacking' I had thought he might be attempting on me for denying him.
Nope, just another dance with fallacies and insanities. Perspective was blind. Change was static. Illusion was reality. All was true. Nothing wasn't a lie, so it is, and it existed somewhere. Ever-empty, eternally-egressing from a nowhere position. I peered into it and it stole my sight forever. I couldn't take my sight back.
Instead the void became my eyes, as my eyes became the void. All an illusion of course, but also the factual truth, for though my eyes had seen the void and taken it they were not capable of ever holding it. Not forever anyway, and so, it wasn't mine. Change is static. Illusion is reality.
'The shifting is boring. I'd really like a box of doughnuts, this time. Also, why does the hallucination keep forcing me into the shadows? I kind of think the light would be nice, right? The void is prolific with power, but the divine has energy to last forever while the void is just so limited. I mean, every observation of it.
'Powerful, big, empty, and overfilled, but burning itself out from inside. How do you, in fact, correct that problem when it's your flesh? Should I surrender my flesh to the void then, and my spirit to the divine? Something probably ought to be put in the right place to solve this.
'I feel this terrible sensation. Like, I should absolutely-not put my spirit out of the divine light. Yet my body won't leave the void either, so, here my mind occupies itself in the shadow.' No effort to alter anything outside me directly yielded results. What I saw noe once more was myself. My universe. All that was me, I binding myself.
Spirit, Divine. Vessel, Void. Mind, Shadow. The light was spirit, the dark was flesh, the illusions were all thoughts. Everything was as it should be. 'Okay, hard place, meet rock. I'm slipping out of here between you as you make contact so have fun. Void wants flesh, divine wants spirit. That leaves me my mind.
'I don't think I like being left with just that for eternity.' Moving my body towards the divine, I had to accomplish the feat of silmultaneously moving my spirit towards the void. It was no act of defiance, however, more like a conviction this could be a man having the chance to see Armageddon.
If the void took my spirit, then God would come for it. If God came for my spirit and saw the void, it would be annhilated. There was no way you survived that one, only God did, and you were destroyed if you had even a bit of evil in you since it could not exist in his presence.
'I bet you never seen this one coming.' I thought at the void, and it moved. Oh, there was plenty of it, but the substance was lacking despite every want to appear contrary. There was a dark in my soul that the void pulled with it as it moved away.
Light went to my flesh from the divine, my body drew closer towards it, my spirit closer to the void, and the divine moved twice as much as the void did away. At that point, I could sense the voids fear, and smelling blood started ever more rapidly escalating and exciting the apocalypse in motion.
'Always wondered if I'd see the apocalypse. Never thought I would cause it. Sorry, all other people still living. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. If you don't like it, well, you shouldn't have counted your chickens yet. Tough-tit, I'm putting myself in the center of absolute annhilation here.'
The pace seemed slow. Dreadful. Dark. Empty, and I sensed that closing in on it would require all of my time, just to get close enough to feel change I could differentiate I must have given up a few years. But by then what was more? It wanted it all, and it was going to get all of it. Once more, one last time.
When I closed in on the void I was only sure that it was all really just myself after it was over. The epiphanies that flooded my mind that were revealing to every feasibility manking would want here meant nothing. Also I started drinking tea, with a little of everything in it, as did John. Both of us were haggard, neither wanting to talk anymore.
The salt, sugar, water, fat from the butter in the tea all served to replace things both of us hadn't lost any of yet felt a powerful desire for. Really I'd made a mess of the dish, table, and cups in more or less dumping some of each from the dishes into a cup each. The butter I'd thrown in with fingers, it was faster than trying to cut a bit off the lump of it.
John wasn't in any better or worse shape but seemed to only be able to move when he'd had a hot mix of all that junk together in his hands, and even after only a sip both of us almost threw the cup out of our hands. Its taste went foul before a good taste could be pulled up from the cups.
The sludge inside after we'd drank from the cups didn't just stink. Looking at it, its proximity, everything about it had been revolting. None more so than the feel alone of it turning into the sludge on my lips, and as if its thickening and purifying might be contagious I stepped out of Johns parlor.
There wasn't anything cozy anymore, anywhere, and knowing now there was nowhere for me to run from it made me feel so weary. I'd wanted to work to make things easier, had worked as smart and hard as I could without pushing myself any harder or lighter than I could take. Body and mind had thresholds to account limits of.
"It shouldn't be this way. You get all the knowledge and before that you would think it makes everything perfect. People assume that with knowing all there is to know of even the wordly would allow them to maneuver their being into that exact life and world they would want to be in.
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"Concentric mentality in a world where none come close; but perspective can only see so far and from one point of view at once. You can never micro manage enough, never explain how important it is that a thing go a certain way, and you can't expect others to see why with the same clarity.
"Just take things easy here for a few weeks. You've got an easier start here than anyone else will have. You were smarter than I was by your actions so far, although a lot more in my age made homes here when they found it. Like you, I too found the evil here, but I did not see it was in myself.
"Not in time to help it." John grew a bit stiff and straightened some from the bent position whatever experience this was had left him in. "You won't even have the hard time of it that I thought, now, just the ease of living and the weight of knowing. Take time off, here or your home, but better brace yourself."
'No, John.' "You said yourself you hadn't done what I did. Did the one who you took this sigil from have that same experience you did, or that I had?" "Breeze had an experience like mine, same as we all do. It's always been possible for one to Concentricate their Sign upon inception.
"None with one knows why it takes many of us centuries, and more of us about a millenium, when the cusp is already close at their beginning." John didn't stay quiet long. He made a motion for me to look at him, and, though I had apparently that hadn't been good enough because he took on a dark and threatening look.
"Your name was already the name you had, for the name you have now. That can not possibly be the reason, yet it can't be discredited outright. Still, it does ring of an energy to it, denoting your increased likelihood of a name effecting who you would be not only at birth. Your father probably named and raised you both with the subconscious intention of versatility.
"A Jack, so to speak, a man whose service stands above others in unfathomable complexities. People of whom kingdoms and empires once literally forced into service, those men too cunningly capable to let have their benefit for theirselves alone. A deck of cards tells more tales than folk know.
"Like a card game, life, really. Else like a military, with each sitting above one and below another, the average King above his Queen yet below the common man they seem to have been set above. Only the wisest King will know this is so, that only fools would truly wish to be him.
"He serves the people above him with wisdom. The Queen serves the King above her with grace. The Jack serves the Queen above him with cunning, and below him the kingdom sends up their most capable. Wisdom makes for the simple and best decisions, those that take time, but make for the best benefit of everyone involved.
"Grace is more reactive and less active even if it occurs right away, it is smooth, you don't even realize how much the Queen is nearly as wise as the King. She does it right off, yet, there isn't much cunning to it so it's not always to her best benefit. A Jacks cunning is intuitive, instinctive, and immediate.
"He comes to court, but was not of the court, and so often he is also seen as the fool as well. That's because his wisdom is too subtle, it gets buried and forgotten like a seed, only to reveal itself later when his words are remembered by those who'll feel themselves blessed or cursed for them later.
"That's not the only reason that the Jack gets associated with the term plant, nor supplant, either. Consider though, how impactful it would be on you to have someone say something on the fly that saved your life soon after, or even much later. That person would seem more powerful or precious to the individual.
"A King would have to be foolish not to have this man under his thumb, far more foolish to have others see this man around him in court where he might usurp his farsightedness from the Kingdom and his people, and a mastermind to put the elite of the Kingdom out of public sight under his clever wife.
"Then the Queen has power, safety, and security the King can only wish he could wield directly. He is wise enough to know that he can not, he will make do with the average and those lesser or greater in their works, with wisdom he makes quality of quantity while the Queen he unwittingly gives the intensity he can not handle."
I didn't stay long after he talked more about a deck of cards for what felt like forever, the hour mostly quiet spent though. I went home not long after, in both ways and places, and once more did exactly what I shouldn't. Something that this knowledge I had in me tried to prevent happening as its contents assured me of the outcome.
When Akyria was banned a couple of days later it was that point in which all the fantasy it lacked changed. Them Arcane were granted the option to change that for classes. Those who did so quickly found they'd gotten all the options they wanted, and yet, everyone who saw that and tried to play for that reason weren't arcane.
That was the sign that the Earth only had another six months until all those who lived in Akyria would come to here, while all on Earth went there. What was Akyria would begin being consumed over three millenium by the void, and what Earth would become would be nurtured by the divine for a hundred millenium.
The process would reverse itself at the point both full measures of different relative times had elapsed, only those who were in the Akyria-void would havd their bodies destroyed as a new world formed. This was what the Sign had imparted with knowledge, anyways. It led me to believe that here everything would stay normal.
That was how I knew. You know how you hear about people getting the weirdest vibes that tell them not to leave home, only to be terrified later when they don't, because something happened that they could never have expected or known about? Premonition, intuition, subconscious outsmarting conscious to preserve.
What if you took it further, though?
No vibe somethings wrong, though your world is being destroyed, whilst the start of that for others will be more indicative of a world where their greater potentials have been unlocked. The truth was they'd be killing each other off quickly, trading humanity for the power they'd gain best by wronging each other most.
That was as wrong as that the other side could be any better. I did nothing but await that year and avoid everything else but acting in the last moments of it. In Akyria I ran every day farther into the desert those last days with my body, so it would be away from any person who might try and stop me.
I wouldn't take any risks at the biggest risk I could take. In those final moments everything was meant to begin to seem like a veil that had been gradually lifting had just begun to be passed, the most profound or subtle sense that Johns memories had amongst them. A sound unlike any other.
It sparked all the thoughts and feelings in my head of late to hear it nearing, the more noteworthy being those that had most made me feel the most terrorized and insane. Apocalypse, Armageddon, Divine, Shadow, Void, Oneness, Nothingness, and then the word John used: Concentricated.
'Third times the charm, let's hope.' With Johns knowledge I teleported my body from Earth to Akyria. It had struggled every bit like the demon I thought and imagined, and even though it looked like myself, it was in reality what I feared would take me over and what John's memories called a shade in the sense it was something lesser you left.
I didn't try to teleport back to Earth. When the intensity of the tone of sound became audible instead of a subtle vibration, I wasn't struggling long in holding the shade. My spirit I willed there, so when I severed the anchor of my vessel, there I was in all the wrong places and times. I'd practiced this twice already.
The sound that 'shade' made, and the resistance of my own body to allowing these events to take place, they were but the dark and void just as my body. All that was divine and my spirit felt the pain then, because my body had been severed by spirit-anchor, what memory said was ones death-chakra.
That 'Eighth' was said to be the last destined to be used ultimately as the 'Origin' body-seed or life-chakra one was born with drained as they lived and finally came into contact with its antithesis eventually. Fate, Time, Life, Death, Cycle, Mantra, Meditation, Religion, Dao, Destiny. One. All.
Nothing. And if merging with the void felt empty, leaving it was like running away from a drug with all the addictive power that a black hole has gravitational force. And yet in that moment I fought to collect myself more than ever and wrestle my oblivion-scatteted-senses together.
All that I knew, percieved, sensed, felt, heard, smelled, tasted, and saw was tormenting. Every negative experience imaginable was intensely flooding my every facet, its intensities escalating yet they had already begun fully overwhelming.
I knew right away when it all came together and I could see, hear my own pained cries, and looked around to see a too-scary-big human head smiling too-toothily and close in my face what had been happening all along. What had worked like a logout before failed then as I first tried to leave.
'Fished into an Isekai by a god. I've been catfished and suckered! Some hack god made Akyria. Ah, those damned alien-abductions I laughed at so hard recently, sonofabitch if they weren't others getting closer to the same experience. 'No. No, I'd rather be dead. Say it ain't so. A baby?'
"So you've really gone and gotten yourself reborn and reincarnated. Well, you know what you're up against, so you must know what I want you to do. Good! Glad this is off of my plate again. Sadly, only you got the timing correct, so you'll be alone as an Other-worlder in this world.
"I'll have to send some less diverse help your way. I'm terrible with the use of a euphamism, sorry to be offensive. Your world is cut off from normal time where it is, instead of just out of time though as its new location obviously suggests, parts of the minds of those in it will be running out.
"The 'Void', as you call it, were once a Pantheon of gods who were all cursed for their corruption. That curse was to never be able to empathize again, and let me just say, gods who can't empathize are as dangerous to themselves as others since that ruins your ability to rationalize completely."
The god laughed, which sounded like any young mans mix of contempt and scoff. "It's funny, because almost all your own leaders are likewise crippled. Sociopaths, psychopaths, it's just so pitiful to think rational human beings who have a working brain would ever trust those groups to lead them.
"Regardless world-leaders use the voids knowledge and intelligence to get the benefits they want out of their life, the void gets an easier time of capturing and studying the empathy it can't understand ever again, because it will have had your leaders make you vulnerable.
"Stupid, because you'll all be taught the same simple logics that make very limited senses in one field. Lazy, because you'll wait on a 'specialist' to do even simple things. Isolated, because your countries will always be like its people, taught to see themselves as apart instead of a part of a whole.
"Your world is the voids next meal, but worst of all, it nor the people will be killed or destroyed by it. When there is little-to-no empathy left, you and your people would destroy each-other, and the world will only be destroyed when there is none of you left alive. So you and I will compromise." A sharks smile had spread on his face, I heard it worn by the next words.
"I'm going to help you, and you're going to help me. For now forget your world as it sits out of time and touch of the void. Akyria instead, where you're really being born now, is where you'll find yourself. But, this isn't the Akyria you have seen so far. That illusion is how the void manages to lure minds and make them attracted to it."
There was only sincerity in the next words. "Almost forgot, I only made one opportunity for this and you'll be born back before the voids existance. Good luck and do your best." 'Good riddance to you, too, shit-for-brains! If it's like that I might be the causality. Wouldn't a smart collective of gods-intelligences try to undo their state?
'And wouldn't creating a paradox where their actions eventually prevented the action that had caused their state to begin with neatly solve their problem?' There was some subtle fact I tried to hold onto proving it couldn't be so, except, as a baby though I still remembered words to think in them the knowledge was too complex.
Hot, hungry, itchy. These were thoughts I could get behind and felt some very real motivation about. "Nnuh. Nnnnnn-nnnn-uh-hn-aanh. Waaaaaaaah-ahuh-waaaaaaaah-ha-hawaaaah." Figuring out my new untrained vocal chords, which I was frighteningly uncoordinated to made crying easier. My moods swung rapidly, and were shallow.
All sense of doom dissappeared when the dissatisfactions of heat, hunger, and itchiness went away and were replaced. The warm and itchy wool beneath me were replaced by the feel of cool and sweaty skin beneath, and over me a sweat moistened and cool light-fabric was rested.
All this while I was being cradled by too-big hands until my head was deftly plopped towards the business end of the mounds I'd eagerly awaited. Already trying to suckle, before it was there, that had been bad form. Lucky for me I'd been in her gown, so this 'suckling' went unnoticed. That was good, no need to scare Ma already.
I didn't even notice when I'd fell asleep. Remembering or noticing much as a baby wasn't practical or possible. All the memories I did have were dark, dark memories I would have to bring to light a bit at a time, as if the complete reverse of alzheimers whereby a young mind is rapidly learning instead of forgetting.