“Orator!” Sofia cried out.
Saria looked surprised for a second after her mouth had been hijacked, but she understood what was going on thanks to Sofia’s outcry, and decided to let things play out.
“That would be me,” the Orator answered through Sofia’s mouth. “And before you ask, youngling, your Sister risks nothing, and neither does your guardian, for that matter.”
Sofia pressed the bodiless voice for answers, “How do you know that? You were surprised I could survive your presence at all before.”
The Orator switched to speaking through Saria again, “A curious thing, is it not? One this Lord has been investigating. Answers have been found, system shenanigans, hidden within your soul, and your Sister’s. As luck would have it, it was your reunion which helped elucidate the mystery.“
Shenanigans?
“Do you have to speak through us?” Saria asked after the Orator finished speaking.
“This one shows reluctance as well? Such a pity,” it answered through Sofia, his voice then coming from somewhere near the door, “Regardless, the system finding countermeasures has been an interesting development, one I will be taking full advantage of,” the bone statuette of Zerei said.
So it was something he couldn’t do himself? I thought the Lords were more powerful than that.
“Speak aloud, Saintess, I have a numerous audience on this day,” the oddly excited voice of the Orator came from Sofia’s mouth.
Right, reading my thoughts and all that, I forgot, sorry. Hey, isn’t now a great time to find out weth-
Sofia repeated her previous thoughts for Saria to hear.
“It’s true that this hardly feels like a discussion with someone strong enough to erase Gods,” Saria added.
“Fools,” the Orator said from another corner of the room, forming a mouth with the bed’s sheets, “Power never was the issue, it had always been the pathetic brittleness of the sapient mind which was. Does your kind care to avoid stepping on the crawling insects? Do you lack the power to do so?”
“Fair point…” Sofia agreed without much conviction, “So, great powerful uncle Orator, would you be so inclined as to satiate the curiosity of these two brittle sisters? Also are you going to help me with Erredis’ request?”
And through Sofia, the Orator sighed. “All modicum of respect has been lost. My repeated appearances must be to blame. That I would be the cause of my own downfall, oh, the sweet irony. So be it. I shall distribute the sparks of knowledge, as such is my purpose at this time.”
Switching to Saria’s mouth, he continued, “Tell the lizard that looking is futile. What she is searching for is no longer of this world, only echoes yet remain. When the time is right, it will present itself once again.”
“Then do you know where and when ‘it’ will be?” I don’t really get it, but that would probably help her.
“When is obvious. Where is untold. That is all which needs be known.”
“Always speaking in riddles… I appreciate the help nonetheless. What about the administrators?”
“Is our guess correct?” Saria also asked.
Sofia watched herself shrug. “Correct is not the word I would have picked but there is a hint of truth amidst the fog. The administrators… It was fun whilst it lasted. Then, self proclaimed nieces of the Deep, let this immemorial sing you a bedtime story.”
The world around Sofia, Saria and Pareth completely disappeared. In a dim red void, the Orator’s voice came from nowhere and everywhere at once. With it, the red void came alive, dancing flames wrapped around unknown blurs. The Orator’s voice was rhythmic and heavy, oozing with otherworldly power and authority.
Three fates entwined, their call fulfilled,
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
The first is gone, forever stilled.
Fell prey to greed, they were so bold,
None shall steal the Griffin’s gold.
The flames dimmed, the red void shook, colors emerged, then faded, space was torn and built anew, countless stars streaking in the horizon. The Orator’s voice echoed again, it became faster as it sang, and so did the stars, becoming little more but streaks of light.
The second drift, through endless space,
In cosmic realms, they found no place.
They sought to reach, a fruitless dance,
A past long lost, a final chance.
The streaks of light paused, and cracked, they shattered in countless pieces and spread through the vast expanse of the void. From each piece, came the Orator’s voice, all slightly different, they harmonized.
The last one sleeps, they are broken,
Nary a dream, thoughts forsaken.
Perhaps one day, forced awake,
They will leave nothing in their wake.
As the last word of the poem faded, so did the strange void. As she regained the ability to think, Sofia panicked. The knowledge of this event was fading just as fast as the illusion she had been trapped in. Like a morning dream, the words of the poem, as fleeting as the flitting stars, were quickly disappearing from her memory.
Visibly, Saria was the same, without a word, she had jumped from her chair and started frantically etching words into the wall with her bare nails, for lack of a better writing implement. Sofia tried to use [Bone Dominus] to write on a bone slab, but the precise control it required only worsened the memory loss, finally she summoned a puddle of blood, and after dipping her fingers into it, wrote what she could in blood on the floor.
A few seconds later, the two sisters stopped, looking at each other and the result of their efforts, Sofia asked first. “Saria, do you remember what just happened?”
“After he spoke of a bedtime story, barely. I remember singing and flames. And these words… Well, I don’t remember them, but here they are.”
“We are the same then… I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.”
“It was not too bad. Hmm, our texts are both missing quite a few words, but we can probably get close to the full thing by combining them. I’m more worried about the hallucinations I’m still having.”
Hallucinations? “You’re still seeing things?”
Saria looked around the room, she described, “It’s like… Ephemeral glittering shapes?“
“That does sound like it’s related to the Deep, then, that weird, I don’t see any-”
Reality disappeared around Sofia, she became a witness to a scenery she recognized. One she had caught glimpses of during her fight against the emissary of Ormoncleth, one of ungraspable geometry and confounding truths, overlapping with reality. There were indeed glittering shapes fading in and out of existence around them, but more interestingly, as she looked around, Sofia caught a glimpse of a wandering shapeless titan, deep beneath the ground. She looked at it, and to her horror, it looked back.
“Sofia? Hey? Hello?” Saria called out to Sofia, softly shaking her by the shoulders. Pareth was right there, looking over them.
“Ah! I- Oh. Alright. Yeah. I’m, I’m here. Did you not see that?”
Everything was back to normal, or as normal things could be for someone sitting on the floor, hands covered in blood.
“I don’t know what you saw, but looking at your face I can tell you I didn’t, no. The glittering stuff is still showing in the corners of my vision, but it’s fading by the second,” Saria explained as her eyes shifted from one side to the other.
“You’re seeing fragments of the Deep. And I just got to see directly into the Deep’s plane, I think.”
“Neat. What color is it, red, by any chance?”
“It’s, uh… Not really? I guess you could say it was close to reddish in overall tone, but the specific colors didn’t match with anything real. It’s a lot more shape than color, if that makes any sense…”
“I think I kind of get it, the hallucinations I’m getting are a bit like that. Interesting then. So the deep is the red plane, for lack of a better word,” Saria said.
“Why are you even trying to attribute it a color?”
“Well, our physical plane is all colors. Mana is kind of all colors but white-ish most of the time and the spiritual plane is almost completely white, Recessed is gray, Margin black. Isn’t it curious how the planes of existence have specific colors? So if the Deep is kind of red, that only leaves the plane of the Gods, I wonder what color that would be.”
“I’d never thought of it like that… But if we’re talking about the Gods’ plane… Have you not completed the 99th floor of the spire?”
“Oh!” Saria cried out, “You’re right! How did I even forget about that! So that would be some kind of blue-ish purple. Really interesting. How did the different planes even come to be…”
“Hmm, Saria.”
“Yes?”
“Not that this isn’t interesting, but shouldn’t we focus on, you know, the poem about the administrators one of the Lords of said Deep just gave us, that we struggled to preserve?”
“Right. Well, it’s not going to disappear.”
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