The rock was not cooperative. In addition to being invisible, it kept trying to slip out of his memory. As a result, he found himself struggling to keep his balance. Truth could have balanced on a razor’s edge, balanced on another razor’s edge, on the edge of a monofilament wire, in a moderate windstorm. So being unable to keep balanced on a roughly foot sized rock in calm seas inspired a lively hate in him.

He fell off. Twice. Truth had already decided to murder anyone who looked to get froggy in the base, but by the time his foot slipped for the third time, he swore it would be on sight. Everybody dies. Sorry, Little Timmy. Daddy caught a bad case of Sword-To-The-Face-itis, and can’t make it home.

Then that thought bummed him out. He didn’t really want to orphan anyone, he was just being pissy. And realistic. No need to play the bully. Which made him hate the rock more. How dare this invisible rock make him depressed as well as angry! He glared at it while treading water.

You don’t have to move forward while you swim. You can move up and down in the water too. Perks had opted to swim alongside Truth, now that the endurance swim was over. Not that Truth was bearing a grudge! It was at most lingering resentment.

Yeah, we call it treading water. Truth kicked slightly harder and managed to lift his entire torso up out of the water.

You can kick hard enough to launch yourself out of the water.

Heh. Yep. I’m pretty strong.

Fast, too. I remember the trees flying past my nest and the sound of the rushing wind.

I am also really, really fast. Truth smiled. He loved how it felt when he pushed his body.

Can you run on water?

Sure can. I figured out I was fast enough to do that way back when I was Level Three. Happy memories.

There was a quiet pause.

So… was there some reason you didn’t just kick up out of the water and start running so fast, you didn’t fall back into the water again? Just run the distance from where you fell to wherever we are now?

Truth watched the black winged gulls fly through the air overhead. He would have thought they were too far from shore, but it seems he didn’t know much about birds. Their cries sounded especially piercing for some reason.

He kicked up out of the water and started jogging around. No problems. He sank back into the water next to Perks.

There is a reason. The reason is that I didn’t think of it. Actually, we could have just had the bird land on the shore and then run over. Forgetting the obvious was embarrassing. Lying to your pet snake about it just seemed extra shameful.

I see.

Truth briefly contemplated drowning himself. Then he pulled himself back together.

Let’s focus on the positive- I have found an invisible rock that tries to make me forget its existence. No doubt we are right on top of the base. Now we just need to figure out how to see it, and get in there.

How are they not seeing us? Perks asked. Truth nodded. It was a reasonable question.

They might see you when you are away from me, but as for me? Unless someone much higher level is looking at me, I’m like the island. Out of sight and mind.

I had wondered about that. Perks would have nodded if he was a human. So how do you plan on getting past the illusion?

Ah, that’s just the thing. It’s not an illusion. The trick works because reality itself is telling us the island isn’t worth noticing. I have a special blessing that lets me blend perfectly with my environment. I’m not sure how the base is doing it, but since Starbrite is vastly more powerful and experienced than I am, he clearly found a way. Hell, he might have basically the same blessing.

The Blessing of the Silent Forest wasn’t unique, after all. He was just one of many people who had received it over the centuries. Though he liked to think that he had really taken full advantage of it.

He floated in the water, thinking it over. The best spell-cracker he could think of for this specific situation was using his other blessing, the Blessing of the Bronze Sea, to define the orthodoxy of his immediate area so strongly, things would be forced into view. The idea had an itchy feeling to it, like there should be a better way he just wasn’t seeing. After the recent experience with the marathon swim, spending some extra time thinking was necessary.

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He tried to think through what it was his magic was actually doing. He was imposing a higher level reality on his immediate environment. It was only higher by a minute fraction of a single degree, but that’s essentially what it was.

Cosmic rays come, ultimately, from God, through the forms of the various Stellar Eminences. It was one of the few things taught at school that he had yet to find out was a lie. What he had learned since leaving school was that the higher the concentration of cosmic energy (the refined form of the cosmic rays) the more ‘real’ something became. ‘Real’ being defined as ‘closer to God’ and frequently existing in a literally higher realm. A realm that humans, or at least the humans on this rock, were too spiritually dead to observe or safely interact with.

Truth had seen the other side of the sky a few times now. Twice, when he fell into the sky, and once when he was carried through the void by Sally, the Shattervoid child. He got the vague impression that what the Shattervoid did wasn’t quite the same, but damned if he knew how it was different. They were just too alien. Maybe they considered themselves human, but their perspective was far beyond his. He couldn’t do what they did.

But that’s not to say there wasn’t some inspirational potential. Earth Folding Step was kind of the inverse of what the Shattervoid did. They went around the other side of reality as a shortcut. Earth Folding Step scrunched up reality on this side, letting him cross distances in a single symbolic step. The spell didn’t require him to see his target location, though it did make the spell a lot easier. Likewise, however the Shattervoid did what they did, they had to know where they were going. As big as they were, if they popped out in the wrong place, the results could only be catastrophic.

Maybe… he could define the reality around him to only show the truth? No, that wouldn’t work, because this wasn’t an illusion. It was a higher level of reality. Could he define himself as someone that saw only a higher level of reality? There was an idea covered in warning tape. Floating in the ocean next to the hidden nest of the most powerful man in the world seemed like a bad place for exciting experiments. Still, the idea had an irresistible appeal. It would be quite the joke for him to rush forward and land in a minefield. Being able to see what was going on was a minimum for this raid.

He… really hadn’t planned this well. Or at all. It occurred to him that a lot of these problems had probably already been solved by Merkovah. One conversation could clear up a lot. Truth shook the idea from his head. He could feel himself tumbling like a boulder down the mountain. He could lead the avalanche, or be crushed under it. He was a holy fool, fighting God without a plan. A half smile tugged the corner of his mouth up. Beat playing a prince.

Truth slowly sank under the surface, while Perks made lazy circles in the water above him. He let his fingers guide him down, along the invisible rock. He didn’t need to breathe much. He could take a little time with this. The System would have been an amazing help here. Heh. The demon is the mage, but in his case, hadn’t he been the demon all along?

He slowly ran the Meditations, trying to lure the worms into helping. He still didn’t know what they were, or what their connection to the Rough Patron was. Didn’t matter, didn’t matter, he forced himself to focus on what he was doing.

He kept thinking in terms of “visible” and “invisible” but it was more primal than that- the spell was trying to deny him the qualifications to perceive the hidden base on any level. But he could feel the rock under his feet, and Perks could smell it. Taste it. Whatever. The point was, he was very close to being qualified.

So what if… what if, instead of refining his physique with the happy side-effect of becoming increasingly real, he focused on refining what he was. Directly elevating his status in the universe by a fraction of a degree?

Another five-alarm idea. He could put it right next to the super-vision idea. They could keep each other company.

Was he really stuck with the brute force method, relying on the Blessings of the Bronze Sea to adjust reality around him to a level he could perceive? Trying to keep it running through a full-blown invasion of the base seemed dumb.

Truth watched Perks swimming around above him. The Shattervoid, from what he had seen, didn’t really look like snakes, even if they were a head stuck on some long, sinuous, bodies. Seven headed snake in the sun. The Creator God looked like a lion head stuck on a snake, according to the Ghul. Even the angel said something about a snake’s burden. It felt like the more you learned about the world, the more mysterious it became.

Truth let his eyes drift shut. The Meditations slowly churned, reinforcing him. Building him up and sealing him off from the world. Only accepting and releasing those things he permitted. He poured more strength into the Blessing of the Bronze Sea. In the narrow area around him, he determined orthodoxy. He couldn’t reshape reality at a whim, but with arms reach, he was the source of truth. Nobody else got to say what was, and what was not.

He had done this before for bad reasons. Did this count as doing it for a good reason?

He let the magic flow into him and through him. Trying to see past the form and formalities, and into the core of the mystery. He was Truth Medici, and in these parts, he was the realest thing there was. He could see the hidden truths of the world. He could stand apart and judge things with his own reason, rather than the common sense of others. He was not going to let Starbrite define his reality. Never again.

Sometimes you need to look up and say God got it wrong. Then you have to look down and decide if you were really talking to God. Then you look straight ahead and start throwing hands. Because no matter what, the only constant was you, which meant that you were going to be the one fixing things regardless.

The water was irresistibly pushed back from him, a cavity forming in the cool sea.

“I name myself, own myself, accept myself. In all my imperfections and in all my glory. I am Truth. And I am more than the sum of my parts. I will keep waking, keep searching. Trying to find the why behind it all. I am Truth, and I have been purified by myriad baptisms. I carry myriad blessings. And right now, I see through the false reality of this tiny creator. He is not God, and he did not create this world. I am Truth. And this is not.”

He didn’t know where the words came from, why they bubbled up inside his heart. Why they formed a spell and meshed with the magic within him. He just knew they were right. When he opened his eyes again, it was to a new world.