I have no idea what I’ve just done. But I’m pretty sure it’s going to fuck up ALL KINDS of things for Starbrite. So. You know. Going to take the win. Oh, and I just saved the sibs, and myself. And my relatives, assuming any of them are still alive.
Harmony was lying very still on the concrete floor. He was short one relative. Short one Sib. But it wasn’t time to panic yet.
One more time. Cup and Knife.
Death, as Truth knew better than most, was not always a clean cut thing. Alive and dead… weren’t we always dying? And when we ‘died,’ didn’t parts of us keep right on living? The soul was a tricky issue, certainly, but since Mr. Red and Ms. Black’s souls had hung around, presumably Har’s had as well.
The spell sank into the young man’s body. He would be… twenty four now? Maybe just twenty three. Truth had completely lost track of time at this point. He carried himself like he was forty, but hung onto that hard physique he had growing up. A fine body, that had been torn into fine shreds.
Truth guided the spell through the body. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. And it seemed Manda agreed with him. The ripped fibers of the muscles re-knit. The torn sacks of the lungs were sealed again, invisibly mended at the cellular level as the nerves that once regulated them were reconnected. Around them, the snapped twigs of the rib cage were reformed into sturdy branches, guarding the healing organs. Marrow refilled the hollow spaces in the bones, and flushed with blood. The eye that had boiled and burst from the heat was reconstructed, delicate layer by delicate layer.
The spell operated on a subtle level, as well as an obvious one. From between the cracked plates of charred skin, nicotine yellow puss and tar black effluvia weeped out, reeking. Stinking of ammonia and bile. He was puzzled about it. There wasn’t much of it, it was just nasty. It took him a while to realize that it was all the crap Harmony had eaten and breathed that hadn’t been cleared out by his kidneys. All the toxic metals, all the plastics, the pill residue from elixirs, it all added up. Cup and Knife scraped out of him.
The little bones in the feet, shattered by a passing shockwave, slowly fused and smoothed back into their proper forms. The tendons relaxed, reconnected, tightened, became strong and elastic. Turning a bag of brutalized and disfigured flesh into well formed feet.
Like a harp. Truth thought. The bones are the frame and the tendons make the string, but what music is played on it?
Truth was a little lightheaded from it all. The ritual raged around him like a storm, its power lashing out ungoverned, ruled only by such laws as still remained in the ruined ritual chamber. There was chaos everywhere, but Harmony was in front of him, shattered and broken by cruel elders. He knew what to do in this situation. He had lived here most of his life.
I wonder if it’s my past lives that got me through my childhood? I figure the memory of how to fight came from them. It’s why I could use almost any weapon straight away- somehow the memory of using them, of scrapping with my hands, stuck with me. But that’s not what saved me when I was a kid. You can be the best boxer in the world, and still get your head slapped off if you are six and they are twenty five. It was the mindset. It was always the mindset.
The blood was full of poisons. Looking more closely, it was because the flesh was riddled with poison too. The toxic backwash of the curse, as well as the lingering damage of the scarification ritual. Things prevent blood from clotting, to whither flesh, to make bones brittle. Even in death, they didn’t spare him. Necrotic venoms racing up the nervous system, destroying the channels of alchemical lightning as they went. No more of that. Cup and Knife washed it away, healing as it went.
The bone rotting flame from Mr. Red’s flame wyrm hadn’t really landed on Har, but given the level difference, even being in the same room with the unholy stuff was fatal. It, too, was a sort of poison. One that took a great deal of care to root out. Fortunately, it was now a rootless flame- the summoner dead, the spell beast dissolved back into the void. The flame was, even for Truth, an eerie thing. It wasn’t just a strange flame- it attacked on a higher level of reality.
The bone rotting flame was like someone had lifted a spark from a fiery corner of Hell and forged it into a weapon. And in that corner of hell was all the bones of everyone who died in a house fire set by an arsonist. All twisted and blackened and pieces lost in the fallen timbers and swept away with the rest of the trash when the ruins were cleared. He had seen similar fires when he fought the fire demons back in Xandre. The notion that a mage could take the flame and leave the demon, forge it into something wholly human in design, was astonishing. He really couldn’t imagine how it was done. It was a wonder. A truly astonishing achievement at the apex of magical technology.
Bone rotting flames. Behold- the very best we can do.
A lot of people had worked very hard to make that. And now he was lifting its remnants out of Harmony, and burning through oceans of power trying to heal what was left behind. His cultivation was churning, mindlessly hauling in the rioting energy around them and processing it. Dumping the power straight into his apertures and then straight out again into healing Har.
Truth was quick, and by now his body held far, far more power than his level would suggest. Harmony was Level Two, and had never cultivated his body. There were a lot of serious problems to fix, but the final product was never anything really special. It was merely flesh and bone and water. Common stuff.
Truth understood the Ghul a little bit, just then. The body was beautiful, but empty. You could put meaning on it. You could fill it with anything. But by itself it was meaningless. The pitcher shaped the water inside of it, but didn’t the water change the pitcher too? There was all the difference in the world between an empty vessel and a full one.
Truth found Harmony’s soul darting around, a little speck of light. Dim, flickering. Even to his inexpert eyes, it looked badly damaged. Truth had never learned exactly how souls left this world and descended to Hell. Even the demons didn’t seem to know. Har’s soul was still hovering over his body. It was more than good enough.
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He cupped his hands gently around the dancing spark, then frowned. It wasn’t dancing. It was frantic. Hurting. Scared. His mouth set in a grim line, and he gently set some ground rules with the Blessing of the Bronze Sea. Souls should be whole, and not mutilated with bits stamped on them. Then he sent more energy into Cup and Knife. This is not what the soul should look like. They spell charged out, pouring its healing power into Harmony's soul. It seemed that Manda strongly agreed.
The soul… he groped for words to understand it. How do you describe the feeling of the intangible? What words can you use to understand the cracks and tears in something that couldn’t possibly ever crack or tear? No wonder no one had ever figured out how the System worked. No wonder it had never been replicated or defeated. It was operating at a level most humans would never perceive.
Was this the big transformation into the Nascent Soul level? You were no longer pushing bits of matter around. You were dealing with things at a higher level. You could flatten mountains with a palm and turn seas to mulberry fields all because you could reach behind the world of seemings and manipulate the real. The whole Initiate level, those levels Zero through Nine, weren’t steps towards immortality. They were preparing you to take that first step. Preparing you to step away from the mundane.
No wonder Angels despised humans. No wonder the Rough Patron thought people were clay dolls. They weren’t real to them. They really were bits of dirt shuffling around and acting like fools. And the only bit of them that was really real, that really mattered, was this singular spark. All beat up, worn down, made grimy and dim from tumbling around in the red dust.
Well. That’s how you polish things, right? Stick ‘em in a tumbler with dirt and other crap, beat them up, then hose them down. Truth let the spell wash over Harmony’s soul. He still couldn’t see the System, but he could feel the flow of Cup and Knife. Feel the edges of it, the ground in contours of it. Like someone had run a dremel and traced the outlines of what would be kept. The rest? Not the maker’s concern.
The grooves were terribly deep. Truth could feel the rest of the soul already fracturing away from it. He leaned in, pouring everything he could into it. Everything he had learned. Everything he had seen. How he had learned to love, and accept the love of others. How he had learned, slowly, to love himself. Feelings of gratitude echoed in Cup and Knife. Gratitude that he had the Sibs. That he had Harmony. He knew what he would have been otherwise. He could see that future path. Another Frobisher?
No.
He would be no Starbrite Knight. He would be the Hell Prince, bringing infernal tidings of pain and reformation for all those who strayed from the path of duty and obedience to the Throne. A life spent in pain, his and others. A life he was saved from by a simple sentence. “A big bro looks out for his sibs.” It was a fragile thread to hang a life from. Like the slightest tug could break it. But it had held, and because it had, his life had become a thing of wonders.
His face twisted into an unwilling grin as he felt the soul heal. He wasn’t getting paid for any of this. Sure, the tickets off-world, the house in Siphios, the various treasures and spells invested in him. But none of that was a paycheck, exactly. He was doing all this mad, painful, scary, frequently suicidal stuff because a big bro should look after his sibs. He was living his truth. And somehow, that was payment enough.
The soul was shining like a diamond in the sun. Truth pressed it gently back on the body, then gave the heart a little jolt. It quickly remembered what it had to do. Blood had to circulate. Nerve impulses had to race up and down the body. The lightning storm in every mind had to crackle and thunder. Eyes had to open.
Harmony coughed, dry, hacking coughs. His lungs had just been scorched. Even if the damage was healed, the body remembered the pain. Truth held up Har’s head and slowly helped him drink.
“Thank you.”
“No problem.”
“What happened? I felt like I was flying, then everything went black.”
“Oh, that’s lucky.”
“What’s lucky?”
“Trauma amnesia. You really don’t want to remember what happened in the next couple of seconds. You did not have a good time.”
“I feel okay?”
“Yeah, after the first time you die, it’s kind of a rush. In your case, it’s all the healing I ran through your body.”
“Heh. Died. Hah.” Harmony went quiet, then frowned. Then started thrashing, trying to get up. “THE SYSTEM! I CAN’T REACH THE SYSTEM!”
“Easy, easy! Yes, I know you can’t. Ease up! Relax!”
“Oh God. Oh God!”
“Easy now. Just breathe. You are going to be okay.”
“I lost the System. I can’t lose the System.” It was brainwashing. He could fix Har’s soul, but he couldn’t fix five years of carefully guided thinking. Not yet, anyway. Not with his level of power and understanding. He actually missed his System. That bitter, acerbic bit of his soul. Was it also smoothed away, returned to the seamless whole? Or was it waiting in him, looking for that moment to be reborn?
“How can I be okay? I lost the System. Was I fired?”
“Manner of speaking, I guess. Set on fire, certainly.”
“You are real funny for a PMC hitter.”
“No, I’m not. I will have you know that I am famous for being bad with jokes. The world, however, is occasionally hilarious when looked at the right way.”
Harmony settled down a moment. “I guess that’s true enough.”
“Yeah. Look, this base is utterly fucked and about to get so, so much worse. I’m pretty sure I know the answer to this, but, do you happen to know if there are emergency life rafts anywhere? Or, like, one off flying charms, or literally anything that would get you off this rock?”
“No idea. And probably not, it seems like an insane security risk.”
Truth nodded sadly. It really did.
“Well. You hang out here, then. Don’t come out until the water comes rushing in under the door, or I come and get you. Or use your best judgment, I don’t know. Just… really. Stay on this side of the door if you value life number two. How long since you last ate?”
“Oh… hours ago, I think?”
“Here’s a couple of bottles of water and some instant noodles.”
“I don’t have a way to boil water, though?”
“You ate them raw often enough.”
There was a strange pause.
“Who… are you?”
“Me?” Truth laughed, and Harmony jolted. “Just another ghost. Stay safe now. I’ve got to go see HR about some back pay.”
The door clanged shut before the words finished echoing in the room.
The hallways were chaos. Didn’t matter. Truth’s grin stretched into a skull’s smile. Next stop- Starbrite.