Chapter 20

Zaidna

The Strait of Kitadesh

Zalas slammed his journal shut and threw his writing shell across the cabin. “Damn it, Davim! Go outside if you’re going to keep retching in here!”

Beneath Zalas’s bunk, Davim’s whimpers echoed from the bucket he was spitting into. “No! I can’t look at the waves without vomiting!”

Zalas scowled, grabbed his rucksack, and jumped from his bunk to reach and climb the ladder. Once he emerged from the hatch, he stormed back and forth across the weather deck, glaring furiously at the sea.

He hated this boat and everything around it. Davim hadn’t done a damn thing in days aside from wallowing in his own sick, leaving Zalas to navigate the waters only aided by Anoth’s questionable reading of the stars. Unlike the canals of Yalet, which were lined by shores on both sides, the ocean here raised like a black void on all sides of him, removing any sense of location. Anoth’s stupid Naltite whore! She was the reason they were sailing to their doom with no guidance.

Zalas flung his rucksack across the deck, spilling its contents. The Orb, which had been packed tightly at the bottom of the sack, rolled out from the confines of its pouch, bowling toward a square drain at the base of one of the bulwarks.

Horrified, he dove to his belly and slid across the deck, grabbing frantically for the Orb as it gathered speed. He caught it by the tips of his fingers and fumbled it to the safety of his chest. He lay prone for a moment as his heart resumed its normal rhythm, then sat up on his heels.

The Orb suddenly flared blue, causing Zalas to jerk it from his chest, only to find that the flash had been nothing more than refracted moonlight glinting through the patchy layer of mud on the Orb’s surface. He brought up a sleeved arm and began scrubbing at the damp grit.

Gradually, his efforts revealed the scores of glyphs crisscrossing the Orb, and when he saw the dirt now caught in the grooves, he attempted to dig them clean with his fingernails. He had only seen these types of glyphs carved on those crude, engstaxi-made communication devices that Davim had always been confiscating from the slaves. No one among his people could make the devices work, not even the hadirs; binding ormé was something the hadirs only practiced upon the living, and with sadistic relish.

Like the engstaxi glyph stones, the glyphs upon the Orb were complex, laid out in a tight spiral starting from the globe’s cap. But there was an obvious difference between the expert strokes on the Orb versus the comparatively primitive designs of the engstaxis. Even to Zalas’s untrained eyes, the Orb was a master work. What was it, really?

He rolled the Orb in his palms. The engstaxi slaves had tried to pass off their communication devices as mere trinkets, but switching to the third degree of focus made their actual purpose obvious. Even though none of the guards could figure out how to activate the devices themselves, there was always a small telltale residue of thought matter clinging to the glyphs after slaves used them to communicate with each other. Was this how Anoth spoke with Verahi? And if so, where was Verahi communicating from?

Zalas shifted focus to the third degree, expecting to be see traces of Anoth’s psyche on the glyphs. To his surprise, there was nothing on the glyphs themselves. But inside the Orb there sat a condensed ball of thought matter, made up of a tight web of glowing but latent strands.

Was this Verahi? Zalas knew that Verahi had lost his body in a war millennia ago, but despite Anoth’s talk of the Orb being a prison, he had always assumed that Verahi’s psyche lived on in the plane from which Anoth originated. But here was Verahi’s psyche lying naked, bodiless and spiritless, with shining tendrils that drooped limply out of the exterior of the Orb. Zalas had never seen a psyche so large but so lifeless.

How had a god like Verahi come to this fate, imprisoned in such a small object? And now to be dependent on a mere mortal to save him from rolling into the depths of the sea—how pathetic his existence seemed now.

And yet. Zalas peered closer at the dormant psyche. Thousands of years of godly knowledge were held within these strands. Even one tendril might hold the key to subjugating an entire people—perhaps the secrets to godhood itself.

Drawn to the thought of such power, Zalas reached out and gathered a few of the exposed filaments with ormé, flicking them up into the air. He half-expected that they would spring to life, but instead they drifted limply, slow as spider silk, back to the others. This confirmed that something was required to wake the psyche, something only Anoth had.

As a youth, Zalas had seen the hadirs torture their victims by performing a variety of patterns in the third degree. Memories were easy to pull from the unconscious by willfully taking them. Fragments of memories could even be gleaned from the dead, although great care was required to avoid breaking the brittle strands before they disintegrated into the ether.

Regardless of whether Verahi was alive or dead, his psyche was exposed, and his knowledge was accessible to even the most primitive of fools. But Zalas was no fool, nor was he undeserving of Verahi’s secrets. He had been forced to yield to the hadirs his entire life; he would only be a fool if he didn’t take an opportunity when he saw one.

With that in mind, Zalas forcibly expelled his own thoughts, wound them into a rope, and then looped them about several of Verahi’s strands. He had only just tightened the first knot before he felt the deck suddenly dissolve beneath him, leaving him flailing and clutching the Orb as though it would keep him from falling. His vision was splashed with white and green, the colors stinging his eyes as strange images erupted from the surf that tossed him, knocking the breath out of him. People and places—too innumerable to count or know—overwhelmed his quaking body.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Just as suddenly, the deluge ended, and solid earth slammed up to meet his heels. Cool air swept across his face as his stomach bounced back to its proper place. He opened his eyes to see thousands of eshtans kneeling before him, groveling and praising him continuously. Now he was Verahi, in an era before ormé existed among the mortals in this plane. He motioned in front of him with his well-manicured hands, drawing out the primal matter in the air. Specks of black and white flowed freely in his view, mingling together as he wove them expertly into a loaf of bread amidst a chorus of enraptured screams.

Zalas’s mind went abuzz with confusion. The loaf of bread was as tangible as any he had seen conjured through ormé, but the primal matter that composed it was two colors at once. Was this lighter matter that which only the Naltites could control? If so, how was he able to see it now? Was this how Verahi saw the world when he possessed a body?

Zalas would never be able to see primal matter the same way again. There was a beauty, an elegance, in the way Verahi effortlessly bent the dark and the light to his will. How could he live with only the dark again? Even Anoth admitted that he could not see the light matter as clearly as he could see the dark. No wonder he revered Verahi; the level of godhood Verahi held over Anoth might even eclipse that which Anoth held over the mortals.

The memory of the bread spun away and Zalas was flung into the light, his spine slamming into the back of a broad, golden throne. Two men entered the audience hall to continue their assault. One hurled a bright ball of fire, composed of the purest light matter, and the other followed up those attacks with rapidly-fired bolts of lightning, each formed wholly out of shadow matter. The heat of their assault rolled off Zalas’s flesh and melted the gold behind him. He had been careless. Even though he knew mortals had received the gift of ormé, he had underestimated their resolve to use it.

These were impressive sons of the tenth house, adept at the use of their respective facets of ormé, but their attacks were still imperfect. Individually, they could char his clothes, but even their most powerful assaults alone could not permanently damage the refined matter that composed his entire being. He swept his arm across his view, knocking the mortals off their feet. They deserved to be crushed, but their powers could yet prove useful to him. “Cease your rebellion and bow to me. Become my weapons and you will live as kings.”

The men signaled their refusal by resuming their volley of attacks. Zalas instantly blinked back into the first degree of focus, flicking his fingers lazily to unravel the incoming destructive patterns as they grew more and more predictable. The fireballs dissolved into spiraling white embers, while the lightning burst into billowing black clouds of ash.

Zalas feigned a loud yawn. The men glanced at each other before continuing their assault, now hurling their patterns simultaneously. Ah, defeating two patterns at once—what a challenge! Zalas smirked as he wriggled his fingers in anticipation. But before he could fully unravel the patterns, they collided with each other in midair, creating a seam of crystalline colors at their center. In a panic, he rapidly dispelled the primal matter surrounding the prismatic crescent hurtling toward him, but could only shield his face with his arms as the remaining energy cut into him like a scythe before dispersing to fly past him on all sides, breaking apart the throne behind him into dozens of melted fragments.

Damn it! Zalas lowered his arms to find them charred all the way to splintered bone. Those simpletons—those infants—had created refined matter! He leapt to his feet, preparing himself for the next onslaught, but caught the fools staring at him in open-mouthed surprise. They had done this by accident! What were the chances that two mortals born under the tenth house with opposing affinities would unite against him? He needed to destroy them before they fully understood what they had discovered.

He raised his shattered arms to the ceiling, finding and unraveling the matter in the mortar between the great stones that loomed above them. The men, realizing his intent, immediately began working another pair of patterns, this time fusing them from the start, and Zalas could feel the already scorched air broil and quiver in front of him, blistering his lungs as he drew it in.

The ceiling moaned as it finally gave way. Zalas looked down in triumph as heavy stones and crumbling mortar rained down upon them all. But it was too late. As the men vanished beneath the rubble, their completed pattern roared toward him, effortlessly tossing aside falling debris as it went. Instinctively, Zalas erected a solid shield of energy in front and above him, which easily deflected the boulders, but when met with the swirling whorl of color, it shattered, leaving him fully exposed.

The brightness scorched his eyes and sent him hurtling into darkness. Almost instantly the physical pain of his flesh and bone turning to charcoal ceased, but the mental anguish persisted, searing his every thread of thought until all he was left with flopped and floundered feebly on the floor.

“You!” Zalas’s thoughts ricocheted back into his skull as he cowered before the cold voice that emerged. “You dare seek my secrets?” Something plunged deep into Zalas’s psyche, ripping apart the strands without mercy.

All at once, his every memory spilled out before him, falling in thousands of congealing layers—a chaotic mosaic of colors and sensations. There was Kailei, Davim’s bed slave, her eyes frozen in horror, Anoth’s fist piercing her neck. Occupying the same space was the engstaxi whose attack leveled Mount Thayl on the day the Orb was found, an eerie smile perpetually etched on his blistered lips. Every face, every sound, taste, touch from Zalas’s memories smeared into each other, forming incomprehensible blurs that his mind could not begin to make sense of. He could only stare helplessly as his psyche was plumbed by the unseen force.

And then the pain abruptly stopped. From the mélange of memory emerged a clear image of Anoth’s face, an almost serene determination gracing it. His outstretched fist gripped the pouch that held the Orb, ready to drop it into Zalas’s hands.

The disembodied voice spoke again. “I see. Interesting.”

“I didn’t—he—” Zalas’s mind stammered.

The voice shifted to surprise. “Oh? You still maintain conscious thought? Perhaps you might be of use after all.”

Zalas blinked and the horrifying, deformed amalgam of memory was gone. He lay flat upon the ship’s deck, back in his body and still clinging to the glowing Orb, but his eyes and brain could not focus on but one thing. The Mother Star, glaring at him from a distance, looked exactly like colorless refined matter.

“You are no longer Anoth’s servant, but mine,” the Orb throbbed. “Return me to him and keep me apprised of his activities. Your reward will be great if you do this well.”

Then the prismatic light vanished, and the Orb was lifeless once more.