Chapter 08

OBLIGATION

PART 2

When Mara finally awoke to take her shift, Kali was asleep next to her, which was a little puzzling. Though, when she pushed aside her tent flap, she found the answer to her question sitting at the camp fire reading a new book in the dim light, a familiar fur-bound tome most adventurers would have read by now.

“I see you took my advice.”

Looking up from ‘The Perils Of Pets’, a book clearly written by a mad man obsessed with courting beastly death, Jackle let his eyes adjust over the campfire as Mara sat down across from him.

“Yeah… Seemed like a better use of my time than idly waiting for you and being lulled by our neighborhood sawmill.”

Meeting his gaze, Mara raised her eyebrows, curious, but cautious.

“Mmm. Waiting, huh?”

Setting the fur tome down, Jackle fished the small beige device from his pocket and held it up for Mara to see.

“Mm-hm. Now I’ve got questions.”

"Ah. You are quick… Alright, shoot.”

Happy to give the floor to him, Mara seemed to stump the poor monk. It was very apparent he had questions, but it looked like he didn’t even know where to begin. For a moment, words didn’t come, but as his gaze drifted to the device, something seemed to click, and the quagmire in his mind began to untangle like pulling a loose thread on a sweater.

“Where… Where did you get this? Is it actually real?”

“Heh- Yup. Sadly it is... Can’t really dispute it- It used to be my tailbone. Which, I’ve since replaced, obviously.”

“It… It was your tailbone?”

“Right? Boggled my mind too when I found it.”

“So… There’s really no disputing what’s in this. The woman I saw was you, but also, wasn’t?”

“Yeah... That’s the gist. Definitely me, but not me, and quite a good bit older- And I thought I was long-lived already.”

Staring at the device in his hand, Jackle found himself once more awash with bewilderment, when something about Mara’s comment caught his attention like an anchor dropped at speed.

“Wait… Mara… Do you not know how old you are?”

Looking at him with wide eyes, Mara hastily tried to hide her face as she suddenly burst out laughing.

“Hahahahaha- No. No I do not. Heh- I’ve spent half my life sailing around this planet, and years get fuzzy when you travel that much- Really, calendars aren’t as consistent as you might think, and once you loose track... Ehh. Who’s asking?”

Mouth agape, Jackle was not expecting that reaction, nor answer. It made sense though, for someone like her at least. No signs of aging, no place to call home… What hold could time claim upon such a woman?

Shaking his head, Jackle still found himself baffled he was friends with someone like this. As Kali put it, their lives would most certainly be far less interesting without her in it. However, he didn’t have time to squander, he had questions that needed answers, without the extra ears.

“So… Tell me about this ‘Cabal’ then, and their madness. Because if you’re serious about this forge, then I think you owe me an explanation. What did she mean by ‘your descent’?”

Sobering up rather quickly with such a change in topic, Mara cocked her head to the side as she looked at Jackle, his question pulling her between hoarding secrets and honoring allegiance… After all, what he sought was old and potent.

“Hmm… A long time ago… When I was still fresh under the collar… I found myself faced with difficult decisions. Inarguables that would inevitably harm… I grappled with that for a while. ‘The morals of it all.’ For a bit, I thought had an answer that sufficed. A balance I struck, where if I were to suffer, before I inflicted suffering, it was… Negotiable. But a question occurred to me one day, and it troubled me so… Is paying tithe to Karma, ‘people pleasing’?”

Picking up a stick from their kindling pile, Mara broke it in half and tossed it in the fire, causing a flurry of sparks to burst forth between them as she freshened its fuel.

“I used to be a citizen of sorts, in a place beyond hope and hospice. Bleak beyond doubt, however, what we lacked in outlook, we more than matched in knowledge. We had taken apart the very building blocks of our realm, examined them in every possible minutia and, hence, they purported ourselves masters of all- But hubris is a funny friend. In all that wealth, they could not reason a way out of lack.”

Standing up, Mara’s tone shifted, as she both literally and figuratively put her foot down, emphasizing her next words.

“What you ask is my secret to keep, and I will not share. But- What I will tell you, is that the forge is from those same people. The Cabal That Remains. I believe it followed me somehow, and I would say I have a duty to handle that, but I really don’t. ‘My motives are my own.’ A statement you should now fully appreciate. So join me, and maybe find your own answers, or leave me. But don’t stand in my way.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Without even giving him a chance to respond, Mara turned and strode out of camp, leaving Jackle to wrestle with what she’d just said. The Forge was from her home world? Turning to try and catch his mentor before she left, all Jackle found was the darkness outside the light of their camp.

Who was she? It was question Jackle had asked himself about Mara more than twice now- A startling number of times in hindsight for someone who prided themselves on reading people. Was she a mechanical? The possibility could explain a LOT about her unaging appearance, but… That was just pure nonsense. She was a mage! A squishy one at that!

His eyes searched for her, but Jackle never had a chance of catching her to begin with. Outside of camp, in the darkest hour of night, Mara made her way across the sands without disturbance or noise- Her steps aided by a myriad of magica she maintained around her constantly like a second skin. She was only perceived if she wanted to be, and now was not one of those times.

Her pupil’s questions had dug up old memories. She knew this would happen when she gave him the recording, but that didn’t make the emotions any easier to deal with. Bad blood was bad blood, and time wasn’t meant to heal all wounds.

She was who she was now out of choice. A form born of necessity, the alternative terminal. To revisit such times was more than just foreign at this point, it was downright disrespectful to her existence. She shed so that she could fly. Any relation she had to that thing in the forge had long since died a good death.

As her feet glided atop the shores of the Obelisk, Mara sensed its ambiguous gaze upon her, the feeling almost oppressive. But as promised, she’d returned ‘the next day’, and now it was time to collect. Would they kneel, or would they fight? Ally or Enemy- The choice was theirs, but a pawn was still a pawn.

Nodding towards the slate-gray pyramid protruding above the calm waters of its crater-turned-bay, Mara made her intentions to enter clear before she strode into the water unaided, her existing magica already more than capable of handling a little moisture.

Underneath, Mara walked through pitch-black murk, her feet retracing their steps in the darkness as her eyes swam with visions of what once was. A time when her eyes were still new, in a world built without regard for sight.

Back then, before she’d found the threshold, she’d been as blind as her peers, fooled by their own sight. They’d built themselves chariots made of science, imparting their existence into constructs of permeance, but had long lost something far more tangible in penance.

Her transgressions were viewed as rebellion, but in the moment of incidence, she’d just been curious. A look back at the things that came before them, using their science to lense time back, particle by particle, just to peek at the magic of meat possessed with thought.

So many worlds had risen and fallen, their forms myriad and organic, but without fail, they championed societies of many number, and their ideas found concepts, and those concepts made themselves material.

Yet, for these ‘peoples’, it wasn’t always about building the tools for tomorrow, at least not in the explicit sense. Something they had, but her own lacked, was a statistical disposition for stories- Mythos, legends, and lore galore.

Purported as reflections of fears and examples to tread in noble goals, these stories were naught but fiction, yet something about them called to Mara, back, back before she was who she was now.

Like lightning to a processing chip, her ‘chariot’ fractured like a nuclear reactor meeting its meltdown in the wake of her obsession. She’d emerged from her curiosity with a drive like no other, possessed by a madness for anything but what was offered- Escapism of the infinite.

Peeling herself from the hive, ‘Mara’ came to be as a rogue chassis, bipedal in construction, and modeled from an amalgamation of her new memories- Now a radioactive cloud of blurred gods, demons, monsters and heroes- She was the eventuality of all that was not. A culmination of stories aching to be heard, the walking dharma of her people’s ignorance.

Yet, to her, she was just a person, an individual. Unseen and unheard in a world built to sustain against the end of everything. Born alone in place without atmosphere, with only the scorching light of daily intervals atop a planet of metal and energy.

The streets she walked were alleys of ducts, piping, and wires; manned by autonomous drones on service calls, and oblivious to anything not programmed into their system. The skies above, silent apart from the occasional burst of light in the form of micro-second beams of highly-compressed data shot between the orbiting planets of similar make.

The experience was novel- A solitude she’d not had before, peace away from others. Her form lacked physical impediments, so time passed without concern, intervals of day and night coming and going as often as an organic might breathe.

In her time, she wandered through the blind and unflinching, a ghost at most to their rigid existence. Her time? Spent within her mind, now a palace of her own making, fantasy and fiction swelling up like the flood of a monsoon after centuries of drought.

How long she wandered like that, mind adrift in a sea of her own making, her feet following paths laid before her, time could not tell. How many times had she envisioned herself as another in her mind, lived a life that was not hers in a world not her own? Each time, emerging from the experience like a child from the reborn from the womb, changed and renewed. Yet, somehow it still felt hollow. Without her people, who was she to share this joy with?

Motivated by an intention to share a reason to see tomorrow for more than another day to wring science for a saving grace in their bleak times, Mara did what she hadn’t before, and broke back into the hive.

Her arrival on the collective net shocked many, the event spreading like a contagion, a virus of thought that infected countless existences. To the hive, her words were poisonous. Just hearing them diverted critical resources from well agreed upon research into potential energy extensions.

As a collective, the hive had no choice but to purge the infections from its systems, sending out a wave of cybernetic death as digital amputation, with only those still capable of seeing reason past her ideas left to persist. The firewall they brought down was quick- Like the sun, casually body slamming one’s face.

In an instant, Mara’s existence had been overwhelmed by the tides of termination- She’d been caught in her own folly, attempting to nurture others, but a moment later, her eyes opened to a world she’d not seen before. One filled with organics and light. Her own chassis, now gone, in its place, one far more squishy- An organic form akin to the lives she’d lived within her own mind, manifested as a new amalgamation from the culmination she’d become within herself.

Where was she? What happened to her chassis back with the Cabal? Was her consciousness actually wiped? These were all questions she wanted answers to. Secrets that only someone from her own world would have.

Looking up, seemingly blind in the murky darkness, Mara knew she’d reached the base of the Obelisk. Above her was a construct that could have only come from one place, and within, the answers she sought might exist, but she couldn’t just ask. The very nature of such questions would reveal who she was, and drawing attention to that was expressly forbidden.