Randidly traced Acri through the air in a particular pattern utilized by Ouranos as he considered how he wanted to describe the interaction. In truth, the explanation was just a pretext; Something in his heart whispered that he couldn’t let Fiona walk away with that sort of feral expression. The Grey Creature stirred as it looked at her; her emotions were building toward a conclusion just as wild and violent as Randidly’s own dark finale.

Or perhaps this is empathy, He wavered slightly, then refocused. He wasn’t good at this, but what he suddenly realized he also wasn’t good at was explaining the way Nether worked to outsiders. He bit his lip as Nether flowed through him.

At this point, it had become a physical part of his new body. Nether traveled through him with its particular sensations and patterns. It came in through his nose and ran along his veins, beside the blood. Telling Fiona about how greasy and inconsistent Ouranos’s pathetic attempt at Nether had been wouldn’t hold her attention for long. It would also miss a lot of the nuance of why her pattern had been so weak.

He drew the S shape one more time. “This Madam Ouranos… did have a unique way of utilizing Nether. But it was ultimately a simple game of cat and mouse. If I had to describe it… that candle between us connected our minds and placed us within a flowing river. Her capability allowed her to peer through that river and reverse its flow in unpredictable ways, so she could drag my ‘fortune’ to where she wanted it along the bank. At a particularly dangerous location, she had prepared with her image.”

Randidly traced several variations on Ouranos’s patterns very quickly. Each produced a slightly different response from the world, sending wind howling away or pulling it to spin around Acri. Ouranos’s method was interesting, but it felt wrong to Randidly’s senses. And considering how easily he had overcome her, he was inclined to trust his senses. Even as he sank into his memories, he made other attempts to improve his rendition.

He had been taken to a cavernous maze when his consciousness flowed into that flame, alone in the dark with the long and gloomy passages. Yet a single breath through his nose had given him a picture of the entire area. He had sensed about twenty floating eyeballs, oozing pus and searching for him. He rapidly traced out the passages around him; her coverage honestly wasn’t that impressive. If one was lucky or moved quickly, it was easy to avoid them as they honed in toward his position.

If you had an accurate picture of the area and didn’t panic, that is.

Yet as he examined him, he felt discovered her subtle pull to guide him to his death. Her interference was slightly annoying. He clicked his tongue as he examined her eyeball images. Even for him, looking directly into those floating pus drippers would have been a dangerous thing.

“How do you beat a river?” Fiona asked in a whisper, pulling Randidly back to the present.

He cleared his throat. “Well, the metaphor is imperfect, but essentially-”

Randidly had gone to a dead end and waited, allowing them all to come closer. The pattern affected movement, but couldn’t force him walk. Soon, all of his escape routes were filled. Still he watched, gathering more and more of an impression of the pattern Ouranos utilized. And as they turned down that final passage, Randidly had unfolded his current position, fueling the change in perspective with his Nether Core.

The dimensions resisted for a second, due to that pattern, but his powerful Nether obliterated that resistance. Suddenly he was at the end of the passage and all the eyeballs were bumping uncomfortably into one another in the dead end. As they twisted around, he folded space again, leaving them trapped in a dark room with no exist, only able to look at each other.

“-if she controlled the river, I controlled the landscape around it,” Randidly finished, drawing another tight spiral. The ground hummed beneath his feet; he was getting closer to the correct execution. “I twisted the river around so it flowed into itself in a circle and couldn’t reach the place she wanted to go. And now she’s stuck there.”

“Stuck how?” Fiona’s frown deepened. “What method did you use?”

“Honestly, no fancy method.” Randidly felt a tickle of insight. He turned his eyes up to the sky, unwilling to look at her directly as he tried his best to give some help. “Well, if I had to put it simply, there are two types of individuals I’ve encountered since getting involved in Nether. People who create patterns and people who are patterns.”

Fiona stiffened, perhaps sensing who he was really talking about.

Randidly pressed forward before he lost the thread of truth. “Everyone makes a choice about which to be, even if they don’t consciously select one over the other. Hell, if you don’t think about it, you are a pattern individual. But you can also choose to take a step back from simply reacting to your context and consider what you want and how to get there. You adjust yourself not to what is happening now, but where you want to be.

“Ah. Well, Ouranos is the former. She reacts, unwilling to think long enough about herself to pause her actions.” Randidly used Acri to draw the shape again, sharper this time. He clicked his tongue at the failure. “Her own power, the flow of her river, is what has her trapped. If she paused long enough to loosen the grip of her own power, she could escape. Yet she doesn’t.”

“But maybe she cannot stop holding onto it,” Fiona whispered. “She- did you not say her Nether Core was fake? Perhaps she has built up so much… context and importance on this thing that is a broken tool. To you, somehow without that impediment, it might seem easy to release your grip. But to her… it is impossible to lay down the past.”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Randidly blinked. Of course. It’s not that the shape is wrong, but that it’s incomplete or bound. Just like even the Nether King fell to its own pattern, on the frontlines.

He drew the shape more slowly this time, emphasizing the bottom. He felt the places that were lacking. “You might be right. I hadn’t considered that. Thank you, for that insight.”

Before he could be pulled into more experimentation, he paused and looked at Fiona. “You know, we might have stayed shallow in our declarations to avoid dishonesty, but these tattoos will reveal if we are lying. If you’d ever like to pause and have a deeper chat about our pasts, I think everyone would be willing.”

Fiona nodded with jerky motions. This time when she turned away, he didn’t try and stop her. He had done all he could. And honestly, what he had done was more than he really felt confident doing.

Weirdly, the extra effort helped ease the tension of the Grey Creature. The image knew very well what it meant to have difficulty letting go.

Randidly returned to the issue of the shape when he was alone in the space outside of Ouranos’s house. His images manifested in the area across his cliff, stretching and exploring this open ring where their fabric was reinforced. With the owner trapped and her image fading, it really was an ideal environment to train. Randidly wished he had more time to remain here and hone himself, yet he would only give himself a few hours to take advantage of this before they needed to move up.

Again and again, he drew the intriguing Nether shape. Slower and slower, until the tip of Acri seemed to be carving into stone. Nether pulses around the shape, hinting that he was closing in on the correct sigil. Significance pooled beneath his feet, as though waiting for his success.

Congratulations! Your Skill Left Hand of the Nether Oracle (M) has grown to Level 862!

…

Congratulations! Your Skill Left Hand of the Nether Oracle (M) has grown to Level 880!

Congratulations! Your Skill Yearnings of the Nether Heir (P) has grown to Level 730!

It was the last Skill Level that made something click in Randidly’s mind. He drew one more time, slower even than before, so that tracing the whole shape took almost ten minutes. When it finished, everything hummed with Nether as his Nether Core accelerated. What lingering remnant there was of Ouranos’s image in the area was blasted away by the seething energies generated.

The drawn rune hung in the air, negative energy discharging as crackling lightning around it. Randidly frowned as it lingered without his prodding, continuing to persist and draw in more Nether. The significance below it began to develop. Gradually, an entire system of energy began to develop.

He cut off its connection to him before it could develop further. For another few minutes it persisted, before running out of steam and collapsing. Randidly watched it the entire time, his skin crawling. For a while, he was confused by why a shape held such persistent meaning, but a stirring within the core of his significance revealed it.

That shape had been the Authority of a dead Nether King. He wondered for a bit whether Ouranos had slain one herself (which seemed unlikely) or whether she had just witnessed the demise of one. He felt oddly sad as he drew the symbol again, letting it persist for a while. From its shape, it seemed like he could allow it to persist and turn into a minor variety of Nether Prince.

With the war against the Nether happening so long ago, how much information was lost? Randidly wondered. How much about this growing Nether Core will I have to stumble through without direction? As far as I know, only one Nether King remains.

…which probably means it is very important that I don’t reveal the fact that I now have a Skill that implies I am a Nether Heir. Randidly’s face turned serious. I have a feeling that Elhume didn’t just engage in the systematic eradication of powerful Nether figures for fun.

However, in the end, being hinted as a Nether Heir was only one of a half dozen reasons Elhume would probably kill him if he had his full information.

Those issues were for later. For now, he released a long breath and took advantage of the wonderful image environment. He stretched out a bit and then began putting his images through their paces.

Yggdrasil grew taller, spreading its shadow across the entire ring. The green of its leaves deepened and the patterns across its trunk began to caper happily. The Stillborn Phoenix gobbled up the scraps of Ouranos’s image and her dirty and poorly refined Nether, happily repurposing everything she had accomplished into its fuel. In its manifested state, the Egg of Depression’s size continued to creep outward. The Grey Creature’s jagged edges sharpened and bled, becoming a constant source of dull pain in Randidly’s heart. Its flesh bubbled and curdled, melted from within by the fires of his emotion.

Yet Randidly didn’t try and slow down its dangerous shift. He simply observed, acquiescing to its desires.

I’ll look at your truth, I haven’t forgotten, Randidly closed his eyes. I’ll someday take a step back from this pattern, I promise.

He also continued to proceed through the Hierarchy of Burden. Once he had a knack for spatial collapse, he proceeded to push his Fatepiece to Level 70. Only halfway through did the strain shift, becoming a pulsating instability that sought both to fold him inward and open him up like a blossoming flower.

The first several times it happened, Randidly collapsed into a groaning and panting pile of limbs. Slowly he pushed himself to his feet and gathered himself for a while. Right when he was about to go back into the training, he noticed Pullas nearby. She stood silently, staring at the ground with a complex expression.

What is the world coming to, Randidly thought to himself as he took a deep breath before speaking to her. “Is something wrong?”

“Not… particularly,” Pullas kicked her foot against the ground. She began shaking her head. “Just- all those we liberated from the tapestries have died. I suspect they had been dead for a while, just physically bound in place by Ouranos’s ability. Their deaths… were not good ones. I suppose that seeing what life not to live is a part of my journey as well.”

For a while she was silent, then she followed up with a second thought. “When I was staying in Idylla, building systems around me… do you think I was like them? Dying slowly without knowing it, woven into the fabric of something that didn’t matter?”

Randidly’s emotional muscles cramped from so much exercise today. But because of the Nether Ritual sewn between them, he tried to answer. “No. At least not at first. Building something… part of the present is preparing for the future, right?”