Chapter 14
Sins of the Past
~<(0)>~
“{Be warned that these memories are going to be the real deal, not simply my portrayal of things. There may be traces of emotions, or otherwise unpleasant side effects.}” Lyrei preoccupied herself with drawing up some of her oldest memories.
“It’s fine, they are your memories after all, and I want to know the real you from… well, you.”
“{Alright. We’ll start off after the activation of the Saturation Project. Anything before is honestly just a blur. I remember being so busy and I’m not surprised everything just melds together.}”
~<(0)>~
Lyrei opened her eyes and took in the unfamiliar room with confusion. “Wh-where” her voice came out raw and raspy as though she hadn’t used it in a while. She was suddenly hit with the realization she was parched.
An unfamiliar voice spoke up, “One moment, Miss Araphine, I’ll get you some water and let the Chief know you’re awake; He wanted to see you after you woke up.”
She nodded slightly, trying to turn her head to see who had spoken to her, but the movement caused her head to pound, forcing her to give up on the movement for the moment. Instead, she focused on what had been said to her. The Chief wanted to see her? That made a certain amount of sense, she had just finished up something important after all. What was it? Oh, of course, the Saturation Project.
It was a subjective eternity before the other elf came back in, a nurse apparently, and helped her to sit up so she could drink the water they had brought. She sipped at it slowly, feeling the cool liquid soothe her tortured throat.
“I’m sure you have several questions about what’s going on. Mostly I’ll let the Chief tell you himself about what’s going on. But I can tell you that you’re physically fine, and we should be able to let you go in a few days.”
That answered at least a portion of her questions, and she stopped drinking and responded with a much-improved sounding “Thank you.”
“I’m just doing my job Miss Araphine. Now drink up, and rest until the Chief comes in, please. From what I understand you’ve been through a lot recently.”
She certainly felt like she’d been through a lot, considering that everything ached.
A short while later an elf came into the room and into her view, and she recognized him.
“Do not worry about bowing. In your current condition, I know that expecting you to bow would be an absurd ask anyways. Now, I’m sure you have lots of questions.”
He seemed apprehensive. She supposed it made some level of sense, considering that she had completed the most important project the Elven Nation had ever known. She opened her mouth to start asking questions, but he raised his hand to stop her. “I’d like to answer as many as I can out of the gate, and you can ask me anything that I don’t cover in my explanation.” She closed her mouth with an audible click and slowly nodded.
“You have been asleep for over a year.” She opened her mouth in surprise, an expression of clear shock written across her features, and she made to ask a question, but the Elven Chief stopped her again. “I will get to that in a moment, but first, I’d like to make it clear that the Saturation Project was a complete success.” She closed her mouth again and listened to what he had to say, processing the information. “When you activated the Saturation Project, at the primary ritual site, the rift consumed you before it stabilized. Were it not for the Eye of the Goddess in the ritual chamber being charged by the rift, you likely would have perished. As it is, it continued regenerating your body until you were able to make it to safety. You seem perfectly healthy, aside from some aesthetic changes,” he pointed at her hair, and she looked down at her pink hair in shock, shifting her hand so she could grab it to confirm that it was, indeed, her hair. “We were unsure that you were ever going to wake up, despite your perfect health, and it is a wonderful surprise to see that you are awake and that your mind is sound.” He paused, sighing as his expression fell, “Unfortunately, your fellow researchers on the Saturation Project weren’t quite as lucky. We have checked each of the ritual nodes and… I’m afraid they met the same fate you would have, but they didn’t have the good fortune of the Eye of the Goddess to sustain their bodies.”
Lyrei felt numb, a low horror creeping up from deep inside as she realized what this meant. There were hundreds of nodes, and over a hundred had been nodes with ritual circles that required monitoring to make sure the rift in the Veil was stable so as to ensure they wouldn’t breach the containment of the protective circles and wreak havoc with the very thaumic energy she and her team sought to enrich the world with. Each and every one of those individuals, all people she had worked with for the better part of a century, were dead.
“Fortunately, the Saturation in its current state should be well within your abilities to manage.” And just like that he had moved on. It seemed almost cold to Lyrei, as though the men and women she had worked with were just… gone. “I’ll make sure that you are allotted the appropriate equipment and funds. I trust you’ll handle this project as well as you did in the research phase.”
“C-Chief Car’iel.” Lyrei spoke, still unused to using her voice yet. The Elven Chief, Car’iel Dalmore, gave her a strange look that she couldn’t decipher. She wondered briefly if what she had said was out of line, but she pushed forward, nonetheless. “What will happen now?”
Car’iel looked confused at the question for several seconds, though he eventually answered, “You are to maintain the Saturation Project, but beyond that you are free to work on your thaumic research however you like. You will be provided with housing and a stipend. You are a valuable asset to this country and will be treated as such. Anything you ask, within reason of course, will be provided as long as you continue to show the fantastic results you’ve shown us so far.”
“Oh, of course.” She responded, voice bereft of any enthusiasm. She hated to see the death of so many she was close to, but it seemed that Chief Car’iel wanted her to move on quickly. She wondered how often he had to do this kind of thing in his position as the Chief of the Elves.
~<(0)>~
“{And thus began my daily life, much as it has been for millennia.}” Lyrei said, finishing off that batch of memories.
“Whatever happened with your deceased fellow researchers from the Saturation Project?” queried Ophelia, carefully making her way around a scorched and shattered boulder.
“{They made a memorial for them that sat in the cemetery of the Church of the Goddess. I paid my respects and visited multiple times a year a year for a while, though my visits gradually grew fewer and fewer until they stopped entirely. It’s a shame, really, I was the only one leaving offerings or flowers. It’s like no one else seemed to remember them but me, and that’s a horrible way to end up.}” Lyrei gave a soft mental sigh, lost in ancient memories, “{Of course, it became even more out of the way to visit when the Elven Chief at the time moved the Capitol.}” she drifted into another batch of memories.
~<(0)>~
Lyrei sighed as she took the notice the elven page had given her, cracking the official seal and unfurling the missive to read through it. Her eyes widened and then she frowned, reading through the entire thing again, and then once more for good measure. “Car’iel is Insane!” she practically shouted at the poor elf who looked practically traumatized at her outburst.
“I-I’m sorry Miss Araphine, I’m q-quite unaware of the message’s contents, they are for your eyes only.” He stammered and tried to back into the hallway and disappear.
“He intends to go to war and wants war spells. He is an imbecile, and I won’t stand for it. Spellcraft is an art, and such a beautiful thing shouldn’t be used for such a barbaric action.” She shoved past the page and started with great speed toward the courtroom, with the terrified elf trailing behind attempting to get her to stop.
She slammed the court doors open with a flick of her wrist and the Elven Chief looked up in surprise, “Why in the name of the Goddess herself are you going to war?”
Chief Car’iel hurriedly motioned for the elf that he had been speaking with mere moments before to beat a hasty retreat, as well as the poor elven page behind the furious force of nature. With the room empty save for his guards, he stood from his throne, face a mask of stoicism that barely any emotion leaked through. He made no move to rebuke her, but simply asked her a question. “Have you taken note of the population of our country? This nation has become the center for what the plebian masses refer to as ‘The Magical Revolution’. Elves from all over the world are migrating here, and as such the nation has been getting quite crowded. Simply put we need room to grow.”
“And you go to war? If we have such a wealth of thaumic knowledge, why aren’t we diplomatically expanding our borders? Surely we could bargain something of value.”
Car’iel gave her a look that bordered between disgust and disapproval. “Deal with the lesser races? They are lesser than us, and we have the power, we might as well use it to take what we want. This war will happen, with or without your approval or assistance.”
Lyrei was taken aback by the response. “I see…” She had hardly noticed the population growing, spending her time in her rooms performing experiments and doing research. People seemed wary of her, and it was difficult for her to socialize with elves that didn’t seem to want her around. Thus, staying secluded and to herself ultimately suited her.
Spellcraft hadn’t fully adapted to this post Saturation world when it came to warfare. There were the spells that had existed before, low power and high impact spells designed and calibrated to draw from the highly sought after thaumic capable gems. Combat spells had developed very little beyond that point, mainly simple adjustments to increase power and switch to drawing from environmental energy instead of that of a gemstone.
Such spells were uninspired. Lyrei had spent no effort developing her own combat spells, as the idea of fighting using magic was a gross misuse of the power. Whether she helped or not, there would be war; and more importantly, there would be war fought with magic. What could she do? She could refrain from helping, but the war would happen regardless. She could supply spells and the war would likely proceed faster. Finally, she could fully assist with the war, and she knew it would go much faster even still. War was a disgusting use for magic, but if it was to happen anyways, she would find a way to bring beauty to the battle. Her spells would be beautiful, and she would be beautiful as she wielded her own spells against the enemy, bringing a swift death, and ultimately a swift surrender. That was the hope at least.
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“I will help with your war, Car’iel.” She spat his name with mild disgust, face screwed up in an expression that matched the way she felt. His expression was one of surprise, but she didn’t care. She’d go to war, and she’d do it her way.
~<(0)>~
Spells flew over Lyrei’s head, impacting the enemy with deadly accuracy; She had designed them to do so, after all. This could hardly be called a battle… it was more of a one-sided slaughter. The enemy lines may have been as paper to a flame with how well they were doing against the onslaught of elven mages. There weren’t even that many mages, and yet the non-thaumic elven soldiers hadn’t even engaged the enemy yet.
And yet, the enemy, comprised of humans who were fighting doggedly to protect their nation, hadn’t broken and fled in the face of such utter superiority. So many were falling with each blast of a spell, and so many had already fallen, yet they still didn’t run from the fight. She admired their determination, but the results were ultimately unsatisfactory to her. She gripped her staff, something she had meticulously carved from a length of wood with a chunk of quartz the size of her fist secured at the top. Despite the care she had put into crafting the focus, the staff was nothing special, but it would certainly do the job it was intended to do.
Letting a trickle of power flow into the staff, Lyrei cast a spell to strengthen and enhance her legs before jumping into the air out and over the battlefield. She cast a thought acceleration spell and the world seemed to slow around her. Below she watched the spells impacting and the poor unfortunate humans that were simply dying with each attack. Her spells did not leave room for injury, they simply killed, a dozen or more at a time. She channelled energy into her staff, drawing from the environment itself, until the quartz shone like a lamp.
If anyone on either side had noticed her, high above the battle like this, they didn’t make any obvious reactions. Thus, it was with complete surprise to the enemy when she landed square amongst them. Lyrei slammed her staff down into the ground and let loose her spell. Electricity arced from her staff as though it were lightning, bolts thick as her arm tearing through the enemy ranks, a soul rattling boom of thunder bowling over those unaffected by the spell itself. None who were wearing metal armour were safe from the spell and hundreds fell from her one attack, corpses smoking from within the metal that was supposed to save their life. Lyrei had singlehandedly blown a massive hole in the enemy ranks the size of a small town, and the only soldiers left were the few that weren’t clad in metal armour and the elven army at her back. All eyes turned to her, filled with fear.
She had the enemy’s full attention now, and she intended to make use of it. She channelled power into her staff again, tweaking her spell to get the power she wanted, and then spoke, her voice spreading out over the battle lines, amplified by her spell. “Surrender while you still have the chance to! The Elven army may take prisoners, but my spells no know such limits!”
They didn’t surrender; They broke ranks and fled. Some who had been beyond the edges of her initial destructive spell charged at her, and she gave them the most merciful end she could.
When she finally stopped to rest, the enemy either annihilated by spells or having fled for the hills, all she could smell was blood. She hated it.
~<(0)>~
Ahead was one the largest remaining fortress of the land Car’iel had planned on taking. During the few days march, they had met with scattered resistance, nothing that even remotely threatened the advance of the elven army. Lyrei had hoped they would surrender by now but was apparently awarded no such luck. She was disgusted that this is what it came to, but it seemed there was no alternative. Lyrei finished the intricate inscriptions she had been working on in the spearhead in her hand, setting it aside three other more or less identical spearheads.
Silently she offered a prayer for the souls of those in the fortress. Then she carefully began to inscribe a magic circle in the dirt, using the handle of her staff. The military was at a standstill, holding at the ready while strategists worked to figure out the best way to assault the fortress town with minimal casualties. That was absurd, there would always be casualties, such was the price of war. It simply mattered where those casualties lay. She finished the circle and took her four spearheads, setting one at each point of the pentagram in the circle save for one, where she planted her staff handle and began to channel power into the ritual.
It was something she had realized over the course of this so-called war. A ritual relied on balance, regardless of how much energy was put into it. Minor rituals could handle a single point of input as the power involved was relatively small. In a way, most spells were small rituals of some kind, able to accept a single input. More complex and more powerful rituals however, required multiple inputs to remain balanced. A single input could be achieved theoretically, but the power required to operate the ritual would be far greater due to the fact it would have to forcefully overcome this balance issue. Thus, Lyrei had designed what she called Ritual Dummies, stand-ins for other ritual participants, that she could feed energy into that would then feed energy into the ritual itself. All the power would still ultimately come from her, but being balanced, it would require less power than if she were simply attempting this on her own. She thought it was as amusing as it was genius, really. Replacing real, flesh and blood elves with cold metal might not have been important, though it wasn’t as though she would get anyone else to help her. Since her display on the battlefield that one day, her fellow elves had shied away from her as though she had become rabid.
It was a lot of power, but Lyrei could feel the thaumic energy coursing through her, more than enough to power up the ritual. Few elven soldiers noticed what she was doing, or if they did, they simply didn’t care beyond giving her the wide berth she had become used to in her time with the army. This suited Lyrei just fine. The Circle glowed and the ritual fully charged. She took a full spear, inscribed with runes to strengthen it, and placed it in the center of the circle. Then she lifted up her staff, guiding the targeting portion of the spell she had cast the first part of. With the finality of an executioner dropping their axe upon the neck of the unfortunate criminal, she dropped her staff to point at the fortress town in the distance. Her lips moved almost soundlessly as she spoke the activation command.
Nothing seemed to happen at first, yet there was a small pop of displaced air as the spear in the center of the circle vanished with a twist of space. Unbeknownst to all but her, 3 relatively small and unnoticeable spell circles flared to life high above the fortress, at the edge of the cold vacuum of space. The first circle pulsed and a small object that, had anyone been looking, appeared as though it were a spear flashed into existence, despite the sheer improbability of a spear spontaneously appearing at the edge of space. The second circle flashed, and the spear began to accelerate downward, out of the circles. Then the third circle flashed, and the spear became impossibly dense as though it were made entirely of tungsten.
Then the spear fell; The atmosphere tore at it as it accelerated, causing the tip of the spear to glow white hot, seemingly a shooting star as it fell from the sky. The shaft attempted to catch fire but the runes carved into the wood warded off the worst of the damage, holding the spear together at speeds exponentially higher than the weapon had been intended to ever see.
From the ground there was a boom as a shooting star travelling multiple times the speed of sound shot across the sky before hitting the town. The world stood still for a moment, birds seeming to hang in the air, elves frozen in conversation and activity, Lyrei’s breath caught in her lungs. Then she exhaled, and time seemed to move forward, creeping like a snail at first, then beginning to shift upwards until it was at full speed again. The earth buckled as searing light blossomed from within the fortress, a massive plume of fire and debris rising into the air. Then the shockwave hit and, despite being prepared, Lyrei was nearly blown to the ground. The rest of the elves weren’t so lucky, being bowled over like toys in a storm as the force of the strike washed over them.
Lyrei’s ears were ringing, but she could faintly hear shouting from various elves as chaos fell upon the camp. She looked up to see the town but saw naught but a cloud of smoke and dust rising into the air, and a crater far larger than the town had been. She had expected the spell to destroy the town, but even this level of spectacle was beyond what she had intended. She had been well within what she might have considered safe limits, and that thought alone should have terrified her, she realized dully; It didn’t though.
Bits of earth and stone were falling around her though she hardly noticed. Her mind was whirring, calculating the energies involved in the attack that had simply vaporized thousands of lives in the span of a heartbeat. Perhaps she had teleported the spear up too high. Perhaps she had increased the apparent density too much. This was important for the next time she needed to use such a spell.
Next time.
This Fortress had been the last bastion of the enemy nation’s defences. Had the Elven army beat them here, they would have likely fled across the lines of contested territory into the lands the elves weren’t trying to take. A large chunk of stone twice the size of her body landed close enough to toss her aside with the wash of air from its passage and knocked her out of her reverie.
There was no next time; The war was won.
No one paid her much mind, and she gathered her implements, wandering through the chaos of the camp like a ghost, patiently observing yet seemingly never being observed.
~<(0)>~
“{I ended up telling them I’d been scrying and managed to detect the falling of a meteor mere moments before it fell,” said Lyrei, “They never questioned it. It wasn’t as though they even had the faintest notion I’d slain an entire fortress of thousands with but a single spear, and I had no intentions of ever telling them.}”
Ophelia was horrified, mouth hanging open. It was nearly a minute before she spoke again, “You killed so many. Each and every one of them just like you, with memories, hopes, dreams, probably families hoping for them to come back home. I… I can FEEL why you did it, and I can’t blame you for it. Just… how did you not break from the weight of all those deaths? I only killed two by complete accident, but you killed them with intention.”
“{Interesting that you think I didn’t. I hated each life I took, and I think each one took a portion of my sanity with it. In the end I returned to the palace and broke down for days. In the end, I did the only thing I could do and hardened my mind to it. It was surprisingly easier than I thought it would be in the end, though I think it left me in a guarded state that would take decades to clear up.” She could feel the ancient emotions bubbling up, though her mind had been guarded against these feelings for centuries, and even now she had to work to properly feel them.
“{In the end… I think that may have been a part of why I ended up the way I did, treating everyone as lesser to me. I do wonder now, with the gift of hindsight, if there were any other options I could have taken. What should I have done when the wellbeing of my nation was at stake? I didn’t choose to go to war, but perhaps I could have done something to stop it. At the time I simply hoped to bring it to a close as quickly as possible, and I think I at least achieved that goal.}” Lyrei paused and thought about it while Ophelia walked in silence, “{I don’t think it matters at this point, I cannot go back and change things, and I have turned my back upon the Elven Empire anyways. I think if given the chance now, I would do all I could to limit loss of life, however that may be. I suppose that’s what you’d want to do too, Ophelia.}”
“I would try to make it so no one dies, though I can recognize that is a somewhat naïve goal to set.”
“{I think it is an admirable one nonetheless.}”
“Barring that,” continued the slime, “I would indeed try to minimize loss of life.)” she paused again, mulling over a question in her mind, “The location of the Capitol now, is that where it got moved after the war ended?”
Lyrei gave the mental equivalent of a nod, “{It is. The Human nation to the west could do little to stop the elves from taking what they wanted, and the land gained by conquest was settled by elves, and the Capitol was built where it is today. The old city still exists, and I think they’ve tried to keep the palace and cathedron around for historical reasons. The seat of the Elven Lord and the home of the Church of Kasira was built at the new Capitol, though it might be more accurate to say they were built first, and the city was built around them.}”
“So why didn’t the Elven Empire continue to take more land?” asked Ophelia after a bit.
Lyrei mentally sighed softly, “{As much as I’d like to think Car’iel was bloodthirsty, he had gone to war with a reason. He had his eyes set on a specific amount of land and once he had gotten what he needed he stopped the advance. I think, even now I have some measure of respect for that, even if I don’t agree with his actions.}”
Ophelia mulled over her mother’s answer for a bit before she came up with something else to ask. However, the question died on her tongue as her eyes drifted across something that didn’t look like it belonged amidst the burning forest. “Mother, what does that look like to you?”
Lyrei looked through Ophelia’s eyes, {Those look like they might have been house at one point.}” her voice became firm, “{Switch with me, story time is over.}”