Chapter 4
Revelations
~<(0)>~
Aleon had a haunted, empty look on his face. He could tell, because it reflected in the gaze of each of his subordinates. They had regrouped after the slime had vanished and taken both Lady Araphine and the deceased captain with it. It had been several minutes beyond that before his subordinate, the one that had come up with this idea in the first place, had attempted to track the object bond on Lady Araphine’s staff again. The device had started homing in on the location as it had before, and then suddenly it had cut off quite suddenly. No matter what any of them did, it refused to pick up the connection again. “Well, what happened? Why isn’t it working?”
“It’s just a thought, Head Monitor, but an object bond like that is only supposed to dissolve a few ways. Either if the object in question is destroyed, if a sufficient amount of time has passed and a new bond has formed, or if the person it was bonded to is gone.”
“So, she’s really dead, is what you’re trying to say…” Aleon said with a defeated and resigned sigh.
“No, that’s not quite it. Object bonds will last for centuries to millenia, depending on how long the bond was intact and being actively kept going. Lady Araphine likely had this staff for a long time, meaning that the bond wouldn’t dissolve on its own for at least a century, likely far more. The only times that a bond has been severed early with the object intact is when the body of the deceased has been completely destroyed. I can say with a great deal of confidence that, since a century has not passed, and the staff is obviously still in once piece, that nothing unfortunately nothing remains of Lady Lyrei Araphine. May the Goddess Bless her soul.”
~<(0)>~
It was Dark, so very dark. And Cold, and wet. It had no idea what was going on, nor where it was. It tried to look around it, and realized suddenly that it couldn’t, mind threatening to devolve into panic. However, a thought and a design occurred to it, and it made several modifications to the substance that made up its body and opened its eyes for the first time. It was sitting on a raft of ice on the surface of an underground lake, bobbing gently in the soft ripples that its own movements were causing. Something wasn’t right, but it couldn’t put its finger on it. Wait, what was a finger, and how did it know this? It scanned through its knowledge and realized that there was a LOT more of it than there had been before. It hadn’t always been like this, right? Finger! A finger was a sort of appendage attached to another appendage that was part of the grasping system for various creatures, including her own… What was going on? The entity attempted to remember what had happened shortly before. It had been attacked by… an elf. A Female elf… one of the ones that laid eggs to reproduce? No, it seemed that despite being called female, a female elf didn’t lay eggs like the…. Scorpion and fish it had run into earlier. It had terms attached to all of these mental categories that it had never had before. It tried to focus. It had been attacked by this elf, who had attempted to freeze it, and take it away. But something had interrupted this… and it seemed it had caused all those holes in that… male elf… causing it to bleed as he instantly died. Then, when the entity… this… slime creature… had engulfed this female elf, she had used a spell to teleport. Several words in that thought had massive books worth of new information tied to them, so much so that if the entity attempted to investigate them all now, it would likely be down here for days.
One thing at a time. It seemed that all of this information had come from the female elf it had absorbed. So much information, as well as her entire mind it seemed, that it was a little difficult to tell where itself ended, and this… Lyrei Araphine began. It could see the world around it now, a gift from Lyrei it seemed, and looked upon itself for the first time. What it saw matched the memories of Lyrei, a gently glowing multihued slime whose colours shifted across and through its entire body. It reached out a portion of its body and using both its knowledge from absorbing both elves, and the memories from Lyrei, it formed a hand in front of its face, gently wiggling the fingers back and forth. Perhaps it was due to the fact it had pulled in a consciousness that was equal, maybe even greater than its own, but this felt right to it somehow.
The entity peered over the edge of its ice raft and peered into the water, momentarily surprised to see an elf looking back at it. The illusion was dispelled quickly, however, as its recently shifted eyes could see right through the face, literally. Those eyes blinked, oddly enough obscuring its vision for a split second, and the face in the water seemed to have done the same. To the best of its knowledge, it was the face of what had recently been Lyrei Araphine. Since it had disassembled the lady elf, along with all of her knowledge, it had gained a number of thoughts and feelings that were exceedingly difficult to differentiate from its own. Yet, despite this strange invasion of its mind, it was growing in ways it had never thought possible. It was as though, beyond just absorbing Lyrei’s body, it was somehow absorbing large portions of her consciousness as well, beyond simple information. It might have balked at this realization, yet it also realized it hadn’t had much in the way of all this before, so it wasn’t a replacement, it was an addition to its very being.
It had mimicked most of Lyrei’s body in its slimy form, though it had trouble with the legs, and stuck to its normal form of locomotion, which was just to keep shifting its slime in the direction it wanted to go. Now that it could see, it was more determined than ever to explore this cave system it was in. It could sift through the mountains of new information as it went.
It seemed as though Lyrei had come to this place for it, as did all of the others that it hadn’t realized were there. Something about the Central Leyline Convergence Reserve… The entity had caused some sort of issue just by existing, and these elves had come to this place to stop it. And it had killed one, entirely by mistake, and absorbed a second one who, though it didn’t understand most of the knowledge that Lyrei possessed, it seemed she had been vitally important for several things. It seemed that… as a side effect of Lyrei’s actions a time so far back the entity could scarcely fathom, the entity had come to be.
She didn’t need to sleep, though she wished she could. Despite the fact Lyrei had done drastic things to avoid sleep for a good portion of her life, she still had the innate ability to destress and unwind when she finally did sleep. The entity didn’t possess that. She really wished she could just… rest and let her subconscious deal through all the feelings she’d been saddled with. But this wasn’t a possibility for a being such as herself. She had killed the being that had inadvertently created her. According to Lyrei’s memories, this being would have been, at least to Lyrei, her mother.
She realized as she sat next to a grouping of large, bioluminescent mushrooms that she felt an odd guilt towards what had happened to Lyrei Araphine. Yet, she couldn’t have done anything in the past to have changed her actions. She could tell that there was a drastic difference between her current state and that of the way she had been before. More than simply information, the complex mind that was Lyrei added to the entity, filling out her consciousness. Because of what she had done, she felt guilty over what she had done. But if she hadn’t done it, she wouldn’t have had the capability of understanding what it was she hadn’t done. Of course, she wasn’t anything, really. She, the entity, was using how Lyrei thought of herself to describe her current being. She didn’t have any sort of reproductive system, no genitalia to speak of, nor did she lay eggs. It was clear to her that she didn’t deserve to call herself female in any sense of the word, and yet, it felt the most natural to her. Perhaps it was because Lyrei was a woman in both mind and body… or perhaps it was something else. In truth, it didn’t matter, because she realized that… she had a slowly growing sense of hatred towards herself.
She had decided to honor the tradition of her mother and take on her surname, Araphine. Well, generally it would have been her father’s name, but she didn’t have one and it wasn’t like anyone would ever know of this anyhow. Some daughter she was, truly, killing her mother the first time she met her. Araphine was digging through Lyrei’s vast memories, hoping that perhaps, something in her mother’s past would make this make sense… or at least… ease her pain. She wished she could undo it, give Lyrei back her life, her body… her world back. But… she couldn’t even begin to figure out how to do that, if it even was possible.
~<(0)>~
Was this what death felt like? Eternal darkness, no feelings, no sensations? She had existed for Millenia, literally thousands of years of knowledge and experience, and she’d spent so much of that time learning new things. How could she do anything else? Elvenkind was practically immortal, she’d have gone mad if she wasn’t constantly expanding her horizons. She never really thought about the end, however. She’d never heard of an elf dying of old age… they either got killed by something or just… vanished one day, never to be seen again. As far as she knew, she was one of the oldest elves left. Or… had been at least. She never imagined she’d meet her end like this… being eaten by a slime. She would have laughed if she was able, what an embarrassing way to go.
She was Auxiliary Process 3. Or at least, had been. While Lyrei had categorized her separate minds like this, nongendered processes running calculations like a machine, each one was equally as much her as she was normally. She couldn’t reach any of the other Processes anymore… so she didn’t feel like it made sense to pretend she wasn’t Lyrei, possibly all that was left of Lyrei, through and through. Honestly, she felt like she should have held more resentment to the slime, but really, the only resentment she held was for the captain of the soldiers. She’d never cared to get his name, and he’d died so quickly, she didn’t even get a chance to chew him out over it. Not that that really mattered anymore, she’d lost, and died. Now what? Did she exist like this for all eternity? So much for tales of spending her second life with the Goddess. She wouldn’t have called herself a believer… although that wasn’t exactly an accurate way of describing how she had felt. She knew the Goddess existed, or at least knew that something had dropped the Eye of the Goddess on this world. She had literally worked with the damn chunk of crystal for most of a century working on the Saturation project, and its lifegiving properties were undeniable, as were its completely alien origins. With the previous inaccurate statement, it wasn’t that she didn’t believe in the Goddess, she simply didn’t worship her like most of her kind did. Maybe it was this that had caused her to come… here, to this eternal purgatory of emptiness.
~<(0)>~
Araphine wished she could cry. She’d gone back to her birthplace, following Lyrei’s memories of the cave system. They were a few thousand years out of date, but the overall layout was mostly the same. She’d come here for some sort of sign… some trace of her creation within the Central Leyline Convergence Reserve and found nothing. Thus, she wanted to cry and had no tears to be able to do so. She wished so badly that she could just go back to the state she’d been in before all of this… or even that she’d never existed in the first place. If she hadn’t existed, none of this would even have happened. What had she done, why did she deserve to live, when someone like Lyrei had died? When… when she had Killed Lyrei. Lyrei had brought magic to the world as a whole, made it beautiful and wonderful, and even after that had worked to better understand the knowledge just beyond the frontier of knowledge. She had sacrificed so much for this goal, all to have it snatched away by a brainless slime who didn’t even know what it was doing.
She truly was a monster… she knew that Lyrei never had thought about her that way… she’d simply been a specimen to her, one that she wanted to understand to further her knowledge. Araphine could understand from those memories, however, that Lyrei’s thoughts were rather unique amongst the elves. More and more she wished that she’d just given in and let Lyrei capture her. Better put to good use, examined, dissected, experimented on… whatever, than to be left like this. She knew she was a monster, and didn’t deserve all that she had, all that she was. The fact that she thought of Lyrei as her mother was disgusting, she knew that the elf would never have thought of her like that. The fact that Araphine… no… the Entity was thinking of her… itself like this was… unforgiveable. It should figure out some way to end itself… not that it would have a chance of fixing what had been done… but it didn’t deserve to even be alive.
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~<(0)>~
She had been mulling over her thoughts when she had recognized something that she had been, up until this point, ignoring for some sort of background noise. Lyrei focused on that noise, trying to filter it out from the nothingness being surprisingly hard. However, as she concentrated on it, she heard her name. Was this it? Was this the Goddess Kasira, finally calling for her to spend eternity in her second life in her divine entourage? She started to focus again, the sounds becoming easier to pick up, almost as though she were becoming more attuned to it, or perhaps that she was moving towards it. Then suddenly it came through far clearer, though still rather scattered and vague.
If she could, she would have sat, open mouthed and stunned. Lacking any sort of body and being well, sort of dead, this was impossible. Someone was calling for her, but unless she was seriously misinformed about the state of reality, it wasn’t Kasira. This someone was calling for her, calling for mother, or rather just referring to her as their mother. The voice sounded like a child, immature and young. None of this made any sense to her. She had never had children while she was alive. She hadn’t even slept with anyone, male, female, or anywhere in between. Ever. It was a scientific impossibility for her to have ever conceived a child, much less carried one to term and brought this child into the world. She was fairly certain she would have noticed, alright?
It wasn’t like she’d never wanted kids, alright? She just never had the time to spare for them. Unlike human reproductive systems, elf ones never shut down, so she could have had them sometime far off in the future when she’d retired from her passion. Listening to this strange mental conversation, however, it seemed that this child really thought of her as their mother. Was this some sort of apprentice she’d been mentoring? She didn’t remember having one of those for at least 500 years, so that seemed unlikely. She didn’t have a pet she was somehow listening to the thoughts of, right? No, this seemed different. She, it seemed this was a little girl of some sort, was far too knowledgeable about things to be a simple animal. Had Lyrei taken in a child, or perhaps given birth and excised the memories from her mind? That didn’t really make sense, considering she didn’t have any holes in her memory right up until her death. Was this an alternate universe child she’d never had in this one? It was possible, though she didn’t have any way to prove or disprove it, so it was still just a loose hypothesis.
Perhaps this was truly what was going on, some sort of penance for the way she had lived. The Goddess was showing her what she’d missed out on by not treating those around her with the same level of respect and care that they had shown each other. She’d always been so far above them; she had been for so very long. One by one her peers, the members of the Saturation Project either died, or vanished at some point as elves occasionally did. And with them had gone the only people she had been able to see eye to eye with. Were these choices, right? For the first time in her life (Heh, it was a little late for that) she felt regret for the way she had lived. Maybe for just a little bit she could pretend to be a mother to this child she had never had.
She had her last name, that was actually sort of cute. She seemed to be missing a first name, which was odd, but she seemed happy about the name she did have. She seemed pretty proud of it though. It seemed like whatever version of Lyrei had been this child’s mother had died, and she was feeling lost without her. Lyrei wished she could comfort her, hug her, something. It wasn’t her fault her mother had died, she deserved to live. That’s the way her mother would have wanted it, after all. The best thing she could do was learn and grow in the world and make a life for herself. If Lyrei were there, she would help her learn things, amazing and wonderful things about thaumic energy, and nature, and life, beautiful life. She wondered if she might have been upset as her child wanted to join the elven military, or the wilderness rangers. It probably would have taken a while, but she would have probably come around to accept her daughter’s wishes. Maybe she would have taken to science like her, spending long hours every day buried in books and papers and research equipment. Would Mother Lyrei have tried to convince her daughter to learn to enjoy the presence of the people around her? She knew that before her death, she certainly wouldn’t have done so… but then again, she also wouldn’t have had a child.
The poor girl was having a fit, crying inside, mental anguish tormenting her through and through. From what she could tell the girl had gone back to her home for the first time in a while, and it had all been too much for her, causing her to break down. Never before in her life had Lyrei wanted to be able to hold someone close and comfort them, telling them it would be okay. With a realization, she wondered if… perhaps since these thoughts were coming towards her, that she might be able to push her thoughts back towards this little girl.
Lyrei tried calling out, but without a mouth or anything like that, found she couldn’t speak. She wouldn’t give up quite so easily however, and started focusing, pushing towards the increasingly distressed voice with a will she had never realized she had possessed. Goddess damn it, this was a child, HER child, and whether or not SHE was a mother, Lyrei Araphine was this child’s mother, and she wasn’t about to let her down. Not even Death was going to stop her. With a final push, she slipped fully into the place this voice was coming from and everything snapped into focus, and her blood would have run cold if she had any. Everything had become clear now…
~<(0)>~
The entity could hear voices through the ears it had made. They were the long pointed ears that Lyrei had possessed, though still formed from the entity’s slime. Thanks to Lyrei’s knowledge, it could understand the words, and understand that the expedition team that had been sent to take care of the problem, to take care of it, had come down to the Central Leyline Convergence Reserve Main Reservoir to check on the state of things. It had no doubt that if it stayed here, it would be found, and it had even less doubt (somehow), that if it were found they would likely use an ice spell or some other form of thaumic attack spell to annihilate it. This was its penance, and it was going to stay in place and take it without struggle. It was the least it could do. It dissolved the form it had taken and slumped as a larger than normal rainbow coloured slime in the bottom of the cavern and awaited its death.
“{Please don’t give up. Your death will fix nothing. You deserve to live}”
The voice startled it in how suddenly it had spoken. It sounded frantic in a way. Beyond that, it shouldn’t have been able to hear anything, it had gotten rid of its ears as it had shed the last part of her form that it had taken on.
“{I do not know how, but I am inside your mind.}”
Someone was somehow talking to it, inside its head, they claimed.
“{I AM inside your mind, and I can understand every thought you have. I know you are in a lot of pain right now, feeling like the world is all wrong and that you should die by the hands of the expedition. I can explain so much more later, but right now we NEED to get out of here.}”
It didn’t see why it should bother with any of this. It was just a useless pointless monster that had caused harm just by existing. At the very least, it should just be wiped out and then everything would stop hurting. It wished that it had never absorbed Lyrei and gained the ability to understand the atrocity it had committed.
“{Araphine! I know you had taken that name up to honour someone who had fallen, someone you considered your mother. If you saw her as your mother, I one hundred percent guarantee that, as your mother, she would have wanted you to survive, to keep on living your life.}”
It didn’t deserve that name. It had killed the person who had that name, and played about in a cruel mockery of her life. What gave this voice the right to tell it such-
“{Araphine, I didn’t want to tell this to you, I’m still processing it myself. But I am former Auxiliary Process 3. I was a part of Lyrei Araphine, and all of her at the same time. I don’t know how I survived this process, but I’m not dead. But please, please… if you feel you owe Lyrei… me… anything, don’t resign yourself to this death. We can talk more about this when we have more time. Right now, we need to get away from the expedition.}”
This couldn’t be possible. Lyrei was dead, the entity contained her memories, thoughts, and feelings, but it wasn’t her, and never would be her. It should just stay here and ignore it, this process had probably overloaded its ability to perceive information and it had lost its mind.
But deep inside, a glimmer of hope flickered to life. It had mourned the loss of Lyrei for days, wandering the caverns alone, desperately trying to find a way to bring her back, to undo the mistake it had made. This had eventually devolved into hate for itself for existing, and led to where it was now. But… if there was a possibility she wasn’t dead… it had to do something. But it didn’t know what to do. It could probably make it past the expedition, but it really didn’t want to kill any more of the elves if it could help it.
“{I believe in you, Araphine. I know this is hard, really hard. We’re both going to need to do a lot of talking after this. Right now, I’ll help you focus on escaping. Can you give me eyes? Are there any other entrances to this cavern?}”
The ancient memories Lyrei possessed of this place had shown only one entrance to the Central Leyline Convergence Reserve, but those were rather extremely out of date. Calling upon the designs, it formed a set of eyes and peered around the massive cavern. As it looked, it could only see the sole entrance it had exited up initially, and more recently how it had re-entered the room.
“{Shame, looks as though no more tunnels opened up in this cavern since I was last here. I mean, I chose this place for its continued stability, but I didn’t exactly expect it to last quite THIS unchanged for as long as it has. And the tunnel isn’t nearly as big as it would need to be for you to pass through unnoticed as you are right now. You can’t camouflage yourself similar to how octopi do, can you? No, you almost certainly don’t know what I’m talking about.}”
It simultaneously did and did not know what she was talking about. Lyrei had obviously known, but the information would take too long to sift through at this point. It formed the ears once more, noting that the voices had gotten louder, they were far closer.
“{Okay, short of managing to break through one of the walls to get out, we’re going to have to go past the expedition. Unfortunately, the stability of this cavern works against us there too. Wait, we might not have to move past them at all. Do you remember when we teleported? Right after you pulled me in, my teleport spell went off, and I guess I didn’t control it well enough, and it took you with me.}”
It remembered that… how could it not? It was the final moments before it had committed a great atrocity. But what did that matter, it couldn’t do that.
“{No, No. Please stop beating yourself up over that. But more importantly, I think I can make it work. Back when I was still… ah… in my own body, I used multiple parallel minds, one of which I originally was, I used them to work on multiple spells at once, packing them up nicely in a way that all my body needed to do was let the thaumic energy flow through it and it would activate properly. I can do that here, I think. I will just need you to provide the energy. You have more energy than I have EVER had, so it should be a breeze for you. Do you think you can handle that?}”
The entity looked through some of Lyrei’s most recent memories before it had absorbed her and its life had shattered. It might have been something difficult to learn naturally, but being able to understand the sensations directly, as well as the thoughts put into it, it was far easier, if not exactly easy. It attempted to focus its energy in a conduit through its body, with a decent amount of success. It was grossly inefficient, but the entity had so much energy stored inside it, literally an underground sea’s worth of gelid thaumic energy, that it didn’t matter if it was only able to pass through a fraction of a percent of its full power, it was more than enough for the projected needs the voice was giving it.
“{Alright, let me put together the spell and give it to you to cast. We’re going to make it through this together.}”
This so-called Auxiliary Process 3 knew what it was talking about, and in a frighteningly short amount of time had shared a mental construct in an odd sort of packaging. The Entity pushed power into the spell, and with a warp of time and space, everything suddenly changed.
~<(0)>~
“What are we going to do if we find it down here?” The voice was one of many that had asked some variant of this question over the past few days. The loss of Lady Araphine had been devastating both to morale and the overall strength of the expedition.
“We do our job and exterminate it. Or we die, in which case we have done all we could, and the survival team we sent up to the surface goes back to the empire after a week of not hearing from us, and a larger, stronger team is sent in to exterminate the slime now that we have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”
It was no exaggeration to say that no one in the expedition party hoped they came across the monstrous slime. In truth, though it was his sworn duty, Aleon hoped they wouldn’t encounter it either. He was already at his limits with this disaster of a mission. This was the final location they were going to check, and they had managed to not run into the slime yet. In a way, considering this was its supposed birthplace, not that this crime against the Goddess had actually been born in any way, it made a certain kind of sense that it might have returned here. He had to assume that they had just missed it, and that it couldn’t teleport, or it had almost certainly already breached containment within the caverns. Surely that had been a botched teleport attempt from Lady Araphine… right?
They came around the final turn and shined the thaumic lanterns into the MASSIVE open space beyond. At this rate, it would take hours to examine the entire space, especially since this close to the actual leyline convergence itself, the thaumic sensors were acting like a compass near a magnet.
Not a single one of them noticed a small ‘whump’ of displaced air deeper into the cavern as a rainbow slime vanished without a trace.