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“-. Interregnum 580-581, Day 10, Evening .-“
There was something in the air. Disbelief and hope, and more disbelief and more hope. But there was also something else, a numb, shivering tension I could feel was just about to break.
“Nobody needs to say anything,” I spoke before the wrong thing could be said again. “There’s no hurry, no time limit. And it doesn’t matter who does it either.”
The tension stalled just before it could burst.
“If you two don’t feel up for it anymore, I’ll just have them myself.” My promise settled over us. It didn’t feel like a burden. “Baby sons or baby brothers, there really won’t be much of a difference.”
It would probably cut down on my marriage prospects, but all my current ones were about to be completely voided anyway. Worst came to worst, I could always work out a deal where I first give miss other half an heir that’s all ours, before having the twins. Surely it wouldn’t be impossible to find someone reasonable enough for that, right?
“You two had better be grateful,” I told the spectral foetuses inside Huginn and Muninn’s glowing, see-through craws. “Many people wouldn’t bother with such high maintenance scrubs.”
Falric and Marwyn did not reply.
The tension released, giving way to a wordless, guilty relief. I didn’t comment on it and neither did anyone else. I didn’t look at my mother and neither did Dad, even as he held her in his arms. And the dragons too.
The ravens stopped being see-through. Huginn tottered around on my wrist and peered at my parents, ignoring the dragons in her arms completely. Muninn ruffled his feathers and opened his beak at me to say: “G-wah.”
“G-wah to you too,” I said dryly. “Are you coming with me, or staying?”
“Tk-tk-tk-tk g-wah,” said the raven.
Both birds then hopped off me and flew over to one of the tallest crates where they started grooming themselves.
I looked at my father, who looked between me and mother, and between the ravens and the dragons, then sent me a confounded but meaningful gaze back. Leaving mother to him, I stepped out of the tent. There, I quietly asked Emerentius to keep guarding the entrance, to which he nodded gravely.
I myself took advantage of the lingering notice-me-not spell to take in the crowds and events in the ‘square.’ The tent behind me was on one of the higher points in Saint’s Tier, so I was well positioned to look over the crowd, even without my great height.
No one was looking in my direction. Instead, all eyes were riveted on the rising, whistling rockets that suddenly burst into multicolored, cascading flashes and crackles in the sky. The earlier fireworks show had, it seemed, been just a taste of things to come.
Down in the middle of the carnival, in the small circle of free space where the fireworks cart was, Blindi was putting on a wonderful act of being amazed and euphoric and bombastic at being able to see again.
I sat down on a bench nearby, which seemed to have fallen within the bounds of the someone else’s problem field. I watched the fireworks. I watched the people. Smiling faces, awe and laughter, happy cheers everywhere. I thought of what I had planned for tomorrow and felt both less and more conflicted.
“And now, let us welcome the new year with a toast!” Blindi’s voice rose above the din of everyone and everything else, once the echoes of the last firework had completely faded. “First of all, a toast to me! Because the father always comes first!”
I pointedly didn’t facepalm even as everyone jeered and groaned at the terrible pun.
“Second, to the winter wind, who was kind enough to constantly blow the smoke away so all the fireworks could be seen clearly! Also for joining us tonight without the blizzard unduly inconveniencing anyone, trust me, I know what I’m talking about.”
“Trust a stool pigeon!” Someone or others hollered. “As if!”
“To his saintliness!” Blindi bellowed with a wide, challenging grin as he pointed his glass straight at me. “Without whose sheer gall we wouldn’t have such bright and merry lights in this darkness!”
When everyone and their grandchild turned towards me, I became aware that the subtle magic I’d been taking advantage of no longer reached past the tent’s stakes. Everyone could see me now just fine. I rose to my feet and bemusedly accepted the glass of sparkling wine that a woman I didn’t know by name briskly strode over to offer on a tray.
I looked at it. It was an actual glass, almost perfectly transparent. As I looked around, everyone had a cup or a mug made of wood, clay or pewter. But Blindi, Uther, Richard’s officers, and a couple more people besides myself, we had glassware from a set like the sort that only the nobles could normally afford.
Odyn had a good appreciation for pageantry, didn’t he?
Why did I feel uneasy?
“And finally, far and above all…” Blindi’s tone took a sudden, distinctly daring cant. He raised his glass high. “To the Titans, by whose will and hand was done the shaping of the world!”
The happy atmosphere veered off into confusion, and my stomach dropped.
“To Aggrammar the Warrior. To Khaz'goroth the World Forger. To Golganneth, the Lord of Skies and Roaring Oceans. To Norgannon, Keeper of Celestial Magic and Lore. To Eonar, the Gentle Caretaker of All Living Things. And to Aman’Thul, the Highfather, by whose will was order first brought into the cosmos at the dawn of time!”
Oh.
Oh no.
“To the Pantheon! The Great Lords of the Seven Constellar Currents, by whose hands was the world of Azeroth ordered in eons past!”
I heard the words in abject dismay. I looked down at my glass. I felt faint and wooden all at once.
“Hail to those who came first! They, who came forward and set to work on forging Order out of Chaos! Hail to Them, who took the very matter of the universe, ground it down to the finest powder and sieved it through the finest sieve, only to find not a molecule of mercy, not a single atom of justice. They beheld the universe, then, and saw that it was not good. And so they set to work on the worlds they encountered. They shaped the planets by raising mighty mountains, they dredged out vast seas and breathed skies and raging atmospheres into being.”
I looked up in surprise. Those words, how did he know them? Did I broadcast more than I realized, earlier when I broke into laughter at the memory of the Hogfather? Or were they mere coincidence?
From the other side of the gathered throng, Odyn’s eyes dared me to interrupt. Deflect. Deny.
To lie.
“And then, to finally instil the notion of some ideal in the cosmos, some rightness in the universe by which it may find worth, they moulded the smaller races. They exalted us, that we may live and shape and judge all their great works.”
That… was not from any of the words or chronicles about Azeroth that I remembered. Also, ‘mould’ didn’t mean ‘create.’ Was his wording on purpose? What was I saying, of course it was.
I looked down at my glass again. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies, Death’s words came to me. And the words of his granddaughter. So we can believe the big ones. Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing.
I’d agreed with those words in spirit, but never entirely in letter because I didn’t agree that they were lies. At worst, they were dreams. It was dreams, not lies, that could ‘become.’
“May their names be worshipped and their works praised with great praise, for this night and all the nights and days to come!”
I looked up. The crowd was dead silent. Even the wind had stopped almost completely, as if the looming clouds themselves were waiting to see what I would do. Say. Reply. Damn myself, perhaps. And with me, everyone who believed in me too. There were some looks of annoyance, a few of chagrin, more looks of mistrust, and many, many of bewilderment and confusion. Some were outright aghast. One or two were even outraged to the point of fanaticism.
But none of those feelings were aimed at me. Only at him. They didn’t understand, didn’t know.
I met Odyn’s gaze.
Here I am not compromising either, his eyes told me. Put your honour where your life is, the gaze I’d just healed dared me.
The Pantheon was dead, and Odyn didn’t know. He didn’t know, his siblings didn’t know, the dragons didn’t know, the elves didn’t know, the trolls didn’t know, the loa didn’t know, the nature gods didn’t know, nobody did. None of them knew. The only one who knew, who understood what happened back then, was Ra. And he’d wallowed in crippling depression well before he was dispossessed of Aman’Thul’s power and imprisoned by Lei Shen.
Fifteen thousand years, the realization struck me. This is why the number felt important. That’s when the Pantheon were murdered.
There was no justice to be had here, was there? There was no room for mercy either, because either I’d be wronged by a lie or Odyn would be, so it wouldn’t be anyone’s mercy at all, just a trade of grief for mistrust.
That leaves duty, doesn’t it?
I looked up at the clouds. What did the blizzard, the winter wind, see? Hear? What awareness did Hodir have in this form? How much did he understand? If I gave Greatfather Winter the worst news he’ll ever receive in his entire existence, would he turn into a real calamity this time? And whatever I said… would he take the knowledge back to Ulduar, and from there to Loken and Yogg’Saron?
Would it make a difference?
For a moment, just for the sake of argument, I actually did consider dissembling. If I were before Odyn on his throne, he’d probably be able to see through me instantly. No matter how bright I made my Light, at the end of the day he was an entity that also had the Light, for much longer than me at that. Moreover, he collected and worked with souls. Being able to dissect the spirit at a glance would be literally required for that, I imagined.
But I wasn’t there, I was here. Blindi was a remote vessel that brought forth just a fraction of Odyn’s true self, no matter how much – or little – of his mind was present in it. At this moment. If I called on the Light to burn in the unseen world brightly enough, even he would have trouble sensing falsehood. At this distance at least.
But suspicion wouldn’t be much better, and either way…
Would it be better to lie? I Reflected. By my standards. Would it be more help to the future, as I conceived it and committed to it?
The Light, unusually, had nothing to say. A very bright and intense and vast nothing.
The second of the Nine Noble Virtues is Truth.
I straightened my back. I raised my glass. I pleaded to Odyn with my own eyes to understand how very, very sorry I was.
And I did my duty. “To their memory.”
There was a long, breathless moment when no one understood anything at all.
Then the cloud cover quaked so violently that everyone’s attention was drawn up and away. Everyone’s but mine.
It was like watching all the stages of spiritual death unfold right before my eyes. Odyn stared at me in utter incomprehension, blinked several times, made to speak only for his voice to fail him, tried again to the same result, then his brow furrowed as thoughts and memories rushed through his head between one breath and the next. I was endued with eyes that witnessed it unfold with sight beyond sight. For the first time, it felt less like a blessing than a curse.
Then his face slackened and his eyes widened so very, very slowly that I didn’t need magic to read his every emotion off his face. Confusion, denial, a belated realization so shocking that I didn’t need to wonder what it was… and then disbelief, denial, denial, denial, denial, denial, before a woe so pure and wretched overcame him that nothing else could coexist.
“Hail to their heirs,” I said in the muteness that had overcome everything, trying and hoping to salvage… I didn’t even know. “Whose promised ascension may yet set right what once went wrong.”
Even before I finished I knew it wasn’t enough. Odyn just… slumped where he stood and then…
The snow was soft, so his glass didn’t break. Watching it fall, though I noted distantly that the drink inside wasn’t the same one I had in mine, or anything at all fancy. Just normal red wine that spilled out on the white.
It looked like blood.
“-. .-“
The door almost slammed open from the force of the snowstorm, even with Dad holding a firm grip on the handle as he opened it ahead of the rest of us. I could barely spare any thought for it, my mind was fully on the task of steering Blindi inside without him stumbling on the last step.
“I cannot linger!” Uther shouted over the furor of the wind as he shielded the rest of us on the way in. “Dragon or not, I must go back to ensure everyone reaches shelter! But there will be questions and I have no answers, what should I tell them?”
“Greatfather Winter got some really bad news and will be much colder company for the next decade!” I shouted back as I steered Blindi’s feet over the threshold with my own. “His substitute too!”
Uther had many questions, but asked none of them and went back out into the blizzard after one last, hard-pressed look at me and my new drop-in.
I finally got Blindi inside. The ravens flew out of Dad’s cloak to watch from atop the furniture. Mother came in right after us, the dragons hanging off her skirt and bodice while leading Orsur in our wake. The man had wanted to decline our hospitality too, since he’d found a place down below and didn’t want to be an imposition. Thankfully, he changed his mind when I said I needed someone with a strong horse and cart to transport us up the mountain. Us and the other important guest who’d initially refused our hospitality.
“Let’s get him to the den, quickly now!” Dad fretted unnecessarily, though I didn’t begrudge him his need to fill the disquiet with something. “There should still be embers in the hearth.”
Warm or cold probably wouldn’t make difference, but putting Blindi down in a chair should finally free enough of my attention to do something other than reacting.
I’d have had Emerentius fly the two of us up, but then the Light blared loudly in my mind for once. The sentient sky shroud would react extremely poorly to a helpless Odyn being carried off by a black dragon, the separation between Blindi and the Titan would make no difference to Hodir in his current state. As it was, the blizzard had resumed regardless, and the only reason it wasn’t killing anyone – yet – was because it was as confused as it was wild.
Granodior was limited to ground-level and below, so he couldn’t save anyone if the storm became truly horrendous. I’d also have to dedicate all my awareness to him in order for him to operate at anything approaching our small scale. Needless to say, I couldn’t do that right now.
But I’d greatly nourished my spirit with the Light all these months, without having to feed it to anyone else, so I was much more than before. My own mystical senses reached far enough that I could perceive some of what was going on. The winds were blowing in all directions at random, which included against each other. It was keeping the gale forces from being as bad as they could be, so far.
Only so far.
I settled Blindi in Dad’s armchair and stepped back while mother fussed over him. She’d get no reaction, but while she got convinced of that it left Orsur at loose ends. I caught his attention and led him to the room I’d prepared for him earlier. Once he knew where everything was, I made my excuses and went back out to stand on the porch, despite the gale and spraying snow.
The blizzard was verging on the truly dangerous this time. I didn’t know what I’d do if it got worse, but while I waited for an idea, I could think about other things. Wonder. Figure out why the Light had blared in my mind so loudly, finally. It had been so clear just now compared to the rest of the day, even the whole month. Based on past experience, the immediate answer was that the impact of unfolding events was too vast in scope to judge one way or another. At least by my standards.
But as I stood in the blizzard and let my blood cool, I began to ponder a different possibility. One that the Light didn’t immediately cast shade on.
I’m not the only one who’s been Reflecting on how to go about things today.
I was strong in the Light, but so was Odyn, and he worked on even longer time frames than me, no doubt. Of course he’d use Reflection to evaluate the impact of his choices ahead of time too. If our foresight happened to focus on the same thing, closely enough, for long enough… Wouldn’t we end up running face-first into each other’s observer effect? All I did sense before, leading up to this, was that whatever was going to happen would be significant, and little else.
Free will was powerful indeed, even when misused.
Add another piece to the puzzle of how the Void can get around the Light.
I never imagined the answer to be ‘too many cooks in the kitchen.’
The knee-jerk response would be for us foretellers to have as little to do with each other as possible, but that was by itself a reactionary, shallow non-answer. Coordination about who and what we happen to be working towards made much more sense. Odyn probably recognized what was happening immediately, and went ahead anyway, which made perfect sense too. Whether as a lesson to me – or not – if the average Joe could do what he had to do without any future sight at all, what excuse did we have?
Delegation was the ultimate superpower for a good reason.
Or maybe the opposite was just as true, and prophets could get even more reliable insight if they looked into the future at the same time. Together. I’d already used the Soulgaze as a medium for something fairly groundbreaking with Emerentius, why not this too? The details would need to be figured out in the future, but for right now…
I went back inside, to the den where only Dad was still keeping guard. Mom had given up on trying to coax a reaction out of our catatonic guest and went to see the other one instead.
I marched in front of the chair, turned Blindi’s face up and Soulgazed an avatar.
The experience was literally psychedelic, but the hallmark feature of the mystical process, one I had taken for granted before but noticed being absent now, was the sense of the interconnectedness of all things. It was missing – no, not missing, incomplete. Like some part of the experience… wasn’t.
The sights, sounds, smells, emotions, the dimensional breaks and curves that buoyed them and were buoyed by them… They unraveled around me, and in me and through me. It was like traveling through a multi-directional tunnel made of thought waves and light beams, while at the same time I also was the tunnel. But despite rising to that state of scale, to that immanence with the cosmos that I’d only surpassed when I was happily dead, the being I found at the other end didn’t acknowledge me. He didn’t look at me, didn’t communicate with me, he wasn’t even aware of me.
Just a large, massive man made of soul and mineral, slumped on his throne.
I pulled back.
Odyn’s body is encased in pink marble and white jade, I thought dimly as I caught myself before I fell. I was dazed. So why is he turning blue?
No, I knew the answer, didn’t I? Either Helya and Old God magic was to blame, or it just came naturally with being a psychopomp. Considering that all his Valkyries shone golden, the second was very unlikely.
I stood in my living room and loomed over my guest while I got my mind back in order. Blindi was blank, Odyn had completely withdrawn to his greater self in the Halls of Valor and left his vessel empty.
He’d done it none too gently either. I comprehended Blindi’s nature now. The body before me had once belonged to a man with the aspirations and talent to become a brave and mighty warrior, if not for an incident that made him a lackwit. So Odyn sent a Valkyrie to offer to raise him to Valholl, where he could fulfil his potential instead of being locked in a body that didn’t let him string two thoughts together, until he finally died choking on his own spit.
The man accepted. In exchange, Odyn gained a body he could possess at a whim. He’d been using it to work his will in the lands of man ever since.
But when pulling back from it this time, he hadn’t shut the door behind him. I could see the ways, the spiritual structures in place for it, the mechanisms, the traps, the safeguards. They were all as dull and comatose as he was. He didn’t just lack the presence of mind to re-engage them when he pulled out, he broke and ruined all of them with how suddenly and harshly he withdrew. He probably didn’t realize he pulled out at all. Back. Away. If his reaction was even a fraction of Ra’s, then Odyn had completely shut down. Odyn…
Odyn was vulnerable.
In all the worst ways.
“Dad,” I called, ignoring the alarming ideas about Loken and Helya that I was thinking up as fast as the blizzard was getting worse outside. “That thing you did, the Soulgaze with mother, what exactly did you give?”
“Everything?” he asked more than answered. “You can control-? What am I saying, of course you can, but I didn’t – it didn’t even occur to me. I guess… I just offered everything I could?”
“Everything, huh?”
I Reflected on my situation. I Reflected on it very deeply. Even now, I still didn’t get anything but the same sense of major significance. I pondered the implications of that. And my options. Especially the options that didn’t involve killing Blindi right now and burning him to ash to scatter in the wind. The very distraught and soon-to-be unfriendly wind if I made the wrong decision here.
Above on the chandelier, Huginn and Muninn watched me. From up atop the mantlepiece, the dragons watched me just as intensely. This would be a formative experience for them too, then.
I steadily felt myself relax.
The Light works atemporally.
If I still couldn’t sense anything specific, that could just as easily mean Odyn would Reflect on what I was about to do too. Himself. In the future. More so, distance was merely a suggestion where the Light was concerned, if you know what you’re doing. Especially if you have auxiliary means of getting what you want.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Or, in this case, where you want.
I got myself a chair of my own, pulled it in front of Blindi, sat down and Soulgazed him second time.
It was a testament to the wrongness of the entire situation that the experience unfolded almost exactly the same, despite that this was one mystical undertaking that should never be less than unique. The end result was the same too, which worked just fine for what I meant to do. The vision settled once more, on the sight of the large, massive man made of soul and mineral, slumped on his throne.
I left my body entirely and astrally projected through Blindi’s empty shell all the way there. Just flew my spirit over, straight through the open door.
Between one thought and the next, I appeared at the foot of Odyn’s throne in the Hall of Glory.
Immediately, I heard a double-take behind me. Just one, female, familiar. Eyir. In front of me, Odyn didn’t react at all, despite that his glowing eye wasn’t closed. It told me just how bad and time-sensitive the situation was. He hadn’t had the presence of mind to even dismiss anyone to think and grieve in peace, Eyir had no doubt had to do it for him. That was why I didn’t sense or hear any of the valarjar that should have been on sentry.
I wasted no time on turning or talking, on vain attempts to explain anything to anyone, and instead used all of my Light to cast the Divine Shield. Around both of us.
Then I flew up as all ghosts could, kicked off the arm of the throne for speed, grabbed tight onto that ghastly magma beard of his, and Soulgazed a deity.
It was like plunging face-first into the sun with my eyes open. It didn’t burn, but that was my only reprieve. His thoughts and emotions were variegated geometry turning in on itself, and their every tug and turn pulled at my edges, stretching my spirit and revealing seams I didn’t know it still had. He was so vast, he saw and considered so much, so quickly, so many things at the same time that it threatened to dissolve my sense of identity. Had I not had a plan coming in, I might have felt alarmed.
But the human spirit is no mere trifle either, especially one who’d lived after death for as long as mine had.
I focused very hard on the distant memories of this world from another life and offered them up. Them and everything else I had to give.
The golden radiance took them, harshly, almost unwittingly, carelessly. Ripped them out of me along with a chunk of spiritual mass that was none too small. I didn’t resist. It was needed to contain them, to keep them in one piece, a single unified record, however scrambled. Even if it didn’t work, the pain would be good practice in case my plans for tomorrow fell through and I had to go with my more painful options. And because it was a part of me, I could sense its path and its transformation even if I couldn’t follow in its wake.
Inevitably, Odyn’s circular thoughts forced mine into his focus, because he barely had the mind to decide what should be in focus, and the chaos shuddered to a halt.
I tried to pull out. To give him back his privacy.
He didn’t allow me. I hadn’t even sensed him turn his attention to me, but he had me in his grip.
I didn’t struggle.
He… didn’t punish my transgression.
He beheld me. Everything about me. Finally, he acknowledge me, or at least the fact that I was there.
He dissected every memory I had of Azeroth from Earth, though they didn’t induce any paradigm-shifting conclusions. Variations of all of them had played out in his own war games and visions, so they were nothing new. All except the last one. The last memory, and the foremost among them. The campaign of Argus. He followed it all the way to its conclusion, when the Pantheon came back to life despite all odds against them.
He watched it, riveted.
Then, very slowly, carefully, mournfully, he set it apart from the rest. Separately.
To be completely disregarded with the rest of the wishful thinking.
I gave my sympathy freely, and I hoped Odyn would forgive me for giving him this spot of hope someday. I’d only pushed that memory to the forefront to shock him out of his downward spiral. I didn’t trust a hope that it would come true either, and I made no pretense to the contrary. Those who first envisioned Azeroth on Earth were culled early on. All the ones telling the stories by the end were petty fabricators with an axe to grind.
With a mighty effort that was still just barely enough, Odyn finally witnessed me, and through me further back, through memory and time until he reached the calm, self-fulfilling solitude of the afterlife that I’ll never truly leave behind. Only there, in that eon of life beyond death, in the proof to the contrary of how horrible he had witnessed the hereafter to be, he finally found a speck of comfort.
The Soulgaze ended without my say so.
I found myself in the palm of Odyn’s hand. The Light – his Light – was flowing through me, soothing the searing pain where my spirit had been scorched by his beard of stonefire. Around us, a Divine Shield turned ever so steadily, but it wasn’t mine. That had lapsed at some point, only for Odyn to cast a new one himself. He wasn’t in any more of a mood to explain anything to anyone either.
“Go home, Prophet,” Odyn said wearily, his one eye shut. “Go home.”
I went back home.
“Get another bed ready,” I ordered once back in my body. My spirit felt raw, like skin scalded by boiling oil, but I’d suffered worse with Emerentius. “I don’t know how long we’ll be hosting this shell, but let’s make him comfortable at least.”
Thankfully, no one asked any questions.
Eventually, I was alone with just the sentient beasts to judge me.
I comforted them as best I could, then went to the kitchen, took the trash bin outside and upended it all on the snow. I overlayed my spirit over the glass shards. I used the Light to scry the Arcane patterns that they used to be arranged in, backwards in time like I’d done for the steam elementals, and cast Holy Light at just the one.
Glass came back together into the shape of Dad’s birthday pint, whole and unbroken.
I picked it up and examined it. There was a wisp of spirit still in it, but it was rapidly dissipating. The object itself was better than new. Prettier too.
You could, it turned out, use the Holy Light to fix inanimate objects. In fact, it had gone from a nice cup to a masterwork, at least within the material limitations.
Not as simple as just casting the Mending cantrip, but not as limited either.
Best of all, it didn’t undermine the Arcane at all. In fact, it repaired it. It didn’t mess with time either. It was healing transformation, not entropy reversal. You just had to be able to target the Arcane substrate, not the object itself. Not the crude matter.
The Arcane itself can be healed.
It was unfortunate that I wasn’t in the state of heart to enjoy my breakthrough.
I looked up, ignoring the snow beating at my face. The clouds were positively corrugated, and the wind and snowfall could charitably qualify as a squall. I tired communicating with the presence in the sky, spirit to spirit, but got no response or reaction.
I cleaned up my mess, took the trash bin and cup back inside, and went back out and down the slope to where the ever-burning cauldron was. Since none of the little sprites had come swarming me in distress, I assumed the magical flame was still there and burning, so the canopy and snow fenders were doing something right. Regardless, I had business with them, because they were the last loose end left to tie up.
I also hoped they might be willing to talk to the blizzard on my behalf, after I was done. And that Hodir would listen to them. Sympathy for the grieving was all well and good, but not when it caused mass casualties across half the country. I didn’t know how I’d go about matching the Light against a force of nature, never mind an entity that could override it by being just plain better at the job.
My workshop was near enough that it stymied the wind from one direction, but there was a big layer of snow under the canopy anyway. In fact, it had built up almost high enough around it to reach the cauldron’s rim. The snow fenders had worked, so the snow just built up around them. I was honestly surprised the magical flame still worked under all that. Even if the heat maintained an air pocket, the oxygen should be running low by now.
I looked at the cauldron and the steam elementals pretending not to realize I was here. Pretending they didn’t want to crowd me and hug me until they were sated on my spiritual energy. If I opened my spirit to them, it would carry everything I feel, everything weighing me down right now. Could I really inflict this burden on them? That would just make everything even worse, wouldn’t it? I was rather upset right now.
I chose instead to walk back a distance and sit down on the farthest makeshift log bench that still put them in my line of sight, well outside the canopy. Then I just… watched the steam go up for a while. I considered going ahead with the procedure I’d devised over the past few months, but I was still a little rattled. I did need at least one of the spirits tomorrow, if I was to do all I planned to do, so I couldn’t afford to leave them be anymore, but… one more hour wouldn’t cut things that closely, surely?
The unintended guests in my home did not figure into my decision. Given how long it took Ra to acknowledge Lei Shen, I’d not have been surprised if it took days or even weeks before Odyn did the same for me, assuming he didn’t just get the blizzard to carry his avatar someplace else on wings of wind.
So it was to my very genuine surprise when, not half an hour later, I was proven entirely incorrect when Blindi came down from the house and took a seat next to me on the rough log. He didn’t say anything.
I did. “I am sorry.”
“… I can feel that you mean it. It is appreciated.”
It was not the same as thanking me, for which I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t be able to thank someone for such horrible news either. Not without it being a complete lie.
When Odyn spoke again almost five minutes later, his voice was outright vacant. “I am an imitation.”
“You’re a legacy.”
A legacy of a shaman who rose to deific status for carving some manner of order during the Bronze Age collapse. Not that anyone was in a hurry to acknowledge that, or its implications. They were more interested in painting Odin as a cowardly degenerate.
That did raise the question of coincidence, though, because at the level the Pantheon operated at, the names and assignments of the Keepers had to be beyond mere happenstance. It made me seriously wonder if the Titans hadn’t known about Earth. Maybe even visited.
… Wait a second.
My assumption about crossing realities was based on vague recollections of what it looked and felt like to leave the Sol System’s rebirth wheel. But I didn’t actually have a frame of reference for any of it, so what really happened there?
I’d not thought too much of the processes involved in me coming to this ‘reality,’ but I’d never believed in an ‘all choices happen’ multiverse to begin with. While I didn’t dismiss the idea that other realities might exist somehow – no more than I could dismiss anything else completely unverifiable – I now had to wonder if I had left my home reality at all.
I wondered if the Warcraft games came to be because someone reincarnated, or because I had. Will. In the future. Backwards in time.
Probably not, I had no plans to go back.
… But an anti-magic blood ward, cast around a Titan’s corpse and fuelled by the blood sacrifice of that self-same World-Soul, would be the ideal place for a soul to flee to. Through means beyond the Twisting Nether. To a place where the nathrezim wouldn’t find, never mind enter. If they even thought to look.
Come to think of it, my vague memories of being dead and eventually reincarnating on Azeroth were remarkably similar to Odyn’s experience existing in and out of the realms beyond the Grey at the same time, in that brief time when he was still one with his other eye. In that light, it was possible that Earth and Azeroth were in the same Great Dark. Same universe.
Here.
If that was true, then the oldest of Earth’s creation myth gained a whole new meaning. The conspicuous dearth of mystical feats by my time also took on a whole new meaning. Even with the wildest psychedelics and occult practices, there was a distinct lack of magic worth a damn on Terra, in the modern age. By this world’s scale, at least.
So… When one thought about what the story of the Divine Twins might mean, when one looked at the story of Ymir, Yemo, Yama, Pangu, whatever you wanted to call him. Our Titan…
Our titan was dead.
Our World-Soul had offered himself to be sacrificed.
The myth said it was so Manu and all whatever other beings would have a place to live, but now I could guess the real reason, and it had everything to do with the lack of spiritual powers. In killing himself, Earth became a dead zone. And thus, it became useless to eldritch tentacle horrors, and very hard – maybe even impossible – to find or assail through the Legion’s means, thanks to the anti-magic protection spell. Maybe it even looked like any other lifeless rock from outside.
The sky was made from the cold giant's skull, the myth said. But that was the oral tradition of people who considered gods to be the constellations measured and tracked by shamans and astronomers in a reflective pool at night. ‘Father Sky’ wasn’t a mere thunder god starting out, he was the firmament. The solar system’s heliosheath.
If the wheel of rebirth didn’t care about time any more than the Light did, assuming they weren’t one and the same… Or part of the same…
The Sol System was a time capsule.
And, because it had practically no other stake on the broader universe, it had the least observer effect at the quantum level. Thus, any ‘visions’ of the outer universe would come across more clearly there than anywhere else. A place where the past and future cast their shades equally, via the only vectors available: souls that reincarnated into the system, on Earth, from outside.
I just happened to have done the reverse.
“The internal combustion engine is locked out by design.”
My loose speculations were completely blown away by what Odyn had just told me. “Excuse me?”
“The technological path that begins with steam power and internal combustion was deliberately tied up with the interplanar mechanics, specifically to prevent its proliferation. The technological advantage of the Burning Legion is insurmountable by conventional paths, the only way to even the odds is by making technology past a certain point so ruinously self-sabotaging as to be useless. That is why the Legion only spreads and invades through mystical vectors. Otherwise they would all travel around in starships enslaving or eradicating everything through orbital bombardment.”
“… That makes a large amount of sense.”
“The Pantheon certainly thought so.” Blindi didn’t nod or gesture anything else, just talking seemed to be taking every scrap of will he could muster. “The alteration to the nature of civilization here also adds to Azeroth’s natural qualities as the key to counter-attacking the Burning Legion. Though if you plan to put your hopes in the World-Soul, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
… I wasn’t planning to, but now that he mentioned it-
“I cannot see the sense in some of the things in your memory, much seems taken right out of Loken’s Tribunal of Ages. But the little you know about the planet’s early eons is correct. The world-soul did not produce an abundance of spiritual energy. In fact, it devoured more than it made. This precipitated the mass starvation of the elements, which in turn caused them to descend into predation and cannibalism. The world was a hellscape long before the tentacle horrors came.”
That… sounded accurate to some of the lore, and also like the complete opposite of Draenor’s problem.
“The Pantheon gave their personal touch to this planet specifically so enough life might emerge to produce enough spiritual energy to sate that hunger. They never shared their thoughts on the matter with me, but I personally will never lay all my hopes for the future upon a creature of such high-maintenance.”
That sounded truly harsh, but my own steam elementals would have sucked my spirit dry if I’d let them, which wasn’t much different. “So why did they put so much work into this world? Or is this the standard?”
“One part was the environmental pressure producing some of the strongest native life forms in the Great Dark. But the greater part is Azeroth’s peculiar celestial cycle, especially the two moons. Also, the Pantheons deliberately created many different and unique biomes, complete with sapient life forms, so that the planet will always qualify as a less adequate target for locator or targeting spells. To that, of course, are added the defenses around the world and system proper.”
“The planet’s not part of any galaxy, so you can’t navigate here via conventional interstellar technology. And mystically…” I snapped my fingers. “The interregnum!”
“Yes. There are other world souls, some that could hatch into bigger and stronger beings than this one, but Azeroth is special because, in cosmic terms, it fits the similarity principle very poorly. You have all the elements to aim an outgoing teleportation or portal to practically any kind of world out there, even pick and choose details until you narrow down a specific one. But the reverse is not true – the only way to get into this place is if it’s given a foothold by internal traitors.”
Deathwing. Medivh. Sargeras.
If he sensed my thoughts, Odyn didn’t give a sign. “Azeroth is special because it is the perfect staging point: you can attack anywhere, but it is practically impossible for it to become the enemy’s beachhead in return.”
“Almost,” I said.
“Yes,” Blindi said wearily. “Almost.”
We both fell silent, me because there was something coming together in my mind, and Odyn because he couldn’t bring himself to do anything after that exertion. That was how he felt to me, at least. Depression was a frightful thing, I didn’t even want to relate to what it might be like, at his scale.
Finally, I realized what was nagging at me. “Wait – why didn’t the Titans exclude atomics then? Is it because your bodies need it to function?”
“Because the demons cannot use it.”
That… was not any answer I even imagined.
“The point is not to stop technological development, the point is to deny the enemy the benefits of industrial automation they will always be able to co-opt and turn against native societies. Enchantment, at least, needs effort to subvert, and never the exact same kind.”
“And fusion can’t be? Fission, elemental enrichment, it only takes-“ But then I realized what he was telling me. “Fel magic.”
He gestured vaguely in confirmation.
“By its very nature, Fel is unstable and degenerative,” I realized. “Not enough to alter the make of a bomb on immediate exposure, maybe, but more than sufficient to do ill upon element fertility and radiation decay over the time it would take to, say, put that bomb together to begin with.” What would it do to the more fiddly and long-term applications, like a power reactor? “The most essential element in harnessing the power of fissile material is precision. Control.”
“And so, all attempts by the Burning Legion to harness nuclear power have ended in ruin for them.”
That was… incredible news. It still left the issue of sabotage, especially by shapeshifters like dreadlords, but that wasn’t really an argument because it could be said of literally anything. Actually, a nuclear power plant would have the best protections and surveillance imaginable, in many layers normal and magical alike. Such facilities wouldn’t even need to be above ground, on a world like this.
For fel powers to be such a terrible idea even without them, it would mean that any use of them would cause anomalies in the reactor, even from a fair distance. That would trip alarms immediately, even if the dreadlord manages to fool all other modes of detection. The kind of skill set needed to cause a Cernobyl in those conditions… Even if they succeeded, the demons wouldn’t get a foothold anyway.
It would make more sense to send such an agent after the leadership instead.
I thought about Outland, and the battalion of giant mechs that the Legion might start to build there at some point in the future. Their low combat capabilities, the lack of interstellar logistics and assets being brought in from elsewhere, it all made a lot more sense all of a sudden.
Meanwhile, on Azeroth, the pinnacle of atomic technology and all military applications already existed in the Titan facilities, including mass automation and everything else that a more conventional industrial revolution would barely manage a fraction of.
Really, I was only surprised that electricity generation wasn’t somehow locked too, since you could achieve mass production that way as well. When I asked Odyn about it, he said that was too fundamental a mechanic to mess with if you wanted any technology beyond campfires.
Or an atmosphere.
I hummed. “You said the technology advantage of the Burning legion would be insurmountable by ‘conventional’ paths.”
Odyn looked up at the clouds.
“What if we do find the workaround?”
“Then it will be noted and you will be encouraged to explore the technology as fully as possible, insofar as it does not actually cause irreparable harm to the Arcane or the planet, so that we are as informed as we can be of the vulnerabilities you discovered when the demons come.”
I blinked. “That’s a lot more lenient than I expected. Is this a stance from before today, or just now?”
“It has always been the way. There would be no point to us Keepers if all we did was stifle life.” With a monumental exertion of willpower, Odyn was able to force himself to stand. He closed his eyes and sighed against the wind beating at his face. “To borrow a phrase from your last life, putting the djinn back in the bottle very rarely works out, and never without pain.”
I got the distinct feeling that he wasn’t talking about hypotheticals anymore. “If this is about tomorrow-“
“My val’kyr can either do their assigned duty or answer your call for intervention, not both at once. Geirrvif will remain, and others are already converging as drawn by their nature, many people will die violently tomorrow night. But I cannot afford to divert more of them your way, even for you. Even if I did, there will be innocent casualties, even if just from shock among those with old and weakened hearts, well beyond your reach. For what you mean to achieve, there was never going to be a clean solution.”
“If you tell me I’ll do more harm than good if I go through with my plans for tomorrow, I won’t do it.”
That, finally, got a true and vivid reaction. “I actually believe you.” When he turned to look at me, his tone was a small bit less dismal. “Before I answer, I will ask this: do you believe yourself to be good?”
What a question. What did he know? What did he see? How far into the future?
Did it matter?
I stood as well, and took time getting my thoughts in order. I could feel the importance of this moment. “A wise man once toyed with the idea that good cannot comprehend evil, and vice versa. I used to think it was nonsense. I believed that Good and Evil will not understand each other only as long as they don’t meet, and then experience will teach everything the other needs to know. But life has since showed me that while most people are good, most really don’t understand evil. The ones who talk and debate on the topic most confidently are usually the ones who understand the least.”
“The meeting between good and evil usually concludes with the better side dead.” Odyn made a gesture that somehow indicated everything. The world. Himself. The storm clouds. Everything. “Or worse.”
I chose my words carefully, acutely aware of how much less of the Light there was in Odyn compared to just an hour before. “Good might be the only one that can truly comprehend the other while remaining itself.”
The Light flickered ever so slightly. Brighter.
“I believe,” I said slowly. “That Good understands itself, but Evil never will. The evil man is inherently hypocritical, or utterly ignorant of himself. Otherwise he’d commit penance or suicide in self-disgust. Or at least stop. Evil cannot create, only corrupt. That’s why, even if I end up shunned or exiled, maybe even hunted to the ends of the world for my acts of tomorrow, I will not hold it against anyone.”
“I see,” Odyn murmured. “You believe what you say. That is good. You will need it tomorrow, especially if tonight concludes for you as I expect it will.”
My thoughtful mood was drenched in cold quite effectively. “And now I’ve an all-new cause for worry.” I knew I wouldn’t be getting an explanation, I sensed it, the certainty. But I asked anyway. “I don’t suppose you’ll explain what you mean?”
“It is not a vision, merely a personal expectation based on lived experience. For that reason, I dare not share it.” Odyn sighed, looking at the cauldron and the spirits within. “I dare not inflict myself on the matter, any matter, as I am right now.”
“But you think I’m about to make a mistake.”
“On the contrary, I believe you’ve acted rightly in all ways relative to this matter, and I also believe that what you are about to do is good. But I also expect it will leave you feeling quite livid.”
Oh.
Oh dear.
What was I going to stumble my way into this time?
Odyn took a deep, fortifying breath and put his hands on my shoulders. When he spoke this time, his tone was low, feeble, but completely heartfelt “You could have become my Lei Shen.”
I… I appreciated the words, but that was going a bit far. Lei Shen was right there with Ra in the Engine of Nalak'sha, when there was no defense between them and no guards. An astral projection was hardly so dangerous. I’d have to figure out where the Broken Isles are first, find the Halls of Valor, get there, break into Skyhold and do all manner of other things before-
Odyn put his hand over my mouth, even though I hadn’t voiced any of that. “This is not just a minor trifle of appreciation anymore. This is a debt of honor. Do you understand?”
Since he still held my mouth shut, I could only nod.
Odyn withdrew. “Light be with you, Ferdinand Rogasian. May others afford you the kindness you do not give yourself.”
I watched Odyn leave. I watched him climb up the mountain until he disappeared into the churning clouds. The sky calmed soon after, or perhaps the clouds just lost their will to struggle, that’s how bleak the air felt. When the cover of mists finally lifted from the crest entirely, there was no one there.
I turned to the steaming cauldron. I pondered the life forms wallowing within. I considered picking up the shovel, but if things went even remotely like I expected, there wouldn’t be a need to. That problem would just solve itself.
I considered turning my back and leaving well enough alone.
The First of the Nine Noble Virtues is Courage.
I let my aura unfold like I hadn’t allowed it since the Lightforging. All this time I’d been nourishing and cultivating my spirit with the Light, only without sacrificing the results to the Aura of Vigor like I’d done before. It unfolded around me, now, spreading wide and far, and farther still until my specter permeated the whole mesa our property sat on.
The little spirits stirred inside the cauldron, despite their stubborn sulk. One even dared peak out over the top.
I held out a hand, palm-up. I traced back my own history, all the way back to the point when the nine little spirits had tried to fuse together. I stopped at that moment, when I seized them and stopped them, mid-way through the process of forming an all-new elemental. I invoked the fullness of that memory, the reality recorded permanently in the record of the past.
I’d called it a reflection of the past upon the present before, but the word was wrong. It wasn’t a reflection, it was a perfect memory of reality at that point in time.
I called on the Light to manifest that reality anew into the world.
A nine-fold elemental spirit core came into being above my hand. It was new, it was big, it was real, it took more than half of my spiritual mass just to form a mould in which the Light could flow and take its form. Coalesce.
Become.
But the Light did flow and become, and the amount I could channel had grown enough that my conjuration would last for as long as I had Light to regenerate it.
“Go on, you little brats.” My voice, my breath, they shook. With exhilaration. “Eat your fill.”
The spirits were amazed. Disbelieving. Astounded.
But the call of satiety and growth could not be resisted forever. One of them, the bravest and the least invested in their collective sulk, ripped loose of the others and descended ravenously on my offering.
And so it was, that at the turn of the New Year’s Eve of the year 581 of the King’s Calendar, I bore witness to the unfolding of all stages in lifecycle of elemental life, from infant to its prime.
The little spirit had barely gorged on half a core’s worth of spiritual mass when it began to metamorphosize. But unlike in nature and the Elemental Plane, where a spirit had to digest and grow and self-actualize and repeat until it had assimilated enough for the next stage, there was no wait here, or delay. I’d stopped the fusion part-way through, at a stage where the substance of the cores was most easily digestible because it was practically transmuting itself. Furthermore, the Light worked intuitively.
I was joined together in spirit with the little one, so well that I could easily have it serve his wants and instincts over mine.
One core became two, then three, then six, then twelve, and more. Each time it grew bigger, each time it took longer.
But the meal never ran out, and while the Light couldn’t touch it directly without pain, the spirit was more than willing to let me play intermediary for the necessary Revelation. The whole while I felt like I was being eaten alive, my spirit was being eaten alive. But I bore through it, if for no other reason than because I’d need the pain tolerance and ability to work through crippling sapped will soon. And when our different perspectives final reached un unbridgeable gap in concepts and understanding, Granodior arose unbidden within me and over him to offer up his own.
The Spirit of Alterac… He had a personal stake in this. I felt it keenly, even though I still didn’t know what it was. I wasn’t surprised. Though the little ones had shunned me this whole time, the same couldn’t be said for everyone else. Who better to turn to than their senior?
Finally, after many minutes, when the little steam puff had grown into a living whirlwind the size of our house, the infusion of growth and nourishment finally started to lag behind self-attainment. It brought to mind what my mother used to say when teaching me how to plant a garden. It didn’t matter how long I fed the same amount of water to a tree if it was just a trickle and a drop.
I cut the flow of power, and waited for the spirit of air and water and flame to finally finish his meal.
The windy, whistling haze around me stabilized. The metamorphosis finally began to settle on a form. The spirit in front of me finally had enough mind to take in his surroundings again, and realized that I was bleeding from a hundred cuts.
He all but ripped himself away from me, which didn’t do me much better because it also stole my breath away. I heaved a big lungful when new air rushed back in, which didn’t improve his disposition by much. Mortified, the elemental spirit melted all the snow around us and the cauldron, swept it around us to form a protective dome, then rapidly raised the temperature of the air to what I was most comfortable with.
~ Mortification, Apology, Concern ~
I raise a finger for him to wait while I hunched over and kindly bid the Light to heal my body now. And my clothes too. I had to reconceptualize my situation and really focus to make it work for the latter, but I powered through it because my shirt wouldn’t survive another bout like that, and there were eight more still to go.
~ Concern, Apology, Chagrin ~
“Does this mean you are speaking to me again?”
~ Chagrin, Vacillation, Embarassment ~
Finally, I was able to stand straight. “I name you Allayiphas.” I declared. “But to avoid exposing your true name so others can bind you, I’ll call you Phaseshift.” ‘Allayí phasis’ was ‘phase shift’ in Greek. I shouldn’t know that, I only knew English and German from back on Earth, but Revelation was proving useful in many small ways too.
~ … … Acknowledgment ~
“You’ve internalized the process of changing the basic states of matter, as part of your maturation. Apparently. Congratulations.”
Steam was fire and water and air. I’d just seen him manipulate all three states, or at least the last two and their temperature. That was no small thing, as I understood it.
The appreciation this time was wordles, but heartfelt.
I watched the new being I’d created. Unbound from the physical trappings of vapour and ice, he spanned half of my range of sight, and not just because he was so close. How much farther and wider could he stretch and fly now, I wondered.
I knocked on the glass shell. It tinkled. I looked at Phaseshift meaningfully.
Obligingly, he dispersed his physical form, and with it the ice dome back into snow – density manipulation too? – revealing once more the night, the blizzard, the canopy now free of snow underneath, and the steaming cauldron that positively boiled with anxious energy.
I watched my little spirits.
Their souls were filled with want.
“One at a time.”