Ethereal Effect. Chapter 32. (Patreon)

Osred Norris

How happy I was that, during the twenty years of my absence from Aetris, the Aiterri had somehow managed not to plunge the Dominion into yet another civil war. And this time it would almost certainly have been no local slaughter between several Great Houses, but a full-scale war within an interstellar state possessing hundreds of inhabited worlds, an enormous fleet, and so many Blessed that the consequences would have taken centuries to clean up. So, looking through the viewport of the descending ship at a capital that was still perfectly intact, I felt quite genuine relief.

I still could not decide, however, whom exactly I should thank for that.

Perhaps the rachni. They had never abandoned their attempts to break into our territory, although their activity had noticeably declined over the past few decades. Too many times their fleets had shattered against fortified systems, and their attempts to push deeper along already known routes had produced too little, so now the Queens were increasingly doing the exact opposite - building defenses against us. It was almost amusing: once, we had halted our own expansion so as not to collide with the full mass of the rachni at once, and now they themselves were constructing a fortified belt that prevented the Dominion from properly reaching the wider galaxy.

Put simply, they had locked us in rather thoroughly.

That in itself did not particularly concern me. For a state that had not even finished developing its own territory, a shortage of new systems was hardly a serious problem, and we had no urgent need to meet every species of the Citadel either. What was far more interesting was watching what happened on the other side of the front.

There, the Rachni War had finally begun to turn the other way.

At first, the appearance of the krogan had merely halted the advance. They were transferred wherever the Council's conventional armies could no longer cope, dropped onto infested worlds, and used as incredibly resilient assault infantry. But over the decades that followed, the krogan had been bred in such numbers that the scale was now completely different.

Citadel Space was gradually going on the offensive.

And it did so with all the elegance characteristic of a major war - by sending armies of millions of young krogan, raised specifically for the next assault, down onto planets. Losses could be horrific, but at the krogan's current rate of reproduction, the Council could afford them. If before the rachni simply could not kill the attackers fast enough, now there were so many krogan that some colonies were beginning to be literally overwhelmed by their pressure.

Then again, peace within the Dominion might have endured for a far more prosaic reason.

The Great Houses had become significantly weaker than the state.

Not in absolute terms, of course. Most old families now possessed incomparably greater resources than during the famous uprising. Their industries had grown alongside the Dominion, the number of Blessed had increased, and by the standards of my distant past, the guard of any Great House could itself have been considered a small army. The state, however, had grown far more.

Now even the guards of some Middle Houses consisted primarily of Lizards and Blessed wearing approved models of combat suits. A single such unit operating in a city could create more problems than an entire armored formation from the old era. But there were strict limits on the total size of such forces, heavy military equipment was almost completely forbidden to the Houses, and their armaments were constantly monitored by state services.

The ban on warships worked especially well.

No matter how wealthy a House was, it simply could not buy itself a cruiser. No Dominion shipyard would sell a warship to a private corporation or an aristocratic family, while attempting to build one in secret required such enormous infrastructure that concealing a project like that was practically impossible. A House could own transports, yachts, large freighters, even armed vessels of certain classes, but a true military fleet remained the privilege of the state and a handful of special organizations.

The strongest structure that did not answer directly to the Council of Eternals and the authorities connected to it was probably the Order of Tyreon. Thirty years ago it had finally won a planet of its own and had since been expanding both its industrial capacity and population there quite actively. The Order already possessed several dozen military cruisers, but even its fleet was built primarily around much cheaper private vessels capable of carrying thousands of soldiers and landing on a planet under their own power.

For a war against the rachni, that was more than enough. For a war against the Dominion, it was nowhere near enough.

I did not consider an uprising by the Lizards or the Aruns a serious threat at all. If anything like that happened, the state army would crush them fairly quickly, especially if the rebels failed to secure the support of some of the Great Houses. The Aruns understood that perfectly well, and over the past centuries they had spent far more effort trying to increase their influence within the existing system than indulging in pointless dreams of independence.

And perhaps the location of Aetris itself had helped save us as well.

Seizing the capital was much more difficult than simply raising a rebellion on several planets. One first had to reach it without the help of relays, move a sufficiently large fleet through ordinary space, somehow keep all of that secret, and then break the defenses of one of the Dominion's most heavily fortified systems. And all of it had to be done before state fleets from neighboring regions could arrive to help.

In short, potential rebels had very few options.

Which of those reasons had mattered most did not concern me all that much. The rachni, the restrictions on the Great Houses, the enormous state fleet, the location of the capital, or the simple absence of anyone eager to repeat the mistakes of the past - the result remained the same.

While I was gone, they had not killed one another.

My own return to Aetris proved much less rapid than I had once expected.

This time I had not even been born there, but in one of the comparatively young colonies that the Dominion had finally retaken from the rachni around fifty years earlier. My parents were two Mortal Aiterri who had themselves once been grown in ectogenesis facilities under a program run by one of the Middle Houses. They were perfectly normal, healthy, and fairly well educated, but neither possessed any exceptional abilities.

The chance of a Blessed child being born to such a pair was small.

Fortunately, my mother had used the Neitron complex for several years. That, at least, had done its job.

And so the remarkable Osred Vil was born. For the first four years of his life, he lived quietly with his parents and differed very little from the countless other children in the colony. Then the Gift awakened, and the family's life changed abruptly. Having a Blessed child automatically opened many opportunities to them, but at the same time raised a question that a poor Mortal family had almost no way to solve.

Who would teach him?

The education of a Blessed was very expensive. It was not enough simply to teach a child to read, count, and use the Gift without accidentally destroying half the house during the next tantrum. Specialized teachers, medical care, constant examinations, training, and equipment were required, while the colonies still offered far fewer opportunities for all of that than the old worlds.

Especially since my parents themselves had once been grown under a program of House Matanik.

So when representatives of the House offered to take their Blessed child in and raise him, there was little room for prolonged argument. For my parents, it meant their son would receive the best education, access to good mentors, and an entirely different level of opportunity. For Matanik, it meant another gifted child who, a few decades later, would begin bringing value to the House.

That was how Osred Vil became Osred Matanik. Not for long, though. By the age of five, my memory had fully returned.

The moment itself was a little different each time, but it was difficult to mistake it for anything else. A vast layer of memories that had previously existed somewhere beyond conscious reach gradually became accessible, and with it returned the understanding of who I actually was. I needed several days simply to put everything in order in my head and stop confusing my own childhood memories with a life lived several thousand years earlier.

After that, I used one of the channels I had prepared in my previous life.

I had left quite a few ways to contact my people. It would have been rather foolish to rely entirely on luck after every rebirth and wait for someone to recognize their former ruler by accident. Especially if the next birth happened somewhere in a colony on the opposite side of the Dominion.

After some time, agents of the Order of Shadows contacted me.

I had founded that organization more than five hundred years earlier specifically for tasks I did not want to entrust to ordinary intelligence services or state agencies. Over the centuries, it had changed its structure, the names of individual divisions, and its leadership several times, but its primary purpose remained the same - to carry out my personal orders and continue its work even when the next version of me did not formally exist yet.

Now the agents had to arrange my return. In fact, that was approximately why House Norris had been created in the first place.

I had deliberately avoided turning it into another Great House or gathering a vast industrial empire under my family name. I needed an organization famous and influential enough for its head to have access to the right people, but not so large that every change within the family became a matter of state politics.

The defining feature of the Norrises was their tradition of constantly accepting talented children into the family. And not only Blessed ones.

During my previous life, I had personally brought into the House many Mortals who had shown exceptional ability in science, administration, economics, or other fields, given them an education, a family name, and the opportunity to build careers of their own. Gradually, this had become a custom that my students continued after me.

So the appearance of yet another foster child should not have raised any questions. Especially if that child was a young Blessed producing some of the best results of his generation.

No one would be surprised if a talented ward of a well-known Middle House gradually began taking higher and higher positions, received the support of several senior family members, and a few decades later became one of the candidates to lead the House. I had deliberately kept succession among the Norrises flexible enough that the family name would never become tied to a single bloodline.

Besides, the House itself was famous to a significant degree precisely because of its previous head.

After my death, one of my older students had taken the position. Formally, he was the full head of House Norris, but he understood perfectly well that his main task was to preserve the House until my return. There was no urgent reason to take power away from him immediately, so for a while longer everything could remain as it was.

And I needed a new identity. A young, talented Blessed from a colony who had risen unexpectedly quickly within a Middle House could quite naturally become interested in politics after some time. Then he could obtain several state posts, produce good results, acquire the necessary connections, and gradually turn into one of the notable figures of his generation.

Far more sensible than having a twenty-year-old boy suddenly declare himself the heir of a dead ruler.

Most importantly, it left me several decades of almost entirely free time. I intended to make good use of them, because the previous experiment had failed.

I really had pushed myself to the limit during the assault on the deep hive, used my abilities until my body had nothing left to give, and with the final technique completely destroyed my own body. If my strength increased in response to serious trials, it was difficult to imagine a more suitable test.

But the new birth brought nothing. The Gift was strong, but the expected leap had not occurred. Once I was fully grown, at best I would return to roughly my previous level, perhaps exceed it slightly thanks to the new body and further training.

I had to return to more traditional methods. Pharmaceutical enhancement of the Blessed had existed for quite a long time; it was simply that most truly effective substances were prohibited outside laboratories. The reason for that restriction was also perfectly understandable: the more strongly a drug pushed the body to increase the amount of Aether it used, the greater the strain on the nervous system became. With constant use, the consequences accumulated over time, and sooner or later even a powerful Blessed paid for the additional capabilities with his own health.

If this body became completely unusable a few hundred years from now, I would simply receive the next one. Deliberately damaging my body for no benefit would, of course, have been foolish, but I was not going to reject a potentially promising method entirely just because of distant consequences either. My task was to determine whether at least part of the enhancement could be made permanent and whether it would somehow carry over into the next life.

That was probably why, from the outside, it looked especially strange that Osred Norris appeared on Aetris only at the age of twenty.

If I had wanted, the agents could have arranged my transfer there by the time I was eight. But since I had been given a young body and several decades during which no one expected great political achievements from Osred Matanik, I decided to use that time for another study. Especially since I had an almost ideal assistant - Kane, my personal insane artificial intelligence.

One rather interesting program had existed under his supervision for a very long time.

Some Mortals who spent more than ten years inside Kane's experimental complexes and still retained a normal psyche gradually began to display abilities very similar to those of the weakest Blessed. They did not gain any more Aether. Something else changed instead: somehow, their bodies learned to use the tiny reserves they had previously been almost unable to control.

The result was extremely interesting. Unfortunately, we had never managed to reproduce it in the Blessed.

The problem lay in the very nature of the Gift. A Mortal could be kept under severe stress for a sufficiently long time while the conditions of the experiment were gradually changed and the body's responses observed. A Blessed, at a certain point, simply used their abilities.

When the threat became severe enough, the body reacted before the subject made a conscious decision. It did not matter at all whether the Blessed knew the purpose of the experiment or sincerely believed the situation was dangerous. At the critical moment, an ordinary protective reflex triggered, and Aether was used automatically. It proved impossible to suppress that reaction by force of will.

No matter how much the cinema of my previous life had tried to convince me that a person could stop their heart through sheer force of will, some functions of one's own body simply cannot be switched off just because one wants it badly enough. You can learn to control fear, suppress pain, remain calm, and force yourself to act against your instincts, but that does not mean possessing complete control over every automatic reaction of the body.

I decided to test whether that rule applied to me as well. It did.

Admittedly, pushing me out of my normal state of control proved considerably more difficult than with most other Blessed. Kane changed the programs of exposure, invented new conditions, adapted to my reactions, and gradually increased the strain. All of this took not a month, and not even a year.

And the funniest part was that the trials themselves were not what finally made me lose my temper. It was the lack of results that infuriated me.

I voluntarily spent a significant portion of my body's active growth phase in an experimental capsule, remained under constant medical observation, took prohibited Aether-containing drugs, and allowed Kane to do practically anything that did not guarantee the immediate loss of yet another body. More than a hundred scientists and physicians worked around the project, collecting so much data from me that a dedicated storage system had to be expanded several times. And still there was no progress.

No noticeable increase in the Gift, no new mechanism for controlling Aether, not even some strange effect that could at least be studied further.

At some point, that frustration became stronger than the habit of controlling my own reactions that I had built over many years. The Gift triggered automatically, and the experiment had to be ended earlier than Kane had planned.

At least now we knew for certain that the protective mechanism of the Blessed applied to me as well. Not the most impressive result for seven years of work.

All that remained was to hope that the hundreds of terabytes of data on the development of a powerful Blessed body under constant strain, the effects of prohibited drugs, and the functioning of Aether structures would ultimately prove more useful than they seemed now. If even part of that information helped our scientists better understand the nature of the Gift or someday brought the Aiterri closer to true immortality, then the seven years spent on the project could not be considered entirely wasted.

I very much wanted to believe that.

Aiterri. The World Beyond the War. A Special Report for Citadel Space.

To most inhabitants of Citadel Space, our people appeared only recently. You saw ships arrive from beyond rachni territory, heard our diplomats speak, and learned of the existence of a state that had remained almost cut off from the rest of the galaxy for more than a century. But for us, that meeting was only another page in a history that had begun long before our first flights to the stars.

Our homeworld is called Aetris. It is a large planet rich with life, and even today there are places there where a sensible Aiterri would prefer not to go without preparation. Vast forests, deep oceans, mountain ranges, and thousands of animal species shaped the lives of our ancestors for centuries. Some creatures are so large that ancient Aiterri mistook them for monsters and gods, while stories of sea creatures hundreds of meters long were considered legends until we began finding their remains.

But the greatest peculiarity of Aetris has always been us.

Aether is present in the body of every Aiterri, but only a small portion of our people can use it consciously. We call such people the Blessed. Today we measure their Gift, study it, and teach children to control it, but several thousand years ago everything looked very different.

Imagine an ancient settlement where one day a child is born who can stop a heavy stone in midair, survive a wound that would kill another, or defend the village from an attack alone. The child had no scientific explanation for those abilities. Neither did anyone around them.

That was how our first legends were born.

The Blessed became defenders of settlements, hunters, and warriors. Some guarded roads for years, protected the weak, or saved people during disasters. Their names were passed down to children and grandchildren, became songs and legends, and after several generations no one could say with certainty where history ended and religion began.

Some Blessed truly came to be worshiped as gods. This was especially true of the Eternals - extremely rare Aiterri whose strength far exceeded the abilities of ordinary gifted individuals. They live longer, endure disease and injury more easily, and in ancient times their abilities could seem almost limitless. If one person outlived several generations of a city's inhabitants while barely changing, it is hardly surprising that a cult arose around them.

Some of those cults have survived into our own time. In some places, an ancient Eternal has long been regarded only as a historical figure; in others, people still leave flowers for them or ask for their protection. We see no great contradiction in this: a sapient being can simultaneously be a real historical figure and a hero whose memory has become part of the culture of an entire region.

But the Gift did not make its bearer good.

Among the Blessed were defenders of the poor and weak, but there were conquerors as well. Some became great physicians, scientists, and rulers; others used their superiority to gain power. Some Eternals united entire lands, others fought one another for centuries, while ordinary Mortals paid for those conflicts with their lives.

That is why the history of the Aiterri is also the history of how our people learned to live alongside beings who, from birth, could be far stronger than those around them.

Over time, Houses began to form around the Blessed. At first they were families and followers of a powerful gifted individual, then they became full political and economic organizations. Some modern Great Houses trace their histories back to an age when most of Aetris was still divided among separate states.

The Houses still exist today, although their role has changed greatly. Now they are simultaneously families, major enterprises, educational systems, and political organizations. A Blessed child born into such a family receives enormous resources for education, because a hundred or two hundred years later that person may still be working for the benefit of their House and the state.

But a Blessed can also be born among Mortals. For such a family, this often changes the future completely: the child gains access to specialized education, mentors, and state programs, while parents and relatives gradually find themselves in an entirely different social position. That is precisely why the Dominion has spent decades investing enormous resources in research capable of increasing the probability that Blessed will be born.

Today, the Blessed can be found in every part of our society.

They serve in the military and rescue units, work as physicians, engineers, scientists, and administrators. During major disasters, it is often a powerful Blessed who can enter places where heat, pressure, or a collapse would kill an ordinary rescuer. In war, they take on the most dangerous tasks, and some of the strongest spend centuries in service.

That is why the old legends of heroes never truly disappeared. Today, instead of a song about a warrior who defended a village from a monster, there may be a story about a Blessed who held up a collapsing structure for several hours while rescuers led people out, or about an Eternal who fought the rachni for decades.

We have changed greatly since those days.

Once, our ancestors did not even know the size of their own world. Then came large states, the Council of Eternals, and the Dominion. We reached space, built our first colonies, and began treating the enormous distances between stars as something ordinary. Then we encountered the rachni and, for the first time, understood how vast the galaxy truly was.

For more than a century, most of our contact with the outside world came through war. Beyond our systems lay the rachni, ruined planets, and regions of space that were nearly impossible to cross without serious risk. For several generations of Aiterri, the wider galaxy therefore remained more of a scientific fact than a part of everyday life.

And now we have learned of the Citadel.

A place where asari, salarians, volus, and many other peoples live side by side. Of states whose histories stretch back thousands of years. Of technologies and cultures that developed entirely independently of our own.

For us, that is a very unusual feeling.

We are accustomed to being the center of our own world. Now it turns out that beyond the war lies an enormous expanse where no one knows our ancient heroes, understands the meaning of the Blessed, or has ever heard the names of our Great Houses. And at the same time, we know almost nothing about you.

We do not expect to become alike in a few years. The Aiterri developed separately for far too long to suddenly abandon our own culture, and the inhabitants of the Citadel are under no obligation to accept everything in our society as natural. We still have a great deal to learn about one another, much to argue over, and there will be times when we simply cannot understand why the other side considers obvious what seems strange to us.

But for the first time, we have that opportunity.

Once, the Blessed defended small settlements whose inhabitants did not know what lay beyond the nearest mountains. Today, their descendants live on dozens of worlds and look toward the Citadel.

We have traveled a very long road to reach this point.

And perhaps we will write the next stage of our history no longer alone.