Chapter: 353 Bonus - Views from Within (Patreon)

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Khesed was greatly displeased.

Not only had the… Mages ignored all his juicy bits of history, they had not even bothered to challenge him on the obvious fabrications.

He had not expected humans to be so disciplined, or he might have tried another tactic.

Khesed supposed that there was a chance that the group genuinely hadn’t known the difference, and everything he said had seemed equally fanciful and tantalizing. However, he just couldn’t believe that even humanity’s memory could be that short.

More frustrating still, that girl had somehow kept him from making new connections, new paths of escape.

He hadn’t been trying to force his way out, not yet, but he had wanted to lay a few more anchors. Those plans had been utterly foiled by the human’s strict adherence to protocol and that child’s oddities.

Still… He felt the edge of his lips curl up as he considered, a proto user of existence magic could change everything.

He could be patient, he could wait and see what these ripples carried through the waters of history.

After all, time was on his side.

* * *

The dead was unconcerned as it gnawed on the remains of a lesser dead.

That is, it was unconcerned save the knowledge that there were only so many lesser dead before it was the least of those left. Then, it might fear being gnawed upon.

No Sovereign power flowed through this dead, and it didn’t have the mind to wish it had been among the Tide.

It simply was and acted as it was wont to do.

The mind behind its raising had locked himself in the central tower, where he had lived for eons uncounted.

If it had thought that far, the dead would have realized that even its potential for concern—becoming the least dead—was nonsense, given the Necromancer wouldn’t ever let souls pass on.

The skeleton whose leg crunched pleasantly between the dead’s teeth would be reanimated and repaired within a decade or so, no one the wiser.

Save the necromancer who would rant and rave uselessly at the dead and swear to alter its foundational action matrix… or some such garbled mash of words. He never would, though. That would remove one of the few tasks that brought the necromancer from his tower, making the man’s isolation all the more complete and tangible.

In truth, the necromancer had gotten very good at repairing things as he alternated between manic research—futilely searching for escape or to perfect his craft—and self-destructive rage against his imprisonment.

He was in that part of his cycle at the moment, screaming and crying, destroying the inside of his tower.

The dead didn’t really care or take great notice save to shift a little further from the tower entrance as it continued to gnaw on the stolen, reconstituted bone.

The necromancer had altered their fundamental commands once long, long ago. He had become irritated at having to command his dead to ignore him, so he’d simply ordered them to wander about until he commanded them otherwise.

That is why the dead did not attack the small group of living it saw as it moved farther from the tower.

The group that stood next to a new tunnel, looking around in clear, wary confusion.

The dead wanted to eat their sweet, untainted flesh, but while the dead could sneak in a bone-gnawing every so often, the necromancer would never tolerate himself being attacked, so the prohibition on attacking the living was woven of gold.

That was fine. The group didn’t stay around for very long anyways. Not even a full day passed before they departed once again.

When the necromancer exited his tower two days later, glumly commanding a report, his rage reached new heights, but there was no one living to hear him scream.

* * *

Sole felt the wench’s power throbbing through him, even as the cell began to seal.

As existence twisted, sealing him away once more and her power didn’t fade, he had a realization.

She didn’t know how to relinquish ownership.

She couldn’t pull it back now that she had laid claim to something within him, and her power was trying to shunt what she had claimed into the void.

That, of course, would harm him, and that couldn’t happen. He’d barred that long ago.

Would that I could undo my workings, or that I dared risk my self to prevent my despair.

He would have severed the connection himself to spare the growing pain within, but he was all but dry of magical power.

He would take decades to refill his stores, but that would have to wait until after the pain passed.

He grit his teeth against the rending sensation.

As the power built to a crescendo, reality itself seemed to reject him, and everything around him twisted, his whole being passing through the void.

That seemed to satisfy whatever the girl’s magics had been working, leaving him whole, and his own magics unopposed.

As he’d known and counted on, he had long ago realized that floating in the void forever would be an unbearable existence. So, he had nullified any chance of him remaining there.

He felt a brief flickering moment of hope. There was a chance that this would mean his freedom.

Would he be thrown out of the void back into Zeme somewhere at random?

Instead, his vision began to coalesce on a twisting existence, filled with impossible shapes, contradictions, and horrors that intrigued him.

Off in the distance he caught a glimpse of a giant that, rather than having a head, had another body connected onto it, neck to neck. The bodies were not a match in size or specific feature, and the collation was rather odd to look upon.

There was a tree made all of leaves, and one made of unmoving lightning, stalled and seeming to just be waiting for time to return so that it may move once more.

A dragon floated, coiled around a ball of precious metals the size of a planet. It seemed to sense his gaze and cracked one eye open before it and its hoard vanished, replaced by a flower that was smaller than Sole’s hand, yet somehow filled the same space that the departed beast and it’s wealth had vacated only a moment earlier.

Best of all within this new scape, there were beings of absence, existing solely by virtue of their nonexistence, beautiful contradictions that seemed to orient on him with a sense of welcome.

Their smiles promised him what he had always longed for.

This was an entirely new side to existence extending out infinitely in all directions. It was a convenient place in which reality could hold back all of the paradoxes and contradictions that it so hated.

When looked at in that light, reality itself was a cell, containing the few things that were deemed ‘acceptable.’ He had been trapped in a cell within a cell.

No longer.

Now, he was seeing the true nature of existence.

Limitless. Existence is without limit.

He hadn’t let himself truly feel how cut off he had become within his imprisonment.

He hadn’t let his confinement get to him.

Deep down he’d believed that he would be free eventually, and that time had arrived.

He felt tension deep within his very being loosen at the reality of his freedom.

So much to study and learn from. Maybe I can hold off on nonexistence for a while and just learn. He had been a scholar once, delving into the mysteries of magic, reality, and existence itself. Maybe, he could walk that road once more.

A final journey before the end.

There was absolutely no magic that he could sense, which would be a problem, but he had overcome worse obstacles.

All that really mattered was that now, he had—

Everything jerked around him, causing him to stumble and fall, his face smacking the stone.

The impact didn’t hurt him, it couldn’t, but when he lifted his head and looked around, what he saw cut him deeply.

The well known, isolated existence of his cell surrounded him once more.

He laid his head back down on the cool stone and wept.

* * *

The researcher was in a mad scramble, moving between his various projects within his limited pocket of reality.

So much to do; so much to do.

He had uncounted projects going on at the same time. His second mind tracked and cataloged all the details, simply notifying him when he had to stop his current obsession to take the next step on those that had previously caught his fancy.

He still loved them all, but he could only have one true love… well, one true love at a time.

So much to do.

His latest reality engine was expanding his cell, giving him more room to work in, but the void engine and his own gate were hard pressed to keep pace with the far more efficient construct.

After all, it was easy to make more that was real, people did that all the time. Making more emptiness? That was much harder, and his own gate had limited throughput, no matter how much he strove to expand its flow rate.

He scrambled through the maze of hallways until he reached that laboratory, quickly dialing back both engines and making sure the conduit that linked to his gate wasn’t operating too strongly.

After all, he was always in need of more magic for other projects.

So much to do.

He passed by a room full of junked automata. No matter how he tried, they always resented him for creating them within this finite space. He simply couldn’t make them see the limitless potential for exploration even within the finite confines he had arranged for himself and his work.

He couldn’t make them content enough to work alongside him, not unless he linked them with his own soul.

There was merit to that, and he would likely get back to that line of research once he had the magic to spare again.

If he did it right, he could then have two bodies—or more—to accomplish his goals.

Not that his body was the limiting factor, and he wasn’t willing to spare the power such a diversion would require.

Still…

No.

Not now.

Maybe in the next few millennia or so.

So much to do.

His extensive gardens needed barely a moment’s attention, given they were all set up to propagate automatically.

The creations that tended them weren’t true automata, given they had no capacity for critical thinking or independent action.

They were merely puppets.

He sometimes regretted the existence of the gardens’ caretakers as they all took yet more of his power to maintain, but without them he’d be spending his life gardening, and that would have been unacceptable.

He ducked into the space just enough to snatch and eat a single all-fruit as he continued on his way.

The taste was still odd, seeming like bacon, rolled in chocolate and sprinkled with strawberry juice, but it contained all the nutrition a human would need for a day of hard work.

He’d get around to adjusting the flavor… eventually.

So much to do.

By his calculations, there would be contamination coming into his domain within the next five to six hundred years.

That would throw off everything he was doing at the time, because he couldn’t possibly plan for what inane magics the maintainers would wield, nor whether or not they would leave him be while they did their menial work.

He needed to button up his more sensitive work in preparation for that disruption.

He had left his fortune as a bribe to buy his isolation, but humanity was fickle. What they saw as valuable today would be worthless in a thousand years, and he had been away for…

He honestly couldn’t remember. He was going to think back and figure out the approximate number, but he quickly decided that he didn’t care.

Always so much to do.

* * *

Vulture of Reality was not happy.

She had been full of confidence when she’d chosen to leave the Consumer, back when she was but a little devourling, surrounded by her broodmates in the deep nothing, outside of existence.

As she wormed her way toward all that was, she had caught the scent of powerful magics and expended herself diving into full existence, only to find herself in a miniscule pocket, cut off from everything else.

There had been something in there with her, and she’d immediately acted as her instincts commanded, taking a shape of intrigue and invitation.

The thing—whatever it had been—had seen Vul-Re as a potential for escape and had eagerly climbed into the mysterious chest at once.

It hadn’t even taken a moment to delve her with magics, at least not that she had been able to detect in her new-wrought state.

That had been quite the meal.

Once she had fully processed all that she had imbibed, she’d come fully into her own.

She knew that it was unusual to gain so much from one single consumption, and it hadn’t been a blessing in the end.

She’d gained full faculties only to realize that there was nothing else for her to consume. Nothing else for her to devour.

Reluctantly, she eventually admitted that maybe, just maybe, the being had escaped, in a certain fashion, after all.

Thus, Vul-Re sat alone, a treasure chest within this small cut-off corner of existence, sulking as she waited for something, anything to change

* * *

Re-al had long ago cast aside her other names, her other bonds.

She no longer even regretted the disintegration of her previous soulbonds.

She no longer had nightmares of her familiar’s fear and pain at the perceived betrayal at the end.

There were no more nightmares.

Not that she remembered.

She didn’t remember much from before her awakening as Re-al.

All that existed now—or had ever existed—was reality, and reality was displeased.

It hated Re-al, but she was its only servant—at least the only one that she knew of—and her master was not one to share such details with one like her.

She ground her teeth, even millennia later, remembering how the foolish others had trapped her in here, preventing her from doing her good work.

They hadn’t even dared to face her, using tricks and magic.

Her mouth was filled with a foul taste at even the thought.

Gated humans were ruining reality, carving away at the foundations with every step, with every drop of magic through their profane doorways to another world.

Only she had done what was needed.

Only she had had the strength of character to tear her gate from that place of unbearable magic and connect it to the underpinnings of reality instead.

This world was all that mattered.

When offered the choice, she’d made her choice in a moment. She did not want to enter that next world of pain and unattainably pure magic. Even nonexistence was better than that, and she was offered eternity with reality.

She had embraced things as they were, and the humans had dubbed her ‘reality-souled.’

She wore that as a badge of honor.

Her inscriptions of iron had cost her more than inscriptions should, and the inscriptionist had still required… motivation to implement them.

Humans were so easy to manipulate. They didn’t understand that sending young souls onward was a blessing. They were banished from where they weren’t wanted, and reality wasn’t harmed.

Everybody won.

Regardless, once she was so inscribed, her power had been unrivaled and the good work had begun.

She had seen herself as untouchable, since their profanities couldn’t touch her or anything within her sphere of authority.

She had been mistaken.

The treacherous, foolish ones had acted outside of her limited view—so tainted was reality with void and magic. They had found her distracted, and acted against their own much vaunted principles, leaving ‘innocents’ to die to delay her.

That showed their hypocrisy clearly enough.

Thus, when she had finished purifying this small settlement, she’d left the low walls to find that the settlement was all that remained.

Oh how she’d railed against the bounds of existence, but reality could only add to or alter existence, it could not bend nor break it.

She shuddered at the thought of even considering such.

That was the domain of magic and the void.

Two sides of the same rotten fruit.

Re-al hesitated, then. Had she mixed that metaphor?

It didn’t really matter.

But her imprisoners had been fools yet again.

There was no shortage of reality within her little corner of existence.

She had refined and remade herself through her early imprisonment.

Re-al was now the most real being to ever exist.

Her inscriptions were beyond reproach and unlike the cursed markings—made by precious metals and burned away with magic—her iron was eternal.

In her second millennium, she had recognized that this pinched-off portion of existence could not last.

She would either win free as reality reasserted itself to set her free, or they would have to come back to maintain the working.

In either case, she would be ready.

When they opened the door, she would teach them the reality of who was weak and who was an abomination.

She cackled as she worked on her preparations, her voice echoing throughout.

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