IX-40 I, Sourcerer (II) (Patreon)

Casting your first sorcery-based spell is going to feel more than a little strange. This applies more to the world than to you, however. Your sorcery is attuned to your legend, and so, no matter what oddities you might encounter upon the first surfacing, you will grasp it quickly and you will adapt accordingly. After all, if you've managed to create your domain, then you likely understand enough about yourself to adequately wield your magic, if only from first principles and intuition alone. The danger you present, then, is to the environment around you and the other people around you, for in allowing the sourced attunement within you to flow, you effectively must transgress upon baseline Integration.

Hence, you will hear me use this term repeatedly: surfacing, as in the surfacing of that which dwells within. You hold a personal sovereignty now, and for the waters of that sovereignty to spill over into the world requires an act of occupation. The mana fields that you previously applied were attached to you by the System. The same rules no longer apply. Your personally tuned field exists within you, and for you to enact any change upon the world, it must press out, occupy, and hold space. You become an invader upon the System, and this grants you power and penalty in equal measure. You will have to understand how to adapt to it. The good news is that your personal attunement likely stands alien to your adversaries. The bad news is it's as alien to your allies now as anything else, and you must take care when using it, for you risk everyone else's lives, especially those who stand incongruous with your legend.

And though the System will not restrict your expansion, take care to pay attention to all the Skills and variables contained within your mythic sovereignty, especially if you encompass the lores of time or space. These two laws are pervasive across multiple dimensions and sometimes exist entwined with one another, with no separation in between. If you hold one yet not the other, prepare to rip that realm asunder every time you call upon your magic. If you hold a specific attuning of time bound to your specific sovereignty and it expresses itself differently than standard time, then you may just be anathema to most other Chronomancers—or even linear-experiential beings as a whole.

After all, if your sovereignty decrees time to flow in broken increments, then what will happen to people who actually exist as a whole of structure?

Many things to consider, Myth, many lessons to learn.

—Mythic Magisteria

IX-40

I, Sourcerer (II)

Shiv's mana slid its way through the fabric of Integration, cleaving vitality and destabilizing the existential structure. The surfacing of his Demesne announced itself in the form of calamity.

Crimson and gold bled across the world. Everyone around him stiffened, tried to move, yet snapped back to their point of origin over and over again, their bodies vibrating in place as they were caught in the riptide of his invasive mana. Everyone who had Magical Resistance lasted a few seconds longer, but he had massed far too much Endless, and they were buried beneath his flow. He was more than any Legend could bear now, even with this initial step, and that showed him more than anything else what it meant to be a Myth and what ruin could be brought to rot if he acted heedlessly without thought.

Where the brutal child he once was might have panicked and caused casualties, despite Shiv assessing the situation by pulling the magic back, to his satisfaction, it obeyed him, for it was him. It was more than even a limb. It was the fabric of his heart, blood, soul, form, and function, and it obeyed his every will without hesitation.

He released all others caught in that initial deluge and contained his magic in a dense, localized area, all of it attached to a single tower that spilled the Endless into the real. The edifice remained unchanged in aesthetic, segmented by vectors, lacquered in time, in vitality, on the edge of an all-cleaving blade, and with the weight of a fist meant to break matter, heart, and mind as if all were but glass. It wasn't the spire that stood different upon this moment of invasion. It was the world, for the spire left the world in shadow. The spire carried with it not only its shape, its mass, its form, but it also consumed the surrounding environment, painting an expansive void of contextless existence. Shiv saw the vitality seep out of the others—watched as their minds and souls writhed as blood-red steam hissed out from them in inverted spirals that flowed toward his tower.

Acting more on deduction than reflex, Shiv shifted the turn of his magics, going from clockwise to counter, and suddenly all that was being cleaved and stolen from the others was restored. At the same time, the spiral peeled out from them, flowed back into place, mending all that had been taken and cementing that which was chipped away from their ontological bedrock. He then imposed a series of Languor spells upon them.

As Shiv's magic looped without end, he had to apply a few specific adjustments to the shaping. First of all, the edges could not clash with any of the patterns within those he sought to protect. They needed to exist at the cracks between, or in the very space in the middle, with the middle being the natural choice to use as a slot, protecting them as if a series of fortress walls rather than a labyrinth of bladed traps.

At the same time, he could not let them exist too long in the shapeless void, and so they needed to be surrounded by the membrane of his personal tenement. Otherwise, the absence of context would eat them and see them sucked clean in scant seconds.

So he narrowed the revolution of his modified Languor spell, now called Stillness. He held them in brief repose, but within a cycle of time that occupied a half-second and no more. They jolted in place as a shimmering effect took form. Their minds, their souls, their mana fields flickered, flashing out and conjuring fields of distortion where they lingered. Oppressed by the weight of Shiv's risen spire, they were like bleached shades themselves, printed upon the scenery. It reminded Shiv a bit of Marikos' Pyromancy, which unleashed conflagrations of such baleful intensity that only stains of dark upon glass and stone remained of lesser adversaries.

This detail nerved him most of all, as it imposed upon him just how treacherous this surfacing was. He no longer knew how to wield himself properly with care, and with this first step toward Mythic-Tier, he soared in power but plunged in stability and control, and so rebalancing was necessary.

“Sorry,” Shiv called out with a laugh of slight embarrassment. “Just a bit of post-Mythic dysfunction. I’ll fix this soon. Just don’t panic. It’ll be fine.”

His words proved fruitless, as everyone did panic, their hearts screaming in a blast of enkindled fire. That enkindled fire, since they were now caught within the grip of his attunement and the partial surfacing of his sovereignty, was then turned into aspects of magic he could wield as well: magic he could turn to his own.

Simply put, he could alchemize any component lore that made up his current myth, stain them with his magic, and see an enemy unraveled from within. And there were so many points of compromise, so many places of failure and attack. If emotion was as if time, and time was as if emotion, and all would bleed, and thought, and glass, and fist, then what did the cold lessons mean? What could he perform with that grand and chaotic merger?

Consider that later. Keep them alive for now.

The tip of Shiv’s Endless Spire cast out a chain of spells, imprinting them as if a looming god pressing brands of favor upon its chosen faithful. All the while, his Highest House shone, injecting magic into the world instead of the void, while the sky above remained cold and barren—parted only by a distant golden constellation of gushing time.

“Hm. Far more devastating than expected. How fitting for a magic born of our legend.”

It was a good thing that he was studied in magic now and that his Highest House could instruct him on what he sought to construct. The two hundred and forty-seven others wrapped and trapped within protective spirals of time. He noticed one among them unaffected, but surprised all the same. She was not encompassed within her physical form, as her illustration was merely a smear, a surreal splatter dotting the corner of Shiv's invading Demesne. The bulk of her loomed incandescent and bright, though she stood a far and distant star, as distant as her actual soul likely was. 

She was a fractured star that Shiv could see: several patterns broken at their haft, and more than a few hundred Skills left in fragments and as jutting shrapnel rather than the powers they once posed.

Maia looked upon Shiv from afar, and he stared back. Awkwardly, he held up a hand to wave, and he read the annoyance on her face as her godly eyes frowned deep and she began pinching the bridge of her nose. He would need to apologize to her, especially afterwards, and he would have to do it first as a preemptive apology, likely with several promises and a cascading series of questions and suggestions that would see her diverted toward the problem of Avalon. Otherwise, she would nag.

He hated it when she nagged.

Importantly, he couldn't take two different people nagging him at the same time. Maia would merely be annoying. Veronica, however, would be receiving a metaphysical lashing. And Shiv was ashamed of the mess he'd caused, and thus he could not underestimate a Legend. Though he now strode toward Mythic-Tier, a Legend possessed enough power to inflict pain upon even gods, when a vulnerability was detected—something he was more than familiar with. 

Yeah, she's going to be pretty pissed about this. But where is…

Shiv caught sight of Curtis first. The man was huddled into a ball on the ground, looking around in confusion, but entirely unaffected by the spill of magic itself. This was a surprising thing, as he seemed to have no soul to drain from, a little bit of thought to exploit, or a timeline that occupied his person. Otherwise, he was utterly unaffected by both contextless void and spell. Shiv squinted at Curtis, and after a few moments, Curtis shifted his arms to meet Shiv’s gaze.

“You alright, Curtis?”

“Y-yeah. What just…”

“Just stay there. You're going to be fine, I think. I'm trying to figure a few things out, but so far, you're pretty unaffected, which is good for you.” But that did bring up more questions for Shiv, as his magics still worked on Curtis. None of the mana was displaced, yet it seemed that some of the effects didn't sink in all the way either.

It might just be a clash. He's a pretty unique being, but so am I, so maybe some of my things work on him, and the others don't. I'll need to figure that out in time too. Maybe the Thief might have an idea, but where—oh.

Shiv stiffened, sighed, and turned to find the Thief standing right behind him. “Master, how long have you been standing there?”

“For about two seconds,” the Thief said. He was ensconced in his mystical aegis, Animancy flowing outside, blurring and blending him into the present sovereignty, as if a sort of passport allowing him to exist in this place as part of its fabric. Within, however, was the corrosive glare of Necromancy, and in that dense egg, the Thief's physical traits were vanquished by a pervasive swell of hissing green. He was only a contour of mixed colors, yet he spoke the same, he acted the same, he moved as he did in his previous reality, and Shiv found himself awestruck by just what power an Axiom might possess. All others within the cavern, even Legends, were helpless before Shiv’s surfacing Demesne—without any ill intent on his part either.

“A most fascinating development in your progress, disciple," the Thief said, keeping his tone light but his curiosity unhidden. He, too, burned at his core, though the color of his emotions was drenched in Necromancy. Shiv hid a frown when he noticed that the Thief understood Shiv's power, or at least suspected much about his new capabilities. To counter Shiv, the Thief of Lost Acheron had turned himself into a metaphysical bomb. The flow of time leading toward him was stained with Necromancy past that threshold of animancy, as were his emotions, as were his thoughts, and all other aspects that comprised his wholeness.

Realizing this caused Shiv to develop a frown, one that turned into a glower. He stared at the blank blue-green face of the Thief, and he couldn't shake the feeling that there was a particularly disgusting grin on his master's face. “How the hell did you know what my myth was going to be?”

“I did not know. That is why it took me two seconds to appear. I had to prepare accordingly.” And the Thief admitted this with lyrical levity in his tone. His admission was both compliment and boast, implying that Shiv required the Thief to prepare for a potential confrontation now—an astronomical change in the dynamic of power between them—but also that the Thief had figured out most of Shiv's abilities in the span of two seconds—and now likely understood how to wield the lore of the Endless better than the Deathless himself.

“It would be most embarrassing if I proved careless and allowed you to reach and infest my emotions with that strange magic of yours. And what a potent, peculiar mana you have developed for it to feed on time, mind, and emotion, and blade, and fist, and heart, all of equal measure. A bit too strange a mixture for my taste, but a powerful mixture nonetheless. Especially for you; you are inspired by chaos, Shiv, and so I most approve of this development.”

Shiv tasted the subtextual mockery in every word. “Did you really have to give that long of a speech just to remind me that you’re still better than me at almost everything?”

The Thief responded with an exaggerated flinch, turning slightly askance, as if offended he would think this way about him. "You project your insecurities on me, young one. It is not my fault, but yours, to see such a thing in your noble master."

“Noble.”

“Quite so. How else would you describe me?”

“In dire need of a bath or ten after shoving that ass-monster inside your soul.”

Whatever the Thief wished to say next came out as a fractured series of syllables. He flinched, and for the first time, the black flame of his heart overpowered the Necromancy. The Thief was indeed reviled by the Realmrunner's presence; though he did what he did, he did it without so much joy as grim acceptance. As Shiv caught sight of that too, a grin replaced his glower as he folded his arms to mock his master in turn. "Oh, I'm sorry, master. I didn't realize you didn't want to do that at all. Maybe you could just hand him back to me, and we can finish things out real neat. I promise to scrub your back afterwards until you feel clean.”

“Nonsense, my disciple. I have need of him, just as you have need to protect your many little friends. We must make a sacrifice to see our dreams come true or to settle the aching little softness of our humanity.”

“It's okay, I understand." Shiv nodded along. “I protect people from you, and that's important to me. You want to fill yourself with people who fill their asses with pianos and castles and stuff.”

Now the Thief must be squinting at Shiv. He held his tongue a few beats too long, and that was the closest he ever got to signaling his displeasure. “You default to baseless slander too easily.”

“Well, don't make it easy for me to do that. We've been together for almost three hundred years—you know that if you give me a chance or a moment to bully you, I'm going to bully you. It's who I am. It's what I do. It’s… it’s my legend. It’s part of my myth, just like it's part of your myth to shove people who shove things up their ass inside your hole. I mean, soul.”

The two immortals stared each other down, both sneering on the surface while seething at least slightly on the inside. The impasse was broken as a warbling, distorted cry echoed out from Veronica, who somehow managed to open her mouth inside that revolving timeline Shiv netted around her. “Get us out-t-t! You buffoon—fool—fucking idiot brat!”

With that, the slightest bits of Shiv's glee died down as he withered at what was soon to follow.

“You are aware that she is trapped. You need not suffer her indignation.” The Thief made a throat-slitting gesture and looked toward Veronica, who somehow, even though she was trapped within a stable time loop created by her mana, managed to press and distort some of the red-gold mana fused around her with her Dimensionality as she tried to teleport.

“No,” Shiv said. “I’ll deal with it. I have it coming. It’s only fair.” He snorted. “And I need to examine Veronica to understand how she's doing that. It’s pretty impressive, actually—I think she's trying to cast her way out of it from inside. Her timeframe’s too short, though, so she can't manage anything significant. You might not be a dedicated Chronomancer, Councilwoman, but you're a pretty damn good mage.”

“You are too polite, Shiv,” the Thief said. “Her casting speed is merely the desperate flailings of a Legend who failed herself more than anyone else. The pace is there, but the promise is long dry.”

“And you just want to kill everyone I care about.”

“Not so much that I want to do it, more that it must be done. You likely now understand more than ever before, don't you?”

And Shiv did. He glanced at his status for a beat, letting his eyes drift across the words Theseus' Lament. 

The Curse demanded he evolve constantly, or suffer the consequences. Kelhaus held a similar burden. 

Might an Axiom’s Curse be even greater? 

“So, what happens if you don't abide by it?” Shiv asked, seeing it unnecessary to explain what he meant, as the Thief would know. Shiv cocked an eyebrow. “Do you die?”

The Ouroboros coiled around Shiv in ravenous anticipation of the Thief's coming answer.

“I will stop being myself. To answer your question: functionally, no, but metaphysically, yes. It would be quite the suicide, would it not? And to spare your mind from decaying me in such a way will not preserve your beloved Valor. In fact, it will cause him to slip beyond your grasp, forever and always.”

A rattling escaped the Ouroboros. The Thief spoke a near lie. But Shiv wasn't so easily incensed anymore. He scoffed and turned away from the Thief, containing his own rage against the man who was both his master and the monster holding the vestige of his grandfather—and oddly enough, a decent companion despite it all.

“It's a godsdamn mess being an immortal, isn't it, Thief?” Shiv asked.

“Yes. But we love it, do we not? How else are we to be?”

To that, Shiv gave his assent in silence.

Only for that silence to be broken by Veronica's echoing shriek as her body started flickering violently before she snapped back to the start of her loop. “SHIIVVVVVV—”

“I was simply jesting earlier,” the Thief noted. “I really can kill her. I can make it very fast, very neat.”

“I know, but I'll deal with it my way.” Shiv cleared his throat and conjured a golem from the substance of his mana. He took a slight investiture, and Shiv sculpted the golem to be as mutilated and crippled as possible, especially in thought. What he forged then was a misshapen mass that was deprived of limbs and higher thought, but ultimately semblant to Shiv in appearance. If that Shiv also suffered severe paralysis along most of his face and body and couldn't control when he wet or defecated himself, Shiv dubbed this the Pain Boy, for it was now meant to take pain on his behalf.

Veronica would likely feel better if she killed something that resembled Shiv. It was a sort of therapy he discovered by creating the abuse clone of Caine. If he and Veronica were the same in any way—and though he loathed to admit it, they very much were—this would be more therapeutic for her than anything else.

Alright, Pain Boy. He clapped his hands together. You know what you got to do. The Pain Boy made a series of ape-like grunts before blinking and then violently letting out a whistle-like fart. Great job, Pain Boy. You're probably not going to understand what's going to happen to you, and I won't need to deal with her. I thank you for your sacrifice. “Now go there and give Veronica someone to hurt.”

With a series of savage undulations, the Pain Boy flopped in the direction of Veronica, bouncing up and down across the ashen expanse—which faded back into a smooth glass cavern as Shiv called his mana to subside. As the magic sank back inside of him, the world inverted as the rupturing of its fabric was restored. The Endless edifice sank into Shiv's shadow and then sheathed itself inside that wound nested at his core once again, and everything returned to how it was. Everything and everyone were given back to the natural laws of Integration.

All around Shiv, people hyperventilated. Some clutched their minds, while others violently vomited—shaken by their ordeal. Gone shook herself once and then was fine, finding this a trifling thing compared to what she suffered in the Banality Cell and perhaps other times before.

“Yeah, you guys probably feel a little bit like how I feel,” Shiv said, trying to hold back a gag as he was forced to contend with their ephemeral natures once more. Gods, that was going to gnaw on them: how they were burning away before his very senses. “Anyway, address any complaints to the Pain Boy I just made. I'm going downstairs, and I think I'm going to bake a cake. You guys want cake, right? I'm making cake.”

He then reflexively tried to skip across time—only to cause the spire to pierce through Integration's flesh anew. “Ah, fuc—”

***

“Hey, grandma. You like chocolate? I figured out how to grow some cocoa plants and get some sugar, so I should be able to make this cake. I'm going to make a big one to feed all two hundred people. It's going to be a really good cake. I'm working on improving my Baking Skill—so if you want to have the first taste…”

The grin on Shiv's face was practically stone-carved. He refused to let go of it, even as Veronica’s eyes were lit by a murderous glare of blazing obsidian. She had the look of a conflicted woman, conflicted in the sense that she didn't know how best to kill her grandson, whether it would be to use her thumbs to gouge out his eyes, whether the fingers deployed in such a task would better be devoted to strangling his over-thick throat, maybe she should simply beat him with the nearest object she could get her hands on, maybe she could scream at him until he exploded, or until she herself exploded and everything was blissful in death.

“What were you thinking?” she managed between tight-clenched teeth. “What passed through that reprehensible, underdeveloped, overcalcified excuse of a brain you have?”

Behind Veronica, Maia nodded extra hard. The scene would be comical if it were happening to someone else.

“I'm guessing that the Pain Boy didn't give you much relief, huh?”

“I ignored that broken excuse of a golem you chucked at me because he is not the one who did this. What were you thinking?”

Veronica battled to collect herself. She took a long breath and tried to formulate her thoughts into proper words. “What was your desired outcome when you did what you did, whatever it is that you did?”

"I was just trying to draw on my mana again," Shiv said defensively. "Mythic-Tier changes things. I'm not the same as I was before. My magic doesn't flow the same. It doesn't even work the same. I can't even form edges anymore. It’s strange.” He turned away from her and began churning batter with his tides. At least that still worked the same, but there was a tether inside of him. He knew it was a tether connected to a cleft leading to his soul, and that place was the truest manifestation of himself. That place and no other. This was merely a tower, a single incarnation, and he had so many more.

This body was nothing more than an extension—it was like turning into a metaphysical hydra.

“Truth be told, I didn't expect that to happen," Shiv admitted with a tired breath. "I thought the magic would just flow out of me or something, but ever since I surfaced, things have been different. Integration's different. People are different. Everything around me is different. They all feel wrong.”

“Wrong how?” Veronica pressed.

“Wrong in the way I don't really fit anymore. Wrong in the way that I feel like I'm a piece of knife sliding between bits of bone, bouncing off aspects of the world. Wrong in that I don't have an end, but you all do, and I can feel it. I can feel it burning out inside of you. You saw me gag, which is why I decided to use my magic at all. Well, it's because that end was leaking out of you, and I didn't want to throw up in front of you. Made me act, and when I acted, everything else went strange.”

“You can feel us… dying?” Veronica said, her voice softening.

“Not physically, not for all of you anyway, but spiritually, mentally, you're all burning like a candle wick. Let me save you the trouble. I don't think you're ending anytime soon, Veronica. Not unless someone snuffs you out manually first. Like the Thief. But it's burning, bit by bit. I don't know if all of you can kindle yourself more, last longer, but I do know this: if nothing changes, then eventually the stretch of eternity is going to grind you down until you're nothing.”

And he saw the same wick in Maia. She responded to his look by taking a half step back, as if sensing a threat behind his gaze, but his eyes were merely tired, and he didn't want to look upon them anymore. Even if that didn't spare him from suffering their presence, they were always nearby, always contained within his awareness, and so he had to focus on another task to distract himself because their ends needled at him always. It was more than just disgust by now.

It was just uncanny. They shouldn't exist. Not as they did right now. They shouldn't exist because Shiv didn't exist that way.

And that made him wonder if the Thief suffered the same effects at the start of his immortality. How long could he suffer the horrors of mortality everywhere around him before something inside him broke, before something inside of him decayed?

Before he decided to sever part of himself from his consciousness and create an echo, just like the Thief did.

You won't. Remember this: you adapt. You adapt to everything. Your mind, especially, is immortal, and against discomfort, you will endure, and you will acclimate as well. It will simply take time. And we have been deadened to genuine torment so long that even discomfort has been forgotten to us. That is a more concerning fact. That is our true alienation. And something that does not inflict consequence will soon become weightless in our considerations. It is simply the way of the mind and the behavior of an organism, and immortal or not, we are still an organism. Simply one that is constructing its own invasive ecosystem.

“What happened during your Delve? You were barely gone for a minute.” Veronica was now further from infuriation and closer to genuine trepidation. Concern was still not close to her heart, for she wasn't worried about Shiv more than herself or all the others. She began to regard him as something close to a bomb. Fitting, as he didn't even know his own nature anymore, not entirely yet, but he would, as he understood himself. He would grasp his lore as well as himself. It would simply require a duration of reacclimation, and he would reacclimate faster than ever before, as this was his mana was born to him, built of him, and heeded him like no other.

“It's not exactly a Delve," Shiv said. "It's more like carving a space out inside your soul. You're building a little world inside a world, a system inside the System, so to speak. All the magic we have on the surface doesn't really belong to us. It's symbiotic. The System attaches it to us, and we feed it in turn, and all that flows as mana. Strife is given back to the System so it can make more worlds, create more things, more possibilities, endless conflicts. It's always growing. It's never really losing because we're the ones feeding into it. We're in a perfect symbiosis for its struggle and strain. To that effect, there's nothing wrong with the System. It keeps us fighting. It keeps feeding us because we're making it grow. We are part of its immortality engine, even if most of us are not immortal ourselves.”

Shiv released his makeshift batter and watched it sink into the curdled whiteness of the eggstuff. “Most of us. But I am now, and if the System yearns for infinity or expansion, then I ended up becoming endless. Do you know what endless means, Veronica? Do you know what happens when you express endlessness upon the world? Let me answer for you. You just did, because the loop is endless, the void is endless. I, then, as part of that, am endless, and now my magic feeds off of that, but you're not endless. That place is going to sap you dry, and so I need to figure out how to cast now without draining every one of your vitality, or driving you insane, or completely destroying you in whatever fashion or function every time I call upon my mana. So, I got a little bit more power, and I got a little bit more Cursed. At the same time.”

He laughed, shaking his head as he thought back to the messes he made. “Did I ever tell you about my fight in Gate Theborn?”

“Theborn.” He saw her mind shift as a pattern of memory came to form. “Yes, under that Lesser Marshal of Scorn.”

“Yeah, kind of an asshole, but this was before that. I fought an orc there and killed a lot of people because I was sloppy, and everything I did was destructive. I was just thinking about how close I came to falling backward while also being flung forward. A lot more power, but I almost lost control. Almost.”

He turned to face her and Maia. "You're all still alive. I managed that. No deaths this time. I'm pretty proud of that. Sorry I shook you. But there are consequences to power and consequences to change. Consequences follow evolution all the time, and now I've touched Mythic-Tier. I have a few questions, things I need answering, because if this is mythhood and if certain people use mythhood to stride into godhood, then it makes sense why so many of the Ascendants ended up insane. Because if a god's Domain is anything like my Demesne, then your grandmother and all the other founding heroes of our Republic are trapped like you were, worse than you were. They were trapped at the center of this place, and they can't die. They're trapped in a place like you were trapped, and it wasn't their story, wasn't their tale, wasn't their mana or godhood to be used. They're using it all the same.”

Veronica was silent now as he pressed his slight ire upon her. “If you want an apology, I'm going to give you an apology right now, but we both know apologies don't mean much if people die. People didn't die. I'm going to continue trying to make sure people don't die, and so we'll have to find an arrangement, a means of contained practice somewhere. Connected to that, I'd like to revisit an old topic between you.” Finally, Shiv looked past Veronica and pointed straight at Maia. As Veronica turned, she found her awareness bouncing off the forgotten Ascended, her mind refusing to settle, even as she tried. "What are you pointing at?" she managed, her mind scattering at the sight of Maia, who was taking a step back, her breath quickening, her eyes widening. Her divine form took on a fight-or-flight posture.

“Maia, I think it's time for you to drop the charm,” Shiv said without rancor. “Because I especially have a few questions for you now that you're here, and now that I think about them. For example, did Udraal plan this all along? Did you even know? And how much of you is still trapped inside someone else's mythology?”