Malcolm Tent
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Wish upon the Stars chapter 632
🕑 Added 2024-05-23 22:52:17 +0000 UTCCallie and the others headed over to meet up with my mom and Chelsea now that they were here, but I stayed back, wanting talk to Zeke about something important.
“Well that guy was a dick.” I said as we wandered away from the group. “Who is he exactly?” I could see the tension in Zeke as we headed for a small alcove without any people in it. He seemed angrier than I’d seen him in a long time, excepting maybe during his fight with the Duke.
When I spoke, he stilled for an almost imperceptible moment and then the anger and tension melted away. “Craygen Norquill.” He said in a suddenly relaxed and casual voice. I knew it wasn’t real though. My uncle was on a Path of Masks, or something like it. Hiding his true feelings was hardly beyond him.
“Who is…” I trailed off leaving my thought hanging for him to finish.
He sighed, and I felt some of that anger come back. “A duplicitous little troll.” He said bluntly. “He’s loyal as hell to Aiden, which I suppose could be considered a redeeming quality, but otherwise he’d cut your hamstrings with a rusty box knife for a piece of candy he was planning to throw away. He’s one of the most vindictive individuals I’ve ever met.”
“And his daughter?” I asked gently. “I could tell something bad happened to her. What did he do?”
Pausing, he seemed to take some time to think about how to phrase it. “You know how recursion pushed people constantly? How it takes a certain kind of person to be able to ignore that?” I nodded. “Well, that spiritual toughness is often assumed to be inherent. Something you can’t train. That’s incorrect. You CAN train it, you just shouldn’t.”
“What?” I said, confused. “But recursion is extremely dangerous. Callie told me that some people who reach high ranks become hollow shells of themselves, overwhelmed by their own recursion.”
He waggled a hand. “It’s happened, but it’s very rare past D-rank. The nature of a Solid Path requires a sense of self. But putting that aside, you’re ignoring what recursion IS, and why we have it. Come on, you have to be able to figure this out. What is recursion, like how would you define it?”
“It’s the emotional seepage from stats.” I shrugged. “Impact and stats are cyclical. You can’t have too much Impact without a solid foundation of stats to hold it up, and you can’t have too many stats without the Impact to hold it together. But the soul is only so big, the rest of your being has to be made up of something. That thing is stats, and the image of you from the renown they’re made of bleeds into you and changes you.”
That got a nod. “Close enough. But has it ever occurred to you why we don’t have some way of preventing that bleedout? Someone at some point could have come up with a way to prevent it. Drain out the image, filter it, whatever. Hell, someone could have wished for that. Why didn’t they?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t consider it. People aren’t really designed to question things they think are unequivocal fact.”
“Which is the whole point.” He said grimly. “What people aren’t designed to do. We NEED recursion. It insulates us from the alienness of our own changing nature. The whims of the legends that make us up help us change and grow into something more than human. As long as you have the grit to prevent yourself from being swept away, the process of recursion is vital to remaining sane as a high level Ascendant.”
Grimacing, I looked back to where Felicity stood. “So the way you train that resistance to recursion is…”
“Basically?” He said with a wince. “By exposing someone to conflicting types of recursion at maximum volume for long periods of time. There are Skills that can mimic the effects of recursion, though they’re usually less subtle.”
My face went pale. “Is that as horrible as it sounds?”
“Imagine someone with much more power than you compelled you, with more strength than you could resist, to feel angry. They push your rage to the point where it should shatter your mind. But then they use the same type of power at the same scale to force you to feel at peace. Then they just leave you there. The conflicting drives essentially grind away the ability to react to that kind of stimuli through repeated torturous exposure.”
“And he did that to his own daughter?” I asked in outrage. “That’s fucking monstrous. How is someone like that Aiden’s second in command? He’s a monster.”
Zeke sighed heavily, bringing me out a side door onto a balcony and gesturing for me to sit on a stone bench. “I think you’ve got a lot of mistaken ideas about the WCP, Shane. We’re not good guys. Some of us are decent enough company, some of us are monsters. But we don’t have much use for morality. You must have seen that?”
“I mean…” I trailed off. “I know Abel and Mel can be cutthroat, and you’ve got your brutal side. But I think you’re all good people at heart.”
He shrugged. “Maybe they are. I’m not.” I opened my mouth to retort and he held up a hand with a laugh. “I’m not fishing for reassurance, Shane. I’m not a ‘good’ person. I don’t even want to be one. The concepts of good and evil are nebulous and mostly meaningless to me. I consider myself loyal, and that’s important to me, but I have no illusions about my moral compass.”
“But that’s…” I was stumped. I’d had some small inkling that my uncle didn’t really care much about rules. But how do you respond to someone you care about informing you they’re amoral.
“Normal.” He said bluntly. “It’s how most high ranking Ascendants are. You don’t usually make it far in our world without certainty of action, and certainty of action doesn’t pair well with morality. Good people are not often completely sure of their path. They question, they waver, they see things from other points of view.”
I slumped back. “So Aiden is…what? Evil? The whole WCP is just a nest of vipers that only care about themselves? What is the point then? Why do I even want to be the Wishmaster?”
“Not evil.” He corrected. “Just ruthless. Maybe to some they’re the same. As for what the point is…I’m not honestly sure. Power for the sake of power is a tune I’ve danced to for most of my life. For myself, for my loved ones, I get stronger. To advance my goals.”
Throwing my hands up, I growled. “But I’m not like that! I care about people. Not just my people, though obviously them to, but people as a whole. I want to help them, make things better.”
“I know you do.” He said with a fond chuckle. “In fact, I suspect that Eli wanted that for you. Sasha is…maybe the most empathetic Ascendant I’ve ever met. Eli loved that in her. Loved her kindness. It was so different from what he grew up with, from what he saw in everyone else. He tried to be like that for a while. For her. But he couldn’t do it.”
That wasn’t something I could really wrap my head around. My dad was a cold bastard, I know he hadn’t always been, that he’d been different once upon a time. Had that all been for my mom? Would I do that for Callie? If I was a monster, would I try to change for her?
But then…hadn’t I? How many times had I been at the edge of doing something cruel or wrong or even just easy and stepped back because of her. Because of the example she set for me?
“I think that’s why he did it, you know.” He said with a sad little laugh. “Left you on Callus. Of all places. He wanted you to grow up to be like her. He couldn’t be there because you were a candidate, but I think that actually suited him. You’re so much better off as the person you are than you would have been with him, and he always knew it.”
I wanted to argue. To lash out. To tell him that was a cop-out and that my dad was just too lazy and uncaring to try. But…I thought back to the Ruined Soul Temple. To the version of myself that I might have been if I’d been raised by my father. Maybe he was right.
Not that it mattered in the long run. I was still angry at him. But knowing what the WCP really was made a difference. Because I could see how that would have poisoned my dad just like he was afraid it would poison me. I knew he’d grown up the same way I had, away from the family, but the place you were left clearly had a big impact on who you became.
Zeke had already told me who he was, and the place my dad grew up had shaped them both. I’d seen the harsh side of the empire myself. All of it just made me so fucking ANGRY.
Because it just never stopped. People hurting people because people hurt them. Without even meaning to. I was just so fucking sick of it. Sick of thinking about how my parents broke me, and now how their parents broke them. Sick of the WCP and its callousness and the gods and their casual cruelty.
Sick of seeing people like Satala and Yvette suffer for the sins of implacable figures so high and distant they might as well be stars.
But most of all I was sick of me being too weak to do anything about it. I’d promised myself that I’d become the Wishmaster, to change this ridiculous way of raising children, but that wouldn’t be enough. I needed more. Needed to go further. I wasn’t just going to become the Wishmaster, I was going to become a fucking GOD.
I was going to make this world a better, kinder place, for Callie. For my own kids when I had them. For my mom who had to give up her child, for my dad who never saw me because he was afraid he’d poison me just by being in my life. For my sister, who grew up alone and isolated.
And most of all…for me. So I could look around and see a world I was proud of. Because what was being an Ascendant if it wasn’t forcing the world to bend to your will. So many people had shown me that through action, and it was finally sinking in. And deep down, somewhere in my soul I could barely feel, I felt something click.
My Path shifted, just a bit. Not enough to change the Skill, but enough to refocus it on what I really needed. I had a feeling I wouldn’t really understand the significance of that for a long while, but that was fine. I had plenty of time to figure it out.
We’d been sitting in silence for a while, since he’d mentioned my dad, and when I finally stood, Zeke seemed almost surprised. “We should go back inside.” I said, my voice charged with surety and purpose. “I need to learn more about the other players in the games. You’ll have to point them out.”
That was my next move. I had my Path, and even if it had shifted a bit I still just needed to walk it. One step at a time, I had to move forward, had to find my way. Because I could see it now. My future. A god with my friends and family around me, safe and happy and free from all this nonsense. I knew exactly where I was headed, and I couldn’t get there fast enough.
Comments
thaughton2
That's the thing, binding yourself to practicality is the problem. In my opinion, the gods that shared his goal lost their way and compromised. You're a god, if you push hard enough, you could be a god among gods like the first Wishmaster, or Morgan Lark once he ascends. Bend the very practical rules of the world to your impractical will and make what you think should be.
thaughton2
Epic self actualization is epic
Dylan Alexander
You know what’s funny? A lot of the other gods probably thought the same thing at one point which is why they became gods, however along the way they likely learned the reality of the situation they were actually in. It’s a noble thing Shane wants but in a world like that? Is it practical? And another thing, that’s probably what the ‘dead gods’ are telling their followers, how life can be better, how it should be better. Very interesting stuff.
