Epsilon Twilight
patreon
73. Testimony
🕑 Added 2022-12-27 20:12:11 +0000 UTC“Did you actually have to tell everything?” Marissa’s first comment after finishing telling my story was but a groan. “You certainly didn’t have to tell all the events until right now?”
“Really, Marissa?” Alatea responded with indignation at Marissa’s complaints. “After everything we have heard coming from Edrie’s mouth, this is where you draw the line? He has just told us he has not only come back from the dead once, but twice. Plus, the fact that he isn’t even ellari, that apparently he personally knows a goddess of death, that he escaped Ferilyn and threatened the very emperor of the draconids, and that he has, I don’t know, brutally assassinated and tortured your killer?”
I was more in line with Alatea’s reaction than Marissa’s, I told them things purely out of fiction, and Marissa was too composed. That could be attributed to shock, though. When people went over traumatic events they normally stopped processing what was happening around them. This was Marissa’s form to cope with everything she had gone through.
“The guy had it coming though,” Marissa added with a plentiful scoop of hate. “What did he even intend with blowing up the leyline? I cannot believe I got killed by someone so moronic.”
“More than moronic, the man was afflicted with severe mental diseases.” I corrected her. “Though that doesn’t excuse his attitude. He put thousands of people in danger.”
“How can you be all this calm?” Alatea told, sliding across the thin line between a stress attack and pure rage. “I c-can’t. This is too much.”
“You wanted answers, and I gave them to you.” I didn’t spare details, choosing to tell my whole story, only skipping the latter years of school and the academy because nothing truly happened during those years. And I was gradual with any revelations, even if they were world-changing to most people.
“I-I need a new cup.” Alatea stood up to prepare more tea, leaving Marissa and me looking at each other.
“Edrie, did you have to tell everything in detail? I feel like I had just listened to two whole novels.” She reiterated.
I felt as if a wall of some sort had just been broken as Marissa spoke.
“That’s just how the True Recall spell works, I don’t have much control over it. I recall EVERYTHING.” I added with clear sarcasm.
“Well then, you better control the spell better next time.” She added with greatly unneeded seriousness.
I chuckled. She chuckled. We began laughing, to the point I shed a few tears. We were both at our wit’s end. We most likely needed to make an appointment with a psychiatrist. More than one at that.
“I’m glad you are back Marissa,” I told her with a warm smile. “For a time, I thought I lost you there.” I unconsciously gritted my teeth and contracted my hands into fists.
“Me too, Edrie. Me too.” Her smile faded away, substituted by indescribable pain. I knew the sensation.
We hugged in a tight embrace.
The both of us knew of our incompetence and the luck we had to even be here in full pieces. Or at least the most important ones. Marissa and Alatea had endured my storytelling without any comments, just letting me weave my memories into a tellable story. We all knew what I had done, that I wasn’t myself, and that almost cost us dearly.
I flashed soul mana. Not only to calm me but also the two women in the room. We were on the verge of collapse, and soothing was a thing we needed greatly. Just a few days ago, Alatea had told me that Mystic’s Dominion was a malevolent spell and that I truly wanted to help someone I should learn healing spells. But she was wrong. Mystic’s Dominion allowed me to analyze souls, mine withstanding, understanding them better, and making it possible to interact with the souls in ways I couldn’t have done before.
One of the core spells forming Mystic’s Dominion is Astral Self, a spell that already worked between worlds, hoping between the spiritual and physical planes at will. This interaction alone was what made me as skillful as I was on souls.
This ten-star spell wasn’t just about power, about having reached the endgame of magic, but of understanding and knowledge. Comprehension of a single spell ascended me onto a greater field of play. That was what allowed me to avoid certain death.
Our silent but physical exchange of misery was interrupted as Alatea sat down once again, leaving a cup of a steam pink infusion on the table.
“Alright, I’m calmed down.” Said the not-at-all calmed down healer.
Alatea was the only one here who hadn’t died, yet she felt as ghostly as us. How much mana and brain power had she used to heal Marissa’s body? To replenish her blood? To link the lifeless corpse with the recovered soul?
I weaved more mana, now focused on her. It wasn’t an intrusion, but a small caress, meant to be noticeable but warm and soothing. The expert mystic looked at me, sighed, and smiled.
“You should stop taxing your soul.” Her voice was weak, more than a counsel, it was a plead. “Back in the leyline, you told us that the raw arcane mana killed you. Then you revived, forcefully linking your soul to your body, and controlling it like a puppeteer. But tell me the whole truth, Edrie. That ungodly amount of mana should have severed the strings moving the body multiple times. How many times did you revive yourself there?”
I looked at her right in the eyes, lavender against emerald irises. No spiritual exchange happened between us. As I thought of the answer, I scoffed with humor and painfully smiled.
“I cannot say,” I told.
“Cannot say, or won’t say?” The healer counterattacked.
“Cannot,” I repeated with… confusion? “I died, yes. I died multiple times, yes. But my body, my mind, my soul, got damaged as I retrieved the artifact from the leyline. Not even True Recall allows me to remember the perfect details. Alatea, my memories are damaged.”
“Oh.” She gasped in surprise, shame, and horror. “Then how?” I could feel she didn’t even know what she meant by that question.
“It’s the corruption,” I added. “The arcane corruption of my soul got fueled back then by the energies of the leyline. I already told you that I couldn’t control my actions, I didn’t feel like myself there. So, the memories… aren’t mine.”
“What do you mean?” Marissa jumped in surprise from her seat. I could see her recoil from the pain, yet she acted as if it were nothing. “Are you saying there’s another entity inside your soul?”
“Not exactly.” I weaved soul mana, forcing Marissa’s body to regenerate as I talked. “It is me. Just not a good side of me. I have told you that the Lady of the River reincarnated me because I was a pure soul, untainted by anything. Then why I ended corrupting my soul, a thing that affects every single living being, it just strokes me harder than it should.”
I stopped and flared Mystic’s Dominion. The soul mana suddenly became visible to everyone, even non-mystics. But if you looked closely, it wasn’t the fully white you might expect. Instead of a pure white mist, there was a lavender haze.
“I’m more vulnerable to soul corruption than other people. I was a pure soul. So, the elemental corruption that happens to every mage has somehow merged with the moral corruption that affects every soul. The corruption based on the grey scale that I talked about multiple times, doesn’t exist in my soul. My spirit is binary. It’s either white or violet. There are no grays or blacks. And at the edge of both energies, there is a fusion, a hue of lavender.” I told as I caressed the haze of lavender mana, slowly swirling around me.
“Are you implying what I’m thinking?” Alatea looked at me with a stern expression, a hint of academic interest, but also the wariness of a physician.
“Yes.” I nodded as I read the shallow images of her soul. “The arcane side of my soul is my evil side.”
Marissa frowned at my words. She wasn’t unbeknownst to the soul; she had spent a lot of time with me. But she didn’t have the studies that Alatea and I had.
“Are you telling me there’s an evil Edrie?” Her tone was serious, Marissa was truly worried, but I couldn’t help but laugh at the notion of an ‘evil’ me. “Hey! I’m being serious here!”
“I know, I know.” I chuckled once more. “But you need to worry not. What I basically said is that my soul works differently than a normal one. All soul has ‘evil’ inside. You, me, Alatea, Adrian, Monica, everyone does. What I meant with all of this is that when I use arcane magic, I become more aligned with this side of me.”
“So, that’s why when he used the arcane energies of the leyline to fight the hemomancer or confront the draconids, he acted with such uncharacteristic aggressiveness and violence,” Alatea explained in understanding. “He had fully tapped on his arcane side of the soul.”
“But even then,” Marissa continued, “this means that every time you use arcane mana you will become evil.”
“Yeeeeees?” I wasn’t sure of the answer myself. “There doesn’t seem to be a threshold for when I start becoming ‘evil’. If you recall the events of the first year I just told you, I did become rather sadistic a few times, and I hadn’t used considerable amounts of mana. So I would dare to say that yes, every drop of arcane mana influences my emotions.”
“That’s… scary.” Marissa backpedaled in fear. “I cannot imagine having my emotions manipulated that way every time I used magic.”
“Is that bad?” I looked at Alatea for answers as I didn’t understand the terror pouring out of Marissa’s visage.
“Tell that to yourself.” The healer shrugged, though her eyes betrayed her, showing her being in a state of deep thought.
“I mean, it isn’t truly emotion manipulation,” I added. “If it’s myself who affects my own emotions, and those emotions already exist inside of me.”
Alatea nodded to my explanation, then took a sip of her infusion, and finally sighed.
“Edrie, you are certainly one of a kind.” She told with a smile. “Not because of your special circumstances, or because of your unbelievable feats, but because you are the only person I know of that could treat the corruption of their very being as nonchalantly as you do.”
“Is that yes?” I asked her.
“You are right to a certain point, but as Kirielle would probably say, an illness is indeed part of a person though that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be eradicated if given the opportunity.”
“But that’s the problem, isn’t it?” I refuted. “There’s no opportunity to solve it, I am a creature of Arcane and Soul at my very core.”
“Then that’s your answer,” Alatea stated. “If you don’t think it’s a problem, then it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is!” Marissa shouted in exacerbation. “How can you two be so calm about it? Edrie is literally having his actions manipulated!”
It would appear that the roles between the two women inverted. One was agitated by death because she hadn’t personally died, and the other was worried about emotional manipulation because she didn’t know the soul that well.
Mages are creatures of expertise. You remove them from their field of expertise and they are suddenly clueless.
“It’s not manipulation, but an augmentation of something that already existed,” Alatea explained to Marissa with her characteristic calmness. “When Edrie killed the hemomancer, something I do not agree with,” she added with venomous hints, “he was mostly conscious about it and would have done it even if he wasn’t corrupted. Rage is an ellari emotion, in the end. It affects everyone. And to his perspective, you had just been killed.”
“I don’t care about that madman!” Marissa’s face contorted in pain and rage “I can’t accept that Edrie can’t be himself.” I could see the faint trickles of water flowing down her eyes.
Ah, I knew what this was about. I casually approached Marissa and gently stroked her hair. She was unable to still cope with her own death. This was but an act to redirect the incompetence she felt when she died, the rage, the pain, the sadness, into something else.
“It’s alright, Marissa.” For some reason, I decided against using soul mana now and just let my words and caresses flow. “You are safe. You don’t have to worry, I’m here for you.”
Then the floodgates opened.
It all became incoherent mumble as Marissa tried to speak, but she was sabotaged by her own wailing. Alatea and I were mystics, in a way, wielders of death. Marissa was a normal girl who had been thrown into a stage too grand for her and paid a great price. I knew she was strong, but I was too blind to see how much she had been tolerating.
I stayed at her side until she fell asleep once more.
“What are you going to do now?” Alatea asked behind me. To be honest, she had taken all these revelations all too well, her panic attack included. “You and Marissa have been missing from the academy for a few days, how are you going to explain that?”
“I…” I sat on the nearest chair, lost in ponderation. “I actually didn’t think about that. Not that I thought very far into the future as you may have seen. I had my hands full with all the killing and dying that I forgot I was a student.”
Alatea’s response? A chuckle.
“You are certainly one of a kind.” I loved the warm smile on her purple skin. “I suppose I could make an excuse that you got separate from the group and then, for some reason, you decided to take private classes with me.”
“Hmm… Not the best excuse, but it’s best to have an alibi.”
“Alibi?” Alatea reiterated. “Edrie, are you trying to get away with your two murders?”
Alatea looked directly into my eyes. I only saw her emerald irises. It was her healer side speaking. I didn’t think of my acts of vengeance as murders, more like self-defense. Depths, the hemomancer tried to kill thousands of people and the cryomancer committed suicide. But I knew deep down that Alatea was right.
“No,” I responded then began channeling mana. “Take care of my body.”
“What are you doing?” Alatea jumped from her seat detecting the lavender mana swirling around.
“Surrendering myself to the authorities,” I told with a smile.
My consciousness went away from the room as I shifted to the spiritual plane with my Astral Self.
**********
The spiritual plane followed a non-linear space, meaning that movement in this plane wasn’t always the same. It had plenty of irregularities, but that was to a common mind. Yes, it didn’t behave like old linear physical space, but you could anticipate how space would develop before you.
Perhaps it’s because I was a non-corporeal being currently as I moved around with my Astral Self, but I hadn’t had difficulties understanding such alien properties.
I used Soul Sight to orient myself, trying to correlate the physical and spiritual planes with one another. I based on the surrounding souls to pinpoint my location and direct to my objective.
It was quite easy and fast to do so. In the end, travel time didn’t really exist on the spiritual plane.
With one frame of existence, the smallest possible timeframe, my Astral Self phase-shifted into an austere-looking office. Full of white and plain furniture, the room lacked any real decoration. This lack of ellari overdecoration suited well with the military persona.
“Who are you?” A feminine voice shouted in front of me with a commanding voice. Then I was quickly surrounded by a myriad of violet arcane constructs. Barriers.
“Worry not, I come in peace,” I rose my arms and open my palms in a non-threatening manner, “Sargent Kalyd.”
“You?” The military woman looked daggers at me, not bothering to dispel the spells ambushing me. “You are that arcanist from a few days ago. The one at the academy outing.”
“Oh, I’m surprised you remember me.” That was my honest reaction.
Whilst Kalyd had indeed noticed me on the outing, I hadn’t done anything noteworthy to be remembered.
One would expect that after realizing a student she would have released her spells, but they became more aggressive. Sections of the barriers shifted into menacing-looking lances. With a quick insight into her soul, I could notice this was but a bluff.
“Tell me why a student of the academy of Ferilyn has just infiltrated my private office and why I shouldn’t detain you on the spot.” She commanded.
“Firstly, that would be quite impossible. This is a construct, not my real body, as you may have noticed.” Astral Self still had that ghostly vibe from Astral Projection, though the avatar was quite more realistic and accurate as the spell got more complex.
“Then explain why I wouldn’t issue your detention.” Sargent Kalyd was on edge. And I knew the very reason for that worry.
“I’m here to present my testimony,” I explained.
“Your… testimony?” Kalyd’s face twisted a bit in confusion, though her spells didn’t waver in the slightest. Talk about discipline.
“About the hemomancer’s case, of course.”
Suddenly I was oppressed by a powerful wave of arcane mana. Even if I didn’t have a physical body, even if I mostly existed on the faraway spiritual plane, I could feel her presence pushing me to the ground.
“Are you the one who killed one of my soldiers?” Her voice didn’t exactly command anger, but sadness.
Her unleashed mana looked like an arcane version of Mystic’s Dominion, so it had to be a dominion or aura type of spell. And it felt almost as powerful as a leyline.
Keyword: almost.
Unluckily for her, I just went to hell and back. And before my way there I just so happened to take a shower in the world’s most radioactive, corrosive, and mortal stream of magic incarnate.
I stood there, still with my hands in the air, unmoving. Her magic did affect me, I didn’t become invulnerable to arcane magic by surviving the leyline’s influence. And she was an eleven-star mage.
Yet this was nothing compared to the raw energy of the world.
“Let me present you with my testimony.” My crafted visage presented no emotions or effects by her magic. “Ikail Natas isn’t the person you believed him to be.”
I don’t know what did the trick, but Sergeant Major Kalyd relaxed her spells. Her gaze was still highly aggressive.
“Talk.” She simply ordered.
“First of all, I’m a mystic, if you hadn’t noticed.” Kalyd didn’t respond, she just continued looking at me.
I obeyed her wordless command and continued my explanation.
“My magic allowed me to see that something was really bad with the man. A certain kind of corruption was degrading his soul, and the soul itself wasn’t precisely stable. As I am a sort of expert on soul corruption, I was able to determine that the man wasn’t sane, most likely suffering from severe psychosis, and intended to do bad things.”
The military woman continued to observe me, her expression showing discontent.
“Continue.” The mighty arcanist said after a few seconds of ponderation.
“So, knowing the man was probably going crazy, I and a companion followed him.” Kalyd’s brows briefly rose at the mention of an accomplice, or that’s what she was thinking Marissa was. “We tailed Ikail to the underground and that’s where we found him talking with a mysterious woman. That woman told him to sabotage the leyline.”
Now that was curious. Upon the mention of the leyline, Kalyd’s soul did an almost unnoticeable jump. Like skipping a heartbeat but in her spirit. Even if I could read her soul, the woman’s visage proved as still as a stone wall.
“The woman gave him a black sphere that I then identified as a mana capacitator. The capacity of the artifact was so big that I feared that it may blow up the leyline if it was ever filled to full to the top.”
“Then you killed Ikail and retrieved that artifact, I suppose?” I was actually surprised by her intervention, I expected a fully silent approach.
“No,” I responded. “Whilst I’m a ten-star mage and could have killed Ikail, the woman was also a ten-star mage, and my companion only a nine-star one. A fight would have been dangerous, especially nearby a leyline.”
“Hmm.” I heard her ponder. “How did you know the woman you mention was a ten-star mage?”
“As a mystic, I can read people’s souls and approximately tell the power of a mage,” I answered even if the truth was more nuanced, and returned to the story. “Then the woman left Ikail alone to do the deed. And when Ikail manually inserted the artifact inside the leyline, he also left. That’s when we acted. My partner followed Ikail in a mad dash, whilst I stayed to remove the artifact… Also, manually.”
“Did you just admit touching a leyline?” The arcanist asked in surprise.
“Yes, it was quite painful.” I rose my burned armed, which my Astral Self showed even with the bandages one. “That’s how I got this.”
“While I wonder how you survived that, did you know that interacting with leylines without governmental authorization is a crime, right?”
“I… did not.” I was taken aback by that. “But that isn’t what matters right now. Ikail does.”
“Right.” She nodded. “Why did you kill him?”
“It was an act of self-defense,” I replied.
“Did he attack you first?”
“No,” I said with a grim face. “But he killed my partner.”
Kalyd jerked back in response. This was clearly not the answer she expected. And somehow, she was greatly affected by it.
“I’m truly sorry. Really, I am.” I read her soul and knew that her words were veritable. Not only she believed me, but her apologies were real.
Before I could continue my confession, a loud noise stormed the place. Suddenly, the door opened wide open, the hinges threatened to pop off.
“Amira, I noticed your mana. Is something wrong?” The man that opened the door said. Then he looked at me and his hands shone blue with lightning.
“Stop, Fynn!” She shouted at him, but the lighting came, nonetheless.
It would seem I had awakened the Ceaseless Storm.
Comments
Epsilon Twilight
This chapter is meant to fulfill the patreon's tier rewards. If I promised you would have 2 chapters in advance, you will have 2. Next chapter's Friday.
