EdgeCases
patreon
EC Book 4, Chapter 11 - Cast in Shadows
🕑 Added 2024-02-09 16:40:55 +0000 UTCVex understood what Raltis meant as soon as he completed the glyph. Tendrils of intent — not mana, but intent, invisible to his normal mana-sensing abilities but clear as day when it was directed toward him — connected to his mind, providing him with a lens through which he could see the world.
The new perspective was almost dizzying. He saw the world weighted with history and metaphor, saw a thousand subjective realities superimposed onto ontological truth.
And he saw through this perspective a means to spin one subjective reality into another. To translate the very nature of a thing from one reality to another. Not a shift, exactly, but a reworking of the rules to make those rules possible.
"Wow," he said out loud, blinking a few times. The rush of information would have been overwhelming if not for the experience he'd already had with this kind of thing from his Research rune.
"That's all you have to say?" Novice said, throwing his hands up. "The first time I tried that it knocked me to the ground and I didn't get up for an hour!"
"I did tell you he'd be fine," Raltis said, amused.
Vex glanced at them. "Please tell me you weren't betting on whether or not this glyph would knock me out."
There was a long silence.
"I am glad it did not knock you out," Derivan said. He said it more to fill in the silence than anything else; Vex saw a trace of amusement in his eyes, and he also saw how the armor would have been very much not amused had it actually managed to knock him out.
Vex just shook his head and laughed.
Now with the Glyph of Translation active, he looked back toward the Spelldisk in his hand, and watched as this new magic splintered it into a hundred disparate pieces.
One piece was the way it was originally created: by a young lizardkin Noram, who listlessly carved the runes he'd seen all the powerful mages use into the stone without knowing what they did or how to use them. The stone never worked, back then, for the runic circuitry was broken on a fundamental level.
One piece was the way the system had changed it. The runes had been subtly altered and realigned into a complete, working set of runes — a set of runes that would in theory cast a [Light] spell.
Except... It was a complicated way of casting that spell. A standard [Light] cast was a single runic circuit that looped in on itself; it was one of the simplest runes in existence. The Spelldisk, on the other hand, used a network of five runes that were complicated in and of themselves. Vex recognized the runes for [Greater Gateway], [Temporal Timeout], [Divine Dominion], [Purifying Presence] and [Shadow's Sublimation].
All were spells a Platinum-ranked adventurer would use. They were spells that tapped into fundamental aspects of reality.
And they were being used to create a ball of light.
Vex looked closer.
The Glyph of Translation sang within him as he channeled his mana into the Spelldisk and watched light blossom into existence above it — but what he had created wasn't light. Not really. It had the properties of light, certainly, but...
"It's almost like a projected [Truesight]," Vex said out loud, looking intently at what the Spelldisk was emitting. He wasn't sure this was something he could have figured out on his own — even his Glyph of Research only simulated what he would do when investigating something. The complexity of this particular Spelldisk was one that would have taken him years to decode. Even beyond the five main runes he'd recognized, there were smaller ones embedded deep into the disk, and mana aspects that were altered by the system in real-time when mana was channeled into it.
It was complicated. But then so was [Truesight]. As Vex understood it, the system itself had multiple variants of the spell, and it never clarified which version of it a mage had; they would have to contend with their own understanding of reality to determine how effective their variant of the spell was. Now that Vex thought about it, the Glyph of Translation he was using was not unlike what the deeper forms of [Truesight] were said to be like.
But the Spelldisk projected [Truesight]'s effects outward, allowing anyone who saw something touched with its light to perceive its underlying reality. They weren't exactly entirely comparable — the Glyph of Translation was a deeper magic, one that was rooted in the fundamental forces of the universe, and the Spelldisk merely unveiled truths — but truths could be a powerful thing.
Especially when, with a little bit of magic, you could decide what the truth was.
Vex held the Spelldisk up to his eye like it was a lens instead of a solid piece of stone; with the effects of the Glyph of Translation active, it might as well have been. He saw, overlaid open itself, the many realities that Derivan could manipulate with Shift. Different timelines, different realities, things where one thing had happened instead of the other.
He saw echoes. Not in the traditional sense — echoes of reality, the same kind of echo that the entirety of his bonus room had been.
And though the residue was muddy and fading...
He could see what remained of the piece of reality that had been his bonus room. It was long gone by now, of course — an echo of an echo, a residual shape left behind by the nothingness of the void rushing in to fill in what once had been a vibrant reality.
Light exists to cast away shadow...
...the Spelldisk may bring a secret to light.
"What if I just..." Vex muttered out loud. He saw, in the corner of his eye, Raltis and Novice both making a move to speak; Derivan, however, recognizing how he was lost in thought in a way that signaled he was just on the verge of an epiphany, quickly shushed them.
Vex gave himself a moment to think about how much he loved the armor, then shifted his mind right back to the Spelldisk and its effects.
Teque was still here. That was key to this — they'd never been able to find the connection between the bonus room and Teque. They knew it was there, and they knew that the Roads should have been able to connect them. It just... hadn't done so.
Vex turned his gaze to the Roads, still looking through the Spelldisk.
He could see the remnant link there. The entirety of that bonus room had been supported by Elyra's Prime Anchor, which had long since fallen apart; Fendal's reality anchor, however, hadn't. Not yet. It was unstable, but it was being supported by reality shards generated by Teque and by the unusual circumstances with which Teque had been created.
"I think..." Vex started his sentence slowly, hesitantly. He wasn't sure if he should say it out loud — he was worried that if he did, he would bring them false hope. That he wouldn't be able to do it. But he made himself say the words anyway.
"I think I might be able to bring the bonus room back."
—
It took some time for him to figure out the details.
The first and most important thing was that as he was right now, there was no way he'd be able to perform a working of magic on a scale quite that large. He would be asking the mana and the system together to recreate an entire world, and both entities had enough trouble maintaining just the current world without having to support a second one on top of it.
The second thing was that the bonus room wasn't the only thing that he might be able to bring back through the Spelldisk. It had been the first one to come to mind, but whatever the system had created here, it gave him the ability to tap into the residual echoes of anything that had been erased, provided that erasure was recent enough. Provided he still had a connection to what had been erased — as he did through the Roads here in Teque. He could... restore things.
Not indefinitely, and not without cost. But the ability to do so at all was so precious Vex could have cried at the thought of it. Derivan, Raltis, and Novice all seemed to be in much the same frame of mind. As a test, Vex had tried to recreate a roll of bread he remembered eating from the little cafe situated near Clyde's inn; the resulting bit of baked good was just the way he remembered it, and he almost hugged it before remembering himself and sharing it with the others instead.
This was a reminder that he needed to find a way to help Derivan taste foods in the same way he cou—
Derivan gently plucked a piece of bread from him, and then, before Vex's eyes, his helmet just... split open. Melted apart as though it were liquid, with dripping slime forming teeth and a tongue.
Vex stared. His face felt hotter than usual.
"You, uh, figured out how to eat?" he asked. His voice came out sounding a little strangled, he was pretty sure, and Derivan looked at him curiously. Vex couldn't figure out if he knew he was flustered or if he was just genuinely oblivious.
"I believe so," Derivan said. "I am not certain that I have correctly manufactured the sensation of taste. But it is unique, and I enjoy it."
"You're using the Slime stat for it?" Vex asked. He couldn't imagine when Derivan would've had time to figure out something like this.
"And a Remembrance," Derivan said, nodding. "There are many I still have yet to explore."
"I see," Vex said. Raltis and Novice both snickered at him, and he did his best to ignore them. "I'm, uh, glad to hear that. You should tell me more about how it works. Later."
Derivan cocked his head. "Are you alright, Vex?"
"I'm fine," Vex said, probably more defensively than he should have. Was Derivan smirking? It felt like Derivan was smirking. "Anyway, we should... figure out the limitations of this thing. The Spelldisk. Not your mouth."
"I did not think you were talking about my mouth," Derivan said. He definitely sounded amused now.
"You're enjoying this," Vex accused.
"Perhaps a little." Derivan smiled at him.
Vex grumbled.
Honestly, it was unfair how easy it was for Derivan to make his heart melt.
Comments
Silver Linings
Next set of chapters will focus on Misa and Sev!
