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EC Book 4, Chapter 4 - Loss of Stability
🕑 Added 2023-07-23 23:06:09 +0000 UTCSev was worried.
This wasn't anything new. He was always worried. But his worry now was something that gnawed at him; he looked out at the world and he saw that it was wrong. Flashes of old memories ate at him, telling him how different everything should have been. Everywhere he looked, he saw dreams and ambitions and cultures that had been cut out of the universe, leaving only ghosts behind.
In a way, he was happy that he remembered any of it at all. Whatever trick Onyx had pulled with Misa's reality anchor — or whatever trick he'd pulled, considering some of this had been orchestrated with a more informed version of himself — had worked. He'd been able to regain... some of his memories.
That didn't make things much easier. He still had no answers. He didn't know how to fix things. He knew his former self had tried to set something up, that there was a little bit that could be carried over in every reset, although that space was rapidly shrinking. A small safe space deep within the Void, anchored to stability so that they could build something that would fix all this.
The problem, of course, was that he didn't remember any of what he was building. He hadn't wanted the Void to have even a conceptual link to it, and so it was erased out of his mind for him to rediscover every iteration. It was inefficient and dangerous, and it was also the only method he knew that could keep that space safe.
The Void was infectious. It raced through physical reality and conceptual links, eating away at anything that wasn't anchored — and sometimes leaking through the anchors, as Elyra's destruction had proven.
Of course, the result was that for all he knew, he hadn't been able to find a working solution at all, and he'd died before finding anything that could help in all six of his previous resets.
But if that were the case, Onyx probably wouldn't have let him get this far. Probably.
He wondered what Onyx was up to now. Communication with the god was still sporadic; as far as Sev understood, he was following a path he couldn't know anything about, lest the Void start eating away at it. Onyx resided in the Void specifically because it was disconnected from the rest of reality — the Void did not link within itself — and with him were a few of the remaining dead gods whose echoes remained alive.
It explained some things early on. Sev remembered the moment in the first dungeon, when they'd first acquired the reality anchor. He remembered the other voice Onyx had spoken to while they were floating in what he now knew was the Void, just before they were transported back to reality.
He wondered how many of those gods were left.
"Somethin' on your mind?" Misa asked, and Sev tried not to jump at her sudden appearance. He was sitting on top of their caravan, just staring out at the scenery, and hadn't been expecting her to join him.
"Just... everything." Sev gestured vaguely, ignoring the way Misa smirked at him. "It all looks so normal, you know? When I look out at it all. But then I remember everything that we've lost..."
"We used to have phoenixes in the sky," he said quietly, and when Misa gave him a questioning look, he elaborated. "They're kind of an Earth legend, and I think the name caught on here. They're flame-aspect birds that burn themselves to ashes when they die to be reborn from an egg."
"That's morbid as fuck," Misa said plainly. Sev let out a startled laugh, and she looked at him. "What? That's morbid! Do you think that's not morbid?"
"I guess I never thought of it that way," Sev admitted. "We usually see their life cycles as something beautiful. Out with the old, in with the new, or something like that. Rebirth."
"Oddly relevant," Misa observed. Sev cocked his head for a moment, then nodded in understanding, glancing out at the scenery again.
Obreve, their world, was dying. If it could be reborn...
But that was a big if.
"Does this mean you're remembering more things about Earth?" Misa asked him. Sev hesitated.
"For the most part, no. I gave up most of my memories of Earth with intention. I won't ever remember who my parents were, or what my childhood was like, or what schools I went to. I can remember general knowledge, I guess. I know bits and pieces of Earth culture from the time I was there."
"There's no way to restore your memories at all?" Misa glanced at him, and he saw the look in her eyes. He let out a small laugh.
"Not unless anyone has memories of me, and even then I'd only be able to know what things were like from their perspective," he said. "It'd be like remembering the life of a stranger."
There was a small silence at that admission. Misa didn't seem to know what to say, and opted instead for grabbing Sev around his shoulders in a rough, one-armed hug; Sev didn't protest. He appreciated the comfort, really, and if he had to admit the truth to himself...
He needed it.
Sev let himself relax, and his mind drifted. He considered everything they had been through together, everything they'd learned so far—
—and then he sat up with a start.
"Derivan's thing," Sev said.
Misa gave him a strange look. "His what?"
"The [Flame of the #######] he got after Misa's bonus room collapsed." Sev tried to put his thoughts together. "Do you have it?"
"No? I don't keep most of our loot." Misa frowned. "Is this about how we forgot to investigate it again?"
"No! I just think I know what it is — come on, let's get Deri," he said.
Sev hopped off the caravan, his mind racing. Phoenixes. They'd been real here. The flame was the flame of a phoenix, representing rebirth.
Maybe — just maybe — it was something they could use.
—
Sev looked expectantly up at his armored friend, who cocked his head curiously.
"I do have it, yes," Derivan said. "But I do not understand. You say it is... the flame of a phoenix? A creature of Earth origin?"
"No— Well, maybe." Sev frowned, trying to figure out how to explain it. "The one on Earth is fiction. There was a similar magical species that lived on Obreve. I'm hoping there are similarities that we can use."
"I see." Derivan hummed thoughtfully. He rummaged through his belongings — he really didn't have very many of them, and mostly kept them in a small bag he kept lodged within his stomach cavity — and pulled out the [Flame of the #######].
It looked just like it did when he first acquired it. A warm, orange glow like a flickering flame held within crystalline amber. It radiated a small amount of heat. Not enough to hurt, but just enough for Sev to feel like he was basking in sunlight, even through the dark clouds that hung overhead.
[Flame of the Phoenix], Sev thought. If he had it right. It fit. He didn't know what he could do with it yet, but if he was right about what it was...
"You said something about phoenixes getting reborn after burning to ashes, right?" Misa said thoughtfully, interrupting his ruminations. "Ya think that might be a phoenix egg?"
Sev blinked.
The system hadn't called it an egg, but that meant almost nothing. Names were arbitrary and representative. A flame could refer to a heart, a soul, a core...
...or an egg.
An egg that hadn't hatched.
"[Triage]," Sev commanded, doing it out loud mostly for the benefit of his companions. Information bloomed in his mind, the system feeding him everything he needed to know about the Flame.
There was a long pause, and then Sev groaned. "Shit. I'm an idiot."
"It's an egg, isn't it?" Misa said, entirely too much smugness packed into her voice. Sev gave her a perfunctory glare, and then nodded reluctantly.
"It's an egg," he echoed. "It can't hatch. There's a hairline crack in the amber that's infected with a tiny piece of Void. It's not spreading, because I think the egg is somehow fighting it off, but... It can't hatch while it's doing that. Let me just—"
Sev reached out with a healing spell — a system-driven one first, just to test the waters — and flinched when it backfired, divine magic exploding out of the makeshift system-rune and smacking him with enough physical force to make him lurch backward. "Ow."
"Did your healing spell just slap you in the face?" Misa asked, sounding amused.
"Shut up," Sev grumbled. He glanced at the system error screen that popped up.
[ <ERROR>: No matching template found. Entity does not have health. Entity cannot be healed. ]
"I should have expected this," he muttered. "The system doesn't know what phoenixes are anymore; it can't just restore them with a Shift like it would normally do with health. And the divine magic it uses as a backup suffers from the same problem when it goes through the system. I think even if I bypass it..."
Sev grimaced a little, calling forth the power of a god's Domain. It always stung him to channel a Domain like this — it felt like his body wasn't built for it. Fire was an appropriate Domain to call upon here, followed by Time to reverse what had been done to it, and Light for its healing properties...
But even the divinity he tried to pit against it was absorbed into that tiny fraction of Void, and Sev grit his teeth in frustration. It didn't make the Void any stronger, at least, but healing didn't seem like what they needed to fix this.
"We're gonna need to find another way, aren't we?" Misa asked, as if she'd been expecting it the whole time.
"The problem is that the system doesn't know what's supposed to fill in the gap," Sev said with a grimace. "So the reality anchor's got nothing to push back against the Void with. If we had something close enough we might be able to get Deri to approximate it using Shift, and I can do the rest."
"Perhaps a mana crystal or a reality shard?" Derivan suggested.
"No, those aren't... we need something that matches this in essence. Like a piece of a flame elemental, or something, except I don't think we've met any of those in a while. There might have been one in Fendal or Teque..."
Sev trailed off thoughtfully. "I'll send Novice a message," he decided. "He or Raltis might have some idea of where we might find an elemental. We could get Vex and Helix to layer some fire magic on the thing, but I don't think that's going to be enough."
If nothing else, at least now they had a plan. Sev let himself feel a little comforted by that, even if he didn't yet know how this would help them in the grand scheme of things.
One step at a time. That was all they could do.
Comments
Russell
Hmm, phoenixes coming back feels like a minor thing, but I wonder if reintroducing the concept of rebirth through them will be one of the major levers to push back the Void
