Rain Harlow
patreon
(Vol 5) Chapter 47: Only I Can Surrender It
🕑 Added 2024-06-18 15:24:27 +0000 UTCThe war was over and the forces of Samantha had lost.
Sitting in the darkness on the floor of a hidden, nameless fortress of solitude in the faraway land of Baladusk — waiting — events ran through Orswyth’s mind as they had a thousand times before. He still lived them.
All the trust and faith of a whole new realm dead to one man’s fanatical desperation to persist. We shouldn’t have underestimated him. Should have remembered [Entropy] can muddle even the future. Or destroy it.
The First Sage, the Sage of Truth, had faced Samantha in a duel that was inevitable on a battlefield that was the same, and one that everyone felt was simply a test before the equally inevitable final battle to come with the True Sage.
But they had read it wrong. The First Sage had somehow learned to replicate a Seed-level effect into triggering with the breaking of his staff, tainting the Goddess of Light mere moments before she claimed the final victory and unable to defend against the new trickery.
Though she resisted by means of [Fate] to survive, it didn’t matter, because success was only temporary — its doom unavoidable. The First Sage slithered away yet again having sprung his trap, with Samantha left screaming in agony and forever stripped of the divinity of [Light], her Angels all turned into burned scars in her mind.
Led primarily by a Glaelychus who was suddenly smelling his own inevitable victory, the collective forces of the unified rebel forces gradually crushed the Dominion while the Sages stayed holed up in the Capital. Eventually, it too was sieged and all but destroyed, the First Sage finally killed by Glae’s hand, and the city taken… but there remained a structure to take below. A final foe to face who had been silent through it all.
Samantha tried to go with Glae… but found her growing attunement to [Entropy] made it impossible — she could only be quickly consumed entirely by it to go forward. She had no choice but to stay behind. Glae, Zadkiel, Six Moons Falling, Bast, Dax, Canmore, Crow, Beikiar, Keinauz, Gelmak Por… many champions went below. Some were kept from going, and some refused to go. Some gave up when the imminent results seemed clear.
Some of us had sense. Focused on what She would have to focus on as well. And Glae, what an idiot you were. What an idiot you always are. If not for you… bah.
Azure pretended she’d not go, but snuck in later, no doubt intent on finding a way to make things right for her lover, to support the final stand and win the day whatever the cost. But the cost was… everything.
None ever returned from their descent.
Samantha invented a new kind of scream when she felt Azure die. Only forceful actions kept her from rushing in to die herself, to feed [Entropy] an even greater power than it had already consumed. In those moments of being forced to live and experience such pain, it was far too much, and so she cut out her ability to feel.
Humanity, though it took time to realize it, had died along with the light in those days. What was left of Samantha was not enough to keep it alive.
And after it all, what came up out of the Sage’s catacombs…
In the dark chamber, Orswyth rose, because suddenly he felt it in his bones, in his sagely being so long illumined to the hidden truths of the world; attuned to their whispers. It is time. He raised his hand and called the artifact Last Light to it — a lantern with a dim, but pure glow within.
The central chamber of the hidden fortress was a custom contraption of sorts born originally of the artifice of bright, shining days of smiles and plenty. Much later, Tashome modified it one last time for him, before they said their goodbyes and the haunted, depleted man used the last of his sanity to jump into the Abyss.
Ostensibly, it was to give the shell of the Goddess of Fate time to contribute herself to the amalgamate that was the Fortuneteller, before the Silent Hordes overran everything. The Southlands were the last holdout on the mainlands, but Geirkos had fallen. Corruption was slowly killing and consuming the forests and swamps, and not even Redberry had been a match for the abomination the Sage had forged and unleashed.
It was his own kind of amalgamate. A counterstroke thousands of years in the making. Thousands of years of fuel he’d been collecting, and then reinforced by the slaughter of heroes. None of their artifice could match it, and in fact, they’d only help fuel it themselves like cherries on the top. Redberry had retreated from a fight for the first time and knew a terror that had wracked her soul worse than the Seed ever had.
Why, [Entropy]? Why, after all this time, did you unleash something so apocalyptic? You-
But Orswyth cast it out of his mind. Old things went over and over and over again in his head. They didn’t matter — they were pollution. The real purpose of the facility before him called. The Hermit within him surged to the surface and he embraced it.
The light of the lantern shone as bright as the sun in the chamber and awakened it.
It was like a sphere in shape, with marble contours etched in runes that reminded him of the old friends who’d helped construct it. It contorted from the walls into twelve points converging on the center, the enchanted stone ending in bronze spheres half a meter in diameter.
In the center where they all pointed was a dais upon which the double-sphere fighting energies of Glae and the Sage floated — the remnants of a great battle that had been studied endlessly. Even with Glae dead, it persisted, though both of them seemed to be weakening and diminishing. Combined artifice had been needed to conspire a way to move it, including Samantha’s aid herself, but it had been done almost as long ago as the battle.
Raising his other hand, Orswyth began the first preparations of the spell. The spheres retracted, revealing bright, swirling orbs of magical light pulsing with concentrated mana.
In his theories and experimentation, he’d come to combine both of the existing ideas of the Seed’s countering — Glaelychus’s sacrificial lamb as a target, and Samantha’s ultimate cleansing ritual. If it were [Light] instead of Glae’s alchemy as a sacrifice, what would happen?
Divine light had been nearly impossible to procure, but he’d hunted it down in distant lands, making friends with friendly tribes and fighting or evading the hostile ones. But finally, he’d found the artifact Last Light, a fragment of a long-dead God of Light.
At first, he’d hoped to heal Samantha, but it was useless. Not only had she ceased to care and spent the majority of her time in the Halls, but they’d already ‘lost’ with so many dead. His inspiration only got worse when the growing potential of his ‘solution’ became clear instead as a preventative measure, blocking even his other idea for it. It couldn’t ‘undo’ damage, period. He almost abandoned it — and hope itself.
But his inner self bid him to continue firmly, with both a great reason and a terrible, blunt revelation: they were a dream inside of a dream. Their entire lives, the entire reality existed only as an instruction to [Time]. To the actual reality they pantomimed.
What a joke we are. What harlequins, hmm?
Most would’ve either gone mad or truly given up, from that knowledge. It was a near thing for him, but… somehow it changed nothing for who and what he was. He existed as that stability ahead, as the guide, as victory, as transcendent Thought. He needed nothing more to exist, whether he existed in the way he originally envisioned or not.
I can still contribute to a greater purpose. It’s enough.
He began the next stage of the spell, and the whole chamber buzzed with energy as it coalesced around the orbs. They provided the raw intensity that Last Light would combine with and transmute. Hopefully enough, for what they were about to unleash.
The Three Daughters of Fate suddenly burst into the room — Ash first of course, shortly followed by Ana hand-in-hand leading Estara. They were frazzled-looking, obviously having dropped other things they were doing to rush there. Though all prime-aged and beyond, he could never see them as anything but young girls — and his. His adopted granddaughters, more or less. Ana was as youthful as ever, at least, being an elf.
Ash — with her one good eye — looked at Orswyth as if she’d been stabbed in the back. “You started without us — how could you?!”
Estara — head wrapped to cover her entirely Entropy-destroyed eyes — made a frustrated and disappointed noise. “You’re out of fucking bounds, Old Man!”
With her free arm — made of magical bronze and silver — Ana pointed accusationally at him, her ears twitching. “Don’t you dare speak one more incantation before incorporating us!”
Orswyth lowered his hands, in truth in no danger of voiding the spell before the final sequence commenced. He looked at the three girls and cackled, to their deepening frowns of annoyance. Not only because he’d gotten one over on them, as he loved to do, but because they had done that adorable thing they did once again — responding in past, present, and future in some fashion, one after the other.
They soon realized they had done this, too, and all glowered at him like he was to blame. Which was probably true.
“Well, come on then!” Orswyth demanded, still chuckling. “Get into your positions so we can do this sometime before I finally keel over.”
“Don’t talk like that, Orsy,” Ana scolded as she assisted Estara in taking position without bumping her head. “You’ve still got a decade, I bet.”
“What Ana said,” Estara said with firm insistence. “Is this shithole really going to help a future iteration, Old Man?”
Ash said nothing, likely out of stubborn contrarianism for their usual subconscious habits.
Orswyth gazed at Estara and nodded. “It could, it should — in some fashion. All pursuits of knowledge and understanding are worthy acts. Sadly, we can’t do more here.” A bit of half-truth. They certainly didn’t ever need to know what The Hermit had revealed.
His eyes lingered on Estara with extra meaning to ‘sadly.’ His other hope had been to heal her, to let her see again. But it was not to be.
Ash stared across the chamber at him. He had confided in her about that after swearing her not to tell the others. When he had later told her he’d discovered it impossible, she was not surprised, and confirmed it to be her ‘preemptive conclusion’ as well, despite his ‘oftentimes miraculous inventions.’
He had told her he wished he could ‘invent’ a way to stop Estara crying nearly every night, but Ash told him it was not for the blindness at all. It was her endless mourning for Samantha and Azure… two mothers lost to her.
A broken world, an apocalypse in progress. Is it any wonder we’re a lesson meant for beyond?
Together, the broken remnants of a family lifted their hands and cast together, and like a confluence of great lasers, light blasted the double-sphere hovering over the dais. In tandem with the unthinkable penetrating power, a third sphere enveloped the mass.
In synchronized timing, the sphere of Glae’s artifact dust was pierced and leaked the ooze-like force of the Seed, while Orswyth’s Last Light shot out and reinforced the new sphere with divine power and light.
Once pierced, the artifact dust dispelled and collapsed onto the dais. The black ooze seemed to expand and splatter against the new wall of light and they fought against each other much as the prior fight went…
And then the greater mass began to shrink as the two opposing energies began to obliterate each other.
Yes!
The four of them watched with wide-eyed elation and excited gasps, even as they continued pouring themselves firmly into the continuance of the spell. Within a minute, the Entropy was gone, and a tiny sparkle of divine light persisted in the center, all around it a great sun-like orb of magical light.
Entropic potentiality can be consumed! It simply needs the perfect sacrifice of that opposing thing it so loves to corrupt — divine light. If one cultivates an equally great preponderance of attuned magical energy, then purifies and transmutes it, they have a vaccine for this disease.
“It’s a solution!” Ana exclaimed near-breathless, jumping up and down and clapping. “We’ve done it!”
“It was a solution,” Ash corrected darkly, shrugging. “All far too late to do any good in our world. Any good to us.”
“But a novel solution, nonetheless,” Estara commented calmly. “Science and Progress is served, in which we believe as a choice of principle. Was the light taken from me when I was made blind? No! No one can take it from my heart. Only I can surrender it, and I will always refuse.”
Orswyth, weakness beginning to ebb through him, smiled with great fondness for Estara. “That is correct. We serve a higher purpose to succeed here. It is not in vain — our lives are not in vain. Even Samantha is only being who she needs to be after falling short. We are all playing our part to the… to the…”
Lightheadedness came very quickly, and then turned even quicker to starry blackness, as he fainted and collapsed. His last sights and sounds were the cries of the girls and Ash catching him with some quickened spell to prevent injury.
Despite this, his final flash of memory and thought before unconsciousness — temporary or his final coma, he didn’t know — was of that bright smile at the top of the train. The beautiful, beaming face of Samantha looking up at him with pride at what she’d created. Her city, her Heaven, always thinking of others and the big picture.. the common and collective good.
So did I, Your Majesty — to the end. So did I.
____________________________________________________________
« (Vol 5) Chapter 46 | Table of Contents | (Vol 5) Chapter 48: Sagely Gifts »
____________________________________________________________
Comment: 'I'll just do half a chapter vision... okay 2/3rds... welp, it'll be a whole chapter... oh, it's over the typical word count, whatever...' 😅
