by Azalea Ellis
Apparently, the Remnants were the greatest masters of arcane technology around. A lot of their knowledge had been lost to their home-world in the time since the network of arrays had been locked. The Shortcuts were the height of the technology that remained, and the Estreyans barely understood those. Ester strongly advised against trying to use Chaos to make Kris bigger, without extensive research into the possible repercussions.
Though Kris had been upset at first, she responded with surprising maturity for a child barely in the double digits and said she was just happy to be alive, no matter how small she was.
Gregor quickly decided that having his older sister be smaller than him came with distinct advantages and lorded it over her until she punched him again.
After less than a day to check out the situation, Captain Milan had talked to Ester, then contacted all the other Estreyan ships still on Earth, letting them know where to come for refuge. The moderately-sized island was bustling with people. The refugees settled in alright, but many of them were traumatized by the sudden reversal of hope to despair, and more than a few of them blamed me for it or thought that I’d deliberately lied when I said I could cure the Sickness. One woman, fresh claw marks from a human running down her face, tried to spit on me as I walked past.
At first, I bristled, my new scales rising up a little like a cat puffing up in anger. But I took a deep breath and let the anger settle back down inside me. Her dislike wasn’t unfounded. In the eyes of the Estreyans, I had either betrayed them or simply failed so horribly they had lost faith in me, even learned to hate me.
I let her be and moved on to keep preparing for the final battle. My new body had come with an increased level of control over my Skills, once again. Chaos, specifically. I found a small bird that had been injured falling from the nest. I picked it up and let Chaos burn at its flesh. I used a combination of understanding what I was trying to do and a measure of steely willpower that forced the remade bird to be healthy and whole even if the laws of nature wouldn’t have allowed it otherwise.
When it didn’t die, and in fact seemed just fine, the seams around my healing invisible even to Wraith, I went straight to Adam. “I can heal your back,” I announced abruptly.
He looked up from the fractal ink tattoo he’d been sinking into his own shoulder. To my surprise, he didn’t brighten at the good news. “Are you sure? This isn’t just as simple as putting me back together. You need to be able to overcome the force that keeps normal people from being able to heal an injury from a god’s attack, too.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m resisting Pestilence, and even the God of Knowledge couldn’t do that. I’m sure I can do it.”
“I’m getting by just fine with the ink latticework under my skin.”
I waved a hand. “This won’t stop you from using that to move around if you want to, or if I fail to heal you properly. But if this works, it will mean you can keep moving even if you’re down to the last drop of Skill power or for some reason don’t have access to Animus again, like what happened during the Yggdrasil Trial. Really, what are you so hesitant about?”
He swallowed a couple times. “I just…this has become normal for me. I’ve wanted to be healed since it happened, but when you offer it so suddenly, it’s somewhat nerve-wracking.” He chuckled. “Well, that’s stupid. Let’s do it. Do we need Sam or anything?”
“Err…that’s probably a good idea.” I should have thought of that ahead of time, but I’d been too excited.
Adam smirked at me, obviously reading the chagrin in my expression. “Let’s go find him then.”
We did find Sam, but we also happened to find Zed, Gregor, and the group of Remnants Ester had set to investigating his Skill and the Other Place.
“We did it!” Gregor yelled, running over to me.
“What did you do?” I caught him in my arms and shifted him around so he could ride atop my shoulders as I walked over to the cold rip hanging in mid-air, which the research group was stationed all around.
“We figured out how to measure the signs of the cracks. Not just the ones to the Other Place, but the ones Pestilence uses! And if we can measure them, these Remnant scientists think they can set something up that will react to them. We can trap Pestilence in the Other Place, and once he’s there, we’ll be able to kill him!” the little boy announced.
The revelation that the Other Place was basically a battleground created to give us an advantage against Pestilence’s regenerative ability gave an impetus to our planning strong enough to hurl us forward.
The Remnants had found that their bodies didn’t react nearly as well to the Other Place as ours did. We speculated that bearing one of the Seal of Nine symbols somehow helped, because, despite how enthusiastic they were about training, it didn’t seem to get any easier for them, and every time they entered we had to worry about them passing out within. It had been the same for Chanelle and Blaine, of course. While the rest of us built up a resistance to its effects, they’d seemed to constantly suffer.
The warriors might not have been useful, but the intellectuals set to creating something that could affect Pestilence via his connection to whatever extra-dimensional void he’d stashed his source of power in, and the rest of us started training our resistance to the Other Place’s draining effects.
I knew the coming fight would be difficult, if not impossible. I spent the time I wasn’t training working on the Oracle’s third gift. But no matter how much I wanted it, I couldn’t get it to fit together. I tried crying and bleeding on it again. I got up in the middle of the night to work on it. I had my teammates try and help me. All to no avail.
To my surprise, Ester wasn’t concerned by my failure at all. She laughed. “The gift of the Oracle is to give one a vision to help one on the path, when they need it. If you do not need it, why are you so desperate? We know how to kill Pestilence now. Maybe one day, you will face another difficulty, and need a vision to guide your way. Save it till then.”
I didn’t stop trying to solve it, but I didn’t worry about it so much after that, and spent more time trying to figure out concrete things I could change to affect the outcome of the battle directly. While the physical Attributes were important for any fight, I knew the true merit of the winner would be dependent on that thing my Attributes only measured indirectly through Charisma. I needed willpower created from a strength so powerful it would mold the world to my wishes. I would have to do more than control my own body and mind, this time.
Ester told me how to strengthen myself in that way, when I mentioned my uncertainty. “A godling grows stronger the same as every other being. Through hardship.”
I found that distinctly unhelpful at first, but realized that the answer might actually be simpler than I thought. It was possible to acclimatize oneself to the Other Place, to build up a resistance to its draining effects over time and with practice. How were we doing that? Sure, our Resilience grew a little bit from the actual cold, but my Charisma also leveled up sporadically after spending too much time in that version of reality. Thus, a somewhat reckless plan was born.
Alone, I stepped through the rip Zed had created, my back close enough to it that someone could reach through and pull me away if things went pear-shaped.
I let a few faint, misty tendrils of Chaos spill out of my palm. There was a subtle sense of tension, of tightening, in the air around me. The hair on the back of my neck rose, and I knew I was being watched. I set Chaos to vibrating the air a few inches above my palm, just enough to warm it.
The world darkened in the distance, as if it was a stage and the spotlight had been turned on me.
I pushed a little harder, and a small ball of air burst into flame. Something inside my chest loosened at the rush of color and life the warmth brought.
Darkness rushed in around me, sucking at the flame with a hunger so great it was palpable in the very air. The flame dimmed, and the color leached out of it, along with all but the tiniest amount of heat.
My eyelashe
s frosted over, and I choked as that same hunger pulled at my body, trying to draw the life from me as if it were sucking the marrow from a stew bone. I pulled back, taking away the warmth and power and holding it within, imagining my skin as an impenetrable barrier. “Are you hungry for the taste of fire?” I called out, my voice rough as my lungs and throat struggled with the frigidity of the air.
The watcher responded, the darkness of its presence concealing the world beyond a radius of a few feet as it swirled around me.
Wraith stretched out, but could not sense its edges.
“I am hungry,” it said to me, with an echoing voice that sounded like a whale singing from the depths of the ocean. In its echo, I caught the idea of a form so vast I couldn’t quite comprehend it. I was like a speck of dust in the eye of a cosmic whale.
“I have an enemy,” I said. “I will bring it to this place to fight it.”
“You wish your enemy to be weakened? For me to devour their life instead of your own?”
I hesitated, and, rather than agreeing, explained exactly who and what my enemy was, to the best of my knowledge.
I caught the echo of acknowledgment, perhaps understanding. “So you must destroy its physical form, and destroy the connections to its power, so that it may not exist again. The boy can do it, if his fingers can learn the touch.”
The boy could do it? “Do you mean Zed?” I said.
The cosmic whale shifted, and I caught its amusement. “Is that what you call him? The one whose fingers can reach me here, from your own realm? The one who brings me warmth and travelers to pull from? Yes,” it said, suddenly echoing back firm confidence, with an undertone of slithering slyness. “I can pull at your fire and life less, when you bring the thing here to kill it. Do you want anything else?”
Slowing the rate that the Other Place weakened us would be a huge boon. I hesitated, before agreeing, though. “Can you do anything else that might help?”
“It is not alive. There is nothing for me to take from it. Though if you wish…I might offer you the adversity to grow stronger.”
I shifted, my eyes narrowing. How did it know that’s what I’d come to ask of it?
It pulsed in a way that felt like laughter. “I heard an echo of your question in the air. That is what you want, is it not?”
I did.
“What will you offer me in return?”
I thought carefully before answering. “Fire.”
“Yes. Light, energy, and life, in its own way. You will give me one day of constant flames, and I will ease the burden of my realm on you while you fight.”
There was that slithering, again. I thought carefully before opening my mouth to speak. I looked at the darkness around the patch of grey I stood on. “What is one day, in a place where the sun never rises and never sets?”
The cosmic whale laughed.
We had a small celebration when I healed Adam’s legs.
Sam very carefully numbed Adam’s body from the mid-back down, which was a kind of torture in itself due to the way Sam’s Skill worked, but not as bad as the burn of Chaos would be. Then, he used Black Sun to give Adam lethargy and apathy, which really didn’t work as a substitute for anesthesia, but at least allowed him to relax.
Before starting, I put my hand on the sides of Adam’s lower back, around where the wound still gaped open, a little raw and only having avoided infection because of Sam’s Skill. I pushed Wraith into Adam’s flesh, cataloguing everything that was wrong, and building a model in my mind of what it should have looked like instead.
I took my time thinking the procedure over, planning the steps, the transformation, and cementing the idea of Adam’s healed back in my mind. He was missing some muscle-mass and bone, and though I could forcefully take it from something else, like air, it was easiest to cut a chunk out of an animal that was roughly the right size. When I was ready, I let Chaos bubble up out of my hand and start to burn. Then I let it eat up the chunk of meat and dropped the flames into Adam’s wound.
Despite Sam’s ministrations, Adam screamed, and his arms scrabbled at the slab of smooth granite he lay on.
Torliam hurried to shove a rolled-up wad of cloth into Adam’s mouth so he didn’t break his teeth with the clenching and grinding. I remembered when he’d done the same for me.
I set my will to making Adam whole again. It took a few minutes.
He kept screaming, but, as I worked, his legs started to twitch and jerk along with his arms.
When I had finished, he lay on the rock slab limply, a sheen of sweat covering his body. He spat out the wad of cloth in his mouth. “Sam, I need an antidote for the numbness. Next time, I’ll just take the pain straight up, that way I don’t have to deal with both.”
When he sat up, able to hold himself without bracing on his arms, and jerked his legs around a little, I let out a sigh of relief, and the others burst into cheers.
Adam managed to stand for a few seconds, his legs trembling under him, before he had to sit back down again. He’d lost a lot of muscle to inactivity, and though I’d replaced a portion of the loss in his back, I hadn’t done so to his legs, simply made sure his nerves worked correctly. It would take time for him to walk and run again, but with practice he’d be as good as new.
We set up a little bonfire and ate fish that Kris had tugged out of the sea by forcing their spirits toward her. If she tugged slowly enough, the spirits weren’t ripped directly out of the fish’s bodies, but were drawn physically and inexorably toward the surface, just like they were caught on a line.
We stayed up late despite the fatigue that had built up throughout the day, because that bonfire was a spot of light in the darkness in more than one way. When we left it, we would have to sleep, and face the reality of our situation. Three of our number would never celebrate with us again, and the nightmares made true rest difficult.
The Remnants had been free from the Sickness before the Champion fell, but, after that, we had brought in the refugees from the downed ship and the encampment around the Shortcut anchor. Some of them showed symptoms, which progressed more rapidly than normal.
I avoided the infected like the literal plague. Partially, this was because I didn’t want to give Pestilence such an obvious opening to find and attack me again, if he didn’t already know where I was. But it was also because I felt guilty, knowing that I could probably help those people if I decided to enter into a blood-covenant with them. Sure, my power would quickly run out if I attempted to keep too many people healthy against Pestilence’s will, but I could do more than I was. Even so, the thought of sharing my blood with strangers made me shudder. I had a faint sense in the back of my head for the rest of my team, now, since I’d given a drop of blood to each of them. It wasn’t nearly as strong as the connection I had to Torliam, but, in its way, it was intimate. I didn’t want to share that with strangers. I sympathized anew with Torliam for his own forced blood-sharing.
Still, the whole thing weighed on me, until I had an epiphany. I burst into Torliam’s room and started pacing the floor in front of him. “I just realized something,” I said.
He watched me pace, but didn’t respond, perhaps waiting for me to explain myself.
“Pestilence feeds off the idea that we can never win. He made it obvious he wants our despair. But what if it’s not just that? What if he needs our despair? What if our despair nourishes him? Think about it. He’s always been cultivating this sense of the inevitable, for the last few thousands of years. ‘If you try to escape your sick world and build another, I’ll just follow you. There is no cure. And if you happen to find one, I’ll destroy it in the most cruel way I can think of and leave you to slowly die.’ But!” I spun, pointing at him.
He blinked slowly, the corners of his mouth twitching upward.
“I realized something new,” I continued. “Perception molds…no, perception is reality, in a way. I reframed the way I thought of myself, and I changed. Or maybe I’d just been holding myself back all along because I lacke
d imagination.” My voice lowered as my thoughts trailed off the path I’d been taking. “I did, after all, use Knowledge’s greater understanding of how my Skill worked to burn out the Sickness once before, even if the Champion was still weakening Pestilence at that point.”
“Yes?” he said, raising an eyebrow. He waved his hand to me, as if the motion would clear my brain of whatever fog was distracting it.
“The point is, I wouldn’t have been able to save Gregor, Adam, and Jacky the way I did, before I remade myself and acknowledged the idea that I’m not the Eve I once was. It was my perception that I was a godling and that I could do it that allowed me to do it. I’m not normally one for the flowery, feel-good, do-gooder heroism. But in this case…hope might literally be a weapon. A sort of poison that actually does make Pestilence’s victory less inevitable. I think that’s why he’s so set on crushing it. I think that’s why the prophecy is about finding a spark of hope, when all seems lost. So we either need to figure out how to heal people, or find another way to give them hope.”
Torliam remained silent.
I grimaced. “I mean, I could be wrong. But why is it that I can affect the world with pure willpower, the gods can, and Pestilence can, but normal people are out of luck? That doesn’t make sense. Sure, maybe the average mortal wouldn’t be very powerful, despite their Seeds, but even if individual power is weak, a huge mass of people working together to change something should have some effect. I think the population has been working for Pestilence, and we accidentally converted them to our side, and that’s why he came after us with such prejudice.
Torliam rubbed at his newly-trimmed beard. “I am skeptical whether the hope of mortals will actually weaken Pestilence, or simply enrage him. Either way, we could use this to our advantage, but I am not sure what might cause the people to feel enough hope to actually make a difference, at this point. As you said, much of my people’s optimism was likely crushed when the moment of reversal and despair was so critically timed to follow their moment of greatest hope.”