The Beginning After The End

Chapter 437

Chapter 435: Scales of Understanding

SYLVIE INDRATH

The Compass portal wrapped around me, embracing me and pulling me in. The transition was seamless, unlike the ancient portals dotted around Dicathen. On the other side, I found myself in a picturesque world that seemed more likely to be found in Epheotus than in Dicathen or Alacrya. Towering trees, their tops not visible from the forest floor, grew up from an expansive, crystal-clear lake. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. Like a picture.

Like coming home.

Even as I acknowledged the strangeness of this thought, I was already losing focus on the scenery. A purple haze fell over my eyes, like a curtain lowering. My body felt stiff and distant, outside of my control.

I sagged, then jerked upright.

The forest was gone. Above me, the aetheric void stretched into infinity in every direction. My feet rested not on solid ground but smooth water, opaque with the reflection of the purple sky.

The moment I acknowledged the water, I descended into it. There was no splash, only cool pressure enveloping me from the feet up. I tried to swim, to claw my way back to the surface, but my limbs slid through the water without creating the upward force necessary to propel me. My eyes burned, my lungs ached, and panic threatened to overwhelm me.

The water, solid as ink, parted. A hand reached down for me, but it wasn’t made of flesh and blood. It felt more like aetheric wind molded into the approximation of an arm and hand.

It didn’t matter. I took it.

My skin prickled as if I’d grabbed a charged mana crystal where the aetheric limb touched me, then I was rising, pulling free of the water, and was back out under the void sky.

A violent fit of coughing racked my body, and I struggled to wipe the viscous liquid from my eyes.

“Breath. Calm your heart. Take control.”

Blinking rapidly, I tried to look at the figure before me, whose hand I was still holding—or rather, whose hand was still holding me up. My toes sank into the water, and without their support, I would have plunged down once again.

“This power will swallow you whole if you let it. Take control.”

The speaker was…a dragon, but—no, she was humanoid, slightly taller than me, horns of deep purple wind thrusting up from amethyst hair—and yet, at the same time, she seemed to be a huge, demonic creature staring down at me. All three at once, perhaps, or changing from one to the next in rapid succession, unless it was a trick of the swirling winds that formed her frame, or—

I shook my head and sank slightly deeper into the water as her grip on me slackened. “I don’t understand, I—” A distant, time-blurred memory surfaced. “Sylvia? M-Mom?”

The wind-carved lips twisted up, indistinct. “Your identity is forged of contradictions. Both dragon and basilisk, an asura bonded to a human, twice born and twice adapted to the power that is aether. You are order from chaos, but the nature of this universe is entropy. These contradictions—these paradoxes—will always be trying to pull you apart. Father and grandfather, dragons and humans…vivum and aevum.”

I listened the same way a child listens to a conversation between adults: I heard the words but could make little to no sense of them.

“Who are you?” I asked again, and my feet sank deeper still, the glass-smooth water caressing my ankles.

“I am not here. But you are. And you will not leave if you continue to focus on all the wrong things. You and you alone can keep yourself from sinking forever.”

I closed my eyes, but the aetheric realm, the endless expanse of water, and the figure were still clearly visible before me. “I’m sorry. What do I need to do?”

“First, you must stand on your own.”

“I can’t walk on water,” I protested, peeking down at the water around my ankles.

“There is no water.”

I wanted to argue, to point at the liquid overtaking me and let out some sarcastic retort. But I held back, remembering what else the figure had said. Breathe. Take control.

I did, or at least I tried. I was hardly in a comfortable enough position to search for mindfulness, but I started with my breath. When I gained control of that, I moved outward, taking hold over one muscle, one limb at a time. Finally, I pulled myself up so my feet were out of the water.

Considering what she had said, I approached the most obvious solution first. “If what I’m seeing isn’t real then…I’m in my own mind, aren’t I?”

When I’d been in the aetheric realm with Arthur, the only interruption of the empty aetheric space was a single Relictombs zone as seen from the outside. This place was similar, but not the same.

My breath steadied. My feet felt sturdier. I lowered them until the soles rested against the cool water. Be stable, I thought, both to myself and the water.

My flesh pressed against the glassy surface. It held.

I was standing atop the water like I had been when I first appeared here, in that single moment before I recognized the floor for what it was. My perception of the floor had caused it to change, taking on the characteristics I expected from it. Like how mana reacts to both my purposeful intention and my expectation of it simultaneously.

“You have many questions. This is your conversation to lead. Ask them. Understanding is how you’ll take control. Time is of the essence.”

Time, I thought, the word triggering a deeper memory, something half lost and only partially found. Even time bends before Fate.

“You…it was your voice I heard in the void. What did you mean?” I asked.

“Time is an arrow.”

Lines formed in the air all around, wind made visible, drawing a bombardment of arrows that fired past us, all moving in the same direction. I stared, unable to make sense of the figure’s words, but the longer I looked, the more I noticed about the arrows. Some moved slightly slower or faster, and others weren’t straight at all. They curved, weaving in and out of the paths of other arrows.

“My innate capacity to influence aether in the path of vivum has regressed,” I said, voicing an uncomfortable thought that had been growing in me since my return. “You’re saying that…my aptitude has shifted toward aevum instead? According to what I was taught, this isn’t possible.”

“Many things are thought impossible until they become real. Fools insist reality must conform to their expectations, while the wise know that knowledge of our reality is constantly evolving, timeless and without finality.”

The arrows arced sharply downward and began to fall as raindrops, and where the rain landed, it revealed the outline of a building. Lacking color, contrast, or detail, it took me a moment to recognize the shape of Dicathen’s flying castle over the dense canopy of the Beast Glades. Aetherial clouds drifted overhead, wind-blown and dark. The water below reflected the rain-drawn outlines above.

Of all the places I had lived—Zestier, Xyrus, Mount Geolus—the flying castle held the strongest memories for me. I had enjoyed being close to the Beast Glades, where I had hunted for years while Arthur adventured. There was a magic to the place, something unexplainable and ancient, and I had enjoyed that too.

But mostly, it was where I grew into myself.

My eyes refocused as the indistinct figure, now a towering being with huge horns, as she faded in and out, the aetheric wind dispersing in chaotic gusts.

“Time is also limited, the most finite of resources. As your mind wanders farther away from here, the sands run faster. You are still in danger.”

“What danger?” I asked. “What is this place? Did you bring me here?”

“Entropy.”

“Is that the answer to one question or all three?” I asked quickly, trying to force myself to be present, to hold one thought in my mind at a time.

But the castle was slowly being destroyed in the background, and my heart sank to think of it. Zestier demolished, only dust and ash, Xyrus taken by the Alacryans, and the flying castle destroyed by Cadell.

My mother’s murderer, I thought bitterly.

The figure faded further, the winds growing even more wild.

“I’m sorry,” I breathed, clenching my eyes shut and focusing on the image. In my mind, she was a beautiful white dragon with lavender eyes. When I peeked through half-closed lids, the figure was stable again. “What are you here to tell me?”

“What do you need to know?”

I shook my head. It was too open-ended, too broad. I hadn’t been back long enough, didn’t fully understand what was needed. Only…

“What is Fate?” I asked, holding my breath.

The voice spoke. The noise of her words entered my ears. I blinked several times, my head lolling helplessly as I stared at the figure. It was just that, noise, but absent meaning or understanding.

I shook my head again. “I…I don’t…” I trailed off, struggling even to form a coherent thought as the meaningless buzzing of the figure’s explanation still wriggled through my brain.

“Unlike the djinn, you can’t construct a castle in the air. Lacking the foundation to build such insight upon, there is no hope for you to understand it.”

I dragged in a long, conflicted breath. The air smelled of smoldering citrus and tasted of ozone. By now, the flying castle, shown only by where the dots of aetheric rain splashed against it, was nothing but a crumbled ruin of orbiting bricks and broken stone.

One thing was starting to make sense to me, at least. “This conversation…I’m molding it, aren’t I? You can’t volunteer information. You aren’t here to tell me something specific. I have to ask you the right questions.”

“In a way, though perhaps there are no specific ‘right questions,’ only those that bring you closer to insight or push you farther from it.”

“Why did my innate capacity toward vivum change?” I asked, deciding on a path forward.

The figure was humanoid now, her wind-drawn body thin and graceful, the features of her face sharp but the details indistinct. “Only one who has progressed far down the path of aevum in their aetheric knowledge can be in two places at once, separating body and spirit to pursue knowledge outside the trail of their own time’s arrow. To travel as you have and returned left this insight’s mark on your spirit like a long journey builds calluses on your heels.”

“And when my body reformed, my spirit’s connection to aevum was stronger than my body’s to vivum,” I said, picking up where the figure left off. I thought I understood, but that understanding was tenuous, hovering at the edge of my consciousness. “But…I don’t feel like I have any insight into aevum. My ability to heal…”

The downpour of aetheric rain receded, blown away by visible striations of gusting wind. The swirling lines of wind straightened and became the dark purple outlines of sharp spikes protruding from the darkness. Amethyst rivulets trickled down the spikes and dripped from their sharp points into the cool, glassy water. It was blood, though I wasn’t exactly certain how I knew.

I began to move, walking through the field of spikes as if in a dream, afraid who I might find pinned beneath them: Alea Triscan, Cynthia Goodsky, Alduin and Merial Eralith, Arthur…

The figure walked beside me in the form of a huge dragon, each step sending out a ripple across the water’s surface. “You remember the many painful lessons of your life, but what you experienced on your spiritual journey was something very different. That insight is woven into the fabric of your being, not burned into your soft tissue by a specific sequence of firing neurons. And yet, it is still there.”

The spikes, pulsing with each gust of the aetheric wind that formed them, seemed to grow closer and closer no matter where my feet took me, even when I stopped entirely. Soon, they were nearly pressing into my skin.

“Agrona and Kezess, they seek this insight, don’t they?” As I spoke, a spike pressed against my throat. “Why was I able to gain what other asuras have tried and failed to for so long?”

“Fear.”

I looked at the spikes all around me but did not feel afraid.

“Not your fear. Theirs. Fear has long rooted them in place. Kezess has made himself and his people unchangeable for fear of what change might bring, terror of the beyond. Agrona, in his fear, seeks to change himself at the expense of all others, to burn worlds as fuel for his own ascension. Both are incapable of risk and self-sacrifice, and so they are incapable of gaining new insight.”

I took a step forward, and the spike at my throat receded. Wherever I walked, the spikes unfolded away from me. “But they are the two most powerful beings in this world. What are they both so afraid of? Each other?”

The figure unraveled at the edges. “Focus. That is a story for another time, and unrelated to what you need to accomplish in this moment.”

I did as the figure commanded, preparing myself to ask a question I already knew the answer to. “If I’m at risk of unraveling because of all these opposing forces that make me up, then that insight will be lost, right?”

“Not just you. Never just you. You are bonded. Three parts of one whole. Spacium. Vivum. Aevum”

“Aether,” I breathed. “Arthur…and Regis. And me.”

The dragon nodded its long graceful neck. With each step she was passing through spikes that came undone, dissolving into wind and drifting away.

I stopped walking through the field of spikes, and the spikes melted like ice. “And this is important—no, necessary. For the…understanding of Fate?”

The figure’s indistinct humanoid face displayed a warm smile. I realized we were each standing in a small pool of water now. The aetheric wind was forming something between and around us, long arms above and bowls below, containing the water. A central beam between, and—

“A scale,” I muttered, staring at the fulcrum.

The figure was a huge dragon again. The scale was much lower on her side than mine

“Only one who has mastered the paths of aevum, vivum, and spacium can begin to understand the fourth edict of Fate. But no single being can walk three paths at once.”

“But if three were as one…” Mentally, I charted the path of our conversation so far, and my mind stuck on one point. “It comes back to entropy, doesn’t it?”

“The nature of all things. Time’s arrow. Movement from order to disorder, form to formlessness. The dissolution of structure.”

“You’re suggesting there is a danger of Arthur, Regis, and I separating,” I thought outloud, staring into the figure’s empty wind-drawn eyes. “But…not all things are divided by entropy. Isn’t it also the process by which things combine and settle, becoming more homogenous?”

“Note that the scales of your understanding have not shifted. Think deeper, farther.”

I struggled to see where this could be going or why it was important enough for me to be speaking with an ephemeral, nameless figure in my mind that may or may not be the disembodied spirit of my mother communicating to me through the aetheric realm. Still, I tried.

“You’re saying that I have to hold myself together against these opposing forces, the ones threatening to pull me to pieces…but I also have to hold us together. Regis is chaos, the living embodiment of entropy—Destruction manifest—and Arthur is”—I smiled, feeling my eyes wrinkle at the corners—“still so very human. He’s already proven once that he’ll rip himself to pieces, cell by cell, to defeat his enemies, burn himself up from the inside if he has to. His sense of self preservation is…lacking.”

The scale shifted slightly closer to equilibrium, though the humanoid figure was still looking up at me from several feet down.

“So, I’m aevum-aligned now,” I said, feeling understanding coming a little more easily. “Time may be an arrow, but I can slow its flight, bend it even. To ensure that we remain together long enough to finish this.”

Even as I said these words, they conjured in my mind a time after, when we weren’t together, and my concentration snapped like a frayed rope.

The scales dissolved, and once again, the figure and I were standing atop the water. My feet sank slightly, just breaking the surface, and the aetheric winds swirled into meaningless chaos, an artist’s rendition of discord and disarray drawn in violet lines against the deep purple sky. The breath caught in my lungs, and each quickened heartbeat pulsed through the water and sky, the aetheric wind, and even the giant demonic figure watching me with what I thought was sympathy.

“You aren’t ready yet. To lose concentration now would be…catastrophic.”

The harder I tried to hold onto my focus, the more violently it seemed to resist me.

“What is too rigid will break under force. That which is too pliable and allows too much freedom of movement can be torn or peeled away. Control. Balance. That is what you are, and what you must find.”

I clenched my teeth and shut my eyes, frustrated that it failed to block out the vision. A moment to adjust, to recover, that was all I asked, all I…

I swallowed heavily. “All things come to an end,” I said, barely a whisper. “But if we—as we master aevum, vivum, and spacium…as we seek insight into the edict of Fate, we get to control when the end is.” My breathing calmed again. I opened my eyes and stared into the figure’s indistinct face. “And for every end, there are new beginnings too. Endings don’t have to be something to fear.”

Jagged lines straightened and the formless mass began to take shape. It was a deeply comfortable place, one that made me want to curl up in a ball and take a long nap atop my bond’s head: Arthur and Elijah’s bedroom within the Helstea estate.

On all fours, I hopped up on the bed, walked in a circle around Arthur’s pillow, and then curled up atop it. The woman rested gracefully at the foot of the bed, watching me.

“The aetheric realm, it’s how things end, isn’t it?” I mused sleepily. “As pure energy when everything else has come apart, the universe separated down to its base. That’s why aether is so potent for the creation of things—but also why the Relictombs is degrading. It is against the nature of that place to maintain form and function.”

She nodded, her eyes leaving me and traveling around the blurry recreation of Arthur’s room.

“But it remembers what it was. The aether. That’s why we can create spellforms. Even the godrunes. They’re an expression of that held memory, insight made manifest. Knowledge of the spellforms is housed in djinn-crafted implements, but the godrunes…”

I had to stop, to really think. It was getting so hard. I just wanted to rest, to sleep.

“The aetheric realm. All the knowledge of any form aether has ever taken. Like…a sleeping god. As Arthur’s understanding of specific edicts grows, the aether remembers and forms a godrune. But this only happens for him. Because of his connection with the aether. The djinn remnant said he was unique, that the aether saw him as kin, in a way.”

Again, a simple nod.

Outside Arthur’s window, a horned owl flew past.

“But if I’m in danger right now, understanding this isn’t helping me.”

I paused, looking more closely at the figure. She was a giant demoness again, but still resting gracefully on the foot of the bed, her broad, frightening visage silent and watchful. But she was unraveling at the edges, and it had been some time since she’d spoken. I had grown distracted. Whatever connection was holding our minds together was coming undone.

Standing suddenly, I physically shook off the sense of comfort I felt. Comfort meant complacence, and complacence was the death of growth. She’d said it before: insight required risk. But more than that, growth required pain.

The bed dissolved into individual threads of wind, and I landed on all fours on the water’s surface. Wind-drawn walls, windows, and furniture alike unfolded and billowed away. I stood, returning to my own humanoid form. The demoness became a dragon again, each scale gusting and distorted.

The bright lines of aetheric wind carved themselves into the rough stone walls of a ravine. The water beneath me began to pop and bubble as it glowed with a bright, violently violet light.

In a slow, controlled motion, I began sinking into the floor. The sensation was purely mental anguish, and it woke me from my drowsing completely, setting my mind alight at a cellular level.

I let out a hissing, pain-filled breath, imagining the water-turned-lava boiling the insight from my bones and releasing it into the atmosphere where I could see it manifest in the scenery around me.

The dragon watched from above, her long neck craning down from atop the ravine walls, her expression unreadable.

“I have to understand my new power or I’ll die,” I said, reciting the problem as if reading it from a book. “If I die, Arthur will fail to gain insight into the edict of Fate.” I let myself sink lower, the aetheric lava now all the way up to my neck. “Time. Time is an arrow. But through the path of aevum, I can influence that arrow. Bend it to avoid or strike a target at will. The insight I gained while experiencing Arthur’s past life is written on my spirit.”

I slipped entirely beneath the surface. The pain wiped every thought and impulse from my mind except for one immediate idea: the reclamation of that subconscious understanding of aevum and aether’s impact on time. I had to reconnect my body and spirit, make sense of all the many aspects of myself that were contradictory in nature.

I understand that I am both dragon and basilisk, the result of the lines of Indrath and Vritra. This is my lineage, but it is not my identity. I choose to be something beyond either of them. I chose to be unafraid.

I appreciate that I am an asura—a so-called greater being—bonded to a human, a “lesser.” Arthur is the third choice, the last hope, humanity’s ascension. There is no shame in my service to him, because through it the very idea of greater and lesser beings will be made meaningless.

I accept that I am order from chaos, spontaneous rebirth, the bond that holds against the inevitable. I am what the rest of my kind are not: changeable. I had my time, and I gave everything I was, and now my time has come again.

I am guardian and guide, caution and fury, daughter and partner.

But I am not my mother’s mistake or my father’s tool. I am not my grandfather’s treasure to be hoarded or weapon to be swung.

I reject the role required of my birth clans, and I refuse the name of Indrath or Vritra.

SYLVIE LEYWIN

I burst up from the aetheric lava, pressing against its bubbling surface as I dragged myself onto my hands and knees, and then stood trembling to my feet.

The ravine walls were collapsing, wind spinning like stones that bounced from one another then fluttered away as birds and butterflies.

The ground was mirror smooth again, and the wind calmed, then vanished entirely. I was standing alone atop the infinite expanse of water under an endless aetheric sky. The figure was nowhere to be seen, though I thought I could still sense her, feel her like breath on the back of my neck.

My reflection was looking up at me from the floor, this taller, leaner frame I had returned within, my face sharper, older, like Arthur’s, our hair and eyes almost making us look like twins. I leaned down, peering more closely. There was more of Arthur in my reflection than I had remembered, almost as if…

I gasped, sinking down onto my hands, staring.

Within my reflection, Arthur was staring back at me. Kind but serious, urgent but patient. He was speaking slowly, calmly, calling to me. I couldn’t hear his words, but I could understand his meaning. They needed me. He needed me.

The water-floor bulged upward. Arthur’s hands, his voice, his presence were pushing through into the mental world I’d become trapped within.

I let my hands sink through the water and interlaced my fingers with his.