Chapter 47: Surrender / Control

Subject: Location:

Wake up! A voice called out from the white expanse.

Caim was incredibly tired, and the exhaustion made it hard to think clearly. Forcing the thoughts along was like wading through a swamp, worried you might fall over if you were too hurried with your momentum.

If you don’t wake up, I might have to do something you won’t like. The voice continued, helping to rouse his attention.

“What won’t I like? Where is… The explosions!”

Even though he felt like he was speaking out loud, Caim couldn’t hear his own voice. It was more that he felt the “clarity” of spoken communication form within the disorder of loose thought.

“Yes, you are in a lot of danger right now,” A soundless voice answered. “Quite the situation. What to do…”

In the relative silence, Caim did hear a dripping sound. Maybe this was why he felt like he was traversing wetland? Or, at least what he imagined a wetland to be like, despite never having set foot in one in real life.

“Who are you?”

“Someone trying to help you. I’ll answer more thoroughly later if you can manage to wake yourself up.”

Caim felt alert. He blinked and tried everything he could think of to ‘wake himself up’. This seemed to be the most awake he could get.

“Where am I?”

He looked up at the sky and saw a familiar expanse. There weren’t enough stars, though, at maybe no more than a dozen. However, it was comforting. More comforting than the dim grey light of the horizon stretching on endlessly in every direction.

“You tell me. I keep telling you to wake up. If you do that, you’ll be someplace you know.”

This expanse felt comfortable. It held a pervasive sense of belonging, like he wouldn’t have to worry about anything if he only just stayed here.

“You really don’t know where I am?” he asked the voice again.

Three more stars appeared, blinking into existence before his very eyes. Eyes set on the stars. Eyes are watching them. Their eyes were watching him.

It was still rather difficult to concentrate.

“If you mean where you think you are, then no. If you mean where you actually are… also no. I did what I could to rouse you, but it doesn’t seem to have worked like I’d hoped. I have no more control over this intermediary space than you do. I only made the decision to bring you here.”

The phrase “no control” had a nice feeling to it. Caim smiled and continued looking up at the stars.

“Caim?”

When he didn’t answer, it seemed to disappoint the night sky. The stars hoped he would continue his dialogue, so he did.

“I feel better here. I want to stay. I think I’ve been trying too hard to get nowhere pleasant, and this might be what enlightenment feels like.”

“Caim. Nothing is safe about where you are. Look… I don’t really understand it, but you really don’t want to stay in such close contact with a greater conduit. What you are feeling is not ‘enlightenment’. I don’t know what it is, I have only stories to go off of, but it definitely isn’t enlightenment.”

Caim was only half listening. He was more concerned with what the stars wanted than this overly-demanding voice. What could he do to earn their approval?

“Now you’re starting to worry me. I was wrong to do this. Good news is I can fix this with you here. I’m going to seize limited control, but I know you won’t like it. I would prefer to have your permission.”

While he wondered if he should give his permission, he felt a ripple through the “water” around him, as if to affirm that this was the right choice.

He waited and saw more stars appear. He felt a fleeting touch of the warmth again. But inside, he knew that leaving this place meant losing a place in the world he’d always longed for. He just hadn’t known that longing before arriving.

Will I be able to return? He wondered.

When he did this, a cascade of stars appeared, and he felt such all-encompassing ecstasy.

“Do it,” he answered reluctantly. “You have my permission.”

It was the right choice. Caim would do anything to find his way back here. He would find a way.

Subject: Mille Location: Maliscade - Blightbane Guild

Between humans, cartemi, and faron, only a faron would be able to interpret a discrepancy like this. But that didn’t mean Mille understood what she was looking at when she saw Caim staring through her.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“Do you know me?”

“Yes, Caim. Do you remember who I am?”

He didn’t hit his head very hard, but maybe that was all it took to cause memory impairment. Was some kind of cognitive problem distorting his magic too?

His eyes weren’t visually any different, nor could Mille detect anything else specifically wrong. He was somehow “disconnected”, or maybe, “replaced”.

“Yes, well… did you know that there is someone dangerous in… this general area?” Caim inquired, waving his hand behind him without looking.

Mille looked around and was somewhat thankful no one else was paying any attention to them. The knights and Guild fighters were still trying to break the stranger’s barrier. The situation was just too chaotic for anyone to have attention to spare.

Behind him, Caim’s summoned magical creature of metal was circling the stranger in the sky, firing projectiles autonomously. Magic lanterns reflected their blue hues off the creature’s metallic sheen.

“You don’t need to be looking at something to attack it?” she asked him, choosing perhaps not the best moment to indulge her curiosity.

He continued to look through her with a glassy-eyed blind stare.

“How well do you know me?” Caim asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Are we… doing the whole ‘pre-mating ritual’ thing? ”

“No!” Mille answered a little too loudly.

What kind of conversation was this to be having in the middle of a battle? She’d heard of personality changes after trauma, but this couldn’t be what that was like, could it?

“Good. I don’t know how he feels, but I don’t want to interfere in his life,” Caim mumbled.

Great. He wasn’t referring to himself in the first person anymore.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” he began, but she ran to cover his mouth before he could speak.

Mille didn’t get the chance. Caim rather clumsily batted her arms away with his and looked down in confusion. It was then that she noticed that their surroundings had changed.

As if covered in a liquid, domed curtain, the air around the two of them trembled, flowing down the face of this invisible dome. Stray magic residue from failed attempts by the knights to breach the stranger’s barrier failed to enter this enclosed space too. It was an invisible wall, and the sound from the outside was tremendously muffled.

“One of Safeguard’s advanced functions. He can’t use it yet, but I’ve marked you as an ally and activated a mechanism that isolates us from our surroundings. I can’t do anything about the pitiful output of that ‘Scion’ power, but it will be enough.”

“Enough for what?”

Caim, or Caim’s hand, rather, pointed over to the glowing stranger in the air with Scion.

“That one’s power is strong, protecting the user while using attacks directed at them to produce a kind of “feedback”. But he is not using it at full strength, and he can’t. I almost feel bad for whoever his master was. Both for their loss and for their pitiful lack of talent.”

“That thing you were going to tell me before. Are you perhaps… Vera?”

Caim flashed a surprised smile Mille had never seen before. He looked flattered by the question, even adorably so, all while continuing to look past her. Were his eyes no longer functional?

“You know who Vera is? You know who I am?”

“Not really, but I’ve heard your name, and I know you are a talented magician. You sent Caim here after teaching him this strange magic you are using.”

Vera, through Caim, was nodding and smiling conspiratorially. Mille didn’t like this.

“My senses are limited like this, so I don’t know precisely how you are reacting. Your physiology is also unfamiliar, but you don’t have to be afraid. I don’t want to trouble myself with causing problems for Caim. I’m only doing this to keep him from dying.”

There was a moment of awkward silence.

“Why are you afraid of me?”

“You are a powerful magician. I don’t know your customs for showing respect, placing me at even more of a disadvantage,” Mille admitted bluntly, looking up at firing at the stranger’s barrier against a colorful backdrop of magical discharge. “You can stop this danger here from happening from wherever you are, using Caim’s body like it’s yours.”

“This body is very different from my own, I’m happy to say. I won’t hurt you or anyone else after putting that poor creature out of its misery. This is hard enough already without me doing things I don’t want to do.”

Just what did Vera mean by that? Was she insulting him, or was she happy to be female? The name implied she was female, but maybe assumptions only led Mille further from the truth. This person wasn’t from The Shrouded Theocracy. She didn’t even know where exactly they were from.

Vera asked Mille for her name, and she gave it up without argument.

“Before you ask, Mille, I won’t explain what I’m doing, but I will tell you it is as pleasant and painless as controlling a puppet with invisible strings. Oh, but let’s add that I can’t see the puppet, and I can only tell where the strings are by a rather clumsy touch. Oh, but don’t go imagining me a puppeteer or something, especially an untalented one at that.”

This personality, through Caim’s mouth, was somewhat humorous. He’d probably be happy Mille thought so. The guy lacked pride, which wasn’t such a bad thing.

“I don’t follow.”

“Do you not have puppets wherever we are? I should have saved that one for Caim. ...He hates me, doesn’t he. I believe connecting with him more would improve our arrangement.”

It wasn’t a question.

“I don’t know. I don’t know him very well.”

“How did he get this armor?” Vera asked, turning Caim’s body in place. “I don’t know what it looks like, but it’s blocking sensation, so it must be somewhat protective.”

“My friend and I paid for it. We didn’t want him to die.”

A particularly loud and spectacular spell broke through the dampening sphere around Caim and Mille, around Vera and Mille, rather.

“Oh? Whyever did you do that? Are you using Caim for something? Did you lie about being uninterested?”

“I would never lie to you, Vera,” Mille tried to emphasize as best she could. “My friend is very interested in him, but not in that way. I think. She just wants a battle buddy, and she decided it will eventually be Caim. It’s all she ever talks about now. So, his survival is a mutual gain.”

Caim’s body twitched.

“What is it you’re fighting?”

“The Blight.”

The answer seemed to satisfy Vera on that matter, but it didn’t evoke any particular response.

She couldn’t possibly not know what the Blight is, could she?

While Mille answered these and many more questions, she wondered what Vera’s motive was. Did she really abandon Caim? Or, was he still working for her in some capacity? She’d stepped in to protect him, by her own words, so it might be the latter.

Without looking, Vera seemed to notice a large black crack in the air around the enemy. Spells, including Scion’s piercing projectiles, were still being repelled, but the barrier was close to breaking.

“Almost done now,” Vera announced, laying down rather oddly and abruptly. “I’ve repaired the injured bodies while we’ve been chatting, but I can’t guarantee the structure won’t collapse and hurt their frail bodies all over again.”

She gestured for Mille to join her, and together they continued the conversation on the floor. Above, a shattering sound signaled the destruction of the stranger’s bubble. Vera waved Caim’s hand, and the metal creature floating above them disappeared.

“What’s this? A death wail? What good’s a tool if it’s in pieces? What use is breaking even more things?”

“Why isn’t that one exploding?” Mille thought to ask.

“Exploding? He just did,” Vera remarked, pointing at a black and white space of unstable energy around where the stranger had been.

The stranger’s body was slowly vanishing… like a blightbeast would, only more violently.

“If you mean some other kind of explosion, I believe he used his power to absorb whatever harm may have come to him. That’s what his power does. It protects the self and then discharges a counterforce at the user’s discretion. This feeble display is nothing compared to what he was trying to do and what I successfully stopped.”

“Please don’t tell him I did this. I want him to hear it first from me. I did technically ask for his permission, but he probably won’t remember that part.”

His permission? What?

Mille nodded that she would ‘let Vera explain’, whatever that meant in this case. She felt it better not to interfere in their relationship. A complicated relationship, by the sound of it.

“I lasted as long as I could, but it was worth it to learn about what kind of situation I put him in,” Vera said weakly. “Ask something else, and I might answer.”

Mille didn’t have time to compile a list of priority questions in her head, so she just blurted out what came to mind.

“Are you still his teacher?”

“No. Yes? He still has a lot to learn from me, but I’ll also be learning from his experiences.”

Caim’s face was deathly serious as Vera said this. She looked conflicted and pained. This wasn’t in line with how she’d been acting.

“Are you his supporter?” Vera asked very seriously.

“Yes, I would consider myself a supporter of all seekers who work for us.”

“I don’t know what that means, but be his supporter, and I think he’ll make it worth your effort. No promises, but I saw what he would do for the creatures he likes. Hopefully, life here will be better for him for a little while. If not, it won’t matter anyway, but I would like him to have some fun, I guess.”

Looking over at Vera, Mille saw Caim’s glassy eyes slowly close. His breathing slowed.