Chapter 214 - Paper Reprise

“The Divine Mandates…?” Argus suddenly felt a piercing pain as a memory was triggered from Pix’s words.

The phrase meant nothing to him at the moment, but he felt that they held a deep significance to his soul. Earlier, Pix had mentioned something called the Soul’s Mandate. A law that apparently he had discovered, long ago, but no longer remembered.

“Do you remember?” Pix asked, tilting her head.

“Yes— No… It feels like it’s there, information that I used to know…” Argus muttered, pressing his palm against his eye. “The more I try to remember, the more it hurts.”

“You’re such an idiot.” Pix rolled her eyes, “If it hurts that much, just don’t do it.”

“I can’t.” Argus said, “Please, help me remember.”

“Don’t crawl back to me when you regret it.” Pix said.

Argus was about to respond when he saw that Pix’s light fur had suddenly turned black and her eyes rolled up into the back of her head until only the bloodshot whites of her eyes were shown.

The sky turned pitch black as the colours in the world inverted. The ashes falling from the sky turned white, falling down to the ruins of the library and blanketing it like snow.

Pix raised her right hand up, her fingers extending into long, black claws. Short fur sprouted on her face as her face became bestial and wild. The youthful half-human girl transformed into a terrible, nightmarish monster before his eyes. Wordlessly, she reached out over the library. The black sun overhead cast long, white shadows across the terraced library floor under her long, bony limbs as they extended unnaturally into the air.

In the center of the atrium she closed her fingers, as if grasping at an invisible sheet. The air shimmered against her claws as she ripped open a tear in the void. A white light shot out of the tear as piles of black paper began pouring out. It began slowly at first, but increased at a rapid pace until the tear was bulging with the huge volume of paper that poured out like a flood.

The mounds of paper splattered down to the ground in heavy, wet clumps, spreading out across the ‘snow’ covered shelves and aisles like thick black gobs of ink.

Argus watched with wide eyes as he couldn’t help but feel horrified by the grotesque way the pulp gushed out into the world. A brackish miasma rose up from the inky mounds, disseminating into the air.

As the cloud of miasma dispersed, Argus found himself remembering.

This was knowledge of the world that had been sealed up for a millennia, locked up by an unnatural force, left to fester and rot. Knowledge that had been forcefully ripped from the minds of those who knew about it and sealed away.

“Ah-!” Argus groaned, falling to his knees as a throbbing pain filled his head. It felt like his brain was bloating and pressing against the confines of his skull.

Memories flooded into his brain of the soul-splitting ritual that he had performed here, in the library. The library had already been incinerated when he had come here with Pix. The ritual very similar to the one in the temple in Huan had been set up, complete with candles and blood and a bronze dagger.

Pix was there with him, in her bestial form. After Argus painfully extracted his soul with the dagger, Pix tore a rift in space and threw the glowing soul shard into it. The colours in the world inverted as she held up a twisted black wand. The surface of the wand was covered in rasps and thorns. Pix muttered a few words, causing the wand to glow with a black, purplish light.

This strange object was the focal point for the ritual that had locked up the events of this space, sealing them as Hidden Knowledge.

Even as Argus watched her perform the ritual he could not recall the nature of the wand, where it came from, or even what Domain or even Kingdom it was attuned to.

The memories came rushing back…

There was one other person in the room - a tall, beautiful woman with long, golden hair. She wore a shining silver breastplate embossed with gold, and long leather boots. She was Ezra, the Angel of Fate that had been with him in the temple in Huan and assisted him with the final soul-splitting ritual.

“I… remember.” Argus said quietly, looking up at the demonic looking Pix with her pitch black fur and warped, elongated limbs.

She twisted her neck and looked over at him with glowing saucer shaped eyes and an empty expression. Her face had elongated and turned caprine, the small horns at the top of her head had grown out and were curling in on each other in a constant spiralling motion.

Illusory whispers and cackles echoed around them, ancient words that twisted at the aetheric energies in the room in a maddening chorus. They did not seem to come from Pix, but were instead a terrible property of the arcane ritual itself.

Pix’s breath escaped her lips in a cold, black mist as she reached into the rift with her long fingers and pulled out a glowing white orb.

A pang of terror filled Argus’ as he felt the instant connection between himself and the glowing orb. He felt the orb searching for him with an aggressive yet desperate instinct. The aura coming out of it was familiar, but rather than cold and comforting, this familiarity was born from trauma and tragedy.

“No-“ Argus’ eyes widened as he suddenly felt the raw emotions that he had felt when he had split his soul.

Frustration, pain and loneliness.

Terror. Fear of the truth that he had uncovered, and the hopelessness of being unable to fix it.

Above all, one emotion reigned supreme.

Desperation.

You wanted this. Pix’s voice repeated in his mind. Cold, chiding and full of remorse. He wasn’t sure whether she was saying it or if it was his imagination.

The nightmarish goat-shaped angel clutched the orb between two of her claws, holding it out toward Argus.

He shook his head weakly, his whole body trembling. But even in his fear he knew it was too late to turn back.

The orb shot out from Pix’s clutches, blasting straight into his heart. His body convulsed from the impact as sheafs of paper embossed with glowing runes tore out of his skin and flesh, spraying behind him and leaving a gaping hole in his chest.

He grasped at his head and screamed as a blinding light burst out from within his throat and eyes. Complicated symbols appeared across his face, shining with a bright bluish white light as his skin peeled off in paper thin layers.

The black pulp that lay in heaps over the shelves began to smoke and smoulder as a vortex formed, sucking in the inky black papers and ashes into the hole in Argus’ chest.

The papers flew into the air, clumping and forming tendrils that were sucked into the hole in Argus’ chest and absorbed.

Memories of eras past, of secrets lost and secrets hidden. Memories of who he used to be before he crippled himself and cut himself into pieces. All the thick, corrupted knowledge and secrets blossomed back to life in his mind like weeds.

Argus fell to his knees as waves of papers rippled off his body and fluttered to the floor around him. His flesh turned to paper thin with a subtle texture. His clothes gained the appearance of origami, constructed from thousands of intricate and subtle folds. All his accessories too, turned into paper, save for the golden astrolabe which remained unchanged.

His body crinkled as he looked down at his paper hands. His breathing slowed as the hole in his chest gradually filled up and absorbed the black inky pulp. The glowing runes all over his skin gradually faded, though his body remained made of paper.

Floating in the air in the center of the atrium, Pix closed the tear in the space. Her stretched, black body gradually reverted back to its original demi-human form as the humanity returned to her eyes. The strange inverted colours of their surroundings returned back to their normal hues.

She floated down slowly toward Argus with a solemn calm look on her face, giving him time to recover from the shock of reuniting with his soul shard.

“I see…” Argus whispered coarsely, coming to an understanding, “It was the strain of discovering the Hidden Knowledge that I was trying to save myself from.”

“You remember now?” Pix asked.

“Not all of it, no.” Argus shook his head, still staring at his paper hands, “There are yet more memories and pieces of my soul that are scattered across the world. I am not ready to retrieve them, but I now know what preparations I must make.”

He pushed himself to his feet, stroking his paper chin with his paper fingers. “It feels so strange. It is like I’ve slept for a thousand years, waiting for the perfect time to wake up...”

“Hmph.” Pix snorted, “Rise and shine, Paper Prince.”