It’s uncanny seeing Karanos create such a perfect projection of our team, not a detail out of place. A Light practitioner can create incredible illusions and projections, their affinity permitting, but accuracy is always a challenge. To create convincing images, Light practitioners might practice the same illusions repeatedly. Even then, the illusions may still be imperfect–it’s difficult to visualize every single detail in a scene.

Glossy programmatics created a way to systematically record and reproduce the real world as projections, accomplishing what was considered by most impossible by all but Light practitioners with a high Beginning affinity and an eye for details.

No wonder people thought that Karanos was a Beginning practitioner on his home world, I transmit to Maria.

He’s shown us projections before, which were always impressive, but on the level I’d expect of a masterful Light practitioner. Maria pauses. This is the first time we’ve seen him create a projection for an extended time, showing complex scenes of multiple practitioners applying their practices to different ends.

To the other proteges around us who don’t know Karanos, I can imagine this being one spectacle of many. In the faction complex, they’re surrounded by brilliant ascendants. But I can’t help a swell of pride from forming in my chest.

I never thought I’d feel anything like pride towards Karanos. I agreed to accept him as my mentor and follow him across the cosmos, but... To feel pride for someone is a step past that. It’s to view their victories as your own. It’s easy for Karanos to feel pride towards someone like me–my success is a reflection of his efforts and teaching.

I shake my head, refocusing my attention on Karanos’s ongoing projection. I may have lived through what he’s showing, but I find myself entranced by how I look in his–and other people’s–eyes.

In the Light projection, I’m wrapped up like an assassin in dark Death energy strips that cover every inch. There’s something inherently disturbing about how the strips cover even my eyes and mouth, something inhuman about the way I drag myself around like a puppet, my limbs slack at my sides.

Even though her eyes glow bright cyan and her skin has an unnatural pallor in the projection, Maria looks more human than I do.

The projection jumps forward to us discerning the centipede’s location in the void. Karanos tweaks the illumination so our personal details are well-lit and visible, rather than veiled in darkness. Then Ketu and Danessa appear, sparking the fight that ends with the centipede descending toward the surface of Vizier’s Crown.

Aside from the instances when I activated my third eye with the dagger, I fought most of the battle relying on my vital vision to see the world, rather than my eyes. However, vital vision was unable to capture the elements used by the elementalists as more than gray smudges. Now seeing a visual representation of the melee, it's crazier than I recall.

The parts of the centipede transformed by the dagger smolder like torches in the abyss of space. I can see in much greater detail how the team’s elementalists used the transformed limbs as weapons to wage an assault on the centipede’s main body. Closer to me towards the front of the centipede, Marcus is a ghost wielding his affinity like a scalpel to sever segments of the centipede’s body while distracting Ketu, his Dark affinity cutting through the water elementalist’s ice barriers.

And then there’s me and Danessa embroiled in conflict. In Karanos’s projection, Danessa has already transformed into a serpentine dragon with her ring of flesh shift. She dances around me and the centipede, the dragon’s lithe body well-suited for travel in the void. The projection fails to capture the ebbs and flows of vitality as we trade blows, but anyone with eyes can witness how we weaponize the centipede’s flesh for our own ends. My army of constructs born from centipede flesh and chitin fill the scene, with Danessa snaking through them and collapsing the constructs with a caress of her whip-thin tail, drawing the energy of their soul gems into herself. Life practitioners can’t use soul gems as batteries like Death practitioners can, but she uses the soul gems that hover like an asteroid belt around her to empower her attacks. Like I can convert Life energy to Death energy, she, too, can transform Death to Life, using the Death energy like a stimulant.

To an outsider, I must look like a storybook villain–the man shrouded in tight wraps of dark energy, facing off against the elegant, life-bringing dragon. I’m well aware of what my practice looks like to others. I weaponized its ability to induce fear during the war on the Ho’ostar peninsula.

Do you not like seeing yourself like this? Maria asks.

Why do you ask?

Over our bond I sense a faint feeling of what might be...exasperation.

I sigh softly. I’m trying to save our world. I don’t really look like a savior, Maria.

You may be the anathema to smiles and sunshine, but those won’t save our world.

We reach the moment that Ketu and Danessa perish from the centipede’s vitality seeking array. As the rest of Karanos’s projection flies by, my interest wanes until the projection finally cuts off.

I just turned around to sneak a look–everyone is staring at us, Maria observes. And in particular, you. They didn’t see how you fought and controlled the centipede until now.

Does she think I haven’t been tracking the way heads have turned my way? Some try to hide their interest by sneaking glances, but others have stared at me without concern for politeness, their heads fixed on my position.

Maria continues, transmitting, Before, they all assumed you’d won due to trickery. It’s a valid conclusion to draw, and you’d be no less the victor for using such methods. What they didn’t expect was for you to win through application of skill.

Everyone here is skillful. The only surprise is that the newcomer competed on their level.

You controlled thousands of constructs all socketed with powerful soul gems, Maria continues. You wove the flesh of the centipede with skill matching Danessa’s, even though freshly-dead matter–still filled with vitality–is harder for a decemancer to control than a Life practitioner. Yes, I know you sucked all the vitality out of the chitin–I could see how you did it during the conflict–but that’s not supposed to be easy to do, Ian. Additionally, your ascendant energy isn’t as dense as Danessa’s, so you were fighting with that disadvantage as well. Finally, everyone saw you wielding the dagger to transform the centipede into a creature of the elements, rather than one of flesh and blood. You used an artifact to do so, but when considered together with everything else...your presence in that fight was undeniable.

She’s still ignoring the fact that the challenge was well suited for the skills of a Death practitioner, but I know she won’t accept that argument to downplay my role in the fight.

You think too highly of me, but I’m not complaining.

You really don’t understand, do you? Consider how much of the projection is focused on you. Karanos couldn’t look everywhere all the time, though he tried his best. He didn’t know that you’d win in the end–victory could have gone to Ketu and Danessa. But still, even though he should’ve been focusing on them equally... She trails off.

My throat tightens.

He’s proud of you, Ian. That’s why he’s been more sullen than usual the past day. Ash is taking you away, and it’s possible he might never get you back.

It’s just a sabbatical, and you’re coming with, too.

Just then, the projection reaches its conclusion, once more revealing the empty void surrounding the plane that gives it its namesake–Voidkeep.

—

I sit in the room where I first met Ash, the one where Crystal battled the ancient ascendant in a game.

It’s one of the only rooms that has a lock, not that locks do much to ascendants. I sit on the room’s lone couch with Crystal next to me, her head in my lap, too big to be comfortable. She and I are both silent, saying nothing, thinking nothing to one another. My head is bowed, my hands clasped over her cheek.

Maria is off with her ascendant mentor, Farona Pyre, the crass woman having agreed to give a critique of Maria’s performance during the hunt. Karanos has been flitting about like a social butterfly, my stellar performance inciting his peers’ interest.

Suddenly someone appears before the door, an ascendant who, like Karanos and Holiday, has mastered using their energy to move swiftly. It only takes a moment for me to recognize Ascendant Kuin, Alan’s sponsor–the ascendant who looks like a teen, is in charge of this year’s gathering of the faction, and loves to argue with Karanos.

He knocks on the door, an unexpectedly polite gesture. I didn’t think he liked me very much.

Sensing my thoughts, Crystal shifts her weight so that her head falls to the side, no longer pinning me down. Giving her a mournful look, I walk over and open the door.

On the shorter side, Kuin looks up at me expectantly.

“Bow your head, Ian,” Crystal says.

Right. I incline my neck, then step back, offering him entry. He walks into the room with graceful, soundless steps, his black boots shining in the yellow-tinged overhead lights.

“You have caught the eye of Ancient Ash,” he says. I sense some uncertainty in his voice, as though he’s not sure where he should begin the conversation. “As the steward of Voidkeep and the ordinator of the pageant, it is my responsibility to prepare you to receive your prize.”

“Thank you,” I reply, unsure of his intentions.

“You may have noticed that Ash and I bear a resemblance,” Kuin states.

“Your complexion is similar,” I concede. Pale, blond.

He smiles, revealing needle-like fangs. Those too. “Ash is a Life practitioner and could change any part of himself as he desired, but he appears to us now is his truest form.” He pauses for a moment, his expression inscrutable. “Ash hails from my world.”

“Your world must be quite old, then,” I reply.

“It is,” Kuin says, “though age isn’t everything. You have cycles of development, empires and kingdoms rising and falling as dynasties die out and new blood usurps the old. The prized weapons of Beginning practitioners are continually destroyed in conflagrations of fire, earthquake, flood, and hurricane, technology reset again and again, the average man left to suffer.”

His gaze becomes piercing. “Left to their own devices, practitioners tend to do rather terrible things. Some affinities are more predisposed to it than others based on their versatility and potential. Give a man a hammer and he can build a house or bludgeon someone to death. There is the potential for both creation and destruction. But give a man a poisoned sword and his options are more limited.

“Despite what I’ve just said, it’s true that not all knowledge and progress is lost through the ages. Life becomes more convenient for the everyman. But so does destruction.”

“They do tend to be coupled,” I say. “Great power can be used for good deeds or abused to wretched ends, and technology is power–rather, the fruits of progress are power, bought with the currency of time.”

Kuin frowns. “When I was a boy, there was a legend from ages past–its true origins lost to time–about a cruel Life practitioner who subjugated the entire world with an army of parasites. When they entered someone, their will was no longer their own.”

“The entire world?” I murmur, trying to imagine the scale of what Kuin is saying.

“A world at war, brought to peace when free will was stamped out. For ten years there was no war, no creativity, no children born. All were preserved by the insects within them, serving as a conduit through which vitality from the Life practitioner flowed. For ten years, the world was in stasis.

“And then one day, a comet from the heavens offered salvation, smiting down the despot and banishing him to tartarus, the empty, infinite pit. Do you understand?”

“I’d have to be dull not to,” I say. “He ascended and eventually became Ancient Ash. As for why he joined your faction...” I shake my head. “He was willing to do anything in the name of peace. Sounds like a good fit for your ideals.”

“He is no longer the same man from that legend. And a legend is a legend, after all–I’ve never gotten a confirmation or a denial from Ash himself. There’s no specific takeaway from this story, but I want you to go into this...sabbatical...prepared to deal with a man whose methods have been historically extreme.”

I feel an uncomfortable weight settle in my stomach. “Thank you for the warning.”

“You’re to meet him at the obelisk outside in an hour.”

I flinch. “Did Ancient Ash tell you how long this sabbatical will last?”

“Six months of time relative to Voidkeep,” Kuin says carefully. “But like Karanos, Ash is familiar with venturing into unstable areas of Eternity, sections where time flows differently.”

So it might be a lot longer, at least for me. I glance at Crystal.

“All of eternity lies before you, Ian–months are inconsequential,” she assures me. “Just make sure you come back.”