Chapter Twenty-Nine - A Bong

“You know, I probably would have just meddled a bit, poked at a few things, then after a decade or two, I would have gone right back to sleep.

I’m tired you see. Dead tired, even, of machinations and politics and all of those boring little mortal things. In the end, how much do I really care about the people in this world, or the world itself, for that matter?

But then, you just had to steal from me.”

***

The gazebo in the garden’s centre was a work of functional art. It’s many pillars, all covered in delicate carvings, held up a roof that would keep off rain and sun while its open sides allowed for a spectacular view of the top of the mountain nearby and of the landscape below. I could imagine someone sitting at one of the wicker seats and merely enjoying the sight of clouds weaving around the peaks.

A stone table sat in the room’s middle, large and imposing, with a polished surface unmarred by anything. In the middle of this table sat a contraption of hooks and pipes and delicate jade handles around a central bowl.

“A hookah?” I asked. The device was decorated with little dragons and other mythical creatures holding up the various components. It certainly fit the aesthetic of the gazebo, but its use didn’t. “I wasn’t expecting that,” I admitted.

Chamomile followed me into the gazebo, her steps whisper-quiet to contrast with Gong Zhu’s heel strikes. “It’s one of the Five Fonts,” she said. “One of the most important artifacts to the gods of this age.”

“Do not touch it, Harold,” Gong Zhu warned. “You have done enough that is sacrilegious today.”

I tilted my head to the side and inspected the font closer. “Does it have a proper name, or is it just called ‘one of the Five Fonts?’” I asked.

“They’re all named. This one is called Ariel,” Chamomile said. “Are you done looking at it?”

I eyed her for a moment without looking her way with my head. One of the advantages of not having real eyes. She wasn’t fidgeting or showing any of her nervousness, but her companion was shifting enough for the both of them.

“This Font, how does it work?”

“When the gods gather, the bowl is lit using divine fire, a smoke rises into that bowl, and we take some of that essence through one of the pipes,” Chamomile said. “It’s hardly a complex process. The last of the old gods built it well.”

“And this makes you stronger?” I asked.

She nodded slowly. “It helps us cultivate our divinity.”

I pushed one of the seats by the table aside to better see the device. It was very much magically active. Something in the main segment of it was creating a great deal of power. Or, rather, if it followed the law of conservation of magic, then it wasn’t so much creating that power as it was giving off that power as a sort of waste energy.

So, what was it, exactly.

The thing throbbed, its magic pulsing like a heartbeat, one that was reaching out towards something. Towards me.

“Oh no,” I said. “Please tell me you were not so foolish as to do that.”

“Do what?” Chamomile asked.

I bought a hand up and allowed a little bit of my magic to gather by my palm. The hookah responded, pulsing in time with the magic I held. The frequency of it, insofar as magic had a frequency, matched perfectly.

“What is at the centre of the font?”

Chamomile looked to Gong Zhu, then back. “I don’t know. It was a gift to us, when our new pantheon was still very young, when we were still as weak as some of the greatest mortals.”

“So, something relatively small, that reacts to my magic, that is giving off a lot of wasted energy. Something that is fairly old, but not so old that the gods had it in my time or I would know of it.” I stared at the hookah, then gestured at it.

“Disassemble.”

A neat little Artificer spell, that. With a wave of magic, the device came apart, sections sliding out of each other, screws spinning apart, and each segment floating to the side to lay itself out in neat rows.

Chamomile gasped. “You broke it!”

“No, I disassembled it. Entirely different,” I said. A final part clicked as it landed onto the table. “And I did so for good reason as I reached out and plucked it up.

It was the piece at the centre of it all, a glassy marble a little smaller than a tightened fist. In its middle was a swirling vortex of magical forces, spinning and swarming around a black point in the dead centre of the marble.

The marble rumbled as electrical jolts from its centre reached out and kissed the tips of my boney fingers. A small press of my magic soothed and calmed the roiling storm within.

“What is it?” Chamomile asked. “Why did you remove it?”

“This is a phylactery,” I said before turning it over. There were only two blemishes on the perfect marble’s surface. The numbers three and two embossed into its side. “Number thirty-two. I would need to look into my notes to see where this one was hidden.”

“A phylactery?” Chamomile asked. “I’m unfamiliar with the term.”

“Mortals have souls. It is the essential thing that allows one to touch the weave, to leave a mark in the structure of the world. It is through the soul that the system operates, and through the soul of all things that divinity is born.”

I twisted the marble this way and that, inspecting it for cracks or marks, but it seemed fine.

“When a soul leaves its physical host, the owner can be said to have died. Their memories are gone, their mind is disrupted to the point of uselessness, and their mortal body begins to deteriorate. The principles of Necromancy involve the opposite of that. Taking a new soul and planting it into an old body, or creating an artificial one to manipulate something like a skeleton or corpse.”

“Morbid,” Chamomile said.

“Magic cares little for anyone’s concept of decency.” I tossed the marble up and caught it, feeling its weight in my hand, both physical and not. “One of the paths to immortality is to take your soul out of your body and place it into a container that is a little more durable while still maintaining control of your body. It is exceptionally complex magic.”

“Is that what that is?” Chamomile asked.

“It is,” I said. “When I made Phylactery Number One I discovered that while my soul was, for the most part, within the phylactery, some of it remained in my bony old body. So why not heal it? It took decades of study into some rather esoteric magics, but soon I had restored my souls to a full state, though the one within the phylactery was mostly dormant.”

“You have two souls,” Chamomile said.

“I realized that having merely two repositories was hardly a true path to immortality. So I created Phylactery Two through Forty Two in the span of a century or so. That’s about the time that the God of Death decided to interfere in my affairs. He didn’t survive the interference as I don’t appreciate meddlers when I’m doing an experiment. I died quite a few times during that little skirmish.”

“That, that thing, the Arial Font, it’s one of your phylacteries?” Chamomile asked. She didn’t seem terribly comforted by the idea.

“It is indeed,” I said. “Number Thirty-Two, of the first generation.”

“First generation.”

I looked at her. ‘You thought I’d stop at just one iteration? I had ideas, ways to perfect the process and ways to improve it. Look at how much magic is leaking from this one. It’s sloppy work, signs that I didn’t yet know what I was doing.”

Chamomile licked her lips. “How many?”

“I haven’t the faintest clue,” I admitted. “I wiped my own memory of some of their creation as a failsafe against future tampering with my memories. Some went into other planes, others were launched out into the stars on million-year long journeys to distant suns and worlds.”

“So our power...”

I nodded. “Wasted energy escaping a poorly designed phylactery.” I tilted the marble this way and that. “It's safe to say you have a bit of me in you.”

“But it made us so much stronger,” she said.

“Divine beings need divinity like mortals need food,” I explained. “Or perhaps a better analogy would be that divine beings need divinity like a fire needs fuel.” I slipped the marble into a pocket.

“Reassemble.”

The hookah’s parts flew together in a twisting mass of glowing magics and within moments the Font was returned to its pristine condition. “There. All better.”

“But there’s nothing giving it power now,” Gong Zhu said.

“Get that Wan boy to add some of his precious herbs to it,” I said. “It might have an effect. Either way, I think my curiosity was satisfied for the day.”

“You’re leaving?” Chamomile said. “After destroying the font, after so casually taking away the source of our power?”

“Would you rather I stay?” I asked. “Truthfully, I’m not even angry. Taking the excess power from my phylactery that way is rather clever, no doubt required some fine tuning and decent preparation, and it shows a willingness to try something new in the face of a new situation. You’ve grown strong enough to support yourselves, haven’t you?”

“We have,” she agreed reluctantly.

“Well, there you have it. I’m taking back what is mine, and I’m not turning this mountain range into flatlands in some sort of misguided sense of... honour or injured pride or whatever. I’m just leaving. You’ll figure it out. The old gods grew with slow increments and with the occasional spot of hard work. You can no doubt do the same.”

I scanned the gazebo with my arcane sight, looking for anything else that might catch my eye, but other than a few godly artefacts tucked away here and there, there wasn’t much to pique my interest.

“On that note, I’ll be off. Thanks for the offer of tea. Do give my regards to the other gods if and when they show up.” I nodded to the two ladies, spun on a heel, and walked off.

I had a few things to think on.

For all that I’d said that I wasn’t angry, that wasn’t entirely truthful. I was somewhat impressed that someone had found such a clever use for one of my soul containers, but it still felt like a violation. Like walking home to find someone sitting in your living room, leafing through your books without permission.

I didn’t cast judgement on these young gods. Chamomile had been kind, and Gong Zhu respectful. It would be simply rude of me to return that with destruction and such.

Nonetheless, I would have to invest a little bit of time and effort into looking into the other four Fonts.

The walk down the Heavenly Path was rather nice. The sun was well on its way to setting, but the walking was easy, especially with gravity on my side on the way down. I ever crossed the monk being carried by a trio of young priestesses.

Arriving at the town at the base of the mountain, I glanced around until I sensed Alex and the limpet in one of the nearby inns.

I stepped in, ignored the gasp from the proprietor on seeing my skeleton face, and moved up a staircase and to the floor where I found Alex tidying up a room and the Limpet reading on a cough.

“Daddy,” Alex greeted.

“Master!” the limpet cheered.

“Hello,” I said as I closed the door behind me. “It’s nice to see you both as well. Now, I’ve had something of an interesting evening.” I pulled the marble from my pocket and eyed it a bit before tossing it to the limpet.

She fumbled it out of the air.

“I’ll need a moment to think. I believe that in the morning we’ll be heading north. Get your sleep, limpet.”

“Yes Master!” the limpet said as she looked between me and the marble.

***