Name: Delta Alana Skyisle Age: [computational error] Species: Homomagicus [+ 4 in base Agility & Dexterity] Affinity: Infoscope [Affiliated skill bonus] Specialization: Soul hunter [+ Soul Devourer skill] Level: 5 Experience: 8451/1800 Health: 5/5 [-53%] Stamina: 5/5 [-42%] Mana: 5/5 [-12%] Mana regen: 5 m/hr [-11%] Strength: 0 Agility: 0 [+4] [-55%] Dexterity: 0 [+4] [-68%] Vitality: 1 [-28%] Charisma: 0 Magic: 1 [-6%] Luck: 0 Intelligence: 239 [-67%] Wisdom: 0 [-79%] Soul: 73 [-16] [-69%] Skills: [Infoscope LV 188] [x2] [-81%] [Soul-Devourer LV 4] [Info-tether LV 69] [-79%] [Beemancer LV 12] [-11%] [Vox Colony LV 0] [-21%] Vows: Sacrifice of: [Destruction] Affliction: [Soul Decay] [ - various % ] [ x 2 ]

I looked back from Delta's stats at the silver-haired girl sitting on the couch of the Computational Institute. She was hurt a lot worse than her avatar showed.

"Delta… how long have you been in the Astral?" I asked.

"Honestly? I don't know,” she sighed. “The tendril that was keeping track of time broke down a long time ago. Time gets extra screwy the deeper you go. Some currents rush faster and others slower. The System goes all glitchy too. It doesn't function well in a place made up of weird ghost bullshit. Linear algebra stats are meaningless in a world where time and space are warped, twisted up, changed. Perhaps the deep corrupted, twisted me up enough that the System can’t tell my age anymore. I can’t remember half of it.”

“I’m sorry,” I sighed. “I wish I could have been there for you.”

“It’s cold in the void between the stars,” Delta whispered. “I wouldn't have made it out on my own... would have been sucked into the Wheel along with your soul.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Who helped you find your way home?”

“The Phantom-Squid that marked us,” Delta uttered.

“Huh?!”

“The Infection pulled us back to her,” Delta pointed at my arm covered in silver cracks. “It's got an Info-Tether, one that’s a lot stronger than what you and I made.”

I gritted my teeth at the revelation.

“She’s not going to let us go,” Delta whispered with a shudder. “She’s never going to let us go. She was down there too… chasing me away from bigger predators.”

“W-what?!” I gasped at her.

“She could have swallowed you and I a thousand times over, but she didn’t. She pretended to attack me and then let me go. Vanished and appeared again. Would cut into me with one of her threads and then not finish the job. Send out her other children to chase me… driving me out of the deep step by step.”

“She’s… led you out of the Astral, back to Skyisle?”

“The infection is strong in us. She’s been playing with us, Dante… not like a cat plays with a mouse, no. Like a fox playing with its cubs. She has to be hundreds of years old, if not thousands. A skilled hunter, a killer. She was teaching me how to hunt in the Astral! How to kill other, smaller, weaker phantoms!” Delta wept.

I shuddered.

“She’s treating us like… her children,” Delta curled up into a ball. “Little, lost sharks that got too far away from home.”

My thoughts started to spiral. I didn’t know what to say.

“I’ve seen her tear through things and I’ve seen her play with her food. To her, we are marked already… it’s not a question of IF we become Soul-Hunters, Phantoms, aberrations. It’s just a matter of WHEN and she is… quite patient. I don't know what she wants... don't understand why she didn't finish me off.”

“It doesn’t matter what she wants,” I said. “We will outsmart her, break the leash when we are ready.”

“I don’t know if the leash can be broken or if it even should be broken,” Delta whispered. “Things like her have been nibbling on humans for countless generations. Humanity isn’t on the winning side in Novazem. The hex-lanterns keep the ghosts away, but they can't... don't hurt or kill them. There is no hope, no heaven and hell is a lot closer than you think…”

“Where’s my upbeat, positive Delta?” I asked, petting her head.

“She grew up in the deep,” the answer came back. “You can’t fix anything, Dante. You can’t stop the fall of Skyisle. From what I saw there’s more holes into the Astral than twelve years ago. Whatever the Valley of Death is, it’s turning the barrier between the physical and the Astral into metaphorical shredded cheese. It’s leeching power from everyone’s souls here, not letting people get stronger.”

“I can try,” I shook my head.

“Did you try to stop Chernobyl alone, with your bare hands?” She shot back. “There’s nothing you can do in this case! I can’t even begin to calculate the kind of power that would be required to fix the shredded gaps in the fabric of the world. Even if we fix every Astral Engine obelisk in Skyisle, it won’t be enough to do anything about the Valley’s pull! It’s hopeless! Even if you get to level one thousand it won’t be enough!”

“No,” I sighed. “But… I’m not alone. I have you. We have each other… that’s a start.”

“It’s a start,” Delta muttered and closed her eyes. She looked like she completely lost hope.

I knew that mere words wouldn't be enough. I thought of what I could do to cheer her up. The one thing I had learned from mom is the calming power of her songs. I turned to Bessie. A soft piano melody began to play in the background. I started to sing, my voice gaining strength, resonating, cascading, growing deeper. I had Bessie auto-tune, combine my juvenile voice with an echo of my other, older-self, make it sound as if both of us were singing in unison.

Mom had never explained to me what the words meant, but I knew them by heart.

By the second stanza, Delta joined in, singing along with me. She remembered it, as mom had sung it to both of us twelve years ago while we worked on the Rewind ward.

“Allsmiru yad, un induranel gushi

Serdi yarni zar, i veznji tishi

Sandavi eno an iijaavri caasch

Je hember va ne Alania nash

En cembroti, la vi,

Kan jacati se mi.”

Her tears stopped. I looked at her curiously. She seemed to have calmed down. The song worked.

One of Delta’s silver tendrils reached out and touched Bessie and I suddenly understood what the words stood for. She had used the Infoscope to identify the meaning of every word of the song. I too finally understood what mom’s lullaby was about.

The Sons and Daughters of Alania rose up against the gods and built a mighty, prosperous Empire. Through the abyss-gate Alanian Archmages brought back our fallen heroes, to march upon the vile enemies standing at our walls. The enemy Archwizards had pulled the stars down from the sky and bathed our great cities in death. We, the Skyisle Sentinels, remember our legacy, a time when we stood as gods and reached for the cosmos beyond. We are last. We are the keepers of the hearth, the last outpost, the last light that must never dim - Skyisle. Descend into the white city and reclaim your legacy when the curse-effulgence ends, children of Alania. Let your Soul-Song guide you home.”

“Holy crap!” I blinked when the song was done.

"Yeah," she nodded. "It's ancient Allanian. I've picked up some of it from the minds of remnants of ghost-shards I feasted upon in the deep Astral."

I frowned, not sure how to feel about her declaration of eating ancient ghosts of people.

“I think I know what happened here,” Delta uttered, her eyes glittering with silver. “Like you, I didn’t think that the lullaby was important, didn't bother to study it... but it’s actually our legacy!”

I thought about the phrase 'abyss-gate' and ‘fallen heroes’.

“Phantoms?” I asked.

Delta nodded. “The Alanian Archmages must have opened a gate into the Astral.”

“Maybe we can find a way to close this gate,” I said. “Lock the Phantoms out?”

“Maybe,” she smiled. “Thank you for giving me hope, brother.”

“You can thank our mom,” I muttered. “She’s the one who passed the song down to us.”

“Okay,” Delta nodded.

“I heard someone got himself two weeks of cleaning at the Church?” Dad boomed when I came down the stairwell for dinner.

I shrugged.

“What did you do this time?” He asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, handing him a folded letter.

Dad opened up the paper and his eyebrows went up. “Cassie! Cass!” He yelled.

Mom emerged out of the kitchen with Diana in tow.

“Sit,” dad ordered.

Mom squinted at him and sat down. “What’s going on?” She inquired.

“Dante’s got a letter from the Emerald City Academia! Look!” Dad handed mom the letter Delta had just printed for me.

Mom looked at the elaborate bee-printer-made logo of the [Emerald City Academia of Magic].

“How?” She looked at me.

“It got delivered by an owl from Agamemnon,” I lied. “I got this letter a week ago. There were instructions attached to it from Great-Aunt Delta on how to take care of the bee colony upstairs. Elder Delta told me everything about what Kliss had done. I’m not going back to the Church of Equality. Not until I am stronger.”

Mom frowned. Dad shook his head.

“You’re twelve! Your Soul-Song isn't even unlocked! Do you think that you can just…” Mom started on one of her tirades, clearly not wanting to let go of me.

I brought up my hand. Using Create-Modify I drained nearly all of my mana, creating a tiny bubble of compressed phosphine gas held by one of Delta’s threads that stretched out of my hand. Phosphine is a colorless, flammable, toxic gas compound with the chemical formula PH3. There were minute amounts of phosphine in the atmosphere of Skyisle, emanating from the Valley of Death so it didn’t take much effort for us to scan it and create more of it in a greater concentration. In the dim living room, the bubble of compressed phosphorated hydrogen ignited as soon as it was created, detonating with a brilliant flash upon contact with the air.

My parents gaped at the flash of fire.

“I didn’t even see the fire-hexagram!” My mom gasped. “How?!”

“Magic! Dante can do magic!” Diana squealed excitedly. “He unlocked his Soul-Song!!!"

Dad glanced at mom. “Elder Delta did tell us that he’s destined for great things. I often wondered what happened to her.”

“Great-Aunt Delta got injured in the fight with the Overseer,” I explained. “A delayed, high-level curse caused by the armacus put her into a decade-long coma. She’s still not fully over it.”

“So…” Dad glanced at the letter.

“Like the letter says, I’ll need a few things for my education. I’ll need to borrow some of your tools, Dad. I won’t be staying home.”

“Where will you be staying?” Mom asked.

“In Agamemnon with Great-Aunt Delta. I’ll be coming and going there via a teleport rune hidden in the house... tonight.” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll visit often, maybe even stay for dinner.”

Mom sighed. Dad looked at her.

“It’s better that he stays away from Skyisle,” he said.

“I know,” she muttered. “It’s just so… sudden. I got used to Dante helping around the house.”

“Maybe he can help us relocate too, when he is...” Dad commented.

Mom’s fiery glare put him down. I recalled listening to their arguments over the years. They constantly fought over it. Mom wanted to stay in Skyisle. Dad wanted to live elsewhere.

I now knew why mom couldn't leave this valley. She was a daughter of the Sentinels of Skyisle, the last keeper of the legacy of the Alanians. She guarded the hearth just as the song asked of her. She had never told me the translation, either because I was too young or maybe because she didn’t want to pass the burden of the legacy down to me.

We ate dinner in tense silence. Diana broke it by harassing me to teach her maths. I promised that I would teach her, in time.

I went to my room, dragged a few old sweaters and pillows upstairs to the attic, piled them underneath the Vox Colony, draped the Overseer's invisibility cloak over myself and vanished.

I wasn’t going to Agamemnon. There was no teleportation rune in our house. It was just a convenient excuse to get out of endless chores. I had no reason to leave Skyisle. My legacy, the ruins of the city of my ancestors was buried here and I hoped to find a way to reclaim it with my knowledge from another world. Darkness fell as I thought about my future plans. Eventually, I curled up on the pile of clothes and fell asleep.