Interlude: The Sage

It has begun.

He considered the implications, considered the glorious cascade of cause and effect, of unintended consequences.

The momentum is insufficient. Once again the catalyst has arrived early.

He unfolded his awareness and examined his inner world, looking for the discrepancy. Ancient words floated up from his earliest self.

Garbage in, garbage out.

He waved the thought away, and overlaid his model on the vast web of meaning that surrounded him, observing the rippling interference patterns in the areas of conjunction, ignoring the far larger expanses of ignorance. He would not seek to understand that which he could not encompass.

What have I missed this time? he asked himself. What factor has hidden itself…

Understanding dawned, and he took a moment to relish the sensation. It was exactly that, an entire dimension of connections was folded in upon itself in a network of deliberate obfuscation. He had seen this effect before, but never at such a scale. He might never have noticed, but for the obvious discrepancy that had arisen between his expectations and the event that had just unfolded.

To think that such a thing has been hiding from my perceptions…

It was humbling, and he took another moment to relish that sensation. Now that he was aware of the obscured network, it wasn’t difficult for him to unravel it, to understand the methods used. He was very familiar with the source of the occlusion. It was an old friend, or enemy, one who he had left behind many ages ago.

Hello Shadow.

He had imposed a certain discipline upon himself, and rarely did he allow it to create friction within his being, but now he could feel the impulse, the urge, to address this change in the direction of the universal momentum. He allowed himself only one overt action in each breath of the great cycle, and he had already spent it, already made his choice for this span of time.

Fewer actions, fewer regrets.

He watched the thought rise and fall. He understood the trap of action well, perhaps better than any being with human roots ever had. But even he felt the temptation from time to time.

Times like this. I see what you have done, Shadow, what you are doing. Your understanding is insufficient to accomplish your purpose, but more than enough to interfere with mine.

He made his decision. It was far to soon to act, and perhaps new options had been opened by Shadow’s interference. He would wait. And this time he would truly see.

Chapter 26: Conjoint

Elatan Thuidium, commander of the Wraiths, narrowed his eyes.

“You are telling me the Outsider’s fortress has been destroyed.” His voice betrayed his skepticism.

The sparrowkin scout raised her beak and ruffled her feathers. “Yes, Commander.” She hesitated before continuing. “I realize it sounds impossible, but the Greatwood has... changed.”

He sat down upon the ground, bringing his eyes to her level. “What is the disposition of their forces?”

They’re all so young, he thought. This kid can’t be more than a year out of the Academy.

Over the decades, most of his people had abandoned the fight. Many had gone further than that, retreating from their senses into isolate despair. Darkening. Even Elatan could only feel the barest ember of the rage that used to burn within his chest. Now most of his forces, what forces remained, were… children. Almost none of them were elves.

“Unknown, sir. I…” she hesitated, conscious of the intense scrutiny. “I saw many things I did not understand.”

“Such as?”

“The High Hollow was filled with smoke clouds of many colors, and the Greatwood itself was covered with...well, I don’t know. Something.”

What possible reason would the Great Deceiver have for perpetrating such an illusion? he wondered. Surely he doesn’t believe we would be tempted by such an overt ploy. He must have a very inflated notion of our capabilities if he thinks we could attack again, even if we wanted to.

The previous day’s engagement had not gone well. Clearly, the Outsiders had been well prepared for the assault. Many of his strongest warriors had been defeated, sent to the mindless void. Unlike the Outsiders, who might return in minutes, or hours, his people could take days, or even weeks. Sometimes, they did not return at all. The older they were, the stronger they were, the longer their resurrection would take.

He realized he had been staring at the young avian without speaking for an uncomfortably long time.

“Something...” he repeated. “Tell me, what is your name?”

“Dart, sir. Dart Passer,” she replied.

“Well, young Dart Passer, tell me why I should give your fantastic vision any credence whatsoever, eh? Over a hundred years spent battling an entrenched enemy and then they up and disappear with no warning, no sign. Seems awfully convenient to me.”

“It must be the Archon’s justice, sir.”

He swallowed the wrong way and coughed harshly. “Archon! Spare me your juvenile nonsense. The Archon doesn’t care about justice. The Archon protects the wicked.”

Seeing the shocked look in her beady eyes made him feel old.

It’s true though. There’s no point protecting her from the harsh realities of our world.

She shuffled her feet nervously and bobbed her head. Her tail feathers dragged in the dirt, and he felt the weight of a hundred years of sorrow pressing on his soul.

This is what I’ve come to. Snapping at babies. I could have ended this before it began, could have kicked that slimy Outsider from the Bough of Burdens. Instead I am cursed to fight this pointless, eternal battle, cursed for my own incompetence.

He kept his face still. “Dart Passer, thank you for your report. That will be all.”

She hopped back several times and bowed with wings spread. Then she spoke.

“What are you going to do, sir?”

He sighed. “Nothing.”

A short trill of surprise escaped her. “But sir!”

Marshaling all the patience he had left in his body, Elatan held up one long finger. “If I have learned anything over my years of futility, it is never to underestimate the devious nature of our opponent. To fall into another trap on the heels of yesterday’s debacle would be the height of folly.”

He studied her face. The fine down around her eyes had flattened, and her beak was slightly open.

Avians are always so easy to read, he thought. Perhaps it is the limited number of features they have to express themselves.

“You disagree, and I understand. I will not forbid you from gathering anyone you can convince to further explore the situation.” He paused and then raised his voice. “From a distance only! Am I clear?”

“Yes sir. Thank you, sir.” She hopped several times and then sprang into the air, as if escaping before he could change his mind.

So young. So hopeful.

She’ll learn better soon enough.

***

Lilijoy found herself in a bit of a predicament. It was enough to make her wonder when it had started feeling normal to stumble from one surreal exercise in survival to another.

It’s been a busy day, that’s for sure, she thought as she looked through several feet of gently glowing slime mold. At that thickness, the slime was almost entirely opaque to normal vision, but was reasonable clear at the more extreme ends of her visual spectrum. She wasn’t particularly worried, as her worst case was suffocation, and thus a respawn that would conveniently deliver her back to the edge of Averdale forest, potentially to reunite with her friends and put this whole sprawling mess of a day behind her.

She remembered quite well, from her earlier use of Two Minds One Self, that the slime mold had a particular passion for rot and decay, along with a hunger for mana in general. To the extent that the forest of Averdale functioned in any way like a reasonable ecosystem, she figured that the slime molds were the primary scavengers and janitors for the forest floor. That explained, to an extent, why she was not being attacked or dissolved; the slime mold had a primal understanding that when something was alive, death was just a matter of time. All that was required was patience.

In her case, it would be another minute or so before she suffocated. If she wasn’t holding her nose shut, it would have been much sooner, as the mold would be more than happy to infiltrate her airways. She planned on attempting to escape from her gelatinous prison soon, but she was a bit distracted, exploring the method by which her Inside body was given the sensation of asphyxia, and the manner in which the signals from her Outside body were diverted. She had already discovered that she could override the Inside sensory data, which made the experience of being engulfed oddly calming, rather than a survival emergency. It didn’t hurt that the speed of her thoughts had recovered to a large extent, giving her plenty of time to consider her options.

And then there was the notification that had crossed her internal awareness just moments after she successfully banished the obelisk.

The First Step

You have placed a foot upon a path

Why does an infant crawl?

She wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Was it addressed to her specifically, calling her an infant? Did it refer to whatever it was she did to re-activate Nandi’s boon?

More riddles. At least I know that my soul-space-core-thing has some kind of meaning to the Inside, or Guardian, or something. Boy, I really need a better name for that. Soul vortex? Experience manifold?

She decided that soul vortex would do for now. Whatever she called it, it was experience given… tangibility?

More like efficacy, she decided. Something different than the experience points that caused her to level on the Inside, though they overlapped. Different from the powerful ineffability of experience in real life, though it was almost the same, just more overt. If two equally powerful warriors fought, the one with more experience would have a discernible, possibly decisive advantage. The contents of her soul vortex were something like that advantage given substance, a repository of energy she could draw upon, given the right circumstance. At least that’s what she suspected.

As usual, more questions than answers, she sighed. Do I start cultivating joyful anticipation? What would that even look like? I mean, I’m still pretty excited about exploring my Trial space- do I get to look in places I haven’t been to? Can I find all those different sources Magpie found?

She took a few seconds to ponder all the amazing powers she could gain if that was the case, not to mention all the other mysteries that might be hidden throughout the Trial. She decided she needed to start talking with other Outsiders about their experiences as soon as she could, when an unsettling thought occurred.

What if knowing something in advance makes it disappear and that’s how the actual Trial works, why everyone is so careful not to tell kids anything about it? Would that still be the case for me?

She resolved to test that notion by seeking out Magpie’s sources the next time she had a chance. If they were there, then she would be fine to hear other people’s secrets. Regardless of the outcome, she was sure there were many hidden secrets she would discover in the near future. She felt a shiver of excitement, and she followed it back to her soul vortex.

I’m feeling joyful anticipation about figuring out how to use my joyful anticipation. Shouldn’t that make some kind of feedback loop? I guess not, but there must be some kind of limit on the intensity of a feeling. Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to be working on, quality rather than quantity.

Examining her soul vortex, she could tell that her recent thoughts and the emotions they inspired were present, but insubstantial, a faint thread added to the vast multi-dimensional tapestry. It seemed it would take more than idle thoughts and feelings to impact the totality.

Of course it would, she realized. The self I see represented before me is what would generate the feelings anyway. It’s closer to a short-circuit than a feedback loop. I need externalities to grow. Fruitful alien intelligences indeed.

She snorted, which brought her consciousness back to her situation, as her airways were entirely inaccessible.

Oh yeah. Encased by giant slime mold. Hey, I wonder…

She ran a quick Scan.

Great Slime Mold: Level: ?

H.P.: 1000+

Primary Attack: None

Damage Abatement: 300-500

Disposition: None

Immunities: Substantial

They live! They… are apparently entirely indestructible. Huh.

She had suspected for some time that there might be a certain minimum size needed for the slime mold to achieve ‘greatness’. It was nice to see her speculations confirmed. It was also nice to see her Scan ability functioning reasonably well, even if the details were far from helpful. It didn’t really matter, not for what she planned next.

***

What am I, a messenger service?

Magpie was feeling a little cranky. Her journey from the drilling platform she had called home for several years was not going terribly well. Nor was it going all that badly. It just was.

And what it was, well, that was pretty crappy.

She pulled her foot loose from the grasp of the vast plain, fighting against the suck of the thick mud. The peak in the distance beckoned, but she was beginning to think she had made a serious mistake.

It looked so green and inviting. How was I supposed to know there wasn’t any actual ground beneath it? She sighed. At least no one can sneak up on me.

In a fit of independence, she had left the drilling platform in a simple aerogel raft, refusing to call upon any resource connected to the Flock. She could still remember the light feeling in her heart as she paddled through the shallow waters of the South China Sea, leaving it behind. Leaving all of it behind.

That light feeling had stayed with her as her hands blistered on the salted handle of her paddle and as the tides left her stranded for hours at a time on the endless morass of stinking mud and sand. It had even lasted when she could no longer paddle her craft and was forced to drag her body through the muddy edge of the tidal flats. The green fields had beckoned, and beyond them the rising hills, keeping her spirit high with the goal in sight.

What finally drove that lightness from her heart was the unfortunate revelation that the rising fields of green were something less than the inviting pastures of the Inside, or even the cutting grasses of the plains where she had once ventured as part of her training. No, the green was thick mats of algae and opportunistic halophytes, conspiring together to hide the treacherous ground revealed by the fall of the oceans. Solid areas of rock and sand buoyed her at times, only to betray her feet to lurking muck. It all looked the same to her inexperienced eyes.

It wasn’t a life or death matter, her arduous progress up the slope of revealed ocean floor. She had plenty of food and a water straw. Unless she was careless enough to find a way to drown, she would be fine. Eventually. But at her current rate, it was going to take days of agonizing slog to pass into the cultivated areas with foot paths and fields.

Live and learn. I wish my body had an autopilot so I could stay Inside, and just come back when this part was over. Meanwhile, Lily is sending me fantasy stories to pass over my burning bridges. She must have really taken it hard. Or she’s really pissed and messing with me.

Probably both, she decided. There was no doubt in her mind that she deserved every bit of blame for the disastrous results of the expedition. She had replayed the events in her mind over and over and examined her previous assumptions with her new understanding.

She had always known she was a pawn, a cog in a greater machine. That had always been a fact of her life, an unquestioned reality. When given a task, you performed to the best of your ability, succeeded or failed, processed that outcome and prepared for the next task. Her entire life had consisted of comfortable conformity, at least from the time she had been pulled off the streets at the approximate age of six, and yet she had never been without choice.

Be elite or be free. Free to go back to a life of poverty and suffering.

It had always been an easy choice, though there had certainly been difficult moments along the way. Her training had been brutal, her existence spartan and isolated much of the time. It was strange to think that she had never wondered why, never asked what it was all for. It made her wonder which questions she wasn’t asking now.

She took another step and felt the crunch of coral through the mud beneath her foot. She had found another reef, and with a little luck, she might be able to follow it towards the distant hills. It was a mixed blessing, as the buried reefs were more treacherous at times, with brittle pockets that could trap feet and cut ankles. But now she could see the little hills and valleys ahead of her, a hint of contour to the terrain.

At least I know what I’m doing now. Putting one foot in front of the other.

She composed a message as she trudged and sent it.

***

I guess it’s time. Time to see the power of individual choice at the level of collective action.

Lilijoy’s plan for escaping the embrace of the ever-accumulating slime mold was simple. She had realized, even before she plunged her body into the pile of yellow goo, that her Two Minds One Self ability wouldn’t be all that helpful to get back out. The ability was powerful, but it only worked in as far as there was a common purpose between the entities, an action or capacity that would serve them both. The slime mold had only one overwhelming impulse, an insatiable hunger to move toward and devour sustenance, in the form of mana.

She could only imagine how dangerous an enemy a great slime mold would be to a typical magic user, a category which included the majority of Insiders and Outsiders to some extent. The only saving grace was that the creature was quite slow, or at least it hadn’t shown any signs of rapid movement in her brief experience so far. But once it had a hold of a food source, it would have absolutely no reason to release it, leading to inevitable suffocation if that food source happened to be a person.

Good thing I have some inside information, she thought.

While the slime mold’s hunger was monolithic and insatiable, the mold itself was a collective, and its hunger, like any hunger, contained a gradient. There were things it preferred, tastes that each individual cell would seek out. While she couldn’t provide its favorite flavors of rot and decay, she could do the next best thing.

She created a gradient of mana types within her own body, circulating her Prana, a preferred flavor, to her legs and her Qi to her head. While the slime mold would happily subsist on either, the individual cells couldn’t help but move along the gradient, seeking their preferred reward. Collectively, the slime around her moved, pressing and competing for proximity to her lower body. By harnessing the appetites of the individual, she had gained control of the collective.

I have become the dictator of slime, she mused as she rose, buoyed by the greater density around her legs. Soon her head broke the surface, and she reached an equilibrium. Her body was still contained in slime from the chest down, but the slime around her upper body only desired to move lower, so she was safe from suffocation.

She took a deep breath and looked around. Her head was about ten feet above the forest floor, and the slime around her extended about twenty feet in every direction. With a little effort, she was able to free her arms and wipe the residual slime off of her face.

I’m like a slime centaur. A slime-taur?

She imagined she must look somewhat terrifying.

And now for my next trick…

She dropped into Meditation, and this time, she gathered the mana toward her, just a little at a time. Her new control over the shape of her gathering field allowed her to create an oval, a parabolic shape that extended just past the body of the slime mold, pointing toward the Greatwood.

Like a carrot leading a donkey. Okay, slimey, time to bring you to some food you’ll like much better than little ol’ me.

Ever so slowly, the mass of slime beneath her began to move.