Chapter 6: Of Memories

Arcane raised her closed eyes to the starry sky, watching the dark beasts swimming towards the inner system, spurred by the burst of uncontrolled energy. She sighed and shook her head. These degraded versions of their long lost ancestors would be unable to trace the power to her. They could barely determine which planet it had originated from, but the motion of the world and her own measures would obscure the precise source and nature. Nodding firmly, she telekinetically donned her cyan dress.

Nudity was not among her taboos, but dressing was a common vice of mortal races. Cultivation or magic of any decent level could defend against typical natural forces, of course, but without such those same forces could cause sickness or even death with sufficient exposure. This led to a habit of concealment, and the essentially perpetual mating cycle of most races added to the development of shame in the naked body in all of them. Thus, for the simple expedient of fitting in slightly better, Arcane wore her dress and concealed her undeveloped body.

Belts and pouches were more sensible in her mind, allowing many more objects to be carried than normally possible. Of course the plain leather she carved from the lizard’s remains did not fit with her fine dress, leading to a gap in her image, but that was easily fixed by introducing a diffraction in the absorbed light. The leather straps started shimmering in a deep blue color, a few spots flashing like gems. Introducing a dye or illusion would have the same effect, but what Arcane did was more akin to fundamentally changing the properties of the material and thus could not be so easily seen through. Using the reflective pool to see herself, though she had no real need to use such a medium, she examined her appearance and nodded, her hair and body gleaming in the pale light of the stars as night fell over the desert lands.

She scooped up the pool into a single waterskin, bending the internal space to make it much vaster than it appeared. Taking a sip of the magically cold waters, she nodded in satisfaction. All was ready for her ‘adventure’.

She walked off into the desert, following the night winds towards what she believed to be the sea. Her hypothesis had been bolstered by the winds flowing the opposite direction during the day, as seen from the patterns cast onto the sand. All was going very well, it seemed, but for her dream and its consequences.

She looked back at the valley in which she spent the heat of the day as she peaked the first dune, muttering under her breath, “Fate…”

Fate… she reminisced to herself about her long dead sisters, the only people she believed had ever been able to understand her. She had had eight siblings once, all female, each named after their purpose, and their power. Her own was Arcane, from the word arcana, secret, and she firstborn of the nine. Fate had been the name of the ninth and last child, a name containing endless meaning and few definitions. In that, like in so many other ways, Fate had been perhaps the most similar sister to Arcane.

It was unfortunate, the way things had turned out because of that.

Arcane cleared her mind of such wayward thoughts as she descended the sand-covered slope. She would have to face her past again, and soon as she measured time. Each time she slept she knew the scars deep within herself grew worse, unable to heal naturally even with endless time available. Each time she hoped the world she awoke into would be able to assist her, would show some sign which could assuage her ageless guilt. There had yet to be, of course. And all the while those wounds only grew worse, the only progress ever made made under her direct guidance, personally controlling the universe to force it to move towards the future she desired.

Still, there would yet be time for that endeavor. It was not on this day that she would have to face and overcome the memories buried deep within her past, and the tribulations they would bring. Arcane would succeed in the end, as she always did, even as the universe changed around her.

Arcane paused to look up at the stars again, her breath catching in her throat. She had slept far longer this time than before. Even if those millions of years were not all that great, but a tiny blip on her total lifespan, mortal races who measured generations in decades or at best centuries would change far too much in that time. This was no longer a universe she knew. Everything Arcane remembered had changed, lost to time and forgotten even to myth. When she first awoke she believed measures would be necessary to wipe out the memory of her children’s failures. Now, she considered it to have been pointless.

Civilizations rarely left records beyond their lifespan doubled. That had been decided as fact even when there existed an unbroken chain of nations rising and falling. Records could be recovered beyond that, of course, and artifacts remained even longer, but fundamentally their memory ended once a civilization had been dead longer than they had been alive. In this harsh universe that was the only certainty.

Her children had not passed that threshold, yet. Even only considering the millions of years they had lasted since she removed herself from their head they had lasted almost twice as long as they had been dead now. But not a single trace of them could be found in the star’s song.

Once again Arcane realized how alone she was. Her pace remained steady, her short strides covering ground far faster than they should, and her breathing was steady without exertion, but internally she felt her own turmoil raging endlessly. She stopped on the top of the next dune, taking a deep breath and sitting down to meditate.

She hated this practice. Cultivation had grown out of it, the clearing of the mind enabling one to feel the natural forms of the mysterious energy eventually defined as qi. Later the ways to refine and harness it to strengthen the body were deciphered, and the martial path that spent time in return for power was established. But Arcane admitted that meditation had its uses. Especially for those who had trouble with emotions.

Loneliness. That was the current issue, and by far the largest. Hopelessness and despair were creeping in on its edges, but those could be easily quelled by a myriad of inspirational tales and memories. Arcane’s resolve was essentially unbreakable, growing stronger with each failure as she had been taught. There was also the subtle fact that Arcane enjoyed difficulty and trouble, especially when there was no consequence for failure. Of other negative emotions, most were nonexistent. The desires called sin had been left out of her design, her body never allowed to mature enough for lust to be a problem and lacking the ability to indulge in gluttony or sloth. Greed and envy were meaningless for perhaps the wealthiest being ever to exist, not that she was capable of them anyway. Similarly, limiters had been placed on her mind to prevent wrath (though they had been proven imperfect before) and she simply couldn’t feel anything like pride. Hatred and malice were not beyond her, but required immense triggers that rarely appeared since she was very young.

That left merely loneliness.

She was capable of feeling lonely, or perhaps even more than capable. She had been born with eight sisters among whom she was never alone. Her entire childhood had been spent with others who understood her, protected by countless guards and given attention that would have made a celebrity blush. Even after she became the last of her kind she was rarely alone, pestered by legions of priests believing her a god, kings seeking her advice, merchants desiring her treasures and countless legions of supplicants begging her aid.

Only in these occasional stretches between empires, few and far between, was she left alone. Even then she was often accompanied by a group, those who stuck to her for some reason or another, even when her awakening did not attract immediate attention and push her straight back to the seat of god incarnate.

She focused inwards. Arcane was unique in many ways, not least of which was her ability to turn adulation and respect directed at a distant god into companionship to salve this emptiness within her. Listening to the song of the stars she picked up on the respect and awe directed towards the Age of Gods, searching further and further for hints of an Age before that, the Primordial Era she had ruled. Some traces of it were found, a few respectful whispers in the annals of the greatest empires. In her meditation, with her mind emptied of all but her loneliness and her conviction that she was the Primordial Era itself, she brought that respect in and believed herself remembered.

It was a makeshift measure. Those whispers formed a mental bandage over the gaping wound in her psyche, but did not fill the fundamental void. It was enough, though.

She forced herself to stand again, brushing off the sand on her legs and dress and allowing her mind to hide the bandage among other thoughts and memories. And even better for her purposes, there were more beasts who were willing to distract her further.

The sand lizards who came upon the meditating girl and thought her easy prey were ripped into countless tiny pieces by blades of pure energy that tore through them like a tornado. All her stress and loneliness were converted into destructive force, a useful combat trick she had picked up long ago. Hate and anger were the most efficient emotions for pure destruction, converting almost perfectly into killing force, but any negative emotion could be used. As their blood sprayed over her in a cooling mist the girl felt all her negativity vanish. Eight more crystal cores floated around her, unharmed by the shredding force, and were sucked into one of her leather pouches. Smiling as she bathed in the blood of her attackers, the girl allowed a cold wind to scour the blood from her skin and dress. Then she took off at a run, ground eating pace rising and falling as she raced freely through the sands.

Step, step, step, step. The rhythm of running filled her mind in time with her heartbeat, each step creating a puff of dust. She was fast, though that was only from the perspective of a powerless being, her limbs slightly blurring in accelerated motion. She crested a particularly large dune and slammed her foot down, leaping from its peak and soaring over the next before landing on the falling slope of the one beyond it. She slid down it to kill her falling momentum before launching herself into motion again, running freely through the desert without a care for what she passed.

Hours later, as the last planet disappeared behind the horizon and the midnight hour rang, the girl reached the top of a ridge of sand and looked down across the falling plains towards a massive plain of stars twinkling both above and below. She paused and looked across the great border between sand and sea, white froth forming at the border barely visible even to her extraordinary vision.

“Tch.” She clicked her tongue unhappily. All along that stretch there were no lights of fire or electricity, no flaunted defiance of the darkness of the night unique to the races. It would seem that merely reaching the sea would not end her journey.

“Reach the sea, we said. There will be people there, we said.” She muttered to herself accusatorially. “That worked out wonderfully, now didn’t it?”

Sighing, she looked down and started walking towards the sea anyway.

“Left or right? I wonder which way is better. On one hand, you have the direction of the world’s spin, which would allow us to go forwards in time and see the sun earlier. On the other hand, we could go the other way and be able to walk longer before day comes.” The girl continued to talk to herself, holding out her hands and shrugging. “On the third, it doesn’t really matter in the slightest now does it? It’s not like there are any useful tricks for whether west or east is more civilized… Oh wait there is, but it only works on one planet!”

Grouching to herself about the pointlessness of the whole endeavor she walked up the next dune, taking her time going through the desert towards the distant sea she could barely see from the summit.

Then she paused once again and turned her face to the distant waters, falling silent in thought. “I wonder…” She whispered. “Is there any chance of a ship passing…” She looked out at the waters, searching for a tiny light moving against the backdrop of stars.

Arcane was not a lucky person, though. No such sign appeared, and she hung her head and started down into the next valley, still complaining to herself.

“Left in a desert, check. No supplies and all alone, check. Only myself to talk to, check. One holy book to pass the time, ex. Animal companionship,” Arcane glanced at the corpse of a sand lizard she had almost unconsciously stabbed while walking through the valley. “Of questionable benefit. So what’s next? Years of learning to survive, or miraculous rescue just before death? Find out next time on My Life, presented by Dominion Electric.”

Chuckling at her joke, she extracted the core from the lizard’s head and walked up the next dune. The stars far overhead blinked in and out as the dark beasts passed over her position as they circled the planet, but she ignored them completely.

At the next summit her hair flew in front of her face. Cursing the windy night, Arcane tucked her unruly tresses behind her ears and held up her hand to look down at the distant sea. Her closed eyes seemed to narrow suddenly, her smiling mouth flipping into a doubtful frown.

“... that’s interesting.” She muttered, staring off into the distance where a dark cloud obscured the distant sky. Instantly constructing magic to boost her perception, she peered through the clear air and saw what hid at the center of that cloud. A single ship, running without light and hiding inside the dark cloud.

“That’s very interesting.” Arcane said, making up her mind instantly to follow this ship even as it tried so hard not to be followed. Explosive force flattened the dune beneath her as she sprang into motion.

Puffs of sand greeted her landing two dunes down, though she was only there for a heartbeat before she leapt off again and soared to the next dune, and the one after it. Her entire body blurring as it accelerated to tremendous speed, she raced the wind down the gently sloping dunes towards the coast beyond. Even as she did she tracked the dark cloud and noted its direction and speed of motion. In response she curved her path to run diagonally down the dunes matching her course to that of the ship and planning to parallel it along the coast.

Inwardly, she wondered what kind of fool would sail with a wind powered ship without light at night. Or why they so badly didn’t want to be found.