There was one big eel-shaped hole in Okeria’s argument. “Selling the endangered eel is helping Rainbow Basin?”

Okeria winced. “Alright, so I’m still not perfect. But it was going ta go ta waste otherwise, so why shouldn’t we do something with it? The scientists get their flesh and bone samples, the conservationists get their reproductive stuff ta try and make more of these, and the rest gets sold ta people who want ta eat or make gear outta the monster. Nothing goes ta waste.”

I’d said what I wanted to, but the truth was Okeria had protected us. No matter what he was now, we owed him our lives. Though I don’t think I was ever going to forget the fact that he’d tried to steal from us after telling us how bad it was that we’d killed the eel.

“Keep going.” Jun insisted with exasperation. “We need some actual information here, and if half-listening to your sob story is what gets us there, then do it fast.”

“That’s what I’m trying ta do.” Okeria sighed. “So I got here to this world, and people finally started listening to me. They gave up on whichever gods they were praying to when I kept pointing out that Thraiv had sent us ta a world with so much water that wouldn’t kill us, even if we had ta boil it before we could do anything with it. I built up a pretty good following without ever raising my core’s mastery, but I didn’t care. I didn’t get one of those fancy unique cores like some others did, but when those same people would defend me from anything, why would it matter to me? I was safe, I was well fed, and I could drink all the water I wanted.”

I waited for the ‘but’, but Okeria just stopped talking. As if that was the end of his story. That couldn’t be true; he wouldn’t be sitting there with his metal things if he didn’t change. I went to point that out, but Jun placed a hand on my arm to get my attention before I could. Her eyes were full of loathing and disdain, and in her hand was a blade. There was something I didn’t understand about what Okeria was doing, and it really bothered Jun.

“Is it illegal to change which god you pray to?” I asked, and Jun gripped my arm harder. It seemed like I’d hit the nail on the head. “Is that why your eyes are tied shut?”

Okeria placed another silver trinket on the table. It looked woven steel wrapped around a cylinder. He then placed a second one down that looked exactly the same as the first, and gently unwound the wire from them.

Strange gems stared out at me from inside two electrical suspension fields. They were vibrant blue with splotches of cloudy white, like the foam on an ocean wave, and they stretched a little too far to either side to be perfect spheres. They were also strangely smooth, like polished amber, and I got a bizarrely biological sense from them. Like they were living beings that just looked like gems, but that couldn’t be right.

Jun’s grip relaxed a little, and I turned to look at her once more. She was fixated on the suspended gems, looking between Okeria and his jewels slowly as if she had just put together a puzzle that I was quite a few pieces short of finishing.

“They’ve got the cloudy rot.” Jun said quietly. “Okeria… when did you take them out?”

Cloudy rot? Was that the white stuff on the gems? And what did Jun mean by… oh. I remembered where I’d seen that overly polished finish before. It stared back at me from Jun’s face, but in a different colour. If that was true, then why the fuck did Okeria save his surgically removed eyes?

Okeria pushed his eyes towards us, then leaned back completely as if he wanted to be as far away from them as possible. Almost like he was trying to get rid of them.

“Not until a long time after I’d shut them for good. They stopped working three decades before someone forced the sealant on them open and ripped them out of me.” Okeria answered, and there was relief in that memory. He spoke as if someone ripping his eyes out was a kindness. “I owe Persephonia what life I’ve managed to live now that I’ve managed to get all the rot out of me. No matter what the people of Rainbow Basin said about her, no matter what our leaders thought of her, she was the best of us. And we threw her away.”

Jun carefully reached out and took one of Okeria’s eyes. She summoned her helmet before bringing it in for a closer look, then shuddered. “You’re lucky this didn’t kill you.”

“Oh, it did.” Okeria chuckled grimly. “Multiple times, in fact. But I had my armor and the best healer I’ve ever met keep me from drowning in that endless abyss. Your many times over grandma kept me alive even when a lot of people would’ve left me for dead, the me of now included, and now I have the heirs ta both the Keratily and Persephonia names in front of me. I’d say it's a coincidence, but I know well enough that trouble always followed Persephonia like a loyal canine.”

I was more than a little lost at this point. “So, uh, did the mold make you go crazy? Is that why you were preaching Thraiv so hard? And how’d you get it out of the rest of your body if it started in your eyes?”

“It didn’t make me go crazy, it completely shut off certain parts of my mind. It’s beyond complicated, but I always boil it down ta not being able to link actions and consequences. If someone punched me, I couldn’t understand that it was because I’d just insulted their god and tried ta bring them to Thraiv. I knew that I was dying and in pain, but I never once thought that it was because of something in me. That’s how the cloudy rot kills and spreads. I’d always wanted ta spread the word of Thraiv, but I kept myself from doing it because I knew everyone had their own gods already. Ones that were just as important ta them as Thraiv was ta me.”

Okeria flicked his finger against nothing, and his other eye slid closer to me. “That’s a gift from me ta ya. Since ya got your armor after ya came in contact with the rot, it’ll make sure ya never get infected with it. Maybe ya can make something good out of it, or sell it off ta some collector from another species for a trawler’s worth of money. Those things have brought me nothing but pain, but maybe they can do something good for ya.”

“Uh, thanks. I guess.” I said quickly, tapping the top of the containment field with my finger and instantly sending it to my inventory. I wanted to ignore the prompt that came up, but catching a single word next to the rarity of it made me do a double-take.

Clouded Staura Eye: The amber-like eye of a Staura, infected with Cloudy Rot. This rot normally kills the host within two months of infection, but thanks to the lack of sunlight to grow, this infection has transformed the eye into something more. Use: unknown. Value: unknown. Rarity: Depleted.

Depleted rarity. I’d said before that the rarity didn’t necessarily equate to strength, but it definitely meant it was unique. If I could find a jeweler I could get them to cut and install this in something, then get an enchanter and runesmith to give it some sort of power, and then use //NULL to corrupt the final item. It would probably cost a hundred times the potential I’d seen so far, and the un-corrupted item would have a mastery requirement way beyond what I was at, but my eyes were always bigger than my core.

“Why didn’t your eyes heal back after they got taken out?” I asked absentmindedly as I looked over the image of Okeria’s eye once again. “If your armor saw it as part of your body, shouldn’t it have healed it back?”

“Hoped you wouldn’t ask that.” Okeria muttered under his breath. “That’s the part of this that’s so painful. Ya can retrain the armor about what it thinks normal, but… it takes a long, long time. Juniper’s granny kept me spiraling the abyss for almost eight months, healing me while removing each and every strain of the rot from my body without once letting me put on my armor. My eyes were unsalvageable, and I kept them as a reminder that something can control my life without me even knowing. A lesson that made me turn down every offer ta become a chosen that came my way.”

“Skies above, can what happened to Nia happen to every chosen?” Jun asked. I’d been thinking the same thing, but I was a little more disgusted than she was. If that was the truth, then The End could do to me what Endra did to Nia. Jun was looking at me with horror in her eyes, her helmet gone along with Okeria’s eye.

Which made Okeria a little more than suspicious. I still didn’t understand how he was seeing, but he definitely was. “No, that’s a uniqueness to Endra as far as I know. She asks for quite literally nothing in return, except for that one line of text that her chosen overlooks thanks ta the extra power Endra promised. But Persephoniia wasn’t like that. She forced Endra ta change the terms, not willing ta bend ta the whims of someone who so easily writes off the lives of her chosen. And Endra betrayed her.”

I sucked in a short breath as those words settled on us. A powerful person betrayed by an embodiment and sent to an early death. I couldn’t help but see the similarities with my own story, but Nia didn’t have a time reversal to save her.

“So whatever the Embodiment puts in their terms is what they can do to you, but then they can just break them whenever they want. Sounds to me like the chosen are getting a bum deal.” I surmised with disdain in my voice.

Okeria and Jun nodded in sync, but only Okeria began to speak. “I’ve felt that ya don’t have much love for the Embodiments or their chosen, but being a chosen doesn’t instantly make someone a monster. Persephonia was the best of us, and she was chosen by the worst of our people’s Embodiments. If you’re harboring any prejudice towards the chosen, ya gotta remember ta look at them just like ya would anyone else. A monster’s a monster no matter what, but a good man can get hitched ta a monster without knowing.”

I found myself reluctantly nodding along. It was especially true if the chosen didn’t have a choice in being chosen in the first place, or what it meant. But first, I’d have to find one of my people’s chosen.