14 - 2

[Magus]

Demonstratum and The Eye That Was Not, Opened

The Blue Priestess of Berrowden - 1st of Evening Star, Year 1125 A.E.

“As I said before, a theory is an explanation for given facts or axioms; things thought to be true. In more meaningful words: a theory is the commander of a band, and the facts are the individual swords therein.

“Following this logic, the commander or captain represents the individuals within the band; a theory explains the facts under its command.

“Like a bad captain, a shoddy theory can be disputed and ousted. In its place, a better theory is given ear and seat. All to best serve the facts beneath its wing.

“Remember, Bare: if a given theory does not best explain the set of facts under its wings, it does not deserve its place. The better, more accurate theory should prevail.

“But, that does not mean it entirely goes away. Like an individual within the band being elevated to captain, a past theory may assimilate into a greater body of knowledge.

“What it once lacked, it now is provided by being subsumed into a more whole explanation of the facts.”

Barry rolled a gesture with one of those shadow-hands of his, the fingertips sharp as cat’s claws. There were wont to do so whenever the lad was especially interested, not unlike a dog eschewing his head when bemused.

With that sign of understanding and intellectual curiosity, the Priestess continued with gusto, her voice crackling fast and furious like a whip.

“Take the Dual Realms of Being as an example:

“They are a single body of theory made to explain how the universe—the cosmic world or macrocosm—behaves the way it does; why mana is a distorted reflection of matter, why space is amorphous when in between the three dimensions of physicks, so on and so forth.

“The Dual Realms does not explain forthrightly certain… quirks or knots, shall we say, of magicking. It does not tell tale of all the different emanations of mana with esoteric or outright paradoxical origins.

“This theory is useful as a stepping stone; it is just the beginning and meant to be discarded for greater things. One of these greater theories is the Tripartite Facet Model.

“According to this planar model, the world is like a cut gem in the shape of a pyramid, containing of three facets.”

Emilia drew a little three-sided pyramid atop the tablet black for Barry’s sake. The Priestess knew that the lad probably understood only half of what she said. And so, the Maiden of the Crone answered his questions, simplified her words as best she could without distilling the content too unrecognizably.

After Barry had a more solid footing on what she explained, Emilia continued.

“The Three Realms are as such: Body, Mind, and Spirit; also known as Corporeal, Cognitive, and Ethereal, respectively.

“The Cognitive,” Emilia filled in the rightmost side of the pyramid with her chalk, “is the base of all, the empty foundation or firmament, if you will. The Cognitive is a place of endless black and pure thought; a place of the mind.

“You’ll perceive this plane when your eyes are closed and thoughts open.”

Barry scratched his rump, but for all intents and purposes, it might as well have been his head.

In an effort to better teach the lad, Emilia used an example bathed in folklore and peasant’s gossip.

“Most commoners know this place as the Void; the same as in the lunar state of a ‘voidmoon’ or new moon.

“The place of dark waters that surrounds all of Creation. If the Pale River winds around all souls to deliver them unto their next life, be it of Nine or Seven, then the Void ecompasses All Things.

“The Pale is but a singular tributary within the grand flow of abyssal water that is the Void.”

Instead of her explanation helping, it only served to make Barry’s brows knit in further bemusement.

Emilia would most certainly not be touching upon other planes of existence such as the Greyen Sands of Limbus or Sheol, the Land of Shades. Though both had heavy presences in the commonery ken, their planar topographies were not accurately represented, all but shrouded and dissolved in the suffocating smoke of rumor.

“I won’t get much more into this Realm of Being as it is… complicated. Very much so for a newborn magicker.”

Barry let out a relieved sigh in response, wiping away at sweat that did not exist on his brow with a crooked grin.

“The Corporeal,” Emilia colored in the leftmost side, leaving the plane in between Mind and Body empty, “is the inhabitation of the void that is the Cognitive Realm. It is substance; it is water in the cup or hand in the glove.

“This is where our physical bodies dwell, in the world of tangibility and what can be seen by the naked and mundane eye.

“The Corporeal plane is also known as the Physical, an analogue—a cognate or counterpart—of the Tripartite Model found in the schema of the Dual Realms theory.”

As the Priestess of the Ken Goddess lectured, the claws on her left hand lit up with a simmering sort of light—just a bit of Ethos drawn, nothing as potent as her Enlightenment spell; the difference being that of a quick puff and a deep pull of the smoker’s pipe.

A dying, magnesium fire smoldered within her right in sympathy to the left.

The little demonstration lit up Barry’s brows in understanding.

“Ahh,” he happily exclaimed, his tone trilling after in epiphany, “now I get’s it: the Corporeal is the same as the Physical.

“Without the explanation of the Dual Realms, tryin’ to fit all this new stuff in my head would’ve been a fool’s errand.”

The Maiden just smiled and gave him a righteous nod with her chin before she continued.

“Now, this model, Bare, is called the Tripartite for a reason. The little “tri” at the start of the word means three; a vestige of the old tongue Vitaen.

“Where the Dual Realms are two,” Emilia drew a circle split in the middle opposite the pyramid, coloring but a single half, “the Tripartite is a model of three interacting planes.”

“The Third Plane is that of the Ethereal; a mix of both the Cognitive and Corporeal—“

“Like a stew?”

“Yes, Barry, ‘like a stew.’”

Emilia could not help but smile a little at that before she continued.

“The Ethereal is made up of the aspects of mind and body, of physicality and cognition. It is water and cup. It is hand and glove.”

The Priestess colored in the middle plane in between Mind and Body, joining both sides of the three-sided pyramid together.

Only the base was left bereft of chalk.

The Fourth Plane was one not even she, a devout follower bathed in the very lifesblood of the Goddess of Knowledge Mercurial, understood. The Fundament of all existence, the fulcrum upon which the Wheel churned Turn after Turn. It was closest to the Void but further still than the Space Between the Minds of Gods, bordering the Grand Loch yet never fully plunging within its crucibiliean waters.

“The Ethereal is also known as the Spiritual in the schema of the Dual Realms. It is where mana—flesh-made-simple as you called it—dwells.”

Barry’s mouth opened a notch, him wanting to speak up but not interrupt the explanation.

Emilia gave him the go ahead with a star-spangled claw o’ hers.

“So mana’s a stew of physical stuff.”

He patted the table and Emilia nodded.

“And, the mind.”

He pointed at the bone of his left brow and Emilia nodded, twice now.

“This is why there is essence to everything,” the Priestess continued, “be it physical phenomena or mental fabrication or anywhere in between.

“The Ethereal, or Spiritual, is a confluence—a mixing of waters—of the Corporeal and Cognitive.

“Fire, for example, is not a physical “thing,” really, yet still it has mana.

“It is a chemical reaction brought about by a catalyst and the proper reagents—sure there is some moot as to the state of plasma, but fire is only minorly made of such matter; it is not enough, physically speaking, to beckon so much mana.

“The Prime Law of the Dual Realms Theory, Materia Distilidas or ‘distilled matter’, cannot account for such a discrepancy: fire’s just mostly heat, and so should possess the spirit of warmth not flame.

“Yet still, for the simple fact that the mind thinks of it as a distinct entity, it too has its own essence. Mentally, fire is just as much an entity as tangible matter.

“You see, mana taken in from without is tainted by and filtered through perception. By how you think something works or is. This is the basis for the Principle of Hubris—one of the many observations cited by the venerable Novigorod the Elder—that magicking as an art is the usage of untruths to bend reality itself to the whims of the practitioner.”

With a thickly-plastered-on air of highbrow birth, Emilia quoted the Elder of Three Towers much to Barry’s mirth and chagrin.

“Truth cannot be found in the Physical, for it is a conception of the mind; an abstract just as impossible as perfection.”

After the man’s chuffed chortle gave out like candleflame to the oil, Emilia asked, “You got all that boyyo? You need a once-over o’ the material at hand?”

Barry nodded and they went through another series of explanations, each one more simplified than the last. The element of flame was the lynchpin uniting the disparate explanations of the same thing; the Principle of Hubris so close yet so far, like trying to chase a nine-damned fairy.

The sellsword-sorcerer scratched his head in bemusement as he took that all in like a sieve trying to hold water.

I need another example, the Priestess thought with frustrating chagrin. The fire analogy has too much technical jargon and did not resonate enough with him.

Looking into the shifting dark that made up Barry’s arms, Emilia had an inkling—a bit of spilling black atop parchment that solved the overworked equation written therein by sheer coincidence.

“Take the aspect of shadow and dark as an example”

She smiled, pearly whites glistening in the candle light.

“It does not exist.”

The lad’s brows knit in confusion further still. She had brought him to the brink, but that would only help the ken sink into his mind and assimilate faster still.

The pull from the precipice would not be easily forgotten.

“The darkness, Bare, is but the absence of light. It is not substance, but lack thereof. It does not exist. Only our mental perceptions and biases give such a name and presence. It is in the minds of men that the dark exists.

“No where else.

“And yet your arms are made of the substance of shadow; a substance of absence. An impossibility if not for the fact that the Third Realm—the Ethereal or Spiritual—is a bridge between the physical and mental.

“It is in only the minds of men that the dark exists.

“And through your spirit, you have given—nay, endowed it with—tangible being.”

That struck a chord on her apprentice’s strings, the loose bits of knowledge settling into the cracks of each other into a greater body of knowing.

Ken turned to kennen, as his brows shot up in epiphany.

Nay, Emilia thought, enlightenment.

Her wide and crooked smile turned sour; this was no light.

The Priestess felt the edges of something baleful and ephemeral twain come upon the lad.

A shiver went down the crooked waterways of her spine:

She had spoken not just with the man apparent, but with the greater being shackled within his flesh.

Through the threshold of sight and soul, the eternal psyche made itself known.

His eyes turned the darkest of darks—abyssian black—expanding from his pupils to cover iris and sclera both. An eternal blink later, a pinprick of blinding light—neveian white—sparked into being at the centers of where the pupils once were, spreading unto the borders of the iris-once-drowned.

Those eyes looked to the middle-distance, so very far away from the here and now like they could see through the false skein of the waking world.

And into the inner workings of the Wheel Itself.

His aura unfolded and ate its own false skin, shedding the weakness of Man in turn.

His shadow unfurled from its mundanity, stretching as if ink spilled upon the parchment of the Physical.

A single eye, its form a subtle thing of glistening black amongst true nothing, opened.

Emilia very much regretted wishing to once again see Barry as he truly was.

This was a truth that could break men from the inside-out.

A wound upon the flesh of this world, his changed shadow made the mind buckle upon itself. For the Eye That Was Not burned with caliginosity, its very presence endowing and ravaging knowledge in equal measure.

Looking upon the Eye was to see All Things at once and be paralyzed with infinity at her grasp, feeble mind uncomprehending of the greater mysteries she could just touch, if only her fingers reached out ever just so. An impossibility to move with absolute possibility before oneself.

And with the Gen so too was there the Eld. For the Eye saw All Things in conjunction with the Abyss that lay alow, biding to swallow the world in its maturity with but a single gulp. It was to not merely to contemplate the true nothingness beyond death but to feel it while still alive, existential dread a paltry descriptor and subestimation both.

The Physical, presence and absence coupled, was laid bare before the Eye That Was Not, skinned to show its inner workings and raw offal. Lines of gossamer nigh transparent in direct sight but solid in the edges of awareness came to.

One could—did—not see thread fatal—the very tendons of reality that bound the meat of existence to the Pillars of Eternity Themselves—with mortal, mundane vision.

But here, in this place consecrated to a kennen god, another deity held sway for but a tiny blink. It fell in between the cracks of physicks and metaphysicks both, profaning the holiness of another’s domain as doth a stain—blemish black.

A parasyte snuggling amid folds of skin, a tiny little itch unfelt and easily dismissed.

The Priestess could not look upon the Eye any longer—the ripping away of her sight from It like the tearing of a tendon—and so Emilia looked away from the soul behind and to the spirit in front.

For how could she not?

Curiosity killed not just the cat but the priest, too, it seems, Emilia thought finally before she was once more enraptured.

Subtle body wrought of the mana of Shadows, blacken veins like the moorings of the Empty Firmament Above crossed the three cavities of his eld being.

His basins and channels mahneanic were darker than the shadow-ether that made up the majority of his endospiritual tissues and membranes. Like the carving concave of stone into mortar bowl, his basins and channels were hollow and empty and waiting to be filled with the waters of flesh-made-simple.

A single basin in specific was a beacon against the general dark of his spiritual self. His Center—the First Basin—pulled at Emilia Forentes, her focus but a leaf spinning into the gullet of its whirlpool and unto the unfathomable beyond the threshold therein.

When her auric senses crested over the hill of his spirit and touched upon the beacon proper, Emilia’s breath hitched.

Nothing stood behind her, and yet the breath of a beast caressed at the nape of her neck.

It smelled of vinegar.

This beacon was no light to guide the lost, but instead a luring voidmoon against the black. A caliginous wound in the night; an omen o’ doom.

It waited in blind joy for the End of All Things.

A shadow ‘ere comes, she thought, mindless and paralyzed.

Prey before the predator.

“Lu…

“Aith…

“—“

From his mouth came no words yet his soul spoke. The sound reverberated from everywhere, expanding to fit the room like the glove it was.

“Lu…

“Xae…

“—“

“Skor…

“Roh…

“—”

Languidly, tears of oozing tar bled from beneath his eyelids as the Power that come upon the orbs of his sight dissipated like smoke in the night.

Opposite and reverse as to how his eyes had changed before, the White was the first to go, receding back into the center of where his pupils would have been.

Then, the Black—the roiling abyssal sea—was dragged into the depths of his pupils.

The tarren tears were the last to go. Course reversed, they climbed back up inside.

Ken eaten alive, kicking and screaming, like a soul being devoured by an alder-thing Beyond the Veil.

Such was what Emilia witnessed.

Though the lad had learned something profound, it was his soul that had reaped the most rewards.

It had not learned.

It had remembered.

What great and terrible things could a primordial forget? Emilia thought.