To say that the hall erupted into chaos would be a bit of an understatement.

It wasn't that anyone attacked — far from it. No one seemed remotely interested in attacking Vex, for all that their immediate reaction had been to raise their weapons. Half the priests were whispering amongst themselves, glancing at one another surreptitiously; the other half were staring raptly at the king, waiting for him to give a response.

And the king, in turn, stared at Vex like he had no idea how to respond. "What do you mean?" he said at last. "And... who are you?"

"Who do you think I am?"

It was a gamble. Vex had no idea who any of these people were, and he had no idea where he was. He was betting that the Roads had brought him first to the Solar Lagrange and then to here for a reason, though, if he was even in a physical place — maybe this was all still part of the vision. He could still feel the semerit pressing against his hands, the floor beneath his scales.

If this was a vision, it was far different from anything he'd experienced before.

Well, not that he'd had a lot of visions. He'd just read about them in books.

"You are..." the king hesitated, looking nervous. And then he seemed to come to a decision — he dipped down to a knee, surprising Vex, who had to withhold his response as all of the priests also dropped to a knee.

They were kneeling.

To him.

"Please don't kneel," Vex finally said, trying to ignore the incredible discomfort he felt at having a half-dozen people kneel at him in a way that was... not unfamiliar. He'd experienced some of this before, when he went out amongst the 'common' folk in Elyra — at least until he'd established that they were no more common than he was. They'd seemed grateful to him for that, though.

Not so much these people. "We must, my lord," the king said. "We have gravely disrespected you."

Vex had... only a small idea what was happening.

"Tell me who I am," he prompted.

"A god," the king said. He kept his head close to the ground.

Vex resisted the urge to press a hand to his face. He'd been hoping it wasn't that. Did he look anything like a god?

And what was happening here?

Vex's mind began to crunch through everything he'd seen. He didn't recognize this place, but if this was an echo, it was an echo where the system existed. The runic circle the king had used to cast that deathbolt was proof enough of that, and although [Mana Sight] didn't seem to quite work correctly in this space, he suspected that if he could use it, he'd see the same dead mana that usually floated around in his world.

This was a vision of some sort, but it wasn't a vision of .

That knowledge helped him a bit. Perhaps this was one of the kingdoms from beyond the Outskirts, from a continent that they'd never been to; it would explain the different customs, the different people, the species he didn't recognize.

It didn't explain the king's reaction to him, though. It didn't explain the state of the kingdom.

"Which one?" Vex asked, mostly to give himself time to think. He didn't know what the semerit wanted from him — what he was supposed to do here. It was strange that he could interact with the vision at all, but perhaps it wasn't just a vision; perhaps he was being projected somewhere...

Vex found that unlikely. There was no precedent for magic of that kind, nor magic that would allow him to cast his own magic, disrupting the king's. Across that distance, shifted across reality itself?

But it was the best guess he had.

"P-pardon," the king said. He actually stammered a little, and Vex winced slightly; he didn't like this. He didn't want to be feared, and he'd never been a leader. He preferred a role in the shadows. "But I do not know. Istarnokov, perhaps, the God of Silence, but..."

Vex sighed.

He could see a few different paths ahead of him. He could try to keep up the ruse, perhaps, and tell the king that he was a god; that he wanted them to stop fighting, and to ask for help. He could tell them the truth: that he was no god at all, merely a wizard that had been sent here by a magic he didn't understand.

He could take a third option.

"I am not a god," Vex said mildly. He walked over to the window, deliberately turning his back on the king. [Mana Sight] or not, he could still sense the presence of mana. He'd know if the king tried to attack him, and hear if the king tried to move toward him. "But I can see what's happened to your kingdom."

"You... you're not?" the king sounded more confused than anything. "A spirit, then? An agent of the gods?"

The last one was the most accurate, actually, if largely because Vex suspected he was here because of Onyx. "An agent of sorts," he decided, because it wasn't a lie. "One who knows what is happening."

"Tell us," the king said immediately. "We serve the will of the gods."

And here, Vex frowned.

"You shouldn't," he said.

"What?" the king's response was reflexive, stunned. Vex shook his head, but didn't turn around.

"You serve your people," he said. "That's what a king does. The opinions of the gods, when there are many... they are always in conflict. Are you going to turn yourselves inside out, responding to the whims of whichever one reaches out to you first?

"Divinity is a step above us, but only a single step. You serve your people, first and foremost; the gods you choose to serve should be the ones that would most benefit your kingdom, that would have your kingdom's best interests at heart. That is not all of them."

Vex knew this much, at least, from his talks with Sev. The cleric had impressed upon him that the gods were not the arbiters of good and evil. Many of them had their own motives, usually aligned with the specific attribute they were gods of, and there were greater duties they had that they weren't entirely privy to. Onyx had told the answers to Sev once, but Sev had lost those particular memories, too.

The king was frozen. Vex didn't need to turn around to know what the expression on his face was — disbelief warring with anger, a conflict born from his own beliefs being pit against another. In most cases...

"If you are not a god," the king said, narrowing his eyes. "Then you are a pretender."

...In most cases, it didn't turn out well.

Vex sighed. He'd tried.

He turned apart the deathbolt the king threw at him. He didn't know what level he was, but it was easy enough to break apart system spells, now. The runic circles were transparent to him after months of studying with Derivan — each one was just an approximation of an existing glyph, held together by the system and strings of dead mana. It took only the smallest injection of his own mana to make it fall apart.

And whatever means he was here by, he still had control over his mana.

The king didn't have physical stats, it was clear. His eyes widened, and his breaths grew quick and fearful as he threw spell after spell at Vex; the lizardkin noted almost dispassionately that he really had grown a lot in his time in the bonus room. There was a time not too long ago when he would have struggled to analyze all these runic circles in time, but that time was no more.

Deathbolt, with a stitched together glyph for Death and Travel. Acid Spray. Burning Air.

Meteor.

That one made Vex narrow his eyes, even as he dismissed the spell with an almost contemptuous smack of the circle. Attacking him was one thing — even if he didn't cancel the spell before it happened, his own resistance would factor in if the spell hit him. He could manipulate and divert the mana at the last minute, as he'd started to learn to do. This put his entire castle at risk.

"You're an idiot," he said.

Glyph of Binding.

The Glyph he painted was a little more complicated than a basic Binding, in fact; a basic Binding would only hold someone in place. Small modifications to the glyph had allowed him to add additional functions to it without completely fusing it with another glyph — this was just a different expression of the same idea.

He reached into his pocket, not quite sure if this would work, and slapped a reality shard into the middle of the glyph.

In theory...

He and Derivan had studied the way the system interacted with a person quite thoroughly. They'd worked out how the system's mechanisms were partially Shifted, in order to allow it to be anchored to the person's soul. The glyph he drew now had the smallest hint of Change and Stability, which were new but far easier to incorporate than the previous versions of this glyph.

And it was even more effective. The king fell like a puppet with its strings cut; he waved at the air frantically. "What did you do?!" he asked. "What did you — why can't I —"

Vex ignored him, and turned his attention back to the priests. They'd been watching him. It said a lot, really, that none of them had tried to interfere in either direction; he saw the fear in their eyes.

All of this was... too similar to home.

But maybe he could convince them to do something different here. Maybe things could go a little bit better, now that he had the power to do what he couldn't before.

When he made his way back to Elyra...

"Pardon me, lord," the priest said. "But what are we to do with him?"

Vex sighed. "I'm not your lord," he said quietly. "I'm no one at all. I don't know how things are supposed to work here... but you shouldn't be listening to someone that doesn't have your best interests at heart."

He wasn't trained for diplomacy. These weren't words that would sway anyone that wasn't already swayed. But a priest stepped forward, the same one that had spoken up against the king originally.

His eyes were surprisingly sharp. "What can you tell us about what's happening to our kingdom?" he asked. Straight to business.

"Your kingdom is being erased," Vex answered. "There is a massive hole in your city, even if you can't see it. Have you noticed anything strange? Transports taking longer than usual, streets more packed because people are forced to travel along different routes?"

"...We thought that was the way it always was," the priest said. His brows furrowed. "But you are right. We would not have built the city that way."

"My best advice is to evacuate," Vex said with a small bow and a slight wince. "I'm sorry that I don't have anything better. But... don't let your pride keep you here, like he was trying to do." Vex nodded at the king — the former king, perhaps. "And ask for help if you need it."

The priest grimaced. "I had hoped for something better. A way to stop all this."

"If we had a way to do that," Vex said. "I suspect we wouldn't have this conversation at all."

The priest sighed. He walked over to his king, who seemed to have slipped into unconsciousness; a hand hovered over his body, glowing with a pale light. "He wasn't always like this," he said, half to himself. "Had the gods not abandoned us..."

"The gods, too, have their own dangers to face," Vex supplied. "It is possible you weren't abandoned at all."

"...Then that would explain a lot, and it would mean we have failed in our duty." The priest didn't look away. "But you are right. We have a greater duty: one to our people."

Vex glanced outside. Even now, the void at the center of that city was inching outwards, slowy growing; inch by inch, it would consume more of this kingdom, and he still didn't know where this was. He opened his mouth to ask —

—but the semerit in his hands glowed suddenly white-hot, and he almost gasped in pain; the vision collapsed, sucked into the three semerit that appeared to have merged into one.

His original spell — his Sign of Research — completed. The notes it contained were both insufficient and deeply worrying.

[ The New Semerit of the First Library ]

Allows access to divine magics, and contains one temporal paradox.