By the time Serenity walked out of the store, it was close to sunset; he’d spent longer shopping than he’d realized. Well, if he was going to go shopping, this was exactly the sort of shopping he preferred. It was less fun than researching runic patterns, but at least he accomplished something.

It was too late in the day to get a better look at one of the planes, since they were always long gone before sunset. He’d have to try for that tomorrow. Tonight, he could finally spend some time in the Library, looking into some of the questions he’d come up with. Over the past few days, he’d assembled everything the Library had on Incarnates, whether that was as semi-deific beings or as a magic level above Aspects, but he hadn’t really had the time to go through it all yet.

As Rissa reminded him when he got back to the Library, he could look into the information the Library had on Incarnates after dinner. It was almost ready and she didn’t want to have to hunt him down when it was time.

Dinner was a deliciously seasoned medley of foods Serenity didn’t recognize; apparently, Blaze had decided to take a rest day and cook after the first round of healing instead of staying at the improvised hospital to do the tasks that only required skilled hands rather than magic. The presentation reminded Serenity of Indian food, but the spices weren’t anything he’d had on Earth.

After dinner, Serenity finally settled down to review the material he’d found. He thought of it as “books”, but that was really only true for two of them; the other material was three scrolls and a collection of loose papers that Serenity thought had probably been someone’s incomplete thesis. He didn’t know how they ended up at the Library, but he was grateful. The thesis, in particular, pointed at a number of sources that simply weren’t available in the Library; fortunately, it had hand-copied excerpts from them.

It took hours, but Serenity eventually put together three different possibilities. Each had its own backing, including seriously inadequate references that mostly tied back to apocryphal stories, and they contradicted each other. Each of the books presented one option, while the papers and scrolls seemed to represent a third.

The first option was that Incarnate meant the same thing as “deity” or “god”, though it was possible that “avatar” was really the closer term. It started from the apparently well known premise that an Incarnate was always an expression of something it called a Concept. Serenity could agree with that; he was apparently the Incarnate of Death, even if he didn’t know what that really meant.

The book that argued the strongest for this option then described how gods work; every god is worshiped and has attributes; it conflated those deific attributes with the Concept that defined an Incarnate’s power. That seemed like a weak argument to Serenity; after all, gods varied widely. Was it simply saying that Incarnates were one type of god?

It then brought up the Beast Gods and compared them to Incarnates to make the argument that Incarnates were really just the avatars of their Concept. Serenity had to admit that that was a far stronger argument; Beast Gods could be said to Incarnate the Concept of a particular “Beast”, whatever that meant. Coyote was a good example of this; for all that he’d met Serenity in a human-like form, he was truly a coyote.

Or, at least, his Incarnate was.

Serenity already knew that the Incarnate and the being they were the Incarnate for weren’t the same. He was the Incarnate of Death, but he wasn’t Death Himself. He suspected that the Coyote he’d met was the Beast God, not the Incarnate.

The thing was, he’d never been Death. Didn’t that mean he wasn’t Death’s avatar even though he was Death’s Incarnate?

Serenity couldn’t completely discount the idea but at the same time he didn’t really like it.

The second book dove deep into the idea that Incarnates were not gods at all. Instead, they were expressions of a level of magical understanding. It added the words “and concordance”, but never really explained what that meant. It completely ignored the Beast Gods and their incarnates other than a single line that mentioned that it was a re-use of the word and not the focus of the book.

A type of magical affiliation was how the Voice classified an Incarnate of magic and obviously the Voice knew what it was talking about; there was nothing mystical about it. It simply meant that you’d reached beyond being able to pull a piece of magic (an Aspect) over yourself to where you could now “be” the whole thing as an Incarnate.

Serenity didn’t believe that for a moment. Sure, some of it was well supported by what he’d seen; it was classified as another higher category than Aspect by the Voice and he absolutely could use it even though it no longer appeared as an Affinity. It was even true that his Incarnate of Death was stronger than his Aspect had been, at least for his Tier.

None of that explained why he could talk to Death, nor why his Affinity had gone over 100% on the way. It also didn’t cover why he was immune to Death; yes, he’d been resistant before, but being immune was a big step away from being resistant. Even the spells that could prevent Death from affecting you weren’t true immunity, only very, very good resistance; they held the magic away from you, they didn’t let it wash over you and not affect you.

It also didn’t explain why Serenity found the presence of Death attuned mana and Death Himself comforting. That was a step beyond even being resistant. At first, he’d thought it was simply because he was used to the presence of Death, but the more he thought about it, the more he thought that wasn’t the entire truth. He’d never met Death in person before he returned to the past, yet he felt like an old friend Serenity was comfortable around.

Also, what had Death said when they talked?

Serenity pulled up the recording.

“I remember; I think, I feel. You are far more than Death was, and you make me more. I wish you well, but I also warn you: your choice to reach beyond Me means that I cannot aid you here in any way other than my presence.”

Death wasn’t able to explain what he meant at the time, but one thing was obvious: Serenity affected Death. Assuming that an Incarnate was nothing more than “an expression of a level of magical understanding and concordance” didn’t fit. It was clear that either being an Incarnate required a certain level of magical ability or perhaps becoming an Incarnate enhanced what was already there, but that wasn’t all it was.

Serenity was grumpy when he moved the two books to the side. Neither was really helpful; the first seemed more accurate than the second, but it didn’t address the points where the second was strong. The mysticism annoyed Serenity, as well; he didn’t like the idea that there were no rules for what an Incarnate was. In his experience, there were always rules. Sometimes they were hard to figure out and sometimes what seemed like a rule was a special case, but there were always rules.

Rules that you could leverage to improve things. That was what he’d done when he created a new runic script, after all; he’d taken the time to understand all of the rules of runic magic enough to codify them into a runeset that didn’t have the weaknesses of the ones he’d disassembled to make it.

It was a complete runeset, rather than the partial ones that were common, so it was more flexible than most and required less knowledge about when and where it didn’t work. It had its own weaknesses, but Serenity was still proud of it; the primary weakness was that it couldn’t be written in spaces quite as small as many of the partial runesets. That was rarely too big a problem, because you needed space for the mana anyway.

He didn’t think he’d be able to do anything similar with his Incarnate, but he still needed to know what the rules were. He’d really been essentially ignoring it, treating it like it was just another higher level of magical compatibility like the second option, until he spoke with Death during the ritual at the eclipse. He’d already known it wasn’t the whole story, but he’d been burying his head in the sand.

The beginning of the incomplete thesis was interesting.

Incarnate is a simple word to define. All it means is to have a body. We use it to speak of all of the beings that do not normally have bodies when they come before us, spirits and gods, demons and angels, sometimes even the soul itself.

That is not what it meant by the word ‘Incarnate’ when it appears on the Voice’s Status Screen. There, it is a type of magic, more powerful even than an Aspect, yet less welcoming of changes and far less within the control of the person who holds it. You cannot lose an Aspect, but you can lose an Incarnate. (Ref. Memoir of the Damned, scroll cs 2376)

Legend says that only one person can hold an Incarnate. In this, it is like the Beast Gods’ Incarnates, for each Beast God can take a new Incarnate only once the old one has died (Ref. Treatise on the Beast Gods, scroll cs 71622). The fact that a Beast God cannot release an Incarnate, however, indicates that the similarities are only that: similarities.

There is one additional similarity between the Beast Gods and the Incarnates, or more specifically between Incarnates of the Beast Gods and those known as Incarnates on their Status: there is something that they are the Incarnate of. In both cases, while the higher Entity seems to somehow set who can be an Incarnate in the first place, they have no further influence; instead, the influence appears to travel in the opposite direction, with the Beast God or Entity taking on characteristics of the Incarnate, especially when they are close (Ref. Treatise on the Beast Gods, scroll cs 71622; The Man of Fire, scroll cs 551).

A distinction must be drawn between the Risen Gods, the Beast Gods, and these Entities; while both Beast Gods and Entities are singular in what they represent, Risen Gods are not. Risen Gods can overlap their attributes and represent multiple things; indeed, if it were not for the fact that Risen Gods’ strength in their Domains requires Faith, that even their existence can require Faith, they could be mistaken for higher-Tier beings.

The Incarnates of Risen Gods appear to be the physical form of the Risen God from before they Rose; they are not separate from the Entity the way Beast Gods and Entities appear to choose or perhaps assume an Incarnate. The truly interesting coincidence is that it appears possible for a Risen God to be chosen as the incarnate of an Entity (Ref. Descension of a Swordsman, scroll cs 5294).

Three of the four scrolls mentioned in the introduction were the three Serenity had found; he’d apparently missed Treatise on the Beast Gods, but it sounded like he didn’t need that one anyway. He skipped to the three scrolls and looked through them; The Man of Fire and Descension of a Swordsman were both legends. The Man of Fire was even told in verse; Serenity groaned. That meant it was even less reliable than Descension of a Swordsman. You never knew what was changed to make something fit a story or legend; they rarely gave the details he needed.

Memoir of the Damned at least was told as a first-person account; unfortunately, it read like the ravings of a madman instead of something that truly made sense. Serenity did notice one odd thing about it, though. There were notes in the margins in another hand that seemed to try to make sense of the scroll.

He couldn’t entirely trust what he’d found, but at least he now knew one thing: no one else knew what it meant either. If they did, it wasn’t here.

Well, there was one other thing. He could apparently lose the Incarnate; from what he could make out from the Memoir, that was a very bad thing. Serenity wasn’t worried; he was certain Death would say something first. That had apparently happened to the author of the Memoir, as well; if there was a common theme running throughout the scroll, it was “why didn’t I listen when I was warned?”