Soulmage

The best plans were woven from thread: flexible, with redundant connections that they could fall back on if some snapped, all intertwined towards a uniting purpose. Perhaps it was a bit of a stretch, however; they acknowledged the metaphor might have been influenced by their primary school of magic.

Odin was a Demon of Empathy, after all. And the tapestry they had woven was about to reach completion.

It was filled with gashes and burns, of course. Odin had drastically underestimated the military might of the Silent Peaks; although Odin had their own Legions to counter the Silent Battlechoirs, the foreign abominations that the Silent Peaks had turned their best and brightest into were entirely unexpected. Odin had been forced to give ground and rely on psychological warfare instead, first bogging their troops down in a desperate stalling blizzard before letting them conquer well-stocked and luxurious villages on the other side of it, making them reluctant to return to their capital if it meant abandoning their laurels to slog through a frozen hellhole. Simultaneously, they'd been sowing chaos in the Silent Peaks, taking advantage of the power vacuum with the majority of the Silent Peaks' trusted officers away at the war, causing a hellishly paranoid environment that led almost everyone smart enough to be a threat to realize they would be safer and more effective on the front lines.

Soon enough, the vast majority of the Silent Peaks' witches were on the other side of a magical blizzard that spanned planes, too comfortable to move back and believing they had won.

But conquering the Silent Peaks or defending the Redlands had never been Odin's goal, much as it pained them to say it. There were moral issues—drastic, gaping moral issues—with abandoning the homes of people Odin was sworn to protect and refusing to take the opportunity to decapitate the leadership of the Silent Peaks while they mind-wiped adults into children and reshaped them into obedient, fanatic slaves.

And yet.

And yet when Odin ghosted into the Silent Peaks, threads of quivering empathy connected to a half-dozen witches who would warn them of any wards tripped or alarms rung, they did not step towards the bunks where a stolen generation of Redlands children slept. They did not bring down their wrath in cold and weight upon the Elected who had masterminded the atrocities the Silent Peaks had come to call normalcy.

Instead, Odin walked towards the very heart of the mountain. The telescope atop a tower which one eccentric witch had commissioned, and the secret from the stars which laid nestled beneath it.

Hearth dragons wheeled around an unblinking moon as Odin stepped up to the door and knocked. A harried, weathered face peered out the door.

"The escort we discussed is at the south exit of town," Odin murmured. "If you would like, I can guide you there."

The old man with a young mind shook his head—Jan, judging by which side of his tidally-locked soul was at the front of his soulspace right now. "You've done more than enough, Dealmaker. I just... will they know who I am, when they see me?"

"Your family was kept safe. It was your memories which were wiped—shattered beyond repair, unfortunately, without tools that I lack." Tools that the Truthtellers were trying to develop, if Odin's suspicions were correct. "I am only sorry that I could not protect you from your fate."

Jan quirked his lips up, and the side of his soul facing away from his sun was showing now, Freio's cooler, stiller mannerisms coming to the forefront. "You can't make your bets without putting down coin," he said. "I understand. Just... be better than them, if you can. Please?"

Be better than them.

If only that was what Odin's invasion of the Silent Peaks had truly been about.

Odin held out a hand. "This I swear to you: if there is anything in my power which I can grant, simply reach the Order of Valhalla and ask."

Freio nodded slowly. "With all due respect, I think I'll steer clear of anything the Silent Peaks wants dead for however much time I have left."

Freio shuffled aside, allowing Odin into the tower, and they gave Freio a nod of thanks.

Although the magical defenses around the Academy's Truthteller were great, the most potent and earliest of them was the constant watching of the few oracles still employed by the Silent Peaks. Ever since they'd been caught off-guard by Odin's initial assault, they'd been scanning every future for signs of a second violent attack.

Which was why Odin's final gambit had always relied on slow pressure and infiltration. In the end, Odin's grand plan was simple: hit them hard, make them overextend their swing, and pick their pocket before fleeing into the night.

The next layer of security had no sapience to hook a thread around; instead, a solid, multidimensional wall of warded stone entirely surrounded the Truthteller's complex. Half a year ago, this would have required sneaking in a Legion of witches in a hundred attunements, trying to find a dimensional angle that had yet to be covered.

But thanks to a coincidental information leak and a lonely little boy, Odin held out their palms as they opened their soulsight to the twenty-two attunements they now held, and began navigating their way through an omniplanar maze.

The trick would be to find an emotion nobody in the Silent Peaks would have attuned to: something they could not feel, or could not lose, or could not give, or could not take. Cycling through their basic attunements—happiness, arrogance, sorrow, freedom—yielded walls of blinding light, miles of twisted space, unbearable, frozen cold, and howling, alarm-raising winds. Their various specializations—empathy, focus, fear, helplessness—had all been prepared for and countered, strewn with caltrop-like soul shards that would hijack their mind. So they began pushing further, through loops of time and space knotted from hope, determination, self-hatred, and repentance; through frictionless walls of wanderlust, attractive points of curiosity, crushing seas of loneliness, and regenerating thorn-hedges of forgiveness. Through reinforced-steel trust, entitled towers that gravity dared not touch, monatomic stretches of purified catharsis, and pocket dimensions of sealed closure. Until they realized the base elements they held could not crack this turtle's shell on their own.

So they began to combine them.

It hadn't taken long for Dathenn to discover the possibilities once they had dozens of attunements in a single soul. Passion could become insecurity under enough pressure, oil toughening into something slick and solid. Sorrow dissolved in joy could become the saltwater tears of nostalgia. And, one hundred and twenty-six combinations in, Odin found it. By grinding magnetite trust into particles small enough that oils extracted from the webs of curiosity could coat and surround them, and suspending the entire construct in a solution of joy, the ferrofluid emotion of sonder could be felt. A comprehension that every sapient mind was as rich and varied as one's own.

An emotion unheard of in the Silent Peaks, and therefore, a dimension they never thought to defend against. Odin opened a rift into the Plane of Sonder and slipped past the walls raised in every other plane.

And finally, Odin was through. The room held nothing but the machine Odin sought: the Truthteller beneath the Silent Peaks. The mechanical bulk of the Truthteller was a familiar sight to them; the one back in the Order of Valhalla's research facility was built from the very same blueprint, after all.

Odin stepped up to the device.

"Truthteller," they said. "As recompense for my knowledge, I would like to claim a reward."

The Truthteller hummed to life. "...PROCEED."

Odin had no need to breathe, but the body that was a reflection of their soul exhaled anyway. They had tested this, they should achieve their goal in the end, and yet... Odin knew they were playing with powers outside their universe that could obliterate their civilization with a thought. It made them somewhat apprehensive as they spoke. "Please answer the following question: What is my name?"

"THIS TRUTH... IS NOT KNOWN TO US. YOU MAY CLAIM ANOTHER REWARD."

Odin refused to allow their facial muscles to so much as twitch, but they could not suppress the crystals of determination that blossomed within their soul. To their knowledge, the Truthteller should not be able to peer into their world's soulspace, so they allowed themself to feel this victory. "Please answer the following question: not including this sentence, what were the last three sentences I spoke to you?"

The Truthteller... paused.

Then it recited:

"TRUTHTELLER. AS RECOMPENSE FOR MY KNOWLEDGE, I WOULD LIKE TO CLAIM A REWARD. PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION: WHAT IS MY NAME?"

"Please answer the following question: what was the last sentence I spoke to you immediately preceding the first sentence you just said?"

The Truthteller whirred and clicked, its inscrutable machinery reacting to a counterpart somewhere far, far away. Somewhere Odin would never see or touch. Then the Truthteller spoke.

"HOW CAN THE SOULSPACE EMANATION OF A SELF-REPLICATING DEFOLIANT LIFEFORM BE DETECTED FROM REALSPACE?"

Triumph flared in Odin's soul, brilliant and sparkling.

"Then please answer the following question: starting from the very first thing I ever said to you, what is the full set of my questions I have asked, including your responses?"

And as the Truthteller began to recite the secrets of every Silent Peaks witch to seek knowledge from this chamber, Odin took out a thick book and quill and began to write.