-

-

Ch234-Birds Of A Feather

-

-

“I’ll talk first, my story is shorter,” Edmund said, as he gestured for Sylver to take a seat on his coffin.

The sun reflected off the glass floor and burned away layer upon layer of Sylver’s shadowy skin. Small pieces came off in wisps of black and disintegrated as they fell, without ever reaching the floor.

“I was born into a family of sheepherders. Normal-ish childhood, but then-” the skin on Edmund’s hands turned an ashy grey, with bright glowing cracks of red extending up to his elbows, “-the farm got attacked. The local lord attacked the farm, killed my family, and tried to burn everything down,” Edmund explained, as he made a grabbing motion towards the floor with his left hand.

A glowing square appeared on the glass underneath Sylver, and as if it was about to break apart, the edges of the square spread outwards. As the cracks lengthened, the square glowed brighter and slowly the edges rose out of the floor and began to form into a cube.

“So, I have a giant hole where my left lung used to be, and then they threw me into the house, where the rest of my family’s corpses are. Somehow, I realize I can absorb the flames, and more importantly, I can steer them. I break out of the burning building, in a blind rage kill everyone in sight, and-”

“You were reborn without your memories,” Sylver interrupted, just as the cube finished forming around him, and gradually began to fill with a brown-colored flame.

“It was my body, but it wasn’t me. I appeared all at once when “I” turned 28,” Edmund said, as the brown flames flooding the cube Sylver was sitting inside passed through his pitch-black torso and latched themselves onto the small piece of flesh inside his shiny indestructible ribcage.

Sylver leaned back and allowed himself to rest against the wall of the cube he was inside.

“That’s about the age you looked when…” Sylver let the words trail away, but found that instead of a grief so deep he couldn’t handle it, he instead felt…

Nothing.

Not actually nothing, he still felt upset, sad, devastated, but it was no longer this overflowing basin of pain, it now felt like a much more manageable bottle. He could tell the glass was brittle, and the cork keeping it closed was the barest shake away from exploding, but at the very least he could look at the bottle, without immediately being splashed with gut-wrenching aching.

“I’m fairly certain even the facial hair was exactly the same,” Edmund said, as the little blob of flesh that composed about 80% of Sylver’s body sprouted a vein, traveled upwards, and expanded into the outline of a heart.

The heart began to beat, and with each beat, spread arteries and veins out through Sylver’s shadowy body, as if it was a seed spreading roots.

“Anyway… The first couple of months are a bit blurry, I didn’t handle… what happened all that well, and the person who I replaced had steady access to a variety of women, narcotics, intoxicants, and other sorts of distractions, which I took full advantage of. I assumed that my dead soul was trying to calm me down, or something to that extent, and just went along with it,” Edmund explained, as Sylver shook his head.

“You never died. I mean, you died back then, but your soul hasn’t been dead,” Sylver said.

The brown flames that had stabbed themselves into Sylver’s body flickered and turned a darker shade of brown. Sylver held back a gasp as he felt bones appear inside of him and nudged them where he wanted them to be.

“So, I died, but the soul of the me that stands before you has never been dead…” Edmund asked.

Sylver rubbed his nonexistent eyes with the palms of his hands, as the brown fire continued giving him more and more bones.

“I wasn’t at my best during the last moments, I may be wrong about you being dead. But… if that sword was enough for Aether, I don’t think you… If anyone’s bloodline magic could make something like this possible, it would be yours. I’m going to run a few tests when we get home, let’s talk about this part then,” Sylver explained.

The rule with magic was that the impossible was impossible.

Up until it wasn’t.

Just because master necromancers like Sylver believed that removing the “scars” of death from a soul was impossible, didn’t necessarily mean it couldn’t be done. Especially for someone like Edmund, his soul was so far above “alive,” that it almost made sense that the “scars” would heal, given enough time.

Sylver lifted his head and nodded at Edmund to continue.

“Once I calmed down a little, I started asking around, surely the queen of a country would know about the Ibis, or at the absolute least heard about one of us,” Edmund said, as Sylver felt his lung organ gradually appear within his chest and felt the uncomfortable feeling of having air forcibly inserted into it.

“It was as if we never existed,” Sylver guessed.

“See, that’s the really weird thing. We never existed, and yet, everything we did very much happened. The names are different, and some of the details have been fiddled with, but the volcanos I tore open are still there, and the obelisks you created are exactly where you left them, I even found a school of healers that use the exact healing practices Adema invented,” Edmund explained, with just a hint of a frown leaking into his voice.

Sylver knew what Edmund wasn’t saying. What he wanted to talk about but was given a warning just for considering.

“Is this a Cassato, or a Cosirius, situation?” Sylver asked hopefully.

“Both? Sort of. Do you have a workaround? Because I know something that might help,” Edmund said.

Sylver felt his spinal discs snap into place and then stretched his newly formed limbs outward. The brown fire became even darker, as muscles, internal organs, eyeballs, all the squishy parts basically, began to grow around Sylver’s partially formed skeleton.

“I have a plan, but it’s going to take a while,” Sylver answered.

Cassato, and Cosirius, were exceptionally powerful clairvoyants, powerful enough that their range extended to every inch of Eira.

Cassato could manipulate information that involved him, if Sylver tried to tell Edmund that Cassato had black hair, Edmund might hear Sylver say that Cassato has blue hair, or white, or blond, or he might not hear anything at all.

The only information that couldn’t be manipulated, was firsthand knowledge. If someone saw, with their own eyes, that Cassato had black hair, even if they couldn’t communicate that information to anyone, Cassato couldn’t stop the person from knowing.

Cosirius on the other hand locked information away.

With Cassato, you could know something about him, but you couldn’t share it.

With Cosirius, he could plain and simple stop you from knowing something. It didn’t even need to be something about him, if he was close enough, he could make a person forget how to walk, or breathe, he could even make a mage forget how to use magic.

Since their supposed defeat, the two names have been used to mean that either a person was incapable of sharing something that they knew, or they “knew” something, but didn’t know it.

“I’ve met people who knew about me, about you, and they-” Sylver started, but was interrupted by Edmund before he could finish.

“Do they have massive gaps in their memories? Or they reincarnated, spent a couple thousand years asleep, something like that, right? All the people who know about us have a period where they were completely unaware of their surroundings,” Edmund interrupted, and Sylver could do little but nod.

Sylver’s vision cleared up a bit, as his right eyeball formed, and connected to the slurry of meat that was gradually turning into a brain.

“There are… I want to say 3, but there are 3 more that I don’t know for certain. But the 3 I know in person, are exactly like you said, Lola just sort of appeared where she did, and Faust and Bruno have massive holes in their memories,” Sylver explained, as his second eyeball materialized inside his upper skull.

Edmund waited for a few seconds, so Sylver could concentrate on adjusting his bone structure before the muscles started getting in the way.

“How long have you been up and about? 173 isn’t bad, especially considering how crippled the [Necromancer] class is, but… I’m going to guess 1 year. Maybe 2?” Edmund guessed.

“Year and a bit. I haven’t really kept track. But that’s from my perspective, from the perspective of this realm, it’s been over 6 years. What level did you get to before you ended up in your coffin?” Sylver asked, and Edmund seemed to remember that he had been in the middle of telling a story.

“I was just shy of hitting level 1,500. You can’t imagine how bad the experience curve gets once you get past 500, and talk about -” Edmund closed his eyes and ground his teeth for a few seconds. Oddly enough, Sylver was happy to see Edmund was hurting, as terrible as that sounded.

“Let’s just enjoy the fact that we’re both here,” Sylver said, as the flames surrounding him became darker and darker.

The two men didn’t say anything for a while, as Sylver nudged Edmund’s healing magic where he needed it most, and by the time Edmund stopped grinding his teeth and calmed down, Sylver was once again whole.

He was naked, but [Greater Undead Armament] provided him with a passable robe.

Edmund in turn looked like he was wearing a shirt and trousers made out of black sand. Every time he moved; the material sparkled as if it was embroidered with extremely small gems.

While Edmund continued telling an abridged version of his story, Sylver used the time to stretch and realign his mana channels.

His body wasn’t just “whole,” it felt better than it ever did. The tiny pieces of metal that sometimes made themselves known by scratching against his spine were gone, as were the various stitches Sylver had been using to keep his left arm attached to his torso.

It even felt like his blood was flowing better than it had before, although that part might be more to do with Sylver’s current mood, as opposed to any physical changes.

Healing an undead is impossible.

Unless you’re a world-class healer, that went out of his way to figure out a method through which he could heal his undead companion.

Due to the nature of his magic, Edmund was capable of inverting his mana, which in turn meant he could cast the opposite of healing magic, which in turn translated into magic that could “heal” an undead.

Sadly, Ed’s “undead healing magic,” didn’t work on undead other than Sylver.

Few know this or bother to learn this, but healing magic has to be adjusted for the person being healed, the adjustment can range from minuscule to massive. Catch-all spells do exist, but their effectiveness is abysmal, to the point they’re almost useless.

In Sylver’s case, the way Ed explained it, the spell he used to heal Sylver barely worked on him, and there wasn’t enough space in the spell’s framework to adjust it to work on anyone other than him.

It would be more correct to say that Sylver just so happened to have the right combination of soul and body, for Edmund to craft a spell that could heal him. Sylver didn’t know enough about healing magic to advise Edmund on the matter, but how many undead did they even know that needed Edmund’s undead healing magic?

Anyone powerful enough for Sylver to know them by name, let alone Edmund, were nigh immortal on their own, from liches to vampires, undead very rarely lived long enough to become strong, without having a method through which to heal themselves.

As Edmund had said, his story was rather short. He spent the majority of his life flying from one catastrophe to the next, demon lords, crazed sorcerers, cults, and so on, and so forth.

By the sound of it, Edmund was so busy playing hero, that he barely had the time to look for members of the Ibis. He asked for the aid of whoever he saved, to at the very least spread his name, so someone who knows him might hear it, but neither Sylver nor Lola found so much as a mention of Edmund’s name in the history books.

But, to his credit, he did pass through the Asberg to see what had happened to the physical location where the Ibis was.

It was gone.

As if it had never been there in the first place.

“I asked a few clairvoyants, seers, and various mages with analysis-related magic to help me, but the answer was always the same. There’s nothing there,” Edmund said.

Sylver ran his hands through his hair and closed his eyes for a while.

He felt like crying.

Just a bit.

It wasn’t as if he expected Edmund to have the answer to every single question he had, but by the sounds of it, Ed had even fewer answers than Sylver. He didn’t even know why he went from an old man to a child, or why he glassed a giant piece of land.

“If you’re here, that means there’s a chance the others also somehow survived,” Sylver said after a long and uncomfortable pause.

“Unless you remember that my bloodline magic is, objectively speaking, the closest thing to man-made true immortality, and you’re a man that knows more about escaping death than every necromancer who ever lived put together,” Edmund said in a tone suggested his words were a compliment, as opposed to a slap across Sylver’s optimistic face.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Sylver said, as he stood up from Edmund’s coffin.

“Why? Because you think you’re such a monster that you don’t deserve-”

“Oh, no, I meant I shouldn’t be here in the sense my spell should have ended me. I didn’t fuck it up, I don’t fuck spells of that caliber. He was a chronomancer, anything less than total annihilation would have been barely a scratch to him. Now that you’re here, I at the very least know that whatever brought me back wasn’t a one-time thing,” Sylver explained in a rush as Edmund’s mildly confused expression gradually turned into a grin.

“That’s actually a good point…” Edmund said.

It was only now that he looked around and noticed that they were standing on top of a seemingly endless ocean of glass.

“Don’t worry, we’re in enemy territory, nobody of value died,” Sylver said.

There was a small chance the Krists had living hostages, or something close to that, but it wasn’t as if Edmund feeling bad about it was going to bring them back.

“I see… And them?” Edmund asked, with a gesture towards the floating golden staff that was Ria.

“One is a magic nullifying liquid golem, that possesses a soul, and the other is a demonic vessel that I have bonded with,” Sylver explained casually. Edmund’s grin grew bigger.

“I can’t tell you how much I missed you man,” Edmund said, with a faint shake in his voice.

“We do actually need to get out of here,” Sylver said, while Edmund looked away for a moment, to wipe his eyes.

“Give me a second,” Edmund answered.

Sylver gestured for Ria to float down to him, while Edmund worked on making sure he didn’t look like he was about to start crying.

“Is everything alright?” Ria whispered into Sylver’s ear, as she tried to hide in his robe, but discovered that the “fabric” wasn’t as dense as she was used to, and she passed right through it.

“Everything is fantastic. Edmund, I would like to meet Ria,” Sylver said, with a gesture towards his golden 3-pronged staff.

“Nice to meet you, Ria,” Edmund said with a nod, with a relaxed and composed look.

“And this is Morana, Mora for short,” Sylver said with a gesture towards the small pale spider sitting on top of his head.

“Nice to meet you, Mora,” Edmund said.

“And this is Spring. He handles the shades I’ve managed to accumulate,” Sylver explained, as Edmund gave the materialized shade a polite nod.

“Alright then. Where are we going?” Edmund asked as Sylver looked up towards the sky to figure out which direction north was.

“That way. I was hoping you-”

Edmund brought his foot down, and a giant crack formed in the glass floor. The crack spread out in an arc and ended up forming a circle around Sylver and Ed’s coffin.

Edmund then proceeded to move his hands in a smooth flowing motion, as if he was playing with smoke.

Ria nearly fell away as the glass platform underneath Sylver’s feet lifted into the air with a lurch, but Sylver caught her before she fell over the edge.

The glass platform rose high into the air, almost high enough to touch the clouds if they hadn’t all been blown away. A moment later Edmund joined Sylver in the air.

He looked as if he was wearing a cloak made out of golden fire, with the barest shade of orange near the bottom tips. As if he had wings that he was too lazy to raise, the blazing cloak appeared almost limp, as Edmund directed the flames to push him forward.

The glass platform underneath Sylver’s feet turned until it was almost perpendicular to the ground. Sylver was ready for it, but in hindsight, he should have warned Ria, because she started to scream, as Edmund exerted his magic onto the glass platform, and caused it to move with the speed of a high-powered missile.