Chapter Twenty-Three

We spent the rest of the afternoon with the gathered villagers in an impromptu festival that was equal parts a wake for the fallen and a celebration for those who survived. I felt awkward and out of place, but I did my best to try and talk to people. Results were mixed— mostly a combination of wary curiosity and dead-eyed exhaustion, but I didn't hold it against them.

Leigh had no such problems and was rapidly the center of attention in any group we approached. Something about the way he was just brought people out of their shells, breathing a steady stream of life into the area that slowly began to dissipate the cloud of gloom I still felt. The thawing attitude of the villagers meant I got to learn more about the various cultures they came from and it… well, it wasn't pretty.

Nezzick had undersold exactly how terrible some of the 'protector gods' could be, with many of these people living in what amounted to generations of horrific slavery. There was no chance of rebellion or escape of any kind other than death, their 'gods' more than willing to stalk runaways through the swamp for sport. Against creatures like the Windstalker, even people with guns were barely even an annoyance— let alone an actual threat. It meant that all the villagers were subject to the tiniest whims of the Beast Lords for their entire lives.

It didn't help that the few that were allowed to leave for trade were almost universally reviled within the major cities as 'beast worshippers' and primitives; bringing back stories of rampant discrimination that reinforced the belief there was nowhere they could go and be welcome except under their 'protectors'. And yet somehow they still felt a perverse (from my perspective) form of pride in the various gods they'd served— eagerly extolling the virtues and strengths of their old masters. They were almost competitive about it, even.

But by far the most uncomfortable conversations were when they started speculating about me.

They didn't know who I was other than a visitor from the caravan, so once Leigh got them to open up a little the first thing on everyone's mind was the new 'Great One' they'd been sent to serve. It was absolutely mortifying to listen to so many people try to talk me up by speaking of my 'peerless strength and skill' since I'd beaten Kurkulakoa— like I hadn't gotten absolutely thrashed by the monstrous griffon for most of the fight.

Of course, Leigh standing right next to me made everything immeasurably worse. He never let out so much as a smirk, but every time the villagers made up some new flattering nonsense about me and I had to physically resist cringing to death, Leigh would lock eyes with me and sagely nod.

"Why yes, the Great One is a magnificent specimen, don't you think so Ray?"

"I will get you for this."

Worse still were the follow-up questions that always came quietly after some predetermined interval of 'praising the Great One'.

Have you seen it?

What is it like?

What does it like?

Does it prefer men or women?

Do you know what it needs from us?

Will it accept us?

How can we—

I shook my head, dispelling the endless— desperate— questions from my mind. We'd spoken to easily over a thousand people throughout the day and nearly all of them had done the same fearful round of questions. It was deeply unsettling to me, the dichotomy of fervent praise and terrified servility. Like someone had modeled an entire culture around the concept of Stockholm syndrome. They were all terrified that I’d be another monstrous tyrant, but even more terrified that I’d refuse to accept them. Each conversation felt like an added weight on my shoulders as I realized the level of expectation they had for me.

Where’s the middle ground? Is it even possible to help them without taking ‘ownership’ of them? How do I deal with this kind of cultural baggage?

My own questions plagued me, so I still wound up feeling grateful to Leigh despite all his shit-giving just because he managed to effectively disarm most of the conversational landmines and still somehow leave a good impression on people.

The sun was just starting to set when Nezzick reappeared with a dark bundle in his hands. Formally presenting it to me, his voice boomed out over the deck.

“Great One! We found this near the site of the battle with Kurkulakoa. The material was too damaged to recover fully, but our finest weavers have worked tirelessly to recreate what they could.”

It was like he’d set off a bomb with that announcement, with how fast the improving mood died. Suddenly there was space around me as people jerked backwards like they’d been stung. People I’d been speaking with all afternoon went pale and collapsed to their knees, starting a domino effect that quickly spread through the encampment. Terrified faces pressed themselves into the wooden planks at my feet, and my discomfort of the afternoon vanished.

Because now, I was pissed.

This asshole.

Wordlessly, I held my hands out to take the offered bundle from him, injecting as much hostility into my glare as I could without terrifying the people nearby even further. Holding it up, I inspected the slightly familiar dark cloth.

My jacket? But what’s all this…?

Shaking out the bundle, I took a look at my ‘recreated’ coat.

The old canvas shoulder-poncho was gone, replaced by a more traditional length poncho. Someone had painstakingly woven in the dark feathers of the Windstalker to the poncho’s exterior, carefully arranged to make it look like wings furled across the shoulders and draping down the torso. The inner lining had been replaced by a cloth with black-and-white geometric patterns, and the same had been done symmetrically to areas of the coat that had been too damaged to repair. The resulting blend of gothic, asian, and south american outerwear should have looked ridiculous, or at least weird, but the quality somehow made everything work. The only complaint I could register was that the additions made the coat look even more edgy. Honestly though… I liked it.

Turning the coat around to continue inspecting it, my eyes were drawn like magnets to a symbol stitched between the shoulders. The details were intricate, the scale of the stitchwork far more complex than I’d have believed possible with the villager’s level of technology. It was a circular mandala, with a pattern of triangles so dense it was dizzying. The shape flowed in my vision, moving without seeming to change at all. Colors sprung out of the fabric, miniature nebulas swirling in the air for an eternal heartbeat before dissipating. I stared longer, and I began to recognize the meaning of the bizarre symbol.

It was words… my words.

“Cosmos is... everything. Everything that has been or could be, a vast and interconnected universe united in Order and Harmony under natural Law. It is the infinity of Light and Dark combined, to become all things.”

It was my answer to the question asked when I’d first found my Ideal. What is Cosmos? The outer circle shifted, my recognition enough for the final message hidden in the symbol to appear.

I AM [COSMOS].

The words hit me like a hammer blow, the Ideal in my soul roaring in triumph at the recognition, the veneration contained inside this symbol. Light exploded out from my skin, a whirling maelstrom of cosmic phenomena that spread to engulf the entire camp like the birth of a galaxy. [Law] gazed upon a symbol crafted to represent it by masterful hands and claimed it, searing the mark forever as mine.

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When the lights faded, the symbol had changed. Instead of stitching, a living starscape had been inscribed between the shoulderblades of the coat. It stretched inwards like a window to infinity, displaying a universe of perfected order for all to see.

My hands shook and my breath was ragged as my head snapped back towards the grinning shaman.

“Where did you get this??”

Nezzick only chuckled.

“A sign was required, Great One. One to mark your people. The will of your [Cosmos] was writ upon your soul, it needed only to be seen.”

My eyes darted back and forth between the old man and the symbol, the embodiment of [Law] in my soul radiating a sense of smug satisfaction that flooded and confused my other emotions. Steadying myself, I took a deep breath.

“Ok.”

Clutching the coat to my chest, I poured magic into [Flight] until it burned in my veins and shot off back to the Duchess.

Back in my room, I traced the smooth lines of the rune idly with my hand and watched the swirls of color that drifted out from the contact. I was a little embarrassed now for just flying off but between all the people, Nezzick’s party crashing and my spewing [Comos] all over everything… yeah, that was a lot for one day. My eyes were pulled right back to the rune, like they had been since the first time I saw it.

I felt so conflicted, looking at it. It was beautiful, unique, and mine, my soul endlessly crowing and preening with satisfaction every time I traced the geometric shapes with my eyes. It was also an intense violation of my privacy that this existed, like a snapshot of my innermost being had been captured and then stitched on the back of a damn coat! How did he even do that??

And yet, I couldn’t hide the rune. Trying to cover it up resulted in a harsh sense of dissonance in my soul that left my hands trembling, like the act of hiding it ran so counter to my Ideal that it was physically painful. I glared at the glowing symbol in exasperation.

Just couldn’t be subtle could it? Well, I guess that’s kinda my fault…

A knock sounded on the hatch to my room.

“Come in!” I shouted, resignedly.

There was a brief pause and then the knock came again, more insistently.

What the hell?

Standing up from my bed, I walked over and pulled the hatch open.

“I said— what?”

I got a brief look at a truly bizarre machine sitting on a tripod in front of the door before it made a muffled *click*. Then a searing flash of light sent me reeling backwards into the room with a startled cry as the machine sounded out a dull *whump*.

"Gah, my eyes!"

Instantly I summoned a cocoon of hex shields around me while I struggled back upright, blinking spots out of my vision and trying to figure out what the hell was going on with my ravaged senses. When my eyes cleared, I found Shani standing in the hallway tinkering with the back of the machine.

“Shani?? What was that?” I asked with confusion.

She looked at me and sniffed haughtily before turning back to the odd contraption.

“‘That’ was for not telling me you weren’t human before we kissed. Rather than wait on you to make up your mind and actually trust me, I'm figuring out what you are for myself."

"Ok, first I distinctly recall you kissed me—" I cut off as I realized the horrible, horrible mistake I was making with those words and Shani's expression turned thunderous. "But I was going to tell you! Things just… moved too fast for me to keep up. Also, what??"

She ignored me, yanking a large, square cartridge the length of my forearm out of the machine and opening it. Inside was a row of translucent slides about the width of my palm that Shani began leafing through.

"Uh… what's all that?" I couldn't help asking with nervous curiosity.

"Aetheric spectroscope." She mumbled distractedly. "And it's going to tell me exactly what— wow that's a lot of mana— I mean, it's going to tell me exactly what you are."

Her eyes widened as she briefly held up a slide with a dense circular imprint on it before shoving it back into the cartridge.

"You know, I could just tell you—"

"Shush!"

Eventually she seemed to find the side she was looking for, holding it up triumphantly before bringing it close to her face and reading it excitedly. The longer she read though, the more she frowned— pausing periodically to glance back and forth between me and the slide. After a few minutes, she seemed to come to a conclusion and aggressively pointed the side at me.

"You are very dense!" She announced.

"Hurtful, but I guess I can't really argue."

The brunette blushed prettily.

"N-no, I mean literally dense. My scope can't make out any details looking at you because of your cross-spectrum density. This is very disappointing."

I stared at her blankly for a moment while she pouted next to her machine.

"Sooo…?" I asked, leadingly.

"Fine." She muttered after a disgruntled pause. "Since science has failed, I guess we'll do this the 'social' way. But I'll be checking everything you say against my data!"

Shani waved the cartridge of slides at me threateningly and I couldn't help smiling.

"I'm sorry for being too 'dense', do you want to come inside?" I asked with a slight wince as I beckoned her through the doorway.

She waved off my apology with a quick eye roll and stepped close, gently tracing where the hole in my shoulder had been with one hand while I froze like a deer in the headlights.

“I checked on you a few times while you were out, but the doctors didn’t know when you’d be awake and there’s still so much work to do on the Terise that I couldn’t stay. I thought you’d be stuck there for the rest of the trip…”

Sighing heavily, she stepped past me and plopped down onto my cot before crossing her arms and giving me an impatient glare.

I'm getting such mixed signals here…

Before I could even start trying to explain what I was to her, she noticed my improved coat with a gasp.

"Is that an origin rune!?" She shouted excitedly. "How did you get it to— no no no, it can wait. *Ahem* you were saying?"

I chuckled softly as she visibly reined in her excitement and barely stopped herself from snatching up my coat. Looking at Shani, I could suddenly feel the nervousness underlying her aggressive posture and I abruptly felt guilty for hiding things from her the way I had. Keeping these kinds of secrets was not a great way to try and start a relationship with someone, and like I’d been reminding myself all day— I live here now. Maybe it was just the pendulum swinging back too far the other way but… She was still here, wasn’t she? That meant she at least kinda wanted this to work, and I could meet her halfway by telling her who I was.

Here goes nothing.

“It all started the first time I died…”

I told her my story. What had happened to me, what I was, all the crazy things I’d seen deep down in the core of the world. Her eyes got wider and wider the longer I spoke, which made me nervously spew out my tale even faster. When I got to the bit where I’d discovered how to wield Anathema she startled, turning away and rapidly flipping through the cartridge of slides before pulling one out for both of us to see. The slide displayed something I immediately recognized— how could I not?

It was my soul. The cosmic nebulae and star patterns swirling around the edges even on this still slide. It was detailed enough that you could actually see the marks where the parasite had infected me, the vein-like pocks of Dezzahn’s tendrils, and the gash of the Emissary’s spear. More important than all that though, was the gaping hole in the center of the slide where Anathema had burned even the image of itself from existence.

Shani stared open-mouthed at the physical confirmation of my story in her hands while I finished, ending with my rebirth for the second time in the caves below Delmoth.

“And then I came here. So… that’s it.”

I could see the thoughts racing behind her eyes, and I couldn’t help the sinking feeling that I’d just massively screwed up by dumping my whole life experience on her in one go. Taking a deep breath, she stood up and calmly closed up the cartridge before walking out of the room. Stopping at the door, she turned around and looked me in the eyes.

“Thank you for telling me and… thank you for telling the truth. I… I need to think for a bit.”

With that, she left.

That was too much, too fast. Damn it.

I sighed and sank back into the cot, telling myself I was relieved to no longer be keeping secrets from people close to me. Even if seeing her walk away had hurt.