Chapter 82: A Stone's Dawn (Patreon)

Having perused the remnant souls of a great many creatures in the short few months of its life, Aby felt confident in its assertion that sleep is a strange and confusing state in which the body and mind both turn off. This left the victim helpless and reliant on a  great deal of luck and, in some cases, trust not to be preyed upon by something bigger, stronger, and less asleep them. Just about every living animal the core had thus far consumed had baffling amounts of time that was simply missing from their memories, not faded and jumbled like the most inconsequential events often were or warped and twisted and amplified like traumas and triumphs, but entirely erased.

But there were reasons why Aby did not envy the clockwork torpor of the fleshy things that were weirder still; the sheer helplessness of it was a big downside, but as it acquired a steady stream of beings that thought themselves smart, it realized that their own slumbers had an added layer of confusion. Dreams made no sense, they were memories that weren’t, events that never happened that were recounted as though they were gospel.

The core couldn’t guess at the purpose behind the nonsensical cognizance that the more intelligent minds experienced during their sleep, especially when dreams were so wholly unique to each individual. Dreams seemed limited to the sapient, or nearly so, but any trends beyond that were beyond the gem’s ability to parse. The first few times Aby had claimed- or reclaimed- a soul with dreams, it thought them broken somehow. Each one was a myriad moment of cause and effect that seemed completely removed from the rest of the souls’ experiences, like a constant, inexplicable intermission that happened nearly every time a mind would fade to nothing in the telltale onset of sleep.

Finally, it managed to put together that these were the dreams occasionally spoken of in the more lucid majority of their life, but that seemed even more confusing. The memories of each soul were generally straightforward, often skewed by emotion or lost with time but Aby could still get a clear idea of the series of events and decisions that led a once simple toddler to grow and mature into a fool scrabbling after scraps of mana they almost never seemed to actually use.

This wasn’t so with dreams, not bound by logic or reason, and Aby was coming to agree with one of the few scholarly opinions it had gathered, the idea that dreams were just mad echoes of life and the blind screaming of a mind that doesn’t realize it should stop thinking. But this hardly explained the mysticism often attached to dreams, the idea of someone simply dreaming up events that come true seems preposterous, but Aby had claimed more than one soul that had actually done so, or so it seemed.

And it just didn’t make sense, not the prophetic morsels the core had found, not the meaningless static, not the deeply repressed terrors or wistful longings for a future that most certainly wouldn’t come true. Aby was frequently confused by more than a little of the alien qualities that seem so ubiquitous to biological creatures, but it had long come to the conclusion that dreams would be one thing that it would never really get the chance to understand, not unless the fleshy creatures outside knew a lot more about sleep and dreams than the many examples it had taken let on. It didn’t understand a lot about the world outside its domain, nor did it want to, but most of the time it could at least piece together some sort of logic to most of it, even if that logic didn’t make sense or just led them to their deaths.

There wasn’t any logic to be had with dreams, not even the dreamer had any logic for how or why they happened, so the inanimate observer shouldn’t have had any hope to even begin empathize beyond a surface level. What it never expected, then, was to one day have dreams of its own. It had honestly never expected to even sleep, but then it also never even imagined that its halls could be blighted by that damnable invader and his truly wicked “gift”, so it wasn’t too shocked, in the end.

Sleep, or the state it was in that it drearily termed sleep for lack of any more fitting word, came quickly once it disposed of the refuse that wandered into its halls and eliminated the enemy. It felt fatigued, its grasp over its own mana being tenuous, and even its soul felt sluggish and splitting. It had no way of consciously going unconscious, the whole instinctual process felt deeply weird but not unpleasant and it simply let go and retreated into its gem. Its mind was active, but sluggish, and for once most of its thinking seemed passive, with thoughts that sometimes wandered and occasionally lingered.

There was a constant stream of consciousness that seemed to be fed directly into its mind, a constant line of sensation that would cook a fleshy brain that just served to confuse the core with its mishmash. In one moment, it would experience being a tyrant, having an iron reign over a trillion lessers and the next, it wanted to sing, perform, truly be elegant. It knew in some part of its mind that it didn’t really want this, nor did it want to become an ocean, whatever that desire even meant, and that as a gem it could make no noise and yet remained the loudest thing in its room already.

But it still experienced the desires, the mundane sensations that broke them up which were themselves just as confusing, it was caught up, a large part of its awareness was just being pulled along by memories and these foreign hopes and eventually, it realized these were basically dreams. Pointless, vague, and unpleasantly hard to pay attention to, Aby eventually stopped trying to altogether, and after the stream of dreams started becoming more and more melancholy, and outright fearful, it turned its mind elsewhere.

It tried to, at least. The core felt distinctly limited as it tried to split its attention, and even maintaining focus on two tasks felt difficult, like it was trying to slip back into the dreams and their nonsense thrall. That was no deterrent, though, and Aby set its mind to trying to think normally, with frustratingly minimal success.

With difficulty it maintained the two separate portions of attention, one to remain prisoner to thoughts it didn’t want to have while the other… just thought. It realized, then, that for all the thinking and planning it had been doing ever since it could do either of those things, it hadn’t really taken a lot of time to reflect on the things that had happened, instead just bouncing from one task to the next as soon as it deemed an experiment successful or not worth pursuing.

Even with the outright prodigious ability to split and shape its mind that all cores shared- an ability that would only continue to get better- Aby never felt that it was enough, and that it could always go back in the future to review old experiments, conducting ever more in the present. Being forced to halt everything it was doing and wanting to do, the only option that remained was to dwell on what it had done and when it did, it realized it had been inefficient a lot more often than it would have liked.

Even from the start, the successes with some of its earliest experiments like the wyrm, it hadn’t bothered to try replicating the results all that hard. Sure, most of the Feats it had accomplished early on, and their boosts to what evolutions the Core had were mostly a one-time deal, and a choice it selected once likely wouldn’t be an option again if it was more esoteric or exotic, but it could’ve still tried and maybe benefitted in some other way.

There were many more examples like this: the kelpie and his evolution, still yet to appear again and quite possibly for lack of trying; Carmine, her evolution gained by an admittedly unlikely to repeat event but it could still spawn other morgens; the drake and his crystals, a line of strengthening that it tried to repeat a few times but when nothing proved as sturdy to the initial implantation or as viable afterwards just gave up on, even brushing past the decorator crabs as some sort of anomaly that, again, Feats would surely ensure wouldn’t show up a second time.

Maybe it was the melancholy of the stream of dreams taking root, but Aby was finding its lack of methodology towards anything disheartening, and it realized that it might be in this situation at all as a direct result of its own poor attention span. It made a decision, then, that whenever it dragged itself out of this coma it would try and overhaul how it conducted experiments, and use a much more scientific approach to its domain, or at least what the memories of a few interlopers termed scientific.

Determination renewed, Aby began reviewing its past experiments in yet more detail, this time also making plans for each, whether it could renew testing or should leave it off for later in favor of some more promising tests. One of the first things it planned to do when it woke would be some rather extensive remodeling; considering that its current layout of floors had practically no rhyme or reason to them it was long overdue.

The thought of doing some very large-scale, comprehensive refurbishing sparked an excitement it hadn’t felt in a while, and it struggled even harder to split its mind again just to dedicate a stream of consciousness exclusively towards it, eventually finding success. Three separate lines of thought then became four in much shorter order, and Aby realized that it was feeling progressively more invigorated as the metaphorical muscles of its mind began to fall back in order.

It could tell that it was getting closer to waking up, feel as its mana and its soul started responding, sluggishly at first but ever more smoothly, to its intent. At some point, it began to feel the countless threads binding it to each of its spawn, as well as another bond at once more removed and so much more intimate than any its spawn could replicate. It nudged that bond, trying to grab hold and pull itself out of its slumber but failing. It felt slippery, for lack of a better term; the bond was there and as unbreakable as ever but it just couldn’t connect yet.

Then it felt the other end respond, raw intent carried across the connection and flavored with some of the most raw emotion the core had felt to date, and its efforts redoubled. Finally, after much too long spent floundering to reach out and reclaim all that was its and all that it was, it succeeded, and in its elation, it shared its triumph.

‘Hi Sela, I am back.’ The core practically exclaimed to its partner, and the world outside its core slowly came into view, and then into focus. It could see the Fae pushing up to the core in a hug it missed far too much, feel the water and air and everything therein reconnect to it, and then experience as its entire domain realized that the one who created it all was back. The core relished in the feeling of truly reconnecting with the largest bonds of its creations, then swiftly being able to weave the threads of even the smallest, simplest creature back into its own soul. It was still a little sluggish, busy spinning its own mind back up to speed, but it adapted to the overwhelming input in short order.