Chapter 264. The Key (Patreon)

The world beyond me is static. Before, crystallized Beginning burned my fingers with caustic, chemical heat. The burning is gone, but the Beginning–a kind of frozen sap–still flummoxes my senses, even my vital vision. It would be an excellent weapon of disorientation if it could exist beyond the bounds of a rift.

When my teeth begin to chatter along with my vibrating hands, I drop the mass of Beginning into my lap, heaving a breath. The fact that I’m hovering at the center of a prismatic geode doesn’t help my disorientation–for a moment, I don’t know which way is up or down.

In my recovering state, it takes me a moment to notice Maria and Ash’s presence.

Hello, love, Maria begins, smiling.

You’re here? I ask, my gaze fixing on Ash. I feel my stomach drop. What is he planning to do with her?

Ash’s mouth cracks open. “Defensive–cute.” He chuckles. “You can’t defend her from me, Ian. Thankfully, you won’t need to.”

I blink. “Why is she here?”

“I’ve worked with many practitioners, tried numerous instructional techniques to maximize results. What I discovered was, at least for me, counter-intuitive. It was always better to pull than push, motivate rather than threaten. You have your own inward motivation, but it’s tainted by the threat of death and apocalypse. And so, I’ve brought another source of motivation with me.” He points. “Maria.”

She gives me a small wave, then looks at Ash. “You said you’d dictate the new curriculum.”

He inclines his head. “Go over to Ian. See how he’s sitting in the middle of the crystal?” He gestures to the geode’s fractured walls. “You need to be in the same place.”

Maria approaches, lithely stepping over the uneven crystal interior. I hover myself slightly forward, only for Ash to control the Life in my body and nudge me back into place.

If I don’t move, there won’t be room for her. “We can’t both occupy the same space at the same time,” I protest.

As the words leave my lips, Maria sits down in my lap, pushing the crystallized Beginning into my groin. My face contorts and I shift my legs, letting the crystal drop. Ash leans forward and grabs it, raising an eyebrow. “Was that so hard?”

I don’t answer him. At least Maria’s body is cool and won’t be cause for overheating.

“Now that you’re both in position, you’re to grab the Beginning together.” He holds up the caramelized clump of Beginning and deposits it in my waiting hands. The world gradually begins its descent into static, but after months of practice, I’ve gotten progressively better at staving it off. I should be able to hold it for a few minutes before my vision goes fully white.

I feel Maria’s body freeze. “Wait–this is Beginning?”

“Yes,” Ash replies simply. He sounds distant to my overtaxed ears.

She’s quiet for a moment. “Can you do the same, then, to End? Externalize it?” I feel the vibrations from her throat in my chest, radiating through my body.

“By the time I’m done with you, you’ll be able to answer that question yourself.”

I feel Maria’s arms shift, her hands nearing mine. She tugs apart my tense fingers and inserts her own into the gaps. She convulses against me as her fingers brush the Beginning spindles. Rather than let her jerk those fingers away, I close my hands around hers.

One, I count, two, three. I open my hands and her arms fly away as though shocked, her head snapping painfully into my chin. For me, the world clears up, no longer shrouded in static. For her, it’s probably still a wash of formless white, her senses fried.

“How was it?” I murmur, my lips upon her hair. She doesn’t seem to hear me. I repeat the words again over our lich bond but all I receive in response is a jumble of pain, confusion, and fatigue.

I sigh and address Ash. “Was I like this the first time?”

Ash scratches at his left vambrace. “Your reaction was much more explosive. You only touched the Beginning for a moment and were insensate.”

“Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?”

He hums. “Inconclusive, at this time. Can you fix your lich?”

Everywhere Maria presses against me, I can sense with unparalleled clarity the state of her vessel. Her sensory organs are more and less than what they once were. Some, like her tongue, no longer function–Maria cannot taste. Others, like her eyes, her skin, her ears, can sense, but only through the blessing of Death energy. The static I felt before affects her ability to process the senses, and exists wholly in the domain of the remote phylactery in my void storage.

With tender fingers, I withdraw a bronze key and hold it up to the light refracted by the geodes. Scintillating sun rays decorate its curvature, casting its old, warped edges in shining white.

“It is not often I see a lich’s phylactery,” Ash says, unmoving. “The fragile heart of an immortal creature, laid bare. How did you choose this as the vessel?”

“I needed something that wouldn’t break,” I reply honestly. “And something to complete the symbology of the chant that anchored her soul.”

His eyes shine. “How so?”

“You wish to know the chant?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll tell you if you promise to answer a future question of mine without reservations,” I offer.

He agrees immediately.

“This is the relevant part: ‘I dare to pluck a thread / to unmake the weave / to bring back the dead / to unturn the key.’”

“Simple,” Ash observes. “That really worked?”

“Of course it worked. I’m no wordsmith, nor do I have the wisdom of age-old ascendants. If that was a prerequisite for success in the dark art, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

“What does this key unlock?” Ash asks.

The phylactery is familiar in my hands, though it feels oddly small. “It doesn’t unlock anything, anymore.” Mother changed the lock to our apartment a few months before I left for Academia Hector. It was a decades old key, thick bronze with several teeth warped by use. Towards the end, only jimmying the key at exactly the right angle into the rusted keyhole unlocked the door.

It was a cast of one of the keys my great-grandfather first acquired when he came to Jupiter, purchased to outfit the towering mansion our offshoot of the family had called home. But coincident with the family’s decline and eventual ruination, that mansion was sold, cannibalized, and ultimately converted to a large multi-family home. We’d retained ownership of a sliver of the property.

As the locks of other residences gradually switched over to newer mechanisms with the passage of the years, only Father was stubborn enough to keep the same lock and key. The keys had been lost over the years and steadily replaced, but that hadn’t mattered to him. They were all the same key, at least in spirit.

Mother held onto the old keys as long as she could. I was honestly surprised the day she decided to replace them. Did it mean she’d finally healed enough to let go of one more remembrance of her husband?

I still don’t know the answer.

“So a key of sentiment,” Ash assumes.

He’s neither right nor wrong. I’d kept the key on a small keyring that I had with me when I’d woken up in Pardin. I didn’t have many belongings after fleeing Selejo, so I’d carried the keyring along from place to place, unthinkingly dumping it into the void storage.

I hadn’t given it much thought until I dug it out and used it for Maria’s resurrection. Sometimes we carry things with us for reasons we can’t explain, unable to discard them like common detritus. They lurk in the back of our minds, ready to be useful when least expected.

I snap out of my thoughts as Maria groans and recall Ash’s original question: Can you fix your lich?

Her phylactery is energized from within, almost tickling my fingers. Her soul is sealed away, folded into the tiny vessel. I can imagine it straining at the edges, looking for an escape, never finding one. Moving the key toward Maria’s chest, I feel a resonance that marks the gateway between her physical body and her imprisoned soul.

I slowly shake my head. “What’s happening to her is natural,” I observe. “It’s the stretching of her soul. There’s nothing I can do save bear the burden for her, but then she won’t improve.”

“Then bear it for her,” he says.

I frown. “I thought you brought her as motivation.”

He laughs. “You thought to compete against her in advancement?”

Am I supposed to laugh along with him? It’s not funny. “Then what was your intent?”

“Maria can help you advance. She is your motivation because her assistance will cause her pain, and she’ll take it upon herself willingly. But you can divest her of that pain by taking it into yourself.”

Why would I strengthen myself at her expense? I shake my head. “Or, we’ll both gain the power of Beginning, and be twice as strong for it.”

“You’re too smart to speak words so stupid.”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you entertain delusions that you would unlock a third affinity while here with me? What have I told you?”

“That a third affinity is drastically more difficult to attain than a second.”

“Precisely.”

“But that’s why we’re here, in this special rift. And I also have the advantage of having recently awakened my Remorse affinity, extending the period of rapid advancement.”

“That would still never be good enough on its own–even with the boon of rapid advancement, awakening a third affinity within five years would be impossible, and after that point you would advance as slowly as the rest of us. You wouldn’t unlock your third affinity for many years, if ever–you’d need to be strong enough to never die once over that entire time.”

“Then why should I bother training anything aside from Remorse?” I ask.

He threads his fingers together behind his back and leans forward, his posture predatory. “To win against Achemiss, a Remorse affinity won’t be enough. You need an affinity that still works well even at low levels, like Beginning, or Regret. Unfortunately, even I don’t have knowledge of a stable rift attuned to Regret. It’s the reason that I, myself, do not have a Regret affinity. But Beginning is the next best bet.” He chuckles darkly. “Against the odds, you managed to awaken Remorse first. Better to awaken Remorse than nothing at all, however... we need something more.”

“You just said it’s impossible to get something more within five years.” Besides, I’ve already spent a few months sequestered away in this rift–I don’t even want to think about spending years here.

“For you or Maria individually, it’s impossible. But I have a suspicion that your advancement is tied, that Maria also benefits from your boon.” He laughs. “In Eternity there is such a thing as a perfect storm. Eternity’s machinations reduce us all to pawns, but I am not an unwilling one. Eternity reveals to us the edge of the evolving, expanding possible. Before I met you I would have said the making of an ancient required thousands of years of devoted pursuit at the barest minimum. But now I see it may not be so. I’ve received Eternity’s invitation to experience what perhaps none has experienced before. It’s been too long.”

I run my free hand through Maria’s hair. “You sound so certain of success.”

“I’m not certain of anything,” Ash retorts, smiling grimly, his fangs on full display. “But I see the world in terms of probabilities, potentials. It is the gaze of a Beginning practitioner–the lens of likelihood. Do you know what my affinity whispers to me about your chances of attaining a Beginning?”

I just stare at him, though he takes that as invitation to expound.

“There was no chance, before. Now there is a rounding error of a sliver.”

“So it is impossible, then.”

He strides forward and is suddenly before me, moving too fast for me to track. He stares into Maria’s absent eyes, his mouth still locked into an eerie, hungry grin. “We’ll see.”