Sell you a Bridge chapter 210 (Patreon)

April 14th 2016 Doomhallow Hall 10:00 AM EDT

I  was finished. My final preparations for creation my Void Paladin  Soulless was officially complete. I was up to sixty thousand points now,  which based on my calculations should be enough to summon the Paladin,  as long as I used Tartarus. The process however, was MUCH more involved  than creating a Knight or Mage. In fact part of what had taken so long  was that I couldn't just point and cast. The Paladin's weren't just meat  suits like my other Soulless, they were complicated beings with real  thoughts and emotions.

Because of that, I needed an actual  ritual to define the parameters of their consciousness. Outside of just  casting the spell it was going to take a ton of setup, but luckily we  had Zee's ritual chamber, and it was finally time to put it to use. Zee  for her part was ecstatic about finally getting the chance to help, and  especially in such an ambitious undertaking. The third member of my  little group was off to one side, waiting patiently as my girlfriend was  fluttering around double checking everything.

She had  been working with this room for a while, apparently using Outer Body to  replay her magic lessons with Madame Xanadu in an attempt to get  better, and now that I needed her on this she couldn't be happier. "So  you're sure the structure is right here? Because I'm pretty sure that  the dimensional anchor point in that hemisphere of the superstructure is  melded to the wrong dimensional sublayer."

I closed my  eyes and exhaled. I l0ved Zatanna. She was the light of my life. I did  NOT want to drop her on a deserted island until I was done with this to  get her out of my hair. Honest. What I DID want was for her to let me  work in peace for five goddamn minutes, because my bewitching girlfriend  "Look baby, I appreciate the assist, and you're a brilliant sorceress,  but I am connected to the void in deep and intricate ways you can't  possibly understand. Combined with my perfect memory there's no way I  would...oh wait, shit you're right. My bad."

I shifted the  anchor point of the spell through three quarters of a dimensional  sublayer as my girlfriend smirked at me smugly. I rolled my eyes and  leaned in to kiss her on the cheek. "Yeah, yeah, I know, I shouldn't let  myself get all smug just because I've been doing so well. You see any  other mistakes?" That magical genius was why I was letting her help me  with this despite the constant annoying notes. She HAD caught one or two  ways I could improve the spell. Just little tweaks to improve the  throughput and smooth out the personality matrix but they added up.

She  bit her lip, scrutinizing the construct slowly. "Nothing pops out." I  snorted and she threw her arms around me consolingly. "Don't sulk.  Design is a hundred times harder than revision. It would have taken me a  year to make this circle. Your grasp on overlapping dimensions is  leagues ahead of mine. I still haven't managed to get past page two of  that damn book. You have ten times the talent for void magic that I do. I  just happen to be a pro at ritual construction. It IS half of what I  do."

That was fair. Plus she had this room and was much  more familiar with using it. "Alright, well since we don't have any more  gaps to fix I think it's almost time to start. For now the personality  matrix is stable, but we need something to use as a base." This was  complex. It was loosely based on the creation of a greater heartless. By  removing the heart of a being before it could completely surrender to  darkness you could create a heartless that retained selfhood. One that  could think and reason.

Obviously removing my entire  heart, or Zee's or anyone elses was going to be a no go here, because  that would just kill them. Or at least kill their body...probably. I  wasn't entirely sure what would happen but I was almost positive it was  bad. I couldn't use the darkness for the gun because I had destroyed the  witch and she had no selfhood to maintain. The hardest part of the  creation process was figured out how to make a psuedo heart of darkness  to inhabit the void paladin.

After a bunch of research  though I'd managed to figure it out. The heart in this case wasn't just a  lump of meat. It was your essence. Your structure and self. The heart  went beyond the physical, which was why the heartless did the same. To  lose your heart was to become an empty husk, but all or nothing weren't  the only options. I'd done a bunch of research in the Outer Body trance  to get it right, but I'd managed to figure out a way to remove PART of a  heart without killing someone.

A third was the most you  could manage before a person's spirit started to unravel. severing the  connection between heart and body and killing the host. It wouldn't even  be possible at all if not for my Hole bloodline and it's ability to  warp the void. That said, a third meant we needed one more person,  because I was going to remove the portions of heart and create a new one  to animate the construct. The new being should be a massively powerful  beast of an entity, assuming we managed it properly.

Which  brought me to the obvious third choice. Dreamer stood off to one side,  fretting as she watched us make the preparations for the ritual. When  I'd told her about this I had given her the option to bow out. She  wasn't required to help with our project, we could have asked Artemis,  or Reggie, or hell even Jim. But Dreamer had been adamant. She insisted  she wanted to do more to help, to be a bigger part of our lives, and I  couldn't turn her down when I saw how determined she was to be involved.

Still,  I was definitely concerned. "You feeling up for this Drea? Because we  can still get someone else. This is a dangerous experimental procedure  that I suspect might have long term side effects. By no means do you  have to participate." I had sort of managed to duplicate the basic  premise in outer body, but the actual ritual had requirements I couldn't  meet in there short term, so while I was sure enough of the basic  procedure to be pretty sure I wasn't killing anyone, I was NOT entirely  certain what would happen after that.

What  I did know was that the void paladin should be absurdly powerful,  dwarfing literally everything else I had summoned. It should  theoretically have powers and traits from all three of us and all at  once, which was a pretty decent spread. It would still be a void  paladin, but it should inherit parts of our abilities to strengthen it's  own. My durability, Dreamer's New God physique, Zee's insane magical  talent. It wouldn't get our powers or anything, but each of these things  should strengthen the powers it did have.

It  MIGHT pick up my bloodline, and possibly some devil traits with it. I'd  put a lot of thought into this one actually. I had been considering if  this was even necessary. If I should go with quantity over quality, but  then I realized I HAD quantity, or at least had it available. The void  paladin was supposed to be an elite, and even if I could only make one,  it had potential to be ten times the warrior the rest of them did. A  warrior I could teach and help grow, who could become a champion for me  far beyond my current power.

Even  once I eventually got strong enough that I surpassed it, I would have a  loyal and powerful right hand that could act when I was occupied.  Combined with the ability to travel through darkness that it should  share, that gave me the power to deploy it to place others couldn't. I  took a deep breath. I knew what I wanted to do, it was time. "Zee, start  the ritual." My voice was tense with nervousness, but focused, and my  girlfriend began without hesitation.

The  circle began to light. The ritual chamber augmented and refined  rituals, allowing them to be adapted on the fly if needed and creating a  flexible and streamlined work environment that make it possible to use  much more complex rituals than would normally be possible. Which was  good, because the personality matrix would hold the heart I was about to  make, and if it wasn't up to the task that would be...bad.

Once  the ritual circle was humming along, I started preparing. The  receptacle wasn't permanent, it was sort of like a mold. We would pour  in the pieces of heart and the ritual would hold them together while  they solidified. Normally that wouldn't be possible. When you took a  piece from a heart and kept it away the piece dissolved if the heart  didn't. hearts weren't really capable of division.

That  said I'd figured out a workaround. While hearts didn't split properly  they did naturally mend if they were damaged. I reached out with my Hole  bloodline after getting nods from the girls and opened a hole in each  of our spirits. Through this hole, I reached in with my ghost powers,  and slowly carved out one third of each heart. The Hole's connected to a  final Hole in the center of the receptacle and by instantly pulling the  pieces through into the receptacle it put them in a position to mend if  they'd all been part of the same heart.

Then  I LIED to the heart. I told it it was all one piece, that the shards of  our hearts belonged together, and with the receptacle keeping them from  dispersing and them thinking they were all part of one hole, they did  as I expected. They joined together and mended. I almost blacked out  from the strain. This was a small lie in the grand scheme of things,  only possible because of a month of prep work, but it was still  massively difficult to manage.

I  expected pain or sorrow from the missing piece of my heart, but I didn't  feel that. I felt...connection. That had been one of my theoretical  options granted. The grafted heart pieces were still part of us, and  merging them had connected the rest of our hearts together by strings I  wasn't sure could ever be broken. I felt my bond with Zee solidify and  another click into place, and where they met was something...new. A new  piece of me, but not of me.

The  receptacle shattered, and as it did I performed the spell with  Tartarus, funneling that new heart into the creation of a Soulless that  wasn't soulless at all. The creation of a new thinking being. Void  spilled through the cracks in the world I hadn't even been able to see  until they opened, pouring into the spell form and binding with the  heart. Ectoplasm flowed through limbs of liquid darkness like blood as  space wrapped around them, binding them into solid form, creating a  permanent and self sustaining being.

The  dark drained away and in it's place was....a girl. She looked about  fourteen or fifteen, a few years younger than us. She was short and slim  with hair and cheekbones like Zee, and lips like Dreamer, and a face  like mine. She was wearing the armor of a void knight and her golden  eyes, which I knew without knowing how were a holdover from the hearless  creation process pinned us all as she knelt before us. "Mothers,  Father, I am Morana. I bid you thanks for my creation. I hope my  existence pleases you." Wait...what?