FINAL CORE - Chapter 137 (Patreon)

Love is such a dangerous thing, isn’t it?

The binding of two or more souls together, the merging of the spiritual essence — what unforeseen consequences could this emotion have down the line for us?

Not just in life but after it. If souls are bound to one another through strong, passionate emotion that transcends mortality itself, then these too must stay together in the afterlife and, so, return then in rebirth to the world anew — connected in some manner, just as they had left it once prior.

What fates were born in a new life because of the passions of the old?

Which person came to be in a new body and role than that which was otherwise predestined for them because they had made the mistake of sharing their heart with another in their prior life? Would the candlemaker’s wife have otherwise been born as a princess? Would the guardsman’s sickly son have been born as a strong, healthy beast of a man in another nation? Would you be where you are right now if you hadn’t made such a foolish mistake in your past life?

And worse yet, just because your souls are interwoven, who is to say that you feel the same things for this person in this life as you did in the last? With a new mind and body come new sensibilities; the alliances of old are void.

No.

Love is a danger; it is a threat.

Never fall in love.

To do so will only compromise your future chances at pure rebirth, free from the entanglements of your past mistakes.

~An excerpt from Monk Shabilayah’s meditations on life

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Caeli

Human, Female, Battle Alchemist

Location: The Tower

Prayer changes things.

It’s easy to think that this statement is nonsense, especially when one has grown to their state of human awareness within an environment that would strongly discourage such notions, viewing it as a form of indoctrination at worst or a senseless ritual at best.

Caeli and her party clamber around as best as they can, in the tower and the rooms inside it as well, having turned almost fully on their sides.

She sits there, her hands clasped, and prays.

Before all of this, she was just an adventurer, just a person trying to scrape by at the very fringe of the world. She and these two people with her weren’t really people living life so much as they were people surviving.

But then their prayers led them to this tower.

And then to so much more, to comfort, to sanctuary, to development, to growth and wholeness and now that all is disrupted.

However, this is not what Caeli prays about.

She has learned that prayer isn’t so much a bargaining tool —  an asking of the divine to alter the happenings of the world — as it is rather a tool to align oneself with the will of the divine. People make the mistake of thinking that when they pray, they should ask for things. However, the heavens have already laid bare the direction of the world, and the things that a person asks for are often not within these plans.

Instead, when praying, it is wiser to communicate and try to find guidance to fit in within these changing happenings rather than wish for them to be altered.

“Come on! This way!” yells Irascaris, leading the way out toward a window that is above their heads and smashing it with his lance. Their party tank, Domi, holds his shield above his head for them to step onto as a ladder, pulling themselves out before pulling him along with them.

The three of them stand on the side of the tower, staring out at the chaotic world exploding all around them — The world below is black and raging with turmoil from a violent conflict between Isaiah, the Witch, the wyrm, and the Dragonslayer, yet the sky above them, which is cut and ripped, is oddly white, serene, and quiet, as if some force were forcing the clouds to simply stop where they are.

Now what?

There’s nowhere to go.

Their new home, so precious and so greatly loved for the short season they were able to hold it, is destroyed. What are they supposed to do now?

Honestly, Caeli, as the party-leader, just doesn’t know.

So she closes her eyes and she thinks, and, at this time, she also prays.

“Hey!” yells a shrill voice from the side.

Caeli opens her eyes, looking behind herself, the heavy ticking of the clocktower shaking her bones, as she looks at the uthra, Mauve, waving her arms for them to come to her.

Several other uthra fly by, carrying villagers away in the opposite direction of the battle.

The alchemist smiles, grabbing her friends’ arms as they run to join the escape, not so much because they are getting out of this mess safely but rather because she knows that, even if they weren’t able to, she in her deepest, most inner self was heard by something — be it Isaiah or otherwise.

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Seide

Dryad, Female, Woodmother

Location: The Destroyed Island

“Move! Get those supplies together!” barks the goblin taskmaster, watching dozens of other goblins running around in a surprisingly organized fashion for goblins as they undergo a major logistics operation.

“Woodmother!” cries a voice from the side, hands clutching her robes. Seide turns her head, looking at the terrified human woman, who hasn’t really asked a question or stated anything in particular that she wants.

Seide grabs her hand. “It’s going to be okay,” she says, nodding her head. “Go with the others,” instructs the dryad, the woman letting go as the people around her, crowded, pull her away through their friction.

The woodmother turns to return to her work, her hand returning for a moment to her bruised and swollen face, which sports what promises to be a very prominent black eye from the fist of the dragonslayer.

Seide, her long hair blowing in the violent winds, stands and watches the battle unfold in the distance, barely being able to keep up with the flashes of opposite colors that cut through one another over and over. The island has all but come undone; its mass spreads and separates, creating thousands and thousands of hovering chunks and platforms that the fight spans across with supernatural fury.

She holds a hand to her chest, her fingers clenched.

She can only hope that the magic of her spell worked. There’s nothing else that she can do for Isaiah now.

But there are things that she can do here.

The dryad looks down below the tower, on the many islands here, where thousands of the crusaders are still trapped in one form or another, be it by the curse that binds them to senseless rage or by the crystal prisons that they have fallen into via the tower’s ‘mercy’ effect.

She’s just going to have to do her part here, now, and know that this is already enough.

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Crusader Legionnaire Nostrae

Human, Female, (Priest + Warlock) Advanced-Class Inquisitor

Location: The Tower exterior

This is a problem.

Nostrae holds onto the metal struts above her head, not sure what the hell is happening anymore. Her feet dangle freely above the air, and she kicks, screaming.

The party she had infiltrated in order to get inside the tower led her through their usual route. She was hoping to infiltrate the tower, to reach its peak and weaken it for the crusade to come, but what the hell is all that?!

They had reached a floor with an external staircase that wrapped around the outside of the tower, but then it tipped over, and now she’s hanging onto an exterior piece of the stairwell, an endless ocean of nothingness down below her.

She’d ask her party for help, but, well, she betrayed and killed them.

This was a tactical mistake.

Nostrae grunts, doing her best to pull herself up. A harpy swoops by, screeching violently, only to receive a boot to the face for its troubles. The warlock grabs hold of another strut, pulling herself up a few more inches, and then a few more, as she works her way onto the sideways staircase, at least to have somewhere with a little solid ground.

She strains herself, kicking with her legs, to grab hold of the next strut, only to find it oddly… soft?

The warlock presses with her fingers, feeling it and identifying it as being fuzzy, before she lifts her head slowly to look at the low rumbling, growling maw of a black dog staring down her way, spit dripping from its widening maw, globs of it landing on her face.

The guardian of the tower, the grimm, and Nostrae act in accordance with their last encounter on the edge of the island, though the outcome is somewhat more grim this time around.