Chapter 2227 (Patreon)

ToC: https://www.patreon.com/posts/23899958

The Prophet twitched. He had the strangest sensation that a trail of bone dust had been sprinkled up and down his spine. He felt unclean, somehow tainted.

He looked around, at first assuming that Scythe had returned early from his mission and had slunk into his private chambers to mess with him. But from the holy light cast by the prophecy, no outside influence revealed itself. Seconds passed without any developments occurring.

The twitch… had apparently come from nothing.

Perhaps this duplication of an existence is beginning to falter, The Prophet mused, but the thought only made him more uneasy. Then he wondered whether this was all inevitable consequences, the collapse of reality around him due to his deviation from the prophecy of El-Kedec. Whether the doubts of the flock were justified.

Whether he had thrown all their souls upon the pyre of his own hubris, assuming he knew better than the prophecy. His tiny mouths on his forehead ached from grinding their teeth. Yet the prophecy cannot grip this reality. Obviously, El-Kedec did not make a mistake. But we might have carried its lessons too far…

After a moment of squeezing his eye shut, the Prophet reached and brushed his fingers against the prophecy without looking at it. The heat beneath his fingers felt just as revolutionary and schema-shattering as the first day the Prophet had been cleansed by pure order and certainty, seared of his flaws and left raw and pure.

The day his life had restarted, the one moment of genuine luck he had ever encountered.

“That revelation is why information regarding the light must be protected at any cost,” The Prophet muttered to himself. His shoulders slumped, but his voice did not waver. “No matter if my own access to light is surrendered… I will choose martyr over prophet.”

The Prophet called in an initiate and spread the word. He sent the word for the entirety of the Cult of the Savior to assemble. Just for the flash of unease the Prophet saw in the initiate's eyes, he considered killing him. However, that would just deepen the doubts of the flock.

Right now, they needed unity. Because on one point, at least, the entire Cult could agree.

Nether King Hungry Eye needed to be eliminated.

So long as the cause was ripped from the body, all would soon return to normal.

As soon as he gave the order, the Prophet felt a gush of relief. Honestly, he wondered why he hadn’t taken this action sooner.

*****

“I’ll make tea,” Devick announced as she unlocked the door. Randidly nodded and followed her into the cramped apartment. The continued celebrations out in the street faded away as they pressed deeper into the squat, concrete building. A quick glance confirmed his initial impressions; the foreign defenders assisting Homewell had been just crammed into any space that had been free. Before being used as housing, this had likely been some sort of storage room. Devick had accumulated a series of strange tapestries, weapons, and bits of art to liven up the place, but the living space wasn’t very impressive.

Yet within that room awaited the Nether Arbiter. He felt the Nether moving before he saw the greatest Nether individual in the Second Cohort, warm and friendly against his own spinning Nether Core. Honestly, he didn’t know what to expect. Their eyes met and Randidly, for the first time in a long time, genuinely flinched back.

A howling gale of energy shredded the air directly around her hands constantly. The immediate area around her person shattered and exploded, the effects layered perfectly so all the force canceled itself out.  Each blast undercut another, a looping cycle of expansion and collapse. The result was a horrifying display of neutered force that produced not even the slightest ripple to affect the surrounding space.

Heedless of the concussive Nether implosions only a meter away, Devick rummaged in a cupboard and pulled out several mugs.

The patterns the Nether Arbiter utilized were nothing like he had ever seen; in fact, the patterns seemed almost exactly the opposite of what Randidly had worked on for so long. He wanted to gather up and accumulate force, and this individual wanted to erase it entirely. With Nether just as implacable and dense as used by Enmya.

The Nether Arbiter offered him a sad smile. Her expression distorted and flickered, not physically but due to the constant motion of energy. “Oh wow, I think I can begin to understand why you so affected the flow of events. Well met, Nether King Hungry Eye. I believe we have much to discuss.”

Congratulations! Your Skill Infinite Incendiary Filaments of the Dove Moirae (P)(U) has grown to Level 1142!

But Randidly couldn’t tear his gaze away from her hands. Her fingers had all the elegant precision of a surgeon’s, but teeming with little bindings of life. They were incandescent in his gaze, millions of Nether Souls all tethered to the slightest twitch. The ornate black wicker shackles at her wrists had no actual restrictive power. If she wished, her hands could twist into claws, tearing at those lifelines and unleashing waves of devastation Randidly’s head spun to imagine.

She wove a storm of fury and silence around her body and dragged a million lives with every finger. The density of energy around her person left Randidly in awe. This was the Nether Arbiter.

He stood frozen for so long that Devick twisted around and frowned at him. “Oh, don’t you dare fucking fall in love at first sight with her. You realize she’s a political fugitive, right? And sure, I get how drama can be super hot-”

“It’s not that,” Randidly shook his head, ignoring Devick’s nonsense. He couldn’t find the words to express what he felt. “I’m not sure-”

No, that’s not true at all. I know exactly what this is, Randidly breathed in through his nose, trying to steady the beating of his heart. His Nether Core wobbled, pressured by the proximity of the Nether Arbiter. I’m afraid. Afraid at the power I see she can produce. I thought I had closed the gap to Elhume… but if he possesses a commiserate amount of power to what she can wield…

Examining her closely required tuning out the shifting, consequenceless storm thundering across her skin, which was no small feat. Once Randidly attuned himself, the Arbiter stood within a dense knot of connections that still appeared simple and manageable. Yet the longer Randidly studied the connections, the more he felt alarmed. All Nether life in the Second Cohort fed into these hands. Elhume wouldn’t possess an exact equivalent, but this was evidence of a new tier of power.

This was his goal, then. He activated all his senses as much as he could manage, attempting to glimpse her limits.

“Sit down. Let me have a look at you. Four Authorities? Well, you certainly don’t do half-measures when you break conventions, do you?” The Nether Arbiter gestured to the chair opposite her.

“Well now who’s the aide,” Devick muttered as she busied herself by the stove.

Randidly slid into his seat and flexed the muscles of his legs and back in an effort to force himself to relax. He had so many questions, it was hard to choose how to start the conversation. “I’ve never seen anything like the energy around your body. Both the external patterns, neutralizing the movement of your Nether Core… and those hands. I can’t believe Phaea can be that dense. Or that you’ve managed to keep it in such an organized framework.”

“My only other options were to accept accidentally killing one of my people as a daily occurrence,” The Nether Arbiter dipped her head slightly. “Considering the weight I already place onto us all… I could not conscious it. Despite other failings I might have, willingness to work hard I have never lacked. It took practice… and my failures caper across the inside of my eyelids whenever I try to rest. But now I am happy to say accidents are a relic of the past.”

Randidly refocused, finally pulling his hands away from those frightful hands, a twitch away from rubbing the whole of Homewell off the map. He rubbed his chin that no matter how mild this being appeared from the patterns across her energy, the Nether Arbiter did not have a single rival in the Aetherlands.

If asked, even Fatia Cerulean would likely admit her superiority.

“You’ve been hiding from the Cult of the Savior?” Randidly asked, both to distract himself and to start the conversation.

The Nether Arbiter nodded. “Ah, if you are aware of their existence, a great deal of the deviations make more sense. Yes, they had plotted to harvest the soul of the universe and then install their own horrid ideals in its place. Considering that falling into their clutches would result in a slow, torturous death… I thought it best to delay that for as long as possible. Imagine my surprise when a series of unlikely heroes rescued me. All individuals you nudged, albeit without understanding how they would eventually encounter me.”

Randidly nodded slowly. The Arbiter offered him a wide, friendly smile. “However, I suspect you don’t want to talk about the Cult of the Savior and their ilk.”

“What do you mean?” Randidly asked.

The Nether Arbiter straightened the pointer finger on her left hand and drew an S in the air. Patterns hummed and tumbled away, a brilliant sunburst of influence and insight. “Your Nether Core is so raw, brutal and harsh. You’ve truly educated yourself the hard way, simply through experimentation. We should speak of Nether, Hungry Eye. For sparing me a fate I thought inescapable, I will teach you everything I know about the great flow.”

Anticipation bubbled through his entire body. Even Randidly’s Nether Core could sense how revelatory this could be for his power.

Yet so much time in the Nexus made Randidly worry. He didn’t allow himself to lean forward and reveal how much he wanted exactly that. “You’ll require nothing else in exchange?”

“Nothing else but your time. And perhaps, one day, between two unusual individuals… your friendship.” The Nether Arbiter seemed so fragile as she said the words, so genuine, that Randidly wanted to agree immediately. But he remained in control.

“How long?”

The Nether Arbiter rolled her eyes, exasperated. “Depends on how good of a student you are. But let me say, this grudging pace doesn’t bode well for us. Oh, relax. I’m not trying to trick you. I would love to teach you, Nether King Hungry Eye. I believe you will genuinely revolutionize the way we use Nether; all you need is a foundation. I can tell you all the information you need, show you all the core patterns, in about eight hours. How much you can learn in that time is up to you.”

Randidly chewed on the inside of his cheek for a few seconds. Neveah would handle the developing situation in the East. Learning what he could about Nether from the Arbiter would only benefit him; he could spare eight hours. He nodded. “Agreed. I don’t mean to be so guarded. It’s just…”

“You can see,” The Nether Arbiter sighed. “I feared as much. Most people-” Both looked at Devick, who scowled at them as she poured tea into cups. “-have no idea what I am. I’ve tried very, very hard to make it so. It makes it easier, in some ways”

“But it means they cannot understand you.” Randidly felt a pang of sympathy for the Nether Arbiter.

She shrugged. “We can be vulnerable later. We will now enter into a very old relationship, teacher and student. You are only the third student I’ve ever taken, although I have had many teachers in order to reach this point. I am Lowanna, the one they call the Nether Arbiter. And to begin our relationship, a story.”

Randidly raised an eyebrow. “Do we need a story? I’d rather we move on to the pattern demonstrations as quickly as possible. The way the destructive force of the patterns around you causes a weakness in the next explosion-”

“We need a story,” The Nether Arbiter said firmly. “You have both Aether and Nether in your body, so you have many different concerns on your mind. Generally, I will say this: both energies benefit from a story laying at the foundation of their existence, although for different reasons.

“Our story begins outside the promised land of the Shallah, after their fall. All were expelled and forced to flee from the lands of plenty, the universes that sparkled and gleamed into and out of existence every moment. Because the great divide between the two energies, Aether and Nether, actually came from a relatively small division.

“Those who would eventually grow to utilize Aether fled from the burning citadels of the Shallah to explore the universe. Those who would use Nether stayed, plopping themselves down right outside the ruins of their progenitors.”