Chapter 45: Providence (Patreon)

  A/N: For those interested in the new schedule, I'm changing days because my schedule wasn't conducive to putting out Friday updates in a timely manner. I want to remove that element of uncertainty and delay which has slowed down my last few updates. Sorry for the wait, everyone. From here on out, new updates will be posted Monday at midnight.

Chapter 45: Providence

It was like watching from behind a thick pane of glass, or from deep beneath the surface of the ocean.

It was like having steel cords wrapped around each finger and toe, each muscle and tendon, each synapse and cell.

It was like the darkness of a locker with blood and insects crawling over my skin and peering out through the slats as the world passed me by.

It was like none of those things.

I’d wondered, academically, what would happen to me after I donned the Helm of Fate. The greatest fear, of course, was that I’d vanish. But then, Kent certainly never seemed impaired from his years and years of hosting a minor god. By the same token, he did not accurately convey the vague horror that was watching something beyond mortal ken—in the Lovecraftian sense—puppet my body around like a toy.

I think, to anyone without an arcane sense like mine, it would seem like they were stuck in an infinity of white. Despite the surface beneath my feet, I could find no measure of distance or depth. It would be disconcerting, if that was the only sense I had to rely on. The truth, as usual, was both simpler and vastly more complex.

Where does the soul go when Dr. Fate takes over the body? A better question, perhaps, would be ‘where does Fate go, when no one is wearing the helm?’

The answers are one and the same after all.

I was trapped on the Plane of Order. If not for my senses, perhaps I could have still seen the outside world, or the real world, rather. But in this case my vision was a double edged sword. The eddies of mana, all of it already shaped and partitioned and owned, rose up like a blizzard around me. A very orderly blizzard, every snowflake with eight symmetrical points that tumbled through the air in ribbons of white.

I was left to hope that Fate did what I wanted him to. I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t want to leave his previous host in the grips of Klarion, but then… Well, it was a gamble at best. I looked up, where, in the distance, I could sense the connection between my soul and my body. Hopefully, he wouldn’t destroy it in the process.

Of course, that was when another extradimensional passenger got my attention. I thought it might take this moment to appear.

I felt it tugging at my attention, energetic and insistent. There was no turning in this place, but my ‘self’ reoriented all the same. I noticed ripples in the fabric of Order around me, waves of gravity rippling out from a star. And then I saw it, peeking into this reality, one spiny protrusion hooking around the fabric of space and time until it reached my shoulder.

“So you’re the source of my powers,” I said. Or maybe I just thought such, and the words became reality without any perturbance in between. Such things can be hard to tell with order.

My visitor had no such difficulties.

[RESPONSE: AFFIRMATION]

[QUERY: LOCATION]

It was the same as Bialya, but back then my mind had been too scrambled to make sense of the connection deep within my soul. Here, with no physical body to distract and no chaotic elements to render out, I could see the bond between us clear as day.

I expected something more Lovecraftian, I think. Instead I stood before a giant mirror, reflecting my knowledge and experience back through itself like some kind of Mobius Strip. When I felt this things simple curiosity, despite its great power, something inside of me eased. 

“The plane of order,” I said. “Fate is borrowing my body, for the time being. I’m actually surprised to find you here.”

[QUERY: HOST STATUS]

I remembered this type of communication hurting, like a pulled muscle, only with my brain. But now I found my mind expanding with each exchange, as I grew used to parsing more and more information.

Really, it was an elegant way to think. Thousands upon thousands of words, bytes of date even, rendered down to a single packet of distilled meaning. And I felt my thoughts shifting to match. I was standing on the edge of something vast.

“I’m alive,” I said. The shard of my power vibrated in the nowhere space. Something clicked.

[OFFER: ASSIST]

“With Fate?” I asked. “No, I need him right now.” I frowned—emoted a frown perhaps. “The idea that you can supersede the control of something like that on the other hand... Call me skeptical.”

[AFFIRMATION]

[DEMONSTRATION]

I paused. “Wait no—”

The connection between us snapped taut.

I for an instant my consciousness flew forward. I saw. Not one line, but two, all reaching out from the same source, the same font of power. Wound around and tangled in the bonfire in my breast.

Streamers of light beyond sight, and threads beyond reckoning.

I saw—

A wave of swords descended upon me.

My hand snapped out on reflexes honed by hours of sweat. The action felt slow, as if moving through molasses. 

A wave of blue mana raced out. The wave of steel discorporate.

My eyes picked out the threat before my conscious mind could process. Lightning fell from the sky, a canopy of blades caught it. The next blow I sidestepped, but too slow.

A rank of steel scrapped into my armor. Then—

Thrust.

I was a foot farther than I should have been. In the air, lights flashed in my eyes. An entirely different set of muscle memories kicked in. 

I could trace the myelin sheath running along my nerves.

The weapon in my hand was, at once, comfortable and entirely foreign. The armor on my body even moreso.

But they were magic, and magic I could see.

“Woah kid!” A voice said, “When did you pick up that move.”

I ignored it.

Across a courtyard awash with blood, my foe still stood waiting. Her dark eyes were wide, surprised perhaps.

I raised my finger like a gun. “Bang.”

The Ankh of Decay tore across the clearing. The magic blades were so much dust before my spell, and I trailed in its wake like a comet tail.

The systems of this mechanical armor felt more familiar to me with each passing second. But there wasn’t time for that, not against a foe who had already dodge my return salvo.

Her tactics changed in an instant. Instead of a wave meant to crush, meant to overwhelm, the swords came like bullets. Too many to counter. 

“Dodge!” I shouted. The suite complied.

It plotted and executed a course through the air that I could barely track. Not time for an accurate blow, not with my reflexes lagging.

But time enough for a decisive blow, all the same. I allowed myself a grin.

The chain of my staff lashed out, propelled by my flight. It lanced after a wave of blue mana, which ashed the swords in the sky.

The blade made a noise like tearing paper as it ripped through the woman’s side. The chain followed, wrapping around her. Her expression shifted to incandescent rage.

My boots screamed as I slid to a stop on the bloody stone.

I pulled. 

She stayed planted.

“Oh!” the voice came again. External speakers. “I wonder what this button does!”

The jets on the arms fired. The chain jerked. Her eyes widened again, and this time, there was no stopping her as I whipped the length of my weapon into the air.

The woman smashed through a score of blades she’d conjured above me. Then she slammed into the ground with a sickening crack.

A bolt of lightning pinned her there, like a needle through a moth, and finally I had time to think.

My conclusions came fast in after one another, even as the tinny voice rattled in my ears.

The pieces slotted into place.

Another connection, the ability to take control of the body at will, the way this power had become all tangled in my Spark.

Something inside of me pulled taut.

I snapped back to the Plane of Order. 

I collapsed to my knees, gasping for breath, as the senses of that other body left me behind. It felt crude, compared to this one, so much less versed in the use of my power. But at the same time, that suit of armor had been beyond anything I’d see in my travels.

And that… that was another version of me.

“Explain,” I said, knowing that the shard would hear.

A slew of concepts followed.

Here, on this plane, I could not hold back the shivers as the explanations slotted into place. This shard was from my home plane. The source of my power, as I’d guessed. But not the source of my magic.

And then… at the funeral, I’d awakened something different inside of me. Something that this thing couldn’t account for. It had shattered.

I had shattered.

And one become two, still bound together by that connection between us and the shard of our powers, sunk deep into my—our—soul at the moment I reached out and touched Blind Eternity.

I bowed my head, eyes squeezed shut.

It explained… things. Why I saw flashes of different universes when the vampire assassin used her own breed of word magic. Why I’d had an affinity for black mana before I’d so much as touched it.

Why I became a telepath. Small wonder, with my mind, my soul stretched out between two disparate points. All I’d needed was a good shock to jar it loose.

For a long time, I just sat there, ensconced in Order, as I tried to make sense of what I’d just witnessed. A twinning of me was out there, in the Blind Eternities. I’d caught only the barest glimpse of what she’d seen. The thought made me tremble, with shock or excitement I could not tell.

Eventually, though, I regained the presence of mind to ask two more questions. “Where did she go?”

The shard seemed to bob, Order flexing around it.

[LOCATION: SWITCH]

I let out a chuckle. Where is Fate when no one wears the helmet?

“But you only explained it to me?” I pushed, unpacking some of the information I’d just received. “Query, why?”

The shard didn’t reply.

I frowned. “I said explain.”

There was a twitch, a flexing of space.

[STATUS CURRENT HOST: PREFERED]

“Wait,” I said. “You… you only told me because you liked me better than that other version of me?”

[QUERRY: CLARIFICATION]

For a long moment, I could only stare. What was this thing, that couldn’t understand the idea of ‘like’, the idea of ‘self’, even as it exercised choices based on those ideas.

It boggled the mind.

Slowly, I pushed myself to my feet. I didn’t have the energy to get into any deeper. Nor the ability to even contact my…counterpart if the information I’d received held any truth to it. It was just one more thing on my plate, one more straw placed upon my back. I could not afford to deal with it now.

The shard seemed to take my silence as an inability to respond.

[OFFER]

It ‘said’ again.

[ASSISTANCE]

“I still need Fate,” I said. “I’m not letting you do anything until he finds Klarion, and Kent.”

[QUERRY: TIME]

“If I could see that, I’d tell you,” I said. “If you’re so damn eager to kick Fate out of my body, then maybe you can be actually helpful and get some of this Order magic out of the way. The stuff is attracted to you like a magnet.”

[QUERRY]—

“If you pulled more of it out of the way, maybe I’d be able to see back into the real world? I get the feeling that… I should be able to.”

Space rippled, more of the shards bulk intruded into this dimension. The Order magic thinned again, and I found the window back into reality that had previously been obscured by the torrents of white mana.

What I saw gave me pause.

“Well,” I said. “It looks like we’ve found Klarion.”

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A/N: This is probably the biggest plot twist I've used in this story thus far, including the end of the first arc. Not sure how it will go over, but I've been looking forward to this for a hot minute now. Hope you all enjoyed it!