The Gamer Chapter 1489 – Wonders [Hailey POV] (Patreon)

The colours surrounded her.

Individual segments, her sight could pierce, until the layered colours became too much. A dome of visible subconscious, like shifting panels of stained glass. Patterns among patterns, symmetries lost in a fleeting moment in time. The Faith above the surface reflected on the calm ocean. The Faith below the surface extended endlessly down. She closed her eyes to not be overwhelmed.

Even behind her closed lids, the colours filled her. The energies moved through her, sometimes filling the tiny gap between her lids and her iris, leaving unburning lines on her optic nerves. More than that, it was the glow of the Faith around her that made it through. A prismatic cascade, tinted red by her relaxed lids. Branching patterns filled everything, her veins standing out against the light like lightning or the limbs of ancient trees.

This, too, proved overwhelming, and so she opened her eyes. A knot of surprise formed in her stomach when she found herself face to face with a fish. It was a little being, silver, its outline a sharp black, consisting of two arches that intersected and parted at the fin. “Ichthus,” it said and looked at the sky.

Tilting her head back, Hailey stared up into the dome, the veil, the colours.

It threatened to overwhelm her all over again, before the colours shifted. In this ocean of all light, thin lines of black gave order. A wheel with seven spokes. The lines were joined in the centre, then drifted outwards, crossing the ring. The lines curved and replicated, mirrored, and circled. Colours blended into gold. Lines aligned into petals. A golden rose, its dense layers turning in interchanging directions. On the base of seven lines, one circle – one flower, seven layers, many petals, all bloomed.

Hailey shot up from the bed, breathing heavily. Her shoulders quaked under a burden ephemeral. Swallowing hard, she ran a hand through her hair, and tried to calm herself. ‘What was that?’ she asked herself, before noticing just how dry her mouth was.

Carefully, she navigated out of bed, climbing over her lovely peers as she did. In any other mood, she’d been tempted to kiss their sleeping faces, but right now she needed to get some clarity. Upstairs, kitchen, fridge, open fridge, pull out bottled water, twist it open, drink – a mundane series of events, by the end of which she at least no longer had a scratchy throat.

Hailey closed her eyes for a moment. Behind her lids, the lights and the branches remained, like the dream had burned it into her retinas. Not ready to return to bed, Hailey pulled a simple nightgown out of her pocket dimension and put it on. More would have been appropriate, but that much was all she could convince herself to bother throwing on.

Covered by the black satin, she stepped out into the night air. Even though the cloudless night sky of the ocean was brilliant, it paled in comparison to what still turned in her mind. Thoughts turned like the layers of the rose. Elbows on the railing of a balcony, right beneath the sundeck, Hailey gazed out into the inky black ocean, and sipped on the water. No one else was around at the moment, it was just her, pondering the dream.

The purpose within it was wrapped in difficulties. Hailey had never had a ‘prophetic’ dream before. Matter of fact, she hadn’t really believed in them until just a few minutes ago. When others during the Sunday church meetings reported of them, she’d put it away as overemphasis or showmanship.

This was undeniable. To her, it was undeniable. If she had described it to someone cynic, they would have found a way to doubt. In this moment, she was filled to the brim with a certainty that it all meant something. She just could not quite parse what that was.

“Sister?”

Hailey was neither surprised to see Lorelei approach nor did she feel any doubt about talking. “Ya ev’r struggle with your faith, Rel?”

“I have never doubted the truth of the Lady,” Lorelei confessed. “I hope I may be of assistance anyhow.”

Just humming, the country gal tried to parse that. “Never been much of a prayin’ gal. I like the good book, ev’n if it’s got a bunch of weird paragraphs. Like that bit with the two bears.” A soft chuckle escaped her at the memory. “Still, I always kinda knew that there was somethin’ greater than us out there and that was just… it got me through some tough times.” Absent-mindedly, she turned the water bottle between her hands. “’Course, the Abyss put all of this on its head. Suddenly, I learn the Lord is real, goes by Gaia, and all that… Jesus was an Abyssal who sacrificed himself to the ire ‘cause it was the right thing, or so they think… it’s all difficult.”

Lorelei wordlessly stepped up. Her slender arm was put around Hailey’s shoulder. A warm and gentle touch on naked skin. The two women in their nightgowns wiggled a little closer to each other, finding comfort in each other.

The manifold love Hailey felt beat with each drum of her heart. She closed her eyes, letting the flashes of light continue to reflect in her mind’s eye. They were beyond real, imprinted so deep into her psyche that they had more influence on her current mindset than any regular stimuli could have.

“I don’t know what exactly to believe in anymore,” Hailey muttered. “I don’t even know how important it is to me. I’m not that faithful, but I just… know there’s somethin’ that listens to me when I pray.”

“That is the greatest blessing of all – to know the Lady listens,” Lorelei whispered encouragingly. Her fingers calmingly combed through Hailey’s hair. “All beyond that is community around the faith. When you have the Lady’s ear and live well in the Lady’s eyes, you are a member of her Order.”

“I don’t know if that’s good enough for me,” Hailey mumbled. “I feel stuck. In my heart, I accepted Christ as my saviour, but I can’t deny what I’ve seen from the Lady either. Ya met her, right?”

“In many forms. Her avatar on this Earth is an interesting entity. Different forms of her surround us at all times.”

“She was all there in the Atlantic Fuse, wasn’t she? A golden rose, hanging above us?”

Lorelei tensed up for a moment, then her lips spread in the kind of smile that only one that heard a cosmic secret unprompted from another person could create. “You have seen the Lady’s presence?”

“It came to me in a dream.” Hailey chuckled weakly, realizing how stupid that sounded when said out loud. Not for a moment did the seer join in her laughter. Her smile ebbed away, the glint in her blind eyes chiding. Any stupidity Hailey felt at her words were washed away by an embarrassment for her doubt. “Sorry…” she mumbled.

“Do not apologize to me, sister. You have not slighted me,” Lorelei was quick to assure. The combing motions of her hand never stopped. Her voice took on the particular tone of citation: “Never loathe those insincere in the presence of the Lady’s miracles – they resist a calling greater than themselves and will only be hurt by it. Patience is the virtue and calm words the means to remind them of what they ridicule.”

Hailey swallowed deeply and nodded, mostly to herself. She knew that feeling in her chest. It was the tight knot of a chore undone out of laziness and the shallow, deep breaths following proof of the consequence of inaction. Guilt claimed her and she returned to the talk with the appropriate sincerity.

“I feel stuck,” she repeated. “I know I was listened to today. But in my dream, both Jesus and the Lady visited me. Neither demanded or called, they just… let me know they were there and watched over me.”

“Is there a contradiction in that?” Lorelei asked.

The question sent Hailey’s thoughts down a slope like a tumbling landslide. Revelations of the Abyss and beliefs that had guided her well all her life were in motion, clashing while all the while in the same direction. Her mouth was dry again. She took a sip of water. “I don’t know.”

Lorelei squeezed her fellow haremette a little tighter. The embrace kept the country gal anchored, while uncertainty tried to rise within her. Tried and tried again, only to be stopped by the impenetrable barrier the purpose of the dream filled her with. Revelation had her spirit reinforced, preventing her from falling into the depths of her crisis.

Then, a little something suddenly snapped into place.

Before Hailey stepped away from the railing, Lorelei had already loosened her embrace. The two walked to the sundeck, requiring the open space.

Materials stored in their dimensional pockets were pulled out with swift and steady motions. A symbiosis, budding during the time they had worked together, blossomed into wordless unity. Sheet metal was frozen through careful touch of Astral Ice and snapped where it most needed parting. The coals in the grill were set ablaze, the core of their fires used to heat tools while the black metal was shaped into a wheel with seven disconnected spokes. It fit in the palm of her hand, the lines thinner than her pinky.

With the greatest care, she retrieved a pair of etching needles from the flames. By a miracle that could not be understood, the Mithril needles melted, filling the very same circuit lines they carved. Lorelei’s enchanting touch turned a sheet of golden Elementium into flaking petals that rained down around the table.

Distantly, Hailey was aware of chatter, but she was too focused on the work to look up. With tweezers, she picked up the golden leaves and etched in more gold lines into them that her naked eye could not perceive. One by one, she aligned them with a red gemstone Lorelei had placed between the seven spokes. The petals layered closely onto the axis of the wheel, until none of them were visible anymore. A hardened bud of gold, like a stagnated flame atop a black brazier.

Suddenly, she did not know what to do anymore. All materials on the table had been exhausted, every tool used. Just when consciousness began to creep back in with the whispers of doubt, a fifth hand reached towards the project. “Lady, will you show us your favour?” a gentle voice asked.

Liquid mana dripped from a fingertip onto the small device like morning dew sparkling under a rainbow sun, breaking the light into heptagons. Gentle brightness illuminated the sundeck for a moment. Petals of metal unfolded slowly, the mechanical flower blooming. Golden runes on golden petals glowed in near invisible incandescence, a gentle, wine red beneath it all. Seven lines crossing one ring, atop them one flower, seven layers circling, many petals, all of it in bloom.

Hailey looked up to see a redhead standing above her. Against the starlit, black sky, one golden halo, its light reflecting on wine red hair. Green eyes beheld green eyes. “Sacred Warden,” Lorelei muttered and bowed her head. Hailey followed the gesture, lowering her head deeply, until she caught a haltingly raised hand.

“You do not bow to me, my friend, especially not tonight,” she said to Lorelei. “And you do not bow to me either, Hailey, especially not when the Lady honours me with the final touch to your work.”

The Shield Warden picked up the mechanical rose, careful not to hurt herself on the thorny protrusion of its base. The gemstone and the petals all remained in place, bound together by artifice of an efficiency that even Hailey’s enigmatic knowledge struggled to comprehend she had created. Holding it up, Moira inspected it with religious curiosity, before presenting it to its creator.

In the brief moment that the Warden and the enigma engineer touched it, the rose’s petals spread out further, spreading the prismatic glow of a leyline across the entire sundeck, like a rainbow curtain. In that illuminated second, all slotted into place. Moira let go and Hailey held the mechanical rose.

In her hand laid the culmination of her theories. Each petal of the golden rose was its own segment in a line of enchantments, each intersection of the circling layers a different combination that created a different effect, all derived from the rechargeable gemstone at the centre. It wasn’t an enchantment that was created with a single, powerful and sturdy purpose. It wasn’t arcano-tech, pulling magic from a variable source for multiple, defined tasks.

This was true artifice, the artifice she wanted, utilizing the power of enchantments and the flexibility of arcano-tech, combining it in one item that had practically infinite applications and could, in theory, be used by anyone.

“A name,” Hailey whispered, raising her gaze to Moira.

“Rose of Artifice,” Moira responded, a name as simple as it was entirely fitting.

Given its title, the creation’s layers stopped circling. Petals settled back against the core, a flower returned to a bud, to bloom again when it was needed.

The sundeck was sacredly silent, not even the parting waters disturbing the sense of quiet akin to a cathedral. A fleeting sense of holiness filled the air, diminishing like the halo behind the Warden’s head. Hailey would have loved to hold onto it for longer, but it was not hers to command. She simply basked in it for as long as it remained.

“A pleasant first meeting.” Moira bowed her head, as the last vestiges of her manifested blessing dissolved. All around, people rustled. A crowd had formed around the sundeck at some point, the other girls of the harem and John himself forming a ring that kept everyone else removed. “If you wish to join me and Lorelei after lunch, I would be most honoured.”

“I’ll be there,” Hailey promised.

With a little smile, the Shield Warden turned away, her ponytail swinging as she strutted through the parting crowd with all the confident calm that had settled in Hailey’s own soul. She did not have her answers, but she did have her revelation.

And was that not so much more impactful?