215, 1/2

“Yesterday was really good,” Erick said, as he fixed his hair in the mirror. He turned back to Quilatalap. “Aside from the weirdness after the song.”

Quilatalap paused for a moment, thinking. It was a very deep thought, and more than likely it was a series of deep thoughts that tangled up inside of the big man, and then got more tangled with every passing moment. Erick could see the distress on Quilatalap’s face as he came to a conclusion, but struggled with how to express that conclusion.

Erick waited. He considered giving Quilatalap another opening to take, to allow him to express his feelings, but no. Erick had given the guy enough openings. For now. He had been waiting for Quilatalap to say his words for several hours, ever since the song ended, and dinner came and went, and the two of them went to bed in the same bed—

Quilatalap blurted, “You’re everything that the Clergy has been looking for ever since the Sundering.”

“… Ah. That’s what you didn’t want to say last night, wasn’t it?”

“I needed some time to think; yes.” Quilatalap seemed like he was lining up all his thoughts to hit Erick all at once with all of them, which was likely exactly what was happening. And then Quilatalap looked away, and began speaking, gesturing with his hands as he said, “Because it was weird. Overly so. I keep imagining that you picked out a song from your childhood that fit the situation, but it fit the situation too well. And now you’re here, a Paradox Wizard, with Benevolence lightning as your major power which looks an awful lot like Primal Lightning. Last night you even spoke of that dyson swarm thing…

“The scale you spoke of got me thinking of the scale of the Old Cosmology.

“It used to be said that there were uncountable worlds in the Old Cosmology. But real estimates put the number of worlds at something like a billion billion, give or take several million trillion. The distances between worlds was like from here to the sun, which is—

“… It’s not as much as there is in your one home galaxy, to hear you tell it— And yes. I know you were just giving estimates when you told me those numbers, but…

“I don’t have to do any actual math at all to know that this New Cosmology is on a whole different scale than the Old Cosmology.

“Which means the New Cosmology is larger than the Old Cosmology, and by a lot. Whether that ‘a lot’ is on the order of hundreds of times over, or a trillion trillion times over…

“Was the Old Cosmology just a dyson sphere? A particularly advanced sphere? Several hundred thousand dyson spheres? In some spiral arm of some ‘milky way’ somewhere?

“But. No. That’s impossible, right? Everything I’ve seen tells me that this is impossible, but functionally, does it matter? I’m not sure I know what the Old Cosmology really was anymore, only that it did exist, and then it stopped existing due to Primal Lightning creating Yawning Voids…

“Which, looking at it another way…

“A lightning-like force creating mana drains, like the Undertow Effect.”

Silence stretched.

And Erick felt a twinge of panic.

Quilatalap continued, “Are you Xoat? Or are you the cause of, and end to, the Old Cosmology, as well as the creation of this New Cosmology? For us, anyway? Did the Old Cosmology even exist? Or did you will it into existence? But no. That makes no sense either. The Old Cosmology existed, for sure.

“So is the problem I’m having… Is it a soul problem?

“Is the nature of the soul something that, when destroyed in one universe, is reborn in another?

“This is a very uncomfortable thought for me, personally.

“I’ve been doing necromancy for a very long time, and I thought that souls do not go to different universes. When a soul finally fully passes on or is ripped apart, or moves into the realms of the gods, the end-process is to become natural mana. It doesn’t go anywhere else. It remains here, or wherever ‘here’ might be, even after it passes the point of easy reconstitution. The gods’ realms are here, just on the other side of creation, just like Ar’Cosmos is, but more. So the souls might transpose into another slice of reality, but they’re still here. They’re still in the mana. Even souls that go on to godly realms still have expressed mana into the world before their soul deaths.

“You can take mana and turn it back into soulstuff, and if you’re very skilled, you can sometimes do some high-tier summoning and bring back something that might look and partially acts and partially remembers the life of its origin-soul.

“So Xoat’s original form, which was the Entire Old Cosmology if you believe in that tale, which I always have, would have been the Entire Old Cosmology. Xoat was still there in the Old Cosmology this whole time!

“And let me tell you this, Erick.

“Back in the Old Cosmology, people had been trying to summon Xoat for as long as there had been people capable of that Ultimate Necromancy. He was the first Wizard Upon Which All The Rest Was Built. The idea that someone had actually done the impossible and brought Xoat back to life was one of the theories behind the Sundering, but such a magic was impossible to work, because—

“Well there was this old tale, about how a lich had taken one of the original worlds —theorized, not actually known— and then transformed that entire plane of several billion people and lands a thousand times the size of Veird, into a person. That ‘person’ rapidly became an insane god which then promptly died due to internal stresses. The lich escaped that death and then went on to try again. A council of Wizards stopped the lich the third time he tried it— It’s a long story which doesn’t need to be repeated in full to understand that the creature that the lich created was not Xoat. Both times, the proto-god was composed of all the lifeforms that it was made of. It wasn’t till the Wizard council transformed a barren world, made of equal elemental parts, into a living thing, that the lich’s magic proved, once and for all, that one could not summon Xoat; that elemental confluence of a barren rock that the Wizards had raised turned into a primordial elemental which had no—

“Long story short: Thanks to those experiments and a hundred thousand smaller proofs, we know that any part of the Old Cosmology, when turned into life, would revert to thought-patterns and soul-patterns reminiscent of the chronologically-nearest lifeform that created the mana that composed that matter.

“If you take a life, kill it, use that body to make a new life, kill it, then use that second body to try and [Resurrection] the first body, it doesn’t work. That particular experiment is very, very involved, but that was the gist of it all—

“Anyway!

“The Sundering happened, and all the Old Cosmology fell through the Yawning Void, into this New Cosmology…

“Would that old experiment to summon Xoat actually work, now that the Old Cosmology was back to being… Not the Cosmology? Now that all existence had been scrubbed from that land?

“Completely possible! Maybe. Maybe the Old Cosmology collapsed enough to allow such a thing!

“Possible, and yet astronomically large odds against such a happenstance.

“And let me tell you that I have gained a large appreciation for that term since your dyson sphere idea. ‘Astronomically large’. Experience in one’s Status only goes to-the-21, but the size of the volume of the sphere of the Veird system goes a lot higher.

“Xoat’s soul somehow falling to some unknown world in this New Cosmology, and then coming together into a whole? Absolutely unbelievable.

“And yet…

“We have the [Reincarnation] spell, which you made, which takes the smallest part of a person’s true soul and remakes them from that smallest part.

“But why did such a thing not happen here? On Veird?

“Or maybe such a thing could only happen outside of Veird, where the Script does not control the mana?

“And so, maybe that is why you were born on Earth, and that it took 1500 years for that to happen. And maybe… Maybe the reason you have your lightning is because the Sundering left an impossible mark on you, too, just as it did for everyone else who survived the Sundering. Maybe that mark survived even through your own [Reincarnation].” Quilatalap finally got all of his words out, his hands calming down as he finally looked to Erick, saying, “And now, you came back to Veird. You came back here as soon as you could, but with your daughter, taking the only part of the New Cosmology you cared about back to the Dark, to here, to what remained of yourself.”

Erick took all that in, watching as Quilatalap made connections that Erick had never made, which the large man then placed in the best possible light. There were so many different ways Quilatalap could have gone with the ‘your lightning looks like Primal Lightning’ idea, and yet, he chose the best one; a version of events that Erick hadn’t even considered.

Quilatalap’s whole splurge of words brought out a lot of uncomfortable maybe-truths, though.

Erick had wondered, with Establishment magic, exactly how deadly he could get with pasts and futures, and thanks to Rozeta asking him why his lightning looked like Primal Lightning, Erick had considered if he could have somehow caused the Sundering. Somehow. Erick, of course, rejected all those ideas, because it made absolutely no sense why he would ever want to cause something as horrible as the Sundering…

But if Quilatalap was right, and if Erick truly was the reincarnation of Xoat, and that the Sundering had left a mark on him, too…

That made a whole lot more sense.

That Erick would try to turn the thing that hurt him into a source of strength made sense… Sort of. A lot more sense than Erick wanting to somehow Paradox the Sundering into happening, anyway. But then again, mana and fae and planars had freely traveled within the Old Cosmology and other universes, so…

Maybe Xoat’s soul had fallen to this New Cosmology just recently, and only now, being reborn, did ‘Xoat’ call to the largest source of mana in the universe, and thus drag himself and his new daughter back to his ‘former home’. Maybe in that calling he had killed the Old Cosmology.

Because after all, what was a mere 1450 years of difference when it came to Paradox magic, and time travel…

And, more than that, even considering this idea, Erick had the distinct impression that he wouldn’t have wanted to be around for post-Sundering Veird. But 1450 years later? Arriving in a somewhat stable time?

… The answer to that was uncomfortable, but it was uncomfortable in the way that Erick could easily tell himself that he would rather have been alive in the 2000’s on Earth, than the -2000’s.

… Would Erick ever want to have caused the Sundering 1450 years ago? In order to bring about the events of today? To make his whole life on Veird, and the life he was planning for in the far, far future?

The future where he made a universe filled with mana and possibilities, where he brought life and hope to his whole ‘New’ Cosmology? Because that’s what it meant to bring mana and [Cleanse] and Healing Magic and eventual immortality to everyone in this new universe. Erick would even bring that power to the alien civilizations that he had never met, but which he would likely meet in the future. Maybe he could even bring all those things back to Earth, eventually, if Earth didn’t blow up before he got there.

… Could Erick have Established the Sundering, killing the uncountable masses, to bring power to even more uncountable masses?

Erick wanted to say ‘No! Absolutely not!’

But the darker parts of his mind looked back to when he was back on Earth, and facing an early grave due to cancer. He had already outlived his own parents, and he was sure that he was going to die of cancer while Jane was living it up at the CIA, committing international crimes on behalf of the United States.

Could he have done something horrible…

Could Erick have done the unimaginable, there in that car ride, in that liminal space where he was raising his daughter, and sending her off, while he died at home, having outlived his time on Earth?

Erick wanted to say that he was better than that awful decision, but if he had always been a Wizard, and if he had accidentally brought them to Veird anyway, if that was truly his fault, then…

Quilatalap looked down at Erick, his eyes worried, his entire self struggling with a crisis of faith, and trying to find the proper explanation for it all. Perhaps searching for an explanation was a fool’s errand, though.

Erick looked up at the beautiful man, saying, “I like your interpretation of events better than the alternatives, but I’m pretty sure that the whole idea of me being Xoat and all that other stuff is all just coincidence. I was raised in a society where lightning was the strongest natural power; our entire world ran on electricity. That’s probably all that connection is.” He shrugged. “And lightning is neat. I made [Call Lightning] long before I learned any particulars of Primal Lightning and the Sundering, and that Undertow and Yawning Void idea is half-assed at best. Drains are some of the best non-violent ways to take down people, but the Sundering was the exact opposite of non-violent.”

For a long moment Quilatalap just looked at Erick. And then he asked/said, “You want to ignore it all, then. All the connections. All the parallels. All the meaning.”

“Absolutely,” Erick said, with perhaps too much force. “What does it change in the end how it happened, Quilatalap?” Erick let some of his fears out, “Either I’m Xoat and it happened as you say it happened, or I’m Xoat, and I caused the Sundering in order to bring you all here for some unfathomable reason, or I’m some random Wizard who was fleeing a myriad death and who wanted to prevent all death, forever more, and thus I came here to Veird where I could do exactly that. And now we have Benevolence and [Reincarnation] and my desire to open new worlds, and make everything better with this newfound power of mine.”

“… Or maybe all of those are true, and it is your right as Xoat to do anything you wish to do with your own body.”

“Even if I were Xoat it would be very wrong of me to be able to do anything I wanted with my own self, especially if other people were using it. And besides! According to your story with the billions-dead-worlds, Xoat wasn’t even conscious. How could he do anything at all? He couldn’t. Not on his own, and certainly not without a whole lot of help, either.”

“Leaving aside the consciousness factor…” Quilatalap gave Erick a Look, saying, “We’ve had the abortion debate before, Erick, when we talked about stuff happening on Earth and I talked about stuff happening on Veird 1450 years ago. I know your true feelings on this.”

“… That’s different.”

“Is it?”

“A difference of scale, yes. It’s different.”

“Let me ask you this, then: Will you eventually return to your idea of going incognito among the people? Will you abdicate your throne once House Benevolence establishes itself?”

“… I will go incognito eventually. Not for a very long time, though. Why?”

“Because while most of the stories about Xoat were how he died and the universe happened, some of those stories are about how Xoat walked among us, doing good things from the shadows, never knowing who he was and yet still doing good all the time.”

“… I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I would prefer not to be laden with all these ideas of what could have happened, because all these theories are impossible to prove anyway. All they do is get in the way of real work. And this is putting way too much weight on stuff that doesn’t matter, because I would absolutely never cause a Sundering! I made Benevolence so that a Sundering never happens again!”

Erick’s words were probably too heated.

But Quilatalap took Erick’s anger in stride, calmly saying, “Because the Sundering marked your soul as much as it marked all of us that remain, and all of those who came afterward. Even after taking 1450 years to come back together, you still did, and then you came back here to Veird to make Benevolence, to prevent all further Sunderings in this entire New Cosmology.”

With a voice filled with quiet bargaining, Erick said, “Reasons and cause and effect literally do not matter, Quilatalap. I’m just a guy, who has a bit of power, who is using that power to do some good. That’s all.”

Quilatalap looked at Erick for a little while.

And Erick waited.

Quilatalap likely had a thousand more thoughts flitting through his mind, but Erick could not and did not want to unravel them all. So he waited, as Quilatalap had a crisis of faith, of purpose, and of the present.

All too soon, Quilatalap stood up a fraction straighter.

Erick waited some more.

“… Well. Okay.” With an air of brightness, Quilatalap said, “Okay! Well. Then let’s ignore all that circumstantial evidence, because what happened before is simply what happened before, and without any hard evidence this way or that, focusing too much on what could have happened might blind us to what actually happened. And besides that, it doesn’t matter anyway.”

Erick felt his heart swell with love, and then he tempered that right back with rationality. Rapidly, Erick ended up in some equilibrium space that veered toward hope, and other nice things, such as a continued relationship with Quilatalap, while he desperately ignored the possible hero/miracle/crisis happening with the big green man right now. Quilatalap seemed to be forcing himself to ignore all of those uncomfortable things, too.

Which was good.

With a calm smile, Erick asked, “Ready for some presentations?”

“I’ll need to make my own. You can go on ahead.”

“… You don’t have to? We’ve already talked about what you’ve done this last year?”

“Sure, but none of the rest know, and I’m rather sure your overseers are still wary of me. A presentation could put their worries to rest.”

“… Okay. Sure?”

Quilatalap smirked. “I’ll catch up with you.”

“… Sure,” Erick said, not sure what else he could possibly say in such a situation.

– – – –

Erick walked alone down the hallway of his private section of the House, for Quilatalap had split off and gone downstairs, to the atrium, to set up in one of the rooms set aside for the presentations. That was probably for the best, for Quilatalap’s thought process regarding Xoat, Erick, the Sundering, and Benevolence, had shaken Erick.

But any more thoughts spent on all of that would be a distraction. He was the host of the Feast and he had work to do.

Ophiels fluttered all around the House, showing Erick that nothing was on fire, and all the people of the House were doing their respective jobs and keeping their heads down, either setting out food or clearing away small messes or cooking in the kitchens. The guests were partaking of the Feast, or setting up presentations, or… Hmm. Flirting with the staff. Erick saw Farix flirt with Cook Donny, but Lapis was at Farix’s side with a quick elbow and a quiet word, and Farix excused himself. Donny excused himself from that situation a second later, once he felt safe enough to do so. The big guy went around a corner and paused, taking a deep breath, before moving on.

Erick moved on, too.

A quick count of people showed that there were a lot more people here than Erick had counted yesterday. The Shade Tower, of which only Goldie was a member until a few days ago, had been transformed from white eternal stonewood and basic niceness, into a fantastically high-class building filled with luxury, and also a secondary section filled with servant-level niceness. In one half of the building there were black carpets running down hallways, four poster beds, and black vases and sculptures of the Dark Dragon on plinths. The other half of Shade Tower was the same normal white flooring and nice lights that Erick had put up months ago. But there were also servants. Some were ghostly, courtesy of Quilatalap, but there were also a lot of real people down there.

Lot of people who had not been there yesterday.

Shadelings of all sorts, from human to orcol to harpy to incani and dragonkin. They all seemed past their initial fugue-state, too, so they weren’t just mindless automatons, but real people. There were also normal people, too. Maybe about 25 people total, all of whom were involved in cooking, or cleaning, or [Fabricate]ing clothes… Making clothes? Yup. Clothes for parties? Probably.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Whatever they were doing was probably fine.

None of the Shades were in residence. Every room given to the Shades was unoccupied, with unseen servants in the process of making up the beds, or completely empty, for the Shades therein had vacated hours ago, or never stayed there at all. Treant’s room looked completely untouched, which was normal for that orcol Shade. He was staying in the grove he had made out of House Benevolence’s southern garden space. A quick look out there showed that the southern gardens were also empty, though the place where Treant had rooted himself for the night had been heavily disturbed, with a void in the dirt where he would have been planted.

Most of the Shades were in the atrium, with only Treant missing… Somewhere.

He’d turn up eventually.

The Cooks and staff seemed to be fine, down there in their rooms located right outside of the atrium, and inside the kitchens already cooking. Breakfast was being served to Queen and Goldie and Hollowsaur now, all of whom sat at the same central table where they had all eaten dinner last night. The three of them seemed to be having a small conversation, which Erick would likely join later if their conversation held past breakfast. A few people had already set up their presentations, and a few presentation spaces were empty. Fairy Moon and Bright Smile were at the presentation rooms located on the second ring of the atrium, beside all the rest, setting up that presentation themselves, with the help of one more.