274, 1/2

 

Erick sat across from Shadow, on pillows, on the moon, under the lights of the towers he had built, and in the atmosphere he had made. It was time to do this fae-ascension thing. Erick didn’t know much about it, except that he needed to become ‘Simply Him’, and that there was some sort of ‘Elemental Life cultivation’, and that he needed to ‘absorb an environment that was himself’. Admittedly, that might have sounded like a lot of good information, but Erick was somewhat lost about the specifics.

Shaping mana? Easy to understand.

Accretion and Cultivation? Also simple. Mana and resons go into the self and do their thing.

Becoming fae?

Not so simple… But it was supposed to be ‘Simple As’, and so Erick might just be overthinking it. He was doing that a lot these days. Thinking was great and all, but doing actually got stuff done, and Erick was ready to start doing something transformative.

Shadow sat tall on her pillow, as she said, “First, we must confront the Self. The Self is the base nature of your being. It is not your entirety. It is the core of yourself, upon which all other things are built. It is the seed. You are the growth of that seed. Tell me of your Self.”

This did not feel like that time when he was in Ar’Cosmos, and Fairy Moon blindsided him with a question about ‘describing Benevolence’. This was just talking. And so, the words came easily to Erick, “For the good of all and every individual… That whole thing.”

Shadow grinned a little. “Usually that’s a much harder step for people, for most people do not make their own Element.”

“How do people usually answer when they use the Elements made by others?”

“The Question of the Self —also known as the Core Question, and other variations— would lead a normal person —who took in the mana of others and made themselves into a powerhouse— to talk about what their chosen power meant to them. That’s how most people got powerful, after all; they picked an Element, and they went on to embody it, and they were never the first to get there. Always, there is baggage.

“Say if a person absorbed Blood as their chosen power. Then such a Question of the Self would go on to discuss what Blood meant to them. What specific aspect of Blood was their chosen aspect, etcetera. Sometimes a person would be born with an Element which they wanted to keep, and in that case the Question of the Self would send that person on a personal Quest to discover themselves, where they would continually refine themselves into Themselves. That sort of transformation into Oneself was usually the easiest, but sometimes people who took power and made it their own had it easier.” Shadow said, “But as for the Quest… The mechanics of such a Quest would likely have such a person spending their entire lives trying to find Themselves, or maybe they’d simply take a few good tragedies and growths to get there. That could take a while. A lot of fae, when they find people who seem like they might become fae themselves one day, will ask them leading questions that would send them down such paths in life. I believe this is what my father did for you, when she helped you make Benevolence.”

Well that was interesting.

Erick nodded, moving on.

Shadow nodded in turn, then said, “Now that you have answered the Question of the Self, we must consider the environment you wish to surround yourself with. It can be anything, of any size or shape at all. This is where things will get weird for you, and thus they will get weird for all of us, because you are a Paradox Wizard and you have tremendous goals ahead of you, and you already plan on becoming a true Time Wizard. You should experiment with Time in the following however-longs, and with Malevolence, and with every glorious and horrible thing you can imagine. You should see sights you wish to see, and things you wish you never knew. You should Create.” She said, “When you are ready, you will know what needs to be done, and this will cause your Great Death. If you can come back from that, then you will be fae.”

Well that got to the Big Part faster than Erick was ready.

Erick almost asked a question about what all of that really meant, and if she really was telling him to play around with Malevolence, but then she hit him with the ‘you will die’, and his questions seemed trivial compared to the gravity of what was to come.

Shadow stood up, and said, “Any more instruction would influence who you Simply Are, so I will leave you with this: I trust you to do well. Cultivate your Life, Erick. I will be here when I need to be here.” And then Shadow loomed over Erick and the entire moon like a Dark Goddess, her black hair flowing in the void, her dark eyes shining with untold depths and distant stars, as she intoned, “The Fate of Fae be upon ye, Erick Flatt, Apparent King, Wizard of Benevolence, and so much more. Thrive in the cataclysm of your own Creation.”

Shadow vanished into a twist in the world.

… Erick was alone, sitting under the bright prismatic lights of his moon base. But he wasn’t really alone at all. Though the shadows were empty, and the world only had Benevolence mana, a lot of slimes tumbled around and inside the mana towers, and in the shallow waters.

…

Welp!

That was a lot of stuff, and also not much at all.

Erick smiled at that, and decided to get on with his initial plans, the ones with actual actions he knew how to take, and to see where those plans took him. He stood up and said, “Time to make a gate space.”

Opening a portal into Benevolence Itself was different outside of the Script. Without that multi-dimensional barrier to surround and contain mana from all possible angles, mana slipped into the void and went… somewhere. Erick wasn’t quite sure where the mana went, but he realized he should find out. He knew a few facts that could help him before he went exploring.

The Script had a very good dimensional barrier. It kept everything inside, and allowed gate spaces to exist properly, without fading away as the mana on this side of reality brushed off into the void. As long as the mana was contained properly on this side, then the gate space on that side was solid, and secure… Except that wasn’t the truth. That only happened on Veird, where the Script set up some weird, multi-dimensional Bands of Intent, or something. When Erick had been on that base on Fenrir, and he had opened up a portal into Benevolence Itself, the entire base almost failed because the mana inside of the barrier washed through that hole, super fast. So a simple containment on this side of reality was not good enough to make a gate space on that side of reality.

In the Painted Cosmology, mana and its private dimensions piled up atop each other, making a home inside of the Dark. During the Sundering, Nothanganathor had opened up massive holes throughout the entire Painted Cosmology, and all of the Painted Cosmology spilled out into the void that existed here, in the Infinite Fractal. So with that sort of thought… The Sundering was more like ‘pulling the plug in the bathtub’ in a way that should not have happened at all. But it did. With the Sundering, the mana ocean of that Old Cosmology faded into the ocean of Infinity on this side of Everything.

Veird survived, though it was a near thing.

Mana on Earth was kind of like a constant Sundering between the Painted Cosmology and the Fractal Cosmology, in that the mana here diluted and died when it went outside of the control of the Intent that made the mana into magic. When the Intent passed, the mana faded back into lower states of possibility, and folded into the universe, where it was sucked away into Infinity.

Only a few places in this Infinity could actually contain mana in any meaningful way. The Script on Veird was one. Fenrir, after Nothanganathor turned the whole of it into a manaminer land, could also contain mana. Margleknot contained mana, too, but Margleknot was more than a mana container. There were so many different dimensionally-active powers on Margleknot that they all sort of muddled together, and Margleknot had some sort of power that kept them all from fading away into Infinity. Erick wasn’t privy to Margleknot’s exact inner workings, due to Yggdrasil being unwilling to tell him, but that was fine.

Erick didn’t need to know the full stretch of Margleknot’s powers —or anyone’s powers— right now.

He needed to figure out how to make a dimensionally-stable gate space, and there was really only one way to do that.

Erick stood up from his pillow, and then he opened a hole into Elsewhere. Iridescent white lightning flickered into a circle and then opened inward, creating an absolute abyss of black that was soon filled with tumbling white mana. That mana flowed out of Erick’s protected space and into the hole, just like when he had first Ascended on Fenrir. Whatever existed beyond this reality, inside that ‘Benevolent Space’ on the other side of the portal, was more like a vacuum.

There were several key differences in Erick’s circumstances between now and back then, on Fenrir. Sure, mana flowed into the hole, robbing this moon base of its equilibrium and stability, but Erick had built this place well, and the bubble walls began to contract right on schedule, responding to the decrease in density. Erick hadn’t built this place to protect against multi-dimensional attacks, though, so that was why he could create the hole into Elsewhere in the first place. Fixing that oversight was part of his chosen tasks today.

And so, Erick stepped into the void to see the problem from the other side.

– – – –

It was strange to see nothing.

That was Erick’s primary thought as he floated inside of the void beyond reality, while a thin tendril of power still connected him to the portal at his back. Benevolence and trace amounts of other manas, birthed on Erick’s moon base, flowed through that portal, spinning off into infinity, rushing against Erick’s back like a thickness in the air. Mostly, Erick felt the rush of air and dust and even a few leaves that sucked through that portal and washed over him.

The space itself wasn’t a space.

The mana and air and otherwise that got sucked through the portal, into this side, spun off into nowhere, practically disintegrating in the void. Erick was rather certain that the only reason he was able to ‘be’ here, and not get ‘voided’ himself, was that he was a True Wizard, in full control of his own body.

So he just enjoyed the space.

It wasn’t black. It wasn’t white. It wasn’t any sort of color. It was just empty. And Erick remained. He floated in the absolute void, subtly glowing. His control over his mana was absolute, but his mana still radiated below his skin, and somehow that caused illumination. Or maybe the very fact that he existed is what caused the illumination.

The portal behind him was still open, and that also caused some light to shine into the void. Erick held onto that portal with a thin bit of aura…

Erick flowed a command through his aura, to the portal, closing the portal—

The portal flashed away, so very far away and fast, like a silent, speeding balloon, racing away after letting go of the nozzle. By the time the portal shrunk and closed and then vanished, it was thousands of kilometers away, or more. Erick couldn’t really tell. Distance was kinda… weird, here.

He was alone in the void. Even the mana and air that had come in here with him was gone; spun off into out there, whatever ‘out there’ was.

Erick decided he needed something solid to start his extradimensional experiments, so he spilled out some mana to create something solid: a rock.

What popped out was not a rock at all. It was a splash of nothing. Or at least that’s what it kinda looked like; Erick had spun his aura into a rock, and what came out was sparkles.

Only because of Erick’s natural tendency to scope out everything that existed around him, and through his Lightning Path, did Erick see what had truly happened. He had created a rock. It had been roughly white and solid, and kinda shaped like rippled and chipped obsidian. And then that rock had turned to dust and then crumbled in the infinite, becoming sands that flowed away like the breaking of so much magic.

Erick frowned a little at that. He had made rocks out of Benevolence before, but this time it had failed?

It wasn’t like this was some sort of metaphysical journey into his soul, like when he had made Benevolence and turned that empty white void into a land of stone, water, air, fire, and life. This was a real place, on the other side of reality.

This act right here was taking place completely outside of his body, in a nothing-space that existed beside reality… where mana went when it was done? Erick wasn’t sure about that last part.

Whatever this place was, it wasn’t the Darkness. Of that, Erick was rather certain. He was still in the Fractal Cosmology, for sure… Probably.

Erick focused and cast a jolt of Benevolence into the air—

The Benevolence fractured and split even as Erick was forming the magic. White iridescence went wide, flowing from the space of high concentration, where he had cast the magic, into all the rest of everything, where nothing existed at all.

Erick cast a few more jolts into the air, trying to keep them together—

He realized something.

A while ago, he had had a conversation with Phagar about the nature of Time Travel, after the reveal of the Fractal and all the side slices of Infinity that one could get lost within. He had basically said that if Erick ever Time Traveled to the past inside the Fractal Universe, that he would likely end up in a different slice of Infinity, like the ones where Nothanganathor ate everything except for the God Pact world. Paradox Wizards didn’t have this problem back in the Painted Cosmology, because, while the gods decided such things as the local time frame and stability, they also decided on a consensus reality. Thus, a Paradox Wizard always ended up in the consensus reality of the gods, unless they were going outside of godly matters, and then they’d just end up in the Dark and likely dead.

Erick wasn’t dead, therefore this wasn’t the Dark.

Being a Paradox Wizard in the Fractal Cosmology was harder than being a Paradox Wizard in the Painted Cosmology, because unless one was aiming very well, and had something specific to aim at —like the ‘ground state’ that was themselves-in-relation-to-their-home— they usually ended up on a side reality.

That didn’t help to explain what was happening in this void, but Erick was on to a different, equally important thing to keep in mind, going forward.

A true Paradox Wizard traveled to their own past; they did not muck around with alternate realities at all. Erick was a true Paradox Wizard. When he eventually figured out the Big Time Travel Magic, that he had spoken about with Phagar before, then he would (if he was aiming correctly!) end up on the God Pact world, under the direct purview of the gods like Rozeta and otherwise.

And being under the views of the gods meant that there would be uncomfortable questions and shit. Even if he evaded Rozeta and the other gods of the Pantheon and their paladins, Melemizargo would definitely notice him. Phagar, too. As for Nothanganathor… Erick could probably evade him… Maybe.

But he couldn’t evade anyone if they could sense his Benevolence spilling out everywhere.

So Erick needed to figure out how to hide his mana.

Briefly, Erick thought about trying to literally ‘hide’ his mana, perhaps through camouflage, to make it look like something else… And that might be part of the solution. The Script contained and purged everything it didn’t recognize, so leaving a bit of Benevolence around wasn’t a huge deal, as long as it looked like, say, Elemental Fairy— No. Elemental Mystical. Yeah. That worked.

And thinking of Mystical… There was another part of the solution to Erick’s mana spilling everywhere, and also the solving of an old problem that he had never gotten around to solving.

Elemental Mystical was what the Script used for Abilities like Clarity, which dropped the mana costs of stuff from 100% costs, to 50% costs, and then even lower, once more and more Mystical mana was being used to dupe the ambient mana to play along with what the Intent-filled magic was doing.

Erick needed to reinvent Clarity for himself.

And he also needed to contain all of his mana; to spill it out there and then bring it back, so that he never actually used any mana at all, like what Solomon had shown him a year ago, back when Erick was trying to figure out how to get Elemental Genesis. Erick had cheated to get Genesis, so he hadn’t really learned the spill-and-suck methods that Solomon had shown him with the tubes and junk. But now it was time to learn those methods.

Erick couldn’t very well travel to the past and then disrupt his own present could he? Absolutely not.

So the only way to do that was to go into the past and be absolutely invisible. Invisible to gods, and everyone.

… But he probably couldn’t do that.

Just being realistic, now. He could not do that. Not on his own.

He needed help.

But the very second he showed up on Veird, no matter the time, he would face the horrors of Nothanganathor, so he couldn’t get help from Phagar… Not yet, anyway. Phagar would have been the first choice.

So who would his second choice be?

Hmm.

Well…

Considering that he was about to fuck around with time in a very, very big way, then why not pick the best possible person to ask for help?

Why not ask himself?

Erick stared out into the void, waiting for himself to appear, to help…

Nothing.

… Erick still needed to work on the gate space, anyway. Something solid that wouldn’t fall apart, that he could access from anywhere… and any time. And maybe, if he did it right…

Erick gazed out into the void. The nothing shifted, but not in any particular way. Erick’s [Wizardly True Sight] eyes were still working fine, and he saw far and true just as well as before, but there was truly nothing out there… And yet, Erick did not feel scared of the emptiness like he had when he had faced the emptiness of Fenrir’s surface. This place was just… just empty. Kinda relaxing, though.

He wondered if his future self was staring back at him from the emptiness, hidden in a cloak of absolute secrecy… or whatever Erick ended up calling it.

Erick held out his hands, a little bit across from each other, and began trying to learn how to perfectly recycle his own mana… and his resons too! Why not. A jolt of Benevolence jumped from palm to palm, fraying as it writhed between his hands, tendrils of white curling and breaking away as the power left the absolute solidness that was Erick’s body. The jolt that exited Erick’s right hand, entered the void, and then came back to Erick’s left hand, had been reduced from wrist-thickness, to hair-thickness. It was a near-complete failure.

This was good experimentation to figure out some better mana control and to try and understand this void, as well… And that made Erick smile. Everything was coming together.

Erick tried the jolt again, this time adding in an expression of his Benevolence Domain to the working. The fraying was less bad this time, but it still didn’t stay together like it should have. Erick began weaving in Elemental Mystical into the whole thing, Intent on making the mana want to remain itself, corralling the whole thing together. Asking and tricking the mana into behaving worked a bit better than pure force; the ropes of Benevolence didn’t fray nearly as much. As the Mystical-altered Benevolence flowed, it turned back in on itself like loose yarn. It was a rather unstructured working, and it wasn’t good for anything except stringing between his hands, but it was rapid progress in the realm of ‘making magic that no one else can sense’ and ‘figuring out dimensional barriers and other Elsewhere logics’.

Gathering the mana he expressed and stuffing it back into his body was kinda difficult, though.

But this emptiness was a great practice zone for expelling and bringing mana back; no interference of any kind except for active dissolution did great for refining control.

Erick played around with the mana for a long while, while also inspecting his body, and the differences that allowed his body to exist without injury in this nothing-space, but which tore at his mana whenever he cast anything. It wasn’t hard to figure out the difference was that mana was mana, and his body was made out of particles, but there was more to it than that, because when Erick cast some Genesis to create a simple quartz crystal, the crystal evaporated just like how particles didn’t.

Erick was still wearing his clothes, too, so it wasn’t a matter of living or dead particles, or whatnot.

What a fun little (probably very large, actually) puzzle!

Erick smiled as he played around with mana, Authority, and Domains. Soon, his work all began to flow together, like silent music, pieces of power building upon other pieces of power, forming an orchestra of Intent and understanding. Erick created a symphony in the dimness of the void.

– – – –

Erick played with power for a long while. Hours or days, he wasn’t quite sure, though according to some math and looking at his Status, he had only been in here for a little over… A month? Really? It had been that long? Time flew when you were having fun, he guessed.

He had made a lot of progress in keeping his mana together and even making it come back together once his spellwork broke.

Erick flicked a ball of Force into the air and the Force broke into shards that then rotated around and came back into the shape of a ball, right above his palm. All of that had taken place outside of his control; outside of his aura. The next part actually took effort, though, as Erick gripped the ball and sucked the ball back into his hand, into his mana well. Erick smiled.

He had managed to do that perfectly this time, and five previous times as well.

He was ready to make a new Ability out of his [Endless Aura] —his ambient mana accretion ability— and his Mana Siphon, and all the rest of his control. This Ability would affect all of his spellwork, and make everything going forward easier, because then he could hide from himself and all others, even in his own timeline…

As long as he got it right.

Erick opened the barrier of his skin, allowing his mana to flow into the void like a white tsunami, tinged with gold and rainbows. Tens of thousands of Mana, Health, Psyche, and resons all poured into the grey void, establishing his Authority in the area, providing Erick with the space and the manasphere necessary to do a larger working.

Briefly, the area around Erick looked like Benevolence Itself, all white with clouds.

Erick expanded his [Endless Aura], crafting tubes of power into the white, into his own expression of power, and then he coiled Siphon through those tubes. [Endless Aura] was incredibly fragile, and even more so in this space, but Siphon and Erick’s own aura control helped to shore up those weaknesses.

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Erick spoke,

“In sightless Void this power’s blessed

“To gently guide a Wizard’s quest.

“Magic turns might to sights unseen

“as Mystical becomes smokescreen.

“And if it is ever known, it turns to here, to this Void’s rest,

“Cleaning up as it departs, ensuring Paradox’s behest

“to not be known until it’s time;

“to show the world, to show the truth,

“That this stranger is not some simple youth

“But a Wizard, true, in his full prime.

“And that this is not a void at all.

“It is Benevolence’s home sprawl.

“And so, with gifts, I mark this space,

“this vibrational, eternal grace,

“With power lovingly inclined,