77. Testing

Chapter 077
Testing

Primordials were strange, enigmatic creatures. They were supposedly first-born children of the primordial dragon from which the world was fashioned, ancient and powerful. In life, their abilities had rivaled those of the gods themselves. In death, they had spawned a multitude of lesser primordials to continue their struggle. One would think that such fearsome beings and everything related to them would be vividly remembered by history, but this was not the case. In his search for primordial prisons outside Cyoria, Zorian had consulted many church documents, historical records and elementals, largely in vain. Primordials may have been powerful and frightening in their heyday, but they had been sealed away thousands of years ago. That was a lot of time for information to be forgotten, especially since the gods had actively tried to limit knowledge of them and their prisons while they had still been active in the world. Thus, finding any substantial information on them was quite hard.

Moreover, even when such information was found, it was hard to gauge how much of it was reliable and how much of it was pure fabrication. A lot of the stories that bothered going into the details of the nature of primordials were mutually contradictory, and there was no way to test any of them to see which one was closer to the truth than the others.

“In other words, you know virtually nothing about primordials except that they exist and that one of them is imprisoned in Cyoria,” Silverlake concluded after hearing their explanation.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Zach confirmed. Although they were searching for the locations of other primordial prisons in their free time, that hadn’t produced much in the way of actual results. “What does this have to do about confirming the truth of our story, though?”

“Patience, boy, patience,” Silverlake urged smugly. “A house must be built from the foundation up. In order to answer that question, I must first show you the truth about primordials and the way they were imprisoned…”

Oh? She could actually answer those questions? Zorian was torn between excitement and a healthy dose of caution. On one hand, this was a powerful witch that has lived through more than a century – surely she wouldn’t be making claims like that without a good reason to be confident? On the other hand… well, it was Silverlake.

After some thought, he decided to voice his concerns to the old witch in front of him.

“Ignorant brat,” she complained. “Do you think I’d be joking about something this serious!?”

Zach and Zorian shared a knowing look between each other.

“Well… yeah,” Zach said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Now that you mention it, that does sound like something I would derive dark amusement from,” Silverlake mused, rubbing her chin with her hand as she stared at the tree branches above her.

“Not exactly something you should be proud of,” Zorian pointed out unhappily.

“Anyway, do you want to hear what I have to say or not?” Silverlake asked loudly, abandoning her musing pose in favor of folding her hands over her chest and looking at them both defiantly.

“Sure we do,” Zorian said. As annoying as the old witch was, she had some very unique skills and insights that were almost impossible to find elsewhere. “Let’s hear it.”

Silverlake stayed silent for a few seconds. Before either Zach or Zorian could say anything about that, the entrance to her secret hideout flared into life again and another Silverlake stepped out of it, carrying a large brown book in her hands.

Zorian raised an eyebrow at this. Silverlake having some kind of duplicate was not that surprising. There were lots of spells that duplicated the appearance of a caster in some way, after all. Even if it was an actual simulacrum, Zorian still wouldn’t find it unusual, since Silverlake was clearly proficient in soul magic. The really interesting question was which Silverlake was the real thing: the one they’ve been talking to all this time or the one that had just walked out of her dimensional hideout?

He activated his newly-acquired soul perception and took a look.

It was not easy for Zorian to use his soul perception. Training it had been slow and frustrating thus far, though he had been told by Alanic that he was doing just fine by normal standards. He’d had the ability for less than a month, so it was to be expected that his control over it was crude and that he had trouble interpreting what it was telling him. Zorian imagined this was how non-psychics felt when they tried to train their non-structured mind magic into something usable.

Still, identifying whether something in front of him had a soul or not was well within his modest capabilities. With that in mind, he focused his soul perception on Silverlake and immediately realized that she indeed had a soul. She wasn’t an illusion, a remote-controlled puppet or a simulacrum, then. So they had actually been talking to the real Silverlake up till now; that was nice to know. Just to be thorough, he shifted his soul perception to the approaching book-carrying Silverlake and…

She had a soul too. What?

Zorian shifted his attention between one Silverlake and the other repeatedly, trying to work out what was happening here. It was no use, though – his soul perception simply wasn’t sophisticated enough to unravel this mystery and he didn’t want to start casting analytical divinations at the old witch and her weird clone. Blatantly scanning someone without their explicit permission was widely considered to be rather rude and insulting behavior.

The other Silverlake soon reached the one Zach and Zorian had been talking to and gave her the book she was carrying. The first Silverlake glanced at the book, nodded slightly and then snapped her fingers.

The other Silverlake seemingly imploded, badly startling both Zach and Zorian, her form collapsing into a smoky black ball. The ball existed for only a moment before reforming itself into a large black bird, which promptly hopped onto Silverlake’s shoulder. It was a raven, Zorian realized.

‘Of course!’ Zorian thought, slapping himself in the forehead. Silverlake had a raven familiar! The link between a mage and their familiar allowed both of them to assume the form of one another really easily, provided that the mage knew the proper spells.

And Silverlake no doubt knew the proper spells, because familiar magic was one of the things that witches were known to be really fond of. Hell, she’d even found the way to shield the raven’s mind from scrutiny, preventing Zorian from easily identifying it as a shapeshifted animal.

Zorian opened his mouth to say something but was interrupted when Silverlake tried to blow away the layer of dust on the cover of the book and ended up sending herself into a coughing fit due to all the dust suddenly flying into her face.

The raven cawed indignantly at this, flapping his wings a couple of times for emphasis.

“Shut up,” Silverlake said to the raven in between her coughing and wheezing. She glanced towards Zach and Zorian. “And why are you two just standing around like that!? Come closer and take this blasted thing away already! Who do you think I brought it for? Do you think I wanted to refresh my memory or something?”

Zorian stepped closer and Silverlake immediately pushed the large leather-bound tome into his hands. He grunted softly and took a step back, caught off-guard by her sudden movement and the book’s considerable weight. Damn, this thing was heavy…

“Read this and everything will become clear,” Silverlake said, finally getting her breathing under control.

Zorian eyed the heavy leather book in his hands suspiciously. The cover was brown and non-descript, with a title that proclaimed, in plain white letters, that this was a collection of cookie recipes. Flipping the random pages of the book seemed to reinforce this claim.

He glanced at Silverlake and saw that both she and the raven perched on her shoulder were eying him closely, waiting for his reaction.

With a small sigh, Zorian swiped his hand across the book and cast an appropriate dispel, shredding the illusion covering the book into pieces. Following that, he was confronted with a lot less innocuous title: Unspeakable Cults, Volume Four.

“You just can’t resist pulling these kinds of tricks all the time, can you?” Zorian asked rhetorically.

“You made a lot of tall claims today,” Silverlake shrugged. “It’s only natural for me to test them every now and then in small ways. If you two are really a bunch of old time travelers like you claim to be, a simple illusion wouldn’t have posed a problem for you. Besides, I can’t exactly leave a book like this out in the open without disguising it somehow…”

“What do you mean?” Zach frowned.

“Unspeakable Cults is one of the most widely banned series of books circulating around Altazia and Xlotic,” Zorian explained, idly leafing through the book. All sorts of ghastly drawings and descriptions immediately assaulted his eyes. “It was written by an anonymous author that had a penchant for infiltrating secretive cults and mage organizations so he could observe their ceremonies and activities. No one is quite sure how he did it, but considering the furor the books created, it’s clear he didn’t make it all up. Anyway, after infiltrating all these cults and watching them for gods know how long, he wrote a series of eight books that go into great detail about what he had seen. Every debauchery he had seen, every messed up sacrifice or morally-bankrupt experiment is described in great detail, and he even illustrated some scenes with drawings and diagrams. Although the books contain no actual spells or ritual setups, they have been banned almost everywhere as blasphemous, degenerate filth.”

He closed the book, eying it in great distaste. He really didn’t want to read this stuff…

“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what page I should be looking at?” Zorian asked Silverlake, staring at her pleadingly.

Silverlake just grinned at him nastily. Damn witch…

Zorian glanced towards Zach speculatively, but the boy immediately shook his head at him before he could even open his mouth.

“No, no, no,” Zach said quickly, extending his arms in front of him in a warding gesture. “Sorry Zorian, but this definitely sounds like a job for you. You have a lot higher tolerance for this kind of stuff than I do.”

Ugh. As much as Zorian hated to admit this, his fellow time traveler kind of had a point. Reading the minds of high-ranking cultists, Sudomir, Ibasan invaders and others had shown him enough of the dark side of humanity that he had been numbed to the horror of it all to a large extent.

He still didn’t want to wade into a book like this one, though, so he decided to get a little creative. He started casting divination after divination spell at the book, trying to divine the section of the book that Silverlake wanted him to read. This was harder than it sounded, because the book was heavily warded against divinations and did not ever mention primordials by name, but Zorian was very good at divinations by now. Especially these kinds of divinations. He’d had his simulacrums in charge of researching mountains of documentation for obscure clues for quite a while now, so a task like this was pure routine by this point.

After five minutes or so he found the section that seemed right and flipped the book open. Both Silverlake and Zach peered over his shoulder to look at the page he had picked.

“You’re no fun, boy,” Silverlake said, scowling at him.

Zorian took that as an admission that he had indeed found the right page to start at and began to read.

The chapter in question described a small cult of mages, ‘somewhere in Xlotic’, which worshipped an entity imprisoned behind some kind of ‘dimensional veil’. They did this by capturing unwary travelers, implanting some sort of magical worms into their brain and then forcibly establishing contact between their mind and the mind of the imprisoned entity. Normally, mental contact with the entity resulted in quick insanity as one’s mind was overwhelmed by the flood of incomprehensible thoughts and images, but the chemicals released by the worms as they fed on the victim’s brain tissue somehow allowed them to last longer under this assault. Drugged out of their minds to keep them talking and half-insane, the victims would then spend the next couple of hours screaming, pleading, cursing and babbling gibberish while the cultists diligently wrote down their feverish ravings for later study.

After repeating this process gods know how many times, the cultists eventually assembled a fair amount of information about this entity, which the cultists called ‘the Golden-Feathered Worm’. To Zorian’s eyes, it appeared clear that this Golden-Feathered Worm was actually an imprisoned primordial, even if the book never actually identified it as such.

Because of the relatively unpleasant nature of the text, the somewhat archaic language the book was written in and the unhinged nature of the ‘insights’ obtained by the cultists, it was tempting to just dismiss all of their findings as delusional gibberish. However, after re-reading the chapter a handful of times and thinking of it in some detail, he felt there was some actual insight hidden amidst the insanity. The victim’s mutterings of ‘eyes between spaces’, ‘time that moves in braids and spirals’, ‘bones that stretched inside and outside’ and other such nonsense all hinted at the idea that the Golden-Feathered Worm was a very dimensionally complex being.

‘The path of the Golden-Feathered Worm is the path of the self as the universe,’ the book said. ‘Indeed, the rest of his kind is also as such: each one a world unto itself, their flesh but a thin, porous cloak to hide the depths beneath.’

That was interesting, to say the least. The book was basically saying that primordials were not really creatures in the way Zorian commonly understood it, but more like living miniature universes. He… didn’t know what to think about that. It sounded crazy, and considering where it had come from, Zorian would normally dismiss the idea without a second thought.

He handed the book to Zach, who had given up on trying to read over his shoulder a while ago, but would probably still want to see what the book had to say. Zorian couldn’t wait to see his face when he got to the lovingly illustrated description of the worm implantation procedure.

“So?” Silverlake asked, not bothering to wait for Zach to read the book too. “What do you think?”

“I presume you’re referring to the idea of primordials being living universes masquerading as flesh-and-blood beings?” Zorian asked.

“Wait, really?” Zach asked incredulously, slowly leafing through the book. He was going through it too fast so Zorian assumed he was only skimming the text instead of meticulously poring over it like Zorian had done. “How does that work?”

“Read the book and you might get your answer,” Silverlake said blandly. What a lie. Zorian had read that chapter several times over and he still had no idea how that could possibly work. “But yes, that is what I was getting at.”

“Great,” Zach said. “But what does that-”

“I think we are living inside a primordial,” Silverlake said.

There was a brief pause as they both digested this statement.

“I think you’re going to have to explain that a little,” Zach said slowly, letting the book hang by his side for the moment so he can focus on her better.

“Well, provided that what you are saying is at all reliable,” Silverlake said. “You are saying that this Sovereign Gate thing can copy the entire world and create its very own miniature universe to house it all. Oh, and run the whole thing at absurd temporal dilation levels. That is not the level of power you get from a divine artifact. The gods may have been able to build such things, I don’t know, but I have never heard of them handing out something on this level of power. Surely such a device would require an absolutely titanic expenditure of divine energy to produce, no? Sounds like a lot of effort just to give a mortal a new toy to play with. On the other hand, if the Sovereign Gate is ‘just’ a modified, mutilated primordial… well, suddenly the whole thing becomes a lot more plausible. Turning one of their ancient enemies into an item like that and handing it down to a measly mortal to use and abuse sounds exactly like something the gods of old would do. Especially if the primordial in question had irritated them particularly badly by primordial standards…”

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A long silence descended upon the scene as Zach and Zorian considered the plausibility of the story. Silverlake waited calmly for their reaction, hands clasped behind her back. She appeared to be trying to project an air of serenity and unshakable confidence with her stance and expression, but the effect was ruined by the fact she couldn’t stop herself from nervously tapping her foot against the ground as she waited.

Silverlake could be onto something, Zorian decided. It had always seemed to him that the Sovereign Gate was ridiculously powerful, even for a divine artifact, and this was as good an explanation as any as to why this was the case. He suddenly remembered the Ikosian myth of how the entire world they lived on had been fashioned by the gods out of the body of a defeated primordial dragon. He’d never taken the old myth very seriously, but maybe there was something to that story…

“You said there might be a very easy way to check if we’re telling the truth or not,” Zach said cautiously. “Is this related to that? Are you saying it’s somehow possible to check whether we are inside a primordial or not?”

“Well, perhaps,” Silverlake said, humming softly to herself. “You see, I have known about the primordial sealed away in Cyoria for quite a while, and have been carefully, carefully studying its prison from time to time. It was never the focus of my studies, but I reckon I know it quite well. If my speculation is correct, I should be able to notice some kind of change in the prison when I study it again. I refuse to believe that being recreated in the body of another primordial will not have a noticeable effect on it. Well, truthfully, my first instinct is to say that such an item couldn’t possibly affect beings on the level of primordials, even if they are sealed away… but from what you say about Panaxeth, I am completely wrong there, so whatever. Anyway, let’s go check!”

“Now?” Zorian asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Is there any point in waiting?” Silverlake challenged.