Chapter 405: The System

The question hung in the air between us, and for a long moment, Dorrik did not answer. The light in the stone flickered, and I was finally able to trace that this flickering was because of the forge.

As it turned out, there was fire burning in the forge, but the flames were invisible, and what was even more strange was that this fire did not seem to be drawing from the flame essence in the air, and if I had not been watching every change in that hall, I would never have known there was fire in it at all.

The more I watched, the more I was able to see the fire casting shadows across the hall, and I glimpsed those shadows moving across the stone-carved face of Dorrik, and for a moment he looked like something ancient and unknown."

I would have been a fool if I did not understand that this old man before me was powerful, but I did not yet know what he was; for the moment, he was not my enemy.

"A name," he said slowly. "You want its name."

"Yes."

He was quiet for a long moment, and in that quiet, I was able to hear the fire pop, and the shadows in the hall stretched. I wonder if I was becoming more aware of the flame the longer I remained in this hall, or the flame was choosing to reveal itself to me, but I did not look away from the stone man.

With a sigh, Dorrik set his cup down, and when he spoke, his voice was softer, almost reluctant.

"Names," Dorrik said. "It’s got dozens... the world is a big place, and folks tend to name things according to the life they had lived."

He reached for the jar again while he spoke, and I noticed he did not pour himself another, almost as if the movement were reflexive, and I found myself oddly wishing for another cup of the stuff, which would have been poison to anyone weaker than me.

"The temples all have their own. The Ordering, that’s the common one, that’s what you’ll hear in the north. Down south they say the Great Fitting, and they say it with their chins up, damned southerners have never once said a plain thing when a long thing was available." He turned the jar and set it down without opening it. "The Ledger. The Weave. The Arrangement, though that one’s mostly used by folk who don’t want to think about it too hard. The Quiet Hand, from a temple not far from here that’s been gone about eighty years now."

Dorrik paused for a long time, and when he spoke next, he was whispering, and it was a good thing I had such great senses, or I would not have heard him, and I instinctively knew that he was never going to repeat what he said here again.

"It is said that the Dragon God that brought it down to this world called it... the Pivot."

I felt a chill run down my spine and spread across my entire body. The Soul Flayer had used that word before it died. It had called the grand machine inside my soul that controlled the Loop a Pivot of Existence, before its soul collapsed into nothing.

It had said that not even a Maker could hold a Pivot, and that I carried something that should not exist inside a soul. Was it possible that all of it was connected - my loop, the Caelith, the System - because a Dragon God went into the void looking for a good death and came back carrying something?

I was filled with so many questions, but I knew that if I could not find the answers here, I would go out into the world to look for them. There were no two ways about it; one way or another, I was going to find out the truth.

Looking at Dorrik, I decided to push the envelope of our conversation further past the limit of safety; I think it was the right time for it.

"Does anybody call it the System?"

∞

The hall got very quiet, and Dorrik, who had been fidgeting with that jar the whole time we talked, stopped every movement he was making, and now he did resemble a real carving.

"No," he said. "Nobody calls it that."

"Ah."

"Say it again."

"It was only a word," I said it evenly. "I heard it somewhere."

"Say it again anyway."

I looked at him, and he looked back at me, and I could see something shifting behind his pale grey eyes. It reminded me that I did not know what kind of power he wielded, and that he was very likely doing something to me I could not detect. However, this was the reason I had pushed; anyone else would have hesitated, but I had endless chances of getting it right.

"The System," I said.

"Hm." He sat back. "No. That’s not any word I have heard for it."

I shrugged. "Then it’s nothing."

"It’s not nothing." He rubbed a thumb along his jaw. "That’s the trouble with it. If you’d said something else, anything else, then that would be nothing... There are countless words you could have chosen."

"It’s just a word."

"It’s a cold word, lad. It’s a word for a machine." He tapped the table once. "It’s the right word. That’s what’s bothering me. Three hundred years of priests and poets and every one of them naming the thing after what they hope it is, and you described what it does. Do you know that there are many fallen gods who search for the right name for this thing, and you have it? So, after digging my head into the sand the last three hundred years, I guess it is fate that someone like you came to my door."

I did not say anything. I have found, over a great many deaths, that there is a moment in every conversation where the next thing you say determines all the things after it, and the correct move is very often to say nothing at all and let the other man decide what your silence means.

People are generous with silence. They fill it with whatever they were already thinking... Dorrik filled it, eventually.

"Where’d you hear this word?"

"I don’t remember."

He laughed, but there was not much humor in it, and still it was somehow not unkind.

"That," he said, "is the first thing you’ve said tonight I don’t believe."

I don’t know how to respond to that, so I said the first thing that came to my mind. "I know."

"You know." He shook his head. "Y’didn’t even deny it; there are not many people who would do this in my presence."

"Would you have believed a better lie?"

Dorrik paused, and the way he looked at me changed. "No. I don’t think I would want a better lie; that would only take me farther away from the truth."

I nodded. "Then it would have been a waste of our time."

The Stoneborn laughed again, got up, and went to put the jar back on its shelf.

"I’ll let it lie," he said, with his back to me. "But I will get to the truth."