Chapter 410: The All Consuming Flame

I felt something touch my forehead. It was cool and smooth, like stone warmed by the sun and then left in the shade. The touch did not hurt, but I felt it in a way that was not quite physical, as if it was reaching into the hollow place where my soul had been torn.

"The System," I said. The words came out as a croak, barely audible. "I don’t... what is that place?"

"Aye." Dorrik’s voice was gentle. "The world protects its inhabitants from seeing the void. It always has. The barrier was woven into the fabric of existence, a mercy granted to those who live within the bounds of reality. But the System... this damned curse that the Dragon God brought back tore open that barrier. It had to. The void that the Dragon brought back could not be contained any other way."

I blinked, and the world slowly resolved into focus. Dorrik was sitting beside me, his stone-carved face lined with something that might have been worry. The forge was still burning behind him, the invisible fire casting shadows that danced across the walls.

"Still, your perception is ridiculous, and it usually takes a bit of effort to look that deeply into the void, but you seem not to have that problem, as if... the void is searching for you."

I grimaced in pain as the pieces of my mind were clashing as they reassembled, and in the center of it was a brand new skill that throbbed with pain.

"The gods," I gasped. "The ones who refused the System. Is this what they see?"

"Yes. The old gods did not have the System’s protection. They had the barrier, the natural mercy of the world, but the System tore that barrier open when it arrived. The old gods had to assimilate or be broken, and many chose to assimilate. Those who refused..." He shook his head. "Had to run to the edges of the world, like this place, and the rest went mad. I told you of the mother of dragons; she roams the sky, and I shudder to think of what she sees, as her eyes no longer close."

I closed my eyes. I could feel the weight of what I had seen, the memory of the shapes in the void, the question that I could not understand. It was still there, pressing against the edges of my consciousness, waiting for me to look at it again.

They may be gone, but there was now a part of my soul that was always open, and although it hurt, a part of me wanted nothing more than to use this skill and peer deeper into the void... to see more, to know more!

These thoughts were still in my head as I lost consciousness again.

∞

My eyes opened many days later; my internal clock said nine days, but it could have been more. I noticed that I had not been touched, and the pain had subsided to a great degree. It seemed that I had managed to pull through and would not be dying yet.

As more of my consciousness returned, I saw that I was on my knees, and my head was bent down as if I was in prayer... I must have been like this for nine days. I still felt so weak, like I was mortal again, and not a Titan made from Adamantium.

I made a small sound as I slowly raised my head, and I felt the breeze shift, and Dorrik appeared beside me, and he crouched, so I could see his face clearly... and then his face moved as if he was about to speak, and the other one inside him moved as well.

I blinked, knowing that I was not hallucinating, since it was almost impossible for a mage of my power. Focusing on Dorrik much more closely, I observed his stone face; nothing had changed there, but there was another him inside his face that was pressing against his skin from the inside, creating horrific bulges on his face, but Dorrik did not seem to be aware that there was another him trying to push out from his body.

When his mouth opened to speak, I watched the shape of that other jaw push outward against the stone of his cheek and settle back.

I made a sound that did not make sense, and I saw something shift in Dorrik’s eyes.

"Aye," he said. "It’s begun, then."

∞

I wanted to ask him what he meant by this, but I suspected that it was the madness that was inflicted on those who looked into the void. When the thought moved from my mind to my lips, I discovered that three days had already passed.

I was still on my knees, even after three days, and Dorrik began to feed me something. I did not know what it was, but it gave me strength, even if the strength seemed to be vanishing into my broken soul that was stitching itself together.

Slowly I began to lift my head, but I avoided looking at him; there was something wrong with that figure that was trying to push itself out of his body that my recovering mind could not put into words.

Was this the effect of my new skill? It did not seem to need any thought from me before it was activated, and might be a permanent part of my life from this point forward. This thought made me shudder.

From that point onward, I decided to close my eyes, but that did not seem to help, and I wondered why I had thought that putting a layer of flesh over my eyes would change anything.

Still, it only took another three days before I began exploring my surroundings with my new eyes, which meant that I was now able to look at Dorrik’s Forge and see the flame, but it was unlike any sort of fire I had ever seen in my life, even from Sovereign Caldus, Master of Flame.

Fire as I knew it consumes a thing and leaves the parts of it that will not burn. This one does not leave anything behind, as it seemed to be swallowing everything in existence, and so would burn forever.

What a strange flame... and so for the next seven days that I slowly regained my strength, enough to begin eating by myself, I watched the flame, and I felt one of the Law Shards inside me begin to loosen.

Dorrik had left his halls a few days before, and had not returned, but all my attention was on the strange new world opening before my eyes.

Eldritch Perception: 1 → 4 (Initiate)

∞

After days had passed, I stopped looking at the all-consuming flame, and I began to look at the walls.

I said in my first hour here that the corridor had no tool marks and that the stone was smooth in a way that was unnatural. I was wrong about the tool marks. They are there. They are simply not on the surface.

Every cut in this mountain was made by drawing a line through the idea of stone and letting the rock catch up afterwards. I can see the lines, and they do not stop, as if the carver had made this entire hall using a single stroke.

I followed the line with my eyes on the eleventh day, out of the hall and through the wall and through the mountain and away east, and I kept following it, even while I was on my knees, and unable to stand, for what I later estimated at three hundred miles, before it made a weird curve and disappeared into the earth.

Eldritch Perception: 4 → 11 (Initiate)

Soul integrity at 7%→ 15%