Chapter 413: The Shape of Terra

I had braced for something to change after I had finally said the truth. Denial, most likely, or maybe scorn or pity, if Dorrik decided I was mad, or broken. Instead, he did something much stranger; he just shrugged and said, "Aye. That’s how it goes."

I looked at him and frowned, before I cocked my head to the side as I reviewed what I just told him. I had said I came from a world that was different from this one, where there were no more gods, but I did not mention that I came from this one; in addition to the fact that Dorrik had seen me fall from the sky, that could be the root of our miscommunication- damned man thinks I was an alien.

"Um, there is something I have not told you about where I come from," I said.

Dorrik shrugged again. "I heard you."

Seeing the confusion on my face, he gestured to his surroundings. "A mortal would not understand what you meant, but I do, and your background is not as strange as you might think."

I cocked my head to the side, not really sure both of us were on the same track anymore. Should I still tell him about the Loop, or go ahead with whatever version of events he has written in his head?

Dorrik sighed, "Lad, how do you think this world got so big?"

I... was not expecting that question. "What... I don’t know what you mean."

"You read the tablet." He came and sat down across from me, heavily. "You saw the size of it, and you must think it does not make much sense for a world to be that size."

Hmm, this was going in a direction that I did not expect, but I replied quickly, "I thought that was the tablet being wrong, or an application of magic I have not come into contact with."

"The tablet’s never wrong; it can be bored, which is a different matter, as it wants me to read it some spicy stories now and then." Dorrik coughed and tapped the tablet with his finger with a bit of annoyance before focusing back on me, "You remember I asked you when you entered my hall, how old you think the world was, and you replied that it’s older than anything in it? Well, you have no idea how close you were to the truth. See here, eleven continents, twenty-two powerful and intelligent species. Did you not think to ask why that is possible?"

Well, I had never thought of it in this manner, and I paused for a second. "I assumed the world made them. She is the mother of us all, isn’t she?"

Dorrik laughed, but there was no mirth in his voice. "No, no, no..." he said. "The world collected them."

∞

Here is what he told me, and I tried to make sure I didn’t miss anything, but it wasn’t really hard because what he was telling me was just too shocking.

Terra was not an average world... it was many.

Dorrik said it was widely agreed that the dragons were here first; they were the rulers and original owners of this world, and that the world was much smaller before it gave birth to gods, and the gods began to leave.

Which you know was not a problem; there is only so much space on a world for a god, but what the gods brought back changed everything.

That is the part I could not hold at first. A god of stone is in all the stone, Dorrik said that to me on my second night here, and I did not fully understand the implication of those words, not fully realizing that this was a description of reach.

A god is not in a place, they were in the substance of a place, wherever that substance happens to be, they would be, and so when they went out, they found worlds, and gods as it turned out, liked too conquer stuff, and when those worlds were won, and the inhabitants believed in the god, then the world become a part of the god.

"Now, here is where it gets interesting," Dorrik said. "The origin of the god belongs to Terra, and when they become a part of the newly conquered world, that world is drawn to this place, where it settles, and after a while there’s a coast where there wasn’t one and a neck of land forty mile across and a road gets built on it, and three generations later there’s nobody alive who remembers arriving."

I stared back at the tablet in my hands, and all the vast continents that it contained, with oceans that seemed to go on forever, in shock.

"Aye, lad, all of them, every landmass and ocean you see came from other worlds that no longer have a name; now it’s all Terra."

"Then everyone on this planet is..."

"Taken," Dorrik said. "But that does not make it our home; we are all just part of something bigger. The dragons understood this truth first; some of the first gods to leave were among their number, but their endless desires had given birth to something monstrous that now tears us apart."

Looking at my shocked expression, Dorrik sighed, "I did not know there were gods who could still draw new worlds to Terra; maybe that is why you are Chained. The god who conquered your world may have fallen as he returned to Terra. The rules have changed, and the void is now so much closer to us here on the ground as the barrier over us and the dark has thinned. Do not despair, Elric; there are many humans on Terra, and you will find your kin, and perhaps, a new god to believe in."

What Dorrik said drew my attention as I remembered that Sovereign Caldus had been shocked that I was able to go to space and return when I met him two loops ago after I crashed with the Caelith.

He had said it was impossible to leave this world due to the dangers in space. It seemed these dangers still existed.

After my near-death experience and acquiring that strange skill, I now know the shape of these dangers after glimpsing them in the sky. I don’t know how everything connected, but I believe I had most of the pieces; I just had to put it all together.

∞

With this new revelation, I did not try to tell Dorrik about the loop, since I was still reeling from learning the origin of my world and that the roots of humanity were most likely born in another world.

I still remembered that the Hollow Avatar said there was something wrong with our power system. The Sovereigns were too powerful; the heavens were broken and no longer answered him.

The Hollow Avatar had said that the Caeliths were meant to roam the void forever, and yet, so many of them had crashed into this world. The Dragon God went into the void and brought the Pivot... the System down to Terra, and somehow, I found myself in the center of a storm that linked the past and the present.

From the beginning, there had always been hints of this world’s strangeness, and I needed to be here before I understood all of it, but then I thought of one mystery I had not touched.

That unknown golden Caelith behind the home of my birth... was it possible that it was here even before the other Caeliths arrived?

Then I sucked in my breath as a terrifying thought entered my mind. The so-called Pivot, the System- was it possible that the golden Caelith in my home was the physical representation of the System? What else could the Dragon God have brought down? After all, in my vision, only thirty-one stars fell to the earth, thirty-one Caeliths... so there was one here before the rest arrived.

I kept calling that golden pyramid a Caelith, but was that the truth?