203 – Divination

The ensuing expedition into the void with Aeris and Lysander passed without incident. It was a shame she needed to watch over them the whole time, though; she wouldn’t ever feel comfortable leaving people alone in the void. When Cataclysm-tier voidbeasts could wander into range and attack at any moment, only the Sorceress playing chaperone could guarantee safety.

For the first while, their party of three flew around and observed the void creatures in their natural habitat. Vivi’s [Invisibility] spell had gotten strong enough to bypass the creatures’ innate immunity to magic, meaning she could glide by unnoticed. But there was only so much to be gleaned from watching the beasts mill about, so soon enough, she was treating Aeris and Lysander to practical demonstrations.

Baiting the monsters into using their ranged void attacks was the most interesting facet, since now Vivi understood what they were doing at a basic level—alchemizing their bodies to call forward a more flexible application of that energy. Their usage was rather simplistic, though. Vivi herself had gotten more creative with void energy than all of what she saw from the creatures themselves.

She found the lack of adaptability intriguing. While the monsters were dumb beasts, natural evolution usually tended toward a more diverse set of outcomes. Perhaps possessing such a potent power had removed standard evolutionary pressure.

Or maybe she was thinking about them in too earthly a mindset, still.

I wonder if voidgods fight in more interesting ways.

After an hour or so of that, she escorted Aeris and Lysander back to reality. Enough time had passed that Ember had sat down cross-legged in midair to meditate. She cracked an eye open at their arrival, then floated upward into a standing position.

Vivi quickly caught the woman up on what had happened, then returned Lysander and Aeris to Meridian. They’d gotten what they could out of exposure to the other realm, which was probably not a whole lot, but also surely useful for their research. She warped back to Ember a minute later.

“Hm,” Vivi said as she hovered beside the taller woman. “I was going to warp to void-Meridian next to see if anything’s over there, just in case. My [Warp Anchor] survived from the first time, so it’ll be easy. But now I’m worried that the time distortion effect is based on travel or location in some way, like Lysander said. I don’t want to burn entire days by accident.”

“Test with shorter distances first?” Ember suggested.

“I did drop [Warp Anchors] along the way, so that’s probably what I’ll do, yeah.” She’d gotten into the habit early—it was only common sense. The spell was cheap and quick to cast, so she’d be silly not to expand her spatial network at every opportunity. “The issue is that I have to come back and check with you in between every test, and I can already feel nausea setting in.”

As she’d suspected might happen, her rapid, repeated passage to and from the void was inflicting a disorientation not dissimilar to casting [Blink] many times back to back. Normally, she had to spam out dozens of that ability to feel anything and would recover within minutes, but dimensional magic had a heavier toll.

“Spatial nausea is tolerable, but I’m worried what dimensional nausea will feel like,” Vivi continued. “Probably better to play it safe there.”

“I doubt anyone would disagree.”

“Do you have an extra timekeeper, by the way?” Though she’d packed a bunch of supplies away into her inventory, she’d failed to include that particular item. Her inventory could probably be organized better in general. The versatility of her spellcasting had led to her overlooking that mundane type of readiness.

Apparently Ember wasn’t as negligent in that regard, because she pulled out a duplicate of the brass device and handed it over. Vivi flipped the top up and studied the small clock within.

“Perfect, thanks,” she said after comparing hers to Ember’s and confirming they were aligned. “Guess I’ll get to it. This might take a few trips to nail down. Sorry again for all this.” She waved a hand around to indicate the situation at large.

“You apologize more than I would have expected from the Sorceress,” Ember replied, a hint of amusement in her voice. “This is hardly some arduous duty you’ve laid upon me.”

Vivi mentally chewed on her lip, realizing that maybe she was being excessive. But while she’d gotten used to asking things of Rafael, and even other people, it normally coincided with their own desires. Aeris and Lysander had wanted to see the void for their own purposes. Rafael and Winston intrinsically enjoyed performing their roles. Asking Ember to sit there and do nothing for an indefinite amount of time felt like a more direct favor than usual.

“Always better to be polite,” Vivi said, shrugging past her sudden self-consciousness. “Anyway, if I’m gone for a while, it’s because I teleported, and that affected the time distortion somehow.” The displacement had been rather reliable for the trips so far, which was a relief.

Her next set of experiments began. Once inside the void, she jumped a meaningful distance: about one-tenth of the way toward Meridian. Through horrendously unfortunate chance, she materialized mid-air nearly nose-to-nose with a titanic voidbeast. Despite her supreme confidence in her magical abilities, the shocking sight might have startled an embarrassing noise out of her.

She vaporized the creature by reflex, took a few seconds to calm her slamming pulse, then checked on the timekeeper. The mechanisms were working fine, the second hand ticking dutifully forward. She didn’t know why she’d thought the apparatus might fail, since no aspect of the void should have broken it, but she wouldn’t have been surprised either.

Once six minutes had passed, she returned to Prismarche, flew through the portal, and compared the two devices.

Thirteen minutes had elapsed in the real world, contrasting Vivi’s six.

“So it is based on location,” Vivi murmured. “But not travel? I went a fair distance, it wouldn’t have been only thirteen minutes for you if miles counted.”

“Evidently so,” Ember said.

“I’ll try going farther and see what happens.”

Vivi repeated the process, hopping to the [Warp Anchor] nearly a third of the way to Meridian. She stayed there six minutes to keep the variable controlled, then returned.

“Nine?” Vivi said, brow furrowed as she compared Ember’s timekeeper to her own. A one-and-a-half-times slowdown, which was in between the Prismarche results and the first wilderness jump. “Huh.” She couldn’t tell if she was making progress, or if she was staring up at a cloudy sky and pretending the strange shapes had meaning.

And unfortunately, she could feel a knot of nausea tightening her stomach, so she couldn’t jump back and forth endlessly to isolate every factor. She would have to keep a notebook with data gathered over weeks to get an overview.

“Whatever,” Vivi said. “We answered the important question. I can warp to Meridian without losing days by accident.” From what they’d seen so far, the dilation was a ratio between the worlds, and only went down to one-third and up to three-times acceleration.

She dove into the void yet again and, after only a short hesitation, hurled herself across the continent and landed at her estate in Meridian. [Blinking] outside and rising into the air, the usual swarm of voidbeasts crawling through an eerily empty, desaturated cityscape met her, but nothing new stood out.

Was hardly expecting the Fell Apostate to be hiding in the capital, that’d be way too risky for him, but still.

Since Meridian hosted a fresh and much larger batch of Echoes to study, and because those entities were apparently high priority now, she flew across the city and inspected each one, not knowing what she would gain from it but feeling responsible to do so anyway.

The ordeal left her feeling raw. She couldn’t block or avoid the bursts of empathy that slammed into her whenever she so much as looked at them, and she also couldn’t know what those emotions would be to prepare herself. Not all were pleasant. Most weren’t, in fact. The Concepts represented the full breadth of human experience, and that came with a lot of unfortunate baggage.

Ultimately, searching Meridian didn’t provide anything except peace of mind, and she returned to Ember once more. Interestingly, Vivi had been gone for less time than in the real world that trip, so there were definitely some location-based shenanigans going on, or otherwise it was random.

“If you were an insane ritualist seeking to harness the power of the void and/or heavens so you could ascend to true immortality,” Vivi opened with after catching Ember up on everything that had happened, “where would you be hiding?”

Ember arched an eyebrow. “If the Sorceress were chasing me? Under a very large, very nondescript rock,” she replied. “But that might not get him the results he wants, so…” She considered. “That he’s taken an interest in the Concepts seems promising. It’s a lead of sorts.”

“You think he’ll be tracking down important ones?”

“They don’t converse, but perhaps he can make them,” Ember said.

Vivi blinked. She hadn’t considered it from that angle—she’d been thinking along the lines of him capturing or siphoning their power directly.

But if he could force the Ashen Hierophant to have a conversation, or harvest his memories somehow…

“Then again,” Ember said, “that might be too obvious, and instead he’ll avoid them, since it’s reasonable to assume that’s where you’d look.” She shrugged. “I think it’s impossible to guess his tolerance for risk, with things being as they are.”

Vivi agreed. A while ago, Rafael had described Duke Caldimore’s rash actions as extremely concerning mostly because he was a normally cautious man. The Fell Apostate was also someone who operated carefully, probably more so than the Duke. But that was while the ritualist had been laying groundwork for millennia. Now that he was in the ‘action’ phase of his long life, and now that he knew Vivi was after him, previous personality profiles didn’t apply. This trip into the void might be his swan song, and nobody could predict how a desperate person would behave.

“It’s a starting point, at least,” Vivi said. “Something to try.” Before, she hadn’t a single idea how to start looking for him. “Too bad I have no clue how to find the Cataclysm’s Echoes, either.”

She’d run into two so far: the Echo of a Great Beast and the Echo of He Who Glimpsed Infinity. Neither had shown up in locations she’d have predicted, and Remian’s Concept in particular had only been in Prismarche thanks to the voidgod and damage to the dimensional boundary. Without something similar to draw his attention, where would she find him?

Though that question depended on him not having teamed up with the Fell Apostate.

“Does divination work on them?” Ember asked.

“I—” Vivi cut off, dumbfounded. “I don’t know.” Divination was such a catastrophically weak field of magic for her that the idea hadn’t crossed her mind. Normally it wasn’t useful because people defended against it, but Concepts shouldn’t have safeguards like that. “I mean, there’s no saying whether an item of the Ashen Hierophant’s links to his Echo, because they definitely aren’t one and the same. But it also might.”

Ember preened under Vivi’s impressed tone, which Vivi would have found amusing if her brow hadn’t furrowed as she considered something else.

“And now that you mention it,” Vivi said, “I’ve been wondering whether void energies would help with cracking through anti-divination measures.”

It was Ember’s turn to pause. She seemed to grow almost wary. “…indeed? You think it might?”

The claim was a fantastic one. Anti-divination was a thousand times—a million times—more potent than divination. But void energy nullified magic in incredible ways and seemed to work universally, against everything.

It wouldn’t allow her to pull information from thin air, but assuming the approach did have merit, she had two rituals handcrafted by the Fell Apostate stored away. Such an anchor might not be the best in the world, since those tended to be treasured personal items carried around for decades, but the man clearly invested a portion of himself into his work, and so it wouldn’t be a bad link either.

So many interesting ideas, not nearly enough time to work on them. Especially when void magic was her highest priority still. She couldn’t ignore the Fell Apostate, but if an army of voidgods came swarming through Prismarche’s breach, she’d feel rather stupid if she hadn’t finished deciphering void energy’s mysteries.

She glanced at the portal. Her stomach lurched at the idea of going through it again.

For a while, she floated next to Ember and considered her next move.

“I’m only going in one more time today,” Vivi said. “I’ll do some basic tests with divination, then call it.”

Not more than that. If the Shattered Oracle had teamed up with the Fell Apostate, Vivi didn’t want to target one of them and accidentally alert them to her strategy. She would start with the other Cataclysms and see if she got anything back. Maybe it would even be smarter to hunt down an artifact from King Alistair and test if the theory worked at all. Just in case the Fell Apostate had gotten to the other Cataclysms already, so her experiments didn’t warn him of what she was trying.

With a man like him, only go for the kill if you’re sure it’ll work, Vivi thought. Revealing a promising trick too early would be self-sabotage of the highest degree.

Vivi began casting [Greater Warp]. Right before the spell went through, an idea popped into her head. Oh, and I should bring Saffra along, now that I know it’s safe.

The girl was seeking a void specialty, after all.