Chapter 84

My two-month assignment to the Pillar Temple ended with considerably less ceremony than the amount of [Knowledge] I had extracted from it warranted.

Most of the Pulse personnel assigned alongside me were occupied with packing equipment, returning borrowed facilities, completing reports, or exchanging farewells with people they had spent the past two months working beside.

I had already finished the first three.

As for the fourth...

"I'll return if I have more questions," I told Lavanya.

"When you have more questions," she corrected from behind the same desk where I had spent so many hours learning.

"I'll return when I have more questions, then," I sincerely said back.

The Keeper lowered the document she had been reading and regarded me for a moment.

"Try not to redesign your entire [Faith] before then."

"I won't."

"That answer came too quickly."

"I'll try not to redesign my entire [Faith] before then."

"Marginally better."

I gave her an appropriately respectful bow according to fairy manners, exchanged a few more succinct farewells with the Voices, Keepers, believers, and other Cult personnel who had contributed enough to my studies to warrant remembering, then departed.

Two months.

Long enough for the Pillar Temple to stop being novel.

Long enough for the people within it to stop presenting only the parts of themselves they offered new arrivals.

And, most importantly, long enough to turn what had previously been a chaotic collection of ideas about my future [Faith] into the beginnings of an actual [Foundation].

Not a complete one.

Nothing close.

But I now knew what I wanted my first generation of [Faith]ful to look like.

Chosen.

A small number of individuals whose Paths were sufficiently [Worthy] of my attention that personally investing my own time in their development would result in mutual benefits and an interweaving of our interests.

That conclusion was useful.

If not yet actionable.

So, once the train returned me to the Pulse Tower and my normal routine resumed, I moved on to the obvious next question.

How did I find them?

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

After a month had passed since I returned from the Pillar Temple, I had four answers to my dilemma of locating the future Chosen of my [Faith].

Or, more accurately, four avenues worth investigating.

That distinction mattered.

I had spent enough of my time researching Aspects, organizations, Paths, and complicated problems to know that finding something which looked like an answer was rarely the same as understanding the consequences of using it.

My research had therefore occurred alongside the rest of my [Cultivation] rather than replacing it.

I continued undergoing my varied [Flow] [Cultivation].

Continued examining my [Foundation].

Continued increasing my [Mastery] over [Vitality] whenever suitable opportunities presented themselves and they didn't impede too much on my Essence development quota.

And between all of those, whenever I had a booknest, repository terminal, private room, or simply enough uninterrupted thought available...

I researched.

The first answer was unsurprisingly the most literal.

The [Worthy] Aspect.

Stavros had demonstrated its usefulness long ago without ever bothering to hide what it did.

His [Worthy] Aspect did not identify some universal category of objectively valuable beings.

It reflected his own [Comprehension] of what made someone [Worthy], then allowed him to perceive how closely others approached that [Ideal].

Which meant the Aspect could potentially solve my problem almost perfectly.

If I formed the [Worthy] Aspect, I could hypothetically use it as a filter through which I may be able to identify prospective Chosen according to the qualities I actually valued

Potential.

Compatibility.

[Will].

Useful or unusual Paths.

The ability to develop under my guidance without becoming dependent upon it.

People whose future achievements could justify the time and resources I invested into them.

Naturally, nevertheless, that raised another problem.

Forming the [Worthy] Aspect.

I had twelve Aspects already.

Every addition to my Path mattered.

And even if the [Worthy] Aspect possessed an extremely obvious use for my future [Faith], that didn't automatically mean it deserved something as permanent as becoming a part of my Path.

Especially when I presently had the [Flow] and [Foundation] Aspects competing for the highest priority available to my Essence development.

So...

Potentially useful, but not presently researched to sufficient depths to justify forming it.

The same broadly applied to the [Fate] Aspect.

The conceptual approach differed, but the resulting utility could overlap.

If the [Worthy] Aspect could identify those matching a sufficiently developed standard, from what I read on it, the [Fate] Aspect could potentially identify people through the trajectories connecting them to me, my objectives, my future, or whatever else the Aspect was formed to recognize and influence.

That was considerably more abstract, and considerably easier to misunderstand.

Still, I didn't necessarily have to form either Aspect myself.

Someone else could possess the [Worthy] Aspect.

Someone whose idea of what made an Essence Entity [Worthy] happened to align sufficiently closely with mine.

Or someone with enough [Mastery] to deliberately alter the criteria they applied.

Likewise, a sufficiently capable "[Fate] reader" might be able to locate individuals whose futures intersected favorably with whatever I intended my Chosen to become.

That transformed two possible Aspect formations into something much simpler.

Find the right person.

Pay them.

Trade information.

Provide a service.

Establish overlapping interests.

Whatever worked.

I wasn't particularly concerned with whether the method was elegant.

Only whether it produced useful results.

The second avenue I found was more familiar.

The Creed Of Nonexistence.

Stavros had told me years ago that I would eventually become involved with them whether I wished to or not.

At the time, I had mostly categorized the claim alongside the many other absurd things he said with sufficient confidence that disproving him seemed more troublesome than waiting to see whether reality did it for me.

Reality had yet to cooperate.

Everything I could find suggested that the Creed possessed some substantial relationship with the idea of being [Worthy].

Not necessarily as its central [Purpose], though.

The public information available about it emphasized very different matters.

[Secrecy].

[Freedom].

Information acquisition.

Concealment.

Infiltration.

Counterintelligence.

The innumerable [Exertion]s involved in acquiring information other Entities considered unsavvy and preferred to keep inaccessible.

Some descriptions made the Creed sound like an intelligence organization.

Others like a philosophical faction that pursued [Freedom] above all.

A few made it sound like a loose association of extremely difficult people who collectively agreed that everyone else knowing less about them was generally preferable.

That last interpretation reminded me enough of Stavros that I gave it additional weight.

Regardless, Stavros formed the [Worthy] Aspect.

He belonged to the Creed.

He had considered me sufficiently [Worthy] that my eventual interaction with them was apparently inevitable.

That was enough of a connection to investigate.

Then...

There was the Fate Conclave.

Their relationship with the Creed was substantially easier to uncover.

They were something close to mutual nemeses.

Not in the simple sense of two factions competing over the same resources, though they certainly did that too.

Their methods and [Purpose]s appeared fundamentally opposed.

Where the Creed concerned itself with controlling what could be known, hidden, discovered, or acted upon...

The Fate Conclave concerned itself with [Fate].

Reading it.

Following it.

Changing it.

Creating it.

Strengthening favorable paths.

Weakening unfavorable ones.

And, according to some sources whose reliability I remained uncertain of, weaving entire sequences of people and events toward outcomes their members considered desirable.

That finally gave me another possible explanation for something Stavros had done before allowing me to leave the Red Sand Sector.

Synthesizing my [Secrecy] Aspect.

I had always understood why he considered it useful for surviving my journey.

Avoiding attention was useful.

Preventing others from gathering information about me was useful.

Being difficult to find, track, predict, or understand was useful.

But perhaps that had only been the most immediate layer.

If sufficiently developed [Fate] wielders relied upon perceiving and manipulating relationships between Entities, events, choices, and possible futures, then [Secrecy] represented a natural defense.

One could hardly manipulate information one couldn't acquire.

If so, Stavros hadn't merely taught me how not to be seen.

He had taught me how to make myself harder to unknowingly weave into whatever [Fate] another Entity wielding the [Fate] Aspect desired for me.

It was only an inference.

A logical one.

But one I intended to verify as soon as possible.

For my current problem, however, the Fate Conclave presented a far simpler possibility than the nebulous promises of the Creed Of Nonexistence.

If they could use [Fate] to locate important people, favorable intersections, or Entities who mattered to a particular future...

Then perhaps they could locate my [Fate]d Chosen.

And if doing so required allowing one of their members to briefly weave me into some controlled [Fate]...

I had absolutely no ideological objection to that.

So long as I understood what was being done.

So long as the consequences were acceptable.

So long as I kept the option of severing the connection afterward if I decided I disliked where it was taking me.

The fact that Stavros would probably disapprove made the idea marginally less optimal, but it was what it was, and too many books about [Fate] had said the same things for me to ignore it altogether simply because Stavros had allegedly [Guided] me toward synthesizing an Aspect intended to combat it.

The fourth avenue was the strangest because it didn't fundamentally have any relationships with being [Worthy] or forming [Fate] at all.

The Fairy Court.

I had known since the Utopia festival that Everwell Prime and many peripheral districts contained several Fairy Court establishments, some accessible even to unaffiliated fairies.

I had simply never gone.

There had always been something more urgent.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

[Mastery].

[Vitality].

My overdevelopment disorder.

[Flow].

[Foundation].

The Cult Of The Divines.

There was always something which, combined with my general lack of interest in what they could offer me, has always made me postpone my visit to it.

But research into the Court's operations revealed something useful enough that continuing to postpone my visit became inefficient.

Because from the perspective of many dreary books about historical events dating back multiple centuries, the Fairy Court wasn't exactly a small player.

It was nowhere near the likes of the Faith Of The Aspects, the Nexus Order, the Pulse Of Eternity, the Cult Of The Divines, or any such major organization, but if only as a political entity, its shadow could be seen in many major events.

And strong political power, combined with the fact that it was a speciesist organization, that fairies were only considered a minority relative to the general population of the Everwell Sector, and that most of the fairies I met had ties to it...

That implied the existence of extensive networks for identifying, observing, contacting, and categorizing fairies.

Lineages.

Factions.

Unaffiliated arrivals.

Promising young fairies.

Powerful individuals.

Fairies whose Paths made them politically, economically, academically, or militarily relevant.

Not a [Worthy] detection system.

But close enough.

If the Fairy Court already spent resources locating unusual fairies, then I could potentially leverage the simple fact of belonging to the same species to access people I would otherwise never know existed.

That made the conclusion easy.

And that made four avenues worth pursuing.

Not equally.

Not simultaneously.

And certainly not by forming two new Aspects without first spending a great deal more time scrutinizing what they would do to my Path.

But they were actionable.

That was enough.

Especially when my Pulse schedule remained oh-so accommodating.

One assignment every eight days.

Minimum administrative obligations.

Everything else mine.

So with my research now finished, I headed for an assignment board to read the listings.

Medical relevance mattered.

Potential [Flow] or [Foundation] opportunities mattered.

Exposure to unfamiliar physiologies remained useful.

But for once, geography mattered too.

I filtered.

Compared locations.

Rejected several assignments that would have otherwise been acceptable to pursue my normal [Cultivation] routine.

Then found one that was merely good medically but extremely convenient geographically.

Its worksite lay within the same peripheral district as a branch of the Fate Conclave, a court of the Fairy Court, and one of only a hundred or so publicly acknowledged branches of the Creed Of Nonexistence.

Perfect.

I signed up for it.

Then, when my assignment was confirmed, six whole days before my assignment commenced...

I left.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

While the Everwell Sector remained too large for me to justify wasting time by opting for distance-wasting itineraries, that didn't mean moving efficiently required me to ignore everything between one destination and the next.

Quite the opposite, actually.

Every street.

Every peripheral district transition.

Every ventilation current between towers.

Every crowded avenue.

Every heated industrial structure bleeding heat into cooler surroundings.

Those were all opportunities for me to further my [Flow] [Cultivation].

The only real problem was deciding which ones deserved more of my [Focus] than others.

Flying at an intentionally moderate pace, my [Awareness] spread far beyond my body while [Guided] continuously helped me separate one movement from another.

Air [Flow]ed around buildings.

Some streams accelerated through narrow spaces before expanding into broad plazas.

Others rose along warm surfaces.

Descending traffic disturbed them.

Passing vehicles compressed them.

My wings added their own tiny disturbances, which propagated behind me long after I had moved on.

Heat [Flow]ed differently.

Slowly.

Through walls.

Across exposed surfaces.

Between warmer bodies and cooler air.

Some structures radiated enough of it that I could identify their active machinery without seeing inside.

Then there was blood.

Mine first.

It moved through vessels whose every turn and pressure difference I now knew intimately.

My heart pushed.

My arteries expanded.

Pressure carried my blood outward.

Smaller vessels divided that movement again and again before the returning [Flow] gradually converged.

A simple system.

Or something that only appeared simple because I had spent an unreasonable amount of my short life learning directly from it through my physiological [Cultivation] [Cycle].

And whenever I felt like it, I also called upon the gentle generation of energy born from nothing more than the [Ambition] of what I wanted my Path to become.

The amount was trivial compared to what I could force out during serious [Cultivation], but that was deliberate.

I wasn't trying to exhaust myself.

I wanted a stable [Flow].

The energy moved through me, and I [Guided] it through my [Will] and [Cultivation] Aspects like it had always been there.

Into one arm.

Across my torso.

Along the base of my wings.

Down one leg.

Back upward.

I changed its route whenever the path became too familiar.

Split it.

Rejoined it.

Made one stream intersect another without attempting to directly [Control] the result.

Observed what happened.

Corrected my understanding.

And repeated the operations as many times as it took for me to be satisfied with what I felt and comprehended from it.

In the meantime, my [Awareness] never let off.

Pedestrians crossing bridges.

Vehicles moving through designated lanes.

Air shifting.

Heat spreading.

Blood circulating.

Energy [Flow]ing.

For my [Awareness] to touch upon everything had simply become its natural state whenever I wasn't restricting it.

And whenever I [Will]ed, it pushed farther.

Not outward.

Inward.

Smaller.

Subtler.

The pressure differential between two neighboring vessels.

The minute turbulence left behind by one wingbeat.

The uneven distribution of heat across a wall.

The faint vibrations propagated through a walkway when something many times my mass stepped upon it.

The harder to distinguish something was and the more uncertain I was of what my [Awareness] glimpsed, the further I naturally heightened my [Clarity] to perceive smaller still.

All to discern evermore of the reality I was inhabiting.

All in an effort to piece just one more piece of the endless puzzle that was the world surrounding me.

Things I could perceive without necessarily understanding.

Things hovering on the edge between actual information and noise...

I pushed anyway.

That's what [Cultivation] was.

Then I suddenly became acutely aware of wanting to return to the aquatic center.

That's when I knew with utter [Clarity] that something wasn't how it should be.

I nearly stopped flying because of that.

Not because the thought itself was strange.

I had intended to return to the aquatic center soon. Studying water [Flow]s was still useful, after all.

But then I suddenly had another unusual thought.

I wanted to go back because...

It had been enjoyable.

I blinked in confusion at the foreign thought that only kept on expanding through my mind.

Apparently, moving through water while experimenting with my wings and learning how [Flow] behaved in a denser medium had been enjoyable enough that some part of me desired to repeat the experience even without accounting for its utility.

Useful information.

Oddly low priority.

I stored it.

Then almost flew into the side of a passing transport because my sense of distance abruptly stretched.

I corrected instantly and moved upward.

That... was more concerning.

Then things went much more wrong.

My [Awareness] contracted.

Expanded.

Then contracted again.

The world became sharper.

Then blurred.

My hearing mixed with vibrations felt through the air.

Heat acquired something resembling spatial depth.

The pressure of my clothing against my skin became indistinguishable from my [Awareness] of where the cloth itself existed.

For three seconds, the city around me felt simultaneously much closer and much farther away.

Then my Essence pulsed.

Oh.

I entered the shallowest communion I could manage while still flying, with all my senses slowly becoming an incomprehensible amalgamation of sensory inputs.

And there, centered around my [Awareness] Aspect, the telltale signs of an unfolding Aspect advancement disorder were emerging at a steady rate that sent shallow ripples throughout my Essence.

I slowed to a hover.

That... was quite unexpected.

Unlike the two previous advancements of my [Awareness] Aspect, no sort of revelation had preceded this one.

Neither was it preceded by a sudden increase in my [Mastery] of how to leverage my [Awareness] to achieve anything new or exceptional.

Nor a decisive new [Comprehension] regarding what [Awareness] meant or how to further it.

I had simply been using it to grasp my immediate surroundings and whatever my [Focus] happened to be on.

Like always.

Apparently... that had been enough.

My [Awareness] expanded again.

The entire street below suddenly became intolerably detailed.

Footsteps.

Heartbeats.

Breathing.

Heat.

Tiny movements of clothing.

A hundred conversations collapsing into one incomprehensible layer of sound.

The air [Flow] generated by passing bodies.

The minute vibrations running through walls.

My own pulse.

The movement of fluid behind my eyes.

The exact tension in every wing membrane keeping me aloft.

Sighting a railing extended from the side of a nearby structure, I promptly turned toward it and touched down upon it just as my senses mixed again.

My sight ceased feeling separate from [Awareness].

Sound stopped arriving from my ears alone.

The position of objects became something I knew through several overlapping channels whose boundaries refused to remain stable.

It was simultaneously highly fascinating and horribly impractical.

Before long, nevertheless, the disorder ebbed enough for me to resume moving carefully after several minutes.

I took off slower than ever.

I had no reason to rush.

My assignment wouldn't begin for days, and even if it had, voluntarily flying at high speed while my primary [Perception] Aspect periodically forgot what [Perception] meant and was supposed to function would be idiotic.

So I continued through the city while mainly observing the consequences of my [Awareness] Aspect advancement instead.

That turned out to be... surprisingly [Insight]ful.

My [Awareness] kept on making things I normally ignored surface to the forefront of my mind.

The aquatic center had been merely the first.

As it turned out, I disliked the texture of one section of my uniform against the back of my neck.

I also had unconsciously altered my usual flight angle over crowded streets because I preferred having more empty space beneath me.

I still expected unusually loud sounds to precede danger despite living in the Everwell Sector long enough for that association to have become mostly obsolete.

I remembered enjoying making Lavanya laugh more than I had consciously categorized.

Eventually, though, my [Awareness] Aspect advancement disorder produced something considerably more worthwhile.

I realized that my [Flow] and [Foundation] [Cultivation]s were becoming imbalanced.

And that was objectively true, if not anywhere near being worth describing as an actual imbalance.

But whenever I had discretionary time, and both were equally reasonable choices...

My [Cultivation] choice ever so slightly tilted toward puzzling out the concept of [Flow] over that of [Foundation].

At least, pushing slightly deeper in that direction, I found a reasonable explanation to elucidate that slight tilt.

Water.

Air.

Heat.

Blood.

Energy.

Crowds.

Movement itself made the concept of [Flow] that much easier to interact with.

There was always another variable to change.

Another medium.

Another consequence.

Another system whose [Flow] I could observe directly.

[Foundation] was different.

Slower.

Less immediately satisfying.

Its best [Cultivation] practice often required me to stop, enter communion, strip something complicated back to its simplest roles, then repeatedly challenge whether what I had identified was actually [Foundation]al or merely familiar.

Useful.

Necessary.

But... less interesting.

Which meant my preferences had begun to influence my priority.

Not yet enough to matter.

But potentially enough to matter after another eight months if my [Cultivation] routine and Essence development priorities remained unchanged beyond the formation of my [Flow] and [Foundation] Aspects.

I noted the discrepancy before allowing my [Awareness] to slip away and return to its chaotic [Flow] of erratic changes while taking in the peripheral districts I passed over.

So relatively close to Everwell Prime and the bountiful abundance of the Everwell Realm, the urban landscape never really ended, only gradually changing character without providing a clean border.

Building density shifted.

Traffic patterns changed.

The proportions of pedestrians to vehicles altered.

Architecture became less uniform.

Advertisements and organizational markings changed.

All the while, my [Awareness] expanded and contracted unpredictably.

Sometimes the changes were subtle enough that I could continue flying without concern.

Other times...

I landed.

Once on the edge of a pedestrian bridge after suddenly perceiving the interior vibrations of the entire structure strongly enough that they drowned out everything else.

Once on a public bench when my senses merged so completely that I briefly couldn't tell whether the pressure I felt against my feet came from physical contact or simply from knowing the bench was there.

And once on the side of a tower because my [Awareness] extended through several layers of wall at the exact moment a mass of moving machinery activated behind them, leaving me with far more information than even my [Clarity] Aspect could deal with at once.

Each incident passed.

Each left something behind.

Not [Comprehension].

Not [Mastery].

Simply... experiences.

Fickle glimpses of my [Awareness] Aspect becoming more.

That was all.

I stopped trying to force an explanation deeper than the one that was right before me.

I had used [Awareness] unrelentingly since I first synthesized my [Awareness] Aspect.

My [Cultivation] of it had never truly stopped, nor could I imagine how I could ever truly stop it.

Eventually, I assumed that accumulation had turned into a natural advancement because that was the only further development that could occur.

And that was it.

There was no requirement for every development to arrive alongside a profound [Comprehension], a drastic elevation of my [Mastery], or something of the kind.

Sometimes my Path simply moved forward because I had already substantiated my [Foundation] enough to make remaining where I was harder than moving forward.

Hours passed.

The peripheral district where the public Creed branch was located grew steadily closer.

My assignment site was somewhere beyond it.

Before I reached it, however, my advancement disorder intensified for what felt like the final time.

Hence, I stopped on the flat upper edge of a low structure and sat.

My wings folded.

My eyes closed.

And I allowed the world to remain only through my [Awareness].

Air [Flow]s crossed the rooftop.

Heat [Flow]ed from machinery beneath me.

Hundreds of beings moved through nearby streets.

Blood [Flow]ed through my body.

The dense energy held within my physiological [Cultivation] [Cycle] continued its gentle [Flow].

The building vibrated.

Voices propagated through walls.

My own thoughts shifted from one subject to another.

[Worthy].

The Creed.

[Fate].

The Fairy Court.

[Flow].

[Foundation].

Lavanya.

Water.

My upcoming assignment.

Everything entered my [Awareness].

And my Aspect expanded.

Contracted.

Then settled.

Aspect Advanced: [Awareness] (Tier 2) ➞ [Awareness] (Tier 3)

For several seconds in the wake of the advancement settling, I remained perfectly still.

Then I opened my eyes.

The world looked exactly the same.

My [Awareness] did not.

I expanded it carefully.

Across the rooftop.

Down its sides.

Into the street.

Through passing bodies.

Around vehicles.

Into neighboring structures.

Physical obstacles like walls resisted.

But less.

Much less.

Before, solid matter had attenuated my [Awareness], forcing me to expend greater effort for increasingly incomplete information the deeper I tried to reach.

Now...

The first wall to impede my [Awareness] of my surroundings barely mattered.

Neither did the second.

My [Awareness] passed through rooms I couldn't see, traced indistinct bodies moving behind layers of solid matter, caught heat leaking through internal conduits, followed vibrations along structural supports, and kept going until distance itself became a greater obstacle than everything filling the space between us.

So I pushed farther.

Through another wall.

Another room.

Another layer of a city that had once been hidden simply because matter stood in the way.

Until, eight or so meters from where I sat, my [Awareness] finally reached its new natural limit.

Everything within that distance remained imperfectly perceived, distorted by density, complexity, and the countless overlapping signals filling Civilization...

But it was there.

Around me.

Within reach.

A piece of reality no longer meaningfully divided into what I could see and what I couldn't.

My [Perception] [Domain].

For now, eight meters was enough.

But I could already imagine what would happen when I stopped relying solely upon my newly advanced [Awareness] Aspect alone and poured every fragment of [Will] I could muster into expanding it.

How many walls would remain relevant then?

How much farther could I reach?

How much of reality could I make impossible to hide from me?

My wings unfolded as I contemplated this.

I couldn't wait to find out just how far this [Perception] [Domain] of mine could grow.