Chapter 86

I approached the same reception station where I had received the black booklet.

This time, I knew what to ask.

The same broadly humanoid attendant remained behind the counter, still concealed beneath the same loose gray garment.

Their eyes briefly settled upon the booklet in my hands before shifting back to me.

"I have a custom request."

"Go ahead."

"I want to hire someone possessing either the [Worthy] or [Fate] Aspect capable of helping me locate prospective disciples."

That produced marginally more of a reaction than my previous request to join the Creed Of Nonexistence.

"Disciples?"

"Easier terminology than explaining the actual relationship I intend to establish," I clarified. "I'm looking for people whose Paths possess sufficient potential and compatibility for me to personally invest in their development. I want someone capable of identifying candidates through either a developed conception of [Worthy] or an appropriate application of [Fate]."

The attendant considered my explanation for several seconds.

"Local?"

"Preferably within the Everwell Sector, but I'm willing to consider sufficiently exceptional candidates from elsewhere if reaching them is practical."

"Age restrictions?"

"None."

"Species?"

"Any."

"Affiliations?"

"As long as they don't interfere, otherwise forget it."

"Existing mentors?"

"Not disqualifying, but far from preferable."

They nodded.

"This qualifies as a custom request. You'll need to submit a down payment before we distribute it."

"How much?"

"Two thousand credits."

"Sure."

I pulled the handy tool called a bank check from my backpack and wrote down the two thousand credits down payment.

There was little more thought involved than that.

Two thousand credits wasn't nothing, but it was also nowhere near enough to justify making something potentially important to the [Foundation] of my future [Faith] meaningfully worse to save money I wasn't using anywhere else.

The attendant, in turn, did things with my check before somehow confirming I wasn't writing a fake check, then handed me out a form to fill.

"Fill this out completely. The more precise you are, the less irrelevant the responses you'll receive. You can use one of the tables."

"Thanks," I threw in some civility, left with the ginormous form to settle on top of a nearby table, then began reading.

The form was considerably longer than I expected.

Not complicated.

Just thorough.

Requested Aspect.

Acceptable related Aspects.

Desired service.

Maximum travel distance.

Expected duration.

Confidentiality requirements.

Whether the request could be shared outside local Creed networks.

Whether intermediaries were acceptable.

Whether applicants needed to reveal their identity before negotiations.

Whether indirect contact was sufficient.

Preferred compensation method.

Information I was willing to provide to candidates before an agreement.

Information I refused to provide.

Risks.

Restrictions.

Potential conflicts of interest.

Then came the important part.

Defining what I was seeking.

I spent considerably longer on that part, debating how to articulate the extensive list of requirements that would make someone [Worthy] enough to be one of my Chosen, all without giving away too much.

I defined the kind of potential I sought.

The kind of compatibility with my Path I wanted.

What my Path was about.

How I intended my Chosen to eventually form the [Faith] Aspect.

The strong [Will], or an equivalent capacity to persist through difficult development, I considered mandatory.

What kind of sufficiently unusual, useful, or promising Path warranted additional scrutiny.

The parts I avoided including were the likes of my expectations for the long-term relationship I would have with my Chosen, or what my Origin Aspect was about.

Those details could wait until I knew who was answering.

Once I finished, I reviewed every word I wrote twice over, allowed [Guided] to flag several ambiguities I had overlooked, corrected them, and only then returned the form.

The attendant read through enough of it to verify that nothing obvious was missing.

"Your request will be distributed."

"How long until I receive answers?"

"Could be hours. Could be months. Depends on who sees it and whether anyone thinks they can satisfy it."

"Alright."

"Anything else?"

I thought about asking how many people with the [Worthy] Aspect belonged to the Creed.

Or whether the organization actively sought out individuals it considered [Worthy].

Or how Stavros fitted into whatever network distributed requests like mine.

I ultimately didn't.

Those answers were ones I would get anyway if I was truly [Fate]d—somewhat contradictorily—to adopt the Creed as part of my Path.

"No. Thank you for your assistance."

Hence, I quickly left.

Because if anything, my increased [Comprehension] of the Creed hadn't changed anything about my next destination.

The Fate Conclave.

The ideological nemesis of the Creed.

Which made visiting them all the more interesting.

If anything, having a better idea of why the Creed opposed them made investigating their side of the matter even more worthwhile than before.

So I headed toward the nearest public Fate Conclave branch.

As I flew, however...

I [Will]ed my [Secrecy] to become deeper.

Not strongly enough to disappear.

That would rather defeat the point of walking into a public establishment and requesting assistance.

Instead, I deepened my [Secrecy] Aspect differently.

Information about me remained visible.

My body.

My uniform.

My direction.

My presence.

All ordinary things I had no reason to conceal.

But against anything that felt even remotely like the [Fate] described in the Creed's booklet...

I [Will]ed it to be obscured.

It was mostly theoretical.

I didn't know how [Fate] actually felt when it interacted with me.

I didn't know whether my [Secrecy] could meaningfully resist a competent practitioner.

I didn't know whether the Aspect even operated through something my [Awareness] could detect.

Nevertheless, one could hardly develop a defense by refusing to practice until already attacked.

So I [Will]ed my [Secrecy] toward the concept I had just spent hours reading about.

My location could be known.

My presence could be observed.

My future destination?

Mine.

The choices that would follow from it?

Mine.

Anyone could see me, but that didn't mean they were entitled to know where my Path went next.

The [Exertion] remained vague enough that I doubted it accomplished much.

But it was a beginning.

The Fate Conclave branch appeared within my sight less than an hour later.

I didn't linger outside.

I entered.

Found a much more elaborate and ornate reception station.

Explained that I wished to submit a custom request.

Then gave them essentially the same one I gave the Creed.

Someone possessing the [Fate] or [Worthy] Aspect.

Capable of identifying prospective "disciples" whose future development warranted my personal investment.

Potential.

Compatibility.

Useful Paths.

Strong enough personal direction not to collapse into utter dependence upon me.

Individuals whose futures might become mutually beneficial intertwined with mine.

The terminology changed slightly once the attendant asked what I meant by "[Fate]d disciples," but the underlying objective remained identical.

Find people I ought to meet.

Whether through what they were...

Or what they might become.

The Conclave accepted the request.

I completed another form.

Paid what was required for it to be distributed.

And throughout the entire process, I maintained the conceptual veil of [Secrecy] wrapped around everything pertaining to my [Fate].

Nothing happened.

No mysterious pressure.

No sudden metaphorical attempt by an invisible force to drag my Path somewhere.

No feeling of another Entity reaching through time to dictate what I would eat six months from now.

Either my defensive exercise worked perfectly...

Or, considerably more likely, nobody had attempted anything.

Eventually, I left the branch with now two requests circulating through two organizations whose members apparently spent considerable portions of their existence preventing one another from doing exactly what the other side considered fundamental.

And that was it, really.

If both produced beneficial results, excellent.

If one did, acceptable.

If neither did...

I still had another option before beginning to chase after much more personal or time-consuming solutions.

The Fairy Court.

And conveniently...

I was already heading there.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

The nearest Fairy Court gathering area—which went by the very ambiguous name of court—announced itself long before I reached its center.

Not through walls.

There weren't any.

That was the first major distinction from the Fairy House I remembered.

The Fairy House had enclosed its tiny territory behind a massive barrier that separated fairy-scale Civilization from everything surrounding it.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Here, the transition happened openly.

Giant-sized structures gradually gave way to mixed-scale buildings.

Platforms protruded from walls.

Small entrances appeared beside large ones.

Walkways branched into narrower walkways.

Then, occupying a broad open area between several conventional giant-sized structures, an entire appropriately-sized area emerged.

A large free-standing central building dominated the area without being particularly large by the standards of the rest of Civilization.

Around it spread residences.

Shops.

Meeting places.

Gardens.

Workshops.

Small towers.

Open platforms.

Covered bridges.

Dozens of structures sized appropriately for someone thirty to forty centimeters tall rather than several times that.

Seeing this type of architecture, I couldn't help but have the Fairy House come immediately to mind.

In its deserted streets, it also had this type of architectural planning, if vastly more practical and built entirely out of rusting metal.

This place, though, was alive.

Very alive.

Even before I stepped into the area, my [Awareness] filled with motion.

Fairies flitted between buildings in every direction.

Not lines of pedestrian traffic.

Not the neat lanes followed by giant vehicles.

Flight made that unnecessary.

They moved over one another.

Under one another.

Diagonally between floors.

Straight through open windows.

Up toward balconies.

Down toward courtyards.

Some accelerated vertically merely because whatever they sought happened to be above them.

Others stopped in midair to talk before splitting apart in completely different directions.

It was the sort of movement pattern only a population that regarded gravity as a minor inconvenience could produce.

And fairies weren't alone.

Several other fairy-sized species occupied the area, some winged, others not.

The architecture also relatively accounted for them, for despite how thoroughly flight appeared to have influenced the area's design, no places other than the likes of isolated rooftops appeared to actually require it.

Ramps connected levels that could otherwise have been reached through open air.

Stairs climbed beside vertical landing platforms.

Bridges crossed gaps a mature fairy would simply fly through.

Ground-level paths remained uninterrupted.

Rails guarded exposed edges.

Not that it said much concerning how speciesist the Fairy Court was, as the prime target for such accommodations was evident from the onset when she remembered her younger days.

Young fairies.

Young fairies who, before her eyes, moved along those accommodations with all the liveliness of youth she either never developed or never lost.

Some ran.

Some climbed.

Some jumped and caught themselves with uncertain flutters.

Others possessed wings that remained too small or immature to properly carry them at all.

That, too, was accommodated without attracting any particular attention.

No one expected a young fairy to fly before they could.

No one needed a special explanation for why a tiny creature used tiny stairs.

No giant nearly stepped on anyone.

No chair was several times taller than its intended occupant.

No table required me to land upon its surface because the seat was functionally useless.

Everything simply...

Fit.

I slowed.

Not intentionally at first.

My wings just stopped driving me forward quite as aggressively.

I [Will]ed my [Awareness] to spread farther, slowly making the crowded area almost too excessively rich in information.

Wingbeats.

Hundreds of them.

Air [Flow]s disturbed by bodies small enough that the movement would have been irrelevant individually, yet together created a constantly shifting web of tiny currents.

Doors sized for my body.

Cooking smells emerging from fairy-sized kitchens.

Children moving across miniature walkways.

Adults arguing over something beside an open storefront.

A group laughing while hovering around a suspended table.

Someone carrying a box almost as large as themselves while two others shouted contradictory directions.

A very old fairy sleeping openly on a rooftop under what looked like a piece of cloth intended to block the artificial sky radiance.

Normal.

That was what struck me.

Not impressive.

Not advanced.

Not [Worthy].

Normal.

I had encountered other fairies throughout my life.

The Fairy House alone had given me weeks surrounded by them.

Lavanya had become one of my most useful recent relationships.

I met fairies in the Pulse.

At the Utopia festival.

Throughout Everwell Prime.

Yet there had always been something around them that wasn't fairy.

A giant-sized institution.

A mixed population.

A temporary gathering.

An organization whose architecture and customs had to accommodate everyone.

Even the Fairy House I had visited...

It had been dying.

Most of its members had already departed by the time I arrived.

I had only ever heard the oldies talk about what it was like before then.

What it meant to live somewhere where every street, shop, residence, custom, and expectation began from the assumption that people like me belonged there.

Now...

I finally saw it.

And surprisingly...

It was nice.

As I experienced it, I probed the sensation carefully.

It wasn't exactly happiness.

Nor was it nostalgia, as I couldn't possibly be nostalgic for something I had never experienced.

Not comfort either, at least not in any conventional emotional meaning of the word.

It was simply...

Nice.

A preference.

An absence of tiny accommodations I had stopped noticing because they were so constant everywhere else.

And beyond that, it was also...

A glimpse.

Not of my past.

Of a past I could have possessed.

Born somewhere like this.

Surrounded by fellow fairies.

With parents.

Growing among others whose bodies followed the same fundamental assumptions as mine.

Whose wings matured.

Whose feet barely needed to touch the ground afterward.

Who nearly all began existence with an Origin Aspect already part of them.

Where being an Origin Essence Entity wasn't an abnormality someone could blame me for.

Where no one would find fault with me for the mere circumstance of being born.

Something inside my Path echoed with that semblance of what I could have been.

Through my [Awareness], I perceived the comparison so clearly that I couldn't ignore it.

Then [Clarity] distinguished what I was seeing from the life I actually lived.

[Harmony] connected the two without requiring either to invalidate the other.

My [Ambition] looked at everything I hadn't possessed and found no reason to regret it when I could simply acquire whatever value it represented now.

My [Purity] held onto the Path those differences had created.

And my [Will]...

My [Will] simply refused to entertain the idea that another beginning would have produced a better me.

As I hovered in the Fairy Court gathering area, my thoughts traced the commonality.

[Awareness].

[Will].

[Clarity].

[Harmony].

[Ambition].

[Purity].

Different concepts.

Different functions.

Yet every one of them seemed to produce some distant echo of actual emotions when I looked at what life I might have lived instead.

Not that I needed much contemplation to unearth the [Foundation]al reason behind why this was happening.

It was because I was different.

My earliest recollections weren't of safety.

They were of survival.

[Cold].

Hunger.

Pain.

Exhaustion.

The need to perform various [Exertion]s.

The need to keep moving.

The need to understand.

The need to find whatever came next before what presently existed killed me.

Those experiences weren't merely old memories.

They had shaped the way I perceived reality before I possessed enough language to describe what reality was.

They influenced why I noticed danger.

Why stopping had always felt unnatural.

Why constraints irritated me.

Why my [Ambition] Aspect so naturally became part of my Path.

Why my [Will] had grown around the idea that continuing was always possible.

Why my [Purity] recognized something worth preserving in the direction I had taken.

The life before me made the contrast obvious enough that even I couldn't miss it.

Those early experiences were part of what made me...

Me.

My [Foundation].

My refined understanding of the [Foundation] concept settled easily within my [Comprehension], expanding what I already learned of it and its manyfold manifestations within the reality that was the world I existed in.

For a couple of seconds, I anticipated my Essence reacting, forming it as a new Aspect.

However, expectedly...

Nothing happened.

If forming the [Foundation] Aspect were truly as easy as visiting an area populated by more fairies than I had ever seen and thinking about my own unique childhood in comparison to what I was beholding, I would have formed it weeks ago already.

A simplistic [Comprehension] didn't become profound merely because it was correct.

And at this stage of my Path...

Correct was nowhere near enough anymore.

My Essence demanded more from me now.

Much more.

The thought reminded me of the mathematical models I always referenced to plan my Essence development's Aspect formation.

The triangular number law.

A mathematical model that ascribed a relative formation difficulty of one to the formation of one's first Path Aspect, which then grew to three, six, ten, fifteen, and so on.

Evidently, it remained only a rough approximation with thousands of exceptions.

Like Origin Aspects, which formed under fundamentally different conditions, with formation difficulty so low that comparing them directly to an ordinary Path Aspect formation was mostly meaningless, but that once formed, still counted as one Aspect.

And beyond that...

Aspect Order mattered.

Conceptual overlap mattered.

Perspective mattered.

Existing development mattered.

The exact nature of one's Essence and Path mattered.

Probably dozens of other variables I still lacked the [Knowledge] to properly account for similarly mattered.

Nevertheless, to my [Knowledge], Civilization had yet to produce a broadly applicable model that estimated the escalating relative Aspect formation difficulty better.

Which brought me to my present situation.

Twelve Aspects.

With my most recent Aspect formation having been my twelfth Aspect—my [Vitality] Aspect.

If my relative Aspect formation difficulty had risen exactly according to the simplified triangular law...

Then compared to the difficulty I would have had to form my first Path Aspect, forming my [Vitality] Aspect would have been seventy-eight times more difficult.

Seventy-eight.

Naturally, that didn't literally mean every stage of forming my [Vitality] Aspect had been exactly seventy-eight—or whatever was the exact number accounting for all the ways I developed my Essence—times harder than forming my first Path Aspect would have been.

Reality wasn't that accommodating to the exact nature of mathematics.

But as an overall representation of the [Cultivation] effort I had to provide?

Most books I read on the topic converged toward agreeing that it worked.

Not in one voice.

But one way or another...

Whether with the depth of [Comprehension] I required.

With the amount of relevant experience I needed to undergo.

Or with the [Cultivation] time I spent living, testing, correcting, embodying, and eventually becoming sufficiently aligned with a concept for my Essence to acknowledge it as mine...

Forming my [Vitality] Aspect had taken at least seventy-eight times more effort to be manifested.

And whichever of my [Flow] or [Foundation] Aspects came first, my thirteenth Aspect would face a relative formation difficulty of ninety-one, while my fourteenth one would face a wall of one hundred and five relative difficulty.

I watched several young fairies who were ostensibly still learning to fly and properly use their wings chase one another through the air beneath me while I contemplated the numbers waiting for my Path ahead.

One hundred and five.

The unavoidable price of developing one's Essence.

Every Aspect I formed increased the difficulty of forming the next one.

And the only known way to somewhat mitigate that increase was through synthesizing one's Aspects.

But even still, the reduction wouldn't totally absolve me of the increased formation difficulty altogether, as any Aspect formed through synthesis would be a higher Order one, and thus would have a higher impact on my future Aspect formation difficulty than "mere" fundamental Aspects.

Which was precisely why anyone with [Ambition] and the [Will] to make it far on their Path had to be extremely meticulous when it came to forming any Aspect without examining the concept it embodied from every direction I could conceive.

The [Worthy] and the [Fate] Aspects?

Both were potentially useful.

But just not enough.

The [Flow] and [Foundation] Aspects, however, had passed far more scrutiny because they directly served my highest priority of solving my overdevelopment disorder while integrating cleanly enough with everything that defined my Path that the price had become acceptable.

Still...

Ninety-one.

One hundred and five.

Numbers that certainly had a way of trying to induce doubt.

Not because they changed the directions I chose to walk my Path toward.

Because they made the cost of being wrong increasingly impossible to ignore.

What if I had missed something?

Not some minor improvement.

Something fundamental.

An Aspect I ought to have formed before my Path became this developed.

An Aspect whose absence would only become visible centuries later.

An Aspect on the level of importance of my [Harmony] and [Purity] Aspects.

Had I not met Knight Thalor and learned about the [truth]ful horrors of Essence corruptions early enough to recognize their importance...

How different would my Path be?

What if right at this moment, such an omission had allowed critical weaknesses to inflict my Path?

Something equally [Foundation]al that I simply hadn't encountered yet?

Some Aspect that would one day seem so obvious that my future self would look backward in hindsight and wonder how I had ever considered my Path to be as close to [Perfection] as I could make it without it?

The possibility existed.

Necessarily.

I wasn't [Omniscient].

I didn't possess perfect [Comprehension].

I wasn't infallible.

Which meant there was always some probability that I had missed something absolutely crucial.

That [Truth] existed, whether I allowed doubts to suffuse my existence and cloud my Path or not.

And that I didn't allow such doubts to suffuse my existence and cloud my Path was because I didn't let them.

Researching new potential Aspects.

Scrutinizing their compatibility with my Path.

Planning for future Aspect syntheses.

Revisiting my old assumptions.

Learning from specialists.

I was already doing everything in my power, as I had since I was conceived within the womb of my unwilling mother.

Doubt?

I had long banished the very concept of it from my Essence and Path.

I had built my Path as well as I could with every fragment of [Insight], every [Comprehension], every mentor, every failure, every success, and every correction available to me.

If tomorrow revealed a mistake...

I would deal with it tomorrow.

If a missing Aspect revealed itself...

I would investigate it.

If something I presently considered [Ideal] proved flawed...

I would change.

That was what [Cultivation] was.

But doubting the entirety of my Path merely because [Perfection] couldn't be proven?

Ridiculous.

My [Ambition] rejected it.

My [Clarity] found no logic in it.

My [Purity] refused to let hypothetical ignorance redefine everything I already knew belonged to me.

And my [Will]...

My [Will] pressed against the thought with such immediate certainty that something deep within my Essence tightened.

Only faintly.

A pressure.

A minute gathering of something around an Aspect already so developed that its ordinary fluctuations rarely caught my attention anymore.

I examined it through [Awareness].

Nothing obviously wrong.

No advancement disorder.

No instability.

No reason to stop.

Only the embodiment of my [Will].

Dense.

Steady.

And, for some reason, feeling ever so slightly more difficult to contain than it had a moment earlier.

I left it alone.

If my Essence wanted to respond to the absurd suggestion that I might one day abandon my [Faith] in the Path I had spent my entire existence building...

It was free to waste its effort.

I had more useful things to do.

Below me, the Fairy Court gathering area continued its endless movement.

Fairies talked.

Argued.

Worked.

Played.

Traded.

Flew.

Lived.

And I had come here for a reason.

Information.

Connections.

A way to seek [Worthy] Chosen.

But none of that would simply present itself because I hovered above everyone while contemplating mathematics.

So I adjusted my posture.

Relaxed my wings.

Let [Guided] draw upon years of accumulated social [Knowledge].

And put on the sort of small, approachable smile that my mounting social experiences had proven useful whenever I wanted strangers to keep talking.

First...

Find where conversations happened.

Then introduce myself.

Listen.

Ask questions.

Make acquaintances.

Learn who knew whom.

Learn which fairies were interesting.

Learn which ones everyone else considered interesting.

And, somewhere along the way, perhaps start untangling the intelligence network I had come here to exploit.

Simple.

I descended toward the busiest open gathering platform I could see.

Whatever faint pressure had gathered around my [Will] followed quietly with me.

Unresolved.

Unhurried.

As if it, too, had no reason to force the issue yet.

Time would provide something worth pushing against eventually.

Until then...

I had fairies to chat up.