Book 3 - Chapter 4: A Piece of Infinity

++One thing I sorely struggled with in my early days as Isabel Vornholt was storage, more specifically storing things in secret.++

- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E.

I continued practicing and experimenting throughout the rest of the day, avoiding any further interaction with my family as I did. I would have to speak with them, I knew that much, but it could wait a while. I had already been exposed to my mother long enough that I believed I had earned myself a reprieve from socialising with anyone else. A short one, at least.

Fortunately, night came relatively quickly, thanks to winter’s imminent approach, and I was soon able to take refuge in the dark.

Both from my family, and from the probing senses of all the other beings in Garamon. This was a liberation beyond just the social. It was the chance I had been waiting for.

One major advantage to the Vornholt estate’s ridiculous size was how easy it made it for me to sneak out. There were so many corridors, windows and rooms that, slightly short-staffed as it was, there was simply no way to keep an eye on the whole place all at once.

That I still had the Grandmaster’s ring and my own mana-obscuring abilities only made things easier, and I slipped out like a mobile shadow to flit across the grounds and head right for the leyline. I had not actually seen it up-close in years, and beholding it again now was…disheartening.

Most of the mana it had once boasted still remained, but I felt it diminished. Where I had previously seen a maelstrom of power more than the equal of any Demigod, it now felt…perhaps three quarters of that.

This still left it more powerful than Lord Dread, slightly, but it meant that my time was growing short. A few brief years had weakened it significantly, a few more would likely diminish its strength even more. A few after that…

Eventually the time would come when I dwarfed the leyline by such an extent that calling on my full power would be easily detected regardless of how close I stood to it.

But that was a problem for the future, right now I still had the precious magical cover it provided, and I intended to make use of the advantage while it still remained. I stood still, took a moment to focus, and then drew on the greatest magician to ever live.

Or unlive.

It felt wonderful, still, to resume my true, ancient form. The sensation is impossible to fully describe. Like I was living most of my life without limbs, eyes, ears or a tongue, then suddenly finding myself gifted with all in a single stroke. Like going, in one instant, from a squirming insect to a stalking predator.

Such power is intoxicating, and I was actually tempted to go searching for Demigods to test it on. Nu’chista had not given me too much trouble, wounded as he was, but I was confident I could defeat even an unharmed servant of the Gods without difficulty. Isabel Vornholt’s power was only a drop in Lord Dread’s ocean, but my newfound knowledge and experience had made me deadlier than ever.

Not deadly enough, however. Because there were many Demigods, and they were not generally nice enough to fight only one at a time. I controlled myself, calling on my mana and pushing it forward into the space before me, feeling the very fabric of reality crack apart.

This was not a portal into the Depths. Were it so easy. No, this was a more primitive and petty kind of magic that nonetheless demanded mana in such quantities as to kill any three normal magicians in the attempt of mustering it.

For me, it was a mild exertion. Akin to running a hundred yards in my mortal form. Space broke down quickly before my will, and I stepped into the resultant wound in the abyss.

Nothing greeted me as the crack closed at my back. A total and perfect nothing stretching on an impossibly vast distance in all directions. There was no ground under my feet either, I ‘stood’ merely by exerting will on the ambient mana around me. Here it was so dense that it behaved as a solid almost whether I intended it to or not.

Colours that did not, and could not, exist in physical space greeted me as I swept my gaze around to examine my surroundings, but as usual I found no intrusion into my domain. This was my Space. A miniaturised reality created by my own hand all those millennia ago, completely inaccessible to me since my rebirth.

But accessible once more, now that I had regained all of my former power.

Only one feature broke the monotonous emptiness, a cage of melted stone and infernal power crackling ten paces to my side. I turned towards it and approached, pleased to see the Demigod Nu’chista remained as trapped as he had ever been.

“You,” he spat. “Back to taunt me again?”

What? This was the first time I had visited him since defeating him in Orapathaqi.

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Ah. He had gone insane in my absence. That made sense, it had been over six months, and this place was as close to a sensory deprivation tank as I could come without deliberately setting out to make one.

I could only hope this would not interfere with my experiments.

“I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS,” I told him. “LOOKING FORWARD TO IT FOR THREE LONG WEEKS, EVER SINCE I IMPRISONED YOU. YOU MUST HAVE BEEN DREADING IT JUST AS LONG, TIME FLOWS EQUALLY AS FAST HERE AFTER ALL.”

I found the thought of disorienting him, making him think his months of torture had only been a fraction as long as they actually were, rather funny, and it would not affect my experimentation much anyway. Besides, he was already mad. And what was the point of being the Lord of Evil if you did not enjoy yourself?

The Demigod began thrashing, spitting silvery spittle and driving his immense strength against the bars of his cage. He had fully healed by now, and I knew that if he freed himself we would have a much more interesting fight than we did last time. Outside of this realm, at least.

But he would not escape. The enchantment holding him had been designed to withstand anything, directing all of its magic into whichever direction it was struck from and whichever point it was hit. Were Nu’chista to free himself, he would still be trapped in my wider space. And simply being in that space empowered every spell matrix I wove together. He was as bound as it was possible for any being to be, and he knew it.

“Just kill me!” he demanded.

I would have rolled my eyes if I still had them.

“SILENCE.” I sighed. “I KNOW THE STORIES ABOUT ME ARE DISTORTED, BUT EVEN YOU MUST KNOW I HAVE NEVER BEEN THAT MERCIFUL.”

He screamed, but it was more pathetic than fearsome. There is very little to fear from a caged animal. And so very much to learn.

The most inconvenient part was getting the Demigod to stay still for my experimentation. I ended up finding a solution only when I improvised a new spell matrix, modifying a teleportation spell to create a portal in the air before me and linking it to the space behind the small of his back. From there I hurled a disintegration spell into the Demigod, then produced another portal to strike him again while he writhed in his surprise on the ground. It took only one more spell before he stopped moving, followed by a few magic missiles before I was confident he would not regain mobility mid-experiment.

Not a technique I could use in battle, the magic was too precise to possibly aim at a moving target, but I filed it away in my head as something that may be worth developing more in the future. Then I opened up my cage, stepped inside and got to work on Nu’chista.

I had dreamed of this moment for thousands of years during my first reign, then for aeons in the Depths. The chance to feel a Demigod’s helpless flesh in my hands and study it however I pleased, to unlock the secrets of divinity. I would have salivated, if I could.

My first act was to take tissue samples, deftly cutting into Nu’chista with blades of aether a thousand times denser and sharper than anything I could have mustered as Isabel Vornholt.

It still took time. These aetheric scalpels held edges so fine that they would have cloven through solid steel, but a Demigod’s flesh was tougher than that, and his skin many times tougher still. I went through more than a dozen of my creations before finally succeeding in slicing off a chunk maybe the size of one fingertip.

Then I needed to preserve it. And this was where my modern knowledge proved even more useful than my ancient power.

Opening another crack in the world, I briefly stepped through back into the cave of the leyline. From there I looked around and gathered materials. Chunks of stone, scrapings of iron from metal carts, handfuls of the sand used to insulate the industrial equipment from otherwise dangerously-hot mana pockets. Once I had it all I made my way back into my artificial space and began breaking it all down.

Chemistry is a wonderful tool. From the iron I made a large mixing vat. The sand was dismantled into silica, then reformed as glass vials and tubes. The stone went to providing additional material needed to add mass wherever my other raw ingredients were insufficient. Within minutes I had a halfway-functional laboratory.

I was so enthused in my work that I barely noticed the Demigod’s screams die down into a choke.

“You can’t win,” he told me. “You—”

“YOU HAVE SAID THIS ALL BEFORE, TEN TIMES NOW,” I interrupted. He had actually only said it once, at Orapathaqi. I simply enjoyed making him question his grasp on reality.

And I enjoyed analyzing this tissue sample even more. Demigods and Godtouched are different from magicians. For us, our power is something external, almost. We talk of ‘having’ Vessels, but that is merely an abstract way to make sense of how our minds function, how they let us draw on and contain the esoteric powers of creation with sheer will.

To a Demigod, however, their power actually is innate and natural within their own bodies, bound to every molecule of them.

Consider coal. Fuel, power contained in physical form. Now consider something more than coal. Consider a living thing, still animated and conscious, but with flesh containing such vast amounts of energy that it boasts more power stored in a single hair than a whole bag of coal. Imagine such vast densities of energy that the form itself almost stops to matter, becomes nothing more than a locus around which the power is focused. Now imagine the power is self-renewing. Not finite and depleted when burned, as with normal coal, but infinite and limited only in how much can be called on at once.

That is a Demigod.

It is a sliver of primal chaos, then fractured again. An echo of an echo of the infinite bound to a puppet of meat and bone.

And it was trapped in my laboratory, subjected to my curiosity. I could not help myself. I laughed. I laughed long and loud, continuing far past the point where organic vocal chords would be hurt by the strain, then laughing some more. And when I finally finished, I got back to work.

This was it. It did not matter that I had missed my chance to consume Zameka’s power, this was it.

This was the opportunity that would see Lord Dread risen above the Gods.