Eight 5.17: The Torn Veil

A core materialized among Gergerol’s remains, a hunk of dark and silver that was about the size of a man’s fist. Fala picked through the mess to retrieve it.

The core pulled at my attention, because of course it did, but my authority drew me to the large outcropping first. My foot was still numb—my spirit frayed there—but it didn’t stop me from walking closer. The shape really did look like a twenty-foot gardening trowel.

At its base were a collection of stones, rounded on one side and flat on the other, each of them about as large as my head. They had probably fit nicely in the giant bishkawi’s hand, though, and it appeared from the marks on them that Gergerol had been using them to smooth the surface of the bottom portion of the outcropping. He’d worn down a path around the trowel’s base by walking around it in endless circles.

With Bear’s Strength, I picked up one of the rocks and dragged it across the outcropping’s surface. The sound grated on my ears. It felt like someone scraping against Tenna’s Gift, and even the land itself seemed rubbed raw.

I dropped the rock and whispered an apology right away.

Fala and the Deer God had also felt the scraping’s effects and came over to see what I was doing. I thought the earth spirit might start immediately bashing the trowel, but he critically examined the outcropping instead, circling around the base. As he did so, I felt a heaviness descend on me.

Then there was an intangible click when he came full circle. I got the sense that something was supposed to happen, but didn’t. Maybe because he hadn’t dragged a rock across the surface? I was curious to know what would happen, but I left the rocks on the ground where they belonged.

“What does your authority tell you to do?” Fala asked.

I stood back to look at the outcropping in its entirety, then circled around it like the Deer God had but from farther out. There was no click this time, so proximity seemed to matter. How much? I wondered and let myself sink deeper into the land.

I became the dry soil and the mist hiding the hollow, the stubborn bushes and… the outcropping stood like an imposing pillar overwhelming everything else. A slash of black across a painting. It resisted me, not letting me become a part of it.

But the land was patient. Time was like the wind, blowing endlessly, and yet the land endured. The stone… endured. Because underneath was an open sore, a tear in the veil between life and death that was slow to heal. The edges were raw where they’d been scraped to keep them open. Where Gergerol must’ve been working to expand the wound’s boundaries.

I pulled back from the land and gazed at the outcropping with new eyes. The trowel was a stopgap, meant to keep this place safe until the tear in the veil could heal itself. The veil should re-form eventually, assuming there wouldn’t be anyone else constantly prying it apart.

What had caused the original wound? Who had plugged it up? I had no answers to either of those questions, though I did now wonder if there was anything hidden under Judgement’s Rock too. People could do all kinds of things on Diaksha, including apparently create tears between realities.

Gergerol had somehow found a way to use this place to feed his Spirit Arts. I could probably do the same, assuming I was willing to turn my back on everything I believed in. The Deer God snorted at the idea, and so did I.

Briefly, I toyed with the thought of trying to heal the wound, but I tossed that out too. I didn’t know enough to safely make an attempt, and honestly, it was sometimes best to let things run their course. Someone had placed the trowel here. They’d likely known what they were doing, more than me anyway.

I turned to Fala. She’d asked me a question and had waited patiently for me to work out an answer. So, I explained what I’d found and followed it up with a question of my own: “Can we create a stone shell to surround the outcropping?”

She quirked her head as she expanded her awareness downward to check on the amount of stone underneath us. “How far out does it need to be?”

I wasn’t sure, so I walked a spiral inward around the outcropping and stopped when I heard it click. From there, I took three steps back and drew an outline in the dirt for where the boundary should be. “Damn, that’s what? Forty feet in diameter. We’re going to need a lot of stone, aren’t we?”

‘About five thousand cubic feet,’ Yuki said, ‘and you’d need a way to support the ceiling.’

Fala gave me a look, speaking to the impossibility of the request.

“All right, all right,” I said. “What if we just bury the base? And camouflage the rest.”

To that she nodded and began to pull stone from the ground, matching the material so that it looked natural. Some of it, she lifted higher up to disguise the trowel shape.

The amount was still a lot, and Fala had to wander into the mist to find the appropriate veins. She managed it, though, and in the end the trowel was no more. In its place was just a regular outcropping.

Walking a circle around it returned no clicks. And simply scraping the stone didn’t do anything either, even when I climbed up to access the shielded sections higher up. Afterward, we admired Fala’s handiwork. The encounter was over, and the area appeared clear of danger.

Finally, I had the breathing room to examine my foot, so I found a spot to sit and take a look.

The meat of it appeared pale but otherwise intact, with the numbness lingering. The spirit was still a yellowish purple, though. The frayed edges waved as if in a breeze. To me, it almost looked like they were searching for their counterparts across the cuts.

A Healing Water spell didn’t help, but Nature’s Spring did—slightly. Ever so slowly, the filaments grew longer, and they more obviously reached toward each other. The effect was noticeable enough for Yuki and me to triple it. My spell was soon joined by their double cast of Nature’s Spring.

I also tried bridging the gap with spirit mana, creating a lattice for the filaments and that seemed to help too. A bandage made of spirit mana didn’t, though, nor did willing the filaments to do anything.

Fala was using her water tablet to watch the experiments, and the Deer God had been just generally hovering over me, also observing the attempts to heal the damaged spirit. I noticed that he hadn’t yet addressed the burn damage to his antlers.

“Any ideas?” I asked him.

His response was to move to closer examine the spirit injury.

I had to lean back out of the way. “Okay, that’s it. As soon as Yuki has another extension ready, you’re getting it. I’d like to have a proper conversation for once.”

His snort blew a thread of snot onto my foot. And god damn it, you know what? The filaments grew about a millimeter as a result.

The Deer God froze in surprise, and I’m pretty sure my jaw dropped. The only person who didn’t seem fazed was Fala.

“Try licking it,” she said.

He eyed her a moment, then used his rough tongue on my foot. One lick, two licks, three. The yellowish purple began to fade, and a ripple of understanding moved through the Deer God, quickly followed by the scent of a spring morning.

My foot glowed with a pale green light, which caused the discoloration to fade even more quickly, and the shredded parts of my spirit began to actively stitch together. A deep sense of satisfaction arose within the Deer God, and I felt him exert his will.

His antlers glowed with the same pale green light, and the burn damage to them also healed. When he was done, they looked like just as they had before.

So did my spirit—the foot tingled a bit when I stood, but even that faded after a couple of steps.

Neither of us appeared to have taken any lasting harm from the fight with the spirit king. And that included the harm to Tenna’s Gift. The gaps in the barrier closed up on their own, without help from any of us. The process appeared to be the same as when I intentionally poked a hole in the barrier. It was naturally self-healing.

Fala and the others reported that the strange noises they’d been hearing had disappeared. So their share of Tenna’s Gift had also healed.

I felt myself finally winding down from the fight then, and an exhaustion spread through me. I was fine physically and spiritually. The battle hadn’t demanded that much. My magical energies were at decent levels too. I’d burned through a lot of mana and qi, yet my wells were more than half full still.

It was my authority that lagged. My influence had fought against Gergerol’s throughout the fight, and then there was the push to help all the ghosts move on.

The feeling was strange, and I—out of nowhere—began to cry. Tears ran down my face for seemingly no reason. My mouth filled with saliva, as if my tear ducts didn’t have the capacity to meet the need and the sorrow required an additional outlet. I mean, it must’ve been sorrow, right? What else could it have been?

I’d lost my path, and while I didn’t regret the decision, that was still a loss.

And Helen, her passing was life proceeding as usual. She’d moved on, and so had I.

Yet those losses came back to revisit me, now that my authority’s support had weakened. It had been, I realized, shielding me from myself.

That shield had fallen due to exhaustion.

It was so, so strange. I didn’t know what to think. All I could do was make room for the feelings, to let them air out.

Fala came over to hug me and place her head on my shoulder. Yuki extended a tendril to pat me on the head. With a soft sigh, the Deer God knelt to make himself more comfortable, his solidity a welcome presence.

We must’ve stayed like that for half an hour. It wasn’t long at all in the grand scheme of things, but… you know, in all the years since, I count that night as one of the most significant in my life.

###

I felt more clearheaded afterward. More myself, the me from before my authority had increased. It was like coming out of a haze, finally able to see clearly.

The first thing I did was kiss my beloved on the cheek.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“Everything,” I replied.

“Silly,” she said, but looked pleased. Then she waggled her eyebrows—an expression she copied from me, I’d like to point out. “Guess what you forgot?”

“I didn’t forget,” I said, pulling Gergerol’s core from our Hoarder’s Pocket. She’d dumped it inside—a mass of coal black and mottled silver. The thing was heavier than it looked, even accounting for him being higher level than me.

Not to be outdone, Fala removed a pouch of the skents’ light from the pocket.

We discussed where and when we should absorb the silverlight. By that point we’d been gone from the camp for about an hour and forty minutes. The fight itself hadn’t taken long, but a good amount of time had slipped past while I was immersed in the land.

“We should absorb it and be done with it,” I said. “None of us is close to leveling, and we’ve experienced silverlight much more intense than this.”

‘The others are probably wondering what happened to us,’ Yuki said. ‘The fight wasn’t quiet.’

I nodded. “Then I’ll do the absorbing, and we’ll split it three ways.”

Yuki had always been able to take his share through me, and Fala could it now as a feature of our having become beloved to each other. First, though, I had to preserve the darklight.

A huff from the Deer God stopped me before I could act. He stood and came closer to inspect the core in my hand. For a long moment, he stared at it, and I sensed a slow, grudging acceptance. He’d had other plans, a different approach to growing stronger, but this fight and its aftermath had shown him that he couldn’t ignore the system in place. He looked me in the eye, then, and I knew he wanted a share of the distribution.

Well, he didn’t want it, but he asked for it.

“Yes, of course,” I said and brought out the measuring scale, in addition to the preservation salves. The work took a few moments—carefully breaking up the cores, rubbing the preservatives onto the darklight, and watching it become shiny as the treatment took effect.

Then I weighed out a quarter portion of the collected silverlight for the Deer God. His lips pulled back as he gently used his teeth to take his share from my hand. His eyes closed, and he… blocked me off from sensing his intentions. Whatever was happening inside him was private, which I respected.

“How about us?” I asked Yuki and Fala. “Are we ready?”

My beloved had been sitting beside me while I worked. She made herself more comfortable and nodded.

Yuki settled themselves in my heart dantian and said, ‘Yes.’

First came the skents:

3,896 silverlight gathered. 1,299 absorbed.

The world shrank to an unexpected simplicity, consisting of the path and the obstacles within it. The only purpose was to pierce through everything, so that I might survive. So that I might feed, reproduce, and create more paths through the world. I drove myself to find ways to go faster. To smash through anything my way. That was the path forward.

“Jesus,” I said afterward. I felt like I’d just jugged a gallon of espresso and taken a triple shot of Dog’s Agility on top of it.

Sitting beside me, Fala grimaced, then turned thoughtful. “It was uncomfortable at first, but I wouldn’t mind more.”

‘Wee, let’s go fast!’ Yuki said, their qi shooting through my meridians.

A resonance had been created by the three of us all taking the silverlight of the same creature at the same time, which in turn had amplified the experience. Absorbing light could already be intense, and this was like turning the volume up to eleven.

In a rare turn of events, I cast an Iron Body on Yuki. They were the one needing the grounding for once. Then, when they’d settled down, it was their turn to cast the spell, one for Fala and one for me. It was preparation for the giant bishkawi’s core.

13,452 silverlight gathered. 4,484 absorbed.

My eyes rolled up into my head, and everything went dark. Somewhere close by, a heart was beating—a steady, rhythmic, entrancing pulse around which the darkness revolved. I wanted to touch the heart. I wanted to find a way to sink my being into it. But I was trapped in the darkness along with… along with the rest of creation. The heart’s mystery wasn’t for me, and yet my longing for it would not be denied. I’d tear the fabric of the world apart in order to get to it.

I woke up from the experience shivering. Fala was in the process of wrapping a blanket around my shoulders when I opened my eyes. She had one around hers already.

Fifteen minutes had passed since taking the silverlight, and the resonance had caused the connections between the three of us to vibrate with the intensity of thoughts-emotions-intentions experienced.

A notification blinked on my phone.

The Archery skill has increased to 14.

The Nonverbal Communication skill has increased to 10.

The Spirit Arts skill has increased to 14.

Meanwhile, on Fala’s Status, two of her skill jumped up in rank: her Spirit Magic rising to 7 and Ritualism hitting 11.

The increases surprised me, because I didn’t feel like I’d gained any new insights from absorbing Gergerol’s silverlight. And not Fala or Yuki either. All we felt were the dregs of his determined longing.

With a sigh, Fala offered her hand to help me to standing. She was as chilly as me, and I rubbed her hands between mine to warm them up.

As I did so, a thought occurred to me. Perhaps there was an insight, after all. “He’d gone after the wrong goal,” I said. “He was meant for other things, but took the wrong way on the Path to Perfection.”

“Sometimes, it’s like this,” Fala said. “A life lived pointlessly.” Then, she had a thought; I sensed it rise and pop, creating a jolt inside my beloved.

I quirked my head, inviting her to share the insight.

“Though he lost his way,” she said, “we gained and learned from it.”

“Our skill increases? Ye, it’s a truth that some good came from the tragedy.”

“Those, and maybe another matter too,” Fala said. Then, she shook her head. “Let me think about it more; I don’t want to get our hopes up.”

###

The hollow’s human ghosts met us about halfway back to the camp. They knelt as a group and bowed, their heads touching the ground. I didn’t spot anything resembling Gregerol’s mark on them, which confused me.

Were they not worthy of it? Maybe he just didn’t like humans? There was no way to know without asking, and I wasn’t about to, no matter how respectful these ghosts seemed.

A few vanished on their own then, and the otherworldly light inspired several more to move on. The rest looked at me with pleading eyes, and I dragged up the will to flex my authority. My influence spread through the mist, and the ghosts left in a mass exodus, accompanied once more by hymns devoted to Tenna.

I felt an ache afterward, like someone had squeezed me like a lemon. I would’ve complained, except I’d been the one to do the squeezing.

The thought got a chuckle out of Yuki, and a faint smile came to Fala’s lips as it spread to her too. The Deer God, on the other hand, approached to nibble at my hair, which I assumed was a gesture of approval. A moment later, he rejoined the herd. His intention was to rest there tonight and depart in the morning so that he could continue paralleling the group’s journey.

Which was good, because I didn’t like the idea of him alone in the woods while distracted. His thoughts were clearly elsewhere after the fight with the spirit king had ended.

Fala took my hand. “Shall we?”

I nodded, and we walked back to the camp together. The rest of journey was uneventful, though we both called out as soon as we saw the mist glowing with firelight. It wouldn’t do for our guides to shoot us full of arrows, because they didn’t know it was their clients approaching.

Then, when we came out of the mists, we found Melwei and his team armed and on alert. They were, in fact, in the process of easing their bowstrings back and un-nocking their arrows.

Melwei walked closer, his eyes checking us for injuries. “Are you two all right? We heard the sounds of magical combat.”

“We’re fine,” Fala signed, then said aloud, “Sleep would be good, though. The night’s been more eventful than we expected.”

Tru laughed from her belly. “No doubt! You would’ve been better off cuddling by the fire. We wouldn’t have minded, I promise.”

“It’s fine,” I said, waving the suggestion off. “Everything worked out in the end.”

Wilaeina walked past us to gaze into the mists. “Did you find anything good out there?”

I scratched my head. “There’s good everywhere you look. And if there isn’t, then you have to make it so.”

Melwei didn’t seem to believe that we’d returned unharmed. He walked around us in a circle, but eventually had to accept what his eyes told him. “The fighting sounded… challenging.”

“This Emma,” I said gesturing, “is an accomplished fighter. Without her, my life would’ve been cut short many times over.”

Melwei glanced her way, and I could practically feel him reassessing her strength, her value, her worth. It was something along those lines—his spirit melded those concepts together. “I understand. And picking good allies is a wisdom of its own; I commend you on it.” He turned back to me. “I assume that you settled the matter, whatever it was?”

“Yes, I don’t expect we’ll have any problems tonight.”

###

I’d spoken a truth—the rest of the evening passed uneventfully. Fala and I didn’t even enter the dream space, letting the natural rhythms of the body and mind work their magic for a restful night’s sleep.

That only applied to those of us that slept, however. Yuki informed us the next morning that my family in Voorhei, as well as my team there, were all wired up to join the next dream-time session. The hidden mind was so excited; their update was the first thing I woke up to.

Fala grinned at the perplexed expression on my face. Yuki’s announcement had caught me half-awake. Apparently, I was the last one to get up. Everyone else was bustling to get their gear in order.

My beloved handed me a bowl of leftover stew. “We’re all packed up except for your bedroll, blanket, and a few other odds and ends.”

My clock said that it was 8:32 AM, and the mist glowed with the light of the morning sun. A quick look showed that our guides were moving better than they had yesterday. The rest had done them good.

“We should make decent time today,” I said.

Fala nodded. “Even with the late start.”

The salty rabbit was barely worth eating, but I scarfed it down anyway. I didn’t want to spend a minute longer than necessary in Slaughter’s Hollow.