Edge Cases - 157 - Book 3: Chapter 22: Interlude - Velykos - Unearthed

Velykos stood in front of the body, staring silently. The golden thread within him hummed, working full force to keep him from falling apart.

The body was wrong, but he didn’t know why.

“This the man that adopted ya?” Harold asked quietly.

“I believe so,” Velykos answered, but the truth was that he wasn’t sure.

“He’s supposed to be a demon, ain’t he?” Harold asked. “He don’t look much like one to me.”

“Daemon,” Velykos corrected. He stared again at the body.

It didn’t look like a daemon. Or a demon, for that matter.

The curious thing was that [Earth Sense] was still pinging, telling him something that was very different from what he could see. It was almost like all of this was intentionally set up to trick someone with his senses.

Or anyone whose domain was earth.

“Wanna let us in on your thoughts, big guy?” Iliss asked. “I can hear you thinking, but I have no idea what you’re thinking.”

“You cannot hear me thinking,” Velykos said automatically, exasperated — and when Iliss smirked at him in her usual impossible way, he sighed.

He did feel a little better.

Velykos knelt beside the corpse of his father, allowing himself one more prayer. This one wasn’t to any god in particular; it was a prayer he made for himself.

Let me understand.

Onyx’s body was stone sculpted in the vague shape of a daemon’s body, just close enough that it could pass for one at a distance. Up close, it clearly wasn’t — the defining features were all unfinished, like a sculpture that had never been completed. Part of him felt a melancholic sadness at the sight.

The rest of him wondered why.

He didn’t know exactly what he could find out from just examining the body — it sat still and silent in front of him, without so much of a hint of changing. Yet there were small details he could see, surely. He was a stone elemental, and Onyx — this version of Onyx, not the true, daemon version — was made out of stone.

There had to be something only he could notice. There had to be a reason that the bodies seemed identical under [Earth Sense], a reason they didn’t register as unusual until he brought them up.

There had to be a reason there were forty-nine separate instances of the bodies.

He just couldn’t think of what it was.

He barely realized it when he began to reach out with [Earth Manipulation], digging into the features that were barely formed. If this was meant to represent his father, it did a poor job; his eyes were more almond-shaped, his nose was a little higher on his face. His hair was wild and free and long, reaching down to the small of his back. He had a tail that curled up and around his hand, a nervous habit he’d clearly picked up at some point.

Velykos didn’t know how long he kept at it. His friends stayed quiet by his side, watching; he was grateful for their company, and grateful that they stayed silent for something that felt so…

Ceremonial.

Velykos didn’t know how much time passed before he was done. The sun was low in the sky by the time the sculpture was complete, and he reached down with a large, gentle hand to slowly prop up the statue of Onyx that he’d completed.

[Earth Sense] had been a guide, he was realizing. He had to use [Earth Manipulation] until it matched what he sensed with [Earth Sense], down to the…

Down to the injuries.

When had Onyx gained injures? His entire right ribcage was missing, like a hole had been torn through his body — except instead of ragged flesh there was a smooth circle of nothing. He hadn’t noticed it before, too preoccupied with the sheer number of corpses and the fact that they all pinged as identical, but—

The body moved.

“Velykos,” Onyx said.

Velykos flinched backward hard, all the stacks of stone that made up his body cracking against one another and threatening to fall apart. Harold made an alarmed yell, holding out his spear like it would do anything against a god made out of stone, and the rest of the skeletons arrayed themselves protectively, prepared both to catch Velykos if he fell and to fight Onyx if needed.

Onyx just laughed. “You found yourself some good friends, huh?”

“You… are alive?” Velykos’ gaze flickered to the wound in Onyx’s chest, at the missing half-circle carved into his torso. “I do not understand.”

“You don’t have to. We don’t have a lot of time…” Onyx glanced over head at the sun, and then tilted his head. “Huh. Actually, no, we have a bunch of time. You did that way faster than I expected. Well done.”

“You do not speak the same way the Onyx I knew did,” Velykos said cautiously.

“It’s been centuries since that version of me existed,” Onyx said, smiling softly. Velykos remembered that smile. His heart ached at the familiarity of it. “But I never forgot you.”

“I’m gonna cry,” Ixiss muttered from somewhere beside him. He would’ve assumed the lizardkin was joking, except he actually did sound vaguely choked up. “Dammit, I miss having eyeballs.”

Onyx’s eyes twinkled. “You’ve found yourself some interesting friends,” he amended. “But to answer your question… I am alive, and I am not. You remember Sev, yes?”

“He claimed to be one of your worshippers,” Velykos said. “You ascended, then? I did not know mortals could become gods.”

“That’s a topic I actually can’t discuss,” Onyx said, looking apologetic. “But there is one that I can. Sev knows about this, and so does Aurum, but most of the gods don’t.”

“This is important,” Velykos said carefully.

“Very,” Onyx said. “The other gods need to know this. I can’t tell them, Aurum can’t tell them. No one who’s been touched by the Void can, and Aurum was, even if it was only for a little bit. And he’s been spending more and more time in it with me, to try to help us…”

At this, Onyx grimaced a little bit. “We need to stop him from doing that,” he said. “He’s too eager to help.”

“I do not understand,” Velykos said. “What is the Void?”

“It is the end,” Onyx told him.

And then he told him everything.

Velykos listened in growing horror as Onyx told him about the slow erasure of the gods — about how they were being sacrificed to keep the system running, to keep the universe at large running. He listened as he was told about countless gods that had already been erased without anyone knowing about it, the world just modified again and again to operate without the god in question.

Harold looked sick. Nathan couldn’t meet Onyx’s eyes. Iliss and Ixiss stood close to one another, hands clenched tight, and Olag simply watched with a certain anger set into his shoulders and simmering in his posture.

Velykos could read them all like a book, by now.

“There must be a way to fix this,” Velykos said. The low rumble of his voice felt almost like static to him.

“I don’t know if there is.” Something in Onyx’s voice changed; his tone was usually friendly, casual, but now there was something of the man he’d considered his father in there — some of that age-old wisdom, and some of that age-old weariness. “Sev is working on it. I cannot… We cannot interact. He is one of my closest friends, but he also made one of the greatest sacrifices he could have for the cause of fixing all of this.

“His relationship with the system is… unstable. If I interact with him, the system may notice; it is dangerous enough that he has acquired an ally that can directly patch the system, though I trust that he will be careful with that power.

“It makes me frustratingly limited in what I can do. I can guide him a bit. I can make changes to the system those few times it lets me through some back door or the other. But it closes them after, and I have to make sure that when I do it, it counts.

“He’s making good progress, though. I wouldn’t be able to talk to you about all this if he and his friends didn’t discover it first. We’re piggybacking on their anchor, linking more people to it when it can handle it; the problem is it still can’t handle everyone…”

Onyx trailed off, shaking his head. “But that’s getting into a lot of the technicalities behind it all. The long and short of it is that Sev can’t see me again, or the system’s going to realize what he did to keep me alive. It was bad enough the last time we interacted.”

Half of that was his father just needing to talk, Velykos realized. Onyx hadn’t really been able to speak to anyone about all of this, and this was the first time he’d been able to talk freely and openly.

He had so many questions. Not even about this. He wanted to know more about what had happened, about the years Onyx had spent as a god. Now that he’d gained more context for what life was like, he wanted to know more about what the man he had considered his father was like.

What his favorite food was. What daemon culture was like — if it was difficult, being so closely associated with demons. If he’d made anything new that he wanted to share.

Onyx had spent centuries on this problem; it had consumed a lot of who he was. Velykos understood why. The problems Onyx spoke of were problems on a cosmic scale, to the point where everything else must have seemed insignificant…

…but it still made him sad.

He understood a little better, perhaps, why Sev’s approach with the gods was what it was. Perhaps that was comparable for all gods — if they were all ascended from mortals, then perhaps they all went through the same thing, their mundane, mortal problems replaced with something grander and greater in scale, dwarfing their previous lives and the things they once cared about.

And even if they weren’t all ascended from mortals…

It was too bad he didn’t still have the tea he normally carried with him. None of the skeletons he traveled with needed food of any kind, or he would have had some on hand.

He did, however, have something else.

“Here,” Velykos said. It wasn’t a perfect response to everything Onyx had just told him — really, it wasn’t a response at all. It was a small offering from the carvings he kept in the bag he wore at his side, one of those precious pieces of art he had created with his new friends. “I would like you to have this.”

“I can’t take anything with me,” Onyx started to deny — but then he saw what Velykos was actually offering him, and fell silent.

In his hand — much smaller than the actual size of his palm, and perhaps all the more vulnerable-looking for that fact — sat a small sculpture of the very quarry they stood in. It was devoid of all the gravestones, of course; instead, the original set of statues that Onyx had created stood surrounding the quarry like guardians.

“…This I can keep,” Onyx said. “Because it falls under my domain. My power is limited, but… thank you.”

“I missed you greatly,” Velykos said. “I understand this matter is urgent, and I do not wish to take away from it. But I do not want this moment to be this — an explanation, a hurried goodbye. You are more than just the god trying to save us.”

“Haven’t heard that in a while,” Onyx said. The words were playful, but his tone was not. The look he gave the sculpture was almost melancholic. “…I am sorry. You meant — you mean a lot to me, too. Were it that we had more time…”

“I understand.” Velykos said simply. “I just had a wish to express. You had a goal in coming here, did you not?”

“I was going to ask for your help warning the other gods,” Onyx said. “Tell them that the system may devour them, and that they must work against it. It will be difficult; many of them think the system is still something to be trusted… and it is doing something good. But it will hinder any further possible solution, and must be destroyed before we can try something else.”

“We aren’t just gonna be able to waltz up to the gods and tell ’em their system is gonna eat them,” Harold protested. He’d been silent up until now, but now he somehow wore a scowl on his skull. Onyx only nodded.

“You will have to gain their trust,” he said. He glanced at the small sculpture Velykos had given him, and very gently placed it against his chest; there was a ripple, and then it merged with his body. “But… I believe that you can. You and your friends.”

“Sure.” Iliss spoke up, but she folded her arms, staring at Onyx. “Do you have a lot of time left here, though?”

“Some,” Onyx said cautiously.

“Then you’re going to stay and talk to Velykos, because he’s been missing you for years,” she declared. “You don’t get to just show up, ask us to do something, and leave. Spend some time with the kid you raised, for crying out loud.”

“Ah,” Onyx said. He smiled, oddly happy, like he’d been hoping exactly this would happen. “I suppose you’re right.”

Velykos decided that he’d been very lucky to make friends with this particular set of mortals.