Edge Cases - 166 - Book 3: Chapter 31: V - Seeds

“What… are they?” Vex tried to keep his curiosity and excitement at bay; something about this still felt… off. For one of them, at least; closer inspection showed that one of the three root-tangled books had slightly rotten leaves, and a weaker core. It was… strange, and it made him hesitate.

“They are new books,” Isolis said, heedless of his thoughts. “There have not been new books here for a long, long time. It was a joy to find these here. And yet behind them…”

Very gently, Isolis plucked out the three new, growing things from behind the books that represented Solidity and Change; they placed each one on the floor in front of Vex as if they were fragile things that would break at the slightest bit of force. Vex noticed one of them glowing more dimply than the others, like it was broken.

“These are…” Isolis hesitated, as if searching for the word. “Semerit. It has been a long time since I have seen them. They are often the sign of a great change ahead, and may evolve to embody any new concept. They are what enable the mana to create new spells. New glyphs. Or they represent such, at least.”

“So other people can create new glyphs now?” Vex asked. Isolis hesitated.

“Normally, yes,” they started. “But…

“You must understand, those glyphs of Stability and Change should not be possible. Not simply because this universe is dead to change, but even by the normal rules of creation… they are too broad. Too powerful. Too capable of doing anything. The mana does not allow for creations like these; they upset the balance of magic.”

“And yet it did,” Vex said softly.

“It did,” Isolis said. Their brows furrowed, and they let out a long sigh. “There must be a reason, but that reason is beyond me. From my perspective, it will only accelerate the destruction of this universe.”

“Why?” Vex felt his chest tighten slightly; that hadn’t been his intent. He hadn’t set out to create new magic in the first place.

Not here, anyway.

“The elementals will use it to benefit themselves,” Isolis said, “and nothing ill will come of that. But everyone else? These are powerful glyphs, unleashed into a world with barely any hope remaining; the mana could barely keep the state of things in place as it is…”

“But there’s always been destructive magic.” This was an argument he’d heard before about magic; not all of the noble houses in Elyra appreciated it, although that was largely political. They wanted the Ashion house to wield less power. “These glyphs aren’t even meant for destruction.”

“Change is a form of destruction,” Isolis said severely. Vex opened his mouth to respond, but the librarian raised a hand; they weren’t finished. “But not all destruction is bad, I know. Do not misunderstand. I do not feel your glyphs are anything other than a boon. But they will cause imbalance, they will cause more mana to be consumed, and in the long term…”

“The long term is already a dead end,” Vex said softly.

“…I suppose that is true.” Isolis frowned. “It would not change much, in the grand scheme of things. It will make people happier. I am… uncomfortable, I will admit. I see much potential for pain. But that is perhaps the nature of my own experiences, coloring my perception.

“Ultimately, it is moot. These semerit will not grow, and if they do not grow… it means we do not have a future. They do not respond to anything anyone has tried to create, and we do not know why. We suspect it is because of this one — the broken one.” Gently, Isolid prodded at the one semerit that glowed weakly. The roots around it seemed halfway rotten.

“Why would it mean you don’t have a future?” Vex frowned. He didn’t quite understand that part.

“Semerit represent future change,” Isolis said. “If they will not grow, and are simply inert, then the creation of new ones serves only to mock us. But they are seeds of your potential, and so… perhaps you will be able to do something with them.”

Isolis sounded almost hopeful.

Vex didn’t know how he felt about all this. It felt strange to have a near stranger put their faith in him like this — particularly one that, to him, was simply so much more learned. How much time had Isolis spent in this library, studying its books? How much more did Isolis know about magic, about history?

But if Isolis was so learned, then perhaps he was right to think that Vex might be able to do something about this. The lizardkin frowned, and fed his mana into [Mana Sight], staring at what Isolis had called the semerit.

They felt off. He wanted to know why.

Even [Mana Sight] didn’t really tell him anything new, though, no matter how much mana he poured into the skill; the semerit glowed in more vibrant colors to him, perhaps, but there was nothing in the mana that was noticeably off. He frowned, glancing through a list of his skills to see if there was anything else he could use —

— well, no. There was something more obvious he could use.

He had his Sign.

Vex used a claw and very gently traced out the sigil for the Sign of Research onto the metallic floor, doing it with careful, measured doses of [Splash of Mana]. He placed the three semerit in the center, two whole, one broken. Isolis just watched, seemingly curious; he had no apparent understanding of Vex’s Sign.

Mana flowed, and Vex closed his eyes as information began to feed into his mind.

Previous uses of the Sign of Research had been something like speeding through the whole process of research. The Sign simulated everything he would do to investigate something, then collected and presented that information back to him in a neat, organized form. He didn’t know where it got some of its information from, exactly — the process by which it was able to extract the original stories behind glyphs was completely opaque to him.

But this was…

This was different.

There was a moment of nothing, like the magic was hesitating, or having difficulty pushing through the mana around the semerit — and then he felt something in it seize his magic, grabbing on to the connection it had with his mind. He almost panicked, but that connection didn’t seem malicious, and he stopped himself a second before he would have cut off his connection with his magic.

The semerit had something it wanted to show him.

In his mind’s eye, Vex saw a place he didn’t recognize. A long, decorated hall stretched out before him, decked in colors of white and gold; lined at the sides were a number of priests and clerics.

At the end of the hallway was a book that looked surprisingly similar to the semerit he held now, though it wasn’t tangled up in knots. Vex reached out—

—and felt carpet beneath his feet.

He paused, almost stumbling; his eyes went wide, and a hand went immediately for his dagger. A lifetime of adventuring had prepared him for a certain set of reactions to any unusual circumstance, and this was no exception — yet not a single one of those priests responded to his presence, despite the fact that he was very clearly present.

Had he teleported? But he felt the semerit in his hands, still, even though he was no longer holding them together—

“We can no longer wait, sire.” One of the priests spoke, though it seemed to be to no one in particular; Vex started when he realized that the priest was looking at him, and he tried to move out of the way. It was when the priest’s gaze followed him that he realized it was not that the priest was talking to no one; it was that he was talking to him. “We must ask for help. The kingdom shrinks by the day.”

“What Kingdom?” Vex tried to ask. “What help do you need?”

Those were not the words that emerged from his mouth, though. Instead, he heard a deep, imperial-sounding voice emerge from somewhere in his chest. “No,” he heard the voice rumble. “We have all the help we need. Have faith.”

“I do have faith,” the priest insisted. “But we must be realistic with our faith. Sometimes our Gods wish for us to call for help—”

“Nonsense,” the voice interrupted. “The Gods will provide. We do not need help.”

Vex winced. He knew exactly what Sev would have to say about all of this; their resident priest had no compunctions about telling people off for exactly these sorts of attitudes. It didn’t even have to be religious in nature. Not wanting to accept help because of pride..

But what was this? Why were the semerit showing it to him?

Vex felt himself moving suddenly, and though he tried to scramble back, the entire hall shifted beneath his feet, forcing him to stumble forward; he caught himself at the edge of the window, looking out at a kingdom.

At half a kingdom.

It was beautiful, certainly — a city of white alabaster and marble, with buildings that twisted and weaved around one another; there were nearly no straight edges that Vex could see. He could imagine what it might have looked like.

But there was a massive hole in the ground, and half of the buildings had collapsed into it; at the bottom of that hole was a sheer nothing. Vex didn’t know what he was looking at — his eyes refused to parse it.

“Our city is fine,” he heard himself say — or the voice that he was representing, at least. “It is whole and intact, and our citizens are hearty. There is little to worry about.”

“The numbers do not match,” the priest insisted. “We have a record of every birth, every death, and a count of every person in the city.”

“And no one is dead.”

“But half the people are missing!” the priest nearly exploded; Vex admired him for it, really. But his mind was distracted — these people were speaking like they couldn’t see the hole.

Infolock?

“Every person in the city is accounted for,” the king said calmly.

“Sire,” the priest spoke, and his voice was deeply exasperated. “The number of births do not match our records of the people in the kingdom — we cannot ignore this!”

Vex hated watching this.

He knew what would happen. The scene played out in his head the way it had played out a dozen times before; he’d seen this exact behavior from his father, from his mother, from every single one of his brothers and siblings. He’d bring to them a problem he’d seen amongst the common folk, and they wouldn’t acknowledge it was a problem at all, because to acknowledge that there was a problem meant to acknowledge there was a failure.

“Stop,” Vex tried to say. “I’ve seen enough.”

But the scene kept going.

“You are insolent,” the voice within his chest spoke, and Vex felt mana gathering in the air.

Death mana. He saw the priest recoil, saw the small murmur start up amongst the others, the whispers. No one was going to stop the king; it was treason to speak back, or something equally absurd.

Vex responded by beginning to gather his own magic.

He didn’t care that everything he’d seen told him that this was a vision. He wasn’t going to stand by and do nothing.

A runic circle formed — a system skill, Vex realized in the back of his mind — and mana flashed into it, too rapid for him to stop; it didn’t matter, because he’d already prepared his own counterglyph.

Stability.

The deathbolt froze in the air, and Vex fell forward, a sudden force pushing him out of the way. He reacted quickly, taking another two steps to regain his balance and one hand whipping out one of his daggers; almost immediately, the entire hall of priests lifted their staffs, the tips glowing menacingly at his sudden presence.

Behind him, the king narrowed his eyes. He was a tall, imposing man — a uzarikt, his mind supplied, the word coming to mind with a strange, dizzying trim. An almost spiderlike thing, with broad shoulders and wicked-looking blades emerging from his back; a low hiss was emerging between his mandibles…

…but Vex had been with Derivan for long enough to learn how to read people, and he saw the lines of guilt in the uzarikt’s face.

So he borrowed a little bit from Misa, and gave the king a severe frown. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”