Edge Cases

169 - Book 3: Chapter 34: D - Monsters

Derivan moved through the Void, his mind still racing. The ant was two or three steps ahead of him. He'd asked it for its name, and it had produced an impossible-to-replicate series of clicks, then sighed.

You may call me Juniper, the ant said. It's what a lot of the others call me.

Derivan had nodded.

Now, they were making their way through the Void. He had no idea how the ant managed to find its way around as far as Derivan could tell, it was a featureless emptiness. The fact that he'd even been found by anyone was a miracle. "How do you know where to go?" he asked curiously.

The void is composed of rotting ideas, Juniper replied. And if you train yourself to look, they are like signposts. Beacons of dead concepts and disappearing peoples.

...That was a rather depressing way to navigate. Derivan almost regretted asking.

And yet, even in the darkness, there was light.

Sev had said it once, he was pretty sure. It had been a long time ago years, when he'd first met the cleric and before they'd even come upon Misa together, when it was just the two of them making their way through the Outskirts. There had been a lot of hiding, back then. Derivan had still been trying to hide the full extent of his abilities, and Sev wasn't particularly high-level himself.

How the cleric had survived making his way through the Outskirts, he didn't know. Probably the same way they did getting out a lot of hiding and fortuitous coincidences.

Sometimes, a lot of the things around Sev seemed a little too coincidental. But he supposed he couldn't be too surprised.

The thought came to him now because of what showed up out of the darkness. It was sudden. It didn't fade into sight slowly, beginning as a small spark of light in the distance; instead, it appeared within one blink and the next.

Except Derivan hadn't blinked.

His awareness had just flickered, and now the exit of the Roads was suddenly somewhere different, and in front of him was a roaring campfire. Below it was actual ground dirt, grass, and stone and surrounding it were...

Monsters, his mind supplied, and he shook his head internally. He didn't want to call them that, even in his mind. Especially not now that he knew the truth.

People.

Every one of them.

It was clear in the way they sat around one another, taking comfort in each others' presence. Derivan saw a spider that he'd once have called a Crystal Mimic, with a body made out of some substance that was just adjacent to mana crystals themselves. She wore a beautiful scarf around her neck, though the edges of it frayed into nothingness, and in that scarf he saw a full life stitched into it the moment she had been born, the moment she'd met her husband. It showed her with their children, teaching them to knit their own scarves from webbing and to paint it with dye.

She sat there now, half-curled up against a solemn figure that stood stone-still near the fire. He was no species that Derivan recognized spiderlike, perhaps, but far more humanoid than the other. Sharp blades emerged from his back, and he stood with an almost royal bearing and yet there was a certain softness in him. One hand was placed on the more spiderlike creature's back, as though in comfort.

That scene was reflected all around the campfire.

A snake Derivan was certain he'd fought before, a venomous species in a dungeon that had simply flung them at him like they were projectiles. He hadn't bothered trying to dodge them. Here, a member of that same species was curled up around another creature's neck, sound asleep. He had no less than a half-dozen little gadgets attached to him, some of them complete, some of them half-complete, and others fading away to the Void.

A makeshift table made of wood sat a few feet away from the campfire, and seated next to it were two dramatically different individuals one of them seemed to be made entirely of moss and fungus, a shifting biomass in a vaguely humanoid shape. It let out a displeased puff of spores as its opponent moved a chess piece on the table in front of them.

The other was...

The other was another person like him. A set of armor, though that armor was different in design.

"Your move," she said. Her voice rang, clear like a bell, with just a hint of smugness in it.

The fungus-person folded its arms and puffed again.

"Yeah, yeah," the armor said, and though there was no change in the glow of her eyes, Derivan could hear her rolling them in the way she spoke. "Again?"

Her opponent stood up, puffed at her a third time, even more crossly, and then waddled away.

Derivan took the opportunity to approach.

She didn't look up from the board, her focus set to setting up the pieces. She did notice, though. "Here for a game?"

"Here to learn about our people," Derivan said quietly, and she finally looked up and then flinched backwards in shock.

It was presumptuous, he supposed. Perhaps he wasn't part of a people at all; perhaps he was just a part of a small batch of creations by some eccentric mage. But there was a look in this other armor's eyes that told him otherwise.

She stared at him for a long moment, and when she finally spoke, her voice was hard. "The Ishimar did not create us to forget, even here," she said. "If you have forgotten, you are a poor Scimitar indeed."

Harsh. But Derivan heard the bitterness in her voice there was a history here he didn't understand, and so he let it go, focusing instead on the content of her words.

"Perhaps I would be, if I was," he said quietly. "But I am a recent creation, in the grand scheme of things. I have not been erased."

All around the campfire, conversation slammed to a stop. Derivan slowly became aware that his voice had carried much further than he'd expected; apparently sound carried much further than was normal in the Void.

"You what?" There was almost a hint of danger in the armor's voice, but she stopped herself before she went too far. She glared around at everyone else around the campfire. "Stop eavesdropping."

No one did.

She sighed. "My name is Jelevar," she said after a minute, her voice short and curt. Her eyes were slightly narrowed. "Explain yourself, if you would."

Derivan did his best.

The murmurs around the campfire were far more animated than before. About half of them were hopeful; they wanted to try to find the exit from the Roads, and to try to escape the Void that way. They'd never been that close to getting out before. Derivan didn't know how to tell them they didn't have the substance for him to even be able to Shift them out.

The other half were horrified to hear about the state of the world. They asked questions of him that were not dissimilar to the ones the voices had asked him in his dream they asked him where their homes were in this new world, if anyone remembered them and their people.

They knew the answers already, of course. They had been forgotten.

But they hoped.

A quarter of them he couldn't even give any answers to. Their homes were on Obreve, but not on the same continent Derivan had been on, as far as he could tell. Once he explained the Outskirts and that they were hemmed in, they returned to the campfire, a certain melancholy hanging around them.

Jelevar had stayed largely silent. She let the others ask their questions, though she clearly had some of her own she just held them back.

And then, as soon as the opportunity showed, she waved the others away, and pulled him to the side.

"You do not remember," she said, searching his eyes. "Not a single thing about our people."

"No," Derivan said. "I did not know I had a people."

Jelevar sighed. It was surprisingly... organic. Derivan thought about how it had taken him weeks to learn to mimic the sound, to understand its purpose.

"We are the Scimitars," she explained. She gestured for him to follow, and he fell into step beside her. "Constructs of the Ishimar Empire. Part of their army, you could say."

Somehow, that explanation pained Derivan.

It wasn't the answer he'd been hoping for.

Jelevar seemed to sense this. She glanced at him, and her voice softened slightly. "That is what we were at first," she said. "We fought back, eventually. They made us too intelligent. They made us our own people. We were able to secure recognition as a true species within their kingdom, worthy of our own individual rights... We should not have had to fight that fight. It cost us dearly."

There was that bitterness in her voice again.

"Most of us did not care to remain," Jelevar continued. "We saw it as pointless. Why would we want to serve as citizens of an empire that did not care to recognize us as our own people? We wanted to strike out on our own, to create our own empire. We... did not."

"Creating an empire is difficult," Derivan said, not without sympathy.

"Quite," Jelevar said. She was using the walk as a way to work off excess energy; her steps were quick and heavy, but her voice softened as she continued. "But we were happy with what we did create. Not an empire, no, but our own little city, built of manaforged metal and exadite ore... You should have seen it, Derivan. It gleamed."

Derivan didn't know how to react to most of this. Part of him had thought he would be relieved to know more about who he could have been, and yet he mostly felt... distant. None of this past really felt like his own.

He understood the pain she spoke with, at least. She had fought for a future for her own people, and lived to see it wiped off the map.

"It sounds like it was beautiful," Derivan said finally.

"It was," Jelevar said. She sighed. "I know you came here because you were led here, and there is something you can learn here, perhaps, that can help you in your quest... and perhaps even to restore us. But if nothing else"

Jelevar stopped and turned to him, showing him a small butterfly pinned to her chest. "An exadite pin," she said. "When we gained our independence, we sought to learn more about the magics that created us, and exadite was one of the hardest ores to smith with. Not all of us dedicated ourselves to it, of course, but we created a tradition out of it... Every five years, we would present our creations to one another, in a ceremony in the center of our city. We called it the day of Freeforged Light.

"If there is nothing else you get from this... Remember that, please. We as a people did not have much that just belonged to us. We did not have much time before we were erased. And if there is a chance now that a small part of us can be remembered..."

Jelevar said nothing further, but her grip on the pin trembled, just slightly. Derivan saw how she felt, in that moment.

Hope that a small piece of them could now be remembered. Anger that this conversation was necessary at all. A flicker of despair, for the part of her that felt like they had fought for nothing.

Derivan stared at the pin, and something resonated within him. It took him a moment to pinpoint, as distant as it was.

The system was responding, the way it had responded when it had first discovered reality shards.

The construct that kept him attached to the system was trembling strangely. It didn't seem like something was wrong instead, it seemed like something within it was struggling to activate. He looked closer, and he saw new gears spinning into existence in the metaphorical clockwork.

And a moment later, a system screen popped up.

[ Potential power source found. Analyzing... ]

Derivan tilted his head slightly, then bowed at Jelevar. "I will remember," he said.

He'd learned a lot about Patch. He understood, to some degree, what the system did. He could see it was trying to turn this into another source of power an advantage it could give to people, perhaps in the hope that this new power would help save them from the decay of the universe.

Derivan didn't care about any of that. What he understood was a smaller, more fundamental piece of what it was and what it needed to be.

In some small way, it would be a way to remember. To give Jelevar and the rest of the Scimitars a legacy.

Derivan seized it with Patch, and with his hand he spun the shape of a glyph.

Change.

[ New system function unlocked: Remembrance.

A Remembrance consolidates your understanding of a lost fragment of history. Effects vary depending on the fragment.

You have gained a new Remembrance: Exadite Pin ]