12 Miles Below

Defusing the situation was simple. All I had to do was tell the pair, “Hecate being Hecate.” and they understood immediately. Wasn’t any follow up questions either, they just nodded and went on with their current to-do list as if nothing had happened. Wrath was many things, but she was still Wrath. She’d already gotten her old reputation within a few days up here.

“I did not detect any falsehood in their answers. They believed you.” Wrath said, frowning as they walked away. “Why did they believe you? I understood miscommunications like this were highly difficult to rectify and are predicted to last weeks, possibly months.”

“Are you calling me a known liar and cheat?” I said in between filled up cheeks of Rokasutō.

“You are.” She said, puzzled.

“Everyone’s a critic.” I muttered, licking the grease off my fingers, before I cut a section of omelet with my chopsticks and chomped down. “All right, Mrs. Wrath. What would have been your oh so great plan to clear up the slate?”

“We would be forced to continue forward, adapting to the situation until a suitable event would allow us to mend the miscommunication. No other way.” She said. “Attempts to deny the situation would only entrench the situation further, you see.”

“No one can say you don't have a 'get-it-done' attitude. But see, that’s where I come in.” I grabbed a drumstick and wiggled it at her, the green joint still easily moving despite having been slow cooked. “I get the impossible done all the time.”

The sauce was the real winner here, Rokasutō itself was somewhat tasteless, but it could easily soak up juices if the exoskeleton was given a few light cracks before cooking. Kidra hired the best, and that included the cooking staff. Way better than eating rations inside a vent while I hid from Father’s training.

These days I had a different kind of training to do, and time was time. I’d been having such a good time talking the scrap with Wrath and I forgot the world was still out to get me. “Ice in a bucket, I’ve got work for that warlock. It’s been so long since I’ve had actual take-home assignments, slipped my mind.”

“Yes, two essays to be completed today, before you see warlock Hexis again.” She said, still looking upset for some reason when I looked back up at her.

I stopped munching. “I’d be impressed at how you knew already, given your own busy schedule here, but I’m guessing Father sent you a message on this?”

“That is correct.” She nodded. “It was a topic of interest to me, and I requested Tenisent to share his findings, as I was unavailable to come with you.” I could tell she was getting more animated about this topic. Things she didn’t know about always seemed to get her curiosity going. “Machine records did not note the warlock guilds as anything dangerous. It seems they were far better at hiding their true capabilities.”

“Not surprised, according to Hexis, if you did have records of them doing more, they’d be dead by now. What did Father send you?”

“I received a full data package of audio and visual content. He was able to hear through the walls and included records of additional paracausal events, occult pulses.”

Hexis’s demonstrations of power.

Those weren’t easy to record on electronics, armor like Journey could only see the visual cues of the occult, while the pulses messed with their heads. Their souls could feel it, but the circuits and brain couldn’t notice anything. Definitely made them nervous, or as nervous as an armor could be.

“Father figured out how to record the occult?”

“No.” Wrath said. “He recorded his personal experiences and observations, and sent those instead.”

“About as close as one can get I suppose. Can you ping my armor and get a second copy of the lecture? Front seats are always better.”

A moment later, she had Journey’s logs added to her own dataset, and Cathida could only pout at all this since I’d given the clear over comms. She was otherwise being used in the sanctum, running a digital emulation of combat within Journey’s systems. Sparring inside the soul fractal within a digital landscape was something that offered a huge amount of quality practice, though it wasn’t completely one to one.

As they’d discovered, a lot of the base rules like gravity could be outright manipulated with enough sheer mental command.

“I’ve been racking my head for a few possible things, and I’ve got to deliver him two essays about it.” Wasn’t looking forward to that. I’d gone to sleep just mulling over what I’d seen. Now I had to write things out.

On the other hand… maybe I might cheat a little on this. “Wrath, how exactly did all the other occultists orders die out?”

Hexis wanted an essay with every rule a budding warlock’s guild should follow on how not to get killed. And I happened to have access to a historian who had every example of what not to do.

Teamwork.

And speaking of teamwork, maybe there were other advantages to having an outright machine to bounce ideas off. Halfway through a list of good facts, I came up with my best idea to date.

“Say, Wrath… how fast can you type?”

The answer was very, very fast. And she could also improvise just as fast.

“Enter.” Hexis said.

Sliding the door, I found he’d changed up his lodgings. Trinkets and different teacups were now placed on the table, where he was clearly still sorting out which of them he wanted to keep. He hadn’t even looked up.

Next to him was a massive stack of papers. Familiar papers, since I’d handed that exact stack to the Winterscar knights and had them deliver it directly to him under lock and key a few hours ago.

“Master.” I said, giving him a polite nod. “I see you’ve visited the clan’s marketplace. Did you get a chance to read the essays?”

"You are fortunate I have an excellent butler to visit the marketplace for me." Hexis said, voice mild. "You wrote twenty-three pages. Twenty-three pages. Almost all of which meandered off topic into random trivia, including a full recipe for cooking insect dishes. Not just once, but seven separate occurrences. If I hadn’t skimmed through your writing, I would have accused you of ignoring your primary task.”

Leave it to Wrath to find some ways to involve food anyhow. This time around though, I felt proud of her work. All stacked up, the papers made a rather impressive pile. He tapped the top of it with a pen. “I admit, I haven’t seen a student go this deep into a practical joke. How much time did you spend on writing all this rubbish? It’s coherent on every page, and interconnected. It couldn’t have been work split across others in your close circle.”

We did end up spending more time than we had any reason to, I’ll be honest. But coming up with random ratshit to include in our masterpiece had been one of the more fun things I’d done. Wrath was a walking encyclopedia, given any topic she could expand it and give a full lecture. Which we did. Every single time we could fit one in.

"Cooking is a highly important topic to the clan culture at large. I had to make sure it was adequately covered," I said, trying to keep a straight face. "Each insect dish was carefully selected for its relevance to the topic at hand. I thought you might appreciate a holistic approach."

Hexis slowly blinked. "I'll specify right now for any future essays or work: Do so without the addition of recipes or other such distractions. Although I suspect you’ll simply find some new way to annoy me regardless. You seem the creative sort."

“In my defense, you did call me insufferable before. What kind of apprentice would I be if I didn’t live up to your expectations?”

The stack of papers was shifted off to the side. Hexis's lips gave a very slight smirk, a little ghost of a smile, although he immediately buried it in a glower and cough. “I did call you insufferable, yes. However, I didn’t expect you to take it as a personal challenge. A commendable attitude in some respects. I must admit, this did bring back… fonder memories of my old days. Consider me surprised."

“Wait, really?”

He nodded, leaning back in his chair. “Believe it or not, I was young once too. During my time as an apprentice, I had my own share of mentors who were... shall we say, irritating to deal with. One above all else. So we decided to teach him a lesson. We embedded an occult plate under his bed, caused his bed, sheets and himself to float in the air at random times during the night. Laxatives in his food. Rearranged his personal affairs across his desk. Rebound his keyboard’s letters, set his writing to insertion instead of standard typing. Switched inks in his pens. One of my old friends even took a screenshot of his private slate, deleted every shortcut, and set the screenshot as his background. Rather inspired, that one. We were quite horrible to him in hindsight, considering his only sin had been generic arrogance and old age, something Warlock councils and higher ranks have in droves.”

I gave Hexis a look over, “You really didn’t strike me as the type to do anything fun, consider me surprised.”

He waved it away. “I enjoyed studying the occult, and that man was actively making a mockery of it. He’s long since retired and died of old age, rest his soul. As for you, I suppose I’ll take the hint as given and be more direct in your training.” His gaze turned back to the stack of paper, “You’ve demonstrated, adequately, that you don’t lack motivation when you have your mind set on something.”

“I’ll assume that means I got a passing grade on these?”

“The goal of the assignment was to force you to pay attention to all details and to critically consider each lesson. Your unconventional approach, while infuriating, did indeed fulfill the task I had envisioned.” His hand came out and grabbed a piece of paper, filled with his own scribbles. On it were a few keypoints - specifically my keypoints.

Don’t know how he managed to catch them all in between the utter scrapshit Wrath and I wrote, but he had. His skimming skills were top tier, or he could actually read faster than I could.

“I never had a background as an engineer.” Hexis said. “A mathematician, yes. Historian, philosophist, researcher - but never an engineer. The way your mind works is quite novel.”

“Was I that wrong about things?”

He tilted his head, as if I’d said something ridiculous. “Of course not, it dovetailed rather neatly with some of my own theories. I’ve never thought of sound in terms of particle displacement or pressure force. Only as waves and trigonometry functions. It’s possible you may derive new equations for the same fractals simply by applying your viewpoint.”

“Derive new equations?”

He nodded, then tapped a finger on one of my points. “You already understood the main lesson yesterday - reality recognizes patterns. All fractals are patterns, however not all patterns are fractals.”

A blank piece of paper was taken out, and he wrote on it four different equations. “Behold the Yez'arah fractal." He said, tapping all four equations. "Each of these represents Yez'arah, which itself is a rather mundane spell that does nothing of true note. Its only function is to alter colors nearby itself. Our perception of color, not the light wavelengths themselves. Trivial, but an apt demonstration of the principle at hand. As you see, there are multiple equations to describe the same pattern. Should you feed a stencil machine with these different equations, each plate will have slightly different properties, despite the pattern being completely identical in every regard. Observe.”

He tapped the sheet of paper before himself. Occult pulsed around his fingers, and I felt like I was outright hallucinating what I saw.

The white piece of paper was now purple. Or rather, a circle around Hexis’s finger was purple, including his own finger. It looked as if I’d stared at a bright yellow dot for too long and then looked anywhere else. The purple was superimposed on reality.

He tapped all four equations, each time his finger and surround area changed to a different color.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“You are not asking about the color, are you?” He smiled.

“No, how did you cast an occult spell without a fractal? Just touching the paper? The equation itself? Yesterday, there were a few dozen ways you could have slipped occult plates in your hands or somewhere to trigger the effects, I'll figure that out soon enough. This? This is just your fingertip on a normal piece of paper, a few math symbols and a clan desk.” My mind was whirring along. Reality recognized patterns. “Does the equation itself count as a pattern?”

“Our mathematical systems are abstractions, a stand in for reality. The occult does not recognize our numbers and letters. You’ve used the forbidden fractal. The answer lies within your grasp. Don't expect me to coddle you like some neophyte. You have a mind. Apply it, apprentice."

The same fractal with the exact same pattern would do different things if it was made with different means. There had to be more to the Occult than just fractals. But he said numbers and letters weren't part of it. So the answer saw somewhere between a full fractal and the equation used for it?

"Allow me to offer you one more hint to think on. Have you ever considered why all occultists inevitably align themselves with the Puritans?”

“Uhh, I didn’t know you were puritans at all. I thought warlocks were just imperials?”

“We work with those gold-crazed idiots more often than I'd like, yes. They are one of the largest religions out there, can't be helped they also represent our traditional customers. But to answer your question more precisely: You'll find that all occultists, once they've reached a certain level of realization within their traditions, are inevitably drawn towards the tenets of the Puritans. Across all time as well. The shamans of old, the mages, the Isodons. Wild-armor linages especially all turn to the same truth. And, paradoxically, even those who follow your own god’s tradition end up Puritans instead of Exodites.”

“Last one’s more of a low hanging bug.” I said. “Talen specifically writes that he’s a human researcher, proving that the three aren’t true gods in any sense.”

Hexis tilted his head at that. “Interestly enough, I hadn’t considered that angle. I doubt I’ll ever give this lecture again, although should that be the case, I’ll be sure to add that addition.” He gave a wave, “But let's put that aside for now. Given that every accomplished occultist eventually aligns with the Puritans, I want you to debate why. Analyze the underlying patterns and principles that might lead to such a convergence.”

All right, he wanted to see me think. Start by listing everything I knew about Puritans. “Puritans believe that humanity and machines used to be the same, and humans remained humans by staying pure, while those who chose the path of darkness became machines.” I said, “You also really don’t like rust, metal, and anything that’s not organic. And wear a lot of pockets and straps. And also really racist to machines, with humans being pure while machines are corrupt. That’s about all I know on your Religion, forgive me master. I am but a humble yokel living in the middle of nowhere.”

“You have the important parts.” Hexis said, “According to Puritans, machines were once humans who chose darkness —embracing the mechanized form— while humanity stayed faithful to their organic roots. Feathers serve as the primary evidence of this belief, given their human appearance. A clear representation of a descent into darkness: Power, and yet insanity. Whether this interpretation is metaphorical or literal is where the denominations within my religion appear. Some puritans believe the words as written - humans grafted themselves with machine parts until they were more machine than human, and forgot their humanity. Others hold to metaphorical readings of these principles. But they all concur on one point: humans are superior to machines in some measure of purity, which means they can be compared in some way. Now then, the question - What do machines and humans have in common?”

“Common sense?” I paused, “Actually, I take that back. Every machine I got to know was a little insane in their own way.”

He raised an eyebrow at that. “Feathers are rather eccentric as I hear, in addition to the murderous psychopathy, yes. Warlocks in general would recommend you not spend time around Feathers. But we are going off topic, explain what you know is common between our kinds.”

That wasn’t the whole question. He’d led by talking about Puritans, right after we nearly touched on the occult’s soul sight. The answer he was looking for had to do with the soul sight.

“Souls. We both have souls.” I said, tapping my chest. “I’ve seen it.”

He smiled again. “Correct. Do you have guesses as to why Puritans assert that humans are superior to machines? This belief is not merely a whim.”

Ah. I could also see where this was going. “We can do more with the occult and the soul sight than machines can. We aren’t limited by anything really.”

He nodded. “There lies the crux of the faith. We saw the truth. Artificial souls are weak, pale imitations. Incapable of surviving the world outside the shelter of a fractal. Unable to see the world outside their home, and unable to touch other fractals unless they are connected to their resting place. Humans are far more versatile. And the universe recognizes us. Exalts us.”

He leaned forward. “This is not some conclusion from one man’s deranged ego. Every single true occultist before us has eventually reached the same conclusion, no matter their tradition or lineage. This is a source of truth. Occultists don’t become Puritans. Puritanism comes from occultists.”

My head was jumping through a small minefield of possible hits, but one kept surfacing again and again.

Concepts. I could see concepts in the soul sight. And Kidra could see things I couldn’t. Concepts of training and combat. Things that didn’t exist in nature. Concepts invented and given life by people. Like numbers and letters.

If humanity hadn’t existed, if the world was simply rocks floating in space with no life - what would concepts even be? Why was willpower, thoughts or emotions what fueled some of these fractals? Why would any of these things be recognized in the first place?

“The occult recognizes our thoughts somehow.” I said. “What we think is seen by the universe. Our thoughts are still part of reality, they exist in some tangible way.”

“If only my other apprentices had arrived to that conclusion at your pace.” He said, “It would have made teaching far more bearable. Now, ask away the follow-up.”

“Can you see concepts of… mathematics?”

He smiled broadly. “As a matter of fact, I can. Every equation I’ve memorized.

I can call them to mind clearly. And they look like patterns.”