LIGHTNOVELONLINE 126 – Talisman Mistress Yao Fu Pt. 5
Places whose people were too healthy or prosperous were erased, sabotaged, polluted, or erased with desolation magic altogether, all so they couldn’t possibly threaten the power of those who held it. A mighty conqueror, a man born two millennia late through artifice and strange technology, took back a country that looked very much like Tiengenzhen from a pathetic, tyrannical regime, though he himself was also a tyrant of another sort. Dozens of millions burned in sun-like flame during that conflict.
Then, through the eyes of another, Yao saw Her. She barely recognized Krahe, under all that metal and other strange materials. This version of her seemed to be more artifice than flesh, but the murderous spark behind those eyes was unmistakable. Then, her point-of-view’s eyes met Krahe’s. A flickering deluge of death in moment-long snippets, many directly involving Krahe. So much death. So much killing. The Eye of Tar made her witness and feel what Krahe had felt in the detached manner of memory-storage artifacts. Anger beyond rage. Hatred beyond articulation. And against what? Monoliths of power that may as well be sects, controlled by untouchable, elder-like figures who would just start another if the current one was destroyed. No… Not the monoliths, nor the elders themselves, but the hidden powerhouses who stood behind them. She had sought to tear out the weed by the root.
In this way, Yao instantaneously knew that she and Krahe were alike.
It was a world so unlike Tiengenzhen, yet so similar in many ways. To Yao, it looked like a twisted, surrealist painting of the worst-case-scenario should Great Sects’ constant vying for greater power were to go unchecked for too long.
And then, Krahe died to a simple act of betrayal.
The desolation that followed, wrought by her own contingencies, was a truly marvelous act of revenge, as far as Yao was concerned, but she also saw the futility of it.
Finally, she saw nothing. Not the usual blackness of the Eye when it decided to stop working, but nothingness, the wrong anti-colour of the outer cosmos. Kenoma, as it was known in the continental languages. There, among incomprehensible cosmic vastness, shapeless forms stirred, eons passed in an instant, and myriad worlds flickered in the dark like stars in the sky, infinitesimal bright ones among infinite blackness.
Then, Chernobog’s unimpeachable vastness enveloped the drifting soul. An embrace of blackest blackness, vastest vastness, a being simultaneously unsurpassed, yet of a capricious nature, with no desire to be a conqueror, but instead to create conquerors, with no ideology of his own but the ideology of giving those mortals with the wherewithal the chance to enact their own ideals. Yao knew who it was; she couldn’t conceivably not know, for his handiwork was within her, part of her. In ancient, antediluvian times, before the Wheel, before Igaria, in a time only recorded in legend, Chernobog’s apostles were known as the mightiest among the mighty, yet his cult never claimed dominion, for his Paragons warred among one another.
Yao beheld a few tiny flickers of that time from the perspectives of priests and would-be faithfuls, but her vision ended with the firing of the World Needle, and the realization of why the Eye of Tar had led her here, and why it had led her to Brunhilde Krahe.
The unlight faded, and Yao quickly sealed her eye once more. She doubled over as she instantly went into a meltdown, shivering as her skin cracked and golden light poured out. Meanwhile, Krahe propped herself up with her hand against her thigh, her meltdown being a comparatively mild coughing fit spitting up ash and soot. The smoke-maelstrom dispersed, the burners returning to steady, upward streams of grey.
It felt like she had sand in her eyes, and the rapid buildup of entropy near the end was certainly unexpected, but Krahe managed. After nearly half a minute, Yao finally recovered from what turned out to be her meltdown, the cracks in her skin closing as she raised her gaze to Krahe with an uncharacteristically manic grin plastered across her face.
The Talisman Mistress soon broke out into a stifled laughing fit.
When it waned, she finally said it.
“I get it now. It’s… It’s you. It’s all of you.”
“Please don’t start speaking in tongues.”
“I assure you, I am wholly lucid. I saw… Well, I suspect I saw far more than you would like, but most importantly, I now know for certain that it is you who is able to help me mend myself, and I know why there is no apparent corruption to your soul like there is to mine. Chernobog, he… Took you. Plucked your True Soul from the void and sheltered it within himself, and in the eon which passed between that point and your rebirth, you took from him. I know not how, or why, but perhaps a surpassing will to live and to reach for the power to eradicate those... Those like the creators of the Sect of White Stones, perhaps that led to you usurping an infinitesimal piece of the Black God. Then, upon your rebirth, your Outer Soul, or as you know it, your Astral Body, formed without the irregularities produced when an Outer God touches and alters a living being’s soul. The blessings I gained from communion are still fundamentally part of Chernobog, they will return to him when I die. But you… There was no giving. No communion. The Outer God slumbered, as they are wont to do, and you, perhaps unknowingly, took from him all you could, and in his vastness, he either didn’t notice, didn’t care, or found it amusing.”
Things clicked into place in Krahe’s mind. She tried to query Chernobog’s Mystic Knowledge, expecting nothing, only to receive more accurate memory-flashes of her own rebirth that all but confirmed Yao’s hypothesis. Perhaps most unsettlingly, she felt an unquestionable certainty that Yao was right about one thing: Chernobog had found it terribly amusing when he realized that a mortal soul had usurped a piece of him. She also suddenly became aware that she had not been the first and she would not be the last in the Black God’s eternal span of existence to do so.
“There was no taint to find,” she thought aloud in a low voice, still processing the new context. “I came into this world already changed. Chernobog did no more than facilitate my incarnation.”
“...And upon your death, your next reincarnation will be the same,” Yao finished.
