Chapter Text
orthodrome: n. great circle;
a circle of which a segment represents the shortest distance between two points on the surface of a sphere,
the center of which is intersected by the plane containing the circle
When you awaken on a morning like any other, you know that something is different.
It tugs you into wakefulness, hovering on the cliff's edge of dream, and your eyes drag themselves open. The canopy above is all you see, and you stare dumbly at it, as if your thoughts might be found there, in its rich purple threads. Sunlight glints somewhere to your right, slipping through the curtains.
Then a chill shudders its way down your spine. Your eyes blink wide, and you sit up violently, throwing off the covers and reaching for the sword leaning against your nightstand as you vault out of bed. Sheathed In Autumn whistles like a cold north wind as it's yanked out of its scabbard, and you scan the room with your back to the wall, heart pounding somewhere in the region of in your throat, until your mind catches up with your racing pulse.
You lower the blade slowly and listen on more than one plane, but you feel and hear nothing out of the ordinary. No voice in your mind, no murmur at the edges of your hearing. No telltale shiver of essence through your spine, no pinprick of the ethereal against your thoughts.
My lady? a clear and easily identifiable voice says in your head. The Steward's concern nudges against the walls of your mind. I felt your distress. Are you alright?
With your eyes still sweeping the room, and your mind still reaching into the ether, you slide the sword back into its scabbard. Yeah, you say, and it isn't quite true. Sometimes you have dreams that are nothing more than scrambled reconstructions of everything you've seen in your strange life, and sometimes contact with the ether feels like a dream. Even after all this time, even with your Awakening quieted for a few years now, you can't always tell the difference. You can't even remember what it is that had you waking with your heart in your throat. I think I was just dreaming.
But as you go through the day, a growing uncertainty gnaws at your bones. Something feels different, in a frustrating way that escapes any tongue you know. It's as if someone had come through in the night and shifted everything around you by a centimeter -- not noticeable to anyone unfamiliar with deep ethereal recesses of your surroundings, but glaring and jarring to a mind attuned with it.
You stare distractedly at blank parchments that are supposed to be a writ of donation and a response to a gala invitation, until you give up on those with a huff and pass them off to your assistant, a studious young orlan woman from Eir Glanfath whom you sometimes suspect is a friendly spy sent by the anamfatha to make sure that Caed Nua is in good hands. You tell her to do her level best to imitate you, and then you seek out other things to occupy your thoughts. But though you smile for Vela and whisk her away on an adventure around the hedge maze, and though the cook corners you in the hearth with demands that you taste test tonight's dinner, your thoughts only grow more unsettled.
When you ask the Steward, she tells you that all is well in the keep itself, but her words trail away, something troubled in the silence.
"I can sense nothing on my own," she says finally. "But... I can feel something through you, like an echo. A... disturbance. It would be undetectable to me if our minds were not attuned. You are not imagining things, my lady. Yours is merely the strongest mind here."
You don't really know how to express your thanks for the reassurance. For the fact that you can turn to someone who knows you and knows your mind, when you aren't sure what is real and what is not. But you don't need to thank her. She's in your head. She already knows.
Something is different, you think, as you leave the main keep and stare out unseeingly at Caed Nua shining in the sunlight. But the question remains: what?
It isn't you, and it isn't the land around the keep. Captain Emery assures you that all is quiet, and when you sit on the topmost stand in the forum and cast your senses out in all directions, your adra pendant in the shape of the Wheel burns against your chest and pushes your mind out far past your soul's usual range. You run up against nothing but travelers creeping along the roads and animals skittering through the underbrush.
It isn't east or west or north or south, which leaves only one real option.
It's down.
The Endless Paths have been quiet for five years now, transformed from a place of death and madness to a place of retreat. It's been many a time that you've sought refuge and solitude within the silent, shadowed levels, with only the great titan and the indistinct whisper of adra veins for company. There's a peace within the earth, that even a bloody history can't blight, a hush and tranquility that can't be found above the surface. Spending time in subterranean serenity keeps you feeling sane and steady, because even without an Awakening tearing at the threads of your mind, sometimes life as a cipher and Watcher and Lady of Caed Nua is all a bit much.
But you don't feel so steady anymore.
You hand Vela over to Captain Emery before you go. The girl immediately takes off down the length of the barracks with your little white wurm clinging haphazardly to her shoulders, while Pumpkin the tabby cat trails after her in a stately manner, to the amusement of the guards. The stern-faced savannah folk woman watches you with narrowed eyes, however, and Emery waits until Vela is out of earshot before asking, "Is everything okay?"
"I don't know yet," you say. "I need to find out. While I do," you nod towards Vela, who is already chattering away to one of her favorite guards, "your job is to keep her safe if something happens. Above all else." It might be nothing, but you don't take chances, not with Vela.
Emery nods. She doesn't blink at the strangeness of the request, and that's why you'd hired her. "I can have a squadron ready in a few minutes, if you need," she offers.
But you shake your head. "I'm going below," you say. "I think something's wrong there." You don't how to explain the gnawing unease reverberating under your skull, so you tilt your head and tap a finger against your temple. The message is clear enough.
Emery's eyes bore into you. "Very well," she says, dubious, but she shrugs. She's used to you, by now. "Call for backup if you need. I'll leave a runner with the Steward today."
You hug Vela and tell her that you're going for one of your usual walks, and then you head for the chapel. You step into its shadow, where the hatch resides, and a shiver rocks your spine as you grab the handle. You stop with your hand on the hatch, looking up at the stone walls of the chapel, worn and ancient in a way that even careful restoration cannot entirely hide.
The chapel had stood for nothing in particular until you'd had it dedicated to Eothas in a fit of righteous spite. That had certainly been one of your less popular decisions, but the look on Edér's face had been worth it, and you'd learned over the years that, new money or not, having wealth and land meant that laws were more like suggestions. After all, few people were willing to argue with the only thaynu in the Dyrwood who'd laid her claim by killing a dragon, a sizable number of monsters, and an erstwhile challenger, who had walked in and brushed off a curse.
No one had made snide remarks about Eothasians in your presence again, after that.
You enter the Endless Paths by means of the master staircase. You intend to narrow down the source of the disturbance to whatever level it resides in and get there as quickly as possible, but as soon as you leave the surface and push your senses down as far as you can, the problem with that becomes immediately apparent.
It's not confined to a single level. It's in all of them.
So you take the levels one by one, lighting each brazier with your torch. You scrape your mind over every inch within, digging into the physical field of essence with a cipher's hand and into the spiritual ether with a Watcher's ear. What you find is agitation, essence afire and the ether roiling in turbulent reaction to... something. You let it roll over you, and your heartbeat quickens. Your breathing wants to hurry along with it, but you master your lungs, maintaining control in the face of whatever has multiple planes of existence in an excited state, and you push farther in.
Your mind treads one path, your feet tread another, one layered over the other, and you aren't fully aware of reaching the fourth level. Your focus is on the ether and on what your mentor had called the quintessential field around you, the low-level hum of essence generated from the core of Eora. You comb through all planes of existence that you can touch, hunting down whatever is hiding within.
It doesn't resist, exactly, but it bends and folds in a way that's meant to conceal the thing coiling within it, blending in with the magnified hum of essence that still lingers under Caed Nua. An ordinary person would be fooled. Even another cipher or Watcher might be fooled. But you haven't spent your entire life attuned to essence fields with increasing precision and skill for nothing. You've spent many hours here in the depths besides, enough to know when something is wrong.
Without meaning to, you find yourself standing on the platform in front of Maros Nua's head.
You come back to yourself, to your other senses, and the adra titan comes into focus. It looks normal, as normal as a gargantuan tribute to the dead can be, adra lined with whirling bronze in the shape of a titanic head jutting out of the ground and gazing sightlessly upward. You blink at it and extend a hand, resting your palm against the adra. The wheel at your neck burns hot, and the fragmented essence within the titan churns unbearably quick, prickling against your skin and your mind.
You want to snatch your hand away, but you keep it pressed against the adra, feeling, listening, assessing the minute fluctuations of energy and comparing them to all you know of essence and souls.
There's something inside the titan.
You don't move your hand. Your lips curl back in challenge, and you gather essence around yourself, pulling it from your pendant, from the titan, from your own soul. Readying yourself, in case you need to strike. Every inch of skin and bone, mind and soul, everything that makes you up, starts to burn as hot as the adra wheel hanging from your neck.
"What are you?" you ask.
Moments creep by, and nothing answers. You grit your teeth, and the fingers pressed against the titan arch, seeking out the thrum of tiny structural weaknesses in the adra. You press your mind against them, diving deeper into the titan's roiling field, and a burning sensation crawls over your skin. But you don't let up.
"Answer me!" you demand.
A moment hangs suspended and rolls forward ponderously like an eon, and then something shifts under your hand.
The air shifts too, the cavern bleeding away into darkness. A void envelops you, but just as quickly, pinpoints of light paint themselves across the black, bursting into being all around you -- the stars and more, great swaths of dusty light that envelop the diamonds of the night. You yank your hand back from the adra statue that you can feel but not see, and you move, your boots scraping against the platform still beneath your feet. The thing in the titan radiates from all directions now, and when you turn and look down, you see it for what it is.
A figure of light stands below at the foot of the platform, white-gold and shining, its radiant aura spilling out into the darkness like a small sun illuminating the night. The figure is shaped like kith, but almost entirely featureless, and you don't know if that's because it burns too brightly to see clearly or because it has no features.
You stare, stunned and speechless, your mind chasing observations and conclusions like a hound on the trail of blood, arriving at the only destination possible.
You don't let go of the vortex of essence you've wrapped around yourself. You draw it in tighter, reflexively, defensively. "You..." But your voice trips in your throat, and all you can do is stare in astonishment. You've seen a lot in your life, and things don't have a habit of surprising you anymore. But this... this is...
There's a god under your keep.
I should have known that you would seek me out, Watcher, Eothas says, in a voice as sonorous as it is soothing. It echoes in your head and in the air around you, unfolding among the stars, emanating from the figure before you and the titan behind. If he has a mouth, you can't see it amidst the light. Your connection to all that surrounds you is stronger than most.
You gape at him a moment longer, and then, with effort, you pull your racing thoughts together. You hold the essence around you in equilibrium, neither letting it grow nor letting it fade. You trust no god, especially not one that's been dead to the world for years, and you don't move from the platform, either. You stand atop the wood that you can feel more than see, at the highest level of the platform, staring down at the glowing figure of Eothas, who stares back calmly.
You don't even know where to start, so you ask the only thing you can: "What the fuck are you doing here?"
The figure doesn't move, but something that you can only just feel pulls back in him. His mind is a great thing that burns with more essence than you've perhaps touched in all your life, but you know where it came from, and it isn't wholly alien. It's present, here in the physical plane, in a way that the gods at Teir Evron had not been, and even as he speaks, you get the sense that there's more you can't see. Something hidden, tucked away beyond the words. It's a sense that you've had many times as a cipher. It's a sense that's kept you alive more times than you can count.
This body, Eothas says, and you are acutely aware of the way that the unseen titan at your back radiates warm energy, was the only thing capable of... housing me, after Evon Dewr, while I gathered myself again.
The hidden thing lurks elsewhere, beyond your reach, and the back of your neck prickles like you have hackles to raise. You are not so reckless as to reach directly into the mind of a god to find out what it is that hides there, but something sparks in you, frustration starting a slow boil. "You know," you say coldly, drawing yourself up, and you don't care that you're throwing accusations a god, that you're holding essence ready and waiting like you're capable of threatening him with it, "everything I've heard about you, I never took you for a liar."
The figure doesn't move. If he has a mouth, you can't see it. But the flickering impression of a smile washes over you, and with it a sense of admiration that rattles you down to your bones. You see much, Eothas says. I did not take you for a worshiper, and yet the chapel above us stands in my honor.
You take a moment to get your wits back. "That was for a friend," you say, and your stomach lurches with the reminder, with frustration, with fury. You know that he's hiding something, that he didn't intend to be found here, and you don't fight your building anger. You're tired of gods, and you advance down the half-seen steps of the platform, violet essence crackling around you. The sound of your boots striking wood echoes through the vision around you, through the stars. "And you owe him. You owe everyone a damn good explanation." You stop at the next level of the platform, where it turns and leads to the ground, and you stand at the edge of the stairs there, glaring down at Eothas. "So start talking."
The figure's head tilts up at you. You feel no anger, no answering frustration. This god is less reactive than some, and somehow that's more irritating. I will give you an explanation, Eothas says. But I believe that it is something you already know, and a sentiment you share.
"What are you talking about?" you ask, frosty.
You have come to this place often, Watcher, Eothas says. Your soul's footprint is vivid. You have spoken to the adra below and to the statue behind you. It resonates even now, and I hear it.
Your lips draw thin as you clench your teeth. "How long have you been down here?"
Long enough, Eothas says. I have not peered into your mind. I have only heard what you've left here for the earth.
A change flickers through the shining figure, and you think you see two gleaming women standing on either side of it now, three figures instead of one -- the Dawnstars. A point between your eyes aches as you try to focus on all of them, and you settle on one woman, then another, then the man, not sure where to look.
You know what I am about to say, the apparition says, their voices overlapping in a mellow harmony. I entered Waidwen with the intention of illuminating the true history of the gods, of Engwith, and throwing light on the lies we gods have perpetuated for millennia, for the Eastern Reach to see. They pause. The two on either side take on a more translucent quality, and when they speak again, Eothas's voice is the loudest. I admit, I overreached. And I see now that success would not have guaranteed anything. Belief creates a foundation upon which a mind's reality is built, and some minds can never let go of that foundation. It would not have achieved what I wished.
As he finishes speaking, you become aware of the fact that you're gaping at him again. You aren't sure what you'd expected, but you realize that you have no idea what kind of being stands below you. The image you'd had, shaped by what you know of the Saint's War and the other gods, crumbles fast, and in its place is a vast uncertainty. "And why would you want that?"
I want mortals to be free of the illusions we've created, the figure says, and the women fade back in for a moment, as your eyes crisscross with the instinct to keep an eye on all of them. It doesn't sound like untruth to your cipher's ear. Free to choose what kind of covenant they want with the gods, free of the falsehoods that keep them dependent and keep the gods arrogant. Kith cannot grow and transform while we stand in your way.
You stand there silently, absorbing it, staring out at the boundless void littered with stars, before returning your attention to Eothas. He's right -- it's not like you disagree with the sentiment. But that hidden thing still lies somewhere out of sight, and there is little you've seen of the gods that has made you think they'd be willing to lower themselves for kith. Not to the degree of exposing every ugly truth about their kind. "I mean, why do you care?"
The luminescent figure stands alone once more. There is regret churning somewhere in his mind, a tidal wave of sorrow that would overwhelm you if you listened too closely, and it doesn't feel insincere. But you watch him suspiciously. I have felt the weight of inaction for a long time now, he says. One must always do as their conscience dictates, even if it means abdicating a position of power. Even if it comes late.
"Okay," you say, and the frustration boiling within you rises up again, "but that's not what I'm asking." You stalk down the steps, pulling the vortex of essence in so tightly that it fits you like a second skin. You hold no illusion that it could protect you. You don't think you need anything to protect you right now, but you like a sense of control. "Why is it important to you?" You're in his face now, and he doesn't move. You think that you see an actual face somewhere in all that light, and it might be unbearably beautiful. "Why are you, out of all of the gods, willing to do that? And don't give me a god's answer."
Eothas isn't any taller than you, and his attention doesn't burn, but it envelops you fully, and you itch with the desire to pull back from the sensation of it, from the way that he doesn't get angry even when you're blatantly squaring up. You remain rooted where you are, waiting.
Then the attention shifts, and the figure moves, no longer so unnaturally still. He turns, out towards the starry void and its dusty light, and you follow a gaze that you can't see.
I am the god of the stars, Eothas says. But in truth, they are beyond even us, save for one. He walks a few steps as if to set out among the stars, and it's only then that you realize that the void reflects back on itself, that doubles of you and him move beneath you, across the void's still-pond surface. They're farther than you can imagine. Sometimes even I have difficulty grasping it. He turns back to you, and somehow, you know that there's a smile on his face. It doesn't overwhelm you this time. Even the gods are small, from a different point of view.
Something swells in your chest. It squeezes tight when you look out at the shimmering void, like homesickness for a place you've never been to. You step forward, past Eothas, your eyes on the stars. Your gaze has been drawn ever downward, towards the planet and its secrets, but it doesn't mean that you haven't looked up sometimes.
It had never occurred to you that a god might, too.
It is... humbling, Eothas says. And I didn't care for that feeling, at first. But I have grown to appreciate it, and to appreciate how it must feel for those smaller than me.
You tear your eyes away from the void and look to the god of light. Your thoughts are racing again, trying to take all of the disparate pieces and impressions of what you know of Eothas and what you've heard, and arrange them into a whole. It doesn't quite align, because his mind is still alien enough that getting a read on him is like trying to hold light in your fingers, but you fold your arms and nod, relaxing your hold on the essence clutched tight.
"Okay," you say again, as the vortex dissipates. "I'm listening. But don't tell me that you're just... re-forming here, or whatever. I know when someone's lying to me, god or not."
And you know that he is listening too, because the hidden thing stirs, like a dark shadow in an ocean. A bit of wariness creeps back into your shoulders and down your spine.
The figure stands luminous against the darkness. It is still alone, but something is different about it now. You see an object curving in its grip, and when you squint and look with more than just your eyes, you think you see a farmer's sickle. You will not like it, he says, the thrum of his voice softer.
Your arms unfold, and your fists clench at your sides, drawing essence towards them on pure instinct. You force them to relax. "Spit it out."
The hidden thing swims upward, towards the surface, and the outline of a sickle is clear. There might be a lantern in his other hand, though it's fainter, less defined. The Saint's War cannot happen again, Eothas -- or Gaun -- says. The Godhammer was more powerful than I expected. Magran's influence, but it was a victory in its own way. Defeating a god showed mortals that it could be done. That such power and ability is within their grasp, and that we are not all-powerful. Still, I cannot allow myself to be stopped this time. As he speaks, his form flickers between the three you've yet seen, a dozen points in your temple aching with it. But when he falls silent for a long moment, Gaun returns. This body will serve that purpose.
You frown. Your eyes slide past him, in the direction of the platform and the adra titan's head, but they've been swallowed by the void. "That thing's half-dead," you say. "It hasn't been connected to the veins for a long time, and half the souls inside got eaten. It would need--"
You stop. Your breath catches in your chest, and a sickly cold floods through you, fear that you shove deep, deep down lest it consume you. It's followed by a roaring heat, frustration boiling over into rage, and you give it free rein, to keep the fear at bay. Your vision narrows, centers on the blazing figure who stands before you, like quarry in your sights.
The figure with the sickle stares at you, unreadable save for the hidden thing now breaching the surface. You hold the knowledge in your mind as if it jumps from his to yours, just how many souls the adra titan would need to maintain the power to move and act in the world.
In that moment, if it were possible for a solitary mortal to kill a god for good, you think that you wouldn't hesitate.
"You rotten fucking bastard," you say, low and shaking. You see a flash of an ocean and an island, too, and a dozen other images and bits of understanding bleed into your mind, but you can't process them past the roaring in your ears. "Fuck you. You're no better than the rest of them." The part of your mind that isn't dedicated to quivering, futile anger is caught up in trying to calculate your options. How quickly could you find a way to destroy the titan? Before Eothas activated it? Probably not, but at least you'd die trying.
You feel a great sadness radiating outward from the light as the figure gazes you. Watcher, Eothas-Gaun-whoever says, plaintive like it's him who will suffer for it, and it's all you can do not to lash out, not to call back the essence and strike with every ounce of power that you have. You know that he wouldn't react if you did, and it only makes you angrier. There is more to it than that.
"More than murdering thousands of people?" You laugh, a bitter smile pulling back the edges of your mouth like a snarl. "Please, enlighten me."
The figure's glow intensifies by a fraction, its conviction glimmering like the thousands of stars around you, and its forms flickering and cycling again, and then Eothas says, simply, I will destroy the Wheel.
"You--" is all you get out, ready to argue and spit out every curse in every tongue you know, before your mind goes blank. Your eyes water in the light's intensity, and you have to drag the ability to speak back up from the dumbfounded depths where it flounders. All that comes out is a word: "What?"
The Dawnstars stand before you again, proud and gleaming. There is a lost city to the south called Ukaizo, where all souls are funneled through the machines of the gods and into the Beyond, they say. I will destroy those machines, and break the thing that gives the gods our power and keeps mortals in thrall. And when my work is done, I will leave this world forever.
You blink at them, watching as the Dawnstars fade back into Eothas, and the words sink in slowly. There are too many moving parts and too many harried thoughts tumbling about in your mind, and you pinch the bridge of your nose between two fingers, suddenly aware of a dull headache creeping up on you in earnest now. It isn't helped by the constant shifting of the figure before you. You look down at your feet, at the nothing you stand on and the stars underneath, at your reflection in the darkness outlined in a god's glow. But it only makes you dizzy, so you force yourself to look up at Eothas.
"Well," you say, and your voice feels far away, "that's one way to get the truth out."
You hold up a warning hand in the next second, lest Eothas try to speak further. To your surprise, he remains silent.
So you take a few more moments to breathe and think. To let your thoughts start arranging themselves in order of urgency. Your mind has always been your greatest weapon, and compartmentalizing comes with the territory, as does a rationality that you're a little bit famous for.
You can't stop a god. You don't like admitting that, even to yourself, but there's no time to wallow in it. You can't stop a god, but you don't disagree with his motivations, even if his execution leaves much to be desired. You can't stop a god, but maybe you can redirect him. If there's any god who'd let himself be redirected, it'd be this one. You see that now and know it for truth, even if you're itching to punch him right in his shiny face.
There is a lot to be furious about, a lot now boiling over and ready to lash out, but you take a breath and bring it under control. You have to think fast and big and smart, not angry, and you let yourself start processing all that you've picked up from Eothas's mind.
You can see the Deadfire and the armillary sphere of the Wheel's physical anchor point spinning away, memory and knowledge that isn't yours, and a dozen other impressions that set your mind to spinning with it. The Wheel does have a physical manifestation, you think, alongside its spiritual ones. It runs through every plane of existence, but something is... wrong with it? No, not wrong, exactly. Warped? Maybe. It isn't clear. "What happens after the Wheel is destroyed?" you ask.
That is for mortals to solve, Eothas says, and again the Dawnstars flicker forth for a moment. Their conviction shines, carried on another overwhelming wave of something like admiration, of belief that kith could do just that. You bat it aside irritably. And either gods and mortals will find a way to move forward together, or they will fail together. But this cycle that we are all caught in will end. The void quakes with the last word, a tremor of promise.
You take to pacing the vast expanse of night all around you, because if you don't give your nervous energy an outlet, you might scream. Your god-lit reflection follows you, and you half-expect your feet to send ripples out into the darkness. They don't. Eothas remains where he is, but the figure tracks you and stays facing you.
"Did it exist before the Engwithans?" you ask finally, looking back at Eothas. It's a question that you've had for a while now, among many others, but now is not the time for the multitude on your tongue. The short answer will suffice. "The Wheel?"
... Yes, Eothas says slowly, and now his curiosity follows you too, palpable waves of it emanating from the figure watching you and from the mind in the titan beyond. Good. You've caught that much, with only a few questions. You just have to hold it. Though in a different form.
You nod once. That's what you'd hoped to hear, and it's the only answer you really need. You don't stop to ask if that different form has something to do with the impression of wrongness you'd picked up from his thoughts. If this works, there will be time for that later.
Instead, your feet take you back and forth, and your fingers begin to twitch with thought. You have nothing to fidget with, except the pendant at your neck, and the wheel rolls underneath your restless hands. You stare out at the stars, your mind speeding at full-tilt, stopping only to connect disparate thoughts into something unified -- Godhammer, resonant frequency, distant memory of an excavation gone explosively wrong, re-amplification mechanisms underlying half your powers and the adra beneath your fingers.
A theory sketches itself out, building upon all you know, all you've learned, all you've seen. It's hasty and broad, but you can worry about the details later. All that matters is that it's plausible, and that you can sway a god with it. No pressure, Watcher.
"So," you say, and you cease pacing and step towards Eothas instead, squaring up in his radiant face again, "you want to destroy the Wheel, and you think martyring yourself to do it will justify the means?"
The figure flutters infinitesimally, like it doesn't know what aspect to settle on. No, Eothas says, and though he doesn't react to your posturing, you can feel something giving, a small flickering of hesitation. With kith, you'd push on it directly using a cipher's touch. With a god, you don't dare. It is not a matter of justification. It is a matter of options. Reaching Ukaizo and breaking the machines there will require considerable power.
"And dragging that big fucking thing across half the planet is your only option?" you demand.
Eothas is silent for a long moment. The flickering grows a shade brighter. It is not as easy as you think for a god to act upon the world, he says. My attempt with Waidwen was... short-sighted. Different measures must be taken.
An opening blossoms before you, lit by that glimmer of hesitation, because a tremor like an aftershock follows Waidwen's name. You can't look closely enough to get a handle on it, but its waves break upon the shore of your mind a lot like guilt does. You hope that's what it is, because you're about to bank on it. "And that's it, isn't it?" you say. "You'd trust us to find our way after, but not to see the deed done."
The star-strewn void is still, and so is Eothas. You don't breathe for a moment, as still as stone yourself, letting the moment hang suspended before you dig in again.
"Magran didn't make the Godhammer. She helped," you say, and you let your anger boil up again.
You need it. You need your conviction to shine like his does, and you need him to listen, and it's an ugly and sudden revelation, to be cognizant of the fact that you're relying on a god again. That you're relying on faith. Your anger steams out of you, and you hurl the full force of it at him. You pull the lid off of your fear long enough to weave it in for good measure.
"Kith made it," you snarl. "Kith made you. But you're very quick to give up on us after all. I don't think you've been humbled near enough. I think you're full of shit." You suck in a breath. "You care about us? You want us to find our own way? Then act like it."
You stop, your heart hammering and your ears roaring with it. But Eothas is silent for a while longer, and as your heartbeat finds a steadier rhythm, you can feel the great sea of his mind churning with restlessness. With thought. You have a sudden, morbid desire to delve deep into it like you can kith minds, just to see what would happen.
The figure continues to shift in your perception, but the outlines of the women and the sickle and the lantern aren't as defined as before, coming in erratically and then fizzling out. And then finally, Eothas seems to settle. He no longer flickers or shines quite so brightly, hardly more than the glow of the dusty strips of light painted throughout the stars, though you still can't make out a clear face.
I will see the Wheel destroyed, Eothas says, and your stomach flip-flops, but if I were to seek another option, and then your chest squeezes vice-tight and giddy, I would need a means of operating in this world.
Your breathing is still coming in a little short, and your head is pounding dully now, but you draw yourself up. "I'll do it." Which is just about the most recklessly dumb thing you've ever offered to do, and that's saying a lot, but you don't stop to think about it. You can have a crisis later.
The shining figure stares at you, faceless and motionless. There is no surprise in the depths of his mind. But there is a deep well of something churning within him, something that you can only scrape the surface of -- revelation, maybe. Wonder. You would break the Wheel, Watcher?
You swallow and shrug. "Why not?" you say, and you push your mind up against his as far as you dare, to show him that you're serious. You pull back at once, like snatching a hand from hot metal. "I don't... disagree with you. And I wouldn't mind kneecapping those bastards."
The mind all around you churns and ebbs, and you don't hear Waidwen's name, but you feel it, feel the weight behind it, a dozen other little impressions slipping through cracks left by aftershocks. Eothas had loved him, you think, and you don't know why you're so surprised. Eothas had loved him and gotten him killed, and that, you know, is the true peril of the god before you.
It would be dangerous, Eothas says. One kith is easily stopped.
"Then we'll have to be quiet about it, won't we?" you say, and you step around the name hovering unspoken. You aren't that cruel, even if he deserves it. "That was your problem before. Made a lot of noise for all the wrong ears. The Leaden Key's been so successful because Thaos knew to work in shadows." You grimace at the reminder of Thaos. A god's flunky skulking about in the dark, just like him. Wonderful. "And if my way doesn't work, then by all means," you wave a hand vaguely in the direction of the titan, "take that thing for a walk."
Eothas considers it. Nothing moves -- not you, not him, not the patterns of stars or the reflections beneath. And then the figure dips its head to you. What would you propose?
You are honestly so surprised to have gotten this far that it takes you a few seconds to remember the thread of a theory you'd been pulling together. You take a deep breath. "The Wheel... it's just energy, right? A system of channeling energy between kith and the gods?"
That is a simple way of describing it, Eothas says, but yes.
You exercise a tremendous amount of restraint to refrain from snapping at him about what simplicity must look like to a god. "Then it has what we need," you say. "You've got all the power you could ask for already cycling though it. You don't need extra souls or the essence of a god when you've got the thing that feeds the gods turning away under you."
The words spill out of your mouth with a touch more excitement than you expect. It's only a problem of engineering essence to achieve a desired effect beyond one's ordinary capabilities, and you've been doing that since you could talk.
"A small reaction-- relatively small, that is, it'd probably be something as big as the Godhammer, or bigger." You pause, your mind already turning towards the issue of how to craft such a thing, and you tug it back on course. That's another problem for later, and you'll need everything that Eothas can tell you about the Wheel, besides. "But if we can engineer a relatively small disturbance in its flow, something that upsets the essence it's conducting, and do it in such a way that it feeds back into the reaction input... the worse one gets, the worse the other gets, continuously destabilizing the machine you're trying to break, until..."
Until it becomes too much, Eothas says.
"Exactly," you say breathlessly, and for a moment, you forget that you're talking to a god. Or lecturing, more like. "It'll overload itself with its own weight, if we give it the right push. It's just a feedback loop." You stop, caution crashing back into you as you remember where you are and what you're discussing. The infinite void of god-lit night glitters around you. "Does that sound... at all plausible?"
You try not to fidget while you wait for an answer. One of your hands automatically returns to the pendant at your neck, absently turning the wheel.
It... might be, Eothas says slowly, wonderingly, and you're really going to have to take a seat soon, because your legs have acquired an ooze-like quality. And you would do this?
"We would do this. Together," you say, and something shivers in the air around you, in the mind of the god who listens to you so intently that you feel the weight of his attention bearing down on you like the breaking light of dawn. The shiver is not unlike the aftershocks that seem to follow a certain name. "Not like Waidwen," you add. "But building something of that magnitude is going to need a... divine touch." A Godhammer pointed at the Wheel this time. There is precedent, and feedback is an easy enough thing to manipulate, in theory. Especially if all you've got to do is wipe a few machines off the face of Eora.
You can feel your words sinking into Eothas. Can feel his mind aligning with yours and seeing the possibilities therein, seeing what you know, what you're capable of, and you let him look. But he says, Ukaizo is protected, and you are abruptly reminded of Iovara for reasons you don't want to dwell on. He isn't arguing with you. He's seeing how you answer.
You spread your hands in half a shrug. "So was this place," you say, and you don't need to summon up any anger to fuel your conviction. You know that he can see it. "And the keep above us. So was Durgan's Battery and Sun in Shadow, and every other damned place I've fought my way through. I always find a way."
Help shouldn't be difficult to secure, either. You are the Roadwarden of Caed Nua, and you already have a god's ear. You know a few people you can ask, your mentor among them, who aren't going to be too happy with the revelation of all that the gods have been hiding, even though the thought of contacting them makes your stomach turn. You're a little less certain about the friends you'd picked up since that fateful night with the caravan, but you're sure that at least some of them will have your back, if nothing else. And you can lie to whomever else you need to, in order to get where you need to go.
The weight of the god of light's attention doesn't make your legs any less shaky, but you hold yourself steady, and let him feel everything roiling in your thoughts, and wait for him to answer.
Something stirs in the mind before you, behind you, all around you. Something like that admiration again, but much more raw and searing. You resist the urge to turn away from it.
Very well, Eothas says. We will try your way.
You sit down hard, then, somehow stumbling your way back to the bottom step of the platform and not quite collapsing onto it. You look up at him, hardly daring to believe it. "Seriously?"
The blazing figure stands as placidly as ever, following your movements, but you get a sense of... hesitance. Like it'd be angled away sheepishly if it wasn't an illusion. Perhaps you are right, he says, and I have not yet learned humility. But I am listening. I hear you, Watcher of Caed Nua. Eothas steps forward and kneels before you, at eye level. You have put your faith in me, and so I will put mine in you. In kith.
Your face grows hot. "Okay," you say, your voice teetering on the edge of inaudible. "Okay." The logistics spin in your head, too many steps to deal with all at once. You're going to need some paper to start writing it all down -- that's step one. Belatedly, you remember to say, "Thank you," and it's even sincere, if strangled. You really don't want to hear more of his own blinding sincerity, though, so you make your voice work. "So... first thing, we need to lay low, yeah? Can you... keep hiding here?" You wave a hand over your shoulder, at the titan. "I have an idea."
Another idea? Eothas asks, but he nods, and it takes you a few moments to grasp that he's making a joke.
"Get used to it," you say, a little faintly. You clear your throat. "I'm going to need what you know, but I can't keep coming back here to talk to you every time I have a question. I think I could make something to solve that." Your hand plays with the pendant at your neck, your thoughts drawn backwards, to the adra dragon. She'd been able to cast her mind far and wide, and you have no doubt that Eothas is capable of the same thing, but the fact remains that you aren't. The dragon had also possessed an amulet capable of transferring her soul to another vessel, and replicating the mechanisms behind that according to slightly different specifications will be easy enough. "Something that could hold enough of your essence to give me a channel back to you. And it'd be a window for you, I suppose. Where I go, you go."
You push yourself to your feet, willing your unsteady legs to keep you upright, and the figure rises too, stepping back. You find yourself face-to-face with him again, both of your reflections gleaming motionless in the darkness below.
"I need to work on that," you say. "And think." And hold your daughter, and talk to your Steward, and gather your wits somewhere far above the roiling essence around you, until your head stops spinning. You make yourself stare into the empty face of light, and you can't help the anxiety winding through your stomach. You trust this god a little more than the others, upon consideration, and your cipher's sense is rarely wrong, but he is still a god. "Can I trust you to stay put? Or are you going to go on a rampage as soon as my back is turned?"
You have my word, Watcher, Eothas says, and the sea that is his mind moves, but the thoughts that push against yours are only the very tips of waves breaking against a shore. They carry that blinding sincerity with them, which offers itself to your mind like a handshake. We do this together.
You stare at him a moment longer and nod.
The void evaporates, the darkness and the stars and the radiant light of the being before you all peeling away, and you find yourself back in the fourth level of the Endless Paths. You look at the dank stone walls lit by brazier light, by the eerie green glow of the titan, and your legs want to give out again, but you take a breath and turn. The looming titan's head now pulses with brilliance no longer hidden, its eyes burning and its brow ablaze with a jagged crown of sun-and-stars. You stare up at it, rigid, and take one step back from the base of the platform, then another.
You've hardly taken three steps towards the corridor that leads to the third level when a thought careens into you, arresting your footsteps. "Wait!" you say, and you spin on your heels. "Do you remember someone named Woden Teylecg?"
The light emanating from the titan pulses, bright enough that this section of the level needs no firelight. The field of essence and the ether stir restlessly as Eothas's mind reaches out through them to brush up against yours. I do, he says, and his voice in your mind doesn't ring quite like it did in the illusion, but it does nothing to help your aching head. I know of his brother too. He is bright in your mind.
"Yeah, well, you owe him," you say again. "And you're going to tell him everything he wants to know." It's more combative than you mean to sound, but you keep waiting for something to go wrong. For Eothas to drop the pretense. For your efforts to amount to nothing before you've even begun.
Of course, Eothas says, and there is nothing disingenuous in him that you can sense. But much of him lies beyond you still, and you aren't in the habit of trusting a good thing until it's proven itself. It is the least I can do.
You stand there, attuning yourself to the way his thoughts ebb and flow within the titan and spill out into the essence around you, as much as you dare. Listening for anything that speaks otherwise, anything to let you know that you need to run as soon as your feet hit the surface. You hear nothing, feel nothing. "Good," you say, and you turn to go before you can give into your reckless impulse to dig deep into the mind of a god.
You stay on your feet until you make it out if the Paths, clambering out of the hatch and immediately slithering to the ground in the light of day. You're dimly aware of several of your guards clustering around you, their cries of "my lady!" and "ma'am!" overlapping with the worried voice in your head. You hadn't even realized that your mind had been absent of the Steward's presence for a while until she floods through it, rooting around underneath your aching skull and looking you over as only she can.
My lady, are you alright? she demands, more frantic than you've ever heard her. You weren't answering me. I was about to send a squadron after you.
"I'm fine," you say, for her benefit and for the guards. "I'm fine. Everything's fine."
You have half a mind to tell them to start an evacuation, and you keep waiting for the ground to tremble beneath your feet, for the chapel to crumble in the grip of the adra fingers holding it close. But nothing happens. Nothing stirs. Only your hands shake, violent and uncontrollable, as the guards pull you to your feet. You clutch your hands together tightly, trying to still them, and take several deep breaths.
"It's fine," you say, exhaling slowly. "It's been handled." Your eyes find Emery's lieutenant, the elven woman who stands nearest to you, armed to the teeth. "Tell the captain I want to talk to her. There's someone I need to find, and I need feelers put out. I'll be in the main keep."
Your guards are used to your eccentricities, and they start to relax, but the lieutenant gives you a side-eye even as she nods. "Sure you're alright, ma'am?"
You nod. You're really not, and the world around you has an unreal edge, like you've been underground for years instead of hours. You're unsteady on your feet like you're punch-drunk, your stomach turning over on itself and your temples throbbing, and you know, distantly, that you're only just now feeling the full force of the fear you'd suppressed below. But you shoo your guards away and head for the main keep, letting the Steward's presence envelop your mind like a shield.
Talking is difficult, so you open the floodgates of your thoughts and let her peruse as she wills. Her speechlessness rebounds onto you, and neither of you speak, until you're within the great hall, until you collapse into the throne over which she presides. Its marble arms can't hold you, but her thoughts do, curling around yours tightly. You lean into them gratefully, allowing your mind to spill over in any which direction it pleases, focused on nothing at all. You sit with your elbows on your knees and your hands covering your mouth, breathing through your trembling fingers.
Your bravery knows no bounds, the Steward says, achingly gentle, speaking only into your mind. She already knows -- this can't get out, except to those you invite into the fold.
You aren't sure if you just made a deal with a god or a devil, and you aren't sure there's a difference. But it doesn't feel brave. Just desperate.
You take another deep breath. We'll see, you say, and then you start painstakingly pulling your thoughts into order, mapping out and prioritizing and planning. I need you to send a messenger to Dyrford.