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axis of revolution: n. a line around which something revolves
You come to yourself all at once, when your greater whole demands to be acknowledged. You are aware of her presence in a dizzying, instantaneous way, aware that you are awake, aware of where and what you are. A fragment of the you whose voice trembles down paths of adra, whose presence and words halt even the god of light's relentless footsteps. A fragment in a sea of lost souls, and yet still you shine brighter than any of them.
The other you falls away as Eothas presses on, but your awareness doesn't fade. You wait for fear to rise up, for fury or sorrow to make themselves known, things that a you who is whole would feel unthinking and automatic, but they do not come. You observe the other souls around you, lost in fear of their own, and you are only... curious.
You are the oldest part, you think absently. The bedrock. The rest of you, she who pursues, is what was painstakingly built upon it, every ounce of care and compassion fought hard and long for. You are the one who sharpened the reach of your power on the whetstone of other minds, and now a mind like nothing you've ever touched forms the sea in which you drift.
How tempting.
It isn't sight, exactly. You don't really have eyes at the moment. If pressed, you couldn't say what colors you behold within the adra titan, or what lost souls or gods made manifest look like. But you remember, of course. The souls of the lost are always tinged violet and wispy, and the brief glimpse of Eothas that you'd gotten before he'd dropped Caed Nua on your head had been... bright. White-gold, shining out from green and bronze.
The mind of a god is vast and alien, so you start with that: imposing order by remembering color and luminosity. You turn your attention to the sea of energy around you, and where you are met with the roiling fright of the lost, you see only cold, dead purple. A map unfolds in your thoughts with it, charting out spaces where souls gather and spaces that are empty, and through it all, a greater essence threads between. That, you see as burning white strands, and a pattern soon makes itself known, a path to pursue.
You follow it.
As you do, slivers of thought begin to meld into your mind, new and unfiltered and random. You know that the sun lies at a distance of millions, and you know that a woman in a dark corner of Old Vailia prays for you to bring mercy to a child withering away. You know that the Watcher is a gleaming knot of focus and curiosity and power that you need, and you know that Berath's caution and unfaltering commitment to status quo will give you just enough time and space to act.
Then all at once, a sense of observance bears down on you, the energy around you warping and bending with it -- a gaze more radiant than the strands you use like rungs of a ladder to climb higher or go deeper, whichever more aptly describes the delve. You aren't sure.
Stop, a voice says, and even though you don't have ears here, you know that it is deep and fundamental and far too kind for such a jackass.
The thoughts that are not yours pull away, and if you had eyes here, you might blink to reorient yourself. You don't really know where you are, and you're not sure that where is an applicable concept here, but you know that there is far less cold purple and far more bright white. You know that it's hotter, as much as the concept of heat is possible to experience here, that the essence vibrates faster and faster. You don't think there is sound here, either, but it isn't so hard to bring it to bear after color, to make the essence tremble with waves and something a little closer to the physical reality of light and noise that you know best.
"Hmm," you say. "No."
You press forward, as relentless as the god of light is across the ocean floor, and this time, the energy around you resists, like water thickening to mud. This time, you use your will to drag another shard of thought forth, ripping it out of the whole, and where its edges are cut free, mild annoyance bleeds forth. You know that Ukaizo still lies far, that you will be slowed by everything that Ondra throws at you with the ocean's hand.
The hole that you'd cut open in the essence closes forcibly, mud hardening to brick. You will only hurt yourself, the voice says.
"And get burned to a crisp, no doubt," you agree, regarding the walls now blocking your path forward, up, down, whichever way you're heading that's bringing you closer and closer to the heart of this creature. "I think I could get pretty far, though. And then..."
You remember lessons taught under thick canopies, on the canvas of unsuspecting minds laid bare. How easy it is to bend mortal minds to one's will, and how difficult it is to even scrape through the outer edges of a god's. But you hadn't learned for nothing, and your will becomes as sharp as a blade, threads of power becoming thin sheets of resonance that fold into a knife and then plunge. The walls crack under the assault, and the shock of it travels through everything that you are. It hurts. You don't care.
"... You'd be down one Watcher soul," you say. You see other thoughts through the cracks, and you are hungry enough to know them that the heat beginning to sizzle throughout your essence pales in comparison. "Tough luck."
But something pulses through the energy around you, hard enough to rattle your concentration. In the moment you take to reorient once more, the moment before you make another attempt to dive further in, the leaking annoyance mellows out. Why don't I answer your questions instead? Eothas says. I believe I owe you that much.
You pause. You let your suspicion blaze loud and clear. "Why don't you answer hers?"
Not while I am pressed for time, Eothas says, and the other gods may yet listen in.
"Do you really think you're being subtle?" you ask incredulously. "A blind dog could see that you're up to something."
The essence grows warm with something that doesn't burn. You think it's amusement, and you note that the heat is not so immediate anymore, though it radiates beyond the hole you'd carved. I need only their hesitation, Eothas says. They -- we -- are forever slow to act.
Well... you'd be hard pressed to argue with anything that sticks it to the gods. The cracks you'd opened up in the essence that forms Eothas's mind have not yet closed, and you look upon them without eyes, at the searing thoughts that swirl beyond. The thoughts of a god. You'd burn away into non-existence before you reached their core, and while that would no doubt cause some inconvenience for Eothas and give you some spiteful satisfaction, it would ultimately amount to nothing.
Your shrug -- at least, you intend to, and form follows sound and color, as you impose the structure of reality on even more of the energy around you. It's not quite like a body, but you have shoulders to roll and legs to fold underneath yourself, like you're settling in for a chat. You have a head that you tilt in the general direction of Eothas's heart, though you still aren't sure if direction is the right way to think about it. "Sure," you say, and you make sure to layer your voice with acid. "It's not like I have anywhere to go or anyone to tell, right?"
The warmth of the energy abates somewhat, subdued. I am sorry, Watcher, Eothas says, and he actually means it, the bastard. The chill of sorrow runs through his thoughts like a substratum, and he can most assuredly go fuck himself for that. I have caused great harm to you and countless others. What follows will give it meaning, but that does not make it any less of a loss.
You use your newfound sense of form to give him the finger.
Amusement settles again, warm instead of hot. If you didn't know better, you'd call it appreciative. However... Eothas continues, and his attention encircles you, piercing, searching, as curious as you are, and as unbothered by your disrespect as you are by your less-than-ideal surroundings, you appear to be... unmoved.
You manage a laugh, and it sends a ripple into the essence around you, a distorted flare of jagged mirth. The souls of the lost maintain a ceaseless rumble of confusion and fear somewhere beyond, muffled now, and you are only aware of it when reminded, in the manner of a mild inconvenience soon forgotten when occupied with other thoughts. "She's the nice one," you say. "You pulled me out. I guess there was more of me to go around." More years spent tearing through minds as carelessly as you'd torn through his, and with much more efficacy, than years spent holding back.
And yet you spent the first few decades of your life deeply unhappy with what you were made to be, Eothas says, as casually as if he hadn't just overheard your thoughts and proceeded to clock you to the marrow.
"Excuse me?" you ask, bristling. He's right, but he has no business saying it. "Am I the one answering questions?"
You think he smiles, even though there's no face to facilitate it. At least, that's how your mind interprets the impression of flickering energy and unexpected fondness that comes through the cracks, applying familiar understanding to things unfamiliar. But you really don't know what to do with... that, and you fold newfound arms of nothing but essence. I suppose not, Eothas says. What would you like to know?
He means that too, and you pause again. He's serious. "Oh," you say, and you don't even know where to start. "Well..."
"If you'd asked," you say, much later, "I would've helped you."
You don't know how long it's been since the first adra vein, but it doesn't really matter. The second adra vein that the other you had used to arrest Eothas's momentum now lies behind, and with it lies pieces of you gifted back to the greater whole. You don't feel lesser for it, maintaining your sense of form and sound and color, but you know that she will sorely need the shield of your hard-bitten edges. Enough had echoed back from the familiar resonance of your soul for you to know that the Deadfire is in turmoil, that she doesn't know how to fix it.
You want to tell her not to bother. There are greater things ahead, the only things on your mind since you'd asked your first question. You must have asked a hundred more in the interim, and Eothas had answered them patiently, delighting when you had already known more than he expected, when you had sought only confirmation.
It had, begrudgingly, endeared him to you. Maybe. Just a bit.
You are already helping me, Eothas says. You will return to the others with the information I gave you, and it will no doubt stay their hands long enough.
He never makes a distinction between you and her. You suppose there isn't one, even if it feels that way. It's yet another errand for your poor other half, however, and though your situation is comparatively comfortable here, you feel a surge of irritation on her behalf. "And yet you think you're so much better than them, don't you?" you say, ice cold. But Eothas knows better than to answer, and with nothing off of which to volley, your annoyance fizzles out as quickly as it had surfaced. "I mean," you say, chewing on the words for a moment, "you could've asked before... resorting to this. I would've helped."
The Wheel is a solvable problem. You'd be more than happy to tear it apart and put it back together, and even now, thinking about it invigorates you in a way that few things do. There is no greater challenge.
But silence answers you, and the essence around you turns over on itself restlessly. You have no qualms about striking at nerves intentionally, particularly not his, but it seems you'd hit one without meaning to. It makes you curious enough that you consider probing past the cracks that you'd carved out, that are not yet healed over. But Eothas has not shielded them from you, and has been entirely forthcoming besides, and you hold back.
I asked a mortal for help once before, Eothas says finally, as flat as the rumbling of a god's essence can be. I will not do so again.
Ah. A hungrier curiosity rears its head, but you don't even need to probe to know that there are wounds beyond the ones you'd caused, ones that are open still, that bleed at the slightest touch.
It would not have been safe for you, Eothas continues. Or me.
"And this is?" you ask disbelievingly, and you make sure that he can see Caed Nua's stones cracking and falling in your mind's eye.
Your mind remains intact, Eothas says, and a sudden, terrible understanding congeals within you, information that you pick up like instinct. For the most part. Even now you've changed, or regressed, as you see it.
It pisses you off, suddenly, that he thinks he holds any responsibility for your willingness to carve bloody holes into his mind, for the way in which the wailing of the lost slides off of you like water. The person who holds that dubious honor is not here. "So you drove him mad and let him die for it, then?" you say, barbed and very much on purpose.
A shudder pulses through the essence around you, like the rolling of a storm through a ship's hull. For a moment, you feel the deep well of sorrow within him turn turbulent and angry, an animal curling defensively around an injury, but the sensation fades quick like a shadow passing over the sun. Yes, Eothas says, low. I betrayed him, in the end.
You want to jab further and deeper and make him hurt, but you find that the anger requisite for it is not so close to the surface, even though there is enough perception and impression seeping through the cracks for you to form a clear picture of what he did to Waidwen. "Easier to hurt someone if you don't know them, huh?" you ask instead, and it doesn't come out as cold as you want it to. It's just... tired.
It's not like you have any high ground to stand on, here.
The essence ripples with something nameless and raw and quiet. Very much so, Eothas says. I do not know those whose souls power this body. But I know you, and I find myself looking forward to Magran's Teeth more than Ukaizo. Though not to parting from your company.
It takes you a moment to process the words, and you have to remember what sound is, before you can keep producing it. You don't really need to, but it helps to keep reality structured around you, and you are in need of that right about now. "Oh," you say, and you reflect on it for a moment, your thoughts unusually disordered. You think that he might also be trying to distract you from the topic at hand, and you decide to allow it. He's felt enough of your bite for now. "Well... as much as I hate to say it, the feeling might be mutual."
You don't know how or when or why, but the thing is, you can't stop thinking about the Wheel. The Wheel, and what comes after, and Eora in all her unfettered glory, and all that you have yet to glimpse in a world not shrouded in lies and obfuscating mist by errant gods. Anyone who hands that to you like so is... tolerable. Maybe even pleasantly so. Even if he is an asshole.
Good, Eothas says, warm like sunlight.
You don't ask him to find some way to stay. You learned young that people don't, and a few exceptions to the rule have never been enough to prove it false.
Instead, you start speculating aloud -- how to get a planet-wide phenomenon back up and running when it's been mangled into a different shape and cannibalized, something that even a god is deeply unsure of -- and he listens.
Eothas tarries in Ashen Maw longer than you would safely advise, from a purely logistical point of view. Magran's ire is already stirring, but he waits for you -- the other you -- and you know that she nears when a change surges through the energy around you, carried on a wave of consternation.
To your surprise, something materializes before you, an almost-physical form to match yours. A figure of light, roughly the shape and size of a man and no bigger than you, but entirely featureless. A small part of a larger whole, like you, but a tool wielded by the greater hand that envelops everything around you. It faces you, and though you aren't really sitting down in the first place, you make sure that you are on your feet, face to face with it, as it steps forward.
I did not wish to interfere with your life more than I already have, Eothas says, and you don't think you've heard him hesitant yet. Whatever else he is, he is sure of himself. But hesitance is as near as you can name it. But there is information that I have not yet shared, that I believe you would wish to know. Something I have seen in your soul. A... knot.
"A knot," you repeat, the only thing you can say in the face of the concern that seeps from him. What would make him concerned?
A powerful deception, Eothas says. Woven by a cipher like you. One that has shadowed your life unknowingly. I have looked past it, and I am familiar enough with its nature to know that finding the truth within it would complicate your path forward. It would complicate what you think you know of your life, no matter what. But I believe it would only bring you happiness in the end. I can... unravel this knot, if you wish.
Something that isn't quite fear begins to churn within you. You already know which cipher, because it couldn't be anyone else, and that thing twists deep within you, angry and aching, as your thoughts instantly spin themselves into a hundred unpleasant possibilities. You don't want to deal with yet another hurt, but you are a creature who has to know.
You want to tell him to leave it alone. You don't.
You have not stopped trying to hold me accountable for how my actions have affected others, Eothas continues, and I have not listened. But I have heard you. He pauses, and something like apology bleeds through the essence around you. This truth is not mine to give. It is yours to take. If you ask, I will keep the memory of this conversation with me, so that it doesn't trouble you.
Like he's aware that you won't stop hungering to know unless the unsolved question is vanished from your thoughts entirely. The figure's arm extends, its palm held up and open, and you stare at it, taking in shape and color even though you have no eyes.
The old instinct to run, to move and never stop, tugs at you insistently. The one time, the one time you had pushed it down and tried to hold on to something, it had blown up in your face, and the god who'd blown it up, who now wants to run off and die on you, has the nerve to talk to you about happiness. You don't even know what he sees when he looks at your soul, but its import, its weight drags at you like the pull of Eora.
The figure of light waits patiently, faceless, hand outstretched.
Damn him.
Your own soul's essence reaches forward, manifesting into another hand, which locks over his like a vice, like his is the only thing that will keep you from tipping over a precipice. "I want to see."
He tugs your thoughts into place where you hadn't even known they were in disarray. The memories unravel and settle into crooks and cracks in your mind, illuminating dark corners and burning away the now paper-thin constructs of lies. Truth returns like the worst nostalgia you've ever known, and your eyes would sting if you had any. If you had a throat here, it would be closing, choking on rage and betrayal and hurt and disbelief.
For so long, you thought you'd been abandoned. Unwanted.
But you'd been loved. Wanted. And stolen away from that.
A pulse of sorrow travels from Eothas's hand to yours. You don't want his pity, but you can't bring yourself to tell him that. You're too tired, all of a sudden, and his hand is too warm and comforting. You let yourself cling to him instead, because you need something to steady you when half your foundations have crumbled beneath you as of late. Most of it is his fault, and you'll remember to be angry with him later, but right now, it just feels good to hold a hand.
"I'm gonna kill her," you mutter.
From what I have seen of your memories, Eothas says, you are perhaps the only person who could. It sounds like he doesn't actually believe you, and you hate that he's right. If you want to pursue the problem of the Wheel, you will need your erstwhile mentor. But you appreciate the comment nonetheless. Damn right you could kill her, if you wanted to.
You try to take it in, to absorb such a new dimension of self into the person who grew up in its absence. Your head is full of two pasts, one true and one false, twin images of people superimposed over each other, and you with no clear idea of who they are anymore. Maybe it will be easier to handle as one person, and not as disparate parts. You hope so. You've had enough of revelations for a good long while.
Still, you appreciate that the door is open now, even if it hurts. "Thank you," you say, and your essence rattles like a weary sigh.
The light dips its facsimile of a head low, and something brushes against your hand, energy meeting energy. You find yourself wondering if there is some merit to what he'd said after all: that in coming into contact with him in this manner, your perspective has changed and expanded, into turning Wheels, and far-off futures brimming with possibility, and damn the cost and whoever's presence you have to stomach to get there. And perhaps his, too, has narrowed in turn, into small physical gestures, and little apologies that are not enough. It is the least I can offer.
You gaze at the light and form before you, and that thing deep within you twists again, a thing made more of anger than ache. "I don't suppose I could convince you to find some way to stick around," you say, even though you already know what the answer will be.
He hesitates. You take it for the victory it is. No, he says, low and steady. I'm afraid that is out of the question.
And you want to hate him so very much for it all, then. For Caed Nua, for making you care that soon he'll be gone, for showing you that there was never any reason to fear that others would leave, for making the long road ahead the only right thing to do. You uncurl your ghostly fingers and pull your ephemeral hand away, biting down hard on everything you could say. "Right," you say anyway. "Don't know why I should expect any different. That's what you do, isn't it? Abandon people?"
The hand of light falls, and the form flickers. Something stirs beyond the cracks of thought, but for the first time, you don't want to look.
"Don't think this makes up for anything," you say, because once you start, it's hard to stop. "Hel, the Wheel doesn't even make up for all of the shit you and your kind have pulled. But you go ahead and run off. I'm sure that's worth two thousand years of responsibility."
The longer you look upon it, the more you know what it is your not-eyes see, there in the light. The sliver between all other natures, the shard that grew past what he was meant for, past aspect and ideal and origin. Not unlike you had. And if it can keep growing, if you can, you will find it easier to believe that cycles can be broken and remade into something better.
But maybe all the gods know is how to bend to their natures, in the end, and the destructive Engwithan nature that supersedes even what they were meant for will always win out.
"Just don't expect any forgiveness from me," you add, because you have your own hard and unyielding nature as well, and it's all that this piece of you really is, at its core. And maybe it's all that Engwith has left you with too, in the end.
You expect a litany of excuses, because he's very good at those, but the figure of light only gazes facelessly at you before it dissipates back into its greater whole with a whisper of fizzling energy. I don't, is all that Eothas says, soft like he understands, and it makes you want to yell at him some more and demand that he give you something to work with. In another situation, you might keep pestering him until he did. You might be amused at the fact that you'd finally gotten him to shut up.
As it is, you return to your own greater whole at last, and all you bring into the fold is an undefinable, aching sense of something inescapable.
Later, in Ukaizo, when you are whole and changed both, you ask only that he light up the minds of mortals in anticipation of what is to come. You don't ask for anything else. There's little point to it, and this time, you stay your tongue and keep your disappointment locked down tight.
You are hardly able to comprehend how it's possible to feel so much of gain and loss, affection and anger, as Eothas pulls away from you, as the adra beneath your feet and the air itself trembles with his movements, the titan shifts its attention back to the Wheel. But you hate the depth of grief and frustration that tears at you as the luminous adra flickers, as the machine begins to crumple, as cracks spiderweb up the arms of the titan. An arm shatters, and a cry drills into your ears, and you want so badly to hate him for it all.
But as the core implodes and the armillary sphere shudders to a halt, as the essence roiling in the Wheel and in the titan dissipates in a great wave that you feel more than see, spreading outward to kith the world over, a piece of essence lances towards where you and your companions stand. It streaks at you like you a star across the night sky, like the pull of Eora is within you instead, and you understand as soon as it floods into the adra pendant that hangs from your neck.
You are only dimly aware of Edér steadying you on one side and Xoti steadying you on the other. The adra cracks under the onslaught of unstable essence, diminished in the extreme but still powerful enough to burn against your mind and very nearly shatter the pendant. You wrap your fingers around it, just able hold it together, because there's a soul smoldering within it now, a soul your cipher's hands can touch and your Watcher's hands can stabilize.
The pendant holds a god's essence within its grasp, because you'd only just shaped it to temper the runaway effects of the divine on you, because Eothas is a part of you now, too, and has been ever since you took that piece of yourself back.
The moments that it takes to brace the energy underneath your fingers, to piece and weave it together into something that can survive as an intact soul, stretch out like an eon, and you aren't even aware of being afraid until at last it settles into an uneasy half-slumber, stable for now.
You'll need to make adjustments to the pendant as soon as possible, to render it capable of housing such a soul on its own, or else find some other vessel for him. Until then, you'll have to keep holding the essence steady by means of your powers, to preserve the flicker of something like life within. Because the Shattered God is within you and within a thing made by your hands, no longer quite a god but something else, something new. A soul pulsing in the adra, alive only because of its tether to you. The roles reversed, a flow reversed, and maybe, in the same way, you are no longer quite mortal, either.
As the last echoes of the Wheel's destruction fade, as the luminous adra across the valley settles into a dull flickering, a voice in the back of your mind resonates, soft and fragmented and exhausted and so very warm. Are you satisfied, Watcher?
Despite everything, you cradle the pendant in your hands as the presence within holds on to you, and you smile, a tired, private, giddy thing. It's a start.