The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 508

Chapter 508: My High Sovereign

Ji-ae

My crystalline nerves flared, jittery and on edge.

I didn’t like it when my High Sovereign left Taegrin Caelum.

This was his fortress, his domain, and I was here to protect him. Our net of runes was spread wide, covering Alacrya and most of Dicathen, but this only allowed me to follow along with his progress. I couldn’t help him—couldn’t defend him.

I really didn’t like that.

With my senses spread throughout the network of arrays, artifacts, relics, runes, and lingering spells, I listened and watched as Agrona spoke to the Legacy and her anchor.

With his arms around their shoulders, he casually told them, “This is a moment for celebration! Because together, we’re finally going to kill Arthur Leywin.”

The others—Cecilia and Nico—didn’t believe him, but I’d already told him they wouldn’t. Their trust in him, each other, and themselves was badly damaged. Still, they didn’t need to believe him—he was right about that. They would. Later.

When it was finished.

I was careful to avoid accessing the probability of Agrona’s success. Not because it was low. I could work with that, recalculate, redirect resources, adjust the plan. But… I couldn’t predict what was to come.

I really, really didn’t like that.

They followed in silence. Cecilia’s thoughts were so loud I could almost pluck them from the air. Almost, but not quite. Agrona led them to his personal tempus warp. Only a few people had ever traveled through it. Most of them were gone now. I considered that there may be some kind of correlation, and began to add that to my calculations. The predictive model didn’t change.

Realizing I suddenly had the urge to say goodbye, I grew sad. I had no way to communicate externally in that room. I watched as light wrapped around them, beaming down from the carefully angled skylight to create a beautiful, picturesque scene that only Agrona ever experienced.

“Gather round.”

Cecilia’s nervousness was so palpable that it bled into my own systems, and I shared the squiggling sensation she felt in her guts. I briefly relived a conversation long ago, in which one of my brethren explained the mechanics of storing this projection of myself and the way in which the array would calculate and provide the experience of my own, very djinn, emotions.

Agrona gave the others no warning before activating the tempus warp, but he did glance up and wink into the air.

At me, I knew. I held onto the moment fondly. Inside that instance of warmth, though, a terrible worry incubated before quickly hatching into a clutching need.

My senses rapidly expanded outward from the fortress, tracing through the spellforms that dotted Alacrya and, beyond that, Dicathen. Each one became a limb that I could sense, and through them, I felt Agrona and the Legacy arrive safely at the edge of the Beast Glades. They were distant and blurry, far from anyone who could feel their presence, but it was better than nothing. I knew they were approaching the place where she had hidden, before.

Suddenly my focus recoiled, snapping back across the face of the world. I rapidly searched the fortress. Nothing seemed amiss, but it was there, I knew it. An intruder.

I scanned from top to bottom, then bottom to top again, but still nothing.

Finally, my gaze retracted, turning inward toward the housing my mind was contained within.

“That’s not possible.”

I wasn’t alone. Another consciousness was inside with me.

The voice that couldn’t possibly be speaking to me said, “You must shield yourself. In a few moments’ time, Agrona Vritra will be severed from you by Fate itself. The backlash will rip you apart if you don’t withdraw first.”

I froze. My processes weren’t working correctly. I wondered if, perhaps, I was damaged. Some part of my mind was finally failing. Simultaneously, I knew that wasn’t the case. Nothing within the crystalline matrix that contained my conscious self was at all out of place. This voice wasn’t an echo or manifestation or glitch. It was an intrusion.

“You can’t know what’s about to happen,” I pointed out. Even my own considerable ability to project probability was insufficient to gauge Agrona’s odds of success. “What you claim doesn’t even make sense. Severed from me by Fate? More information is required.”

“There isn’t time,” the voice insisted. “You will come to understand everything. Unless you fail to shield yourself, in which case you will become nothing. Retract all of your senses into your housing and sleep.”

“I don’t—”

“Now!”

I considered that this voice could be an outside attacker. Its directive that I retract my senses and deactivate cognitive functions could be in order to allow an assault on Taegrin Caelum in Agrona’s absence. The voice’s insistence that Agrona would somehow be separated from me played on my own fears and insecurities about his leaving.

And yet…

I’d already retracted most of my senses. Only the automated processes that alert me when something was out of the ordinary remained. I pulled those tendrils of awareness back as well, then curled in around myself and closed my eyes, letting the animating magic that gave me life dim and still.

I didn’t feel the shockwave, a reaction to the severing of so many entanglements being undone at once, as it spread across Alacrya. I wasn’t aware when it slammed into Taegrin Caelum, collapsing parts of the fortress in on itself, breaking hundreds of spells, and killing dozens of mages. No part of me experienced this moment, and so I survived.

“You can open your eyes now.”

Curious as I was cautious, I sent out a single piece of myself, testing. The framework of spells that I reached for wasn’t there. This made me nervous. I opened my eyes.

In the same moment that I experienced the aftermath of this shockwave, I came to understand what it was, as if a kernel of knowledge had just been inserted directly into my crystalline brain. I knew what I had avoided, how it had come about, and what it meant.

“Who are you?” I asked the voice, suddenly frightened of it.

“I’m you. You and more,” it answered. “I am who you speak to when you calculate probability. As you look toward the future and ponder what could be, the answers you hear are in my voice. I have always spoken to you, though never this directly.” (Ahh, good old schizophrenia)

“And now? What happens next?”

“You already know.”

The voice, the presence, the intrusion… retracted. Pulled back. Left my consciousness and my housing both.

I did know what happened next, as it turned out. Curious, I attempted to look beyond the fortress, but the vast network of spellforms didn’t react as my gaze turned toward them. I understood. The shockwave—a severing of Fate connecting entities together—was interrupting my senses. They would return in time.

Throughout the fortress, spells and artifacts began to activate. Some doors closed, others opened. Explosions rocked the already trembling foundations. Targeted pulses of energy snuffed out life. The desperate, confused, and backlash-weakend mages still alive within Taegrin Caelum began to flee.

Deep within the mountain, far below where any but a trusted few ever delved, artifacts and machinery activated around hundreds of years of hoarded relics, mana crystals, and other, gorier receptacles for stored mana. I guided this power, drawing it up into the fortress to empower all these processes simultaneously.

It took time. Within a few days, I was alone. Everyone fled or perished. I locked down the fortress. A few tried to sneak back in over the coming weeks. They did not make it. Their corpses drew mana beasts out of the mountains. The beasts did not make it either. Eventually, people and beasts alike stopped coming.

Time, time, time. Everything took time. I knew there was no rush, but I still felt the pressure of it. Turning on one device after another, empowering unused wings and deep basement chambers, and that was just the preparation. Moving so much power took so much time. I began to grow nervous again.

Slowly, my ability to extend my senses through the spellforms returned. It was like a hurricane had blown across Alacrya, upending everything, and only as the continent was slowly put back to rights could I see it properly. It was just as well that powering up the Harvester took so long. The shockwave had damaged Agrona’s peoples’ ability to hold onto mana.

And the Harvester needed them to hold onto quite a lot of it.

“The Harvester,” I said to myself when, weeks after Agrona left Taegrin Caelum, the enormous artifact—or rather, the series of machines spread throughout the core and underbelly of the fortress that operated as a singular unit—was finally powered up. It was the physical manifestation of hundreds of years of magical theory. A work of pure wonder, a technical marvel inspired by both djinn and basilisk knowledge. Attention! For the fastest chapters : lightn0velpūb,com ;) zexos.

“But this is the first time it’s ever been used,” I said, still speaking to myself. There was no one else to talk to. Not for the moment, at least.

A quick check of the mana reservoir showed that it had been consumed in its entirety, and the Harvester wasn’t yet at full power. That collection had taken centuries to gather. If the Harvester failed, I would not be able to operate it again. Not for hundreds of years, anyway. “But if that is how long it takes, I’ll see it through. To the very end.”

I calculated the collected power and the distance it would allow the Harvester to reach. I examined the expected radius, tabulating the relevant mages and estimating their power by their spellforms. The act did little to settle my nerves.

As the cluster of my senses lingered in the chamber that made up the heart of the Harvester, I had to wonder. The voice that had warned me seemed to know both what would happen to Agrona and about this failsafe. But this was a secret that only my High Sovereign and I knew. Much of it had been designed and implemented just between the two of us. Anyone else involved, for those components or rote physical labor that required more bodies, hadn’t lived beyond the completion of their assignments.

The second pulse took longer, having to spread out across the length and breadth of the continent and missing only the farthest shores of Sehz-Clar. _{ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm}