Mage Tank

Chapter 235: Soul Carving

I felt cold water on my face and realized that Nuralie had thrown something at me. I opened my eyes and glanced at her, then down at the rag she’d tossed. It smelled like spice and peppermint. I took a deep breath of the aroma, feeling my mind clear and realizing I’d almost fallen for a trap.

The fragment was chagrined, and we laughed it off. Then I continued to strip it of its identity, gnashing it between my teeth.

My mind wheeled through a hundred ways I could manipulate my party members, then dug into how I could manipulate everyone else. This was an easier trap to avoid, since I already thought about that kind of thing a lot and chose to ignore it. Unless it was useful, of course. It should have tried a thought I hadn’t already had before.

Maybe it couldn’t.

I realized there was a back and forth going on. The fragment was pulling at threads that connected to something that was real about me. It wasn’t manufacturing feelings, it was enhancing my more toxic social habits and the thrill of gaining power. My impulse was to reject it, but ignoring these things only made them worse. I’d known that for a long time. It was something I’d worked on extensively.

I focused on acceptance and Xim’s gentle voice led me to a memory. When I first encountered the Eye, it had stripped me bare and looked at everything I’d ever done. Despite seeing all my flaws in a single glance, the Eye accepted me for what I was. A flawed person, working to become better.

I was seen before I learned how to See. A separate point of view revealed my triumphs and imperfections before I learned to Reveal my own perspective to others. The final step of the Eye was to Embrace, and that thought sent me tumbling into myself.

The fragment was doing something similar to the Eye, but it was corrupt, only focused on the impulses. There was no rhyme or reason to its desires, other than to satisfy its need for chaos. It saw something primal in my heart, showed it to me, and tried to force me to embrace it. I allowed it to grasp my arms and fold them around those impulses, but I reached out to hold the rest of me alongside it.

This wasn’t about resistance or rejection. Grit and raw willpower wouldn’t save me. I confronted the fragment’s naive view of emotion and Revealed to it the complexity of being. I was selfish and I was giving. I was angry and I was loving. I was manipulative and I was trusting.

The fragment had no context for this. It was an alien thing, incapable of comprehending desires outside of its own. But it wasn’t really desire that drove it. That was the wrong word. It was a mandate, an irresistible directive, inescapable programming emergent from its nature. My disgust held it at bay, and I put that aside so that it understood I was not here for violence. I was here to heal myself and my allies. The fragment, for all that it amplified my flaws, could help. I accepted it as I was accepted, and I brought it into my embrace along with everything else.

The flood became a gentle stream as I began to take only what was needed.

“Two minutes,” Xim whispered.

I’d forgotten we were on a clock, and was surprised by how little time had passed. I turned my Sight inward, hunting for the distortions in my soul. I didn’t even have to guide the fragment’s power. It worked alongside me, and I saw everything that had been twisted.

It was Hysteria. The realization hit me like a drug being filtered from my blood. Hysteria had done this to us. Of course they had! It was so obvious, and somehow we’d been incapable of even considering it. They’d even told us they were implanting us with commands while they’d rattled on about assassinations or something. I was momentarily stunned by how profoundly my mind had been duped, but let the feeling dissolve. There would be time to process that later.

Grotto helped lead me to the areas of my soul that we’d identified. Fortunately, none had been missed. Thirty-six separate places where my experiences had been reweighted to create changes to my personality. The forced blind spots were the most gruesome to look at, like traumatic memories that my mind held at bay to keep me sane. Conclusions that would destroy my sense of self, held back by a powerful block of repression.

With the locations mapped, I used Reveal to connect with Varrin. The big guy’s soul shuddered as he accepted me into himself. My emotions were a tranquil ocean, and I’d just dropped him into the deepest trench. He recovered quickly, able to lock onto the pieces of my perception that were relevant.

Then he started slicing.

The scalpel cut through my soul like a shard of ice. Bright and stinging pain gave way to numbness. I focused on my breathing as I watched small splotches of soul corrode and disappear. Dread welled up as I actively felt pieces of my identity vanish. It was thick and palpable, but I didn’t allow it to break my peace with the fragment. I was aware of my health plummeting, though I ignored the numbers. I was alive and I would live.

Varrin made the cuts in under thirty seconds. The poison finished its work moments after. My mood turned and plummeted, and my emotional stability was threatened by a spiral of despair and confusion.

I leaned into my connection with the others, using them to stabilize.

“One minute.”

Ostensibly, we were done, but I needed to check Varrin’s work. I needed to see if the poison was successful. I crawled through the wounds in my soul, searching for the foreign influence that had held me in a strangled knot.

Seconds ticked past as I studied the holes in my identity. At first, everything seemed to be stable, as much as it could be given the destructive nature of our task.

Then I saw the faintest thread, a familiar scintilla of essence winding itself back into the emptiness in my soul. My pulse quickened and I felt Grotto throttle my adrenaline as I followed the energy back to its source. I flung my Sight back to the channel of power I was converting from the Hysteria fragment, but I lost the trail.

I frantically scanned the energy coming through. I could feel my soul being stitched back together, a hack job being automatically triggered. It tugged at my past, reaching out to draw in new threads from different experiences. It was bypassing our work and doing more damage in an effort to reintegrate the changes we’d just unwound.

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I realized the influence wasn’t coming from the stream of power trickling into my soul, not the one I was harvesting deliberately. It was infiltrating, sneaking through my defenses. I looked at the fragment proper and saw a web of over a hundred reaching filaments strung out between everyone in the party.

The fragment was maintaining the fuckery. Now it was repairing Varrin’s work, and I was already struggling to remember that it was the culprit.

Varrin shared my realization as I had it, instantly understanding what had to be done. The problem was that the fragment was still inside Etja’s soul. Varrin could carve through her to reach it, but I was afraid of what would happen to the mage.

Grotto psychically coordinated my thoughts with Etja and Varrin. I split my mind, handling the conversation on one side while clamping down onto the fragment with the other.

“Thirty seconds.”

Etja didn’t hesitate. She ejected the fragment from her soul, and it immediately tried to flee.

Hysteria was overwhelmed by the need to escape, to rejoin their greater self. The fragment flexed its power and pushed against the constraints of Xim’s dreamscape. It contested her control, but she wasn’t alone. Her revelation allowed us to work in tandem, and we exercised our authority over the space to keep the fragment from breaking loose now that it was outside of Etja’s containment.

We couldn’t bind it, but we could hold it steady. Varrin dashed forward with a scalpel, the other two held in his offhand. The tiny blades dealt very little damage, but they could slice through Deific resistance; Nuralie’s toxin would utterly annihilate whatever they grazed.

Varrin’s arm blurred as he struck the fragment a hundred times and then a hundred times more. He flicked the first scalpel from his hand, and then the second, replacing each with impossible dexterity, his attacks never faltering. Flecks of the tiny droplet of avatar soul disappeared, corroded and decaying into oblivion. For a horrible second, I thought that it wouldn’t be enough.

As Varrin neared the end of the final scalpel’s charges, the fragment of Hysteria’s soul unraveled. I felt a final, miserable call as the avatar’s essence reached out to me, begging for my acceptance. It wanted to shelter inside of me, use my soul to stitch its wounds.

I understood it. I could not bring myself to hate the fragment for its nature, but it was a corruption on the world. I turned away from it and Xim swept up the fleck of soul with the final vestiges of the dreamscape’s power. She muttered a soft prayer, and held out a hand to the fragment.

I felt a river of divinity raging around us, something that was always there, but just out of sight. A realm that was intentionally kept separate, a universe of concepts driven to order without will.

It was then that I truly understood one of the Dread Star’s primary functions. It was a god of the gaps, and it was this gap that the avatars by their very nature violated.

Xim gave the fragment a final, gentle push, sending it into the stream of divinity. Its identity dissolved into the waters of the divine, and it found the rest that it had never known to seek.

The dreamscape faded. The ritual came to an end. I passed the fuck out.

*****

When I awoke, my thoughts were raw and oppressive. I felt a weight across my emotions, pressing me into the ground with an irresistible force. I was a speck facing down the magnitude of our actions, and I was struck by the thought of the sun swallowing me whole, ignorant that I’d ever existed in the first place.

“Hey,” said Xim.

I snapped out of my brief moment of existential dread and glanced over at the cleric. She sat on an exceptionally fluffy pillow beside me, appraising me. I was back in our living space, inside one of our sparsely furnished bedrooms, laying on a pile of thick blankets. There were a host of notifications waiting for my review, but I blinked them away for now.

“Hey,” I said. I couldn’t muster the energy to say anything else. Xim nodded, the fatigue in her expression a reflection of my own. The edges of her mouth pulled into a frown. For a moment I thought she might cry.

“Good news is I think it worked,” she said.

“What’s the bad news?” I asked, terrified of her response. I’d never seen her so shaken. “Is Etja okay?”

“She’s fine,” said Xim, then she shook her head. “She wasn’t hurt, I mean. She’s upset, embarrassed that the fragment was keeping our heads screwed up, not that any of us blame her. It slipped through her immunity, so she was as blind to it as the rest of us.” She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “We’re all okay. The bad news is that, since it worked, everyone’s now dealing with our souls recovering from being absolutely, royally, just totally messed up.”

She took a breath and glanced at the ceiling, then turned away. I was pretty sure she was crying.

“Is that why I’m regretting being alive right now?” I asked.

“Hopefully,” she said, turning back and brushing the moisture from her cheek. “If you regretted it for some other reason, you should let us know. This is… it’s not real.” Her shoulders slumped. “It’s real, but it’s not real. We just need some time to get back to normal.”

“Well, this sucks,” I said. “But objectively it’s pretty great.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Doesn’t feel great. But yeah.”

We sat in silence for a minute.

“So what’s the prescription while we wait for our souls to heal?” I asked.

She shrugged. “We need to be around some people we care about. Family, friends, to keep us stable. Remind us that it’ll be alright.”

I considered that. “Guess we’ve got a head start,” I said.

Xim gave me a sad smile and she piled onto me with a mighty hug. We laid there together for a while. Eventually she sighed into my chest and stood. She held out a hand and I took it, allowing her to pull me to my feet. She locked me into another embrace.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she said.

“I’m glad you’re okay too.”

“I don’t normally get scared,” she whispered. “Realizing how much we’d been changed… it’s terrifying. I really hate it.”

I reached up and brushed the hair along the back of her head. “It’s all right. We’re safe now. Safe as we can be with our lifestyles.”

She chuckled, gave me a final back cracking squeeze, then let me go. “I want to go home and see my parents,” she said. “Varrin’s going to head to Ravvenblaq manor. Nuralie and Etja are going to Eschengal to hang out with the Zenithars. Come with me back to the tribe?”

“I’d like that,” I said. “Just let me pack a bag real quick.” I glanced around. “Okay, done.”

Xim didn’t quite roll her eyes, but she smiled. “Got your whole life everywhere you go,” she said.

“Like any good vagrant worth their salt.”

“Then let us vagrant the hells out of here.”

“Pretty sure that’s not a verb,” I said.

“Language is alive. I’ll just decree it to be a verb.”

“Fair enough. However, since I’m the president of Closetland, I could pass a law decreeing that it’s not a verb.”

“Good thing we’re heading to the Third Layer,” Xim said, “where I can have the tribe agree that it is a verb and literally alter reality so that it is.”

“Is that how that works? Seems a bit abstract.”

“I’m intentionally mystifying it so that you don’t know my limits.”

“Very well. I bow to your verb-defining wisdom, great sage.”

We stepped out of the bedroom to join with the others, prepared to divide and recover.