Ar'Kendrithyst

Chapter 172, 1/2

Chapter 172, 1/2

Erick asked, “We’ll talk here?”

They were still in the First Wizard’s Library, which was almost fully trapped with paintbombs. The couches were rigged to pop and the few comfortable chairs had holes in the ceiling above, ready to open up and spill paint over whoever was bold enough to sit down.

Rozeta said, “No.”

Erick blinked. Suddenly, Rozeta, Ophiel, and Erick were in a different place, but thankfully it wasn’t a clouded land. They had only moved a floor up and over a ways, to a lounge with a sign hanging out front naming this place as ‘Koyabez’s Rest’. Pastries and drinks rested in baskets behind counters, waiting to be served to customers who would sit at nice little tables, while they sat around on nice large couches and drank various drinks from large cups.

It was a nice little room, without any traps at all.

Rozeta went behind the counter and grabbed herself a small basket to fill with an assortment of muffins. She came back around, moving to a table as she said, “Feel free to pick something. You don’t have to actually [Duplicate] what you grab since I’ll restore this place after you leave, but it’s a nice sentiment anyway.” She sat down and crossed her legs as she bit into a muffin.

… Erick had been a little bit worried about everything, but Rozeta was Rozeta; she treated fairly and with an eye toward growth. Erick didn’t have any true worries about her.

He had worries about himself.

Ah.

Yeah.

He was just hesitant about this Wizard thing.

Erick asked, “Which one of these drinks are like coffee? I feel I need some coffee.”

“The green pot on the third heater.” Rozeta gestured to a counter with heated containers full of liquid, and then she gestured again to some small jars on that same counter. “It used to be served with some sweet jelly stirrers, but sugar is a close enough approximation and that’s in the small— Yeah. You got it.”

Erick grabbed himself a large mug of green ‘tea’ and a small jar of sugar. Ophiel grabbed him a few sugar cookies from the baskets behind the counter, then flew over to the table and set them down.

Erick sat down across from Rozeta, asking, “How much of this stuff is exactly how it used to be?”

Rozeta nodded, then began, “That depends on your philosophy; your adherence to actuality, or your adherence to emotionalism.” She held up a muffin flat on her hand. It had a bite out of it. “In actuality, zero percent of what you see is how it used to be. This muffin is in zero ways exactly as it would have been back at the Conclave’s Wizards’ Tower.” She held the muffin and tilted it, looking at the bite she had taken from it, saying, “But emotionally… The taste and the feeling of consumption and the wholeness a person gets from the muffin is about 95% how it used to be.” She touched the bitten part, saying, “A part of it will always be missing. That’s translation for you.” She set down the muffin on her small plate and gestured at the jar of sugar Erick had brought over. “And some things don’t translate at all. We tried to get slime-sugar to take off; but it didn’t keep like it did back in the Old Cosmology. Bacteria and such— More than that, though, was that slime-sugar usually ended up spawning colonies of slimes in people’s houses, and half the time [Cleanse] targeted it, erasing it from existence.” She shrugged. “Cactus sugar can be dried out into solid white grains, though, and those keep indefinitely. It’s just one of the many, many ways that the Grand Translation forced us to change everything.”

Erick had sipped his tea and decided it needed more sugar. He had added some, and now it tasted passable; sort of like sweet grass water, or something like that. He sipped his sweet tea, thinking about slimes in the liquid, then asked, “What about physically? The shape of everything, I mean.”

“Shapewise we managed 99% or 100%, depending on who you ask,” Rozeta said. “If you ask a real curmudgeon who actually knows what they’re talking about? They’d say we managed to hit 25%, but there will always be dissenters.”

Erick refilled his tea and took another sip. He felt a nervous energy begin to settle into his chest, and then settle out into a normal wakefulness. Ophiels sat down around the room, watching with intent, but not saying a word. Erick had almost moved onto the next, most important subject, but he had noticed that he was apparently nervous enough to leak over into Ophiel. With a concentrated inward pull, Erick managed to calm himself down a bit more. Ophiel chirped a bit, discarding his hard edges and returning to his playful self; he was still on high alert, though, but at least it wasn’t directed at Rozeta.

Rozeta had a bite of her muffin. She noticed Ophiel, for sure, but she hadn’t let his edges bother her.

Erick had another sip of tea.

Then he dove right in, “Why are you sure I am a Wizard?”

Rozeta paused. Then she set down her muffin, and said, “I imagined we would begin the other way, but this is a good start, too, for reasons that will rapidly become apparent once explained.

“You exude Chaos, Erick, and just now you altered how I saw this conversation going. That Chaos is a big clue to you being a Wizard, but some people have a fair amount of natural Chaos without being Wizards. This is a degree of deniability you have benefited from for a while, mostly since you didn’t truly know about this aspect of yourself, so you never even thought to deny this small truth. For anyone looking closely, all they saw was you being you, and missing certain proper ways an actual Wizard would deny being a Wizard.

“You’ve never even directly wielded this Chaos to your benefit. It was just a thing that happened.

“Your Chaos energy is merely a clue, though.

“Another clue is that the mana loves you. But the mana loves everyone who tries to listen to it and is actually capable of understanding it, so this isn’t that special either. Some Wizards can’t hear the mana. Some barely passable magelings can hear the mana perfectly. In the end, this is just another clue.

“And so, we come to the largest of clues, which is not actually proof of Wizardry: your creation of Particle Magic. But then again, the Script is designed to be filled with all possible iterations of magic, to categorize and constrain as well as uplift everyone in ways you probably don’t even realize it does. One of the major ways it does this is that it allows people to make new magic, and then it gives that magic to everyone, as long as that magic is sufficiently different from what already exists and it’s not too powerful.” Rozeta said, “Though, in the end, this is just another clue toward your Wizardry.

“You’ve had it almost right all along.

“A Wizard is known by three things. The first two are the creation of a lot of extra mana that is perfectly aligned with themselves, and the possession of a core which does a lot of things with that mana. That’s complicated, though. The third thing a Wizard possesses is a Truth that lets them override all other influences.” Rozeta said, “This Truth enables a Wizard to overwrite their Reality onto reality.

“Before the Script, in the Old Cosmology, all Archmages would have had two of the three, with Truths and cores being rather universal.

“But they wouldn’t have the third thing. They wouldn’t create extra mana.” Rozeta looked at Erick, with eyes as white as the rest of her wrought-human body, saying, “You know that the Script is a manaminer. You know the basic functionality of a manaminer. The primary function, from which all others derive.”

She stopped talking.

Erick realized that Rozeta was letting him acclimate.

It wasn’t going very well.

His tongue felt heavy and his throat didn’t feel like vibrating to make noise, to counter her argument that he made extra mana, for how could he do that? He could barely breathe. Sweat poured out of him. Rozeta was perfectly calm and relaxed, nonjudgmental and patient. She picked up her muffin and took a bite.

Eventually, Erick sipped his tea again, and his mouth seemed to start working.

Erick said, “The Script… The manaminer takes the mana generation of every single living thing and has individual mana production manifest inside the Core, under control of the Script, instead of pouring out of the true origin point… Out of the living things that make that mana.”

“90% correct. A more true thing to say is that mana is generated by every living thing and also by everything that causes living things to do something, or to be a different way. A great artwork can often cause a great outpouring of new mana into Veird, both because it elicits a creative response in many different viewers, but also, because it elicits a response, the artwork itself also becomes a mana producer in its own right. Singular items of cultural significance are much more able to achieve this level of mana creation than mass produced items… Eh. It’s complicated, and we can leave that for another day.” Rozeta said, “I’m only telling you this to distract you from your obvious discomfort.”

Erick gave a nervous chuckle. “Yeah! There’s a fair bit of nervousness here!”

Rozeta casually ripped Erick’s life to shreds, saying, “I see how much mana certain people produce because I have access to that information. When you fell to Veird you produced 500 times as much mana as a normal person does in a single day. Now, that multiplier is up to 100,000. Sometimes twice or three times that, like when you were ending Terror Peaks.

“You’re a Wizard and you always have been.”

Ophiel twittered in the background.

Everything and nothing happened all at once.

And then Erick came back to himself.

“Ahhh…” Erick sat back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, letting his mind drift. He whispered, “Shit.”

Graciously, Rozeta said nothing for a while.

But she had places to be, so Rozeta started answering some of Erick’s questions, since he couldn’t ask them at the moment. “Mana production is unaffected by Stats or spells or fame or infamy, but it is affected by how well a person knows magic, how much magic they do, and the mana itself. You’ve both learned and done a lot. You might not have been much of an archmage when people first started calling you that, but you’re certainly an archmage now. As of right now, you’ve actually become the single largest contributor of new mana to the Script. You contribute as much as a city of people, and all by yourself.

“I’m sure you’ve heard of how Wizards used to make magic, and then they gain students and they give those students their mana, thus giving them their magic? You’ve already been giving your mana to everyone on Veird.” Rozeta said, “It’s been great for the spread of Particle Magic. The Script evens a lot of things out for a lot of people, but you made a huge splash when you released Particle Magic to the world, and a lot of people started accepting your mana into them over all others, allowing them to make more of the same mana; the same magic. And thus the cycle grows.

“[Renew] is going to be even bigger.” She added, “And with that particular spell, more than all the others, people in the know will recognize you for the Wizard you are.”

Erick’s eyes were involuntarily locked on the ceiling, as he asked, “There’s not some fame-backlash thing, making me only appear to gain mana production because people are treating me as an idea instead of as a person? Or… Or…” His voice trailed off. He wasn’t sure where he was going with his words.

“Your question is like trying to cut a loaf of bread with a tub of water.” Rozeta said, “You think your question has merit, but there’s a fundamental misunderstanding. Short explanation: No; your fame does not make you a Wizard. If you would have become a hermit instead of what you did... If you had released your Particle Magic anonymously, and if you still kept up with your magical learning and experimentation —by some sheer stroke of pure luck since you would not have encountered the same resources as you did— you would still be at the same level of mana production as you are now.

“You make extra mana. You are a Wizard. There is no other explanation.” Rozeta added, “Believe me; I looked.”

Erick was starting to come down from his nervousness. Rozeta’s calming voice helped. He turned his head back toward the white goddess. He asked, “You said earlier— Why is [Renew] a problem? More than the other circumstantial evidence?”

Rozeta said, “Everyone makes mana, but everyone’s mana is different. This is why Wizards could create schools under them, because they were able to gift their mana and thus their magic to their students, in a self perpetuating cycle that would eventually ‘lock’ into place, and the school would expand since everyone was making the same sort of mana and magic. The mana produced by the people of Veird is no different.” Rozeta said, “But the mana of people isn’t mana that is good for the spellwork supplied by the Script… I’m going to skip over several years of learning here, and say that, broadly, this is how it goes: mana is created in the Core, then it’s ‘scrubbed’ of individual meaning, and then it’s given back to people to use for the spellwork installed by the Script.

“But it’s still their mana which is given back to them first, which still has some of their own minor truths. It’s near impossible to fully scrub mana of meaning, but the Script does manage to scrub out most individuality from the mana.

“Anyway.

“Because it’s not a perfect system, people cannot directly boost the magics of others without being very in-tune with the targeted magic, because it's the ‘cutting a loaf of bread with a tub of water’ problem, again. There are only a few things that can get past this problem.

“Strings of runes can translate ideas, though there is a lot of loss through that translation, as any immortal who lived through the Grand Translation could attest.

“Gods can bridge gaps between people rather easily because people wish for us to be able to do that, so we can.

“And Wizards can do the same thing without a god’s help.

“And that’s what you did. But you did it for everyone.” Rozeta said, “You made a spell that directly contradicts all known ways magic should work, and you made it so that it works well with the Script. Which I appreciate, by the way.” She added, “What happened when you made that magic was this: your mana inside the Core flashed into strange, Wizardly shapes, and now we’ve got a brand new rune to work with.” She held up her hand, spilling golden fire into the air to form a solid image. “This is the rune for [Renew], by the way.”

It was an arrow twisted into a circle, with the arrowhead and tail at the top, nearly touching and going in a clockwise direction. It was almost like the ‘on’ symbol for something electronic, but doubled at the top and bent toward the left.

“Ah.” Erick said, “That works.”

“It does.” Rozeta closed her hands and the rune vanished. “All the other spells you made were well within the workings of the Ancient Script we already had, but [Renew] required something more. It required Wizardry.”

After a moment, Erick asked, “What kind of Wizard am I?”

“I’m guessing Paradox, with a leaning toward Creation.” Rozeta said, “The trinity of Creation, Destruction, and Paradox is more of a convention than reality, for every individual Wizard’s Reality is their own, but in some ways there are Truths even Wizards can’t escape. Think of it like this: some parts of Creation are simply antithetical to Destruction, like white and black don’t mix without producing grey. But then, of course, you could go Paradox, which does both, but by going that way, you will likely never fully understand the white and the black.” She added, “But let’s stick to the surface level questions before we dive too deep into those depths. I had thought to lay everything out there and then talk of tangents, but I can see that your questions come first, so ask them.”

Erick asked, “Can I be a Wizard and still be connected to the Script?”

“You already are, but if you go down this path much further, then the answer is ‘no’, but also ‘yes’; this is my hope for you, actually, though it might not work out that way. We’ll see.”

After a moment of silence, Erick asked, “Can you… explain more?”

“Here’s what will happen: As soon as you choose to go down this route of Wizardry and you achieve the end-state of ‘being a full Wizard’, I cannot have any part of you directly interacting with the Script any longer. You will be removed from the Script. It’s a security issue. But, it’s more complicated than that… Which we will get into.

“Either way, Erick, you don’t have to go down this route unless you want to. [Renew] is Wizardry, yes, but it’s a small Wizardry. It’s forgivable. When you did that, it was very Paradoxical because it’s like the rune for [Renew] has always existed; none of the systems that should have been harmed by the inclusion of a new rune have been harmed by the inclusion of a new rune. The only actual problem is going to come about when the people of this world recognize that you’re a nascent Wizard, and they capture or coerce you into taking hold of your Wizardly power, and then they take advantage of your temporarily weakened state to force you to do what they want.” Rozeta said, “This is the usual end for Wizards.”

“And by ‘people’, you specifically mean dragons.”

“Dragons are the largest perpetrators of this offense; yes.” Rozeta said, “That Curse is a large bottleneck to their power and Wizardry can remove that curse, so they pursue Wizardry to unlock that bottleneck. Imagine living a life constantly under a yoke, and you will know what it means to be a dragon, and what it means to see a Wizard walking around like a key to your cage. Aside from physical and mental damage, the magical problem with that is the dragon will almost always ride a Wizard hard, shaping their Truth until it becomes the exact thing the dragon needs it to be, in order for the Wizard’s power to unlock the dragon’s shackles. Eventually, such harsh use breaks the Truth of the Wizard, and even if they get their mind and their body back, they remain magically broken forever.”

“Can you teach me to remove the Curse? Without breaking my Truth?”

Rozeta instantly said, “No. The Dragon Essence Curse is terrible in its effect, but overall, it is good for this world that the number of dragons who live here are not able to live openly. Veird cannot handle a true flight of true dragons. It would destroy this world.”

“… Ah.” Erick said, “That’s why you haven’t tried to remove the Curse already. Why no one has.”

“Mostly correct.” Rozeta said, “Kirginatharp hunts down all Wizards who look like they could possibly remove that yoke from dragon society.”

Erick corrected himself, “Why no one has been allowed to remove the Curse.”

“This is the more correct wording, yes.”

“… What if I Bless them first?”

Rozeta said, “I will make no decisions for you, Erick.”

“Okay. Then…” Erick asked, “What do you hope to get out of this conversation? You’re talking rather openly about a lot of stuff that you’ve never spoken about before. You’ve directly told me a bit about how the Script works, and at its Core, too. It’s all very… strange, compared to how you normally speak.”

Rozeta nodded. “This is strange. I am talking to you about secrets that should not be spoken aloud, or put out there in any way, shape, or form. But you are here in the Core, fully under my authority, and that allows me the ability to speak more openly. This will probably never happen again.”

Erick sipped his tea. He listened.

“This is also a test, of sorts.” Rozeta said, “I won’t do anything to you no matter your choices following this conversation, but I will enact safeguards which will likely have adverse effects on you if you break or look to break anything truly important.” She said, “The only thing I allow myself to care about is that this world remains stable, and steadily growing, which brings us to perhaps the most important tangent of this conversation.

“Currently, you are on a Path to bring about new worlds, exactly like the Old Wizards used to do. Most everyone of power on Veird is terrified of this for multiple, good reasons, almost all of which are due to the fear that Melemizargo will destroy everything left behind when he finally escapes this world.

“It’s a valid fear. But also, maybe not.

“The oldest of us who still retain a bit of their own rationality hold onto hope that Melemizargo can retake his old mantle of the God of Magic, in the way it is meant to be donned; that he can guide people further into the Welcoming Dark. But…

“This universe is not the Old Cosmology. There is no Welcoming Dark. It’s all endless void and scattered stars and dead planets and— Not even ‘dead’ planets, though. They’re planets Without Possibility. Worse than dead, because even in traditional death there is possibility for more to come.

“But there is no traditional death out there.

“Right now— If you were to have everything lined up perfectly, and the entire world behind you, and everything was set to open up a [Gate] to one of the other planets of this system, to establish a foothold and a nascent Script…

“This would be a monumentally bad idea. My father wants this to happen as soon as possible, but we cannot allow this, for multiple reasons. Let me lay some numbers on you to help you understand, at least the numerical problem.

“The Script requires… Let’s call it 100 units of mana to remain stable. These days, Veird produces 110 units of energy on a good year, and we do what we must to ensure that happens. This world used to produce ten thousand units a year, back at the beginning of the Script, back before Melemizargo went mad.” Rozeta wiped a momentarily sad look away, as she said, “Perhaps, if we had expanded into the rest of this New Cosmology faster… Perhaps if the few remaining Wizards who fell to Veird hadn’t have been murdered by well-meaning people, or driven into hiding only to be hunted down for answers by even more zealots… Perhaps if Melemizargo hadn't gone almost instantly crazy. Perhaps if we had more time. Perhaps if the Original Script hadn't been so damned difficult to—” She sighed. “Perhaps we could have expanded to new worlds in the beginning, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But that didn’t happen, and so we are here at this crossroads where the first to blink will likely die.”

Erick focused on a solution, asking, “What if a Wizard went back in time and prevented those issues?”

Rozeta waved a hand, saying, “Already been tried. Only the smallest Time Magics remain open to us, and only in the current day. Traveling back to the beginning is not something we can do, for not even Phagar can get through that broken tapestry anymore. We very much tried that, Erick. Too many times to count.”

Erick sat back in his seat, thinking.

Rozeta said, “Anyway. Mana production has gone down a lot since the Sundering, and mostly because of the problems my father has caused. This year, we might make 109 units of energy because of the various destabilizing forces you have created. We expect a large upswing in the following decades, though, if everything remains as it is. I have no idea what [Renew] will do, but I’m expecting… I don’t know what I’m expecting—

“And there’s another problem, before we even get to the problem of opening new worlds!

“If Melemizargo wanted to destroy this world he could do that in a single moment. He only doesn’t because —and I assume— that some part of him has always remained sane, and destroying magic is already antithetical to him, for he is a Wizard of Creation. He has always sought to force this world to think that it was a prison, and that the people here must ‘break free of their chains’. A lot of the people of this world don’t understand that about Melemizargo, but since his actions often bring ruin, they are not necessarily wrong that he ‘wants to destroy the world’.

“But if he could go to a new world, he might do the antithetical thing, just out of spite. He’s still a dragon, Erick. And, he’s a Wizard.

“Anyway. We’re not opening new worlds with the amount of mana generation we have, and we’re not allowing Melemizargo to do any Creation Wizardry to solve any mana problems. We don’t accept his mana here in the Core, or anywhere else.

“And so, to bring it all together:

“The initial cost of creating a second Script around another world would be at least 100,000 units of energy, but Veird only produces 109, and 100 of those are used for maintenance.

“If you opened a Gate to a new world without proper protocols Veird would destroy itself in a flashing instant; all of our mana would flush out into space. Rocks fall. Everyone dies. And with everyone dead, recovering from that disaster is that much tougher. We’d have to sunder the souls of everyone who died and rebuild from there, letting the monsters take over everything and regenerating this world from slimes, because monsters also produce mana, Erick.”

Rozeta sat back and had another bite of her muffin while Erick thought. As his brain swirled and his mind hammered into itself looking for solutions to everything, all he could really think about was that all his problems were compounding to an insane degree—

“How about...” Erick said, “A small Script that grows over time. It doesn’t immediately take over a world, but it will, eventually. It’ll have to be a lot simpler than it is now. Don’t cover the whole planet at once.”

“It takes a hundred thousand units of power to make a Script.” Rozeta said, “I’m already taking into account the ‘growing’ aspect of a new one.”

“… Ah.” Erick said, “So I need to become a Creation Wizard, then.”

“Not necessarily.” Rozeta said, “The only option that doesn’t work is Destruction, and it’s probably better if you pick Paradox anyway, so that we can make this plan take a bit longer, to ensure that Melemizargo isn’t plotting to kill us all, and so that the population of Veird can climb higher.” She purposefully nodded to Yggdrasil’s [Scry] eye on Erick’s shoulder, speaking to both of them now, “Yggdrasil should be able to gradually soak in excess units of energy and create Seeds of Life, which is what World Trees usually end up doing, anyway. As a Paradox Wizard, you can bless such seeds with the ability to hold a nascent-Script, and also to be able to [Gate] into lands without mana, which is what they would need to do to be able to survive on other, barren worlds. It would take many years for such seeds to mature, but it can be done.

“As a Creation Wizard, you would be able to make Yggdrasil instantly spawn Seeds of Life, but you’d have less ability to control the Script they carried; someone else would have to imbue that into them, and someone else would need to grant those seeds the ability to [Gate] to worlds without mana.” Rozeta said, “But you wouldn’t lack for offers. I would be first in line to do such imbuing, though that is another conversation entirely. Before all of that, you’d have to change how the world thinks of Wizards, or you’d have to hide, really, really well, which, for you, might be impossible due to the amount of extra mana you actually produce.”

“… Unless I go far into Paradox, and make it so that my excess mana remains invisible.”

Rozeta nodded, confirming Erick’s assumption, but then wrecking it a moment later, saying, “In that end-stage of Wizardry I wouldn’t allow you to remain a part of the Script. So if anyone asked to see any blue boxes then you couldn’t show any. You would need to reveal yourself long before then, or suffer all this backlash at that point in time.”

Erick’s brief moment of possible joy was crushed under brutal reality. “And there’s no way I could remain in the Script and be a full Wizard at the same time?”

“Absolutely not. It’s security, pure and simple. Every end-point of you becoming a full Wizard means you lose access to the Script.”

“What would happen to the magic I already have, without the Script to help me cast it?”

“It’s there, inside your soul. You might be able to use it like normal, too. It would require a whole new way of magic, though.”

“… Can you run through everything that will happen to me in choosing to become a Wizard?”

“Yes.” Rozeta began, “First, all of your magic breaks. But you’ve got your aura and your mana sense and you are a Wizard, so you can get back most of your smaller magics rather quickly. But the Script prevents higher tier magic from functioning, so the most mana you could ever spend on a spell is 500. All normal restrictions of the Script remain in place; Infinitesimal Ban, Propagation Ban, Dimensional Ban, Atomic Ban, and a few others you don’t know about and I hope no one ever gets close to ever knowing ever again. I thought Particle Magic was going to need to be Banned like Atomic was Banned, but I feel it’s been well integrated, so it will remain.

“Anyway.

“You lose your Health.

“Your Mana becomes the mana you produce, which hinges on the Wizardly Discipline you manifest. Pick Destruction or Paradox, and you’ll remain at 100,000 to 200,000 mana per day. Pick Creation and you could end up with endless mana. In such a case you might become too valuable to ever kill, so you would likely be hunted down and contained.

“You can only use your mana; you no longer have access to the mana of others, which is what the Script does for most people.

“Stat increases no longer work, so your rings are now useless. This is how it is for most monsters, anyway.

“Your Stats will drop precipitously until you can learn to fortify yourself in the ways that the Script now does.

“Abilities like Mana Altering no longer function for you; you have to do that on your own.

“Aurify, which allows two auras at once, is now removed. You get one aura, your base aura, which you can barely handle.

“[Greater Lightwalk] is both removed and also fully taints your aura, so you might not ever learn Mana Altering for anything other than light.

“[Lodestar] still works, and you might be able to use that in your aura work, but [Domain of Light] costs 5000 mana and you can only use 500, so you’re restricted to [Lodestar] aura, only.

“Intelligence, Clarity, all of the abilities that reduce mana costs are defunct. You now pay full costs for all spellwork until you can learn how to properly cast all of your spells.

“And you have to manually cast every single spell. Some spells with larger mana costs will take longer to cast, upwards of minutes, and must be done in ritual for the 500 mana cap still applies.”

Erick felt physically ill. He almost puked up his tea, but instead he sipped carefully while he listened.

Rozeta continued, “Ophiel would still be connected to you but there will be some growing pains there. You will find it extremely difficult to resummon him for multiple reasons, with mana cost being only one of those reasons. Every single Ophiel that dies is likely to stay dead for a long time, until you can make time to perform the rituals necessary to recast him.

“Yggdrasil will be similarly difficult to conjure. More so, probably, since you will need to build up a few million mana reserve for your ritual, or else you will die trying to cast him.

“On the plus side, you no longer have a Maximum Mana cap, though you still have a 500 mana per second cap on your throughput.”

For about two minutes the wall behind Rozeta was supremely interesting. Erick stared at that wall while Rozeta plucked a pink muffin from her basket and ate it. Then she stood up and went to make herself some milk tea.

As she stirred her tea, she asked, “Want a stronger drink, Erick? There’s a rum-equivalent here.” She pointed with her spoon to a crystal bottle of bright orange liquor, sitting with similar bottles of other colors. “It tastes a bit more like cinnamon than most stuff you have in your memories.”

Erick snapped out of it, eager to talk about something less important. “Yes. Also: Is that the cinnamon rum that Apogee was trying to make? Did his Worldly Path take him down here?”

Rozeta smiled a bit, then she started making him a drink, saying, “While I will talk openly about the Script down here, and about pretty much everything you want to discuss, I won’t talk to you about other people’s magic, or travels.” She handed him a crystal glass of orange liquor as she sat back down in her chair with her own new drink.

“Thank you.” Erick accepted the glass, but he did not take a sip. He held it in his hands as he asked, “What about… Instead of Wizardry, you make a Script for Yggdrasil that I can use, too? Something separate from your Script, that will allow me to maintain my power without the need to weaken myself, first?”

Rozeta said, “The Script denies all other mana miners; it has to in order to work like it needs to work. I will not break security in this way.”

Sudden exasperation flooded through Erick. “I get that you’re being helpful. I understand that you’re laying all these secrets of the Script out there… But I need something more. I can’t go back out there like this. I’m going to accidentally trigger some Wizardly thing and lose access when I can least afford it; I know I will.”

“I will help you in all the ways I can, but my father controls your Worldly Path, and I already asked him to give it to me. He won’t.”

“… Ah.”

Rozeta continued, “You are an uncommonly powerful Wizard, Erick. You can change your own Worldly Path if you want, and if you know how. To that end, let us discuss the options to this problem of you losing power when you finally become a Wizard.”

Erick was all ears.

Rozeta continued, “As stated, I cannot give Yggdrasil a manaminer of their own.

“But if you were a Paradox Wizard, you could simultaneously link to the Script, and be separate from the Script. You could have a core, and not have a core. You could exude mana, but also not.”

Erick’s eyes went wide, yet again. “But you just said you would remove me?”

“I did, and I will.” Rozeta said, “But I can also help you learn how to connect to a Script that doesn’t exist. The first step after becoming a Wizard will be to do what you already did with the Rune of Renew; create a ‘sandbox subsystem’ inside the Script. No one but me will be able to see it, and if I don’t like it, I can delete it myself. In this way, I will help you become a Wizard with no downsides unless you start breaking things, and then I’ll remove you from the Script and probably send paladins your way.” Rozeta said, “But I don’t want to do that, Erick.”

Erick stared a bit. “Okay? This seems… Odd. And difficult.”

“It will be extremely difficult, but I will be helping you along the way to ensure that I can pull the plug if needed.”

“What possible failure states am I looking at, here?”

“You might not be able to go all the way with it, and be stuck without Script assistance; this is the most reasonable failure. You might fuck up and die in the center of the process; this is the least possible outcome. You might interface incorrectly, opening up vulnerabilities all around; this is where I will have to kill you to prevent further corruption to the Script. Also a low possibility there, but not zero.”

Erick breathed out, whispering, “Ahhh.”

Rozeta said, “Even if you succeed, you will lock yourself into Paradox Wizardry. This means, once Yggdrasil is capable of creating Seeds, that it will take many years to create those Seeds. Some people will not like this, and they will look to sunder souls in order to speed up the process. I would occasionally send you Quests to stop such sundering, and I will expect you to respond with Light and Ash to prevent such events.”

Decision time.

Erick set down his untouched drink, saying, “I’m okay with Paradox. How do we proceed? Will it be possible for me to do this before the wrought squad show?”

“They’re four days away. It will be close, but you should be able to manage full Wizardry in that time, though I have barely begun to cover all the warnings.” Rozeta said, “Mainly, we have this: Monsters and cannibal humans and all sorts of creatures with cores become extremely angry with everyone who uses the Script because of two factors: they are forced to form their cores from ambient mana, and they recognize the Script tries to control them. This is how it’s always been for monsters on worlds with manaminers, like Veird, because they can’t use their own mana to manifest a pure core.

“In order for you not to suffer this fate, you cannot form a core from ambient mana, at all. It will drive you insane.”

Erick startled. “So that’s…? That’s why monsters are so crazy?”

“One of the smallest reasons, but it’s enough of a foundation to build all the other reasons upon. Worlds shouldn’t have this many monsters on them, and the Shades made some nasty monsters, and that malevolence compounds...” Rozeta said, “We’re getting distracted again.”

“Right,” Erick said, but he knew he’d be wondering about monsters for a long time from now.

Rozeta said, “With that warning out of the way, this is how it is going to go:

“In order to begin to form your core, you must explore your soul and find the link to the Core. Then you must shut that link. Most people begin to exude excess mana at this point. You will veritably explode with the stuff. From there, you use your aura to condense your mana into your body. There are many ways to do this, from pressurizing your own mana till it phase-changes into something solid, and then continues to grow with your directed input of mana. You could instead build your core up with perfect piece after perfect piece, like a crystal growing from a seed.

“At this point, since you already had Script access at a sentient level of power, you will be cut from the Script, and you will be forced into wielding your own power for your own gains. You will have formed a small monster core.

“You will not have access to the full Wizardry power of a Wizard Core. You will be like a shadeling in a fugue, and like a shadeling, it is still possible for you to rejoin the Script, for the Script will continue to try to reconnect to you. When the Script does reconnect, your excess mana will once again manifest inside the Script and you will regain most of yourself, but you will now be on the limited Script of the monsters.

“You must break your connection to the Script again to begin to create a Wizard Core, but this time it will be much, much harder for you to break that connection. You will have to enact Wizardry in order to regain control over your own mana.

“Melemizargo does this Wizardry to his shadelings to create Shades, manifesting a Truth inside the shadeling in the process. Each one of those Shades has a convalescence of several days to weeks to regain themselves. From there, it's more work to come into their full Shade power.” Rozeta said, “That central Truth is what makes them pseudo-Wizards. But they’re not true Wizards because none of them got there themselves, and none of them can take that final step to become a real Wizard.

“You should be able to take this final step, but it’s going to be difficult.

“You have to transform your entire self into a mana crystal, abandoning your body, but also retaining your current shape.” Rozeta said, “All Wizards must achieve this act of Paradox Wizardry in order to unlock their full power, because only when one is fully in tune with their own mana can they enact true Wizardry. As a side note, technically anyone can achieve this level of transformation if they’re slow enough and careful enough, but only Wizards produce enough mana on their own to sustain this transformation. All others must use mana from other sources thus tainting their Truth and risking insanity or worse, or they can only use their power once every century, or they have to be part of a very large collective with everyone producing the exact same mana. That last one is a lot tougher than you would think, and usually requires a Full Wizard of its own to get started.

“You have options, though. You can do this transformation slowly, changing each bone into crystal and each organ and then muscles and skin and what have you. Or you can do it all at once. I suggest the second path for expedience since I will be here to help you, but the first path is safer.

“Either way, the end result has several side effects, most of which you already see present in the Shades. Ageless immortality. Immunity to mind magics if you choose to close off your mind. The ability to assume a greater form, if you make your mana crystal form into such which many Shades do. Assorted other benefits.

“All this while, you will have lost the benefits of the Script and it will attempt to shut you down all the time, unless you go deep into Paradox. If you want access to Wizardry and the Script, then you must figure out how to Paradoxically go both ways.” Rozeta said, “And as I said before, I will help with this.”

Erick resisted the sudden urge to make a joke about already going both ways, but his sanity was already fraying, and he was in a time crunch. He appreciated the attempt at levity, though, which was probably exactly why Rozeta said her small joke.

“So.” Erick asked, “How does Paradox work?”

They spoke for a while.

- - - -

The muffin basket was devoid of muffins. Two bottles of liquor were almost completely empty, and a third was tried but decided against. The tea pot had been refilled and emptied several times, with a small pile of tea bags sitting in the trash nearby. More snacks had been had, with the refuse of all that scattered around their small area. Rozeta had come and gone several times, taking care of small problems here and there, and mostly whenever Erick got too emotional to continue. He was thankful for that.

By now, Erick had gotten over most of his panic.

But here, at the end of their discussion, Rozeta ratcheted it up one last time.

Rozeta said, “You can choose to forgo this opportunity to become a Wizard in the next three days, with the longer you wait meaning the less we can get through, but if you choose to not accept my help, then you’ll forget quite a lot of our conversation. I will erase everything you have learned about Wizards, because I cannot have you doing this out there where my father can get to you. I need that failsafe, Erick. I won’t let you go without it.”

Erick’s small bit of good humor vanished like water in the desert sun. “Ah.”

Rozeta said, “You’re free to choose your own path in life. I won’t force anything upon you. In some ways, it might be better for you to forget what I told you. It might be better for you to come into your true power later, when you’re more settled. It’s entirely possible that my father won’t try to influence your power to his own ends. If you choose to go this route, then the test of morality will be upon him, instead of you.

“In which case, and going by my father’s track record, such a choice will likely end in your death.

“That’s a choice you have to make; I will not make it for you. For what it’s worth, if you choose to become a Wizard now, I will work with you to spin the truth about Renew into something less damaging for you, but people will know you for what you are with that creation.”

Erick leaned back. “Ah. So many carrots and sticks. Highly motivating.”

“I’m offering nothing but carrots, Erick. The only ‘stick’ is that you won’t gain any of these carrots, and I will rescind the knowledge that I have already granted you here today; I will take back one carrot.” Rozeta said, “If you choose to say no, then I will put you right back where you were when you walked into the First Wizard’s Library, and you’ll be free to go along as if this conversation never happened.

“I must do this to ensure that either you pull me directly onto your Worldly Path in a good way, or else I remain a detour on your Path; gone and mostly unremarked.

“For Fate can ensnare even gods, Erick.” Rozeta asked, “Why do you think the demons and the angels haven’t interfered with you yet? It’s certainly not because they’re afraid of you, specifically. They’re afraid of the Fate surrounding you, when combined with how much devotion you’ve already paid to Koyabez. If they met you in any other setting than a peace talk, then either one of them would surely suffer massive losses trying to go up against Melemizargo’s Fate Magic.”

The conversation was moving down another detour that Erick wanted to explore a lot more than solving the current problem of becoming a Wizard…

But Erick stayed on track, saying, “I need an hour to think about it all.”

Rozeta nodded then stood up, saying, “Of course. Take your time, but please make a decision that is good for the world, and for all the worlds yet to come. The longer you take to decide to accept my help, the less help I can give you, before other people show up and break the sanctity of this communion.”

The Goddess of the Script vanished between moments, leaving Erick to his thoughts.

Erick got up, stood there for a solid minute, thinking about nothing in particular.

Then he cleaned up the room, and then he went for a walk. His feet took him where he felt like going. Ophiel didn’t try to trip any traps this time. The little guy just floated along, wary, watching Erick in almost the exact same way that Yggdrasil watched; almost sadly.

- - - -

Erick found himself at the entrance to a stairwell at the second-to-highest floor of the Wizards’ Tower. Without hesitation, he followed the stairs upward. Inside the closed stairwell, Erick circled a central space that was inaccessible by normal means. With his mana sense, he saw gears and pipes and timing mechanisms made out of more white metal, but while there was no degradation on the system, it did not move, at all.

There had been no traps around here which is why Erick chose to go this way; it was almost like a path had been laid out for him, or probably for anyone that came here. Or maybe the mechanism was one large trap, though there were no blades or goo packets or anything like that stuffed inside these walls. Just more and more gears and axles and belts and chains.

He passed a landing that led out into the roof of the Grand Wizard’s Tower, where small gardens grew and small seating areas allowed people to sit in the sun, or under shade, to discuss whatever topics they wished. A snack stand nestled against the tower, where dozens of cakes and pies and cookies and drinks waited to be served by people who didn’t exist, to customers with similar existence deficiencies. There were a few traps out there on the roof, but none were serious; just more goo packets attached to physical tripwires and pressure plates.

Erick continued up the stairwell, toward his target: the orrery.

- - - -

It was both more impressive than Erick thought it would be, and less.

The room containing the orrery was massive and made of white metal. The domed roof was clear crystal, providing adequate lighting for the entire space. Maps of the Old Cosmology and ten thousand smaller plaques held to the interior walls of the space, fully encircling the orrery like ten thousand scales of a fish, or, more likely, a dragon. All of the scales had words on them, but some were large enough to have maps. There was an organization there, between plaques and maps, but Erick would get to that later.

The central structure of the room dominated his attention.

The orrery itself was a thing of a million moving parts, forever stilled by the lack of magic. A plaque on a pedestal between the stairwell and the orrery explained this much, breaking the immersion of this land like the people would show up at any moment. This larger plaque outright told all visitors to this space that when the Old Cosmology died, it took everything with it, including the magic that would have made this representation of this section of the Old Cosmology come alive at the touch of visiting or working Wizards.

Erick imagined a working orrery would have been grand.

A million jumbled circles and spheres of colored metal and tiny lights, like dust cast in bright sunlight, held suspended itself over the central thirty meters of the orrery like an octopus of a thousand bodies with uncountable arms. Near invisible wires connected the pieces together, and those wires were the first obviously lethal trap of this place. They reminded him of [Hermetic Shredder]. There was no doubt in his mind that to touch this sculpture would likely cost him the offending finger.

There was very little rhyme or reason to it all at first glance, but as Erick studied the massive structure, and as he read the plaque before it all, he saw the individual motes of dust were each individual planes; whole worlds. A few of the larger bits of dust here and there were Node Worlds, but even those worlds were little more than the heads of brightly colored pins.

That was Erick’s first impression. As he looked, he saw individual galaxies of hundreds of connected planes, held aloft and to their neighbors on near-invisible strings. As he studied, he realized that the jumbled cosmology was only as it might have been at one small, frozen point in time, like ever-moving neurons in an oceanic brain. This whole thing was supposed to move, and yet, it could not. Not anymore. Everything in the connected axles and gears, both downstairs and up here, was all for show.

If that galaxy cluster moved as it should, then it would hit that galaxy cluster, which would cause that whole arm of the thing to break off and then who knew how chaos would unfold. Certainly not Erick.

This was a showpiece. Perhaps a final map of the Old Cosmology; one final image captured right before Primal Lightning shot through the whole thing, breaking it all.

… And, according to another plaque, this map was not representative of the entire Old Cosmology, either. This was just the part that the survivors were able to recreate from memory, and from maps left over after the Sundering.

For a long moment, Erick just stared, viewing it all, taking it all in, feeling the ethereal weight of a trillion, trillion, trillion lost lives.

Of a killed universe.

It was enough to drive anyone insane. No wonder there were mass suicides even after the Grand Translation. No wonder Melemizargo was the way he was. No wonder…

Erick took it all in.

Minutes passed in silence. And then Erick breathed deep. He blinked a bit, wiping away tears. Then he turned to the maps around the room, to understand it all from a more logical perspective.

As he studied those maps, he saw that they were not like the maps below, down there in the remade tower of a long dead Wizard conclave. These maps up here in the orrery were written by specific people, detailing where their specific worlds were back in the Old Cosmology, and a small part of their story of how they got to Veird during the Sundering.

Erick picked one at random.

The one he picked, like all the rest, had coordinates which matched with the orrery.

—

The world of Rorilo was created by Wizard Polikia 75,000 years before the Sundering. It had been a Node World located about 12,500 world-hops away from Veird, though, on a good year, they were only 8,000wh away. Calling it a ‘good year’, when the Sundering came right in the middle of it seems deeply wrong. But it was a good year. I and my friends survived because we stole a yacht from the schoolyard, were stupid enough to try and sail the Eddies at this time of year, and lucky enough to get pushed the right direction at the last moment. The nine of us were the sole survivors of our ancient, wonderful, prosperous and peaceful world of Roliro. Everyone else died. 25 billion souls, lost to the Sundering.

—

The next plaque was much the same, but of a different world in a different part of the Old Cosmology.

12 billion dead on that one.

2 billion dead on the next one.

3 million here. 1.2 trillion there.

A thousand here. Back to 219 billion there.

Uncountable lost when the Radiant Depths died, erasing the Celestial Heavens as Primal Lightning ripped through. Estimations of ‘trillions upon trillions lost’.

Uncountable lost when the Abyssal Rift broke, erasing the Demonic Worlds and killing… Some large number with way too many numerals for Erick to desire to read, or to try and comprehend.

.

.

.

Erick went back to the orrery. He now saw several spaces that one could walk into the center of the orrery, avoiding all of the suspended cosmology and the cutting wires, to reach the middle, where one small, silver world lay. He took a step onto the orrery, and walked toward that central space, passing by now-dead worlds like some specter of death, feeling a heaviness in his chest with every passing step. This path was laid for people to walk, and so Erick walked it, to the center. To see. To feel.

To look down upon that central world, which was, of course, Veird.

It didn’t look like a central world until Erick stood here, in the middle. Most of the dust-like worlds existed in circular flows with other worlds that were only tangentially connected to Veird. Sharp turns and strange fractures abounded. But in every system there was at least one break from that flow, and oftentimes several. Eventually, Erick understood how the whole orrery gradually pointed toward this central location, to Veird.

Erick stared down at a silver jewel of a planet. It was so very, very tiny.

Yggdrasil’s [Scry] eye moved from his shoulder to stare at the representation of Veird alongside him. Ophiel was already silently holding in the air all around, more eyes than wings at the moment, too, staring at everything, trying to comprehend it all. The Ophiel still on Erick’s shoulder was tiny and shaking with some unknown-to-him emotion.

Erick patted Ophiel, and the little guy warmed up a bit, cooing gently, giving sound to the otherwise dead silent room. He spoke to Yggdrasil, and to Ophiel, “How much of this do you understand, Yggdrasil? Ophiel? How much do you understand about what happened here, or in that room with Rozeta?”

Ophiel was a nearly blank slate; he chirped at his name, but he did not respond beyond that.

A bit sad, Yggdrasil spoke to Erick’s mind, ‘I don’t understand.’

“That’s okay.” Erick hoped his words would get through, but he wasn’t delusional, as he said, “You can’t tell anyone I’m a Wizard. Do you understand that?”

‘Why?’

“This room is why. Because people believe that Wizards were responsible for killing their entire Old Cosmology.” Erick gestured at the dust-mote worlds all around him, his sight lingering on the countless few that were slightly larger than the rest. “Every single speck of stuff here used to be an entire world, and the Old Wizards might have killed everything you see here and much, much more, but no one really knows.”

‘… Oh.’ Yggdrasil’s eye swept across the field of mote-sized gravestones, each representing millions or billions of lives, though Erick suspected it would be a while yet before Yggdrasil actually understood that. ‘I want to visit them.’

Erick smiled softly as he looked away, gazing across the expanse. “They’re gone; no one can visit any of these worlds anymore. But maybe we can visit new worlds later. Like the ones out in the night sky that you can see sometimes, if you look close, and if they’re in the right position overhead. Would you like that?”

‘Yes. I want that.’

“There are a lot of things we have to do before we get to that point, Yggdrasil.”

‘What need?’

“The primary thing, right now, is that you can’t tell anyone I’m a Wizard. It’s a secret. An important one that you need to keep. I need you to understand this, Yggdrasil. Not even Poi can know I’m a Wizard.” Though Poi would know, but Erick kept the idea simple for Yggdrasil. Erick said, “No one can know I’m a Wizard.”

‘Because they killed the Old Cosmology?’

Erick smiled. “Yes.”

‘I understand.’ Yggdrasil asked, ‘Are you going to kill the New Cosmology?’

“No. I’m hoping to expand into the New Cosmology, to make more worlds habitable for people, and you can help me with that.”

‘Okay.’ Yggdrasil asked, ‘What kind of Wizard?’

“What kind of Wizard am I going to be? I’m going to choose Paradox, of course.”

‘Creation sound good.’

“I’m sure I’ll be able to do a bit of that, too. But not as much.”

‘Your aura feels Creation.’

Erick smiled. He made a little joke, “I suppose it’s rather Paradoxical to go a different way, eh?”

‘...Oh! I understand!’ Yggdrasil gave a small, tinkling laugh that echoed in Erick’s mind like children playing at a park.

Erick chuckled along with the laughter, feeling Yggdrasil’s mirth through their connection. This spilled over into Ophiel, who chimed in with his own trilling calls. Ophiel didn’t really understand humor, but he was mimicking rather well these days and that was a step in the right direction.

It felt wrong to laugh in this room full of gravestones, but sometimes humor was all a person had, and Erick had been laughing at danger and death his entire life.