Unbound

Chapter Four Hundred And Fifty Two – 452

Chapter Four Hundred And Fifty Two – 452

Karys left soon after that, his other duties proving to be more pressing than he had let on. He parted with a new timeline: "The last Manaship will depart in six days. If we wish to defend our Territory, you must make it back by then."

That was even later than Felix had originally supposed. By his estimation, they would reach the Caleph Pass in three more days, and then it was a relatively quick overland journey to Haestus Lake and the Naga nest below the waves. With the compression that traveling the Shadowgate brought, they would reach Nagast with days to spare.

Plenty of time to focus on self-improvement.

Pit set about exploring the limits of his core space and seeking out ways to improve. Felix asked to help, but the willful tenku wished to do it alone and Felix didn't press the issue. Pit was determined.

Instead, Felix found a familiar cavern within Pit's core space. He immediately recognized it by the overgrown vines that hung long to obscure its entrance, identifying the cavern as the one they had ventured into just before falling into the Archon's Domain. There were differences, of course, just below the surface. The cave was shallow and far too close to the riverFelix remembered exploring for hours before reaching it in the pastand the shadows inside were thick and strangely textured. Familiar in a way that had little to do with distant memories. As Pit was busy walking the length of his core space, Felix entered the cavern, almost swimming through the dense darkness until the very floor fell away. Then he was falling toono, flyingsoaring across the dark expanse while lights ignited into burning bonfires of red-gold and blue-white light.

He had found the Link between their core spaces.

Felix glanced backward. Behind him, drifting away, was the Skill Etheric Concordance. For a moment it was shaped like a long, narrow cave before it flickered and shifted back into a swirling ball of light and sound. Makes sense that my bond Skill would serve as transport between our core spaces. This was the only route he'd encountered between his friends' Linked cores that didn't require Felix to punch a hole into things. Felix didn't even feel the strain of his Cardinal Flame as he entered his own, not required to bend himself backward to jump between cores. In fact, as he traced the connection of Mana back it was a straight line from the Skill to his visualized Body, as if he'd never even stepped into Pit's channels. Huh. He cut off its use.

The illumination from his core rings dominated the area, distant as they were, but closer to hand were his numerous Skills. Not as many as he once held, certainly, but quite a lot compared to his friends. He drifted closer, pivoting his visualized Body in circles to fully take in the strange wonder of his own inner world. Seeing all of his friends' core spaces had given him a new perspective on things, namely on how vast his own appeared to be, even as it remained significantly more nebulous.

It's all so spread out. Everyone else had a compactness to their core, except maybe Vess. She's an outlier though. All that early training in visualization was surely responsible for the growth of her mountain range. Compared to the others, even Atar and Alister, she had a leg up in terms of time and resources. Maybe being Unbound has something to do with it.

He had tried to gain access to Beef's core space, but the teen Minotaur had flat out refused. Perhaps it was because of his recent exposure to the Regalia, but Felix had an inkling it was more than that. Beef, more than anything, seemed terribly nervous. 'Why' was an issue he'd worry at later, but it was something he had to tackle, if only because experiencing another Unbound's core space could give Felix greater insight into his own.

For the moment, Felix floated. In the past he had used his Intent to sharpen the details of his core space, and he did so again. The dark became clearer and less gritty, while the light became brighter and more vibrant. The ribbons of red-gold and blue-white light gleamed against the black, vivid lassos securing his Tempered Skills to his dual cores. Skills shone and their songs soared through the expanse, while above the nebula of Essence glittered like multi-hued gemstones, ground to dust. The Divine Tree trembled, but didn't change overmuch, and the pillars below merely grew more stark against the inky sky.

"Hmph," he grunted. His Intent and Willpower, powerful as they were, could only sharpen what was already extant. And then, only to a point. As an experiment he tried to change the color of his nearest SkillAria of the Green Wildsfrom a rich, verdant green-gold to a dark wine red. The Skill flickered, color blooming inside of its turning patterns like a bloodstain...before it vanished, returning once more to its original coloration. "I can change things...but everything just reverts to its original state. What if I use Fiendforge?"

He activated the Skill, and in the distance nearer his cores, what resembled an enormous gas giant began to hum. The Skill was Unique, an ability he'd formed after taking on the Omen Paths and all the dangers within it, and its size and complexity reflected that. Easily twice the dimensions of his highest leveled Transcendent Skill, Fiendforge was an intricate ball of thrumming lines; wave forms turned and bound into an orb-like pattern and colored like a burning sunset. The humming increased in pitch as Felix felt the familiar pressure clamp down around everything, locking it firmly into its unbreakable crucible. Again, Felix applied his Intent and Willpower, directly attempting to change the color of the Aria of the Green Wilds. The bloody red persisted for longer this time, but just as before it faded as his attention slackened.

"Changing things outright isn't possible, at least not through sheer brute force." Felix floated, basking in the multifarious jewel lights around himself. Brute force wouldn't workwhich meant real skill had to take its place.

Felix righted himself and stood upon a single leg, and breathed.

Three hours later, Felix's Mind roared with unending flashes of thought and memory, spoiling his eighth attempt. A disgusted growl ripped from his visualized throat, and Felix slammed his Will against the dark around him. Lightning crackled, bursting along his blue-white ribbons as brilliant serpents, just as red-gold fire twisted atop its own threads.

"Fuck!" he shouted, loud enough that his Fiendforge quivered and flexed. "What am I even doing?"

He could be training his Skills, practicing sigaldry, alchemy, any number of things. Instead he was sitting in an imaginary world, meditating upon an even smaller imaginary world, hoping to make both imaginary worlds slightly better. Felix ran his hands across his face but jolted when his fingernails cut bloody lines across his cheeks. He glared at his nails, now blackened talons, and a smaller scoff of distaste slipped out. "You followed me into here too, huh?" Felix checked his feet and sure enough they were the same: scaled and clawed and in proportion with his new, much larger frame. "Great."

His failed attempts to clear his Mind were annoying, but what truly ground at Felix's nerves was the sensation that he was not in control of himself. For all his strength and power, he couldn't get a handle on Vess' technique. It was like his Mind was rebelling, shoving intrusive thoughts into the shreds of calm he could only barely manage to wrestle into existence. The claws and scales were just icing on the cake.

Many thoughts pushed their way into his head during the prior three hours. From worries about their schedule to the risk of monster attack on their ships and Ahkestria, it was hard to shut it all off. Impossible, even. But more than anything else, more than his fears and anxieties about the days or months ahead, Felix's thoughts kept returning to one single point: What do I want?

It was a simple question. For a long time, what he wanted was to be safe. Then the goalposts shifted, and it became about keeping his friends safe. From there he became concerned with protecting a city, then a Territory. Again and again the goals shifted, the metric by which he determined success constantly slipping further and further ahead. Now Felix rode at the head of a fleet of Manaships, deadset on stopping an incursion of Hierocratic forces into his Territory. He rode to war.

What do I want, though?

Karys and others had described a core space as a reflection of your unconscious needs, shaped by connotations, instinct, and deep-seated desires. The start of the process was always an instinctive leap, a subconscious jumping off point where so much was guessed at and intimated. Yet by the time one's channels were formed your core space, however small, would have taken its first steps into the Visualization Stage. Felix had turned the burning heat of his Fire Within and ignited a core that flared with fire and crackling lightning...and from there his Skills expanded, sorting themselves around it like planets around a sparking sun. It carried on from there, growing stranger and more arcane as Felix fought and triumphed overor at least survivedall that attempted to end him.

If his core space represented his desires, his true goals beyond thoughts and surface motivations...then what the hell did his mean?

"It's a solar system. But that's so damn broad." Felix let his Perception unspool, cloaking the vast expanse of his core until he could sense every part of it. Above everything, he had a huge, galactic tree that spread its branches out into a nebula of glimmering dust and lights that hung from it like leaves and fruit. Below that, the burning sun had turned into two fiery rings, within which a terrible, hungry abyss lingered. Still further down were his pillars, woven of roots and shining core-stuff. Felix could even make more of them, and he should in order to firm up his foundation so he could step into Master and beyond without issue. "But should I? How can I build more foundation when I have no clue where I'm going with all this?"

Vess had said it was harder to enact visualization changes as one grew more powerful, and Zara had confirmed it. To advance, they both maintained, was to affix yourself, becoming rigid and potent at the expense of flexibility and change. He wasn't a fan of the idea, and Harn suggested something else that had either been left out of his tutelage by accident or design: that leaving an edge of unknown in your core space was possible, even preferable, in order to retain the flexibility to enact changes in your core.

Felix certainly had a bounty of unknown infusing his core space, namely in the thick, textured darkness that surrounded everything. It had always felt pregnant with purpose to him, even in its earliest stages, as if anything could walk out of the dark and into the light. And that, above all things, felt right to him.

"Out of the darkness," he muttered, still slowly rotating above his many Skills. "Into the light. Why does that feel...important?"

He had a path, one had forged by dint of his own achievements and titanic Willpower. He'd wrested his very self from the dark, shoving himself back into existence during his trippy time among the Omen doors, and now walked the Path of the Cardinal Fiend. Yet since that occurrence, Felix hadn't stopped to consider what that Path might mean.

The Fiend was a name. A persona he'd earned and learned to embrace, to a certain extent. It was the Felix that could be ruthless and unflinching when the hard decisions came up. He was not always a fan of the Fiend, were he being entirely honest, but Felix could recognize that it was necessary at times. Cardinal, on the other hand, was tied to his Primordial nature. A gift, you could say, from the Maw and its interference in his life.

Felix looked at his center, where the tree, rings, and pillars sat resolute among the rotating dance of his Skills. The cores were the [Thunderflame Core] and [Cardinal Beast Core], one an evolution of his own power and the other a concentration of all that made him Primordial. Where they met, ring atop ring, they ground into one another and produced waves of glorious song and harsh, unremitting cacophony. Harmony and Dissonance, ever present within him. Beyond it was his abyss, his Hunger, another relic of the Maw, while the tree was a Divine root he'd stolen and allowed to grow, anchoring his pillars and cores together.

So should he chase that? A world tree upon which to build himself? No, came the answer, quick and decisive. That wasn't him, as much as he liked nature. Felix liked to think he was violence and compassion in roughly equal measure. He was devoted to magic and to thwarting those that stood in the way of his people.

Inheritor.

Autarch.

Scion of the Unseen Tide.

All of it was building to something. But what?

He focused on his Skills, floating like planets around the sun of his dual cores. A solar system with a black hole at its center. Hm. Black hole. Do I lean into that? A ring of light, surrounding the collapsing event horizon of a monstrous point in spacetime that devours everything. It's almost too fitting.

Then his Bastion of Will caught his eye. The center of his one and only Skill Array, the Bastion looked like a collection of intersecting vibrating lines that, if he squinted, could appear to be a green-ish planet. Around it, the other pieces of his Skill Array floated, orbiting the Bastion like moons...except unlike moons, they were all nearly the same size. Some even larger.

It was a tiny model of the rest of his core space. The Skill Arrays had strengthened him, bolstering the abilities of all Skills contained within it. Felix hadn't noticed a huge difference, but then he hadn't had the spare moment to pay too much attention.

Should I arrange for more Skill Arrays? What else could I group together? And could he just make them more like planets? Moons? A black hole core, surrounded by the ever-shifting revolutions of countless celestial bodies. Is that...is that what I want?

He pondered and floated. No longer posing or posturing. Just breathing. Felix attempted once again to empty his Mind.

It was hard. Harder than many things he had attempted. Just as in Vess' core space, his efforts were constantly interrupted by his busy, anxious thoughts, as well as by the hum and clash of Harmony and Dissonance. They sang to him, crooning at every possible instant, a battle that would never end.

Yet in his blank-eyed floating, Felix realized he had wandered close to his cores. The song grew heavy and unavoidable, a riotous glory in his consciousness...until it began to dim. A hush settled over it all, and Felix jolted to full awareness. He realized, quite quickly, that he was standing above the abyss. His Hunger.

It had been curiously quiet, not pushing or prodding Felix save for its desire to consume the Regalia. And now, just above it all, Felix could tell the noise of his being did not quite penetrate its dark depths. "Hey."

His Hunger was silent, but Felix could feel it...orienting on him.

"You eat Essence and Mana, skin and bones, piece of gods...What else can you eat?"

Feed me. Find out.

Felix hesitated for only an instant before he shrugged. "Worth a shot."

He drifted closer, lower, and the noise of his anxious thoughts faded. His enhanced Intelligence increased the speed of his cognition, and it still chugged away but now it was at a remove. An invisible wall had been erected between Felix and all of the things that animated him. He floated further.

His thoughts did not come to him slower, but like the Harmony and Dissonance, it was like music half-heard in another room. It grew...heavy. As if it were trying to escape the event horizon of his Hunger.

A black hole, came the thought, the space between words vast. Huh.

Felix coasted closer, until the burning blaze of his cores was below him, and he stood at the very cusp of the deeper dark. There, his Mind quivered as the Hunger inside him gleefully roared to life. Thoughts vanished, tumbling from his grasp before they could form, falling down into the dark....

Yet his hands began to weave, a performance he'd attempted so many times before that it had ingrained itself into his muscle memory. Except this time, Felix was able to pull a small ovoid from the void around him, speckling it with bright lights and spinning flame, bisecting it with a tree and pillars and the firmament of dazzling, multi-hued dust.

His core space, in miniature.

Felix's Mind was divorced from his thoughts, his memory perfect despite his walled off Intelligence. Perhaps that would have ended the experiment before it began, but his Born Trait was Perfect Recall, and there were few places more rooted in him than his core space.

He tweaked the miniature ovoid, casting his Will and Intent across it like a blanket. Around him the dark rippled and flexed, and the Divine tree, so close, shimmered. Its crimson bark smoothed and shone, turning oh so very crystalline. Elation fluttered across Felix's gut, but he didn't pay it any attention, focused only on the ovoid.

Below, the abyss trembled, its velvet expanse shifting as his thoughts and emotions were swallowed wholesale. It quivered.