The Weight of Legacy

“What have you got for me, Lorekeeper?”

The woman who approached wore quite the mismatched outfit—a short skirt with a flower pattern topped by a tan trenchcoat several sizes too large, pumps with blue socks, and a white shirt with a black tie. Had the light dancing in her eyes in all the colors of dawn not given her nature away, her utter inability to look like a normal person would have.

She should have stuck to pretending to be a seafarer.

“The same words of advice as before,” Niklaus could not suppress the sigh that escaped him. His own disguise as a balding man was somehow making his scalp itch, despite its illusory nature. Perhaps it was the stress of dealing with her, manifesting. “Namely, that you should let go of this. Move on.”

“Not an option.”

“Yes, it is.”

She was infuriating. In his long life, Niklaus had dealt with exactly one hundred and thirty-seven other beings that fell under the umbrella of ‘spirit’, and not once before had he wanted to forcibly remove one from its vessel as badly as he did now.

Less than three decades ago, when a certain Ere had chosen to fool around in the shape of a woman, there had been no cause for concern. It was nothing special, and no one could have predicted it to get this lost in the roleplay.

No one could have predicted that it would go from pretending to be a person to wanting to actually be one. An individual—in comparison to what it truly was, to be an individual person was limiting. Flawed.

And most importantly, mortal.

A spirit dispersing was not the same thing as death. The winds did not cease to be for a lack of storms. Even for a Lorekeeper, one charged with documenting special cases and interesting circumstances, the idea of something wanting to give such an advantage up was absurd.

Then again, that something had so far taken to calling itself a ‘someone’.

Perhaps sanity had long since exited the room.

“Beyond your words—which have been noted and ignored—do you not have what your mistress promised?” Agneta pressed. The woman’s expressions were hard for him to read, despite his experience. She was not anywhere near as convincing as she believed herself to be, and it was clear she knew not the details of just what was owed to her.

Niklaus just hissed out a breath. It was foolish to cling on to this hope, to actually think he could dissuade her. The real loss from this would be the true end of an Ere. While far from truly rare, the variant wasn’t popular enough to be a common sight, and the relatively cordial relationship they had cultivated over the past years would be lost forever should anything happen to the woman before him.

And something inevitably would.

“Fine.”

The Lorekeeper produced a simple golden sheet from his inventory, handing it to the soon-to-be former spirit. He wasn’t even sure why he cared this much, when she clearly did not. “Keep that safe. It contains all we know about your friend, from her appearance in this world, to the moment she left.”

“I thank you,” Agneta the Ere said without bothering to look up. Her brief gratefulness became a frown within seconds. “There is hardly anything here I did not yet know.”

“Then I must unfortunately inform you your spent favor was wasted.”

Niklaus would not deny he was every so slightly smiling as he shrugged.

“Whatever,” the woman huffed, crushing the sheet within a fist.

Those are expensive. Their interaction had officially gone from him being annoyed on account of his opinions to a personal affront—the materials Lorekeepers used were among the best in all of Existence!

Either oblivious or uncaring for what she had just done, the woman-shaped calamity began to walk towards the platform, and Niklaus simply couldn’t help himself, habit overriding thought. “You will regret this.”

“Should that ever be the case, it would be my business, and my business alone.”

“Yet I am obliged to at least try and dissuade you,” the Lorekeeper pressed. “As much as you may refuse to acknowledge it, your view of Existence is currently severely limited. A vessel cannot perceive even a fraction of what you could if you shed it and returned to your natural state. If you do this, you will effectively be killing a universal treasure.”

“You act as though we were not one and the same,” was all Agneta said as she pressed her arm down, kneeling. She paused then, lifting her head to meet his gaze, and Niklaus felt a chill go down his spine, at odds with the harmlessness the woman before him stood for—regardless of the value of her kind. “Make no mistake, I know exactly what I’m doing. If nothing else, it disappoints me that someone of your status could ever be this ignorant.”

“You call me ignorant?” Niklaus took an involuntary step forward. “You get one taste of what it’s like to be human and decide to throw everything away. For what? To go look for someone who was but a mayfly in the grand scheme of things? You discredit what you really are.”

“I throw nothing away, save for a hindrance,” the kneeling woman countered. “Truly, you have your head so far up your own ass that you can’t see the obvious before you. Tell me, why the fuck would I want to go back to the immaterial? To let go of who I am now that I am?”

The Lorekeeper hadn’t even listened to the last part. “I reckon the liberal use of the terms otherworlders are fond of just further proves my point.”

Agneta kept her eyes on him for only a second longer before turning back to the ground she knelt on. “I shan’t waste further breath on this.”

Niklaus opened his mouth, if only to get the last word in, but he was cut off as the very world seemed to erupt into a lightshow protagonized by the first rays of each and every day.

It lasted but a second from his perspective, yet the conclusion was inevitable.

Something irreplaceable had been lost, even if the something in question was still walking about in another world now.

Unbelievably, it’d been four years. Four years, they had been walking around in circles. That was long enough that some animal species might live out half if not more of their lifespans, just like that. Like that thing that wasn’t a horse—was it a pegasus’s tiny cousin?—that Achim had back at the royal gardens.

Oh, by the void that awaited all, Aitel had actually found that miniature pegasus to be one of the cutest animals he had seen in ages, and for all he knew, it might be dead by the time they returned. Tō’s inability to read the room was going to keep him from ever seeing that tiny pegasus again.

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Assuming he still cared enough to be angry by the time they returned to Grēdôcava, Aitel would have some words with the man. Certainly, he could have been more up-front of why he thought—no, knew for a fact—that they were wasting their time, but that would have required opening up to people he actively disliked, about things he wouldn’t tell his own children.

He wondered what was taking so long—why weren’t news of the Executor’s death reaching them here? They couldn’t possibly hope to keep it under wraps for that much longer, and it was frankly a miracle that word on the street hadn’t caught up yet.

At this rate, we might have better luck finding poor Adalhard’s grandchildren instead. He’d thought that humorously, before pausing for a moment to ponder the feasibility of it. The boy they were looking for would be old enough for that in a few years, though admittedly, the matter of whether that was actually likely to happen remained dubious. While Aitel had long since come to terms with the fact that biological children were something he could never have, not even if he somehow came upon all the power in the world, he still might have done his best to avoid thinking about that sort of thing at all. That left him willfully unaware of what societal expectations might lead people to wait—or not—before having children.

Still, he knew the Prince was dead. He had felt the… disturbance. An unborn demon’s essence scattering just before it formed. This particular Adalhard hadn’t been a terrible Executor, which set him apart from many of his predecessors, but Aitel could only bring himself to be annoyed at the needlessness of a death like that. Why did they always find it so hard to simply step away from power before it consumed them? Granted, the birth of a new demon would have been bad news for most people, and the Saints of Grēdôcava took pride in claiming to never allow such beings to form within their borders. And people believed them.

Shaking his head, Aitel resumed reading the book before him, letting it lay flat upon the table. There was something oddly nostalgic about an empty library, and just the feeling of being here would make everything worth it when the noblemen back at their temporary residence complained about his absence. It wasn’t his problem that they were acting like children, refusing to so much as take one step out the door because unfamiliar lands scared them like the dark might scare a toddler.

As for how he had ended up here? Well, even the likes of him could get bored, and having all errands delegated to him provided the perfect cover for him to just get everything done swiftly then spend the rest of the day on whatever else appealed to him. His excuse for going to a library would have been that he needed to brush up on the local language, but really, he’d only been perusing the more recent history books—it’d been a while since his last visit, after all—when he overheard a group of young students arguing. They had that air about them that gave them away as actual young adults, not just timelessly youthful.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Watch your tongue, Laurent, lest you find the waves taking it!”

The volume of their argument rose—not ideal considering their current location—but one comment stood out above the rest.

“It was a genuine question! If lost civilizations keep getting buried and built over, does that not mean the ground rises? The sea is right there! Wouldn’t we just inevitably keep building higher and higher until the sea above us means we run out of space?”

Aitel paused. He had just now been reading about a relatively young Immortal and how she had taken it upon herself to overthrow one of the more recent caste-based regimens in a bid to avenge her mortal daughter.

Scowling, he glanced in the direction of the student. He hadn’t even overheard her name, and the entire group was currently in the process of being kicked out for their outbursts.

Was their space beneath the waves getting smaller? If it was, it would probably be too negligible a change for it to truly matter anytime soon, yet Aitel found he could neither refute nor confirm the assertion immediately. Whether or not the question was dumb was ultimately irrelevant—it’d simply been a while since he found himself so utterly stumped by something so random.

He was under the impression that planets normally got smaller over time—though he’d never visited any others to confirm that—but just as the accumulation of ruins upon ruins, he doubted that would be noticeable. Aitel had measured their planet once, and the details were probably somewhere he had no intention of recovering, but it had only been the once—he had nothing to compare it to. With the advent of the system and how it tanked the mortality rates, population had skyrocketed before longer lifespans made people start managing their family expansions more carefully, and all those people had to go somewhere. By the time the waves claimed all this land, most of it had been settled.

The short of it was, Aitel hadn’t managed to get another opportunity to measure anything, not when he hadn’t even been eager to do it again in the first place when he still had the chance to go about unnoticed. And regardless of whether or not debris piling up on the ground made a difference, it wasn’t as though the sea had stopped growing, and that was even harder to quantify when sibyls rarely answered questions politely.

Minutes passed as he completely ignored the book before him, scratching his head—mostly because scratching one’s chin when having no facial hair to shield the skin did occasionally leave behind marks—as he pondered with a frown.

It does not even matter, does it? No, it did not. Perhaps he was simply more vulnerable to this type of concern taking root, with any potential existential threat being something he would have to face sooner or later if it was real. He would be around forever, after all.

With a sigh, Aitel shook his head and resumed his reading—one day, this world would likely cease to be anyway, but he could deal with the consequences then. Even the potential of their livable space beneath the waves shrinking felt irrelevant next to that, and truth be told, the surface was still out there. Gods above could present a problem, but if people needed to flee, nothing could ever truly close off the option of going up if enough resources were invested on carving a path there.

Having gone back to his reading, he wouldn’t deny he was impressed by the one they called Gravedancer, for all he couldn’t settle on whether that name was fitting or incredibly corny. The Immortal had outlived all her enemies and had put considerable effort on letting that be known, nevermind that she hadn’t personally killed most of them. The old regimen had made a habit of memorializing cultivators who weren’t scheduled for resurrection—meaning most of them, given the usual cost of such things for the strong—while mortal obits were often tossed into the sea to ‘clear up space’, with that latter habit being what earned them the woman’s ire in the first place.

It’s worth remembering Lizanąn law at the time did not only discourage relationships between cultivators and mortals, it outright criminalized it in most cases, with anyone caught being liable for heavy fines. This was especially the case for mortals who gave birth to cultivators, as such children were often taken from them, regardless of whether they had actually been the product of an illicit affair with a cultivator or not. Lizanąns believed maintaining the purity of their bloodlines and nurturing Affinities through arranged matches was necessary for cultivators to thrive.

Now, while it is true that they had the necessary infrastructure to handle ‘reclaimed’ children, those born of mortals were oftentimes seen as lesser than ‘real’ cultivators, those with proven bloodlines. Worse off where their foil, however—though rare, it is perfectly possible for cultivators to bear offspring who inherit no potential from their parents. Vile as the regimen was, they still frowned upon infanticide, so cultivators had to come up with an alternate method to pretend their mortal children didn’t exist. This was how the first ‘hope homes’ were established, run by supposedly charitable cultivators willing to raise the unwanted, mortal children of other cultivators—so long as the donations kept coming, that was.

Aitel grimaced. He’d been passably familiar with that period in history, not having witnessed it himself, and this was the first time he’d seen things spelled out so directly. His opinion of the Immortal responsible for that regimen’s downfall further improved, even if the woman was probably a little unhinged, if the habits she gained her name for were genuine.

He felt quite inclined to seek her out someday—it wasn’t the type of curiosity that could spur on an active search, but the Gravedancer seemed like someone worth meeting. Then again, even whenever someone caught his eye, rarely did their paths actually cross. Aitel wasn’t fond of forcing that type of thing.

Besides, the descriptions of the woman’s reported abilities made her sound difficult to find. Having shed their merged Skills by that point, Immortals operated purely off their Affinities and Classes, and a woman described as elusive even at the start of her crusade would surely prove a challenge to track down.

There was irony to that, truly. No matter her fame—or infamy, one could suppose—the Immortal was praised for neither subterfuge nor prowess, no. All that mattered was that she always got away, regardless of her opponent’s strength, and that she always appeared to speak ill of the dead, no matter how hidden their demise might have been.

That latter part might have been far more amusing than reasonable for Aitel—if he did end up meeting her someday, he’d at least try to point her in the direction of a few memorials for people he never liked. Still, the more he read on, the least likely it seemed an encounter would ever happen unprompted.

It was known, after all, that there was no one better at appearing and disappearing with no rhyme or reason than the Gravedancer of Lizaną herself.