380. Sphere
Liv’s body was ripped apart and scattered into a million pieces. The sensation was something like how it felt when she became the storm, exchanging flesh and bone for wind and driving snow, save that there was no physical manifestation of herself at all – only mana, and spirit.
There was a rushing sensation, as of immense speed, through the darkness. The darkness, too, was familiar, and for the briefest moment Liv felt Elder Aira’s fingers catch at hers, saw the old woman’s face wrinkle in a kind smile, before they were torn apart from each other. Aira, and all of the other spirits of those who had died fighting on the surface of the moon, were left far behind, while the barest trace of Liv was sent spinning off into the void.
There was so, so much mana here, in the place between worlds. Under and behind and beneath everything that existed, it streamed and flowed in swirling eddies of power that would, Liv was certain, burst any human exposed to it instantly. Even the depths of Godsgrave would be nothing compared to where she found herself. Without a body, she could not breathe, and yet at the slightest thought, the mana flowed into her spirit all the same, until Liv was near to bursting once again, just like beneath the Well of Bones.
And where was Ractia?
Somewhere in the vast black, just ahead, and just out of reach. Liv could feel her: a bundle of mana and spirit, near the same as her but differing in type, in consistency. There was nothing cold about Ractia, no snap of winter air or glitter of sun on ice. Rather, there was the taste of fresh juice, the feeling of biting into an overripe fruit with sharp teeth. The scent of blood, not flowing from a wound, but left on a birthing bed. All that was living and growing, beginning from the smallest seed, swelling until strong, and then producing new seeds, new children, in an endless cycle.
The cycle itself was nothing evil: it was natural. Only the use that Ractia put her power to was despicable, and very actions of the Lady of Blood fouled every bit of her soul, of the mana coiled at the heart of her insubstantial form, like rotting fruit, food that has gone foul, like stillbirth and disease.
Ractia vanished, and Liv had the sensation of rushing up on some indefinable edge, going over the top of a waterfall and tumbling down. There was light all around, nearly blinding after an eternity in darkness. There was a platform, high above an alien city, where spires of glass and steel stretched, like grasping fingers, above trees toward an unnatural sky. The world curved away to every side, not ending in a horizon, but instead somehow extending up, up in every direction, as if this entire place were built on the inside of a ball. In the center hung a yellow sun, casting its warm light on the fields, the forests, the lakes and the seas and the cities which faded into the far distance.
The platform was circular in shape, and spread out around the rim were dozens of black orbs, just like the one that Ractia had created beneath the moon. They hung, every one of them, in the air, motionless, separated by a distance of perhaps ten feet from each other.
The knot of spirit and mana which was Ractia flexed, and rebuilt her body. Long legs, swelling hips, black hair tumbling down past her shoulders, and finally, woven from raw mana, a red dress that hung down past her feet, and trailed behind her along the surface of the platform when she moved.
Liv remained formless.
“It was a mistake to follow me,” the Vædim said, practically purring in satisfaction at her apparent victory. “Nothing physical can survive travelling like this – only mana. I’m astounded that you were able to make the journey at all, actually, without losing yourself. Most of us have some sort of training, or a guide, before such an attempt.”
Ractia stalked around what was left of Liv in a circle, like a prowling jungle cat. “This is what it means to be Vædim,” she said. “Every part of you but spirit is replaceable, and spirit can be anchored to mana. So long as mana exists, we exist. But you’ve gone too far, too quickly, and this is where you lose.” She raised a hand, fingers flexing into black claws that sparked at the edge with golden mana. “I was going to let you live, Livara. But your husband took my son from me. Consider this repayment.”
Liv flexed her intent, and the world froze, Dā spinning to life amidst the whorls of mana that were her. Ractia’s claw, caught in the midst of a downward slash, nonetheless felt very, very dangerous. She was certain that if it tore through her, that would be the end. But I’ve done this before, Liv told herself. I’ve come back before. Even without Keri to guide me home, I can do it again.
Just like returning from the storm, she rebuilt her body, piece by piece, from toes to the tips of her ears. The stormwand was gone, and her armor, but Liv spun a dress from the mana that saturated this world, spun it into white cloth, as pure and clean as new fallen snow. Ractia’s frozen form wavered, then shook, and Liv knew that she wouldn’t be able to hold the other woman for long. A dozen blades of adamant ice froze into existence around her, and then motion returned to the world.
Two blades crossed, slicing Ractia’s hand from her wrist before the Lady of Blood could comprehend what was happening. Ten more pierced her perfect body in as many places, from as many directions, so that she fell down onto the platform, where a pool of blood leaked out from her wounds.
“That word,” Ractia gasped, and then coughed up blood.
“Broken, I know,” Liv said, stepping carefully around the fallen goddess who had caused her, and so many other people, such pain. “But good enough to slow you down. If I understand you correctly, these wounds won’t kill you. One trip through one of those gates would destroy your body anyway, so I assume you can rebuild a new one whenever you like.” She paused, tilting her head to one side as she considered a thought which had just now occurred to her.
“Is that why your people are immortal?” Liv asked. “There’s no reason to rebuild an old body, when you can just as easily build a young one, is there?”
Ractia spit a gob of blood up at Liv, which she deflected with a small mana shield, conjured into existence at a thought.
“But it does hurt,” Liv continued, nudging Ractia’s leg with her foot. The goddess flinched. “And I do know how to kill you. Just like I ended what was left of Costia and Celris.” She opened her lips, prepared to draw in a breath. The God-Eating Queen, as yet unborn, smiled in anticipation.
A shaft of light shot down from the sun, blinding and hot, just inside the rim of the platform but far enough away from those black orbs that it was not sucked into them. Opposite the light, a bonfire roared into existence, and faster and faster, all around the circle, more of the Vædim arrived. A woman of molten silver, and a man of gold; a cold mist, and a crackling bolt of lightning, not transient but persistent. Some of the presences were so abstract and nebulous that Liv could hardly even understand them as more than a feeling – weight, the notes of a song, and just to one side, the feeling of potential, of something about to change, but with no physical form at all.
“They won’t let you kill me,” Ractia coughed, from where she lay broken and defeated. “It is one of our laws. No Vædim shall kill another.”
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“You said yourself that I’m not one of you yet,” Liv said, and inhaled. She pulled the mana out of Ractia, just like she’d done to the remnants of Costia, and then to the shade of Celris. The Lady of Blood fought back, but Liv crushed her Authority utterly and without mercy. Power burned through her, and Liv fought to keep control of it as her veins began to darken. She had the urge to fling the mana out of her, in all directions, as she’d done beneath the Well of Bones to keep herself from bursting, but instead she merely clamped down, exerting control. Within the space of only a few heartbeats, Ractia’s body crumbled away to red dust, like rust.
Liv, thrumming with power, looked around the circle. There were no eyes to meet, but she spoke all the same. “I am Livara tär Valtteri kæn Syvä. Ractia killed thousands on my world,” she declared. “She enslaved my ancestors, made war upon us, killed my grandfather. If you heard her, you know that she would have killed me.”
The man of gold spoke first, in the same chorus of voices and languages which Ractia had used so many times. “Irrelevant. Killing members of less developed species is not a crime.”
“And yet, uplifting them without permission is,” a voice sang from nothing, accompanied by the notes of a song. “A crime for which some of us have already been punished, stemming from this very same world. Compensation is owed to them. They were not given a choice.”
“Veitha?” Liv guessed. The Lady of Song trilled a melody in response, and Liv turned to the column of light. “Bælris? My husband is your great-grandson.”
The light coalesced into the form of a man with sun-bleached hair and browned skin, and that odd, not-quite human look in the face that Liv had come to associate with Ractia alone. Now, she realized it must be the form of all the Old Gods. “A descendant of Väinis?” he guessed.
Liv nodded. “Inkeris, son of Ilmari, son of Väinis,” she said. “We have a daughter together. Her name is Rianne. I would like to go back to her, and to him, if that is possible.”
Something thrummed through the air around Liv – a chorus of voices, rapid whispers, not a single one in a language that she could comprehend. The forms around the rim of the platform began to wink out of existence, one after another, until only she and Bælris remained.
“It has been agreed that I will handle this matter,” the Lord of Light stated. “Your fate, and the fate of your world, has been left to my judgement. The others have promised not to interfere.”
Liv swallowed. She liked her chances better with Bælris than that figure in gold, but she was not at all certain yet how this was going to turn out. Nor could I fight so many, she admitted to herself. One, yes. Two, perhaps. But not a dozen, not a score. “Will you let me go home, then?”
Bælris stepped forward, and reached out to take her chin with one hand. He tilted her face back, then from side to side, gently but firmly. “You are descended from Celris and from Däivi?” he decided, after a moment.
“Yes,” Liv confirmed. “Though I never knew either. Both were killed in Mirriam’s rebellion. I don’t recall whether you left before or after their deaths.”
The Vædim dropped his hand, and nodded. “What a disaster that was, and what a waste. So many of us dead, some beyond any hope of recovery. We found a shard of Antris soon enough, but a thousand years hasn’t been long enough to search out any part of Däivi. If there is anything left of her at all.”
“Will you – may I ask you a few questions?” It could very well be, Liv knew, her only opportunity.
“You may.”
“Why did you all do it?” Liv said, and the words came tumbling out like a rush of water in spring. “Why come to our world, and where did you come from - here? What even is this place? Why make us? Was it just to use us as slaves?”
Bælris seemed to mull over his words. “To answer all of that fully would keep us here speaking for days, young one, but I will do my best. We are an old people – very old, from a time when the universe was still expanding. The world we came from has been gone for nearly as long as any can remember – consumed when our star aged. If we had known then what we know now, we might have saved it, but you will find that the longer you live, the more you lose. It was a world like many others, like yours, but special in one respect.”
“Mana,” Liv guessed.
“Yes.” Bælris smiled. “On our world, mana gathered naturally. We evolved to live in it, to breathe it, to wield it. Only when we left our planet behind did we discover that so much of the universe was terribly, horrifyingly dead. We built great machines, to turn the power of the wind, the light, the waves, into mana. And we spread throughout the stars.”
“To worlds like mine.”
“Not yours. Your planet, and your people, came later,” Bælris explained. “After the war. The Vidre came in a great wave, what we later learned was a mass migration away from the core. At the time, we simply fought to survive; we didn’t ask why they left their worlds. When we finally learned the answer, that knowledge did more harm to us than the war ever had.”
“The terrible truth is, child, that the universe is collapsing upon itself. The force which drove the stars outward from the core is spent, and now all falls in once again. It is a long, slow death, but it is death for all things, make no mistake. The only thing to do is to flee outward, toward the rim, as the Vidre did, as we delay the inevitable.” Bælris met Liv’s eyes. “And that is where your world comes in.”
“We’re – what? Further out?” Liv said, trying to envision things on the grand scale the god was describing.
“Further than where our settled planets were, further than where we fought the Vidre – but not so far as where you are now,” Bælris confirmed. “This is the Last City, built around the furthest yellow star from the singularity at the middle of all things, into which we will all be pulled, eventually.”
“Try to imagine what it is like to tell a race of immortals that they are all going to die, and that there is nothing they can do to prevent it,” the god continued. “We went mad for a while, I think. Fought and argued like animals. Broke apart into factions – one of which took your world as a place to live. We used machines, at first, as our servants, but eventually we grew lonely. For many of us, the old laws seemed now to be meaningless, in the face of our deaths. And so when Ractia proposed uplifting a savage, native race to be our companions… we agreed.”
“Slaves, you mean,” Liv muttered bitterly.
“It wasn’t like that at first,” Bælris said. “But eventually – yes. Mirriam’s rebellion was a wake up call for some of us. We left, so that you could become masters of your own world, and find your own path, in what time remained to you. You, Livara, are only the second Vædim to be born on that world, and to escape it.”
“After Tamiris,” Liv reasoned. “But there’s a difference. He was – is? – the son of two gods. I’m not.”
“No, you are not,” Bælris admitted. “But he left you, and all of you people, a gift, did he not? The gift of potential?”
“The potential to become one of you,” Liv whispered.
Bælris smiled. “Yes. You understand. But as one of us, you are subject to our laws – which means I must punish you for killing Ractia, no matter how detestable she had become, and no matter how much I might personally disagree with her actions.”
“You all let me,” Liv spat, letting her anger show. “You all just sat there and watched while I did it. You could have stopped me at any time.”
“Yes.” Bælris nodded. “And so, the punishment shall be a light one. You are banished from the Last City, Livara. Do not return for a thousand years. If you come before that time, the full consequences of your actions will fall upon you.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “You will let me go home, then?”
“Let you?” Bælris raised inhuman eyebrows. “I am doing no favor for you, Livara, no kindness, let us be clear upon that. I hereby banish you. You may use whichever bridge you like, so long as you are not here at the end of this conversation. The one you came through, or another, it makes no difference to me.” His lips curled in a very slight smile, and to Liv, it did not appear at all unkind.
Liv’s eyes drifted to the orb she’d come through. “Will it last a thousand years?”
“Now that it is connected to the Last City? The bridge will survive so long as the city does,” Bælris assured her. “It will, however, be off-limits to the other Vædim. As recompense for what has been done to your people, against their will, I will pronounce a period of time during which your natural development may not be interrupted. Let us call it – a thousand years.”
“The same amount of time I’m banished for,” Liv pointed out.
“Is it?” Bælris shrugged. “What a coincidence. Best not to dwell upon it for too long.”
Liv turned, took three steps toward the black orb which would lead her home, and then hesitated. “If we all have Tamiris’s Gift, that means any of us can do what I’ve done? In a thousand years, all of us could come here?”
“If they are ready,” Bælris said. “They may come. I suppose they would need someone to teach them the way, of course.”
“Thank you.” Liv reached a hand out, her fingers hovering just above the orb.
“It is an odd thing, to thank someone for inflicting a punishment,” Bælris said. “Best not to say that too loudly. Farewell, Livara. I look forward to seeing you again, before the end of all things.”
She touched the orb which was a bridge, and departed the Last City.