Luke Everhart
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Chapter 89 - Change
🕑 Added 2024-11-25 14:09:54 +0000 UTCSomeone shook him.
He heard his name.
He heard crying.
But it was so quiet. So comfortable there…
He wanted to stay. He wanted to stay forever.
When was the last time he had felt such… He didn’t even know the right word for it.
It felt like he was back in his mother’s arms, before everything that had happened.
Come on. We cannot stay here.
And why not, he wondered. Why not stay here? There were no worries. No pain. No fear. No obligations, or duties, or goals. There were no dreams calling out to him. It was quiet. It was perfect.
We still have things to do, Nar.
What things? What could be worth leaving this place?
Come on, Nar. There’s work to be done!
And he remembered. His dad. His party. The Climb. The Upper Levels.
He had come so far. He wasn’t going to give up now and abandon it all.
Come on, wake up!
His eyes flashed open, and for a moment, he couldn't understand what he was seeing.
“Cen?” he asked. “What happened to you?”
“Oh, Nar, I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry! I didn’t know this was going to happen!”
She held her hand to his face and wept.
“But Cen, why-why are you gray?”
She only cried harder, holding tight onto his hand. A hand that was gray too.
No, it was covered in a hazy gray light. It was almost smoky, an ethereal gray smoke that emanated from and stuck to her skin in gently swirling patterns of white, black and all the grays in between.
“Is that [Aura]?” he asked her.
Cen dropped over his chest, crying, and before he could say anything else, a window appeared before his eyes.
It felt like it had been a long time since he’d seen one, and with trepidation, he saw that it was a long one.
-[ Class change complete!
Class [Basic 20] has been upgraded to [Auramancer 1]
All attributes preserved!
Extra attributes gained:
Aura* 78 -> 100
??? 14 -> 19
??? 20 -> 25
Endurance 8 -> 11
Instinct 21 -> 24
Hearing 13 -> 16
Sight 12 -> 15
Smell 5 -> 8
Gains threshold exceeded!
Gains threshold ignored! Gains applied!
Congratulations!
You have gained your second attribute modifier.
[Aura] has become [Aura*]. For each point gained in [Aura] you will now gain an additional 1.8 points (rounded down).
(Example: 5 points gained in [Aura*] = 5 + (5 1) + (5 * 0.8) = 14)
New status unlocked:
Aura
New skills gained:
[Meditation]
[Aura Channels 4] (Passive)
[Aura Senses 2] (Passive)
Skills upgraded:
Skill [Strong Attack 2] upgraded to [Aura Attack].
Skill [Quickening 2] upgraded to [Aura Quickening]. ]-
Nar reached out and patted Cen’s head. He now understood why she was crying.
“You were right, Cen,” he said. “You were right all along.”
“Oh, Nar,” she sobbed, lifting her head to look at him. “Check your status.”
His heart thudded with sorrow. He already knew what he was going to find, but he looked anyway.
Under his HP and stamina bars, there was now a new bar. It was a familiar shifting gray, and it read 207/1000.
Shocked laughter escaped him.
“One thousand? Really?”
It was four times his HP! Four times his stamina!
It was such a ridiculously high number that he could only laugh in the face of it.
“One thousand… Your second modifier! Nar!”
He reached up with both hands and grabbed her face.
“It’s okay. No! Cen, listen to me. It’s okay.”
“It was my idea!” she cried.
“It was the only way forward,” he said. “And now, I can keep going. Thank you. It was all thanks to you.”
“There could have been another way!” she shouted.
“You don’t believe that,” Nar said. “You know this is what the System wanted. First in the tutorial. Then with that Sentry. Then after the first bridge, and then after the cannibals… It’s been pushing [Aura] into us from the start. There was nothing we could do. And we don’t know if this is even the last of it…”
“But the magic, Nar! The magic!” she shouted, her eyes wide and nearly mad.
She pushed through his hands and hugged him, weeping, and he hugged her back, feeling his own tears falling out from the corner of his eyes.
“I’ll think about it,” Nar said. “There might still be a way. And I still have three modifiers to go. So, it’s going to be alright.”
But Cen only cried harder.
“Come on Cen, you should be happy!” he said. “You were right! There is a path for [Aura]! And look! It doesn’t hurt anymore! I’m okay now!”
But the more he tried to make her feel better, the more his own tears flowed.
What was the point of crying now, though?
It was done.
An Auramancer, whatever that was, with 1000 points of aura and with [Aura] skills. And five of them no less!
He had always bemoaned his short list of skills, and now, he had just gained three more in one go.
Yet, he cried.
Cen cried.
And they hugged each other. Nar suffering for what he had lost, and Cen suffering for what Nar had lost.
They cried and hugged, under an enormous Pressure that no longer bothered them.
A Pressure that had shattered his dreams to a point he did not know if they could recover from. And yet, by the Crystal, how beautiful that glowing Pressure was.
*********
They stepped out of the Pressure almost in the same way they had gone in. Together, and holding hands.
However, they did not hold their weapons anymore. The swirling [Aura] that coated them, clothes and all, was more than enough to protect them now.
They let go of each other's hands, as well as their hold on their [Aura], and faced the party. The others, including even Viy, were arranged in a semi-circle around them.
Nar looked from one end to the other, then he smiled.
“Come on, no need to look like that,” he said.
Kur stepped forward. “Nar, I’m…”
“And no need for that either,” Nar said, raising a hand to stop him. “This was both my choice and the only way forward. Self-pity won’t do anything. No amount of pity will.”
Gad, behind Kur, nodded sagely at him, with a hint of a sad smile gracing her lips.
“What’s important now is that Cen was right,” Nar said, smiling down at the caster. “And we have a way forward again.”
Kur nodded once, and grimly.
“What was it, in the end?”
Cen sniffled and looked up at Nar.
“Nar found the place where [Aura] comes from. It’s inside us. It never came from anywhere else. It’s always been there.”
“Crystal above all!” Tuk whispered.
“Fuck me sideways…” Mul muttered, at the same time.
“How?” Gad said. “And where?”
“Where the hole is, there is… A space?” Cen said, unsure. “If you go into it, and down, you will find this ball of light. That’s where it is. That’s what it is.”
Tuk frowned and closed his eyes. “There’s nothing there.”
“I think the Pressure will help with that,” Nar said. “That’s probably why it's here, and why the path took us here.”
Cen nodded. “Also, we need to stop taking out chunks from it, and making them white and sharp like that... We just need to take it all.”
“White? What in the pile are you talking about?” Mul asked.
Cen sighed wearily, her shoulders slouching forward.
“We need to stop purifying our aura,” she explained. “We were wrong. I don’t know why they made us do it like that, but it makes our aura sharp, and that is why it feels so bad when it gets into our bodies. Also, it doesn’t go in our blood. There are special channels for it inside our bodies… But, not really there?”
“What?” Kur said.
“Oh, also, my class changed,” Nar said.
“Oh, mine too. Auramancer Caster.”
Nar laughed. “I just went from Basic to Auramancer! Figures.”
“Nar…” Cen whispered, her eyes shining again.
Kur raised his arms. “Wait! Wait! Wait! That’s too much information all at once!”
“Well, we…”
Suddenly, Nar realized that he did not feel like talking. In fact, he didn’t even feel like standing.
“Cen, do you mind explaining it to them?” he asked. “I think I need to sit down.”
“Oh, Crystal! Of course! Your HP went down to zero!”
Nar nodded. “Yeah, that really took it out of me.”
He cast a quick glance at Gad, who nodded back at him.
Not being pitiful. Just taking it easy. Let Cen do the talking, he thought, and Gad seemed to understand and agree with him.
“Alright, I’ll be over with our stuff,” Nar said.
“Yeah man, take a good rest,” Kur said. “Well done.”
“It was all Cen.”
“No, it wasn’t!” she protested.
Chuckling, Nar walked to where the party had made their temporary home.
As soon as he reached the wall, he reached out to it, and quickly lowered himself to the floor.
He heaved a big sigh and leaned sideways against the wall. It wasn’t the most comfortable of positions, but he didn’t want the party to see his face.
For a moment, he thought of nothing.
The orange ceiling and columns still swirled in their magnificence.
The silent lightning still ran across the ceiling with its slow magnificence.
The party’s conversation drifted in and out of his focus.
Time passed.
At some point, he woke up.
He had fallen asleep, head pointing towards the endless room, staring at the lights overhead.
Also, he was not alone.
“You’ve hidden your emotions well,” Rel said. “But not anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked her, confused.
“Come on, Nar! It’s just us two here!” she breathed. “And I can feel it coming off of you. It’s so strong it’s picking on it. Whatever this auramancer class is, it's making it crazy around you. Only the… Boss, ever scared me like that.”
Nar blinked at her, unsure of what he had just heard.
“What are you talking about?” he asked. “That I’m dangerous?”
He did not mean anything by it, and yet, the words came out half growled, half hissed, and his hands balled into fists.
Rel didn’t move, but the fear he read in her feverish eyes made him recoil.
“My Yearning,” she whispered. “Crystal, I almost jumped there…”
“I wasn’t going to attack you,” Nar said, looking at her in bewilderment. “I would never do that! What in the pile is going on?”
“I know that,” Rel said. “That’s why I didn’t move away.”
“Then what in the pile is going on?”
She pondered her words for a moment, and slowly, she seemed to become more aware, her eyes a little bit brighter.
“Whatever you did today… Your emotions are pouring out of you,” she whispered, leaning forward. “At least for us… We can feel it. Me, with my Yearning, and Jul with her [Instinct]. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Nar frowned at her, but understanding hit him a split second later, and he stared at the others, searching for where Jul slept.
“She’s not very good at dealing with fear,” Rel said, leaning even closer, her breath hot on his face. Searing. “Not yet at least, and I don’t want her to get scared of you. Don’t ruin all the work and progress that you both have made.”
“But I’m not doing anything!” he said. “Crystal, I can feel the heat from you! Are you okay?”
Rel pulled back from him, and looked at him sideways, considering him.
“Do you remember what I told you about the Yearning?”
“Of course!” he said, his heart thumping in his chest, his mind reeling, trying to make sense of what was going on. Was she out of her mind?
“Remember how I told you that as kids we fear it, but as adults, we are resigned to it?”
“I do,” Nar said, frowning. Where was she going with this?
“Well, I lied,” she said, looking out into the great orange that they would soon cross.
“What?”
“I lied,” she repeated. “And so did the adults. That morning, when I woke up with the Yearning, I saw the fear in my parents’ eyes. Then on my grandfather’s. Then on every other alfin adult. But then, I saw my uncle. You know, the one who was with the aunt that smashed her head open?”
“I… Yes. I remember.”
“Yes. Well, he wasn’t afraid. There was something else on his face.”
He noticed that she was rubbing her index finger and thumb while she tried to make her disjointed point. It was a vigorous gesture, almost angry, as if she was trying to scratch an itch she couldn’t reach.
“At first I didn’t know what it was,” she said, her eyes distant. “Only that it scared me. So much I started avoiding him… But then, I started to notice that same look on other people’s faces. On other alfin’s faces. Those with both the Yearning and those that didn’t have it yet.”
She stopped rubbing her fingers and pressed them against one another instead. Hard, to the point where her fingertips went completely blanched, devoid of any color.
“I noticed how other people avoided them. How my father spoke to his brother. Carefully, like he too, was afraid of him. And then, one night, I figured out why,” she whispered. “They were talking about me, and my uncle started getting angrier and angrier. He shouted how it wasn’t fair. How I had done nothing wrong. How I was too young. That even though I could Climb, I was just trading one death for another… My father tried to calm him down. To reason with him. But my uncle only got angrier. He accused him of being a coward, of not caring about his own daughter. Of caring only for himself!”
She took a ragged deep breath, her eyes reflecting the orange of the Pressure with a glint of madness.
“My father said that he understood him, because of what had happened to my aunt,” she whispered. “But by the Crystal. He shouldn’t have said that.”
Rel finally released her fingers from their torture. She looked at them, slowly filling back with color, turning into a furious, sickly red.
“I never heard anyone shouting so loudly. So angry like that,” she said, staring at the spreading red. “And I'll never forget the last words he spoke, before he got up and left.”
Nar held his breath while he listened to her. Rapt, despite the insanity and suddenness of it all.
“My uncle said, how can you still sing and worship that Thing? Even after what It did to your daughter, and to your sister, how can you still pray to It?”
Her words were barely a whisper, yet they set a shiver running down his spine.
Nar’s eyes widened in understanding at last.
“Yes,” Rel said, still not looking at him. “My uncle hates the Crystal. He cannot understand how It is capable of punishing us like It does. We, who don’t even know what our sin is. We, who weren’t even alive to do it in the first place…”
She looked at him then, with haunted, hollow eyes. “When the cannibals got to me, I resented the Crystal. I swung between praying for mercy and help, and shouting abuse at It. But I never really felt what my uncle did. That hatred.”
Rel narrowed her eyes at him and got close to his face again.
Nar held his breath as she passed by his face, and her lips brushed his ear.
“Something happened to you, didn’t it?” she whispered.
Nar grit his teeth, but he couldn’t move away from her.
“This Unclean thing… There’s still something much worse that you’re not telling us, isn’t there?” she said, her lips and breath tickling him. “So much so, that now, with this auramancer class, your hatred is pouring out of you through your [Aura].”
A spasm went through her, and he heard her swallowing. She pulled away from him and stared at him with something that he couldn’t understand. Something else. Something that made his heart beat faster.
She made fists out of her hands and suddenly, she stood up.
“You have to let go,” she said, avoiding looking at him.
“Rel?” he asked, lost.
“You have to let go. Anger is one thing. But hatred and resentment?” she asked, shaking her head. “The alfin who Yearn and hate and resent have to be put down. All of them.”
She licked her lips and gulped. Her breath came out ragged and labored, and sweat shone on her forehead.
“What’s happening?” Nar asked, stunned by how quickly it had all happened.
“Remember what I said! At least, do it for Jul. Please!” she begged him. “I don’t want to see her scared again!”
She turned, and fled into the darkness.
“Rel!” he called after her.
But she kept going until she was gone.
She didn’t make it very far however, and Nar heard everything.
Inside him, deep down in the place where he could now easily go whenever he wanted to, the ball of light rippled and quaked. It boiled and seethed.
“No…” Jul whimpered from where she slept.
Shocked, Nar took a deep breath. He took several.
But what he had done to his [Aura]? What they all did still, not knowing the truth! His dad, the Unclean, and all the operators in the cubeplant…
The Unclean.
The alfin.
The workers.
The Climbers, eaten and tortured.
The Climbers, burning on the bridges.
Smashed, and crushed and cut to pieces by unfeeling machines.
How much suffering was going on, in that endless B-Nex?
How much punishment?
How much could be solved if their god simply talked to them?
All for something done an infinite number of generations before him. Something he didn’t know. Something he didn’t do. Something none of them had done!
And then, he remembered it… The worst memory of his entire life. The beginning of Unclean.
“No! Please…” Jul begged.
Nar didn’t know if she was still sleeping, or if he had woken her up and was speaking directly to him.
He didn’t wait to find out.
His aura flared around him and he jumped into the Pressure.
Jul wouldn’t hear or sense him there.
Perhaps not even the Crystal would.
At that moment, he didn’t care.
He walked into the endless room, and turned left, behind the wall, where they couldn’t see him.
He screamed and roared.
His fists became bloody and marred the featureless wall with dark stains.
His aura flared from his skin, covering him in a tangle of ghostly limbs, much like the guardians and their many bladed legs. Except his limbs of aura convulsed and stretched, and contorted into straight, bent, angry lines.
And he screamed till his voice went hoarse.
He punched until things broke in his hands.
His tears fell but were erased immediately by his burning aura.
Though any onlooker would have recoiled from the terrifying sight that he presented, within, his aura embraced him. It enveloped him. It hated and cried with him. It understood him better than anyone.
The thought that he could still not accept it, that he needed the Crystal’s magic for what had to be done, was just one more reason for him to hate and resent It.
The priest had spoken of fire, and ice, and lightning, and wind, and all the things that magic was, and did, and granted, and allowed.
The Named Few wielded it with a power so terrifying, they were only beneath the Crystal Almighty Itself.
None of them used [Aura]. Not a single one.
Wind for Nar, who shared his name, and whatever it was for Romilt and his thorns.
Magic was what he needed. But now, in the irony of ironies, it was his [Aura] he wanted to accept and embrace. He wanted nothing to do with the Crystal.
And thinking about it reminded him of the sorry, wounded state he had found his [Aura] in, and hatred was finally tempered by sorrow.
He didn’t even know what aura was. He didn’t understand it at all. Not a bit. But his treatment of it. His rejection of it. It caused him such a grief he could barely bear it, and he didn’t even understand why.
Nar leaned against the wall, placing his forehead against his blood, and slid down to his knees.
I love the Crystal.
I praise the Crystal.
I give my all for the Crystal.
I am a sinner, like my father…
“... and his father before him!” he screamed into the Pressure. “May the Crystal in Its Benevolence grant me forgiveness! May the Crystal in Its Mercy grant me passage! Please Crystal, guide my Climb!”
He shouted his prayer, not even bothering to think if it would be heard.
“I love the Crystal! I praise the Crystal!”
Again, and again, he prayed.
His aura slowly stilled and receded back to his skin and clothes.
He felt sick. Sick of himself. Of what he had one.
He had sinned and blasphemed like never before.
Please forgive me, Crystal. I didn’t mean it.
But the words felt empty. A lie.
He finally felt the pain in his hands and looked at them, seeing the destruction he had done.
He puked.
He sobbed.
He begged the Crystal to heal him before the others woke up.
He didn’t want them to see what he had done to himself. He didn’t want them to know how he felt. Especially not Jul.
Nar sat beside his vomit and blood, and watched it disappear, sizzling to nothing under the burning might of the Pressure.
He hid his face, and begged and cried to the Crystal.
He shouted and raged, and then prayed and begged some more.
At some point, he even sang, almost screaming the words.
Fortunately, as hybrid as he was, he was still a tank.
Fingers and knuckles were a simple enough thing for his HP to regenerate. It had brought him back to full health after much more grievous wounds after all.
When he finally let go of his aura, and lay down next to the others, not even three hours had passed.
He was healed, and they still slept. And he had done his best to bury everything back up again.
Jul, thank the Crystal, slept peacefully, and did not even stir at his passage.
Only Rel was up.
She was propped against the wall, and she looked worse than he had ever seen her before. Her sparse hair clung to her sweaty face. Her eyes and cheeks were sunken, and her lips were pale and cracked and scarred. Her face looked like that of someone at the end of their life, rather than still at the beginning of it.
She saw him return and looked up at him.
Their eyes met, and she gave him a single, weak nod.
Nar looked away, afraid his emotions would burst free again.
He closed his eyes and he prayed. He worshiped the Crystal and praised Its Endless and Everlasting Grace, Glory and all Its other magnificent characteristics.
He didn’t even look at the orange lights, and its beautiful silent display.
He prayed and prayed, his newly healed hands joined together above his chest, in the image of the Crystal. Devout.
Eventually, he slipped into a sleep full of nightmares, reliving his memories again and again, in an endless loop.
And through it all, someone screamed and screamed and screamed.
Comments
Lucas Onderwater
Haha, no sorry! Who is Lith?
Swally
“Fuck me sideways…” please tell me that this is an allusion to Lith :D
