The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 475

Chapter 475

Chapter 473: Beckoning Fates

My infant years passed by unattended, my life happening on a kind of autopilot as my mind focused on the problem of the keystone and my missing companions.

In this alternative reality presented by the keystone, even small changes seemed to snowball into an entirely new life that I had to live. But as the simulated life got further from reality—or perhaps, as the person I grew into inside the keystone became further from who I really was or had been—the part of my mind that was conscious of events outside of the keystone seemed to go to sleep, causing me to forget my purpose and even the fact that I was living out a fake, simulated existence.

The memories of my time growing up in Taegrin Caelum resurfaced. It was difficult to parse everything; I remembered it clearly, but the person I had become under those circumstances seemed so far from who I actually was that it was almost like I’d had someone else’s dream. But where, I wondered, had that scenario come from? Is the keystone realm just inventing responses to my actions, or is Fate somehow involved? Could the keystone know what really would have happened—or what will happen in the future? I considered aether and Fate, and knew I couldn’t completely discount this fact.

Elder Rinia could search through possible timelines and potential events using her magic. Certainly the djinn could do the same, with their heightened control of aether, including the branch of aevum. Still, in comparison to the mechanism behind each of the previous keystones, these unfolding worlds and timelines seemed impossibly complex. Does gaining insight into Fate require seeing how all these realities played out in response to each small change?

I felt my stomach sink as I wondered just how many times I’d have to relive my life in different permutations to gain this insight, and this nerve-wracking thought brought me to yet another unnerving consideration: How long have I already been here?

If the keystone world moved at the same scale of time as I lived it, then I’d already been inside for decades. I had to assume that time spent in the keystone wasn’t one-to-one with the outside world. Time didn’t seem to move at a constant pace in the keystone, it flies past at incredible speed when I didn’t focus on the world it was presenting. If nothing else, that suggested that time was highly subjective, perhaps even an illusion entirely.

What if that’s it? I jolted into a scene of my toddler self flipping through the Encyclopedia of Mana Manipulation. Staring around in confusion—it felt like I was born only minutes ago—I tried to draw myself back out of the life and allow it to simply play out before my eyes.

My excitement seemed to tether me to the moment. I squeezed my eyes shut, concentrating on disconnecting from myself. Something seemed to tug at me from my sternum, like I had a fishing hook embedded in my chest and someone was pulling on it. My eyes flashed open, and I stared around, wondering what the sensation could have been, but I saw and felt nothing obvious.

Realizing I was letting myself get too anxious and excitable, I forced my small body to take several deep breaths. My mother came into the room, chattering away about me always staring at those books and how cute it was, and time began to spill away from me.

In moments, I was awakening, then we were already heading up the mountain path that would lead us to the ambush. It played out as it had in life, and suddenly I was with Sylvia. Although I had ideas about how my time with her could have played out differently, I avoided changing anything, even the smallest detail, in order to test my current theory.

My time with her ran out, and then my life as a boy in Elenoir was speeding past. Before I knew it, I was seeing my family again, and then Jasmine and I were adventuring together in the Beast Glades. My time in Xyrus started, leading to the Widow’s Crypt, the attack on Xyrus Academy, and my training in Elenoir. The war itself was already over, culminating with my battle against Nico.

It was as my body began to fail from overuse of Sylvia’s beast will and Sylvie’s impending sacrifice loomed that I had another realization.

Focusing on the moment, I attempted to step back into my body and take control of the situation, knowing what I wanted to change.

Only, I couldn’t.

Time was passing by even more quickly now, with Sylvie’s death, my first unintended ascent into the Relictombs, and then my time in Alacrya all going by in the same breath. Suddenly I was bidding farewell to Ellie, having lied to her about where I would be while accessing the fourth keystone, and Sylvie, Regis, and I were activating and stepping into the keystone again.

I waited in darkness, breathless and confused about what had just happened. Again, the light in the distance. Again, the words, “Congratulations, sir and madam, he’s a healthy boy.”

My mind was blank for quite a while. Time didn’t slip away from me and start the loop over again, but I could feel the shock seizing control of my faculties, and instead of fighting it, I simply let myself be.

I had thought, perhaps, that the lesson of this place was something trite, like that my life had played out just the way it was supposed to or that I couldn’t change the past. I certainly hadn’t expected to lose control and get dragged along as my life repeated exactly as it had, unable to enforce my will on it at all.

It was like being caught in a rushing river, I thought in wonder after the shock began to settle. But what is the point of that? How does it lead to insight into Fate?

I struggled to see how this new data point fit in with my previous theories. Obviously, it shattered the idea of simply not changing anything. In fact, this vortex effect suggested the opposite: that I had to explore the many opportunities of this life—or lives—in order to gain insight into the aspect of Fate.

I rolled this idea around for quite some time but achieved no new insight. Finally, I turned away from it, again considering a moment from the previously rushed-through life. As I had approached Sylvie’s sacrifice, a wild thought had occurred to me. How can I exist in this life if Sylvie doesn’t sacrifice herself for me, splitting her essence to be drawn across the cosmos where she then watches my life as Grey unfold? Because, if she doesn’t do that, how can she then pull me away from Agrona’s effort to reincarnate me and instead place me inside this body?

I looked around, searching for the ghostly apparition of Sylvie that I knew must be watching me. After Sylvie had experienced my life as Grey, she had followed my spirit through the cosmos as it was dragged to this world by Agrona. At the last moment, she had forced me aside and brought me to the Leywins. And that is where this simulation of my life began.

It was a paradox. Although the keystone lives always began at my birth, in reality, my own life began long before that, with my birth as Grey on Earth. I clung tightly to that fact. The presence of a potential paradox was a data point, a flaw in the system, one I could identify and potentially extrapolate information from.

‘I suppose, in this place, my presence at your birth—and also everything I did before your birth—is like a fixed point,’ a distorted voice said. I turned my overly large head on the neck that still didn’t support it, staring off the side of a straw-filled mattress to see the same slightly see-through, younger version of Sylvie that I’d encountered before. ‘You can’t change something that was already set in stone before your arrival.’

I was looking for you, I said, meeting her transparent golden eyes.

‘I know,’ she answered.

I have an idea, I thought, instinctively stuffing a chubby fist into my mouth. Will you help me with something?

‘In the context of this life as it is currently playing out, I have just watched Grey grow from desperate childhood to disconsolate kingship. I then crossed an unknowable expanse across time and between worlds to keep Agrona from claiming you,’ she thought back matter-of-factly. ‘I have already sacrificed everything for you, Arthur, and I will do so again. And again. As many times as is necessary. So yes. Of course I will help you. Just tell me what you need.’

I quietly gathered my thoughts before projecting them to her. You are a part of Sylvie. Before, you called yourself a projection of Sylvie as I understood her to exist in this moment, right?

‘That’s correct,’ she confirmed, watching me curiously.

But there is another part of Sylvie here as well, I continued. Her real conscious mind from the outside world. Except she’s…sleeping, her and Regis.

‘That’s true.’

My infant face scrunched up in concentration. Her mind hasn’t woken yet. I think, maybe, that’s because it hasn’t had a time and place to do so inside the keystone. Even in the lives where I’ve bonded with her, that version of Sylvie has her own personality intact, consistent with who Sylvie was in that timeframe, without the memories of our life outside this place. That leaves no room for my Sylvie, the real Sylvie, to wake up.

The ghostly face watched me expectantly.

But you’re already only a piece of her. And in a few years, you’re going to be drawn back into your own egg and reborn as that version of Sylvie.

‘That’s also true.’

If you…attached yourself, somehow, to Sylvie’s mind—the real Sylvie—then maybe she could wake up and act through you, and then be born back into herself.

There was a long pause, and I had to concentrate very hard to keep my mind and infant body awake and focused on the moment.

‘How?’ she asked eventually.

I didn’t really know how, but I was convinced that waking Sylvie and Regis was essential to making progress within the keystone. They represented different aspects of aether that, together with me, forged a more complete insight of spacium, vivum, and aevum as a whole. It was my hope that, as outside consciousnesses, they wouldn’t suffer the same effects of deviating from my regular life and could somehow tether me to myself.

It’s all guesswork at this point, but I can feel Sylvie’s mind inside my own. Can you…enter my body? Maybe I can act as some kind of bridge between you.

The ghostly image nodded in understanding, then drifted forward, passing through the bed and into my flesh. A shiver ran through my tiny body, and I could feel a new, comforting presence floating just beneath the surface.

Wiggling my infantile body, I got more comfortable on the straw mattress and closed my eyes.

Her mind is inside me somewhere. We just have to find it.

I focused on the ghost’s warm presence, trying to follow her within myself as she searched for the real her. Such an internal, meditative practice would have been easy in my years as a quadraelemental mage or later, once I had an aether core. I’d practiced searching inside of myself with mana and aether for more hours than I could hope to count.

But now, in the body of a tiny baby with no mana core of my own, I realized that I lacked the facilities I would normally rely on.

Do you feel any sense of her? A resonance, or a pull, or anything?

‘No, but don’t despair,’ she assured me.

As my focus honed in on finding Sylvie and forging a connection between the two partial versions of her—one real, the other manifested by the keystone—I lost my sense of the outside world. Even when my infant body slept, my adult mind remained intent on the connection between Sylvie’s apparition and her sleeping mind. Time passed discordantly, with the outside world seeming to rush by while only minutes or hours passed according to my consciousness.

And yet I sensed nothing concrete within myself but the mana slowly concentrating inside my sternum, where my core would eventually form.

‘This isn’t working,’ ghost-Sylvie thought, her voice cutting through the fog of my hyper-concentration. ‘We need to do more, but what? I have no knowledge of this process.’

I took several deep breaths, struggling to think through the building tension. In a couple of years, your spirit naturally rejoins your unborn body, held in stasis by your mother’s magic. And then later, you are reborn through a natural process I don’t fully understand, a combination of a magical reaction to your sacrifice and a tremendous amount of aether channeled into that second egg.

‘Both rebirths then required an egg…’ she mused, her mentally projected voice quiet in my head, nearly buried beneath the thumping of my pulse. ‘But both were also influenced by outside magic tying back to the sacrifice of my body to rebuild yours. We need a catalyst to awaken the real me and bond me with this simulation of myself.’

But what kind of catalyst would suffice?

The ghostly simulation of my bond didn’t answer. She was gone.

I let time pass, thinking about my next steps, until I reached the cliffside and once again saw her. But the battle exploded, and I followed along with the necessary sequence of events that would lead me to Sylvia. I looked for a time or way to communicate with the watching ghost, but no such opportunity presented itself, and then, once again, I was tumbling from the cliffside.

By the time I came to at the bottom of the long fall, lying next to the broken corpse of the bandit I had dragged down with me, Sylvie was already gone.

I considered simply allowing the simulation to play forward to its beginning again in order to continue my attempt to wake Sylvie, but the idea of wasting an entire life simply watching it fly by chafed at me. It was obvious now that my goal of waking the real Sylvie into the ghostly manifestation of her spirit would be a work of more than one lifetime, but there was still a lot I didn’t understand about the keystone trial, and I didn’t want to waste an opportunity to learn more, either.

I continued on until Sylvie was reborn, but she was not born with any memories, either of her life outside the keystone or our discussions before her birth. She was an infant asura, growing quickly in both intellect and power, but she was Sylvie as she had been then, not my companion as she now slept.

My time in Elenoir and then as an adventurer and student unfolded without significant change, but I remained watchful of each passing decision to avoid the vortex effect pulling me straight through to the end again. It was difficult, as I lived through the same events yet again, to avoid second-guessing the many decisions of my life. Where could I have chosen differently? What other power could I have gained or what piece of knowledge might I have obtained if only I’d walked a slightly different path?

Years passed before the moment I’d been waiting for came, and I sank into myself, becoming fully present in the unfolding events.

Virion was nodding to me as he dug into the inside pocket of his robe. “There’s one last thing you need to think about.”

I already knew what he was going to pull out when he opened his hand in front of me to reveal a black coin the size of his palm. The coin glimmered at the slightest movement, drawing my attention to the complex engravings etched all over it.

“This is one of the artifacts that were handed down to me. I had given them both to my son when I resigned from the throne, but after Alea’s death, he gave this one back to me, saying I should choose the next Lance.”

I stood there silently for a moment, carefully considering the oval coin that seemed to pulse in Virion’s hand. “This is the artifact Alea had.”

“Yes. Bonding it with your blood and mine will trigger it, giving you the boost that allowed all the other Lances to break into the white stage. I know you’re not an elf, but I’d be honored if you’d serve as a Lance under me.”

“I’ll fight for you even without this bond, but I can’t accept it. I may regret this, but it doesn’t feel right for me to cheat my way into the white stage. I’ll get there on my own.”

These words echoed back to me from what felt like a lifetime ago. It was true, I had reached the white core stage on my own, but it took so long…and when I finally came face to face with Cadell at the flying castle, it still wasn’t enough.

And soon after, I lost everything I’d worked so hard for when my core was broken.

“It would be my honor to serve as your Lance,” I said at length, bending into a bow before Virion.

The Lance ceremonies—the actual bonding of blood and service—had always taken place secretly, and so it was for me. Only Virion, his son Alduin, Lance Aya Grephin, Lord Aldir, and Sylvie were present, all gathered within an unadorned chamber deep within the flying castle.

I knelt in the center of the chamber, Sylvie sitting beside me in her small, catlike form, her side pressed against my leg. Virion stood before me, while the others were half in shadow encircling us. He held out the black oval coin. Its etched surface reflected the dim light like stars on the ocean at night. After a few seconds, he released the coin. Instead of falling to the ground, it stayed where it was, hovering in the air between us at my eye level.