The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 477

Chapter 477

Chapter 475: Transcendence

ARTHUR LEYWIN

“I think he’s sick,” my mother said, rocking me back and forth in her arms. “He’s not eating, Reynolds, and he hasn’t made a peep all day.”

My father moved to stand at Mom’s side. He stared down at me nervously. “I can send for the doctor?” He made the statement a question, his voice rising along with his brows as he regarded my mother, uncertain.

Mom’s brows, on the other hand, descended thunderously. “Can you, Rey? That would be lovely!”

My father flinched back, rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly, and mumbled, “Um, of course, I’ll…” Whatever else he might have said trailed off as he hurried away.

Mom rolled her eyes at his back, then refocused her attention on me. “That father of yours…” She tried to smile, but the expression didn’t quite reach her eyes. She poked my stomach gently, wiggling her finger back and forth to tickle me. “With any luck, you’ll get his good looks but my brains, little Arthur.”

I was aware of this exchange, but I did not think about it. My conscious mind sat nestled within my infant body, in control and living with it moment to moment instead of allowing the keystone to pull time away from me the way you might pull a carpet out from under someone’s feet. I clung to it, desperately intent on remaining myself, being myself.

I will not lose myself again only to wake up with the memories of another man’s life, I had told myself repeatedly while pointedly not thinking about the heartbreaking events of my previous attempt at the keystone. And I meant to keep this promise to myself. Only…I still didn’t understand how.

But I was starting to understand a piece of the keystone, at least. After my last two lives, I felt confident that I saw the trap in it—the reason one could not leave until they had “completed” the keystone—and why that was so unlikely. The lives lived were punishing in a way I hadn’t expected. Already, my memories of these lives were full of bitterness, regret, and loss. Despite not really being “myself” during these events, the memories of my decisions, of my feelings—my deaths—were vivid.

I was still unsure if Sylvie and Regis, and their respective abilities, were central to my continued progress, but now I was sure there was more to it than just that. Despite the djinn’s ability of foresight, it seemed like a bridge too far to think that they had accounted for, expected, or even required the presence of three connected minds to enter and alter the keystone in whatever way would fulfill its purpose. What they had accounted for, on the other hand, was the requirement that a mage already know three very specific aether arts to have reached this point.

The abilities taught by the previous keystones had acted as keys to enter this puzzle, but as I sat within the days and weeks of mulling rumination, I grew more and more convinced that they had to be more than just keys.

After first arriving and experiencing the miracle of my own birth for the second time, I shouldn’t have been able to see the aether gathering for my awakening, but I had. The importance of that had been lost on me in the following repeated attempts at this life, but in retrospect, this strange fact felt like some kind of clue or hint toward the keystone’s solution.

But pursuing any clue was itself a problem I wasn’t sure how to solve. After all, how could I attempt to make a change to learn more about it if the act of making that change meant I lost all sense of what I was doing, at least until I was born yet again with an entirely new life’s memories stuffed into my exhausted brain.

There has to be a way to navigate this place more purposefully, I told myself, thinking of the Relictombs and the Compass.

A cry erupted from my tiny form, and I pulled back, letting time pass as my mother cleaned and fed me, a distinctly uncomfortable experience to focus on. Before I knew it, I was a toddler yet again, already near my awakening.

I lurched back into the present with a jolt of fear. I’m not ready to go farther. Not yet.

Perhaps due to my temporal proximity to the day of my awakening, I was again reminded of the strange sight of aetheric particles swarming as if to spectate that event.

I should not be able to see aether, but there are times that I can. What could that mean?

Tentatively, I reached for Realmheart. My infantile body contained no godrunes, of course, but my real physical body did. If there were times I could see aether, it could only be because some sense of it was bleeding between the mental keystone realm and the physical world.

But if there was some physical connection, I could not find it. Like my search for Sylvie, attempting to activate Realmheart revealed nothing.

Sylvie…

‘I am here.’ The ghostly apparition of my bond manifested in front of me. She was sitting with her legs crossed and watching me carefully. ‘It’s fascinating. I can see it all in your mind, everything we’ve already discussed across these multiple lives you’ve lived.’

Good, that at least saves me the trouble of explaining it over and over again, I answered, realizing I hadn’t been shielding my thoughts at all, because there had been no need.

‘To continue our previous conversation, I think I may have an idea.’

I waited, silently encouraging her to continue.

‘If we need a catalyst to wake the real Sylvie’s mind and allow me to bind to her, perhaps we can channel the energy of your awakening.’

How?

‘I have no clue.’

I sat with the idea for a while, trying to use what I knew about magic to piece together a possible solution. Unlike with Sylvie’s resurrection egg, however, I was not handed some strange mystical answer. Whatever I did would be up to me, and if it didn’t work, I might drastically alter the timeline and end up forgetting all over again.

I began reaching for Realmheart again, more as a meditative practice than any expectation that I would actually make the connection. It was like trying to curl the fingers of a hand that was no longer attached to my body. Sylvie and I remained there for what felt like hours to my disconnected brain and body, but I was certain that my mother would have come to check on me if that were the case.

Pudgy fingers raised to dig into my bare sternum.

I scrunched up my face and scratched more vigorously. There was an itch deep inside my chest that I couldn’t seem to reach.

My vision flickered, and for a moment Sylvie lit up like an old Earth Christmas tree, her body made of light, both mana and aether.

The sudden change made me flinch, and it blinked away.

‘What was that?’ Sylvie asked, looking at me with a mixture of concern and excitement. ‘Do it again.’

I looked at her and tried to unfocus my eyes, to cross them, to stare so hard that the lights would appear again. When they didn’t, I closed my eyes entirely, clenching my little fists and straining to reach that mindset that had just flickered past me like a moth in the dark.

There was a sudden rumble, and the room filled with an embarrassing smell. I grimaced, and my mother reappeared to clean and change me. I endured the experience, afraid to slip free of the bonds of that moment. When she was done, instead of leaving me to my business, she carried me out of the room on her hip, bouncing me and singing softly.

I was so close, I grumbled to Sylvie, who walked patiently along at Mother’s side. My fingers dug into my sternum again.

“Do you have an itchy, Art?” Mom asked suddenly, holding me up for inspection. Her fingers brushed the spot with a soft humming noise. “I don’t see anything, but…” Her fingers sparkled with magic, and I felt the soothing mana move through me. Although it wiped away the ache in my legs and backside from sitting so still for so long, it only highlighted the strange itch I felt in my—

My core! I squirmed, and my speech came out as a burbling coo.

“Art, what—oh!”

I had shaken free of Mother and pattered away in my toddler style, doing my best version of a run back to the bedroom.

“Okay then, I can take a hint,” my mother said with mild sarcastic amusement as I crawled off.

Plopping back down, I turned my focus inward as best I could. Closing my eyes, I again reached for Realmheart.

The itching sensation grew more pronounced.

I felt a lopsided grin tremble across my face. My core, Sylv. I can feel my actual core. That damned itch…I can feel it.

Following the uncomfortable sensation like a beacon, my keystone-bound consciousness reached for my physical body.

Although my eyes were closed, the air within the bedroom grew warm with the sudden glow of atmospheric mana and aether.

Slowly, I opened my eyes and gaped at the motes of red, yellow, blue, green, and purple that swam all around me. I took a deep breath, and a little shudder ran down my spine. With Realmheart active, I simply sat and stared. It was beautiful, and it changed everything.

I quickly began to feel tired, so I released my connection to the godrune. The floating mana particles faded away, leaving only the purple motes of aether. After another few seconds, they too vanished. Despite this fatigue, I wasn’t discouraged. In fact, I was exhilarated.

I have an idea.

Despite spending most of my conscious time living in the present moment, the next couple of months seemed to fly by in a blur. With the ghostly version of Sylvie at my side, I practiced connecting to and activating Realmheart, Aroa’s Requiem, and King’s Gambit. While Realmheart seemed to work more or less as expected, I couldn’t utilize Aroa’s Requiem to repair a broken item as I had in ‘real’ life, and King’s Gambit served more to muddle my thoughts than to clarify them, and I had yet to duplicate the effect of splitting my mind and considering many possibilities at once. I suspected that it was due to my inability to actually manipulate aether inside the keystone.

Still, Sylvie and I had a plan that we were confident in.

The day of my awakening arrived at last. I began my meditation as usual, slowly condensing all the mana within my body to my sternum. Sylvie floated within me, hovering at the center of that spot like Regis so often did. She was silent, but her thoughts were hyper-focused on the real Sylvie’s slumbering mind. Despite being asleep, her connection to me remained.

Which meant that there were two halves of Sylvie’s whole present inside of me.

It’s beginning, I projected to Sylvie. Hold on, it might get a bit bumpy in there.

Using the itch in my core as a tether back to my body as I’d done before, I activated Aroa’s Requiem and focused on the ghost Sylvie. At the same time, I opened my mind to the real Sylvie, reaching through our link to give her a strong mental shake. Or trying to, at least. I couldn’t be certain if I was successful.

A powerful pushing force erupted out of me as my core formed and I awakened. Closing my eyes, I channeled Aroa’s Requiem into Sylvie, willing her to be whole and complete again. I projected my desire and request to the aether I knew was gathering around our home to watch the explosion unfold, drawn by some unknown twist of Fate. I couldn’t manipulate it the way I did my own purified aether, but if I was right…

In a kind of echo of my condensing mana, the atmospheric aether also gravitated toward me, through me. Within the pushing force, within my body, within the core that was rapidly forming out of the explosion that leveled our house, the violet motes shimmered and danced around the ghostly manifestation of Sylvie. The force of my awakening rippled outward not only in the keystone space, but it also vibrated through my physical body and the connections I had with my companions.

Somewhere outside of my self, I felt Sylvie’s eyes snap open.

Her ghostly form spilled out of me, transparent golden eyes wide as she spun around. Momentarily untethered from reality and uncertain what was happening, her thoughts snapped and sparked across the surface of my mind like the scales of the lightning drake. There was a liquid texture to her transparent body as she seemed to shift and reform, aging and then deaging rapidly as she vacillated between the younger, pre-rebirth version of herself and the slightly older Sylvie I was familiar with over these last many months.

Sylvie, you’re all right. Don’t worry, you’re just waking up.

My bond gazed down at her incorporeal body, let out a scream only I could hear, then swelled outward, bursting into the form of a dragon. Her broad, black-scaled chest rose and fell heavily, and her long neck twisted back and forth, scanning the environment. Had her very real fear not been pumping directly into me, the sight of this huge, transparent dragon flailing around while my mother and father tended to me none the wiser would have almost been humorous.

It wasn’t until Mom and Dad began taking me out of the rubble of our home that Sylvie seemed to focus, her head snapping down and her eyes fixating on them as if they were a lighthouse seen through a long-fought storm.

Grabbing onto that attention, I tried to reach her again. Sylvie, it’s going to be okay. It’s me, Arthur. I’ve managed to wake you up and…bind you to the ghost of your past self. I struggled to put the strange thought into real words I knew she would understand. We’re in the fourth keystone. And I need you.

Despite being able to see through them, I held her golden eyes. The huffing and puffing of her massive body slowed. One tentative footstep after another, she followed where Mother and Father carried me, their conversation meaningless background noise at this point. Her huge clawed limbs left no prints in the wreckage of the home as she passed.

‘Arthur?’

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. It worked.

Sylvie opened her mouth to speak, but I held her mind and focused on the memories of everything that had transpired in the keystone so far. It took time for Sylvie to work her way through the shared visions, but I didn’t rush her. Instead, we sat with my mother in the shade of a small tree as Father inspected the ruins and spoke to a neighbor, who had come running at the noise.

Finally, Sylvie’s focus returned to the present. She had shrank back into her humanoid form and now regarded me with disbelief. ‘I saw some of what was happening, like I was dreaming. This is all…’ She trailed off with a shake of her head. Sylvie watched my mother slowly brushing her fingers through my hair for a minute or two, then continued. ‘I’m sorry, Arthur. I’m so sorry. The things you’ve had to endure here…it’s sick.’

I think you get out of it what you bring into it, I answered, watching Father pick through the rubble without truly seeing. The lives I lived here were the direct result of my own choices. Deviating from the experiences of my real life nearly always ends up resulting in…

I stopped, frowning, as a new thought came to me. Almost tentatively, I again followed the distant itch back to my physical body and activated Realmheart. While there was no physical manifestation of the godrune activating on my toddler body, aether and mana swam into my vision.

A fiery claw squeezed my heart, which began to beat rapidly.

Among the familiar colors that I expected to see, something else lit up under the influence of Realmheart.

‘What is that?’ Sylvie asked, sharing in my vision through our mental connection.

There was a nimbus of golden light radiating from the house. Thin golden threads seemed to connect the demolished house, me, my parents, and places that weren’t places, but rather times, both forward into the future and back into the past.